ZNet Commentary
By Cynthia Peters
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/22peters.cfm
Readers of ZNet know how the "system" works, but who among us has not wanted to take certain individuals by the shoulders and force them to face the consequences of their actions. When I was a kid, we used to have a dog that would occasionally relieve himself right in front of the TV set. To punish him, my mother used to force his nose to within millimeters of the offensive steaming heap. "Look what you've done," she would say. And there'd be no way to gloss over the fact of the situation. He had created a great big pile of shit.
Eighty years ago today, on August 23, 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were murdered by a corrupt legal system and a racist and xenophobic political culture. These two working men - Italian immigrants, World War I draft dodgers, anarchists - were accused of armed robbery and murder and sentenced to die by a court that needed a scapegoat more than it wanted justice. However, it was not only a faceless, nameless system that was responsible for denying appeals, ignoring testimony, and signing off on executions. There was a person behind the pen, and in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, it was Judge Webster Thayer.
To honor the legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti on this, the eightieth anniversary of their death, I am reprinting a letter I came across in the liner notes of the Smithsonian Folkways "The Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti." (http://www.akpress.org/2000/items/balladsofsaccovanzetti) It is by Woody Guthrie, and it is addressed directly to Judge Thayer, and it is a most brilliant, poetic, poignant cry of "Look what you've done."
According to the liner notes, the letter was probably written in 1947, 14 years after Judge Thayer died. It is testimony not only to how deeply Guthrie felt the tragic loss of Sacco and Vanzetti, but how he understood the way that power dehumanizes the master as well. It is a raw, unedited soliloquy against those who choose a "tiptoeing life on rugs and carpets," who "escape through varnished doors," and who live in such a state of fear and mental shut-down that they are, in fact, "never alive."
To Bush and Cheney, then, and to the corporate executives and mercenaries, and to all the board-room-dwelling paper-pushers whose pens rob and kill as surely as any weapon or electric chair, put your nose in this:
"To Judge Thayer" by Woody Guthrie
I would like to paint you a picture with strokes of electricity, to make you see, Judge Thayer, the wrong thing that you done. It would take something faster than firesparks to send this picture around the world, but the blood of Sacco and Vanzetti did flow around the world, and the picture was in the minds of people before that hand of your button pusher could push your electric button and take his finger away again.
I say the blood flowed, but it was not the blood that ran, because you did not hang them, you did not shoot them, but you did torture them, you did insult and abuse them, you made comics and puppets out of them to dance and to dangle in front of your sad eye. You set their souls free with a spark of Massachusetts electricity because you were so unwise as to think that this would hold and silence their voices.
You killed Bartolomo [sic] Vanzetti, a poet and a fighter, and you killed Nicolo [sic] Sacco because he taught workers how to get together and talk about their work. The reason that you killed these two men was because you lost your spiritual connection with all men, and you did not believe that there was any such a thing as a spiritual connection between any men. You did not believe in the mental ability of the ordinary workingman and woman to stand together and to meet together, to speak their problems over in a free land together.
This is a rough way to try to tell you because you are used to nicer and politer ways, ways memorized out of books, ways learned in your college buildings, and in your schools. You have taken your hide and shelter in these halls of learning for a long time, but I would not call you a man that has learned anything. You fell onto the patter of action that you used over and over till you wore your mind out, and then you thought that this same calamity had happened to everybody else. You lived a quiet life, a tiptoeing life on rugs and carpets. You found some kind of dark world there in your caverns with your stalagmites and you wanted to hang on to whatever little nervous nightmare that you were having. You did not want to be kicked out, nor relieved, nor have somebody else take your bench and judge people from it. You wanted to keep on stepping down your back stairways, through your varnished doors, yes. You certainly did not want any wild gang of illiterate workers busting into your court room nor into your house and telling you that you had lost your job. You somehow got scared, then to make out like you were not scared, you walked all around and shouted that you were not scared. (People knew that you were because you yelled that you were not.)
You got afraid of people all around you. You really felt afraid of every person that came close to you. You did not always say this out loud, but you know very well that you felt this way every hour of every day. You felt it even worse after dark. You did not even tell your wife nor your closest friends how scared you were. You were not only afraid of people, but the tides and the seasons scared you and you came to be afraid of the weather. Your seasons were things of locks and keys and your sleep was a wild running nightmare, but you used all kinds of tricks to make your face look like it was not afraid of the people. You feared the working people. You feared the business people. You feared the idle classes and you feared the racketeers. The world was a puddle of manure and mud and all of the faith on this planet could not change human nature's greed.
I don't know tonight as I write this whether you are alive or dead. It had been a long time since you pulled the electric trigger on Sacco and Vanzetti, but it could be that you are still dwelling in your same body. I had rather be dead than to be a man of your cut and caliber. It would be wrong for me to wonder if you are living or dead because it is truer to say that you never was alive. I mean warm alive like most of all my loud and noisy neighbors around me here in Coney Island.
If your spirit is out of your carcass, I certainly would not blame it, for if I was a spirit I would not dwell for long in any such a body as you own. If I was a body I would not live with any such a spirit as yours. If I was a mind I would not play any sweet music inside your brain, and if I was a soul I would not bring any very big visions into your heart. If I was the Creator I would undo you and if I was the Maker I would unmake you and take the clay and try again. I cannot curse your soul too much because you may be remolded into a union organizer. I cannot curse your clay too much because you will fertilize some nice corn and grain and drift out across some dandy pasture lands where horses nicker and the cattle graze.
You did not wish for Sacco nor Vanzetti neither one to dwell on our planet here, and so you schemed and you figured out a way to take them away. If you had been a true man wise or unwise you would have never let your drunkest and scaredest nightmare cause you to do such a deed. You would have known that you would wake up ten million souls around the world to fight to enter into their union. You would have known that you were not only kicking your own pants off of the judging bench, but several hundred thousand judges and shysters of your stripe and breed. You would have known this if your mind had not been so completely blind. I cannot rile myself too much to curse you because I am not too much of a curser, and I know that you did, in one way, wake the workers of the world up, but you did it in the craziest, greediest and most terrible way that you could. You called our attention to the fact that if it was geniuses of your level who own and rule our world and make its laws, judge us good and bad, to be alive or to be dead, then, well, this was the one thing that put us on the move and tore your world down faster than ten grenades would have.
You are a big judge. You may be living and you may be dying. You may already be dead. No matter what your natural estate (sp????????) may be, I realize that I must speak to you polite and nice even if I hate your royal guts. And so this (is/?????????) why tonight I hold my criticism down to just the one single planet called the earth. If I was to let my words fly at you like I really feel I ought to. I would chase you up one universe and down the next, up one glacial age and down the next, up one history book and down the other, over several icebergs and out through several jungles. I would rail you and scale you, jail you and bail you, I would mail you and nail you and assail you and frail you. I would run you ragged and craosseyed, cockeyed and whopperjawed. I would not let one drop of your blood rest easy nor one cell of your brain miss my trimming. I think of your old age and your natural condition of a tablet of salt, and I will not try to take your coyote heart out of you because in all of your horror and terror you have ignorantly defeated your own self and your own class. You have done the only earthly thing that could undo your entire class, and it might well be that you were created just to perform this one act and then no more. Oh, I know that you performed a lot of other lesser and smaller acts, but they just broke the ground for the deed that you did to Sacco and Vanzetti.
For more information about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, see ZNet's excerpt of Howard Zinn's book A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=12575) and an interview with him by Sonali Kolhatkar and Gabriel San Roman (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9551).
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Toxic Toys, Deadly Dog Food and Other Wonders of "Free Trade"
By Todd Tucker, Eyes on Trade
Posted on August 21, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60323/
The Times had this gem this morning:
Separately, laboratory tests have found that some Chinese-made vinyl baby bibs sold at Toys "R" Us stores appear to be contaminated with lead.
Industry analysts said Mattel's woes are part of a much larger problem.
"If I went down the shelves of Wal-Mart and tested everything, I'm going to find serious problems," said Sean McGowan, managing director and the toy analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities. "The idea that Mattel -- with its high standards -- has a bigger problem than everybody else is laughable. If we don't see an increase of recalls in this industry, then it's a case of denial."
Even Mattel executives said repeatedlyyesterday that the company may have more recalls.
"No system is perfect," Robert A. Eckert, Mattel's chairman and chief executive, said in a conference call. "There's no guarantee that we will not be here again."
Wow. Before yesterday, these mega corporations were saying, oh, it's just a few bad apples caught up in the supply chain. (Kinda like Enron… remember that?) Now, we have the mega-corps admitting that - no, actually it's part of the design of the system.
System?! You mean it's not just a few bad apples? How could such a "system" have ever been devised? Did anyone ever vote on this "system", because I can't imagine it would be popular among anyone that, well, eats or consumes. Oh, that's right - thanks Billy, Joey, Chrissy, Johnny, Sammy, Freddy, and Johnny, also known as the boy band of former and perhaps future presidents. (They unfortunately lack many of the redeeming qualities of those other boyz' bands.)
For an excellent read into what a stupid (in the dictionary definition of the term) SYSTEM we have now, please check out Barry Lynn's piece in Harpers on the madness of mega-corporations' unregulated, global sourcing strategies.
Look closely at today's global production system and you will see shockingly high degrees of specialization, in terms of both geography and ownership. More and more activities take place in only one or a few places on earth, and within one or a few companies. This is especially true in electronics: Taiwan produces more than half of the world's vital customized chips. But it is also ever more true of heavy industries, like automobile manufacturing, even of agriculture and food processing. One of the crowning conceptions of the Enlightenment has been achieved, yet economists appear entirely unwilling to recognize the fact, let alone begin the task of examining how this revolutionary event might alter the purposes and pathways of their work.
At the other side of the Times (the ed board), they don't like to think about that, saying that we shouldn't change the way we look at supply systems or trade policy, but rather we should have Mattel police itself and the U.S. government play global cop, flying around the world to inspect hundreds of thousands of factories. No doubt about it: I agree with the Times and 99.999999% of the civilized, non-libertarian world that the FDA needs more resources. But as we've shown, having trade agreements that prioritize safety over a race to the bottom is a far more efficient way of pursuing the same end.
How many more pets have to die or consumers get sick before we accept that states and social institutions have a legitimate role to play alongside the market?? These other institutions at least have the virtue of predating the market, as Karl Polanyi pointed out decades ago:
No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy ofNot that I want the Stone Age, mind you, but we also don't have to feel bashful about using state power to protect people. As Polanyi's book shows, state and social regulations were the only thing that made the emergence of the modern market even thinkable. Anyone wanting a sustainable globalization is going to have to make sure that states have the flexibility to be able to guide the process. First stop for that kind of alter-globalization - shrink or sink the WTO.some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets. In spite of the chorus of academic incantations so persistent in the nineteenth century, gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy. Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60323/
Smashing Capitalism!
By Barbara Ehrenreich, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on August 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60506/
Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.
First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract. There were "NINJA" loans, for example, awarded to people with "no income, no job or assets." Conservative columnist Niall Fergusen laments the low levels of "economic literacy" that allowed people to be exploited by sub-prime loans. Why didn't these low-income folks get lawyers to go over the fine print? And don't they have personal financial advisors anyway?
Then, in a diabolically clever move, the poor - a category which now roughly coincides with the working class -- stopped shopping. Both Wal-Mart and Home Depot announced disappointing second quarter performances, plunging the market into another Arctic-style meltdown. H. Lee Scott, CEO of the low-wage Wal-Mart empire, admitted with admirable sensitivity, that "it's no secret that many customers are running out of money at the end of the month."
I wish I could report that the current attack on capitalism represents a deliberate strategy on the part of the poor, that there have been secret meetings in break rooms and parking lots around the country, where cell leaders issued instructions like, "You, Vinny -- don't make any mortgage payment this month. And Caroline, forget that back-to-school shopping, OK?" But all the evidence suggests that the current crisis is something the high-rollers brought down on themselves.
When, for example, the largest private employer in America, which is Wal-Mart, starts experiencing a shortage of customers, it needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror. About a century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, never seemed to figure out that its cruelly low wages would eventually curtail its own growth, even at the company's famously discounted prices.
The sad truth is that people earning Wal-Mart-level wages tend to favor the fashions available at the Salvation Army. Nor do they have much use for Wal-Mart's other departments, such as Electronics, Lawn and Garden, and Pharmacy.
It gets worse though. While with one hand the high-rollers, H. Lee Scott among them, squeezed the American worker's wages, the other hand was reaching out with the tempting offer of credit. In fact, easy credit became the American substitute for decent wages. Once you worked for your money, but now you were supposed to pay for it. Once you could count on earning enough to save for a home. Now you'll never earn that much, but, as the lenders were saying -- heh, heh -- do we have a mortgage for you!
Pay day loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May 21st cover story on "The Poverty Business," BusinessWeek documented the stampede, in the just the last few years, to lend money to the people who could least afford to pay the interest: Buy your dream home! Refinance your house! Take on a car loan even if your credit rating sucks! Financiamos a Todos! Somehow, no one bothered to figure out where the poor were going to get the money to pay for all the money they were being offered.
Personally, I prefer my revolutions to be a little more pro-active. There should be marches and rallies, banners and sit-ins, possibly a nice color theme like red or orange. Certainly, there should be a vision of what you intend to replace the bad old system with -- European-style social democracy, Latin American-style socialism, or how about just American capitalism with some regulation thrown in?
Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60506/
Debt Crisis: No Bail-Outs for Loansharks
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Posted on August 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60210/
In April, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, declared that all the signs he saw indicated that the housing market was "at or near the bottom." Earlier this month he was still insisting that problems caused by the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages were "largely contained."
But the time for denial is past.
According to data released yesterday, both housing starts and applications for building permits have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, showing that home construction is still in free fall. And if historical relationships are any guide, home prices are still way too high. The housing slump will probably be with us for years, not months.
Meanwhile, it's becoming clear that the mortgage problem is anything but contained. For one thing, it's not confined to subprime mortgages, which are loans to people who don't satisfy the standard financial criteria. There are also growing problems in so-called Alt-A mortgages (don't ask), which are another 20 percent of the mortgage market. Problems are starting to appear in prime loans, too - all of which is what you would expect given the depth of the housing slump.
Many on Wall Street are clamoring for a bailout - for Fannie Mae or the Federal Reserve or someone to step in and buy mortgage-backed securities from troubled hedge funds. But that would be like having the taxpayers bail out Enron or WorldCom when they went bust - it would be saving bad actors from the consequences of their misdeeds.
For it is becoming increasingly clear that the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody's Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the '90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.
Yet our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn't prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble.
Most of the proposals I've seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices - which would have been very useful three years ago - but they wouldn't help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.
Consider a borrower who can't meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan's terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.
Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, "the first link in a financial merry-go-round." The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody's or Standard & Poor's were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there's nobody to deal with.
This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there's a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn't be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.
And we've done this sort of thing before - for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries' debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.
The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages - not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans - at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I'm happy to listen to better ideas.
The point, however, is that doing nothing isn't the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts - but let's help borrowers work things out.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/60210/
Faux liberal NPR shows true colors
Action Alert
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3164
NPR Touts Pro-Nuke 'Environmentalists'
Network's own nuclear links undisclosed
8/22/07
An August 15 NPR Morning Edition segment touted the benefits of nuclear power, suggesting it was gaining popularity with many environmentalists who once opposed it.
The segment was an interview with Fortune magazine editor David Whitford, who has written a series of articles about the debate over nuclear power. The piece was introduced by NPR anchor John Ydstie, who asserted that "with fossil fuel carbon emissions in the environmental bull's-eye, nuclear power is starting to shake off its bad reputation." Whitford elaborated on the claim that nuclear power's image is improving: "There are many environmentalists now who began their careers opposed to nuclear power who are now reconsidering nuclear power in the face of global warming."
But Whitford cited just one such environmentalist, Stewart Brand, describing him simply as the creator of the 60s and 70's publication, the Whole Earth Catalogue, and calling him "sort of the original off-the-grid environmentalist." In fact, Brand is currently a businessman, a co-founder and leader of the corporate consulting group Global Business Network (GBN). GBN numbers, among the 192 clients named on its website, more than a dozen corporations and governmental agencies involved in the production or promotion of nuclear energy: General Electric, Bechtel, Duke Power, Siemens-Westinghouse, Fluor, Electric Power Research Institute, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, �lectricit� de France, Iberdrola, Vattenfall, Sydkraft (now E.ON Sweden) and Sandia National Labratories. Some of these, including GE, Bechtel, Duke Power and Westinghouse, are receiving government subsidies to develop the next generation of nuclear power plants, according to a Department of Energy report. Brand's financial links with the industry went unmentioned in the NPR segment.
Brand is one of a small number of former nuclear critics who have become prominent nuclear advocates (Alternet, 03/16/07). But it is a stretch to suggest, as Whitford does, that a handful of former nuclear foes with no current ties to leading environmental groups--and often with financial links to the nuclear industry--constitute "some division within the movement."
In fact, leading environmental groups including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council all agree that nuclear power, with its huge safety, security and cost issues, is not the solution to climate change. A 2005 letter released by Public Citizen and signed by nearly 300 groups opposed congressional subsidies for the nuclear industry:
As national and local environmental, consumer and safe energy organizations, we have serious and substantive concerns about nuclear energy. While we are committed to tackling the challenge of global warming, we flatly reject the argument that increased investment in nuclear capacity is an acceptable or necessary solution.
Instead of a story about a growing fervor for nuclear power among some environmentalists, the story is really one about a growing fervor to resurrect nuclear power among corporate and political elites, aided by a handful of mainly environmentalists-for-hire.
This kind of one-sided coverage is characteristic of NPR's recent reporting on the nuclear industry. In the six stories NPR has broadcast over the past 90 days about the future of nuclear power production in the U.S., NPR's sources included only three opponents of nuclear power plants, versus eights sources touting the safety, environmental friendliness and financial benefits of nuclear energy. Moreover, only one of the three opponents was an expert on the topic, while NPR cast seven of the eight sources speaking in favor of nuclear power as authorities. This period saw an accident at the largest power plant in the world - in Japan (NPR's All Things Considered, 7/19/07) - which was the subject of three additional NPR stories. Yet, even in this coverage of the accident, no experts critical of nuclear power were cited.
One factor that is relevant to NPR's cheerleading for nuclear power is its own financial links to the industry. According to NPR's website, between 1993 and 2005, the public radio service received between $250,000 and $500,000 from Constellation Energy, which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction. During the same period, another nuclear operator, Sempra Energy, donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to NPR. This potential conflict of interest was not disclosed in the August 15 segment, or in any other of NPR's recent largely industry-friendly reports. (NPR has in the past insisted that the corporate "underwriting" money it receives has no bearing on its coverage--a defense that would seem to undercut the rationale for NPR's existence as a noncommercial broadcaster.)
In his interview with Whitford, NPR's Ydstie asked the Fortune editor, "What are the forces that are aligning that make the industry optimistic that there's going to be a revival?" Whitford didn't mention one-sided reporting that fails to disclose its financial ties to the industry as factors that help the industry "shake off its bad reputation" and clear the ground for a nuclear revival.
ACTION: Please contact NPR to suggest that future reports on nuclear power include the consensus view of the environmental movement, and that such reports disclose NPR's financial ties to the industry.
CONTACT: Assistant to the Ombudsman, Chantal de la Rionda, through NPR's website: http://www.npr.org/templates/contact/index.php?columnId=2781901.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3164
NPR Touts Pro-Nuke 'Environmentalists'
Network's own nuclear links undisclosed
8/22/07
An August 15 NPR Morning Edition segment touted the benefits of nuclear power, suggesting it was gaining popularity with many environmentalists who once opposed it.
The segment was an interview with Fortune magazine editor David Whitford, who has written a series of articles about the debate over nuclear power. The piece was introduced by NPR anchor John Ydstie, who asserted that "with fossil fuel carbon emissions in the environmental bull's-eye, nuclear power is starting to shake off its bad reputation." Whitford elaborated on the claim that nuclear power's image is improving: "There are many environmentalists now who began their careers opposed to nuclear power who are now reconsidering nuclear power in the face of global warming."
But Whitford cited just one such environmentalist, Stewart Brand, describing him simply as the creator of the 60s and 70's publication, the Whole Earth Catalogue, and calling him "sort of the original off-the-grid environmentalist." In fact, Brand is currently a businessman, a co-founder and leader of the corporate consulting group Global Business Network (GBN). GBN numbers, among the 192 clients named on its website, more than a dozen corporations and governmental agencies involved in the production or promotion of nuclear energy: General Electric, Bechtel, Duke Power, Siemens-Westinghouse, Fluor, Electric Power Research Institute, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, �lectricit� de France, Iberdrola, Vattenfall, Sydkraft (now E.ON Sweden) and Sandia National Labratories. Some of these, including GE, Bechtel, Duke Power and Westinghouse, are receiving government subsidies to develop the next generation of nuclear power plants, according to a Department of Energy report. Brand's financial links with the industry went unmentioned in the NPR segment.
Brand is one of a small number of former nuclear critics who have become prominent nuclear advocates (Alternet, 03/16/07). But it is a stretch to suggest, as Whitford does, that a handful of former nuclear foes with no current ties to leading environmental groups--and often with financial links to the nuclear industry--constitute "some division within the movement."
In fact, leading environmental groups including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council all agree that nuclear power, with its huge safety, security and cost issues, is not the solution to climate change. A 2005 letter released by Public Citizen and signed by nearly 300 groups opposed congressional subsidies for the nuclear industry:
As national and local environmental, consumer and safe energy organizations, we have serious and substantive concerns about nuclear energy. While we are committed to tackling the challenge of global warming, we flatly reject the argument that increased investment in nuclear capacity is an acceptable or necessary solution.
Instead of a story about a growing fervor for nuclear power among some environmentalists, the story is really one about a growing fervor to resurrect nuclear power among corporate and political elites, aided by a handful of mainly environmentalists-for-hire.
This kind of one-sided coverage is characteristic of NPR's recent reporting on the nuclear industry. In the six stories NPR has broadcast over the past 90 days about the future of nuclear power production in the U.S., NPR's sources included only three opponents of nuclear power plants, versus eights sources touting the safety, environmental friendliness and financial benefits of nuclear energy. Moreover, only one of the three opponents was an expert on the topic, while NPR cast seven of the eight sources speaking in favor of nuclear power as authorities. This period saw an accident at the largest power plant in the world - in Japan (NPR's All Things Considered, 7/19/07) - which was the subject of three additional NPR stories. Yet, even in this coverage of the accident, no experts critical of nuclear power were cited.
One factor that is relevant to NPR's cheerleading for nuclear power is its own financial links to the industry. According to NPR's website, between 1993 and 2005, the public radio service received between $250,000 and $500,000 from Constellation Energy, which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction. During the same period, another nuclear operator, Sempra Energy, donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to NPR. This potential conflict of interest was not disclosed in the August 15 segment, or in any other of NPR's recent largely industry-friendly reports. (NPR has in the past insisted that the corporate "underwriting" money it receives has no bearing on its coverage--a defense that would seem to undercut the rationale for NPR's existence as a noncommercial broadcaster.)
In his interview with Whitford, NPR's Ydstie asked the Fortune editor, "What are the forces that are aligning that make the industry optimistic that there's going to be a revival?" Whitford didn't mention one-sided reporting that fails to disclose its financial ties to the industry as factors that help the industry "shake off its bad reputation" and clear the ground for a nuclear revival.
ACTION: Please contact NPR to suggest that future reports on nuclear power include the consensus view of the environmental movement, and that such reports disclose NPR's financial ties to the industry.
CONTACT: Assistant to the Ombudsman, Chantal de la Rionda, through NPR's website: http://www.npr.org/templates/contact/index.php?columnId=2781901.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
FOX Attacks Iran!
This time we can watch and be aware as FOX fulfills its role as Bush/Cheney regime media tool.
Look and learn...or be lulled and goaded into submission as so many FOX watchers are.--Pete
Look and learn...or be lulled and goaded into submission as so many FOX watchers are.--Pete
Saturday, August 18, 2007
A PLAN FOR PEACE IN IRAQ
[From the Transnational Foundation]
1. Withdraw foreign troops, mercenaries and bases and end the
occupation.
2. Respect Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity and reduce the
role of the U.S. Embassy
3. Establish an international peace building mission for Iraq under UN
leadership
4. Cancel all Iraq's debt
5. Compensate Iraq for the sanctions, the war and the occupation
6. Secure that Iraq regains full sovereignty over its oil resources and
receives 100% of the revenues
7. Make the Middle East as a Zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction
8. Establish a Truth and Reconciliation Process, public apology
accompanied by dialogue and forgiveness
9. Organize people-to-people co-operation and civil society exchanges
10. Organize a long-term regional conference working toward a
comprehensive settlement for the entire region, including its two core
conflicts - Iraq/the West and that Palestine/Israel
DETAILS
http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/TFF_Iraq_Peace_Plan.html
1. Withdraw foreign troops, mercenaries and bases and end the
occupation.
2. Respect Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity and reduce the
role of the U.S. Embassy
3. Establish an international peace building mission for Iraq under UN
leadership
4. Cancel all Iraq's debt
5. Compensate Iraq for the sanctions, the war and the occupation
6. Secure that Iraq regains full sovereignty over its oil resources and
receives 100% of the revenues
7. Make the Middle East as a Zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction
8. Establish a Truth and Reconciliation Process, public apology
accompanied by dialogue and forgiveness
9. Organize people-to-people co-operation and civil society exchanges
10. Organize a long-term regional conference working toward a
comprehensive settlement for the entire region, including its two core
conflicts - Iraq/the West and that Palestine/Israel
DETAILS
http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/TFF_Iraq_Peace_Plan.html
Friday, August 17, 2007
Singing the iPhone Billing Blues
From TelecomWeb News, August 17, 2007
The first flock of iPhone fanatics have gotten their first bills this week — some of them 300 pages long and delivered in a box, others for $3,000 or more. AT&T’s customers are not amused.
Dramatizing the situation better than most has been a video on YouTube posted by graphic designer and blogger Justine Ezarik. In it, the attractive young woman goes through all 300 pages of her bill while the music used in iPhone commercials plays in the background. As of TelecomWeb news break’s posting time, her video had been played 140,905 times in fewer than 48 hours — and that was just for the version Ezarik herself posted on YouTube. Others had re-posted the video, and the video is also on other sites, including Ezarik’s own blog site.
“I got my first AT&T bill, right here,” Ezarik says on the video, “in a box.” (The video is on her blog, http://www.tastyblogsnack.com, for anyone who wants to watch it.)
What’s apparently happened is easily explainable. AT&T uses a separate billing line for each phone call, each data transmission, each text message — even if there’s no charge for them, like on an unlimited plan or where the service falls within the allotted quotas of a user’s service plan. And with the iPhone, the flow of data bits back and forth is constant with many applications, triggering lines by the hundred.
Ezarik, admittedly, does lots of data-intensive things with her iPhone. “Texting and e-mail is my main form of communication, and I know I’m not alone. Why call when you can text?” she asks.
As it turns out, Ezarik and what now looks to be thousands of others, based on the flow of chatter around the blogosphere, didn’t think of signing up for electronic billing when they got their iPhones, an option offered by AT&T that would eliminated the pile of paper. “Sign up for e-billing! Stop the madness!,” Ezarik now recommends. AT&T also offers a condensed billing option.
So far, though, there’s been no explanation of why the salesmen busily ringing up $500 iPhone sales hadn’t been briefed on the billing situation, in order to recommend e-bills to users.
As for the enormous iPhone bills — those are apparently due to data charges for overseas roaming. The all-you-can eat data plans, it seems, don’t cover the iPhone when roaming overseas. AT&T apparently charges $19.97 per megabyte, billed at the rate of $0.0195 per kilobyte. According to complaints reported on a series of blog sites, one hapless user was billed $3,000 for his use of an iPhone for two weeks on a trip to the U.K.; another reported $5,086.66 in charges. AT&T allegedly has an $300 annual international data plan for iPhone, with a 20MB-a-month limit, but the users neither knew about it nor had any idea they would be charged a fortune for what was a relatively small amount of data.
Finally, word is spreading, warning iPhone users who travel outside of the United States to turn off a feature called “eMail autocheck.” It seems the automatic download of PDF spam has been hitting some road warriors in the pocketbook, to the tune of almost $100 in extra charges for a brief trip abroad.
This article is from TelecomWeb News. If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to visit their Web site and register an account, if necessary, to view all their articles on the Web. Support quality journalism.
The first flock of iPhone fanatics have gotten their first bills this week — some of them 300 pages long and delivered in a box, others for $3,000 or more. AT&T’s customers are not amused.
Dramatizing the situation better than most has been a video on YouTube posted by graphic designer and blogger Justine Ezarik. In it, the attractive young woman goes through all 300 pages of her bill while the music used in iPhone commercials plays in the background. As of TelecomWeb news break’s posting time, her video had been played 140,905 times in fewer than 48 hours — and that was just for the version Ezarik herself posted on YouTube. Others had re-posted the video, and the video is also on other sites, including Ezarik’s own blog site.
“I got my first AT&T bill, right here,” Ezarik says on the video, “in a box.” (The video is on her blog, http://www.tastyblogsnack.com, for anyone who wants to watch it.)
What’s apparently happened is easily explainable. AT&T uses a separate billing line for each phone call, each data transmission, each text message — even if there’s no charge for them, like on an unlimited plan or where the service falls within the allotted quotas of a user’s service plan. And with the iPhone, the flow of data bits back and forth is constant with many applications, triggering lines by the hundred.
Ezarik, admittedly, does lots of data-intensive things with her iPhone. “Texting and e-mail is my main form of communication, and I know I’m not alone. Why call when you can text?” she asks.
As it turns out, Ezarik and what now looks to be thousands of others, based on the flow of chatter around the blogosphere, didn’t think of signing up for electronic billing when they got their iPhones, an option offered by AT&T that would eliminated the pile of paper. “Sign up for e-billing! Stop the madness!,” Ezarik now recommends. AT&T also offers a condensed billing option.
So far, though, there’s been no explanation of why the salesmen busily ringing up $500 iPhone sales hadn’t been briefed on the billing situation, in order to recommend e-bills to users.
As for the enormous iPhone bills — those are apparently due to data charges for overseas roaming. The all-you-can eat data plans, it seems, don’t cover the iPhone when roaming overseas. AT&T apparently charges $19.97 per megabyte, billed at the rate of $0.0195 per kilobyte. According to complaints reported on a series of blog sites, one hapless user was billed $3,000 for his use of an iPhone for two weeks on a trip to the U.K.; another reported $5,086.66 in charges. AT&T allegedly has an $300 annual international data plan for iPhone, with a 20MB-a-month limit, but the users neither knew about it nor had any idea they would be charged a fortune for what was a relatively small amount of data.
Finally, word is spreading, warning iPhone users who travel outside of the United States to turn off a feature called “eMail autocheck.” It seems the automatic download of PDF spam has been hitting some road warriors in the pocketbook, to the tune of almost $100 in extra charges for a brief trip abroad.
This article is from TelecomWeb News. If you found it informative and valuable, we strongly encourage you to visit their Web site and register an account, if necessary, to view all their articles on the Web. Support quality journalism.
USA Today's Iraq Progress(?) - Action Alert!
http://www.fair.org
Military claims appear without scrutiny
8/17/07
Government efforts to portray progress in the Iraq War were boosted by USA Today's August 13 front page story, "Major attacks decline in Iraq."
The paper's report relied entirely on current and former military officials, with the key claim being that "large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago." The paper added that such attacks "have dropped to about 70 in July from a high during the past year of about 130 in March, according to the Multi-National Force-Iraq."
This claim deserved some serious scrutiny, but USA Today unfortunately provided none. There was no explanation as to why this particular time frame (from March to July) was uniquely relevant, and USA Today did not explain what the military even meant by 'large Al-Qaeda-style attacks.' The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, which tracks military and political developments in Iraq, provides one count of multiple fatality bombings and casualties from such attacks. By their tally, multiple fatality bombings from March to July showed a slight decline—nothing close to the 50 percent being touted by the U.S. command, and July's total was slightly higher than the previous two months. Bombing using vehicles increased slightly from March to July; meanwhile, civilian deaths in multiple fatality attacks declined only slightly, while deaths of U.S. and Iraqi forces increased. And according to the Iraq Index, multiple fatality bombings targeting civilians were higher in July than the previous two months.
Counts of civilian deaths in Iraq vary: the Associated Press reported (Christian Science Monitor, 8/3/07) at least 2,024 violent deaths in July (an increase of 23 percent from June), while the Iraqi government reported a lower total (1,652) that was nonetheless a significant increase from the previous month (Agence France Presse, 8/1/07)
Given that such data is readily available, USA Today should have—at the very least—acknowledged that the military claims could be questioned. In contrast with USA Today's approach, McClatchy Newspapers (8/15/07) covered similar Pentagon claims regarding violence in Baghdad. But instead of merely repeating the official claims, McClatchy's Leila Fadel raised questions: "U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim."
McClatchy then offered its own analysis of the violence in Baghdad:
It's to be expected that advocates for prolonging the Iraq War will try to argue that the troop 'surge' has brought about some progress in the country. It's not too much to ask that mainstream journalists treat such claims skeptically.
ACTION: Contact USA Today and ask them why their August 13 report, "Major attacks decline in Iraq," merely repeated military claims instead of scrutinizing them.
CONTACT:
USA Today
Brent Jones, Reader Editor
accuracy@usatoday.com
1-800-872-7073
8/17/07
Government efforts to portray progress in the Iraq War were boosted by USA Today's August 13 front page story, "Major attacks decline in Iraq."
The paper's report relied entirely on current and former military officials, with the key claim being that "large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago." The paper added that such attacks "have dropped to about 70 in July from a high during the past year of about 130 in March, according to the Multi-National Force-Iraq."
This claim deserved some serious scrutiny, but USA Today unfortunately provided none. There was no explanation as to why this particular time frame (from March to July) was uniquely relevant, and USA Today did not explain what the military even meant by 'large Al-Qaeda-style attacks.' The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, which tracks military and political developments in Iraq, provides one count of multiple fatality bombings and casualties from such attacks. By their tally, multiple fatality bombings from March to July showed a slight decline—nothing close to the 50 percent being touted by the U.S. command, and July's total was slightly higher than the previous two months. Bombing using vehicles increased slightly from March to July; meanwhile, civilian deaths in multiple fatality attacks declined only slightly, while deaths of U.S. and Iraqi forces increased. And according to the Iraq Index, multiple fatality bombings targeting civilians were higher in July than the previous two months.
Counts of civilian deaths in Iraq vary: the Associated Press reported (Christian Science Monitor, 8/3/07) at least 2,024 violent deaths in July (an increase of 23 percent from June), while the Iraqi government reported a lower total (1,652) that was nonetheless a significant increase from the previous month (Agence France Presse, 8/1/07)
Given that such data is readily available, USA Today should have—at the very least—acknowledged that the military claims could be questioned. In contrast with USA Today's approach, McClatchy Newspapers (8/15/07) covered similar Pentagon claims regarding violence in Baghdad. But instead of merely repeating the official claims, McClatchy's Leila Fadel raised questions: "U.S. officials say the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital is down 50 percent. But U.S. officials declined to provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don't support the claim."
McClatchy then offered its own analysis of the violence in Baghdad:
The number of Iraqis killed in attacks changed only marginally in July when compared with December — down seven, from 361 to 354, according to McClatchy statistics.
No pattern of improvement is discernible for violence during the five months of the surge. In January, the last full month before the surge began, 438 people were killed in the capital in bombings. In February, that number jumped to 520. It declined in March to 323, but jumped again in April, to 414.
No pattern of improvement is discernible for violence during the five months of the surge. In January, the last full month before the surge began, 438 people were killed in the capital in bombings. In February, that number jumped to 520. It declined in March to 323, but jumped again in April, to 414.
It's to be expected that advocates for prolonging the Iraq War will try to argue that the troop 'surge' has brought about some progress in the country. It's not too much to ask that mainstream journalists treat such claims skeptically.
ACTION: Contact USA Today and ask them why their August 13 report, "Major attacks decline in Iraq," merely repeated military claims instead of scrutinizing them.
CONTACT:
USA Today
Brent Jones, Reader Editor
accuracy@usatoday.com
1-800-872-7073
Good Riddance!
Karl Rove - media manipulator, political dirty-trickster, rat-fink bastard - please don't come back. We won't miss you.
Some of us are painfully aware of the fact that you've built a home in the Florida panhandle - The Republican Riviera - and that Jeb Bush will be 59 soon. Please take stock of the damage you've done to the republic thus far, and reconsider dressing up this turkey for the consumption of the living room sheep. They'll buy anything the consensus manufacturing machine tells them to (but you know that).
Perhaps your Machiavellian egoism prevents you from truly viewing your machinations objectively and historically, but you must have some sense of shame, do you not - some sense that all you've accomplished has been done in the most divisive, underhanded fashion. I honestly don't know how you can sleep.
Don't take the fawning adulation and revisionist history of the corporate media to heart. They've always been your bitches. Your legacy will be as tarnished as your soul.
Some of us are painfully aware of the fact that you've built a home in the Florida panhandle - The Republican Riviera - and that Jeb Bush will be 59 soon. Please take stock of the damage you've done to the republic thus far, and reconsider dressing up this turkey for the consumption of the living room sheep. They'll buy anything the consensus manufacturing machine tells them to (but you know that).
Perhaps your Machiavellian egoism prevents you from truly viewing your machinations objectively and historically, but you must have some sense of shame, do you not - some sense that all you've accomplished has been done in the most divisive, underhanded fashion. I honestly don't know how you can sleep.
Don't take the fawning adulation and revisionist history of the corporate media to heart. They've always been your bitches. Your legacy will be as tarnished as your soul.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
New airport agents check for danger in fliers' facial expressions
Kaitlin Dirrig | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: August 14, 2007 06:21:10 PM
WASHINGTON — Next time you go to the airport, there may be more eyes on you than you notice.
Specially trained security personnel are watching body language and facial cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The watcher could be the attendant who hands you the tray for your laptop or the one standing behind the ticket-checker. Or the one next to the curbside baggage attendant.
They're called Behavior Detection Officers, and they're part of several recent security upgrades, Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley told an aviation industry group in Washington last month. He described them as "a wonderful tool to be able to identify and do risk management prior to somebody coming into the airport or approaching the crowded checkpoint."
The officers are working in more than a dozen airports already, according to Paul Ekman, a former professor at the University of California at San Francisco who has advised Hawley's agency on the program. Amy Kudwa, a TSA public affairs specialist, said the agency hopes to have 500 behavior detection officers in place by the end of 2008.
Kudwa described the effort, which began as a pilot program in 2006, as "very successful" at identifying suspicious airline passengers. She said it had netted drug carriers, illegal immigrants and terrorism suspects. She wouldn't say more.
At the heart of the new screening system is a theory that when people try to conceal their emotions, they reveal their feelings in flashes that Ekman, a pioneer in the field, calls "micro-expressions." Fear and disgust are the key ones, he said, because they're associated with deception.
Behavior detection officers work in pairs. Typically, one officer sizes up passengers openly while the other seems to be performing a routine security duty. A passenger who arouses suspicion, whether by micro-expressions, social interaction or body language gets subtle but more serious scrutiny.
A behavior specialist may decide to move in to help the suspicious passenger recover belongings that have passed through the baggage X-ray. Or he may ask where the traveler's going. If more alarms go off, officers will "refer" the person to law enforcement officials for further questioning.
The strategy is based on a time-tested and successful Israeli model, but in the United States, the scrutiny is much less invasive, Ekman said. American officers receive 16 hours of training — far less than their Israeli counterparts_ because U.S. officials want to be less intrusive.
The use of "micro-expressions" to identify hidden emotions began nearly 30 years ago when Ekman and colleague Maureen O'Sullivan began studying videotapes of people telling lies. When they slowed down the videotapes, they noticed distinct facial movements and began to catalogue them. They were flickers of expression that lasted no more than a fraction of a second.
The Department of Homeland Security hopes to dramatically enhance such security practices.
Jay M. Cohen, undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, said in May that he wants to automate passenger screening by using videocams and computers to measure and analyze heart rate, respiration, body temperature and verbal responses as well as facial micro-expressions.
Homeland Security is seeking proposals from scientists to develop such technology. The deadline for submissions is Aug. 31.
The system also would be used for port security, special-event screening and other security screening tasks.
It faces high hurdles, however.
Different cultures express themselves differently. Expressions and body language are easy to misread, and no one's catalogued them all. Ekman notes that each culture has its own specific body language, but that little has been done to study each individually in order to incorporate them in a surveillance program.
In addition, automation won't be easy, especially for the multiple variables a computer needs to size up people. Ekman thinks people can do it better. "And it's going to be hard to get machines that are as accurate as trained human beings," Ekman said.
Finally, the extensive data-gathering of passengers' personal information will raise civil-liberties concerns. "If you discover that someone is at risk for heart disease, what happens to that information?" Ekman asked. "How can we be certain that it's not sold to third parties?"
Whether mass-automated security screening will ever be effective is unclear. In Cohen's PowerPoint slide accompanying his aviation industry presentation was this slogan: "Every truly great accomplishment is at first impossible."
McClatchy Newspapers 2007
Pocket Paradigms
Throughout history, community order has largely grown out of the cooperation and effectiveness of individuals, schools, families, and the strength and local institutions. The police have been there not to maintain order, or even to define it, but to assist and protect the community and to intervene in those rare cases the normal community systems can't handle. One should not expect the fire department to come over and cook your dinner safely or light the logs in your fireplace; nor should one expect the police to replace the normal functions of individuals, families, and community institutions. Yet that is precisely what we have done.
-- Sam Smith, Progressive Review
-- Sam Smith, Progressive Review
Post-Constitutional America: New Law
WASHINGTON POST - The D.C. government has fined an antiwar coalition more than $10,000 for posting signs promoting the March to Stop the War on Sept. 15. . . But members of ANSWER, which stands for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, say the fines are a politically motivated way to silence their grassroots efforts. The signs advertise a march that coincides with the anticipated report from Gen. David Petraeus about conditions in Iraq.
The coalition began receiving the citations on Monday and were told to remove all of the signs within 72 hours, said Brian Becker, national coordinator for ANSWER. That time has since passed, and the coalition has been fined $150 for each illegally posted sign, which amounts to more than $10,000 thus far.
Becker said the coalition has posted similar signs for more than six years and follows city regulations such as using water soluble paste as an adhesive. "We consider this to be a political act targeting the anti-war movement," Becker said. "We're not doing anything illegal."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/15/AR2007081501245.html
The coalition began receiving the citations on Monday and were told to remove all of the signs within 72 hours, said Brian Becker, national coordinator for ANSWER. That time has since passed, and the coalition has been fined $150 for each illegally posted sign, which amounts to more than $10,000 thus far.
Becker said the coalition has posted similar signs for more than six years and follows city regulations such as using water soluble paste as an adhesive. "We consider this to be a political act targeting the anti-war movement," Becker said. "We're not doing anything illegal."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/15/AR2007081501245.html
kill, Kill, KILL!!
ANDREW GUMBEL, INDEPENDENT, UK - The Bush administration is preparing to speed up the executions of criminals who are on death row across the United States, in effect, cutting out several layers of appeals in the federal courts so that prisoners can be "fast-tracked" to their deaths. With less than 18 months to go to secure a presidential legacy, President Bush has turned to an issue he has specialized in since approving a record number of executions while Governor of Texas.
The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales - Mr Bush's top legal adviser during the spree of executions in Texas in the 1990s - is putting finishing touches to regulations, inspired by recent anti-terrorism legislation, that would allow states to turn to the Justice Department, instead of the federal courts, as a key arbiter in deciding whether prisoners live or die. The US is already among the top six countries worldwide in terms of the numbers of its own citizens that it puts to death. Fifty-two Americans were executed last year and thousands await their fate on death row.
In some instances, prisoners would have significantly less time to file federal appeals, and the appeals courts significantly less time to respond. On the question of whether defendants received adequate representation at trial - a key issue in many cases, especially in southern states with no formal public defender system - the Attorney General would be the sole decision-maker.
The US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales - Mr Bush's top legal adviser during the spree of executions in Texas in the 1990s - is putting finishing touches to regulations, inspired by recent anti-terrorism legislation, that would allow states to turn to the Justice Department, instead of the federal courts, as a key arbiter in deciding whether prisoners live or die. The US is already among the top six countries worldwide in terms of the numbers of its own citizens that it puts to death. Fifty-two Americans were executed last year and thousands await their fate on death row.
In some instances, prisoners would have significantly less time to file federal appeals, and the appeals courts significantly less time to respond. On the question of whether defendants received adequate representation at trial - a key issue in many cases, especially in southern states with no formal public defender system - the Attorney General would be the sole decision-maker.
Pollution causes 40% of global deaths
SCIENCE DAILY - About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.
David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences, and a team of Cornell graduate students examined data from more than 120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases. Their report is published in the online version of the journal Human Ecology and will be published in the December print issue. . .
David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences, and a team of Cornell graduate students examined data from more than 120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases. Their report is published in the online version of the journal Human Ecology and will be published in the December print issue. . .
The Less-Than-Generous State
NYT Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/opinion/16thu3.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/opinion/16thu3.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
You would think that we were living in the lap of the Nanny State. One of the most puzzling facts of the political debate is how much traction Republicans still get from their calls to cut taxes and public spending, and how timorous Democrats are in arguing against them.
The United States has long had one of the most meager tax takes in the industrial world. America’s social spending — on programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security to food stamps — is almost the stingiest among industrial nations. Among the 30 industrialized countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only four — Turkey, Mexico, South Korea and Ireland — spend less on social programs as a share of their economy.
Long a moral outrage, this tightfisted approach to public needs is becoming an economic handicap. Shortchanging public health impairs America’s competitiveness. If the United States is to reap the rewards of globalization, the government must provide a much more robust safety net — to ensure public support for an open economy and protect vulnerable workers.
The O.E.C.D.’s definition of social spending includes programs to help people overcome such challenges as old age, poverty and unemployment. It excludes most education and the tax deduction for mortgage interest, which in the United States benefits the well-to-do more than others.
The United States has long preferred financing some social goals with tax breaks, such as the deduction for company-provided health insurance or credits for dependent care. After adding in these breaks America still comes out sixth from the bottom in total social spending.
Abdicating responsibilities doesn’t make them go away, it just pushes them onto the individual or the private sector, which often can’t cope with the burden. That’s most evident in companies’ withdrawal of health benefits. In this country, according to an O.E.C.D. study, unemployment benefits replace, on average, 14 percent of workers’ lost earnings. Of the 20 richest countries in the organization, only Japan’s are lower.
For American workers, and voters, to accept the increased competition brought on by globalization, the public sector would have to provide much better social insurance than that.
Innocent Man Sentenced to Death Under Cruel Texas Law
By Liliana Segura, The Brooklyn Rail
Posted on August 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59484/
Kenneth Foster's time is running out.
On Tuesday, August 7, in a six-to-three decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his final writ of habeas corpus, giving the legal green light for his execution. Foster, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection on August 30, is now at the mercy of the merciless Board of Pardons and Paroles. The odds are bad. Five out of seven board members must recommend clemency before Governor Rick Perry will consider it -- and in a state that has executed nearly 400 people in thirty years, clemency has only been granted twice. But Foster's supporters, who are spearheading a letter-writing campaign to the board and governor, are relying on one particularly salient detail to move their minds, if not their hearts: Foster didn't kill anyone.
Foster was convicted for the 1996 murder of Michael LaHood Jr., who was shot following a string of robberies, by a man named Mauriceo Brown. Brown admitted to the shooting and was executed by lethal injection last year. Now Foster faces the same fate. So, if Brown was the shooter, what did the 19-year-old Foster do to get a death sentence? He sat in his car, 80 feet away, unaware that a murder was taking place.
Foster was convicted under Texas's "law of parties," a twist on a felony murder statute that enables a jury to convict a defendant who was not the primary actor in a crime. This can mean sentencing someone to death even if he or she had no proven role in a murder. Texas's law states that "if, in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to commit it." Defendants, the Texas courts say, can be held responsible for "failing to anticipate" that the "conspiracy" -- in Foster's case, the robberies, for which he was the getaway driver -- would lead to a murder. Foster's sentence, death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal recently commented, "criminalizes presence, not actions."
In theory, the law of parties is "a well-recognized legal document," says Houston defense attorney Clifford Gunter, and most states with the death penalty on the books include a similar provision for "non-triggermen." Nevertheless, critics of the Texas law say it's an aberration -- a slippery legal statute that stands in direct violation of the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Enmund v. Florida. Still the "prevailing view," according to Gunter, Enmund held that the death penalty was unconstitutional for a defendant "who aids and abets a felony in the course of which a murder is committed by others but who does not himself kill, attempt to kill, or intend that a killing take place or that lethal force will be employed." In Texas today, the law or parties says exactly the opposite.
Even more troubling is the law in practice. When Justice Byron White wrote the Enmund decision in 1982, he observed that the Court was not aware of a single execution of someone who did not kill or intend to kill. What a difference another quarter-century makes. Months after Enmund was decided, Texas executed its first prisoner since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. In the tidal wave of capital cases that followed, numerous defendants would be sentenced to die under the law of parties.
One was Norman Green. Green was charged for a murder during a botched robbery in an electronics store in 1985. He got death. His accomplice, the man who actually pulled the trigger, got life. The arbitrary result exemplifies what Green's appellate lawyer, Verna Langham -- who also handled Kenneth Foster's first appeal -- sees as the danger of the law of parties. "[It] is subject to such loose interpretation," she told the Austin Chronicle in 2005. "A kid in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people can end up being sentenced to death." Green was executed in 1999.
No formal study has been done on the number of defendants subjected to the law of parties in Texas. Anti-death penalty activists estimate that Texas death row has 80 to 100. This number seems high to David Dow, founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and author of Executed on a Technicality (2005). But he says that it could be an accurate measure of the number of prisoners whose juries were given the choice of applying the law of parties, even if their conviction did not hinge on it. "In a lot of cases, you have a [law of parties] instruction, but jurors have to find one or the other: Either the person was responsible for killing the victim or they are responsible for participating in a crime where it should have been anticipated that a murder would take place." For a defendant facing lethal injection, it's a distinction without a difference. Regardless of the number of times the law of parties has been used, its clear effect has been to broaden the pool of defendants eligible for death. By inviting a jury to speculate whether a defendant "should have known" a murder could happen, it drastically lowers the burden of proof for a punishment supposedly reserved for "the worst of the worst."
From the zeal of prosecutors to the legal machinery that supports them, "the structure of the Texas's legal system makes it easier to sentence people to death," says Dow. Between the Polunsky Unit in Livingston and the women's death row in Gatesville, nearly 400 prisoners are awaiting execution. By the end of the summer, Texas will have killed its 400th prisoner since the death penalty was brought back. The state that famously carried out 152 executions under Governor George W. Bush has seen Gov. Rick Perry surpass his record. Since taking office in December 2000, Perry has signed off on over 158 executions -- a number that will be dated when this piece goes to press (and which would be higher still were it not for the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which forced Perry to commute the death sentences of 28 prisoners who were younger than 18 at the time of their crime). In this context, it's hard not to see the law of parties as an irresistible tool in a legal system designed to summarily execute people. Especially if the defendant is black and the victim is white.
Kenneth Foster's case is a good example. He's not just a black man accused of killing a white man; he was convicted for killing the son of an attorney highly esteemed by the legal community. As with so many other cases involving families of influence, the media was all over it, and the LaHood family's wish for an execution quickly became public knowledge. (LaHood's mother reaffirmed her support of Mauriceo Brown's execution last year.) In other particularly high-profile cases, the law of parties has come in similarly handy for the prosecution. In the trial of Patrick Murphy Jr. -- one of the notorious "Texas Seven," who in 2000 escaped from prison, killed a police officer on Christmas Eve, and were summarily sentenced to die -- prosecutors seeking death sentences across the board used the law of parties to circumvent the fact that Murphy was not at the scene of the crime. Prospective jurors were asked not just how they felt about capital punishment, but also about the law of parties specifically. (It worked. Murphy is now sitting on death row.)
The many excesses of Texas capital law offer a portrait of a brutal and broken system -- one that has long been protested by anti-death penalty activists. More recently, prisoners themselves have begun to organize from the inside. Kenneth Foster is among them. In 2005 he helped found D.R.I.V.E, a group of death row prisoners who protest the death penalty as well the abusive conditions of their incarceration. D.R.I.V.E, which stands for "Death Row Inner-Communalist Vanguard Engagement," is multi-racial, highly political, and, perhaps most important, thriving -- on one of the most repressive death rows in the country. Members encourage fellow prisoners to protest on execution days, and to protest their own executions (refusing to walk to the van that takes them to the executions chamber; refusing last meals). They also protest inhumane prison conditions. Last fall, a dozen death row prisoners at Polunsky went on a hunger strike to protest the inedible food and constantly overflowing toilets in their cells, among other abuses. Comparing themselves to the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, they eventually caught the attention of the New York Times.
Some members of the group also invoke the legacy of Gary Graham -- a.k.a. Shaka Sankofa -- the Texas death row prisoner who was executed in 2000, despite overwhelming evidence that he could be innocent. Graham, who was put to death amidst widespread protests, maintained his innocence until the end, declaring in his last statement, "They are murdering me tonight." This era, which Dow considers the "heyday" of protest around executions, coincided with increased repression on Texas death row. Following an attempted prison break in the late 90s, the death row population was relocated. At their new home in the Polunsky Unit, prisoners are housed for 23 hours a day in cells that are 60 square feet (the American Correctional Association recommends a minimum of 80 feet). Work and recreation privileges are pretty much non-existent, and the few prisoners entitled to small luxuries can easily have them taken away. Such is the case of Stephen Moody, whose participation in last fall's hunger strike led to the confiscation of his radio. Texas death row prisoners are allowed no contact visits, and only a few phone calls a year.
Despite this, Kenneth Foster and D.R.I.V.E. have allies on the outside. In addition to his supporters and family in Texas, a New York-based political hip-hop group called the Welfare Poets is speaking out on behalf of Foster and other prisoners on Texas death row; grassroots groups like the Campaign to End the Death Penalty are working to protest Foster's execution, from Harlem to Austin. With Foster's legal recourses almost dried up, a letter campaign to members of the appeal board is underway. But it's a long shot. "Perry has never granted clemency in a capital case before, even when the Board recommended it," says Bryan McCann, a CEDP activist in Austin. In a state that will have executed 400 people by September, clemency has only been granted two times. "If Kenneth Foster has a good innocence claim, that would be great for him," Dow says, noting that innocence is what gets attention these days. But while Foster's supporters argue that Foster is innocent -- that nobody should be executed "for driving a car," in the slaughterhouse state of Texas, innocence can be harder to prove than guilt.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/59484/
Children Deserve Veterinary Care Too
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com
Posted on August 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59483/
This year, Americans will spend about $9.8 billion on health care for their pets, up from $7.2 billion five years ago. According to the New York Times, New York's leading pet hospitals offer CT scans, MRI's, dialysis units, and even a rehab clinic featuring an underwater treadmill, perhaps for the amphibians in one's household. A professor who consults to pet health facilities on communication issues justified these huge investments in pet health to me by pointing out that pets are, after all, "part of the family."
Well, there's another category that might reasonably be considered "part of the family." True, they are not the ideal companions for the busy young professional: It can take two to three years to housebreak them; their standards of personal hygiene are lamentably low, at least compared to cats; and large numbers of them cannot learn to "sit" without the aid of Ritalin.
I'm talking about children, of course, and while I can understand why many people would not one of these hairless and often incontinent bipeds in their homes, it is important to point out that they can provide considerable gratification. There's a three-year-old in my life, for example, who gives me many hours a week of playful distraction from the pressures of work. No matter how stressed I am, she can brighten my mood with her quavering renditions of the ABC song or "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
She has health insurance, as it turns out, and generally high quality care. But you can never be too sure. So I went to the website of VPI Pet Insurance, one of the nation's largest animal companion health insurers, to see what kind of a policy I could get for her. In the application form, I listed her as a three-year-old mixed breed dog -- a description made somewhat plausible by the fact that her first words, spoken at the remarkable age of 10 months, were "ruf ruf" and "doggie outside." When I completed the form and clicked to get a quote I was amazed to see that I get her a "premium" policy for a mere $33 a month.
But, you may be wondering, could a veterinarian handle common children's ills? On the hopeful side, let me cite the case, reported in June by Bob Herbert of the New York Times, of Diamonte Driver, a 12-year old boy who died recently from an abscessed tooth because he had no insurance and his mother could not afford $80 to have the tooth pulled. Could a vet have handled this problem? Yes, absolutely.
Or there's the case of 14-year old Devante Johnson, also reported by Herbert, who died when his health insurance ran out in the middle of treatment for kidney cancer. I don't know exactly what kind of treatment he was getting, but I suspect that the $1.25 million linear accelerator for radiation therapy available at one of New York's leading pet hospitals might have helped. The Times article also mentions a mixed breed named Bullwinkle who consumed $7,000 worth of chemotherapy before passing on to his reward. Surely Devante could have benefited from the same kind of high quality pet care, delivered at a local upscale animal hospital.
It may seem callous to focus on children when so many pets go uninsured and without access to CT-scans or underwater treadmills. But in many ways, children stack up well compared to common pets. They can shed real tears, like Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. They can talk as well as many of the larger birds, or at least mimic human speech. And if you invest enough time in their care and feeding, they will jump all over you when you arrive at the door, yipping and covering your face with drool.
The Senate Finance Committee has approved a bill that would expand state health insurance coverage for children (S-CHIP) to include 3.2 million kids who are not now covered (but leaving about 6 million still uncovered.) Bush has promised to veto this bill, on the grounds that government should not be involved in health coverage. If Bush does veto the bill, the fallback demand should be: Open up pet health insurance to all American children now! Though even as I say this, I worry that the president will counter by proposing to extend euthanasia services to children who happen to fall ill.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/59483/
Prices for Key Foods are Rising Sharply; Half of Eligible Poor Don't Get Food Stamps
By Kevin Hall and Rob Hotakainen, McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on August 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59713/
Prices for Key Foods are Rising Sharply
By Kevin G. Hall
The Labor Department's most recent inflation data showed that U.S. food prices rose by 4.1 percent for the 12 months ending in June, but a deeper look at the numbers reveals that the price of milk, eggs and other essentials in the American diet are actually rising by double digits.
Already stung by a two-year rise in gasoline prices, American consumers now face sharply higher prices for foods they can't do without. This little-known fact may go a long way to explaining why, despite healthy job statistics, Americans remain glum about the economy.
Meeting with economic writers last week, President Bush dismissed several polls that show Americans are down on the economy. He expressed surprise that inflation is one of the stated concerns.
"They cite inflation?" Bush asked, adding that, "I happen to believe the war has clouded a lot of people's sense of optimism."
But the inflation numbers reveal the extent to which lower- and middle-income Americans are being pinched.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its June inflation report that egg prices are 19.5 percent higher than they were in June 2006. Over the same period, according to the department's consumer price index, whole milk was up 13.3 percent; fresh chicken 10 percent; navel oranges 19.8 percent; apples 11.7 percent. Dried beans were up 11.5 percent, and white bread just missed double-digit growth, rising by 9.6 percent.
These numbers get lost in the broader inflation rate for all goods and services, which measured 2.7 for the same 12-month period. Across the economy, rising food prices were offset by falling prices for things bought at the mall: computers, cameras, clothing and shoes.
"All of that stuff is going down in price, but prices for gasoline have gotten higher, and food prices have gone up," said Mark Vitner, a senior economist for Wachovia, a large national bank based in Charlotte, N.C.
People also go to the mall a lot less than they go to the grocery store, so they're constantly reminded that dietary staples are up sharply.
Why are food prices rising?
It's partly because of corn prices, driven up by congressional mandates for ethanol production, which have reduced the amount of corn available for animal feed. It's also because of tougher immigration enforcement and a late spring freeze, which have made farm laborers scarcer and damaged fruit and vegetable crops, respectively. And it's because of higher diesel fuel costs to run tractors and attractive foreign markets that take U.S. production.
The Labor Department's last detailed survey of consumer spending, in 2005, showed that Americans spent about 12.8 percent of their income on food. A bit more than 7 percent of their income was spent on food at home, and 5.7 percent was spent on food away from home.
These percentages suggest that higher food prices, while unwelcome, won't break the bank for most consumers. But for retirees such as Jacqueline Wilson, 60, of Upper Marlboro, Md., rising food and fuel prices take a big bite out of fixed income. "I make every dollar count," said Wilson, outside a Giant supermarket. "I cut back. … I get only as much as I need. I don't buy it because it is 10 for $10, but so that I'm using it and not wasting my money."
Asked about her view of the economy, she answered, "Terrible."
In broad terms, the economy isn't terrible. Unemployment is near record lows, and the second quarter posted a strong 3.4 percent growth rate. But it is for those Americans who are pinched by rising food and gasoline costs, and that's a lot of folks. Half the nation's families earn below the median family income of about $56,000. Three-fifths of American families report income under $70,000.
At the Al-Mara farm in Midland, Va., Jeff and Patty Leonard run a large dairy operation where about 600 cows produce 19,000 pounds of milk each day. They plant about 1,000 acres of corn, so they don't face all of the rising feed costs like some farmers. But they sympathize with consumers because the costs of nitrogen fertilizers and diesel fuel have all gone up sharply, raising production costs by nearly 30 percent.
"That's how your farmer feels here at home when we're trying to buy soybean meal, food for our cows and trying to maintain our equipment," said Patty Leonard. "I can understand exactly what the shopper is going through."
Milk prices aren't set on the farm. That's done by marketing cooperatives, which this year have been successful in passing on higher production costs after several dismal years of prices that took dairy farmers back to the 1970s.
"It's pretty much a realignment of the actual value of milk in today's dollar," Patty Leonard said. "Milk has been cheap for a long, long time."
Globalization also explains higher milk prices. Australia, a leading milk exporter, is struggling through a drought, and European governments are pulling back dairy subsidies. So U.S. farmers, aided by a weak dollar, are stepping in to meet growing demand for milk products in China and India. That's pinched supply at home and abroad, driving up prices.
"U.S. per capita dairy consumption is the highest it's been since 1987," said Chris Galen, vice president of the National Milk Producers Federation, pointing to rising U.S. demand for cheese, made from milk. "Americans are eating more cheese than ever -- not just volume but per capita."
To make more milk, or raise more chickens that lay more eggs, farmers need feed corn and other feed products. But corn prices have soared over the past year as Congress pushes ethanol, a renewable fuel made from corn. Fields that previously grew soybeans are now yielding corn, and that's driven up the price of soybeans as they become scarce.
Iowa State University's Center for Agricultural and Rural Development shocked the farm sector earlier this summer with a report that corn farmers are expected to lock in prices of $4 a bushel through 2010, about double what corn fetched two years ago.
"You will probably be seeing these prices rise for quite a long time and stabilizing, maybe, but not going back to the $2-a-bushel corn," said Jacinto Feitosa, co-director of the center in Ames, Iowa.
Study: Half of Nation's Poor Don't Get Food Stamps
By Rob Hotakainen
Half of the nation's eligible poor aren't getting the food stamps to which they're entitled, a study released Tuesday found.
The District of Columbia had the highest participation rate in 2004, at 71.8 percent, while Missouri ranked first among the 50 states in getting food stamps to its low-income residents. Nevada ranked last among states, with 32 percent of its eligible residents getting food stamps.
Overall, 50.2 percent of the nation's qualified poor received food stamps in 2004, according to the study by the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group that examines the local impact of federal budget policies.
"We've got over 35 million people in this country struggling to get enough food to eat, and 50 percent of all low-income people are not receiving the benefit that is intended to alleviate this food insecurity," said Greg Speeter, the project's executive director. "While the food-stamp program provides a vital service, clearly too many people are still going without."
After Missouri, the states with the highest participation rates were Tennessee, Maine, West Virginia and Oklahoma. After Nevada, the states with the lowest participation rates were Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho.
The food-stamp program, founded in 1964 and run by the Department of Agriculture, is the largest of the federal government's food and nutrition programs. In 2004, the program cost $28.6 billion, or 1.2 percent of total federal spending, and served 23.2 million people, according to the study.
In examining state participation rates, the authors of the study focused on county data for 2004, finding wide differences.
The study found that a significant number of counties, 13.2 percent, had below-average percentages of low-income people participating in the program, even though they had above-average poverty rates.
The authors cited many reasons for the disparities, including the stigma of government benefits, eligibility rules and lack of information about the benefits.
Under the food-stamp program, a family is eligible for aid if its income is 130 percent of the poverty level.
Nearly all of the states followed a national trend of increasing the number and percentage of low-income people participating in the food-stamp program in recent years. The study said that much of the increase was the result of changes in eligibility rules that took effect in 2002. And since 2004, all states are now using electronic benefits transfer systems, which allow food-stamp beneficiaries to appear to be using debit cards.
Only three states — Hawaii, Rhode Island and Connecticut — had decreases in the proportion of low-income people participating in the program between 2000 and 2004.
Percentage of low-income people receiving food-stamp benefits in 2004 by state, from low to high:
United States - 50.2
1. Nevada - 32.3
2. Wyoming - 35.0
3. Utah - 35.2
4. Colorado - 36.6
5. Idaho - 38.7
6. New Jersey - 38.9
7. Wisconsin - 40.0
8. Kansas - 40.4
9. Maryland - 40.4
10. New Hampshire - 40.8
11. Massachusetts - 41.2
12. Florida - 43.2
13. Minnesota - 43.7
14. California - 44.2
15. Iowa - 44.4
16. Nebraska - 46.0
17. Rhode Island - 46.1
18. Arizona - 46.1
19. Connecticut - 46.2
20. Montana - 46.8
21. North Carolina - 47.1
22. Texas - 47.2
23. North Dakota - 47.3
24. Virginia - 47.5
25. New York - 47.5
26. South Dakota - 48.2
27. Washington - 50.0
28. Mississippi - 51.3
29. Alaska - 52.0
30. Alabama - 53.1
31. Georgia - 53.3
32. Pennsylvania - 53.3
33. Delaware - 53.7
34. Ohio - 53.7
35. Illinois - 55.1
36. Indiana - 55.2
37. New Mexico - 55.7
38. Vermont - 55.8
39. Michigan - 58.9
40. South Carolina - 59.3
41. Hawaii - 60.1
42. Arkansas - 60.6
43. Kentucky - 61.0
44. Louisiana - 64.6
45. Oregon - 64.7
46. Oklahoma - 65.1
47. West Virginia - 65.3
48. Maine - 67.1
49. Tennessee - 67.9
50. Missouri - 71.5
District of Columbia - 71.8
(Source: National Priorities Project)
AlterNet is making this material available in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107: This article is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/59713/
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
House of Death Whistleblower Wins
August 14, 2007
Please Distribute Widely
Dear Colleagues,
The US Government continues to attempt to stem the information released about the 'House of Death' case that Narco News has been reporting on for over three years. Now the US Department of Justice has had to make a six figure legal settlement to the whistle-blower who started it all, Sandalio Gonzalez, after harassing him for years.
Conroy reports:
"The U.S. government's willingness to abort its appeal and pay through the nose - which is a concession that it did, in fact, discriminate against Gonzalez - is yet more evidence that Gonzalez' claims about the House of Death cover-up are on the mark.
"...Gonzalez argued that he was transferred from Miami to El Paso in retaliation for exposing the missing coke in Miami and that the retaliation only intensified after he blew the whistle on the House of Death cover-up in El Paso. The government's treatment of him eventually led Gonzalez to retire from DEA on Jan. 8, 2005.
"Gonzalez claims further that the cover-up of the House of Death murders goes to the highest levels of the departments of Justice and Homeland Security and that DEA Administrator Karen Tandy initiated the retaliation against him at the behest of President Bush's buddy, U.S. Attorney Sutton."
Conroy's latest report on the House of Death cover-up can be found online at Narco News:
A complete archive of all 56 reports on the House of Death can also be found online in a Narco News special section:
From somewhere in a country called América,
David B. Briones
Webmaster
The Narco News Bulletin
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Monday, August 13, 2007
How Market-Democracy Keeps the Public and "Populism" At Bay
By Edward Herman
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/13herman.cfm
It was interesting to see the New York Times editorialize against the growing role of money in elections, pointing to "the sheer volume of money it [the current election campaign] is generating," and the "ludicrously premature handicapping of the race based on the ability to raise cash" (ed., "Running for Dollars," April 5, 2007). The editors note that the "political industry" is "ordaining mega-fund raising as the sine qua non of a credible candidacy," when "in principle" a political race should be a "competition…if not of ideas, then at least of personalities and positions."
But it is even more interesting to observe how the New York Times falls in line with the standards of the "political industry" in their treatment of potential candidates and thrusts aside the "principles" that would give weight to "positions" and perhaps even "ideas" as well as personalities. Day after day the paper features Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, with lesser attention to John Edwards, including their history, fund-raising achievements, political strategies, and swipes at one another, with minimal attention to their "positions" or "ideas." And there has been minimal attention to how their fund-raising is related to their "positions" currently or possibly in the future. The Times is hardly unique in featuring the candidates that have the bucks, marginalizing both their positions and ideas, and paying negligible attention to the candidates who are not raising much cash, but the paper is notable for pointing out the principles being sacrificed as it sets them aside and joins the media crowd in following the money!
So the process of selecting leaders via supposedly democratic elections in the United States starts with the flow of money to candidates--and the size and direction of that flow depends on who has the money and uses it to fund election campaigns. In this country, with a highly developed and profitable corporate community, the money comes disproportionately from Wall Street and a broad array of business interests. Enormous sums are needed these days as TV ads are expensive and necessary and the competition among candidates for the necessary funds is intense-many candidates who are already in office have complained about the great proportion of their time they need to devote to just raising money.
Those that provide the money are investors in candidates and elections, and credible theories have been developed on the extent to which the parties serve particular investor groups who focus heavily on particular parties, though almost always hedging their bets and building good will with the less favored party. (See Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995]). The investor-businesses must consider this use of capital a profitable one, with rates of return high enough to justify this form of investment. The payoffs may be specific and large, as where the investment helps bring with it a large government contract, or it may just be a broadly based but still substantial payoff in reduced tax rates, eased environmental constraints, benefits from reduced or impaired regulation, wars and rising military budgets, and other payoffs. Market-based democracy has proven to be very profitable in recent years.
Clearly, if the relative size of the flow of funds from investors to candidates defines election "credibility," the investors effectively vet the candidates before the voting public has any say in the matter, vetoing those who they disapprove, and exercising a huge influence on the success of those who pass through the vetting filter. The investors also operate indirectly through funding party bosses, party thinktanks, and party activities, as in the case of the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute, whose officials strongly influence the selection and advance of candidates within their own party--candidates who must be acceptable to the underlying investor community. AIPAC and other organizations and investors focused on support of Israel are reputed to provide 40 percent or more of Democratic Party election funds, and are therefore a highly important investor block who represent only a subset of the U.S. Jewish community, which in total constitutes something like 2 percent of the population.
The vetting and support power of election investors means that a market democracy is not a real democracy as the public participates only indirectly in choosing their leaders, and their choices are restricted to the set approved by the monied elite. In economics terminology, voters have free consumer choice but not consumer sovereignty in the electoral process, the latter resting with the party leaders and, most importantly, their funders in the investor community. This also means that extremely well qualified potential candidates, and candidates running on minor party tickets, will not be able to compete with the vetted "credible" candidates for lack of money. Thus, by this selection process improper "ideas" and "positions" either won't make it into the serious election competition (e.g., Kucinich and Gravel), or as minor party candidates will be underfunded and underreported (e.g., Nader in 2000 and 2004).
The electoral process would not work in this highly undemocratic fashion without the full cooperation of the mainstream media in allowing financial support to define credibility and determine coverage, as the New York Times does in contradiction with its editorial admonitions on the importance of have competition based on substance other than money support. The media do this because they are part of the same corporate community as the election investor-funders: their owners are rich, their advertisers have strong pro-business political interests, their leading sources are members of the government, the flak they worry about is from powerful people and the rightwing, and they work on the basis of establishment ideology. They accept or are frightened into cooperation with the pro-Israel donors and organizations. Their editors, having internalized all of these considerations, gravitate to allowing money flows to dominate, with a focus on the horse-race, and, importantly eschewing tendencies toward "populism," which is generally anathema to the investor community.
It may be argued that the public's sentiments are really tapped ex ante because the vetted candidates pulling in the money usually have high poll ratings, which they must have-along with the money-to stay in the competition. This misses two important points. One is that high poll ratings are strongly related to media attention and media spin, so that money, the associated credibility and substantial media coverage, mean good poll ratings, assuming a positive or at least neutral spin. Another point is that the vetted and credible candidates quickly become "electable," whereas those poorly funded and not credible are soon seen, even by those who prefer them in substance, as not electable. The non-electables lose poll status for those anxious that their party win, even with a second- or third-best candidate.
Investors don't like populists who, by definition, want to serve popular forces rather than elite interests. Populists are likely to seek more progressive taxes-and higher taxes for the election investors--support for labor organization, more money for education and infrastructure improvement, a building up of the sagging benefits of the welfare state, and a sharp cutback in resources for the warfare state and "security." (The latter are the elite's preferred form of resource waste and "make work"-and in contrast with, say, the New Deal's WPA, derided at the time by the elite but which built huge numbers of schools, roads, dams and museums-in fact the last major surge of infrastructure construction in this country-- the elite's preferred form of waste produces only debt, fear, and dead and mangled bodies.)
Paralleling the elite's dislike of populism is that of the elite representatives or proxies in the mainstream media. This is reflected in the media's regular hostility to populist candidates, their frequent claims that the Democrats have lost elections because of populist tendencies and a failure to attract centrist independents, and their regular suggestions that the Democrats must combat their lack of adequate attention to "national security." In a classic illustration, the New York Times defended the exclusion of Ralph Nader from the 2000 pre-election debates on the grounds that the two major candidates provided adequate options (editorial, "Mr. Nader's Misguided Crusade," June 10, 2000). Both candidates called for more arms and neither featured any items on the populist agenda. In the present campaign, it has been noted that the media are already impatient with the inclusion of populists like Kucinich and Gravel in organized debates, while at the same time they laud the "diversity" in Republican debates that include marginal candidates (see Peter Hart, "Clear the Stage," EXTRA!," July/August 2007). An exception: the pundits are furious at the lesser-known Republican contender Ron Paul, an antiwar candidate!
With both the money flows and media bias hostile to populism, the "credible" candidates start out with or quickly learn the formulas: steer clear of any firm commitment reorienting taxes, helping labor organization, or spending large sums on infrastructure and welfare, but make clear your financial support of the national security state and your commitment to Israel and the active pursuit of the leading foreign targets (today, Iran and a recalcitrant Pakistan, along with Chavez and Venezuela). For the Democrats, given their mass base, it is common for one or more of the credibles to make populist gestures in the primary competititon, but these are usually not very specific, and whether general or specific are likely to be ignored following the election in a process of social-democratic betrayal that has become global (see Edward Herman, "Democratic Betrayal: A Standard Form," Z Magazine, January 2007; http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Jan2007/herman0107.html).
The growth of inequality and the weakening of the union movement, with the associated concentration of economic power, has increased the election vetting power of a tiny elite. The increased concentration of control of the media has had the same effect, and the two factors reinforce one another-that is, they both contribute to a political shift to the right, which produces tax, labor and other policies that increase inequality and that facilitates media concentration, both of which contribute to a further shift to the right, and so on. The vetting process becomes even more built-in, and the same is true of the media's acceptance and normalization of the link between money flows to candidates, their associated credibility, and the attention given to them as opposed to impoverished candidates. There is even reinforcement from court appointments by rightwing politicians, with the help of the vetted Democrats, who make sure that there are no residual "checks and balances" to the triumph of rightwing ideology, including the right of money to "free speech" and electoral domination.
So the system is working well for the investors in the market democracy, even if poorly for the general electorate, and the efforts at mass mobilization in the public interest have made little headway so far in stopping let alone reversing the trend, at least in the United States and other "developed" countries.
Pay CEOs less, minimum wage workers more
By Holly Sklar
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/12sklar.cfm
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/12sklar.cfm
Minimum wage workers made $5.15 an hour when Harry Potter became a sensation a decade ago, and nothing more until July 24, three days after the final Harry Potter book release.
The same year Harry Potter and the $5.15 minimum wage made their debuts, in 1997, Business Week declared CEO pay was "Out of Control." Since then, CEO pay has gotten more out of control.
Average CEO pay at the top 500 companies jumped 38 percent to $15.2 million in 2006 -- the year we broke the record for the longest period ever without a raise in the federal minimum wage.
The July 24 minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $5.85 is so little, so late, that the minimum wage is still worth less than it was back in 1997, when it was $6.67 in today's dollars.
Minimum wage workers had more buying power when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton opened his first Walton's 5 & 10 in 1951.
CEOs make more in 90 minutes than minimum wage workers make in a year.
The two longest periods in history without a minimum wage increase have occurred since 1980. Those long draughts without a raise have left minimum wage workers in the dust.
In 1980, the average CEO at a big corporation made as much as 97 minimum wage workers. In 1997, the average CEO made as much as 728 minimum wage workers.
Last year, CEOs made as much as 1,419 minimum wage workers.
"As the productivity of workers increases, one would expect worker compensation to experience similar gains," a 2001 U.S. Department of Labor report observed.
Instead, the gains have gone to record-breaking profits, CEOs and other have-mores.
Between 1980 and 2006, worker productivity went up 70 percent, average worker wages went nowhere, the minimum wage fell 32 percent, and domestic corporate profits rose 256 percent, adjusting for inflation.
A red light for minimum wage was a green light for accelerating greed.
Adjusting for inflation, men in their thirties make less today than their fathers' generation made in the 1970s.
It's time to stop overpaying CEOs enough to keep their families rich for many generations to come at the expense of workers paid poverty wages today.
Even the state with the highest minimum wage, Washington at $7.93, doesn't match the buying power of the federal minimum wage at its peak in 1968. Worth $9.56 in today's dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was more than $2 higher than the scheduled raise in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 on July 24, 2009.
Too bad we can't use Hermione's magical Time-Turner to send the minimum wage and CEO pay both back to 1968.
The minimum wage sets the wage floor. If the minimum wage had stayed above $9, Wal-Mart and McDonald's, our nation's largest employers, couldn't routinely pay wages much lower.
Wal-Mart's wages would be closer to Costco, which pays starting wages over $10 an hour. Costco CEO Jim Sinegal has long asserted, "Paying your employees well is not only the right thing to do, but it makes for good business."
McDonald's starting wages would be more like In-N-Out Burger, which has a minimum wage of $9.50 an hour and has long ranked first or tied for first nationwide among fast food chains in overall excellence.
Our nation's minimum wage would be closer to Harry Potter's U.K., where the minimum wage already tops $10, child poverty rates have fallen sharply, and the economy is stronger than ours.
Overpaying CEOs and underpaying workers is bad for business. Studies show that showering stock options on chief executives lowers shareholder returns, and increases the likelihood companies will cook their books, default on debt and go bankrupt.
Higher worker wages benefit business by increasing consumer spending, reducing costly employee turnover, raising worker morale and productivity, and improving product quality and company reputation.
In the words of Gary Theilen, owner of Theilen Farm and Cattle in Enid, Okla., "As a small-business owner who has always paid well above the minimum wage, it has been my experience that paying living wages makes good business sense. It is good for business, workers and the community."
Theilen has joined business owners from across the nation in endorsing higher minimum wage at Business for a Fair Minimum Wage (www.businessforafairminimumwage.org).
Paying workers enough to live on is the minimum employers should do.
Holly Sklar is co-author of "A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future" and "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us." She can be reached at hsklar@aol.com.
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