Monday, April 27, 2009

On the Road Again !!!!!!!!!

If you've been wondering why I haven't been posting recently it's because I'm working out of town again.............at least I'm working after having been off for 2 months..........anyway, I thought I could rely on my laptop to keep up with this blog but it decided differently.........major malfunction and it will be a while before I can afford to get it fixed..........consequently I'm going to have to put the blog on hiatus once again............I'll pick up again when I return home.........Thanks for your support..............PEACE...........Scott

Saturday, April 18, 2009

April 15:

1947 : Jackie Robinson breaks color barrier

On this day in 1947, Jackie Robinson, age 28, becomes the first African-American player in Major League Baseball when he steps onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to compete for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson broke the color barrier in a sport that had been segregated for more than 50 years. Exactly 50 years later, on April 15, 1997, Robinson's groundbreaking career was honored and his uniform number, 42, was retired from Major League Baseball by Commissioner Bud Selig in a ceremony attended by over 50,000 fans at New York City's Shea Stadium. Robinson's was the first-ever number retired by all teams in the league.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, to a family of sharecroppers. Growing up, he excelled at sports and attended the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was the first athlete to letter in four varsity sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. After financial difficulties forced Robinson to drop out of UCLA, he joined the army in 1942 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. After protesting instances of racial discrimination during his military service, Robinson was court-martialed in 1944. Ultimately, though, he was honorably discharged.

After the army, Robinson played for a season in the Negro American League. In 1945, Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, recruited Robinson, who was known for his integrity and intelligence as well as his talent, to join one of the club's farm teams. In 1947, Robinson was called up to the Majors and soon became a star infielder and outfielder for the Dodgers, as well as the National League's Rookie of the Year. In 1949, the right-hander was named the National League's Most Valuable Player and league batting champ. Robinson played on the National League All-Star team from 1949 through 1954 and led the Dodgers to six National League pennants and one World Series, in 1955. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility.

Despite his talent and success as a player, Robinson faced tremendous racial discrimination throughout his career, from baseball fans and some fellow players. Additionally, Jim Crow laws prevented Robinson from using the same hotels and restaurants as his teammates while playing in the South.

After retiring from baseball in 1957, Robinson became a businessman and civil rights activist. He died October 24, 1972, at age 53, in Stamford, Connecticut.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

General Interest
1947 : Jackie Robinson breaks color barrier
http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihVideoCategory&id=52565
1865 : President Lincoln dies
http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=4922
1912 : Titanic sinks
http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=6868
1998 : Pol Pot dies
http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=4923

American Revolution
1783 : Congress ratifies peace with Great Britain
http://www.history.com/tdih.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=463

Scarlett Johansson: Sexist Tabloids Make Me Feel Bad About My Weight and Body

By Scarlett Johansson, Huffington Post. Posted April 15, 2009.

10 million women and 1 million men in the U.S. battle eating disorders. Our trashy media doesn't help.

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Young and Gay in the Bible Belt: 'My Mom Came at Me With a Butcher Knife!'

By Bernadette C. Barton , AlterNet. Posted April 15, 2009.

For many Bible Belt gays, "home" is not a haven from the outside world. Home may be more dangerous than the streets.

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Tax Day: You Pay Your Taxes -- Why Don't the Rich Pay Their Share?

By Chuck Collins and Sam Pizzigati, AlterNet. Posted April 15, 2009.

Few Americans realize just how incredibly little our nation's wealthy now pay in taxes. Our grandparents seriously taxed the rich. Why can't we?

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Our nation needs a plan to pay for long-overdue investments in education, health and retrofitting our energy infrastructure. Nothing could be more obvious. But, just as obviously, we need a plan to pay for those investments.

Short-term borrowing, during an economic downturn, certainly makes sense. Long term, we need to do much more than borrow. We need to totally reverse 30 years worth of federal tax and budget policy.

George W. Bush, over his eight years, took tax and budget policy to the crony-capitalist limit. His White House racked up $5 trillion in national debt by waging reckless wars, shoveling lush contracts and bailouts to corporate and Wall Street insiders, and, perhaps most arrogantly of all, slashing already-low tax rates on the incomes of the super rich.

Few Americans realize just how incredibly little, historically speaking, our nation's wealthy now pay in taxes.

In 1955, the year April 15 became the IRS tax-filing deadline, America's top 400 taxpayers paid three times more of their income in taxes than the top 400 of 2006, the most recent year with IRS data available.

According to a new Tax Day report that we co-authored, if the top 400 of 2006 had paid taxes at 1955 rates, the federal treasury would have collected -- from these 400 taxpayers alone -- an additional $35.9 billion more in revenue in 2006.

The 139,000 U.S. taxpayers who made over $2 million in 2006, our report also notes, averaged $5.9 million in income. They paid 23.2 percent of their total incomes in federal income tax. The comparable rate for equivalent high-income Americans in 1955: 49 percent.

If the over-$2 million set in 2006 had paid taxes at the same rate as their 1955 counterparts, the federal treasury would have collected $202 billion.

We've now lived through 30 years of "shrink, shift and shaft" federal budget and tax policies. Right-wing pols, aided by Democrats who should have known better, have shrunk government and the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest 1 percent. The tax burden, consequently, has shifted off wealth and onto wages, off the federal tax system and onto the regressive tax systems of states and localities.

The direct result: States and localities have gotten the budget shaft -- and that has forced years of chronic underfunding for mass transit, education and myriad public services.

So what can we do, as a nation, to start turning this situation around? Our Institute for Policy Studies report -- "Reversing the Great Tax Shift" advances a set of specific steps that would generate over $450 billion in annual revenue, dollars that would help finance our recovery fairly.

We recommend that lawmakers:

Tax income from capital gains and dividends at the same rates as wage income. Under current law, income from investments gets taxed at 15 percent. Income from work gets taxed at up to 35 percent. No coherent moral justification exists for such an enormous tax preference for income from wealth. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, taxing all forms of income the same would generate $80 billion a year.

Create a new top tax rate for incomes over $2 million. Presently, a person with an income of $300,000 faces the same tax rates as a person with an income of $3 million. Instituting a top tax rate of 50 percent on incomes over $2 million would generate more than $60 billion a year.

Levy a progressive estate tax on large fortunes. The federal estate tax, our nation's only levy on grand accumulations of private wealth, will expire in 2010 and revert to the 2000 status quo. Lawmakers aren't going to let that happen -- if, for no other reason, to take inflation into account -- and that reality creates an opportunity to make the estate tax more progressive.

One reform would be to institute graduated tax rates on large estates, while exempting estates worth less than $2 million, $4 million for a couple. Such an approach would generate over $100 billion a year a decade from now -- while taxing no more than 1 of every 200 estates.

All these steps, we believe, would enjoy widespread public support.

Our grandparents seriously taxed the rich. Why can't we?

See more stories tagged with: taxes, estate tax, rich, progressive tax, capital gains, dividends

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and chairman of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality, an emerging coalition of religious, business, labor and civic groups concerned about the wealth gap. He is co-author, with Bill Gates Sr., of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.

Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

BREVITAS

OBAMALAND

Christian Science Monitor - The Obama administration announced that it will loosen some restrictions on Americans' contact and dealings with Cuba â€“ a first step in what is seen as a gradual revision of US policy toward the communist island country. . . They include a broadened list of items that families can send to relatives in Cuba, such as humanitarian goods like clothes, fishing equipment, and personal-hygiene products. Moreover, some US telecommunications companies will now be permitted to apply for licenses to do business in Cuba. If the Cuban government allows it, they could bring improved radio, TV, mobile phone, and Internet service to the country â€“ part of the Obama administration's effort to link Cubans to the outside world. . .

JUST POLITICS

Political Wire - Gov. Rod Blagojevich's staff was told last year that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) would raise up to $5 million in campaign cash for the ex-governor if he was appointed to the U.S. Senate, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. "Besides the $5 million to be raised by Jackson, the proposal also included another $1 million for Blagojevich's campaign fund that would come from Indian donors, sources say. This is the first revelation that a proposal for the Jackson appointment involved an alleged promise that he'd raise campaign cash for the ex-governor. Also, the amount of money allegedly offered to Blagojevich is significantly higher than what's been reported so far."

POLICE BLOTTER

Boston Globe - Police in southern New Hampshire are searching for a burglar who says he's sorry. Pelham police say a resident who pulled into his driveway Friday afternoon caught a burglar coming out of the house with jewelry boxes and electronic items. The homeowner told police that when he approached the burglar, the man apologized, then put the stolen goods back. Police say the homeowner tried to detain the burglar by engaging him in conversation, but the suspect fled by the time officers arrived.

INDICATORS

Handan T. Satiroglu, The Wip - In what Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni eloquently calls "the great emotional sickness of our era," people are finding themselves increasingly detached and drifting away from intimacy. . . A 2006 study published in the American Sociological Review found that Americans had on average only two close friends, as opposed three, two decades ago. One in four Americans said they had no one to confide in, compared to one in ten in 1985, while the number of people who depend solely on their spouse went from five to nine percent.

SPYING ON BIG BROTHER

New Scientist - People watching CCTV images back in the control rooms often have too many screens to monitor at once, and so may miss the criminal or antisocial activities they are there to spot. To the rescue of Big Brother's limited attention capabilities come Ulas Vural and Yusuf Akgul of the Gebze Institute of Technology in Turkey, who have developed a gaze-tracking camera system that watches the eyeballs of CCTV operators as they work. It then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV video sequences they have missed during their shift. "This increases the reliability of the surveillance system by giving a second chance to the operator," the researchers write in the journal Pattern Recognition Letters. The system uses webcam-style cameras trained on the irises of the CCTV operators. From this, software works out where the operators are looking as they stare at each monitor - and the areas they have not been paying attention to. From this it creates a video of what they missed, for them and their bosses to watch at the end of their shift.

INDICATORS

Christian Science Monitor - For the first time in a quarter century, the number of African-Americans incarcerated for drug offenses in state prisons has declined more than 20 percent while the number of white imprisoned drug offenders has increased more than 40 percent. The decline took place over a six year period from 1999 to 2005 and reflects fundamental changes in the so-called "war on drugs" - how it's targeted and prosecuted - as well as the waning of the crack epidemic in predominantly minority urban areas and the increase in methamphetamine abuse in largely white rural neighborhoods

FREEDOM & JUSTICE

Richard Winton, LA Times - Civil rights activists called for the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and sheriff to close the Men's Central Jail, where they say nightmarish conditions and overcrowding have exacerbated the symptoms of thousands of inmates suffering serious mental illness. American Civil Liberties Union leaders made the call as they released a report by an expert on mental health in jails that paints the aging Men's Central Jail in downtown L.A. as a massively overcrowded center where the mentally ill are abused, kept in their cells for much, if not all, of the day, and instead of being treated are subject to discipline

BIG BUST LEADS TO TSA ABUSE OF WOMAN

SUSTAIN YOURSELF

Tree Hugger - With too many [Santa Monica] gardeners filling up the waiting list for community gardens, it's taking as long as 5 years to finally get a plot of dirt to grow veggies. So gardeners and city officials started a registry to connect homeowners willing to have their yards turned into gardens with the people who are willing to do the gardening.

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LESS THAN HALF OF UNEMPLOYED ARE RECEIVING BENEFITS

Barbara Hagenbaugh, USA Today - While 13.2 million people were unemployed in March, approximately 5.8 million were collecting unemployment benefits at the end of the month, double the number from a year ago, the government said. That means less than half of those who were out of work and were actively trying to find a new job were receiving unemployment benefits.

"There are so many gaps," says Monica Halas, lead attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, which provides free legal aid to low-income people. "People think (if) they are unemployed, they are going to get unemployment. Not true."

There are a number of reasons people are ineligible for unemployment benefits. Policies vary widely by state: The proportion of unemployed people who were collecting benefits in 2008 ranged from 18% in South Dakota to 61% in Idaho, according to the National Employment Law Project.

Often, those who worked part time or who were not at their job for very long before being laid off are not eligible. That tends to disproportionately include women, low-income workers and people with more seasonal jobs, such as construction, according to the NELP. A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office found low-wage workers were about one-third as likely to collect unemployment benefits as those earning more. People who are fired for performance issues, who quit or who were self-employed are immediately tossed out.

60% OF AMERICANS HAVE TAX PAID HEALTH INSURANCE

Susan L, Daily Kos - The old get Medicare, paid for by taxes. Those in the riskiest line of work, war, get the Veteran's Administration, paid for by taxes. The poor get Medicaid, paid for by taxes. Then we have those who are employed by the Federal government, the states, the county, the towns. Their health insurance too, is paid for by taxes, although the tax money mostly goes towards the profits of the private health insurance companies. So tax money directly pays for medical care of the highest risk categories. We pay high profit to the insurance companies for the prime, low health risks of public employees. Put all the people together whose health care is paid by tax dollars already and we've got about 60% of the population covered.

That means that private employers are paying for only four out of ten people who are insured in this nation. Despite this, they are paying vastly increasing premiums, increasing far beyond the rate of inflation and they are paying these large sums mostly on the lowest risk population. Insurance companies are basing their premiums on the loss of their investments in the stock market, not on the cost of providing health care. If the government collected the premiums on this population instead of the private health insurance companies, the first thing that would happen is that the costs would go down by 30% due to the excessive amount of money spent by the insurance companies on people hired to deny payments to those they insure. The second thing that would happen is we'd be adding premium money to government funds from the people most likely to pay more into the system than they take out.

As our system exists now, the private companies get to keep the profitable clients and the rest are picked up either by the government directly or indirectly, due to failure of the uninsured to be able to pay. The insurance companies, in their never ending greed, aren't willing to concede that they've had a system rigged to make them rich all these years, count their winnings and leave the table. No, they want the system to continue forever, and are unconcerned with the fact that people are dying needlessly due to their greed. They will fight tooth and nail to keep their cherry picked clients and keep the profits for themselves rather than using this extra money to pay for additional coverage, benefits, or reduced premiums.

They seem to have made progress even with Obama, who has given the great insurance company giveaway when the government decided to pay 67% of COBRA fees rather than take the unemployed and put them on Medicare. . .

Faced with increasing health care costs, some policies are becoming too expensive to use, with deductibles in the $10,000 range. This means that the business is paying more, the employee is paying more, and yet they don't actually get health care. Particularly preventative health care. Doctors and hospitals are reporting that even insured people are coming in later in an illness and sicker. Costs of treating such patients can be exponentially more than if they had sought medical care earlier.

Another thing insurance companies do, and are allowed to do, is to tier their premium price to risk factors such as age or previous illness -- so that the premium for someone who is 60 is three times higher than the twenty something who works in the same office. Guess what? This motivates companies to fire or lay off their veteran employees to save money. . .

BRITISH LABOR PARTY PLANS COMPULSORY NATIONAL SERVICE

We've noted that there is under the counter movement towards some form of mandatory national service in the U.S.. Rahm Emanuel clearly supports such service and Obama has inferred that he does too. Now the British Labor Party has joined the trend.

Guardian, UK - Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labor wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labor's manifesto. Under the scheme, the work - which could include helping charities in the UK and abroad - is likely to become part of the national curriculum. It would be integrated into moves to make everyone stay in education or training until 18 by 2011. Writing in the News of the World, the prime minister said he wanted community service to be " a normal part of growing up in Britain."

He went on: "The contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us. That would mean young people being expected to contribute at least 50 hours of community service by the time they have reached the age of 19.

"This will build on the platform provided by citizenship classes as they develop in our schools. But because the greater part of what I envisage as community service takes place outside the school day, it will require the close involvement of local community organizations and charities."

There would also be a "clear system of accreditation" to mark what youngsters have achieved through voluntary work, he added.

Mr Brown proposed the idea of a National Youth Service to channel teenagers into voluntary work last year. It is due to be formally launched in September, and would become compulsory if Labor was re-elected.

SECRET INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT TREATY DRAFT LEAKED

Inquisitr - A discussion draft of a secret ACTA International copyright treaty has been leaked to Wikileaks. The treaty, between the European Union, United States, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Japan was agreed upon in 2008, but despite requests across member nations, no Government so far has released any of the details.

The copy at Wikileaks is an early discussion draft, which parts missing and comments left by the various signatories, but what is there paints a disturbing picture of international co-operation on the issue of intellectual property.

The core of the document details how each party should deal with intellectual property matters, including costs, complaint process and legal standards. Where it goes further is with the introduction of set rate penalties based on types of infringement, and further makes no clear distinction (that I could see) between a commercial piracy outfit, and a kid at home downloading a movie on BitTorrent.

While international co-operation on issues such as these isn't out of the ordinary, it's the secrecy around the document that has caused alarm so far; and it turns out that it was justified. The net effect of this treaty is to overrule local laws and to increase the severity of intellectual property/ copyright laws in signatory nations.

WIKILEAKS

COMING SOON TO A SCHOOL NEAR YOU: A NATIONAL CURRICULUM?

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called for national educational standards. Leaving aside the fact that there is no constitutional basis for the federal government establishing national educational standards, they are also just one step removed from a national curriculum. Here's some of the reaction to such an idea in Britain.

Guardian, UK - Teachers are under pressure to follow the national curriculum so rigidly they can no longer react to what their pupils are learning, a teaching union leader warned.

Schools fear inspectors will criticize them if they do not obey the national curriculum to the letter, Julian Chapman, president of the largest teachers' union in the UK, said.. . .

His view echoes calls from MPs on the children, schools and families select committee earlier this month for the national curriculum to be drastically slimmed down.

The MPs said that all schools should only be required to follow a national curriculum in English, maths, science and information and communication technology - a freedom currently only extended to the government's flagship academies.

The committee called for the national curriculum to be capped so that it accounted for less than half of teaching time in schools.

Chapman said: "There is a danger that some teachers are being expected to stick rigidly to their lesson plans, rather than use their professional judgment and react to a child's enthusiasm.

WHAT DUNCAN REALLY DID TO CHICAGO SCHOOLS

Rethinking Schools - For the past several years, Chicago's model of school closings and education privatization has received national attention as another beacon of urban education reform. . . . As Chicago Mayor Daley said in a 2006 press conference, "Together, in 12 years we have taken the Chicago Public School system from the worst in the nation to the national model for urban school reform." . . .

The myth is that Chicago has created a new, innovative way to improve education-Renaissance 2010. The heroes in this myth are Mayor Daley, who introduced Renaissance 2010 in June 2004 at a Commercial Club event, and Arne Duncan, who oversaw its implementation and was its chief spokesperson. Renaissance 2010 was touted as the future of education in Chicago, with a plan to close 60 schools and open 100 new, state-of-the-art, 21st-century schools. These schools would be either small, charter, or contract schools. Renaissance 2010 was (and is) marketed as an opportunity to bring in new partners with creative approaches to education. That's the myth.

There is a completely different reality on the ground. For affected communities who have longed for change, Renaissance 2010 has been traumatic, largely ineffective, and . . .

Arne Duncan has overseen the beginning destruction of neighborhood schools with neighborhood students. Schools are no longer community pillars because many students no longer live in the area. When CPS closes schools and reopens them as Renaissance 2010 charter or contract schools, there is no guarantee or requirement that students who attended the old schools will go to the new ones-and many don't. For example, not all new schools are the same grade level as the old schools. There are complicated applications and deadlines, limits on enrollment, requirements of families, and informal selection processes that may disadvantage some students.

Families with multiple children who used to attend one school have had to scramble as schools close and their children are split up. Young children who walked to their neighborhood school have had to leave their community and cross heavily trafficked streets. Schools that are "turned around" terminate all adults in the building, including security, custodial, clerical, paraprofessional, and kitchen staff (as if they contributed to students' poor performance), causing severe dislocation and job loss in the community. Tenured teachers who are released are reassigned for 10 months as negotiated in the union contract. During this time, they receive their salary and benefits, sub some days of the week, and look for a position on other days. At the end of the 10 months if they have not found a position, they can be "honorably terminated." As one parent of a child in a closing school said, "when you close a school, you kill the heart of the community."

In a democratic society, instruments of engagement allow citizen voice in decision-making processes. In Chicago education, that instrument is Local School Councils. The most powerful parent, community, and teacher, local-school, decision-making structures in the country, LSCs' responsibilities include hiring principals, monitoring budgets, and developing school improvement plans. . . A 2005 Designs for Change study of 144 of the most successful neighborhood schools in Chicago serving primarily low-income students listed effective LSCs as a key reason for success. Despite this and other evidence documenting LSC effectiveness, CPS, under Duncan, has worked tirelessly to weaken LSCs by whittling away at their authority.

The LSCs came out of the grassroots movement to elect Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, in 1983. Parents and community members across the city made alliances and worked with school reformers to fight for local school councils, which the state legislature created when they passed the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Chicago's LSCs are probably the most radical school reform in the country and are the largest body of elected, low-income people of color (especially women) in the United States. . .

Why is CPS working to eliminate LSCs? Consider this: Chicago has almost 7,000 LSC members. If they were organized, they would be a major force in the struggle for equity in education. In fact, CPS has worked extremely hard to underserve LSCs. . .

Duncan publicly stated in April 2007 that he wanted to break the "monopoly" of the LSCs, and in October 2007, Board of Education president Rufus Williams, in a speech to the City Club of Chicago-a major grouping of business people-likened LSCs running schools to having a chain of hotels being run by "those who sleep in the hotels." . . .

To justify Renaissance 2010, Duncan has been a strong proponent of school choice-including military schools. He was quoted in the Nov. 2, 2007, issue of USA Today saying: "These are positive learning environments. I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline."

According to the CPS website, Chicago has "the largest JROTC program in the country in number of cadets and total programs." CPS has five military high schools, more than any city in the nation, and 21 "middle school cadet corps" programs. The military high schools teach military history and have military-style discipline. Students wear military uniforms, do military drills, and participate in summer boot camps. The hierarchical authority structure mirrors the Army, Navy, and Marines, with new students ("cadets") under the command of senior students who work their way up and require obedience from those in "lower ranks.". . . All but one of the military high schools are in African American communities. . .

Before Duncan, schools could be put on probation and have external partners forced upon them, but now schools are phased out, closed, or "turned around" by private contractors (some funded by the Gates Foundation). In the turn-around model, everyone is removed from their position, from principal to custodial workers. Accountability measures drastically increase pressure to do well on standardized tests. "Extracurriculars" rapidly disappear, like art, physical education, and recess, as reported in an Aug. 25, 2008, Chicago Sun Times article.

Two thirds of the 76 Renaissance 2010 schools are charter or contract schools. Not only do charter schools need only 50 percent certified teachers, but their teachers cannot be part of the Chicago Teachers Union bargaining unit of 32,000 members. As one might expect, the union opposes Renaissance 2010. Contract school teachers can join the CTU-but only if their administration permits it. Chicago is losing its certified, union teachers as schools are closed or "turned around," and displaced teachers with long-time seniority are becoming common. . .

TRIKING FREIGHT AROUND TOWN

Oregon Public Broadcasting - A husband and wife team are biking freight around downtown Portland, in an effort to replace trucks. Kristian Foden-Vencil caught up with the couple at a neighborhood grocery store. . .

Franklin and Kathryn Racine-Jones unload organic vegetables out of big insulated boxes on the backs of their tricycles. It sounds pretty unremarkable really -- until you see the size of those trike boxes. They're big enough to fit say . . . two-thirds of an upright piano. And each bike costs about $10,000.

Franklin Racine-Jones: "It has both front and rear brakes. The rear brakes are two disc brakes and the front is an hydraulic brake. We have a great bell here that not only let's people know we're coming, but it's fun and produces big smiles."

Kristian: "And you have a big battery here to help you up the hills."

Franklin Racine-Jones: "Right. It's a deep cycle marine battery. It weighs about 80 lbs, but it also has a tremendous amount of torque power."

Kathryn Racine-Jones: "This morning a huge semi came to our warehouse and dropped off say 1000 pounds of produce and then we ferry that out using our electric assist trikes so they don't have to go down there and people walking around downtown don't have to deal with big trucks in the urban core.". . .

The trikes make about 11 miles per hour, which is competitive with a truck -- especially if you include the time it takes to park one of those suckers downtown.

CRASH REPORT

Fortune - Goldman Sachs reported a much stronger-than-expected first-quarter profit, bouncing back from its worst quarter as a public company.
Goldman also set plans to raise $5 billion through a sale of stock, saying it wants to become the first big bank to repay the federal loans extended during last fall's financial sector meltdown.

In reporting its results a day earlier than expected, New York-based Goldman said it earned $1.81 billion, or $3.39 a share, for the quarter ended March 31. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were looking for a profit of $1.64 a share.

Goldman shares have surged more than 70% during the past month. . . The firm said the latest quarter's gains were driven by big profits in its fixed income business, where revenue surged to $6.56 billion - 34% above the previous record. . .

Goldman received $10 billion in funding from the Treasury Department last year as part of the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Karl Denninger, Market Ticker - You don't think being paid by the taxpayer through AIG's "conduit" for losses that didn't (yet) happen at 100 cents on the dollar might have anything to do with that, do you?

And further (and potentially much worse) there is the repeated statement by Goldman executives that they were "fully hedged" against a potential counterparty default by AIG.

One wonders - was that "hedge" to be short the equity on AIG itself, perhaps?

Why is this important?

Because if that's how Goldman hedged they got paid twice and the taxpayer literally got robbed.

Someone in Congress needs to look into this now; there are already rumblings of investigation. Those rumblings need to get a lot louder and turn into subpoenas, not "polite inquiries."

Forbes - The superstars at Harvard defied markets for years-- until now. . . Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school year began, but at Harvard University it was as if the boom had never ended. . . Budgets were plump, and students from middle-class families were getting big tuition breaks under an ambitious new financial aid program. The lavish spending was made possible by the earnings from Harvard's $36.9 billion endowment, the world's largest. That pot was supposed to be good for $1.4 billion in annual earnings.

Behind the scenes, though, a different story was unfolding. In a glassed-walled conference room overlooking downtown Boston, traders at Harvard Management Co., the subsidiary that invests the school's money, were fielding questions from their new boss, Jane Mendillo, about exotic financial instruments that were suddenly backfiring. Harvard had derivatives that gave it exposure to $7.2 billion in commodities and foreign stocks. With prices of both crashing, the university was getting margin calls--demands from counterparties for more collateral. Another bunch of derivatives burdened Harvard with a multibillion-dollar bet on interest rates that went against it. . .

It would have been nice to have cash on hand to meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none. That was because these supremely self-confident money managers were more than fully invested. As of June 30 they had, thanks to the fancy derivatives, a 105% long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy more stocks.

Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep parked away for a long time. . . And now, in the last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money, much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off credit card bills. . .

Harvard has oversize positions in emerging market stocks and private equity partnerships, both disaster areas in the past eight months. . .

CARGO SHIP POLLUTION CAUSES 60,000 U.S. DEATHS A YEAR

Guardian, UK - Britain and other European governments have been accused of underestimating the health risks from shipping pollution following research which shows that one giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50 million cars.

Confidential data from maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760 million cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles.

Pressure is mounting on the UN's International Maritime Organization and the EU to tighten laws governing ship emissions following the decision by the US government last week to impose a strict 230-mile buffer zone along the entire US coast, a move that is expected to be followed by Canada.

The setting up of a low emission shipping zone follows US academic research which showed that pollution from the world's 90,000 cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year in the US alone and costs up to $330 billion per year in health costs from lung and heart diseases. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates the buffer zone, which could be in place by next year, will save more than 8,000 lives a year with new air quality standards cutting sulphur in fuel by 98%, particulate matter by 85% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%.

BOHEMIAN GROVE MOGULS MOVE FROM RUINING THE COUNTRY TO RUINING THEIR OWN FOREST

Alex Shoumatoff, Vanity Fair - Is this really what I want to be doing? Sneaking into the exclusive Bohemian Grove, on the Saturday night when roughly 2,500 of America's richest, mostly right-wing Republicans are kicking off their annual July "encampment"? The members of the San Francisco-based Bohemian Club are mostly all here, partying boisterously in this primeval stand of gargantuan redwoods 75 miles north of the city, or will be during the next 16 days. Over the years all the usual suspects have made appearances: Rumsfeld, Kissinger, two former C.I.A. directors (including Papa Bush), the masters of war and the oilgarchs, the Bechtels and the Basses, the board members of top military contractors - such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Carlyle Group - Rockefellers, Morgans, captains of industry and C.E.O.'s across the spectrum of American capitalism. The interlocking corporate web - cemented by prep-school, college, and golf-club affiliations, blood, marriage, and mutual self-interest that makes up the American ruling class. Many of the guys, in other words, who have been running the country into the ground and ripping us off for decades.

The summer high jinks begin, as they have for more than 100 years, with a macabre, hokey ceremony - with Druidic, Masonic, Ku Klux Klan, and Aryan forest-worship overtones - called the Cremation of Care, which is starting in 40 minutes down by the lake. I squeeze through a hole in a chain-link fence onto the 2,700-acre property and follow an old overgrown railroad bed. To my left, below a dense tangle of California bay laurel, big-leaf maple, and understory shrubs, the muddy-green Russian River is sliding by. I didn't see any posting on that side of the property, but I know I am trespassing.

While many in the world see this gathering of the military-industrial high command as the bad guys - a sort of rogue state operating outside the constraints of democratic institutions, a favorite watering hole for what Peter Phillips, a Sonoma State University sociologist who has published extensively on the Bohemian Club, calls "the global dominance group" - this is not how the members imagine themselves. They see themselves as the moral underpinnings of America's greatness, whose central tenets are the Protestant work ethic: work hard and prosper and you'll get into that great club in the sky. The Bohemian Club is like the Opus Dei of the Protestant American establishment. Very few Jews have made it in, and even fewer blacks.

The encampment is more of a drunken blowout and an opportunity for bonding than a serious roundtable like Davos, although there is a series of lakeside talks that are enlightening about what the government has up its sleeve for the upcoming year. Kissinger is a perennial favorite. His speech nine years ago, "Do We Need a Foreign Policy?" was music to the ears of the Bush administration. In 1942, Edward Teller is said to have planned the Manhattan Project here. There's a lot of dark history in this forest retreat. It's rumored that during the presidency of Gerald Ford one Grove employee was a charming, impeccably mannered ex-Nazi, who used to drive around in a jeep that had the decal - a palm tree with a swastika on it - of Rommel's Africa campaign, which he had served in. Ford made him take it off. . .

I am here to investigate reports that the Bohemians have been desecrating their own bower. That nothing is sacred with these guys anymore. Everything is fair game. But how could the Bohemian Club, where California's forest-preservation movement began, be logging its own land, which includes the largest stand of old-growth redwoods in Sonoma County? That's what it did quietly from 1984 to 2005-11 million board feet, roughly 11,000 prime redwoods and Douglas firs. I imagine they don't need the money. It costs $25,000 to join the club and $5,000 a year after that. A 150-foot redwood with a 27-inch D.B.H. (diameter at breast height) fetches only $850 these days, and a similar-size Douglas fir $450. Critics say to sacrifice these jewels for such small change is unconscionable. And for the last three years they have been trying to double the harvest.

AND NOW THE REST OF THE SOMALIA STORY. . .

Independent, UK - In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site Wardheer News found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

THE FLIP SIDE OF ZERO TOLERANCE

Marc Fisher, Washington Post - We don't really know what we want. That's the conclusion of a social psychologist who decided to test just how committed parents and others are to single-sanction, zero-tolerance, tough-love punishment regimens of the kind that many schools have adopted to fight drug use by teenagers.

Colgate University psychologist Kevin Carlsmith concluded that people fail to recognize that a zero-tolerance policy that seems simple and effective in theory will violate their sense of justice when they see it in practice. And that's exactly the response I've been getting to my column last week about Josh Anderson, the Fairfax high school junior who killed himself on the eve of a disciplinary hearing that was likely to have ended with his expulsion for being caught on campus with a small amount of marijuana.

I've heard from hundreds of parents whose kids -- like Josh -- have gotten caught up in a punishment system that fails to distinguish between drug users and dealers. . .

Confronted with people going to jail for decades for stealing a kiddie video for a Christmas present or for lifting a Snickers bar, Californians turned against the "three strikes, you're out" legislation they had enthusiastically supported in theory. Likewise, parents who support zero-tolerance policies tend to reject them when they see some dumb teen getting expelled for acting like the dodo-head many 17-year-olds become.

In a fascinating postscript, Carlsmith asked whether a school with a zero-tolerance policy had a worse or less severe problem with drug use than a school with a more flexible approach. Those surveyed thought the zero-tolerance school had the more severe problem . . .

JUSTICE THOMAS THINKS AMERICANS HAVE TOO MANY RIGHTS

Adam Liptak, NY Times - Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question from the Supreme Court bench since Feb. 22, 2006. He speaks only to announce his majority opinions, reading summaries in a gruff monotone. Glimpses of Justice Thomas in less formal settings are rare.

But he turned up in a Washington ballroom the other night to respond to questions from the winners of a high school essay contest. . .

Justice Thomas talked about his own school days, reminiscing fondly about seeing "a flag and a crucifix in each classroom." He talked about his burdens and his dark moods and about seeking inspiration in speeches and movies. And though the dinner was sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute, he admitted to an uneasy relationship with the whole idea of rights. . .

The event, on March 31, was devoted to the Bill of Rights, but Justice Thomas did not embrace the document, and he proposed a couple of alternatives.

"Today there is much focus on our rights," Justice Thomas said. "Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights."

"I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances," he said. "Shouldn't there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?"

He gave examples: "It seems that many have come to think that each of us is owed prosperity and a certain standard of living. They're owed air-conditioning, cars, telephones, televisions."

Those are luxuries, Justice Thomas said.

"I have to admit," he said, "that I'm one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how the dishes were magically cleaned."

HOMELAND POLICE SAY SUPPORT OF SECOND OR TENTH AMENDMENT COULD BE SIGN OF POLITICAL EXTREMISM

Washington Times - The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in "rightwing extremist activity," saying the economic recession, the election of America's first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.

A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority. . .

The White House has distanced itself from the analysis. When asked for comment on its contents, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said, "The President is focused not on politics but rather taking the steps necessary to protect all Americans from the threat of violence and terrorism regardless of its origins. He also believes those who serve represent the best of this country, and he will continue to ensure that our veterans receive the respect and benefits they have earned." . . .

World Net Daily - The report from DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines right-wing extremism in the U.S. as "divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.". . .

Last month, the chief of the Missouri highway patrol blasted a report issued by the Missouri Information Analysis Center that linked conservative groups to domestic terrorism, assuring that such reports no longer will be issued. The report had been compiled with the assistance of DHS.

The report warned law enforcement agencies to watch for suspicious individuals who may have bumper stickers for third-party political candidates such as Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin. . .

Chief James Keathley of the Missouri State Patrol issued a statement that the release of the report, which outraged conservatives nationwide, prompted him to "take a hard look" at the procedures through which the report was released by the MIAC.

"My review of the procedures used by the MIAC in the three years since its inception indicates that the mechanism in place for oversight of reports needs improvement," he wrote. . . . "For that reason, I have ordered the MIAC to permanently cease distribution of the militia report," he said.

From the report - Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AND ASSOCIATED PROBLEMS

Sam Smith

Watching Tom Curley on the Charlie Rose Show, I began to feel really sorry for him. The horrible things that were happening to his company, the threat to his business model, the vicious dogs yapping at his legs. He was a sad, dreary and bitter man, the sort of guy who might have a hard time knowing it was a new morning if his alarm didn't tell him.

Tom Curley is CEO of the Associated Press and the terrible things he was confronting included Google, news aggregators, blogs, and online journals like, well, like mine.

I kept trying to connect his misery to reality but I couldn't get out of my mind how many people come to our site each week because they've asked some question and Google has given them one of our links as a possible answer. Or how many times reporters and bloggers have sent us stories with the request or hint that we give them a virtual boost.

I got into this internet business 14 years ago when there were only 20,000 websites worldwide. Now there are more than 150 million. No one used the term aggregator back then. That was a couple of years before the Drudge Report went on the web and it was before the Washington Post had recovered from its first Internet failure.

One of the things I liked about the web was how it encouraged both competition and cooperation, not unlike the way those who do business on the water or in small communities work. They understand that part of progress involves helping others, which Americans generally accepted until the corporate greedsters took things over in the 1980s.

When Matt Drudge went online in 1997, I became fascinated by his use of links to other stories. I had initially seen the web just as a place to put all the stuff we didn't have room for in our print version, but Drudge encouraged another approach. After we started running news clips and links, our readership doubled in each of the next four years.

Part of Drudge's cleverness was that he had created a place where others wanted to be featured. What drives his audience is not his personal conservative views, but an understanding that his site is one of the best places to go for breaking news. Journalists understood this, hence the number of stories based on advance notice of a hot piece to which the reporters wanted to drive readers and impress their bosses. In at least one case, it seems one or more reporters had another objective: to get their publication to stop suppressing a story. Which is how the Monica Lewinsky story, which Newsweek was withholding, finally broke. The AP's Curley may not understand this, but plenty of good journalists have.

Yet I also realized that some publications would not understand the Internet and would not want to be linked. Our rule was simple: we would never link to or mention them again. In 14 years and more than 30 million article views, we have had exactly five such complaints. And when the AP began making threatening noises some months ago, although not specifically against us, we sent them into oblivion as well, despite the fact that their legal position thumbs its nose at the laws of fair use.

The fact is we don't need them all that much. As the song goes, "Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now." Here are a few good reasons:

- The AP isn't all that good a news source for a journal with a section called Undernews. It doesn't break many interesting stories or shed new light on them. It is more like a daily Wikipedia of what's happening. Quite useful but far from indispensable.

- Many AP stories are based on press releases or testimony or public speeches that are easily found elsewhere. One of our new hobbies has become to find alternative sources for AP stories. It's not that hard at all.

- You can not copyright facts or history. If Karl Rove tells the AP that Joe Biden is "a liar," the only way it can claim copyright over those words are if Rove sold the rights to his comments to AP, which would be a big story in itself. If 35 people die when a bridge collapses, that fact does not belong to AP even if it reports it first.

- It is therefore relatively easy to simply present facts and quotes in new language without the slightest copyright infringement. All you have to do is to be able to type fast.

- The Review started as an alternative journal in 1964 with no conventional material, and certainly none from AP. A few years later we are joined by over 400 underground papers in the U.S. We still didn't need the AP; we just shared with each other. And in the process we changed America, including helping foster the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, women's and gay movements. Not even the Internet can make such a claim, and certainly not AP.

The fact is that the archaic media is just not as important as it thinks it is. And where it should be important, such as covering our imperial wars objectively, it has allowed itself to become an embedded mouthpiece of the government.

While it is true that we are small enough that the AP doesn't need us either, the same can't be said of Google as Jeff Jarvis, writing of the recent Newspaper Association of America meeting, put it:

"Yesterday, you delivered a foot-stomping little hissy fit over Google and aggregators. How dare they link to you and not pay you? . . . Beware what you wish for. You'd lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators and bloggers and Facebook all decided to follow suit, you'd lose half your traffic. On most of your sites, only 20 percent of the audience in a day ever sees your homepage and its careful packaging; 4 of 5 readers instead come in through search and links. In the link economy - instead of the outmoded content economy in which you operate - Google and aggregators and bloggers are bringing value to you; they should be charging you for the value they bring. "

Shane Richmond in London's Telegraph phrased it well: "Should plumbers complain if they can't make enough money from the business they get from the Yellow Pages?"

This from Sarah Lacey of Business Week: "Old Media's indignation is akin to a parent who tries to punish a kid by taking away the Glenn Miller records. Let's be honest: The traditional media is threatening to cut off access to an asset that's declining in value, and in many cases, no longer brings in profits. Think about that. What exactly is the "or else" here? Or else, we won't take your free traffic, and we'll just watch our subscriber rolls dwindle and ad revenue shrink all alone? . . .

"It's not just that Old Media is wrong, it's that they've played this sad hand so badly. They spent years nakedly trying to get more and more traffic from search, portals, and aggregators, and now they suddenly strike a victim pose once they realized their business models are broken beyond repair. . .

"There's always been a lot of pride associated with the Old Media world. There had to be -- we didn't make much money, we worked long hours, we had to ask uncomfortable questions and report things people didn't want reported. And then there's that endless stream of deadlines. But this week is the first time I can think of that I'm embarrassed for my profession. Once you're reduced to legal threats and whining, you're one step away from admitting total defeat. Just ask the music industry. What's next, suing our own readers for clicking on Google links?"

Danny Sullivan wrote of a complaint by the Guardian which is also on the warpath against Google:

"Gosh, it was about a year ago I sat at a panel at the Guardian, designed for its reporters, and talked about ways they could (and they wanted) to generate traffic from search engines. Doing keyword research, looking for trends, all that. And Google was by far -- by far -- the biggest referral of traffic the Guardian got. If I recall, it sent something like 3 million visitors to the Guardian per day.

"Seriously, the Tribune and the New York Times saddled themselves with debt, and that problem is somehow Google's fault? The Guardian's had a decade to figure out how to earn off the internet, and it complains to the UK government that it can't succeed?"

That AP and the Guardian don't understand this is just sign of the degree to which business is run these days by those who don't play well with others.

They don't understand that how much of success - business, political or social - is based on symbiosis and viral activity. Consider the Internet, the Obama campaign, or a thriving downtown district with a mix of business, entertainment and service all dependent on others in the same 'hood.

Instead these media run to their lawyers as an alternative to creativity and new ideas.

This seldom works because lawyers are not natural lodes of creativity and new ideas. They can put you behind a wall but that's seldom a good way to find new customers.

Arianna Huffiington summed up the situation well:

"Take online video. Not that long ago, content providers were committed to the idea of requiring viewers to come to their site to view their content -- and railed against anyone who dared show even a short clip.

"But content hoarding -- the walled garden -- didn't work. And instead of sticking their finger in the dike, trying to hold back the flow of innovation, smart companies began providing embeddable players that allowed their best stuff to be posted all over the web, accompanied by links and ads that helped generate additional traffic and revenue.

"Or go to any college, as I often do, and ask a group of students how many of them, during the campaign, saw Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin. It's usually 100 percent. Then ask how many saw it on Saturday Night Live. It's usually no more than one or two. Yes, SNL could have said tune in to NBC Saturday Night at 11:30 or don't see it at all. But Lorne Michaels and Jeff Zucker obviously don't want to go the way of Rick Wagoner and his Detroit buddies."

Or consider the fact that I didn't see the aforementioned Tom Curley video clip thanks to AP or because I watch Charlie Rose, but thanks to Huffington Post, whose boss was the other guest on the show. Huffington Post ran the clip even though it clearly disagreed with it. On the Internet even your foes can help you.

Speaking of Huffington Post and the AP, it is perhaps instructive to see what's been happening to their page views according to Alexa, with HP first and AP below it:

There is another problem with the blame-it-on-the web approach, which is that the stats don't back it up. For example , Forbes reported last year that "in 2007, Internet advertising accounted for 7% of the industry's total revenue, up from 5.4% in 2006, according to the Newspaper Association of America." And writing in the Neiman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld finds that, contrary to the popular impression, "whether you look at page views or time spent reading, only around 3 percent of newspaper reading happens online."

Further, the problem blamed on the Internet actually started well before the internet began to flower. The NY Times' circulation, for example, peaked in 1993 and has been falling ever since. Google didn't even start until 1996.

In 1989, the same year that the World Wide Web began, I was invited to a community meeting to discuss the Washington Post, called by its publisher Don Graham. I couldn't make it, so instead wrote up a few comments in the Review such including:

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What are we doing as we sit glazing our fingers with your ink? At one level we believe we are educating ourselves. But at another, and very important level, we are developing an impression of the day and of our city that will affect our mood, our conversation and our actions for the hours to come.

And how does the Post serve us at this critical juncture? What sort of day and city does it prepare us for? Basically it says to the reader: you are about to go out in a city which has a wealth of problems that you can't solve, pleasures which you're not important enough to enjoy, and people who, when they are not just being dull, are deceitful, avaricious or mean. . .

The Post seems at times almost maniacally determined to drain the life out of the city. What remains is a bureaucratic memo on the last 24 hours from the perspective of that small minority of people who wield power in this town.

So if I had been able to come to your meeting I would have accused you of being a wet blanket on my mornings and, by consequence, on the rest of the day. To my mind, this is as serious a charge as one can make against a daily newspaper.

I think this is so not because Post writers and editors are inherently dull, indifferent, or lack humor or emotion. Many, I have found, consider themselves more prisoners than collaborators. I think the problem stems from the fashion in which the Post attempts to rule, benignly and with noblesse oblige, from its monopoly position. Its methods, as I understand them, are not strikingly different from those of McDonald's, that is to say they depend in no small part on quality control. This control, aimed at preventing bad things from happening, has the inevitable result of preventing a lot of good things from happening as well. You end up with a product not unlike Muzak, in which both the low and high pitches are removed leaving the listener with the bland middle range.

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As it turns out, not only is the Post in financial trouble but Muzak has filed for bankruptcy.

Seventeen years later I tried again to help out the Post:

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- Newspapers early surrendered the image battle to TV when, in fact, TV only shows images for a few seconds at which point they are gone forever. Newspapers should go back to the approach to photos that made Life Magazine so appealing: images that made you stop and look either because of the quality of the photo or because of the story that a series of photos told. When, for example, was the last time you let a photographer edit your page design?

- Dump the Pulitzer porn such as your recent series on black men. That dreary combination of abstractions, stats and not all that interesting stories makes for poor journalism, especially over breakfast. Besides, you can't make up for years of ignoring the problems of black men with an occasional series even if it does win a prize.

- Put news on your front page. I define news as something that has happened, something that is happening or something that is going to happen. News is not what someone said about what is happening nor what someone perceived was going to happen nor what the editors thought the impact of something happening would be on its readership.

- The one exception to filling the front page with news would be a story or two that are just interesting, which is to say ones about which readers will ask their friends, "Did you see that story about. . ?"

- Use the "holy shit" principle of news editing. If your reaction to a story is "holy shit" and the story is true, many of your readers are going to feel the same way.

- Run more and shorter stories. You can get the edge over both the Internet and TV through quantity rather than just style of news. And the more names the better.

- Run more local stories, more stories affecting different ethnic groups, and more stories about sports people play rather than just watch.

- Go back to pyramid style reporting or at least get to the point within the first paragraph or two.
- Stop burying stories that affect ordinary readers in the business and real estate sections and put them in the front of the paper where they belong.

- Run more stories that affect ordinary readers. Handle your news from the viewpoint of your readers rather than from that of your advertisers, sources, or journalistic staff - few of whom live in some the toughest yet newsworthy parts of town.

- Have a labor section as well as a business section. After all, you have more employees than employers in your circulation area.

- Slash the number of stupid, spinning, or sophistic quotations from official sources used in your paper.

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In the end, I suspect, it was the pretensions of what was once a trade but turned into a power-partying profession that has done a lot of the damage to the conventional media.

Richard Harwood once remarked of the journalism in which he began his career: "We were perceived as a lower form of life, amoral, half-literate hacks in cheap suits. Thus I was assigned to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Nashville in the late 1940s and, with other reporters, was given lunch at a card table set up in a hallway to protect the dining room from contamination."

Moving from this dubious trade, a majority of whose practitioners hadn't gone to college, to a profession graced by graduate schools and thence to a status that was part actor and part apparatchik of a rising corporate uber-culture, journalists became ever more prominent and self-referential even as they were losing touch with both their purported constituency and their purported purpose. They became the first group in human history to dramatically improve their socio-economic status simply by writing about themselves, self-casting themselves among the very elite from whom they had once been expected to protect their audience.

So it was not surprising that this crowd met the Internet with contempt. In my 2001 book, Why Bother?, I gave a few early examples:

- Cokie and Steve Roberts wrote a column, headed 'Internet Could Become A Threat To Representative Government,' warning against the direct democracy of the Internet and saying it could threaten the "very existence" of Congress.

- A commentator on Court TV argued that acceptance of government regulation of the Net was the equivalent of growing up.

- Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes called for the removal of undesirable information from the Net. Asked on what grounds, Stahl replied, "That it's wrong, that it's inaccurate, it's irresponsible, that it is spreading fear and suspicion of the government; 10,000 reasons."

- A writer in the Washington Post warned that without gatekeepers of information -- e.g. the Washington Post -- "our media could become even more infested with half-truths and falsehoods."

- On Crossfire, Geraldine Ferraro breathlessly warned that "we've got to get this Internet under control."

And it hasn't changed all that much. The Atlantic reported recently:

"In a poll of prominent members of the national news media, nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping. The poll, conducted by The Atlantic and National Journal, asked 43 media insiders whether, on balance, journalism has been helped more or hurt more by the rise of news consumption online. Sixty-five percent said journalism has been hurt more, while 34 percent said it has been helped more."

In short, the archaic media has never liked the Internet, never learned what it was about or how to use it, and now wants to blame it for all their troubles. That's probably not a great business model.

What Should Be the Goal of Health Care Reform?

Thursday 09 April 2009

by: Monica Sanchez | Visit article original @ The Campaign For America's Future

Due to widespread underinsurance, even people who have health care coverage may not be able to afford a doctor visit when they need one. (Photo: Daily Press)

In his New York Times op-ed [1], "The Misguided Quest for Universal Coverage," Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the goal of health care reform should not be universal coverage. On that point, we agree. The goal of health care reform should be to guarantee everyone in the United States has access to quality, affordable health care.

But that is where our agreement stops because what Ponnuru proposes would not achieve that goal.

People need health care insurance for the same reason they need fire and auto insurance. To protect them from bankruptcy should they be faced with a disaster, be it a fire, an accident or an illness. If they or someone in their family is among the 5 percent of the population that uses up 50 percent of all health care dollars [2], they need insurance to cover those high costs.

And everyone needs to be covered for the same reason. Those of us who are lucky enough to not have fires, accidents or serious illnesses help cover the costs of those who do in exchange for the security of knowing that we will be covered if the need ever arises. That is the very basis of insurance and it is why universal coverage is a vital first step towards guaranteeing everyone has access to quality, affordable health care when they need it.

Or as Winston Churchill put it [3] we have "a real opportunity for bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions."

Having health insurance is important to our health as well as our bank accounts. The Urban Institute estimates [4] that 137,000 people died from 2000 through 2006 because they lacked health insurance.

But it is only the first step. Simply giving people health insurance coverage does not guarantee them access to quality, affordable health care. That is clear from the millions of people who are already insured and still cannot afford the health care they need.

A report [5] by the Commonwealth Fund found there are 25 million underinsured adults in the U.S. Underinsured: that means those of us who have insurance but can't count on it for financial protection. It's a frightening number--but still a huge underestimate.

Who did the study count? People who said they spent 10 percent or more of their income (or 5 percent if they had very low incomes) on health care--even with their insurance--or who had deductibles at 5 percent of their income. Not counted? Lots of people who haven't been hit with hefty health care bills yet. That's why you may be underinsured and not even know it.

Even by the Commonwealth Fund's undercount, the number of underinsured adults is up by 60 percent from 2003. That's because health insurance is covering less and less. A Harvard study [6] found that 75 percent of people who had filed for bankruptcy because of medical debt had health insurance at the time they got sick or injured.

To guarantee everyone has access to quality, affordable health care when they need requires system-wide reform that will lower the cost of health care and slow its ridiculously high inflation rate [7]. That cannot be accomplished through Ponnuru's suggestions.

Simply aiming to "make health insurance more affordable and portable" does nothing to keep health care costs from continuing to skyrocket, thus continuing to make insurance more and more expensive over time. Massachusetts reform [8] has proven that.

In today's world, affordable insurance too often equals Swiss-cheese coverage [9]. We don't need that kind of 'affordable' insurance [10]--we need to be able to afford the health care we need when we need it.

The way to lower overall health care costs, stem their inflation rate and guarantee everyone access to quality, affordable health care is to give everyone the choice of a public health insurance option. Making people with good employer-sponsored insurance pay taxes on that benefit does nothing to further that goal.

As Jacob Hacker, Professor of Political Science, U.C. Berkeley and Co-Director, Center for Health, Economic & Family Security put it in his report "The Case for Public Plan Choice in National Health Reform: Key To Cost Control and Quality Coverage [11]," (PDF):

"Without public plan choice, on the other hand, we will continue to lack strong institutional mechanisms to rein in costs and drive value down the road, putting the broader goals of reform and our nation's public and private budgets at risk. Although expanding insurance and upgrading inadequate coverage will require substantial up-front investments, any viable proposal for affordable quality health care for all must be able to contain long-run health costs. Ensuring that mechanisms for effective cost restraint are embodied in national health reform is essential--and a key argument for public-private competition." [Emphasis added]

Visit this page to learn more about a public health insurance option. And then stand with President Obama and Dr. Howard Dean to demand the choice of public health insurance. Sign the petition today [13]!

Links:
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09ponnuru.html
[2] http://www.ahrq.gov/research/ria19/expendria.htm
[3] http://books.google.com/books?id=qcgCafO1iAUC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=bring the magic of averages to the rescue of millions churchill&source=bl&ots=27r8KnzmJD&sig=JGu1XexZVFT7RfprOHQLiwOronU&hl=en&ei=pRbeSc7jMIPflQezyoFK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1
[4] http://www.urban.org/publications/411588.html
[5] http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=688615
[6] http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.63/DC1
[7] http://www.przoom.com/news/19249/
[8] http://www.ourfuture.org/files/MA_Health_Reform_Final.pdf
[9] http://www.coloradostatesman.com/content/99889-hb-1243-would-ok-limited-hmo-coverage
[10] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/12/AR2007061201817_pf.html
[11] http://institute.ourfuture.org/files/Jacob_Hacker_Public_Plan_Choice.pdf
[12] http://www.ourfuture.org/healthcare/public-health-insurance
[13] http://StandWithDrDean.com/

Guerrilla Girl Power: Have America's Feminist Artists Sold Out?

Thursday 09 April 2009

by: Guy Adams | Visit article original @ The Independent UK

Answering their own poster, the Guerrilla Girls have entered the museum world. A large collection of artwork produced by the radical feminist group has been acquired by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. (Artwork: Guerrilla Girls)

After a quarter of a century railing against the dusty establishment, the art world's most prominent group of radical feminists has decided to join it. The Guerrilla Girls, a collection of radical, left-leaning pop artists famed for wearing gorilla masks and fishnets to highlight sexism, racism, and other pillars of injustice, announced this week that its historic archive will be kept, for posterity, by the bluest of America's blue-chip cultural institutions.

Forty boxes of material from the group's headline-grabbing career, which began in earnest in the 1980s, when it covered New York with posters asking "Does a woman have to get naked to get into the Met?", have been acquired by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

"We've been keeping this stuff in boxes in a storage room in New York for years, and have been thinking about doing something with it for a long time," explained Kathe Kollwitz, a founding member of the group, whose members assume the identities of dead female artists to maintain anonymity. "It's mostly correspondence, photos, fan mail, hate mail, sketches, notes on projects, and drafts of some of our books. We are now taught in many universities as part of art history and sociology courses and the Getty will be able to properly catalogue it and put it online to make it accessible."

For the Research Institute - founded by the extraordinarily wealthy (and distinctly male) oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty - to be entrusted with the subversive group's archive may seem at best counter-intuitive, and at worst downright hypocritical. But the Guerrilla Girls have always trod a fine line between radicalism and the mainstream. Since 1985, when they began producing their trademark brand of provocative protest posters, badges and leaflets, they have been lauded by the very establishment they seek to undermine. In recent years, the Guerrilla Girls have exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, and the Venice Biennale. Later this year, their work will be exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The group was formed in 1985, when a dozen like-minded female activists picketed the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where an exhibition claiming to be a "definitive" survey of contemporary painting and sculpture included just 13 women in its 169 featured artists. Few people paid any attention to that protest. So the group's members decided on a new tack: they began wearing gorilla masks, and flyposting Manhattan with hundreds of smartly designed black and white posters outlining their various beefs.

The typical Guerrilla Girls poster, which they've been producing variations of ever since, contains a selection of statistics and bold headlines that level charges of racism or sexism at various quarters of the arts world, from white, male critics and artists to galleries and museums.

Their first poster, produced in 1985, listed 42 contemporary artists. "What do these artists have in common?" it asked. Answer: "They all allow their work to be shown in galleries that show no more than 10 percent women, or none at all". Other early works railed at the tendency of collectors to pay more for work by male artists than that of their female contemporaries. "When racism and sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth?" asked one.

The group attracted a wealth of criticism in the early years. New York Times critic Hilton Kramer dubbed the Guerrilla Girls "quota queens". Art dealer Mary Boone described their campaigns as "an excuse for the failure of talent". But the public loved them. Initially, the posters were printed in batches of 500, and plastered up by gorilla-mask-clad activists in the dead of night. But soon they began to attract acclaim, and collectors gobbled them up, providing the group with the funds to get their works on giant billboards.

"We're trying to change people's minds by using facts that they maybe won't have seen and presenting them in an interesting way," Kollwitz said in an interview yesterday. "What we do is humorous. It's satire. A lot of political art points at something and says 'This is bad'. We are trying to find a funny way of doing the same thing. Humour has always been part of the ticket. One of our goals has always been to confound the notion of what feminism is. Everyone hates to see women complain. But I think we have found a way to do it so that no one complains."

In the 1990s, they branched out into the world of politics, with posters railing against rape laws, and the religious right. Recent targets include George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Don't let your Governor grope you" proclaimed a cut-out "Schwarzenegger shield" they produced. In 2002, they took out a large advert during Oscar season, featuring an "anatomically correct Oscar statue" - a podgy, white man clutching his genitals. Next to the picture was the observation that no woman had ever won the "Best Director" award.

Today, the number of Guerrilla Girls members remains a secret. Kollwitz says that over the years, between 50 and 70 people have been involved, but only about a dozen are active at any one time. As to accusations of selling out, Kollwitz is anxious to stress that none of the organisation's members will directly profit from the sale of the group's archives. "We don't need money. We just need bananas," she says. "Seriously, though, we all have other careers."

Getty trumpeted its acquisition yesterday, saying in a press release that the archive would "be useful in understanding the second phase of feminist art history". The acquisition may suggest that at least part of the Guerrilla Girls' work is done, but Kollwitz isn't about to hang up her gorilla mask. "The art world still has a lot of issues, so there's plenty for us to carry on protesting about," she said. "Culture likes to think of itself as avant garde, when really, it is still very derriere."

Utah Finds Surprising Benefits in Four-Day Workweek

Friday 10 April 2009

by: Jenny Brundin | Visit article original @ NPR News

Malory Haben, a member of the kitchen staff at Utah State Hospital, now works ten-hour days, in keeping with the state's new law mandating a four-day work week. (Photo: Mario Ruiz / Daily Herald)

Last summer, amid surging gas prices, Utah became the first state in the nation to mandate a four-day workweek for state employees.

A recent assessment of the program by state planners found the expected energy cost savings haven't materialized, but there have been unexpected boosts to productivity and worker satisfaction.

Unforeseen Benefits

Sonia Smith is one of the 18,000 state workers who began a four-day, 10-hour workweek eight months ago. At first, she says, she was shocked and scared about the change. The state accountant is a single mom, and she worried about child care for her 10-year-old son. Now, Smith is a champion of the switch.

"I like having the three-day weekend," Smith says. "I like being able to have one day set aside to do everything that I need to do, and then the other two days where I can devote to my son."

Every Friday morning now, Smith volunteers at her son's school. She helps students with their spelling tests and relishes the extra time with her son. Smith's family and baby sitter adjusted their schedules to enable her to work the adjusted hours.

Smith is among the 70 percent of Utah state employees surveyed who now say they prefer the shorter workweek. Mike Hansen, strategic planning manager in the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget, says one of the more surprising effects of this workday change is that employees are now taking significantly less leave.

"That's increased productivity - that's employees behind their desk more this year than the last two years, to the tune of 9 percent" less time off, Hansen says. Paid overtime is also down.

Energy Challenges Remain

But when Utah implemented the shorter workweek, the goal was to cut energy use by 20 percent and save the state money - and those big savings haven't come through yet.

So far, energy use has been reduced - but only by 13 percent. Each of Utah's 900 government buildings is unique. State energy managers have to figure out how to turn everything off on Fridays - especially the massive heating and air conditioning units.

Energy specialists monitor kilowatt hours used at state buildings, looking for inefficiencies that might be driving costs up. In May, the state also plans to kick off a peer-to-peer energy reduction campaign in each department.

Not Everyone Is Thrilled

The shift to longer hours isn't without other challenges.

For Nicki Lockhart the change has taken a toll emotionally and physically. "I hate it," she says. "It is not working one single bit for me."

On a recent day, Lockhart walks around her office building. It's about 3:30 in the afternoon, right when fatigue is starting to set in, with nearly three more hours of work left to go. "A 10-hour day for me is like eternity," she says.

By the time the customer service agent gets home and eats dinner, she says, it's time for bed. By Friday, Lockhart is so stressed out, she gets headaches. She's one of the 20 percent of state employees who are still struggling with the change.

All Eyes On Utah

But the good news, for everybody, is that the reduction in Friday commuters and the energy savings in buildings have cut down the carbon dioxide pumped into the local air. And the public - the people these government offices serve - seems happy with the change.

Exiting the Department of Motor Vehicles office, Utah resident Jose Sales says he likes the 10-hour days the program created "because I can come in after work and take care of my business - 20 minutes and I'm done."

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman will decide next summer whether to make the four-day week permanent. If Utah's experiment succeeds, it could have an impact on thousands of workers across the country.

"Nobody else has done it like this on this scale," says Hansen of the Office of Budget and Planning, "and everybody is watching."

---------

Jenny Brundin reports for member station KUER in Salt Lake City.

The Dire Fate of Forests in a Warmer World

Tuesday 14 April 2009

by: Bryan Walsh | Visit article original @ Time Magazine

Researchers observing the Pinon pine have determined that the trees' death rates climb as temperatures increase. (Photo: Larry Workman / QIN)

It's not easy to kill a full-grown tree - especially one like the piñon pine. The hardy evergreen is adapted to life in the hot, parched American Southwest, so it takes more than a little dry spell to affect it. In fact, it requires a once-in-a-century event like the extended drought of the 1950s, which scientists now believe led to widespread tree mortality in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

So, when another drought hit the area around 2002, researchers were surprised to see up to 10% of the piñon pines die off, even though that dry spell was much milder than the one before. The difference in 2002 was the five decades of global warming that had transpired since the drought in the 1950s. That led terrestrial ecologists at the University of Arizona (UA) to pose the question: With temperatures set to rise sharply over the coming century if climate change goes unchecked, what impact will it have on the piñon pine? (See the top 10 green stories of 2008.)

Unsurprisingly, the outcome doesn't look good. In a new study published April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists at UA found that water-deprived piñon pines raised in temperatures about 7 F (4 C) above current averages died 28% faster than pines raised in today's climate. It's the first study to isolate the specific impact of temperature on tree mortality during drought - and it indicates that in a warmer world, trees are likely to be significantly more vulnerable to the threat of drought than they are today. "This raises some fundamental questions about how climate change is going to affect forests," says David Breshears, a professor at UA's School of Natural Resources and a co-author of the PNAS paper. "The potential for lots of forest die-off is really there."

The PNAS study, led by Henry Adams, a doctoral student at UA's ecology and evolutionary biology department, also confirms that hotter temperatures actually suffocate trees in dry times. Piñon pines respond to drought by closing the pores in their needle-like leaves to stop water loss. That keeps them from going thirsty, but it also prevents them from breathing in the carbon dioxide they need to live - and eventually, the drought-stressed trees simply suffocate. (See pictures of activists defending backcountry forests from logging.)

The higher levels of atmospheric CO2 that would likely be seen in a warmer future won't make much of a difference either - if the pine needles' pores are closed to prevent water loss, CO2 simply won't get in. Even more worrisome, the PNAS study doesn't take into account possible changes in precipitation patterns in a warmer future, which many climate models say could be drier, exacerbating the impacts of higher temperatures. "We can envision the landscape getting hammered over and over again," says Breshears.

The study took advantage of the university's unique Biosphere 2 research facility. The 7.2-million-cubic-foot dome - famous for an experiment in the early 1990s when eight people lived inside it for two years - allows scientists to recreate almost any climate on Earth. Adams and his collaborators kept two groups of piñon trees inside Biosphere 2 in nearly identical conditions. One key difference: For the experimental group, researchers ramped up the temperature 7 F (4 C), the rough midpoint of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's business-as-usual predictions for warming in this century. "We thought temperature might play a big role, but that was speculation until we could conduct an experiment," says Adams. "The great thing about Biosphere 2 is that it allowed us to test this out."

Adams's paper is the latest in a number of recent studies that paint a grim fate for the world's forests if warming isn't slowed. A major Science study published in January found widespread increase in tree mortality rates in the western U.S., thanks in part to regional warming trends and growing water scarcity. Another study published last month also in Science found that even the seemingly limitless Amazon rainforest could be highly vulnerable to drought. And since living trees suck up CO2 from the atmosphere, massive tree mortality due to warming could produce a feedback effect, further intensifying climate change. In the end, we might need a bigger Biosphere 2, because we're on track to screw up Biosphere 1 - otherwise known as the Earth.

President Barack Obama: The House Upon the Rock

This is a lengthy article ..............check it out........PEACE.......Scott

President Barack Obama: The House Upon the Rock

http://www.truthout.org/041409S

President Barack Obama: "It has now been twelve
weeks since my administration began. And I think
even our critics would agree that at the very least,
we've been busy. In just under three months, we have
responded to an extraordinary set of economic
challenges with extraordinary action - action that
has been unprecedented in both its scale and its speed."

Where Did Roosevelt Go?

Saturday 11 April 2009

by: Gil Courtemanche | Visit article original @ Le Devoir

Gil Courtemanche deplores the absence of a modern-day Roosevelt. (Photo: Hugh Gregory Gallagher)

The press in general has described the G-20 Summit that was held in London as a remarkable success. Reporters were astonished by the speed with which the countries representing 80 percent of the world's wealth succeeded in agreeing on the objectives of a common program. If success was so frequently evoked, that was probably because people were certain there would be failure.

And if success was evoked, it's probably also because, for once, an international gathering identified and named the villains. Tax havens, responsible for governments' reduced finances and obscure conduits for speculators and money launderers; hedge funds, which create no wealth and which prowl around like hyenas to appropriate every scrap of wealth to themselves; rating agencies, finally, who live a curious situation: they rate their own clients. It's good that the great of this world should point out those apparently responsible for the crisis.

A chronicler for Le Monde wrote: "capitalism is dead; long live capitalism." He was so right.

During his stay in Washington, from atop his mighty soap box, President Sarkozy said it was necessary to "restructure" capitalism. The Americans wanted more energetic recovery plans from the Europeans. In London, everyone agreed not to follow either path. And everyone shook hands and embraced. And the press applauded such beautiful unanimity.

And yet, we know perfectly well that, in spite of the OECD's white, gray and black lists, tax havens will continue to operate, rating agencies will remain the reference for dabblers in the market and hedge funds will not be outlawed. Tax havens like Switzerland will collaborate a little more with governments, the rating agencies will be a bit more cautious, and hedge funds, more discreet.

Nonetheless, the crisis that we are experiencing brilliantly illustrates the absolute amorality of capitalism as we have been practicing it the last thirty years, as well as the risks it makes citizens run. The lure of profit has replaced the necessity of profit; property's materiality has been replaced by virtual games that even qualified bankers do not master.

* * *

In the beginning, humans exchanged goods in the hope of improving their lot. One may call that profit. Then, they employed people to produce more wealth, then convinced people to bet on future wealth, and, finally, invented products that don't exist. We have gone from legitimate enrichment to absolute predation. We don't talk about that except when the predators are fraudsters like Madoff in New York. But all these people who play with our lives and our futures are fraudsters and rip-off artists.

We lived for a long time thinking that the Stock Market and the factory, finance and employment, were developing within different spheres. But here we are with a crisis created by speculators who never invented a single job; the crisis kills jobs and creates poverty.

We talk about countries that have been weakened like Iceland, about great financial institutions, about the financial system that must be refloated. We must save capitalism which put us into this deep shit. That's what they did in London: saved the system so it can fuck us over again.

Local thinking does not go any further. We must revive demand quickly; then consumption will return. And jobs as well, always within the same absurd system that incessantly repeats in a thousand different ways that profit is more necessary than the well-being of persons. So they give money for concrete and infrastructure. When construction runs, everything runs. That's not true. For the crisis marginalizes. The people who are losing their jobs are either the youngest, those working at the end of their careers, or temporary workers. The first victims of the crisis are neither construction workers, who are not so badly off, nor subcontractors manufacturing concrete and asphalt.

People do not much talk about those marginalized people. We most especially do not discuss alternative models, different visions for taming and transforming reality. Our sole tool seems to be concrete.

A Japanese economist and philosopher maintains that we must invest in health, food and energy to combat the crisis. Why? Because these are sectors that escape the financial insanity of the stock markets. What he proposes is not rocket science, after all. He proposes an economy of proximity that does not lurch around to the rhythm of global speculators, but evolves according to the needs of the local population. To measure our footprint and our movements, to encourage small local businesses, to increase the supply of at-home services for the elderly, to refocus the economy on real and daily needs by using our own resources; in the end, to partially shelter ourselves from the madness of fundamentalist free market capitalism. But we've gotten off to a really bad start. The Agriculture Minister wants to play the big global game and is persecuting local cheese-makers; our health money is in the future deficits of the Montreal University Hospital's public-private partnerships, and the recovery, in concrete. As for new energies, that's reserved for cronies, not localities. When the crisis started, people evoked Roosevelt and the New Deal. For the moment, I see no Roosevelt on the planet and especially not here. Business as usual for Mr Charest.

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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

Obama Ends Limits on Cuba Travel by Cuban-Americans

Monday 13 April 2009

by: Lesley Clark | Visit article original @ McClatchy Newspapers

A Cuban woman welcomes a relative to Havana. Those with ties to Cuba can travel freely, send money, and US telecom companies may offer their services. (Photo: Enrique De La Osa / Reuters Pictures)

Washington - President Barack Obama on Monday made the first U.S. overture toward Cuba in decades, lifting all travel and gift restrictions for Cuban Americans and sending charter tour companies scrambling for more and bigger jets to meet the expected demand.

The formal announcement _- expected for months as part of a presidential campaign promise - came at the apparently first-ever bilingual White House briefing, with spokesman Robert Gibbs saying Obama was "taking some concrete steps today to bring about some much-needed change that will benefit the people of Cuba, to increase the freedom that they have."

The policy change - which includes pushing for more cell phone and satellite service for Cubans on the island - reversed former President George W. Bush's efforts to tighten restrictions against Cuba but stopped far short of efforts in Congress to lift all travel restrictions to the island.

The move also reignites one of the most emotionally charged issues in Miami's Cuban exile community: Should exiles visit the island they fled, and in doing so, help prop up the communist government's economy with U.S. dollars?

White House officials said the changes are aimed at hastening change on the island, in part by helping Cubans become less dependant on the Cuban government.

"We think the positive benefits here will way outweigh any negative effects that they may have," said Dan Restrepo, a special assistant to the president who spoke in English and Spanish. "That creating independence, creating space for the Cuban people to operate freely from the regime is the kind of space they need to start the process toward a more democratic Cuba."

The changes would allow unlimited family visits and remittances, let U.S. companies seek contracts for communication services in Cuba and expand the types of humanitarian aid that can be sent. Last month, Congress resumed allowing Cuban Americans to visit family members once a year. Under Bush that was pushed back to once every three years.

Obama campaigned on a promise to improve relations with Cuba, and the policy changes have support among Cuban Americans who'd like to see family more often.

Farm state lawmakers and trade groups have urged Obama to go further and lift the trade ban entirely.

Supporters of a hard-line stance against the communist regime, though, criticized Obama for not seeking concessions from Havana. In a joint statement, Miami Republican Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart said Obama has made "a serious mistake by unilaterally increasing Cuban-American travel and remittance dollars for the Cuban dictatorship."

They said Obama should insist that Cuba release political prisoners, legalize political parties, labor unions and the press and schedule elections. But the White House said the changes are aimed at increasing communication - among Cubans on the island and here in the United States.

The telecommunication changes include allowing U.S. companies to seek to operate satellite radio and TV on the island - something Cuba would have to permit. They also would allow Americans to pay for cell phone bills in Cuba, which can be expensive.

The White House also called on the regime to end its practice of keeping a portion of every remittance.

"The president's very clear that we're getting the United States out of the business of regulating the relationship between Cuban families," Restrepo said. "The Cuban government should get out of the business of regulating the relationship between Cuban families."

The Cuban American National Foundation, a leading exile group that has sought more interaction in recent years, applauded the decision, saying the Bush administration's stance did little to improve the lives of Cubans."

"We believe that the announcement today of the changes will help the Cuban people to become protagonists of their (own) changes in Cuba," CANF President Francisco "Pepe" Hernandez said at a news conference in Miami's Little Havana.

The new policy also would expand the items that can be sent to Cuba, including clothing, personal hygiene items and fishing equipment. Still prohibited: sending items to senior government officials and Communist Party members.

The announcement is timed to coincide with the fifth Summit of the Americas, which opens this week in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Latin American leaders have pressed the administration to normalize relations with Cuba, and its outsider status is likely to be a topic of conversation.

Both Gibbs and Restrepo dismissed suggestions that the changes were made to curry favor with Latin America, noting that Obama had promised during a campaign stop in Miami to change U.S.-Cuba policy.

Cuba watchers say the regime is unlikely to make any grand gestures in response. Havana wants Washington to repeal entirely the trade embargo, which the administration has resisted.

For some, the changes may not have gone far enough. The move comes a week after the Congressional Black Caucus met with Fidel and Raul Castro and said they planned to ask Obama to start talking to the Cuban government.

Bills to lift the travel ban have been introduced in both chambers of Congress. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., who is traveling with Obama to Trinidad, said he planned push to lift all travel bans.

"It's time to initiate a complete overhaul of our relationship with Cuba," Farr said. "It will start with reform to family travel and remittances, but it can't end there. We must expand this new policy of diplomatic outreach to our own backyard and restore responsible relations with Cuba."

--------

Miami Herald staff writers Laura Figueroa, Luisa Yanez and Trenton Daniel contributed from Miami.

S.E.C. to Review Whether Bank of America Broke the Law

Tuesday 14 April 2009

by: Sarah O'Connor and Greg Farrell | Visit article original @ The Financial Times

Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-California) (Left) and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland) (Right) listen while subcommittee chairman Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) (Center) speaks. Kucinch wrote the S.E.C. and requested an investigation of Bank of America. (Photo: Getty Images)

Washington and New York - The Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing whether Bank of America broke the law by not telling shareholders about Merrill Lynch's plan to pay out $3.6bn in bonuses before they voted for a government-backed merger of the two banks.

Merrill paid the bonuses in December, days before it was acquired by BofA and a month before bonuses were normally dispensed.

BofA has said it was not required to tell its shareholders about the bonuses.

But Mary Schapiro, chairman of the SEC, wrote in a letter to a Democratic congressman that the regulator was "carefully reviewing the Bank of America disclosure" and had not yet expressed a view on whether the bonus plan should have been revealed.

Federal securities law prohibits institutions from "omitting material facts" in connection to the purchase or sale of securities.

The incident has stirred controversy because Merrill was racking up record losses of $27.5bn for the year when it paid the bonuses, and Ken Lewis, BofA chief executive, eventually asked for $20bn in taxpayers' money to complete the takeover.

The pay-out, revealed by the Financial Times this year, has prompted an investigation by Dennis Kucinich, chairman of an investigative House sub-committee, shareholder lawsuits and an investigation by Andrew Cuomo, New York's attorney-general.

Mr Kucinich wrote to the SEC last week to ask whether BofA should have told its shareholders about the bonuses. He has also demanded that the Treasury and Federal Reserve reveal what they knew about the plan, given their close involvement in the merger discussions.

In response to Mr Kucinich, Ms Schapiro wrote: "Where the SEC believes that there has been an omission of material facts necessary in order to make the statements not misleading, we will carry out our enforcement responsibilities with vigour and vigilance."

If the SEC decided that BofA was derelict in not informing its shareholders of the bonuses before they voted for the takeover on December 5, the bank would be exposed to civil penalties.

It would also add fuel to Mr Cuomo's investigation, which has expanded beyond the bonuses and into the question of whether BofA treated its shareholders fairly.

BofA declined to comment.

Failures to Communicate

Tuesday 14 April 2009

by: Richard Cohen | Visit article original @ The Washington Post

George W. Bush. (Photo: Getty Images)

Former president George W. Bush and some of his White House aides are gathering in Dallas this week to plan the future George W. Bush Policy Institute. There, I guess, they will ponder grand themes and marble foyers, but I propose they begin by simply renaming the place. I suggest naming it the "George W. Bush Institute of Management Failure" and dedicating it to studying how this presidency went so wrong - a task as big as Texas itself.

Bush's tenure was truly remarkable. He left office with the lowest presidential poll ratings in 60 years, two wars begun and not ended, and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. If it's true that we learn from our mistakes, Bush's eight years represent a bonanza of lessons.

What commends the Bush presidency to further study was its sheer managerial ineptitude. This is irony aplenty for a man not known for irony. Bush's one area of expertise, after all, supposedly was in management. Not only had he been a businessman, but he had graduated from Harvard Business School. Bush was the Decider. He was a delegator. He was precise and punctual - early to the office, early out of the office and a clean desk at all times. Wow!

Conventional wisdom holds that the bungling of the Iraq war was a consequence of ideology run amok. Maybe. But it was also an example of awful management. Whether you supported the war or opposed it, you have to concede that it should have ended years ago and, along with the invasion of Grenada, be a fit dissertation subject for a desperate PhD candidate and not, as it remains, a festering debacle.

At the insistence of Donald Rumsfeld, the war was fought with too few troops, and then, when the country was occupied, too few troops were there to maintain law and order. Matters were made infinitely worse when L. Paul Bremer, Rumsfeld's designated viceroy, disbanded the Iraqi army, freeing a good many armed and unemployed young men to shoot the place up. Bremer also purged Baath Party members from the government, leaving precisely no one in senior positions who knew anything. This, the evidence suggests, was modeled on the Bush White House itself.

Had Bush, Rumsfeld and Bremer performed better, the war might have ended a lot sooner. It finally took the surge to get things under control - and that may yet turn out to be too optimistic a statement. Still, the surge would not have been necessary had the war been handled competently from the beginning.

The war in Afghanistan waged against the Taliban, which had provided Osama bin Laden with sanctuary, was similarly mishandled. Once again, too few troops were sent to do too big a job. Good managers know how to make choices. Bush not only chose wrongly when he gave Iraq precedence over Afghanistan, but he chose not to choose at all when he thought both wars could be fought on the cheap - no draft, no tax hike, no sacrifice from the general public.

The Bush Institute of Management Failure should also look into how the administration was so late in noticing that the country was slipping into a profound recession. This should be coupled with a look-see at how Bush's various appointees failed to regulate the banking, insurance, housing and mortgage industries. (Have I mentioned Hurricane Katrina and "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job?" No? Just as well.)

Bush and his aides ought to devote time to what went wrong at the Justice Department. It was politicized and mismanaged to the point where even the Senate noticed. U.S. attorneys apparently had to pass political muster, the Constitution was interpreted along monarchical lines, and somehow the trial of Ted Stevens was so botched that his conviction was thrown out. Alberto Gonzales, a Bush crony, was supervised from the White House by Harriet Miers, an old Bush friend whose qualification for the job was that she was an old Bush friend.

If Bush and his aides do get around to politics, it is my fondest wish that they ask the always voluble Karl Rove - that latter-day Mark Hanna who was going to create a Republican era to last 30 or 40 years - what happened. Rove has reduced the Republican Party to himself, Rush Limbaugh and a scattering of red ties in Congress that only he can name. He has so very much to teach us.

Bush's presidency - rich in lessons - should keep everyone occupied deep into the night. If it's not too late - and especially for those already critical of Barack Obama - let me suggest dessert.

How's humble pie?

US News Media Fails America, Again

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by Consortium News

US News Media Fails America, Again

by Robert Parry

Watching Glenn Beck of Fox News rant about “progressive fascism” – and muse about armed insurrection – or listening to mainstream pundits prattle on about Barack Obama as the “most polarizing President ever,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that today’s U.S. news media represents a danger to the Republic.

By and large, the Washington press corps continues to function within a paradigm set in the 1980s, mostly bending to the American Right, especially to its perceived power to destroy mainstream journalistic careers and to grease the way toward lucrative jobs for those who play ball.

The parameters set by this intimidated (or bought-off) news media, in turn, influence how far Washington politicians feel they can go on issues, like health-care reform or environmental initiatives, or how risky they believe it might be to pull back from George W. Bush's "war on terror" policies.

Democratic hesitancy on these matters then enflames the Left, which expresses its outrage through its own small media, reprising the old theme that there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Democrats and Republicans - a reaction that further weakens chances for any meaningful reform.

This vicious cycle has repeated itself again and again since the Reagan era, when the Right built up its intimidating media apparatus - a vertically integrated machine which now reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to radio, TV and the Internet. The Right accompanied its media apparatus with attack groups to go after troublesome mainstream journalists.

Meanwhile, the American Left never took media seriously, putting what money it had mostly into "organizing" or into direct humanitarian giving. Underscoring the Left's fecklessness about media, progressives have concentrated their relatively few media outlets in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away - and three hours behind - the news centers of Washington and New York.

By contrast, the Right grasped the importance of "information warfare" in a modern media age and targeted its heaviest firepower on the frontlines of that war - mostly the political battlefields of Washington - thus magnifying the influence of right-wing ideas on policymakers.

One consequence of this media imbalance is that Republicans feel they can pretty much say whatever they want - no matter how provocative or even crazy - while Democrats must be far more circumspect, knowing that any comment might be twisted into an effective attack point against them.

So, while criticism of Republicans presidents - from Ronald Reagan to the two Bushes - had to be tempered for fear of counterattacks, almost anything could be said against a Democratic president, Bill Clinton or now Barack Obama, who is repeatedly labeled a "socialist" and, according to Beck, a "fascist" for pressuring hapless GM chief executive Rick Wagoner to resign.

The Clinton Wars

The smearing of President Clinton started during his first days in office as the right-wing news media and the mainstream press pursued, essentially in tandem, "scandals" such as his Whitewater real-estate deal, the Travel Office firings and salacious accusations from Arkansas state troopers.

Through talk radio and mailed-out videos, the Right also disseminated accusations that Clinton was responsible for "murders" in Arkansas and Washington. These hateful suspicions about Clinton spread across the country, carried by the voices of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy as well as via videos hawked by Religious Right leader Jerry Falwell.

While not accepting the "murder" tales, mainstream publications, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, often took the lead in pushing or exaggerating Clinton financial "scandals." Facing these attacks, Clinton sought some safety by tacking to the Right, which prompted many on the American Left to turn on him.

The stage was set for the Republican "revolution" of 1994, which put the GOP in charge of Congress. Only in the latter days of the Clinton administration, as the Republicans pushed for his ouster through impeachment, did a handful of small media outlets, including Consortiumnews.com and Salon.com, recast the war on Clinton as a new-age coup d'etat.

Yet, despite the evidence of that, the major American news media mocked Hillary Clinton when she complained about a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

After Clinton survived impeachment, the national press corps transferred its hostility toward Vice President Al Gore in Campaign 2000 , ridiculing him as a serial exaggerator and liar, even when that required twisting his words. [For details, see our book Neck Deep.]

Then, when George W. Bush wrested the White House away from Gore with the help of five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court, the drumbeat of hostility toward the American President suddenly disappeared, replaced by a new consensus about the need for unity. The 9/11 attacks deepened that sentiment, putting Bush almost beyond the reach of normal criticism.

Again, the right-wing media and the mainstream press moved almost in lockstep. The deferential tone toward Bush could be found not just on Fox News or right-wing talk radio, but in the Washington Post and (to a lesser degree) the New York Times - and on CNN and MSNBC. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "America's Matrix."]

To some foreigners, the U.S. news media's early coverage of the Iraq War had the feel of what might be expected in a totalitarian state.

"There have been times, living in America of late, when it seemed I was back in the Communist Moscow I left a dozen years ago," wrote Rupert Cornwell in the London-based Independent. "Switch to cable TV and reporters breathlessly relay the latest wisdom from the usual unnamed ‘senior administration officials,' keeping us on the straight and narrow. Everyone, it seems, is on-side and on-message. Just like it used to be when the hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin." [Independent, April 23, 2003]

Bush's Slide

Bush skeptics were essentially not tolerated in most of the U.S. news media, and journalists who dared produce critical pieces could expect severe career consequences, such as the four CBS producers fired for a segment on how Bush skipped his National Guard duty, a true story that made the mistake of using some memos that had not been fully vetted.

Only after real events intervened - especially the bloody insurgency in Iraq and the ghastly flooding of New Orleans - did the mainstream U.S. press corps begin to tolerate a more skeptical view of Bush. However, the news personalities who had come to dominate the industry by then had cut their teeth in an era of bashing Democrats (Clinton/Gore) and fawning over Republicans (Reagan and the two Bushes).

With Barack Obama as President, these "news" personalities almost reflexively returned to the Clinton-Gore paradigm, feeling the freedom - indeed the pressure - to be tough on the White House.

Though MSNBC does offer a few shows hosted by liberals and there are a few other liberal voices here and there, the national media remains weighted heavily to the right and center-right.

For every Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, there are dozens of Larry Kudlows, Sean Hannitys, Bill O'Reillys, Joe Scarboroughs and Charles Krauthammers who take openly right-wing or neoconservative positions - or the likes of Lou Dobbs, John King and Wolf Blitzer, who reflect Republican-oriented or neocon views out of personal commitment or careerist caution.

While the right-wing media denounces Obama as a "socialist" and Republican activists are organizing "tea parties" to protest taxes, the mainstream media continues to follow the old dynamic of framing political issues in ways most favorable to Republicans and least sympathetic to Democrats.

On CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday, in an interview with Gen. Ray Odierno, host John King pushed a favorite media myth about President Bush's successful "surge" in Iraq. King never mentioned that many factors in the declining Iraqi violence predated or were unrelated to Bush's dispatch of additional troops, nor did King note the contradiction about Bush's supposed "success" and Odierno's warning that he may have to urge more delays in withdrawing U.S. troops.

‘Polarizing' Obama

The commentariat class also has continued to frame the Republican hatred of Obama as Obama's fault, describing his "failure" to achieve a more bipartisan Washington or - in its latest formulation - calling Obama "the most polarizing President ever."

It might seem counterintuitive to call a President with approval ratings in the 60 percentiles "polarizing" - when that term was not applied to George W. Bush with his numbers half that of Obama's. But this notion has arisen because Republicans have turned harshly against Obama, while Democrats and Independents have remained supportive.

This gap of about 60 points between Democratic approval and Republican disapproval is called the largest in the modern era. (Bush presumably was less "polarizing" because his Republican numbers slumped along with his approval from Democrats and Independents.)

What is rarely acknowledged is that the Republican Party has both shrunk in size and retreated toward its hard-line "base," meaning that the "polarization gap" could simply reflect the fact that a smaller, more extreme Republican Party hates Obama, while other presidents faced a larger, more moderate opposition party.

Rather, according to the Washington pundit class, this gap is Obama's fault, much as he was blamed for "failing" to attract Republican votes for his stimulus bill and his budget. Rarely do the pundits lay the blame on the Republicans who have taken a position of near unanimous opposition to Obama, much as they did toward Clinton 16 years ago.

Instead of seeing a pattern - that Republicans may hope to torpedo Obama's presidency and reclaim congressional control , as they did in 1993-94 - the Washington press corps describes the Republicans as holding firm to their small-government principles and the Democrats as refusing to give due consideration to GOP alternatives.

Already a new conventional wisdom is taking shape, that "polarizing" Obama would be wrong to use the "reconciliation" process to enact health-care and environmental programs by majority vote, that he should instead water them down and seek enough Republican votes to overcome GOP filibusters in the Senate, which require 60 votes to stop.

To get enough Republican votes on health care would almost surely mean eliminating a public alternative that would compete with private insurers, and on the environment, cap-and-trade plans for curbing carbon emissions would have to be shelved.

But that is the course that the pundit class generally favors, while demanding that Obama and the Democrats, not the Republicans, take the necessary steps toward cooperation.

"It will continue to behoove Obama to woo Republican help - no matter how tough the odds," wrote Washington Post columnist David Broder on Sunday. "Presidents who hope to achieve great things cannot for long rely on using their congressional majorities to muscle things through."

But if Obama takes the advice of Broder and other pundits and dilutes his proposals to make them acceptable to Republicans, the President will surely draw the wrath of the Democratic "base," which will accuse him of selling out. The vicious cycle will have rotated once again.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

The Differing Views of the 'Rule of Law' in Spain and the US

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by Salon.com

The Differing Views of the 'Rule of Law' in Spain and the US

by Glenn Greenwald

Scott Horton reports this morning that, in Spain, "prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates [John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Doug Feith and William Haynes] over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo." Spain not only has the right under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture to prosecute foreign officials for torturing its citizens, but it -- like the U.S. -- has the affirmative obligation to do so. (Indeed, the Bush administration itself insisted just last year that the U.S. the right to criminally prosecute foreign officials for ordering acts of torture even in the absence of an accusation that any of the victims were American).

As Hilzoy argues, however, the primary obligation for these prosecutions lies with the country whose officials authorized the war crimes -- the United States:

It is a requirement of law, the law that the Constitution requires Obama, as President, to faithfully execute. He should not outsource his Constitutional obligations to Spain.

That the U.S. has the legal obligation under the U.S. Constitution, our own laws and international treaties to commence criminal investigations is simply undeniable. That is just a fact. Yet it's hard to overstate how far away we are from fulfilling our legal obligations to impose accountability on our own torturers and war criminals.

The barriers to these prosecutions are numerous, but one of the principal obstacles is that CIA Director Leon Panetta has been emphatically demanding that there be no investigations of any government officials whose conduct was declared legal by DOJ lawyers (i.e., the very individuals the Spanish are now investigating for war crimes). And it's not surprising that Panetta has taken this position given that at least two of his top deputies at the CIA are among those implicated, to one degree or another, in the torture regime, as John Sifton detailed earlier this month at The Daily Beast:

The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that "no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished." Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta's attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush's policy into the Obama administration's dirty laundry.

Take Stephen Kappes. At the time of the worst torture sessions outlined in the ICRC report, Kappes served as a senior official in the Directorate of Operations-the operational part of the CIA that oversees paramilitary operations as well as the high-value detention program. (The directorate of operations is now known as the National Clandestine Service.) Panetta has kept Kappes as deputy director of the CIA-the number two official in the agency.

And why is it that Stephen Kappes was made the number 2 officials at the CIA despite his being in a key CIA position during the implementation of America's torture regime? Because the two most important Senate Democrats on intelligence matters -- Jay Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein -- insisted that he be so empowered as a condition for their supporting Panetta's nomination, after both of them first demanded that Kappes actually be made CIA Director. Here's what Andrea Mitchell reported back in January:

NBC News has learned that Senate Democrats -- including Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller, who are the incoming and outgoing Intelligence chairmen -- have privately recommended a career CIA officer to head the agency.

Democratic sources indicate that both have recommended deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes, a veteran CIA intelligence officer who is widely credited with getting the Libyans to give up their nuclear program.

Just to give a sense for how our political class thinks about torture, here is what Mitchell appended to the end of her report: "One potential downside for Kappes: Like former counter-terror chief John Brennan, some critics says [sic] he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention." So Kappes' connection to the CIA's torture program was a "potential downside" to his becoming CIA Director. A potential downside. Once Obama chose Panetta rather than Kappes, Rockefeller and Feinstein agreed to support Panetta's nomination only once they were given assurances that Kappes would become Panetta's deputy.

This Thursday will be a very significant test for how much influence the anti-accountability camp exerts within the Obama administration and for how serious Obama's pledges of transparency were, as that day is the latest deadline for the Obama DOJ either to release the three key OLC torture-authorizing memos, release them in heavily redacted form, or refuse to release them at all. It has been widely reported that a "war" has broken out within the Obama administration over their release, with key Bush-era intelligence officials -- such as Obama's top counter-terrorism aide John Brennan and ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden -- demanding the ongoing concealment of the memos. Those torture memos are reputed to be among the most vivid torture documents of the Bush era, and thus will almost certainly fuel the flames of investigations and prosecution -- both here and internationally. That is what has prompted the "war" over their disclosure. It's hardly a surprise that if you empower the very people most connected to the Bush CIA, there will be substantial forces blocking any attempt to bring accountability under the rule of law for the crimes that were committed.

Just think about what all this means: not only are we failing to investigate or indict those who authorized torture, but we haven't even reached the point yet where we've decided that these crimes are bad enough that those implicated ought to be barred from serving in the highest positions in our Government. While Spain proceeds to fulfill the Obama administration's duties to investigate and prosecute our war criminals, some of those most implicated remain in positions of high authority within our own intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies -- thanks to Senate Democrats such as Feinstein and Rockefeller.

Our political class has simply never come to terms with how severe are these war crimes and how acquiescent to and outright supportive so many officials from both parties -- and so many of our media stars -- were. That's why huge numbers, arguably majorities, of Americans want criminal investigations to commence, but our political class remains virtually unified against them -- notwithstanding that they are legally required -- because, as has been conclusively proven over and over, the last thing our political and media elites care about is the "rule of law." That will become more apparent as other countries, such as Spain, demonstrate that they actually take things like that seriously.

* * * * *

On a related note, Rachel Maddow last night potently eviscerated Barack Obama for his attempts to deny Bagram detainees any rights of any kind, and she and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff then discussed the significance of Thursday's deadline for the release of the OLC torture memos:

UPDATE: In comments, Jim White highlights a fact from Horton's story that I intended but neglected to mention: the Spanish "advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters." As White points out, that is how war crimes investigations are intended to proceed under numerous treaty provisions by which the U.S. has bound itself: namely, the country whose officials commit the crimes have the primary obligation to investigate and hold the criminals accountable. But other treaty signatories are not only entitled, but required, to commence such proceedings if the violating country refuses or otherwise fails to do so.

Thus, the only way to object to what Spain is doing here is if one: (a) suffers from total ignorance of the basic provisions of Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture; (b) believes that the U.S. has no obligation to abide by its treaties even though the U.S. Constitution provides that such treaties are "the supreme law of the land"; and/or (c) believes that the U.S. need not abide by rules we impose on other countries, such as when we prosecuted other countries' leaders for war crimes in the past. None of those is a particularly noble excuse.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

The Bailout We Owe the Developing World

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by Unsilent Generation

The Bailout We Owe the Developing World

by James Ridgeway

One outcome of the G-20 meeting (as I wrote yesterday) was an agreement to earmark as much as $1 trillion for developing countries, where the economic crisis is having a life-threatening impact. This figure is in line with what the United Nations estimates is needed to "buffer the blows of the global downturn on the most vulnerable."

In fact, $1 trillion is the least the rich countries owe to the poor, considering the chaos and suffering our own economic policies and practices have brought upon them. In part, the additional hardships now being experienced by the developing nations result from the recession trickling down in a way that wealth never seems to do. But there's more to the story than this.

Some of the heightened suffering in the developing world can be traced back to the Clinton and Bush administrations, when a series of legislative and regulatory changes paved the way for rampant speculation on the commodities market. What happened next is explained in a report by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), the most comprehensive source of information on this subject.

Wall Street went to work and bundled together groups of commodities futures-everything from oil to copper to basic staples like corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans-into commodity index funds, similar to what you find in the mutual fund business. The subsequent explosion of buying and selling by a handful of Wall Street firms (led by Goldman Sachs and AIG) ran the prices of different commodities up and down with little relation to any actual market or to the so-called laws of supply and demand. (James Galbraith describes the process in detail here.)

In the five years leading up to the recession, commodity index speculation increased by 1900 percent. In this way, Wall Street not only pushed the price of oil through the roof, but directly caused skyrocketing food prices and food shortages around the world. In short, the IATP report concludes:

U.S. government deregulatory steps opened the door for large financial services speculators to make huge "bets" that destabilized the structure of agriculture commodity markets. According to the United Nations, global food prices rose an estimated 85 percent between April 2007 and April 2008. Prices rose for wheat (60 percent), corn (30 percent) and soybeans (40 percent) beyond what could be explained by supply, demand and other fundamental factors, according to the report.

For people in the poorest countries, these changes sometimes meant the difference between subsistence and starvation: In 2007, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), an "estimated 75 million people were added to the 850 million already defined as under-nourished and food insecure."

In view of all this, the United States and the other wealthy nations that dominate the world economy owe the developing world more than a bailout (which would in any case amount to a fraction of what we're giving to the very financial institutions that added to world hunger for the sake of profits). We also owe them a reformed global financial system that will prevent such travesties from happening again.

But it doesn't look like those reforms will be happening any time soon. Bills to regulate commodities exchanges have been floated in both houses of Congress, but according to the IATP, they are progressing slowly and leave a lot to be desired. President Obama's nominee to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, is a former Goldman Sachs executive who, while working in Clinton's Treasury Department, backed the very deregulatory moves that allowed commodity speculation to run wild in the first place (as exposed in Mother Jones last year). Senator Bernie Sanders is seeking to block Gensler's nomination for this reason.

And on the international level, as IATP pointed out in the runup to the G-20, regulation of commodities exchanges was a subject conspicuously absent from the meeting's agenda-despite its potential life-and-death impact on food and energy security worldwide.

James Ridgeway is the Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones.

Anatomy of Bush's Torture 'Paradigm'

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by Consortium News

Anatomy of Bush's Torture 'Paradigm'

by Ray McGovern

The prose of the recently leaked report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on torture seems colorless. It is at the same time obscene - almost pornographic.

The 41-page ICRC report depicts scenes of prisoners forced to remain naked for long periods, sometimes in the presence of women, often with their hands shackled over their heads in "stress positions" as they are left to soil themselves.

The report's images of sadism also include prisoners slammed against walls, locked in tiny boxes, and strapped to a bench and subjected to the drowning sensation of waterboarding.

How could it be that we Americans tolerate the kind of leaders who would subject others to systematic torture - yes, that's what the official report of the international body charged with monitoring the Geneva agreements on the treatment of prisoners concludes - torture.

Over the past week I have been asked to explain how this could have happened; who authorized the torture in our name? The Red Cross report lacks the earmarks of rogues or "rotten apples" at the bottom of some barrel.

This is what I have been telling those who ask:

Rather than Harry Truman's famous motto on his Oval Office desk, "The Buck Stops Here," this was a case of "The Buck Starts Here." President George W. Bush set the tone and created the framework, with strong support from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The first hints of what was in store came from the President himself in the White House bunker late on Sept. 11, 2001, at a meeting with his closest national security advisers after his TV address to the nation about the terrorist attacks that morning.

The vengeful bunker mentality prevailing at that meeting comes through clearly in the report of one of the participants, Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies. Describing the President as confident, determined, forceful, Clarke provides the following account of what President Bush said:

"We are at war.... Nothing else matters. ... Any barriers in your way, they're gone."

When, later in the discussion, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off.

"No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

‘Taking the Gloves Off'

In the weeks that followed, the air in Washington hung heavy with demons of retribution. Afghanistan was invaded in October 2001, and during a prisoner uprising on Nov. 25, a CIA officer was killed there.

A young American citizen, John Walker Lindh, was discovered among the prisoners in the area. There was not the slightest evidence that Lindh had anything to do with the killing.

But documents show that U.S. Joint Special Operations troops were told that the office of the Defense Secretary's counsel (William J. Haynes II, was Pentagon general counsel at the time) had authorized an Army intelligence officer "to take the gloves off and ask whatever he wanted" of Lindh.

Despite urgent intervention by Justice Department ethics attorney Jesselyn Radack, Lindh was not properly read his rights. Instead, the FBI agent on the scene ad-libbed in an offhand way, "You have the right to an attorney. But there are no attorneys here in Afghanistan."

Lindh had been seriously wounded in the leg. Despite that, U.S. troops put a hood over him, stripped him naked, duct-taped him to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, and threatened him with death.

Parts of his humiliating ordeal were captured on film (a practice that became tragically familiar with the photos of Abu Ghraib).

In her book, Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of John Walker Lindh, attorney Radack comments that official documents pertaining to this case provide "the earliest known evidence that the Bush Administration was willing to push the envelope on how far it could go to extract information from suspected terrorists."

(Because she protested, Radack was fired as Justice Department legal ethics advisor, put under criminal investigation, and even added to the "no-fly" list.)

End-Run Around Geneva

But the Bush administration was just getting started.

On Jan. 18, 2002, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised the President that the Justice Department had issued a formal legal opinion concluding that the Geneva Convention III on the Treatment of Prisoners of War (GPW) does not apply with respect to al Qaeda.

Gonzales added that he understood that Bush had "decided that GPW does not apply and, accordingly, that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees are not prisoners of war under the GPW."

On Jan. 19, 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told combat commanders that the President had "determined that al-Qaeda and Taliban individuals under the control of the Department of Defense are not entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

Secretary of State Colin Powell asked the President to reconsider his decision and to conclude, instead, that the GPW does apply to both al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Powell's protest was couched in bureaucratic politeness, rather than in anger and outrage. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Cowardice in the Time of Torture."]

The next step took the form of the fateful memorandum of Jan. 25, 2002, signed by Alberto Gonzales but drafted by counsel to the Vice President David Addington. That memo outlined for the President "the ramifications of your decision and the Secretary's [Powell's] request for reconsideration."

It described a "new paradigm" that, the writers claimed "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners, and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales and Addington urged the President to disregard Powell's misgivings and move ahead. But they cloaked their argument in lawyerly language that obscured what was to come.

The lawyers argued that it was "appropriate" and "consistent with military necessity" to waive Geneva regarding the treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, but they inserted assurances that the prisoners would be treated "humanely" and "in a manner consistent with the principles of GPW."

Powell Rebuffed

Brushing aside Powell's objections, President Bush adopted the Gonzales/Addington language and signed a memorandum to that effect on Feb. 7, 2002. The memo went to Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Chief of Staff to the President Andrew Card, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Condoleezza Rice, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers.

The memo amounted to an executive order, although it was not labeled as such. In it, the President alludes fulsomely to Justice Department opinions and recommendations, as well as "facts" supplied by the Defense Department.

Bush then takes clear responsibility for the decision to spurn Geneva: "I determine that common Article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. ... I determine that Taliban detainees ... do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva ... and that al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war."

The Feb. 7, 2002, memo bears the Orwellian title "Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees." In it, Bush lifts verbatim the language from the Gonzales/Addington memo of Jan. 25, 2002, and makes it his own.

Bush claimed, for example, "the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm [that] requires new thinking in the law of war."

Bush then tries to square a circle, directing (twice in the two-page memo) that "detainees be treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of GPW."

Smell Smoke?

The smoking-gun memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, was released to the media, together with other documents, by Gonzales on June 22, 2004, but it did not receive the attention it deserved until recently.

On Dec. 11, 2008, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released, without dissent, the summary of their committee's report on the abuse of detainees.

The report's first subhead was: Presidential Order Opens Door to Considering Aggressive Techniques, and the first words of the first sentence of the first paragraph were, "On Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating..."

Referring to the "President's order," the first paragraph adds that "the decision to replace well-established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees."

"Conclusion Number One" of the Senate Armed Services Committee report states: "Following the President's determination [of Feb. 7, 2002], techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions ... were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody."

Once Bush had opened the door with his Feb. 2, 2002, memo, other actions followed to implement the President's "new paradigm."

White House lawyers worked with Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel to develop constitutional theories about expansive presidential powers that effectively let Bush operate beyond the law.

The OLC traditionally is the office that tells presidents the limits of their constitutional authorities. However, in this case, Yoo collaborated with Gonzales, Addington and other White House lawyers in hammering out arguments that the administration could use to implement harsh interrogations of al Qaeda suspects.

On Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo and his OLC superior, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, issued an opinion that so narrowly defined "torture" that it cleared the way for a variety of "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, which creates a near-drowning experience.

Top-Down Torture

As the legal framework for Bush's torture policies took shape, senior officers and lower-level participants in the interrogations understood that the basis for the newly permitted harsh tactics stemmed from a presidential decision.

In a report on Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger indicated that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, instituted a "dozen interrogation methods beyond" the Army's standard practice under the Geneva Convention.

Sanchez said he based his decision on "the President's memorandum," which he said allowed for "additional, tougher measures" against detainees, according to the Schlesinger report.

An FBI e-mail of May 22, 2004, from a senior FBI agent in Iraq stated that President Bush had signed an Executive Order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.

The FBI official sought guidance in confronting an unwelcome dilemma. He asked if FBI personnel in Iraq were required to report the U.S. military's harsh interrogation of detainees when such treatment violated Bureau standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.

In sum, abundant evidence indicates that the torture techniques applied in the jail cells and interrogation chambers - the "alternative set of procedures" about which Bush boasted publicly on Sept. 6, 2006 - resulted directly from Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memo and implementing actions by his administration.

Interrogators also were egged on by comments from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld regarding the "tough" treatments they favored.

One fig leaf left covering the otherwise exposed role of Bush and his top aides remains the clever inclusion of the word "humane" in the memo that made possible what the International Committee of the Red Cross condemned as "inhuman" treatment of terror suspects in U.S. custody.

There's also the-Justice-Department-told-me-it-was-legal excuse, though the evidence is now clear that the Bush administration essentially stage-managed the Yoo-Bybee opinions.

For instance, when the Yoo-Bybee opinions were withdrawn by Bybee's OLC successor, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, Addington and other administration officials successfully pressured Goldsmith to resign and then welcomed a new OLC chief, Steven Bradbury, who reinstated the key opinions in May 2005.

And - as the evidence built of illegal torture in 2006 - the Bush administration pushed the "Military Commissions Act" through the Republican-controlled Congress with phrasing that granted a degree of retroactive immunity.

The law states that "no person may invoke the Geneva Conventions or any protocols thereto in any habeas corpus or other civil action or proceeding to which the United States, or a current or former officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent of the United States is a party as a source of rights in any court of the United States or its States or territories."

That provision was interpreted as a broad amnesty for U.S. officials, including President Bush and other senior executives who may have authorized torture, murder or other violations of human rights.

The law also granted Bush the authority "to interpret the meaning and the application of the Geneva Conventions." [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Shame on Us All."]

However, there remain legal questions about whether the law's language would prevent prosecutions under pre-existing anti-torture laws.

The sudden appearance of the damning report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, initially given to the CIA's acting general counsel on Feb. 14, 2007, greatly complicates any rotten-apples-at-the-bottom-of-the-barrel-type disingenuousness.

In a departure from the usual diplomatic parlance, the ICRC minces not a word in referring to those who authorized torture. In the report itself, the Red Cross calls on current U.S. authorities "to punish the perpetrators, where appropriate, to prevent such abuses from happening again."

What do you suppose is holding Attorney General Eric Holder back from appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate, with a view toward rubbing out, once and for all, this shameful stain on our collective conscience?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Why Not Send My Tax Check Directly to Wall Street Execs?

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Why Not Send My Tax Check Directly to Wall Street Execs?

by Sarah Anderson

My husband and I just made out a check to the IRS for $5,021. It's more than usual because of solid investment returns in his native Canada, where their quaintly regulated banking system continues to hum along. Normally, though, we don't mind paying our tax bill. We believe that strategic government investment is the way out of this crisis, and we're happy to contribute our fair share.

But this year I cringed as I dropped that check in the mail, thinking about how I might as well have just handed it directly to a Wall Street executive.

Congressional efforts to recoup the most outrageous of all the outrageous examples of bailout profiteering - the $165 million in AIG bonuses -- have stalled in the face of White House opposition. And now comes the news that Obama officials appear to be resorting to money laundering to help companies elude even the extremely modest compensation restrictions that Congress has already enacted.

A House oversight committee is investigating reports that the Treasury Department is creating special entities to receive bailout funds and then channel them to corporate recipients - no strings attached. Obama officials have reportedly already reversed a Bush administration decision to apply pay limits to one bailout initiative aimed at boosting consumer lending.

If you listen to President Obama's speeches, you wouldn't expect this kind of backsliding. He has spoken powerfully about how the current compensation system has "contributed to a reckless culture and quarter-by-quarter mentality that in turn have wrought havoc in our financial system."

In other words, the President rightly sees bloated paychecks as not just a moral outrage, but also a cause of the crisis.

The President also said that "in order to restore our financial system, we've got to restore trust. And in order to restore trust, we've got to make certain that taxpayer funds are not subsidizing excessive compensation packages on Wall Street."

So why the disconnect between the President and his own economic advisors? Treasury's argument against stronger pay rules has been that financial firms will turn up their noses at taxpayer support if it means having to limit pay for their top brass. They argue that while these firms might not go bankrupt without the aid, they wouldn't be able to increase lending enough to get the economy rolling.

But wouldn't other companies see their competitors' voluntary withdrawal from the lending game as an opportunity to take over the market? I say call their bluff.

Officials are particularly protective of hedge and private equity fund participants in the most controversial bailout program, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plan to provide heavily subsidized loans for the purchase of up to $1 trillion in toxic assets. These firms may not be getting emergency aid, but as many noted economists have pointed out, they are getting a sweetheart deal. Nobel prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz recently described it as a "win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win - and taxpayers lose."

Since they're shouldering nearly all the risk, taxpayers have every right to demand that their government prevent excessive amounts of their money from going into financial executives' pockets. A recent poll showed that 81 percent of Americans support such restrictions.

I'm hoping the Congressional inquiry into the money laundering scandal will prompt a change of course at Treasury and even a renewed effort on Capitol Hill to tighten up existing pay rules. Otherwise, I'll have to keep wondering what a Wall Street executive might do with our $5,021.

For my husband and me, it might have meant finally fixing our gutters. For them, it wouldn't mean much. It amounts to roughly 0.05% of the average $10 million bonuses enjoyed by the top 10 Merrill Lynch executives last year and 0.001% of the average $464 million pocketed by the top 25 hedge fund mangers.

The out-of-control executive compensation system is one of the reasons we're in this economic hole. By protecting this system, Congress and Treasury will just dig us in deeper.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

A Peaceful Legacy

Laos is the most bombed country in history as a result of U.S. bombings from 1964-1973, leaving close to half of the country contaminated with vast quantities of unexploded ordnances, including 78 million cluster bombs that litter forests, rice fields, villages, school grounds, roads, and other populated areas.

Over 34,000 people have been killed or injured since the bombing ceased, most of whom are children. And now, nearly 40 years after the last bombs were dropped, over 350 new casualties occur each year.

To stop the continued harm and suffering of innocent lives, we can do something.

Tell the U.S. government to increase funding for cluster bomb removal in Laos and assist victims and affected families.

Sign the petition today and get involved.

Overfishing to Wipe out Bluefin Tuna in 3 Years: WWF

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by Reuters

Overfishing to Wipe out Bluefin Tuna in 3 Years: WWF

MADRID - Overfishing will wipe out the breeding population of Atlantic bluefin tuna, one of the ocean's largest and fastest predators, in three years unless catches are dramatically reduced, conservation group WWF said on Tuesday.

A fishmonger at the market in Tunis, sells red tuna, also known as Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in 2007. European Union countries adopted new rules to help restore endangered bluefin tuna stocks in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, bringing the bloc into line with international standards. (AFP/File/Dominique Faget)

As European fishing fleets prepare to begin the two-month Mediterranean fishing season on Wednesday, WWF said its analysis showed the bluefin tuna that spawn -- those aged four years and older -- will have disappeared by 2012 at current rates.

"For years people have been asking when the collapse of this fishery will happen, and now we have the answer," said Sergi Tudela, Head of Fisheries at WWF Mediterranean.

The fish, which can weigh over half a ton and accelerate faster than a sports car, are a favorite of sushi lovers. Demand from Japan has triggered an explosion in the size of the Mediterranean fleet over the past decade and many of those boats use illegal spotter planes to track the warm-blooded tuna.

"Mediterranean (Atlantic) bluefin tuna is collapsing as we speak and yet the fishery will kick off again tomorrow for business as usual. It is absurd and inexcusable to open a fishing season when stocks of the target species are collapsing," added Tudela.

Environmental groups condemned an agreement signed in November by states setting bluefin quotas -- a body dominated by EU members. The groups called it "a disaster" and "a disgrace," saying the states again chose to ignore their own scientists and set quotas 47 percent higher than recommended.

Illegal fishing is also rife for the bluefin, the dried, dark red meat of which once fed Roman armies on the march.

Growing numbers of restaurants and retailers including Carrefour's Italian supermarkets are boycotting it.

WWF said that analysis of official data showed the average size of mature tunas had more than halved since the 1990s and that this has had a disproportionately high impact since bigger fish produced many more offspring.

The bluefin can only be saved by a complete halt to fishing in May and June as the fish rush through the Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean, WWF and other campaign groups say.

(Reporting by Ben Harding)

Germany Bans Cultivation of GM Corn

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by Spiegel Online (Germany)

Germany Bans Cultivation of GM Corn

Germany has banned the cultivation of GM corn, claiming that MON 810 is dangerous for the environment. But that argument might not stand up in court and Berlin could face fines totalling millions of euros if American multinational Monsanto decides to challenge the prohibition on its seed.

Activists fly a kite to protest against the cultivation of genetically modified maize. (AFP)

The sowing season may be just around the corner, but this year German farmers will not be planting gentically modified crops: German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner announced Tuesday she was banning the cultivation of GM corn in Germany.

Under the new regulations, the cultivation of MON 810, a GM corn produced by the American biotech giant Monsanto, will be prohibited in Germany, as will the sale of its seed. Aigner told reporters Tuesday she had legitimate reasons to believe that MON 810 posed "a danger to the environment," a position which she said the Environment Ministry also supported. In taking the step, Aigner is taking advantage of a clause in EU law which allows individual countries to impose such bans.

"Contrary to assertions stating otherwise, my decision is not politically motivated," Aigner said, referring to reports that she had come under pressure to impose a ban from within her party, the conservative Bavaria-based Christian Social Union. She stressed that the ban should be understood as an "individual case" and not as a statement of principle regarding future policy relating to genetic engineering.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) both welcomed the ban. Greenpeace's genetic engineering expert, Stephanie Töwe, said the decision was long overdue, explaining that numerous scientific studies demonstrated that GM corn was a danger to the environment.

However the ban could prove costly for the German government. Experts in Aigner's ministry recently told SPIEGEL that it will be hard to prove conclusively that MON 810 damages the environment, which could enable Monsanto to win a court case opposing the ban and potentially expose the government to €6-7 million ($7.9-9.2 million) in damages.

Monsanto said Tuesday that it would look into the question of whether it would take legal proceedings as quickly as possible. Andreas Thierfelder, spokesman for Monsanto Germany, said the matter was very urgent as the planting season was just about to start.

Aigner has recently come under pressure from Bavaria to ban GM corn. Bavaria's Environment Minister Markus Söder wants to turn Germany into a "GM food-free zone." Environmental groups have long called for a ban on GM crops in Germany, arguing that they pose a danger to plants and animals.

However, supporters of genetic engineering argue that a ban could prompt research companies and institutes to pull up stakes and leave Germany. Wolfgang Herrmann, president of Munich's Technical University, has said that a prohibition risks precipitating "an exodus of researchers."

The issue has exposed a split between Bavaria's CSU and its larger sister party, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. Katherina Reiche, deputy chairwoman of the CDU/CSU's parliamentary group, has complained of the "CSU's irresponsible, cheap propaganda," claiming that it could harm German industry. She argued that anti-GM sentiment was one reason a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Bayer decided to moved its facilities for genetic engineering from Potsdam, near Berlin, to Belgium.

MON 810 was approved for cultivation in Europe by the European Union in 1998 and is currently the only GM crop which can be grown in Germany. The plant produces a toxin to fight off a certain pest, the voracious larvae of the corn borer moth. The crop was due to be planted this year on a total area of around 3,600 hectares (8,896 acres) in Germany. The cultivation of MON 810 is already banned in five other EU member states, namely Austria, Hungary, Greece, France and Luxembourg.

A Long, Dark Journey to Joyous Night in El Salvador

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by The Seattle Times

A Long, Dark Journey to Joyous Night in El Salvador

The minister had endured torture and exile during El Salvador's brutal civil war. Last month, journalist-turned-elections-observer Steve Kelley was at his side as thousands celebrated a new era.

by Steve Kelley

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - Late at night, into the early hours of a Monday morning in mid-March, joyous throngs of people, as many as 600,000, paraded down Avenida Escalón, through the heart of some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in this capital city.

As hundreds of thousands rally in celebration on Avenida Escalón in San Salvador , a supporter holds a poster of El Salvador's President-elect Maurício Funes, whose victory at the polls last month completed a historic journey for his party of former rebels. (Jose Cabezas/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Three generations of Salvadorans wore red T-shirts, red bandannas and red caps. For them, it was the color of victory. The color of change. FMLN red.

They walked past grim-faced, helmeted police who, we were told, were mobilized to protect the real estate of the rich. And they walked past portable razor-wire fences that were wheeled into place as soon as the polls closed.

The avenue was a season of red, and the celebration reminded me of Lincoln on a fall Saturday night after a Nebraska football win over Oklahoma.

Many of those celebrating around me had fled north during the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992. While in exile, they told their stories again and again, from Ottawa to Seattle, from California to British Columbia. They talked about their archbishop and their teachers, their parents, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors who had disappeared or were murdered during the war.

On this evening, they cheered the first leftist presidential victory in Salvadoran history. After decades of oppression, their candidate, Maurício Funes of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), had defeated Rodrigo Ávila of ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista), 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent.

Their exuberance was unquenchable.

I walked that Sunday night, March 15, with my friend, Pastor Miguel Tomás Castro of Emmanuel Baptist Church, whose older brother and hero, Gabriel, was murdered while fighting in the civil war.

Miguel was abducted during that war, tortured for being a pastor and exiled to Canada. He returned to his congregation and his country in 1989 because he believed that he one day would witness this profound change, and he strolled through the sultry election night with a smile as wide as the avenue.

Support from Seattle

More than two decades ago, in 1986, he had told his story in a living room in Seattle. Like so many others who were living in exile, he bore witness to the seemingly unbearable suffering of his people. Few in the United States listened then, but there were those in Seattle, Portland, Eugene and others cities who did.

"Know the truth," Miguel said that night, "and the truth shall set you free."

Those words came to life on Avenida Escalón. They were revealed on the faces and in the tears of those who celebrated. Families were reunited on this street. These people had returned home to reclaim the promises and the reality of the hope that had sustained them for more than 20 years.

It felt on this night as if fear had been defeated.

Miguel grabbed my arm and pointed to the homes and office buildings of the wealthy. "This is where they planned the massacres," he said. "This is where they planned the election fraud. This is where they planned the murders."

We listened as Funes spoke to hundreds of thousands in front of him. The scene was reminiscent of President Obama's election-night speech in Chicago's Grant Park.

Miguel translated for me as Funes forgave "the lies" that Ávila told about him during the election. Funes promised "safe change," and the crowd's roar rolled down the avenue.

Fireworks crackled. Teenagers climbed five-story billboards to get a better view of the president-elect, and kicked the metal panels, cheering his every word. Strangers hugged and cried in each other's arms.

"We were not sure that this could happen," Miguel told me. "There were too many periods of loss. We all lost so much, but we believed that if we kept on fighting, this day would come. We have to thank all the people who died in this journey. This day is for them."

I was wearing a light-blue jacket and hat that identified me as one of 4,000 international observers who presided over the election process. And, as I walked, people came up to me and my colleagues and thanked us, in both English and Spanish, for "coming to be with us at this time."

An elderly woman kissed me on the cheek. "She's thanking you for your part in assuring the election's fairness," Miguel told me.

A day of change

"This day means we have taken more steps from a very long march, seeking an opportunity for real democracy," he said. "We can look forward to taking the difficult steps to start a process to build a different country. A very different country where everybody has an opportunity for a life with dignity."

These people, who walked along the avenue, had lived in fear of Salvadoran death squads, many of which were military- and police-trained at the American War College at Fort Benning, Ga. These death squads had terrorized the country for more than a decade.

All day I felt the energy of this moment. I felt something I'd never felt during a U.S. presidential election.

On Election Day in El Salvador, the capital's streets were choked with cars and pilgrims. Voters and their families marched to their polling places. It felt like the excitement that builds during the morning of a big sporting event.

People wore the colors of the parties they supported: blue for ARENA, red for FMLN. They flew party flags from their cars and chanted party slogans. Vendors sold food and souvenirs on the sidewalks.

Entire families came. Parents shared their experience with their children, holding hands as they signed in at the voting tables and as they leaned into the official cardboard boxes to cast their votes.

It was Sunday, a day off, and the election was a shared, family experience. It made me think that this is the way we should do it in the United States. Everyone should have a visceral sense of the meaning of democracy.

Sanctuary support here

When I told friends I was going to be one of 4,000 election observers, the typical response was, "Why you?"

In truth, I was invited by Miguel to be part of an ecumenical group, one of several international teams asked to oversee the election process. By our presence at polling sites, we hoped to limit coercion and election fraud. I was invited because of my association with people who had been part of Seattle's sanctuary movement in the 1980s.

Twenty-five years ago, it was the unambiguous convictions of refugees in Seattle, and of those who assisted them, that captured my attention and won my respect.

With the help of people like then-Mayor Charles Royer, Seattle became one of the most supportive cities in the United States, advocating on behalf of Central American refugees whose immigration petitions for political asylum were summarily denied by State Department officials, who said there was no just cause for their petitions.

Providing protection for former teachers, labor organizers and Roman Catholic lay leaders, and offering shelter and assistance to Salvadoran refugees so they might document their political asylum claims in Seattle's immigration court, were deemed violations of U.S. law.

But the city's archbishop, Raymond Hunthausen, stood with the refugees and alongside the people who sought to defend them. His courage and the strength of the people with whom he stood were justified on this election night.

During the weeklong observation period leading up to the election, I made visits to memorials of those who had died. I visited the small chapel in a hospice center where Archbishop Oscar Romero, a revered supporter of the Salvadoran poor, was murdered. The assassin killed him at the moment Romero lifted a chalice while officiating at a Mass for hospice staff and those dying of cancer.

I saw the bloodstained garments he wore at that service, part of a memorial for him on the hospice grounds. I saw the bullet hole in the vestment, located directly over his heart.

I went to the University of Central America, where in November 1989, five priests, their housekeeper and the woman's young daughter were murdered by members of the military's elite guard, Atlacatl. The premeditated killings on the Jesuit campus occurred at the height of the FMLN's attack against government forces in the capital.

The bodies of the priests were dragged into the yard outside their shared dwellings. Today, rose bushes planted in memory of each priest and the two women grow and bloom as a memorial to their courage.

These memorials crystallized for me the importance of this election to the future of this country.

On the eve of the election, I spoke with Josue Cruz, a law student at El Salvador University. A tall, thoughtful young man, he said to me, "Most people in an election ask, 'What is in it for me?' But I don't want anything for me. Not one penny. All I want is for the people to be given some hope. And for the poor to be given respect."

On that Sunday night in mid-March, Josue walked in this sea of red, in the neighborhoods of the wealthy, and celebrated what he believed was a newly delivered hope and respect for the poor.

He walked with memories of those who had died to make this night possible. He walked with Miguel and the hundreds of thousands who never gave up, never quit on the idea of a democratic future.

It was a privilege to be among them.

The Bush Six to Be Indicted

Published on Tuesday, April 14, 2009 by The Daily Beast

The Bush Six to Be Indicted

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo.

by Scott Horton

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

In this Jan. 6, 2005 file photo, then-Attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales testifies during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

The six defendants-in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith-are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in "the war on terror." The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. "The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation," one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

But prosecutors will also ask that Judge Garzón, an internationally known figure due to his management of the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other high-profile cases, step aside. The case originally came to Garzón because he presided over efforts to bring terrorism charges against the five Spaniards previously held at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors consider it "awkward" for the same judge to have both the case against former U.S. officials based on the possible torture of the five Spaniards at Guantánamo and the case against those very same Spaniards. A source close to the prosecution also noted that there was concern about the reaction to the case in some parts of the U.S. media, where it had been viewed, incorrectly, as a sort of personal frolic of Judge Garzón. Instead, the prosecutors will ask Garzón to transfer the case to Judge Ismail Moreno, who is currently handling an investigation into kidnapping charges surrounding the CIA's use of facilities as a safe harbor in connection with the seizure of Khalid el-Masri, a German greengrocer who was seized and held at various CIA blacksites for about half a year as a result of mistaken identity. The decision on the transfer will be up to Judge Garzón in the first instance, and he is expected to make a quick ruling. If he denies the request, it may be appealed.

Judge Garzón's name grabs headlines in Spain today less because of his involvement in the Gonzales torture case than because of his supervision of the Gürtel affair, in which leading figures of the conservative Partido Popular in Madrid and Valencia are now under investigation or indictment on suspicions of corruptly awarding public-works contracts. Garzón is also the nation's leading counterterrorism judge, responsible for hundreds of investigations targeting Basque terrorist groups, as well as a major recent effort to identify and root out al Qaeda affiliates operating in the Spanish enclaves of North Africa.

Announcement of the prosecutor's decision was delayed until after the Easter holiday in order not to interfere with a series of meetings between President Barack Obama and Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero. However, contrary to a claim contained in an editorial on April 8 in the Wall Street Journal, the Obama State Department has been in steady contact with the Spanish government about the case. Shortly after the case was filed on March 17, chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza was invited to the U.S. embassy in Madrid to brief members of the embassy staff about the matter. A person in attendance at the meeting described the process as "correct and formal." The Spanish prosecutors briefed the American diplomats on the status of the case, how it arose, the nature of the allegations raised against the former U.S. government officials. The Americans "were basically there just to collect information," the source stated.The Spanish prosecutors advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters. They pressed to know whether any such investigation was pending. These inquiries met with no answer from the U.S. side.

Spanish officials are highly conscious of the political context of the case and have measured the Obama administration's low-key reaction attentively. Although Spain is a NATO ally that initially supported "the war on terror" under Bush with a commitment of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, relations with the Bush administration deteriorated after Zapatero became prime minister and acted quickly to withdraw the Spanish contingent in Iraq. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican John McCain referred to Spain as a hostile state in comments that mystified Spaniards (it appears that McCain may have confused Spain with Venezuela and Zapatero with Hugo Chávez). Recently, the United States and Spain also wrangled over Spain's decision to withdraw its troop commitment in Kosovo as well. Both Zapatero and Obama, however, have given a high priority to improving relations between the two long-standing allies. Spanish newspapers hailed the fact that Obama referred to Zapatero three times as "my good friend" during the recent European summit meetings, a sharp contrast with meetings at which former President Bush gave Zapatero a cold shoulder.

Both Washington and Madrid appear determined not to allow the pending criminal investigation to get in the way of improved relations, which both desire, particularly in regard to coordinated economic policy to confront the current financial crisis and a reshaped NATO mandate for action in Afghanistan. With the case now proceeding, that will be more of a challenge. The reaction on American editorial pages is divided-some questioning sharply why the Obama administration is not conducting an investigation, which is implicitly the question raised by the Spanish prosecutors. Publications loyal to the Bush team argue that the Spanish investigation is an "intrusion" into American affairs, even when those affairs involve the torture of five Spaniards on Cuba.

The Bush Six labored at length to create a legal black hole in which they could implement their policies safe from the scrutiny of American courts and the American media. Perhaps they achieved much of their objective, but the law of unintended consequences has kicked in. If U.S. courts and prosecutors will not address the matter because of a lack of jurisdiction, foreign courts appear only too happy to step in.

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

Wowza, New CEO Pay Numbers‏

Dear T. Scott,

In 2008, CEOs and other executives responsible for our current financial crisis pocketed millions of dollars from bonuses and golden parachutes, while our government spent billions of our dollars bailing out their companies.

Vikram S. Pandit, CEO of Citigroup Inc., received more than $38 million in total compensation in 2008, the same year his company took $50 billion in U.S. taxpayer money.

To shed light on executive pay, the AFL-CIO released Executive PayWatch 2009 earlier today. In this report, we learn that CEO perks alone grew in 2008 to an average of $336,248—or nine times the median salary of a full-time worker.

This comprehensive report includes much more information, including:

Detailed CEO compensation data for some of the country's largest companies.
Tools that allow you to compare your pay to the CEOs.
Close-up case studies focusing on 10 executive compensation practices that define a broken system that leaves the American taxpayer holding the bag.
The anatomy of a double standard: Executives enjoy job and retirement security while fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to form unions and bargain for basic security.
Action for you to take to put balance back into our economy.
Boot the CEO, a satisfying online game.

Outrageous executive pay is a symptom of a disease that has infected our entire economic system. It is a disease of greed and corruption made worse by the Bush administration’s obsession with further deregulating Wall Street and ideological aversion to oversight and accountability in our financial system.

Check out Executive PayWatch 2009 today and pass it around to your family and friends. It’s time to shed light on outrageous executive compensation, particularly while America’s working families are bearing the brunt of the worst economic crisis in our country since the Great Depression.

In Solidarity,

Marc Laitin
AFL-CIO Online Mobilization Coordinator

P.S. Mad about overpaid CEOs? So are we. The most important thing to do right now to curb executive pay is to fix our broken financial system by regulating our financial markets. Tell your representatives to draft legislation that truly strengthens our financial regulations and begins curing the disease that has infected our economic system.

Arianna Huffington: Here's a Switch: Some Good News About Banking

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AP/San Francisco Chronicle, Lacy Atkins

Arianna Huffington: Here's a Switch: Some Good News About Banking

Arianna Huffington: An upcoming analysis by the IMF reportedly says that when all is said and done toxic debts on the balance sheets of banks and insurers could go as high as $4 trillion. But it's not all doom and gloom -- there are actually many things going right in the banking industry. Before I lay them out, though, it's important that we clarify our terminology. When it comes to the current crisis, all banks are definitely not created equal -- or equally culpable. As the head of the American Bankers Association recently put it: "Wall Street and Main Street banking are very different." So when we rightly castigate "bankers" for the toxic economic swamp we are struggling to drag ourselves out of, we are really talking about the high-flying financial gluttons of Wall Street, not the vast majority of much smaller "traditional" banks. Click here to read more.

Tax Rates for America

posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 04/13/2009 @ 10:06am

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With Tax Day just around the corner, and the nation attempting to recover from our worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) -- "Reversing the Great Tax Shift" -- offers seven strong recommendations on how to pay for the recovery and rebuild an economy of shared prosperity.

There is good momentum for reversing the disaster of thirty years of tax cuts for the wealthy that have contributed to growing inequality, concentration of wealth, and a shifting of the economic burden to the poor and middle class. In New York, for example, a strong progressive coalition won a key victory in pushing through a new tax structure that requires the wealthy to pay their fair share instead of paying the same rate as those earning just $20,000 a year.

The IPS report provides a good dose of historical perspective at a time when Republicans and too many Democrats fulminate at the possibility of raising the highest tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent for households earning over $250,000. It notes that in 2006 (the most recent IRS data) the 139,000 taxpayers reporting incomes of $2 million or more paid just a 23 percent rate thanks to mega-loopholes; in 1955, people earning over $2 million in 2006 dollars paid a 49 percent rate. The top 400 taxpayers paid a 51 percent in 1955; in 2006 they paid just 17 percent of their incomes in federal income tax.

IPS' seven policy proposals would result in over $450 billion in annual revenues from the wealthiest people who have benefited the most from the failed conservative economic policies embraced by both parties. Some of these practical proposals include supporting the bipartisan Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act which would crack down on individuals and corporations to the tune of $100 billion annually; reversing the Bush tax cuts on income, capital gains, and dividends for households earning over $250,000, bringing in $43 billion annually (and impacting just 2.5% of taxpayers); a progressive estate tax on large fortunes -- exempting estates worth under $2 million, or $4 million per couple -- that would bring in $40-$60 billion per year while taxing no more than 1 of every 200 estates; a 50 percent tax rate on incomes over $2 million, generating $60 billion a year.

IPS says there are things you can do right now to drive these good proposals. You can contact your representatives and tell them to support the following: the president's budget -- which includes an increase in the top tax rate (35 percent to 39.6 percent) and closes overseas tax havens; the Income Equity Act introduced by Representative Barbara Lee which would eliminate tax subsidies for excessive executive compensation; and the Sensible Estate Tax Act, which will be reintroduced by Representative Jim McDermott later this month (in contrast to too many weak-kneed Senate Dems who have bought hook, line and sinker the absolute hogwash that the estate tax is hurting small businesses and family farms, and voted with the GOP to cut it.) Wealth for the Common Good is also building support among small and large business leaders and high net worth individuals who will pay these higher taxes.

Finally, in June, look for IPS to formally launch a "revenue campaign" to rally support around these proposals. There will be more opportunities for action as supporters push for further legislative action.

In the mean time, check out this smart and valuable report to learn more about good policies and for a clear historical perspective on tax rates in America. As we look to address challenges on health care, energy, global warming, and a more equitable economy, this is the kind of good work that will help provide the solutions we need.

The Cassandra Syndrome

Tuesday 14 April 2009

by: Michael N. Nagler, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

(Illustration: Vicious Media, Credit: Ric Stulz, www.ricstultz.com)

Last month, 57 people lost their lives in eight mass shootings across America. "The killing grounds," Timothy Egan wrote in The New York Times last week, "include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child's bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center." It is hard to argue when he calls this epidemic "the cancer at the core of our democracy."

It's not that hard to understand why we're experiencing an upsurge in "senseless violence." More to the point, it isn't all that hard to see what we can do about it.

This rash of killings was an uptick on a very general trend. That's important, because we don't want to just level out the trend that is already higher than any country calling itself civilized should put up with: we want it drastically lower. We want the killing to stop. It's not particularly easy to face why we've been inflicted with all this violence, but we must, because how else will we find a solution. And in the end, the solution may not be as unpleasant as we think.

As a colleague of mine in Public Health recently declared, "We are increasing violence by every means possible." He was talking about the mass media. The enormously high, and increasing, level of violence in the "entertainment" industry - including the violent emphasis of the nightly news - makes violence seem normal, unavoidable, sexy and fun - even a source of meaning. The studies documenting this go back for decades, only lapsing for a while in the early eighties when scientists began to realize nobody was listening to them. They could say, as the US Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior said in 1972, that the "preponderance of evidence" makes it very clear that television was already making young (and other) people more unfeeling and aggressive; they could complain about it in PTA meetings (as I have done) or shout it from the rooftops: neither policymakers nor producers nor us, the end consumers, paid much attention.

Summing up in 1996, psychologist Madeline Levine wrote, "there is a large, consistent, and damning body of evidence that says that watching a lot of violence makes children aggressive and fearful;" and she adds, tragically, "we are losing our awareness of what it means to be human." Since then we not only did not reduce violent viewing, we "advanced" from passive television to interactive games that, according to preliminary evidence and common sense, dehumanize people more effectively.

What scientists and the public did not know when this research began (and the public still does not) is the striking evidence now available from non-invasive methods to study brain activation, primarily Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It has given physical reality to the observation of all psychologists and anyone who knows a child that we're profoundly imitative creatures. In a conversation I had about the effects of the mass media recently with UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, he told me that we humans are so "wired for empathy" that, "If we could stop all the violence for a week, it would never come back." Translating this into practical terms, anyone who could step out of the "exciting" barrage of violent imagery would so reduce his or her artificial provocation to violence that the rest of the problem could, over time, be brought down to very minimal levels. Enough of us doing this and we'd be on our way to living in a nonviolent culture.

Since government is not likely to intervene (it sounds too much like censorship), and the industry itself shows no sign of waking up to its responsibilities, we are left with one recourse, and fortunately it's a good one: if we don't buy, they don't sell. You may think, "Oh, I'm just one person," but that's the point: As writer George Orwell said of a hanging he had to witness back in the bad old colonial days in Burma, "One life less; one world less." Never underestimate the damage that's being done to your mind - or the power of your example once you repair it.

Am I saying that everyone who wants to stop this shameful mayhem should stop watching violent programming, even when it's disguised as news? I am. But I also say something else: let's have more legitimate satisfactions that take us in the opposite direction. Real human contact is the most effective substitute. Of course, actual people can be a pain in the neck (present company excepted), but it's way more fulfilling to talk to your neighbors, have coffee with an old friend or a potential new one, say your piece at a book club, or even have a reasonable argument with someone who disagrees with you than trying to have a passive relationship with pixels on a flat screen.

Gandhi had a famous formula he called the "Seven Social Sins." Wealth Without Work was one of them, I remember, and Science Without Humanity. I think if the Mahatma were physically alive today he would add Entertainment Without Discretion. So let's not turn our scientists into Cassandras, doomed to predict the future with nobody believing them. Let's act, at least individually and in our families, before we become a civilization without a future.

Michael N.Nagler is professor emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC, Berkeley, where he founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and taught the upper-division nonviolence course as well as meditation and other courses for more than twenty years, and is the founder-president of The Metta Center for Nonviolence Education.

Court Declares Franken Winner; Coleman to Appeal

Tuesday 14 April 2009

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Monday, April 27, 2009

Saturday, April 18, 2009

US News Media Fails America, Again

The Differing Views of the 'Rule of Law' in Spain and the US

The Bailout We Owe the Developing World

Anatomy of Bush's Torture 'Paradigm'

Why Not Send My Tax Check Directly to Wall Street Execs?

Overfishing to Wipe out Bluefin Tuna in 3 Years: WWF

Germany Bans Cultivation of GM Corn

A Long, Dark Journey to Joyous Night in El Salvador

The minister had endured torture and exile during El Salvador's brutal civil war. Last month, journalist-turned-elections-observer Steve Kelley was at his side as thousands celebrated a new era.

The Bush Six to Be Indicted

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo.

posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 04/13/2009 @ 10:06am