Thursday, March 26, 2009
By Walter E. Williams
Our Colonial ancestors petitioned and pleaded with King George III to get his boot off their necks. He ignored their pleas, and in 1776, they rightfully declared unilateral independence and went to war.
Today it’s the same story except Congress is the one usurping the rights of the people and the states, making King George’s actions look mild in comparison. Our constitutional ignorance—perhaps contempt, coupled with the fact that we’ve become a nation of wimps, sissies and supplicants—has made us easy prey for Washington’s tyrannical forces. But that might be changing a bit. There are rumblings of a long overdue re-emergence of Americans’ characteristic spirit of rebellion.
Eight state legislatures have introduced resolutions declaring state sovereignty under the Ninth and 10th amendments to the U.S. Constitution; they include Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington. There’s speculation that they will be joined by Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nevada, Maine and Pennsylvania.
You might ask, “Isn’t the 10th Amendment that no-good states’ rights amendment that Dixie governors, such as George Wallace and Orval Faubus, used to thwart school desegregation and black civil rights?” That’s the kind of constitutional disrespect and ignorance that big-government proponents, whether they’re liberals or conservatives, want you to have. The reason is that they want Washington to have total control over our lives. The Founders tried to limit that power with the 10th Amendment, which reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
New Hampshire’s 10th Amendment resolution typifies others and, in part, reads: “That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General (federal) Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Put simply, these 10th Amendment resolutions insist that the states and their people are the masters and that Congress and the White House are the servants.
Put yet another way, Washington is a creature of the states, not the other way around.
Congress and the White House will laugh off these state resolutions. State legislatures must take measures that put some teeth into their 10th Amendment resolutions. Congress will simply threaten a state, for example, with a cutoff of highway construction funds if it doesn’t obey a congressional mandate, such as those that require seat belt laws or that lower the legal blood-alcohol level to .08 for drivers. States might take a lead explored by Colorado.
In 1994, the Colorado Legislature passed a 10th Amendment resolution and later introduced a bill titled “State Sovereignty Act.” Had the State Sovereignty Act passed both houses of the legislature, it would have required all people liable for any federal tax that’s a component of the highway users fund, such as a gasoline tax, to remit those taxes directly to the Colorado Department of Revenue. The money would have been deposited in an escrow account called the “Federal Tax Fund” and remitted monthly to the IRS, along with a list of payees and respective amounts paid.
If Congress imposed sanctions on Colorado for failure to obey an unconstitutional mandate and penalized the state by withholding funds due, say $5 million for highway construction, the State Sovereignty Act would have prohibited the state treasurer from remitting any funds in the escrow account to the IRS. Instead, Colorado would have imposed a $5 million surcharge on the Federal Tax Fund account to continue the highway construction.
The eight state legislatures that have enacted 10th Amendment resolutions deserve our praise, but their next step is to give them teeth.
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=45680
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Commander confirms Netanyahu war plans
Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:36:18 GMT
The last Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip claimed the lives of at least 1,350 Palestinians.
Israel is preparing for all-out war on multiple fronts that include Iran, Syria and Lebanon, a senior military commander claims.
Israeli army Home Front Command Major General Yair Golan said Sunday that Tel Aviv is preparing for "all possible scenarios", indicating that one such scenario would be to fight a simultaneous war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The confirmation comes as US President Barack Obama seeks "new beginnings" with its arch-rival Iran. The US offer has been met with world praise but with fury in Tel Aviv.
Israeli media outlets late on Sunday began propagating wild scenarios that Iran is using the Lebanese Hezbollah to recruit Palestinian fighters to carry out terror attacks on Israel.
Citing anonymous sources, the reports began to surface after Tel Aviv countered an alleged bombing attempt outside a shopping mall in the northern city of Haifa.
"We are treating the attempted attack in Haifa with great gravity. A huge disaster was prevented by a miracle," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a weekly cabinet meeting after the bomb was defused on Sunday.
Israel has long accused Iran of arming Hezbollah and Palestinian groups via Syria, in an attempt to demonize the two Muslim countries.
Tel Aviv also accuses Tehran of developing nuclear weaponry -- a charge denied by the UN nuclear watchdog.
At a conference held in Tel Aviv, Golan also confirmed the likeliness of Israel staging another military confrontation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel does not consider rocket attacks from Gaza as a serious threat, there is the possibility of "dangerous" missile attacks by other countries, he said.
He failed to elaborate how such missile attacks would relate to Gaza.
His remarks came as reports claim that the soon-to-be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has plans for "a major military conflict in the coming months."
The commander also revealed that Tel Aviv will install new warning systems across Israel in preparation for its war plans.
The last Israeli-waged war on the Gaza Strip, which began on December 27, killed at least 1,350 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,450 others in the densely-populated sliver.
The aggression was the last in a series of operations carried out by the Israeli forces against the natives of the land since occupying Palestine in 1948.
SB/AA/MD
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=89413§ionid=351020202
The last Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip claimed the lives of at least 1,350 Palestinians.
Israel is preparing for all-out war on multiple fronts that include Iran, Syria and Lebanon, a senior military commander claims.
Israeli army Home Front Command Major General Yair Golan said Sunday that Tel Aviv is preparing for "all possible scenarios", indicating that one such scenario would be to fight a simultaneous war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The confirmation comes as US President Barack Obama seeks "new beginnings" with its arch-rival Iran. The US offer has been met with world praise but with fury in Tel Aviv.
Israeli media outlets late on Sunday began propagating wild scenarios that Iran is using the Lebanese Hezbollah to recruit Palestinian fighters to carry out terror attacks on Israel.
Citing anonymous sources, the reports began to surface after Tel Aviv countered an alleged bombing attempt outside a shopping mall in the northern city of Haifa.
"We are treating the attempted attack in Haifa with great gravity. A huge disaster was prevented by a miracle," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a weekly cabinet meeting after the bomb was defused on Sunday.
Israel has long accused Iran of arming Hezbollah and Palestinian groups via Syria, in an attempt to demonize the two Muslim countries.
Tel Aviv also accuses Tehran of developing nuclear weaponry -- a charge denied by the UN nuclear watchdog.
At a conference held in Tel Aviv, Golan also confirmed the likeliness of Israel staging another military confrontation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Although Israel does not consider rocket attacks from Gaza as a serious threat, there is the possibility of "dangerous" missile attacks by other countries, he said.
He failed to elaborate how such missile attacks would relate to Gaza.
His remarks came as reports claim that the soon-to-be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has plans for "a major military conflict in the coming months."
The commander also revealed that Tel Aviv will install new warning systems across Israel in preparation for its war plans.
The last Israeli-waged war on the Gaza Strip, which began on December 27, killed at least 1,350 Palestinians and wounded more than 5,450 others in the densely-populated sliver.
The aggression was the last in a series of operations carried out by the Israeli forces against the natives of the land since occupying Palestine in 1948.
SB/AA/MD
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=89413§ionid=351020202
IMF director warns of war
25 March 2009
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned on Monday that the global economic situation is "dire" and could lead to social upheaval and war. The statement is the latest in a series of worried pronouncements from leading international figures in the financial and political establishment.
The IMF is projecting a 1 percent decline in the global economy this year, which Strauss-Kahn noted would be "the first setback of the world economy in over 50 years." The IMF chief was speaking before a meeting of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The economic crisis, Strauss-Kahn said, would affect "dramatically unemployment for many countries. It will be at the roots of social unrest, some threats to democracy and maybe for some cases, it can also end in war."
Without citing specific countries, Strauss-Kahn also warned of regions of the world where "the financial collapse risk does exist."
The implications of the economic collapse for working people internationally are still in their initial stages. The ILO predicted in January that up to 50 million jobs would be eliminated throughout the world in 2009. This is likely an underestimation, as the economic crisis has sharply accelerated over the past several months.
Strauss-Kahn's position is one of concern over the prospect of mass opposition to the policies of the ruling elite as the economic situation deteriorates. He pleaded for the capitalist powers to implement policies that would prevent the crisis from "becoming a wasteland of unemployment." The major architects of the capitalist system over the past several decades are keenly aware that they have created an economic catastrophe that threatens social upheaval.
While Strauss-Kahn did not specify what he meant by the danger of war, his remarks came in the midst of hardening conflicts between the major powers over economic policy in the run-up to the G-20 summit meeting of major economies in London next month.
On Tuesday, German President and former IMF chief Hörst Koehler echoed some of Straus-Kahn's concerns and urged the countries participating in the G-20 summit to come up with a common plan for restructuring the world financial order. "I stand by my suggestion of organising a Bretton Woods II under the auspices of the United Nations to push forward a fundamental reform of the international economic and financial system," Koehler said. He warned that the outcome is a "test for democracy as a whole. Many citizens are unsettled. The coming months will be very tough."
In the back of the minds of many heads of state and figures such as Strauss-Kahn is no doubt the last time world leaders gathered in London to discuss a financial crisis. At the 1933 London conference, the major powers failed to come up with any coordinated agreement to respond to the Great Depression. The breakdown of the conference accelerated protectionist and beggar-thy-neighbor policies, which intensified the slump and exacerbated national antagonisms, culminating in the eruption of World War II.
As in 1933, world leaders are today proclaiming the need for international coordination, even as they fiercely defend the national interests of their respective financial and corporate elites.
In a column published in many world newspapers on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama asserted that "the leaders of the Group of 20 have a responsibility to take bold, comprehensive and coordinated action that not only jump-starts recovery, but also launches a new era of economic engagement to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again."
The US continues to insist that European countries implement expanded stimulus packages, while Europe—particularly France and Germany—are insisting that the summit focus on new international financial regulations. While making vague reference to new regulations, Obama wrote that the efforts of the major powers "must begin with swift action to stimulate growth" and that fiscal stimulus "should be robust and sustained until demand is restored."
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon argued on Monday that France had already committed sufficient resources to stimulus and that it was necessary to "avoid creating a bubble of public debt." The major European powers have opposed further stimulus packages, in part over concern over inflation and the stability of the euro.
Whatever Obama's talk of "coordinated action," the US is implementing a policy that approaches the financial equivalent of preemptive war. The government has committed trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street and US banks. Capitalizing on the still privileged position of the US dollar, the American ruling class is intent on funding these bailouts through the sale of massive volumes of debt on world markets, sucking up available financing and making it more difficult and expensive for other countries to get funding for their own programs.
The United States has initiated a policy of printing vast quantities of money—in part to finance the very debt that it is creating to bail out its banks. This potentially inflationary policy has generated an extremely nervous reaction from other powers, most noticeably China, which has over $1 trillion in dollar-denominated assets. These assets would plunge in value in the event of a major decline in the value of the dollar.
The head of the Chinese central bank argued on Monday for a new international currency to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency. On Tuesday, Li Xiangyang of the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences called the Fed's new policy of purchasing US Treasuries "irresponsible." He said that China would likely ask for "specific measures" on the part of the US to ensure the value of Chinese holdings.
Behind these policy differences are competing interests. The financial stakes are considerable. Tens of trillions of dollars in paper wealth have been destroyed on world markets since the crisis began. The combined wealth of the world's billionaires has declined by almost a half. How will these losses be allocated?
Whatever the hopes of Strauss-Kahn and Koehler for a more coordinated policy that will help head off social conflict, there is an inexorable logic to the class interests involved. On the one hand, the ruling class in every country will work ruthlessly to impose the burden of the economic crisis on the backs of working people. This is already taking place through massive job- and wage-cutting and attacks on social programs. On the other hand, the economic crisis will exacerbate the struggle over resources between the major powers—a struggle that, within the capitalist system, can ultimately be resolved only through war.
Joe Kishore
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/pers-m25.shtml
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned on Monday that the global economic situation is "dire" and could lead to social upheaval and war. The statement is the latest in a series of worried pronouncements from leading international figures in the financial and political establishment.
The IMF is projecting a 1 percent decline in the global economy this year, which Strauss-Kahn noted would be "the first setback of the world economy in over 50 years." The IMF chief was speaking before a meeting of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The economic crisis, Strauss-Kahn said, would affect "dramatically unemployment for many countries. It will be at the roots of social unrest, some threats to democracy and maybe for some cases, it can also end in war."
Without citing specific countries, Strauss-Kahn also warned of regions of the world where "the financial collapse risk does exist."
The implications of the economic collapse for working people internationally are still in their initial stages. The ILO predicted in January that up to 50 million jobs would be eliminated throughout the world in 2009. This is likely an underestimation, as the economic crisis has sharply accelerated over the past several months.
Strauss-Kahn's position is one of concern over the prospect of mass opposition to the policies of the ruling elite as the economic situation deteriorates. He pleaded for the capitalist powers to implement policies that would prevent the crisis from "becoming a wasteland of unemployment." The major architects of the capitalist system over the past several decades are keenly aware that they have created an economic catastrophe that threatens social upheaval.
While Strauss-Kahn did not specify what he meant by the danger of war, his remarks came in the midst of hardening conflicts between the major powers over economic policy in the run-up to the G-20 summit meeting of major economies in London next month.
On Tuesday, German President and former IMF chief Hörst Koehler echoed some of Straus-Kahn's concerns and urged the countries participating in the G-20 summit to come up with a common plan for restructuring the world financial order. "I stand by my suggestion of organising a Bretton Woods II under the auspices of the United Nations to push forward a fundamental reform of the international economic and financial system," Koehler said. He warned that the outcome is a "test for democracy as a whole. Many citizens are unsettled. The coming months will be very tough."
In the back of the minds of many heads of state and figures such as Strauss-Kahn is no doubt the last time world leaders gathered in London to discuss a financial crisis. At the 1933 London conference, the major powers failed to come up with any coordinated agreement to respond to the Great Depression. The breakdown of the conference accelerated protectionist and beggar-thy-neighbor policies, which intensified the slump and exacerbated national antagonisms, culminating in the eruption of World War II.
As in 1933, world leaders are today proclaiming the need for international coordination, even as they fiercely defend the national interests of their respective financial and corporate elites.
In a column published in many world newspapers on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama asserted that "the leaders of the Group of 20 have a responsibility to take bold, comprehensive and coordinated action that not only jump-starts recovery, but also launches a new era of economic engagement to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again."
The US continues to insist that European countries implement expanded stimulus packages, while Europe—particularly France and Germany—are insisting that the summit focus on new international financial regulations. While making vague reference to new regulations, Obama wrote that the efforts of the major powers "must begin with swift action to stimulate growth" and that fiscal stimulus "should be robust and sustained until demand is restored."
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon argued on Monday that France had already committed sufficient resources to stimulus and that it was necessary to "avoid creating a bubble of public debt." The major European powers have opposed further stimulus packages, in part over concern over inflation and the stability of the euro.
Whatever Obama's talk of "coordinated action," the US is implementing a policy that approaches the financial equivalent of preemptive war. The government has committed trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street and US banks. Capitalizing on the still privileged position of the US dollar, the American ruling class is intent on funding these bailouts through the sale of massive volumes of debt on world markets, sucking up available financing and making it more difficult and expensive for other countries to get funding for their own programs.
The United States has initiated a policy of printing vast quantities of money—in part to finance the very debt that it is creating to bail out its banks. This potentially inflationary policy has generated an extremely nervous reaction from other powers, most noticeably China, which has over $1 trillion in dollar-denominated assets. These assets would plunge in value in the event of a major decline in the value of the dollar.
The head of the Chinese central bank argued on Monday for a new international currency to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency. On Tuesday, Li Xiangyang of the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences called the Fed's new policy of purchasing US Treasuries "irresponsible." He said that China would likely ask for "specific measures" on the part of the US to ensure the value of Chinese holdings.
Behind these policy differences are competing interests. The financial stakes are considerable. Tens of trillions of dollars in paper wealth have been destroyed on world markets since the crisis began. The combined wealth of the world's billionaires has declined by almost a half. How will these losses be allocated?
Whatever the hopes of Strauss-Kahn and Koehler for a more coordinated policy that will help head off social conflict, there is an inexorable logic to the class interests involved. On the one hand, the ruling class in every country will work ruthlessly to impose the burden of the economic crisis on the backs of working people. This is already taking place through massive job- and wage-cutting and attacks on social programs. On the other hand, the economic crisis will exacerbate the struggle over resources between the major powers—a struggle that, within the capitalist system, can ultimately be resolved only through war.
Joe Kishore
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/pers-m25.shtml
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
China calls for new global currency
By JOE McDONALD, AP Business Writer Joe Mcdonald, Ap Business Writer Tue Mar 24, 10:23 pm ET
BEIJING – China is calling for a new global currency to replace the dominant dollar, showing a growing assertiveness on revamping the world economy ahead of next week's London summit on the financial crisis.
The surprise proposal by Beijing's central bank governor reflects unease about its vast holdings of U.S. government bonds and adds to Chinese pressure to overhaul a global financial system dominated by the dollar and Western governments. Both the United States and the European Union brushed off the idea.
The world economic crisis shows the "inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system," Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan said in an essay released Monday by the bank. He recommended creating a currency made up a basket of global currencies and controlled by the International Monetary Fund and said it would help "to achieve the objective of safeguarding global economic and financial stability."
Zhou did not mention the dollar by name. But in an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for a foreign audience.
China has long been uneasy about relying on the dollar for the bulk of its trade and to store foreign reserves. Premier Wen Jiabao publicly appealed to Washington this month to avoid any response to the crisis that might weaken the dollar and the value of Beijing's estimated $1 trillion in Treasuries and other U.S. government debt.
For decades, the dollar has been the world's most widely used currency. Many governments hold a large portion of their reserves in dollars. Crude oil and many commodities are priced in dollars. Business deals around the world are done in dollars.
But the financial crisis has highlighted how America's economic problems — and by extension the dollar — can wreak havoc on nations around the world. China is in a bind. To keep the value of its currency steady — some say undervalued — the Chinese government has to recycle its huge trade surpluses, and the biggest, most liquid option for investing them is U.S. government debt.
To better insulate countries from the ills of one country or one currency, Zhou said the IMF should create a "reserve currency" based on shares in the body held by its 185 member nations, known as special drawing rights, or SDRs.
He said it also should be used for trade, pricing commodities and accounting, not just government finance.
President Barack Obama described China's proposal as unnecessary during a prime-time news conference Tuesday.
"I don't believe that there's a need for a global currency," Obama said.
The president also pointed to the current strength of American money. "The reason the dollar is strong right now is because investors consider the United States the strongest economy in the world with the most stable political system in the world."
Earlier in the day, both U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took similar positions at a congressional hearing. They were asked by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., if they would "categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar and going to a global currency," and both said they would.
And the European Union's top economy official said the dollar's role as the international reserve currency is secure despite China's proposal.
"Everybody agrees also that the present world reserve currency, the dollar, is there and will continue to be there for a long period of time," EU Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Tuesday after a meeting of the European Commission.
Zhou also called for changing how SDRs are valued. Currently, they are based on the value of four currencies — the dollar, euro, yen and British pound. "The basket of currencies forming the basis for SDR valuation should be expanded to include currencies of all major economies," he wrote.
Beijing has been unusually bold in recent months in expressing concern about Washington's financial management and pushing for global economic changes. That reflects both its relative financial health and growing concern that increased globalization means missteps abroad could harm its own economy.
Zhou's comments are also part of China's longstanding push to reform the IMF, World Bank and global financial system to give greater voice to China and other developing economies — another theme that will be heard from China, Brazil, Russia and India at the summit of Group of 20 major economies next week.
"Overdue reforms should give proper representation to and increase the say of the emerging and developing economies," Yi Xianrong, a researcher with the Institute of Economics and Finances at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, wrote in the government newspaper China Daily.
"Proper representation and a bigger voice for the developing countries are the need of the hour. For instance, being the world's third-largest economy and the largest foreign reserves holder, China should get its due place in the monetary body."
Another idea Yi raised was that the U.S. and Europe should give up their traditional privileges of appointing the heads of the World Bank and the IMF.
The idea of a creating a new global reserve currency isn't new. But analysts say the proposal isn't likely to gain much traction because it faces major obstacles. It would require acceptance from nations that have long used the dollar and hold huge stockpiles of the U.S. currency.
"There has been for decades talk about creating an international reserve currency and it has never really progressed," said Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management.
Managing such a currency would require balancing the contradictory needs of countries with high and low growth or with trade surpluses or deficits, Pettis said. He said the 16 European nations that use the euro have faced "huge difficulties" in managing monetary policy even though their economies are similar.
"It's hard for me to imagine how it's going to be easier for the world to have a common currency for trade," he said.
___
Chinese central bank (in Chinese): http://www.pbc.gov.cn
Chinese central bank (in English): http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090325/ap_on_re_as/as_china_global_currency/print
BEIJING – China is calling for a new global currency to replace the dominant dollar, showing a growing assertiveness on revamping the world economy ahead of next week's London summit on the financial crisis.
The surprise proposal by Beijing's central bank governor reflects unease about its vast holdings of U.S. government bonds and adds to Chinese pressure to overhaul a global financial system dominated by the dollar and Western governments. Both the United States and the European Union brushed off the idea.
The world economic crisis shows the "inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system," Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan said in an essay released Monday by the bank. He recommended creating a currency made up a basket of global currencies and controlled by the International Monetary Fund and said it would help "to achieve the objective of safeguarding global economic and financial stability."
Zhou did not mention the dollar by name. But in an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for a foreign audience.
China has long been uneasy about relying on the dollar for the bulk of its trade and to store foreign reserves. Premier Wen Jiabao publicly appealed to Washington this month to avoid any response to the crisis that might weaken the dollar and the value of Beijing's estimated $1 trillion in Treasuries and other U.S. government debt.
For decades, the dollar has been the world's most widely used currency. Many governments hold a large portion of their reserves in dollars. Crude oil and many commodities are priced in dollars. Business deals around the world are done in dollars.
But the financial crisis has highlighted how America's economic problems — and by extension the dollar — can wreak havoc on nations around the world. China is in a bind. To keep the value of its currency steady — some say undervalued — the Chinese government has to recycle its huge trade surpluses, and the biggest, most liquid option for investing them is U.S. government debt.
To better insulate countries from the ills of one country or one currency, Zhou said the IMF should create a "reserve currency" based on shares in the body held by its 185 member nations, known as special drawing rights, or SDRs.
He said it also should be used for trade, pricing commodities and accounting, not just government finance.
President Barack Obama described China's proposal as unnecessary during a prime-time news conference Tuesday.
"I don't believe that there's a need for a global currency," Obama said.
The president also pointed to the current strength of American money. "The reason the dollar is strong right now is because investors consider the United States the strongest economy in the world with the most stable political system in the world."
Earlier in the day, both U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took similar positions at a congressional hearing. They were asked by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., if they would "categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar and going to a global currency," and both said they would.
And the European Union's top economy official said the dollar's role as the international reserve currency is secure despite China's proposal.
"Everybody agrees also that the present world reserve currency, the dollar, is there and will continue to be there for a long period of time," EU Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said Tuesday after a meeting of the European Commission.
Zhou also called for changing how SDRs are valued. Currently, they are based on the value of four currencies — the dollar, euro, yen and British pound. "The basket of currencies forming the basis for SDR valuation should be expanded to include currencies of all major economies," he wrote.
Beijing has been unusually bold in recent months in expressing concern about Washington's financial management and pushing for global economic changes. That reflects both its relative financial health and growing concern that increased globalization means missteps abroad could harm its own economy.
Zhou's comments are also part of China's longstanding push to reform the IMF, World Bank and global financial system to give greater voice to China and other developing economies — another theme that will be heard from China, Brazil, Russia and India at the summit of Group of 20 major economies next week.
"Overdue reforms should give proper representation to and increase the say of the emerging and developing economies," Yi Xianrong, a researcher with the Institute of Economics and Finances at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, wrote in the government newspaper China Daily.
"Proper representation and a bigger voice for the developing countries are the need of the hour. For instance, being the world's third-largest economy and the largest foreign reserves holder, China should get its due place in the monetary body."
Another idea Yi raised was that the U.S. and Europe should give up their traditional privileges of appointing the heads of the World Bank and the IMF.
The idea of a creating a new global reserve currency isn't new. But analysts say the proposal isn't likely to gain much traction because it faces major obstacles. It would require acceptance from nations that have long used the dollar and hold huge stockpiles of the U.S. currency.
"There has been for decades talk about creating an international reserve currency and it has never really progressed," said Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management.
Managing such a currency would require balancing the contradictory needs of countries with high and low growth or with trade surpluses or deficits, Pettis said. He said the 16 European nations that use the euro have faced "huge difficulties" in managing monetary policy even though their economies are similar.
"It's hard for me to imagine how it's going to be easier for the world to have a common currency for trade," he said.
___
Chinese central bank (in Chinese): http://www.pbc.gov.cn
Chinese central bank (in English): http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090325/ap_on_re_as/as_china_global_currency/print
Postcard from Pipelineistan
By Pepe Escobar
What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.
Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.
All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)
I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own DIY routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen," Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.
In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow -- which digitally details every single pipeline in Eurasia -- or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement for me.
Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.
Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban -- neo, light or classic -- or that "war on terror," whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.
Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?
Calling Dr. Zbig
In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the U.S. on its modern energy wars -- laid out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy." Later, his master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr. No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).
For Dr. Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia -- from, that is, thinking big -- it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system."
By now, Dr. Zbig -- among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama -- must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.
Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan -- and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington -- will have the upper hand in whatever's to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.
Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development of energy alternatives." Though you may not have noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.
In these early skirmishes of the twenty-first century, China reacted swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of 9/11, its leaders were formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be around for a while.
Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union -- Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan -- which the Clinton administration and then the new Bush administration, run by those former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.
Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves -- and thus sell much more to the West than U.S.-imposed sanctions now allow. No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neocon chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a U.S. attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming to represent.
Global BRIC-a-brac
Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang Province, its Far West.
The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.
Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations -- Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist -- and, because of that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway global strategists like Dr. Zbig and President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the twenty-first century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries -- for those of you by now collecting Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Add in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high octane dream.
The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.
Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to the Chinese border. No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would determine much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of U.S. military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).
AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity registered in the U.S., is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the Trans-Balkan," slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a U.S.-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by President Bill Clinton's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and later by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (thence on to Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.
As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest overseas base the U.S. had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo. Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the neocon-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").
How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan? Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's Global War on Terror. Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable -- but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another time.
Rainy Night in Georgia
If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability -- in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of the energy flow.
It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant," less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.
From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing -- and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.
For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the U.S. version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.
Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.
President Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC -- its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe -- means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.
In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.
In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC -- once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil -- lives or dies.
Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those U.S. bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.
And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from the Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the most important question on the planet.
What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.
Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.
All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)
I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own DIY routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen," Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.
In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (before it was moved to Astana, in the middle of the middle of nowhere) the locals were puzzled when I expressed an overwhelming urge to drive to that country's oil boomtown Aktau. ("Why? There's nothing there.") Entering the Space Odyssey-style map room at the Russian energy giant Gazprom's headquarters in Moscow -- which digitally details every single pipeline in Eurasia -- or the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)'s corporate HQ in Tehran, with its neat rows of female experts in full chador, was my equivalent of entering Aladdin's cave. And never reading the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" in the same sentence is still a source of endless amusement for me.
Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.
Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban -- neo, light or classic -- or that "war on terror," whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.
Who said Pipelineistan couldn't be fun?
Calling Dr. Zbig
In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the U.S. on its modern energy wars -- laid out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy." Later, his master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr. No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).
For Dr. Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia -- from, that is, thinking big -- it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system."
By now, Dr. Zbig -- among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama -- must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.
Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan -- and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington -- will have the upper hand in whatever's to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.
Energy expert Michael Klare has been instrumental in identifying the key vectors in the wild, ongoing global scramble for power over Pipelineistan. These range from the increasing scarcity (and difficulty of reaching) primary energy supplies to "the painfully slow development of energy alternatives." Though you may not have noticed, the first skirmishes in Pipelineistan's Liquid War are already on, and even in the worst of economic times, the risk mounts constantly, given the relentless competition between the West and Asia, be it in the Middle East, in the Caspian theater, or in African oil-rich states like Angola, Nigeria and Sudan.
In these early skirmishes of the twenty-first century, China reacted swiftly indeed. Even before the attacks of 9/11, its leaders were formulating a response to what they saw as the reptilian encroachment of the West on the oil and gas lands of Central Asia, especially in the Caspian Sea region. To be specific, in June 2001, its leaders joined with Russia's to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It's known as the SCO and that's an acronym you should memorize. It's going to be around for a while.
Back then, the SCO's junior members were, tellingly enough, the Stans, the energy-rich former SSRs of the Soviet Union -- Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan -- which the Clinton administration and then the new Bush administration, run by those former energy men, had been eyeing covetously. The organization was to be a multi-layered economic and military regional cooperation society that, as both the Chinese and the Russians saw it, would function as a kind of security blanket around the upper rim of Afghanistan.
Iran is, of course, a crucial energy node of West Asia and that country's leaders, too, would prove no slouches when it came to the New Great Game. It needs at least $200 billion in foreign investment to truly modernize its fabulous oil and gas reserves -- and thus sell much more to the West than U.S.-imposed sanctions now allow. No wonder Iran soon became a target in Washington. No wonder an air assault on that country remains the ultimate wet dream of assorted Likudniks as well as Dick ("Angler") Cheney and his neocon chamberlains and comrades-in-arms. As seen by the elite from Tehran and Delhi to Beijing and Moscow, such a U.S. attack, now likely off the radar screen until at least 2012, would be a war not only against Russia and China, but against the whole project of Asian integration that the SCO is coming to represent.
Global BRIC-a-brac
Meanwhile, as the Obama administration tries to sort out its Iranian, Afghan, and Central Asian policies, Beijing continues to dream of a secure, fast-flowing, energy version of the old Silk Road, extending from the Caspian Basin (the energy-rich Stans plus Iran and Russia) to Xinjiang Province, its Far West.
The SCO has expanded its aims and scope since 2001. Today, Iran, India, and Pakistan enjoy "observer status" in an organization that increasingly aims to control and protect not just regional energy supplies, but Pipelineistan in every direction. This is, of course, the role the Washington ruling elite would like NATO to play across Eurasia. Given that Russia and China expect the SCO to play a similar role across Asia, clashes of various sorts are inevitable.
Ask any relevant expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and he will tell you that the SCO should be understood as a historically unique alliance of five non-Western civilizations -- Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist -- and, because of that, capable of evolving into the basis for a collective security system in Eurasia. That's a thought sure to discomfort classic inside-the-Beltway global strategists like Dr. Zbig and President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft.
According to the view from Beijing, the rising world order of the twenty-first century will be significantly determined by a quadrangle of BRIC countries -- for those of you by now collecting Great Game acronyms, that stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- plus the future Islamic triangle of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Add in a unified South America, no longer in thrall to Washington, and you have a global SCO-plus. On the drawing boards, at least, it's a high octane dream.
The key to any of this is a continuing Sino-Russian entente cordiale.
Already in 1999, watching NATO and the United States aggressively expand into the distant Balkans, Beijing identified this new game for what it was: a developing energy war. And at stake were the oil and natural gas reserves of what Americans would soon be calling the "arc of instability," a vast span of lands extending from North Africa to the Chinese border. No less important would be the routes pipelines would take in bringing the energy buried in those lands to the West. Where they would be built, the countries they would cross, would determine much in the world to come. And this was where the empire of U.S. military bases (think, for instance, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo) met Pipelineistan (represented, way back in 1999, by the AMBO pipeline).
AMBO, short for Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corporation, an entity registered in the U.S., is building a $1.1 billion pipeline, aka "the Trans-Balkan," slated to be finished by 2011. It will bring Caspian oil to the West without taking it through either Russia or Iran. As a pipeline, AMBO fit well into a geopolitical strategy of creating a U.S.-controlled energy-security grid that was first developed by President Bill Clinton's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and later by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Behind the idea of that "grid" lay a go-for-broke militarization of an energy corridor that would stretch from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through a series of now independent former SSRs of the Soviet Union to Turkey, and from there into the Balkans (thence on to Europe). It was meant to sabotage the larger energy plans of both Russia and Iran. AMBO itself would bring oil from the Caspian basin to a terminal in the former SSR of Georgia in the Caucasus, and then transport it by tanker through the Black Sea to the Bulgarian port of Burgas, where another pipeline would connect to Macedonia and then to the Albanian port of Vlora.
As for Camp Bondsteel, it was the "enduring" military base that Washington gained from the wars for the remains of Yugoslavia. It would be the largest overseas base the U.S. had built since the Vietnam War. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) would, with the Army Corps of Engineers, put it up on 400 hectares of farmland near the Macedonian border in southern Kosovo. Think of it as a user-friendly, five-star version of Guantanamo with perks for those stationed there that included Thai massage and loads of junk food. Bondsteel is the Balkan equivalent of a giant immobile aircraft carrier, capable of exercising surveillance not only over the Balkans but also over Turkey and the Black Sea region (considered in the neocon-speak of the Bush years "the new interface" between the "Euro-Atlantic community" and the "Greater Middle East").
How could Russia, China, and Iran not interpret the war in Kosovo, then the invasion of Afghanistan (where Washington had previously tried to pair with the Taliban and encourage the building of another of those avoid-Iran, avoid-Russia pipelines), followed by the invasion of Iraq (that country of vast oil reserves), and finally the recent clash in Georgia (that crucial energy transportation junction) as straightforward wars for Pipelineistan? Though seldom imagined this way in our mainstream media, the Russian and Chinese leaderships saw a stark "continuity" of policy stretching from Bill Clinton's humanitarian imperialism to Bush's Global War on Terror. Blowback, as then Russian President Vladimir Putin himself warned publicly, was inevitable -- but that's another magic-carpet story, another cave to enter another time.
Rainy Night in Georgia
If you want to understand Washington's version of Pipelineistan, you have to start with Mafia-ridden Georgia. Though its army was crushed in its recent war with Russia, Georgia remains crucial to Washington's energy policy in what, by now, has become a genuine arc of instability -- in part because of a continuing obsession with cutting Iran out of the energy flow.
It was around the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, as I pointed out in my book Globalistan in 2007, that American policy congealed. Zbig Brzezinski himself flew into Baku in 1995 as an "energy consultant," less than four years after Azerbaijan became independent, and sold the idea to the Azerbaijani elite. The BTC was to run from the Sangachal Terminal, half-an-hour south of Baku, across neighboring Georgia to the Marine Terminal in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Now operational, that 1,767-kilometer-long, 44-meter-wide steel serpent straddles no less than six war zones, ongoing or potential: Nagorno-Karabakh (an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan), Chechnya and Dagestan (both embattled regions of Russia), South Ossetia and Abkhazia (on which the 2008 Russia-Georgia war pivoted), and Turkish Kurdistan.
From a purely economic point of view, the BTC made no sense. A "BTK" pipeline, running from Baku through Tehran to Iran's Kharg Island, could have been built for, relatively speaking, next to nothing -- and it would have had the added advantage of bypassing both mafia-corroded Georgia and wobbly Kurdish-populated Eastern Anatolia. That would have been the really cheap way to bring Caspian oil and gas to Europe.
The New Great Game ensured that that was not to be, and much followed from that decision. Even though Moscow never planned to occupy Georgia long-term in its 2008 war, or take over the BTC pipeline that now runs through its territory, Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst Konstantin Batunin pointed out the obvious: by briefly cutting off the BTC oil flow, Russian troops made it all too clear to global investors that Georgia wasn't a reliable energy transit country. In other words, the Russians made a mockery of Zbig's world.
For its part, Azerbaijan was, until recently, the real success story in the U.S. version of Pipelineistan. Advised by Zbig, Bill Clinton literally "stole" Baku from Russia's "near abroad" by promoting the BTC and the wealth that would flow from it. Now, however, with the message of the Russia-Georgia War sinking in, Baku is again allowing itself to be seduced by Russia. To top it off, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev can't stand Georgia's brash President Mikhail Saakashvili. That's hardly surprising. After all, Saakashvili's rash military moves caused Azerbaijan to lose at least $500 million when the BTC was shut down during the war.
Russia's energy seduction blitzkrieg is focused like a laser on Central Asia as well. (We'll talk about it more in the next Pipelineistan installment.) It revolves around offering to buy Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen gas at European prices instead of previous, much lower Russian prices. The Russians, in fact, have offered the same deal to the Azeris: so now, Baku is negotiating a deal involving more capacity for the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline, which makes its way to the Russian borders of the Black Sea, while considering pumping less oil for the BTC.
President Obama needs to understand the dire implications of this. Less Azeri oil on the BTC -- its full capacity is 1 million barrels a day, mostly shipped to Europe -- means the pipeline may go broke, which is exactly what Russia wants.
In Central Asia, some of the biggest stakes revolve around the monster Kashagan oil field in "snow leopard" Kazakhstan, the absolute jewel in the Caspian crown with reserves of as many as 9 billion barrels. As usual in Pipelineistan, it all comes down to which routes will deliver Kashagan's oil to the world after production starts in 2013. This spells, of course, Liquid War. Wily Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev would like to use the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to pump Kashagan crude to the Black Sea.
In this case, the Kazakhs hold all the cards. How oil will flow from Kashagan will decide whether the BTC -- once hyped by Washington as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on Persian Gulf oil -- lives or dies.
Welcome, then, to Pipelineistan! Whether we like it or not, in good times and bad, it's a reasonable bet that we're all going to be Pipeline tourists. So, go with the flow. Learn the crucial acronyms, keep an eye out for what happens to all those U.S. bases across the oil heartlands of the planet, watch where the pipelines are being built, and do your best to keep tabs on the next set of monster Chinese energy deals and fabulous coups by Russia's Gazprom.
And, while you're at it, consider this just the first postcard sent off from our tour of Pipelineistan. We'll be back (to slightly adapt a quote from the Terminator). Think of this as a door opening onto a future in which what flows where and to whom may turn out to be the most important question on the planet.
Do the Secret Bush Memos Amount to Treason? Top Constitutional Scholar Says Yes
By Naomi Wolf, AlterNet
Posted on March 25, 2009, Printed on March 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/133273/
In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.
The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.
It was as if Milton's Satan had a law degree and was establishing within the borders of the United States the architecture of hell.
I thought this was -- and is -- certainly one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, making the petty burglary of Watergate -- which scandalized the nation -- seem like playground antics. It is newsworthy too with the groundswell of support for prosecutions of Bush/Cheney crimes and recent actions such as Canadian attorneys mobilizing to arrest Bush if he visits their country.
The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.
As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?
Astonished, I sought a reality check -- and a formal legal read -- from one of the nation's top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.
Here is our conversation:
Naomi Wolf: Michael, can you explain to a layperson what the Yoo memos actually mean?'
Michael Ratner: What they mean is that your book looks moderate in respect to those issues now. This -- what is in the memos -- is law by fiat.
I call it "Fuhrer's law." What those memos lay out means the end of the system of checks and balances in this country. It means the end of the system in which the courts, legislature and executive each had a function and they could check each other.
What the memos set out is a system in which the president's word is law, and Yoo is very clear about that: the president's word is not only law according to these memos, but no law or constitutional right or treaty can restrict the president's authority.
What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone.
What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)
The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.
Who has suspended the law this way in the past? It is like a Caesar's law in Rome; a Mussolini's law in Italy; a Fuhrer's law in Germany; a Stalin's law in the Soviet Union. It is right down the line. It is enforcing the will of the dictator through the military.
NW: The mainstream media have virtually ignored these revelations, though it seems to me this is the biggest news since Pearl Harbor.
MR: I think that's right. We had a glimmering of the blueprint for some of this -- when they picked up Jose Padilla, the military went to a prison and snatched an American citizen as if they had a perfect right to do so.
Now we can see that these memos laid the legal groundwork for such actions. We knew the military could do this to an individual. We did not know the plan was to eliminate First Amendment constitutional rights for the entire population.
NW: If Bush only wanted these powers in order to prosecute a war on terror, why does he need to suspend the First Amendment? Isn't that the smoking gun of a larger intention toward the general population?
MR: Part of this plan was actually implemented: for instance, they tried to keep people like Padilla from getting to a magistrate. They engaged in the wiretapping, because according to these memos there was no Fourth Amendment.
They had to be planning some kind of a takeover of the United States to be saying they could simply abolish the First Amendment if the president believed it was necessary in the name of national security. It lays the groundwork for what could have been a massive military takeover of the United States.
Here they crept right up and actually implemented part of the plan, with Padilla, with the warrantless wiretapping. Yet they are saying in the White House and in Congress that it is looking backward to investigate the authors of these memos and those who instructed Yoo and others to write them.
But investigation and prosecutions are really looking forward -- to say we need the deterrence of prosecution so this does not happen again.
NW: What about the deployment of three brigades in the U.S.? How should we read that?'
MR: With terrorism as less of a concern to many, but now with the economy in tatters there is a lot more militant activism in U.S. -- the New School and NYU student takeovers, protests around the country and strikes are just the beginning. I think governments are now concerned over people's activism, and people's anger at their economic situation. I don't think those brigades can be detached from the idea that there might well be a huge amount of direct-action protest in the U.S.
There could have also been a closer election that could have been stolen easily and then a huge protest. Those troops would have been used to enforce the will of the cabal stealing the election.
NW: As a layperson, I don't fully understand what powers the memos actually manifest. Are they theoretical or not just theoretical? What power did the memos actually give Bush?
MR: They were probably, in fact almost for sure, written in cahoots with the administration -- [Karl] Rove, [Dick] Cheney -- to give them legal backing for what they planned or wanted to carry out.
What I assume happened here is people like Cheney or his aides go to the Office of Legal Counsel and say, "We are going to need legal backing, to give a face of legality to what we are doing and what we are planning." When the president then signs a piece of paper that says, "OK, military, go get Jose Padilla," these memos give that order a veneer of legality.
If you are familiar with the history of dictators, coups and fascism (as I know you are), they (the planners) prefer a veneer of legality. Hitler killed 6 million Jews with a veneer of legality -- getting his dictatorial powers through the Reichstag and the courts.
These memos gave the Bush administration's [lawless] practices the veneer of legality.
NW: So are you saying that these memos actually created a police state that we did not know about?
MR: If you look at police state as various strands of lawlessness, we knew about some of this lawlessness even before this latest set of memos.
But the memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be -- that this wasn't just going to be a few individuals here or there who suffered the arrows of a police state.
These memos lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if that's not a coup d'etat then, nothing is.
NW: Can I ask something? I keep thinking about the notion of treason. In America now, people tend to read the definition of treason in the Constitution as if they are thinking of a Tokyo Rose or an American citizen acting as an agent for an enemy state -- very much a World War II experience of the traitor to one's country.
But I've been reading a lot of 16th and 17th century history, and it seems to me that the founders were thinking more along the lines of English treason of that era -- small groups of Englishmen, usually nobility, who formed cabals and conspired with one another to buy or recruit militias to overthrow the crown or Parliament.
The notion that a group might conspire in secret to overthrow the government is not a wild, marginal concept, it is a substantial part of European, and especially British, Renaissance and Reformation-era history and would have been very much alive in the minds of the Enlightenment-era founders. (I just visited the Tower of London where this was so frequent a charge against groups of English subjects that there is a designated Traitor's Gate.)
So clearly you don't have to act on behalf of another state to commit treason. The Constitution defines it as levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. It says nothing about the enemy having to be another state.
When the Constitution was drafted, the phrase "United States" barely referred to a singular country; it referred to a new federation of many united states. They imagined militias rising up against various states; it was not necessarily nation against nation.
Surely, when we have evidence Bush prepared the way to allow the military to imprison or shoot civilians in the various states and created law to put his own troops over the authority of the governors and the national guard of the various states, and when the military were sent to terrorize protesters in St. Paul, [Minn.], Bush was levying war in this sense against the united states?
Hasn't Bush actually levied war against Minnesota? And if our leaders and military are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, and there is clear evidence now that Bush and his cabal intended to do away with it, are they not our enemies and giving aid and comfort to our enemies? Again, "enemy" does not seem to me to be defined in the Constitution as another sovereign state.
MR: You are right. Treason need not involve another state. Aaron Burr was tried for treason. I do think that a plan to control the military, use it in the United States contrary to law and the Constitution and employ it to levy a war or takeover that eliminates the democratic institutions of the country constitutes treason, even if done under the president of the United States.
The authority given by these memos that could be used to raid every congressional office, raid and search every home, detain tens of thousands, would certainly fit a definition of treason.
This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States.
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/133273/
Posted on March 25, 2009, Printed on March 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/133273/
In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.
The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.
It was as if Milton's Satan had a law degree and was establishing within the borders of the United States the architecture of hell.
I thought this was -- and is -- certainly one of the biggest stories of our lifetime, making the petty burglary of Watergate -- which scandalized the nation -- seem like playground antics. It is newsworthy too with the groundswell of support for prosecutions of Bush/Cheney crimes and recent actions such as Canadian attorneys mobilizing to arrest Bush if he visits their country.
The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.
As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?
Astonished, I sought a reality check -- and a formal legal read -- from one of the nation's top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.
Here is our conversation:
Naomi Wolf: Michael, can you explain to a layperson what the Yoo memos actually mean?'
Michael Ratner: What they mean is that your book looks moderate in respect to those issues now. This -- what is in the memos -- is law by fiat.
I call it "Fuhrer's law." What those memos lay out means the end of the system of checks and balances in this country. It means the end of the system in which the courts, legislature and executive each had a function and they could check each other.
What the memos set out is a system in which the president's word is law, and Yoo is very clear about that: the president's word is not only law according to these memos, but no law or constitutional right or treaty can restrict the president's authority.
What Yoo says is that the president's authority as commander in chief in the so-called war on terror is not bound by any law passed by Congress, any treaty, or the protections of free speech, due process and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The First, Fourth and Fifth amendments -- gone.
What this actually means is that the president can order the military to operate in the U.S. and to operate without constitutional restrictions. They -- the military -- can pick you or me up in the U.S. for any reason and without any legal process. They would not have any restrictions on entering your house to search it, or to seize you. They can put you into a brig without any due process or going to court. (That's the Fourth and Fifth amendments.)
The military can disregard the Posse Comitatus law, which restricts the military from acting as police in the the United States. And the president can, in the name of wartime restrictions, limit free speech. There it is in black and white: we are looking at one-person rule without any checks and balances -- a lawless state. Law by fiat.
Who has suspended the law this way in the past? It is like a Caesar's law in Rome; a Mussolini's law in Italy; a Fuhrer's law in Germany; a Stalin's law in the Soviet Union. It is right down the line. It is enforcing the will of the dictator through the military.
NW: The mainstream media have virtually ignored these revelations, though it seems to me this is the biggest news since Pearl Harbor.
MR: I think that's right. We had a glimmering of the blueprint for some of this -- when they picked up Jose Padilla, the military went to a prison and snatched an American citizen as if they had a perfect right to do so.
Now we can see that these memos laid the legal groundwork for such actions. We knew the military could do this to an individual. We did not know the plan was to eliminate First Amendment constitutional rights for the entire population.
NW: If Bush only wanted these powers in order to prosecute a war on terror, why does he need to suspend the First Amendment? Isn't that the smoking gun of a larger intention toward the general population?
MR: Part of this plan was actually implemented: for instance, they tried to keep people like Padilla from getting to a magistrate. They engaged in the wiretapping, because according to these memos there was no Fourth Amendment.
They had to be planning some kind of a takeover of the United States to be saying they could simply abolish the First Amendment if the president believed it was necessary in the name of national security. It lays the groundwork for what could have been a massive military takeover of the United States.
Here they crept right up and actually implemented part of the plan, with Padilla, with the warrantless wiretapping. Yet they are saying in the White House and in Congress that it is looking backward to investigate the authors of these memos and those who instructed Yoo and others to write them.
But investigation and prosecutions are really looking forward -- to say we need the deterrence of prosecution so this does not happen again.
NW: What about the deployment of three brigades in the U.S.? How should we read that?'
MR: With terrorism as less of a concern to many, but now with the economy in tatters there is a lot more militant activism in U.S. -- the New School and NYU student takeovers, protests around the country and strikes are just the beginning. I think governments are now concerned over people's activism, and people's anger at their economic situation. I don't think those brigades can be detached from the idea that there might well be a huge amount of direct-action protest in the U.S.
There could have also been a closer election that could have been stolen easily and then a huge protest. Those troops would have been used to enforce the will of the cabal stealing the election.
NW: As a layperson, I don't fully understand what powers the memos actually manifest. Are they theoretical or not just theoretical? What power did the memos actually give Bush?
MR: They were probably, in fact almost for sure, written in cahoots with the administration -- [Karl] Rove, [Dick] Cheney -- to give them legal backing for what they planned or wanted to carry out.
What I assume happened here is people like Cheney or his aides go to the Office of Legal Counsel and say, "We are going to need legal backing, to give a face of legality to what we are doing and what we are planning." When the president then signs a piece of paper that says, "OK, military, go get Jose Padilla," these memos give that order a veneer of legality.
If you are familiar with the history of dictators, coups and fascism (as I know you are), they (the planners) prefer a veneer of legality. Hitler killed 6 million Jews with a veneer of legality -- getting his dictatorial powers through the Reichstag and the courts.
These memos gave the Bush administration's [lawless] practices the veneer of legality.
NW: So are you saying that these memos actually created a police state that we did not know about?
MR: If you look at police state as various strands of lawlessness, we knew about some of this lawlessness even before this latest set of memos.
But the memos revealed how massive the takeover of our democracy was to be -- that this wasn't just going to be a few individuals here or there who suffered the arrows of a police state.
These memos lay the groundwork for a massive military takeover of the United States in cahoots with the president. And if that's not a coup d'etat then, nothing is.
NW: Can I ask something? I keep thinking about the notion of treason. In America now, people tend to read the definition of treason in the Constitution as if they are thinking of a Tokyo Rose or an American citizen acting as an agent for an enemy state -- very much a World War II experience of the traitor to one's country.
But I've been reading a lot of 16th and 17th century history, and it seems to me that the founders were thinking more along the lines of English treason of that era -- small groups of Englishmen, usually nobility, who formed cabals and conspired with one another to buy or recruit militias to overthrow the crown or Parliament.
The notion that a group might conspire in secret to overthrow the government is not a wild, marginal concept, it is a substantial part of European, and especially British, Renaissance and Reformation-era history and would have been very much alive in the minds of the Enlightenment-era founders. (I just visited the Tower of London where this was so frequent a charge against groups of English subjects that there is a designated Traitor's Gate.)
So clearly you don't have to act on behalf of another state to commit treason. The Constitution defines it as levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. It says nothing about the enemy having to be another state.
When the Constitution was drafted, the phrase "United States" barely referred to a singular country; it referred to a new federation of many united states. They imagined militias rising up against various states; it was not necessarily nation against nation.
Surely, when we have evidence Bush prepared the way to allow the military to imprison or shoot civilians in the various states and created law to put his own troops over the authority of the governors and the national guard of the various states, and when the military were sent to terrorize protesters in St. Paul, [Minn.], Bush was levying war in this sense against the united states?
Hasn't Bush actually levied war against Minnesota? And if our leaders and military are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, and there is clear evidence now that Bush and his cabal intended to do away with it, are they not our enemies and giving aid and comfort to our enemies? Again, "enemy" does not seem to me to be defined in the Constitution as another sovereign state.
MR: You are right. Treason need not involve another state. Aaron Burr was tried for treason. I do think that a plan to control the military, use it in the United States contrary to law and the Constitution and employ it to levy a war or takeover that eliminates the democratic institutions of the country constitutes treason, even if done under the president of the United States.
The authority given by these memos that could be used to raid every congressional office, raid and search every home, detain tens of thousands, would certainly fit a definition of treason.
This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States.
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/133273/
Monday, March 23, 2009
Water, Water Everywhere? Sustaining Scarce Resources in the Desert
By Randall Amster, Huffington Post
Posted on March 10, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130890/
Life here in the desert southwest is richly complex and oftentimes a great challenge. A hint of frontier culture remains even as rampant growth and homogenization take hold at breakneck speed. People love the landscapes and the history, but can still sit and watch both disappear in the name of "progress." At times it seems as if a strange double consciousness exists here, nowhere more prominently than in our relationship to water.
It's interesting to live in a place where you regularly see coyotes, roadrunners, hawks, antelopes, and javelina (just to name a few local species) with packs of the latter still roaming through our downtowns. People have horses in their front yards, gunracks on their cars, and cacti in their burritos. In a few hours time you can go from a densely-packed urban center to the Grand Canyon, watching the landscape change from desert hills to mountain forests and back again. Despite ubiquitous strip malls, golf courses, and backyard swimming pools, the southwest is still magical in many ways.
The trouble is, as many already well know, there's not much water left here. California is dry too, and Florida will be soon. Atlanta has already run out more than once. Australia is basically permanently drought-stricken and agriculturally bankrupt. It's one thing when the desert is bereft of water, but the marshlands? The nation's agricultural leader? Major cities? Whole continents? And this is only the beginning.
Whereas the wars of the recent past were fought over oil, the ones of the near future almost certainly will devolve upon water. Like they say in these parts, "Whiskey's for drinkin', but water's for fightin'." If contemporary wars are any gauge, it isn't going to be pretty when the pump don't work -- regardless of who took the handles.
Consider that the earth's surface is about two-thirds water, and we humans are made up of roughly the same percentage. Water is the lifeblood of the planet, and of ourselves as well. While abundant in a general sense, much of the planet's water is in the oceans, and desalination takes large energy inputs (often reliant upon oil, no less) in order to yield any net benefit. Global climate change is melting arctic ice and playing havoc with the water cycle, creating rising tides and disastrous floods, which presents us with the irony of having too much water of the wrong kind -- much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ancient mariner had experienced:
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
As this essential resource dwindles, two related phenomena take hold. First, military strategists overtly cite "resource control" as a principle aim of national security, blithely observing that conflicts to attain it will dominate the coming decades. Secondly, at the same time, multinational corporations are pumping water as fast as possible, turning a previously common resource into one that is privatized and engendering a global commodity trade that gives new meaning to "liquidity." In both cases, the aim is to wrest water supplies away from localities and set up a distribution system that simultaneously turns a profit and forces people to become dependent on others for a basic need.
It's bad enough to watch public goods such as energy, education, health care, and the airwaves become privatized. But when it reaches the level of water, we're talking about something that no one can do without under any circumstance. This raises the stakes considerably and threatens to tighten the sense of blackmail that often pervades the machinations of the military-industrial complex. Yes, President Eisenhower warned us about this as he prepared to leave office, but it doesn't seem as if we've done a whole lot to prevent his prophecy from materializing.
In fact, we've gone in the opposite direction, letting our sense of self-reliance atrophy as powerful forces take what once belonged to all of us and sell a watered-down version (pun intended) back to us. This holds true for people living in shantytowns in places like Mumbai and Capetown as much as it does for the American middle class. Companies marketing bottled water brands capture the diminishing resource at the expense of communities around the globe and here at home, often without paying for it, and we wind up purchasing from them that which ought to be free and which no one should ever own.
Our common law legal system actually once knew this, going back to Blackstone's 1766 treatise on the laws of England that later helped form the basis of our legal system:
"There are some few things which, notwithstanding the general introduction and continuance of property, must still unavoidably remain in common, being such wherein nothing but an usufructuary property is capable of being had. . . . Water is a moveable, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue common by the law of nature; so that I can only have a temporary, transient, usufructuary property therein."
In plain English, Blackstone observed that water could only be used but never owned as property. American frontier law turned this on its head through the doctrine of "prior appropriation" (sometimes colloquially understood as "first in time, first in right") but conveniently ignored the rights of native peoples who were unquestionably here first. In the end, like the frontier itself, water was given property status of a sort, and we're still living with the disastrous implications today.
In the face of these concerns, there's a great need for the articulation of alternative models of resource allocation that don't necessitate militarism and subjugation. With scarce supplies of essentials running down, and with the global economy plainly unable to deliver on its false promise of universal prosperity, we come to realize that the bedrock Western belief in the "tragedy of the commons" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that it is precisely the privatization of the shared wealth of humanity that has led to degradation and inequality. Education and conservation are crucial in turning this downward spiral around, and yet at times the tendency to focus on much-needed macroscopic solutions often misses important lessons from local initiatives.
In this regard stand numerous examples around the world of people and communities who still manage scarce resources collectively and sustainably. Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great "common pool resource" systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself. In this model, water is viewed as sacred and not subject to private ownership. Instead, local communities manage the resource together through a collective self-governance system whereby everyone using the water gets what they need and also contributes their labor to maintain the entire operation. A non-authoritarian "mayordomo" administers the resource equitably, resolves conflicts, and guards the overall integrity of the structure before passing the baton to someone else and rotating the role of facilitator.
This is a low-tech solution to a complex modern problem. Water is moved through ditches and channels, and everyone takes only as much as they need. It works because, over time, people engaged in such an enterprise come to see themselves as interconnected with their neighbors in a meaningful way, so that their own prosperity is bound up with that of their fellow community members. Mutual interdependence replaces corporate dependence, and in a feat of old-school sustainability, people in the southwest have been cultivating this way of life for a few hundred years.
If relatively poor people confronted with extreme scarcity in arid regions can create a stable, collective, and nonhierarchical common pool system, then certainly we can find ways to do so as well with all of the tools at our disposal. It's more than just a matter of wishful thinking or utopian longing; our very survival may well be at stake. Progress might have its virtues, but sometimes the solutions we seek are already at hand and in fact have been in practice for a long time. Indeed, the answers aren't just blowin' in the wind -- they might be flowin' in the water as well.
© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130890/
Posted on March 10, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130890/
Life here in the desert southwest is richly complex and oftentimes a great challenge. A hint of frontier culture remains even as rampant growth and homogenization take hold at breakneck speed. People love the landscapes and the history, but can still sit and watch both disappear in the name of "progress." At times it seems as if a strange double consciousness exists here, nowhere more prominently than in our relationship to water.
It's interesting to live in a place where you regularly see coyotes, roadrunners, hawks, antelopes, and javelina (just to name a few local species) with packs of the latter still roaming through our downtowns. People have horses in their front yards, gunracks on their cars, and cacti in their burritos. In a few hours time you can go from a densely-packed urban center to the Grand Canyon, watching the landscape change from desert hills to mountain forests and back again. Despite ubiquitous strip malls, golf courses, and backyard swimming pools, the southwest is still magical in many ways.
The trouble is, as many already well know, there's not much water left here. California is dry too, and Florida will be soon. Atlanta has already run out more than once. Australia is basically permanently drought-stricken and agriculturally bankrupt. It's one thing when the desert is bereft of water, but the marshlands? The nation's agricultural leader? Major cities? Whole continents? And this is only the beginning.
Whereas the wars of the recent past were fought over oil, the ones of the near future almost certainly will devolve upon water. Like they say in these parts, "Whiskey's for drinkin', but water's for fightin'." If contemporary wars are any gauge, it isn't going to be pretty when the pump don't work -- regardless of who took the handles.
Consider that the earth's surface is about two-thirds water, and we humans are made up of roughly the same percentage. Water is the lifeblood of the planet, and of ourselves as well. While abundant in a general sense, much of the planet's water is in the oceans, and desalination takes large energy inputs (often reliant upon oil, no less) in order to yield any net benefit. Global climate change is melting arctic ice and playing havoc with the water cycle, creating rising tides and disastrous floods, which presents us with the irony of having too much water of the wrong kind -- much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ancient mariner had experienced:
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
As this essential resource dwindles, two related phenomena take hold. First, military strategists overtly cite "resource control" as a principle aim of national security, blithely observing that conflicts to attain it will dominate the coming decades. Secondly, at the same time, multinational corporations are pumping water as fast as possible, turning a previously common resource into one that is privatized and engendering a global commodity trade that gives new meaning to "liquidity." In both cases, the aim is to wrest water supplies away from localities and set up a distribution system that simultaneously turns a profit and forces people to become dependent on others for a basic need.
It's bad enough to watch public goods such as energy, education, health care, and the airwaves become privatized. But when it reaches the level of water, we're talking about something that no one can do without under any circumstance. This raises the stakes considerably and threatens to tighten the sense of blackmail that often pervades the machinations of the military-industrial complex. Yes, President Eisenhower warned us about this as he prepared to leave office, but it doesn't seem as if we've done a whole lot to prevent his prophecy from materializing.
In fact, we've gone in the opposite direction, letting our sense of self-reliance atrophy as powerful forces take what once belonged to all of us and sell a watered-down version (pun intended) back to us. This holds true for people living in shantytowns in places like Mumbai and Capetown as much as it does for the American middle class. Companies marketing bottled water brands capture the diminishing resource at the expense of communities around the globe and here at home, often without paying for it, and we wind up purchasing from them that which ought to be free and which no one should ever own.
Our common law legal system actually once knew this, going back to Blackstone's 1766 treatise on the laws of England that later helped form the basis of our legal system:
"There are some few things which, notwithstanding the general introduction and continuance of property, must still unavoidably remain in common, being such wherein nothing but an usufructuary property is capable of being had. . . . Water is a moveable, wandering thing, and must of necessity continue common by the law of nature; so that I can only have a temporary, transient, usufructuary property therein."
In plain English, Blackstone observed that water could only be used but never owned as property. American frontier law turned this on its head through the doctrine of "prior appropriation" (sometimes colloquially understood as "first in time, first in right") but conveniently ignored the rights of native peoples who were unquestionably here first. In the end, like the frontier itself, water was given property status of a sort, and we're still living with the disastrous implications today.
In the face of these concerns, there's a great need for the articulation of alternative models of resource allocation that don't necessitate militarism and subjugation. With scarce supplies of essentials running down, and with the global economy plainly unable to deliver on its false promise of universal prosperity, we come to realize that the bedrock Western belief in the "tragedy of the commons" has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that it is precisely the privatization of the shared wealth of humanity that has led to degradation and inequality. Education and conservation are crucial in turning this downward spiral around, and yet at times the tendency to focus on much-needed macroscopic solutions often misses important lessons from local initiatives.
In this regard stand numerous examples around the world of people and communities who still manage scarce resources collectively and sustainably. Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great "common pool resource" systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself. In this model, water is viewed as sacred and not subject to private ownership. Instead, local communities manage the resource together through a collective self-governance system whereby everyone using the water gets what they need and also contributes their labor to maintain the entire operation. A non-authoritarian "mayordomo" administers the resource equitably, resolves conflicts, and guards the overall integrity of the structure before passing the baton to someone else and rotating the role of facilitator.
This is a low-tech solution to a complex modern problem. Water is moved through ditches and channels, and everyone takes only as much as they need. It works because, over time, people engaged in such an enterprise come to see themselves as interconnected with their neighbors in a meaningful way, so that their own prosperity is bound up with that of their fellow community members. Mutual interdependence replaces corporate dependence, and in a feat of old-school sustainability, people in the southwest have been cultivating this way of life for a few hundred years.
If relatively poor people confronted with extreme scarcity in arid regions can create a stable, collective, and nonhierarchical common pool system, then certainly we can find ways to do so as well with all of the tools at our disposal. It's more than just a matter of wishful thinking or utopian longing; our very survival may well be at stake. Progress might have its virtues, but sometimes the solutions we seek are already at hand and in fact have been in practice for a long time. Indeed, the answers aren't just blowin' in the wind -- they might be flowin' in the water as well.
© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130890/
Was Throwing a Shoe at Bush a Violent Act?
By Medea Benjamin, AlterNet
Posted on March 17, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
On March 12, one week before the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush on Dec. 14, 2008.
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin talked about the incident with Hero Anwar Brzw, a Kurdish Iraqi woman, who is getting her master's degree in conflict transformation at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
Medea Benjamin: Al-Zaidi's action spawned a lively debate, even within the peace movement, over whether throwing shoes is a violent act. As an Iraqi and a student of nonviolence, what is your opinion?
Hero Anwar Brzw: I have thought about this a lot and have concluded that his action was not a violent one. Al-Zaidi was simply trying to express the humiliation and anguish that Iraqis have experienced since the start of the occupation. He wanted to insult Bush in a symbolic way.
He did not want to kill or injure the president. There are plenty of other ways to inflict harm, if that were his intention. As al-Zaidi said in his trial, "What made me do it was the humiliation Iraq has been subjected to due to the U.S. occupation and the murder of innocent people. I wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons."
Dr. Gene Sharp, a famous American writer on nonviolent struggles, says that insulting someone in power is a legitimate form of nonviolent resistance. One of his writings, called Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, is a collection of 198 methods of nonviolent action. He groups these into several categories, the first being nonviolent protest and persuasion. The methods in the first group are the kinds of things you can do if you have little power or resources, because they are simple and easy. No. 32 is called "taunting officials (mocking or insulting them)." That is precisely what al-Zaidi did.
MB: What if al-Zaidi had actually hit Bush with the shoe?
HAB: Even if the shoe hit Bush in the head, I would still consider it a nonviolent action. It wouldn't have really hurt; at most Bush would have gotten a bump on his head. Remember, al-Zaidi's intention was to insult, not hurt.
And of course, the harm that could be inflicted by a shoe cannot be compared with harm inflicted by an unwarranted occupation that has resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions of Iraqis. U.S. foreign policy is about killing, maiming, leaving orphans and widows, destroying infrastructure. Throwing shoe is violent, you say? No. War and occupation is violent.
MB: So you consider this action nonviolent, but was it appropriate, especially for a journalist who is supposed to be objective?
HAB: I have worked for an Iraqi NGO on peace-building. I, too, have felt the effects of the occupation -- the violence that the invasion unleashed, the daily humiliations of being second-class citizens in our own country. Iraqi journalists have felt this as well. They have seen firsthand the terrible destruction caused by U.S. soldiers. Many Iraqi journalists have died in the violence, and many have been imprisoned and terribly abused by U.S. soldiers.
So it is normal that we would want to express our anger. Some Iraqis express their anger through violent means, but that puts them on the same level as the occupiers. In general, journalists and NGO workers don't believe in violence. But we also don't have to be passive or conform to the oppressors.
In Kathleen Fischer's book Transforming Anger, she says "True nonviolent resistance is not possible until we have learned to acknowledge and express anger in healthy ways. Nonviolence is not the same as suppressing an emotion because of fear, intimidation or censorship. We do not choose nonviolence because we are afraid to fight." We can and should continue resisting -- as al-Zaidi did. And I think it takes more courage to resist oppression through nonviolent actions than picking up a gun.
MB: There were many Americans who don't like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.
HAB: If someone threw a shoe at Hitler, would people say it was rude? If someone threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein, would someone say it was rude? If New Yorkers were able to confront the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, I don't think they would throw shoes at them; they would probably kill them with their bare hands. And Osama bin Laden killed a lot less people than George Bush.
Would the American people prefer that we express our anger by killing American soldiers? Would that be less rude? I don't think so. But people in the United States should acknowledge that we are human beings, and we need a way to express our anger.
For other people, especially in the Arab world, al-Zaidi immediately became a folk hero. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed millions of times. The company that made the shoes became wealthy overnight. And al-Zaidi has received everything from job offers to marriage proposals. Do you consider al-Zaidi a hero?
HAB: There are people all over the world who consider him a hero, especially because his act countered the powerlessness that many Arabs feel. I wouldn't call him a hero, though. I call him a nonviolent resister; I call him brave. And I certainly understand his anger, for I am angry, too.
MB: President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes because he wanted to become famous.
HAB: That's ridiculous. He was prepared to die, if he had to. Instead of attributing dishonest motives to al-Zaidi, Bush should ask himself why someone would dare insult the leader of the most powerful country in the world, knowing how serious the consequences could be.
Bush was a symbol for U.S. foreign policy. We Iraqis have been the victims of these policies for too many years, and we are fed up.
The American government supported Saddam in the 1980s during the Iraq-Iran War; it encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, but then turned against him and "liberated" Kuwait. Then the U.S. government imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially children.
Today, American troops have become the owners, and we Iraqis are treated like illegal intruders in our own country. People in the United States have no idea what Iraqis have been enduring, how much we have suffered from this invasion. That's why al-Zaidi, when he threw his shoes, cried out: "This is for the widows, the orphans and all those who have died in Iraq." He was doing it for his people, not to become famous.
MB: Bush said that thanks to the U.S. intervention, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone, and Iraq is a free country. And of course, the Kurds were particularly brutalized by Saddam. As a Kurd, aren't you grateful to George Bush for overthrowing Saddam?
HAB: The U.S. government has told too many lies to the American people and the international community. Saying that the Kurdish people have been happy with U.S. occupation is one of those lies.
I agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator, and yes, we Kurds were victims of his brutality. I always dreamed about freeing ourselves from his rule. We were happy to get rid of Saddam, and many trusted the United States and thought it would bring democracy.
But then we saw our country go from a dictatorship to an occupied nation. Why should the cost of getting rid of Saddam be a U.S. invasion and occupation? Is that our only alternative?
How can we accept the presence of armed foreigners in the streets of our country? For years, they have been ordering us around us at checkpoints, breaking down our doors in midnight raids, imprisoning our loved ones without cause and torturing them. Should we thank Bush and the U.S. government for that?
Besides, it was not the role of the United States to get rid of Saddam. That was for us, the Iraqis. Many people around the world didn't like Bush. But would Americans have wanted a foreign military to invade their country to get rid of him? Would that be acceptable to Americans? I don't think so.
MB: What do you suggest people do to support al-Zaidi?
HAB: It is absurd that al-Zaidi will spend three years in prison while George Bush walks free. It is Bush who should be in prison for war crimes. I also fear for al-Zaidi's life if he remains in prison. He was already tortured while the world spotlight was on him; imagine what might happen when people have forgotten him. He could easily be killed by government agents.
If Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki believed in democracy and human rights, he would consider al-Zaidi's act an expression of free speech and pardon him.
If there is enough public pressure, that could happen. People should sign petitions, and call the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. It is only through public pressure that he can be released.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink: Women for Peace. Contact the Iraqi Embassy at (202) 483-7500 and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. at (212) 737-4433. Sign petitions at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/signUp.jsp?key=3909.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
Posted on March 17, 2009, Printed on March 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
On March 12, one week before the sixth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush on Dec. 14, 2008.
Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin talked about the incident with Hero Anwar Brzw, a Kurdish Iraqi woman, who is getting her master's degree in conflict transformation at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University.
Medea Benjamin: Al-Zaidi's action spawned a lively debate, even within the peace movement, over whether throwing shoes is a violent act. As an Iraqi and a student of nonviolence, what is your opinion?
Hero Anwar Brzw: I have thought about this a lot and have concluded that his action was not a violent one. Al-Zaidi was simply trying to express the humiliation and anguish that Iraqis have experienced since the start of the occupation. He wanted to insult Bush in a symbolic way.
He did not want to kill or injure the president. There are plenty of other ways to inflict harm, if that were his intention. As al-Zaidi said in his trial, "What made me do it was the humiliation Iraq has been subjected to due to the U.S. occupation and the murder of innocent people. I wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons."
Dr. Gene Sharp, a famous American writer on nonviolent struggles, says that insulting someone in power is a legitimate form of nonviolent resistance. One of his writings, called Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, is a collection of 198 methods of nonviolent action. He groups these into several categories, the first being nonviolent protest and persuasion. The methods in the first group are the kinds of things you can do if you have little power or resources, because they are simple and easy. No. 32 is called "taunting officials (mocking or insulting them)." That is precisely what al-Zaidi did.
MB: What if al-Zaidi had actually hit Bush with the shoe?
HAB: Even if the shoe hit Bush in the head, I would still consider it a nonviolent action. It wouldn't have really hurt; at most Bush would have gotten a bump on his head. Remember, al-Zaidi's intention was to insult, not hurt.
And of course, the harm that could be inflicted by a shoe cannot be compared with harm inflicted by an unwarranted occupation that has resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions of Iraqis. U.S. foreign policy is about killing, maiming, leaving orphans and widows, destroying infrastructure. Throwing shoe is violent, you say? No. War and occupation is violent.
MB: So you consider this action nonviolent, but was it appropriate, especially for a journalist who is supposed to be objective?
HAB: I have worked for an Iraqi NGO on peace-building. I, too, have felt the effects of the occupation -- the violence that the invasion unleashed, the daily humiliations of being second-class citizens in our own country. Iraqi journalists have felt this as well. They have seen firsthand the terrible destruction caused by U.S. soldiers. Many Iraqi journalists have died in the violence, and many have been imprisoned and terribly abused by U.S. soldiers.
So it is normal that we would want to express our anger. Some Iraqis express their anger through violent means, but that puts them on the same level as the occupiers. In general, journalists and NGO workers don't believe in violence. But we also don't have to be passive or conform to the oppressors.
In Kathleen Fischer's book Transforming Anger, she says "True nonviolent resistance is not possible until we have learned to acknowledge and express anger in healthy ways. Nonviolence is not the same as suppressing an emotion because of fear, intimidation or censorship. We do not choose nonviolence because we are afraid to fight." We can and should continue resisting -- as al-Zaidi did. And I think it takes more courage to resist oppression through nonviolent actions than picking up a gun.
MB: There were many Americans who don't like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.
HAB: If someone threw a shoe at Hitler, would people say it was rude? If someone threw a shoe at Saddam Hussein, would someone say it was rude? If New Yorkers were able to confront the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks, I don't think they would throw shoes at them; they would probably kill them with their bare hands. And Osama bin Laden killed a lot less people than George Bush.
Would the American people prefer that we express our anger by killing American soldiers? Would that be less rude? I don't think so. But people in the United States should acknowledge that we are human beings, and we need a way to express our anger.
For other people, especially in the Arab world, al-Zaidi immediately became a folk hero. YouTube videos of the incident have been viewed millions of times. The company that made the shoes became wealthy overnight. And al-Zaidi has received everything from job offers to marriage proposals. Do you consider al-Zaidi a hero?
HAB: There are people all over the world who consider him a hero, especially because his act countered the powerlessness that many Arabs feel. I wouldn't call him a hero, though. I call him a nonviolent resister; I call him brave. And I certainly understand his anger, for I am angry, too.
MB: President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes because he wanted to become famous.
HAB: That's ridiculous. He was prepared to die, if he had to. Instead of attributing dishonest motives to al-Zaidi, Bush should ask himself why someone would dare insult the leader of the most powerful country in the world, knowing how serious the consequences could be.
Bush was a symbol for U.S. foreign policy. We Iraqis have been the victims of these policies for too many years, and we are fed up.
The American government supported Saddam in the 1980s during the Iraq-Iran War; it encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, but then turned against him and "liberated" Kuwait. Then the U.S. government imposed sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially children.
Today, American troops have become the owners, and we Iraqis are treated like illegal intruders in our own country. People in the United States have no idea what Iraqis have been enduring, how much we have suffered from this invasion. That's why al-Zaidi, when he threw his shoes, cried out: "This is for the widows, the orphans and all those who have died in Iraq." He was doing it for his people, not to become famous.
MB: Bush said that thanks to the U.S. intervention, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone, and Iraq is a free country. And of course, the Kurds were particularly brutalized by Saddam. As a Kurd, aren't you grateful to George Bush for overthrowing Saddam?
HAB: The U.S. government has told too many lies to the American people and the international community. Saying that the Kurdish people have been happy with U.S. occupation is one of those lies.
I agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator, and yes, we Kurds were victims of his brutality. I always dreamed about freeing ourselves from his rule. We were happy to get rid of Saddam, and many trusted the United States and thought it would bring democracy.
But then we saw our country go from a dictatorship to an occupied nation. Why should the cost of getting rid of Saddam be a U.S. invasion and occupation? Is that our only alternative?
How can we accept the presence of armed foreigners in the streets of our country? For years, they have been ordering us around us at checkpoints, breaking down our doors in midnight raids, imprisoning our loved ones without cause and torturing them. Should we thank Bush and the U.S. government for that?
Besides, it was not the role of the United States to get rid of Saddam. That was for us, the Iraqis. Many people around the world didn't like Bush. But would Americans have wanted a foreign military to invade their country to get rid of him? Would that be acceptable to Americans? I don't think so.
MB: What do you suggest people do to support al-Zaidi?
HAB: It is absurd that al-Zaidi will spend three years in prison while George Bush walks free. It is Bush who should be in prison for war crimes. I also fear for al-Zaidi's life if he remains in prison. He was already tortured while the world spotlight was on him; imagine what might happen when people have forgotten him. He could easily be killed by government agents.
If Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki believed in democracy and human rights, he would consider al-Zaidi's act an expression of free speech and pardon him.
If there is enough public pressure, that could happen. People should sign petitions, and call the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. It is only through public pressure that he can be released.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink: Women for Peace. Contact the Iraqi Embassy at (202) 483-7500 and the Iraqi Mission to the U.N. at (212) 737-4433. Sign petitions at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/signUp.jsp?key=3909.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132091/
Thursday, March 19, 2009
House passes bill taxing AIG and other bonuses
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer 7 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Acting with lightning speed, the Democratic-led House has approved a bill to slap punishing taxes on big employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers.
The vote was 328-93.
Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "We want our money back and we want our money back now for the taxpayers."
Republicans called it a legally questionable ploy to paper over Obama administration missteps.
Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the bill was "a political circus" diverting attention from why the administration hadn't done more to block the bonuses before they were paid.
The bonuses, totaling $165 million, were paid to employees of troubled insurer American International Group, including to traders in the unit that nearly brought about the company's collapse.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats pressed for quick action Thursday on a bill to slap punishing taxes on big employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers. Republicans called it a legally questionable ploy to paper over Obama administration missteps.
"The American people demand protection and that's what we're doing today," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
But Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the bill "a political circus" diverting attention from why the administration hadn't done more to block the bonuses before they were paid.
The bonuses, totaling $165 million, were paid to employees of troubled insurer American International Group over the weekend, including to traders in the unit that nearly brought about the company's collapse.
Democratic leaders rushed the bill to the floor under a procedure that requires a two-thirds majority for passage. The numerous Republican complaints about the measure during Thursday's debate raised questions on whether it would pass.
"The Democratic bill brought to the floor today is constitutionally questionable," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. "It's obviously a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the truth that Democrats in Congress and this administration made these bonus payments possible."
The bill would levy a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money.
"We figured that the local and state governments would take care of the other 10 percent," said Rangel.
Rangel said the bill would apply to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among others, while excluding community banks and other smaller companies that have received less bailout money.
A tax expert said there is plenty of precedent for levying punitive taxes on behavior that lawmakers find objectionable. Robert Willens, a corporate tax lawyer in New York, cited the steep excise taxes levied on money paid to firms to keep them from launching hostile takeover bids, known as "greenmail."
"You can write very narrowly tailored laws," Willens said. "And they can do it for bonuses already paid."
House Democratic leaders unveiled the bill Wednesday as the head of embattled American International Group Inc., which has received $182 billion in bailout money, testified about $165 million in bonuses paid out in the past week to about 400 employees in its Financial Products unit.
Edward Liddy, who was brought in last year by the government to run AIG, told a House subcommittee that the company was contractually obligated to pay the bonuses but that some of the recipients have begun returning all or part of them.
Liddy said that on Tuesday, he had "asked those who have received retention payments in excess of $100,000 or more to return at least half of those payments." Some have "already stepped forward and returned 100 percent," he added.
In the Senate, the top two members of the Finance Committee on Tuesday announced a bill that would impose a 35 percent excise tax on the companies paying the bonuses and a 35 percent excise tax on the employees receiving them. The taxes would apply to all companies receiving government bailout money, but they are clearly geared toward AIG.
President Barack Obama, who took office just under two months ago, told reporters Wednesday that his administration was not responsible for a lack of federal supervision of AIG that preceded the company's demise.
But Obama added, "The buck stops with me."
___
The bill is HR 1586.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/aig_outrage
WASHINGTON – Acting with lightning speed, the Democratic-led House has approved a bill to slap punishing taxes on big employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers.
The vote was 328-93.
Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "We want our money back and we want our money back now for the taxpayers."
Republicans called it a legally questionable ploy to paper over Obama administration missteps.
Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the bill was "a political circus" diverting attention from why the administration hadn't done more to block the bonuses before they were paid.
The bonuses, totaling $165 million, were paid to employees of troubled insurer American International Group, including to traders in the unit that nearly brought about the company's collapse.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats pressed for quick action Thursday on a bill to slap punishing taxes on big employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers. Republicans called it a legally questionable ploy to paper over Obama administration missteps.
"The American people demand protection and that's what we're doing today," said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
But Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the bill "a political circus" diverting attention from why the administration hadn't done more to block the bonuses before they were paid.
The bonuses, totaling $165 million, were paid to employees of troubled insurer American International Group over the weekend, including to traders in the unit that nearly brought about the company's collapse.
Democratic leaders rushed the bill to the floor under a procedure that requires a two-thirds majority for passage. The numerous Republican complaints about the measure during Thursday's debate raised questions on whether it would pass.
"The Democratic bill brought to the floor today is constitutionally questionable," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. "It's obviously a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the truth that Democrats in Congress and this administration made these bonus payments possible."
The bill would levy a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money.
"We figured that the local and state governments would take care of the other 10 percent," said Rangel.
Rangel said the bill would apply to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among others, while excluding community banks and other smaller companies that have received less bailout money.
A tax expert said there is plenty of precedent for levying punitive taxes on behavior that lawmakers find objectionable. Robert Willens, a corporate tax lawyer in New York, cited the steep excise taxes levied on money paid to firms to keep them from launching hostile takeover bids, known as "greenmail."
"You can write very narrowly tailored laws," Willens said. "And they can do it for bonuses already paid."
House Democratic leaders unveiled the bill Wednesday as the head of embattled American International Group Inc., which has received $182 billion in bailout money, testified about $165 million in bonuses paid out in the past week to about 400 employees in its Financial Products unit.
Edward Liddy, who was brought in last year by the government to run AIG, told a House subcommittee that the company was contractually obligated to pay the bonuses but that some of the recipients have begun returning all or part of them.
Liddy said that on Tuesday, he had "asked those who have received retention payments in excess of $100,000 or more to return at least half of those payments." Some have "already stepped forward and returned 100 percent," he added.
In the Senate, the top two members of the Finance Committee on Tuesday announced a bill that would impose a 35 percent excise tax on the companies paying the bonuses and a 35 percent excise tax on the employees receiving them. The taxes would apply to all companies receiving government bailout money, but they are clearly geared toward AIG.
President Barack Obama, who took office just under two months ago, told reporters Wednesday that his administration was not responsible for a lack of federal supervision of AIG that preceded the company's demise.
But Obama added, "The buck stops with me."
___
The bill is HR 1586.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/aig_outrage
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Are We Breeding Ourselves to Extinction?
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on March 11, 2009, Printed on March 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130843/
All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared.
We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms -- an estimated 8,760 species die off per year -- because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E.O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic -- the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland.
The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles because they have the military and economic power to consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in the world each year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as sufficient. It has been left to developing countries to cope with the emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute population control measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The U.N. estimates that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied territories, will double in two decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines.
The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining wilderness areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create an overpopulation problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that industrialized nations consider their birthright will become harder and more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet where life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our borders. Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population of the United Kingdom -- the number of people the country could feed, fuel and support from its own biological capacity -- is about 18 million. This means that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can no longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think.
A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.
James Lovelock, an independent British scientist who has spent most of his career locked out of the mainstream, warned several decades ago that disrupting the delicate balance of the Earth, which he refers to as a living body, would be a form of collective suicide. The atmosphere on Earth -- 21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen -- is not common among planets, he notes. These gases are generated, and maintained at an equable level for life's processes, by living organisms themselves. Oxygen and nitrogen would disappear if the biosphere was destroyed. The result would be a greenhouse atmosphere similar to that of Venus, a planet that is consequently hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth. Lovelock argues that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soil are living entities. They constitute, he says, a self-regulating system. Lovelock, in support of this thesis, looked at the cycle in which algae in the oceans produce volatile sulfur compounds. These compounds act as seeds to form oceanic clouds. Without these dimethyl sulfide "seeds" the cooling oceanic clouds would be lost. This self-regulating system is remarkable because it maintains favorable conditions for human life. Its destruction would not mean the death of the planet. It would not mean the death of life-forms. But it would mean the death of Homo sapiens.
Lovelock advocates nuclear power and thermal solar power; the latter, he says, can be produced by huge mirrors mounted in deserts such as those in Arizona and the Sahara. He proposes reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide with large plastic cylinders thrust vertically into the ocean. These, he says, could bring nutrient-rich lower waters to the surface, producing an algal bloom that would increase the cloud cover. But he warns that these steps will be ineffective if we do not first control population growth. He believes the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of about seven. As the planet overheats -- and he believes we can do nothing to halt this process -- overpopulation will make all efforts to save the ecosystem futile.
Lovelock, in "The Revenge of Gaia," said that if we do not radically and immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions, the human race might not die out but it would be reduced to "a few breeding pairs." "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," his latest book, which has for its subtitle "The Final Warning," paints an even grimmer picture. Lovelock says a continued population boom will make the reduction of fossil fuel use impossible. If we do not reduce our emissions by 60 percent, something that can be achieved only by walking away from fossil fuels, the human race is doomed, he argues. Time is running out. This reduction will never take place, he says, unless we can dramatically reduce our birthrate.
All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going to work if we do not practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation, in times of hardship, will create as much havoc in industrialized nations as in the impoverished slums around the globe where people struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth is often overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130843/
Posted on March 11, 2009, Printed on March 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130843/
All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared.
We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms -- an estimated 8,760 species die off per year -- because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E.O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic -- the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland.
The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles because they have the military and economic power to consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in the world each year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as sufficient. It has been left to developing countries to cope with the emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute population control measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The U.N. estimates that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied territories, will double in two decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines.
The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining wilderness areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create an overpopulation problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that industrialized nations consider their birthright will become harder and more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet where life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our borders. Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population of the United Kingdom -- the number of people the country could feed, fuel and support from its own biological capacity -- is about 18 million. This means that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can no longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think.
A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.
James Lovelock, an independent British scientist who has spent most of his career locked out of the mainstream, warned several decades ago that disrupting the delicate balance of the Earth, which he refers to as a living body, would be a form of collective suicide. The atmosphere on Earth -- 21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen -- is not common among planets, he notes. These gases are generated, and maintained at an equable level for life's processes, by living organisms themselves. Oxygen and nitrogen would disappear if the biosphere was destroyed. The result would be a greenhouse atmosphere similar to that of Venus, a planet that is consequently hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth. Lovelock argues that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soil are living entities. They constitute, he says, a self-regulating system. Lovelock, in support of this thesis, looked at the cycle in which algae in the oceans produce volatile sulfur compounds. These compounds act as seeds to form oceanic clouds. Without these dimethyl sulfide "seeds" the cooling oceanic clouds would be lost. This self-regulating system is remarkable because it maintains favorable conditions for human life. Its destruction would not mean the death of the planet. It would not mean the death of life-forms. But it would mean the death of Homo sapiens.
Lovelock advocates nuclear power and thermal solar power; the latter, he says, can be produced by huge mirrors mounted in deserts such as those in Arizona and the Sahara. He proposes reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide with large plastic cylinders thrust vertically into the ocean. These, he says, could bring nutrient-rich lower waters to the surface, producing an algal bloom that would increase the cloud cover. But he warns that these steps will be ineffective if we do not first control population growth. He believes the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of about seven. As the planet overheats -- and he believes we can do nothing to halt this process -- overpopulation will make all efforts to save the ecosystem futile.
Lovelock, in "The Revenge of Gaia," said that if we do not radically and immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions, the human race might not die out but it would be reduced to "a few breeding pairs." "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," his latest book, which has for its subtitle "The Final Warning," paints an even grimmer picture. Lovelock says a continued population boom will make the reduction of fossil fuel use impossible. If we do not reduce our emissions by 60 percent, something that can be achieved only by walking away from fossil fuels, the human race is doomed, he argues. Time is running out. This reduction will never take place, he says, unless we can dramatically reduce our birthrate.
All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going to work if we do not practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation, in times of hardship, will create as much havoc in industrialized nations as in the impoverished slums around the globe where people struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth is often overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/130843/
U.S. high-tech water future hinges on cost, politics
Thu Mar 12, 2009 2:32am EDT
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Anyone who has visited Disneyland recently and taken a sip from a drinking fountain there may have unknowingly sampled a taste of the future -- a small quantity of water that once flowed through a sewer.
Orange County Water District officials say that's a good thing -- the result of a successful, year-old project to purify wastewater and pump it into the ground to help restore depleted aquifers that provide most of the local water supply.
The $481 million recycling plant, the world's largest of its kind, uses microfiltration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide disinfection to treat 70 million gallons (265 million liters) of sewer water a day, enough to meet the drinking needs of 500,000 people.
Just don't call it "toilet-to-tap."
County officials prefer the term "Groundwater Replenishment System," a name chosen after similar projects in Los Angeles and San Diego fell prey to public misconceptions, also known as the "yuck" factor," and local election-year politics.
Their experience underscores one of the great lessons facing municipal officials across the U.S. West as they seek to bring purification and recycling technologies to bear against drought cycles expected to worsen with climate change.
Scientists, policymakers and investors agree ample know-how exists to solve the water crisis; the difficulties lie in energy constraints, economics and politics.
"We can solve most, if not all, of the world's biggest water problems with technology that exists today," said Stephan Dolezalek, who leads the clean-energy practice of Silicon Valley venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners. "What we may not have is the willpower."
"A NEW DAY" FOR WATER
Experts say price distortions in the West, where government has long subsidized farm irrigation and the cost of pipelines and pumping stations to send fresh water from distant sources to cities, have discouraged the development of new supplies.
"The water that we use in the West is generally undervalued," said Tim Barnett, a marine research physicist for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
The math has changed as the region's water grows scarcer, its population swells and environmental pressures mount.
"This is a new day, and we have conditions which compel us to look to new water resources," said David Nahai, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility.
He and other water managers see tremendous potential in stepped-up conservation, from encouraging more waste-conscious personal behavior to installing low-flow showers, toilets, appliances and lawn sprinklers.
Such measures could add more than 1 million acre feet of water -- enough for 8 million people -- to Southern California's regional supply alone, or about 25 percent of current annual use, according to a report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Further gains are possible by replenishing groundwater basins with rainfall runoff that normally flows to sea.
THE HOLY GRAIL
Desalination, the process of converting salt water to fresh, has long been viewed as the holy grail in the quest to replace imported drinking supplies, said Jonas Minton of the environmental group Planning Conservation League.
But Minton, who chaired a California state desalination task force earlier this decade, and other experts cite two major drawbacks.
One is a risk to marine life from intake pipes that suck water into the system and from a highly concentrated brine byproduct that gets discharged back into the ocean.
The other is the relatively high cost of removing salt from ocean water, which contains roughly 30 times more dissolved impurities than sewer water and thus takes far more energy to distill. Energy demands become especially vexing in light of efforts to curb carbon emissions tied to global warming.
Desalination is common in parts of the Middle East, where freshwater sources are extremely scarce, oil is plentiful, and environmental laws are less stringent. But U.S. ocean desal plants are rare. The biggest so far is in Tampa, Florida.
Six small-scale plants exist in California, and about 20 more are in various stages of planning or development.
The most ambitious, a $300 million facility to be built by the Connecticut-based company Poseidon Resources in Carlsbad, near San Diego, would produce 50 million gallons (189 million liters) of drinking water daily, enough for about 110,000 households.
The Poseidon plant, twice the size of the Tampa facility, would be the largest in the Western Hemisphere. It has yet to receive final approval for construction.
FROM THE GROUND AND BACK AGAIN
Once considered a less attractive alternative, wastewater recycling technology has proven more economically feasible and gained greater public acceptance.
"We're to a certain extent helping to drought-proof ourselves," said Michael Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District and the chief engineer behind its Groundwater Replenishment System.
"Within three years, the price of imported water will be $800 per acre foot, and projects like this, even without outside funding, will become viable," he said. An acre foot of water is about a year's supply for two families.
By comparison, Orange County's recycling system currently produces water for $600 an acre foot, not including subsidies it received for the initial capital investment.
The plant takes pre-treated sewer water that otherwise would be discharged to the ocean and runs it through a three-step cleansing process -- essentially the same technology used to purify baby food and bottled water.
Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials.
The water then passes to a reverse osmosis system, where it is forced through semi-permeable membranes that filter out smaller contaminants, including salts, viruses and pesticides. Reverse osmosis also is the main process used in desalination.
Finally, the water is disinfected with a mix of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide.
The resulting product exceeds all U.S. drinking standards but gets additional filtration when it is allowed to percolate back into the ground to replenish the aquifer.
Much of the technology is supplied by private companies, including German-based Siemens AG, which makes the microfilters, and Danaher Corp, headquartered in Washington, D.C., which furnishes the UV lamps.
The Orange County system is serving as a model for a project that Los Angeles plans to resurrect nearly 10 years after it was killed when local politicians disparaged the concept as "toilet-to-tap." San Diego's recycling project met a similar fate and also is back on the drawing board.
A recent study cited by L.A. County Economic Development Corp found more than 30 Southern California recycling projects with the potential of yielding over 450,000 acre feet of water within five years. That's about half the amount the region expects to import this year from the Colorado River.
Water managers say they now realize that an aggressive public education campaign is key to building support.
They want the public to understand that much of what comes from the tap today is recycled sewer water. The Colorado River, for example, contains large amounts of heavily treated waste discharged from cities upstream, including Las Vegas.
As the L.A. County Economic Development Corp study puts it, "What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas."
(Bernie Woodall and Nichola Groom contributed to this report, editing by Alan Elsner)
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE52B04T20090312
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Anyone who has visited Disneyland recently and taken a sip from a drinking fountain there may have unknowingly sampled a taste of the future -- a small quantity of water that once flowed through a sewer.
Orange County Water District officials say that's a good thing -- the result of a successful, year-old project to purify wastewater and pump it into the ground to help restore depleted aquifers that provide most of the local water supply.
The $481 million recycling plant, the world's largest of its kind, uses microfiltration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide disinfection to treat 70 million gallons (265 million liters) of sewer water a day, enough to meet the drinking needs of 500,000 people.
Just don't call it "toilet-to-tap."
County officials prefer the term "Groundwater Replenishment System," a name chosen after similar projects in Los Angeles and San Diego fell prey to public misconceptions, also known as the "yuck" factor," and local election-year politics.
Their experience underscores one of the great lessons facing municipal officials across the U.S. West as they seek to bring purification and recycling technologies to bear against drought cycles expected to worsen with climate change.
Scientists, policymakers and investors agree ample know-how exists to solve the water crisis; the difficulties lie in energy constraints, economics and politics.
"We can solve most, if not all, of the world's biggest water problems with technology that exists today," said Stephan Dolezalek, who leads the clean-energy practice of Silicon Valley venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners. "What we may not have is the willpower."
"A NEW DAY" FOR WATER
Experts say price distortions in the West, where government has long subsidized farm irrigation and the cost of pipelines and pumping stations to send fresh water from distant sources to cities, have discouraged the development of new supplies.
"The water that we use in the West is generally undervalued," said Tim Barnett, a marine research physicist for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
The math has changed as the region's water grows scarcer, its population swells and environmental pressures mount.
"This is a new day, and we have conditions which compel us to look to new water resources," said David Nahai, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility.
He and other water managers see tremendous potential in stepped-up conservation, from encouraging more waste-conscious personal behavior to installing low-flow showers, toilets, appliances and lawn sprinklers.
Such measures could add more than 1 million acre feet of water -- enough for 8 million people -- to Southern California's regional supply alone, or about 25 percent of current annual use, according to a report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Further gains are possible by replenishing groundwater basins with rainfall runoff that normally flows to sea.
THE HOLY GRAIL
Desalination, the process of converting salt water to fresh, has long been viewed as the holy grail in the quest to replace imported drinking supplies, said Jonas Minton of the environmental group Planning Conservation League.
But Minton, who chaired a California state desalination task force earlier this decade, and other experts cite two major drawbacks.
One is a risk to marine life from intake pipes that suck water into the system and from a highly concentrated brine byproduct that gets discharged back into the ocean.
The other is the relatively high cost of removing salt from ocean water, which contains roughly 30 times more dissolved impurities than sewer water and thus takes far more energy to distill. Energy demands become especially vexing in light of efforts to curb carbon emissions tied to global warming.
Desalination is common in parts of the Middle East, where freshwater sources are extremely scarce, oil is plentiful, and environmental laws are less stringent. But U.S. ocean desal plants are rare. The biggest so far is in Tampa, Florida.
Six small-scale plants exist in California, and about 20 more are in various stages of planning or development.
The most ambitious, a $300 million facility to be built by the Connecticut-based company Poseidon Resources in Carlsbad, near San Diego, would produce 50 million gallons (189 million liters) of drinking water daily, enough for about 110,000 households.
The Poseidon plant, twice the size of the Tampa facility, would be the largest in the Western Hemisphere. It has yet to receive final approval for construction.
FROM THE GROUND AND BACK AGAIN
Once considered a less attractive alternative, wastewater recycling technology has proven more economically feasible and gained greater public acceptance.
"We're to a certain extent helping to drought-proof ourselves," said Michael Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District and the chief engineer behind its Groundwater Replenishment System.
"Within three years, the price of imported water will be $800 per acre foot, and projects like this, even without outside funding, will become viable," he said. An acre foot of water is about a year's supply for two families.
By comparison, Orange County's recycling system currently produces water for $600 an acre foot, not including subsidies it received for the initial capital investment.
The plant takes pre-treated sewer water that otherwise would be discharged to the ocean and runs it through a three-step cleansing process -- essentially the same technology used to purify baby food and bottled water.
Thousands of microfilters, hollow fibers covered in holes one-three-hundredth the width of a human hair, strain out suspended solids, bacteria and other materials.
The water then passes to a reverse osmosis system, where it is forced through semi-permeable membranes that filter out smaller contaminants, including salts, viruses and pesticides. Reverse osmosis also is the main process used in desalination.
Finally, the water is disinfected with a mix of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide.
The resulting product exceeds all U.S. drinking standards but gets additional filtration when it is allowed to percolate back into the ground to replenish the aquifer.
Much of the technology is supplied by private companies, including German-based Siemens AG, which makes the microfilters, and Danaher Corp, headquartered in Washington, D.C., which furnishes the UV lamps.
The Orange County system is serving as a model for a project that Los Angeles plans to resurrect nearly 10 years after it was killed when local politicians disparaged the concept as "toilet-to-tap." San Diego's recycling project met a similar fate and also is back on the drawing board.
A recent study cited by L.A. County Economic Development Corp found more than 30 Southern California recycling projects with the potential of yielding over 450,000 acre feet of water within five years. That's about half the amount the region expects to import this year from the Colorado River.
Water managers say they now realize that an aggressive public education campaign is key to building support.
They want the public to understand that much of what comes from the tap today is recycled sewer water. The Colorado River, for example, contains large amounts of heavily treated waste discharged from cities upstream, including Las Vegas.
As the L.A. County Economic Development Corp study puts it, "What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas."
(Bernie Woodall and Nichola Groom contributed to this report, editing by Alan Elsner)
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE52B04T20090312
U.S. unemployment to near 10 percent as slump worsens
Thu Mar 12, 2009 6:14am EDT
By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. unemployment will approach 10 percent as the country endures its worst recession since World War Two, leaving more than 13 million Americans jobless, according to a Reuters poll of economists.
The economy will level out in the third quarter, the results showed, but the poll painted a bleaker picture than a survey conducted just a month ago.
Median forecasts now assume gross domestic product will shrink an annualized 5.3 percent this quarter, following a brutal 6.2 percent decline at the end of 2008.
The recession will continue into the second quarter, moderating to a 2 percent drop, stabilizing sometime this summer. GDP should turn the corner, albeit hesitantly, by autumn.
Analysts say the turbulence plaguing large sectors such as banking and autos means predictions are less reliable than usual.
"The economic outlook remains very uncertain," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates. "A bottom is likely by the end of the year, but downside risks continue."
The Reuters poll indicates the jobless rate, already at a 25-year high of 8.1 percent, will climb to 9.6 percent, probably sometime early next year, before receding. An eventual rebound in hiring will probably be mild and erratic.
In this environment, inflation will remain non-existent. Indeed, the consumer price index is expected to fall for the first nine months of this year, with a 2.2 percent decline in the third quarter marking the steepest pullback.
Prices will then climb again into next year, but modestly enough to allow the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates on hold until at least the latter part of 2010.
SPENDER OF LAST RESORT
The federal government has attacked the problem by committing trillions of dollars to help the banks and passing a $787 billion stimulus package aimed at reigniting growth.
Such measures should help with some of the worst effects of the crisis, analysts said, although there has been much debate about what types of stimulus offer the best path to recovery.
"We anticipate a rebound driven by fiscal and monetary stimulus," said Abiel Reinhart, economist at JP Morgan. "Unfortunately, it will take at least three other quarters before improvement in conditions will translate in a rebound for the job market."
This is bad news for both unemployed workers and businesses which rely on Americans' spending. Data on Thursday are expected to show a 0.5 percent decline in retail sales, adding to what was already the most dramatic pullback in spending in decades.
(Polling by Bangalore Polling Unit)
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Economy/idUSTRE52B1KM20090312
By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa
NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. unemployment will approach 10 percent as the country endures its worst recession since World War Two, leaving more than 13 million Americans jobless, according to a Reuters poll of economists.
The economy will level out in the third quarter, the results showed, but the poll painted a bleaker picture than a survey conducted just a month ago.
Median forecasts now assume gross domestic product will shrink an annualized 5.3 percent this quarter, following a brutal 6.2 percent decline at the end of 2008.
The recession will continue into the second quarter, moderating to a 2 percent drop, stabilizing sometime this summer. GDP should turn the corner, albeit hesitantly, by autumn.
Analysts say the turbulence plaguing large sectors such as banking and autos means predictions are less reliable than usual.
"The economic outlook remains very uncertain," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates. "A bottom is likely by the end of the year, but downside risks continue."
The Reuters poll indicates the jobless rate, already at a 25-year high of 8.1 percent, will climb to 9.6 percent, probably sometime early next year, before receding. An eventual rebound in hiring will probably be mild and erratic.
In this environment, inflation will remain non-existent. Indeed, the consumer price index is expected to fall for the first nine months of this year, with a 2.2 percent decline in the third quarter marking the steepest pullback.
Prices will then climb again into next year, but modestly enough to allow the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates on hold until at least the latter part of 2010.
SPENDER OF LAST RESORT
The federal government has attacked the problem by committing trillions of dollars to help the banks and passing a $787 billion stimulus package aimed at reigniting growth.
Such measures should help with some of the worst effects of the crisis, analysts said, although there has been much debate about what types of stimulus offer the best path to recovery.
"We anticipate a rebound driven by fiscal and monetary stimulus," said Abiel Reinhart, economist at JP Morgan. "Unfortunately, it will take at least three other quarters before improvement in conditions will translate in a rebound for the job market."
This is bad news for both unemployed workers and businesses which rely on Americans' spending. Data on Thursday are expected to show a 0.5 percent decline in retail sales, adding to what was already the most dramatic pullback in spending in decades.
(Polling by Bangalore Polling Unit)
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Economy/idUSTRE52B1KM20090312
Foreclosures up 30 percent in February
By ALAN ZIBEL, AP Real Estate Writer Alan Zibel, Ap Real Estate Writer 19 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Despite halts on new foreclosures by several major lenders, the number of households threatened with losing their homes rose 30 percent in February from last year's levels, RealtyTrac reported Thursday.
Nationwide, nearly 291,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month, up 6 percent from January, according to the Irvine, Calif-based company. While foreclosures are highly concentrated in the Western states and Florida, the problem is spreading to states like Idaho, Illinois and Oregon as the U.S. economy worsens.
"It doesn't bode well," for the embattled U.S. housing market, said Rick Sharga, vice president for marketing at RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm. "At least for the foreseeable future, it's going to continue to be pretty ugly."
The rise in foreclosure filings came despite temporary halts to foreclosures by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and major banks JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America. Those companies pledged to do so in advance of President Barack Obama's plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which was launched last week.
Two states that contributing to the increase were Florida and New York, where temporary bans on foreclosures ended.
But other states are moving to enact similar measures. On Wednesday the Michigan House approved legislation that would give homeowners facing foreclosure a 90-day reprieve. The legislation now goes to Michigan's Republican-led Senate, where its future is unclear.
While the number of foreclosures continue to soar nationwide, banks have held off listing properties for sale, Sharga said. There were around 700,000 such properties nationwide at the end of last year, making up a "shadow inventory" of unsold homes that could drag the housing crisis out even longer.
"It's going to take us longer than you might anticipate to burn through he inventory of distressed properties," he said.
The results highlight the challenge ahead for Obama and his economic advisers. The Obama administration is aiming to help up to 9 million borrowers stay in their homes through refinanced mortgages or loans that are modified to lower monthly payments.
Still, the faltering economy, driven down by the collapse of the housing bubble, is causing the housing crisis to spread. Nearly 12 percent of all Americans with a mortgage — a record 5.4 million homeowners — were at least one month late or in foreclosure at the end of last year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. That's up from 10 percent at the end of the third quarter, and up from 8 percent at the end of 2007.
The RealtyTrac report said more than 74,000 properties were repossessed by lenders in February as the worst recession in decades, falling home values and stricter lending standards continue to sap the U.S. real estate market.
Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida had the nation's top foreclosure rates. In Nevada, one in every 70 homes received a foreclosure filing, while the number was one every 147 in Arizona. Rounding out the top 10 were Idaho, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Oregon and Ohio.
Among metro areas, Las Vegas was first, with one in every 60 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing. It was followed by the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida and five California metropolitan areas: Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Riverside-San Bernardino and Bakersfield.
___
On the Net:
RealtyTrac Inc.: http://www.realtytrac.com
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090312/ap_on_bi_ge/foreclosure_rates/print
WASHINGTON – Despite halts on new foreclosures by several major lenders, the number of households threatened with losing their homes rose 30 percent in February from last year's levels, RealtyTrac reported Thursday.
Nationwide, nearly 291,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month, up 6 percent from January, according to the Irvine, Calif-based company. While foreclosures are highly concentrated in the Western states and Florida, the problem is spreading to states like Idaho, Illinois and Oregon as the U.S. economy worsens.
"It doesn't bode well," for the embattled U.S. housing market, said Rick Sharga, vice president for marketing at RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm. "At least for the foreseeable future, it's going to continue to be pretty ugly."
The rise in foreclosure filings came despite temporary halts to foreclosures by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and major banks JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America. Those companies pledged to do so in advance of President Barack Obama's plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which was launched last week.
Two states that contributing to the increase were Florida and New York, where temporary bans on foreclosures ended.
But other states are moving to enact similar measures. On Wednesday the Michigan House approved legislation that would give homeowners facing foreclosure a 90-day reprieve. The legislation now goes to Michigan's Republican-led Senate, where its future is unclear.
While the number of foreclosures continue to soar nationwide, banks have held off listing properties for sale, Sharga said. There were around 700,000 such properties nationwide at the end of last year, making up a "shadow inventory" of unsold homes that could drag the housing crisis out even longer.
"It's going to take us longer than you might anticipate to burn through he inventory of distressed properties," he said.
The results highlight the challenge ahead for Obama and his economic advisers. The Obama administration is aiming to help up to 9 million borrowers stay in their homes through refinanced mortgages or loans that are modified to lower monthly payments.
Still, the faltering economy, driven down by the collapse of the housing bubble, is causing the housing crisis to spread. Nearly 12 percent of all Americans with a mortgage — a record 5.4 million homeowners — were at least one month late or in foreclosure at the end of last year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. That's up from 10 percent at the end of the third quarter, and up from 8 percent at the end of 2007.
The RealtyTrac report said more than 74,000 properties were repossessed by lenders in February as the worst recession in decades, falling home values and stricter lending standards continue to sap the U.S. real estate market.
Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida had the nation's top foreclosure rates. In Nevada, one in every 70 homes received a foreclosure filing, while the number was one every 147 in Arizona. Rounding out the top 10 were Idaho, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Oregon and Ohio.
Among metro areas, Las Vegas was first, with one in every 60 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing. It was followed by the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida and five California metropolitan areas: Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Riverside-San Bernardino and Bakersfield.
___
On the Net:
RealtyTrac Inc.: http://www.realtytrac.com
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090312/ap_on_bi_ge/foreclosure_rates/print
Iraqi journalist who threw shoes gets 3 years
By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writer Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press Writer 24 mins ago
BAGHDAD – The Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at then-President George W. Bush was convicted Thursday of assaulting a foreign leader and sentenced to three years in prison, lawyers said. He shouted "long live Iraq" when the sentence was read.
The verdict came after a short trial in which Muntadhar al-Zeidi, 30, pleaded not guilty to the charge and said his action was a "natural response to the occupation."
Some of his relatives collapsed after the verdict and had to be helped out of court. Others were forcibly removed by security forces when they became unruly, shouting "Down with Bush" and "Long live Iraq."
Al-Zeidi could have received up to 15 years in prison for hurling his shoes at Bush last December during a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
But defense lawyers said the judge showed leniency because of al-Zeidi's age and clean record. Many Iraqis consider al-Zeidi a hero for defiantly expressing his anger at a president who they believe destroyed their country after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Thousands across the Muslim world took to the streets to demand his release.
Defense lawyers said they would appeal because they believe the action was a legitimate political protest and did not merit prison time.
"This judiciary is not just," al-Zeidi's brother, Dargham, said tearfully.
The journalist has been in Iraqi custody since the Dec.14 news conference where he threw his shoes at Bush, who quickly ducked to avoid being hit. Al-Zeidi was quickly wrestled to the ground by guards and dragged away.
During Thursday's proceedings, al-Zeidi, wearing a beige suit over a brown shirt and brown leather shoes, walked swiftly to the wooden pen where defendants are kept and greeted the panel of three judges with a nod and a wave.
Presiding Judge Abdul-Amir al-Rubaie asked al-Zeidi whether he was innocent or guilty.
"I am innocent. What I did was a natural response to the occupation," the defendant replied.
The proceedings took place under heavy guard with scores of armed policemen inside the courtroom and the Iraqi soldiers who escorted al-Zeidi waiting outside.
The trial began on Feb. 19 but was adjourned until Thursday as the judges weighed a defense argument that the current charge is not applicable because Bush was not in Baghdad on an official visit, having arrived unannounced and without an invitation.
Al-Rubaie on Thursday read a response from the prime minister's office insisting it was an official visit.
Chief defense attorney Dhia al-Saadi then demanded that the charge be dismissed, saying his client's action "was an expression of freedom and does not constitute a crime."
He echoed al-Zeidi's testimony at the previous hearing, saying his client had been provoked by anger over Bush's claims of success in a war that has devastated his country.
"It was an act of throwing a shoe and not a rocket. It was meant as an insult to the occupation," the lawyer said.
The judge then turned to the defendant and asked whether he had anything to add
"I have great faith in the Iraqi judiciary. It is a judiciary that is both just and has integrity," al-Zeidi responded.
The judge delivered the verdict to the defendant and his attorneys after ordering other people in the audience out of the courtroom.
Many people in the region — angry over the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq — have embraced al-Zeidi. They have staged large street rallies calling for his release, and one Iraqi man erected a sofa-sized sculpture of a shoe in his honor that the Iraqi government later ordered removed.
When al-Zeidi threw his shoes at Bush, he shouted in Arabic: "This is your farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."
But al-Maliki was deeply embarrassed by the action against an American president who had stood by him when some Arab leaders were quietly urging the U.S. to oust him.
The journalist's family has raised concerns about his welfare, and he testified earlier that he had been tortured with beatings and electric shocks during his interrogation — allegations the Iraqi government has denied.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090312/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq/print
BAGHDAD – The Iraqi journalist who threw shoes at then-President George W. Bush was convicted Thursday of assaulting a foreign leader and sentenced to three years in prison, lawyers said. He shouted "long live Iraq" when the sentence was read.
The verdict came after a short trial in which Muntadhar al-Zeidi, 30, pleaded not guilty to the charge and said his action was a "natural response to the occupation."
Some of his relatives collapsed after the verdict and had to be helped out of court. Others were forcibly removed by security forces when they became unruly, shouting "Down with Bush" and "Long live Iraq."
Al-Zeidi could have received up to 15 years in prison for hurling his shoes at Bush last December during a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
But defense lawyers said the judge showed leniency because of al-Zeidi's age and clean record. Many Iraqis consider al-Zeidi a hero for defiantly expressing his anger at a president who they believe destroyed their country after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Thousands across the Muslim world took to the streets to demand his release.
Defense lawyers said they would appeal because they believe the action was a legitimate political protest and did not merit prison time.
"This judiciary is not just," al-Zeidi's brother, Dargham, said tearfully.
The journalist has been in Iraqi custody since the Dec.14 news conference where he threw his shoes at Bush, who quickly ducked to avoid being hit. Al-Zeidi was quickly wrestled to the ground by guards and dragged away.
During Thursday's proceedings, al-Zeidi, wearing a beige suit over a brown shirt and brown leather shoes, walked swiftly to the wooden pen where defendants are kept and greeted the panel of three judges with a nod and a wave.
Presiding Judge Abdul-Amir al-Rubaie asked al-Zeidi whether he was innocent or guilty.
"I am innocent. What I did was a natural response to the occupation," the defendant replied.
The proceedings took place under heavy guard with scores of armed policemen inside the courtroom and the Iraqi soldiers who escorted al-Zeidi waiting outside.
The trial began on Feb. 19 but was adjourned until Thursday as the judges weighed a defense argument that the current charge is not applicable because Bush was not in Baghdad on an official visit, having arrived unannounced and without an invitation.
Al-Rubaie on Thursday read a response from the prime minister's office insisting it was an official visit.
Chief defense attorney Dhia al-Saadi then demanded that the charge be dismissed, saying his client's action "was an expression of freedom and does not constitute a crime."
He echoed al-Zeidi's testimony at the previous hearing, saying his client had been provoked by anger over Bush's claims of success in a war that has devastated his country.
"It was an act of throwing a shoe and not a rocket. It was meant as an insult to the occupation," the lawyer said.
The judge then turned to the defendant and asked whether he had anything to add
"I have great faith in the Iraqi judiciary. It is a judiciary that is both just and has integrity," al-Zeidi responded.
The judge delivered the verdict to the defendant and his attorneys after ordering other people in the audience out of the courtroom.
Many people in the region — angry over the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq — have embraced al-Zeidi. They have staged large street rallies calling for his release, and one Iraqi man erected a sofa-sized sculpture of a shoe in his honor that the Iraqi government later ordered removed.
When al-Zeidi threw his shoes at Bush, he shouted in Arabic: "This is your farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."
But al-Maliki was deeply embarrassed by the action against an American president who had stood by him when some Arab leaders were quietly urging the U.S. to oust him.
The journalist's family has raised concerns about his welfare, and he testified earlier that he had been tortured with beatings and electric shocks during his interrogation — allegations the Iraqi government has denied.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090312/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq/print
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