Trusting the Scorpion: BP, the Legacy of Republican Hypocrisy and Democratic Cowardice

by John Atcheson

The progressives are up in arms over the oil spill.  Like a scene from Frankenstein, the good citizens are storming the hydrocarbon castle
with torches ablaze, and pitchforks held high.

Some demand stricter regulations, some a wiser energy
policy, but they're all focused on tarring BP with this heinous crime against
nature.  Especially now that Obama is
starting to get some blame.  An
inordinate amount of energy is being spent on how we can use this event to
"message," with the emphasis here on assigning the blame to BP.

It would be nice to get stricter regulations; certainly a
wiser energy policy would be good.  But
focusing on blaming BP is missing the point. 
Of course they cut corners; of course they're sleazy.  It's what they do.

But they can do it only because we let them.  The whole thing is reminiscent of the fable about the scorpion and the frog.  If
you've forgotten, it goes like this:

 A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog, afraid of being stung, refuses at first, but when the scorpion points
out that if it were to sting the frog,  the
frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well, he relents. Yet when they reach the middle of the river, the scorpion
stings him. As they are sinking,  the
frog asks why, and the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's what we do."

The hydrocarbon castle we would storm is but one building in
a vast city as dark as Mordor.

That's why focusing on blaming BP, even in hopes of getting
a saner energy policy, is such a waste - it's like worrying about a case of the
sniffles (albeit a very bad case) when you've got end stage cancer.  Was Exxon - the mot profitable company in
history last year -- not blamed for the "Exxon-Valdez?" Did it change anything?

Here's the grim reality: the oil spill is merely a symptom
of a much deeper problem, one that is our fault, because for the last 30 years
we've been trusting the scorpion.

The fact is, Reagan had it backwards. Government, it turns
out, is often the solution and unconstrained private industry the problem.  Many of us knew this, but few have had the
courage to stand up to Reagan's dangerous, but popular, fantasy, then or
now. 

Indeed, when the history of the last three decades is
written, it will be a story of epic hypocrisy on the part of Republicans,
enabled by abject cowardice on the part of Democrats, with consequences that created
a legacy far more tragic and irreversible than even this horrendous oil spill.

There may have been a few conservative ideologues who
actually believed the small government, magic market mantras spouted by the
likes of Reagan, Grover Norquist (I simply want to rduce
[government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in
the bathtub) William Kristol and assorted industry-funded
think tanks, but they were few and far between. 

The real reason this philosophy spread was because it was
politically expedient, it was backed and funded by powerful interests who made
campaign contributions, and few had the courage or conviction required to confront
a fantasy that told people they didn't have to pay for the services they
demanded.

Across our entire economy and society we are now reaping the
harvest of that hypocrisy, and the fruits of that cowardice. 

To any remaining acolytes of Reaganism, the track record
stands in stark rebuke.

The evidence mounts every day.  The BP oil spill, yes.  But also The Big Branch coal mining disaster;
the sub-prime disaster; the AIG and various other Wall Street disasters; the
growing income
disparity between the rich and the rest of us; a global thermostat set
on self-destruct; a globalized economy as volatile as a vial of
nitro-glycerin - everywhere you look, you see more proof that the conservative
mantra of small government and uber-free markets has completely failed. 

If one examines the record, it's pretty clear that Republicans
and conservatives (effectively the same thing) never really cared much about small government.  In fact, government grew rapidly under
Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. The only time since Carter that government growth
subsided was under Clinton.

Doubt that?  Here's
the numbers.

If you rank all Presidents since Nixon by the number of government employees per 1000 citizens, here's what you'll find: Reagan tops the list with the most, and Bush II is next. Clinton, on the other hand, had the smallest government by number of employees.  The story is much the same for deficits:
Reagan increased the federal deficit as a per cent of GDP by 10%, Bush I by
13%, and Bush II by an incredible 20%. 
In contrast, Clinton
lowered it by 10%.

Of course there are lots of ways to slice and dice the
statistics, but any honest look at the numbers comes up with the same
conclusion - Reagan, Bush I and Bush II talked about small government but
presided over dramatic growth in the size of government, while Clinton actually made
progress in reducing the size of government. 

And rather than having the courage to actually cut popular
services, Republicans cut taxes and raised deficits to continue providing them,
while making it virtually inevitable that someone, someday would have to shrink
government - hopefully enough to drown it in the bathtub.  Ironically, Democrats - only slightly more
interested in delivering good government than amassing power than Republicans
are - did most of whatever spending cuts did happen.

So, if small government wasn't really the goal for
conservatives, what was? 

Simple: weak government. 
Government that couldn't constrain the vaunted private sector - the font
of all good things according to conservatives' public pronouncements - the font
of campaign contributions in reality as Paul Krugman
pointed out in a recent column, and Thomas Frank noted in What's the Matter with Kansas?. 

And while Clinton
made real progress in constraining government growth, he signed onto the
Conservative notion of eviscerating government. 
It was Clinton's
economic team, after all, which led the charge to rescind the Glass Steagall
Act - the jewel in the crown of financial deregulation, and the source of much
of our misery now.  It was Clinton who  ended welfare and proclaimed the era of big
government to be over.

It wasn't just Clinton.
Democrats quickly became complicit in this epic hypocrisy. They formed the DLC
and went after corporate campaign contributions, they triangulated, they
became split-the-difference Democrats, adopting much of the conservative
playbook, and legitimizing more of it.

Aside from the obvious ethical and moral issues, the problem
with this strategy is that when the policy, philosophy or system fails, the
triangulator owns a big share of the catastrophes that failure creates.

For example, back to the BP oil disaster.  Just weeks before it occurred, in a classic
triangulation, Obama announced that he supported off-shore drilling.  Because he failed to take a stand then, he
couldn't avoid taking some of the blame for the spill.  Had he made Republican deregulation an issue
and opposed offshore drilling rather than cratering to the drill-baby-drill
crazies - had he stood on principle - he wouldn't be in a defensive position,
trying to pass off blame and criticism to BP. 
Rather he would have made deregulation the issue, and he'd be leading a
popular charge against a broken regulatory system and a failed political
philosophy, putting conservatives in a defensive position. 

That's right, because of political cowardice and a
too-clever-by-a-half strategy, the Obama administration is fending off blame
for something Republicans, conservatives, and the drill-baby-drill crowd fought
to put in place.

And this is just one example of a dynamic that has dominated
politics since Reagan. 

You can't confront Wall Street when you've set up Goldman
Sachs South in the US Treasury and the White House, stocking it with the very
folks who created the problem.

You can't confront Health Care crazies when you've made back
room deals with big Pharma, and preemptively ceded the victory to private
industry. 

You can't confront the collapse of the educational system,
if you've advocated tax cuts.  Look at California, which was at
the vanguard of the tax cutting frenzy. 
Their educational system went from number 1 in the country when Reagan
took over to number 47, now. 

You can't get out of illegitimate and ill-advised wars when
you've given them legitimacy.  Come
on.  Does anyone really believe the US
has a strategic stake in Afghanistan?  And even if you did, does anyone believe that
occupying the hapless country with conventional military forces is the way to deal
with it?  Let's face it, we doubled down
on this war because Democrats thought it would be the best way to inoculate
themselves against the dreaded "soft on defense" epithet.

In fact, Democrats have been so ready to run from name
calling it's as if they're wearing track shoes and poised in starting blocks,
the better to sprint from their convictions at the first whiff of a meanie. 

They've been so eager for power, that they stopped thinking
about why the want it - it became an end, not a means.

If we'd been willing to stand on principle for the last
three decades, we might have lost a few elections, but at least the debate
would be framed, the battle lines clear.

And when the inevitable failures from the conservative
hypocrisy came, Tea-partiers might have been pouring into the streets demanding
that the rich pay their fair share of taxes and the corporations quit
exploiting humanity and the planet so that a few CEOs might buy an extra 25,000
square foot vacation home in Barbados.  Indeed, they might even be demanding that
government fulfill its role as guarantor of a civil society.

Now, instead, no one believes government has a role.

Bottom line: we're not having the debate this country so
desperately needs to have because for decades, we've run from that debate, and
to do so now would be to expose the full depth of that cowardice.   

That's why watching liberals and progressives falling all
over themselves trying to figure out how to fix the blame on BP is such a
tragedy. Even if they succeed the root cause of the disaster remains, and far
more serious issues go unaddressed.

We are now fording difficult passages - as dangerous as any
this country has ever faced - and until we confront the larger conservative
failure, we will do so with the scorpion on our collective back. 

The countless failures of Reaganism are laid out like
stepping stones across this broad river we must ford. 

We can see, on the other side, shimmering in the distance,
the promised land - a land in which citizens run government, not corporations;
in which the wealth of our collective endeavors is shared among us all, not
ceded to the top 1%; a land in which we treat nature with the care and
reverence our very survival demands, not as a spare parts shed and waste pile;
a land in which government is the way we come together to meet the great
challenges of the 21st Century, not a punch line to a cynical and
manipulative speech given by corporate lackeys posing as politicians.

The choice is clear. 
We could treat each of the national disasters facing us as discreet
entities, in which case we attempt to swim the river with the scorpion on our
back.  Or with a little courage and a
little integrity, we could confront them as symptoms of the larger failures of
conservatism that they are, in which case we simply step across the stones
before us to reach the other side.

We have no choice.  Conservatism's
failure is complete, the consequences of not confronting that failure too
dear.  The time is now; cowardice is no
longer an option. All we lack is a leader with the courage to take the first
step.

Mr. Obama, will you be that leader?

John Atcheson's
writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several
wonk journals. His last article for Common Dreams was "Fear, Ignorance and the Summer of Our Discontent"
on 10/4/09. He is currently at work on a fictional Trilogy that centers
on climate change.  Atcheson's book reviews are featured on
Climateprogress.org. Email to: atchman@comcast.net

Beeline to Extinction

According to the recently released annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), more than a third of U.S. managed honeybee colonies—those set up for intensified pollination of commercial crops—failed to survive this past winter. Since 2006, the decline of the U.S.’s estimated 2.4 million beehives—commonly referred to as colony collapse disorder (CCD)—has led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies: Hives are found empty with honey, larvae, and the queen intact, but with no bees and no trail left behind. The cause remains unknown, but appears to be a combination of factors impacting bee health and increasing their susceptibility to disease. Heavy losses associated with CCD have been found mainly with larger migratory commercial beekeepers, some of whom have lost 50-90 percent of their colonies.

A “keystone” species—one that has a disproportionate effect on the environment relative to its biomass—bees are our key to global food security and a critical part of the food chain. Flowering plants that produce our food depend on insects for pollination. There are other pollinators—butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, and birds—but the honeybee is the most effective, pollinating over 100 commercial crops nationwide, including most fruit, vegetables, and nuts, as well as alfalfa for cattle feed and cotton, with a value estimated between $15-$20 billion annually. As much as one of every three bites of food we eat comes from food pollinated by insects. Without honeybees, our diet would be mostly meatless, consisting of rice and cereals, and we would have no cotton for textiles. The entire ecosystem and the global food economy potentially rests on their wings.

Experts now believe bees are heading for extinction and are racing to pinpoint the culprit, increasingly blaming pesticide usage. U.S. researchers have reported finding 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax, and pollen. New parasites, pathogens, fungi, and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods are also part of the equation. Three years ago, U.S. scientists unraveled the genetic code of the honeybee and uncovered the DNA of a virus transmitted by the Varroa mite—Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV)—found in almost all of the hives impacted by CCD. Researchers have also found the fungus Nosema ceranae and other pathogens such as chalkbrood in some affected hives throughout the country.   Other reported theories include the effects of shifting spring blooms and earlier nectar flow associated with broader global climate and temperature changes, the effects of feed supplements from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and the effects of cell phone transmissions and radiation from power lines that may be interfering with a bee’s navigational capabilities. (Last year, a study revealed that a contaminant from heat-exposed HFCS might be killing off the bees.) However, according to a recent congressional report on CCD, contributions of these possible factors have not been substantiated.

The industrial bee business and the demands of intensified food production could also be playing a role in the bees’ demise. Widespread migratory stress brought about by increased needs for pollination could be weakening the bees’ immune systems. Most pollination services are provided by commercial migratory beekeepers who travel from state to state and provide pollination services to crop producers. These operations are able to supply a large number of bee colonies during the critical phase of a crop’s bloom cycle, when bees pollinate as they collect nectar. A hive might make five cross-country truck trips each year, chasing crops, and some beekeepers can lose up to 10 percent of their queens during one cross country trip. Bees are overworked and stressed out.

California’s almond crop is a prime example of our reliance on bees’ industriousness for our agriculture success. The state grows 80 percent of the world’s almonds, making it our largest agricultural export and bringing in a whopping $1.9 billion last year. The crop—with nearly 740,000 acres of almond trees planted—uses 1.3 million colonies of bees, approximately one half of all bees in the U.S., and is projected to grow to 1.5 million colonies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is now predicting that Central Valley almond growers will produce about 1.53 billion pounds of almonds this year, up 8.5 percent last year. To meet the demand, bee colonies are trucked farther and more often than ever before and demand for bees has dramatically outstripped supply. Bee colonies, which a decade ago rented for $60, cost as much as $170 this February in California.

Few organic beekeepers have reported bee losses, suggesting that natural and organic bee keeping methods may be the solution. In addition, organic farmers who maintain wildlife habitat around their farms are helping to encourage bees to pollinate their crops.  “The main difference between our farm and our conventional neighbors is the amount of wildlife and insect habitat that we have around the edge of our farm,” said Greg Massa, who manages Massa Organics, a fourth generation 90-acre certified organic rice farm near Chico. Massa started growing organic almonds six years ago, and works with a small, organic beekeeper in Oregon who brings in 30 hives to his farm. Massa’s farm has a large wildlife corridor which has been revegetated with native plants and covered in mustard, wild radish, and vetch, a favorite of bees and also a good nitrogen source for his rice crop.

Time might be running out for the bees, but there are simple actions we can take to make a difference. First, support organic farmers who don’t use pesticides and whose growing methods work in harmony with the natural life of bees. In particular, buy organic almonds. Don’t use pesticides in your home garden, especially at mid-day when bees most likely forage for nectar. You can also plant good nectar sources such as red clover, foxglove, bee balm, and other native plants to encourage bees to pollinate your garden. Provide clean water; even a simple bowl of water is beneficial.  Buy local honey; it keeps small, diversified beekeepers in business, and beekeepers keep honeybees thriving. In addition, you can start keeping bees yourself. Backyard and urban beekeeping can actively help bring back our bees. Finally, you can work to preserve more open cropland and rangeland. Let’s use our political voices to support smart land use, the impact of which will not only result in cleaner water, soil, and air, but also just might help save the humble honeybee.

http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/nstarkman/2010/05/21/beeline-to-extinction/

The War Is Making You Poor Act

Rep. Alan Grayson
Congressman Alan Grayson represents Central Florida (FL-8).
Posted: May 21, 2010 03:46 PM

Next week, there is going to be a "debate" in Congress on yet another war funding bill. The bill is supposed to pass without debate, so no one will notice.

What George Orwell wrote about in 1984 has come true. What Eisenhower warned us about concerning the "military-industrial complex" has come true. War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore.

But we're going to change this. Today, we're introducing a bill called 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars.

Next year's budget allocates $159,000,000,000 to perpetuate the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. That's enough money to eliminate federal income taxes for the first $35,000 of every American's income. Beyond that, leaves over $15 billion to cut the deficit.

And that's what this bill does. It eliminates separate funding for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and eliminates federal income taxes for everyone's first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for couples). Plus it pays down the national debt.

The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There's no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.

We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don't even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using 'emergency supplemental'. A nine-year 'emergency'.

Let's show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.

Tell Congress that you like 'The War Is Making You Poor Act'. No, tell Congress you love it. Act now.

http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

All we are saying is "give peace a chance." We will end these wars.

Together.

Follow Rep. Alan Grayson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alangrayson

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/the-war-is-making-you-poo_b_585343.html?view=print

The Greeks Get It

Posted on May 24, 2010

By Chris Hedges

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it. 

The former right-wing government of Greece lied about the size of the country’s budget deficit. It was not 3.7 percent of gross domestic product but 13.6 percent. And it now looks like the economies of Spain, Ireland, Italy and Portugal are as bad as Greece’s, which is why the euro has lost 20 percent of its value in the last few months. The few hundred billion in bailouts for other faltering European states, like our own bailouts, have only forestalled disaster. This is why the U.S. stock exchange is in free fall and gold is rocketing upward. American banks do not have heavy exposure in Greece, but Greece, as most economists concede, is only the start. Wall Street is deeply invested in other European states, and when the unraveling begins the foundations of our own economy will rumble and crack as loudly as the collapse in Athens. The corporate overlords will demand that we too impose draconian controls and cuts or see credit evaporate. They have the money and the power to hurt us. There will be more unemployment, more personal and commercial bankruptcies, more foreclosures and more human misery. And the corporate state, despite this suffering, will continue to plunge us deeper into debt to make war. It will use fear to keep us passive. We are being consumed from the inside out. Our economy is as rotten as the economy in Greece. We too borrow billions a day to stay afloat. We too have staggering deficits, which can never be repaid. Heed the dire rhetoric of European leaders.

“The euro is in danger,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel

told lawmakers last week as she called on them to approve Germany’s portion of the bailout plan. “If we do not avert this danger, then the consequences for Europe are incalculable, and then the consequences beyond Europe are incalculable.”

Beyond Europe means us. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the current government of George Papandreou, did what the Republicans did under George W. Bush. They looted taxpayer funds to enrich their corporate masters and bankrupt the country. They stole hundreds of millions of dollars from individual retirement and pension accounts slowly built up over years by citizens who had been honest and industrious. They used mass propaganda to make the population afraid of terrorists and surrender civil liberties, including habeas corpus. And while Bush and Karamanlis, along with the corporate criminal class they abetted, live in unparalleled luxury, ordinary working men and women are told they must endure even more pain and suffering to make amends. It is feudal rape. And there has to be a point when even the American public—which still believes the fairy tale that personal will power and positive thinking will lead to success—will realize it has been had.

We have seen these austerity measures before. Latin Americans, like the Russians, were forced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to gut social services, end subsidies on basic goods and food, and decimate the income levels of the middle class—the foundation of democracy—in the name of fiscal responsibility. Small entrepreneurs, especially farmers, were wiped out. State industries were sold off by corrupt government officials to capitalists for a fraction of their value. Utilities and state services were privatized.

What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf’s ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

We are facing the collapse of the world’s financial system. It is the end of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism and internal and external intelligence agencies—much of their work done by private contractors—has given these corporations terrifying mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation.

Dwight Macdonald laid out the consequences of a culture such as ours, where the waging of war was “the normal mode of existence.” The concept of perpetual war, which eluded the theorists behind the 19th and early 20th century reform and social movements, including Karl Marx, has left social reformers unable to deal with this effective mechanism of mass control. The old reformists had limited their focus to internal class struggle and, as Macdonald noted, never worked out “an adequate theory of the political significance of war.” Until that gap is filled, Macdonald warned, “modern socialism will continue to have a somewhat academic flavor.”

Macdonald detailed in his 1946 essay “The Root Is Man” the marriage between capitalism and permanent war. He despaired of an effective resistance until the permanent war economy, and the mentality that went with it, was defeated. Macdonald, who was an anarchist, saw that the Marxists and the liberal class in Western democracies had both mistakenly placed their faith for human progress in the goodness of the state. This faith, he noted, was a huge error. The state, whether in the capitalist United States or the communist Soviet Union, eventually devoured its children. And it did this by using the organs of mass propaganda to keep its populations afraid and in a state of endless war. It did this by insisting that human beings be sacrificed before the sacred idol of the market or the utopian worker’s paradise. The war state provides a constant stream of enemies, whether the German Hun, the Bolshevik, the Nazi, the Soviet agent or the Islamic terrorist. Fear and war, Macdonald understood, was the mechanism that let oligarchs pillage in the name of national security.

“Modern totalitarianism can integrate the masses so completely into the political structure, through terror and propaganda, that they become the architects of their own enslavement,” he wrote. “This does not make the slavery less, but on the contrary more— a paradox there is no space to unravel here. Bureaucratic collectivism, not capitalism, is the most dangerous future enemy of socialism.”

Macdonald argued that democratic states had to dismantle the permanent war economy and the propaganda that came with it. They had to act and govern according to the non-historical and more esoteric values of truth, justice, equality and empathy. Our liberal class, from the church and the university to the press and the Democratic Party, by paying homage to the practical dictates required by hollow statecraft and legislation, has lost its moral voice. Liberals serve false gods. The belief in progress through war, science, technology and consumption has been used to justify the trampling of these non-historical values. And the blind acceptance of the dictates of globalization, the tragic and false belief that globalization is a form of inevitable progress, is perhaps the quintessential illustration of Macdonald’s point. The choice is not between the needs of the market and human beings. There should be no choice. And until we break free from serving the fiction of human progress, whether that comes in the form of corporate capitalism or any other utopian vision, we will continue to emasculate ourselves and perpetuate needless human misery. As the crowds of strikers in Athens understand, it is not the banks that are important but the people who raise children, build communities and sustain life. And when a government forgets whom it serves and why it exists, it must be replaced.

“The Progressive makes History the center of his ideology,” Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man.” “The Radical puts Man there. The Progressive’s attitude is optimistic both about human nature (which he thinks is good, hence all that is needed is to change institutions so as to give this goodness a chance to work) and about the possibility of understanding history through scientific method. The Radical is, if not exactly pessimistic, at least more sensitive to the dual nature; he is skeptical about the ability of science to explain things beyond a certain point; he is aware of the tragic element in man’s fate not only today but in any collective terms (the interests of Society or the Working Class); the Radical stresses the individual conscience and sensibility. The Progressive starts off from what is actually happening; the Radical starts off from what he wants to happen. The former must have the feeling that History is ‘on his side.’ The latter goes along the road pointed out by his own individual conscience; if History is going his way, too, he is pleased; but he is quite stubborn about following ‘what ought to be’ rather than ‘what is.’ ”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_greeks_get_it_20100524/

Everything Is Everything

Sunday 23 May 2010

by: Winslow Myers, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

photo
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: orangeacid, Reto Stöckli / NASA)

The online Urban Dictionary gives three definitions for this ancient jive phrase: first, similar to saying "It's all good," or "everything is going according to plan;" second, similar to "It is what it is;" and third, from the teachings of the Nation of Islam, "Comes from the Supreme Alphabet, a system of interpreting text and finding deeper meaning. 'E'-Meaning 'Equality', to knowledge your knowledge, you will deal equally with everything within your cipher, which gives birth to wisdom that is showing and proving." Okay.

Recalling the use of the phrase by hip jazz musicians in the 1960s, I had always assumed it meant a Buddhist sense of the radical interconnection among all phenomena. Here in brave new 2010, that's the definition that still makes the most sense to me. Take the exploded BP oil rig off the Louisiana coast. Things in the Gulf are definitely not all good, and certainly not going according to plan. Resigned acceptance of the status quo, "It is what it is," won't cut it either, as an entire generation of fishermen in four or five states wait to see if they will lose their livelihoods. As for a wisdom that shows and proves, I think we need a wisdom, even at the risk of simplification, that reaches for a new level of connection between apparently separate events.

On a small planet, everything is everything. Back in the 1970s, with oil prices spiking, lines lengthening at the gas pumps, and President Carter moralizing disagreeably on TV about a fundamental need to change our profligate ways, the visionary futurist Amory Lovins advocated for a "soft energy path" - cutting our dependence on foreign energy by putting solar panels on our roofs and decentralizing our whole energy system. The corporate powers-that-be would have none of it, even to the degree that Mr. Reagan pointedly took down the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof.

Carter himself had articulated a doctrine of protecting by military means if necessary "our" oil sources in the Gulf (that other Gulf, over there - but it doesn't matter, because everything is everything, it's all one ocean). The size and scope of our bases in places like Saudi Arabia, site of Islam's most holy shrines, engendered a horrific Pushback - Osama bin Laden and 9/11. In the mother of all vicious circles, this justified a strong U.S. military presence anywhere and everywhere on the globe, for an indefinitely extended time, because terrorists can take root anywhere near or far. Supporting all this military activity without a draft required the Pentagon to contract out more and more support services, up to and including providing intelligence and security, to civilian businesses. Paying for the involvement of all these people in two separate but related wars, wars that seem to be equally about terror and fossil fuels - everything is everything - left us with a debt crisis that will last for generations. And it spurred investment banks to invest in the failure of mortgages rather than in the success of projects like the Pickens plan-building wind towers in the Midwest that would put people to work, lighten our carbon footprint, and lessen the need for a heavy U.S. presence in the oil-rich Middle East.

The power and reach of corporate culture, especially its fossil-fuel segment, (the reach extends deep into our Supreme Court, who ruled that money is free speech and corporations must remain free to speak) ensured that Lovins's soft path would continue to be a road not taken. Instead, with the global oil supply peaking, companies like British Petroleum had to reach miles down onto the sea floor for their oil, in a stretch of technological prowess equal in risk to going to the moon. They promised that what now has happened couldn't possibly happen, convincing even Obama, until disaster struck, that more deep water offshore drilling could be part of a safe integrated energy program.

The circle of interconnection between terrorism and war and oil, sketched out all too briefly here, is almost complete. It lacks only one segment to be an adequate descriptor of the ties between everything and everything else-what it lacks is you and me, the ones who drive the cars and turn the thermostats that burn the gas that comes from the Saudi oil protected by our military in one Gulf, or the oil too riskily attained in the other Gulf.

It is our own ethics, our buying power, our involvement, our votes, our holding great powers accountable, that is the only possible key to redressing the present dysfunctional imbalances-imbalances between impersonal corporate power and the well-being of shrimpers and shrimp in the one interconnected ocean; imbalances between our getting and our spending, imbalances between the human and the living system without which the human cannot survive. Because everything is everything. And that ain't no jive.

http://www.truthout.org/everything-s-everything59539?print

MOS DEF & CORNEL WEST ON BILL MAHER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VueTsxxgWas&feature=related

GOOD: If Mos Def Were President

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udwTkU1QKPc&feature=channel

VIDEO: Protesters Swarm Wall St. Lobbyists' Homes

— By Andy Kroll

| Sun May. 16, 2010 4:31 PM PDT

— Demonstrators occupy the front lawn at the house of Gregory Baer, a top lobbyist for Bank of America. Photo by Andy Kroll.

Late Sunday afternoon, the well-heeled residents of Chevy Chase, Maryland, a bucolic suburb northwest of Washington, DC, witnessed a commotion rare for their neighborhood. Toting signs and megaphones, fired up and chanting at the top of their lungs, some 700 demonstrators from around the nation paid a visit to two residents who work as powerful lobbyists for the United States' biggest banks: Gregory Baer, a deputy counsel for Bank of America, and Peter Scher, a high-ranking executive and lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase.

Bussed into Washington by the Service International Employees Union (SEIU) and National People’s Action (NPA), a community organzing network, the protesters visited Baer's and Scher’s homes as part of a multi-day stand in Washington. On Monday, SEIU and NPA will lead a series of protests on K Street in Washington—a street synonymous with influence and lobbying. The groups are pushing for strong new financial reforms (as teh Senate continues debating legislation to bolster the rules governing Wall Street) and urging banks to stop foreclosures and to promote job creation.

But before Main Street arrives on K Street, a fleet of yellow school buses and motor coaches delivered the demonstrators, clad in red, blue, and purple t-shirts, to a park in Chevy Chase near the home of Bank of America’s Baer. After a quick briefing, the throngs of protesters, hailing from Chicago, San Francisco, Staten Island, and other locales, gathered on Baer’s front lawn and marched to his front door. Members of NPA delivered a letter to a family member who opened the door. Baer, this family member said, wasn’t home. The letter, addressed to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, asks Moynihan to meet with groups "to address the critical problems facing our neighborhoods and our country—problems that were caused in part by Bank of America and that continue to fester due to Bank of America’s inaction."

Here's a video, courtesy of National People's Action, of the scene at Baer's home:

Undeterred by Baer’s absence, the boisterous group chanted—"Bank of America, Bad for America," "Take It Back," "Fired Up, Can’t Take It No More"—and, via megaphone, blasted Bank of America for foreclosing on homeowners and lobbying against financial reform. One woman who took the mic explained how she’d called Bank of America dozens of times to fight off foreclosure but hadn’t had any success with the bank’s unresponsive and unhelpful employees. People in the crowd booed references to the bank. Many hoisted signs that read, "People First Economy”"and "Hold Wall Street Accountable."

Just as the crowd was about to leave around 4:15 pm, Baer, in a baseball cap and shorts, strode up his front lawn and into the crowd. Baer briefly spoke with one of the protest's organizers, declined to say much at all, then ducked into his house. The crowd hung around Baer’s house for another 25 minutes, their chants drawing curious (and agitated) neighbors onto their porches. Then they left for their second stop of the day.

Protesters crowd in front of JPMorgan Chase lobbyist Peter Scher's house in Chevy Chase, Md. Photo by Andy Kroll.A 15-minute ride later, the buses arrived at the stately home of JPMorgan lobbyist Peter Scher. Like the previous demonstration, people poured out of the buses and quickly filed onto the neatly manicured front lawn and rushed Scher’s red front door. This time, no one answered, despite repeated demands by the Rev. Eugene Barnes from Illinois People’s Action. At Scher’s house, Montgomery County police nudged protesters off the lawn onto a nearby street, where the speeches and chanting and banging of drums continued. (One of the officers said the event was "very peaceful.")

A handful of protesters walked to neighboring houses and handed fliers criticizing Scher and JPMorgan to neighbors watching the scene. On the street, Mark Freeman, a Minneapolis resident and lifelong union member, told of battling Bank of America, which was attempting to foreclose on his modest home in north Minneapolis. "It’s time that we repossess America," Freeman shouted into the megaphone.

As the sun sank lower in the sky, the activists returned to the buses and headed to their hotels. On Monday, their target is a more obvious one: K Street, the Rodeo Drive of Washington lobbying shops, where they will protest Wall Street's influence-peddlers' attempts to whittle down financial reform.

Andy Kroll is a reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips and insights at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/05/main-street-battles-wall-street-seiu-npa-gregory-baer-peter-scher-jpmorgan-chase-bank-of-america?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Motherjones%2Fmojoblog+%28MotherJones.com+|+MoJoBlog%29

Goldman Sachs Publicly Supports Financial Reform, But Fights It With Lobbyists

Huffington Post Investigative Fund
Adele Hampton
First Posted: 05-17-10 09:22 AM   |   
Updated: 05-17-10 10:24 AM

For all of Goldman Sachs' professed support for an overhaul of financial regulations, the megabank hasn't exactly withdrawn its army of lobbyists. Far from wearing out its welcome, the firm is busier than ever safeguarding its interests while a Wall Street crackdown takes shape in Washington.

Goldman has an unrivaled and influential network of lobbyists, including about 50 people with close ties to Congress and past White Houses, a Huffington Post Investigative Fund analysis of lobbying and campaign records shows. The lobbyists are challenging reforms aimed at Goldman's profit centers, including the trading of complex contracts known as derivatives. The Senate this week will continue debating proposed regulations of derivatives, which are blamed for fueling the financial crisis.

Perceptions of Goldman's role in the crisis, along with a civil fraud case brought against the bank last month by the Securities and Exchange Commission, have already spurred predictions of a less dominant future. But all is not lost for Goldman, which still stands out as perhaps the most influential of the nation's top six banks -- a remarkable feat given a crowded field of well-connected institutions.

Goldman's professional persuaders hail from 14 different lobbying firms, Senate lobbying records show. No other top bank -- not JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo or Citigroup -- has as many firms lobbying on its behalf. Goldman has hired nearly 40 lobbyists, all former government employees, to target financial reform alone, Senate disclosure records show.

These services have not come cheaply. Since the beginning of 2009, Goldman has spent nearly $6 million on lobbying, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Only Citigroup and JPMorgan spent more.

So far this year, Goldman has revved up its lobbying even further. In the first three months of 2010, the bank spent $1.53 million lobbying, a 22 percent jump over the same period last year. Goldman also has increased its donations to political campaigns.

 "It does show how a corporation will leave no stone unturned -- creating a powerful and potentially influential lobbying force," said Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that advocates for greater disclosure of how Washington works and is influenced.

To be sure, Goldman isn't the only investment bank with a sophisticated lobbying operation, and pro-financial reform groups have attacked them all. Last week, three liberal advocacy groups said they had tallied the amount of money big banks are spending to influence financial reform: An estimated $600 million on lobbying and political campaign contributions since the government bailed out Bear Stearns in March 2008, and a lobbying force of more than 240 former government officials and Capitol Hill staffers. (Labor groups today will take to the lobbying industry's venerable K Street corridor in Washington to protest the prominent role lobbyists are playing in the financial reform debate.)

Most of Goldman's lobbying is done through an internal firm, The Goldman Sachs Group.
Leading the group is Michael Paese, who was deputy staff director of the House Financial Services Committee until September 2008. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the committee, has prohibited Paese from lobbying the committee for two years. He did so to prevent Paese from influencing the House's Wall Street reform bill, which Frank largely crafted. Paese can still lobby other lawmakers, the White House and government agencies.

Paese and his group have indeed cast a wide net, lobbying the House, the Senate, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, records examined by the Investigative Fund show. Last year, in the wake of the financial crisis, the group zeroed in on Congress' impending overhaul of Wall Street. They lobbied on financial reform issues each quarter, records show.  

A Goldman spokeswoman declined to comment for this story and several Goldman lobbyists did not return calls seeking comment. Without speaking to the lobbyists, it can be hard to tell exactly what they are arguing for or where they stand, because of the vagueness of lobbying disclosure reports.

Public statements suggest that, on the face of it, Goldman appears to support reform. "I think, on the whole, financial reform is absolutely essential," Goldman's Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last month. "America will be a big beneficiary" from reform, he predicted, though he added, "we will as well."

But some congressional staffers note that big banks are vigorously opposed to reforming their profit-making ways.  

The legislation is "especially tough on Wall Street," said Steve Adamske, a spokesman for the financial services committee. "They've all come to talk to us, and none of them like the bill."

Financial reform legislation, in particular some proposed regulations of derivatives, could hit Goldman especially hard.

Derivatives protect companies from the risks of investing in stocks, commodities and mortgage-related securities, among other items. In the lead up to the 2008 financial collapse, Goldman would sometimes sell risky mortgage-related securities to investors, use derivatives to bet that the securities would fail and profit when they did.

At the hearing last month, Blankfein said he supported new derivatives rules, which for the first time would bring much of the $600 trillion private market onto regulated exchanges and clearinghouses.

"While derivatives are an important tool to help companies and financial institutions manage their risk, we need more transparency for the public and regulators as well as safeguards in the system for their use," Blankfein said.

But Senate disclosure records show that Goldman's lobbyists have paid close attention to proposed derivatives regulations during the past year. After all, the bank could lose 41 percent of its profits if the new derivatives regulations pass, according to a new report by Bernstein Research.

One controversial provision in the bill would prohibit banks from trading derivatives altogether, which could cost Goldman billions of dollars in revenue. The plan would force banks to spin off their derivatives trading into separate entities. This idea came from Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), chairwoman of the Senate Agricultural Committee, which passed a derivatives reform bill last month.

Goldman executives and lobbyists met with Lincoln last month to voice their objection to her proposal, according to news reports. Goldman also planned to host a campaign fundraiser in New York for Lincoln, who is facing a fierce primary challenge Tuesday. After the SEC filed its fraud case against Goldman, Lincoln canceled the fundraiser and said she wouldn't take any more cash from the bank. Goldman executives and the bank's political action committee have given about $2.4 million to federal candidates during the last two years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Meanwhile, Goldman's arsenal of lobbyists -- a collection of former White House staffers, SEC employees and congressional committee aides -- has provided the bank with direct access to lawmakers.

Paese answers to Faryar Shirzad, head of global government affairs for the Goldman Sachs Group. Shirzad was a top economic and national security aide to President George W. Bush. The group also employs Ken Connolly, a former staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; Joyce Brayboy, a former chief of staff for Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.); and Joe Wall, a former deputy assistant for legislative affairs under former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Goldman also hired 13 outside lobbying firms, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms. These lobbyists include former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt; Stephen Elmendorf, Gephardt's former adviser; Ken Duberstien, former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan; and Janice O'Connell, former adviser to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Goldman also has tapped Harold Ford Sr., a former Democratic congressman from Tennessee and Daniel Meyer, former chief of staff to then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

The bank, once nicknamed "Government Sachs," has a long tradition of swapping employees with the federal government, including Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin. Elena Kagan, the U.S. solicitor general and recent nominee to the Supreme Court, served on a Goldman advisory council from 2005 to 2008. 

Goldman has also gained influence by hiring a series of Washington insiders who technically aren't lobbyists. In April, Goldman hired communications specialist Mark Fabiani, known as the "Master of Disaster" for his handling of public relations crises. The bank also hired veteran New York Times reporter Stephen Labaton, who wrote about regulatory issues. Labaton, who also is a lawyer, serves as a full-time consultant and reports to Blankfein.

Although Goldman's influence troops have largely focused on banking issues, the bank has also lobbied the House and Senate over transportation infrastructure legislation and renewable energy tax incentives for wind and solar power.

Goldman's lobbyists last year also aimed to influence the Treasury Department as it decided whether to allow the bank to pay back $10 billion in bailout funds received in 2008. In April of last year, the bank paid back the money in order to shake off compensation and hiring restrictions imposed on banks that took government aid. The bank expressed its "disapproval" of these restrictions, according to last year's lobbying records.

Goldman's more immediate concern, meanwhile, is the SEC's accusations of fraud and potential criminal charges that could ensue from that case.

In response to the commission's accusations, Goldman is beefing up its legal team. The megabank is projected to hire Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a prominent corporate law firm, according to a Financial Times report. An SEC spokesman said he could not comment if Goldman, after hearing about the civil fraud investigation, dispatched lobbyists to dissuade the commission from pursuing the case.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/goldman-sachs-publicly-su_n_578434.html?view=print

Oceans’ fish could disappear in 40 years: UN

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, May 17th, 2010 -- 1:43 pm

The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday.

"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.

The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing ecological destruction around the planet.

UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on which it relies.

However, "our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest. Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are many others revising the policies on the green economy," he said.

Collapse of fish stocks is not only an environmental matter.

One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein source, according to the UN.

The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world on 20 million boats. About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of people financially linked to 520 million.

According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of commercially viable catches by 2050.

The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish -- with little attempt to allow the fish populations to recover.

Fishing fleet capacity is "50 to 60 percent" higher than it should be, Sukhdev said.

"What is scarce here is fish," he said, calling for an increase in the stock of fish, not the stock of fishing capacity."

Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says.

Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that -- once fish stocks recover -- would be able to land bigger catches.

"We believe solutions are on hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required," Sukhdev said.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0517/oceans-fish-disappear-40-years/

Class Warfare: Hundreds Protest Outside Bankers' Houses In DC

First Posted: 05-16-10 08:00 PM   |   Updated: 05-17-10 08:58 AM

Huge raucous crowds converged outside bank employees' houses on Sunday afternoon to demand banks stop lobbying against Wall Street reform.

"Bank of America: bad for America!" shouted community leaders outside the house of Bank of America general counsel Gregory Baer.

The Chicago-based grassroots organization National People's Action, in coordination with the SEIU, bused more than 700 workers from 20 states to Baer's neighborhood, one of the wealthiest corners of Washington. The action kicks off several days of protests targeting K Street for lobbyists' role in financial reform.

Baer himself apparently tried to blend in with the crowd until a neighbor outed him. The mob booed loudly as he walked into his house. "I don't have time for you," he said, according to Trenda Kennedy of Springfield, Ill. who used a bullhorn to tell the crowd about her trouble getting a mortgage modification from Baer's bank.

Kennedy told HuffPost she'd been making reduced monthly payments thanks to a trial modification via the Home Affordable Modification Program. She said that when the bank turned her down for a permanent mod, she was told she still owed all the money she'd been paying during the trial. She said she's been notified of several sheriff's sale dates but has somehow managed to keep her home.

"Every time I'm inches away from losing my house, by some miracle it's been pushed off," said Kennedy, who is a member of Illinois People's Action.

Passersby and dogwalkers smiled at the sight of people gathered all over Baer's lawn and blocking the road. Baer's neighbor from across the street won little sympathy when he angrily yelled at protesters for waking up his two-year-old daughter. Kennedy was one of several people who used a bullhorn to tell personal bank horror stories.

Baer, formerly a senior official at the Treasury department, is a lawyer for the bank's regulator and public policy legal group. Bank of America declined to comment.

"Bank of America came to the homes of everyday Americans when you spread predatory loans in neighborhoods across, the country, when you financed payday-lending storefronts, when your reckless behavior sent the economy to the brink of disaster, and when your bank-owned properties littered neighborhoods from coast to coast," said a letter the group asked Baer to deliver to CEO Brian Moynihan. "You've created a historic mess and have been unreceptive to very polite, very formal and very consistent requests to fix the problems you helped create."

The group also protested outside the house of Peter Scher, a lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase. Nobody answered the door.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/16/class-warfare-hundreds-pr_n_578015.html?view=print

Genetically Modified

By Layla Anwar

07 May, 2010

Arab Woman Blues

Some years ago, I knew a Western woman...she was was not exactly a friend, more like an acquaintance, a friend of a good friend of mine. Anyways, this woman I will call her Marion, was newly wed and she and her husband were very much looking forward to having a baby.

When Marion got pregnant, after careful planning, because Westerners love to plan everything right down to the last cent -- she had all the medical care she needed. Tests, ultrasounds and the rest....and during her 4th month of pregnancy she underwent the usual exam to determine that her baby was a healthy fetus.

Marion was devastated when her doctor informed her that her baby had some genetic deformity and she had to undergo an abortion. Marion then lapsed into a severe depression despite the fact that her doctor assured her that she can still have healthy babies in the future, she'd panic at the thought of getting pregnant again and her marital relation suffered a severe blow which ended up in a divorce...

During her grieving period, her friends and family showed her the utmost support...everyone sympathized with her losing a 4 month old fetus, empathy overflowed, so did the pampering, and the endless sessions with specialized psychiatrists who tried their best to help Marion overcome her grief...

It was a big deal...very big deal...how could nature deal such a fate to Marion - everyone wondered...and I saw heads shake in disbelief at this cruelty...and heard the exclamations of horrified indignation, for one pregnancy gone awry.

I felt - well yes it is sad, but it is not the end of the world. She's lucky she found out in mid pregnancy instead of waiting till delivery and she's still young and in good health, she has access to medical services, she lives in a healthy environment, she has a good diet, she has support, and she can get pregnant again...

The fuss was overdone in my opinion...but then Westerners care so much about life, healthy babies, healthy families, and their absolute right to have all of the above in the best conditions possible...

Years passed, I don't know what happened to spoiled Marion, maybe she conceived again, maybe she's still getting over the fact that she had to terminate a pregnancy because of some nature's mishap...but what I do know on the other hand -- is that thousands of Iraqi mothers are being asked not to get pregnant at all...

The latest I heard and it is unofficial, is that in Basra, doctors are advising women not to get pregnant for the next 25 years. Basra being an enclave of the shiite government, no one dares publicly announce that. It just circulates in secret among the newly wed...

In Falluja on the other hand, it is official --women are publicly advised not to have any babies, no number of years are indicated -- it is assumed for a long, long time...

The reason for this pregnancy dissuasion stems from the fact that the West who cares so much about its own little infants, had absolutely no qualms into pouring tons of lethal chemicals as in Weapons of Mass Destruction over the people of Basra and Falluja --to name but a few...chemical weapons like depleted uranium and phosphorus which caused cancer rates to soar among children and which produced the most ugly looking monsters -- genetically modified by "freedom and democracy"...

The mothers of Falluja and Basra don't have the luxury of some Marion...and their little Frankensteins are not a product of some odd nature's mishap.. no. Their little ones have been planned and conceived in Washington DC and 10 Downing Street. Their are the fruit of the West. The West's labor...and our pangs.

No one will fuss over the Iraqi mothers, nor will they receive the satin gloved support and empathy like Marion did...they will just lie in that delivery room, assuming there is one...and expel one monster after another...made in America and Great Britain.

But you see there is one thing that probably escapes you...these monstrous infants, these deformed babies -- not of nature but of your "civilization" -- are only a reflection of you own ugliness...in themselves these infants are beautiful...and in yourselves, you are just plain hideous.

http://www.countercurrents.org/anwar070510.htm

Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter

Alison Benjamin
The Observer,
Sunday 2 May 2010

Honey bees are vital insect pollinators, responsible for the healthy development of many of the world’s major food crops. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. "It's getting worse," he said. "The AIA survey doesn't give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be."

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater. "Continued losses of this magnitude are not economically sustainable for commercial beekeepers," he said, adding that a solution may be years away. "Look at Aids, they have billions in research dollars and a causative agent and still no cure. Research takes time and beehives are complex organisms."

In the UK it is still too early to judge how Britain's estimated 250,000 honeybee colonies have fared during the long winter. Tim Lovett, president of the British Beekeepers' Association, said: "Anecdotally, it is hugely variable. There are reports of some beekeepers losing almost a third of their hives and others losing none." Results from a survey of the association's 15,000 members are expected this month.

John Chapple, chairman of the London Beekeepers' Association, put losses among his 150 members at between a fifth and a quarter. Eight of his 36 hives across the capital did not survive. "There are still a lot of mysterious disappearances," he said. "We are no nearer to knowing what is causing them."

Bee farmers in Scotland have reported losses on the American scale for the past three years. Andrew Scarlett, a Perthshire-based bee farmer and honey packer, lost 80% of his 1,200 hives this winter. But he attributed the massive decline to a virulent bacterial infection that quickly spread because of a lack of bee inspectors, coupled with sustained poor weather that prevented honeybees from building up sufficient pollen and nectar stores.

The government's National Bee Unit has always denied the existence of CCD in Britain, despite honeybee losses of 20% during the winter of 2008-09 and close to a third the previous year. It attributes the demise to the varroa mite – which is found in almost every UK hive – and rainy summers that stop bees foraging for food.

In a hard-hitting report last year, the National Audit Office suggested that amateur beekeepers who failed to spot diseases in bees were a threat to honeybees' survival and called for the National Bee Unit to carry out more inspections and train more beekeepers. Last summer MPs on the influential cross-party public accounts committee called on the government to fund more research into what it called the "alarming" decline of honeybees.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has contributed £2.5m towards a £10m fund for research on pollinators. The public accounts committee has called for a significant proportion of this funding to be "ring-fenced" for honeybees. Decisions on which research projects to back are expected this month.

WHY BEES MATTER

Flowering plants require insects for pollination. The most effective is the honeybee, which pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide. As well as most fruits and vegetables – including apples, oranges, strawberries, onions and carrots – they pollinate nuts, sunflowers and oil-seed rape. Coffee, soya beans, clovers – like alfafa, which is used for cattle feed – and even cotton are all dependent on honeybee pollination to increase yields.

In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m. Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature's natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/02/food-fear-mystery-beehives-collapse

Saudi-Funded Fox News Rejects Ad Arguing Against Middle East Oil Dependence

Last week, progressive veterans organization VoteVets.org released an ad arguing that “a clean energy climate plan would cut our dependence on foreign oil in half and cut oil profits for hostile nations.” The ad asserts that “every day, Iran gets $100 million richer selling oil around the world and peddling hate.”

While CNN and MSNBC have aired the ad, Fox News is refusing to do so. Politico reports Fox apparently found the ad “too confusing.” Watch the “confusing” ad:

There is nothing confusing about the ad. VoteVets’ assertion that hostile nations profit off our oil dependence is based on a Wonk Room analysis that finds, under the a strong carbon cap regime which restrains U.S. appetite for oil, Iran would lose $1.8 trillion worth of oil revenues over the next forty years — or, over $100 million a day. “If the world moves away from oil dependence, Iran’s regime will no longer be able to rely on petrodollars to stay afloat,” Brad Johnson writes in pretty simple terms.

In a statement issued to ThinkProgress, Richard Smith, a senior adviser to VoteVets who served in Afghanistan, says “the only confusing thing” is why Fox is rejecting the ad:

“There’s nothing confusing about the link between oil and terrorist funding, and even the most dyed-in-the-wool neocons agree on that point. The only confusing thing here is why FOX News would reject an ad that calls on Congress to defund our enemies by finding new sources of energy.”

It’s unclear what Fox News’ motivations are. As Media Matters has documented, the network is a reliable source of misinformation on clean energy reform. Interestingly, Saudi oil tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns a 7 percent stake in Fox News’ parent company News Corp, making him the largest shareholder outside the family of CEO Rupert Murdoch. But Murdoch has said the he is for a mandatory cap on carbon emissions and believes that Fox News ought to be covering the issue differently.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/05/saudi-fox-clean-energy-ad/

Media Ignore The Fact That Man Who Alerted Police To Failed Times Square Bombing Is A Muslim Immigrant

The chief suspect in the case of the failed Times Square car bombing is Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, who has confessed to the plot. Much of the media has latched onto Shahzad’s Muslim faith and his Pakistani identity, making inflammatory remarks and suggestions about Muslims and Pakistanis:

– CNN contributor and Redstate.com blogger Erick Erickson complained that the words “muslim” and “Islam” are “not mentioned” enough in stories about Shahzad. He wrote, “It really is pathetic that you’re more likely to see the words “racist” and “Republican” together in the newspaper these days than “terrorism” and “Islam.” [5/4/2010]

– Hate radio host Neal Boortz tweeted, “OMG! The Times Square Bomber is a Muslim! Shocker! Who would have believed it?” [5/4/2010]

– The cover of today’s Washington Post-published Express features a black-and-white photo of Shahzad with the sensationalist headline “MADE IN PAKISTAN” [5/5/2010]

Yet one fact being ignored in the American media’s sensationalist narrative about the failed bombing is that the man who was responsible for police finding the bomb was Muslim. The UK’s Times Online reports that Aliou Niasse, a Senagalese Muslim immigrant who works as a photograph vendor on Times Square, was the first to bring the smoking car to the police’s attention:

Aliou Niasse, a street vendor selling framed photographs of New York, said that he was the first to spot the car containing the bomb, which pulled up right in front of his cart on the corner of 45th street and Broadway next to the Marriott hotel.

“I didn’t see the car pull up or notice the driver because I was busy with customers. But when I looked up I saw that smoke appeared to be coming from the car. This would have been around 6.30pm.”

“I thought I should call 911, but my English is not very good and I had no credit left on my phone, so I walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to mine, and told him. He said we shouldn’t call 911. Immediately he alerted a police officer near by,” said Mr Niasse, who is originally from Senegal and who has been a vendor in Times Square for about eight years.

As the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights notes, “South Asian, and Muslim communities may yield useful information to those fighting terrorism. Arabs and Arab Americans also offer the government an important source of Arabic speakers and translators. The singling out of Arabs, South Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs for investigation regardless of whether any credible evidence links them to terrorism will simply alienate these individuals and compromise the anti-terrorism effort.”

Reflecting on Niasse’s good samaritanism Muslim-American author Sumbul Ali-Karamali writes, “It’s somewhat consoling to know that the man who first noticed the smoking Nissan Pathfinder and sought help is also Muslim, a Senegalese immigrant. … I grew up Muslim in this country, with Muslim friends and non-Muslim friends, and there was very little difference between the two groups. We were all American.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/05/senagalese-muslim-vendor/

Far-left violence rising in Germany

By David Wroe in Berlin

 Last year's May Day in Berlin was the most violent in a decade [GALLO/GETTY]

Lukas sits drinking a beer in Baiz bar, a popular hangout for Berlin's leftwing scene.

He has a steady job, is well-groomed and wears a brand-name jacket. There is nothing that readily identifies him as a leftist radical.

Yet the 25-year-old is explaining what members of Germany's far-left jokingly refer to as "sports groups" - teams of young men whose "sport" consists of beating up neo-Nazis.

"A friend calls and says, 'There are neo-Nazis down in the park, playing their music'," he says, describing one incident he was involved in. "We said, 'Not anymore.' It was the first and last time they were there."

Lukas was in many such brawls in his younger days. Well-built and trained in martial arts, he survived them unscathed, though a friend once caught a broken bottle in the face and still has a thick scar to prove it.

Although he has retired from the "sport" and moved into more organised political activity - which is why he does not want his full name used - Lukas says he is still perfectly comfortable justifying violence against neo-Nazis.

"A friend once told me, 'You have to speak the language that people understand. Those guys, the neo-Nazis, they don't understand any other language'."

'Declaration of war'

Violence, it seems, is increasingly the preferred language of Germany's estimated 6,300 leftwing extremists.

The country, which is still grappling with its Nazi history 65 years after the fall of the Third Reich, has been shaken in recent months by a spate of brazen attacks targeting police, government buildings, large corporations and personal property - notably the almost nightly arson attacks on expensive cars.

In 2009, there were more leftwing than rightwing crimes in Germany [GALLO/GETTY]

Last month, Germany's interior ministry announced that there were 9,375 leftwing crimes committed in 2009 - a startling 39.4 per cent rise on the previous year.

Violent crime, including arson, rose even more sharply, jumping 53.4 per cent to a total of 1,822 offences.

For the first time since the current system of record keeping began in 2001, assaults committed by the left outnumbered those by the right - 849 against 800 - most of which were directed either at police during rallies or at neo-Nazis.

More than 400 cars - mostly expensive ones - were torched in Berlin and Hamburg last year.

In December, about 10 masked attackers set upon a manned police station in Hamburg, setting a patrol car on fire and hurling stones through the windows - an incident the head of the police union branded a "declaration of war".

With the traditional leftwing day of protest, May 1, on Saturday, authorities are bracing themselves.

Last year's May Day in Berlin was the most violent in a decade, with hundreds of arrests and dozens of police officers injured.
 
Fashionable 'cult'

Yet the causes of this surge in crime and violence remain frustratingly opaque.

Florian Herbs, 26, an unemployed graphic designer and member of the radical group Antifascist Revolutionary Action Berlin (Arab), admits that car burning has become a fashionable "cult".

But beneath that, there is genuine anger about the gentrification of previously poorer, working-class and immigrant districts of Berlin.

Arson has become a popular tool of Germany's leftwing extremists [GALLO/GETTY]

Wealthier residents are moving into leftist and anarchist heartlands such as Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, pushing up rents and fuelling the clandestine attacks on cars, offices and upmarket property developments.

The backlash, Herbs says, is working: Dozens of attacks on property developments have served as a real deterrent to gentrification, he argues.

"Now nobody wants to buy one of those apartments."

To Lukas, the former "sportsman", the question is: Why shouldn't the left use violence?

"Why should we be the only ones to refrain?" he asks.

"It's too easy to say, 'Violence is terrible'. But this society is full of violence. The difference is that we don't go around beating immigrants."

A new generation

So what do they want? Experts say leftwing German militants today are very different from their predecessors.

Issues such as nuclear weapons and even the more recent anti-globalisation movement have faded in importance.

"The leftwing extremist scene is made up of a very heterogeneous group of people with different ideological views," says Stefan Ruppert, an expert on extremism and an MP for the pro-business Free Democrats party.

"Only the vague goal of overthrowing our existing social order serves as a unifying effect. This complexity ... makes it all the more difficult to grasp the problem as a whole and work out solutions."

His assessment is borne out by Herbs, who says his Arab group, which has 30 to 40 members, is one of about 30 radical groups in the Kreuzberg district alone.

Neighbouring Friedrichshain, another leftwing stronghold, probably has another 30 groups.

Further complicating things, some neo-Nazis - so-called nationalist autonomists, who answer to no political organisation - have come to resemble the radical left "autonomists" in appearance and even share their anti-capitalist views.

"That increases the potential for violence during confrontations between left and right wing extremist groups, which in turn raises the danger for the police forces," Ruppert says.

Legitimising each other

Indeed, some analysts point out that, without each other, the two sides would not have much to do.

"They legitimise each other," said Viola Neu, an expert on political extremism at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

Leftwingers blockaded a far-right march in Dresden in February [GALLO/GETTY]

"They are there because the other exists. They are extremely interested in what the other lot is doing. They watch each other, they fight, and their arguments go back and forth."

No one is sure what to expect on Saturday.

Rightwing extremists are planning their own march through the leftist district of Prenzlauerberg - a gesture many on the left see as a provocation.

What is more, the left is full of confidence in the wake of its success in blockading a far-right march in February commemorating the 1945 allied bombing of Dresden. It will try the same on Saturday, forcing the police to intervene.

"Maybe there will be clashes," says Herbs.

"Maybe some people will start throwing things. There is a dynamic to the moment that we can't control."

"We hope it will stay peaceful, but with the capitalist crisis and gentrification, people are very angry. We'll see what happens."

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/04/201042995544279317.html

Climate Concerns Spur Changes in U.S. Military

By Matthew Berger

WASHINGTON, Apr 29, 2010 (IPS) - Though some conservative politicians and activists in Washington remain unconvinced of the need for action, the U.S. military is taking the effects of climate change increasingly seriously.

Addressing a crowd of about 400 people gathered to hear about the significance of climate change to U.S. national security Wednesday, Nathaniel Fick, CEO of the Washington-based think tank Centre for a New American Security, pointed out how the first event CNAS hosted on this topic drew only about 50 attendees in June 2008.

"Natural security issues are clearly taking hold, growing in importance, reaching new audiences, and becoming more mainstream. And rightfully so," said Christine Parthemore, who directs the think tank's Natural Security Programme, which analyses the interrelationship of natural resources and national security.

Wednesday's event launched two new reports from CNAS examining this relationship. These join a growing body of reports by civil society and government alike on the importance of climate change to military operations - and the importance of militaries in addressing and responding to aspects of climate change.

The impacts from extreme drought, heat waves, desertification, flooding, and extreme weather events like hurricanes are all expected to continue to escalate as a result of climate and are cited in CNAS's report as reasons why the military needs to be prepared for a climate change-impacted world.

The 105-page report, titled 'Broadening Horizons: Climate Change and the U.S. Armed Forces', says the effects of these environmental events will be amplified by existing socio-political factors. "Countries and regions of strategic importance - from Afghanistan to the Arctic, China to Yemen - are likely to confront major environmental pressures on both their societies and ecosystems," it says.

Counterinsurgency expert and CNAS non-resident senior fellow David Kilcullen also pointed Wednesday to such phenomena as desertification leading to humanitarian situations like mass migrations. "These changes are happening now and they're impacting national security issues now," he added.

Due to increasing humanitarian crises, including the January earthquake in Haiti, the role of the military has moved far beyond combat, said Rear Admiral Philip Cullom, who heads the U.S. Navy's task force on energy issues. The acceleration of climate change will only exacerbate those crises.

"Due to the scale of natural catastrophes, we are facing the militarisation of humanitarian relief" since militaries are the only institutions with the capacity to deal with disasters of such massive scale, Cullom said.

And even on a practical, day-to-day level, adapting to climate change will impact the armed forces. Transportation of fuel in combat zones is treacherous and requires personnel and money that could otherwise be used elsewhere.

The U.S. military has not been blind to this mountain of reasons why they should take steps to both address their preparation for the impacts of climate change and their own contributions to these impacts.

In February, the U.S. Department of Defence released its Quadrennial Defence Review and, for the first time ever, identified climate change as a having an impact on its operations around the world.

"While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world. In addition, extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defence support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States and overseas," it said.

The report also laid out how the military is addressing climate-related issues, both in its own operations - in terms of reducing the military's reliance on fossil fuels, for instance - and in helping develop energy efficient and renewable technologies.

The Pentagon sees energy security - "assured access to reliable supplies of energy and the ability to protect and deliver sufficient energy to meet operational need" - as a strategic priority, and one which greener energy can help it secure.

A report released last week by the Washington-based Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate commended the U.S. military for its clean energy programmes. It pointed to the Department of Defence's goal of getting 25 percent of its electric energy from renewable sources by 2025, the U.S. Air Force's goal of meeting 25 percent of base energy needs with renewable energy sources by 2025, and the U.S. Marine Corps' 10X10 campaign, which aims to reduce energy intensity and water consumption and increase the use of renewable electric energy.

Along the way to those goals, the U.S. Navy is developing a "green" carrier strike group that will run on alternative fuels by 2016. Last week, they successfully tested their "Green Hornet" jet, which runs on 50 percent biofuel and 50 percent fossil fuel. The "Green Hornet" more directly addresses energy independence that environmental impacts due to the energy and resources required to produce the biofuels, but it does also mean fewer emissions from military operations.

Fort Irwin, in south-eastern California's Mojave Desert, has been ground zero for many of the Department of Defence's green initiatives. Most notably, it is expected to become energy independent by 2022, when the military's largest solar installation is expected to be completed at the base.

But one key difficulty in bringing the military up to date with the realities of a changing climate remains, says another report released Wednesday by CNAS.

National security professionals "currently lack the 'actionable' data necessary to generate requirements, plans, strategies, training and material to prepare for future challenges" related to climate change, the report says. "Though the scope of and quality of available scientific information has improved in recent years, this information does not always reach - or is not presented in a form that is useful to - the decision makers who need it."

That gap in information may have been partly addressed at the event Wednesday. For about 40 minutes, Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, spoke and then answered questions on a variety of climate change-related issues before the largely national security-focused audience.

(END)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51259