| by Steve Connor | |||
| Thousands of scientists from 63 countries are joining forces to make a detailed study of the Earth's polar regions, where climate change is having a dramatic impact on ice formations that have been stable for millennia.
"Global warming is the most challenging problem our society has ever had to face up to. Ice is the canary in the coal mine of global warming," Sir David King, the Government's chief scientist, said yesterday. Britain's effort will be spearheaded by the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, which is involved in 45 IPY projects, and supported by 65 other British institutions, including 40 universities, research council institutes, government departments, museums and science centres. "The change of phase from snow and ice to water is the biggest tipping point in the Earth's system and so, although the IPY covers a huge range of science, for me the big issue is climate change and the impact that it's having here," Professor Chris Rapley, the director of the British Antarctic Survey, said. "So, over the next two years, I'm looking forward to major progress on key issues, such as 'How are the ice sheets responding?' and the trillion dollar question from the point of view of sea-level rise, 'How much, how quickly?'," he said. A report by the Intergovernmental Panel in Climate Change said the Arctic was one of the fastest-warming regions of the world and summer sea ice in the northern hemisphere could disappear by the end of the century. Meanwhile, parts of Antarctica - notably the Antarctic peninsula - have become significantly warmer, leading to the disintegration of ice shelves, large bodies of floating sea ice that are connected to the mainland. The fear is that the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, which have built up on land over thousands of years, will start to melt, causing global sea levels to rise. "Parts of the ice sheets are responding to warming rather more quickly than glaciologists had thought," Professor Rapley said. "In parts of the Antarctic, there's been a significant and sustained acceleration. The trouble is we've never seen a major ice sheet collapse before. "IPY is much more than climate change. It's got everything from astronomy on the high plateaux of the Antarctic, through plate tectonics, to social sciences and the welfare of the northern indigenous peoples," Professor Rapley said. The Antarctic ice sheet is up to 3 miles thick in places and it holds 90 per cent of the world's fresh water. It is also crucial to the circulation of the world's ocean currents and therefore to planetary air circulation. In the Arctic, the problems of melting ice will involve the 4 million people who live in the region. Global warming is already reducing the area of ocean ice by 3 per cent every decade. © 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Scientists from 63 Countries to Investigate Polar Melting
Voice to Debate Sheehan Can't be Found
Anti-war activist to speak before Senate panel Friday | ||
| by Daniel Barlow | ||
| When anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan testifies against the Iraq war before a Senate committee Friday, the voice in favor of the conflict may be silent. Committee Chairman Sen. Vincent Illuzzi, R-Essex-Orleans said Monday that he has been unable to find anyone to testify in favor of the four-year-old war during the noontime hearing in the Senate chambers later this week. Illuzzi said he has contacted the state departments of Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, along with representatives of the Vermont National Guard Enlisted Association, but none wanted to come before the committee opposite Sheehan. "I wanted a balanced hearing to show that there are two sides to the question," Illuzzi explained. "But so far everyone had declined the opportunity to speak in favor of the war." Sheehan's testimony before Illuzzi's Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs comes weeks after the Vermont Legislature became the first in the country to pass a resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Although the Senate and the House supported a nonbinding resolution earlier this month calling for the end of the war, Illuzzi said Sheehan will be allowed to speak again on that measure during the committee hearing Friday. The session has been moved from its traditional committee room into the Senate chambers because lawmakers are expecting a large crowd. Sheehan will also be giving a press conference outside the Statehouse following her testimony. Sheehan's testimony is the first stop on a three-day tour of Vermont aimed at building support for a series of nonbinding town meeting resolutions calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and the impeachment of President Bush. Twenty-three towns have the impeachment and end-the-war questions on their warnings, but organizers of the grassroots movement, which started last year in the rural Windham County town of Newfane, say more towns may tackle the issue under other business. Sheehan will make stops during the tour in Middlebury, Castleton, Rutland and Brattleboro along with a half-dozen more towns, according to Dan DeWalt, a member of the Newfane Select Board who kicked off the grassroots Green Mountain impeachment movement and organized her visit. DeWalt said Sheehan, who was in Jordan this week, will speak about ending the war during the pre-town meeting stops and efforts to push the U.S. Congress to impeach Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. She also plans to raise the impeachment issue during her Senate testimony, DeWalt said. A bill calling for Bush's removal has been introduced, but the committee it has been referred to is unlikely to act on it. "The Vermont Legislature seems intent on avoiding the issue of impeachment, but Cindy will talk about the need to remove this man from office before he does more damage," DeWalt said. This will not be Sheehan's first visit to Montpelier. Two months before her historic demonstration outside of President Bush's Texas ranch in August 2005, Sheehan and other anti-war activists, including family members of other soldiers killed in Iraq, rallied for peace at the Unitarian Church in Montpelier. "Our children are cannon fodder for the war machine," she said at that meeting, which occurred about 16 months after her son, Casey, was killed in Iraq. "We have to make it a country we can be proud of again." Illuzzi said he is looking forward to hearing Sheehan speak Friday. Although her activism following her son's death has resulted in acclaim from other anti-war activists, some conservatives have been critical of some of her comments. "I'm curious to see which side of that fence I'll be on after hearing her speak," Illuzzi said. On the Web: www.vtimpeach.com
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Sierra Club Currents
 Sierra Club Currents - Wall Street Buys in to Clean Energy Future
Quote of Note: (1) Texas: Wall Street Buys in to Clean Energy Future (2) Children's Health: Global Warming Fever (3) Take Action: And the Oscar Goes to… Solving Global Warming! (4) Take Action:Protect Workers' Rights! (1) Texas: Wall Street Buys in to Clean Energy Future  Just days after a court struck down Texas Governor Perry's order to fast track new coal plants through the permitting process, a buyout of Texas Utility TXU has lead the company to abandon plans for 8 new coal-fired power plants in Texas. As part of the takeover TXU has signed on to a long list of environmental measures, including doubling the amount of money spent on efficiency programs and pursuing wind power. Thanks to the efforts of the Sierra Club and other activists energy investors are paying increasing attention to the benefits of going green.Learn more about other alternatives to coal.  (2) Children's Health: Global Warming FeverGlobal warming is responsible for an increase in the number of children's hospital emergency room visits, according to a new University of Sydney report which shows that hospital admissions for fever soar as days get hotter. Children are especially at risk because they are less able to regulate their body temperature than adults. The study is the first to make a solid link between increasing temperatures and childhood illness. Find out what you can do to curb global warming. (3) Take Action: And the Oscar Goes to...Solving Global Warming!  Last night, global warming took home Hollywood's biggest award. An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar for Best Documentary. The film follows former Vice President Al Gore around the world on his crusade to educate audiences about global warming. In his Oscar acceptance speech, Gore called on Americans to come together and find the political will to stop the climate crisis. We have the solutions; we just need to put them to work.Sign the petition calling on President Bush to stop blocking action on global warming.
(4) Take Action: Protect Workers' Rights!  You may be surprised but protecting workers' rights is an environmental issue. Workers are often the first line of defense against hazardous pollution, chemical spills and other toxic accidents not only in the workplace, but in their communities as well. Union workers are taught about the safety risks of dangerous chemicals and are empowered to prevent accidents and help hold corporations accountable. Now legislation has been introduced that would protect workers rights to unionize and advocate for stronger protections for workers and communities.Tell your Representative to support worker's rights and vote for the Employee Free Choice Act! |
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Why Have So Many US Attorneys Been Fired? It Looks a Lot Like Politics
The New York Times
Monday 26 February 2007
Carol Lam, the former United States attorney for San Diego, is smart and tireless and was very good at her job. Her investigation of Representative Randy Cunningham resulted in a guilty plea for taking more than $2 million in bribes from defense contractors and a sentence of more than eight years. Two weeks ago, she indicted Kyle Dustin Foggo, the former No. 3 official in the C.I.A. The defense-contracting scandal she pursued so vigorously could yet drag in other politicians.
In many Justice Departments, her record would have won her awards, and perhaps a promotion to a top post in Washington. In the Bush Justice Department, it got her fired.
Ms. Lam is one of at least seven United States attorneys fired recently under questionable circumstances. The Justice Department is claiming that Ms. Lam and other well-regarded prosecutors like John McKay of Seattle, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Daniel Bogden of Nevada and Paul Charlton of Arizona - who all received strong job evaluations - performed inadequately.
It is hard to call what's happening anything other than a political purge. And it's another shameful example of how in the Bush administration, everything - from rebuilding a hurricane-ravaged city to allocating homeland security dollars to invading Iraq - is sacrificed to partisan politics and winning elections.
U.S. attorneys have enormous power. Their decision to investigate or indict can bankrupt a business or destroy a life. They must be, and long have been, insulated from political pressures. Although appointed by the president, once in office they are almost never asked to leave until a new president is elected. The Congressional Research Service has confirmed how unprecedented these firings are. It found that of 486 U.S. attorneys confirmed since 1981, perhaps no more than three were forced out in similar ways - three in 25 years, compared with seven in recent months.
It is not just the large numbers. The firing of H. E. Cummins III is raising as many questions as Ms. Lam's. Mr. Cummins, one of the most distinguished lawyers in Arkansas, is respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. But he was forced out to make room for J. Timothy Griffin, a former Karl Rove deputy with thin legal experience who did opposition research for the Republican National Committee. (Mr. Griffin recently bowed to the inevitable and said he will not try for a permanent appointment. But he remains in office indefinitely.)
The Bush administration cleared the way for these personnel changes by slipping a little-noticed provision into the Patriot Act last year that allows the president to appoint interim U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period without Senate confirmation.
Three theories are emerging for why these well-qualified U.S. attorney were fired - all political, and all disturbing.
1. Helping friends. Ms. Lam had already put one powerful Republican congressman in jail and was investigating other powerful politicians. The Justice Department, unpersuasively, claims that it was unhappy about Ms. Lam's failure to bring more immigration cases. Meanwhile, Ms. Lam has been replaced with an interim prosecutor whose résumé shows almost no criminal law experience, but includes her membership in the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.
2. Candidate recruitment. U.S. attorney is a position that can make headlines and launch political careers. Congressional Democrats suspect that the Bush administration has been pushing out long-serving U.S. attorneys to replace them with promising Republican lawyers who can then be run for Congress and top state offices.
3. Presidential politics. The Justice Department concedes that Mr. Cummins was doing a good job in Little Rock. An obvious question is whether the administration was more interested in his successor's skills in opposition political research - let's not forget that Arkansas has been lucrative fodder for Republicans in the past - in time for the 2008 elections.
The charge of politics certainly feels right. This administration has made partisanship its lodestar. The Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed in his book, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," that even applicants to help administer post-invasion Iraq were asked whom they voted for in 2000 and what they thought of Roe v. Wade.
Congress has been admirably aggressive about investigating. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, held a tough hearing. And he is now talking about calling on the fired U.S. attorneys to testify and subpoenaing their performance evaluations - both good ideas.
The politicization of government over the last six years has had tragic consequences - in New Orleans, Iraq and elsewhere. But allowing politics to infect U.S. attorney offices takes it to a whole new level. Congress should continue to pursue the case of the fired U.S. attorneys vigorously, both to find out what really happened and to make sure that it does not happen again.
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The Iraq Effect:
The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased
Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022707D.shtml
explaining the effects of the Iraq war, its players,
politics, cost in treasure and lives, and long-term
implications.
Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Crops and Keepers in Peril
The New York Times
Tuesday 27 February 2007
Visalia, California - David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.
In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable.
"I have never seen anything like it," Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. "Box after box after box are just empty. There's nobody home."
The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.
Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.
Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.
As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call "colony collapse disorder," growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.
Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.
A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. "Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food," said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.
Beekeepers are the nomads of the agriculture world, working in obscurity in their white protective suits and frequently trekking around the country with their insects packed into 18-wheelers, looking for pollination work.
Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.
Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.
"There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate," Mr. Browning said. "While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling."
Some 15 worried beekeepers convened in Florida this month to brainstorm with researchers how to cope with the extensive bee losses. Investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.
They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees' innate ability to find their way back home.
It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.
Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.
Researchers are also concerned that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to bees' stress, helping to spread viruses and mites and otherwise accelerating whatever is afflicting them.
Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the "strong immune suppression" investigators have observed "could be the AIDS of the bee industry," making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.
Growers have tried before to do without bees. In past decades, they have used everything from giant blowers to helicopters to mortar shells to try to spread pollen across the plants. More recently researchers have been trying to develop "self-compatible" almond trees that will require fewer bees. One company is even trying to commercialize the blue orchard bee, which is virtually stingless and works at colder temperatures than the honeybee.
Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers, and three cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas, Mr. van Engelsdorp said.
Today the industry is in a weaker position to deal with new stresses. A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year.
California's almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country's bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California's Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.
Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.
This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.
A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers' costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.
The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.
To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.
"A couple of farmers have asked me, 'Why are you doing this?' " Mr. Bradshaw said. "I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us."
Almonds fetch the highest prices for bees, but if there aren't enough bees to go around, some growers may be forced to seek alternatives to bees or change their variety of trees.
"It would be nice to know that we have a dependable source of honey bees," said Martin Hein, an almond grower based in Visalia. "But at this point I don't know that we have that for the amount of acres we have got."
To cope with the losses, beekeepers have been scouring elsewhere for bees to fulfill their contracts with growers. Lance Sundberg, a beekeeper from Columbus, Mont., said he spent $150,000 in the last two weeks buying 1,000 packages of bees - amounting to 14 million bees - from Australia.
He is hoping the Aussie bees will help offset the loss of one-third of the 7,600 hives he manages in six states. "The fear is that when we mix the bees the die-offs will continue to occur," Mr. Sundberg said.
Migratory beekeeping is a lonely life that many compare to truck driving. Mr. Sundberg spends more than half the year driving 20 truckloads of bees around the country. In Terra Bella, an hour south of Visalia, Jack Brumley grimaced from inside his equipment shed as he watched Rosa Patiño use a flat tool to scrape dried honey from dozens of beehive frames that once held bees. Some 2,000 empty boxes - which once held one-third of his total hives - were stacked to the roof.
Beekeepers must often plead with landowners to allow bees to be placed on their land to forage for nectar. One large citrus grower has pushed for California to institute a "no-fly zone" for bees of at least two miles to prevent them from pollinating a seedless form of Mandarin orange.
But the quality of forage might make a difference. Last week Mr. Bradshaw used a forklift to remove some of his bee colonies from a spot across a riverbed from orange groves. Only three of the 64 colonies there have died or disappeared.
"It will probably take me two to three more years to get back up," he said. "Unless I spend gobs of money I don't have."
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Wall Street Adds Climate Change to Bottom Line
The Christian Science Monitor
Tuesday 27 February 2007
The environmentally tinged takeover of TXU Corp. illustrates global warming's increased financial relevance.
New York - Wall Street now views the color green as something other than money.
In the latest sign that global climate change is becoming a major factor for investors, potentially the largest private takeover in the nation's history has environmentalists' fingerprints all over it.
A consortium of private investors announced Monday they would pay almost $45 billion to acquire TXU Corp., which generates electricity in the state of Texas. What makes the deal more than just another gigantic financial transaction is that the buyers of the company consulted with environmental groups and agreed to sharply scale back plans to build new coal-fired power plants.
"This is a real breakthrough, an indication investors are paying attention to the real financial risk associated with climate change," says Dan Bakal, director of electric power programs at Ceres, a Boston-based environmental group that advises investors controlling $3.7 trillion in assets. "It means Wall Street is really beginning to pay attention."
Wall Street analysts believe the deal could mean that future takeovers will start to factor in the cost of corporate carbon emissions.
This could affect mergers and acquisitions in a broad range of industries, including manufacturing companies, the auto industry, mining companies, and other utilities.
"What it shows is the environment has a much greater presence than in the past and the issue of global warming is under increased scrutiny," says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor's in New York. "These are additional factors that must be addressed in future mergers."
In fact, there are some signs Wall Street is trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible. For the past three years, the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C., has been working with investment banks and securities firms such as Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs to teach them how to establish their own carbon "footprint" and analyze other companies' emissions.
Analysts Eye Carbon "Footprint"
By calculating the footprint - the amount of greenhouse gases a company pumps into the atmosphere - analysts can begin to forecast the potential risks of climate-change lawsuits and future costs of any greenhouse-gas regulations.
"It's been a slow start, but we have been pleased to see financial institutions begin to grapple with those systems," says Jennifer Layke, deputy director of climate and energy for WRI. "But this is the first time we have seen a set of investors reach out to the environmental community around the terms of a new investment deal."
Last year, the New York Stock Exchange began to educate CEOs about the issue. It sponsored a lunch with former Vice President Al Gore, who gave a slide-show version of his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
Investors Call for Carbon Accounting
This year there will be a record number of shareholder resolutions asking companies about their carbon footprint.
Normally, shareholder propositions don't receive much traction in the corporate world.
But, the proposals have been receiving a significant amount of institutional support from such large shareholders as Calpers, the California public-employee pension fund. And there is increasing concern that corporate boards may have a liability if they don't start to plan for future limits on carbon emissions.
Pressure was already building on TXU to scale back its proposal to build 11 coal-fired power plants. Over the weekend, Ceres issued a report that looked at the potential carbon taxes the utility would face, assuming that Congress or the states begin to enact such charges.
"Our report made some reasonable assumptions, including that none of the costs would be grandfathered in," says Mr. Bakal. "That means 100 percent of the carbon dioxide must face a carbon tax, which we estimate could be as much as $780 million per year, perhaps for 15 years."
At the same time, the Ceres report called into question some of the revenue and cost assumptions that TXU had made to justify the new plants.
"We think they had overestimated the amount of growth and underestimated the amount of the coming carbon controls and the cost of complying with the existing Clean Air Act," says David Gardiner, one of the authors of the report and a sustainability consultant in Arlington, Va.
TXU Buyers Moved to Ease Opposition
Some of these issues resonated with the group of TXU buyers, which includes the Texas Pacific Group, Goldman Sachs, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Texas Pacific and KKR are private equity groups that amass money from pension funds and wealthy individuals and buy companies.
Monday, in Dallas, the buyers' group said they would drop eight of the 11 new coal-fired power plants if their deal succeeds. They also said they would roll back electricity rates by 10 percent. And, they indicated they would work towards meeting any national emissions caps in the future.
"It's a sign people are paying attention," says Rodney Taylor, managing director of the environmental-services group at Aon, a large Chicago-based insurance broker. "From a financial standpoint, it also says something about the perception of where energy costs are going. KKR is kind of a medium-term investor, so they must be looking at energy costs going up sharply over the next three to five years."
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Stuck in the 1950s
 | Why Working Women Are Stuck in the 1950s |
Silencing Soldiers
February 28, 2007
Sarah Olson is an independent journalist and radio producer based in Oakland, CA. She can be contacted at solson75@yahoo.com.
The Army refiled five charges against first Lt. Ehren Watada late last week, paving the way for a possible second court-martial for the highest-ranking member of the military to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq. When his first court-martial ended in a mistrial on February 7, serious debate on the emerging opposition to the war within the military, the legality of the war and the right of military personnel to publicly disobey illegal orders had not yet begun to surface. Though it’s unclear that a second court-martial may legally proceed, the possibility brings these issues back into focus.
I was one of two journalists subpoenaed to testify in Lt. Watada’s court-martial. I objected on the grounds that members of the military must be free to speak with journalists without fear of retribution or censure. That so few critical voices in the military are given an ongoing platform in the media contributes to an inaccurate view of the Iraq War and erroneous ideas about how to ameliorate the problems. Supporting the troops requires that we listen to what they have to say.
Army Specialist Mark Wilkerson was just sentenced to seven months in prison for refusing to return to Iraq. Last year, he wrote:
In the year I was in Iraq, I saw kids waving American flags in the first months. Then they threw rocks. Then they planted IEDs. Then they blew themselves up in city squares full of people. … Hundreds of billions of American dollars, thousands of American lives, and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives have all been wasted in this war. I feel as though many more soldiers want to say things like this, but are afraid of retribution, and who’s really listening anyway.
Ivan Brobeck, a Marine who went to Canada rather than return to Iraq, was released from prison on February 6, just in time for the birth of his first child. Army Medic Augustine Aguayo awaits a March 6 court-martial in Germany and is facing up to seven years in prison. He’s a conscientious objector who refused to load his gun during the year he spent as a combat medic in Iraq. Despite nearly three years attempted to have his conscientious objector status approved, Aguayo was ordered back to Iraq. When his commanding officers threatened to send him to Iraq in shackles, he climbed out his bedroom window and went AWOL into Germany. According to the Pentagon, there are at least 8,000 soldiers who have quietly gone AWOL, while hundreds more have gone to Canada.
The Appeal for Redress has received over 1,600 active duty signatures. The online petition says:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price.
And what began as a simple online petition has exploded into public dissent: Soldiers are attending anti-war demonstrations, holding press conferences. Liam Madden is one of the appeal’s founders, and embarked on a cross-country speaking tour just two weeks after being released from the Marines.
Last year’s Zogby poll showed that 72 percent of soldiers wanted to leave Iraq by the end of 2006. Opinion has not grown more sanguine. Though soldiers have stinging criticisms of the Iraq War, we rarely get to hear them. Instead, Lt. Watada is relentlessly juxtaposed with soldiers who have no apparent qualms about their orders.
When Lt. Watada announced his opposition to the Iraq War on June 7, 2006, many called him a coward. He took an oath, they argued, and must obey orders regardless of the war’s legality. Even those sympathetic to Lt. Watada’s beliefs sometimes appear uneasy with his public opposition to the war, especially when speaking to members of the press.
Whether members of the military should abandon individual responsibility when they go to war is a debate worth having. While they have agreed to certain speech restrictions—members of the military agree not to speak contemptuously about the commander-in-chief and Lt. Watada expressed himself respectfully, out of uniform, off base and after work hours—the extent of those limitations is by no means explicit. In fact, it is one of several questions in Lt. Watada’s prosecution. It seems that the specter of military law is so dark and mysterious a force that ordinary civilians have ceded their ability to question the authority of those that wield it.
Why is our civilian society so comfortable allowing the military to determine the parameters of acceptable speech during a time of war? Lt. Watada—along with the thousands of men and women who are returning from Iraq today —is uniquely positioned to speak about the military mission in Iraq. What do we lose when we allow the systematic exclusion of their voices?
The Iraq War is messy. It’s inconvenient. The absence of soldiers denouncing the war in mainstream consciousness likely has something to do with the public’s unwillingness to face the war itself. What does it mean if this war is actually illegal? In what ways is each of us complicit in the perpetration of a war not thoroughly vetted by the media, debated by congress, nor considered by the public? The starkness of these answers is reflected in the faces of the people returning from battle. But if we don’t hear from Ivan Brobeck, Mark Wilkerson, Augustine Aguayo and any of the hundreds of Iraq veterans return to the United States isolated and disillusioned, it’s easier to believe that everything is going just fine.
Perennial Lobbying Scandal
February 28, 2007
Lee Drutman is the co-author of The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy .
Last week it was reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had spent $72.7 million on lobbying in 2006, setting a new American record, previously held by ... the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: $53.4 million in 2004. It is a remarkable amount of money, and so it's worth asking: How exactly does a group manage to spend so much money on the political process? And should we care?
This little factoid was not major news. Sadly, there is little “new” about business groups spending ridiculous amounts of money to try to influence public policy. When the Center for Responsive Politics totaled up all lobbying expenditures from 1998 to 2004, of the top 100 groups (all of whom spent at least $19 million), 60 were corporations and 32 were business trade groups (like the Chamber of Commerce). That means 92 percent of the most active groups were businesses or business trade groups. The Chamber topped the list at $204 million, followed by Altria at $101 million and General Electric at $94 million.
The Chamber’s record-breaking expenditures are also not news because there is nothing outwardly scandalous about them, in the way that, say, Jack Abramoff’s delightful dealings were outwardly scandalous. I suspect that most of the Chamber's lobbying is decidedly uninteresting and above-board—lots of meetings, mostly in the greater Capitol Hill area, full of long-winded arguments about why proposed or existing regulations are bad for economic growth.
But this dull fact doesn't neatly fit the picture of that “culture of corruption” that the Democrats keep promising to end. One looks in vain for the outlandishly inappropriate gifts and meals and tickets and trips that are said to buy influence. Though I don’t know for sure, I strongly suspect that large organizations like the Chamber of Commerce (or General Electric, or Boeing, or the Edison Electric Institute or any of the other business groups that spend tens of millions a year on professional lobbying) are not basing their lobbying strategy primarily on steak dinners and choice seats at a Wizards game. (If this were all it took, the Chamber would certainly have to spend a lot less).
Which is not to say that there aren’t plenty of such lavish lawmaker-lobbyist goings-on around the greater District of Columbia area, each with its own distinct whiff of impropriety. But the relentless focus on highlighting these goings—on (pick up a copy of The Washington Post or listen to a Democratic speech on the subject) offers a very misleading picture of lobbying.
If only it were that glamorous, the actual lobbyist must think! Lobbying is a shoe-leather business and it involves more than just the luxury box. To be effective, it takes relentless focus on the arduous and complex process by which a bill becomes a law (drafting it, attending hearing after hearing, then the subcommittee vote, the committee vote, the floor vote, the conference committee and so on). And then after all that, the endless attention to the process by which a law becomes an agency rule (public comment after public comment) and then to a never-ending litigation strategy once the rule is in place. And so on and so on, over and over again. Start participating at every level (and shaping public opinion, where necessary) and the lobbying expenditures do start to add up.
Only those with millions to spend can fight full strength at every stage of the process. Or even better, credibly threaten to fight full strength at every stage, in order not to actually have to.
Consider the prescription drug reform the Democrats promised during campaign season. By mid-January, when the bill was ready, Democratic leaders had backtracked. They had left intact the ban on Canadian drug imports, the ban on price caps and the requirement that private insurance plans remain small and numerous (and hence handicapped in their ability to negotiate bulk discounts).
Did pharmaceutical companies make their case with meals and tickets and trips? Or did they use more “appropriate,” though more costly, means, like hiring hordes of former Democratic staffers to make convincing arguments on why all those reforms would, in fact, be counterproductive, and by just generally being annoyingly persistent? They were successful, at least in part, because pharmaceutical lobbyists could promise to fight the Democrats every step of the way—a credible threat, given their resources. The pharmaceutical and health products industry spent $612 million to lobby between 1998 and 2004, more than any other industry. While such reforms might be popular generally, there was no organized group to push Democrats with nearly as many resources.
The fact that the Chamber of Commerce could and did spend $72.7 million on lobbying last year ought to give us far more pause than any of these periodic scandals of improper trips or exploited loopholes that keep popping up in our newspapers. Yes, these scandals are outrageous, and obviously worth noting and exposing. But the real outrage is the broad range of progressive policies that are simply off the agenda because to go against all that money is widely viewed as political suicide. In addition, a broad range of business-friendly policies are on the agenda because all that business money has worked tirelessly to place them there.
Sure, Congress could and should put all the limits it wants on gifts and travel (though by all indications, loopholes abound in all the latest plans and probably always will). Sure, more disclosure about lobbying is great (though not particularly useful, given that citizens don’t really get meaningful choices between candidates who listen to a lot of lobbyists and those who don’t). But it’s also time to look at the fundamental imbalances in the world of lobbying, and at who can afford to spend $72.7 million to influence public policy and who can’t. And why that matters far, far more than a single golf outing to Scotland.
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DAILY GRIST
Still basking in Oscar's glow, Al Gore makes headlines for using a lotta energy. An inconvenient truth or an ugly smear campaign? Readers react in Gristmill.
Yes We Ken
London mayor unveils comprehensive climate-change plan
London Mayor Ken Livingstone unveiled a Climate Change Action Plan yesterday in hopes of making the English capital the greenest city in the world. Under the scheme, London will switch 25 percent of its power supply to local generation, and businesses that invest in green technology will earn merit badges, Scout-style. The U.K. plans to cut carbon emissions 60 percent by 2050, but London's leaders hope to achieve that goal within 20 years, and are setting aside $92.3 million in next year's budget to do so. "This will make London the first city in the world to have a really comprehensive plan to cut its carbon emissions," says the mayor's climate-change adviser. Livingstone also appealed to the 7.5 million common folk, urging energy efficiency and introducing such cutting-edge ideas as discounts on insulation. "Londoners don't have to reduce their quality of life to tackle climate change," said the mayor, "but we do need to change the way we live." Always with the crazy talk, that one.
Nisshin Accomplished
Burned out of business, Japan calls a halt to its annual whale hunt
Japan's whaling fleet, unable to recover from a mid-February fire that killed a crew member and disabled its main ship, has called off its controversial annual hunt a month early. While protesters expressed sympathy for the human loss, they also did a dance of joy that "no more Southern Ocean whales will die from grenade-tipped harpoons this season." Observers had also feared that the floundering 8,000-ton Nisshin Maru would cause an oil leak off Antarctica, and the government of nearby New Zealand had asked Japan to haul ass outta there. The whalers declined an offer from Greenpeace to tow the ship, managing to restart it this weekend. Since undertaking the hunt in November, the fleet had killed 508 whales -- about 350 shy of its goal. "We have been research whaling for 20 years, but this is the first time we have had to cut the expedition short," said a Fisheries Agency official. "It is very unfortunate." Happily (for the fleet, not so much the whales), there's always next year.
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You Can Poach an Egg, But You Shouldn't Poach an Elephant
Elephants massacred as ivory trade picks up
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Group Hug
Leading tech competitors bury the hatchet to improve energy efficiency
Hold onto your geek hat: 11 leading tech companies have partnered to reduce the energy used by servers and data centers. The Green Grid -- made up of foes including Intel, IBM, Microsoft, AMD, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard -- thinks data-center efficiency "is the most significant issue facing technology providers and their customers today," and plans to whip up new energy standards and technologies. A study released this month by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab estimates that servers ate 1.2 percent of U.S. energy in 2005, and their power use doubled from 2000 to 2005. "What each of the companies [has] realized is that these issues of efficiencies can't be dealt with in the usual competitive approach that pervades the industry,'' says the lab's Jonathan Koomey. "They really need to figure out a way on certain issues to cooperate.'' Said Sun's sustainable computing director, putting Mr. Rogers fuzziness aside: "Green is green, conservation and efficiency equal profits in every case."
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