From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Sep 1 19:05:18 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 10:05:18 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Entropy Gets No Respect Message-ID: <20090902100518.4813a552.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (August 26 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society The relation between modern industrial society and the scientific ideas that supposedly guide it is more complex than a casual glance will necessarily reveal. The ideology a society believes that it embraces and the assumptions about the world that actually underlie its actions and institutions are not uncommonly at odds with one another. It often takes the most strenuous sort of willed inattention to fail to notice the gap, but efforts toward that end can count on the support of public opinion as well as the more tangible backing provided by economic interests. Consider the clash between the Christian and liberal values allegedly embraced by the great powers of nineteenth century Europe and the ruthless political and economic exploitation imposed by these same powers on the subject peoples of their huge colonial empires. The result was a rush to find some justification for European empires other than the obvious one, which was simply that Europeans wanted the wealth and power they could get by exploiting the rest of the planet. As Stephen Jay Gould chronicled in his engaging The Mismeasure of Man (1981), generations of scientists thus spent their careers trying to argue that the "white race", that imaginary and variously defined beast, was biologically superior to the other "races" on the planet. These efforts fell afoul of a minor detail of anthropology. It so happens that people of European descent fall toward the middle range of a great many biological indices; people of African descent tend toward one end of most of these indices, and people of East Asian descent tend toward the other. Thus it proved impossible to argue, say, that Britons were superior to Africans without providing evidence that Chinese were superior to Britons, and claims that Britons were superior to Chinese ended up just as effectively proving that Africans were superior to Britons. Still, these efforts continued right up into the first half of the twentieth century, because the alternative was to admit that European domination of the planet was a straightforward act of piracy backed by nothing more edifying than a temporary advantage in military technology. The industrial nations of the early 21st century are in a very similar predicament - or, more precisely, in two very similar predicaments. On the one hand, the relationship between the industrial nations and their Third World client states is very little more equitable than that between the British, say, and the quarter or so of the Earth's land surface that was occupied by British troops and exploited by British economic interests in the nineteenth century. Claims of racial superiority having fallen out of fashion, the industrial nations nowadays justify their position by claiming that their political and economic institutions are superior, and the rest of the world's nations can share exactly the same lifestyles of abundance if they only adopt these. Today's industrial societies treat this claim as a self-evident truth. Of course the colonial powers of the nineteenth century treated the claim of European racial superiority as a self-evident truth, too, and the two claims are equally bogus. The abundance enjoyed by the world's industrial nations just now, after all, is the result of the fact that those same industrial nations use the great majority of the world's fossil fuel production. Given that the current industrial nations have burnt around half the planet's fossil fuel resources themselves, leaving the remaining half to fuel themselves and the rest of the world in the future, dangling the carrot of industrial prosperity in the faces of Third World countries at this point in the historical process is dishonest at best. Of course it does seem to be true that representative governments and corporate-capitalist economies are more efficient than the competition at turning abundant fossil fuels into suburban lifestyles. This does not make representative governments and corporate-capitalist economies the cause of the prosperity of today's industrial nations, any more than the skin color of people from Europe was the cause of Europe's ascendancy during its age of empire. Still, just as the unmentionable realities behind European imperialism made it inevitable that there would be attempts to justify it via bad science, the equally awkward realities behind the ascendancy of today's industrial powers provide the push behind well-meaning attempts to package the industrial world's institutions for export to the Third World. The same sort of logic, on an even deeper level, governs the relationship between the nations of the modern industrial world and the foundation of those nations' present prosperity - the Earth's fossil fuel reserves themselves. The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of spectacular economic abundance, and by doing so, foreclosed the chance that anybody else would enjoy that same abundance in the future. Fossil fuels are not renewable resources in any time frame accessible to our species. Every barrel and ton and cubic foot of fossil fuel we use now is subtracted from the total available to our descendants; despite an orgy of handwaving, no other resource can provide anything approaching the glut of cheap abundant energy on which our lifestyles of relative privilege depend. Yet this point of view is at least as unmentionable in polite society just now as were the gritty realities of European colonialism in its time, or the equally gritty facts underlying the ascendancy of the world's industrial nations over the Third World today. The strenuous efforts to find a racial basis for European supremacy a century ago, and the equally vigorous efforts to hold up contemporary Western institutions as the key to prosperity and peace in the Third World today, thus have precise equivalents in the enthusiasm with which every imaginable alternative energy resource gets treated by government officials and media pundits throughout the industrial world. None of these resources can actually provide the cheap abundant energy needed to maintain the kind of society we have today. I know that this is a controversial statement just now. Still, it's worth noting that every alternative energy resource that's actually been brought into production has turned out, at best, to provide a modest increment to existing energy supplies, and that only if you don't keep track of the energy subsidy the new resource gets from fossil fuels. Of course technologies that haven't been put into production look more promising, and the further they are from implementation, the more impressive they look; hype, often geared to the very practical goal of selling shares in IPOs, is at least as abundant in the energy field as anywhere else. And this, dear reader, is where the gap between our society's official respect for science and its real attitudes toward the world shows up with remarkable clarity. Once again, the role of the B-movie heavy in this drama is played by the second law of thermodynamics, better known as the law of entropy. As mentioned in a previous post, this is the gold standard of physics, the law you can't break without, as Sir Arthur Eddington put it, collapsing in deepest humiliation. Everybody in the industrial world with the least smattering of a scientific education knows about it, or at least was introduced to it, and yet next to nobody wants to talk about how it affects the emerging energy crisis of our time. The crucial implication of the law of entropy, for our purposes, is that it's not energy as such, but a difference in energy potential, that allows work to be done. Imagine two smooth round boulders of equal weight, one of them sitting on a flat plateau and the other sitting on the slope of a steep hill. If the two are at the same distance from the center of the Earth, gravitation gives them exactly the same amount of potential energy. Still, if you give the one on the plateau a push, you aren't likely to do anything but strain your muscles, while if you give an equal push to the one on the slope, you may send it rolling down the hill, squashing everything in its path. The difference is that every part of the plateau has the same energy potential due to gravity, while every part of the slope does not have the same potential, and the boulder rolling down the slope can cash in some of the difference in potential to keep itself moving. The greater the difference in potential, the greater the payoff in terms of energy released. Notice, though, what happens when the boulder on the slope finally lurches to a stop at the bottom of the valley below: it stops, and another push won't get it going again. It still has a lot of potential energy in that position - it has, in theory, 4500 miles to fall until it reaches the center of the earth - but there's nowhere it can go to release any of that energy. Without a difference in potential, how much energy you've got is a meaningless statistic. (This is, incidentally, why the quest for zero point energy is an exercise in absurdity; by definition, zero point energy is at the lowest possible potential state, and therefore cannot be made to do any work at all.) The same rule applies to every energy resource: there has to be a difference in potential that allows energy to be released, and the bigger the difference, the bigger the benefit. With petroleum, the difference is in chemical energy. Those long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms have a lot of energy to release when they come apart and combine with highly reactive oxygen instead; the short chains that form natural gas have less, and the carbon in coal has less still, though it's still a lot by the standards of other energy sources. All the extraordinary things our species has done with fossil fuels over the last three hundred years are functions, in effect, of the difference in chemical potential energy between a barrel of oil and a cloud of smoke. Why are these reflections as welcome in the collective conversation of our time as a slug in a fresh green salad? Because they point up the profoundly shortsighted nature of the decisions that made the world in which all of us now live. The immense potential energy locked up in fossil fuels was put there by millions of years of photosynthesis. It's as though, to return to our metaphor, living things down through the ages rolled boulders uphill and perched them high above the valley floor. After a half billion years or so, our species came along, and figured out how to roll those boulders downhill. As long as there are still plenty of boulders in place, we can continue using them, but when the rate at which we want to send boulders rolling downhill outstrips the boulder supply, it's a waste of breath to insist that we can get the same results by bouncing pebbles across the valley floor. This is basically what the more enthusiastic proponents of alternative energy are saying. By the time sunlight gets to us, after traversing 93 million miles of empty space, it's simply not that concentrated an energy source; that's why it took the Earth's photosynthetic organisms so many millions of years to build up the energy reserves we now squander so freely. Wind and hydroelectric power are both secondhand sunlight, the product of natural cycles driven by the sun; the same is true of every kind of biofuel, of course. Nuclear energy is the one nonsolar energy resource we've got, but it has severe problems and limitations of its own, not least the fact that the fossil fuel inputs needed to build, run, and decommission a nuclear reactor are so vast that there's a real question whether nuclear power is a net energy source at all. (Of course the further a nuclear technology is from actual implementation, the better it looks, and the ones that are still vaporware look best of all.) Does this mean alternative energy is a waste of time? Of course not. Modest as the energy outputs from alternative sources are, they're what we'll have to work with when the fossil fuel is gone. What it means, rather, is that the particular kind of civilization we've built in the last three centuries will not survive the end of cheap abundant fossil fuels. A society that is used to getting things done by rolling huge boulders down steep slopes is going to have to learn to make do on the much less lavish results of bouncing pebbles across the flat. The problem here is that very few people want to deal with that reality. The great majority will make themselves believe in zero point energy and evil space lizards and any other absurdity you care to name, rather than gulp and take a deep breath and admit that the prosperity we've enjoyed for the last three centuries was bought at our grandchildren's expense. I sometimes suspect that one of the reasons so many people like to imagine an apocalyptic end to the industrial age is that sudden extinction is easier to contemplate than the experience of slowly waking up to the full extent of our own collective stupidity. And that, dear reader, is why entropy has become the Rodney Dangerfield of the contemporary energy debate. It may be the gold standard of physics, but in the collective conversation about our future, it don't get no respect. _____ I'm pleased to report that both the new projects mentioned in last week's post are moving ahead. Readers who are following "Star's Reach", my online blog-novel about the world after peak oil, will want to know that a new episode has been posted at http://starsreach.blogspot.com. The Cultural Conservers Foundation is also moving forward. Those interested in participating in a more focused discussion of the subject are invited to join me on a newly founded email list, cultural_conservers at yahoogroups.com. The list is moderated, and the same rules apply there as here - no spam, no flaming, no trolls, et cetera. The fast way to join is to send an email to cultural_conservers-subscribe at yahoogroups.com, with "subscribe" as the subject line. The process of starting a nonprofit also takes a certain amount of cash; I'm putting my own money into it, but would welcome help with the startup costs. A PayPal account for the Foundation under the address culturalconservers at verizon.net has been set up to handle donations for the foundation. If you haven't used PayPal before, and are minded to make a donation, the website at www.paypal.com will walk you through the process in a very user-friendly fashion. Many thanks in advance for your help! _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/08/entropy-gets-no-respect.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Sep 1 19:18:26 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:18:26 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [A-List] How the Israel lobby controls the U.S. In-Reply-To: <000001ca2b37$df4f43f0$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> References: <1766397279.5821681251315721401.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> <7o7ghn$5o14cn@ipo4smtp.cc.utah.edu> <000001ca2b37$df4f43f0$0900a8c0@PRISONLEGALNEWS.local> Message-ID: <4A9DC7E2.5040500@gmail.com> Pollard was one of the people my father, who I previously have mentioned (at least on A-List) was the S.E. U.S. regional coordinator for the ADL, had discussed with me. My dad was very angry about his continued imprisonment and did not understand why the various Israeli and Jewish interest groups were unable to free him either. An interesting mystery. Maybe Pollard was a double agent for the Illuminati? Leigh Paul Wright wrote: > If AIPAC controls the US then why is Jonathan Pollard still languishing > in prison after 22 years for spying on the US for Israel? Every Israeli > government and many prominent Zionists have sought his release to no avail. > > > > **Paul Wright, Editor** > > **Prison Legal News** > > **P.O. Box**** 2420** > > **West Brattleboro****, VT 05303** > > **802 257-1342** > > **pwright at prisonlegalnews.org** > > **www.prisonlegalnews.org** > > > > **Seattle**** Office** > > **2400 NW 80th St. Suite 148** > > **Seattle****, WA 98117** > > **206-246-1022** > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > *From:* a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu > [mailto:a-list-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu] *On Behalf Of *Todd Boyle > *Sent:* Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:20 PM > *To:* The A-List > *Subject:* Re: [A-List] [R-G] How the Israel lobby controls the U.S. > > > > The Israeli government viewpoint has quite a remarkable access to U.S. > television viewers and radio listeners. We get it constantly from PBS, > NPR, as well as corporate channels (Comcast CSPAN, FOX, NBC, etc) as > well as the BBC, and from syndicated shows like the Takeaway funded by > Liberty Mutual, Microsoft, Pemco, etc. > > */How do they do it?!! No other country has the open-door access to > speak to U.S. audiences. > > /*The Israeli government takes full advantage of this access many times > per day, to subvert U.S. interests and advance Israel's intersts. See > this morning, Dore Gold for example had an hour on CSPAN-- > http://cspan.org/Recent/Default.aspx > The result of such widespread repetition of their propaganda will likely > be continued U.S. military aggressions against Muslim people across > south asia. > > *Fmr. Israeli Amb. Dore Gold, Author, "The Rise of Nuclear Iran" * > > *According to Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Iran > continues to pursue nuclear weapons even as western leaders pursue talks > with the Islamic republic. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, Amb. > Gold discusses his new book, "The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran > Defies the West." * > > *Today : Washington, DC : 1 hr. * > > Todd > > > At 08:50 PM 8/30/2009, Suzanne de Kuyper wrote: > > This is an understatement of massive proportions. The AIPAC agenda is U > S Foreign Policy, it is E U Foreign Policy and is in process of > demonizing over two billion humans who happen to be either Arab or > Islamic. As NATO countries join in the baying of the hounds catching > sight of the prey, Germany and France cave in to B. Netanyahu's 'destroy > Iran' demands, the self imolation of the E U and of the U S laws and > rights speeds up, mirrored as if with the forest fires of reluctant > Greece and bankrupt California. > > Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com > > > On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:42 PM, Sid Shniad > wrote: > > Arab News 24 July 2009 (01 Sha`ban 1430) > > The Middle East's Leading English Language Daily > > How Israel lobby controls US > > Jeff Gates > > IN the early 1960s, Sen. William J. Fulbright fought to force the > American Zionist Council to register as agents of a foreign government. > The council eluded registration by reorganizing as the American Israel > Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC has since become what Fulbright most > feared: A foreign agent dominating American foreign policy while > disguised as a domestic lobby. > > Israelis and pro-Israelis object when they hear that charge. How, they > ask, can we so few wield such influence over so many? Answer: It?s all > in the math. And in the single-issue advocacy brought to bear on US > policy-making by dozens of ?domestic? organizations that now compose the > Israel lobby, with AIPAC its most visible force. > > The political math was enabled by Sen. John McCain whose support for all > things Israeli ensured him the GOP nomination to succeed George W. Bush. > McCain?s style of campaign finance reform proved a perfect fit for the > Diaspora-based fundraising on which the lobby relies. Co-sponsored by > Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, this change in federal election law > typifies how Israeli influence became systemic. > > ?McCain-Feingold? raised the amount (from $1,000 to $2,300) that > candidates can receive from individuals in primary and general > elections. A couple can now contribute a combined $9,200 to federal > candidates: $4,600 in each of the primary and general elections. Primary > elections, usually low-budget, are particularly easy to sway. > > Importantly for the Diaspora, this change also doubled the funds > candidates can receive without regard to where those contributors > reside. A candidate in Iowa, say, may have only a few pro-Israeli > constituents. When campaign support is provided by a nationwide network > of pro-Israelis, that candidate can more easily be persuaded to support > policies sought by Tel Aviv. Diaspora-based fundraising has long been > used by the lobby with force-multiplying success to shape US foreign > policy. Under the guise of reform, John McCain doubled the financial > resources that the lobby can deploy to elect and retain its supporters. > > Fulbright was right. The influence-peddling process works like this. > Candidates are summoned for in-depth AIPAC interviews. Those found > sufficiently committed to Israel?s agenda are provided a list of donors > likely to ?max out? their campaign contributions. Or the process can be > made even easier when AIPAC-approved candidates are given the name of a > ?bundler.? > > Bundlers raise funds from the Diaspora and bundle those contributions to > present them to the candidate. No quid pro quo need be mentioned. After > McCain-Feingold became law in 2003, AIPAC-identified bundlers could > raise $1 million-plus for AIPAC-approved candidates simply by contacting > 10 like-minded supporters. Here?s the math: > > The bundler and spouse ?max out? for $9,200 and call 10 others, say in > Manhattan, Miami, and Beverly Hills. Each of them max out ($10 x $9,200) > and call 10 others for a total of 11. (111 x $9,200 = $1,021,200.) > > Imagine the incentive to do well in the AIPAC interview. One call from > the lobby and a candidate can collect enough cash to mount a credible > campaign in most congressional districts. From Tel Aviv?s perspective, > that political leverage is leveraged yet again because fewer than 10 > percent of the 435 House races are competitive in any election cycle > (typically 35 to 50). > > Additional force-multipliers come from: (a) sustaining this financial > focus over multiple cycles, (b) using funds to gain and retain seniority > for those serving on congressional committees key to promoting Israeli > goals, and (c) opposing any candidates who question those goals. > > ?Jewish Achievement? reports that 42 percent of the largest political > donors to the 2000 election cycle were Jewish, including four of the top > five. That compares to less than two percent of Americans who are > Jewish. Of the Forbes 400 richest Americans, 25 percent are Jewish > according to Michael Steinhardt, a key funder of the Democratic > Leadership Council. The DLC was led by Jewish Zionist Sen. Joe Lieberman > when he resigned in 2000 to run as vice president with pro-Israeli > presidential candidate Al Gore. > > Money was never a constraint. Pro-Israeli donors were limited only by > how much they could lawfully contribute to AIPAC-screened candidates. > McCain-Feingold raised a key limit. The full impact of this foreign > influence has yet to be tallied. What?s known, however, is sufficient to > apply the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Of the top 50 > neoconservatives who advocated war in Iraq, 26 were Jewish (52 percent). > > Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, remains one of the more notable > recipients of funds. In 1948, he was trailing badly in the polls and in > fundraising. His prospects brightened dramatically in May after he > recognized as a legitimate state an enclave of Jewish extremists who > originally planned to settle in Argentina before putting their sights on > Palestine. > > That recognition was opposed by Secretary of State George C. Marshall, > the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the bulk of the diplomatic corps, the > fledgling Central Intelligence Agency and numerous distinguished > Americans, including moderate and secular Jews concerned at the troubles > that were certain to follow. Not until 1984 was it revealed that a > network of Jewish Zionists had funded Truman?s campaign by financially > refueling his whistle-stop campaign train with $400,000 in cash ($3 > million in 2009). > > To buy time on the public?s airwaves, money raised from the Israel > lobby?s network is paid to media outlets largely owned or managed by > members of the same network. Presidents, senators and congressmen come > and go but those who collect the checks rack up the favors that amass > lasting political influence. > > The US system of government is meant to ensure that members of the House > represent the concerns of Americans who reside in congressional > districts ? not a nationally dispersed network (a Diaspora) committed to > advancing the agenda of a foreign nation. Federal elections are meant to > hold senators accountable to constituents who reside in the states they > represent, not out-of-state residents or a foreign government. > > In practical effect, McCain-Feingold hastened a retreat from > representative government by granting a nationwide network of foreign > agents disproportionate influence over elections in every state and > congressional district. Campaign finance ?reform? enabled this network > to amass even more political clout ? wielding influence disproportionate > to their numbers, indifferent to their place of residence and often > contrary to America?s interests. > > This force-multiplier is now wielded in plain sight, with impunity and > under cover of free speech, free elections, free press and even the > freedom of religion. Therein lies the perils of an entangled alliance > that induced the US to invade Iraq and now seeks war with Iran. By > allowing foreign agents to operate as a domestic lobby, the US was > induced to confuse Zionist interests with its own. > > _______________________________________________ > > Rad-Green mailing list > > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 1 20:01:25 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 19:01:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Entropy Gets No Respect In-Reply-To: <20090902100518.4813a552.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <20090902100518.4813a552.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: <184034.14334.qm@web43505.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Arch druid? I hope human sacrifice isn't part of your prescription. The original Druids were up there with the Aztecs in quality of human sacrifice to the gods. I am more of a fruit and flowers guy myself. The gods I prefer don't care much for blood. ? But then perhaps he is from the reformed Druid church. ________________________________ From: Bill Totten To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Tuesday, September 1, 2009 6:05:18 PM Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Entropy Gets No Respect by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (August 26 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society The relation between modern industrial society and the scientific ideas that supposedly guide it is more complex than a casual glance will necessarily reveal. The ideology a society believes that it embraces and the assumptions about the world that actually underlie its actions and institutions are not uncommonly at odds with one another. It often takes the most strenuous sort of willed inattention to fail to notice the gap, but efforts toward that end can count on the support of public opinion as well as the more tangible backing provided by economic interests. Consider the clash between the Christian and liberal values allegedly embraced by the great powers of nineteenth century Europe and the ruthless political and economic exploitation imposed by these same powers on the subject peoples of their huge colonial empires. The result was a rush to find some justification for European empires other than the obvious one, which was simply that Europeans wanted the wealth and power they could get by exploiting the rest of the planet. As Stephen Jay Gould chronicled in his engaging The Mismeasure of Man (1981), generations of scientists thus spent their careers trying to argue that the "white race", that imaginary and variously defined beast, was biologically superior to the other "races" on the planet. These efforts fell afoul of a minor detail of anthropology. It so happens that people of European descent fall toward the middle range of a great many biological indices; people of African descent tend toward one end of most of these indices, and people of East Asian descent tend toward the other. Thus it proved impossible to argue, say, that Britons were superior to Africans without providing evidence that Chinese were superior to Britons, and claims that Britons were superior to Chinese ended up just as effectively proving that Africans were superior to Britons. Still, these efforts continued right up into the first half of the twentieth century, because the alternative was to admit that European domination of the planet was a straightforward act of piracy backed by nothing more edifying than a temporary advantage in military technology. The industrial nations of the early 21st century are in a very similar predicament - or, more precisely, in two very similar predicaments. On the one hand, the relationship between the industrial nations and their Third World client states is very little more equitable than that between the British, say, and the quarter or so of the Earth's land surface that was occupied by British troops and exploited by British economic interests in the nineteenth century. Claims of racial superiority having fallen out of fashion, the industrial nations nowadays justify their position by claiming that their political and economic institutions are superior, and the rest of the world's nations can share exactly the same lifestyles of abundance if they only adopt these. Today's industrial societies treat this claim as a self-evident truth. Of course the colonial powers of the nineteenth century treated the claim of European racial superiority as a self-evident truth, too, and the two claims are equally bogus. The abundance enjoyed by the world's industrial nations just now, after all, is the result of the fact that those same industrial nations use the great majority of the world's fossil fuel production. Given that the current industrial nations have burnt around half the planet's fossil fuel resources themselves, leaving the remaining half to fuel themselves and the rest of the world in the future, dangling the carrot of industrial prosperity in the faces of Third World countries at this point in the historical process is dishonest at best. Of course it does seem to be true that representative governments and corporate-capitalist economies are more efficient than the competition at turning abundant fossil fuels into suburban lifestyles. This does not make representative governments and corporate-capitalist economies the cause of the prosperity of today's industrial nations, any more than the skin color of people from Europe was the cause of Europe's ascendancy during its age of empire. Still, just as the unmentionable realities behind European imperialism made it inevitable that there would be attempts to justify it via bad science, the equally awkward realities behind the ascendancy of today's industrial powers provide the push behind well-meaning attempts to package the industrial world's institutions for export to the Third World. The same sort of logic, on an even deeper level, governs the relationship between the nations of the modern industrial world and the foundation of those nations' present prosperity - the Earth's fossil fuel reserves themselves. The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of spectacular economic abundance, and by doing so, foreclosed the chance that anybody else would enjoy that same abundance in the future. Fossil fuels are not renewable resources in any time frame accessible to our species. Every barrel and ton and cubic foot of fossil fuel we use now is subtracted from the total available to our descendants; despite an orgy of handwaving, no other resource can provide anything approaching the glut of cheap abundant energy on which our lifestyles of relative privilege depend. Yet this point of view is at least as unmentionable in polite society just now as were the gritty realities of European colonialism in its time, or the equally gritty facts underlying the ascendancy of the world's industrial nations over the Third World today. The strenuous efforts to find a racial basis for European supremacy a century ago, and the equally vigorous efforts to hold up contemporary Western institutions as the key to prosperity and peace in the Third World today, thus have precise equivalents in the enthusiasm with which every imaginable alternative energy resource gets treated by government officials and media pundits throughout the industrial world. None of these resources can actually provide the cheap abundant energy needed to maintain the kind of society we have today. I know that this is a controversial statement just now. Still, it's worth noting that every alternative energy resource that's actually been brought into production has turned out, at best, to provide a modest increment to existing energy supplies, and that only if you don't keep track of the energy subsidy the new resource gets from fossil fuels. Of course technologies that haven't been put into production look more promising, and the further they are from implementation, the more impressive they look; hype, often geared to the very practical goal of selling shares in IPOs, is at least as abundant in the energy field as anywhere else. And this, dear reader, is where the gap between our society's official respect for science and its real attitudes toward the world shows up with remarkable clarity. Once again, the role of the B-movie heavy in this drama is played by the second law of thermodynamics, better known as the law of entropy. As mentioned in a previous post, this is the gold standard of physics, the law you can't break without, as Sir Arthur Eddington put it, collapsing in deepest humiliation. Everybody in the industrial world with the least smattering of a scientific education knows about it, or at least was introduced to it, and yet next to nobody wants to talk about how it affects the emerging energy crisis of our time. The crucial implication of the law of entropy, for our purposes, is that it's not energy as such, but a difference in energy potential, that allows work to be done. Imagine two smooth round boulders of equal weight, one of them sitting on a flat plateau and the other sitting on the slope of a steep hill. If the two are at the same distance from the center of the Earth, gravitation gives them exactly the same amount of potential energy. Still, if you give the one on the plateau a push, you aren't likely to do anything but strain your muscles, while if you give an equal push to the one on the slope, you may send it rolling down the hill, squashing everything in its path. The difference is that every part of the plateau has the same energy potential due to gravity, while every part of the slope does not have the same potential, and the boulder rolling down the slope can cash in some of the difference in potential to keep itself moving. The greater the difference in potential, the greater the payoff in terms of energy released. Notice, though, what happens when the boulder on the slope finally lurches to a stop at the bottom of the valley below: it stops, and another push won't get it going again. It still has a lot of potential energy in that position - it has, in theory, 4500 miles to fall until it reaches the center of the earth - but there's nowhere it can go to release any of that energy. Without a difference in potential, how much energy you've got is a meaningless statistic. (This is, incidentally, why the quest for zero point energy is an exercise in absurdity; by definition, zero point energy is at the lowest possible potential state, and therefore cannot be made to do any work at all.) The same rule applies to every energy resource: there has to be a difference in potential that allows energy to be released, and the bigger the difference, the bigger the benefit. With petroleum, the difference is in chemical energy. Those long chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms have a lot of energy to release when they come apart and combine with highly reactive oxygen instead; the short chains that form natural gas have less, and the carbon in coal has less still, though it's still a lot by the standards of other energy sources. All the extraordinary things our species has done with fossil fuels over the last three hundred years are functions, in effect, of the difference in chemical potential energy between a barrel of oil and a cloud of smoke. Why are these reflections as welcome in the collective conversation of our time as a slug in a fresh green salad? Because they point up the profoundly shortsighted nature of the decisions that made the world in which all of us now live. The immense potential energy locked up in fossil fuels was put there by millions of years of photosynthesis. It's as though, to return to our metaphor, living things down through the ages rolled boulders uphill and perched them high above the valley floor. After a half billion years or so, our species came along, and figured out how to roll those boulders downhill. As long as there are still plenty of boulders in place, we can continue using them, but when the rate at which we want to send boulders rolling downhill outstrips the boulder supply, it's a waste of breath to insist that we can get the same results by bouncing pebbles across the valley floor. This is basically what the more enthusiastic proponents of alternative energy are saying. By the time sunlight gets to us, after traversing 93 million miles of empty space, it's simply not that concentrated an energy source; that's why it took the Earth's photosynthetic organisms so many millions of years to build up the energy reserves we now squander so freely. Wind and hydroelectric power are both secondhand sunlight, the product of natural cycles driven by the sun; the same is true of every kind of biofuel, of course. Nuclear energy is the one nonsolar energy resource we've got, but it has severe problems and limitations of its own, not least the fact that the fossil fuel inputs needed to build, run, and decommission a nuclear reactor are so vast that there's a real question whether nuclear power is a net energy source at all. (Of course the further a nuclear technology is from actual implementation, the better it looks, and the ones that are still vaporware look best of all.) Does this mean alternative energy is a waste of time? Of course not. Modest as the energy outputs from alternative sources are, they're what we'll have to work with when the fossil fuel is gone. What it means, rather, is that the particular kind of civilization we've built in the last three centuries will not survive the end of cheap abundant fossil fuels. A society that is used to getting things done by rolling huge boulders down steep slopes is going to have to learn to make do on the much less lavish results of bouncing pebbles across the flat. The problem here is that very few people want to deal with that reality. The great majority will make themselves believe in zero point energy and evil space lizards and any other absurdity you care to name, rather than gulp and take a deep breath and admit that the prosperity we've enjoyed for the last three centuries was bought at our grandchildren's expense. I sometimes suspect that one of the reasons so many people like to imagine an apocalyptic end to the industrial age is that sudden extinction is easier to contemplate than the experience of slowly waking up to the full extent of our own collective stupidity. And that, dear reader, is why entropy has become the Rodney Dangerfield of the contemporary energy debate. It may be the gold standard of physics, but in the collective conversation about our future, it don't get no respect. _____ I'm pleased to report that both the new projects mentioned in last week's post are moving ahead. Readers who are following "Star's Reach", my online blog-novel about the world after peak oil, will want to know that a new episode has been posted at http://starsreach.blogspot.com. The Cultural Conservers Foundation is also moving forward. Those interested in participating in a more focused discussion of the subject are invited to join me on a newly founded email list, cultural_conservers at yahoogroups.com. The list is moderated, and the same rules apply there as here - no spam, no flaming, no trolls, et cetera. The fast way to join is to send an email to cultural_conservers-subscribe at yahoogroups.com, with "subscribe" as the subject line. The process of starting a nonprofit also takes a certain amount of cash; I'm putting my own money into it, but would welcome help with the startup costs. A PayPal account for the Foundation under the address culturalconservers at verizon.net has been set up to handle donations for the foundation. If you haven't used PayPal before, and are minded to make a donation, the website at www.paypal.com will walk you through the process in a very user-friendly fashion. Many thanks in advance for your help! _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/08/entropy-gets-no-respect.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Sep 1 20:42:44 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:42:44 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Entropy Gets No Respect In-Reply-To: <184034.14334.qm@web43505.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <20090902100518.4813a552.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <184034.14334.qm@web43505.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4A9DDBA4.7050401@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gary Crethers wrote: > Arch druid? I hope human sacrifice isn't part of your prescription. The original Druids were up there with the Aztecs in quality of human sacrifice to the gods. I knew the chief Arch-Angel of Holy City California. He was a fat little Portuguese guy who wore a tam-o-shanter, smoked cigars (and weed), and used to drive a Renault R-10 that had outlived it's supply chain. But I digress... The only similarity being he's deceased, and so is anyone who had any solid information about ancient Druid practices and no axe to grind... or 'strokes' for that matter. Druids now, are like Wicca practitioners... of modern philosophical origin grafted on to what is know of the 'olde time religion'. Not much is known with any certainty, and human sacrifice is one of those uncertainties. "Diodorus Siculus asserts, on *unnamed sources*, that a sacrifice acceptable to the Celtic gods had to be attended by a druid, for they were the intermediaries. He also claims that before a battle they often threw themselves between two armies to bring about peace. (That's 'sacrifice', but not the kind of which you speak...) Diodorus remarks upon the importance of prophets in druidic ritual: "These men predict the future by observing the flight and calls of birds and by the sacrifice of holy animals: all orders of society are in their power... and in very important matters they prepare a human victim, plunging a dagger into his chest; by observing the way his limbs convulse as he falls and the gushing of his blood, they are able to read the future." Archaeological excavations at Ribemont in Picardy, France and at Gournay-sur-Aronde carried out by Jean-Louis Brunaux in the late 1990s were interpreted by Brunaux as human sacrifices, but the British archaeologist Martin Brown has suggested that these might be war memorials honouring the dead for their courage.[12] (Which is a lot like arguing whether the US army supplied the smallpox blankets to the Mandan intentionally, or not. We'll most likely never know, but are doomed to eternally extrapolate.) At a bog in Lindow, Cheshire, England was discovered a body, designated the "Lindow Man", which may also have been the victim of a druidic ritual, but it is just as likely that he was an executed criminal or a victim of violent crime.[13] The body is now on display at the British Museum, London." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid#Ritual_and_sacrifice -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKndugAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysy4IH/iWT4QOe6SlJy0bFggwUoAEK oBNm4Lq8Jw/l9cIdrSnUvS7MX31v8PiJkV0/Pso2eGABO85AK7AFEB+vpehA8Jdl 6Fjsy9sWyGxyg+xTwNcV9FlO1mk2zkInFLGhfCXFe/T+gk759sLoMNSVogliobH5 0Q9fvZvVw8k9SnrnEUsPwq8cl1QT//+D9TP6p3glY9RbZNjS92jQ/fcFjNJwBrQV frYtCYo/5+XxwZh37weAi54yAP9RAFij27iKcpon151aTTvwPdS3BOf1fjBGeguC NjsNxEpy84c0D8tc/gXQF3yyWqLV46vLXSW1rWe8Ej/TKARvVbUNU5ka/nStWrM= =pXmo -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 1 22:10:32 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 21:10:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Free Jailed Falsely :) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <33551.57233.qm@web111511.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Help Mr. Leonard Peltier get the parole he, and humanity, truly deserves, advocate and evoke?? :) Leonard has carried a constant burden for all of humanity, for over 34 years straight, graciously, courageously, and with great generosity, and, besides thanking him, we have a responsibility to act, not just to right the wrongs of this world, to act to lessen? Leonard's, and those like Leonard's, burdens; they've humbly born for us all.? Luckily, "we, the people...", can still be the voice for those unheard; let us do what we can do to support Leonard's parole.? Thanx, again.? Ciao.??? :) reality This Action, on Change.org, the url??? :) Free Jailed Falsely??? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/free_jailed_falsely http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions10 ? Very latest from Friends Digest? :) Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 8?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8793 Friends Digest Acts: Attorney Seitz on denial of parole; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8769 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 7?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8759 Shout Out to NH and Surrounding Area :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8756 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 6?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8748 News from Lewisburg :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8744 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 5 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8727 Eyes On Members of Congress?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8707 Peltier Medical Alert?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8677 June 26th Statement from Leonard Peltier :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8670 34th Anniversary Events?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8666 LP-DOC: Acts: Update on the Lewisburg Vigil, 7-28-09; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8660 LP-DOC: Acts: Health Alert: Peltier Needs Medical Assist; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8655 Previous?? :) Focus Parole, Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 4?? ;) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8650 ? Previous Actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) free falsely jailed?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/free_falsely_jailed Act to Protect Leonard Peltier, severely beaten, institutionally abused, etc..?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/act_to_protect_leonard_peltier_severely_beaten_institutionally ? Other Actions for Leonard on Change.org?? :) Leonard Peltier Petition?? :) http://criminaljustice.change.org/actions/view/leonard_peltier_petition Leonard Peltier Petition?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/leonard_peltier_petition_2 From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 1 22:52:48 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 21:52:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Entropy Gets No Respect In-Reply-To: <4A9DDBA4.7050401@gmail.com> References: <20090902100518.4813a552.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <184034.14334.qm@web43505.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <4A9DDBA4.7050401@gmail.com> Message-ID: <962695.74416.qm@web43502.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Could be most of what I know about Druids come from Tacitus, and my years in the New Age, as a communard in a gnostic community durring most of the 1970's who were in close contact with the Findhorn community and the Fairies of Britannia, I am somewhat familiar with the revisionist view of Druids. Being able to say I have been there and done that, I will take Tacitus and the Romans before I would take a 20th century or 21st century reinterpretation. ?? I have seen the specials on Druids on History and National Geographic and have read Gerhard Herms 'The Celts". and some other books like 'Bede "History of the English Church", "Anglo Saxon Chronicle", "In Search of the Dark Ages" by Michael Wood, "The Twelve Caesars" Suetonius, "Early History of Rome" Livy, "History" Polybius, "The Gallic Wars" Caesar, and a lot more stuff over the years, as well and I belonged to a late roman reenactment group for a while that was into Arthurian stuff, although I could never afford the costume. ?? Here is Tacitus. Basically I am agnostic on the gentle Druids, I think they were fighting to keep their position and saw the Romans as a major threat. Which was legitimate from their viewpoint. After all he managed to stamp out the independence of the Gauls and many of them fled to Britain. They knew from experience what to expect when Claudius invaded. But from Claudius's viewpoint he was getting rid of an evil bloodthirsty cult. At least that seems to be how he justified the invasion. Most of us would be opposed to Roman imperialism if we were to compare Rome to the USA or Great Britain in the last century. Just as most of us would oppose the Spanish imperialism in Mexico when Cortes took Montezuma hostage. But I don't think I would want to be trying to defend cutting out of hearts to make the sun rise, no matter how well the argument was made. Tacitus, Annals, Book XIV, Chapters 29-37 Chapter 29. [Military campaign in Wales] During the consulship of Lucius Caesennius Paetus and Publius Petronius Turpilianus [AD 60-61], a dreadful calamity befell the army in Britain. Aulus Didius, as has been mentioned, aimed at no extension of territory, content with maintaining the conquests already made. Veranius, who succeeded him, did little more: he made a few incursions into the country of the Silures, and was hindered by death from prosecuting the war with vigour. He had been respected, during his life, for the severity of his manners; in his end, the mark fell off, and his last will discovered the low ambition of a servile flatterer, who, in those moments, could offer incense to Nero, and add, with vain ostentation, that if he lived two years, it was his design to make the whole island obedient to the authority of the prince. Paulinus Suetonius succeeded to the command; an officer of distinguished merit. To be compared with Corbulo was his ambition. His military talents gave him pretensions, and the voice of the people, who never leave exalted merit without a rival, raised him to the highest eminence. By subduing the mutinous spirit of the Britons he hoped to equal the brilliant success of Corbulo in Armenia. With this view, he resolved to subdue the isle of Mona; a place in habited by a warlike people, and a common refuge for all the discontented Britons. In order to facilitate his approach to a difficult and deceitful shore, he ordered a number of flat-bottomed boats to be constructed. In these he wafted over the infantry, while the cavalry, partly by fording over the shallows, and partly by swimming their horses, advanced to gain a footing on the island. Chapter 30. [The Druids at Mona Island] On the opposite shore stood the Britons, close embodied, and prepared for action. Women were seen running through the ranks in wild disorder; their apparel funeral; their hair loose to the wind, in their hands flaming torches, and their whole appearance resembling the frantic rage of the Furies. The Druids were ranged in order, with hands uplifted, invoking the gods, and pouring forth horrible imprecations. The novelty of the fight struck the Romans with awe and terror. They stood in stupid amazement, as if their limbs were benumbed, riveted to one spot, a mark for the enemy. The exhortations of the general diffused new vigour through the ranks, and the men, by mutual reproaches, inflamed each other to deeds of valour. They felt the disgrace of yielding to a troop of women, and a band of fanatic priests; they advanced their standards, and rushed on to the attack with impetuous fury. The Britons perished in the flames, which they themselves had kindled. The island fell, and a garrison was established to retain it in subjection. The religious groves, dedicated to superstition and barbarous rites, were levelled to the ground. In those recesses, the natives [stained] their altars with the blood of their prisoners, and in the entrails of men explored the will of the gods. While Suetonius was employed in making his arrangements to secure the island, he received intelligence that Britain had revolted, and that the whole province was up in arms. Chapter 31. [Causes of Boudicca's revolt] Prasutagus, the late king of the Icenians, in the course of a long reign had amassed considerable wealth. By his will he left the whole to his two daughters and the emperor in equal shares, conceiving, by that stroke of policy, that he should provide at once for the tranquility of his kingdom and his family. The event was otherwise. His dominions were ravaged by the centurions; the slaves pillaged his house, and his effects were seized as lawful plunder. His wife, Boudicca, was disgraced with cruel stripes; her daughters were ravished, and the most illustrious of the Icenians were, by force, deprived of the positions which had been transmitted to them by their ancestors. The whole country was considered as a legacy bequeathed to the plunderers. The relations of the deceased king were reduced to slavery. Exasperated by their acts of violence, and dreading worse calamities, the Icenians had recourse to arms. The Trinobantians joined in the revolt. The neighboring states, not as yet taught to crouch in bondage, pledged themselves, in secret councils, to stand forth in the cause of liberty. What chiefly fired their indignation was the conduct of the veterans, lately planted as a colony at Camulodunum. These men treated the Britons with cruelty and oppression; they drove the natives from their habitations, and calling them by the [shameful] names of slaves and captives, added insult to their tyranny. In these acts of oppression, the veterans were supported by the common soldiers; a set of men, by their habits of life, trained to licentiousness, and, in their turn, expecting to reap the same advantages. The temple built in honour of Claudius was another cause of discontent. In the eye of the Britons it seemed the citadel of eternal slavery. The priests, appointed to officiate at the altars, with a pretended zeal for religion, devoured the whole substance of the country. To over-run a colony, which lay quite naked and exposed, without a single fortification to defend it, did not appear to the incensed and angry Britons an enterprise that threatened either danger or difficulty. The fact was, the Roman generals attended to improvements to taste and elegance, but neglected the useful. They embellished the province, and took no care to defend it. Chapter 32. [Omens and early Roman setbacks at Camulodunum] While the Britons were preparing to throw off the yoke, the statue of victory, erected at Camulodunum, fell from its base, without any apparent cause, and lay extended on the ground with its face averted, as if the goddess yielded to the enemies of Rome. Women in restless ecstasy rushed among the people, and with frantic screams denounced impending ruin. In the council-chamber of the Romans hideous clamours were heard in a foreign accent; savage howlings filled the theatre, and near the mouth of the Thames the image of a colony in ruins was seen in the transparent water; the sea was purpled with blood, and, at the tide of ebb, the figures of human bodies were traced in the sand. By these appearances the Romans were sunk in despair, while the Britons anticipated a glorious victory. Suetonius, in the meantime, was detained in the isle of Mona. In this alarming crisis, the veterans sent to Catus Decianus, the procurator of the province, for a reinforcement. Two hundred men, and those not completely armed, were all that officer could spare. The colony had but a handful of soldiers. Their temple was strongly fortified, and there they hoped to make a stand. But even for the defense of that place no measures were concerted. Secret enemies mixed in all their deliberations. No fosse was made; no palisade thrown up; nor were the women, and such as were disabled by age or infirmity, sent out of the garrison. Unguarded and unprepared, they were taken by surprise, and, in the moment of profound peace, overpowered by the Barbarians in one general assault. The colony was laid waste with fire and sword. The temple held out, but, after a siege of two days, was taken by storm. Petilius Cerealis, who commanded the ninth legion, marched to the relief of the place. The Britons, flushed with success, advanced to give him battle. The legion was put to the rout, and the infantry cut to pieces. Cerealis escaped with the cavalry to his entrenchments. Catus Decianus, the procurator of the province, alarmed at the scene of carnage which he beheld on every side, and further dreading the indignation of a people, whom by rapine and oppression he had driven to despair, betook himself to flight, and crossed over into Gaul. Chapter 33. [Suetonius abandons London to the Boudiccan forces] Suetonius, undismayed by this disaster, marched through the heart of the country as far as London; a place not dignified with the name of a colony, but the chief residence of merchants, and the great mart of trade and commerce. At that place he meant to fix the feat of war; but reflecting on the scanty numbers of his little army, and the fatal rashness of Cerealis, he resolved to quit the station, and, by giving up one post, secure the rest of the province. Neither supplications, nor the tears of the inhabitants could induce him to change his plan. The signal for the march was given. All who chose to follow his banners were taken under his protection. Of all who, on account of their advanced age, the weakness of their sex, of the attractions of the situation, thought proper to remain behind, not one escaped the rage of the Barbarians. The inhabitants of Verulamium, a municipal town, were in like manner put to the sword. The genius of a savage people leads them always in quest of plunder; and, accordingly, the Britons left behind them all places of strength. Wherever they expected feeble resistance, and considerable booty, there they were sure to attack with the fiercest rage. Military skill was not the talent of Barbarians. The number massacred in the places which have been mentioned, amounted to no less than seventy thousand, all citizens or allies of Rome. To make prisoners, and reserve them for slavery, or to exchange them, was not in the idea of a people, who despised all the laws of war. The halter and the gibbet, slaughter and defoliation, fire and sword, were the marks of savage valour. Aware that vengeance would overtake them, they were resolved to make sure of their revenge, and glut themselves with the blood of their enemies. Chapter 34. [Suetonius prepares to counterattack] The fourteenth legion, with the veterans of the twentieth, and the auxiliaries from the adjacent stations, having joined Suetonius, his army amounted to little less than ten thousand men. Thus reinforced, he resolved, without loss of time, to bring on a decisive action. For this purpose he chose a spot encircled with woods, narrow at the entrance, and sheltered in the rear by a thick forest. In that situation he had no fear of an ambush. The enemy, he knew, had no approach but in front. An open plain lay before him. He drew up his men in the following order: the legions in close array formed the center; the light armed troops were stationed at hand to serve as occasion might require: the cavalry took post in the wings. The Britons brought into the field an incredible multitude. They formed no regular line of battle. Detached parties and loose battalions displayed their numbers, in frantic transport bounding with exultation, and so sure of victory, that they placed their wives in wagons at the extremity of the plain, where they might survey the scene of action, and behold the wonders of British valour. Chapter 35. [Boudicca addresses her army] Boudicca, in a [chariot], with her two daughters before her, drove through the ranks. She harangued the different nations in their turn: "This," she said, "is not the first time that the Britons have been led to battle by a woman. But now she did not come to boast the pride of a long line of ancestry, nor even to recover her kingdom and the plundered wealth of her family. She took the field, like the meanest among them, to assert the cause of public liberty, and to seek revenge for her body seamed with ignominious stripes, and her two daughters infamously ravished. From the pride and arrogance of the Romans nothing is sacred; all are subject to violation; the old endure the scourge, and the virgins are deflowered. But the vindictive gods are now at hand. A Roman legion dared to face the warlike Britons: with their lives they paid for their rashness; those who survived the carnage of that day, lie poorly hid behind their entrenchments, meditating nothing but how to save themselves by an ignominious flight. From the din of preparation, and the shouts of the British army, the Romans, even now, shrink back with terror. What will be their case when the assault begins? Look round, and view your numbers. Behold the proud display of warlike spirits, and consider the motives for which we draw the avenging sword. On this spot we must either conquer, or die with glory. There is no alternative. Though a woman, my resolution is fixed: the men, if they please, may survive with infamy, and live in bondage." Chapter 36. [Suetonius meanwhile addresses his army] Suetonius, in a moment of such importance, did not remain silent. He expected every thing from the valour of his men, and yet urged every topic that could inspire and animate them to the attack. "Despise," he said, "the savage uproar, the yells and shouts of undisciplined Barbarians. In that mixed multitude, the women out-number the men. Void of spirit, unprovided with arms, they are not soldiers who come to offer battle; they are bastards, runaways, the refuse of your swords, who have often fled before you, and will again betake themselves to flight when they see the conqueror flaming in the ranks of war. In all engagements it is the valour of a few that turns the fortune of the day. It will be your immortal glory, that with a scanty number you can equal the exploits of a great and powerful army. Keep your ranks; discharge your javelins; rush forward to a close attack; bear down all with your bucklers, and hew a passage with your swords. Pursue the vanquished, and never think of spoil and plunder. Conquer, and victory gives you everything." This speech was received with warlike acclamations. The soldiers burned with impatience for the onset, the veterans brandished their javelins, and the ranks displayed such an intrepid countenance, that Suetonius, anticipating the victory, gave the signal for the charge. Chapter 37. [The decisive battle] The engagement began. The Roman legion presented a close embodied line. The narrow defile gave them the shelter of a rampart. The Britons advanced with ferocity, and discharged their darts at random. In that instant, the Romans rushed forward in the form of a wedge. The auxiliaries followed with equal ardour. The cavalry, at the same time, bore down upon the enemy, and, with their pikes, overpowered all who dared to make a stand. The Britons betook themselves to flight, but their waggons in the rear obstructed their passage. A dreadful slaughter followed. Neither sex nor age was spared. The cattle, falling in one promiscuous carnage, added to the heaps of slain. The glory of the day was equal to the most splendid victory of ancient times. According to some writers, not less than eighty thousand Britons were put to the sword. The Romans lost about four hundred men, and the wounded did not exceed that number. Boudicca, by a dose of poison, [ended] her life. Poenius Postumius, the Prefect in the camp of the second legion, as soon as he heard of the brave exploits of the fourteenth and twentieth legions, felt the disgrace of having, in disobedience to the orders of his general, robbed the soldiers under his command of their share in so complete a victory. Stung with remorse, he fell upon his sword, and expired on the spot. ________________________________ The translation from Latin is adapted from Arthur Murphy (Works of Tacitus, 1794). ________________________________ From: LCM To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Tuesday, September 1, 2009 7:42:44 PM Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Entropy Gets No Respect -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gary Crethers wrote: > Arch druid? I hope human sacrifice isn't part of your prescription. The original Druids were up there with the Aztecs in quality of human sacrifice to the gods. I knew the chief Arch-Angel of Holy City California. He was a fat little Portuguese guy who wore a tam-o-shanter, smoked cigars (and weed), and used to drive a Renault R-10 that had outlived it's supply chain. But I digress... The only similarity being he's deceased, and so is anyone who had any solid information about ancient Druid practices and no axe to grind... or 'strokes' for that matter. Druids now, are like Wicca practitioners... of modern philosophical origin grafted on to what is know of the 'olde time religion'. Not much is known with any certainty, and human sacrifice is one of those uncertainties. "Diodorus Siculus asserts, on *unnamed sources*, that a sacrifice acceptable to the Celtic gods had to be attended by a druid, for they were the intermediaries. He also claims that before a battle they often threw themselves between two armies to bring about peace. (That's 'sacrifice', but not the kind of which you speak...) Diodorus remarks upon the importance of prophets in druidic ritual: "These men predict the future by observing the flight and calls of birds and by the sacrifice of holy animals: all orders of society are in their power... and in very important matters they prepare a human victim, plunging a dagger into his chest; by observing the way his limbs convulse as he falls and the gushing of his blood, they are able to read the future." Archaeological excavations at Ribemont in Picardy, France and at Gournay-sur-Aronde carried out by Jean-Louis Brunaux in the late 1990s were interpreted by Brunaux as human sacrifices, but the British archaeologist Martin Brown has suggested that these might be war memorials honouring the dead for their courage.[12] (Which is a lot like arguing whether the US army supplied the smallpox blankets to the Mandan intentionally, or not. We'll most likely never know, but are doomed to eternally extrapolate.) At a bog in Lindow, Cheshire, England was discovered a body, designated the "Lindow Man", which may also have been the victim of a druidic ritual, but it is just as likely that he was an executed criminal or a victim of violent crime.[13] The body is now on display at the British Museum, London." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid#Ritual_and_sacrifice -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKndugAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysy4IH/iWT4QOe6SlJy0bFggwUoAEK oBNm4Lq8Jw/l9cIdrSnUvS7MX31v8PiJkV0/Pso2eGABO85AK7AFEB+vpehA8Jdl 6Fjsy9sWyGxyg+xTwNcV9FlO1mk2zkInFLGhfCXFe/T+gk759sLoMNSVogliobH5 0Q9fvZvVw8k9SnrnEUsPwq8cl1QT//+D9TP6p3glY9RbZNjS92jQ/fcFjNJwBrQV frYtCYo/5+XxwZh37weAi54yAP9RAFij27iKcpon151aTTvwPdS3BOf1fjBGeguC NjsNxEpy84c0D8tc/gXQF3yyWqLV46vLXSW1rWe8Ej/TKARvVbUNU5ka/nStWrM= =pXmo -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 1 23:56:13 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 22:56:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Famous Fuck You- Bombing of LA Times, RAC, Bob Avakian, Japanese New Government, My Attitude. Message-ID: <420141.2795.qm@web43502.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Famous Fuck You- Bombing Of LA Times, RAC And You, Bob Avakian?s Ghost September 1st, 2009 Some people don?t like me. I don?t understand it myself. I mean I really try to be nice to people. But sometimes I just got to tell it like I see it and that offends people. Not everyone, but it happens. Like my former boss. I got really fed up one day after working for the guy for about 6 years and I called him an asshole. He took it personally. I don?t see how people can be so stuck on themselves. I mean I know I am an asshole sometimes, you would think the guy would thank me, but no, he got all offended and fired me. Or maybe it was because we were trying to join the Teamsters and someone ratted on us. Could be. I will never know now. Or like the moderator at this anarchist site in LA. He really doesn?t like my comments about certain people. I asked him to be more specific but all he would say was ?Fuck You?, eloquent enough I guess, but you know I am kind of dense, I like an explanation that goes beyond a simple explicative, especially from my comrades in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. I mean, if we are ever in the trenches together I want to know if I can trust the guy or if he is a little cry baby who can?t take a little comradely criticism. But then how likely are we ever to be in the trenches here in LA? You never know. When we were marching down Sunset heading for the CNN building during the 2003 anti war protests arm in arm, it would be good to know if the person on the right or left is trustworthy. Or when we were battling with the cops last summer in the streets of Denver, you want to know that the people with you are going to let your comrades know if you get busted or hurt. There are lots of situations that come up when you have to know if you can count on the people you are with and if you can?t even engage in a little verbal debate without the people you are supposedly counting on getting all frosty on you, well then you wonder what would happen in a real stressful situation. Just a few thoughts from an older comrade who has been through the shit a few times. What is this thing with Bob Avakian and the RCP on Pacifica? It is Tuesday it must be RCP day on KPFK. The DJ was even playing a speech by Bob Avakian. I mean the guy may or may not have some good ideas, but he is a lousy speaker. Please. I was driving home from work, I like a good rousing political speech as much as the next guy. But Bob Avakian? Really! I would rather listen to Ralph Nader, or Amy Goodman, or even Obama. But Avakian has a voice like he was being strangled or had just had a piano fall on his foot. It is not pleasant. He did speak about the four alls and other Maoist rhetoric that I haven?t heard since high school. It was a little embarrassing, I mean do people really talk in terms of the 4 alls? I guess if we were ignorant peasants in rural China who had never been to school this might be revealing, but it was a little dated. Not that I disagreed with anything that he said. I mean we all want to live in a communist society and in a world where we love what we do day in and day out. But Bob, the New Age was in the seventies. This it the 21st century. We have issues like global warming, health care reform and a war in Afghanistan and Iraq. It sounded like he came straight off of a time warp from 1969. A good year, but not this year. Anyway, what is the issue of the day? Japan has a new government, whoopee, already they are back tracking on some rather risque statements about America. It seems that the new prime minister didn?t really mean all those nasty things he was saying about the USA, he was just fooling, you know, saying stuff to get votes, nothing serious?. This is from Yahoo News ?Relocation of US troops will test new Japan leader By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press Writer Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press Writer ? Tue Sep 1, 2:27 pm ET TOKYO ? Reservations within Japan?s incoming government about a plan to move thousands of U.S. Marines off Okinawa will likely be the first test of its leader?s efforts to remake the country?s relationship with Washington while maintaining their strong alliance. Yukio Hatoyama, riding a landslide victory by his Democratic Party of Japan in Sunday?s parliamentary elections, is expected to be formally voted in as prime minister as early as early as Sept. 16, ending more than a half-century of almost uninterrupted rule by the staunchly pro-Washington Liberal Democratic Party. Though Hatoyama is facing a mountain of economic problems, including Japan?s worst unemployment rate since World War II, attention is also keenly focused on his ability to fulfill promises that he will remake Tokyo?s relationship with Washington. Hatoyama has said he wants Japan?s relationship with the U.S. ? a key trade partner and the Asian power?s strongest ally ? to be more equal. The transfer of Marines off the southern island of Okinawa could be the first test of that effort, analysts said Tuesday. Under a deal negotiated with the U.S., Tokyo agreed to foot part of the bill to move 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to a new base in Guam by 2014, easing overcrowding on the Japanese island that hosts more than half of the 50,000 American troops stationed in the country. About 10,000 Marines will remain. Another key issue he?ll have to address is a long-delayed plan to relocate Okinawa?s Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to a new location. ?The United States has no intention to re-negotiate the Futenma replacement facility plan or Guam relocation with the government of Japan,? State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Monday. The challenge comes amid concerns over Hatoyama?s inexperience in foreign affairs and worries that his desire for more balanced relations with Washington and deeper ties with Asian neighbors could open a rift between the old allies. Those have largely been fueled by an op-ed published in The New York Times ahead of Sunday?s election, in which he suggested that Japan had suffered under U.S.-led globalization. He appeared to try and distance himself somewhat from the controversy, however, saying in comments broadcast Tuesday on Japanese television that what he wrote ?was in no way an expression of anti-U.S. views.? In August, some 200 people gathered to oppose the use of Futenma at the campus of Okinawa International University, where a helicopter crashed five years ago, damaging a school building and triggering calls for shutting the base. They want the base off the island altogether, not simply relocated to a less congested area. Another thorn in the relationship could arise if Tokyo decides not to renew a refueling mission in the Indian Ocean that provides support for U.S.-led coalition troops in Afghanistan. The Democrats have said they want to end it when it next comes up for renewal in January.? Looks like trouble in River City. Weird shit happens. I mean today I come home and my refrigerator is defrosted. At first I thought it was a power failure, but it was turned off. It was turned off by someone and all my stuff was melted. Lucky for me the weather changed and cooled off in Long Beach or I would have had to throw everything out. A couple of weeks ago my cell phone disappeared. I mean I had it in the morning and when I went to use it in the evening it was gone. Nobody used it apparently because when I reported it missing a week later it hadn?t been used according to the phone company. I know the CIA monitors my blog, they have even commented on it once. But why do something petty like defrost my Trader Joe?s fish? That is downright petty. This morning on Democracy Now they were interviewing some officer from the PR department in Afghanistan and they told the reporters that every morning a report is made on all the news they can gather on what people are saying about the military in Afghanistan. But come on guys, leave my sorbet alone. This is the intro to the piece on today?s Democracy Now. ?As Pentagon Cancels Rendon Group Contract, US-NATO Spokesman in Afghanistan Defends Using Company to Profile Journalists The Pentagon is canceling its contract with the private public relations firm The Rendon Group to produce background profiles of journalists seeking to cover the war. One journalist profiled was Nir Rosen, who got a hold of his profile. The Rendon Group reported to the Pentagon that Rosen?s reporting in Afghanistan was ?highly unfavorable to international efforts.? The Rendon Group profile also mentioned Rosen?s appearance on Democracy Now!, when he stated his belief that the war is unwinnable and that the US should withdraw. We speak with Col. Wayne Shanks, the public affairs officer for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.? On Bloomberg they are talking about the recovery in the economy. Andrew Morris from a staffing firm Robert Half International says revenues are still decreasing. Every job is now being tested to make sure it is benefiting companies from a cost benefit analysis. Retraining and adding to the bottom line is what people need to have in today?s job market. Base salaries for the big players is the same, only bonuses have been cut back in the big firms. There is still a shortage of highly skilled marketing professionals. At least that is the case in the financial sector. So in other words, for those of you who are looking for reform in the financial sector, good luck. They are simply laying low in bonus department until the heat is off and the economy picks up a little and the average person is too busy with their life to deal with the big issues like, why the fuck am I working at a shitty job after all these years. Just not as shitty as the shittiest job, but not much better than my first good job, at least in my experience. The market went down today because banks on the west coast are still facing a lot of bad debt, Bank of America and Citigroup are dragging the financials down. Companies like American Express and AIG are also going down. Despite the fact that home buying contracts and manufacturing were up in August. I love to watch these professional bullshitters get up there and tell people to invest, invest, invest. They are talking about investing in the emerging markets and say stay away from Russia. They like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. Go for the domestic consumer in the local markets there, that is the big growth area if you have bucks to invest, look for businesses that focus on the domestic consumer in their economies where the growth will be over the next few years. Invest in BRIC?s according to David Riedel of Ridel Investments. He likes Sohu the Chinese Internet company. They are down 1.18% in trading today in case you are paying attention. Are you paying attention? This is not for you, but for my rich anarchist friends. Stock market is not exposed to the industrials. The infrastructure is so bad that the IT industry had to get around the lack of infrastructure. The place to go is in the infrastructure companies is through the Swiss Global Engineering Company ABB. China Communications Construction is a favorite of his and it has a lot of growth ahead. He also likes Poland with CETV CP being a good buy there. That is all I have to offer to those of you who are interested in investing in emerging markets. Ok now I want to discuss the issue of RAC. My position on them seems to be controversial. I am not exactly approving of their activities. But then you decide, this is from their web site. ?This website is a portal dedicated to educating our members about the need to divest from the Iranian oil sector and on how to implement such divestment on an individual, congregational, statewide and national level. Personal Divestment Divest Your Own Holdings (DOC 68.61 KB) A Letter to Your Investment Manager on Divesting Your Personal Investments from Iran Companies Investing in Iran?s Oil and Natural Gas Sector (JCPA) State Divestment What is your State doing? (XLS 38.40 KB) Sample Letter to Georgia?s Treasury Federal Divestment Take Federal Action: Push for Your Representative and Senators to Pass Iran Divestment Legislation? RAC, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is asking people to take their money out of companies invested in Iran. They want to see Iran fall. I am not in favor of Iranian nukes, but neither am I in favor of Israel being the only nuclear power in the middle east. Pakistan is in South Asia. Wrong RAC? Ok what about the RAC that my Anarchist friends are talking about? Maybe it is this RAC? ?Revolutionary Autonomous Communities Thursday, June 11, 2009 Links to Download the Film, ?We?re Still Here, We Never Left? / Link para bajar la pelicula, ?Todavia Estamos Aqui, Nunca nos Fuimos? Here are the links to download the film ?We?re Still Here, We Never left? in its entirety, we hope folks can set up screenings and fundraisers with them for their organizations and for our defense fund. We want people to see it all over, we?re are still open to going out to cities and different places and speaking if that is possible and if that can be organized. If not, then folks should still screen it. If you want a physical copy of the DVD, let us know and we?ll send one out to you, please help with cost and shipping. email rac at riseup.net Also we encourage people to donate, whatever you can, to help the community programs of the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities. You can send donations to RAC P.O. Box 292344, Los Angeles, Ca. 90029. USA Also through Pay Pal on our blog: revolutionaryautonomouscommunities.blogspot.com The Revolutionary Autonomous Communities is putting out a call for their film, ?We?re Still Here, We Never Left? to be screened at your university, community center, church and anywhere else. The film documents the truth about the police repression on May 1st, 2007, and also shows the growing popular movement in oppressed communities. It has footage never before seen on the mainstream media. We hope to create dialogue with the film, a space for popular education, and a movement. We want this film to be seen all over, in different cities and possibly different nations. The film will also ready for distribution. Contact us at rac at riseup.net if you?re interested in organizing an event.? Ok not much to go on. I mean if I hadn?t met them personally I would not know what they were all about. I have met them at some events and even participated in a discussion group after the showing of their movie at the Anarchist Conference in LA this summer, mistakenly labeled the ?2nd Los Angeles Anarchist Conference?. This is at least the fifth one I can think of. There was one last November, there was one in 2000, there was one in 1993 or 1994 and I am pretty sure there were some others in the late 1990s at Decenter but I couldn?t vouch for that. What I found amazing is the lack of institutional memory in the Los Angeles Anarchist Community. People active now are not even aware of what went on here 10 years ago. Let alone what was going on 20 years ago or in the 1960?s or the 1940?s and who remembers the bombing of the LA times by radical workers back in 1910? Talk about a Fuck you!! This is the article in Wikipedia ?Los Angeles Times bombing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Los Angeles Times bombing was the purposeful dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building in Los Angeles, California, on October 1, 1910 by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. The explosion started a fire which killed 21 newspaper employees and injured 100 more. Termed the ?crime of the century? by the Times, brothers John J. (?J.J.?) and James B. (?J.B.?) McNamara were arrested under suspicious circumstances in April 1911 for the crime. Their trial became a cause c?l?bre for the American labor movement. J.B. admitted to setting the explosive, was convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. J.J. was sentenced to 15 years in prison for bombing a local iron manufacturing plant, and returned to the Iron Workers union as an organizer. The Iron Workers union formed in 1886. The work was seasonal and most iron workers unskilled. The union remained weak and much of the industry unorganized until 1902. In that year, the union won a strike against the American Bridge Company, a subsidiary of the newly-formed U.S. Steel corporation. American Bridge was the dominant company in the iron industry, and within a year the Iron Workers had not only organized nearly every iron manufacturer in the United States but also won signed contracts which included union shop clauses. James B. McNamara and John J. McNamara were Irish American trade unionists. John (known as J.J.) and his younger brother James (known as J.B.) were both members of and active in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (the Iron Workers). In 1903, officials of U.S. Steel and the American Bridge Company founded the National Erectors? Association, a coalition of steel and iron industry employers. The primary goal of the National Erectors? Association was to promote the open shop and assist employers in breaking unions in their respective industries. Employers used labor spies, agents provocateur, private detective agencies, and strike breakers, and engaged in a campaign of union busting. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies cooperated in this campaign, which often employed violence against union members. Hard pressed by the open shop campaign, the Iron Workers elected the militant Frank M. Ryan president and John J. McNamara secretary-treasurer in 1905. In 1906, the Iron Workers struck American Bridge in an attempt to retain their contract. The open shop movement was a significant success. By 1910, U.S. Steel had nearly succeeded in driving out of existence every union in its plants. Unions in other iron manufacturing companies also vanished. Only the Iron Workers held on (although the strike at American Bridge continued). Desperate union officials turned to violence to counter the violence they had suffered. Beginning in late 1906, national and local officials of the Iron Workers launched a dynamiting campaign. The goal of the campaign was to bring companies to the bargaining table, not to destroy plants or kill people. Between 1906 and 1911, the Iron Workers blew up 110 iron works, although only a few thousand dollars? worth of damage was done. The National Erectors? Association was not unaware of who was responsible for the bombings. Herbert S. Hockin, a member of the Iron Workers? executive board, was a paid spy for the Association. In Los Angeles, employers had been successfully resisting unionization for nearly half a century. Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, was vehemently anti-union. Otis joined and then seized control of the local Merchants Association in 1896, renamed it the Merchants and Manufacturers? Association (colloquially known as the M&M), and used the M&M and his newspaper?s large circulation to spearhead a 20-year campaign to rid the city of its few remaining unions. Without unions to keep wages high, open shop employers in Los Angeles were able to undermine the wage standards set in heavily unionized San Francisco. Unions in San Francisco feared that employers in their city would soon begin pressing for wage cuts and institute an open shop drive of their own. The only solution would be to unionize Los Angeles again. The San Francisco unions relied heavily on the Iron Workers, which remained one of the few strong unions in Los Angeles. The unionization campaign began in the spring of 1910. On June 1, 1910, 1,500 Iron Workers struck iron manufacturers in the city to win a $0.50 an hour minimum wage ($10.52 in 2007 dollars) and overtime pay. The M&M raised $350,000 ($7.4 million in 2007 dollars) to break the strike. A superior court judge issued a series of injunctions which all but banned picketing. On July 15, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously enacted an ordinance banning picketing and ?speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone?, with a penalty of 50 days in jail or a $100 fine or both. Most union members refused to obey the injunctions or ordinance, and 472 strikers were arrested. The strike, however, proved effective: by September, 13 new unions had formed, increasing union membership in the city by almost 60 percent. At 1:07 a.m. on October 1, 1910, a bomb went off in an alley outside the three-story Los Angeles Times building located at First Street and Broadway in Los Angeles. The bomb was supposed to go off at 4:00 a.m. when the building would have been empty, but the clock timing mechanism was faulty. The 16 sticks of dynamite in the suitcase bomb were not enough to destroy the whole building, but the bombers were not aware of the presence of natural gas main lines under the building. The bomb collapsed the side of the building, and the ensuing fire destroyed the Times building and a second structure next door that housed the paper?s printing press. Of the 115 people still in the building, 21 died (most of them burned alive in the fire). The Times called the bombing the ?crime of the century?, and publisher Otis excoriated unions as ?anarchist scum,? ?cowardly murderers,? ?midnight assassins,? and ?leeches?.[ The next morning, unexploded bombs were discovered at the homes of Otis and F.J. Zeehandelaar, secretary of the M&M; the Alexander Hotel; and the Los Angeles County Hall of Records (then under construction by the non-union Llewellyn Iron Works). The Iron Workers strike committee in Los Angeles and Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), immediately condemned the bombing and declared that no labor union or individual could have been responsible. William J. BurnsThe Times and law enforcement authorities announced that the perpetrators would be caught immediately. But weeks passed, and no arrests were made. The City of Los Angeles posted a $25,000 reward for the capture of the bombers, and the M&M raised another $50,000. On December 25, 1910, a bomb went off at the Llewellyn Iron Works, partially wrecking the plant. The City hired noted anti-union private detective William J. Burns to catch the guilty parties. Burns had been investigating the nationwide wave of iron manufacturing plant bombings for the past four years on behalf of the National Erectors? Association, and took the City job (and the pay that went with it) as part of his investigation. From his paid Iron Workers spy, Hockin, Burns learned that Iron Workers union member Ortie McManigal had been handling the Iron Workers? bombing campaign on orders from union president Ryan and secretary-treasurer McNamara. McManigal and McNamara were borderline alcoholics who liked to drink and hunt at the same time. Burns infiltrated one of their late-winter hunting trips with a spy, and during the trip McNamara boasted of having blown up the Times building. The undercover private eye also surreptitiously took a photo of McNamara. Burns showed the photo to a hotel clerk in Los Angeles, who recognized McNamara as a ?Mr. J.B. Bryce? who had checked in the day before the bombing and hurriedly checked out the following morning. On April 14, 1911, Burns, Burns? son, Raymond, and police officers from Detroit and Chicago went to the Oxford Hotel in Detroit and arrested McManigal and James B. McNamara. Dynamite, blasting caps and alarm clocks were found in their suitcases.[3] The two men were told they were being arrested for robbing a bank in Chicago. Since they had watertight alibis for the alleged crime, both men agreed to accompany Burns and the police officers back to Chicago. In Chicago, McManigal and McNamara were not taken to a police station, but to the private home of Chicago Police Sergeant William Reed. From April 13 until April 20, they were held against their will. Burns apparently convinced McManigal that he knew everything and that McManigal could save himself by cutting a deal with authorities. McManigal agreed to tell all he knew in order to secure a lighter prison sentence, and signed a confession directly implicating Ryan, J.J. McNamara, Hockin and other Iron Worker leaders. Burns wired California officials and secured extradition papers for McManigal, J.B. McNamara and J.J. McNamara. Burns left for Indianapolis, Indiana, where the Iron Workers had their headquarters. With the assistance of officials of the National Erectors? Association, he convinced Governor Thomas R. Marshall to issue an arrest warrant for J.B. McNamara. On April 22, Burns and two local police detectives burst into an executive board meeting of the Iron Workers and arrested McNamara. J.J. McNamara was taken before a local circuit court. The judge refused McNamara?s request for an attorney and, without legal authority to do so, released J.J. McNamara into the custody of Burns. Arrest to departure took 30 minutes. The same day, McManigal and J.B. McNamara were taken by Los Angeles police by train to California. All three accused men arrived in Los Angeles on April 26. Clarence DarrowThe national labor movement was outraged by the way the McNamaras had been treated, and labor leaders were convinced the brothers were innocent. Burns had clearly engaged in kidnapping, misrepresentation of his status as a law enforcement officer, unlawful imprisonment, and possibly torture in his handling of McManigal and J.B. McNamara. He had unlawfully extradited J.B. McNamara, and might have committed kidnapping by transporting him across state lines. The local circuit judge had unlawfully denied J.J. McNamara access to legal representation and had no authority to approve his extradition. Both McNamaras had been arrested on the basis of a confession wrung from a third man who himself had been kidnapped and perhaps coerced into confessing. The case seemed too much like the kidnapping and trial of Bill Haywood and others in 1906. Labor leaders were also convinced of the McNamara?s innocence by other factors as well. The open shop movement and virulent hostility shown by Otis convinced many that the whole event was a frame-up (with some, including Eugene V. Debs, suggesting that Otis himself might have planted the bomb). Burns repeatedly implied that Gompers and other labor leaders were involved in the national bombing campaign, and AFL officials feared a national campaign of arrests designed to destroy the nascent labor movement might be in the works. Meanwhile, George Alexander, mayor of Los Angeles, was locked in a very close re-election battle against Job Harriman, a Socialist Party of America candidate. The bombing, some felt, might simply be a plot to keep Harriman out of City Hall. Iron Workers president Frank Ryan asked Clarence Darrow to defend the McNamaras. But Darrow was in ill health. Ryan turned to Harriman, who agreed to be the brothers? defense attorney. Gompers, however, visited Darrow in Chicago and convinced him that the case required his expertise. Reluctantly, Darrow consented to be lead defense attorney. Harriman stayed on as his assistant. Darrow also recruited former Los Angeles county assistant district attorney Lecompte Davis, pro-union Indiana judge Cyrus F. McNutt, and president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Joseph Scott as co-counsel for the defense. The McNamaras were arraigned on May 5, 1911. They pled not guilty. McManigal, who had turned state?s evidence, was not charged at that time. Darrow argued that he would need $350,000 for the defense. The AFL immediately began to raise the funds. The AFL Executive Council established a permanent ?Ways and Means Committee? to seek money. The federation appealed to local, state, regional and national unions to donate 25 cents per capita to the defense fund, and set up defense committees in larger cities throughout the nation to take donations. Pins, buttons and other paraphernalia were sold to raise money, and a film ? ?A Martyr to His Cause? ? was produced. It premiered in Cincinnati and an estimated 50,000 people paid to see it. Labor Day throughout the nation was declared to be ?McNamara Day,? and mass marches were held in 13 major cities in support of the defendants. Jury selection began on October 25. As voir dire continued, Darrow became increasingly concerned about the outcome of the trial.[18] He felt J.B. could not be relied on as a witness and would break down under cross-examination. On October 15, he learned that the prosecution had acquired masses of evidence to support 21 separate charges. On October 18, he learned that U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham had obtained enough evidence on his own to secure, with President William Howard Taft?s approval, a federal subpoena against the McNamaras. The first panel of jurors was exhausted on October 25, forcing the court to order an additional panel of jurors to appear. The jury was finally seated on November 7. As jury selection continued, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens arrived in Los Angeles. Steffens, convinced the McNamaras were guilty, visited them in jail. Steffens decided to defend their actions as ?justifiable dynamiting? in the face of employer violence and state-sponsored repression of labor unions. J.B. was an eager proponent of Steffens? plans, but J.J. refused to cooperate unless Darrow agreed. Darrow was stunned by Steffens? report that the brothers had admitted their guilt. But with his health worsening and his pessimism about the defense growing, Darrow agreed to permit the McNamaras to cooperate with Steffens. The weekend of November 19-November 20, Darrow and Steffens met with newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps. During their discussions of the trial, Darrow raised the possibility of pressuring the prosecution into accepting a plea bargain. In exchange for light prison terms for the McNamaras, the AFL would end its debilitating strike and organizing efforts against Los Angeles employers. Steffens met with Otis and Harry Chandler, Otis? son-in-law and assistant general manager at the Los Angeles Times. Surprisingly, both men agreed to the plan. The success of the AFL?s public opinion campaign had apparently worried both newspapermen, and the Iron Workers? success in maintaining (even widening) the strike had weakened the resolve of many in the Los Angeles business community. Chandler offered to open negotiations with the district attorney, John D. Fredericks. Fredericks balked. Although a group of Los Angeles businessmen had endorsed the secret talks, Fredericks refused to sanction any plan which let the McNamaras go free. The National Erectors? Association had learned of the talks (both the defense and prosecution had their paid spies in the other?s camp),[9] and was pressing Fredericks to reject any plea bargain. As a compromise, Fredericks demanded that J.B. receive life in prison and J.J. receive a much shorter term (7 to 10 years). The agreement was laid before the McNamara brothers. J.B. initially refused to agree to any plea bargain that did not set his brother free. But when Darrow told him that a settlement was possible only if both brothers pled guilty, J.B. gave his consent.[3][18][19] Darrow sent for a representative of the AFL. The shocked labor leader refused to accept the agreement until Darrow convinced him that the defense had almost no chance.[3] Darrow had hoped that a plea bargain (rather than an admission of guilt in open court) would be all that was needed. But Los Angeles employers were worried that defense attorney Harriman would trounce Mayor Alexander on election day (December 5). Nothing short of an actual admission of guilt in open court would discredit Harriman and prevent his victory, and the employers were pressing hard for one.[2][3] The defense?s position weakened further when, on November 28, Darrow was accused of attempted bribery of a juror. The defense team?s chief investigator had been arrested for bribing a juror, and Darrow had been seen in public passing the investigator money. With Darrow himself on the verge of being discredited, the defense?s hope for a simple plea agreement ended.[21] [edit] Conviction and aftermath On December 1, 1911, the McNamara brothers changed their pleas in open court to guilty. James B. McNamara admitted to murder by having set the bomb that destroyed the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910. John J. McNamara, setting foot for the first time in court, admitted to having set the bomb that destroyed the Llewellyn Iron Works on December 25.[2][3] J.J. McNamara later told an interviewer that Darrow had kept the McNamara brothers isolated from public opinion. Had they known how strongly the public was on their side, they would not have agreed to the plea deal, he said. Samuel Gompers was traveling by rail in New Jersey when the change in plea was made. A reporter with the Associated Press boarded his train, woke him, and handed him the dispatch regarding the guilty verdicts. ?I am astounded, I am astounded,? he said. ?The McNamaras have betrayed labor.? The Socialist Party, however, refused to condemn the McNamara brothers, arguing that their actions were justified in view of the employer- and state-sponsored terror their union had faced for the last 25 years. Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs echoed that sentiment. Wrote Debs: It is easy enough for a gentleman of education and refinement to sit at his typewriter and point out the crimes of the workers. But let him be one of them himself, reared in hard poverty, denied education, thrown into the brute struggle for existence from childhood, oppressed, exploited, forced to strike, clubbed by the police, jailed while his family is evicted, and his wife and children are hungry, and he will hesitate to condemn these as criminals who fight against the crimes of which they are the victims of such savage methods as have been forced upon them by their masters. On December 5, the court sentenced J.B. McNamara to life and J.J. McNamara to 15 years in prison. The two brothers entered San Quentin State Prison on December 9. J.B. McNamara?s post-trial conclusion was: ?You see? . . . The whole damn world believes in dynamite.? Harriman was narrowly defeated by Mayor Alexander in the race for mayor on December 5. Although Harriman had been mentioned as a possible governor, the verdict ended his political career. The labor movement in Los Angeles collapsed. The employers refused to honor additional terms of the plea agreement, which required the convening of a meeting of labor union and employers and an end to the open shop campaign. Instead, employers redoubled their efforts to break the labor movement in Los Angeles. The Central Labor Council suffered severe membership losses in the early months of 1912, and the labor movement in the city did not begin to show signs of growth until the 1950s. Another 55 members and officers of the Iron Workers were arrested on charges of conspiracy and the interstate transportation of explosives to conduct the dynamite campaign. Hockin testified against his colleagues in order to avoid prison himself. In all, 38 of the 55 were convicted, including President Frank Ryan (who served a 7-year prison term).[2][3] The Iron Workers suffered severe membership losses, and appealed to the AFL for funds. The AFL declined to offer financial assistance or permit Gompers to speak at the next Iron Workers convention. The heads of a number of AFL unions did speak, however, and Iron Worker delegates re-elected Ryan president. Darrow was indicted on two charges of jury tampering. His chief investigator turned state?s evidence, and even implicated Samuel Gompers in the bribery attempt. Darrow was in financial difficulty, and asked for AFL assistance in raising funds for his defense. Gompers declined to give it. When the presidents of the United Mine Workers of America and Western Federation of Miners issued an appeal for donations, the AFL Executive Council postponed consideration of a donation until the issue was moot. Darrow was acquitted in his first trial. When charges were brought in the second bribery case, the trial ended in a hung jury. Steffens was so troubled by the vituperation heaped on the McNamara brothers that he began a campaign to ease economic and class differences in the United States. By mid-1912, a number of prominent individuals?including social workers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, industrialist Henry Morgenthau, Sr., journalist Paul Kellogg, jurist Louis Brandeis, economist Irving Fisher, and pacifist minister John Haynes Holmes?had asked President Taft to appoint a commission on industrial relations to ease economic tensions in the country. Taft requested that Congress approve a commission, and it did so on August 23, 1912. The reports of the Commission on Industrial Relations, led by Frank P. Walsh, helped establish the eight-hour day and the World War I-era War Labor Board, and profoundly influenced most New Deal labor legislation. Ortie McManigal served two and a half years in prison before being released on parole. James B. ?J.B.? McNamara died of cancer in San Quentin on March 9, 1941.[27] Despite repeated attempts by left-wing labor leaders and politicians to win his release, McNamara refused to file any parole requests.[3] His brother John died in Butte, Montana on May 8, 1941. At the time, J.J. was an international organizer for the Iron Workers.? Pretty long but labor day is coming up. Lets get in the spirit. Tags: Japanese Have New Government, LA Times Bombing, RAC Controversy. Anarchist Reliability. Bob Avakian From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Sep 2 01:03:00 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 16:03:00 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] End of Summer Blues Message-ID: <20090902160300.fe49b345.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005) www.kunstler.com (August 31 2009) In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread. It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a Lord of the Flies (1954)type of summer camp. And so here I am, many decades later, still uneasy as the final page of the August calendar flies away in a hot Santa Ana wind, and a great hellfire closes in on the far eastern reaches of Los Angeles, and the American money system falls into a peculiar limbo, and every fifth person is out of work, or going bankrupt, or glugging down the seawater of default, or being denied coverage by health insurance that he-or-she has already shelled out ten grand for this year, or getting shot in a trailer park. I was in Los Angeles for a few days last week, as chance had it, marveling at the odd disposition of things there. I've been there many times over the years, but you forget how overwhelmingly weird it is. Altogether the Los Angeles metro area has the ambience of a garage the size of Rhode Island where someone happened to leave the engine running. To say that Los Angeles is all about cars is kind of like saying the Pacific Ocean is all about water. But one forgets the supernatural scale of the freeways, the tsunamis of vehicles, the cosmic despair of the traffic jams. The vistas of present-day Los Angeles make the Blade Runner (1982) vision of things look quaint in comparison. You motor out of the Los AngelesX airport - personally, I love the name "Los AngelesX" because it so beautifully describes the collective ethos of the place - and you discover quickly that the taxi cab's windows are not that dirty, it's the air itself colored brown like miso soup. Going north on the 405 freeway, you see the looming Moloch of the downtown skyline through the brown miso soup. And you begin to understand why the products of the film industry are so fixated on the theme of machine apocalypse. Downtown Los Angeles looks like just such a gigantic machine as the FX crews would dream up, as if a day will come when those gleaming mirrored office towers will pull themselves out of the ground from their roots and begin lumbering, crunch crunch crunch, north toward the Hollywood Hills seeking to exterminate the vile humanity responsible for making the place what it is. I happened to be camping out briefly in West Hollywood, in a scene-ster hotel where tiny bubbles of show biz mega-success wafted around amidst a background odor of failure, and an impossibly thin line was drawn between being pampered and being asked to go die in the gutter, please. The place is not without a certain decorum. I couldn't help but imagine how lovely Hollywood must have been in, say, 1923, when 92 percent of all the hopeless crapola now on the ground there had not yet been built, when there were no freeways, and fewer cars than currently found in Lincoln, Nebraska, you could go out to the Pacific Ocean on a "Big Red" streetcar, and on a clear day you could see from La Cienga out to Mount Wilson, and the movie "industry" was like a college theater department. What a fabulous giggle it must have all been - apart from poor Fatty Arbuckle - in that romantic desert at the edge of the world. The whole "Dream Factory" myth has become such an awful cliche, but what remains interesting now is how it utterly infected every other organ, byway, and lost corner of American life, to the degree that the life of this nation became little more than a "narrative", a story-board, a montage of wishes superimposed over the harsher mandates of reality. Hollywood now is a mere cartoon of what Wall Street and Washington have turned into. We're a civilization of fluff now, riding on a river of toxic sludge. I found Hollywood utterly exhausting. On morning walks down in the buzzard flats below Sunset Boulevard you almost never saw a human being outside the protective carapace of a car. I think I was the only person who ever walked down Melrose Avenue this calendar year. There were a lot of fresh store vacancies in the endless one-story strips, as if the retailers had just packed up and left Dodge under the cover of night. There were obvious, if lame, attempts to pedestrianize the major surface boulevards with fancy crossing pavements, but traffic flowed on them at sixty off the rush hours, and you felt like a marmot in a buffalo stampede out there. For solace, I listened to Bruce Molsky sing "I Ride an Old Paint" on the iPod. The fiddle part is lovely. The city of Los Angeles, indeed the whole state of California, seems exhausted too. Apocalypse is probably such a rich theme out there precisely because everything about that particular way of life seems to be nearing its end - whether it's the fiscal fiasco or the water supply, or the aerospace economy, or the music industry, or the once-great university system, or the Happy Motoring fantasy of cruising for burgers in what Tom Waits called the dark, warm narcotic American night. I went to the movies there one hot afternoon - Tarantino's latest, Inglourius Basterds, a completely crazy but enjoyable revenge romp against Hitler & Company - and before the feature, they showed a "trailer" for Roland Emmerich's forthcoming apocalyptathon. 2012, in which virtually every global landmark from the Vatican to the White House is destroyed, and mankind's last hope is John Cusack riding a spaceship to worlds unknown ... If that isn't shooting your wad as a movie-maker, I'm not sure what is. Maybe next time out, Roland will step back and make a movie about a puppy. I had my fill of apocalypse by the time I left the place, only to find myself back in a real nation really dissolving into a puddle of goo. In the strange new ether of the Web, a consensus grows that we're in for a rocky autumn, as if the signal event will be something like a hurricane of shoes dropping - bank failures galore, repudiation of US debt instruments by America's former patrons, foreclosures to the farthest horizon, jobs and incomes terminated, and all the good intentions of the folks in charge coming to naught in the face of historic forces. We're off to that kind of a start this morning, with the Dow dropping eighty points and the news that Disney Inc has just paid four billion for the rights to the Marvel Comics posse - Spiderman and his homeys. As if America needs more childish fantasy. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/end-of-summer-blues.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Sep 2 19:49:14 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 10:49:14 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] It's Time for a New Monetary System Message-ID: <20090903104914.6f364f23.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Obama Economic Program Increases America's Bondage to Wall Street Billionaires by Richard C Cook Dandelion Salad richardccook.com (March 23 2009) This article previews the author's new six-part video series scheduled for release April 2: "Credit as a Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis". The Obama administration is spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to persuade the banking system to restart lending. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke plans to create hundreds of billions more of new bank reserves by purchasing mortgage-related debt. With Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner working together, "the initiative will seek to entice private investors, including big hedge funds, to participate by offering billions of dollars in low-interest loans to finance the purchases. The government will share the risks if the assets fall further in price." (Martin Crutsinger, AP) Finally, President Obama is taking over the distinction of being the biggest Keynesian in history with a fiscal year 2009 deficit of $1.75 trillion. The cancer of debt grows by the day. According to Michael Hodges' famed "Grandfather Economic Report": "America has become more a debt 'junkie' than ever before, with total debt of $57 trillion, and the highest debt ratio in history. That's $186,717 per man, woman and child." With the federal bailouts of the financial system and the recession, the debt load has increased by $4 trillion in the last six months. What are we going to do with even more debt coming? The growth in debt will be impossible for households to deal with when more then half a million jobs are still being lost per month. Impossible too for US businesses when the drop-off of consumer spending reflects not only job loss but also a new propensity to actually save a portion of our earnings after the mortgage-based spending spree of the last decade. The debt will be more possible to bear perhaps for the Treasury Department, which has benefited from investors searching for a safe haven so still being willing to buy Treasury bonds. This includes Treasury's biggest current customer, the Bank of China. Yet what does it say when the government can open its doors in the morning only if the Chinese give us permission? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Beijing in February to be sure they still looked on us with favor and returned home to assure the president they did. But is this any way to run a country? Why can't the most productive nation on earth afford to pay for its own government? The Obama economic program, which so-called progressives call "revolutionary", will take us further away from, not closer to, real solutions. The massive new debt it creates can only be enforced by the courts, the police, and ultimately military power. Within the US, the authorities are preparing for civil unrest. Overseas, "dollar hegemony", the system by which nations like China continue to enable our massive debt, is increasingly unstable as the world bails on the dollar as its reserve currency. When is anyone in authority going to utter the unutterable, which is that our financial collapse ultimately goes back to the fact that every dollar in circulation derives from a loan made by a bank to a producer, consumer, or the government, and that all these loans have attached to them a rental charge known as interest which is paid to the bankers' monopoly? When will someone admit that the government's economic recovery plan is a welfare program for Wall Street billionaires? We live and work under a debt-based monetary system that has been in force since Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It's how the system works. The government goes into debt, and the banking system then uses it as a reserve base for lending to the public. It wasn't always this way. In the 19th century, until the Civil War, the government lived within its means. President Thomas Jefferson balanced the federal budget for eight consecutive years, and President Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt. Back then the government issued currency based on gold and silver, and the US mint stamped precious metals into coinage for anyone who brought it through the door. Local commerce was fueled by a system of state and local banks operating on the "real bills" doctrine. Inflation was virtually unknown, and unpaid debt led swiftly to bankruptcy and a sheriff's sale. When the Civil War began, President Lincoln needed money fast. The New York bankers offered outrageous terms: interest at 24 to 34 percent. So Lincoln was authorized by Congress to print and spend Greenback money directly into circulation. Contrary to later propaganda, the Greenbacks were not inflationary. They were upheld by the Supreme Court as constitutional and remained in circulation until the early 20th century. They even spawned the Greenback Party that elected members of Congress and ran candidates for president. But the bankers, by now centered on Wall Street, gained a foothold with the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, where the banks were allowed to purchase Treasury bonds as a lending reserve. Currency issued by the state and local banks with their hard money reserves were taxed out of existence. In 1913 the bankers' trap snapped shut when the Federal Reserve System came into existence. After World War One, the currency inflated so much that the value of both the Greenbacks and coinage were destroyed. A monetary system based on bank lending means constant cycles of inflation and deflation. The banks create these financial bubbles then destroy them, always to their profit. In the 19th century, the deflations were called "panics". The Great Depression was a bank-created panic on an unprecedented scale. The collapse of 2008 and 2009 is the panic we're in now, but with plenty of assets on the market at fire-sale prices for those rich enough to cash in. For instance, there was a lot of hand-wringing when Citigroup's stock dropped to $1 a share. But those who could still buy-in saw their holdings triple in value when the stock rose to $3 a share a few days later. The solution is not to restart huge amounts of bank lending in order to create new bubbles. Unfortunately, the Obama budget is an attempt to create such a bubble based on Treasury securities. But this bubble too will likely collapse, because there is no economic engine on the horizon strong enough to pay the debt that will be used to inflate it. The next collapse could even lead to a world war if China and other creditor nations, possibly including those of Europe, decide to enforce their claims against us. But economists, politicians, and others who say there is no immediate solution lie. They just don't want to tell us what the solution is. It's to get rid of the debt-based monetary system altogether and return to one controlled by our representative government where a substantial amount of money is spent directly without borrowing or taxation. A Greenback system for the 21st Century is contained in the draft American Monetary Act developed by the American Monetary Institute and briefed to a number of members of Congress and congressional staffers. A Greenback-type currency would be regulated to support the needs of the real producing economy, not bank speculation, and could be used to pay off the national debt, supplement taxes to pay federal expenses, capitalize a new federal infrastructure bank, or fund alternative energy research and development. A currency based on real US money would replace debt-derived Federal Reserve Notes. It doesn't matter whether that currency is paper, gold, or electronic entries. What is important is that it exists in the right amount to conduct the business of the nation, is non-counterfeitable, is not misused for speculation, and does not have debt or interest attached to it. The Federal Reserve would remain as a processor and clearinghouse, but not a bank of issue. Greenbacks could also be used for a basic income guarantee for citizens that would restart the economy at the grassroots level much more effectively than government top-down job creation based on more Treasury deficits. The need for consumers to borrow from banks or use credit cards even for necessities like groceries and health care would sharply decrease. I have proposed such a program through the Cook Plan that would provide citizens with a dividend in the form of vouchers in the amount of $1,000 a month. The vouchers could be used to capitalize a new network of community savings banks that would lend at the local level. There is a good chance that the American Monetary Act will be introduced during the current session of Congress. It should be supported by anyone who cares about the future of our nation more than bankers' profits. (c) 2009 by Richard C. Cook Richard C Cook is a former U.S Treasury analyst who also worked in the Carter White House and for NASA and writes on public policy issues. His new book is We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform (Tendril Press 2009). His website is http://www.richardccook.com. He is a member of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network and has been an adviser to Congressman Dennis Kucinich and the American Monetary Institute http://www.monetary.org Also See: The US Economy: Designed to Fail by Richard C Cook http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/the-us-economy-designed-to-fail-by-richard-c-cook/ The Cook Plan (video) http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/the-cook-plan-video/ Bailout for the People: "The Cook Plan" by Richard C. Cook http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/bailout-for-the-people-the-cook-plan-by-richard-c-cook-2/ Restoring our Financial Sovereignty: A New Monetary System by Nikki Alexander http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/restoring-our-financial-sovereignty-a-new-monetary-system-by-nikki-alexander/ The Intentional Destruction of the Dollar by Josh Sidman http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/the-intentional-destruction-of-the-dollar-by-josh-sidman/ Federal Reserve http://en.wordpress.com/tag/federal-reserve-on-dandelion-salad/ Barack Obama http://en.wordpress.com/tag/barack-obama-on-dandelion-salad/ The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2 http://wordpress.com/tag/the-economy-sucks-and-or-collapse-2/ http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/obama-economic-program-increases-americas-bondage-to-wall-street-billionaires-by-richard-c-cook/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From fentona at shaw.ca Wed Sep 2 20:16:04 2009 From: fentona at shaw.ca (Anthony Fenton) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 19:16:04 -0700 Subject: [R-G] =?windows-1252?q?Canada=92s_outsourced_war_for_Iraq=92s_oil?= =?windows-1252?q?_riches?= Message-ID: Hostile takeover: Canada?s outsourced war for Iraq?s oil riches by Anthony Fenton This Magazine September/October 2009 In March 2008, when the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush?s ?coalition of the willing? marked its fifth anniversary, Canadian media outlets were in a self-congratulatory mood: ?Canada isn?t involved? there, one reporter wrote. ?The further we get away from the actual date, the better Canada?s decision to not get involved with the U.S. invasion of Iraq looks,? wrote another. Another referenced the anti-war demonstrations that ?stopped the Canadian government?s support for the invasion of Iraq.? It was a fact to be proud of: ?We didn?t go to Iraq.? Didn?t we? In fact, Canada has been involved with the Iraq conflict in many ways?political, economic, military?some subtle, some overt. But the notion that Canada ?didn?t go to Iraq? is, at best, wishful thinking. And though the war has slipped off the front page of the newspaper, Canada?s involvement in Iraq hasn?t decreased?in fact, today we?re in it deeper than ever. [...] http://this.org/magazine/2009/09/01/canada-iraq-oil/ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Thu Sep 3 19:12:48 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 10:12:48 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <20090904101248.ea56bc3c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by William Blum www.killinghope.org (September 02 2009) "And on the most exalted throne in the world sits nothing but a man's arse". -- Montaigne If there's anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero's welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was "highly objectionable". His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were "outrageous and disgusting". British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "angry and repulsed", while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images "deeply upsetting". Miliband warned: "How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya's reentry into the civilized community of nations". {1} Ah yes, "the civilized community of nations", that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward. {2} No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an "accident". Why then give awards to those responsible? Today's oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi's innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he's innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi's trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case. [3] The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror. The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non - loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport - for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act. And the court admitted it: "The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case". {4} The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany - guaranteed, sworn to, scout's honor, case closed - until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq's troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya - the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq - that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington. The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on November 14 1991. Within the next twenty days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite. {5} In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. "If he goes back to Libya", Swire says, "it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case ... I've lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball's chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive". {6} And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost twenty years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years. The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: "American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain's worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal". Added the Times: "The DIA briefing discounted Libya's involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was 'no current credible intelligence' implicating her". {7} If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it's highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect. One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya's guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take "responsibility" for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing. Humankind shall never fly All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are "socialist". (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with "Socialism" in large letters, as the only word. {8}) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol' capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans - like most of their countrymen - might be rather surprised to discover that they don't really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled "The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?" A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can't do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than eighty percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs. {9} Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction - putting the outside contractors in the best light. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century - without exception - was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement - from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador - not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly. The continual selling of the Afghanistan war "But we must never forget", said President Obama recently, "this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people." {10} Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It's simple - We're fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We're fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11 2001. Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation. As to "plotting to do so again" ... there's no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda. There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn't have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn't even have to be such a thing as a "member of al Qaeda". It tells us nothing that some of them can be called "al Qaeda". Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month. In any event, as in Iraq, the American "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon. The only "necessity" that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? But the war against the Taliban can't be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out. The revolution was televised You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials. Because the revolution will not be televised ... There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news. The revolution will not be right back after a message. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised. These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron's song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as '60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called "revolution". Fast Forward to 2009 ... Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post: WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution? GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution. [11] Oh? So that's it? That's what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn't have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward. Yugoslavia During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence. -- David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2009) There's no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs' new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities. Notes 1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26 2009 2. Newsweek magazine, July 13 1992 3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17 2009 4. "Opinion of the Court", Paragraph 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001 5. Read many further details about the case at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm 6. The Independent (London daily), April 26 2009 7. Sunday Times (London), August 16 2009 8. Washington Post, August 06 2009, page C2 9. Washington Post, June 8 2005 and March 23 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned 10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17 2009 11. Washington Post, August 26 2009 William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer73.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 3 22:25:58 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 21:25:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report In-Reply-To: <20090904101248.ea56bc3c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <20090904101248.ea56bc3c.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: <13413.66719.qm@web43514.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> I knew that there was something more to this. NPR would only say that the British interviewed were sanguine about this because they suspected that he was not guilty. But they wouldn't report why the chicken shits. ________________________________ From: Bill Totten To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 6:12:48 PM Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Anti-Empire Report by William Blum www.killinghope.org (September 02 2009) "And on the most exalted throne in the world sits nothing but a man's arse". -- Montaigne If there's anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero's welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was "highly objectionable". His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were "outrageous and disgusting". British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "angry and repulsed", while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images "deeply upsetting". Miliband warned: "How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya's reentry into the civilized community of nations". {1} Ah yes, "the civilized community of nations", that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward. {2} No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an "accident". Why then give awards to those responsible? Today's oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi's innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he's innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi's trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case. [3] The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror. The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non - loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport - for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act. And the court admitted it: "The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case". {4} The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany - guaranteed, sworn to, scout's honor, case closed - until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq's troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya - the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq - that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington. The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on November 14 1991. Within the next twenty days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite. {5} In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. "If he goes back to Libya", Swire says, "it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case ... I've lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball's chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive". {6} And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost twenty years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years. The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: "American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain's worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal". Added the Times: "The DIA briefing discounted Libya's involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was 'no current credible intelligence' implicating her". {7} If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it's highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect. One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya's guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take "responsibility" for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing. Humankind shall never fly All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are "socialist". (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with "Socialism" in large letters, as the only word. {8}) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol' capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans - like most of their countrymen - might be rather surprised to discover that they don't really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled "The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?" A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can't do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than eighty percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs. {9} Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction - putting the outside contractors in the best light. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century - without exception - was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement - from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador - not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly. The continual selling of the Afghanistan war "But we must never forget", said President Obama recently, "this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people." {10} Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It's simple - We're fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We're fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11 2001. Never mind that the "plot to kill Americans" in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation. As to "plotting to do so again" ... there's no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda. There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn't have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn't even have to be such a thing as a "member of al Qaeda". It tells us nothing that some of them can be called "al Qaeda". Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month. In any event, as in Iraq, the American "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon. The only "necessity" that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? But the war against the Taliban can't be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out. The revolution was televised You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials. Because the revolution will not be televised ... There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock news. The revolution will not be right back after a message. The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath. The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised. These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron's song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as '60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called "revolution". Fast Forward to 2009 ... Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post: WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution? GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution. [11] Oh? So that's it? That's what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn't have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward. Yugoslavia During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence. -- David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2009) There's no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs' new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities. Notes 1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26 2009 2. Newsweek magazine, July 13 1992 3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17 2009 4. "Opinion of the Court", Paragraph 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001 5. Read many further details about the case at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm 6. The Independent (London daily), April 26 2009 7. Sunday Times (London), August 16 2009 8. Washington Post, August 06 2009, page C2 9. Washington Post, June 8 2005 and March 23 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned 10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17 2009 11. Washington Post, August 26 2009 William Blum is the author of:- Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995) Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002) West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002) Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004) Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 at aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite. Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer73.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 4 00:51:31 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 23:51:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Updates: Free Jailed Falsely :) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <274782.56761.qm@web111513.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Help Mr. Leonard Peltier get the parole he, and humanity, truly deserves, advocate and evoke?? :) Leonard has carried a constant burden for all of humanity, for over 34 years straight, graciously, courageously, and with great generosity, and, besides thanking him, we have a responsibility to act, not just to right the wrongs of this world, to act to lessen? Leonard's, and those like Leonard's, burdens; they've humbly born for us all.? Luckily, "we, the people...", can still be the voice for those unheard; let us do what we can do to support Leonard's parole.? Thanx, again.? Ciao.??? :) reality This Action, on Change.org, the url??? :) Free Jailed Falsely??? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/free_jailed_falsely http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions10 ? Very latest from Friends Digest? :) Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 9?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8803 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 8?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8793 Friends Digest Acts: Attorney Seitz on denial of parole; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8769 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 7?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8759 Shout Out to NH and Surrounding Area :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8756 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 6?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8748 News from Lewisburg :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8744 Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 5 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8727 Eyes On Members of Congress?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8707 Peltier Medical Alert?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8677 June 26th Statement from Leonard Peltier :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8670 34th Anniversary Events?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8666 LP-DOC: Acts: Update on the Lewisburg Vigil, 7-28-09; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8660 LP-DOC: Acts: Health Alert: Peltier Needs Medical Assist; etc..?? :) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8655 Previous?? :) Focus Parole, Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 4?? ;) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/message/8650 ? Previous Actions, on Change.org, the url?? :) free falsely jailed?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/free_falsely_jailed Act to Protect Leonard Peltier, severely beaten, institutionally abused, etc..?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/act_to_protect_leonard_peltier_severely_beaten_institutionally ? Other Actions for Leonard on Change.org?? :) Leonard Peltier Petition?? :) http://criminaljustice.change.org/actions/view/leonard_peltier_petition Leonard Peltier Petition?? :) http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/actions/view/leonard_peltier_petition_2 From suzannedk at gmail.com Fri Sep 4 05:25:34 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 13:25:34 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Afghanistan NATO Airstrike Message-ID: NATO is in Afgahanistan to warn the natives what will happen to them if they mess with the pipeline going in quite near them in the old Silk Road Route they know well. Not to bring democracy to the Afhanis, not to bring peace, not to bring in clean water, no business infrastructures so they have enough of the simple things to be able to have children that are healthy and safe enough to go to schools. NATO is there as US directed pipeline cover, and will stay there until long after all the oil is gone. Since the corporate plan (the sun never sets on the US Empire) is to take all the oil, make all the profits, to them, what happens to the country or to the indigenous peoples is of absolutely not concern to the western powers led by America Here is the reason we were never to have counted the amount of Iraqi dead and maimed, never to have seen the flag draped coffins of U S soldiers, why the museum in Bagdad was allowed to be looted completely. Irag was slated to disappear as a possibly indigenously powerful key Middle East country. Alexander burned down that famous library a a victor's comment on the civilization he conquered. A history lesson not lost on the mafia that planned the Iraq War. It made them feel quite grand and connected to history, the ancient world they were once immigrants from. It is said the history tells us who we are. Without our real histories, none or those made up, who actually are we? A psychological place millions of Amercans live with. This fact is being put to use. Nothing wasted. Wonder how many antique dealers plan on great wealth some day on the Iraqi artifacts? Suzanne suzannedk at gmail.com From lcm95060 at gmail.com Fri Sep 4 11:40:40 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:40:40 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Eisenhower's Forgotten Warning... Message-ID: <4AA15118.7080406@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 As I've said somewhere along the line... "He didn't know much about "Communism" except what Keenan and the State Department boyz were whispering in his ear, but he had First Hand experience with Fascism": Eisenhower's Forgotten Warning and the Threat of Authoritarian Currents in Our Politics By Max Blumenthal, The New York Times Posted on September 3, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/142404/ In this summer of town hall disruptions and birth-certificate controversies, a summer when it seemed as if the Republican Party had been captured by its extremist wing, it is worth recalling a now-obscure letter from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that raised concerns about the ?military-industrial complex,? his letter offers an equally important ? and relevant ? warning: to beware the danger posed by those seeking freedom from the ?mental stress and burden? of democracy. The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he ?felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty.? He added, ?We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.? Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs?s note or sent a canned response. But he didn?t. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society. ?I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed,? Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. ?Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.? Eisenhower also recommended a short book ? ?The True Believer? by Eric Hoffer, a self-educated itinerant longshoreman who earned the nickname ?the stevedore philosopher.? ?Faith in a holy cause,? Hoffer wrote, ?is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.? Though Eisenhower was criticized for lacking an intellectual framework or even an interest in ideas, he was drawn to Hoffer?s insights. He explained to Biggs that Hoffer ?points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems ? freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.? The authoritarian follower, Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the pressures of a free society. Alluding to Senator McCarthy and his allies, Eisenhower pointed out that cold war fears were distorted and exploited for political advantage. ?It is difficult indeed to maintain a reasoned and accurately informed understanding of our defense situation on the part of our citizenry when many prominent officials, possessing no standing or expertness as they themselves claim it, attempt to further their own ideas or interests by resorting to statements more distinguished by stridency than by accuracy.? It is worth noting, of course, that these Cold War exaggerations weren?t just a Republican specialty: John F. Kennedy was making a supposed ?missile gap? between the United States and the Soviet Union a key element of his presidential campaign. In closing his letter, Eisenhower praised Biggs for his ?fortitude in pondering these problems despite your deep personal adversity.? Perhaps it was the president?s sense of solidarity with a fellow soldier that prompted him to respond to Biggs with such care; and perhaps it was his experience as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe that taught him that the rise of extreme movements and authoritarianism could take root anywhere ? even in a democracy. Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The Nation Institute. His new book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books) has just been released. Contact him at [Redacted for spam control] ? 2009 The New York Times All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142404/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKoVEWAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysCesIALd07bLcDl8TPHOPdYWuKsFz kvDP0DAqAsJQQlaYJMZdvLDvLdV8/o2GUlRXkvfpfk6dK4dpchxJnhj4cyD/KBqg +fMZMtXzzTsLCIsak01Mb4K8NL07pS3dehtH062UEC/LjEx2+Pbvuhitb/Hc/NnG HRF7RotB71vSUsN2WddOqjgqG9n6QTVYZbrLEMP9F6tJ8b8IQflQl1xXzhLMmXIM i0Gakfi2/r2RApfg19z7Lwfq7ySh64YJgS806DmkesiZNJAbnd+z8uUZwtK8jlmW oTv4ldFKd5T04rmhs9Sog+D1ASzJsWp2ej6TFbdRkdWtl6FUcNoW9JeKdy7Sj1Y= =z4t6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From lcm95060 at gmail.com Fri Sep 4 16:07:47 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:07:47 -0700 Subject: [R-G] How the war on drugs is a war on class Message-ID: <4AA18FB3.70206@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > Anonymous received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he > studied Comparative Middle Eastern Government under some of the > university?s most renowned professors and minored in Arabic > > He was employed by the Department of Defense for five-years, and > worked in some of the DoD's most sensitive and salient missions. > > He finished his career in Counterterrorism, where he produced > analysis on some of the most ruthless and well-trained terrorists in > the world. > > He left to write Tremble the Devil, to help every American > understand the true face of terrorism. "As our financial crisis deepens and the schisms between the haves and the have-nots continue to open, American drug laws are beginning to gather an increasingly harsh spotlight. But so what, it's not like the War on Drugs has done anything to increase the growing level of economic disparity in America... does it? A lot happened in 1973. It was a few years after Nixon slammed the gold window shut, the waning hours of a decapitated Civil Rights movement, when the kindling of an energy crisis was beginning to pile up, and the year that marks our disentanglement from Vietnam. But it also marks the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed, and the precise year that the income gap between black and white begins to widen back out, instead of closing - as it had been up until that year. Is that just a coincidence, or is there demonstrable cause-and-effect at work? Drug laws in America, after all, "have originally been based on racism... all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot."1 The popularly cited motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War. Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there's no way in hell that was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers' addiction as opportunistic displacement. Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed in some states, banning the consumption of alcohol. But not, of course, for everyone. Whites could drink as much as they pleased - as well as use opiates and cocaine, but if you were a minority in much of antebellum America you were prohibited from imbibing or using any drug at all. At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn't control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all "uncivilized races." In this case, "uncivilized" was synonymous with "dark." At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted ? while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant. Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a "cocaine-crazed negro." Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON'T DIE!, and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn't large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty. However blacks weren't singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone, and then eventually altogether. i i i Nixon's public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in the story of American anti-drug laws that has always been rooted in racism. Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and eventually the entire federal government. They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, partially because they included a fifteen-year prison term for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year. CHART More: http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/09/as-our-financial-crisis-deepens-and-the-schisms-between-the-haves-and-the-have-nots-continue-to-open-american-drug-laws-ar.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKoY+wAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysjRoIAKHuFu82tir3XKXJ1rSn5VYP nABXL4JT5sYlA5igIYc6E+T9k+eYE6f7jXpmaAqdfCtS7ozTU+9qmTAzFv8QhWFm mGK6ewn2KeXFM5tMgMd0mAAanx/nqapCjT1s95JZPinMn0DxX/5sPvTpfkAaRUOu Xf1UrwIqMraaUy9/vUfkv/jxtSpOFJvJRtMjT5M3L8NqMUjFFNu6y+SJzOJM0Po/ 9bKQOvCESpXhIF/7EwGf2Cph1nyaYypZF+PSnlbio046S2IXvMvkxqcZUQelHU+p Mo68dF9Yzpn/rWr8vMa0jrpz/2NKRif3AI+mFGvqHA+XnwObJF+vBqAh4D9zOP4= =doch -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Sep 4 19:31:19 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 10:31:19 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Red Flag Message-ID: <20090905103119.d749423f.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Communism and the Making of the Modern World Western progressives nostalgic for the Soviet Union shouldn't get too excited by the global financial crisis. A fine new history of communism shows why. by John Gray New Statesman (August 27 2009) It cannot be long before progressive opinion begins to look back on communism with nostalgia. Whatever they may have been like in practice, communist states were established to embody ideas that progressives understood and to a large extent shared. The Soviet Union and Maoist China were seen as advancing the cause of humanity and many on the left judged it best not to make too much of any crimes these regimes committed along the way. However imperfectly, communism continued an authentic tradition of European radical humanism. One of the many virtues of David Priestland's The Red Flag (2009) is that it places communism squarely in this tradition. Citing Marx's description of Prometheus as "the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar", Priestland shows how Marx's Promethean world-view has animated communist movements and regimes throughout their history. In the preface to his dissertation, Marx wrote, in the words of Aeschylus: "In sooth all gods I hate. 'Tis better to be bound on a rock than bound to the service of Zeus." In Marx's variation on the Promethean myth, heroic humanity wages war against religion, inequality and subservience to nature. Priestland shows that this modern mythology was propagated right up to the end of communist Russia. As a graduate student at Moscow State University in 1987-88, studying (in secret) Stalin's Terror half a century earlier, he found himself "at the centre of a curious communist civilisation: my neighbours had come from all corners of the communist world - from Cuba to Afghanistan, from East Germany to Mozambique, from Ethiopia to North Korea - to take degrees in science and history, but also to study 'scientific communism' and 'atheism', the better to propagate communist ideology at home ... The system was unravelling and revealing its secrets, but it was still communist". Just over twenty years later, that curious communist civilisation has all but vanished from the face of the earth. There are still states ruled by communist parties - Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China - and the last ruling communist party in Europe was pushed out of power only a few weeks ago in Moldova. But except for North Korea and, in a limited way, Cuba, no country anywhere is governed, even in theory, by any version of Marxism. Marxist-Leninist insurrectionist movements still exist, with remnants of the Shining Path still active in Peru and Maoists leading a coalition government in Nepal for a time. But the new civilisation that Lenin believed he had founded in 1917, which Sidney and Beatrice Webb admired in the 1930s after touring Ukraine at the height of the famine, and which for all its faults western progressives believed was unshakeable, has ceased to exist. While radical humanism was the feature that beguiled most western intellectuals, it was just one of several elements in communism. Priestland presents a useful typology of the stories in terms of which the history of communism has been understood: the official one, derived from Marx, in which communist regimes were stages on the way to a world of harmony and abundance; a story of modernisation, in which communists were rational bureaucrats committed to developing backward countries; and a narrative of repression, in which communists imposed a totalitarian system on an un?willing population. As he notes, the repression story comes in two different versions, one claiming that the new ruling classes were "quasi-religious fanatics, true-believers in secular garb, demanding total commitment and promising a millenarian heaven on earth" and the other maintaining that communists were "cynical political bosses who sought to re-create a version of the oppressive, obscurantist tyrannies of old under the guise of 'modern communism' ". The narrative most commonly invoked by progressives today is the second version of the repression story, and its appeal comes from placing the responsibility for communist oppression on its victims, rather than the humanist project that their rulers were struggling to implement. The universal suppression of freedom under communism is blamed on the tsarist inheritance in Russia, Confucian authoritarianism in North Korea and Maoist China, Prussian dirigisme in the former East Germany, lamaism in Mongolia, the cult of Latin machismo in Cuba, tribalism in Africa, and so on. The flaws of communism are always in the people, never in the ideology. There is an unmistakable whiff of racism in this legend, but its chief interest may be in what it shows about the need for belief on the part of western intellectuals. There can be no reasonable doubt that during the Bolshevik period, and to a degree in the Stalin era, communism had many of the features of a religion. But in communist countries faith in a radiant future died out long ago, even among the ruling elites. Material advantages - privileged access to housing and health care and a superior education for their children - were what motivated the nomenklatura. It was sections of the western intelligentsia that kept the faith alive - Trotskyites who insisted all would have been well if only Stalin had not won, and the legions of liberal anti-anti-communists who only grudgingly acknowledged the full scale of terror and mass murder in the Soviet Union and its colonies. When all was said and done, these were, after all, progressive regimes. The Red Flag is a comprehensive guide to the biggest political delusion of the 20th century. Starting with the origins of communist ideology in the French Revolution, it presents an interesting analysis of Marx's thinking as being shaped as much by Romanticism as by the Enlightenment. Priestland also examines communist governments and movements in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America as well as the Soviet Union, and discusses the Nazi-Soviet pact as well as Stalin's ban on anti-fascist activity in Europe, concluding with a level-headed account of the communist collapse. Always readable, Priestland is often entertaining. Lenin, he writes, was "a model pupil at school", where his headmaster reported that the "guiding principles of his upbringing were religion and rational discipline". A Czechoslovakian rock group, arrested after the 1968 invasion and tried on charges of "extreme vulgarity" and "extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism", were defended by their lawyer on the grounds that they were only implementing Lenin's maxim "Bureaucracy is shit". The group were sent to prison anyway, but their case led to the founding of Charter 77 and eventually helped overturn the communist regime. Priestland gives an astute analysis of the leader who unwittingly dissolved the Soviet superstate. "Gorbachev's world-view for the first few years of his rule", he writes, "was, at root, a Romantic Marxist one". Later, Priestland notes, Gorbachev was as much attracted by neoliberal ideology. What Priestland does not tell us is that it was precisely this absurd jumble of ideas that endeared the last Soviet leader to western progressives. Gorbachev's fantasy that the Soviet Union could be reformed and turned into a gigantic reincarnation of Swedish social democracy allowed Soviet communists to indulge the conceit that they had been right after all. Even more, it gave them the feeling they were still in some way relevant. The actual course of events has left progressives beached. Russia - for nearly three-quarters of a century supposedly the site of a new civilisation that would abolish religion and nationalism - is a Eurasian power whose prime minister, Vladimir Putin, wears around his neck a Russian Orthodox cross given to him by his pious mother. China has reinvented itself as a Confucian capitalist civilisation, while the US flounders. Rather than rejuvenating any kind of socialism, the global economic crisis is showing the strength of the varieties of capitalism that resisted neoliberal dogma. None of these developments figures in any scenario envisioned by progressives. It will be surprising if, redundant in a world they could never have imagined, they do not rediscover lost virtues in communism. Might it not be time for a King Street Manifesto? At the end of the first volume of his magnificent trilogy, Main Currents of Marxism (2005), Leszek Kolakowski (who died in Oxford last month) summarised the communist debacle as follows: "And thus Prometheus awakens from his dream of power, as ignominiously as Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis". As a description of communism, this cannot be faulted. As a judgement on the illusions of much of the western intelligentsia, it is perfect. The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World by David Priestland (Allen Lane, 676 pages, GBP 35) _____ John Gray's latest book is Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (Allen Lane, GBP 20) http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/08/communism-communist-soviet TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 4 21:38:33 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 20:38:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] FIREDOGLAKE Supports Retreat On HealthCare. Tell Them No Way. Message-ID: <58474.83668.qm@web43510.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> INSTEAD OF A BLOG... I am going to post when I am riled up about something. My problem is that it happens almost every day. Nice try Ben. But I am pretty disappointed in the lackluster performance put on by the Democrats. I voted for Clinton in 92 because he promised health care reform and I voted for Obama for the same reason. It looks like he wasn't serious or he would have presented us with a Medicare like single payer plan instead of this weak public option and now you are trying to spin that into a plan when he has failed to get even that? Give me a break. I don't buy it. You Democrats are in the pockets of industry just like the Republicans. GO ASK YOUR CORPORATE BUDDIES FOR MONEY. I am not wasting my time on the democrats I am going Green Party, or Peace and Freedom, or even Libertarian, or Labor Party if we ever get one. But I am done with this Demo-publican game of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. ?? If there was a revolutionary party worth its salt I would be part of that. Perhaps it is in the nature of all parties to become corrupt once they get a taste of power. The example of the Green Party in Germany is not exactly inspiring. They supported German involvement in the Kosovo mess, perhaps belatedly, but they didn't put up much of a fight. Perhaps they have a better position on Afghanistan, well least several Greens in Germany voted against supporting the invasion of that country but the Social Democrats were still able to ram through the war support after 9-11. It sure makes the Truth-er position more believable. ?? If I could believe in some kind of council communist/syndicalist/communitarian/anarchist/coop health plan I would, but the longer I have been involved in that type of political movement the more frustrated I am with its lack of an ability to coalesce into something with real clout. I simply believe now that most people simply don't care enough about politics for a totaly volunteerist society to be able to overthrow capitalism or for a volunteerist health care plan to be able to beat the private industry at its own game. Where would the incentive be and why would we want to start from scratch when we have a perfectly good model in the VA or Medicare to start from? People are simply too nice, too busy and to distracted.? We pay with our taxes for government. We elected a totaly different vision of where America is headed with Obama. He promised us Health Care reform. We want it. We are putting up with his ridiculous war in Afghanistan just to get health health care reform. Now we want the goods delivered or we will dump this crew just like the last crew. ???? Done... Read what Ben from Firedog has to say, Let me know if you think this is a snow job. Let him know if you think the "Cosmic Trigger" is an old saw.? That horse is headed right back to the barn. Anyone who has been horseback riding will probably be able to tell you that a horse given its head will take you back to where its meals come from, as fast as they can. That is what I see here. Some shill it trying to con us. Sorry Ben. I want real reform. Not some half ass-ed joke.? - Gary Rumor "Hi Gary, My name is Ben Tribbett. ?I'm the new Executive Director for Accountability Now and in charge of political action for Firedoglake. ?Since 2005 I have written the largest state blog in the country at "Not Larry Sabato," covering Virginia politics. ?Prior to that I ran local, state and federal campaigns for Democrats in Virginia. ?Now, I am so excited to work with you for heath care reform. Next week Obama will speak to Congress to outline his plan for health care reform. Incredibly, Barack Obama may advocate for passing a bill with a "trigger" - meaning he'll wait for our health care crisis to get even worsebefore implementing a public health insurance option.? We need to get ready for this monumental moment to save the public option.? But we need the resources for our campaign team to prepare for this fight.? Can you help us raise $50,000 by next week to help save the public health insurance option?? Click here to donate now. At a minimum, any bill that passes Congress has to have a strong public health insurance option in order to compete against the greedy insurance industry.? And that public option needs to be available on day one - no triggers.? So far 65 members of Congress have stood up and said they'll only vote for a bill that has a strong public option without triggers.? But they're going to be under intense pressure next week to cave for a weak bill that simply bails out the insurance industry. With your help, we can hold members of the House who pledged to only vote for a strong public health insurance option and target the so-called "progressives" who won't take that pledge.? It won't be easy, and we need the resources to make it happen. Your donation will fund our team of bloggers, online organizers, and strategists working night and day to hold the line on the public option.? We can do this, but we need your help. Can you "pull the trigger" for real health care reform?? Help us raise $50,000 by next week to get ready for the fight to save the public option. Click here to donate: https://secure.firedoglake.com/page/contribute/pullthetrigger" This may be the half a loaf. But It looks more like a mouldy piece of hard tack to me, not a brilliant plan to outfox the Republicans. What do you think? Generally I like Firedoglake but if this is a trial balloon to see if we will buy a no public option reform, I suggest we tell them in no uncertain terms that we want a real reform. Preferably a revolutionary one, but at least a reform that will benefit the American people, not just some sop to get the Democrats off the hook for the next election. Also please let me know if you prefer emails or if you would rather that I simply post on my blog and social network sites. Feedback lets me know which approach I should take. From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 5 01:02:47 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 00:02:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] U.S. Somali Professors Decry Airport Profiling In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <813933.18313.qm@web111505.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> This Action, on Change.org, the url??? :) Professors Profiled?? :) http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org/actions/view/professors_profiled http://www.change.org/profile/189788/actions Read? about?? :)?????? U.S. Somali Professors Decry Airport Profiling ? Support CAIR Contact Us Verse: Strive as in a Race in All Virtues Somali-American Professors Angered Over Repeated Searches (MPR) http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/08/21/somali-professors-travel/ CAIR-FL: Acquitted Muslim Released by Judge (SP Times)CAIR-MI: Mali Can Teach Detroit a Lot About Community Spirit (Free Press) MI: West Africans Boost Muslim Community (Free Press)CAIR-NJ: Muslims Share Meals in Cultural Outreach (Courier-Post) CAIR-OH: Holy Month Will Bring Muslims Together (Dispatch)CAIR-Seattle: DHS Funds Israel Trip for Law Enforcement OfficersCAIR-OK: Oklahoma City Islamic Art Exhibit Draws Hundreds U.S. Muslim Airmen and Their Families Celebrate Ramadan ----- VERSE OF THE DAY: STRIVE AS IN A RACE IN ALL VIRTUES - TOP ?If God had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (His plan is) to test you in what He has given you. So strive as in a race in all virtues.? The Holy Quran, 5:48 ----- ? Action Alerts??? :) http://www.cair.com/ActionCenter/ActionAlerts.aspx ? SOMALI-AMERICAN PROFESSORS ANGERED OVER REPEATED SEARCHES - TOP Laura Yuen, Minnesota Public Radio, 8/24/09 Click here to listen to the story. Minneapolis ? Two Somali-American scholars at the University of Minnesota say they're outraged by what they consider invasive questioning and searches while traveling abroad this summer. Abdi Samatar chairs the U's geography department. He's married to Cawo Abdi, a sociology professor. Since June, the husband and wife say they've been pulled aside a total of six times at airports for lengthy interviews that have lasted up to two and a half hours. They believe customs officials targeted them for being Muslim and ethnic Somalis. Earlier this month, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan -- the "Brad Pitt of India" -- made headlines around the globe when he was stopped at a New Jersey airport. Khan said, at the time, that he believed he was questioned because his Muslim name raised red flags in a post-Sept. 11 world. But countless Somali-Americans who don't enjoy Khan's level of celebrity say they've been subjected to similar searches, called secondary inspections, upon re-entering the U.S. (More) http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/08/21/somali-professors-travel/ ----- CAIR-FL: GOVERNMENT AGREES TO RELEASE OF MEGAHED AFTER JUDGE RULES IT COULDN'T PROVE TERRORISM CASE - TOP Kevin Graham, St. Petersburg Times, 8/22/09 MIAMI ? Youssef Megahed returned to his family Friday after an immigration judge refused to deport him, ruling the Department of Homeland Security had failed to prove terrorism charges. "I'm very happy for this," the former University of South Florida student told reporters, moments after walking beyond security gates of the Krome Detention Center and reuniting with relatives. "This was the only correct decision the judge could have made." Megahed, 23, spent the last four months in immigration custody. His sudden release came after Homeland Security attorneys abandoned plans to ask that he be held while they consider appealing Immigration Judge Kenneth S. Hurewitz's decision to dismiss the case. "I doubt they are going to do the appeal because they have a very weak case," Megahed said. "The truth has come out and this is all over." He said he intends to return to Tampa, reapply to USF, and renew efforts to become a United States citizen. (More) ----- CAIR-MI: MALI CAN TEACH DETROIT A LOT ABOUT BEING A COMMUNITY - TOP Dawud Walid, Detroit Free Press, 8/23/09 The prospective renaissance of Detroit will not be found in new City Council members or restructuring the school system but with a major paradigm shift in what is deemed culturally acceptable related to family and community life. I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Mali, which naturally caused me to compare its capital, Bamako, with Detroit. What I saw provided further instruction as to why I disagree with the commonly held notion that poverty and our miserably performing school system are the primary factors behind Detroit's social ills. Bamako, a city whose population size is similar to Detroit, resides in a post-colonial nation whose average household income is $275 per year with an 80% illiteracy rate in the national language of instruction, French. Remarkably, however, Bamako's crime rate is extremely low, drug abuse is almost nonexistent and the HIV/AIDS rate is slightly less than 2%. Based on conventional wisdom, Bamako should be like the Wild West due to its abject poverty and illiteracy. In fact, I felt significantly safer walking the streets of Bamako as a non-French speaking American. What Bamako has that Detroit currently lacks is a culture that has no acceptance for overt antisocial behaviors that compromise the family and community life. Crime is low in Bamako because it is interwoven into the cultural fabric that an offense toward one's neighbor is literally a threat to the entire society. Out-of-wedlock births are not punishable by law yet viewed as antithetical to mores that bind the community together. Detroiters have to admit that we have come to accept the unacceptable, and that a vigorous cultural critique has to be in constant motion before there is any real paradigm shift within the city. (More) SEE ALSO: WEST AFRICANS BOOST MUSLIM COMMUNITY - TOP Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press, 8/22/09 After midnight on a Thursday this month, a dozen Muslims from Senegal known as Murids sat in a circle inside a hotel ballroom, copies of the Quran on wooden stands before them. For more than an hour, they chanted verses, their voices echoing throughout the Southfield center where hundreds had gathered. It was a scene that illustrated the growth and vibrancy of the west African Muslim community in metro Detroit. Hailing from a range of countries -- Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, among others -- the African immigrant population has taken root in local centers. (More) ----- CAIR-NJ: MUSLIMS IN CULTURAL OUTREACH - TOP Kim Mulford, Courier-Post, 8/21/09 To introduce her classmates to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Fatima Nelson passed a plate of chabbakia that she had made the night before. The sticky Moroccan dessert of fried dough flavored with orange blossom water and coated with sesame seeds and honey won smiles Thursday from the men and women in the English as a Second Language class at Gloucester County College. The Washington Township resident, who married an American and moved to the United States 2 1/2 years ago, spent hours making homemade bread, cheese, pastries and soup to share with the students who come from countries all over the world. The iftar, or breaking the fast, is the meal shared by families after sundown during Ramadan, which many Muslims will start celebrating today. But Nelson wanted to treat her classmates to the joyous ritual. "It's a new family," Nelson explained. Ramadan offers Muslims an opportunity to teach others about their beliefs, both in school and through mosques, according to Afsheen Shamsi, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations-New Jersey. "We see that so much more," said Shamsi. "Just about every major mosque hosts an interfaith iftar." The Islamic Center of South Jersey in Palmyra will host its interfaith iftar on Aug. 29, said Rafey Habib, an English professor at Rutgers-Camden and a member of the mosque. "It's especially important nowadays because there is so much misunderstanding, I think, of Islam," said Habib, a Cherry Hill resident. "We need to promote a greater mutual understanding between different religions. We need to work together." (More) SEE ALSO: CAIR-OH: HOLY MONTH WILL BRING MUSLIMS TOGETHER - TOP Meredith Heagney, Columbus Dispatch, 8/21/09 For 84-year-old Samir Gharbo, Ramadan no longer means fasting from sunup to sundown. He's diabetic, and his body can't go without food and drink as in years past. But he can still practice other aspects of the holiest month in Islam. Ramadan begins after sunset tonight, according to the Islamic Society of North America. Some Muslims wait for a moon sighting to signal a new lunar month, which could make a one-day difference in the start date. Ramadan is the month in which Muslims believe that God revealed the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad 1,400 years ago. The observance is a time of fasting, prayer, charity and community. Gharbo, of Worthington, plans to give $5 to $10 a day to the poor, which is about equal to what he spends to feed himself. He will pray at a mosque twice a week, visiting a different one each time. "I am here 40 years, and I know most of the people," said Gharbo, who moved from Egypt to Columbus in 1969. "So I go and see my friends and my acquaintances." This is the busiest time of the year for mosques in central Ohio and around the world. Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Dublin will offer its first Taraweeh tonight. The Taraweeh is a nightly "extra" prayer in which part of the Quran is recited, with the idea of getting through the entire holy book during Ramadan. During the rest of the year, the mosque might have 100 worshippers on a typical weeknight that isn't a Friday, said Jamal Sadoun, Noor's outreach coordinator. During Ramadan, that number is 800 to 1,000. On Aug. 29, the Columbus chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations will have an iftar, or fast-breaking meal, at the Ohio State University Recreation and Physical Activity Center on W. 17th Avenue. Non-Muslims are welcome at the dinner, which offers a chance for people to get to know one another, said Abukar Arman, president of the local chapter. (More) The Columbus chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations will host an iftar dinner at 7 p.m. Aug. 29 at the Ohio State University Recreation and Physical Activity Center, 337 W. 17th Ave. The free event is open to the public. Call 614-451-3232 for information. ----- CAIR-SEATTLE: ?WHERE DOES THE HATRED COME FROM?? - TOP Eli Clifton and Daniel Luban, InterPress Service, 8/24/09 This fall, U.S. law enforcement personnel will have their final chance to take advantage of a rare opportunity. Participants will travel to Israel to receive ?homeland security training,? but the counterterrorism briefings and martial arts practice sessions are only one part of the package. The program also includes visits to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land ? an aspect likely to be especially attractive to Christian Zionists ? along with other sites such as the Knesset and the Israeli ?security fence?. The Israel program is run by Security Solutions International (SSI), a group that has attracted controversy due to its ties to Islamophobic propaganda groups ? as well as its apparent view that indoctrinating first responders with alarmist information about Islam is an essential part of counterterrorism training. Most striking of all, the SSI Israel trip is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DHS?s funding of this venture is a concrete illustration of the ways that Islamophobic fringe groups have exploited the ?global war on terror? for their own purposes? While this DHS-funded trip might already seem a bit odd ? especially the emphasis on Christian religious sites during what is ostensibly a counterterrorism training program ? things take a turn towards the bizarre in the section of the website advertising SSI?s two day presentations on ?The Islamic Jihadist Threat?? It?s hard to imagine how an introduction to Islam that begins with ?where does the hatred come from?? could lead the audience to come away with anything but distrust and fear of Muslims? As Arsalan Bukhari, president of the Washington state chapter of CAIR, told the Seattle Times: ?Most police officers don?t have a basic grounding in Islam, so before you teach them about Islam, how can you teach them about radical Islam? It just makes you nervous because when a law-enforcement person pulls someone over, when they see a Muslim person or someone who appears Muslim to them ? all this information they just learned kicks in.? (More) ----- OKLAHOMA CITY ISLAMIC ART EXHIBIT DRAWS HUNDREDS - TOP CAIR-OK, Gold Dome Multicultural Society co-host exhibit during Ramadan (OKLAHOMA CITY, OK, 8/24/09) - The Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-OK) and the Gold Dome Multicultural Society recently co-hosted the opening of an Islamic Culture and Art Exhibit in Oklahoma City. Hundreds of people turned out for the art exhibit and a CAIR-OK open house in the same facility. The art exhibit will continue throughout the month of Ramadan. See: Islamic Art Exhibit at Oklahoma City's Gold Dome Honors Ramadan http://newsok.com/islamic-art-exhibit-at-oklahoma-citys-gold-dome-honors-ramadan/article/3394506 ?The Islamic art exhibit is an excellent way for Oklahomans to get to know their Muslim neighbors and the talents they offer,? said CAIR-OK Executive Director Razi Hashmi. The Islamic Culture and Art Exhibit features artwork by Uzma Muzaffar, Tehmina Cheema, Samir Abdullah Hulseberg, and Farzana Jahangir. Works of art consist of Arabic calligraphy and Islamic folk art. Mediums include oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, pottery, and digitally enhanced artwork. All the artwork is for sale. WHAT: Islamic Culture and Art Exhibit WHERE: Gold Dome, 1112 NW 23rd St., Suite 111. Oklahoma City, OK 73106 WHEN: August 14 - September 25, 2009. Exhibit Hours: Tuesdays 11a-5p; Thursdays 2-7p; and Saturdays 11a-3p. Appointments may be made by contacting Daniel Kline. CONTACT: Daniel Kline, Gold Dome Multicultural Society Project Executive Director & Curator, E-Mail: golddomemcs at gmail.com, Phone: 405-208-3381 CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. CONTACT: CAIR-OK Executive Director Razi Hashmi, 405-248-5853, E-Mail: rhashmi at cair.com; CAIR-OK Chair Michael Aziz Gipson, E-Mail: mgipson at cair.com ----- FAR FROM HOME, AIRMEN AND THEIR FAMILIES CELEBRATE RAMADAN - TOP 1st Lt. Joe Kreidel, Pacific Air Forces, 8/24/09 8/24/2009 - KADENA AIR BASE, Japan -- "It's like planning for Christmas while everyone else is going about their business," said Tech. Sgt. Angela Errahimi, a combat communications chief with the 909th Air Refueling Squadron, about preparing for Ramadan here. This same sense of dislocation is no doubt shared by many military members celebrating Ramadan in places like Okinawa where Islam is by far a minority religion. Ramadan, which began Aug. 22, is a 30-day fast during which devout Muslims abstain from food, drink, and sex from sunrise to sunset. Ramadan is the preeminent ritual in a faith that gives particular importance to its ritual observances. "Islam was something I was looking for - the mosque was so quiet and peaceful," said Sergeant Errahimi of her conversion six years ago. After meeting her now-husband, who is from Morocco, she studied at a mosque for one year prior to making her "shahada" or witness of faith. It was Islam's structure and emphasis on community that first appealed to Staff Sgt. Marvin Morris, an X-ray technician and the assistant NCOIC of radiology at the 18th Medical Operations Squadron. He called the daily regimen of five scheduled prayers "the military version of prayer." (More) Visit our web site?? :) http://www.cair.com/ Council on American-Islamic Relations 453 New Jersey Ave, S.E., Washington, D.C., 20003 Council on American-Islamic Relations Copyright ? 2008 All rights reserved. From srobin21 at comcast.net Sat Sep 5 14:29:45 2009 From: srobin21 at comcast.net (Steven Robinson) Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 13:29:45 -0700 Subject: [R-G] EGYPT: Textile workers go on hunger strike Message-ID: <0E989FF048AD43A7B206C85C4D1749FA@StevenPC> EGYPT: Textile workers go on hunger strike Amro Hassan in Cairo Babylon & Beyond September 5, 2009 Unlike other Muslims in Egypt, six workers at Indorama Textiles Co. don't look forward to sunset during Ramadan so they can eat after more than 12 hours of fasting. They are on a weeklong hunger strike. The workers are carrying out the strike in a university hospital in Menoufeya after, they said, they were "abusively sacked and suspended" by the company's board of administrators. They announced that they won't end their hunger strike until they either die or get back their jobs. The atmosphere at the former public-sector company, which was sold to Indian investors, has been marred by tensions between workers and the board since employees carried out an 11-day strike in March demanding pay and bonus increases. "The strike proved to be a success and the workers' demands were fulfilled. However, problems started rising when the board became keen on avoiding any future confrontations by punishing those who led the strike," workers' legal representative Ahmed Ezzat told The Times. "First, they transferred four of the strike leaders to the company's warehouses in Alexandria. They were demoted to services works after they were production workers and didn't receive any extra traveling or accommodation costs," Ezzat said."All these practices are against Article 76 of the Egyptian working law." According to Ezzat, the transferred workers were eventually dismissed or forced to resign from their positions. Indorama Textiles workers have released a report threatening to sue Minister of Manpower Aisha Abdel Hadi if they don't return to their jobs. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2009/09/egypt-textile-workers-go-on-hunger-strike.html This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Sep 5 22:09:39 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 13:09:39 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Earth Plus Five Percent Message-ID: <20090906130939.5a95002d.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by Larry Hannigan This story was written by me, Larry Hannigan in 1971 - The sole purpose was to explain the simple mathematics of reality and the current Banking System - that is - 100 plus NOTHING does NOT equal 105 - and that charging interest on something that is created out of nothing, makes it impossible to repay, giving great power to those who do create money out of nothing - that is, the Banks. Money is NOT a commodity, it is a system of debit-credit bookkeeping - nothing more. This story was placed on the Internet to be used as an educational tool only. Many people have taken my story, translated it into other languages and placed it on the Internet, where it has been very helpful. Sadly, some people have taken my story and claimed it as their own with no acknowledgment to me. Not only that, they have changed my story to suit their own personal philosophy, by leaving some sections out and adding in extra parts about conspiracies (true or false), or so called ancient wisdoms, mysteries, and religions et cetera. By doing this, these people are actually helping the enemy. How ? Sooner or later, the words of Lord Acton will materialise. He said - "... the issue which has swept down the centuries and will have to be fought sooner or later is THE PEOPLE VERSUS THE BANKS". That battle is getting closer every day in every language. Please do not give the enemy anything that can be used to divide and distract THE PEOPLE with side issues away from the real issue that 100 + 0 does not = 105. PLEASE DO NOT INTERFERE WITH MY ORIGINAL ENGLISH TEXT (OTHER THAN BY LANGUAGE TRANSLATION) AS PRESENTED HERE AT: http://www.larryhannigan.com/TheEarthPlus5.htm And please have the integrity to acknowledge me as the author if you do use it. If you want to discover the real Fabian, visit: http://www.larryhannigan.com/pastpresentfuture1.htm You may download this article as a .pdf file. Click Here to download: http://www.larryhannigan.com/The_Earth_Plus_5.pdf If you wish to comment on my article, by all means please feel to do so, but keep the original intact and as is. Make your comments and additions as a separate part of your reproduction. Thank you. Feel free to make as many copies of this article, and to reproduce this article, SO LONG AS YOU COMPLY WITH THE ABOVE REQUIREMENTS AND ADD A LINK TO www.larryhannigan.com The Earth Plus Five Percent by Larry Hannigan - Australia (c) 1971-2009 Fabian was excited as he once more rehearsed his speech for the crowd certain to turn up tomorrow. He had always wanted prestige and power and now his dreams were going to come true. He was a craftsman working with silver and gold, making jewelry and ornaments, but he became dissatisfied with working for a living. He needed excitement, a challenge, and now his plan was ready to begin. For generations the people used the barter system. A man supported his own family by providing all their needs or else he specialised in a particular trade. Whatever surpluses he might have from his own production, he exchanged or swapped for the surplus of others. Market day was always noisy and dusty, yet people looked forward to the shouting and waving, and especially the companionship. It used to be a happy place, but now there were too many people, too much arguing. There was no time for chatting - a better system was needed. Generally, the people had been happy, and enjoyed the fruits of their work. In each community a simple Government had been formed to make sure that each person's freedoms and rights were protected and that no man was forced to do anything against his will by any other man, or any group of men. This was the Government's one and only purpose and each Governor was voluntarily supported by the local community who elected him. However, market day was the one problem they could not solve. Was a knife worth one or two baskets of corn? Was a cow worth more than a wagon ? and so on. No one could think of a better system. Fabian had advertised, "I have the solution to our bartering problems, and I invite everyone to a public meeting tomorrow". The next day there was a great assembly in the town square and Fabian explained all about the new system which he called "money". It sounded good. "How are we to start?" the people asked. "The gold which I fashion into ornaments and jewelry is an excellent metal. It does not tarnish or rust, and will last a long time. I will make some gold into coins and we shall call each coin a dollar." He explained how values would work, and that "money" would be really a medium for exchange - a much better system than bartering. One of the Governors questioned, "Some people can dig gold and make coins for themselves", he said, "This would be most unfair". Fabian was ready with the answer. "Only those coins approved by the Government can be used, and these will have special markings stamped on them". This seemed reasonable and it was proposed that each man be given an equal number. "But I deserve the most", said the candle-maker. "Everyone uses my candles". "No", said the farmer, "without food there is no life, surely we should get the most". And so the bickering continued. Fabian let them argue for a while and finally he said, "Since none of you can agree, I suggest you obtain the number you require from me. There will be no limit, except for your ability to repay. The more you obtain, the more you must repay in one year's time. "And what will you receive?" the people asked. "Since I am providing a service, that is, the money supply, I am entitled to payment for my work. Let us say that for every 100 pieces you obtain, you repay me 105 for every year that you owe the debt. The five will be my charge, and I shall call this charge interest." There seemed to be no other way, and besides, five percent seemed little enough charge. "Come back next Friday and we will begin". Fabian wasted no time. He made coins day and night, and at the end of the week he was ready. The people were queued up at his shop, and after the coins were inspected and approved by the Governors the system commenced. Some borrowed only a few and they went off to try the new system. They found money to be marvellous, and they soon valued everything in gold coins or dollars. The value they placed on everything was called a "price", and the price mainly depended on the amount of work required to produce it. If it took a lot of work the price was high, but if it was produced with little effort it was quite inexpensive. In one town lived Alan, who was the only watchmaker. His prices were high because the customers were willing to pay just to own one of his watches. Then another man began making watches and offered them at a lower price in order to get sales. Alan was forced to lower his prices, and in no time at all prices came down, so that both men were striving to give the best quality at the lowest price. This was genuine free competition. It was the same with builders, transport operators, accountants, farmers, in fact, in every endeavour. The customers always chose what they felt was the best deal - they had freedom of choice. There was no artificial protection such as licences or tariffs to prevent other people from going into business. The standard of living rose, and before long the people wondered how they had ever done without money. At the end of the year, Fabian left his shop and visited all the people who owed him money. Some had more than they borrowed, but this meant that others had less, since there were only a certain number of coins issued in the first place. Those who had more than they borrowed paid back each hundred plus the extra five, but still had to borrow again to carry on. The others discovered for the first time that they had a debt. Before he would lend them more money, Fabian took a mortgage over some of their assets, and everyone went away once more to try and get those extra five coins which always seemed so hard to find. No one realised that as a whole, the country could never get out of debt until all the coins were repaid, but even then, there were those extra five on each hundred which had never been lent out at all. No one but Fabian could see that it was impossible to pay the interest - the extra money had never been issued, therefore someone had to miss out. It was true that Fabian spent some coins, but he couldn't possibly spend anything like five percent of the total economy on himself. There were thousands of people and Fabian was only one. Besides, he was still a goldsmith making a comfortable living. At the back of his shop Fabian had a strongroom and people found it convenient to leave some of their coins with him for safekeeping. He charged a small fee depending on the amount of money, and the time it was left with him. He would give the owner receipts for the deposit. When a person went shopping, he did not normally carry a lot of gold coins. He would give the shopkeeper one of the receipts to the value of the goods he wanted to buy. Shopkeepers recognised the receipt as being genuine and accepted it with the idea of taking it to Fabian and collecting the appropriate amount in coins. The receipts passed from hand to hand instead of the gold itself being transferred. The people had great faith in the receipts - they accepted them as being as good as coins. Before long, Fabian noticed that it was quite unusual for anyone to actually call for their gold coins. He thought to himself, "Here I am in possession of all this gold and I am still a hard working craftsman. It doesn't make sense. Why, there are dozens of people who would be glad to pay me interest for the use of this gold which is lying here and rarely called for. "It is true, the gold is not mine - but it is in my possession, which is all that matters. I hardly need to make any coins at all, I can use some of the coins stored in the vault." At first he was very cautious, only loaning a few at a time, and then only on tremendous security. But gradually he became bolder, and larger amounts were loaned. One day, a large loan was requested. Fabian suggested, "Instead of carrying all these coins we can make a deposit in your name, and then I shall give you several receipts to the value of the coins". The borrower agreed, and off he went with a bunch of receipts. He had obtained a loan, yet the gold remained in the strong-room. After the client left, Fabian smiled. He could have his cake and eat it too. He could "lend" gold and still keep it in his possession. Friends, strangers and even enemies needed funds to carry out their businesses - and so long as they could produce security, they could borrow as much as they needed. By simply writing out receipts Fabian was able to "lend" money to several times the value of gold in his strong-room, and he was not even the owner of it. Everything was safe so long as the real owners didn't call for their gold and the confidence of the people was maintained. He kept a book showing the debits and credits for each person. The lending business was proving to be very lucrative indeed. His social standing in the community was increasing almost as fast as his wealth. He was becoming a man of importance, he commanded respect. In matters of finance, his very word was like a sacred pronouncement. Goldsmiths from other towns became curious about his activities and one day they called to see him. He told them what he was doing, but was very careful to emphasize the need for secrecy. If their plan was exposed, the scheme would fail, so they agreed to form their own secret alliance. Each returned to his own town and began to operate as Fabian had taught. People now accepted the receipts as being as good as gold itself, and many receipts were deposited for safe keeping in the same way as coins. When a merchant wished to pay another for goods, he simply wrote a short note instructing Fabian to transfer money from his account to that of the second merchant. It took Fabian only a few minutes to adjust the figures. This new system became very popular, and the instruction notes were called "checks". Late one night, the goldsmiths had another secret meeting and Fabian revealed a new plan. The next day they called a meeting with all the Governors, and Fabian began. "The receipts we issue have become very popular. No doubt, most of you Governors are using them and you find them very convenient." They nodded in agreement and wondered what the problem was. "Well", he continued, "some receipts are being copied by counterfeiters. This practice must be stopped." The Governors became alarmed. "What can we do?" they asked. Fabian replied, "My suggestion is this - first of all, let it be the Government's job to print new notes on a special paper with very intricate designs, and then each note to be signed by the chief Governor. We goldsmiths will be happy to pay the printing costs, as it will save us a lot of time writing out receipts." The Governors reasoned, "Well, it is our job to protect the people against counterfeiters and the advice certainly seems like a good idea". So they agreed to print the notes. "Secondly", Fabian said, "some people have gone prospecting and are making their own gold coins. I suggest that you pass a law so that any person who finds gold nuggets must hand them in. Of course, they will be reimbursed with notes and coins." The idea sounded good and without too much thought about it, they printed a large number of crisp new notes. Each note had a value printed on it - $1, $2, $5, $10 et cetera. The small printing costs were paid by the goldsmiths. The notes were much easier to carry and they soon became accepted by the people. Despite their popularity however, these new notes and coins were used for only ten percent of transactions. The records showed that the check system accounted for ninety percent of all business. The next part of his plan commenced. Until now, people were paying Fabian to guard their money. In order to attract more money into the vault Fabian offered to pay depositors three percent interest on their money. Most people believed that he was re-lending their money out to borrowers at five percent, and his profit was the two percent difference. Besides, the people didn't question him as getting three percent was far better than paying to have the money guarded. The volume of savings grew and with the additional money in the vaults, Fabian was able to lend $200, $300, $400 sometimes up to $900 for every $100 in notes and coins that he held in deposit. He had to be careful not to exceed this nine to one ratio, because one person in ten did require the notes and coins for use. If there was not enough money available when required, people would become suspicious, especially as their deposit books showed how much they had deposited. Nevertheless, on the $900 in book figures that Fabian loaned out by writing checks himself, he was able to demand up to $45 in interest, that is, five percent on $900. When the loan plus interest was repaid, that is $945, the $900 was cancelled out in the debit column and Fabian kept the $45 interest. He was therefore quite happy to pay $3 interest on the original $100 deposited which had never left the vaults at all. This meant that for every $100 he held in deposits, it was possible to make 42% profit, most people believing he was only making two percent. The other goldsmiths were doing the same thing. They created money out of nothing at the stroke of a pen, and then charged interest on top of it. True, they didn't coin money, the Government actually printed the notes and coins and gave it to the goldsmiths to distribute. Fabian's only expense was the small printing fee. Still, they were creating credit money out of nothing and charging interest on top of it. Most people believed that the money supply was a Government operation. They also believed that Fabian was lending them the money that someone else had deposited, but it was very strange that no one's deposits ever decreased when a loan was advanced. If everyone had tried to withdraw their deposits at once, the fraud would have been exposed. When a loan was requested in notes or coins, it presented no problem. Fabian merely explained to the Government that the increase in population and production required more notes, and these he obtained for the small printing fee. One day a thoughtful man went to see Fabian. "This interest charge is wrong", he said. "For every $100 you issue, you are asking $105 in return. The extra $5 can never be paid since it doesn't exist. "Farmers produce food, industry manufacturers goods, and so on, but only you produce money. Suppose there are only two businessmen in the whole country and we employ everyone else. We borrow $100 each, we pay $90 out in wages and expenses and allow $10 profit (our wage). That means the total purchasing power is $90 + $10 twice, that is, $200. Yet to pay you we must sell all our produce for $210. If one of us succeeds and sells all his produce for $105, the other man can only hope to get $95. Also, part of his goods cannot be sold, as there is no money left to buy them. "He will still owe you $10 and can only repay this by borrowing more. The system is impossible." The man continued, "Surely you should issue 105, that is, 100 to me and five to you to spend. This way there would be 105 in circulation, and the debt can be repaid." Fabian listened quietly and finally said, "Financial economics is a deep subject, my boy, it takes years of study. Let me worry about these matters, and you look after yours. You must become more efficient, increase your production, cut down on your expenses and become a better businessman. I am always willing to help in these matters." The man went away still unconvinced. There was something wrong with Fabian's operations and he felt that his questions had been avoided. Yet, most people respected Fabian's word - "He is the expert, the others must be wrong. Look how the country has developed, how our production has increased - we must be better off." To cover the interest on the money they had borrowed, merchants were forced to raise their prices. Wage earners complained that wages were too low. Employers refused to pay higher wages, claiming that they would be ruined. Farmers could not get a fair price for their produce. Housewives complained that food was getting too dear. And finally some people went on strike, a thing previously unheard of. Others had become poverty stricken and their friends and relatives could not afford to help them. Most had forgotten the real wealth all around - the fertile soils, the great forests, the minerals and cattle. They could think only of the money which always seemed so scarce. But they never questioned the system. They believed the Government was running it. A few had pooled their excess money and formed "lending" or "finance" companies. They could get six percent or more this way, which was better than the three percent Fabian paid, but they could only lend out money they owned - they did not have this strange power of being able to create money out of nothing by merely writing figures in books. These finance companies worried Fabian and his friends somewhat, so they quickly set up a few companies of their own. Mostly, they bought the others out before they got going. In no time, all the finance companies were owned by them, or under their control. The economic situation got worse. The wage earners were convinced that the bosses were making too much profit. The bosses said that their workers were too lazy and weren't doing an honest day's work, and everyone was blaming everyone else. The Governors could not come up with an answer and besides, the immediate problem seemed to be to help the poverty stricken. They started up welfare schemes and made laws forcing people to contribute to them. This made many people angry - they believed in the old-fashioned idea of helping one's neighbour by voluntary effort. "These laws are nothing more than legalised robbery. To take something off a person against his will, regardless of the purpose for which it is to be used, is no different from stealing." But each man felt helpless and was afraid of the jail sentence which was threatened for failing to pay. These welfare schemes gave some relief, but before long the problem was back and more money was needed to cope. The cost of these schemes rose higher and higher and the size of the Government grew. Most of the Governors were sincere men trying to do their best. They didn't like asking for more money from their people and finally, they had no choice but to borrow money from Fabian and his friends. They had no idea how they were going to repay. Parents could no longer afford to pay teachers for their children. They couldn't pay doctors. And transport operators were going out of business. One by one the government was forced to take these operations over. Teachers, doctors and many others became public servants. Few obtained satisfaction in their work. They were given a reasonable wage, but they lost their identity. They became small cogs in a giant machine. There was no room for personal initiative, little recognition for effort, their income was fixed and advancement came only when a superior retired or died. In desperation, the governors decided to seek Fabian's advice. They considered him very wise and he seemed to know how to solve money matters. He listened to them explain all their problems, and finally he answered, "Many people cannot solve their own problems - they need someone to do it for them. Surely you agree that most people have the right to be happy and to be provided with the essentials of life. One of our great sayings is 'all men are equal' - is it not?" "Well, the only way to balance things up is to take the excess wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Introduce a system of taxation. The more a man has, the more he must pay. Collect taxes from each person according to his ability, and give to each according to his need. Schools and hospitals should be free for those who cannot afford them ?" He gave them a long talk on high sounding ideals and finished up with, "Oh, by the way, don't forget you owe me money. You've been borrowing now for quite some time. The least I can do to help, is for you to just pay me the interest. We'll leave the capital debt owing, just pay me the interest." They went away, and without giving Fabian's philosophies any real thought, they introduced the graduated income tax - the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. No one liked this, but they either paid the taxes or went to jail. Merchants were forced once again to raise their prices. Wage earners demanded higher wages forcing many employers out of business, or to replace men with machinery. This caused additional unemployment and forced the Government to introduce further welfare and handout schemes. Tariffs and other protection devices were introduced to keep some industries going just to provide employment. A few people wondered if the purpose of the production was to produce goods or merely to provide employment. As things got worse, they tried wage control, price control, and all sorts of controls. The Government tried to get more money through sales tax, payroll tax and all sorts of taxes. Someone noted that from the wheat farmer right through to the housewife, there were over fifty taxes on a loaf of bread. "Experts" arose and some were elected to Government, but after each yearly meeting they came back with almost nothing achieved, except for the news that taxes were to be "restructured", but overall the total tax always increased. Fabian began to demand his interest payments, and a larger and larger portion of the tax money was being needed to pay him. Then came party politics - the people started arguing about which group of Governors could best solve the problems. They argued about personalities, idealism, party labels, everything except the real problem. The councils were getting into trouble. In one town the interest on the debt exceeded the amount of rates which were collected in a year. Throughout the land the unpaid interest kept increasing - interest was charged on unpaid interest. Gradually much of the real wealth of the country came to be owned or controlled by Fabian and his friends and with it came greater control over people. However, the control was not yet complete. They knew that the situation would not be secure until every person was controlled. Most people opposing the systems could be silenced by financial pressure, or suffer public ridicule. To do this Fabian and his friends purchased most of the newspapers, television and radio stations and he carefully selected people to operate them. Many of these people had a sincere desire to improve the world, but they never realised how they were being used. Their solutions always dealt with the effects of the problem, never the cause. There were several different newspapers - one for the right wing, one for the left wing, one for the workers, one for the bosses, and so on. It didn't matter much which one you believed in, so long as you didn't think about the real problem. Fabian's plan was almost at its completion - the whole country was in debt to him. Through education and the media, he had control of people's minds. They were able to think and believe only what he wanted them to. After a man has far more money than he can possibly spend for pleasure, what is left to excite him? For those with a ruling class mentality, the answer is power - raw power over other human beings. The idealists were used in the media and in Government, but the real controllers that Fabian sought were those of the ruling class mentality. Most of the goldsmiths had become this way. They knew the feeling of great wealth, but it no longer satisfied them. They needed challenge and excitement, and power over the masses was the ultimate game. They believed they were superior to all others. "It is our right and duty to rule. The masses don't know what is good for them. They need to be rallied and organised. To rule is our birthright." Throughout the land Fabian and his friends owned many lending offices. True, they were privately and separately owned. In theory they were in competition with each other, but in reality they were working very closely together. After persuading some of the Governors, they set up an institution which they called the Money Reserve Centre. They didn't even use their own money to do this - they created credit against part of the money out of the people's deposits. This Institution gave the outward appearance of regulating the money supply and being a Government operation, but strangely enough, no Governor or public servant was ever allowed to be on the Board of Directors. The Government no longer borrowed directly from Fabian, but began to use a system of IOUs to the Money Reserve Centre. The security offered was the estimated revenue from next year's taxes. This was in line with Fabian's plan - removing suspicion from himself to an apparent Government operation. Yet, behind the scenes, he was still in control. Indirectly, Fabian had such control over the Government that they were forced to do his bidding. He boasted, "Let me control the nation's money and I care not who makes its laws". It didn't matter much which group of Governors were elected. Fabian was in control of the money, the life blood of the nation. The Government obtained the money, but interest was always charged on every loan. More and more was going out in welfare and handout schemes, and it was not long before the Government found it difficult to even repay the interest, let alone the capital. And yet there were people who still asked the question, "Money is a man-made system. Surely it can be adjusted to serve, not to rule?" But these people became fewer and their voices were lost in the mad scrabble for the non-existent interest. The adminstrations changed, the party labels changed, but the major policies continued. Regardless of which Government was in "power", Fabian's ultimate goal was brought closer each year. The people's policies meant nothing. They were being taxed to the limit, they could pay no more. Now the time was ripe for Fabian's final move. Ten percent of the money supply was still in the form of notes and coins. This had to be abolished in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. While the people used cash, they were free to buy and sell as they chose - they still had some control over their own lives. But it was not always safe to carry notes and coins. Checks were not accepted outside one's local community, and therefore a more convenient system was looked forward to. Once again Fabian had the answer. His organisation issued everyone with a little plastic card showing the person's name, photograph and an identification number. When this card was presented anywhere, the storekeeper phoned the central computer to check the credit rating. If it was clear, the person could buy what he wanted up to a certain amount. At first people were allowed to spend a small amount on credit, and if this was repaid within a month, no interest was charged. This was fine for the wage earner, but what businessman could even begin? He had to set up machinery, manufacture the goods, pay wages et cetera and sell all his goods and repay the money. If he exceeded one month, he was charged 1.5% for every month the debt was owed. This amounted to over eighteen percent per year. Businessmen had no option but to add the eighteen percent onto the selling price. Yet this extra money or credit (the eighteen percent) had not been loaned out to anyone. Throughout the country, businessmen were given the impossible task of repaying $118 for every $100 they borrowed - but the extra $18 had never been created at all. Yet Fabian and his friends increased their standing in society. They were regarded as pillars of respectability. Their pronouncements on finance and economics were accepted with almost religious conviction. Under the burden of ever increasing taxes, many small businesses collapsed. Special licenses were needed for various operations, so that the remaining ones found it very difficult to operate. Fabian owned and controlled all of the big companies which had hundreds of subsidiaries. These appeared to be in competition with each other, yet he controlled them all. Eventually all competitors were forced out of business. Plumbers, panel beaters, electricians and most other small industries suffered the same fate - they were swallowed up by Fabian's giant companies which all had Government protection. Fabian wanted the plastic cards to eliminate notes and coins. His plan was that when all notes were withdrawn, only businesses using the computer card system would be able to operate. He planned that eventually some people would misplace their cards and be unable to buy or sell anything until a proof of identify was made. He wanted a law to be passed which would give him ultimate control - a law forcing everyone to have their identification number tattooed onto their hand. The number would be visible only under a special light, linked to a computer. Every computer would be linked to a giant central computer so that Fabian could know everything about everyone. A Summary and Other Information The story you have read is, of course, fiction. But if you found it to be disturbingly close to the truth and would like to know who Fabian was in real life, a good starting point is a study on the activities of the English goldsmiths in the 16th & 17th centuries. For example, The Bank of England began in 1694. King William of Orange was in financial difficulties as a result of a war with France. The Goldsmiths "lent him" 1.2 million pounds (a staggering amount in those days) with certain conditions: 1. The interest rate was to be eight percent. It must be remembered that Magna Carta stated that the charging or collecting of interest was a serious crime. 2. The King was to grant the goldsmiths a charter for the bank which gave them the right to issue or create credit out of nothing. Prior to this, their operations of issuing receipts for more money than they held in deposits was totally illegal. The charter made it legal. In 1694 William Patterson obtained the Charter for the Bank of England. By the way, the correct terminology used in the financial world for this money system is "fractional reserve banking". Lets now do some research ? Quotations Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition - "Banks create credit. It is a mistake to suppose that bank credit is created to any extent by the payment of money into the banks. A loan made by a bank is a clear addition to the amount of money in the community." Lord Acton, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1875 - "The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the People versus the Banks". Mr Reginald McKenna, when Chairman of the Midland Bank in London - "I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." Mr Phillip A Benson, President of the American Bankers' Association, June 8 1939 said - "There is no more direct way to capture control of a nation than through its credit (money) system". Sir Denison Miller - During an interview in 1921, when he was asked if he, through the Commonwealth Bank, had financed Australia during the First World War for $700 million, he replied, "Such was the case, and I could have financed the country for a further like sum had the war continued". Asked if that amount was available for productive purposes in this time of peace, he answered, "Yes". So how should a proper money system work ? As a simple example, what happens when we want to build a bridge ? 1st Question: Do we know how to build a bridge ? - Yes 2nd Question: Do we have the materials to build it ? - Yes 3rd Question: Do we have enough people producing food to feed the men while they are building the bridge ? - yes So how does money get into the project ? If there is work to be done, and the material is available and the labour willing, all we have to do is create the money which really is as simple as credit for work done. Credit can be in the form of a ledger column, or even printed tickets which we might choose to call - dollars. Ask yourself why depressions have happened. The labour was still available. The work to be done was still there. The materials had not disappeared, and goods were readily available in the shops, or could be produced, except for the want of money. All that went missing from the community was the money to buy goods and services. So why did the money supply dry up ? Here is a letter written by the Rothschild Brothers of London to a New York firm of bankers on 25 June 1863: It reads - "The few who can understand the System (Cheque Money and Credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class. While on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical (hostile, hurtful) to their interests." The following quotation was reprinted in the Idaho Leader, USA, 26 August 1924, and has been read into Hansard twice: by John Evans MP, in 1926, and by M D Cowan MP, in the Session of 1930-1931: In 1891 a confidential circular was sent to American bankers and their agents, containing the following statements: "We authorise our loan agents in the western States to loan our funds on real estate, to fall due on September 1st 1894, and at no time thereafter". "On September 1 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration". "On September 1st we will demand our money - we will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession". "We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price". "We may as well own three quarters of the farms of the west and the money of the country". "Then the farmers will become tenants, as in England". The understanding of this issue of money into the community can be best illustrated by equating money in the economy with tickets in a railway system. The tickets are printed by a printer who is paid for his work. The printer never claims the ownership of the tickets. And we can never imagine a railway company refusing to give passengers seats on a train because it is out of tickets. By this same token, a government should never refuse people the access to normal commerce and trade by claiming it is out of money. Suppose the government borrows $10 million. It only costs the bankers a few hundred dollars to actually produce the funds, and a little more to do the book-keeping. Do you think it is fair that our citizens should struggle to keep their homes and families together, while the bankers grow fat on these profits? Credit created by a Government-owned bank is better than credit created by private banks, because there is no need to recover the money from people by way of taxes, and there is no interest attached to inflate the cost. The public work completed with the credit by the Government bank is the asset that replaces the money created when the work is finished. None of our problems will disappear until we correct the creation, supply and circulation of money. So What Keeps the Banking System going ? Suppose you are a fairly successful private businessman, and you want to expand, so you take a loan or overdraft of $10,000 from your local bank. Things go well for a while, and you have paid back $5,000, or half the loan. But things go wrong, and you have to tell the bank that you can no longer keep up the payments on the outstanding principal and interest. The $5,000 you cannot, will not, or have not repaid, remains in circulation as interest free money, for other debors to use, to pay the interest and principal on their loans. It is this money from defaulted loans that enables the system to keep going. Of course, the banks say they don't want that to happen, but in reality, they can now foreclose on your real assets, for something they gave only bookkeeping credit on. Whenever the debts increase beyond a certain point, orders go out to banks to refuse further credit, and then they foreclose on certain outstanding loans. So who gets forclosed and why ? Governments are never foreclosed. If it is necessary to eliminate a government that becomes hostile to those controlling the banking system, it is accomplished through war and revolution. Large corporate bodies are generally left alone, as they are necessary in the coming World Government, rather than individual countries. Foreclosures are nearly always directed against those who are the smallest, and least organised to resist, such as the small businessman, the home owner, and especially the family farmers. These can be handled with the least trouble. In order to keep Israeli, the Communist nations and international usury banking going, small businesses must be foreclosed. Western Governments give away billions of dollars in foreign aid, while thousands of farmers and small businesses are cruelly foreclosed every month. So when we pay our taxes this is what it is all about. Those persons who now rule and control the world, foreclose heavily on the small home owner, business people, and especially the farmers, who want to make their own decisions and take their own consequences. They do not usually research history and the economic situation, but they feel justified in borrowing what they need from the banks. But in times of good farm prosperity, it is bankers who encourage these loans. Those who run the banking system, know that farmers and small business people are the most independent people in the nation. They are encouraged to get into debt, so foreclosure can be enforced to kill their independence. When you plant one grain of corn, it will yield an increase of several hundred grains - this God's gift of increase. Animals also produce increase, but money, in any form, cannot increase, yet people believe it does, and today, many people live off interest. Money is a great system, far superior to barter. Creating money to equate the real wealth of a nation or giving credit to an individual, is not the problem. It is the charging of INTEREST that is the root cause of all our economic problems. We are told that all nations are in debt. Ask yourself, or any politician - if all nations are in debt, who is the creditor ? Thou shalt not lend upon usury (interest) to thy brother, interest on the money, or on anything that is lent with interest. Deuteronomy 23.19 He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent, he that doeth these things shall never be moved. Psalm 15:5 PLEASE DONATE TO THE DVD PROJECT There are many websites to help you understand the Money Question and what you can do - here are two to start with: http://www.wepin.com/why/ep5anal.htmll www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html (c) Larry Hannigan 1971 - 2008, Australia http://www.larryhannigan.com/TheEarthPlus5.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 6 19:02:02 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 18:02:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Earth Plus Five Percent In-Reply-To: <20090906130939.5a95002d.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <20090906130939.5a95002d.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: <138588.87722.qm@web43509.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Pretty good tale. I am impressed although I am not sure I agree with the conclusion. Banking in my resarch seems to go back to ancient Greece. Wikepedia says it goes back to Babylon but I have not read enough about that to verify it. The Greeks bought their style of banking to Egypt. This is what Wikipedia says. "The first banks were probably the religious temples of the ancient world, and were probably established sometime during the third millennium B.C. Banks probably predated the invention of money. Deposits initially consisted of grain and later other goods including cattle, agricultural implements, and eventually precious metals such as gold, in the form of easy-to-carry compressed plates. Temples and palaces were the safest places to store gold as they were constantly attended and well built. As sacred places, temples presented an extra deterrent to would-be thieves. There are extant records of loans from the 18th century BC in Babylon that were made by temple priests/monks to merchants. By the time of Hammurabi's Code, banking was well enough developed to justify the promulgation of laws governing banking operations.[1] Ancient Greece holds further evidence of banking. Greek temples, as well as private and civic entities, conducted financial transactions such as loans, deposits, currency exchange, and validation of coinage. There is evidence too of credit, whereby in return for a payment from a client, a moneylender in one Greek port would write a credit note for the client who could "cash" the note in another city, saving the client the danger of carting coinage with him on his journey. Pythius, who operated as a merchant banker throughout Asia Minor at the beginning of the 5th century B.C., is the first individual banker of whom we have records. Many of the early bankers in Greek city-states were ?metics? or foreign residents. Around 371 B.C., Pasion, a slave, became the wealthiest and most famous Greek banker, gaining his freedom and Athenian citizenship in the process." ? ?? It is a nice parable, poor Fabian. ________________________________ From: Bill Totten To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Saturday, September 5, 2009 9:09:39 PM Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Earth Plus Five Percent by Larry Hannigan ??? ? ??? ? ??? This story was written by me, Larry Hannigan in 1971 - The sole purpose was to explain the simple mathematics of reality and the current Banking System - that is - 100 plus NOTHING does NOT equal 105 - and that charging interest on something that is created out of nothing, makes it impossible to repay, giving great power to those who do create money out of nothing - that is, the Banks. Money is NOT a commodity, it is a system of debit-credit bookkeeping - nothing more. This story was placed on the Internet to be used as an educational tool only. Many people have taken my story, translated it into other languages and placed it on the Internet, where it has been very helpful. Sadly, some people have taken my story and claimed it as their own with no acknowledgment to me. Not only that, they have changed my story to suit their own personal philosophy, by leaving some sections out and adding in extra parts about conspiracies (true or false), or so called ancient wisdoms, mysteries, and religions et cetera. By doing this, these people are actually helping the enemy. How ? Sooner or later, the words of Lord Acton will materialise. He said - "... the issue which has swept down the centuries and will have to be fought sooner or later is THE PEOPLE VERSUS THE BANKS". That battle is getting closer every day in every language. Please do not give the enemy anything that can be used to divide and distract THE PEOPLE with side issues away from the real issue that 100 + 0 does not = 105. PLEASE DO NOT INTERFERE WITH MY ORIGINAL ENGLISH TEXT (OTHER THAN BY LANGUAGE TRANSLATION) AS PRESENTED HERE AT: http://www.larryhannigan.com/TheEarthPlus5.htm And please have the integrity to acknowledge me as the author if you do use it. If you want to discover the real Fabian, visit: http://www.larryhannigan.com/pastpresentfuture1.htm You may download this article as a .pdf file. Click Here to download: http://www.larryhannigan.com/The_Earth_Plus_5.pdf??? If you wish to comment on my article, by all means please feel to do so, but keep the original intact and as is. Make your comments and additions as a separate part of your reproduction. Thank you. Feel free to make as many copies of this article, and to reproduce this article, SO LONG AS YOU COMPLY WITH THE ABOVE REQUIREMENTS AND ADD A LINK TO www.larryhannigan.com The Earth Plus Five Percent by Larry Hannigan - Australia (c) 1971-2009 ??? Fabian was excited as he once more rehearsed his speech for the crowd certain to turn up tomorrow. He had always wanted prestige and power and now his dreams were going to come true. He was a craftsman working with silver and gold, making jewelry and ornaments, but he became dissatisfied with working for a living. He needed excitement, a challenge, and now his plan was ready to begin. For generations the people used the barter system. A man supported his own family by providing all their needs or else he specialised in a particular trade. Whatever surpluses he might have from his own production, he exchanged or swapped for the surplus of others. Market day was always noisy and dusty, yet people looked forward to the shouting and waving, and especially the companionship. It used to be a happy place, but now there were too many people, too much arguing. There was no time for chatting - a better system was needed. Generally, the people had been happy, and enjoyed the fruits of their work. In each community a simple Government had been formed to make sure that each person's freedoms and rights were protected and that no man was forced to do anything against his will by any other man, or any group of men. This was the Government's one and only purpose and each Governor was voluntarily supported by the local community who elected him. However, market day was the one problem they could not solve. Was a knife worth one or two baskets of corn? Was a cow worth more than a wagon ? and so on. No one could think of a better system. Fabian had advertised, "I have the solution to our bartering problems, and I invite everyone to a public meeting tomorrow". The next day there was a great assembly in the town square and Fabian explained all about the new system which he called "money". It sounded good. "How are we to start?" the people asked. "The gold which I fashion into ornaments and jewelry is an excellent metal. It does not tarnish or rust, and will last a long time. I will make some gold into coins and we shall call each coin a dollar." He explained how values would work, and that "money" would be really a medium for exchange - a much better system than bartering. One of the Governors questioned, "Some people can dig gold and make coins for themselves", he said, "This would be most unfair". Fabian was ready with the answer. "Only those coins approved by the Government can be used, and these will have special markings stamped on them". This seemed reasonable and it was proposed that each man be given an equal number. "But I deserve the most", said the candle-maker. "Everyone uses my candles". "No", said the farmer, "without food there is no life, surely we should get the most". And so the bickering continued. Fabian let them argue for a while and finally he said, "Since none of you can agree, I suggest you obtain the number you require from me. There will be no limit, except for your ability to repay. The more you obtain, the more you must repay in one year's time. "And what will you receive?" the people asked. "Since I am providing a service, that is, the money supply, I am entitled to payment for my work. Let us say that for every 100 pieces you obtain, you repay me 105 for every year that you owe the debt. The five will be my charge, and I shall call this charge interest." There seemed to be no other way, and besides, five percent seemed little enough charge. "Come back next Friday and we will begin". Fabian wasted no time. He made coins day and night, and at the end of the week he was ready. The people were queued up at his shop, and after the coins were inspected and approved by the Governors the system commenced. Some borrowed only a few and they went off to try the new system. They found money to be marvellous, and they soon valued everything in gold coins or dollars. The value they placed on everything was called a "price", and the price mainly depended on the amount of work required to produce it. If it took a lot of work the price was high, but if it was produced with little effort it was quite inexpensive. In one town lived Alan, who was the only watchmaker. His prices were high because the customers were willing to pay just to own one of his watches. Then another man began making watches and offered them at a lower price in order to get sales. Alan was forced to lower his prices, and in no time at all prices came down, so that both men were striving to give the best quality at the lowest price. This was genuine free competition. It was the same with builders, transport operators, accountants, farmers, in fact, in every endeavour. The customers always chose what they felt was the best deal - they had freedom of choice. There was no artificial protection such as licences or tariffs to prevent other people from going into business. The standard of living rose, and before long the people wondered how they had ever done without money. At the end of the year, Fabian left his shop and visited all the people who owed him money. Some had more than they borrowed, but this meant that others had less, since there were only a certain number of coins issued in the first place. Those who had more than they borrowed paid back each hundred plus the extra five, but still had to borrow again to carry on. The others discovered for the first time that they had a debt. Before he would lend them more money, Fabian took a mortgage over some of their assets, and everyone went away once more to try and get those extra five coins which always seemed so hard to find. No one realised that as a whole, the country could never get out of debt until all the coins were repaid, but even then, there were those extra five on each hundred which had never been lent out at all. No one but Fabian could see that it was impossible to pay the interest - the extra money had never been issued, therefore someone had to miss out. It was true that Fabian spent some coins, but he couldn't possibly spend anything like five percent of the total economy on himself. There were thousands of people and Fabian was only one. Besides, he was still a goldsmith making a comfortable living. At the back of his shop Fabian had a strongroom and people found it convenient to leave some of their coins with him for safekeeping. He charged a small fee depending on the amount of money, and the time it was left with him. He would give the owner receipts for the deposit. When a person went shopping, he did not normally carry a lot of gold coins. He would give the shopkeeper one of the receipts to the value of the goods he wanted to buy. Shopkeepers recognised the receipt as being genuine and accepted it with the idea of taking it to Fabian and collecting the appropriate amount in coins. The receipts passed from hand to hand instead of the gold itself being transferred. The people had great faith in the receipts - they accepted them as being as good as coins. Before long, Fabian noticed that it was quite unusual for anyone to actually call for their gold coins. He thought to himself, "Here I am in possession of all this gold and I am still a hard working craftsman. It doesn't make sense. Why, there are dozens of people who would be glad to pay me interest for the use of this gold which is lying here and rarely called for. "It is true, the gold is not mine - but it is in my possession, which is all that matters. I hardly need to make any coins at all, I can use some of the coins stored in the vault." At first he was very cautious, only loaning a few at a time, and then only on tremendous security. But gradually he became bolder, and larger amounts were loaned. One day, a large loan was requested. Fabian suggested, "Instead of carrying all these coins we can make a deposit in your name, and then I shall give you several receipts to the value of the coins". The borrower agreed, and off he went with a bunch of receipts. He had obtained a loan, yet the gold remained in the strong-room. After the client left, Fabian smiled. He could have his cake and eat it too. He could "lend" gold and still keep it in his possession. Friends, strangers and even enemies needed funds to carry out their businesses - and so long as they could produce security, they could borrow as much as they needed. By simply writing out receipts Fabian was able to "lend" money to several times the value of gold in his strong-room, and he was not even the owner of it. Everything was safe so long as the real owners didn't call for their gold and the confidence of the people was maintained. He kept a book showing the debits and credits for each person. The lending business was proving to be very lucrative indeed. His social standing in the community was increasing almost as fast as his wealth. He was becoming a man of importance, he commanded respect. In matters of finance, his very word was like a sacred pronouncement. Goldsmiths from other towns became curious about his activities and one day they called to see him. He told them what he was doing, but was very careful to emphasize the need for secrecy. If their plan was exposed, the scheme would fail, so they agreed to form their own secret alliance. Each returned to his own town and began to operate as Fabian had taught. People now accepted the receipts as being as good as gold itself, and many receipts were deposited for safe keeping in the same way as coins. When a merchant wished to pay another for goods, he simply wrote a short note instructing Fabian to transfer money from his account to that of the second merchant. It took Fabian only a few minutes to adjust the figures. This new system became very popular, and the instruction notes were called "checks". Late one night, the goldsmiths had another secret meeting and Fabian revealed a new plan. The next day they called a meeting with all the Governors, and Fabian began. "The receipts we issue have become very popular. No doubt, most of you Governors are using them and you find them very convenient." They nodded in agreement and wondered what the problem was. "Well", he continued, "some receipts are being copied by counterfeiters. This practice must be stopped." The Governors became alarmed. "What can we do?" they asked. Fabian replied, "My suggestion is this - first of all, let it be the Government's job to print new notes on a special paper with very intricate designs, and then each note to be signed by the chief Governor. We goldsmiths will be happy to pay the printing costs, as it will save us a lot of time writing out receipts." The Governors reasoned, "Well, it is our job to protect the people against counterfeiters and the advice certainly seems like a good idea". So they agreed to print the notes. "Secondly", Fabian said, "some people have gone prospecting and are making their own gold coins. I suggest that you pass a law so that any person who finds gold nuggets must hand them in. Of course, they will be reimbursed with notes and coins." The idea sounded good and without too much thought about it, they printed a large number of crisp new notes. Each note had a value printed on it - $1, $2, $5, $10 et cetera. The small printing costs were paid by the goldsmiths. The notes were much easier to carry and they soon became accepted by the people. Despite their popularity however, these new notes and coins were used for only ten percent of transactions. The records showed that the check system accounted for ninety percent of all business. The next part of his plan commenced. Until now, people were paying Fabian to guard their money. In order to attract more money into the vault Fabian offered to pay depositors three percent interest on their money. Most people believed that he was re-lending their money out to borrowers at five percent, and his profit was the two percent difference. Besides, the people didn't question him as getting three percent was far better than paying to have the money guarded. The volume of savings grew and with the additional money in the vaults, Fabian was able to lend $200, $300, $400 sometimes up to $900 for every $100 in notes and coins that he held in deposit. He had to be careful not to exceed this nine to one ratio, because one person in ten did require the notes and coins for use. If there was not enough money available when required, people would become suspicious, especially as their deposit books showed how much they had deposited. Nevertheless, on the $900 in book figures that Fabian loaned out by writing checks himself, he was able to demand up to $45 in interest, that is, five percent on $900. When the loan plus interest was repaid, that is $945, the $900 was cancelled out in the debit column and Fabian kept the $45 interest. He was therefore quite happy to pay $3 interest on the original $100 deposited which had never left the vaults at all. This meant that for every $100 he held in deposits, it was possible to make 42% profit, most people believing he was only making two percent. The other goldsmiths were doing the same thing. They created money out of nothing at the stroke of a pen, and then charged interest on top of it. True, they didn't coin money, the Government actually printed the notes and coins and gave it to the goldsmiths to distribute. Fabian's only expense was the small printing fee. Still, they were creating credit money out of nothing and charging interest on top of it. Most people believed that the money supply was a Government operation. They also believed that Fabian was lending them the money that someone else had deposited, but it was very strange that no one's deposits ever decreased when a loan was advanced. If everyone had tried to withdraw their deposits at once, the fraud would have been exposed. When a loan was requested in notes or coins, it presented no problem. Fabian merely explained to the Government that the increase in population and production required more notes, and these he obtained for the small printing fee. One day a thoughtful man went to see Fabian. "This interest charge is wrong", he said. "For every $100 you issue, you are asking $105 in return. The extra $5 can never be paid since it doesn't exist. "Farmers produce food, industry manufacturers goods, and so on, but only you produce money. Suppose there are only two businessmen in the whole country and we employ everyone else. We borrow $100 each, we pay $90 out in wages and expenses and allow $10 profit (our wage). That means the total purchasing power is $90 + $10 twice, that is, $200. Yet to pay you we must sell all our produce for $210. If one of us succeeds and sells all his produce for $105, the other man can only hope to get $95. Also, part of his goods cannot be sold, as there is no money left to buy them. "He will still owe you $10 and can only repay this by borrowing more. The system is impossible." The man continued, "Surely you should issue 105, that is, 100 to me and five to you to spend. This way there would be 105 in circulation, and the debt can be repaid." Fabian listened quietly and finally said, "Financial economics is a deep subject, my boy, it takes years of study. Let me worry about these matters, and you look after yours. You must become more efficient, increase your production, cut down on your expenses and become a better businessman. I am always willing to help in these matters." The man went away still unconvinced. There was something wrong with Fabian's operations and he felt that his questions had been avoided. Yet, most people respected Fabian's word - "He is the expert, the others must be wrong. Look how the country has developed, how our production has increased - we must be better off." To cover the interest on the money they had borrowed, merchants were forced to raise their prices. Wage earners complained that wages were too low. Employers refused to pay higher wages, claiming that they would be ruined. Farmers could not get a fair price for their produce. Housewives complained that food was getting too dear. And finally some people went on strike, a thing previously unheard of. Others had become poverty stricken and their friends and relatives could not afford to help them. Most had forgotten the real wealth all around - the fertile soils, the great forests, the minerals and cattle. They could think only of the money which always seemed so scarce. But they never questioned the system. They believed the Government was running it. A few had pooled their excess money and formed "lending" or "finance" companies. They could get six percent or more this way, which was better than the three percent Fabian paid, but they could only lend out money they owned - they did not have this strange power of being able to create money out of nothing by merely writing figures in books. These finance companies worried Fabian and his friends somewhat, so they quickly set up a few companies of their own. Mostly, they bought the others out before they got going. In no time, all the finance companies were owned by them, or under their control. The economic situation got worse. The wage earners were convinced that the bosses were making too much profit. The bosses said that their workers were too lazy and weren't doing an honest day's work, and everyone was blaming everyone else. The Governors could not come up with an answer and besides, the immediate problem seemed to be to help the poverty stricken. They started up welfare schemes and made laws forcing people to contribute to them. This made many people angry - they believed in the old-fashioned idea of helping one's neighbour by voluntary effort. "These laws are nothing more than legalised robbery. To take something off a person against his will, regardless of the purpose for which it is to be used, is no different from stealing." But each man felt helpless and was afraid of the jail sentence which was threatened for failing to pay. These welfare schemes gave some relief, but before long the problem was back and more money was needed to cope. The cost of these schemes rose higher and higher and the size of the Government grew. Most of the Governors were sincere men trying to do their best. They didn't like asking for more money from their people and finally, they had no choice but to borrow money from Fabian and his friends. They had no idea how they were going to repay. Parents could no longer afford to pay teachers for their children. They couldn't pay doctors. And transport operators were going out of business. One by one the government was forced to take these operations over. Teachers, doctors and many others became public servants. Few obtained satisfaction in their work. They were given a reasonable wage, but they lost their identity. They became small cogs in a giant machine. There was no room for personal initiative, little recognition for effort, their income was fixed and advancement came only when a superior retired or died. In desperation, the governors decided to seek Fabian's advice. They considered him very wise and he seemed to know how to solve money matters. He listened to them explain all their problems, and finally he answered, "Many people cannot solve their own problems - they need someone to do it for them. Surely you agree that most people have the right to be happy and to be provided with the essentials of life. One of our great sayings is 'all men are equal' - is it not?" "Well, the only way to balance things up is to take the excess wealth from the rich and give it to the poor. Introduce a system of taxation. The more a man has, the more he must pay. Collect taxes from each person according to his ability, and give to each according to his need. Schools and hospitals should be free for those who cannot afford them ?" He gave them a long talk on high sounding ideals and finished up with, "Oh, by the way, don't forget you owe me money. You've been borrowing now for quite some time. The least I can do to help, is for you to just pay me the interest. We'll leave the capital debt owing, just pay me the interest." They went away, and without giving Fabian's philosophies any real thought, they introduced the graduated income tax - the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. No one liked this, but they either paid the taxes or went to jail. Merchants were forced once again to raise their prices. Wage earners demanded higher wages forcing many employers out of business, or to replace men with machinery. This caused additional unemployment and forced the Government to introduce further welfare and handout schemes. Tariffs and other protection devices were introduced to keep some industries going just to provide employment. A few people wondered if the purpose of the production was to produce goods or merely to provide employment. As things got worse, they tried wage control, price control, and all sorts of controls. The Government tried to get more money through sales tax, payroll tax and all sorts of taxes. Someone noted that from the wheat farmer right through to the housewife, there were over fifty taxes on a loaf of bread. "Experts" arose and some were elected to Government, but after each yearly meeting they came back with almost nothing achieved, except for the news that taxes were to be "restructured", but overall the total tax always increased. Fabian began to demand his interest payments, and a larger and larger portion of the tax money was being needed to pay him. Then came party politics - the people started arguing about which group of Governors could best solve the problems. They argued about personalities, idealism, party labels, everything except the real problem. The councils were getting into trouble. In one town the interest on the debt exceeded the amount of rates which were collected in a year. Throughout the land the unpaid interest kept increasing - interest was charged on unpaid interest. Gradually much of the real wealth of the country came to be owned or controlled by Fabian and his friends and with it came greater control over people. However, the control was not yet complete. They knew that the situation would not be secure until every person was controlled. Most people opposing the systems could be silenced by financial pressure, or suffer public ridicule. To do this Fabian and his friends purchased most of the newspapers, television and radio stations and he carefully selected people to operate them. Many of these people had a sincere desire to improve the world, but they never realised how they were being used. Their solutions always dealt with the effects of the problem, never the cause. There were several different newspapers - one for the right wing, one for the left wing, one for the workers, one for the bosses, and so on. It didn't matter much which one you believed in, so long as you didn't think about the real problem. Fabian's plan was almost at its completion - the whole country was in debt to him. Through education and the media, he had control of people's minds. They were able to think and believe only what he wanted them to. After a man has far more money than he can possibly spend for pleasure, what is left to excite him? For those with a ruling class mentality, the answer is power - raw power over other human beings. The idealists were used in the media and in Government, but the real controllers that Fabian sought were those of the ruling class mentality. Most of the goldsmiths had become this way. They knew the feeling of great wealth, but it no longer satisfied them. They needed challenge and excitement, and power over the masses was the ultimate game. They believed they were superior to all others. "It is our right and duty to rule. The masses don't know what is good for them. They need to be rallied and organised. To rule is our birthright." Throughout the land Fabian and his friends owned many lending offices. True, they were privately and separately owned. In theory they were in competition with each other, but in reality they were working very closely together. After persuading some of the Governors, they set up an institution which they called the Money Reserve Centre. They didn't even use their own money to do this - they created credit against part of the money out of the people's deposits. This Institution gave the outward appearance of regulating the money supply and being a Government operation, but strangely enough, no Governor or public servant was ever allowed to be on the Board of Directors. The Government no longer borrowed directly from Fabian, but began to use a system of IOUs to the Money Reserve Centre. The security offered was the estimated revenue from next year's taxes. This was in line with Fabian's plan - removing suspicion from himself to an apparent Government operation. Yet, behind the scenes, he was still in control. Indirectly, Fabian had such control over the Government that they were forced to do his bidding. He boasted, "Let me control the nation's money and I care not who makes its laws". It didn't matter much which group of Governors were elected. Fabian was in control of the money, the life blood of the nation. The Government obtained the money, but interest was always charged on every loan. More and more was going out in welfare and handout schemes, and it was not long before the Government found it difficult to even repay the interest, let alone the capital. And yet there were people who still asked the question, "Money is a man-made system. Surely it can be adjusted to serve, not to rule?" But these people became fewer and their voices were lost in the mad scrabble for the non-existent interest. The adminstrations changed, the party labels changed, but the major policies continued. Regardless of which Government was in "power", Fabian's ultimate goal was brought closer each year. The people's policies meant nothing. They were being taxed to the limit, they could pay no more. Now the time was ripe for Fabian's final move. Ten percent of the money supply was still in the form of notes and coins. This had to be abolished in such a way as not to arouse suspicion. While the people used cash, they were free to buy and sell as they chose - they still had some control over their own lives. But it was not always safe to carry notes and coins. Checks were not accepted outside one's local community, and therefore a more convenient system was looked forward to. Once again Fabian had the answer. His organisation issued everyone with a little plastic card showing the person's name, photograph and an identification number. When this card was presented anywhere, the storekeeper phoned the central computer to check the credit rating. If it was clear, the person could buy what he wanted up to a certain amount. At first people were allowed to spend a small amount on credit, and if this was repaid within a month, no interest was charged. This was fine for the wage earner, but what businessman could even begin? He had to set up machinery, manufacture the goods, pay wages et cetera and sell all his goods and repay the money. If he exceeded one month, he was charged 1.5% for every month the debt was owed. This amounted to over eighteen percent per year. Businessmen had no option but to add the eighteen percent onto the selling price. Yet this extra money or credit (the eighteen percent) had not been loaned out to anyone. Throughout the country, businessmen were given the impossible task of repaying $118 for every $100 they borrowed - but the extra $18 had never been created at all. Yet Fabian and his friends increased their standing in society. They were regarded as pillars of respectability. Their pronouncements on finance and economics were accepted with almost religious conviction. Under the burden of ever increasing taxes, many small businesses collapsed. Special licenses were needed for various operations, so that the remaining ones found it very difficult to operate. Fabian owned and controlled all of the big companies which had hundreds of subsidiaries. These appeared to be in competition with each other, yet he controlled them all. Eventually all competitors were forced out of business. Plumbers, panel beaters, electricians and most other small industries suffered the same fate - they were swallowed up by Fabian's giant companies which all had Government protection. Fabian wanted the plastic cards to eliminate notes and coins. His plan was that when all notes were withdrawn, only businesses using the computer card system would be able to operate. He planned that eventually some people would misplace their cards and be unable to buy or sell anything until a proof of identify was made. He wanted a law to be passed which would give him ultimate control - a law forcing everyone to have their identification number tattooed onto their hand. The number would be visible only under a special light, linked to a computer. Every computer would be linked to a giant central computer so that Fabian could know everything about everyone. A Summary and Other Information The story you have read is, of course, fiction. But if you found it to be disturbingly close to the truth and would like to know who Fabian was in real life, a good starting point is a study on the activities of the English goldsmiths in the 16th & 17th centuries. For example, The Bank of England began in 1694. King William of Orange was in financial difficulties as a result of a war with France. The Goldsmiths "lent him" 1.2 million pounds (a staggering amount in those days) with certain conditions: 1. The interest rate was to be eight percent. It must be remembered that Magna Carta stated that the charging or collecting of interest was a serious crime. 2. The King was to grant the goldsmiths a charter for the bank which gave them the right to issue or create credit out of nothing. Prior to this, their operations of issuing receipts for more money than they held in deposits was totally illegal. The charter made it legal. In 1694 William Patterson obtained the Charter for the Bank of England. By the way, the correct terminology used in the financial world for this money system is "fractional reserve banking". Lets now do some research ? Quotations Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition - "Banks create credit. It is a mistake to suppose that bank credit is created to any extent by the payment of money into the banks. A loan made by a bank is a clear addition to the amount of money in the community." Lord Acton, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1875 - "The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the People versus the Banks". Mr Reginald McKenna, when Chairman of the Midland Bank in London - "I am afraid that ordinary citizens will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." Mr Phillip A Benson, President of the American Bankers' Association, June 8 1939 said - "There is no more direct way to capture control of a nation than through its credit (money) system". Sir Denison Miller - During an interview in 1921, when he was asked if he, through the Commonwealth Bank, had financed Australia during the First World War for $700 million, he replied, "Such was the case, and I could have financed the country for a further like sum had the war continued". Asked if that amount was available for productive purposes in this time of peace, he answered, "Yes". So how should a proper money system work ? As a simple example, what happens when we want to build a bridge ? 1st Question: Do we know how to build a bridge ? - Yes 2nd Question: Do we have the materials to build it ? - Yes 3rd Question: Do we have enough people producing food to feed the men while they are building the bridge ? - yes So how does money get into the project ? If there is work to be done, and the material is available and the labour willing, all we have to do is create the money which really is as simple as credit for work done. Credit can be in the form of a ledger column, or even printed tickets which we might choose to call - dollars. Ask yourself why depressions have happened. The labour was still available. The work to be done was still there. The materials had not disappeared, and goods were readily available in the shops, or could be produced, except for the want of money. All that went missing from the community was the money to buy goods and services. So why did the money supply dry up ? Here is a letter written by the Rothschild Brothers of London to a New York firm of bankers on 25 June 1863: It reads - "The few who can understand the System (Cheque Money and Credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class. While on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical (hostile, hurtful) to their interests." The following quotation was reprinted in the Idaho Leader, USA, 26 August 1924, and has been read into Hansard twice: by John Evans MP, in 1926, and by M D Cowan MP, in the Session of 1930-1931: In 1891 a confidential circular was sent to American bankers and their agents, containing the following statements: "We authorise our loan agents in the western States to loan our funds on real estate, to fall due on September 1st 1894, and at no time thereafter". "On September 1 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration". "On September 1st we will demand our money - we will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession". "We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi and thousands of them east of the great Mississippi as well, at our own price". "We may as well own three quarters of the farms of the west and the money of the country". "Then the farmers will become tenants, as in England". The understanding of this issue of money into the community can be best illustrated by equating money in the economy with tickets in a railway system. The tickets are printed by a printer who is paid for his work. The printer never claims the ownership of the tickets. And we can never imagine a railway company refusing to give passengers seats on a train because it is out of tickets. By this same token, a government should never refuse people the access to normal commerce and trade by claiming it is out of money. Suppose the government borrows $10 million. It only costs the bankers a few hundred dollars to actually produce the funds, and a little more to do the book-keeping. Do you think it is fair that our citizens should struggle to keep their homes and families together, while the bankers grow fat on these profits? Credit created by a Government-owned bank is better than credit created by private banks, because there is no need to recover the money from people by way of taxes, and there is no interest attached to inflate the cost. The public work completed with the credit by the Government bank is the asset that replaces the money created when the work is finished. None of our problems will disappear until we correct the creation, supply and circulation of money. So What Keeps the Banking System going ? Suppose you are a fairly successful private businessman, and you want to expand, so you take a loan or overdraft of $10,000 from your local bank. Things go well for a while, and you have paid back $5,000, or half the loan. But things go wrong, and you have to tell the bank that you can no longer keep up the payments on the outstanding principal and interest. The $5,000 you cannot, will not, or have not repaid, remains in circulation as interest free money, for other debors to use, to pay the interest and principal on their loans. It is this money from defaulted loans that enables the system to keep going. Of course, the banks say they don't want that to happen, but in reality, they can now foreclose on your real assets, for something they gave only bookkeeping credit on. Whenever the debts increase beyond a certain point, orders go out to banks to refuse further credit, and then they foreclose on certain outstanding loans. So who gets forclosed and why ? Governments are never foreclosed. If it is necessary to eliminate a government that becomes hostile to those controlling the banking system, it is accomplished through war and revolution. Large corporate bodies are generally left alone, as they are necessary in the coming World Government, rather than individual countries. Foreclosures are nearly always directed against those who are the smallest, and least organised to resist, such as the small businessman, the home owner, and especially the family farmers. These can be handled with the least trouble. In order to keep Israeli, the Communist nations and international usury banking going, small businesses must be foreclosed. Western Governments give away billions of dollars in foreign aid, while thousands of farmers and small businesses are cruelly foreclosed every month. So when we pay our taxes this is what it is all about. Those persons who now rule and control the world, foreclose heavily on the small home owner, business people, and especially the farmers, who want to make their own decisions and take their own consequences. They do not usually research history and the economic situation, but they feel justified in borrowing what they need from the banks. But in times of good farm prosperity, it is bankers who encourage these loans. Those who run the banking system, know that farmers and small business people are the most independent people in the nation. They are encouraged to get into debt, so foreclosure can be enforced to kill their independence. When you plant one grain of corn, it will yield an increase of several hundred grains - this God's gift of increase. Animals also produce increase, but money, in any form, cannot increase, yet people believe it does, and today, many people live off interest. Money is a great system, far superior to barter. Creating money to equate the real wealth of a nation or giving credit to an individual, is not the problem. It is the charging of INTEREST that is the root cause of all our economic problems. We are told that all nations are in debt. Ask yourself, or any politician - if all nations are in debt, who is the creditor ? Thou shalt not lend upon usury (interest) to thy brother, interest on the money, or on anything that is lent with interest. Deuteronomy 23.19 He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent, he that doeth these things shall never be moved. Psalm 15:5 PLEASE DONATE TO THE DVD PROJECT There are many websites to help you understand the Money Question and what you can do - here are two to start with: http://www.wepin.com/why/ep5anal.htmll www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html (c) Larry Hannigan 1971 - 2008, Australia http://www.larryhannigan.com/TheEarthPlus5.htm TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 6 19:04:07 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 18:04:07 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Right Wingers Attemt To Paint Muslims as New Communist Menace. Old story new faces. Message-ID: <793624.98692.qm@web43516.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> This is one of the most absurd arguments I have ever read. Islam is based on the same spiritual traditions as is Christianity and Judaism. It is an Abrahamic religion. The Muslims were so successful in the 7th century in overwhelming both the Persian and Eastern Roman Empires due to the popularity of the system they offered compared to the oppressive systems they were replacing. ? Islam is a religion that places emphasis on the dignity of the individual and on law. It is a religion that was formed as a reform of the corruption of the culture of the world as perceived by the Mohammedans.. It preached love of god, brotherhood, kindness and sharing. Sharia law is simply the application of those values as interpreted by the modern leaders. There is no incompatibility with democracy. The system that emerged in the 7th century was simply a reflection of consensus values of that time in which it was felt that a monarchy was the most just form of government. There were various other forms tried by early Muslim communities at that time but as with the vast majority of the world they determined that Monarchy was the best way in implement a fair system of justice as a king would be powerful enough not to be bought off by various vested interest groups and would not be tempted to give in to the arbitrary rule of the nobility. ?? The early Muslims were responcible for copying and commenting upon the Greek political theories that had been prevalent in the world. It is partially because of Muslim scholarship that we have a western style democracy in the first place. They kept the records and transferred them to the Christian west mostly via Jewish scholars moving between Muslim Spain and Christian Italy and France. Other Muslim scholars in Damascus and Baghdad translated Greek into Arabic and wrote their own political theory and commentary. ? This blog seems intent upon presenting Islamism as a reverse of Zionism. While it is true that Islam sees its duty to spread the good news to all the world they consider other peoples of the book ie Christians and Jews to be people to be tolerated and respected as their predecessors. Where the idea that Islamic values are anti-western is a twisting of the debate in the west over our own value system and the war between fundamentalist Christians and moderate or progressive Christians. Substitute the work Papists for Islamicists and you see the same argument that was used against Catholics in the 19th century and even into the 20th century when Kennedy ran for president and would probably be used against a Jewish candidate. ?? The argument is absurd. There are fundamentalist Muslims and liberal Muslims just as there are in every other religion. Jihad is war on the ego, the ultimate enemy of Islam. It was also interpreted as the physical enemies of God and Islam especialy durring the period of the crusades when Christian armies invaded the Middle East and Massacred the entire population of Jerusalem in 1099 when they surrendered. In contrast when Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187 he allowed the defeated Christians to leave or stay but he did not massacre them, he escorted them to the coast so they could return to the west unharmed. That is civilization. What the crusaders did was barbaric and if that is what you mean by western values then I think the Muslims have over on us. ? I would recommend that people read something of the history of Islam before they buy this propaganda. ?? "The Way of Sufi Chivalry" By Ibn al-Husayn al-Sulami is a good start for Islamic ethics. "The Venture of Islam" by Marshall Hodgson is another. ?? You could simply watch the recent movie "Kingdom of Heaven" to get a reasonable picture of the times if you don't like to read. ? ??? Christians gave Muslims the choice of death or conversion. Muslims gave Christians a choice between paying a tax or conversion. You tell me which is more barbaric? ??? Iran has a democratic government. Their elections this time around were flawed. We could say the same thing about elections in the USA. In 2000 a minority President was picked by a 5 to 4 majority of the Supreme Court. Show me where in the Constitution is says the Supreme Court selects the President. I would call that a flawed election. ??? Saudi Arabian volunteers, and a few others blew up the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon. This would have been considered to be a heroic act if it had been American flyer's attacking Tokyo or Berlin in World War 2. The west firebombed Dresden and Tokyo killing hundreds of thousands. We nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the worst single war crimes in human history. But we won the war so they were considered to be nessisary. ?? Hitler killed millions of Jews, gypsies, gays, communists, Seventh Day Adventists and Union organizers. Is that part of the western tradition we are so proud of? And there there were the wars between protestant and catholic or the Crusader conquest of Constantinople over back pay. Tell me what western tradition are you so concerned about saving? ?? Islam is simply the lasted bogey man that establishment pundants target as the enemy of the west. They need somebody to replace the communists, an excuse to perpetuate the excessive military budgets and to give cover for the increased use of totalitarian methods in the west. We have found the enemy and the enemy is us. (Or at least those among us who insist upon rattling the saber and creating fear and irrational panic among people too busy to do the research themselves). ?? --- In Politics_CurrentEvents_Group at yahoogroups.com, marc samberg wrote: > yidwithlid.blogspot.com > *If the West Doesn't Start to Know Our Islamist Enemy, Islamism Will DESTROY > US! > > Posted: 04 Sep 2009 09:23 AM PDT > > *"Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be > in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy, but know yourself, your > chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and > yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."*-Sun Tzu, The Art > of War. > > Sun Tzu is credited with writing those words 2,500 years ago, but they could > have been written as a warning to President Obama as he refuses to > acknowledge who we are fighting against, Islamist extremists. He refuses to > even understand how our enemy defined themselves. > > Tawfik Hamid, onetime prot?g? of Ayman Zawahiri, writes the following: > > *The real way to strengthen moderate Muslims in their fight against the > radicals is to spotlight radical teachings and flush out those who believe > in them. ....This is especially true in war: define your enemy correctly, > and you will rally legitimate allies to your side. Blur what a battle is > about and, stuck in the muddle, you are bound to lose.... Calling angina a > "common cold" does not change its nature. It only prevents us from taking > the necessary steps in treating it, which will only lead to further > sickness, and possibly death. Playing word games with jihadists is not only > meaningless, but plays right into the hands of the radical Muslim > terrorists-who, to be defeated, must first be called by their true name....* > > We are not fighting a war against terrorism,or whatever the Department of > Homeland Security wants to call it this week. We are fighting a war against > Islamists who use terrorism as a tool to bring down the lifestyle of western > democracies. People who want to use violence to establish Islam as a > political rather than a religious system. > Andrew McCarthy of NRO Calls it a dangerous delusion: > > *.... Islamism is not terrorism. To be sure, Islamism includes terrorism in > its arsenal. Still, there is major disagreement among Islamists about when > violence should be used and how effective it is. In any event, we must fight > the tendency to meld these concepts. Terrorism is a tactic that divides > Muslims. Islamism is a belief system that unites tens of millions of > Muslims. Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, > estimateswhat he > calls the ?radicalized? portion of the umma at about 15 percent. I > think he?s low-balling it, but even if he?s right, that would be about 200 > million people. > * > > * So what is Islamism? It is the belief that Islam is not merely a religious > creed but a comprehensive guide to human existence, conformity to which is > obligatory, that governs all matters political, social, cultural, and > religious, from cradle to grave (and, of course, beyond). The neologism > ?Islamist? was minted over three-quarters of a century ago by Hassan > al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. To this day, the credo of > the Brotherhood is ?Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The > Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest > hope.? The Brotherhood claims, preposterously, to have renounced terrorism. > It maintains, more credibly, that it is the Muslim Nation, as in a mass > movement representing what Muslims, broadly, believe. > * > > The Muslim Brotherhood is all around the world, including in the United > States where the Organization CAIR was formed by the Muslim Brotherhood. > They want to Establish a political system that will force people to get rid > of "modern trappings" and establish a political Caliphate: > > *The Brotherhood?s Islam is called Salafism. Developed in the 19th century, > Salafism calls for a return to the unalloyed Islam of the 7th-century > founders. It is to be ?unalloyed? in the sense that it should be stripped of > modernizing influences ? particularly Western influences. This is to be > achieved by implementing sharia, the divine law designed to govern all > aspects of life. > > Implementing sharia is the aim of jihad. Because our government does not > want to be seen as Islamophobic, we are discouraged from noting the palpable > nexus between Islamic scripture and Islamist terror. Thus we?re conditioned > to think of jihad, a creature of Islamic scripture, as a form of madness ? > as if terrorists blew up buildings for no better reason than to blow up > buildings. But jihad is a central tenet of Islam. It is the obligation to > struggle in the path of Allah ? to impose God?s law everywhere on earth. > Jihad can be savage, but it is not irrational. > > Jihad is correctly understood as a military duty, but it need not be > violent. That does not mean, as Islam?s Western apologists claim, that jihad > is some wishy-washy internal struggle to become a better person. To the > contrary, just as war is politics by other means, violent force is one of > several jihadist tactics by which the Muslim Nation seeks to install sharia. > If non-Muslims are willing to accommodate sharia in their political, legal, > and financial systems, combat is not required. Surrenders are happily > accepted.* > > *.... In 2004, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the ?nonviolent? Muslim Brotherhood?s > spiritual guide, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to fight the Americans in > Iraq. He was zealously supported by the faculty at al-Azhar University in > Cairo, the most authoritative voice of Islamic jurisprudence in the Arab > world. A few months later, Alberto Fernandez, then the State Department?s > top spokesman in the region, > gushedthat > Qaradawi was an ?intelligent and thoughtful voice from the > region . . . an important figure that deserves our attention.? It was an > idiotic thing to say, but it was said in recognition of the grim reality > that Qaradawi is not a fringe figure. His influence is vast. Understand > this: It is not just terrorists but millions of Muslims who believe > Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan should be killed even if they believe they > are risking their lives so that Muslims can have a better life.* > > * Why should Islamism matter to us? Because, besides being the ideology that > catalyzes jihadist terrorism and threatens our freedoms in sundry other > ways, Islamism rejects the premises of Western democracy. Islamists believe > that sharia is the perfect, non-negotiable blueprint for law and life, > prescribed by Allah Himself. Therefore, Islamists reject the notion of free > people at liberty to govern themselves, to legislate in contradiction to > God?s law. They reject freedom of conscience: Islam must be the state > religion, and apostasy from Islam is a capital crime. They deny the > principle of equality under the law between men and women, and between > Muslims and non-Muslims. They abjure any semblance of Western sexual > liberty: gay sex, adultery, and fornication are brutally punished. They > countenance slavery. They encourage polygamy. I could go on, but you get the > idea. > * > > America, including President Bush and even more-so President Obama are > framing the question of "who is our enemy?" all wrong, because when you > frame it correctly the answer is more scary first though, because, to > paraphrase Sally Field, "They Hate Us, *They Really Hate Us*: > > *Most of our uninformed national conversation about Islam since 9/11 has > been about the degree of Muslim support for terrorism. If you?re going to > embark on a quest to remake the Middle East, that?s the wrong question. We > should be asking: What is the degree of Muslim support for Islamism? The > answer to that question is: immense.* > > * Islamism is the official creed of Saudi Arabia, which, as noted above, is > risibly portrayed as a U.S. ally against terrorism. The Saudis have lavishly > supported and collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1950s, > enabling the Brothers to spread Islamism globally, including in America and > Europe. Islamism, moreover, is the dominant ideology in the Arab world and > in much of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. It is strengthening in northern > and eastern Africa. Despite decades of suppression, it is resurgent in > Turkey. Even in Indonesia, where Islamism is not preponderant, it is a > growing force.* > > *The fact that Islamists disagree with their terrorist factions on tactics > obscures the reality that they heartily agree with the terrorists? contempt > for the West*. Most of the places that are sources of Islamist terror do not > want Western democracy. They want sharia. > > This includes places like Afghanistan, were we are trying to create a > democracy, but one ruled by Sharia Law. Democracy and Sharia are mutually > exclusive: > > *We can?t change that about them, and it cheapens us when we try. The State > Department?s new ?democratic? constitutions for Afghanistan and Iraq are a > disgrace: establishing Islam as the state religion and elevating sharia as > fundamental law. That is not exporting our values; it is appeasing Islamism. > It is putting on display our lack of will to fight for our principles, which > only emboldens our enemies... It?s not safe for non-Muslims, period. We?re > not building a democratic culture. * > > The Same can be said of non-Muslims in Iraq and the Palestinian Territories. > This is why we need to win in Afganistan, and why we need to encourage > Israel to root out terrorist interests in the Palestinian Territories before > there are any discussion regarding a Palestinian State. > > True Democracy need not be our primary objective. Especially when/where the > Islamists are using democracy against itself, as in the case of the United > States and CAIR or Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories and their > Islamist ringleader Iran.? Protecting the west from attack should be our > primary objective. > > * We can?t stop Muslim countries from being Islamist. That is their choice. > It should be no concern of ours who rules them as long as they do not > threaten American interests. When they inevitably do threaten us, or allow > their territories to be launch pads for terrorists, we should smash them. > But the price of defending our nation cannot be spending years ? at a cost > of precious lives and hundreds of billions of dollars ? in a vain attempt to > give people who despise us a way of life they don?t want. > > Meanwhile, we must accept that Islamism is our enemy and has targeted our > constitutional system for destruction by slow strangulation via sharia. > Instead of worrying about democracy in Afghanistan, we need to worry about > democracy in America. The surge we need is at home: to roll back Islamism?s > infiltration of our schools, our financial system, our law, and our > government. In addition to not being universal, the ?values of the human > spirit? are not immortal. If we don?t defend them in the West, they will > die.* > > >? This Post only uses a piece of McCarthy's Article, I recommend you read the > *entire thing by clicking > here.* > > * > http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzFiZDY4MzlmMmU0MDdiNDViN2QxYzcxMDI5ZWI3MTQ= > * > -- > A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy > enough people to make it worth the effort. > ~Herm Albright~ > > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProJewishProZionistGroup/?yguid=368134690 > > http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/stillnotjustmusicanymore/?yguid=368134690 > > http://groups.yahoo.com/adultconf?dest=%2Fgroup%2Fwhateverreturns%2F%3Fyguid%3D368134690 > > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shieldofdavid/?yguid=373549731 > From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sun Sep 6 19:25:48 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 10:25:48 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism Message-ID: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so offer a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are setting the future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in the dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed almost unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of these news items seem to have been missed by most observers. The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is planning to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who don't track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have become crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for example, is used in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent magnets used in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and other hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being hyped by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of the world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines outside of China that can produce the same minerals A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to make it into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means minor issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this news; in each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the export quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is the fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products containing rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the raw materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they are no longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a source of raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of somebody else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare earth elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese factories, and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in Chinese hands. As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more denunciations of "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces "resource nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on the control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The problem arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources these days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real estate. Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply one of the consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, with troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took place in very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted the virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a system of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's wealth in London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United States - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture their emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British Empire waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the First World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the role of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing strategic trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we might reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to 1945 transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by America's. Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I want to discuss here points up one of the differences. This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative market has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion dollars. The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom may well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that costs you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have spent one quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such figures if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two things should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion dollars worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any meaningful sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than more financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report post, derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of abstract numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and has now gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a few words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially a bet regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called the "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands when the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might obligate me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price fixed in advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due determined who profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all the usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite literally be conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in many ways the perfect speculative instrument. It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to run. Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and that other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are produced and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two economies is credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its aftermath offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit produced in the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so, causing apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all that credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives have less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities did, and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives bubble have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more arbitrary than those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not completely impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the real economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial realms of speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on its rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does not exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself suddenly overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative hubris. Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it - by a set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its founders, could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like it. The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five years when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its foreign loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect of a default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble stopped bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks had to be strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that politics trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times over the last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to notice. If I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next fifty years or so of history. In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the midst of a transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar to us over the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism", and a new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of cheap abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, scarcity industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. One of the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions that control significant amounts of important resources will find those resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same sort of clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may reclaim in the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or cartels of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to build their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking advantage of the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism dawns. They may well have recognized that in a world that will increasingly be shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own resource bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian government to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- and British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the chaos and corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to learn it as well. The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand many of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be out of place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies might, if they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, and next week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according to the August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity-industrialism.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 6 20:54:39 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 19:54:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Message-ID: <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Your site and Arch Druids are a pain in the ass to post comments on. I don't know why they are not simple like Wordpress or this is. Anyway this is my comment to his post you can pass it on to him or not I tried twice to post it on his site and it wouldn't let me. It is a good thing I saved my comment first or I would be pissed off. This is an interesting post and I would say first the point about Rare metal export restriction is probably part economic warfare between the USA and China. The US wants to produce cars with rare metal batteries, China wanted to buy GM. They got Hummer, and now they have access to that military technology, even if they had to agree to make it in the USA. Being able to export the batteries puts China in the position to control the market as long as batteries are based on lithium technology. ?? On the other hand there is nothing new about that. China has been the manufacturing plant of choice for the world's capitalists for a couple of decades. ?? The USA has become the great agricultural exporting nation and has been for a century. We were only the worlds center of manufacturing for a few decades when Europe's capacity was devastated by war. ?? This bit about derivatives and the financial markets driving the world economy is part of a temporary bubble that boomed after the Bretton Woods agreement was abrogated in the 1970's when Nixon was forced to let the dollar float. This is literally play money and has nothing to do with the real economy. It was created artificially and it will disappear once people are done playing this version of monopoly. ?? We are not entering a scarcity economy but simply transiting to a non fossil fuel economy. This can be as soft or hard a transition as we want to make it depending on how willing the ruling classes are to simply chuck the oil economy and retool for a solar one. There may be a transition with a nuclear economy but there is the same availability problem with uranium as there is with oil. There is only enough for about 50 years to fuel the world economy. All we need to do is reallocate resources. Since the wealthy won't allow us to take the money from them it will come out of the hides of the workers as is normal but at some point it will happen. They will try to sell it to us as a matter of scarcity but that is only to squeeze more wealth out of the majority of the population. There is no shortage, only problems of allocation. ? As a former participant in a gnostic community, anarchist communist activist and currently a blogger/activist I find this to be one of the better blogs, even if I have problems with Druidism. - Gary Rumor. ________________________________ From: Bill Totten To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2009 6:25:48 PM Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so offer a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are setting the future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in the dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed almost unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of these news items seem to have been missed by most observers. The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is planning to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who don't track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have become crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for example, is used in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent magnets used in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and other hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being hyped by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of the world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines outside of China that can produce the same minerals A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to make it into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means minor issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this news; in each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the export quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is the fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products containing rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the raw materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they are no longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a source of raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of somebody else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare earth elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese factories, and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in Chinese hands. As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more denunciations of "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces "resource nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on the control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The problem arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources these days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real estate. Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply one of the consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, with troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took place in very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted the virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a system of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's wealth in London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United States - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture their emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British Empire waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the First World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the role of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing strategic trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we might reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to 1945 transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by America's. Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I want to discuss here points up one of the differences. This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative market has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion dollars. The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom may well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that costs you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have spent one quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such figures if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two things should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion dollars worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any meaningful sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than more financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report post, derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of abstract numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and has now gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a few words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially a bet regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called the "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands when the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might obligate me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price fixed in advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due determined who profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all the usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite literally be conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in many ways the perfect speculative instrument. It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to run. Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and that other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are produced and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two economies is credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its aftermath offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit produced in the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so, causing apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all that credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives have less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities did, and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives bubble have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more arbitrary than those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not completely impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the real economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial realms of speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on its rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does not exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself suddenly overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative hubris. Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it - by a set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its founders, could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like it. The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five years when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its foreign loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect of a default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble stopped bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks had to be strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that politics trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times over the last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to notice. If I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next fifty years or so of history. In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the midst of a transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar to us over the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism", and a new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of cheap abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, scarcity industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. One of the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions that control significant amounts of important resources will find those resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same sort of clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may reclaim in the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or cartels of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to build their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking advantage of the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism dawns. They may well have recognized that in a world that will increasingly be shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own resource bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian government to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- and British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the chaos and corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to learn it as well. The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand many of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be out of place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies might, if they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, and next week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. _____ ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon? [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according to the August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity-industrialism.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From gmeyerson at triad.rr.com Mon Sep 7 08:10:28 2009 From: gmeyerson at triad.rr.com (gregory meyerson) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 10:10:28 -0400 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> there is n't a uranium availability problem with 4th generation nuclear. see for a brief but informative reference, James Hansen's Letter to Obama. for more detail, see barry brook's bravenewclimate site and tom blees book, prescription for the planet. the left knows nothing about new nuclear. course, the key problem to solving climate change is capitalist social relations, but the wind/solar nuclear discussion needs to resemble the truth. see also david mackay, "sustainability without the hot air," available on line for free. On Sep 6, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: > Your site and Arch Druids are a pain in the ass to post comments on. I > don't know why they are not simple like Wordpress or this is. Anyway > this is my comment to his post you can pass it on to him or not I > tried twice to post it on his site and it wouldn't let me. It is a > good thing I saved my comment first or I would be pissed off. > This is an interesting post and > I would say first the point about Rare metal export restriction is > probably part economic warfare between the USA and China. The US wants > to produce cars with rare metal batteries, China wanted to buy GM. > They got Hummer, and now they have access to that military technology, > even if they had to agree to make it in the USA. Being able to export > the batteries puts China in the position to control the market as long > as batteries are based on lithium technology. > ?? On the other hand there is nothing new about that. China has been > the manufacturing plant of choice for the world's capitalists for a > couple of decades. > ?? The USA has become the great agricultural exporting nation and has > been for a century. We were only the worlds center of manufacturing > for a few decades when Europe's capacity was devastated by war. > ?? This bit about derivatives and the financial markets driving the > world economy is part of a temporary bubble that boomed after the > Bretton Woods agreement was abrogated in the 1970's when Nixon was > forced to let the dollar float. This is literally play money and has > nothing to do with the real economy. It was created artificially and > it will disappear once people are done playing this version of > monopoly. > ?? We are not entering a scarcity economy but simply transiting to a > non fossil fuel economy. This can be as soft or hard a transition as > we want to make it depending on how willing the ruling classes are to > simply chuck the oil economy and retool for a solar one. There may be > a transition with a nuclear economy but there is the same availability > problem with uranium as there is with oil. There is only enough for > about 50 years to fuel the world economy. All we need to do is > reallocate resources. Since the wealthy won't allow us to take the > money from them it will come out of the hides of the workers as is > normal but at some point it will happen. They will try to sell it to > us as a matter of scarcity but that is only to squeeze more wealth out > of the majority of the population. There is no shortage, only problems > of allocation. > ? As a former participant in a gnostic community, anarchist communist > activist and currently a blogger/activist I find this to be one of the > better blogs, even if I have problems with Druidism. - Gary Rumor. > > > > > ________________________________ > From: Bill Totten > To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com > Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2009 6:25:48 PM > Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism > > > by John Michael Greer > > The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) > > Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial > society > > > Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so > offer > a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are setting the > future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in > the > dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed > almost > unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of these > news > items seem to have been missed by most observers. > > The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is > planning > to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who don't > track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have become > crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for example, is > used > in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent magnets > used > in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and > other > hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being > hyped > by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth > elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of the > world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an > imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of > speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines outside > of > China that can produce the same minerals > > A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to > make it > into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means minor > issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this news; in > each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the export > quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is > the > fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products > containing > rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the > raw > materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they are no > longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a source > of > raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of > somebody > else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare earth > elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese > factories, > and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in Chinese > hands. > > As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more denunciations of > "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces "resource > nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on the > control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The > problem > arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources > these > days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real > estate. > > Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply one of > the > consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a > century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, with > troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took place in > very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted > the > virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a > system > of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's wealth > in > London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United > States > - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture their > emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British > Empire > waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the > First > World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. > > We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the > role > of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing > strategic > trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own > industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we might > reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and > punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to 1945 > transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by > America's. > Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I > want > to discuss here points up one of the differences. > > This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative > market > has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion > dollars. > The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the capacity > of > the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom may > well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that > costs > you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when > multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have spent > one > quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such > figures > if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. > > In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two > things > should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion dollars > worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The > second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those > derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any > meaningful > sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than > more > financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report > post, > derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of > abstract > numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and has now > gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. > > As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a few > words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially a bet > regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called > the > "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands when > the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might > obligate > me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price fixed in > advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due determined > who > profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts > themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all the > usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite literally be > conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in > many > ways the perfect speculative instrument. > > It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in > derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to run. > Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and that > other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are > produced > and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two economies > is > credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly > exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its aftermath > offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit produced in > the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so, > causing > apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all that > credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives have > less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities did, > and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives > bubble > have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more arbitrary > than > those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent > stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not completely > impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure > abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the real > economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. > > Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial realms > of > speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and > services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on its > rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does not > exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself > suddenly > overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows > out > of the barrel of a gun. > > This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term > Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative > hubris. > Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel > laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it - by > a > set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its > founders, > could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like > it. > The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five > years > when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its > foreign > loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect of a > default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble > stopped > bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks had to > be > strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of > dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. > > The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that politics > trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times over > the > last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to > notice. If > I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next > fifty > years or so of history. > > In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the midst > of a > transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar to us > over > the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism", > and a > new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where > abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of cheap > abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, > scarcity > industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. One of > the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions that > control significant amounts of important resources will find those > resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same > sort of > clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may reclaim > in > the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or > cartels > of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. > > If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to > build > their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of > course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking advantage > of > the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism > dawns. > They may well have recognized that in a world that will increasingly be > shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own > resource > bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has > already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian > government > to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- and > British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the chaos > and > corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to > learn > it as well. > > The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand > many > of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be > out of > place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies might, if > they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, and > next > week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. > > _____ > > ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality > movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, > including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He > lives in Ashland, Oregon? [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according to the > August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". > > http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity- > industrialism.html > > TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click > on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this > essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From tchilds at resist.ca Mon Sep 7 10:38:55 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 16:38:55 +0000 Subject: [R-G] AFP: Chavez wows red carpet crowd at Venice filmfest Message-ID: <1612394082-1252341427-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-898137687-@bda216.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jj_Org315oSCkhPlpPdB0wII9IPg Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry From lcm95060 at gmail.com Mon Sep 7 11:16:00 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:16:00 -0700 Subject: [R-G] Labor Day greetings from Cabale News Services Message-ID: <4AA53FD0.9000405@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 September 07 2009 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: A 'Labor Day' Message From Cabale News Service - "The Working Class And The Employing Class Have NOTHING In Common..." A sample of what's in the news... "Not supposed to" times two - One of the primary rules of Journalism... "The journalist IS NOT supposed to become part of the story..." has been broken by Associated Press, apparently not on purpose, but because they 'violated' a 'rule' of American social mores... Associated Press has published a picture of a dying US Marine, Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard [IMAGE] Astonishing! If you thought the pictures of soldier's caskets coming into Dover AFB raised a shitstorm, you ain't seen nuthin'. It IS notable that it took a FEMALE photojournalist to push this limit. The Guardian UK put it like this: > It is a graphic image of the harsh realities of war: the fatally > wounded young marine lying crumpled in the mud, his vulnerable face > turned to the camera. And it is one the US defence secretary would > rather you did not see. > > Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard, pictured being tended by comrades in > southern Afghanistan, died of his injuries soon after. Now the > release of this record of the 21-year-old's last moments has divided > America, prompting furious debate over the sanitisation of war at a > critical time for the military offensive. Whereas Tom Ricks, EX-Washington Post War Reporter, now ensconced as a pundit for CNAS (Neo-Liberal Think Tank) affiliated Foreign Policy magazine Headlined it this way: > "The dying marine: What the hell was the AP thinking?" Yours truly responded to Mr. Ricks, as have others... . . . After the commentary, from DailyMotion and Da Buffalo's personal collection. Something old (Phil Ochs, Joe Hill, from 1968), something new, something 'Rocker' (Joe Grushecky & The House Rockers, 'American Babylon'), Something 'Blue' (Todd Snider & The Nervous Wrecks, 'This Land Is OUR Land'), courtesy of the respective artists and DailyMotion In full at Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/tth_090907 ...or Razed By Wolves: http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2009/09/september-07-2009-travus-t-hipp-morning.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKpT/OAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysGZUH/inUuZtSG9lPrx7EqChphQSm 9ED0HEpMUdhiw7dF7GDDVwbUJsni3vqAW+Xp0Bf9AQK6saY/UARIQzrlwCGVG2MS JFyDaHxy9JkbBB9Yh2Jw1knigXtpbonIGSb0JILMMtZj4II6v3tehlypyq5P4Rvv 5fbT2TqCawIU2NQamcu6Qr5L9TajhjjahdPKWDxoG0SwgGhjz7W2EVwja2tg27YR N5FQr3F9h93PQZy119QKoP9GtzeD+uFrt/wjcys1S0y0YD266jQmcOWcH9Wi1ARw ngZgof5OzMVzwDFtcuwk6Pznqn42dw5aFxobeF2Qo28K8yETxN8noHjq7+qCV18= =CqyR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From aaron.doncaster at gmail.com Mon Sep 7 11:39:35 2009 From: aaron.doncaster at gmail.com (aaron doncaster) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 09:39:35 -0800 Subject: [R-G] Set-off your student loan Message-ID: <164236a30909071039y4a645f49l2b97ba4f3f459c3c@mail.gmail.com> I found this at thinkfree.ca, check out the site, it has some valuable information. *YOU CAN SET-OFF YOUR STUDENT LOAN NOW!!* *Free your Bond? your mind will follow!* This information is provided for education, entertainment and positive social change purposes only and does not constitute legal advise. It is not intended to aid any one in avoiding lawful debts. ts purpose is to secure for all Canadians their right to fully funded post secondary education. The following is from the Federal Student Loan Act. Canada Student Loans Act CHAPTER S-23 An Act to facilitate the making of loans to students 19.1 (1) Subject to this section and section 19.2, no action or proceedings shall be taken to recover money owing under a guaranteed student loan more than six years after the day on which the money becomes due and payable. Deduction and set-off (2) Money owing under a guaranteed student loan may 1 be recovered at any time by way of deduction from or set-off against any sum of money that may 2 be due or payable by Her Majesty in right of Canada to the borrower or the estate or succession of the borrower. 1-In the first use of 'may', they are giving permission. That implies TWO parties. What if whoever they are giving permission to, needs permission from two sources? And what if you are the second source of permission? If you never give it, they cannot act. 2- In the second use of 'may' they are defining the level of claim needed to be made. It does not say 'is due or payable'. All you have to do is claim, not claim and prove. *If they owe you money, it can be used to pay off your loan. Here's the thing: THEY ALWAYS OWE YOU MONEY!!!* Now look on the back of your Birth Certificate. ? You will find a number. (If you are from Ontario, it may be on the front. It's the number they do not identify. It will start with a letter.) ? It?s a Bond tracking number and every year that bond generates revenue. (Its supported by your pledge of future commercial output and your consent to be taxed.) ? That revenue is in fact yours and is part of the Federal Transfer payments the federal government sends to the provincial government every year. The Federal Minister of Finance is acting as a fiduciary over that revenue and bond. Those funds are yours and they owe it to you. (Who else?s could it be, when it is supported by YOUR pledge?) ? Because you never ask for it or direct how it is to be spent, they send it to your provincial representatives. ? When you direct the Minister of Finance to direct funds from the transfer payments (which are in fact yours) and deposit them into an account for the payment or set-off of the debt, you discharge your loan. (It goes to zero.) ? The transfer payments received by your provincial representatives will be decreased by the amount transferred, but you as a member of the society will no longer be in debt, and that?s actually good for you and your society. Additionally, since you honourably discharged your loan, your credit rating improves, you can justify getting another loan and bringing in even more money to your society. ? Plus, your provincial representatives will get LESS OF YOUR MONEY TO SQUANDER AND WASTE! DO THIS: 1. Read the letters attached and create a similar ones. Send the letter to the MP first, then 7 days later file the Claim of Right. After 30 days serve them a Notarized copy of the Bill of Exchange. 2. Bring it to a Notary Public and have them notarize it and then mail it via registered mail. The original goes to the Minister of Finance and a certified true copy of the original to the financial institution you are dealing with. 3. Your debt is set off or discharged. You owe nothing. You have paid by ordering your fiduciary trustee to act. The financial institution will have to go after the Minister, not you. 4. Have a big party. Invite Rob at mrmitee at hotmail.comThis email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it 5. Attend a "Think Free" Seminar and learn even more about the governments' deception. Support The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society. 6. Start a great life without a big debt load. Be loving, compassionate and truthful. *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* *International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights* Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966 entry into force 3 January 1976, in accordance with article 27 Article 13 1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to education. They agree that education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity, and shall strengthen the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. They further agree that education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups, and further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. 2. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize that, with a view to achieving the full realization of this right: (a) Primary education shall be compulsory and available free to all; (b) Secondary education in its different forms, including technical and vocational secondary education, shall be made generally available and accessible to all by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education; (c) Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education; (d) Fundamental education shall be encouraged or intensified as far as possible for those persons who have not received or completed the whole period of their primary education; (e) The development of a system of schools at all levels shall be actively pursued, an adequate fellowship system shall be established, and the material conditions of teaching staff shall be continuously improved. 3. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to choose for their children schools, other than those established by the public authorities, which conform to such minimum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the State and to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions. 4. No part of this article shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principles set forth in paragraph I of this article and to the requirement that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State. Article 28 The provisions of the present Covenant shall extend to all parts of federal States without any limitations or exceptions. *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* *Q&A's* What is a 'set-off'? In Sigurdson v. R. in Right of B.C., [1982] 2 W.W.R. 579 (B.C.C.A.), Carrothers, J.A., speaking for a majority, dealt with the concept of set-off at page 592, as follows: The law relating to true set-off is well settled. A true set-off of indebtedness can take place only between two debtors who are at the same time one another's creditors. A set-off is merely the remission or cancellation pro tanto of reciprocal debts by applying one's credit receivable from another against one's debt owed to that other. A set-off is a cross-claim for money's worth respecting mutual or reciprocal debts due and owing and to the same parties in the same right. Arguments: Won't we be taking money from hospitals, roads, schools and emergency services? YES. Absolutely. (See there really is no free lunch.) Now tell me, which of those things mentioned can be designed, built, maintained or upgraded without an educated populace? Every penny you invest in education comes back in dollars. I had to struggle to go to school. Why shouldn't everyone else? You should hire a lawyer and sue whoever educated you, for they failed to teach you the most fundamental aspects of being a decent human being and community member. 'I suffered so you must also' is the thought process of an angry and bitter person. What is stopping you from thinking "I suffered, so you shouldn't have to!" ? Many died in the last century in World Wars. Because they did so, are we obliged to as well? Or are we perhaps free from those burdens BECAUSE they previously carried them? Please wake up. Whose Money is it? Your federal representative is transferring money to your provincial representative and neither would have the right to touch that money if not for the fact that they are acting as your representative. So, who must that money actually belong to? Plus the courts have ruled that transfer payments cannot be used for partisan purposes. It has to be spent on the people in the province. What if they simply refuse to do it? *Remember a few key things:* 1. The only form of government recognized as lawful in Canada is a representative type. 2. Representation requires MUTUAL CONSENT. 3. If you revoke your consent, you no longer have a representative and therefore no longer have a government! 4. No STATUTE will have the force of law over you. No government agent will have any authority over you. You can in effect SINK YOUR BOND. 5. Tell them if they refuse to do what you wish, that you will no longer be a member of society and will never consent to governance again. Then ask who will be paying THEIR pensions? Certainly wont be you? 6. Realize this is your right. It is fundamentally unlawful for your representative government to burden you for wishing to better yourself and your society. The threat of the debt stops many from seeking a higher education. The burdens once placed, harm our families; deny our children their parents? time and resources and result in less volunteer work in our communities. It causes stress and immense harm. The government is the only one who benefits from an ignorant and uneducated populace. 7. Contact Rob mrmitee at hotmail.comThis email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it and have him advocate for you. He will argue the government did not fail to meet their obligations. If any government agent wishes to argue under oath and upon their full commercial liability, that the government did fail to meet their obligations, they are free to do so. Only the educated are free. --- Epictetus If you can read this, thank a teacher. --- Anonymous teacher Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little need of reform in our prisons. --- John Ruskin *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* How to use these documents: 1. Send the letter (marked ?Notice?) to your MP asking the 20 questions. ? When they do not respond, send off the second letter and go to the next step. 2. Create a Claim of Right, get it Notarized and send a certified true copy of the original via registered mail to all of the following: 1. The Prime Minister 2. Your MP 3. The Premier 4. Your MLA 5. The Minister of Finance 6. Receiver General 7. Head of The Student Loan organization 3. Craft a simple Affidavit attesting to the fact you have served that Claim of Right on the people in question. (See the example) 4. Wait 30 days. 5. If no one responds, your claim is perfected and you have established your rights claimed. Congratulations! Now create and send off the Bill of Exchange. The original goes to a notary public for presentation to the Minister of Finance, your agent. A certified true copy goes to the student loan organization. (Whoever you would make your payment to) 6. Three days later, send off copies of the notarized Confirmation of Settlement Letter via registered mail and keep one for safe keeping. Congratulations, you are finished! You have not only paid off your loan, you have uncovered a fundamental truth the government never wanted you to find out! Your actions, and those of others at this time will inevitably result in a system of fully funded post secondary education for all Canadians. You are a Hero! *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* *Notice* DATE: Dear M.P. I have heard talk lately of the number on the back of my Birth Certificate being a bond tracking number. Apparently our pledge to consent to taxation supports these bonds. I have also heard that we have the right to access funds within those bonds, or the revenue generated by them to pay for our education. If so this would be a great benefit to millions of students throughout this great country. Also, over the last election, I heard a great deal of talk concerning government accountability coming from those we have elected. I feel that accountability is impossible without honesty, knowledge and competence. Towards that ends I must ask you a series of important questions. These questions are very simple and straightforward and I demand you answer them fully, completely, honestly and immediately. Failure to do so will mean you accept my right to answer these questions myself, and then inform you as my representative, what those answers are. You will then be bound by those answers as if you had supplied them. This seems very fair, reasonable and equitable to me. I have numbered the questions for your easy reference and to aid in our communications. 1. What exactly is the number on the back (front) of my Birth Certificate? 2. Why is it not identified as to its function? 3. Is it a 'bond tracking' number? 4. If so, when was a bond generated? a) Who generated it? b) Did they enjoy informed consent? 5. What is the value of the bond, assuming there is one? 6. Who owns title to that bond? 7. Does that bond generate revenue? 8. Does my pledge, promise, oath or obligation, support the bond, if there is one? 9. If yes, when did I pledge, promise or make oath? 10. If there is no money in my bond generating revenue, who stole my money? 11. Who initially put money in the bond? 12. Is interest paid on that bond? 13. If so, to whom and how much interest is paid? 14. Does the revenue generated by the bond, if there is any, form part of the 'Federal Transfer Payments' the Federal and Provincial levels of government bicker over? 15. Would either level of representation have the right to control or access those payments if they were not acting as a representative? 16. To who do those Federal Transfer Payments actually belong? 17. Is there a fiduciary over the bond? 18. If so who is it? a) If not does this mean NO ONE is in charge of the bond? 19. Is it true we have the right to deny consent to be represented and thus governed? 20. Has your hand been 'in the cookie jar'? Please answer these questions as herein directed. Many people want and need to know the answers to these simple questions. If you cannot or will not answer them, all must conclude that you are grossly incapable of representing me, and appropriate and lawful steps will then be taken. Sincerely and without malice aforethought, ill-will, vexation or frivolity, Will U. Tellme DaTruth All rights reserved, non-assumpsit, With Prejudice *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* *Notice* DATE: _________________________ Dear M.P. _______________________ CC: TWIMC Hi! I am _______________________ and I recently wrote to you, asking twenty simple questions. I informed you that if you failed to respond and answer those questions, I would answer them for you, and you would be bound by those answers as if they had been your own. As you have had time to respond, and have not, and as I am sure you have seen these questions before, your reluctance to answer is strongly indicative of fraudulent activity. Here are the answers to the questions. Now, if you are ever asked them again, you can refer to this correspondence and your other constituents wou?t have to wait or otherwise feel they are being defrauded. What exactly is the number on the back (front) of my Birth Certificate? Answer: Bond Tracking Number Why is it not identified as to its function? Answer: Government does not want us to realize the Bonds? existence. Is it a 'bond tracking' number? Answer: YES! If so, when was a bond generated Answer: When our parents registered our birth. Who generated it? Answer: The government did, with the apparent consent of our parents. Did they enjoy informed consent? Answer: NO, they did not! What is the value of the bond, assuming there is one? Answer: At least One Million Dollars Who owns title to that bond? Answer: Whoever holds The Record of Live Birth (Government) Does that bond generate revenue? Answer: If it does not, someone is guilty of either theft, or gross negligence. Does my pledge, promise, oath or obligation, support the bond, if there is one? Answer: YES! If yes, when did I pledge, promise or make oath? Answer: Your parents initially made oath, you confirmed when you applied for your SIN. If there is no money in my bond generating revenue, who stole my money? Answer: This requires an RCMP investigation. Who initially put money in the bond? Answer: This requires an RCMP investigation. Is interest paid on that bond? Answer: This requires an RCMP investigation. If so, to whom and how much interest is paid? Answer: This requires an RCMP investigation. Does the revenue generated by the bond, if there is any, form part of the 'Federal Transfer Payments' the Federal and Provincial levels of government bicker over? Answer: YES! Would either level of representation have the right to control or access those payments if they were not acting as a representative? Answer: NO! To who do those Federal Transfer Payments actually belong? Answer: Whoever is being represented. Is there a fiduciary over the bond? Answer: YES, of ocurse! If so who is it? Answer: The Minister of Finance If not does this mean NO ONE is in charge of the bond? Is it true we have the right to deny consent to be represented and thus governed? Answer: Absolutely! Has your hand been 'in the cookie jar'? Answer: This requires an RCMP investigation. As all can tell from our agreed upon answers to these questions, there is clearly a need for an RCMP investigation on five or more seperate issues. If you do not agree this is the case, please get back to me within 7 days. I will be including a copy of this letter to the Commissioner of the RCMP and informing them that both I and my Member of Parliament feel there is a need for an immediate investigation. Sincerely and without malice aforethought, ill-will, vexation or frivolity, Will U. Tellme DaTruth All Rights Reserved, Non-Assumpsit, With Prejudice *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* *Claim of Right* DATE: _____________ I, __________(Name)________ ___, a Human Being in a Common Law jurisdiction, born in ______( ********* City)____________ on or about the ______________ day in the month of _____________ in the year _______________ to _____(mother)______________ and _____(father)___________ have the ability and power to establish rights by use of a Claim of Right. I do hereby claim that among my rights are all of the following: 1. I claim the right to an education. 2. I claim the right to use the funds either in my bond (evidenced by the bond tracking number on the Birth Certificate issued to me by the government) or to use the funds generated by the bond to either pay off any student loan if I do have one, or to pay directly for my education if I do not have a loan. 3. I claim the right to use the funds in the bond or revenue generated by those funds to pay for food and shelter and any other rights recognized by the United Nations. 4. I claim the right to fire any one acting as a fiduciary over my bond if they fail to acknowledge all rights herein claimed. 5. I claim the right to revoke or deny consent to be represented and in doing so free myself from all statutory obligations and restrictions, if doing so is, in my opinion, in my best interest. 6. I claim the right to direct my fiduciary as to what to do with the revenue generated by my bond, provided the directives are a benefit to my society and me. 7. I claim the right to order and direct my federal representatives to transfer directly to me funds and moneys which they would normally transfer to my provincial representatives in the absence of any directives, if doing so is, in my opinion, in my best interest. These Rights are hereby lawfully claimed and are established as Law thirty days hence. Any and all concerned parties wishing to discuss or dispute these claims must send a Notice of Dispute or Offer of Discussion within thirty days via Registered mail to the address below. Failure to do so means that all parties agree that these rights herein claimed are lawfully established and will not be infringed, violated or abrogated in any way. All parties who have been served proper Notice of this claim and fail to discuss or dispute, and then infringe, violate or abrogate said rights, directly or through their agents, employees or proxies, agree they do so under FULL COMMERCIAL LIABILITY and further agree to pay to me upon my demand a sum certain of One Million Canadian Dollars for every infringement, violation or abrogation. This Claim of Right is made and served with the intent of bettering my society and myself and, without ill will, malice aforethought, frivolity or vexation. Claimant: ______________________________ Notary: ________________________________ *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action * * * *NOTICE* Date: __________________ Addressed To: _______(Minister of Finance , by NAME) CTCO: ______(Financial Institution_ RE: Student Loan #:______________________ I am ______(NAME)_________________ and my Birth Certificate registration number is ____(# From FRONT)______________ and the bond tracking number found on my Birth Certificate is ______(# on Back)_____. It is my understanding that the Bond evidenced by the tracking number generates revenue and that you are acting as a fiduciary in Trust to administer that bond and the revenue generated by it for my benefit, within our societal structure. In the Act governing my student loan, ____________ section _______ does state: Money owing under a guaranteed student loan may be recovered at any time by way of deduction from or set-off against any sum of money that may be due or payable by Her Majesty in right of Canada to the borrower or the estate or succession of the borrower. Furthermore, Article 13.2(c) of The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Canada is a signatory, was ratified on January 3rd, 1976 and does state: (c) Higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education; Therefore TAKE NOTICE, that I am hereby directing you my fiduciary in Trust, to seize and direct sufficient funds and no more in the sum certain of $_________, generated by my Bond which you administer and to direct said funds to the financial institution herein mentioned to be used solely to set-off and discharge my student loan honourably, fully, completely and immediately. This lawful directive is a benefit to myself and my society, fulfills the UN Covenant and is well within your fiduciary authority. Failure to do as you are hereby lawfully directed within THREE juridical days will result in your dishonour, charges of nonfeasance and an immediate termination of your fiduciary responsibilities and Trustee status over my bond. Failure to discharge this account immediately may also result in legal action being instituted against you by the aforementioned financial institution. GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY. Jane Q. Student SIGN _________________________ NOTARY _______________________ *The Elizabeth Anne Elaine Society Justice is Truth in Action* *Notice of Confirmation of Settlement With Prejudice* From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Sep 7 14:10:00 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 13:10:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> Message-ID: <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> That new nuclear is so far from reality that it is like Cold Fusion a pipe dream. ________________________________ From: gregory meyerson To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Monday, September 7, 2009 7:10:28 AM Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism there is n't a uranium availability problem with 4th generation? nuclear.? see for a brief but informative reference, James Hansen's? Letter to Obama. for more detail, see barry brook's bravenewclimate site and tom blees? book, prescription for the planet. the left knows nothing about new nuclear. course, the key problem to solving climate change is capitalist social? relations, but the wind/solar nuclear discussion needs to resemble the? truth. see also david mackay, "sustainability without the hot air," available? on line for free. On Sep 6, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: > Your site and Arch Druids are a pain in the ass to post comments on. I? > don't know why they are not simple like Wordpress or this is. Anyway? > this is my comment to his post you can pass it on to him or not I? > tried twice to post it on his site and it wouldn't let me. It is a? > good thing I saved my comment first or I would be pissed off. > This is an interesting post and > I would say first the point about Rare metal export restriction is? > probably part economic warfare between the USA and China. The US wants? > to produce cars with rare metal batteries, China wanted to buy GM.? > They got Hummer, and now they have access to that military technology,? > even if they had to agree to make it in the USA. Being able to export? > the batteries puts China in the position to control the market as long? > as batteries are based on lithium technology. > ?? On the other hand there is nothing new about that. China has been? > the manufacturing plant of choice for the world's capitalists for a? > couple of decades. > ?? The USA has become the great agricultural exporting nation and has? > been for a century. We were only the worlds center of manufacturing? > for a few decades when Europe's capacity was devastated by war. > ?? This bit about derivatives and the financial markets driving the? > world economy is part of a temporary bubble that boomed after the? > Bretton Woods agreement was abrogated in the 1970's when Nixon was? > forced to let the dollar float. This is literally play money and has? > nothing to do with the real economy. It was created artificially and? > it will disappear once people are done playing this version of? > monopoly. > ?? We are not entering a scarcity economy but simply transiting to a? > non fossil fuel economy. This can be as soft or hard a transition as? > we want to make it depending on how willing the ruling classes are to? > simply chuck the oil economy and retool for a solar one. There may be? > a transition with a nuclear economy but there is the same availability? > problem with uranium as there is with oil. There is only enough for? > about 50 years to fuel the world economy. All we need to do is? > reallocate resources. Since the wealthy won't allow us to take the? > money from them it will come out of the hides of the workers as is? > normal but at some point it will happen. They will try to sell it to? > us as a matter of scarcity but that is only to squeeze more wealth out? > of the majority of the population. There is no shortage, only problems? > of allocation. > ? As a former participant in a gnostic community, anarchist communist? > activist and currently a blogger/activist I find this to be one of the? > better blogs, even if I have problems with Druidism. - Gary Rumor. > > > > > ________________________________ > From: Bill Totten > To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com > Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2009 6:25:48 PM > Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism > > > by John Michael Greer > > The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) > > Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial? > society > > > Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so? > offer > a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are setting the > future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in? > the > dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed? > almost > unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of these? > news > items seem to have been missed by most observers. > > The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is? > planning > to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who don't > track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have become > crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for example, is? > used > in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent magnets? > used > in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and? > other > hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being? > hyped > by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth > elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of the > world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an > imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of > speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines outside? > of > China that can produce the same minerals > > A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to? > make it > into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means minor > issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this news; in > each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the export > quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is? > the > fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products? > containing > rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the? > raw > materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they are no > longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a source? > of > raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of? > somebody > else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare earth > elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese? > factories, > and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in Chinese > hands. > > As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more denunciations of > "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces "resource > nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on the > control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The? > problem > arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources? > these > days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real? > estate. > > Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply one of? > the > consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a > century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, with > troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took place in > very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted? > the > virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a? > system > of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's wealth? > in > London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United? > States > - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture their > emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British? > Empire > waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the? > First > World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. > > We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the? > role > of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing? > strategic > trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own > industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we might > reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and > punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to 1945 > transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by? > America's. > Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I? > want > to discuss here points up one of the differences. > > This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative? > market > has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion? > dollars. > The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the capacity? > of > the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom may > well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that? > costs > you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when > multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have spent? > one > quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such? > figures > if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. > > In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two? > things > should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion dollars > worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The > second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those > derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any? > meaningful > sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than? > more > financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report? > post, > derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of? > abstract > numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and has now > gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. > > As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a few > words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially a bet > regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called? > the > "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands when > the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might? > obligate > me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price fixed in > advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due determined? > who > profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts > themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all the > usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite literally be > conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in? > many > ways the perfect speculative instrument. > > It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in > derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to run. > Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and that > other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are? > produced > and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two economies? > is > credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly > exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its aftermath > offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit produced in > the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so,? > causing > apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all that > credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives have > less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities did, > and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives? > bubble > have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more arbitrary? > than > those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent > stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not completely > impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure > abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the real > economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. > > Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial realms? > of > speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and > services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on its > rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does not > exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself? > suddenly > overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows? > out > of the barrel of a gun. > > This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term > Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative? > hubris. > Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel > laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it - by? > a > set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its? > founders, > could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like? > it. > The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five? > years > when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its? > foreign > loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect of a > default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble? > stopped > bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks had to? > be > strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of > dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. > > The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that politics > trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times over? > the > last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to? > notice. If > I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next? > fifty > years or so of history. > > In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the midst? > of a > transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar to us? > over > the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism",? > and a > new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where > abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of cheap > abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels,? > scarcity > industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. One of > the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions that > control significant amounts of important resources will find those > resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same? > sort of > clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may reclaim? > in > the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or? > cartels > of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. > > If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to? > build > their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of > course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking advantage? > of > the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism? > dawns. > They may well have recognized that in a world that will increasingly be > shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own? > resource > bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has > already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian? > government > to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- and > British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the chaos? > and > corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to? > learn > it as well. > > The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand? > many > of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be? > out of > place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies might, if > they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, and? > next > week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. > > _____ > > ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality > movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, > including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He > lives in Ashland, Oregon? [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according to the > August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". > > http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity- > industrialism.html > > TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click > on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this > essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Sep 7 14:10:43 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 13:10:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Labor Day, Israel And the Escape From Slavery Message-ID: <804257.61267.qm@web43504.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Labor Day - Israel Story of Escaped Slaves The story of Moses and Israel is a story of escape from slavery, and the tribulations of a small group of former slaves in their attempts to keep alive the sense of community that developed. It is the story of the struggle for human freedom and justice in a world full of dictators and kings. The people of Israel were in Egyptian bondage. They had come down from Canaan durring a period of drought when they were taken in by the Egyptians. Prior to that they were one tribe among many living in that region where they had emigrated earlier from Chaldea. They had to work as labourers for the Egyptian Pharaohs. Moses led them in a rebellion that although not able to overthrow the Pharoah, they were able to escape from Egypt and find a home in Canaan. They then fought bloody battles to evict the current residents and founded for themselves a land in which they were free under the tutelage of the Judges. Later under pressure from a political movement to promote the latest in government theory they selected kings. This led to a period of expansion and then decay as they were conquered by the Babylonians. Later the Persians conquered Babylon and liberated the Israelites and sent them on their way back to their land of Israel. The Greeks conquered the Persians, taking Israel as one if their prizes. The Israelis rebelled and for a while they were free under the Maccabees. Later the Herod?s became kings of Israel again, helped the Romans beat Mithridates but were later dumped in favor of direct Roman rule. The Israelis rebelled again, but the Romans were a much tougher cookie to crack than the Greeks. They fought back. Destroyed the Israelis took the wealth in the temple in Jerusalem and used the money and the enslaved Israelis to build the Colosseum. The Israelis rebelled again, were again defeated by the Romans but this time they were dispersed and told they could not live in their land. Many went to the Parthian lands of Babylon where they were accepted as refugees. Others lived in the outlying areas of Judea and others moved to various parts of the known world were Jewish groups existed. That was the state of affairs until the Islamic forces conquered the middle east and allowed Jews again to live in peace in their homeland. They merely had to pay a tax to the Islamic rulers. During the crusades Christians came and massacred the population of Jerusalem set up a Christian kingdom invited immigrants from Europe until Saladin was able to reunite the forces of Islam to restore Islamic rule in the land. They did not massacre the inhabitants but they were forced to buy their freedom for a ransom. Jews again were able to live in Jerusalem. They were under the suzerainty of Arab rulers until the Turks conquered the area. Then they ruled until the British came and took it from the Turks in World War One. The British wanted to protect their interest in the Suez Canal and they had an interest in the oil being discovered in the new country of Iraq. The Balfour agreements were signed which promised a home land for the newly emergent Zionist movement. It developed in the 19th century in Europe where Jews had been often discriminated against, especially in eastern Europe and Russia where there had even in the 19th century been programs against Jews. In the period after world war one many Jews migrated to the British protectorate of Palestine. By the end of the 1920?s the local Muslim leaders became upset about this and felt that they were losing control of the land that had been Muslim since the 7th century except for the brief period in the 12th century when there was a crusader state there. The Arab and Turkish rulers had been Muslim. They had allowed Christians and Jews to live there but taxed them. Many had converted to Islam over the centuries but the area was a patchwork of various religious beliefs with Islam dominant. There were riots in 1929. The British decided to control Jewish immigration, this pissed of the Jews and did not satisfy the Arabs. Tensions grew, Jewish guerrilla groups formed to attack the British. During the Second Word War Nazi agents went to the area to stir up the Arabs against the British. The Germans and Italians attempted to conquer the middle east via a pincer move from Africa and Russia but it stalled and failed. After the war the British were now facing the horrors of the holocaust. The Zionist lobby pushed for a homeland in Israel. The British who were negotiating away their empire in India had no real reason to maintain a presence in Palestine and came up with a two state solution that would split the region between Jews and Arabs. The Arabs felt that they were being pushed out of their homeland. Hostilities broke out between Jews and Arabs. The Jews quickly were able to defeat the Arab forces and pushed their way to the borders that existed from the 1949 armistice until the 1967 war when the Israel forces conquered a swath of land from Jordan, Syria and the entire Sinai from Egypt. Later Israel made peace with Egypt and gave back the Sinai but the people of Palestine who had been evicted from their land in the war 1947-1949 at the time of the independence of Israel ended up in refugee camps. They insisted on their right of return. Because the United Nations now existed this gave all the parties a forum in which to voice their concerns. From the Arab viewpoint this was nothing more than a return of the Crusaders under a new guise. From the perspective of the Jews this was the restoration of the ancient state of Israel and the reparations from the world that had stood by while the Nazis had murdered millions in concentration camps. In the 1960?s Palestinian groups, the christian and Muslim people who were now exiled, such as Al Fatah formed to regain the land they had lost and they began a guerrilla war against Israel. There were some spectacular actions to gain the attention of the world to their cause and eventually after years of fighting and negotiating the Oslo Accords in the 1990?s became the beginnings of a Palestinian mini state in the West Bank region of Jordan that was occupied by Israel in 1967 and in the strip of land known as the Gaza. Fatah formed the beginnings of a state but it had no real power and was divided into sectors closely controlled by the Israeli military. After the war in 1973 the oil producing nations exerted their muscle and through their international body OPEC began to raise prices on oil and imposed an embargo on the USA which resulted in the 1973 fuel crises. This was done because the USA was the main supporter of Israel providing weapons and financial aid. Some saw this as a proxy war between the USA and the Soviet Union with the Arabs using Soviet weapons, the Israelis using American. President Nixon was forced to impose gas rationing and for a while the USA economy looked like it was on the brink of collapse. The USA was forced to pressure Israel to withdraw its troops from the West bank of the Suez. It did and the Oil Embargo ended. But the price of oil in the world did not return to prewar levels. There have been several uprisings on the part of the Palestinians, that have been put down by the Israelis. With the main power Egypt now out of the picture due to the peace treaty known as the Camp David Accords the Muslim states had no recourse but to accept Israeli dominance. Israel secretly build nuclear weapons in conjunction with the then white ruled Apartheid South Africa. Upon return to majority black rule South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons program but Israel did not and it now is suspected of having over 200 bombs. Iraq attempted to build a bomb of its own to counter that but its plutonium generating nuclear facility was bombed by Israel in the 1980?s. It never was able to move in that direction again despite the Bush era propaganda. Iran stepped into the vacuum and took over the leadership of the Muslim forces arrayed against Israel. They supported Hamas in the Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel fought a war with Hezbollah in which they did not manage to destroy Hezbollah. Israel ended its occupation of southern Lebanon which it did in responce to guerrilla raids from Lebanon and rocket attacks across the border. Israel also pulled its troops out of Gaza. Hamas was able to win elections in Gaza as the Palestinian people were upset with the lack of progress in the forming of a Palestinian state and because of the ongoing blockade of the Gaza by Israel due to homemade rocket launches from the Gaza into Israeli territory. In December and January of this year Israel launched a controversial series of assaults upon Gaza in an attempt to weaken the Hamas control over the area. Many civilians were killed as has been the case for years in the ongoing conflict. Currently Iran is attempting to develop its own nuclear capacity and it may or may not succeed depending on its internal political will. The pro western forces in Iran are now attempting to wrest power from the Islamic forces. We shall see which one wins. Israel in the meantime has threatened to strike Iran as it did Syria and Iraq to destroy nuclear facilities. Although Syria claims the facility destroyed recently was not part of a nuclear program. Israel insists it was with the aid of North Korean scientists. Israel now stands in the unique position of being a functioning non Muslim state in a predominantly Muslim region. Lebanon is a mixed Christian and Muslim state that exists in a precarious balance between the two. Iran is an Islamic Republic with a democratically elected government with an Islamic council of Mullahs acting in an oversight capacity. Turkey is a secular Republic with an Islamic party in power at this time. The rest of the middle eastern countries are ruled by Military juntas, traditional kings, single party rule with fake elections, or as in Iraq under occupation of the United States as weak semi-puppet regime with a democratic patina. The experiment that was founded in the 2nd millennium BCE is now a restored and controversial state. Because it is mainly populated by refugees from the Holocaust, Russian emigres and Americans it is a unique example of the transportation of an essentially European culture in a culture that has maintained the traditions that have existed for centuries in the the middle east. Because of the long memories of the Crusades, and the violence and intolerance of the Crusaders, the Muslims feel that Israel is an imposition, a colony of western values in their cultural environment. But Islam is a living culture itself and comes out of the same roots in Abrahamic religion as is Judaism and Christianity. But that is another issue. The issue in between Israel and the Palestinians is one of land and water. It is a matter of redressing wrongs, working out a detailed settlement and coming to an agreement. Ultimately I think Israel will have to come to terms with its neighbors. It has a lot to offer in terms of technological advances, it has a well developed infrastructure, and a robust democracy and the sooner they are able to integrate with their neighbors the sooner their message of liberty and resistance to injustice and tyranny will be spread to those who are now suffering from repressive regimes. The Middle East is undergoing a cultural realignment. The United States must allow these people to find ways to integrate. Obama may have set the tone in his Cairo speech. He certainly inspired the secular forces in Iran and the Christians in Lebanon. Israel has to find a way to change from being an embattled state to being a progressive one. That may mean a reinterpretation of the meaning of Judaism from an exclusive tribal outlook to one of the universal values of freedom and liberation from tyranny upon which the Israeli people coalesced into a people so many centuries ago. Islam was founded to set the peoples of the world free from bondage to false gods and inhumane practices. When the message of human brotherhood in the name of Allah was spread across the middle east it swept all before it the Roman and Persian Empires fell before the power of its message of human dignity and the value of each individual. Muslims too must remember the original message and revive that spirit that almost conquered the world with its simplicity and universal message of love and compassion. What does this have to do with labor day. We all labor under the dictatorship of one form of Moloch or another. Capitalism is a form in which this dictatorship has been allowed to flourish in the name of laissez faire. Laissez faire is fine in an open marketplace where there are no powerful bodies distorting things for their own benefit. It is a description perhaps of a primitive tribal meeting place where peace reigned between factions for the sake of some form of commerce. This is the peaceful aspect of exchange that we should encourage. But that is not what the world has become. What we have is a battle between factions that are attempting to maintain control of resources for their advantage and to the detriment of all those who are not part of their elite circles. They rig the markets and the means of exchange, the enslave the workers and enforce that system with a state mechanism that makes it hard for the workers to resist. Labor day was founded by Congress in 1894 after then President Cleveland, a Democrat, crushed the Pullman workers strike with federal troops. Workers were killed by troops and thugs hired by Pullman. Congress passed the labor day legislation to placate the outraged sentiments of the working classes of America who saw the federal government step in and take sides in a labor struggle using the excuse that the mails were being threatened by the striking rail workers as the strike spread to others supporting the Pullman workers. Working people need to remember that our goal is not just better pay. We need to understand that the wealth of the world is created by our labor and these capitalists are taking more than their share of the wealth due to the unfair rules set up under our so called free market capitalism. If anything has shown people how unfree this market is, the recent bailout of the banks should prove that. The story of the original Israelis escaping from bondage is all our story, it is part of our human heritage no matter our religion. We all need to fight for our own liberation from our own modern day Egyptian bondage. That bondage is one of enslavement to the system that treats humans as commodities and not as beings with rights to live freely under the sun. Break the chains of human bondage wherever they arise!!! Tags: Labor Day A Day To Think Of Liberation From Capitalist From gmeyerson at triad.rr.com Mon Sep 7 14:22:07 2009 From: gmeyerson at triad.rr.com (Gregory Meyerson) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 16:22:07 -0400 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> gary: it's already been built. the most advanced is GE's s prism. and the demo reactors were built years ago and tested at argonne. you don't what you're talking about, as the comparison with cold fusion shows. and gen threes are out which have built in passive safety, though not the efficiency with uranium use. listen: read the stuff I suggested. I know all the anti nuke arguments backwards and forwards and they're based in ignorance. don't just read caldicott or wasserman. then you'll be stuck where I was one year ago, in serious misinformation. I've cc'd tom blees if you're interested . On Sep 7, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: > That new nuclear is so far from reality that it is like Cold Fusion > a pipe dream. > > > > > ________________________________ > From: gregory meyerson > To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com > Sent: Monday, September 7, 2009 7:10:28 AM > Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity > Industrialism > > there is n't a uranium availability problem with 4th generation > nuclear. see for a brief but informative reference, James Hansen's > Letter to Obama. > > > > for more detail, see barry brook's bravenewclimate site and tom blees > book, prescription for the planet. > > > the left knows nothing about new nuclear. > > > course, the key problem to solving climate change is capitalist social > relations, but the wind/solar nuclear discussion needs to resemble the > truth. > > > see also david mackay, "sustainability without the hot air," available > on line for free. > On Sep 6, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: > >> Your site and Arch Druids are a pain in the ass to post comments >> on. I >> don't know why they are not simple like Wordpress or this is. Anyway >> this is my comment to his post you can pass it on to him or not I >> tried twice to post it on his site and it wouldn't let me. It is a >> good thing I saved my comment first or I would be pissed off. >> This is an interesting post and >> I would say first the point about Rare metal export restriction is >> probably part economic warfare between the USA and China. The US >> wants >> to produce cars with rare metal batteries, China wanted to buy GM. >> They got Hummer, and now they have access to that military >> technology, >> even if they had to agree to make it in the USA. Being able to export >> the batteries puts China in the position to control the market as >> long >> as batteries are based on lithium technology. >> On the other hand there is nothing new about that. China has been >> the manufacturing plant of choice for the world's capitalists for a >> couple of decades. >> The USA has become the great agricultural exporting nation and has >> been for a century. We were only the worlds center of manufacturing >> for a few decades when Europe's capacity was devastated by war. >> This bit about derivatives and the financial markets driving the >> world economy is part of a temporary bubble that boomed after the >> Bretton Woods agreement was abrogated in the 1970's when Nixon was >> forced to let the dollar float. This is literally play money and has >> nothing to do with the real economy. It was created artificially and >> it will disappear once people are done playing this version of >> monopoly. >> We are not entering a scarcity economy but simply transiting to a >> non fossil fuel economy. This can be as soft or hard a transition as >> we want to make it depending on how willing the ruling classes are to >> simply chuck the oil economy and retool for a solar one. There may be >> a transition with a nuclear economy but there is the same >> availability >> problem with uranium as there is with oil. There is only enough for >> about 50 years to fuel the world economy. All we need to do is >> reallocate resources. Since the wealthy won't allow us to take the >> money from them it will come out of the hides of the workers as is >> normal but at some point it will happen. They will try to sell it to >> us as a matter of scarcity but that is only to squeeze more wealth >> out >> of the majority of the population. There is no shortage, only >> problems >> of allocation. >> As a former participant in a gnostic community, anarchist communist >> activist and currently a blogger/activist I find this to be one of >> the >> better blogs, even if I have problems with Druidism. - Gary Rumor. >> >> >> >> >> ________________________________ >> From: Bill Totten >> To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com >> Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2009 6:25:48 PM >> Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism >> >> >> by John Michael Greer >> >> The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) >> >> Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial >> society >> >> >> Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so >> offer >> a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are >> setting the >> future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in >> the >> dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed >> almost >> unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of these >> news >> items seem to have been missed by most observers. >> >> The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is >> planning >> to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who >> don't >> track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have >> become >> crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for example, is >> used >> in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent magnets >> used >> in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and >> other >> hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being >> hyped >> by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth >> elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of >> the >> world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an >> imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of >> speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines >> outside >> of >> China that can produce the same minerals >> >> A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to >> make it >> into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means minor >> issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this >> news; in >> each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the >> export >> quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is >> the >> fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products >> containing >> rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the >> raw >> materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they are no >> longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a >> source >> of >> raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of >> somebody >> else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare >> earth >> elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese >> factories, >> and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in >> Chinese >> hands. >> >> As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more >> denunciations of >> "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces "resource >> nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on the >> control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The >> problem >> arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources >> these >> days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real >> estate. >> >> Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply >> one of >> the >> consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a >> century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, >> with >> troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took >> place in >> very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted >> the >> virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a >> system >> of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's wealth >> in >> London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United >> States >> - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture >> their >> emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British >> Empire >> waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the >> First >> World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. >> >> We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the >> role >> of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing >> strategic >> trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own >> industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we >> might >> reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and >> punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to >> 1945 >> transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by >> America's. >> Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I >> want >> to discuss here points up one of the differences. >> >> This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative >> market >> has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion >> dollars. >> The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the capacity >> of >> the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom >> may >> well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that >> costs >> you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when >> multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have >> spent >> one >> quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such >> figures >> if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. >> >> In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two >> things >> should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion >> dollars >> worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The >> second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those >> derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any >> meaningful >> sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than >> more >> financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report >> post, >> derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of >> abstract >> numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and >> has now >> gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. >> >> As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a few >> words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially >> a bet >> regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called >> the >> "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands >> when >> the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might >> obligate >> me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price >> fixed in >> advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due determined >> who >> profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts >> themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all the >> usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite literally be >> conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in >> many >> ways the perfect speculative instrument. >> >> It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in >> derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to >> run. >> Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and >> that >> other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are >> produced >> and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two >> economies >> is >> credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly >> exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its >> aftermath >> offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit >> produced in >> the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so, >> causing >> apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all >> that >> credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives >> have >> less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities >> did, >> and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives >> bubble >> have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more arbitrary >> than >> those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent >> stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not >> completely >> impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure >> abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the >> real >> economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. >> >> Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial realms >> of >> speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and >> services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on >> its >> rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does not >> exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself >> suddenly >> overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows >> out >> of the barrel of a gun. >> >> This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term >> Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative >> hubris. >> Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel >> laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it >> - by >> a >> set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its >> founders, >> could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like >> it. >> The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five >> years >> when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its >> foreign >> loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect >> of a >> default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble >> stopped >> bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks >> had to >> be >> strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of >> dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. >> >> The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that politics >> trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times >> over >> the >> last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to >> notice. If >> I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next >> fifty >> years or so of history. >> >> In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the midst >> of a >> transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar to us >> over >> the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism", >> and a >> new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where >> abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of >> cheap >> abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, >> scarcity >> industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. >> One of >> the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions that >> control significant amounts of important resources will find those >> resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same >> sort of >> clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may reclaim >> in >> the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or >> cartels >> of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. >> >> If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to >> build >> their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of >> course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking >> advantage >> of >> the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism >> dawns. >> They may well have recognized that in a world that will >> increasingly be >> shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own >> resource >> bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has >> already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian >> government >> to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- >> and >> British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the chaos >> and >> corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to >> learn >> it as well. >> >> The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand >> many >> of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be >> out of >> place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies >> might, if >> they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, and >> next >> week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. >> >> _____ >> >> ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality >> movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, >> including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He >> lives in Ashland, Oregon [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according >> to the >> August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". >> >> http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity- >> industrialism.html >> >> TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click >> on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this >> essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ >> _______________________________________________ >> Rad-Green mailing list >> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Rad-Green mailing list >> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Sep 7 18:37:32 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 17:37:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The Internet devalues everything it touches... Message-ID: <648949.36500.qm@web43512.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> ?The Internet devalues everything it touches . . . http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=556 This is a very interesting article. It has wide ranging implications for all industries. I have noticed it in the industry I work in. I have seen the value of my labor go down as the amount I am able to do goes up. There is a combination of a speedup and an ever increasing pressure to become more efficient. It is scary and it is exhilarating also. ?? It has liberated me to write content like never before but that content is free. I have no means of recouping value for that content unless I decide to put advertising on my site but then I would not be writing content I would be selling advertising and that would force me to angle my content to satisfy potential advertisers. I could say it wouldn't but my experience in sales has taught me that sales and marketing are one area, content is another and if you mix them then you are compromising your message and becoming simply part of the product delivery chain instead of the content provider mechanism. ?? Now what exactly is content? For my part it is the inspired combination of experience and research on various subjects in the world. I could be an expert on Mongolian sports and with the a few typed words I discover enough about the subject to be able to pass in every day conversation. Here is the Wikepedia entry on classic Mongolian sports. "Naadam (Mongolian: ??????, Classical Mongolian: Na?adum, games) is a traditional type of festival in Mongolia. The festival is also locally termed "eriin gurvan naadam" (????? ?????? ??????) "the three games of men". The games are Mongolian wrestling, horse racing and archery and are held throughout the country during the midsummer holidays. Women have started participating in the archery and girls in the horse-racing games, but not in Mongolian wrestling." ???? But like that commercial about people who are able to regurgitate meaningless random content like a computer what is the point of all this information? It is possible now to simply decide that we are going to implement full employment. Everyone works 2-4 hours a day. They get a living wage or simply bypass the entire economic system. People are given a credit access card and a value creation access card. They access material as is needed and create value as required. It goes onto the computer network gets sent to the appropriate area and it is done. ?? We can spend the majority of our time in education mode or down time mode. But there would be 4 basic modes. A)Energy consumption mode, B)Value addition mode, C)Information absorption mode and D)Down time mode. Down time would be off the grid activities. Everyone would have access to all four modes. There would be free access to all modes, I don't even know if there needs to be any minimum time spent in any one mode. Perhaps there should be some kind of warning device that lets you know when you have been in any one mode for longer than is healthy and each person could determine what that time is for themselves in every 24 hour cycle. ?? But it is obvious that unless we are going to simply work ourselves to death in an attempt to chase the ever spiralling downward remuneration for the time we spend in what is called labour, we are going to simply have to reevaluate how we determine what people are doing with their time. ?? This is the real star trek world and it could be the end of both capitalism and communism. We simply will have evolved to a stage where our optimal efficiency has out grown those primitive modes of organizing structures. ?? If this is the case then we are entering a truly brave new world. There is no shortage, only a lag in the social organization that functions to match the technology. ?? There is another question. Do we want to enter into this brave new world. As the author of the article stated it would simply be irrational to resist the efficiency is so great that resistance is truly futile or feudal as it were. ?? But if we are to thrive in the world we need to make the social structures match the systemic requirements. There are people in places like India where they are selling their children to keep them from starving and selling their wives simply to get enough money to pay for bread to support their families in hard times. This is absurd in a world where there are people who have literally billions of what we currently call dollars. ?? It is a crisis in allocation. This is not a matter of incentive to be productive. It is simply a matter of setting some humane standards by basically reallocating until all have access. ?? There are still a few isolated parts of the world where technology does not exist, but as the article stated if you have electricity, you have access and that means anywhere on the planet.? ? Do we really want to encourage a class system with a vast underclass of illiterates who live in ghettos and survive on scraps and odd jobs? There are a few humans who are not intelligent enough to function with technology, I am perhaps one of them, but the vast majority are easily trained to press buttons. The real question is are we willing to challenge people to truly learn and reach their highest potential. People like President Obama preaches that religion. What we need is to restructure the society to make it so. Are we ready? From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 18:53:50 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 17:53:50 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Charlie Demers on Canada, Blackwater and Afghanistan In-Reply-To: <64a8dcdaad455a25f7b6a5349364097d@localhost> Message-ID: <1651967770.230241252371230788.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Charlie Demers, co-host of the CityNews List, on Canada, Blackwater and Afghanistan's 'friends': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bbkZjhpNJQ From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Mon Sep 7 19:46:59 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 10:46:59 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Labor Day Blues Message-ID: <20090908104659.0ed69c5e.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005) www.kunstler.com (September 07 2009) One national moment-of-nausea this Labor Day weekend struck Sunday morning, when CNN's John King led off his 10 am State of the Union show with a valentine to ABC's Diane Sawyer, on her becoming anchor of that network's evening news. (This was the most important news of the week???) The old legacy networks have taken on the role of dishing out reassurance to an anxious and insecure public as job number one, and the subtext of the Sawyer lede was that a Mommy figure would soon be in place to soothe the multitudes even as the nation free-falls into bankruptcy and disorder. This is supposed to be a counterpoint to the chorus of smug, braying rabble-rousers who inflame the crowds on Fox News and MSNBC, and CNBC - the Glen Becks and Keith Olbermans and Dennis Kneales - who work the anger regions of the brain. The inherent conflicts arise from a nation that simply cannot bring itself to try getting its house in order. Instead of adult leadership, we prefer good parent / bad parent therapy - a psychodrama of alternating messages of reassurance and punishment that provides distraction from problems and conundrums too horrible to face. One unfortunate result is the evaporating legitimacy of anyone or anything in authority, and that is extremely dangerous at a time like this because it creates the perfect opportunity for the rise of a corn-pone Hitler who will beat a path straight into a national ordeal-by-fire, and make everybody feel better by telling them clearly what to do. President Obama rolls out his much-awaited message on health care reform to a joint session of congress this week after a summer of chaotic and often mendacious debate. The system now running is so unjust and ruinous that a citizenry unmedicated by psychotropic drugs would have burned down the insurers by now (and perhaps torched their doctors' BMWs). As a tactical matter, the best Mr Obama can do about the "public option" is to endorse it while kicking the can down the road, since the stark insolvency of the US treasury obviates any real ability to make it happen. But I believe the public would be greatly appeased (and helped!) by legislation that achieved a few simple ends: (1) clearly and absolutely outlaw insurers canceling policy contracts under any circumstances; (2) outlaw denial-of-care tactics; (3) outlaw campaign contributions by lobbyists, period. If Obama can present these items front-and-center, he can then point to congress and tell the nation that they can hold them responsible for their plight. Other urgent health care reforms could be subject to regulation rather than legislation. For example, medical care is not "competitive" in any meaningful sense; people with severe problems and illnesses are not comparable to "consumers" comparison shopping for flat-screen TVs. The truth is, they are hostages to their local hospitals and the specialists they are referred to. The ridiculous prices charged for everything from aspirins to tests to cotton swabs to time occupying a hospital room ought to be subject to review, and procedures can be set up to accomplish this, with severe fines for abusers. Personally, I'd charge the FCC with returning to its policy of banning drug advertising on TV. Polls are reporting a steep slide in President Obama's approval ratings, especially among white voters. I doubt that this is about the health care debate, which obviously remains unresolved at the time the polls were taken. I think it is about Mr Obama's shoveling of huge sums into Wall Street, and the unabated obscene money-grubbing by the executives there - while millions of ordinary people get thrown out of their houses, lose jobs that they'll never get back, and slip-slide permanently out of the middle class. His relations with Wall Street are destroying his legitimacy. His failure to demonstrably clean house at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators, or to direct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute misdeeds stemming from the swindles and frauds in securitized debt, make him look like a stooge to the bankers. I personally fault the president for putting no effort into the larger necessary tasks of leading a transition away from suburbanization, failing to promote public transit rather than continued car-dependency, not preparing for re-localized farming, and continuing the unaffordable racket of imperial military over-reach in a mode indistinguishable from G W Bush. Whatever the politics of the moment may be, national attitudes are surely changing. A psychology of hardship is overtaking even the bread-and-circus blandishments of the Cheez Doodle / infotainment / professional sports matrix of idiocy that the sociopathic corporate axis-of-evil operates to take advantage of ordinary human weakness. Soon, the public will lack the resources even for these tawdry comforts, and God knows what they'll turn to for solace then. A large part of Mr Obama's appeal as a candidate last year had to with presenting himself as an intelligent adult - as opposed to a parent figure (or a crazy old uncle in the case of John McCain). But so far, apart from his personal charm and good looks, his adult persona is that of an actuary - someone who can read charts, parse figures, and report them down the line for other people to draw conclusions . What he lacks at the moment is the very thing that history might foist on him: a sense that life is tragic and history is merciless and that sometimes we have to do the hard things that times require of us. _____ My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers. http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/09/-one-national-moment-of-nausea.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 20:13:32 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 19:13:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Pilger on Lockerbie: 'Megrahi Was Framed' In-Reply-To: <318538427.239331252375828739.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <541239847.239581252376012008.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2009/09/03/lockerbie-megrahi-was-framed/ Lockerbie: Megrahi Was Framed John Pilger Antiwar Forum September 04, 2009 The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown's "repulsion" to Barack Obama's "outrage," the theater of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. "But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?" whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. "What will you say to your constituents, then?" Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he "pays" for his "heinous crime": the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose "compassion" allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to "face justice from a higher power." Amen. The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as "a babbling brook of bullsh*t." Such eloquence summarizes the circus of Megrahi's release. No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests." "The endgame came down to damage limitation," said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, "because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi's] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice." New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft - he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognize him in the courtroom. The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, "discovered" in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi's suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was "transferred" through two airports undetected to Flight 103. A "key secret witness" at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a "protected witness." The defense exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans' conviction, up to $4m as a reward. Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in "neutral" Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a "mass of conflicting evidence" and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page "opinion," wrote Foot, "is a remarkable document that claims an honored place in the history of British miscarriages of justice." (Lockerbie - the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from the Private Eye website for ?5). Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt canceled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the "architect" of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr. on 11 January 1990, she agreed to "low-key" the disaster after their intelligence services had reported "beyond doubt" that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship's captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr. "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer." Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran's support as he built a "coalition" to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. "Like lazy and overfed fish," wrote Foot, "the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op-ed warmongering against Libya." The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defense intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centerpiece of Megrahi's defense. In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi's case for appeal. "The commission is of the view," said its chairman, Dr. Graham Forbes, "that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice." The words "miscarriage of justice" are missing entirely from the current furor, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that "higher power." What a disgrace. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 20:24:30 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 19:24:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Ilan Pappe: A big thank you In-Reply-To: <521703195.240501252376605374.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2088588925.240651252376670641.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10752.shtml The Electronic Intifada, 4 September 2009 A big thank you Ilan Pappe Israel's wall as seen from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. (Fadi Arouri/ MaanImages ) 3 September 2009 Today was a unique day in the history of media coverage and discussion in Israel. All the electronic agencies, radio and television alike, discussed the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians and more importantly, the possible price tag attached to it. It lasted only for 12 hours and tomorrow the obedient Israeli media will return to parrot the governmental new message to the masses that the "conflict" has ended and is about to be solved. On the one hand, you already have happy-go-lucky Palestinians in the West Bank (see the latest reports by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times and Ari Shavit in Haaretz ). And on the other, alas, those who opted out from the blissful new reality: the oppressed Palestinians who still live under Hamas' dictatorship in the Gaza Strip. Tomorrow we all will go back to the dismal reality in which Palestinian students are imprisoned daily without trial in Nablus, Palestinian children are killed near Ramallah, as also happened today. We will return to the reality of house demolitions as occurred two weeks ago in Jerusalem, of the continued strangulation of the Gaza Strip and the overall dispossession of Palestinians, wherever they are. But today of all days, those of us who happened to be here on the ground saw a light, a very powerful light, illuminating for a very short moment, the horizon of a different reality of peace and reconciliation. And it was all due to the decision of the Norwegian government to withdraw its investments in the Israeli hi-tech company Elbit (due to the latter's involvement in the construction and maintenance of the apartheid wall). We have to keep a proportional view on this: only one section of Elbit, Elbit Systems, was affected. But the significance is not about who was targeted, but rather who took the decision: the Norwegian ministry of finance through its ethical council. No less important was the manner in which it was taken: the minister herself announced the move in a press conference. This is what transformed for a short while the media scene in the Zionist state. Usually matters of foreign or military relevance are discussed in the Israeli media by generals or recruited political scientists from the local academia who provide the interviewers with what they want to hear as commentary. In this case, as one could gather from the questions they have posed to the individuals they invited, they wished to hear that the Muslim minority in Norway is behind this. Or that traditional anti-Semitism explains it and that the newly formed Elders of anti-Zion, with the new recruits -- the Iranian and Libyan governments -- concocted it. But since the target was a hi-tech company, the commentators invited to the live bulletins were either experts on economy and finance, such as the economic correspondents of the local dailies or captains of the local industry and hi-tech companies. The views of these commentators are a far cry from those usually expressed here in this and similar venues. But they do deal with economic realities and facts of life, and less with mythology and ideological fabrications. And they explained, on prime time, that it is actually the Norwegian sensitivity to human rights that begot this last action and quite likely similar actions will be taken in the future. For the readers of this site, this may sound boring or too elementary, but the average listener and viewer in Israel has not been exposed to such a clear deduction in the mainstream media by mainstream journalists and personalities for a very long time. The significance of this alas, short lived exposure of what lies behind the apartheid wall and the fences that encircle the West Bank and the Gaza Strip stems from the seniority of Kristin Halvorsen, the Norwegian finance minister who herself announced the decision to divest. It is the first official act of this kind by a Western government. It is reminiscent of the first day when governments heeded the pressures of their societies in the West to act against apartheid South Africa. We were all moved, and rightly so, when brave trade unions took such decisions against Israel; we were all very hopeful when the International Court of Justice ruled against the wall and when courageous individuals, the last one being the filmmaker Ken Loach, took a firm stand against participating in anything which officially represents Israel. But now there is an evolution, a quantum leap forward and a momentum we have to keep and maintain! This is a clear message for all the good people in the West looking for ways of helping the Palestinians in their moment of nadir. They want to march and sail peacefully to Gaza, they wish to facilitate more meetings between Israelis and Palestinians and are adamant despite all the hurdles to volunteer in the occupied territories. These are all noble actions but changing the public opinion in the West, is what people in the West can do best. And if one government has already shifted significantly the name and the rules of the game -- be it in a very minor decision that may still be revised under the tidal Zionist reaction, others will surely follow. For the time being all we can say is a huge thank you to a brave politician that will enter the pages of history as someone who paved the way to a better future for everyone in Israel and Palestine. Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History at the University of Exeter. From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 20:28:46 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 19:28:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Jane Fonda, Danny Glover & Naomi Klein protest Israeli Apartheid In-Reply-To: <1454963014.240791252376841381.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <680269430.241011252376926408.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> "We object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d?Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime." http://torontodeclaration.blogspot.com/ http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/09/toronto-declaration-no-celebration-occupation Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation Wednesday, September 2, 2009 The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival: September 2, 2009 As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival?s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine. In 2008, the Israeli government and Canadian partners Sidney Greenberg of Astral Media, David Asper of Canwest Global Communications and Joel Reitman of MIJO Corporation launched ?Brand Israel,? a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel. Brand Israel would take the focus off Israel?s treatment of Palestinians and its aggressive wars, and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. An article in Canadian Jewish News quotes Israeli consul general Amir Gissin as saying that Toronto would be the test city for a promotion that could then be deployed around the world. According to Gissin, the culmination of the campaign would be a major Israeli presence at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. (Andy Levy-Alzenkopf, ?Brand Israel set to launch in GTA,? Canadian Jewish News, August 28, 2008.) In 2009, TIFF announced that it would inaugurate its new City to City program with a focus on Tel Aviv. According to program notes by Festival co-director and City to City programmer Cameron Bailey, ?The ten films in this year?s City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today?s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.? The emphasis on 'diversity' in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine?s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city?s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto. We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year?s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d?Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime. This letter was drafted by the following ad hoc committee: Udi Aloni, filmmaker, Israel; Elle Flanders, filmmaker, Canada; Richard Fung, video artist, Canada; John Greyson, filmmaker, Canada; Naomi Klein, writer and filmmaker, Canada; Kathy Wazana, filmmaker, Canada; Cynthia Wright, writer and academic, Canada; b h Yael, film and video artist, Canada Endorsed by: Ahmad Abdalla, Filmmaker, Egypt Hany Abu-Assad, Filmmaker, Palestine Mark Achbar, Filmmaker, Canada Zackie Achmat, AIDS activist, South Africa Ra'anan Alexandrowicz, Filmmaker, Jerusalem Anthony Arnove, Publisher and Producer, USA Ruba Atiyeh, Documentary Director, Lebanon Joslyn Barnes, Writer and Producer, USA John Berger, Author, France David Byrne, Musician, USA Guy Davidi Director, Israel Na-iem Dollie, Journalist/Writer, South Africa Igor Drljaca, Filmmaker, Canada Eve Ensler, Playwright, Author, USA Eyal Eithcowich, Director, Israel Sophie Fiennes, Filmmaker, UK Peter Fitting, Professor, Canada Jane Fonda, Actor and Author, USA Danny Glover, Filmmaker and Actor, USA Noam Gonick, Director, Canada Malcolm Guy, Filmmaker, Canada Mike Hoolboom, Filmmaker, Canada Annemarie Jacir, Filmmaker, Palestine Fredric Jameson, Literary Critic, USA Juliano Mer Khamis, Filmmaker, Jenin/Haifa Bonnie Sherr Klein Filmmaker, Canada Paul Laverty, Producer, UK Paul Lee, Filmmaker, Canada Yael Lerer, publisher, Tel Aviv Jack Lewis, Filmmaker, South Africa Ken Loach, Filmmaker, UK Arab Lotfi, Filmmaker, Egypt/Lebanon Kyo Maclear, Author, Toronto Mahmood Mamdani, Professor, USA Fatima Mawas, Filmmaker, Australia Tessa McWatt, Author, Canada and UK Cornelius Moore, Film Distributor, USA Yousry Nasrallah, Director, Egypt Rebecca O'Brien, Producer, UK Pratibha Parmar, Producer/Director, UK Jeremy Pikser, Screenwriter, USA John Pilger, Filmmaker, UK Shai Carmeli Pollak, Filmmaker, Israel Ian Iqbal Rashid, Filmmaker, Canada Judy Rebick, Professor, Canada David Reeb, Artist, Tel Aviv B. Ruby Rich, Critic and Professor, USA Wallace Shawn, Playwright, Actor, USA Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker and Scholar, Paris/London/Sderot Elia Suleiman, Fimmlaker, Nazareth/Paris/New York Eran Torbiner, Filmmaker, Israel Alice Walker, Writer, USA Thomas Waugh, Professor, Canada Howard Zinn, Writer, USA Slavoj Zizek, Professor, Slovenia From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 20:38:43 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 19:38:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Response to Uri Avnery In-Reply-To: <1013618945.241611252377363698.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <994306740.241801252377523860.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/on-rationalizing-israels-dispossession-of-the-palestinians/ Dissident Voice September 5th, 2009 On Rationalizing Israel?s Dispossession of the Palestinians by Jeff Blankfort Hello Uri, I have just read your response to critics of your opposition to boycotting Israel and, having long ago realized the limits of your activism and worldview, it held no surprises. You have quite clearly invested too much time and energy over the years in rationalizing Israel?s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland to acknowledge the injustice that was not only inherent but required for Israel?s creation. The passage of time does not erase that injustice no matter how many times you or others invoke the Nazi holocaust. The die for establishing a Jewish state displacing the Palestinians from their homes and villages was cast well before Hitler came to power so that issue should have no place in this argument. The arguments against establishing a Jewish state in Palestine raised by anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews going back to the early years of the last century were well known and all have been proved correct. So it should not be a matter of surprise that Israel?s legitimacy has not been accepted by the Palestinians and the other peoples of the region. It was advertised by Zionists worldwide as a colonial settler enterprise with pride, in fact, until such terminology fell out of favor. That it was established at a time when the rest of the world was engaged in a period of decolonization was even a further guarantee of its rejection and had it not been for the influence of its supporters in the US and Europe and the arms that flowed from that support, Israel, like French Algeria, would have become another episode in history. (And it is noteworthy that it was Israel?s support for the French against the Algerian resistance that led to France being Israel?s chief supplier of weaponry until 1967). You are also well aware that to maintain Israel as the Sparta of the Middle East, the ?Pro-Israel Lobby? has long held the US Congress in thrall, strangling what little is left of American democracy. Do you not recall writing how one president after another tried to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict and how each one was forced by The Lobby to retire from the field defeated? And with each defeat, the theft of Palestinian land and the growth of the settlements continued. Who has paid the price for that? As you have already assumed, I am against the existence of the state of Israel or a Jewish state by any other name which is based on the notion that a Jew from anywhere in the world has more of a right to live in what most of the world knew and accepted as Palestine than a Palestinian Arab who was born there or her or his family members. If that is not both immoral and racist, we need new definitions for those words. And yet you, apparently, do not find it so and reject the opinions of those who do. (The notion that Israel or any country can be a homeland for a person not born there and who cannot trace a single relative that was born there is but another example of how Zionists have twisted the language to justify the unjust.) You desperation for an argument against the idea of a single state becomes apparent when you write that the French and the Germans did not agree to live together. Do you really believe there is any comparison to be made between the two situations. Are the French sitting on German land or vice versa? I continue to be mystified at your continuing efforts to separate the settlers from those Jews living within the Green Line as if the majority of those in Israel proper are not as responsible for electing a series of professional killers as their prime ministers year after year, all of whom have expanded the settlements. There hasn?t been a single poll of Israeli Jews that I have seen going back to 1988, in the early days of the first intifada, where half of those polled did not call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. How many settlers were there in 1988? In your wonderful democracy, every able bodied Jewish man or woman, with the exception of the chassidim, has served as an occupier in the West Bank or Gaza for the past 42 years. Are they not culpable? Yesterday, I watched on Al-Jazeera as Israeli soldiers fired waves of tear gas and some smelly green liquid on non-violent Palestinians who were marching to demonstrate against the steel fence that cuts through their land at Ni?ilin and who then began targeting the Al-Jazeera reporter. Are we expected to embrace these young thugs wearing an Israeli uniform? Are those who hate them to be condemned and not the thugs and those who sent them there? You repeatedly use the word ?peace? but not once do you use the word ?justice.? And that is what separates you and your fellow Zionists from the Palestinians and those who genuinely support them. The occupation bothers your conscience, your sense of identity as an Israeli, but how much does it affect your life? Ending the occupation no matter how it is arranged will bring you peace of mind and time to finish your memoirs. Now, try if you can,and imagine yourself as a Palestinian who has been under an Israeli jackboot all of his or her life. Would you be simply looking for peace, an absence of that Israeli jackboot, or would you be seeking and demanding justice? Your conclusion expresses your confusion. You write that you want ?Israel to be a state belonging to all its citizens, without distinction of ethnic origin, gender,religion or language; with completely equal rights for all,? yet you assume there will be a ?Hebrew-speaking majority? that will allow its ?Arab-speaking citizens? to cherish their close ties with their Palestinian brothers and sisters?? If there is no distinction between one citizen and another, Jewish or Arab, how can you assume that the majority will continue to be Hebrew-speaking (or are you allowing for the possibility that Israel?s Palestinian Arab population which already is largely bi-lingual will become the majority at which point Israel will no longer be a Jewish state?). If that is so, perhaps there is hope for you yet. Jeff Blankfort Jeffrey Blankfort is former editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin , long-time photographer, and has written extensively on the Israel-Palestine conflict. He also hosts a program on international affairs for KZYX, the public radio station of Mendocino County, California. He can be reached at: jblankfort at earthlink.net . Read other articles by Jeff . This article was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 20:40:01 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 19:40:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Avnery rejects boycott campaign against Israel In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <354525011.241941252377601061.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Uri Avnery 29.8.09 Tutu?s Prayer HOW MUCH did the boycott of South Africa actually contribute to the fall of the racist regime? This week I talked with Desmond Tutu about this question, which has been on my mind for a long time. No one is better qualified to answer this question than he. Tutu, the South African Anglican archbishop and Nobel prize laureate, was one of the leaders of the fight against apartheid and, later, the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated the crimes of the regime. This week he visited Israel with the ?Elders?, an organization of elder statesmen from all over the world set up by Nelson Mandela. The matter of the boycott came up again this week after an article by Dr. Neve Gordon appeared in the Los Angeles Times, calling for a world-wide boycott of Israel. He cited the example of South Africa to show how a world-wide boycott could compel Israel to put an end to the occupation, which he compared to the apartheid regime. I have known and respected Neve Gordon for many years. Before becoming a lecturer at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, he organized many demonstrations against the Separation Wall in the Jerusalem area, in which I, too, took part. I am sorry that I cannot agree with him this time ? neither about the similarity with South Africa nor about the efficacy of a boycott of Israel. There are several opinions about the contribution of the boycott to the success of the anti-apartheid struggle. According to one view, it was decisive. Another view claims its impact was marginal. Some believe that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that was the decisive factor. After that, the US and its allies no longer had any reason for support the regime in South Africa, which until then had been viewed as a pillar of the world-wide struggle against Communism. ?THE BOYCOTT was immensely important,? Tutu told me. ?Much more than the armed struggle.? It should be remembered that, unlike Mandela, Tutu was an advocate of non-violent struggle. During the 28 years Mandela languished in prison, he could have walked free at any moment, if he had only agreed to sign a statement condemning ?terrorism?. He refused. ?The importance of the boycott was not only economic,? the archbishop explained, ?but also moral. South Africans are, for example, crazy about sports. The boycott, which prevented their teams from competing abroad, hit them very hard. But the main thing was that it gave us the feeling that we are not alone, that the whole world is with us. That gave us the strength to continue.? To show the importance of the boycott he told me the following story: In 1989, the moderate white leader, Frederic Willem de Klerk, was elected President of South Africa. Upon assuming office he declared his intention to set up a multiracial regime. ?I called to congratulate him, and the first thing he said was: Will you now call off the boycott?? IT SEEMS to me that Tutu?s answer emphasizes the huge difference between the South African reality at the time and ours today. The South African struggle was between a large majority and a small minority. Among a general population of almost 50 million, the Whites amounted to less than 10%. That means that more than 90% of the country?s inhabitants supported the boycott, in spite of the argument that it hurt them, too. In Israel, the situation is the very opposite. The Jews amount to more than 80% of Israel?s citizens, and constitute a majority of some 60% throughout the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. 99.9% of the Jews oppose a boycott on Israel. They will not feel the ?the whole world is with us?, but rather that ?the whole world is against us?. In South Africa, the world-wide boycott helped in strengthening the majority and steeling it for the struggle. The impact of a boycott on Israel would be the exact opposite: it would push the large majority into the arms of the extreme right and create a fortress mentality against the ?anti-Semitic world?. (The boycott would, of course, have a different impact on the Palestinians, but that is not the aim of those who advocate it.) Peoples are not the same everywhere. It seems that the Blacks in South Africa are very different from the Israelis, and from the Palestinians, too. The collapse of the oppressive racist regime did not lead to a bloodbath, as could have been predicted, but on the contrary: to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Instead of revenge, forgiveness. Those who appeared before the commission and admitted their misdeeds were pardoned. That was in tune with Christian belief, and that was also in tune with the Jewish Biblical promise: ?Whoso confesseth and forsaketh [his sins] shall have mercy.? (Proverbs 28:13) I told the bishop that I admire not only the leaders who chose this path but also the people who accepted it. ONE OF the profound differences between the two conflicts concerns the Holocaust. Centuries of pogroms have imprinted on the consciousness of the Jews the conviction that the whole world is out to get them. This belief was reinforced a hundredfold by the Holocaust. Every Jewish Israeli child learns in school that ?the entire world was silent? when the six million were murdered. This belief is anchored in the deepest recesses of the Jewish soul. Even when it is dormant, it is easy to arouse it. (That is the conviction which made it possible for Avigdor Lieberman, last week, to accuse the entire Swedish nation of cooperating with the Nazis, because of one idiotic article in a Swedish tabloid.) It may well be that the Jewish conviction that ?the whole world is against us? is irrational. But in the life of nations, as indeed in the life of individuals, it is irrational to ignore the irrational. The Holocaust will have a decisive impact on any call for a boycott of Israel. The leaders of the racist regime in South Africa openly sympathized with the Nazis and were even interned for this in World War II. Apartheid was based on the same racist theories as inspired Adolf Hitler. It was easy to get the civilized world to boycott such a disgusting regime. The Israelis, on the other hand, are seen as the victims of Nazism. The call for a boycott will remind many people around the world of the Nazi slogan ?Kauft nicht bei Juden!? - don?t buy from Jews. That does not apply to every kind of boycott. Some 11 years ago, the Gush Shalom movement, in which I am active, called for a boycott of the product of the settlements. Its intention was to separate the settlers from the Israeli public, and to show that there are two kinds of Israelis. The boycott was designed to strengthen those Israelis who oppose the occupation, without becoming anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic. Since then, the European Union has been working hard to close the gates of the EU to the products of the settlers, and almost nobody has accused it of anti-Semitism. ONE OF the main battlefields in our fight for peace is Israeli public opinion. Most Israelis believe nowadays that peace is desirable but impossible (because of the Arabs, of course.) We must convince them not that peace would be good for Israel, but that it is realistically achievable. When the archbishop asked what we, the Israeli peace activists, are hoping for, I told him: We hope for Barack Obama to publish a comprehensive and detailed peace plan and to use the full persuasive power of the United States to convince the parties to accept it. We hope that the entire world will rally behind this endeavor. And we hope that this will help to set the Israeli peace movement back on its feet and convince our public that it is both possible and worthwhile to follow the path of peace with Palestine. No one who entertains this hope can support the call for boycotting Israel. Those who call for a boycott act out of despair. And that is the root of the matter. Neve Gordon and his partners in this effort have despaired of the Israelis. They have reached the conclusion that there is no chance of changing Israeli public opinion. According to them, no salvation will come from within. One must ignore the Israeli public and concentrate on mobilizing the world against the State of Israel. (Some of them believe anyhow that the State of Israel should be dismantled and replaced by a bi-national state.) I do not share either view ? neither the despair of the Israeli people, to which I belong, nor the hope that the world will stand up and compel Israel to change its ways against its will. For this to happen, the boycott must gather world-wide momentum, the US must join it, the Israeli economy must collapse and the morale of the Israeli public must break. How long will this take? Twenty Years? Fifty years? Forever? I AM afraid that this is an example of a faulty diagnosis leading to faulty treatment. To be precise: the mistaken assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resembles the South African experience leads to a mistaken choice of strategy. True, the Israeli occupation and the South African apartheid system have certain similar characteristics. In the West Bank, there are roads ?for Israelis only?. But the Israeli policy is not based on race theories, but on a national conflict. A small but significant example: in South Africa, a white man and a black woman (or the other way round) could not marry, and sexual relations between them were a crime. In Israel there is no such prohibition. On the other hand, an Arab Israeli citizen who marries an Arab woman from the occupied territories (or the other way round) cannot bring his or her spouse to Israel. The reason: safeguarding the Jewish majority in Israel. Both cases are reprehensible, but basically different. In South Africa there was total agreement between the two sides about the unity of the country. The struggle was about the regime. Both Whites and Blacks considered themselves South Africans and were determined to keep the country intact. The Whites did not want partition, and indeed could not want it, because their economy was based on the labor of the Blacks. In this country, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have nothing in common ? not a common national feeling, not a common religion, not a common culture and not a common language. The vast majority of the Israelis want a Jewish (or Hebrew) state. The vast majority of the Palestinians want a Palestinian (or Islamic) state. Israel is not dependent on Palestinian workers ? on the contrary, it drives the Palestinians out of the working place. Because of this, there is now a world-wide consensus that the solution lies in the creation of the Palestinian state next to Israel. In short: the two conflicts are fundamentally different. Therefore, the methods of struggle, too, must necessarily be different. BACK TO the archbishop, an attractive person whom it is impossible not to like on sight. He told me that he prays frequently, and that his favorite prayer goes like this (I quote from memory): ?Dear God, when I am wrong, please make me willing to see my mistake. And when I am right ? please make me tolerable to live with.? From shniad at sfu.ca Mon Sep 7 20:40:52 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 19:40:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Joel Kovel on Naomi Klein and Durban In-Reply-To: <481790055.228451252370485876.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <832446996.242001252377652376.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://mondoweiss.net/2009/08/joel-kovel-on-naomi-klein-and-durban.html The War of Ideas in the Middle East Joel Kovel on Naomi Klein and Durban by Joel Kovel on August 28, 2009 ?Minority Death Match,? Naomi Klein ?s feature story in the September Harper?s , is about the two ill-fated United Nations-sponsored Durban conferences on racism?in 2001 at the South African city, and in Geneva earlier this year?and what tied their failings together: the interrelations between Blacks and Jews, the manipulations of Zionism, and US presidential politics. It?s a typically sharp Klein piece, excoriating in its rendition of the betrayals by the great, including our Barack Obama, hard at work putting distance between himself and his black brethren. But there?s a problem. About midway in her article, Naomi turns to the disaster that took place in Durban-2001 and assigns blame for what went wrong. She concludes that a lot of the fault lay in the insertion of the ?Zionism is racism? claim by Islamists into what was intended to be an event focussed on anti-black racism and the cause of reparations. This allowed the Israel lobbies in America and Europe to run wild with charges of blood-libel and other kinds of anti-semitism, thereby giving the US a pretext for withdrawing and throttling the rising cry for reparations. The fact that the conference ended just before 9/11/01 also had a great deal to do with this, as Naomi admits. But her main idea is that the reparations cause got side-swiped by the anti-Zionism cause although the former had all the legitimacy, the latter, none. For Klein, ?The original Durban conference was not at all about Israel [as Zionists have charged]. . . ; it was overwhelmingly about Africa, the ongoing legacy of slavery, and the huge unpaid debts that the rich owe the poor.? I find this claim way off the mark, empirically, logically, morally and politically. ? empirically, I have seen images of people marching at Durban in support of the anti-Zionist cause. Some were Neturai Karta, Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews, who came all the way from the United States for the purpose. ? logically, it is nonsense to claim of an issue this immense, subtle and interrelated, that it is all one way or the other. ? morally, it is wrong to prioritize amongst victims of injustice. The reparations movement is noble and worthwhile; but so is the Palestinian quest for justice. ? politically, the UN, however flawed, cannot afford to either ignore or foreground any valid claim of collective racism. Naomi might have meant her judgment to be tactical, in that Africa, the continent plundered of black human beings as well as resources, can be seen as a natural setting for the reparations issue. But Africa is also home to many millions of Muslims and a smaller number of Jews (including Ethiopian Jews) caught up in the rift set going by Zionism. And the city of Durban, South Africa, is home to the most vibrant Indian community anywhere outside of India itself, and the setting, a century ago, for Gandhi?s development of Satyagraha. The flourishing Indian community of Durban was a haven for a major presence at the 2001 conference by representatives of the giant Dalit community (aka ?untouchables?), at a quarter billion, the largest oppressed group in the world. For India?s Dalits, participation in Durban 2001 was just as important as participation was for African-Americans seeking reparations. (I was in India in January 2002, and Dalits were still vibrant with excitement over the event.) Properly understood, nothing could be better for each of these movements than for all of them to come together in a massive outpouring against the common roots of racism. It is hard to think of a worse outcome than to set them against each other. Naomi Klein starts off and ends strongly. In the middle, however, her article runs into trouble, as the following passage reveals: There was one hitch. Six months before the meeting in Durban, at an Asian preparatory conference in Tehran, a few Islamic coutnries requested language in their draft of the Durban Declaration that described Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories as ?a new form of apartheid? and a ?form of genocide.? Then, a month before the conference, there was a new push for changes that were sure to grab international headlines. Some references to the Holocaust were placed in lower case, pluralized (?holocausts?), and paired with the ?ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine.? References to ?the increase in anti-Semitism and hostile acts against Jews? were paired with phrases about ?the increase of racist practices of Zionism,? and Zionism was described as a movement ?based on racism and discriminatory ideas.? There is a strong argument to be made that Israel?s legal system? which has different laws and even roads for Israelis and Palestinians living in the West Bank, and which grants and denies citizen rights based largely on religious affiliation?meets the international definition of apartheid (a few years later, former president Jimmy Carter would use the same term to describe the segregation in the occupied territories). But taken as a whole, this proposed language?by attempting to downplay the significance of the Holocaust and diluting the clauses on anti-Semitism?carried an unmistakable whiff of denialism. Most importantly, by reviving the incendiary equation of Zionism with racism that had torn the U.N. apart for decades, the Islamic states instantly upstaged Africans? demands. As Nicole Lee, the current director of the TransAfrica Forum, told me, there was an acute awareness in Durban that ?if you put Zionism on trial, that?s all you can do.? What was particularly frustrating to the countries fighting for a new consensus on the legacy of slavery was that the Zionism sentences were attracting all the media attention despite the fact that they had no chance of making it into the final draft. The Islamic states did not have the votes, and Mary Robinson, the conference?s secretary general, had made it very clear ?that we cannot go back to the language of Zionism as racism.? In short, the proposed clauses had little hope of helping Palestinians, but they did serve another, entirely predictable, function: they gave the U.S. government the perfect excuse to flee the scene?. This hysterical response to Durban can perhaps best be explained by a phenomenon psychologists call ?illusory correlation?: it happens when people experience two intense events in close proximity and their minds make a causal connection where no factual link exists. The first intense event was Durban itself. For many Jewish delegates the experience was unquestionably traumatic. It was not only the incidents of anti-Semitism, which were real and frightening. It was the dominance of a political discourse that described Israel?s citizenship and security laws as being a version of apartheid, deserving of the same kind of economic sanctions that ultimately put an end to the practice in South Africa. For Zionists in Durban, seeing an international consensus build around this idea?one that challenges core Zionist policies?was jarring enough. But the real trauma happened when they went home and immediately faced the far greater shock of the September 11 attacks. The pro-Palestinian activists in Durban seemed to merge with the Muslim hijackers, becoming a single, hostile Arab mass, while the political threat Israel faced at the conference dissolved into the very real attacks on New York and Washington, until somehow these wholly unrelated events fused into a single, seamless narrative. Let me count some ways this passage goes awry: 1. The language is invidious, and serves to both marginalize the proponents of the Zionism=racism charge [?one hitch?; ?a few Islamic countries?] and impugn their motives with derogatory images, for example, ?unmistakable whiff ??. Later in the article, when the 2009 events are discussed, the maniacal figure of a certain president of Iran is trundled out for the civilized world?s derision: ?six hours after the conference began, the inevitable: a rustle of men in slim-fitting suits escorting the president of Iran to the podium. After ranting for a while about the imperialist makeup of the UN security council, Ahmadinejad proceeded to do exactly what everyone expected him to do: he called Israel ?the most cruel and repressive racist regime.? ? Well, if this madman says it?and his is the only actual voice brought forth by Klein to do so?then why should the rest of us take the charge seriously? Naomi fails to give agency to the Palestinians, whom we evidently are to regard as mere pawns in the machinations of a ?few Islamist countries,? with no role in their own liberation struggle. Nor is there a recognition that these countries are home to a billion people the great majority of whom have no difficulty in accepting the notion that Zionism=racism because, in fact, it corresponds to a definite history that has blighted their lives. Naomi suggests that the Islamist leaders are manipulating these masses. I would say, rather, that the leadership, for the most part thoroughly bought off by the West, are forced to give some expression to the feelings from below lest they be toppled. 2. The Zionism=racism charge is further adulterated by Naomi?s substitution of the part for the whole: it is ?Israel?s legal system? that ?meets the international definition of apartheid,? not Israel itself. No recognition here that Israeli law is both the expression and perpetuator of a massive?and growing?pattern of anti-Arab racism that grips the great majority of Israeli society, just as it did in the United States South during the Jim Crow era, when the legal system also colluded in and upheld societal racism. A whole society takes on a racist character if its basic project entails radical exclusion of others from the social contract. In the case of Israel: because it could not make use of an actual national liberation struggle, the Zionist movement had to fabricate its national story out of the expropriation of an indigenous people. The criminal implications of this are impossible to bear without secondary adjustments, and so racism is brought in to degrade the victims and make them deserving of their fate. This allows Israeli society to coalesce around an intractable and cancerous core of racism. The notion, Zionism=racism is not in itself an empirical statement, though mountains of evidence can be brought forth for purposes of demonstration. It is essentially a logical identity, which would be as self-evident as the notion that the Pope is Catholic were it not for Zionist propaganda and repressive muscle-power. 3. The ?whiff of denialism.? Lacking a structural concept of Zionism, Naomi is forced to buttress her position. This she chiefly does by absolutizing the Holocaust and taking after people who do not see things that way, with the charge of ?denialism.? As this passage shows, Naomi believes that ?denialism? includes using the lower case in describing the Holocaust when pairing it with ?ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine.?; or when references to ?the increase in anti-Semitism and hostile acts against Jews? are paired with ?the increase of racist practices of Zionism.? This is quite an extreme point of view and puts Naomi in league with the likes of Elie Wiesel and Abe Foxman in asserting the incomparability of the Shoah, and even of anti-Semitism. I hope she thinks more constructively about this. If one believes that the sufferings of Jews are incomparable then you are already on the way to affirming that Jews are human beings on a different ontological plane than others, i.e., you have stepped into the zone of racism. She should also bear in mind that Zionism showed its racist propensities long before the Third Reich hove into view; and that the absolutization of Jewish suffering deprives us of the power of understanding it and hence blocking its repetition. Understanding requires making comparisons and differentiations. That some people would abuse this principle is only to be expected, and must be contested when it arises. Smears such as the ?whiff of denialism,? will not do, however, especially given the fact that those comparisons which she considers to be denialist are perfectly reasonable as stated. 4. ?Most importantly, writes Naomi, ?by reviving the incendiary equation of Zionism with racism that had torn the U.N. apart for decades, the Islamic states instantly upstaged Africans? demands.? I fail to see what most important here. And I hope that black activists reject the insinuation that their cause had priority because it was the only one feasible. I think rather that we all need to pay attention to why the Zionism=racism charge is in fact ?incendiary.? Naomi?s thesis that it was the manipulations by bad Islamic states that caused such incendiarism is quite inadequate, not least because it mimics the ideological bludgeon of the Zionists themselves, that criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic. No, the real reason for the power of the Zionism=racism charge is plain: once the world begins to recognize that Zionism is in fact necessarily racist?and on an expanding scale?then the legitimacy of Israel collapses like the proverbial house of cards. Zionism?s ideological apparatus reacts to any hint of this like a swarm of yellow-jackets when someone steps on their hive. In this respect Naomi should eschew the psycho-babble centering on the ?hysterical response to Durban.? There is a very real factual link behnd said hysteria, which is that Israel is indeed a racist state. It is accepting this revelation that frightens. It is, in a word, the truth that threatens, not the rantings of demagogues like Ahmadinejad. 5. So what that ?Mary Robinson, the conference?s secretary general, had made it very clear ?that we cannot go back to the language of Zionism as racism??? I should think that by now Naomi is well-versed in the fact that the UN is usually a big part of the problem and not the solution. (Interestingly, Robinson has herself recently run afoul of the Zionist Thought Police, which only proves that they are never to be appeased.) The point is that to embrace the notion of Zionism=racism is not to go back but forward. If this brings on the wrath of the United States, then that is no more than another demonstration of the seamless character of imperialism. 6. Naomi writes: ?It was not only the incidents of anti-Semitism, which were real and frightening. It was the dominance of a political discourse that described Israel?s citizenship and security laws as being a version of apartheid, deserving of the same kind of economic sanctions that ultimately put an end to the practice in South Africa.? Yes, this is upsetting to those with a lingering affection for the State of Israel. But accepting the basic identity of Israel and South Africa as racist states happens to be the goal toward which we should strive, taking the lead of Bishop Tutu, Ronnie Kasrils, the leadership of the trade union confederation COSATU, and others from South Africa, who not only affirm the structural identity but go on to say that Israel is in fact worse than Apartheid South Africa, because the latter had an interest in preserving the labor power of black Africans, while Israel?s goal is the annihilation of the Palestinians. Those who adopt the Boycott-Divestment-Sanction campaign against Israel are in effect accepting this linkage. South African state racism and not any particular abuse was the matrix of the contemporary boycott movements, and the same principle holds for Israel. This makes Naomi?s article doubly puzzling, as she has recently in a speech at Ramallah adopted the BDS strategy, to widespread and deserved praise. I hope that she will reflect further on this contradiction between what she puts into print and what she advocates as an activist. 7. Finally, we learn that the ?shock?of September 11 raised fantasies of ?a single, hostile Arab mass, while the political threat Israel faced at the conference dissolved into the very real attacks on New York and Washington, until somehow these wholly unrelated events fused into a single, seamless narrative.? It is Naomi?s conclusions that shock here. No, we are definitely not dealing with an undifferentiated and hostile Islamist force. But we are also definitely not dealing with ?wholly unrelated events??even if the relationship has yet to be pieced together, and never may be. It is remarkable how people forget the arrests of Mossad agents who were monitoring the attacks on the WTC on that day (they were?surprise!?shipped back home, where they disappeared from view). Equally pertinent is how often the statements of those associated with the WTC bombings (of 1993 as well as 2001) implicate the Zionist conquest of Palestine as a prime incentive to exact revenge, by terror if necessary. No liberation movement from the beginning of the world has escaped moral ambiguities and contradictions. The movement to liberate Palestine from Zionism is no exception. That?s what makes it so challenging?and why we need to hold firm to basic principles and be steadfast in the struggle. A bedrock principle is that, yes, Zionism=racism. This is true whether or not people use it for the wrong purposes. Our task is to use it for worthy purposes?the non-violent transformation of Palestine/Israel into a just society, and not to shelve it so that other virtuous causes can go forward. Until people of good will across the world come together around this truth, Palestine cannot be free. Joel Kovel is author of Overcoming Zionism. From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Mon Sep 7 21:56:28 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 20:56:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Response to Uri Avnery In-Reply-To: <994306740.241801252377523860.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <994306740.241801252377523860.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <234510.81087.qm@web43505.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Greetings, I am not specifically a writer on this subject but I have an active interest in the affairs of Israel and the Palestinian people. There must be justice in Palestine for their to be peace. I am not sure that a strictly political solution is possible. Both sides have strong moral arguments and in the passion of their positions both sides have shed blood and committed crimes that have taken the lives of non combatants. ?? The Jews have been battered by empire for centuries, used as pawns and pawn brokers in the wars from the time of Herod right up until modern times. They have been allied with the Romans against Mithridates, with Persians against Rome and were taken in and protected by Muslims when persecuted and exiled from Spain in 1492. ? In the 19th century a movement among jews arose to find a state of their own, this was part of the same movement of ethnic minorities all over Europe and the world. It has been called the age of nationalism. ? The British played the Arab desires for a national identity independent of the Turkish imperial rule in world war one and made promises to Arab Bedouin nationalists that culminated in the occupation of Damascus near the end of the war. There was an attempt at forming a united Arab government it failed and the Arabs lost out in the negotiations in Versailles as did the Jews. The western powers took what the wanted from the decimated Turkish empire with Britain getting Palestine and Iraq and France getting Syria and Lebanon.? ?? In the period between the wars Jews migrated to Palestine, there were riots when Arabs felt that there were too many Jews moving in this was exacerbated by the British who were playing the Jewish and Arab interests against one another similar to their own desire to play Muslim against Hindu in India. By dividing the people they could keep power. ?? But Palestine was only important to protect access to the Suez Canal and as a route to the Oil Fields in Iraq. There was no inherent interest in Palestine other than the dubious status of having control of Jerusalem. India, the jewel in the crown of empire and the rubber plantations of Malaya were the main interest. ?? The second war came and the British Empire was forced to make deals with the Indian Nationalists to keep them from sabotaging the war effort. Britain depended on the manpower and resources of its empire to fight Germany. Nazi infiltrators were in the middle east attempting to arouse revolt against the British. Rommel was in Egypt and in the North the Nazis reached the Caucasus. But they were stopped by British and Russian troops bolstered with American tanks, guns and aircraft. ??? After the war many Jews who had fought in the resistance against the Nazis in Poland and Russia and in the Russian and British armies migrated to Palestine. They were well educated in the ways of war and soon the British were fighting a full scale guerrilla war. Their headquarters was blown up and as they were forced to give up India, there was little reason to keep Palestine. ??? But as they were leaving they decided to poison the waters. They left both India and Palestine in a divided and volatile state. War broke out in both the former colony of India and the protectorate of Palestine. Hostility between Jews and Arabs over the land was intense and as I said before exacerbated by the British. Their attitude was one that would leave the Israelis dependant on the west for aid. Because of a deliberate policy that insured that they would not make peace with their neighbors the Arabs, the Jews, full of self righteousness after the horrors of World War 2 and the Nazi concentration camps, the lack of support from both the west and the east, they felt that they had earned the right to this land and instead of coming as they had in previous eras in peace they came with a vengeance. They had been brutalized and now they were playing out the same brutality on the Arabs as had been played out upon them. ?? In the war the British and Americans new about the camps. They did nothing about them.? The Russians helped arm Jews to fight the Nazis but there were also problems as they played the Jewish resistance off against the Polish Catholic resistance. French police turned jews in to the Nazis, America turned German jews away when they were trying to escape Nazi Germany before the war. ?? The Jewish people were rightly desiring a place where they could go that was safe. But the ground they sough, the traditional homeland of Israel had been home to Christians, Jews and Muslims under Arab and Turkish rule for centuries. There had been no problems. But when it was a British Protectorate all of a sudden it was a problem.? Arabs all of a sudden didn't want Jewish neighbors, Jews all of a sudden felt they needed to arm themselves and resist both the British and the Arabs. This seems to have been manipulated by the British for the sake of maintaining a control over the Jews imigrating from Europe. ??? This played out in 1956 when the French, British and Israelis united to attack the Suez Canal. Nasser turned to the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had to force the British and French to back down and replaced the British as the main sponsors of the Israelis. American troops landed in Lebanon. The British pulled out of Cypress and the Russians began a build up of aid in Syria and Egypt. War was inevitable and broke out three more times before the situation more or less stabilized after the 1973 war and the oil embargo. ?? Meanwhile the Palestinian people organized and began a long armed resistance. Israel a dependency on the west will never come to terms until it accepts its position not as an outpost of the west in the middle east a remnant of the Crusader state of the middle ages, but accepts its identity as part of the fabric of the middle east. ?? One state or two state solution. It must come as the Jewish people heal from the horrific scar of the Nazi experience but also learn that they have been manipulated by the intelligence services of the USA, and Britain in particular for the interest of international capital. ?? The future of Israel is with its Arab and Turkish brothers who have historically treated the Jewish people with respect. Not to be manipulated by the interests of the western powers. ________________________________ From: Sid Shniad To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Sent: Monday, September 7, 2009 7:38:43 PM Subject: [R-G] Response to Uri Avnery http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/on-rationalizing-israels-dispossession-of-the-palestinians/ Dissident Voice September 5th, 2009 On Rationalizing Israel?s Dispossession of the Palestinians by Jeff Blankfort Hello Uri, I have just read your response to critics of your opposition to boycotting Israel and, having long ago realized the limits of your activism and worldview, it held no surprises. You have quite clearly invested too much time and energy over the years in rationalizing Israel?s dispossession of the Palestinians from their homeland to acknowledge the injustice that was not only inherent but required for Israel?s creation. The passage of time does not erase that injustice no matter how many times you or others invoke the Nazi holocaust. The die for establishing a Jewish state displacing the Palestinians from their homes and villages was cast well before Hitler came to power so that issue should have no place in this argument. The arguments against establishing a Jewish state in Palestine raised by anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews going back to the early years of the last century were well known and all have been proved correct. So it should not be a matter of surprise that Israel?s legitimacy has not been accepted by the Palestinians and the other peoples of the region. It was advertised by Zionists worldwide as a colonial settler enterprise with pride, in fact, until such terminology fell out of favor. That it was established at a time when the rest of the world was engaged in a period of decolonization was even a further guarantee of its rejection and had it not been for the influence of its supporters in the US and Europe and the arms that flowed from that support, Israel, like French Algeria, would have become another episode in history. (And it is noteworthy that it was Israel?s support for the French against the Algerian resistance that led to France being Israel?s chief supplier of weaponry until 1967). You are also well aware that to maintain Israel as the Sparta of the Middle East, the ?Pro-Israel Lobby? has long held the US Congress in thrall, strangling what little is left of American democracy. Do you not recall writing how one president after another tried to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict and how each one was forced by The Lobby to retire from the field defeated? And with each defeat, the theft of Palestinian land and the growth of the settlements continued. Who has paid the price for that? As you have already assumed, I am against the existence of the state of Israel or a Jewish state by any other name which is based on the notion that a Jew from anywhere in the world has more of a right to live in what most of the world knew and accepted as Palestine than a Palestinian Arab who was born there or her or his family members. If that is not both immoral and racist, we need new definitions for those words. And yet you, apparently, do not find it so and reject the opinions of those who do. (The notion that Israel or any country can be a homeland for a person not born there and who cannot trace a single relative that was born there is but another example of how Zionists have twisted the language to justify the unjust.) You desperation for an argument against the idea of a single state becomes apparent when you write that the French and the Germans did not agree to live together. Do you really believe there is any comparison to be made between the two situations. Are the French sitting on German land or vice versa? I continue to be mystified at your continuing efforts to separate the settlers from those Jews living within the Green Line as if the majority of those in Israel proper are not as responsible for electing a series of professional killers as their prime ministers year after year, all of whom have expanded the settlements. There hasn?t been a single poll of Israeli Jews that I have seen going back to 1988, in the early days of the first intifada, where half of those polled did not call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. How many settlers were there in 1988? In your wonderful democracy, every able bodied Jewish man or woman, with the exception of the chassidim, has served as an occupier in the West Bank or Gaza for the past 42 years. Are they not culpable? Yesterday, I watched on Al-Jazeera as Israeli soldiers fired waves of tear gas and some smelly green liquid on non-violent Palestinians who were marching to demonstrate against the steel fence that cuts through their land at Ni?ilin and who then began targeting the Al-Jazeera reporter. Are we expected to embrace these young thugs wearing an Israeli uniform? Are those who hate them to be condemned and not the thugs and those who sent them there? You repeatedly use the word ?peace? but not once do you use the word ?justice.? And that is what separates you and your fellow Zionists from the Palestinians and those who genuinely support them. The occupation bothers your conscience, your sense of identity as an Israeli, but how much does it affect your life? Ending the occupation no matter how it is arranged will bring you peace of mind and time to finish your memoirs. Now, try if you can,and imagine yourself as a Palestinian who has been under an Israeli jackboot all of his or her life. Would you be simply looking for peace, an absence of that Israeli jackboot, or would you be seeking and demanding justice? Your conclusion expresses your confusion. You write that you want ?Israel to be a state belonging to all its citizens, without distinction of ethnic origin, gender,religion or language; with completely equal rights for all,? yet you assume there will be a ?Hebrew-speaking majority? that will allow its ?Arab-speaking citizens? to cherish their close ties with their Palestinian brothers and sisters?? If there is no distinction between one citizen and another, Jewish or Arab, how can you assume that the majority will continue to be Hebrew-speaking (or are you allowing for the possibility that Israel?s Palestinian Arab population which already is largely bi-lingual will become the majority at which point Israel will no longer be a Jewish state?). If that is so, perhaps there is hope for you yet. Jeff Blankfort Jeffrey Blankfort is former editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin , long-time photographer, and has written extensively on the Israel-Palestine conflict. He also hosts a program on international affairs for KZYX, the public radio station of Mendocino County, California. He can be reached at: jblankfort at earthlink.net . Read other articles by Jeff . This article was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:10:47 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:10:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Don't Get Sick! In-Reply-To: <1943976136.464861252440534566.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <976255693.466321252440647716.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.truthout.org/082709A?n t r u t h o u t 27 August 2009 Don't Get Sick! by Gail Pellett Don't get sick! Those were the last words my grandfather said to me as I left Vancouver for the United States. It was 1964. Canada was in the process of implementing a universal health care system. I hadn't noticed, because I was young, healthy and restless. Now, these many years later, as I witness the health care reform "debate," my grandfather's words have returned to haunt me. He had been a pioneer farmer in Saskatchewan on the Canadian prairies. That's where Canada's universal health care system was conceived during the hard years of the depression and its aftermath. Medicare (Canada's health care plan) was largely the brainchild of a Baptist minister turned politician, T. C. (Tommy) Douglas. He and others founded a new party in Saskatchewan (which later became the New Democratic Party) based on "humanity before private interests." Universal health care was at the top of their agenda. By 1964, Saskatchewan implemented a health care plan that treated everyone according to their needs regardless of their ability to pay. Despite a doctor's strike that tried to kill it, the farmers - including my grandfather - made sure that this new health care plan survived. Then, just as now, there were those who thought it made total sense and others who thought it was a Communist conspiracy. However, it proved so popular in Saskatchewan that within a few years the federal government adopted it for the entire country. Imagine the audacity of this during a raging cold war. The year the plan went into effect was the year of the Cuban missile crisis. In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a poll to determine whom Canadians thought was the greatest Canadian of all time. It was not Pierre Trudeau, Joni Mitchell, Dan Aykroyd, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Lorne Michaels, Oscar Peterson, Peter Jennings, Celine Dion, Neil Young, Keanu Reeves, nor Wayne Gretzky. It wasn't even Keifer Sutherland or his dad, Donald. No, it was Keifer Sutherland's grandfather, Tommy Douglas, who is credited with making sure that Canadians would have universal, government-funded health care. When Canadians are periodically polled and asked what they are most proud of, in addition to peacekeeping, it is their national health care system. What irritates me - depresses me the most in fact - is that Americans seem so unwilling to learn from any other country. "We would never want to have a plan like the Canadians" is a comment I heard from an interviewee on NPR the other day. Sadly, this speaker has never visited Canada, because if they had they would probably witness that the average working-class or middle-class person in Canada lives longer, works less, is a tad wealthier and has better sex. And, of course, they have that single-payer health care plan. I'd like to say I'm joking, but you can check the sources of these claims in MacLean's, Canada's weekly news magazine. In Canada there are endless efforts to compare the happiness of Canadians vs. Americans and the Canadians were tickled to read that they might have it better in a 2005 MacLean's feature, which began like this: "Like the perpetual little brother, Canadians have always lived in the shadow of our American neighbors. We (the Canadians) mock them (the Americans) for their uncultured ways, their brash talk and their insularity, but it's always been the thin laughter of the insecure. After all, says University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, a leading tracker of social trends, 'Americans grow up with the sincere belief that their nation is a nation that is unique and special, literally called by something greater to be blessed and to be a blessing to people around the globe.' Canadians can't compete with that." So, hubris prevents Americans from learning about Canada's health care system - or any others for that matter - just when it could be helpful as American citizens try to reform their own unfair and costly system dominated by private interests. Admittedly, NPR has, in this late stage of the debate, been reporting about some other health care systems in Europe. Finally. As a citizen of both the US and Canada, I am perplexed by the ignorance of so many comments I hear and read. Many interviewees don't seem to know that the US already has huge government-funded health care programs called Medicare, Medicaid or the Veterans Health Administration that together cover more than 80 million people! That's more than the populations covered by Canada's or any one European country program! Principles of Canada's Health Care Plan But let's get back to what might be helpful for Americans to know about Canada's program. Here are some essential facts. 1. It is a single-payer system, meaning that the government - federal and provincial - pays the bills. But many providers - clinics, hospitals, diagnostic services, etc. - are privately owned. They are reimbursed for services just as doctors - who are mostly incorporated - submit for fees. 2. You get to choose your doctor. In 2005, all the provincial government leaders reconfirmed their commitment to The Canada Health Act's key principles: that Canadians have the right to timely, high quality, effective and safe health services on the basis of need, not ability to pay, and regardless of where they live or move in Canada. They also committed to a system that is sustainable and affordable and that will be there for future generations. Lively Debate There is a lively debate in Canada about how well this system is meeting those principles. On the right, is the Fraser Institute, a think tank based in Vancouver that regularly releases reports outlining the extensive wait times for operations and procedures and plugs the benefits of a private market driven system. From the left, come worries about creeping privatization within the system. There is a tug of war between those who wish to preserve the public system and those who want more private options. And everyone worries about costs. The conservatives want to put less into the system; the liberals want to put more in and get more out of it. The outgoing president of the Canadian Medical Association (a doctors' organization like the AMA), Dr. Robert Ouellet, was a champion for privatization. During this month's annual meeting, he wanted to "pull out all the stops" to push for private health care. But that effort flew in the face of the most recent poll by Nanos Research, which found that more than 85 percent of Canadians want to strengthen their public health system rather than expand for profit services. Dr. Anne Doig, the new CMA president, vowed a commitment to quality care rather than privatizations. The debate will not go away, but Americans could learn from this. Canada's System Under Stress Whether seen from the right, left or middle, Canada's system is under stress for similar reasons that our health care costs have skyrocketed here. Like most advanced industrialized countries, Canada is facing a demographic bubble of seniors - an aging population. Senior health care costs more. A recent New York Times article reports that treating the medical needs of seniors with chronic diseases during the last two years of their lives consumes a third of the US Medicare budget. Canada has lowered some of those costs by making generic drugs available through its system. As anyone in the US Medicare system knows, the drug program is a complicated, expensive mess. And some Americans go without drugs because they simply cannot afford them. Recently, US seniors have expressed concern that by extending Medicare to the currently uninsured (40 plus million folks in the US) that somehow their own services will be compromised. They could look at this differently. The power that an expanded Medicare would have to negotiate better deals for services and drugs could benefit everyone. Other developments in health care force costs up in Canada just as in the United States, like the overuse of advanced diagnostic tests. Canadian health care specialists have been trying to tackle that issue. And the discussion has begun among reformers in the US. But one area where Canada's single-payer system really cuts costs is in the bureaucracy. While American hospitals typically hire dozens of people to handle claims for hundreds of insurance companies, in Canadian hospitals only a handful of people are required to keep track of expenditures. The Anecdotal Story - Wait Lists We often hear anecdotal complaints about the waiting time for operations in Canada. And that is a serious issue. I saw a TV ad on cable, as I was cruising stations recently, that said if you fall off a horse in Canada and break your back you will wait six months to see a specialist. This is nonsense. And since so many of the negative stories are anecdotal, I will tell mine. I recall my mother's experience with several hip operations. (She lived in Vancouver.) The first was for a hip replacement. Yes, she had to be put onto a waiting list. In the early '90s she waited some six months to get her operation. Yes, she was uncomfortable and a bit impatient, but she also knew she was getting a doctor with a brilliant reputation for fine work and she would need to get in line for him. She lived in a retirement community where demand was high. (Recent Canadian studies have shown that the waiting times are costing the Canadian system more than finding solutions to shorten the waits. And in 2005, Health Canada invested some $4.5 billion to reduce waiting times during the next six years. Also in 2005, after a Supreme Court decision allowed private clinics with private patients, Quebec province promised it would send patients to those clinics and pay for them if they had to wait longer than six to nine months for operations.) But back to my mother's experience. Some eight years later, when my mother fell and broke the part of her hip device that extended into her leg, she was operated on within a few weeks. Since I was working out of the country when this happened, the operation was scheduled for when I could get to Vancouver in order to care for her. She walked with difficulty until the operation. Then in 2005, when she became very sick and weak, she fell and broke her other hip. She was operated on that night. Just as you would be in the US - if you had insurance or could pay. Canada's Reforms Canada's system is always under scrutiny from various factions and frequent analyses of abuses or problems are matched by eagerness to reform. Americans could learn from Canada's reform efforts to address rising costs. In some provinces, they are experimenting with creating more neighborhood, 24-hour clinics in heavily populated communities to take the expensive pressure off of hospital emergency rooms. Some clinics are run by nurse practitioners and focus on preventative care. They are also promoting midwifery and hospital birthing centers to increase the quality of care and reduce maternity costs. Mouseland Finally, resistance to health care reform is driven by a combination of corporate and political interests. Tommy Douglas understood this well and had a famous stump speech he used to deliver when trying to organize a new political party on the prairies that put humanity first. Over the years, that speech has become known as Mouseland. He told the story about mice who every few years held elections. Sometimes, they elected the White Cats, who would proceed to pass legislation favoring their interests including building a mouse hole large enough to get their paw into. So, when the next election came around, the mice voted in the Black Cats. These Cats also passed legislation to favor themselves. They wanted to build a mouse hole even larger so cats could get two paws in. The mice tried everything at subsequent elections, like mixing up the Black Cats and White Cats. Finally, they decided to elect a mouse. But that mouse was immediately arrested and jailed as a Bolshevik. Douglas concluded that this fable illustrated why the two party system only works for the Cats. He was stumping for a third party that he successfully introduced to the Canadian political landscape - a party that pushed and won universal health care. You can go to to see an animated version of this speech introduced by Keifer Sutherland. What Can We Americans Do? First, we can learn as much as we can from other countries about their health care systems. (And, perhaps, why a two-party system keeps building bigger mouse holes.) We can speak up for humanity before private interests. And we can let all of our representatives know our thoughts. And Canadians? Meanwhile, in Canada, a petition is circulating that registers Canadian concern about the lies and attacks on their health care system funded by corporate interests in the US. If you are a Canadian you may wish to check out the petition at this link. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:13:18 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:13:18 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] White House Fears Liberal War Pressure In-Reply-To: <65076981.439561252437570497.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1611926457.467421252440798789.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/01-8 White House Fears Liberal War Pressure by Mike Allen Politico.com : Sept. 1, 2009 White House officials are increasingly worried liberal, anti-war Democrats will demand a premature end to the Afghanistan war before President Barack Obama can show signs of progress in the eight-year conflict, according to senior administration sources. These fears, which the officials have discussed on the condition of anonymity over the past few weeks, are rising fast after U.S. casualties hit record levels in July and August. The aides also expressed concern that Afghan election returns, still being tallied, will result in a narrow reelection for President Hamid Karzai that could result in qualms about his legitimacy - "Tehran II," as one official put it, in reference to the disputed Iranian election. The result: some think Afghanistan - not health care - will be the issue that defines the early years of the Obama administration. "There's no question that the drumbeat is going to get louder and louder on the left, and you'll see some fall-off on the right," said Matt Bennett of the think tank Third Way, the moderate voice of the progressive movement. "His supporters on the Hill are fighting a really serious political battle to keep the criticism under control." The Afghanistan conflict, which has gotten relatively little attention in part because Obama talks far more often about domestic concerns, is roaring back to the top of the Obama agenda as Congress is about to return from weeks of meetings with often unhappy voters. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) last week called for a timetable to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan - the same tactic he and other war opponents used to build congressional support for forcing an end to the Iraq war. But Obama officials - including National Security Adviser James Jones and Defense Secretary Robert Gates - know the problem is much bigger than Feingold and timetables. They anticipate a growing number of anti-war liberals will call, with increasing force, for an end to the conflict when lawmakers return. Cost could become an issue, too. With deficits high, there will be heavy pressure on Obama to find savings somewhere in 2010 - and war critics see Afghanistan as a good place to start. George F. Will opened a new fissure among conservatives with a column Tuesday calling for the U.S. to pull all ground troops out of Afghanistan, on the theory on the French general Charles de Gaulle that genius "sometimes consists of knowing when to stop." But it's Democratic opposition that could force Obama to retreat on what he has called a "war of necessity." To try to salve critics, the administration has been developing a series of numerical indicators, scheduled to be sent to Capitol Hill by Sept. 24, that are designed to sharpen U.S. goals by measuring everything from civilian deployments to the proportion of the Afghan population that is secured. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told POLITICO: "We have to show the American people that all this effort, all these resources, all these lives are making a difference." White House officials expect that a whole new national conversation about what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan, and how, will be prompted by recommendations for strategy adjustments that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, made in an assessment of the war that went to the Pentagon on Monday and is likely to be delivered to the White House in the next week. McChrystal held off from requesting additional troops in the assessment, but administration officials expect he will ask for at least 10,000 more soldiers and Marines later this fall, on top of the 20,000 additional troops Obama authorized in February and March. "Our point here is: Let's see what's working, and what's not, and base it on the facts, not a gut instinct that most commanders have, that more is better," a senior administration official said. "We're prepared to shift and adjust, depending on what we see work. We need to let this strategy take hold, and see what we're doing well, and if there are deficiencies, before coming in with any requests for additional resources." Nevertheless, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at Monday's briefing: "I think there's broad agreement that for many years our effort in Afghanistan has been under-resourced politically, militarily, economically." Liberal House members have already made it clear they will balk at future funding requests, but now the administration is trying to make sure that leaders and key committee chairmen don't also lose their stomach for the conflict after two months in a row of record U.S. casualties since the 2001 invasion. "It doesn't need to be victory in 12 months to 18 months -- that's not realistic," a top administration official said. "But the American people needed to have a sense that we are moving in the right direction. We need to bring about noticeable change on the ground. We have to start to show progress." Bennett, of Third Way, said Americans need to recognize that the situation Obama inherited in Afghanistan "is as bad as the economy was -- heading off the rails in just as dramatic a way." "In both cases, the president took a bunch of action very quickly to get back on track, and it will take time to show benefits," Bennett said. But unlike with the economy, there are few signs of "green shoots" in Afghanistan. In August, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan passed 50 for the first month since the 2001 invasion, adding to administration worries about keeping key lawmakers on board. A senior official said the White House always "knew it was going to get worse before it got better." "These casualties, as gut-wrenching as they are, are not a surprise to anyone," the official said. "When you put in 20,000 additional forces and you deploy them to regions of the country that had been untouched by coalition forces for a long time -- had been basically ceded to the Taliban -- it's not at all unexpected that that would then result in difficult confrontations, and American and coalition lives lost. But, ultimately, by going after the Taliban in these strongholds, it'll turn the tide in those areas." ? 2009 Capitol News Company LLC From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:16:58 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:16:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] A financial crisis becoming a debt crisis? In-Reply-To: <113890197.426771252436275689.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1151992325.469221252441018863.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Globe and Mail September 8, 2009 A financial crisis becoming a debt crisis? We have propped up economies by running massive government deficits ? this isn't sustainable Kenneth Rogoff Everyone from the Queen to laid-off Detroit auto workers wants to know why more experts did not see the financial crisis coming. It is an awkward question. How can policy-makers be so certain that financial catastrophe won't soon recur when they seemed to have no idea that such a crisis would happen in the first place? The answer is not very reassuring. Essentially, there is still a risk that the financial crisis is simply hibernating as it slowly morphs into a government debt crisis. For better or for worse, the reason most investors are now much more confident than they were a few months ago is that governments around the world have cast a vast safety net under much of the financial system. At the same time, they have propped up economies by running massive deficits, while central banks have cut interest rates nearly to zero. But can blanket government largesse be the final answer? Government backstops work because taxpayers have deep pockets, but no pocket is bottomless. And when governments, particularly large ones, get into trouble, there is no backstop. With government debt levels around the world reaching heights usually seen only after wars, it is obvious that the current strategy is not sustainable. If the trajectory is unsustainable, how long can debt keep piling up? We don't know. Academic economists have developed useful tools to predict which economies are most vulnerable to a financial crisis. But, although we can identify vulnerabilities, getting the timing right is virtually impossible. Our models show that even an economy that is massively overleveraged can, in theory, plod along for years, even many decades, before crashing and burning. It all boils down to confidence and co-ordination of expectations, which depend in turn on the vagaries of human nature. Thus, we can tell which countries are most vulnerable, but specifying exactly where and when crises will erupt is next to impossible. A good analogy is the prediction of heart attacks. A person who is obese, with high blood pressure and high levels of cholesterol, is statistically far more likely to have a serious heart attack or stroke than a person who exhibits none of these vulnerabilities. Yet high-risk individuals can often go decades without having a problem. At the same time, individuals who appear to be ?low risk? are also vulnerable to heart attacks. Of course, careful monitoring yields potentially very useful information for preventing heart attacks. Ultimately, however, it is helpful only if the individual is treated, and perhaps undertakes a significant change in lifestyle. The same is true for financial systems. Good monitoring yields information that is helpful only if there is a response. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the political and regulatory system is often very weak and shortsighted. Indeed, no economy is immune to financial crises, no matter how much investors and leaders try to convince themselves otherwise, as Carmen Reinhart and I show in our new book, ironically entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly . Right now, the latest ?this time is different? folly is that, because governments are taking all the debt on their shoulders, the rest of us don't have to worry. We are constantly reassured that governments will not default on their debts. In fact, governments all over the world default with startling regularity, either outright or through inflation. Even the United States, for example, significantly inflated down its debt in the 1970s, and debased the gold value of the dollar from $20 per ounce to $34 in the 1930s. For now, the good news is that the crisis will be contained as long as government credit holds up. The bad news is that the rate at which government debt is piling up could easily lead to a second wave of financial crises within a few years. Most worrisome is America's huge dependence on foreign borrowing, particularly from China ? an imbalance that likely planted the seeds of the current crisis. Asians recognize that if they continue to accumulate paper debt, they risk the same fate that Europeans suffered three decades ago, when they piled up U.S. debt that was dramatically melted down through inflation. The question today is not why no one is warning about the next crisis. They are. The question is whether political leaders are listening. The unwinding of unsustainable government deficit levels is a key question that G20 leaders must ask themselves when they meet in Pittsburgh later this month. Otherwise, the Queen and Detroit auto workers will be asking again, all too soon, why no one saw it coming. Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:16:13 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:16:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Eric Margolis' American Raj: liberation or domination In-Reply-To: <651518875.429251252436462750.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1602102218.468841252440973661.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thecanadiancharger.com/page.php?id=5&a=121 Canadian Charger September 3, 2009 Eric Margolis' American Raj: liberation or domination Dr. Qais Ghanem American Raj: liberation or domination. Author: Eric Margolis. Publisher: Key Porter books. Number of pages: 400 The book comes in 15 chapters which deal with trouble spots all over the world, mainly of course involving the Middle East and Muslim countries in general. It starts by talking about the earlier struggles of Muslims to establish their independence. This is done extremely well in my opinion, having studied that history, even as I was growing up and attending school. A chapter of about 30 pages dedicated to the problem of Palestine which Mr. Margolis stresses as a major cause of conflict. Other chapters which are extremely well done are on Afghanistan, Iran, Chechnya, Kosovo and the Balkans. There is also a thorough and long chapter on the problems in Lebanon and an excellent chapter on Iraq. It becomes clear as you read the book that Eric Margolis is quite familiar with the history, the customs and perhaps the languages spoken in these countries. He deals with different groups of people in a very open-minded manner. For example, when he talks about Hamas and Hezbollah, he stresses the fact that these two organizations distinguished themselves from Arab governments by a establishing a reputation for honesty and public service. On this subject he states "after of the highly destructive Israeli bombing in the brief 2006 war, Hezbollah astounded everyone by swiftly setting about rebuilding of shattered buildings and bridges, cleaning up rubble and caring for homeless civilians while in the US-backed regime in Beirut dithered and did nothing." The author is very familiar with the Arab regimes in the area. He points out that however harsh Israel?s repression and torture of rebellious Palestinians, many of them would likely opt for an Israeli prison rather than one of Algeria's nightmarish prisons or Egypt's torture mills. He adds "in a sad commentary on human nature, it has been this writer?s observation when covering 14 wars and civil conflicts that people would fight to the death against oppression and abuse by foreigners but seem to accept exactly the same kind of mistreatment from their own co-citizens." In this chapter, Mr. Margolis reminds us of statement by Bin Laden, where he says that the liberation of Palestine begins in Cairo and Rabat and Amman and Jeddah. The author frequently refers to double standards. For example he points out that when the African National Congress bombed caf?s and burger bars frequented by whites in South Africa, there was no international condemnation of these crimes yet when they were foolishly duplicated by Palestinians, the world was quick to denounce them as acts of terrorism. Another example is the fact that Winston Churchill authorized the Royal Air Force to use poisonous mustard gas against rebellious Kurdish tribes, but eight decades later Tony Blair would brand Saddam Hussein a monster and war criminal for doing to the Kurds precisely what Churchill had done. Mr. Margolis clearly addresses the issue of the pro-Israeli lobby. For example he points out that Israel?s American supporters had learnt the lesson of 1956 when Washington ordered the Jewish State out of Sinai, and how in the ensuing five decades they had come to dominate and guide American Middle East policy and exercise a veto over it. He adds that no one in Washington cared or dared to stand up to the Israel lobby. Throughout the book Mr. Margolis makes numerous appropriate comparisons of situations involving the Muslim world as compared to other parts of the world. When he talks about Osama bin Laden, he points out that the few experts on the region that read bin Laden's declaration of war dismissed it as the ravings of an obscure Islamic leader. He further points out that a half century earlier Sir Winston Churchill had also dismissed another world shaker of things, India's Mahatma Gandhi whom he called a half naked fakir. The author does not promote the idea of what has been called the conspiracy theory about 9/11, but it does remind us that 56% all Americans, according to a poll done in September 2006, believed that the U. S. government was behind the attacks or had allowed them to happen. The author also reminds us that in that Bin Laden denounced Saddam Hussein as a tyrant and apostate but this fact was covered up by the Bush administration in order to convince Americans that Saddam had conspired with Al Qaida to launch the 9/11 attacks. He also stresses that Bush and Blair had concocted a brazen war of aggression against Iraq behind a tissue of lies. It becomes clear as well that Mr. Margolis has met many of these major characters that feature prominently in the history of the Muslim world, including for example General Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, Colonel Gaddafi as well as several prominent Afghans. In the chapter on Afghanistan the author is very clear about the non-validity of the election process which he calls an electoral charade. Although Mr. Margolis is critical of many of the American characters involved in these conflicts in the Muslim world, he also admires some. One of these is Major-General Fuller, believed to have said that military victories are meaningless unless they create the groundwork for ensuing favorable political settlements and that the object of war is peace, not military victory. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:18:41 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:18:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The rise of Israel's military rabbis In-Reply-To: <829304027.403601252434303300.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <521836582.469971252441121991.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8232340.stm BBC News 7 September 2009 The rise of Israel's military rabbis Teenagers at a Jewish seminary in the West Bank talk about the connection between the Israeli army and God [video] Katya Adler BBC Newsnight, Israel Israel 's army is changing. Once proudly secular, its combat units are now filling with those who believe Israel's wars are "God's wars". Military rabbis are becoming more powerful. Trained in warfare as well as religion, new army regulations mean they are now part of a military elite. They graduate from officer's school and operate closely with military commanders. One of their main duties is to boost soldiers' morale and drive, even on the front line. Israeli general warns of dangers of turning war into 'jihad' This has caused quite some controversy in Israel. Should military motivation come from men of God, or from a belief in the state of Israel and keeping it safe? The military rabbis rose to prominence during Israel's invasion of Gaza earlier this year. Some of their activities raised troubling questions about political-religious influence in the military. Gal Einav, a non-religious soldier, said there was wall-to-wall religious rhetoric in the base, the barracks and on the battlefield. As soon as soldiers signed for their rifles, he said, they were given a book of psalms. And, as his company headed into Gaza, he told me, they were flanked by a civilian rabbi on one side and a military rabbi on the other. "It felt like a religious war, like a crusade. It disturbed me. Religion and the army should be completely separate," he said. 'Sons of light' But military rabbis, like Lieutenant Shmuel Kaufman, welcome the changes. In previous wars rabbis had to stay far from the front, he says. In Gaza, they were ordered to accompany the fighters. "Our job was to boost the fighting spirit of the soldiers. The eternal Jewish spirit from Bible times to the coming of the Messiah." Before his unit went into Gaza, Rabbi Kaufman said their commander told him to blow the ram's horn: "Like (biblical) Joshua when he conquered the land of Israel. It makes the war holier." Rabbis handed out hundreds of religious pamphlets during the Gaza war. When this came to light, it caused huge controversy in Israel. Some leaflets called Israeli soldiers the "sons of light" and Palestinians the "sons of darkness". Others compared the Palestinians to the Philistines, the bitter biblical enemy of the Jewish people. Israel 's military has distanced itself from the publications, but they carried the army's official stamp. Still, army leaders insist their rabbis respect military ethics and put their private convictions aside. They say the same about the new wave of nationalist religious solders joining Israel's fighting forces. 'Religious duty' I visited an orthodox Jewish seminary near Hebron in the West Bank. It is one of an increasing number of religious schools that encourage taking the Jewish Bible to the battlefield. All students at the seminary choose to serve in Israel's combat units while statistics suggest less ideologically driven Israelis are avoiding them. This has made headline news in Israel. The 19-year-olds I spoke to at the seminary told me religious soldiers like them can make the army behave better and become "more moral". They believe it is their religious duty to protect the citizens of Israel, the Jewish state. The Lord commands it, they said. The students' seminary is built in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. If President Barack Obama gets his way, Israel will eventually evacuate most settlements. They are illegal under international law and Palestinians claim the territory as part of their future state. But for the religious soldiers the West Bank is part of land given to the Jews by God. Gal Einav thinks many soldiers will refuse to close settlements down. The settlement issue could well tear the army apart, he told me, adding that most of his officers were settlers these days. "If it comes to a clash between political orders from Israel's government and a contradictory message from the rabbis, settlers and religious right-wing soldiers will follow the rabbis," he said. Threat of 'Jihad' Israel 's military leaders strongly disagree. Brig Gen Eli Shermeister is the army's chief education officer. He admits some mistakes were made in the past but says the right balance has now been found with the military rabbis. He insists Israel's military commanders are the only ones in charge of the soldiers' spirit. "The moral code of Israel's army is clear. We judge soldiers in the light of this code. Nobody can create another moral code. [Certainly] not a religious one." But Brig Gen Shermeister's predecessor describes what he sees as clear and worrying changes within the military. According to Reserve Gen Nehemia Dagan, what is happening in the army is far more dangerous than most Israelis realise: "We (soldiers) used to be able to put aside our own ideas in order to do what we had to do. It didn't matter if we were religious or from a kibbutz. But that's not the case anymore. "The morals of the battlefield cannot come from a religious authority. Once it does, it's Jihad. I know people will not like that word but that's what it is, Holy War. And once it's Holy War there are no limits." Many religious Jews object to the type of preaching heard during Israel's recent Gaza operation. They say it perverts the true teachings of Judaism as well as contradicts Israel's military code. Day to day, Israel's army mainly operates in civilian areas - in Gaza, the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. The influences that Israeli soldiers are exposed to are extremely significant. How they view the Palestinians who live here is likely to affect the way they use their power and their weapons. Watch Katya Adler's film on rabbis in the Israeli army on Newsnight on Monday 7 September 2009 at 10.30pm on BBC Two, then afterwards on the Newsnight website. From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:17:49 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:17:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Workers of the World Unite! A New Message for Labour Day 2009? In-Reply-To: <847173018.428381252436404659.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1285643481.469591252441069894.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t )))) ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 251 .... September 7, 2009 ________________________________________________ Workers of the World Unite! A New Message for Labour Day 2009? Leo Panitch What is the significance of the way not only Keynes but even Marx has been brought back into fashion amidst the global economic crisis? This is a question well worth pondering on the day that is officially designated to celebrate the class that Marx saw as carrying the promise ? and the responsibility ? of creating a better world. Twenty years ago, many cast Marx's ideas into the dustbin of history along with the statist Communist regimes that collapsed in 1989. Yet Marx, who more than any 19th century liberal economist or philosopher insisted that the state was an imposition on society, and looked forward to it 'withering away' after a proletarian revolution, would have been the severest critic of those regimes. As Schumpeter once said, there was as little in common between Marx and Stalinism as there was Jesus and the Inquisition. In any case, as the globalization of capitalism quickened through the 1990s, it actually became more fashionable than ever to quote Marx, especially on how ?the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,? creating in the process ?a world in its own image.? But what was usually left out when the Communist Manifesto was quoted in this way in the 1990s was Marx's prescience on capitalist globalization ?paving the way for more extensive and exhaustive crises.? It has been this aspect of Marx's profound understanding of capitalist dynamics that has come to the fore in the current crisis. It does indeed seem to confirm that capitalism is like ?the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.? But what is especially important to bear in mind on Labour Day is that Marx, unlike many of those Marxist economists who make it their business to predict economic crises, would had no illusions that the purely economic contradictions of capitalism would themselves bring about a better world. Marx knew very well that capitalism, by its nature, fosters social isolation, leaving ?no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'.? This creates passivity in the face of personal crises, from factory layoffs to home foreclosures. So, too, does this isolation impede communities of active, informed citizens from coming together to advance radical alternatives. Marx would look at this crisis from the perspective of what it would take for workers to overcome this all-consuming social passivity. He saw the trade unions developing in his own time as a step forward in relation to the ?immediate aim? of ?the organization of the proletarians into a class? whose ?first task? would be ?to win the battle for democracy.? And Marx would today encourage the formation of those types of collective identities, associations and institutions through which people could redefine their needs and develop their ambitions and capacities to fulfil them by winning the battle for economic democracy. This is something no capitalist society can ever become. No such vision for enacting change has arisen from the labour movement in this crisis, at least not so far. Nor is it likely to emerge from the primarily defensive way trade unions are currently constituted. They do need to resist employer pressures to make workers bear the burden of the crisis in the public as well as private sectors. But their lack of ambition to organize and represent all workers in all facets of their lives, not only in terms of a narrow orientation to collective bargaining, is proving increasingly debilitating. It is significant that the Labour Day we celebrate today, legally established in 1895 to occur on the first Monday of September, involved Canada abjectly following what the U.S. government had done to avoid workers there joining in the celebration of May Day as the international workers holiday. This practice had been established in 1889 when the first congress of the Second International (the successor to the First International organized by Marx in 1860s) called on workers everywhere to join in an annual one-day strike on May 1st. This date was chosen to coincide with the timing of international protests against the bloody repression of workers in Chicago in 1886 who had been campaigning for an eight-hour working day. Unions in Canada, like those in the U.S., went along with politicians who sought to replace the May Day that symbolizing labours' insurgent history and revolutionary potential with a state-sponsored 'official' Labour Day holiday in September that symbolized the recognition of labour's search for respectability. This was epitomized by the free admission to the Canadian National Exhibition at the end of the Toronto's annual Labour Day parade. But the global economic crisis once again points to why labour needs to move in the other direction. If the fashionability of quoting Marx today is going to amount to much, labour will need to ?recover the spirit of revolution,? as Marx himself once put it, rather than ?to set its ghost walking about again.? ? Leo Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University. His most recent books are American Empire and the Political Economy of International Finance and Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination . From shniad at sfu.ca Tue Sep 8 14:21:55 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:21:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] CONTRA AVNERY: A Case for BDS (Salem News) In-Reply-To: <495019194.436681252437166719.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2099117808.471611252441315478.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.salem-news.com/articles/september042009/israel_sanctions_9-4-09.php Salem-News.com September 4, 2009 CONTRA AVNERY: A Case for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) By Alan Sabrosky Salem-News.com One should never put down any weapon when one?s arsenal is so nearly empty and the struggle is so uphill. (JACKSON, Miss.) - Avnery has written and done many good things, but on this issue I believe he is wrong. Avnery?s position on BDS reminds me of a Jewish colleague in the US who had a lot of visibility debating the AIPAC crowd on the OT (Occupied Territories) issue. When I asked him what he would do to Israel to coerce it into changing its position and policies, he hemmed and hawed and finally came down on nothing tangible, just behind-the-scenes persuasion. Now, any country or person who is not punished for doing something unacceptable has no reason whatsoever to change its behavior. This is why Netanyahu is essentially giving Obama the diplomatic equivalent of the ?raised middle finger? (in US parlance) on the settlements issue ? nothing bad happens to Israel for insultingly dismissing out of hand his only real benefactor. And this is why following Avnery?s argument also gives Israel no real incentive to do anything different. If they aren?t being hurt, they won?t change. Defining the Context There is also the fact that the Israeli establishment, and that includes the entire AIPAC-Hasbara-ADL crowd in the US and their counterparts elsewhere, do believe that BDS is a weapon of consequence that can matter greatly. Otherwise they wouldn?t be worried about it, or spend so much time arguing against it. No one bothers with what will be trivial, ineffective or counter-productive. They do bother with what can be significant, in the future if not now. In part, that is because there is an upper limit to what Israel can get from the US alone without it being noticed by the American public, and possibly hurtful to it. As long as the EU (and others) largely go along with the US-Israeli line, and the Israelis can still buy and sell goods on the global market, US aid to them while large in absolute terms is still pretty trivial within the US GNP and national budget. But if Israel couldn?t get anything important elsewhere ? like oil, natural gas, a lot of consumer goods & luxury items ? and if it couldn?t sell its products (especially military hardware) elsewhere ? it would hurt, and hurt badly. And if this forced up the US subsidy significantly to offset those losses, that would highlight it starkly on the American public?s radar screen. Add to that another oil embargo, should even the Arab members of OPEC finally acknowledge reality and do something useful, linking the embargo explicitly to US complicity in Israeli crimes, and that would be politically explosive here. Extending the Context There are also collateral benefits, at least in the US, to pursuing the BDS campaign. One is that it engages some part of the American public, especially on a small but growing number of campuses where it has rising appeal, in the anti-Zionist struggle. Another is that the entire debate on BDS (which AIPAC and its collaterals will have to force, or let BDS proceed and succeed by default ? this is a fight they cannot afford to sidestep) will push Israeli policy, practices and crimes increasingly into the open for Americans to understand for the first time, which they cannot afford either. AND THIS IS IMPORTANT. The growing BDS campaign places the brigade of Zionist organizations on and off campus in America (and perhaps elsewhere) in an untenable, and perhaps impossible, situation: If they ignore the BDS campaign, unchallenged it will inevitably gain adherents, grow in momentum, and begin to hurt Israel badly ? US aid and the purchase of (usually tax-exempt) Israel Bonds cannot offset such losses. If they challenge BDS and unleash a public debate, then the entire Zionist regimen inside and outside of Israel is compelled inevitably to slither out from under the ?media blackout? rocks where it has been concealed, and its criminal misconduct ? especially in Gaza and the West Bank ? simply cannot stand the light of day. And they know it. Finally, even if BDS is a long, slow way to do something to hurt the Israelis, nothing else on the anti-Zionist agenda now has a chance of achieving anything at all significant or useful. Symbolism is important, and even small gestures like an occasional truck convoy or ship trying to get into Gaza do matter, but it is like celebrating Earth Day once a year and littering the ground the rest of it. One should never put down any weapon when one?s arsenal is so nearly empty and the struggle is so uphill. BDS is a good weapon. It did work in South Africa, and it can work on Israel. Use it. ======================================================= Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a writer and consultant specializing in national and international security affairs. In December 1988, he received the Superior Civilian Service Award after more than five years of service at the U.S. Army War College as Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. He is listed in WHO'S WHO IN THE EAST (23rd ed.). A Marine Corps Vietnam veteran and a 1986 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Sabrosky's teaching and research appointments have included the United States Military Academy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Middlebury College and Catholic University; while in government service, he held concurrent adjunct professorships at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Sabrosky has lectured widely on defense and foreign affairs in the United States and abroad. You can email Dr. Alan Sabrosky at: docbrosk at comcast.net CONTRA AVNERY: A Case for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) Salem-News.com From lcm95060 at gmail.com Tue Sep 8 22:08:08 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:08:08 -0700 Subject: [R-G] The "Real Deal": Forty Percent of Working-Age Californians Jobless Message-ID: <4AA72A28.2070602@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 A good video of the same name, and relevant... The Real Deal... Lifers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTveTi1jT9s "It's been said that official unemployment numbers undercut the true unemployment numbers, with many dropping off the radar as their unemployment benefits expire, and with many taking jobs that "underemploy" them. Still, this study comes as a shock, saying that 2/5 of Californians of working age are out of work. The report, "In the Midst of the Great Recession: The State of Working California 2009," by the California Budget Project, states that less than 3/5 of California's working age adults had jobs in July 2009. That contrasts to the official unemployment rate, which says that California's jobless rate is 11.9%. Other highlights (or lowlights) of the report... In full @ Snafu-ed (Situation normal, for people who don't think at all ... and offbeat news, for the rest of us ...) http://snafu-ed.blogspot.com/2009/09/forty-percent-of-working-age.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKpyomAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysbP0IAJp7e2LzpoWRAvTnrWK19aP8 vxARCxjCU+dTks0CcImcjJFBHHaK5YLvXM4uHaWOMxhPXXl59mceuRiFrKCkaKbW ekUhZqLnHhMdnsrO0mzbQ8r0lc41fNhlRRiLFBh8gsc+j0YB0bWiXkt71VbSX22e Hukf7c2ZrAWiEquprcskCXsoStS9ROuWLpqWCExsyCeiKet25b17fk56PWtVNFBn cHDATGO1h7vV9WdK37CZzQ2bqwH97Vtkvf244SIsVOH1QsV8fxeudoLup51HOjZq gYWwvwpvhzeRYa9LUc9NDne5DCKkvVAPFkFhQdy+HFrTjO+KRpxoxW40UpaIzMc= =5r8L -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Tue Sep 8 22:10:55 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 13:10:55 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The American Money Scene Message-ID: <20090909131055.d4a6f3c0.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Bulletin Five of the American Monetary Institute http://www.monetary.org (August 16 2009) Dear Friends, As you know the states are in terrible financial condition, cutting back on necessary programs, laying off people and raising taxes. This has been the case for several years, and thanks to the banking crisis has reached terrible levels. This is the time - an opportunity to push for real reform, such as the American Monetary Act. But instead, suggestions have recently been circulated on the internet that the states go into the banking business to solve or lessen this problem. The American Monetary Institute concludes that these suggestions, though they may be for well meaning purposes, are bad ideas for a lot of reasons as described below. People involved in real monetary reform understand that the private creation of money through what amounts to a fractional reserve accounting system is at the heart of the monetary problem which has plagued humanity and has now brought down the world economy. That vicious system by which money is created in our society must be reformed, not imitated. But there is no reform whatever in the proposal for states to enter banking. It would also distract lawmakers from facing the facts about the national reforms that are needed to solve this crisis and institute a money system grounded in justice, which will operate to promote the general welfare. It would even sanction the present fractional reserve banking system, the source of the problem. That system requires structural reform, not endorsements! We'll soon have a blog at the end of this article below, so that you may record and post your reactions to Mr Walton's research. Sincerely, Stephen Zarlenga Director, American Monetary Institute Why States Going into the Banking Business Would be a Distraction, not a Solution to their Fiscal Problem by Jamie Walton, AMI researcher "We may not be able to stop them, but we can join them. We the people need to play the bankers' game ourselves". {1} That was written by one of the promoters of the notion that the state governments should go into the fractional reserve banking business to beat Wall Street at its own game and solve their fiscal problems. What an insult to humanity! How about a dose of morality and common sense. Isn't that like saying: "We're victims of organized financial crime, so lets join the criminals!" Trying to beat Wall Street at its own game is obviously not the answer. As Albert Einstein once said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them". Forty-eight States currently have budget deficits and many are sharply cutting services to try to close 'fiscal' gaps opening up to an average 24% by 2010. Some attention has recently been given to the idea that State governments can get out of their fiscal problems by setting up their own banks. This is mainly a distraction away from genuine reform of the system, as encapsulated in the proposed draft American Monetary Act (more about that below). The argument being put forward is that State governments can increase their revenues without increasing taxes by collecting profits from State-run banks. The proposal suggests that State governments go into the banking business and "fan" their deposits into ten or twelve times as much in loans, using 'fractional reserve' or 'capital adequacy' rules, to cover fiscal gaps with bank profits. This is a foolish suggestion, for several reasons. 1. You don't solve a problem with more of the problem. The so-called "public option" scheme for banking would only 'serve to protect' the status quo. The 'proposal' completely fails to confront the main problem identified by all serious monetary reforms: 'fractional reserve' banking. Instead, it actually endorses and sanctions this vicious and destructive process, by suggesting that State governments engage in it - it's immoral! 2. What the promoters describe is not how banking operates. No single bank can multiply its deposits by ten or twelve times in loans, they can only make loans (or purchases of securities, for example bonds) up against ninety to 95% of their deposits; these loans create new deposits, which, when spent, are most likely transferred to other banks; then receiving banks can again make new loans up to ninety to 95% of these deposits, and so on. This 'process' is repeated indefinitely, in ever-decreasing increments, and the effect over time is that the banking system as a whole multiplies those initial deposits by ten or twelve times. This process is carried on at great cost to the community as a whole, because every new loan (or new security purchase) is additional interest-bearing debt. As presently operated, banks can be viewed as debt factories; they primarily create debt and only create the bulk of our money supply as a debt byproduct. Banks make profits and stay in business by putting the community as a whole into more debt than it can repay in any given time. This results in a net claim against the community going into the future. While some profits are paid to shareholders as dividends, this is only a small percentage of the debt created. If a bank was State-owned, the 'shareholders' would nominally be the people of the community, but any profits would still be based on the indebtedness of the community. That's the inevitable outcome, no matter who owns a bank, because the same rules apply to all banks in the banking system. But the question is not who should be the beneficiaries of perpetual claims against the community, the question is should anyone be the beneficiaries of perpetual claims against the community - why place ourselves forever on a treadmill just to have what we've already got? It makes no sense. 3. The problem is being misidentified as interest, when the problem is debt. Interest collected by "private" banks is not kept out of 'circulation'. Most, if not all, interest re-enters the system in some way at some time (for example as expenses, dividends, investments, et cetera). This is not the problem. The problem is almost all of our money is created with a debt attached; it is 'borrowed into existence' from banks, who create it when we have to borrow it. As our economy grows, we need new money, but almost all of the new money is presently created with interest-bearing debt, so almost every new dollar has more than a dollar owing on it - so it has to 'earn' more than a dollar and pay it all back to banks (who never had it in the first place). Who owns and runs any particular bank makes little or no difference because the debt-based money-creating banking system will still own and run us, on a treadmill. Money doesn't have to be created like this; coins aren't, they're just created as money, with no debt attached; when they're issued, it's revenue for the US government, saving taxpayers dollars. All money can be created this way. And; if we don't start with any debt, then we don't start with any interest either. With that in mind, let's look again at the States' fiscal crisis. State governments receive money from the community for the provision of public services and the support of volunteer services. These are generally things that are needed in the community which aren't commercial in nature, they're not the types of things that it's either possible or desirable to make a profit on (for example rape crisis centers, battered women's refuges, assisted housing for people with physical/mental impairments, respite care for caregivers, et cetera). Non-commercial services needed in the community couldn't exist without being paid for straight out, because providers can't borrow and then generate income to repay loans, that's not how they work (if they could do that, they'd be doing it already) - they need money that doesn't have to be paid back. Diverting public resources away from desperately needed services toward a commercial venture would only make things worse. The effect on the ground could lead to the commercialization of services intended for the relief of poverty, disability, pain, suffering and misery; by forcing service providers to also be profit makers (for example commercialized prisons); or reverting to relying on the whims of charity. If neither of these 'choices' worked-out (which history shows, they generally don't), the community services essential for any viably functioning civil society might disappear altogether, and then "there goes the neighborhood" - social disintegration is a slippery slope, for everyone. This is a very serious situation - it's no time to be playing games. In addition to these defining moral questions, there are also some more technical reasons why they won't automatically work as suggested. 1. No bank's an island - they're all in it together. A bank can only lend out what it can expect to receive back, not only from its borrowers in the long term, but also from all other banks through the clearing process in the very short term, that is, usually overnight. Even if a State-run bank could attract other banks to have accounts with it and/or require its employees and suppliers to have accounts with it, the other banks would have to call in their loans by ten or twelve times the amounts transferred (so there'd be no net gain in loans available). Of course, at some stage, all of its depositors would need to spend their money with people having accounts at other banks, so sooner or later its reserves would drain back to other banks and it would then have to call in its loans by ten or twelve times as much. In any case, no bank can lend more than the prevailing level of lending of all other banks; every bank has to move in step with every other bank, otherwise it would soon sustain an adverse net balance through the clearing process and drain all its reserves to the other banks. It's a complete error that any bank can just go ahead and multiply it's 'reserves' or 'capital' by ten or twelve times in loans. If the other banks aren't lending, a State-run bank wouldn't be able to lend either. 2. Don't be fooled by what's happening in a low-population State. North Dakota has about 700,000 people, a strong community spirit based on farming in difficult conditions, and significant oil revenues. The model being presented is the Bank of North Dakota, which provides support services to some other banks in its area. {2} But this arrangement won't automatically translate to other States, as the banks in other States may not wish to engage in it, and requiring them to could be very unpopular. This could lead to significant risks to taxpayers. In 1931, the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales (a federated State of Australia), at that time the second largest savings bank in the British Empire, was closed down by a run caused by a series of 'scare' stories put out in the media as part of a 'political' attack. {3} If a similar action were possible against a State-run bank today, taxpayers might be called upon to pay for the aftermath (for example the Bank of North Dakota is not FDIC-insured (!), and is instead guaranteed by the State Government itself). 3. The promised golden goose may prove to be a noose. What may look like a boost for taxpayers could end up being a ball-and-chain. For instance; where are States already in deficit going to get the money to set up a bank? As the President of the Bank of North Dakota, Eric Hardmeyer, explains (in the article cited above), to avoid a drain on existing deposits from other banks, and the consequent contraction in loans, a State government would probably have to issue bonds to raise the capital needed to set up a State-run bank. {4} Yet more debt bondage at a time like this may be more than the State's taxpayers can bear. In any case, a new bank would be as much of a burden on the community as any other bank. We would have the ridiculous situation of the people, as taxpayers, being put further into debt to build a debt factory to put the people, as the community, even further into debt. 4. States shouldn't gamble taxpayer's money on risky business. The actual balances of State government bank accounts aren't huge, and they don't grow, because they're always being spent - that's what they're for. The actual profit margins banks make on their funds under management are generally modest, so any returns from a relatively small loan portfolio, after deducting operating expenses and re-investment in the business, wouldn't be anywhere near the amount required to fix the current fiscal shortfalls of the State governments. For example, in recent years the Bank of North Dakota has transferred between about a third to a half of its net income to the State coffers; about $25 million in 2007, about $20 million in 2008. {5} The total budget for the State Government for the 2007 to 2009 fiscal period is $6.5 billion. {6} A State law requires the bank to pay $60 million to the general fund over the same period - a contribution of less than one percent to the State budget. Meanwhile, State governments face average budget shortfalls of 24% for 2010 - so the numbers just don't stack up. {7} Weighing the pros and cons; relatively low potential returns compared to potential high risks (for example the concerted aggressive actions of other banks); it's not a very good bet. 5. States would be better-off using their clout with the banks. A more prudent course of action would be for State governments to negotiate more favorable contracts for their banking business with one or more banks. This would involve much less cost and trouble (for example recruiting competent staff and administering a new enterprise) than trying to set up a bank, especially when public services are being cut. The banks need those deposits - they'll do anything to keep them (even if they don't like to admit it). 6. We don't need any more diversions anymore. We citizens have only so much energy and time to devote to changing our world for the better. Diverting good people into nonsense condemns us to continue suffering unnecessarily. This time of crisis must be used for real reform, not diversions. So what is the solution? It's the monetary system which must be changed to end the fiscal crisis, and State governments cannot do this - it's a matter for the Federal Government. Under present constitutional and legal conventions, the only institutions that can create money without debt are national treasuries and/or central banks. State governments within a federal nation cannot do this - the problem can only be solved at the national level. Proposals promoting anything else would require a constitutional amendment, which is not necessary. There are some additional specious arguments being made within these promotions claiming that the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 5) does not authorize the US Congress to issue non-coin money, so implying that it authorizes the States (or the people) to issue non-coin money. {8} It most certainly does not. As Robert G. Natelson, in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, exhaustively and authoritatively determined, the term "coin" (with a lower-case "c") means to create money in any form, whereas the term "Coin" (with an upper-case "C") means coins. {9} There's also a lot of misinterpretations in these same arguments regarding the term "Bills of Credit" in the US Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1) and "bills of credit" in other contexts, and the terms "Tender" and "Coin" (again). These misinterpretations lead to some ridiculous assertions like stating that: "The States violate the [US] Constitution every day ? to pay their debts ? since gold and silver coins are no longer in general circulation". {10} All of these spurious 'ideas' only serve as distractions during a time of crisis. We have a big problem in our economy and society today: too much debt. Banking cannot solve this problem because banking produces debt, which is the problem. It's incredible that even now the delusion of borrowing ourselves out of debt is still seen as a solution, by anyone, let alone so-called reformers. We're in a deep hole because we listened to cheerleaders yelling "keep on digging" without thinking. We cannot afford to keep doing this any more. Proposing to get governments involved in banking is the complete opposite of a solution, because it keeps the problem in place. As American Monetary Institute Chapter Leader, Dick Distelhorst, says: "We don't want to put the government into the banking business - we want to get the banks out of the money creation business!" - Dick Distelhorst The correct solution to the crisis was presented in Stephen Zarlenga's speech at the US Treasury in December 2003, titled "Solution to the States' fiscal crisis" (read it at www.monetary.org). That solution has become the proposed American Monetary Act. In California, Governor Schwarzenegger has had a copy of The Lost Science of Money (the historical research which led to the solution) on his bookshelves since the spring of 2004. Experience has taught us what we need to do: 1. Put the Federal Reserve System into the US Treasury. 2. Stop the banking system creating any part of the money supply. 3. Create new money as needed by spending it on public infrastructure, including human infrastructure, for example education and health care. These 3 elements must all be done together, and are all in draft legislative form as the proposed American Monetary Act (read it here: http://www.monetary.org/amacolorpamphlet.pdf). The correct action is for Congress to fulfil its constitutional responsibilities to furnish the nation with its money by making the American Monetary Act law. The correct action for the States is to insist on this Federal action! Genuine monetary reform is the solution to the nation's fiscal problems, and that can only be achieved at the national level. _____ The American Monetary Institute is sponsoring the fifth annual Monetary Reform Conference at Roosevelt University in Chicago, September 24 to 27 2009, to bring together the best minds to get done what has to be done. Jamie R Walton Notes: 1. "The Public Option in Banking: How We Can Beat Wall Street at Its Own Game", Hodgson Brown, Ellen, JD. Web of Debt (website), August 05 2009. 2 & 4. "How the Nation's Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street", Harkinson, Josh. Mother Jones, March 27 2009. 3. "NSW Savings Bank Board Official Announcement: Protection To Depositors", The Age, April 23 1931. 5. Bank of North Dakota 2008 Annual Report: Independent Auditor's Report, page 4. 6. State of North Dakota: 2009 to 2011 Executive Budget Summary, page 3. 7. "New Fiscal Year Brings No Relief From Unprecedented State Budget Problems", Lav, Iris J and McNichol, Elizabeth. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (website), updated August 12 2009. 8 &10. "Another Way Around the Credit Crisis: Minnesota Bill would authorize State Banks to "monetize" productivity", Hodgson Brown, Ellen, JD. Web of Debt (website), March 23 2008. 9. "Paper Money and the Original Understanding of the Coinage Clause", Natelson, Robert G. Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, July 01 2008. _____ (c) 2009 The American Monetary Institute Dedicated to the independent study of monetary history, theory, and reform Stephen Zarlenga, Director Post Office Box 601, Valatie, New York 12184 http://www.monetary.org ami at taconic.net http://www.monetary.org/moneyscenefive.html TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From tchilds at resist.ca Tue Sep 8 23:06:39 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 05:06:39 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Road to Copenhagen going off the cliff - Am Johal Message-ID: <1488933334-1252472691-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-303810521-@bda216.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Excellent analysis: http://rabble.ca/news/2009/09/road-copenhagen-going-cliff Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Sep 9 13:10:05 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 12:10:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Will US, Canada and NATO back Karzai despite "clear and convincing evidence of fraud"? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <893202782.841501252523405631.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Vancouver Sun September 9, 2009 Afghanistan ?s election unlikely to deliver legitimate mandate Electoral fraud was assured months ago when Karzai began to ally himself with regional warlords, drug traffickers and top officials in the provinces who feared losing their jobs if he was defeated. By Jonathan Manthorpe It is now next to impossible to imagine Afghanistan's election last month producing a credible result or a president with a clear and legitimate mandate to govern. The announcement on Tuesday by the ultimate arbiters of the election result, the United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, that it has found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" and that there must be a recount of many votes means that the marred credibility of the Aug. 20 election is almost beyond retrieving. Just look at the numbers. To begin with, the turnout was very low because people feared violence from the Taliban, whose six-year insurgency has spread from their heartland in southern Afghanistan and the porous border region with Pakistan into the previously peaceful north of the country. Only about 4.3 million ballots were cast, representing less than a third of the 15 million registered voters. But already the body overseeing the vote counting, the independent Election Commission, has discarded close to half a million ballots as either fraudulent or invalid. Now the Complaints Commission says that it has found a "clear pattern" of fraud, most of it on behalf of incumbent President Hamid Karzai. There is evidence that supporters of Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious voting stations where no one voted, but where hundreds of thousands of votes were recorded for the president. Karzai's supporters also took over about 800 of the 25,000 legitimate voting stations and registered tens of thousands of fraudulent votes for the president through them. For example, in Kandahar province where Canadian forces are the lead element in NATO's efforts to bring security and stability, ballot boxes contained 350,000 votes, mostly for Karzai, were sent for counting. But election officials believe that only about 25,000 people in the province went to the polls. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, one of the best and most knowledgeable observers of Afghanistan, says electoral fraud was assured months ago when Karzai began to ally himself with regional warlords, drug traffickers and top officials in the provinces who feared losing their jobs if he was defeated. So the unappetizing prospect now is that the United States, Canada and the other NATO allies with more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan will find themselves propping up the unsavoury and deeply corrupt Karzai when few Afghans either voted for him or regard his re-election as credible. That raises the danger, voiced by Karzai's main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, of ethnic and political civil war among the followers of rival candidates. Of course, the Taliban is already heartened by what it sees as its victory in effectively preventing a legitimate election. The Taliban's success on the ground is a major reason why the U.S. and NATO need a credible and reliable president in Kabul. Officials in Washington and the NATO headquarters in Brussels are assessing options for a new approach to the Afghan war sent to them last week by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Whatever comes out of this review -- and it will probably involve sending up to 40,000 troops in addition to the 103,000 already there -- is intended to mesh with the reconstruction strategy put forward by U.S. President Barack Obama in March. This puts emphasis on developing agriculture, job creation and the justice system. That's undoubtedly where the emphasis needs to be, but the 18 months the administration says it needs for Afghans to see the benefits and turn away from the Taliban is probably too optimistic. Two to three years is more realistic and with more than 50 per cent of Americans now saying they want the troops home, Obama may not have that much time. He is already under attack from both the political right and left by people who point out that the main reason for invading Afghanistan eight years ago was to destroy al-Qaida. But al-Qaida is now operating in Pakistan as well as Africa and Europe, and can be attacked by means other than propping up a distasteful regime in Kabul. Those arguments don't hold water, but Obama and other NATO country leaders are going to have an increasingly tough time persuading citizens the Afghan game is worth the candle. jmanthorpe at vancouversun.com From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Sep 9 13:19:26 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 12:19:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Deeper Into the Tunnel In-Reply-To: <822608584.846081252523906462.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <223837612.846691252523966058.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09042009.html Weekend Edition September 4-6, 2009 CounterPunch Diary Deeper Into the Tunnel By ALEXANDER COCKBURN A s General Stan McChrystal plans his march on Washington to demand more troops in Afghanistan the antiwar movement lies on the sidewalk, as inert and forlorn as a homeless person in the rain at a street corner, too dejected even to hold up a sign. This is at a time that as Mark Ames has just pointed out, ?Obama is doubling down in Afghanistan with more troops deployed now than the Soviets ever had.? Yes, add up US troops and contractors and you get a US invasion of Afghanistan bigger than the Soviet force at its peak. Is there any sign of life in a movement that marshaled hundreds of thousands to march in protest against war in Iraq? Ah, but those were the Bush years. Now we have a Democrat in the White House. One person hasn?t tossed aside her peace sign. Cindy Sheehan sees war as war, whether the battle standard is being waved by a white moron from Midland, Texas or an eloquent black man from Chicago. But when she called for protesters to join her on Martha?s Vineyard to stand outside Obama?s holiday roost for four days at the end of August there was a marked contrast to the response she got when she rallied thousands to stand outside Bush?s Crawford lair. As John Walsh described it here last week, ?the silence was, as Cindy put it in an email to this writer, ?crashingly deafening.? Where are the email appeals to join Cindy from The Nation or from AFSC or Peace Action or ?Progressive? Democrats of America (PDA) or even Code Pink? Or United for Peace and Justice. And what about MoveOn although it was long ago thoroughly discredited as principled opponents of war or principled in any way shape or form except slavish loyalty to the ?other? War Party. And of course sundry ?socialist? organizations are also missing in action since their particular dogma will not be front and center. These worthies and many others have vanished into the fog of Obama?s wars.? Before he joined Sheehan on Martha?s Vineyard, Walsh says he contacted several of the leaders of the ?official? peace movement in the Boston area ? AFSC, Peace Action, Green Party of MA (aka Green Rainbow Party) and some others. Not so much as the courtesy of a reply resulted from this effort - although the GRP at least posted a notice of the action. Click through the leftish or progressive websites these days and you?ll find endless alarums about the renascent right, the brownshirt threat, the massed stormtroopers of Glenn Beck. You won?t find too much practical organizing against Obama?s escalation in Afghanistan. Take the craven behavior of the leadership of the October 17 anti-war protest in San Francisco, the first scheduled to be held in the Obama era. In the nuts-and-bolts details of organizing and endorsements, the saga tells us much about the spavined state of the antiwar movement. On August 29, the October 17 Coalition voted to endorse a protest at the Westin-St. Francis, one of the city?s flashier hotels, the following Friday where San Francisco Congresswoman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was to be honored with a $100 a plate breakfast. But by the end of the day the October 17 coalition leadership got cold feet when it learned that the host of the breakfast was none other than the San Francisco Labor Council. Now, in the Bay Area, the bleak truth is that organized labor?s participation in marches and demonstrations has been minimal since the first Gulf War. But rather than challenging the Labor Council about its apathy on the war questions and about its choice of Pelosi, a war supporter, as its breakfast honoree, the coalition ? replete with supposedly fiery socialists - promptly tried to cancel the protest. There?s nothing new here. Genuflections to the Labor Council has long characterized San Francisco?s anti-war movement leadership when it comes to determining its public agenda. Unsurprisingly, panic at anything to do with Israel?s conduct has characterized many of these more odious chapters in this history, as was forcefully demonstrated by the refusal of what was then called the Spring Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice to [include] planks to its major marches against US intervention in Central America and apartheid in South Africa in 1985 and 1988 that demanded, ?No US Intervention in the Middle East,? and ?End US Support for Israeli Occupation,? respectively. In the spring of 1985, Israel was in its fourth year of occupation of Lebanon after an invasion that had been publicly supported by the AFL-CIO with no dissent from San Francisco?s labor bureaucracy. The main organizer of both of those marches was Socialist Action. In its newspaper this group regularly boasted of its anti-Zionism and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Nonetheless, in this instance Socialist Action promptly turned into Socialist Inaction. The group was adamant about not allowing any demand that referred to the Middle East to be added to the Mobilization?s program. The limp excuse: ?labor will walk.? So determined was it, in fact, to keep the issue from being raised at the Mobe?s general meeting that Socialist Action had two of its members stand at the end of the aisle where she was sitting to keep Lebanese-born Tina Naccache, a well known radio host from Berkeley?s KPFA, from trying to approach a microphone and addressing the packed union meeting hall. It was considerably more difficult for Socialist Action and its allies to ignore the Palestinian intifada in 1988 but again they rose to the challenge, managing to appease the Labor Council by doing so. This required Socialist Action to cancel a general meeting of anti-war activists that quite likely would have led to the addition of a demand for an end to Israeli occupation. Today we find the very same Socialist Action leader, Jeff Mackler, longer of tooth but no closer to socialism, taking unilateral action to prevent the picketing of the Labor Council breakfast for Pelosi. In an email to the October 17 steering committee, Mackler described in rather comically elevated terms the proposed picket of the breakfast as a ?time bomb [that] was ticking?. I based my decision [to cancel the meeting] on a higher principle. We made a decision [to approve the picket] based on false information. No one knew that we voted to hold a demonstration at the Labor Council breakfast! No one knew that our coalition was going to be the ONLY initiator and sponsor of the demonstration! ?After I consulted with several of the leading forces present, it was clear that we had made a grave mistake that needed immediate correction. The demonstration we had approved was essentially 3 days away and we had to assume that it was being built in our name, with our leaflet and with our approval. It is now clear that no one approved such a demonstration, with perhaps one exception, the maker of the motion who neglected to inform us of what we were voting for.? The maker of the motion was Steve Zeltzer, a long time labor activist who may be remembered, along with Jeffrey Blankfort and anti-apartheid campaigner, Anne Poirier, for having successfully sued the Anti-Defamation League for spying on them and thousands other activists in the late Eighties. ?We could have done ourselves great harm had we waited,? Mackler quavered. ?Had we not acted as we did, we might have lost the coalition or a good portion of it. We definitely would have lost the ability to ask in good faith for Labor Council support. And no one doubts that labor's support is critical in these days of terrible encroachments on the lives, health and stability of working people, not to mention the masses who are daily slaughtered in the course of the U.S. wars that we so strongly oppose.? Opposition to the war and the slaughter of the masses apparently stops and flees at the hideous possibility of causing embarassment to the San Francisco Labor Council. There is not a hint in Mackler?s lengthy email suggesting that the Labor Council might owe anti-war forces an explanation for having invited Pelosi in the first place. So Pelosi and the Council were spared embarrassment. ?As it stands now the event remains cancelled,? wrote Mackler contentedly, ?now agreed to by most everyone, and hopefully with the least amount of damage done.? The Executive Director of the Labor Council, Tim Paulson, who also happens to head the state Democratic Party?s labor caucus, was quick to show his appreciation to both Pelosi and to the October 17th Coalition while attacking Zeltzer. ?We are?honored to be visited by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has been fighting tirelessly for real health care reform and is taking time out of her busy schedule to break bread with her friends in the labor movement before she heads back to Washington, D.C..? wrote Paulson in a letter to union members. ?I have recently received an email put out by Steve Zeltzer and was saddened to learn that Zeltzer is trying to organize and smear our event by protesting the Speaker at our celebration of Labor Day. ?Our partners in the anti-war movement have been calling me to say they are condemning this protest as irresponsible and divisive. U.S. Labor Against the War has written an email condemning this action. The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition is also not supporting Zeltzer, and many progressive anti-war activists are emailing and calling the Labor Council to distance themselves from Zeltzer?s misguided efforts. ?This missive is just to let our friends know that you might be met outside the hotel by some protesters, but that almost unilaterally the labor and anti-war movements condemn these efforts.? ?What labor and anti-war movements?? San Franciscans might legitimately ask. For the historical record, and for illustrations of the political effectiveness of causing embarrassment and rocking the boat, the last picket of a San Francisco Labor Council event took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco on October 15, 1987. It was the annual dinner that the Labor Council hosted for the Israeli Labor Federation, the Histadrut, which had an office at a San Francisco union hall and whose close business ties with apartheid South Africa had been exposed in the Israeli press. It was also the first public event of the Labor Committee on the Middle East which had been co-founded by Steve Zeltzer and Blankfort earlier that August. The featured speaker was to be Mayor Willie Brown and Zeltzer and Blankfort wrote him requesting that, as an opponent of apartheid, he cancel the speaking invitation and make a public statement condemning the Histadrut. Needless to say, Brown refused and along with Walter Johnson, the executive director of the Labor Council at the time, and many of the guests, were forced to enter the hotel by a side entrance to avoid crossing our picket line. As a result of the protest, which garnered considerable publicity, there were no more Labor Council dinners honoring the Histadrut and shortly thereafter, it closed its office and left the city. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn at asis.com From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Sep 9 13:23:31 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 12:23:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The Firestorm Ahead in the Middle East - Immanuel Wallerstein In-Reply-To: <291201690.482711252442437842.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <460603465.848641252524211763.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=34025=34025&format=0 2009-09-01 The Firestorm Ahead by Immanuel Wallerstein There is a firestorm ahead in the Middle East for which neither the US government nor the US public is prepared. They seem scarcely aware how close it is on the horizon or how ferocious it will be. The US government (and therefore almost inevitably the US public) is deluding itself massively about its capacity to handle the situation in terms of its stated objectives. The storm will go from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Israel/Palestine, and in the classic expression "it will spread like wildfire." Let us start with Iraq. The United States has signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq, which went into effect on July 1. It provided for turning over internal security to the Iraqi government and, in theory, essentially restricting US forces to their bases and to some limited role in training Iraqi troops. Some of the wording of this agreement is ambiguous. Deliberately so, since that was the only way both sides would sign it. Even the first months of operation show how poorly this agreement is operating. The Iraqi forces have been interpreting it very strictly, formally forbidding both joint patrols and also any unilateral US military actions without prior detailed clearance with the government. It has gotten to the point that Iraqi forces are stopping US forces from passing checkpoints with supplies during daytime hours. The US forces have been chafing. They have tried to interpret the clause guaranteeing them the right of self-defense far more loosely than the Iraqi forces want. They are pointing to the upturn in violence in Iraq and therefore implicitly to the incapacity of Iraqi forces to guarantee order. The general commanding the US forces, Ray Odierno, is obviously extremely unhappy and is patently scheming to find excuses to reestablish a direct US role. Recently, he met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq and President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdish Regional Government. Odierno sought to persuade them to permit tripartite (Iraqi/Kurdish/American) joint patrols in Mosul and other areas of northern Iraq, in order to prevent or minimize violence. They politely agreed to consider his proposal. Unfortunately for Odierno, his plan would require a formal revision of the SOFA agreement. Originally, there was supposed to be a referendum in the beginning of July on popular approval of the SOFA agreement. The United States was afraid of losing the vote, which would have meant that all US forces would have had to be out of Iraq by Dec . 31, 2010, one full year earlier than the theoretical date in the SOFA agreement. The United States thought it was very clever in persuading al-Maliki to postpone this referendum to January 2010. Now it will be held in conjunction with the national elections. In the national elections, everyone will be seeking to obtain votes. No one is going to be campaigning in favor of a "yes" vote on the referendum. Lest this be in any doubt, al-Maliki is submitting a project to the Iraqi parliament that will permit a simple majority of "no" votes to annul the agreement. There will be a majority of "no" votes. There may even be an overwhelming majority of "no" votes. Odierno should be packing his bags now. I'll bet he still has the illusion that he can avoid the onset of the firestorm. He can't. What will happen next? At the present, but this may change between now and January , it looks like al-Maliki will win the election. He will do this by becoming the number one champion of Iraqi nationalism. He will make deals with all and sundry on this basis. Iraqi nationalism at the moment doesn't have much to do with Iran or Saudi Arabia or Israel or Russia. It means first of all liberating Iraq from the last vestiges of US colonial rule, which is how almost all Iraqis define what they have been living under since 2003. Will there be internal violence in Iraq? Probably, though possibly less than Odierno and others expect. But so what? Iraqi "liberation" ? which is what the entire Middle East will interpret a "no" vote on the referendum to be -- will immediately have a great impact on Afghanistan . There people will say, if the Iraqis can do it, so can we. Of course, the situation in Afghanistan is different, very different, from that of Iraq. But look at what is going on now with the elections in Afghanistan. We have a government put into power to contain and destroy the Taliban. The Taliban have turned out to be more tenacious and militarily effective than any one seemed ever to anticipate. Even the tough US commander there, Stanley McChrystal, has recognized that. The US military is now talking of "succeeding" in perhaps a decade. Soldiers who think they have a decade to win a war against insurgents have clearly not been reading military history. Notice the Afghan politicians themselves. Three leading candidates for the presidency, including President Hamid Karzai, debated on television the current internal war. They agreed on one thing. There must be some kind of political negotiations with the Taliban. They differed on the details. The US (and NATO) forces are there ostensibly to destroy the Taliban. And the leading Afghan politicians are debating how to come to political terms with them. There is a serious disjuncture here of appreciation of realities, or perhaps of political objectives. The polls -- for what they are worth -- are showing that the majority of Afghans want the NATO forces to leave and the majority of US voters want the same thing. Now look ahead to January 2010, when the Iraqis vote the United States out of Iraq. Remember that, before the Taliban came to power, the country was the site of fierce and ruthless fighting among competing warlords, each with different ethnic bases, to control the country. The United States was actually relieved when the Pakistani-backed Taliban took power. Order at last. There turned out to be a minor problem. The Taliban were serious about sharia and friendly to the emergent al-Qaeda. So, after 9/11, the United States, with west European approval and United Nations sanction, invaded. The Taliban were ousted from power -- for a little while. What will happen now? The Afghans will probably revert to the nasty continuing inter-ethnic wars of the warlords, with the Taliban just one more faction. The US public's tolerance for that war will evaporate entirely. All the internal factions and many of the neighbors (Russia, Iran, India, and Pakistan) will remain to fight over the pieces. And then stage three -- Pakistan. Pakistan is another complicated situation. But none of the players there trust the United States. And the polls there show that the Pakistani public thinks that the greatest danger to Pakistan is the United States, and that by an overwhelming vote. The traditional enemy, India, is far behind the United States in the polls. When Afghanistan crumbles into a full- fledged civil war, the Pakistani army will be very busy supporting the Taliban. They cannot support the Taliban in Afghanistan while fighting them in Pakistan. They will no longer be able to accept US drones bombing in Pakistan. So then comes stage four of the firestorm -- Israel/Palestine. The Arab world will observe the collapse of US projects in Iraq, Afghanistan , and Pakistan. The US project in Israel/Palestine is a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israelis are not going to budge an inch. But neither now, and especially after the rest of the firestorm, are the Palestinians. The one consequence will be the enormous pressure that other Arab states will put upon Fatah and Hamas to join forces. This will be over Mahmoud Abbas's dead body -- which might literally be the case. The whole Obama program will have gone up in flames. And the Republicans will make hay with it. They will call US defeat in the Middle East "betrayal" and it is obvious now that there is a large group inside the United States very receptive to such a theme. One either anticipates firestorms and does something useful, or one gets swept up in them. Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World (New Press). From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Sep 9 13:24:41 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 12:24:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Taking the Movement Out of the Obama White House In-Reply-To: <1858780347.476581252441851273.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <74405604.849451252524281619.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://open.salon.com/blog/david_sirota/2009/09/06/taking_the_movement_out_of_the_obama_white_house/ September 6, 2009 Taking the Movement Out of the Obama White House By David Sirota My column that was published on Friday of this week was about the difference between a political party and a political movement - and I can't say I'm happy to see the lessons of that difference being highlighted so intensely and so negatively as they are with today's news that Van Jones was forced out of the Obama administration (and let's be real clear, despite the "resignation" billing, the White House's pathetic behavior this week makes clear Jones was forced out by the higher ups). This is a serious tragedy for the progressive movement on three levels. First and foremost, Jones was one of the only movement progressives in a policymaking position in the Obama White House. By that I mean, he was one of the only people in the White House who came out of grassroots movement work and not just political/partisan hack work, and one of the only movement progressives put in a policymaking job, and not ghettoized into a political/tactical job. Whenever I got sick to my stomach at the thought of Obama's Team of Corporate Zombies - people like Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Jim Messina - running the show, I was able to at least tell myself that hey, someone like Van Jones is at least in there somewhere fighting the good fight as he always has. No more - and that's a damn shame. Second, Jones being forced out will not mollify the racists, crazies, tea baggers, Republican congresspeople and other assorted conservative freakshows - it will only embolden them. When lynch mobs in the Old South lynched someone, when a witchhunting band caught a target in Salem, when HUAC "proved" the supposed communism of its victims, that didn't calm them down - it only intensified their bloodlust because it made them believe they could be even more successful in the future. So if the White House's political "gurus" believe booting Jones was the safe and prudent way to mitigate right-wing hatred, then they are as short-sighted and stupid as they've proven themselves to be in mismanaging the summer's health care debate. Seriously, folks - if you think you can appease or mollify someone who takes to the public airwaves and does this, then you are as crazy as that screaming lunatic is. Finally, the Jones announcement will inevitably create a chilling effect on the aspirations of other movement progressives. Van is a fantastic person who has done fantastic work. He's kept his advocacy real and didn't compromise his principles. And so when he was appointed to a high-level White House job, it seemed to validate that you could, in fact, keep it real and also advance in American politics and government. That is to say, his story seemed to prove that an outsider could also succeed on the inside - and that outside advocacy doesn't automatically prohibit you from one day working on the inside. Now, though, because of today's announcement, that lesson has been rewritten. Jones being tossed from the White House says that even in an administration headed by a former community organizer, progressive movement activists (as opposed to far-right conservative movement activists who are celebrated in D.C.) probably cannot hope to ever enter or rise in government.* I'm not saying that's an ironclad rule - but that is the message of this particular event, and you better believe that all the movement activists who know Jones or looked to him as a hero will get that message loud and clear. And that's a tragedy. The obvious rejoinder to these points is that Jones supposedly brought this on himself by long ago making a mistake and signing a misguided petition about 9/11. Obviously, he made a mistake** - and he admitted that. But even if you don't accept that apology or admission of fault, the idea that him signing that petition means he's worthy of removal is just a pathetic argument that highlights the most damning hypocrisies of all. For instance, are we really expected to believe that Jones signing one random petition is a bigger problem than, say, Geithner accepting free room and board for the industry he is supposed to be regulating? I could make a huge list of such contrasts, including the tellingly different media/political Establishment treatments of "birthers" (cheered on) and "truthers" (totally ostracized) - but you get the point: the entire brouhaha about Jones supposedly awful transgressions is manufactured, considering the genuinely problematic transgressions of so many other White House officials are treated as no problem at all. Let me just end this post by saying I'm sincerely disappointed about Jones getting kicked out of the White House for all three reasons I've laid out above - and also because I've been personally inspired by the guy. I've seen him speak, read his work and met him at the Democratic convention here in Denver. Out of all the activists and leaders I've met in more than a decade in movement politics, he's really one of the best. And while I hope - and expect - Jones will be back in movement politics soon, losing him as a voice in an Obama administration that is so mobbed up with corporate sycophants and political hacks is a real bummer. * For the 9/11 truthers out there, let me just say this: Yes, there is ample evidence that the government was grossly negligent in ignoring intelligence warnings about 9/11. And yes, there is evidence that the government has not been all that forthcoming about acknowledging that fact. To say that is not controversial at all - it's verifiably true, and to support better efforts to uncover the evidence around 9/11 isn't controversial either. But no, there is no evidence that proves or strongly suggests the government deliberately orchestrated 9/11. The 9/11 Truth movement has tried to aggressively harass/intimidate almost every person in public life - me, Van Jones, and everyone else - in an attempt to force people to sign onto its statements that the government wasn't just negligent, but orchestrated 9/11. These people are absolutely incessant - and their tactics and statements attempting to equate governmental negligence with governmental orchestration is as offensive as it is awful. It's the worst mix of bullying and conspiracy theorism - and it's not merely "controversial," it's unacceptable and it needs to end. ** By the way, that message is especially true for African American movement activists, because let's just be honest - the fact that the right chose to mount a hysteria campaign specifically around an African American, Jones, was no coincidence. The right didn't just randomly pick some mid-level guy working on noncontroversial issues (green jobs) - they were specifically looking for a black guy with movement politics in his background. Remember, he was targeted WAY BEFORE the 9/11 stuff ever came out - in other words, the right-wing started attacking him before those conservative voices ever even KNEW about the 9/11 controversy. Hence, we can be assured the original targeting of Jones was a calculated move with race in mind - a move designed to fit the criticism into a larger racial backlash framework first perfected in the 1980s. That framework has created a simple reality: In America, governmental advancement is wide open for right-wing movement players, and you can even vaguely hope for a seat at the political table if you are a white progressive former hippe-turned-yuppie liberal. But if you are a black person with any enduring loyalty to progressive movement or social justice activism, the loud and clear message from politicians and the media is that you are not welcome anywhere near the halls of power, because you will be billed as some nefarious combination of Al Sharpton, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Willie Horton. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Sep 9 13:24:21 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 12:24:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] California's Real Death Panels In-Reply-To: <350300226.477501252441957665.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <365128265.849211252524261020.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.calnurses.org/media-center/press-releases/2009/september/california-s-real-death-panels-insurers-deny-21-of-claims.html California Nurses Association For Immediate Release September 2, 2009 California's Real Death Panels: Insurers Deny 21% of Claims PacifiCare's Denials 40%, Cigna's 33% in First Half of 2009 More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient's physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation's biggest state, according to data released Wednesday by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. CNA/NNOC researchers analyzed data reported by the insurers to the California Department of Managed Care. From 2002 through June 30, 2009, six of the largest insurers operating in California rejected 47.7 million claims for care -- 22 percent of all claims. The data will be presented by Don DeMoro, director of CNA/NNOC's research arm, the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy, at CNA/NNOC's biennial convention next Tuesday, Sept. 8 in San Francisco. The convention will also feature a panel presentation from nurse leaders in Canada, Great Britain, and Australia exploding the myths about their national healthcare systems. "With all the dishonest claims made by some politicians about alleged 'death panels' in proposed national legislation, the reality for patients today is a daily, cold-hearted rejection of desperately needed medical care by the nation's biggest and wealthiest insurance companies simply because they don't want to pay for it," said Deborah Burger, RN, CNA/NNOC co-president. For the first half of 2009, as the national debate over healthcare reform was escalating, the rejection rates are even more striking. Claims denial rates by leading California insurers, first six months of 2009: a.. PacifiCare -- 39.6 percent b.. Cigna -- 32.7 percent c.. HealthNet -- 30 percent d.. Kaiser Permanente -- 28.3 percent e.. Blue Cross -- 27.9 percent f.. Aetna -- 6.4 percent "Every claim that is denied represents a real patient enduring pain and suffering. Every denial has real, sometimes fatal consequences," said Burger. PacifiCare, for example, denied a special procedure for treatment of bone cancer for Nick Colombo, a 17-year-old teen from Placentia, Calif. Again, after protests organized by Nick's family and friends, CNA/NNOC, and netroots activists, PacifiCare reversed its decision. But like Nataline Sarkisyan, the delay resulted in critical time lost, and Nick ultimately died. "This was his last effort and the procedure had worked before with people in Nick's situation," said his older brother Ricky. Cigna gained notoriety two years ago for denying a liver transplant to 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan of Northridge, Calif. and then reversing itself, tragically too late to save her life. In 2008, six days before RN Kim Kutcher of Dana Point, Calif., was scheduled to have special back surgery, Blue Cross denied authorization for the procedure as "investigational" even though the lumbar artificial disc she was to receive had FDA approval. At the time of denial, which she calls "insurance hell," Kutcher had "already gone through pre-op testing, donated a unit of blood, had appointments with four physicians." Kutcher paid $60,000 out of pocket for the operation and is still fighting Blue Cross. Rejection of care is a very lucrative business for the insurance giants. The top 18 insurance giants racked up $15.9 billion in profits last year. "The routine denial of care by private insurers is like the elephant in the room no one in the present national healthcare debate seems to want to talk about," Burger said. "Nothing in any of the major bills advancing in the Senate or House or proposed by the administration would challenge this practice." "The United States remains the only country in the industrialized world where human lives are sacrificed for private profit, a national disgrace that seems on the verge of perpetuation," she said. CNA/NNOC supports an alternative approach, expanding Medicare to cover all Americans, which would give the U.S. a national system similar to what exists in other nations. Data released in late August by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which tracks developed nations, found that among 30 industrial nations, the U.S. ranks last in life expectancy at birth for men, and 24th for women. From shniad at sfu.ca Wed Sep 9 13:27:36 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 12:27:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Lockerbie Part of a Bigger Story In-Reply-To: <1607393650.423761252436004601.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1405288025.851381252524456968.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/30-0 Toronto Sun August 30, 2009 Lockerbie Part of a Bigger Story By Eric Margolis Libya's Moammar Khadaffy, once branded "the mad dog of the Middle East" by Ronald Reagan, is celebrating 40 years in power in spite of a score of attempts by western powers and his Arab "brothers" to kill him. In 1987, I was invited to interview Khadaffy. We spent an evening together in his Bedouin tent. He led me by the hand through the ruins of his personal quarters, bombed a year earlier by the U.S. in an attempt to assassinate him. Khadaffy showed me where his two-year old daughter had been killed by a 1,000-pound bomb. "Why are the Americans trying to kill me, Mister Eric?" he asked, genuinely puzzled. I told him because Libya was harbouring all sorts of anti-western revolutionary groups, from Palestinian firebrands to IRA bombers and Nelson Mandela's ANC. To the naive Libyans, they were all legitimate "freedom fighters." Last week, a furor erupted over the release of a dying Libyan agent, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, convicted of the destruction of an American airliner over Scotland in 1988. Hypocrisy on all sides abounded. Washington and London blasted Libya and Scotland's justice minister while denying claims al-Megrahi was released in exchange new oil deals with Libya. The Pan Am 103 crime was part of a bigger, even more sordid story. What goes around comes around. 1986: Libya is accused of bombing a Berlin disco, killing two U.S. servicemen. A defector from Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, claims it framed Libya. Khadaffy demands Arabs increase oil prices. 1987: The U.S. tries to kill Khadaffy but fails. Eighty-eight Libyan civilians die. 1988: France wages a secret desert war with Libya over mineral-rich Chad. France's secret service, SDECE, is ordered to kill Khadaffy. A bomb is put on Khadaffy's private jet but, after Franco-Libyan relations abruptly improve, the bomb is removed before it explodes. 1988: The U.S. intervenes on Iraq's side in its eight-year war against Iran. A U.S. navy Aegis cruiser, Vincennes, violates Iranian waters and "mistakenly" shoots down an Iranian civilian Airbus airliner in Iran's air space. All 288 civilians aboard die. Then vice-president George H.W. Bush vows, "I'll never apologize ... I don't care what the facts are." The Vincennes' trigger-happy captain is decorated with the Legion of Merit medal for this crime by Bush after he becomes president. Washington quietly pays Iran $131.8 million US in damages. Five months later, Pan Am 103 with 270 aboard is destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland. The U.S. and Britain pressure Scotland to convict al-Megrahi, who insists he is innocent. Serious questions are raised about the trial, with claims CIA faked evidence to blame Libya. Some intelligence experts believe the attack was revenge for the downing of the Iranian airliner, carried out by Mideast contract killers paid by Iran. Serious doubts about al-Megrahi's guilt were voiced by Scotland's legal authorities. An appeal was underway. Libyans believed he was a sacrificial lamb handed over to save Libya from a crushing U.S. and British-led oil export boycott. 1989: A French UTA airliner with 180 aboard is blown up over Chad. A Congolese and a Libyan agent are accused. French investigators indict Khadaffy's brother-in-law, Abdullah Senoussi, head of Libyan intelligence, with whom I dined in Tripoli. Libya blames the attack on rogue mid-level agents but pays French families $170 million US. I believe al-Megrahi was probably innocent and framed. Scotland was right to release him. But Libya was guilty as hell of the UTA crime, which likely was revenge for France's attempt to kill Khadaffy. Pan Am 103 probably was revenge for America's destruction of the Iranian Airbus. In 1998, Britain's MI6 spy agency tried to kill Khadaffy with a car bomb. In the end, the West badly wanted Libya's high grade oil. So Libya bought its way out of sanctions with $2.7 billion US total in damages. The U.S., Britain, France and Italy then invested $8 billion US in Libya's oil industry and proclaimed Khadaffy an ally and new best friend. Happy birthday, Moammar. From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Wed Sep 9 20:52:51 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 19:52:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Obama Sells Out To Insurance Industry, Channeling My Angry Young Man Message-ID: <509150.677.qm@web43514.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> ? Bumble Bumming Around With Jack, Future Shock Internet Devaluation and Obama Gets Ready. Obama Speaks Sweet Nothings, Time To Push For Change, My Life As An Angry Young Man I caught the last part of Obama?s speech tonight driving home from work. I got the part from where he was listing things like Tit and butt examinations as part of the plan. That was probably more than I needed to know, but I am glad he mentioned some of the things he plans to cover. I liked the bit he read from Ted. It teared me up a little. I didn?t think a political speech could do that too me any more, but I was all choked up there for a minute, like a sad dog story will. You know the loyal dog that gets dragged on the road by its master, like that bit from National Lampoon?s Family vacation. Sad. No I am not a total cynic. I knew Obama was going to waffle on the public plan. The last bit that would make this a decent health care plan and he was ready to let it go. Even Congress Woman Lee, a real Liberal from Oakland barely could get any enthusiasm to mention single payer she was so enamoured with Obama. The rest is just a win fall for the insurance companies disguised as reform. They are getting exactly what they want, mandatory insurance. The companies get us all and we get no option. We are screwed coming and going. Thanks Obama, thanks progressive caucus. Not one Republican made even the slightest move to meet you, and you just about bent over and said do it now. I am so sick of these half hearted liberals and their imaginary reforms. When it gets down to the nitty gritty, they all wimp out. Dean was the only one I heard tonight with any fire left in his belly for the public option. The rest of it seemed to be rollover and play dead and listen to the president make nice noises. If Obama is going to suck up and kiss Republican ass on tort reform, like Biden did with the Bankruptcy laws, then he at least should get the public option for it in exchange. Period. Otherwise I say release the hounds, send the Attorney General on a witch hunt and go after every Republican operative who supported the War in Iraq, who supported torture and don?t let up until they agree to stop blocking on health care. Nixon and Johnson knew how to play down and dirty, even Kennedy did. What is wrong with Obama? Is he affraid to get his hands dirty? Make them pay for all the dirty games they have been playing this summer. Done with that. I knew it would be a bunch of sweet rhetoric and it was. We have to let them know we want real reform not this bending over for the insurance companies. Last night I had a hard time sleeping. I woke up thinking about all the evil I have done. I was thinking how I need to use that evil nasty shit kicker side of my nature to get things done. I was thinking about the nasty things Peter has said I did in the past and he was right. I did piss on an altar and walked checks at bistros in Boulder when I was a starving artist. Hell back then I had shoes with holes in them. I used to have to stuff newspapers in the bottom of my shoes to walk to work in the snow. I used to eat leftover macaroni and cheese from the day care center run by my buddy Howard?s mother. I used to live in an unheated room in the middle of below zero Boulder winter weather. When I left the spiritual commune I had no money and used to sleep on the chairs at the restaurant I worked at as a dish washer. The three of us, Howard, Peter and I were known as the Wrecking Crew. We terrorized downtown Boulder, not with anything serious, petty larceny, symbolic and poetic gestures mostly. We drove around in Peters VW with the Sex Pistols blasting!! We were bad for Boulder, tame by modern standards. We were angry young men hanging out at the Dunkin Donuts all night drinking bottomless cups of coffee and writing poetry about our alienation. We did our punk rock Radio show on KGNU, we had our band the Dancing Assholes, we put on shows at the local Free School and put together a punk fanzine. That was when I founded the Colorado chapter of Rock Against Racism. I tried to organize a union at a couple of places and got blacklisted in Colorado. I ended up only being able to work at the recycling plant as a bottle smasher Yeah I was a little mean, and I had an attitude that said fuck you church and state. I was kicked out of school, left the commune I lived in because my best buddy and my girlfriend were sleeping together in the next room. I was glad to be out of that hypocritical BS where they preached about love and honesty and fucked you over when your back was turned just like any other corrupt social structure. When Peter met me I was pissed off and ready to riot. That was when I started to believe in direct action, to throw bricks through piggy business windows and I protested gentrification, against racism, against capitalism, against nukes, against any and everything that seemed wrong in the world. When I was in my twenties I was ready to blow a fuse and at one point I was about 5 minutes away from picking up a gun and joining the hard core revolution. But by 1980 when I was ready most of those groups like the Red Army Fraction and Badder Meinhof and the Red Brigades and the SLA and the Black Dragon Group and Black Liberation Army and the Weathermen had all been broken up and become inactive. When they were going underground in the early seventies I joined the spiritual commune. I was ready to make the society that we dreamed of a reality. But by the late seventies I was fed up with the power trips and the false spiritual leadership in the group. I was ready for the revolution but it wasn?t ready for me. I guess I was lucky. If I had joined it in the early seventies I might be dead by now. Instead I waited and when I wanted to bust a move, the only thing left was gang banging. Last night I felt the weight of the misery of my anger. How it has served me both to ill effect and to help me persevere when a weaker person might have gone under. It got me through the Reagan years of hell and the Clinton years of hypocrisy and the Bush years of more hell. Now I guess I had better get ready for more hypocrisy but I am older and a little wiser, perhaps. At least I can see what is in front of me and understand where it comes from. I rage against the machine in my own way, but I know how to chill and cope with my own frustration a little better. I am still learning the meaning of the old saw, organize don?t agonize. I am ready do do one more round of attempts to encourage the Democrats to stand for something besides selling out to corporate greed. Then I am going to work for the Green Party, and for libertarian communism in our time. Perhaps this is a waste of time, but I still can feel my heart pounding and feel the blood coursing through my veins. As long as there is life, there is hope. Revolution or evolution, but change must happen in our lifetimes!!! Tags: Channeling My Angry Young Man In Middle Age, Obama Speech On Health Care, Time for Real Reform From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Wed Sep 9 23:07:35 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:07:35 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] More Than One Way ... Message-ID: <20090910140735.cbee12d1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> ... to Reclaim the Power to Create Money. An Open Letter to the American Monetary Institute by Ellen Brown webofdebt.wordpress.com (August 28 2009) Sirs: This is in response to the entry posted on your American Monetary Institute blog on August 16 2009, which references my articles on a state-owned bank solution to the credit crisis. I was disappointed to read that you thought my proposal was "an insult to humanity", as the idea was actually drawn from the AMI's book The Lost Science of Money (2002). I do quite a bit of writing and speaking, and I always follow your lead in saying the ideal monetary model is that established in Benjamin Franklin's colony of Pennsylvania, which not only spent but lent money into the economy, through its own publicly-owned bank. The Lost Science of Money calls it "Pennsylvania's Superior Money System". On pages 370-71, your book quotes Pennsylvania Governor William Keith, who wrote of the province's founding of a publicly-owned bank: "It is inconceivable to think what a prodigious good effect immediately ensued on all the affairs of that province ... The poor middling people who had any lands or houses to pledge, borrowed from the loan office, and paid off their usurious creditors. The few rich men who had before this [quit] the trade - except that of usury - were obliged to build ships, and launch out again into trade." It is submitted that our proposals aim for the same thing - reclaiming the money power for the people themselves. We would just get there by different routes. My public bank would create credit on its books, lend it, and charge interest on it. You would have a public entity create money and lend it to private banks at interest, which would then lend it to consumers and businesses at interest. The private banks in your scheme would no doubt tack their interest costs onto the interest charged to the end borrowers, since banks are in the business of making a profit, and that is the only way they could make a profit in your system. My proposal would just eliminate the profits to the private banker middlemen. Banking would become a non-profit public service, with the interest returned to the public purse. You maintain that publicly-owned banks are "mainly a distraction from genuine reform of the system, as encapsulated in the proposed American Monetary Act". Indeed, much in that Act is excellent; but it would leave the determination of how much credit is available in the economy to a central planning board, when the money supply needs to be flexible, expanding and contracting organically in response to the needs of trade. The American Monetary Act gives the final word on the money supply to the Secretary of the Treasury, under the guidance of an independent monetary board. Today, that would be Timothy Geithner. Trusting Timothy Geithner to determine the day to day credit needs of the country would be the equivalent of trusting the Russian Soviet to accurately determine how many size nine shoes its population needed. When the pot of available funds decreed by the Treasurer ran out, creditworthy borrowers would be turned away, and the economy would falter. Ready credit is what makes an economy run smoothly, and its availability should not be subject to the whims of a political body. Credit-money is created when creditworthy borrowers take out loans. Banks merely "monetize" the borrowers' promise to repay. As The Lost Science of Money makes clear, "money" is not a commodity but is created by legal agreement. Credit-money is created when the "full faith and credit" of the community is advanced to the borrower. The function of the banker is just to oversee the agreement, acting as the middleman who advances the funds and collects them back. Publicly-owned banks are the most efficient and cost-effective way to get ready credit into the economy. They are not a temporary stopgap measure, any more than the land bank of the colony of Pennsylvania was. You have divided your objections to state-owned banks into two groups, "moral" and "technical", with separate numbering for each. I will follow your numbering in addressing these points. Moral Objections 1. You state that for a public bank to engage in "fractional reserve" lending - that is, to create credit on its books - is immoral. That appears to me to be a mischaracterization of the problem. What is immoral is the private creation of money. Both our proposals are attempting to overcome that flaw. I am just suggesting that publicly-owned banks are the most direct and practical means to that end. Congress is now owned by Wall Street, as Congressmen themselves are complaining. States, on the other hand, still have some autonomy. 2. You state that banks cannot create credit on their books but can make loans only against 90 to 95% of their deposits. This is no longer true. Federal Reserve data establishes that the reserve requirement is now essentially obsolete. For a detailed discussion, see Jake Towne, "Yes, Virginia, There Are No Reserve Requirements (Part 2)", August 12 2009, establishing that "reserve requirements are effectively not in existence and easily avoided by accounting tricks in the US banking system". See also Eric deCarbonnel, "US Banks Operating Without Reserve Requirements" (March 29 2009), stating, "Although, under current regulations, all depository institutions are required to maintain reserves against transaction (checking) deposits, the reality is they don't". Both articles are supported with Federal Reserve data. What limits bank lending today is chiefly the capital requirement, and states are in a far better position to meet that requirement than private banks are. Banks must have Tier One capital equal to four percent of loans and other risk-weighted assets, and they must have combined Tier One plus Tier Two capital of eight percent of risk-weighted assets. Tier Two capital includes several things, but the most interesting here is the appreciated value of unencumbered real assets. For a private bank, that typically means only the building that houses it; but a state has buildings, prisons, parks, et cetera peppered all over the state. It has a HUGE asset base, so it basically does not have to worry about Tier Two capital at all. That just leaves Tier One capital, which is essentially the bank's own money. For a private bank, that generally means the capital contributed by shareholders and the interest earned on loans. Again, a state has a huge amount of money of its own. A friendly regulator could count the state's whole revenue base as Tier One capital. But let's say that the state wants to dot all the i's and cross all the t's by actually setting aside enough Tier One capital to please the regulators. At four percent, $1 billion would be enough to create $25 billion in credit - virtually enough to meet California's $26 billion budget deficit in one fell swoop. You say that this would just be a loan, which has to be paid back; but that is not necessarily the case. The state owns the bank, so it can roll the loan over as long as needed; and the interest returns to its own coffers, so the loan is essentially interest-free. The federal government has been rolling over its debt since the days of Andrew Jackson. For a state to create interest-free money on its books and roll the loans over indefinitely produces the same result you wish to achieve - an interest-free government-issued money supply. In both our schemes, the government gets the money interest-free, while private borrowers get it with an interest charge attached. You say that only the federal government, not the states, can create money under the Constitution; but this is not true. The Constitution forbids states only to issue "bills of credit", which has been interpreted to mean paper money. US Supreme Court case law holds that a state can own a bank, and that the banknotes issued by the bank are not the sorts of "bills of credit" forbidden to the states by the Constitution. Banks no longer issue banknotes, but the principle still holds: bank-created money is not forbidden to governments any more than to private banks. We know that private banks create money. In fact, they create virtually all of our money. The ownership of the bank will not affect the bank's ability to create credit on its books. Rather, it will just achieve our mutually desired end of transferring the power to create money from private to public control. 3. "The problem is being misidentified as interest", you maintain, "when the problem is debt". You argue that all money could be created interest-free by the government, just as coins are today; and that this would save the taxpayers money. I totally agree with that: Congress should issue money outright. That was the model followed in the colony of Pennsylvania, which we agree was the ideal model. Congress should create not just coins but paper dollar bills and accounting entry money. But that is a completely different issue from consumer credit or debt. You are not proposing to eliminate banks that charge interest to borrowers; you would just tack an extra interest charge on by making banks borrow from the government as the ultimate creator of credit. Under my proposed system, as in yours, the government would be the ultimate issuer of credit; but with a bank that was state-owned, the extra interest drawn off by private banker middlemen would be eliminated. Technical Objections 1. You state that "no bank's an island ... If the other banks aren't lending, a State-run bank wouldn't be able to lend either". Today, the other banks are not lending because they are not able to meet the capital requirement for additional loans; and this is because the "shadow lenders" have disappeared - the investors who were taking loans off their books, making room for more loans. A state-owned bank would have huge capital and deposit bases and a clean set of books, and therefore would have a huge capacity for lending as and where needed. It would not be dependent on other banks to meet its reserve requirement, which as noted above is now essentially obsolete. 2. You caution about following the model of the Bank of North Dakota, which you warn is playing with fire because it is not FDIC insured and could be subject to a bank run. In fact, the FDIC is now broke - literally. Its own funds offer little if any protection. In a few months it will have to start borrowing from the government. If the banks were owned by the government in the first place, this problem would have been obviated. 3. You say that a state bank would take deposits away from other banks, reducing the lending ability of those banks. However, the overall credit capacity of the system would not be reduced; the business would just move to the state-owned bank, as well it should if the latter can provide superior service at cheaper rates. The State of California has $17.6 billion in demand deposits and NOW deposits, which could be moved at will; and most of the banks it has them at actually turned down California's request to honor its IOUs. Some of those banks got taxpayer bailout money specifically to keep credit flowing to the states and consumers, an obligation they have clearly failed to fulfill. California owes them nothing and has every right to remove its deposits from those banks into its own. That is free-market capitalism. More than that, it is a matter of survival. Why should we be feeding parasitic out-of-state banks that aren't helping us in return? The Bank of North Dakota was set up in exactly those circumstances: the farmers were losing their farms to the Wall Street bankers, so they set up their own credit system to escape the Wall Street maelstrom - and it worked, brilliantly well. 4. You state that the meager benefits of forming a state-owned bank would not be worth the costs. However, you are looking at a very limited range of benefits. Let's consider again California. With its enormous capital base, California could generate enormous amounts of credit, which could be used to refinance its existing debt; and since the state would own the bank, it would pocket the interest. California pays $5 billion yearly in interest alone - as much as some states' whole budgets. Just that savings would make a state-owned bank worth the trouble; but a state-owned bank could serve more purposes than that. It could eliminate the cost of borrowing for income-generating projects such as infrastructure, low-cost housing, and alternative energy development. On average, interest has been calculated to compose fifty percent of the cost of every project. Moreover, the state wouldn't have to scramble around looking for a loan when it needed one, knuckling under to inflated interest rates. On the question of costs, today a bank can be set up on the Internet, without even the cost of a physical building. 5. You suggest that negotiating better terms with existing banks would be more cost-effective than setting up a new bank. Again, you are overestimating the costs and underestimating the potential benefits of a state-owned bank. 6. You write, "We citizens have only so much energy and time to devote to changing our world for the better. Diverting good people into nonsense condemns us to continue suffering unnecessarily. This time of crisis must be used for real reform, not diversions." I agree with that. The economy is in an emergency state. We cannot afford to wait for a Congress that has been captured by the same private money-creating monopoly from which we are trying to free ourselves. Your plan represents a far more radical diversion from the status quo than mine and is therefore a harder sell to make to basically clueless politicians. A state-owned bank has already been operating very successfully for ninety years in one pioneer state, and following that model would require doing nothing different from what banks do now. How can regulators object, when we'll be satisfying all their requirements? In fact, the shift will seem so minor that its significance is liable to be missed. Even committed monetary reformers like yourselves have apparently missed its implications and potential. Through state-owned banks that create money on their books, we can achieve what Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and William Jennings Bryan all aimed to achieve: a publicly-created money supply issued by the people for the people. http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/more-than-one-way-to-reclaim-the-power-to-create-money-an-open-letter-to-the-american-monetary-institute/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From tchilds at resist.ca Wed Sep 9 23:13:41 2009 From: tchilds at resist.ca (tchilds at resist.ca) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:13:41 +0000 Subject: [R-G] Video resource - Kyoto Plus petition PSA - www.kyotoplus.ca Message-ID: <1684320500-1252559621-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-681381403-@bda699.bisx.prod.on.blackberry> Spread it around. tc http://m.youtube.com/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dkzx1ycLXQSE&v=kzx1ycLXQSE Sent on the TELUS Mobility network with BlackBerry From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:43:26 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:43:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] =?utf-8?q?Israeli_government_ad_says_intermarried_Jews_are_?= =?utf-8?b?4oCYbG9zdOKAmQ==?= In-Reply-To: <1612110582.970171252537017678.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <362055829.92291252604606562.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/take-a-look-at-the-israeli-government-ad-that-says-intermarried-jews-are-lost.html Mondoweiss September 3, 2009 Take a look at the Israeli government ad that says intermarried Jews are ?lost? by Philip Weiss You can see the Israeli government-paid ad that says that intermarried Jews in the United States are "lost" here . Look at the poor Feldman?s and Fine?s and Jacobs?s pictured in the ads, most of them young men. This could be a big story, if the media would unblinker itself. The ad encapsulates the problem with a state that is tied so directly to ethnicity. It has to ethnically cleanse Jerusalem. It has to have grossly-discriminatory immigration policies. It has to have separate roadways. And now it has to proselytize the race in other countries like Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo preaching against the "mongrelization" of the white race. It?s surely offensive to people like? say, Dennis Ross, or Andrea Koppel, or Arthur Sulzberger Jr, or descendants of the late Richard Hofstadter ? all the product of intermarriage. Is any US tax money paying for this? Dana Goldstein : "On a more personal note, this policing of personal lives ? the guilt attached to the circumstance of loving someone who is not Jewish ? has always been one of the elements that pushed me away from organized Judaism, after being raised in a conservative shul. This ad is an embarrassing misstep, and sure to alienate many of the Jews it is intended to reach." From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:44:30 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:44:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Why not sanctions for Israel and the US? In-Reply-To: <1391669327.960221252536080706.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1145474401.92941252604670108.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/Why-not-sanctions-for-Israel-.html Aljazeera Magazine 03/09/2009 Why not sanctions for Israel? Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have lived in for centuries? No, that?s what Israel has been doing. By Paul Craig Roberts In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for ?crippling sanctions? against Iran. The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the U.S. and NATO. Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran? Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure? No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the U.S. Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have occupied for centuries and herding them into ghettoes? No, that?s what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years. What is Iran doing? Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran?s nuclear energy program is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program. The position taken by Israel, and by Israel?s puppet in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program. In other words, Israel and the U.S. claim the right to abrogate Iran?s right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/U.S. position has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the United States. The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as we know, U.S. help. As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm. Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an apartheid state, as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book, Palestine : Peace Not Apartheid. The U.S. led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South Africa?s apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is ?anti-semitic? to criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent. What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints. The Israeli government?s explanation for its gross violation of human rights comprises one of the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the exception of American ?Christian Zionists,? believes one word of it. The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. is over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. public, the UN and NATO, the U.S. government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the ?war on terror? that Washington orchestrated to overturn U.S. civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America?s crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq?s professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The U.S. government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the U.S. qualifies a thousand times over. No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered by the U.S. in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the U.S. military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military situation in Afghanistan is ?serious and deteriorating.? Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the U.S. armaments industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the United States. What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan and already the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more. Obama is escalating America?s war of aggression against the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan. Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday for Israel?s military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral Mullen declared that the U.S. will always stand with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel murders. No matter how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes, villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the United States and Israel. Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health care. Yet, the U.S. government continues to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on wars that serve no U.S. purpose. President Obama and General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public be damned. It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and the U.S. military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and deception. Many governments are complicit in America?s war crimes. With Obama?s budget deep in the red, Washington?s wars of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America?s wars of aggression against Muslims stop. The U.S. is not a forever ?superpower? that can indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law. The U.S. will eventually fall as a result of its hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes court? -- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com . -- Middle East Online From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:46:27 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:46:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Will US, Canada and NATO back Karzai despite "clear and convincing evidence of fraud"? In-Reply-To: <691082901.964951252536490772.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1942442826.94401252604787965.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Vancouver Sun September 9, 2009 Afghanistan ?s election unlikely to deliver legitimate mandate Electoral fraud was assured months ago when Karzai began to ally himself with regional warlords, drug traffickers and top officials in the provinces who feared losing their jobs if he was defeated. By Jonathan Manthorpe It is now next to impossible to imagine Afghanistan's election last month producing a credible result or a president with a clear and legitimate mandate to govern. The announcement on Tuesday by the ultimate arbiters of the election result, the United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, that it has found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" and that there must be a recount of many votes means that the marred credibility of the Aug. 20 election is almost beyond retrieving. Just look at the numbers. To begin with, the turnout was very low because people feared violence from the Taliban, whose six-year insurgency has spread from their heartland in southern Afghanistan and the porous border region with Pakistan into the previously peaceful north of the country. Only about 4.3 million ballots were cast, representing less than a third of the 15 million registered voters. But already the body overseeing the vote counting, the independent Election Commission, has discarded close to half a million ballots as either fraudulent or invalid. Now the Complaints Commission says that it has found a "clear pattern" of fraud, most of it on behalf of incumbent President Hamid Karzai. There is evidence that supporters of Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious voting stations where no one voted, but where hundreds of thousands of votes were recorded for the president. Karzai's supporters also took over about 800 of the 25,000 legitimate voting stations and registered tens of thousands of fraudulent votes for the president through them. For example, in Kandahar province where Canadian forces are the lead element in NATO's efforts to bring security and stability, ballot boxes contained 350,000 votes, mostly for Karzai, were sent for counting. But election officials believe that only about 25,000 people in the province went to the polls. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, one of the best and most knowledgeable observers of Afghanistan, says electoral fraud was assured months ago when Karzai began to ally himself with regional warlords, drug traffickers and top officials in the provinces who feared losing their jobs if he was defeated. So the unappetizing prospect now is that the United States, Canada and the other NATO allies with more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan will find themselves propping up the unsavoury and deeply corrupt Karzai when few Afghans either voted for him or regard his re-election as credible. That raises the danger, voiced by Karzai's main challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, of ethnic and political civil war among the followers of rival candidates. Of course, the Taliban is already heartened by what it sees as its victory in effectively preventing a legitimate election. The Taliban's success on the ground is a major reason why the U.S. and NATO need a credible and reliable president in Kabul. Officials in Washington and the NATO headquarters in Brussels are assessing options for a new approach to the Afghan war sent to them last week by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Whatever comes out of this review -- and it will probably involve sending up to 40,000 troops in addition to the 103,000 already there -- is intended to mesh with the reconstruction strategy put forward by U.S. President Barack Obama in March. This puts emphasis on developing agriculture, job creation and the justice system. That's undoubtedly where the emphasis needs to be, but the 18 months the administration says it needs for Afghans to see the benefits and turn away from the Taliban is probably too optimistic. Two to three years is more realistic and with more than 50 per cent of Americans now saying they want the troops home, Obama may not have that much time. He is already under attack from both the political right and left by people who point out that the main reason for invading Afghanistan eight years ago was to destroy al-Qaida. But al-Qaida is now operating in Pakistan as well as Africa and Europe, and can be attacked by means other than propping up a distasteful regime in Kabul. Those arguments don't hold water, but Obama and other NATO country leaders are going to have an increasingly tough time persuading citizens the Afghan game is worth the candle. jmanthorpe at vancouversun.com From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:45:25 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:45:25 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Tom Tomorrow with Goofus and Gallant In-Reply-To: <1092784247.1015621252542637637.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <2082287805.93721252604725894.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> . From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:42:52 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:42:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike In-Reply-To: <1902627647.1019741252543666354.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1652629061.92011252604572859.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09092009.html September 9, 2009 Action Against Wave of "Racist" Measures Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike Israel?s annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 per cent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave. By JONATHAN COOK in Nazareth. The increasingly harsh political climate in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?s right-wing government has prompted the leadership of the country?s 1.3 million Arab citizens to call the first general strike in several years. The one-day stoppage is due to take place on October 1, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police. The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called ?racist? government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state. ?In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts,? said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel. ?This attitude is feeding down to the streets.? Confrontations between the country?s Arab minority and Mr Netanyahu?s coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures. The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of the ?nakba?, or catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state; and banned political demands for ending Israel?s status as a Jewish state. Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped. But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when the education minister, Gideon Saar, presented educational reforms to mark the start of the new school year. He confirmed plans to drop the word ?nakba? from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism. He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service. Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place. Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Mr Saar ?must understand that he is the education minister, not the defence minister?. The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands of more classrooms and is massively underfunded ? up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than an Arab one, according to surveys. Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last month showed that Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes. Mr Netanyau, who accompanied Mr Saar on a tour of schools last week, appeared to give his approval to the proposed reforms: ?We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land.? Mr Barakeh also accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. ?Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs ? the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever.? Mr Barakeh was referring to a raft of recent proposals. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced last month that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service. Of the foreign ministry?s 980 employees only 15 are Arab, a pattern reflected across the civil service sector according to Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organisation. The housing minister, Ariel Atias, has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, ?more Jewish?. The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks. The transport minister, Israel Katz, has insisted that road signs include placenames only as they are spelt in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth. Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. Last month, the infrastructures minister, Uzi Landau, refused to meet Taleb al Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business, justifying the decision on the grounds that Arab MPs were ?working constantly here and abroad to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state?. Shortly afterwards, Mr al Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah?s congress in Bethlehem, prompting Mr Lieberman to declare: ?Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk ? they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined.? Mr Tibi responded: ?When Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement.? Israel?s annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 per cent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave. Mr Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens. Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Mr Farah said, with only one conviction. Last week, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi?s actions ?reckless?. This week, in another controversial case, Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al Atrash, as the latter fled. Mr Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a ?real dirty Arab?. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:47:39 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:47:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] It's Time to Get Help In-Reply-To: <1334594465.952781252535251326.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1648313895.95211252604859922.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/opinion/08herbert.html?th&emc=th New York Times September 7, 2009 It's Time to Get Help By BOB HERBERT Maybe the economic stress has been too much. Looking back at the past few months, it's fair to wonder if the country isn't going through a nervous breakdown. The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don't even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care. The administration's most popular anti-recession initiative was a startlingly creative economic breakthrough known as the cash-for-clunkers program. Over the weekend (presumably while the president was sleeping, because this occurred in the wee hours of the morning), White House officials whispered the official announcement that Van Jones would no longer be working in the administration. The White House wishes it had never heard of Mr. Jones, who was hired to be its point person on green jobs. It turns out that Mr. Jones had used a nasty anatomical slur to refer to Republicans and once signed a petition suggesting that George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president's stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it. There is not a thing you can come up with that the G.O.P. is for. Sunshine in the morning? Harry Reid couldn't persuade a single Senate Republican to vote yes. Incredibly, the party's poll numbers are going up. We need therapy. President Obama is planning to address the nation's public school students today, urging them to work hard and stay in school. The folks who bray at the moon are outraged. Some of the caterwauling on the right has likened Mr. Obama to Chairman Mao (and, yes, Hitler), and a fair number of parents have bought into the imbecilic notion that this is an effort at socialist or Communist indoctrination. As one father from Texas put it: "I don't want our schools turned over to some socialist movement." The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd. But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The Obama administration's biggest domestic priority is health care reform. But the biggest issue confronting ordinary Americans right now - the biggest by far - is the devastatingly weak employment environment. Politicians talk about it, but aggressive job-creation efforts are not part of the policy mix. Nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed, according to official statistics. The real numbers are far worse. The unemployment rate for black Americans is a back-breaking 15.1 percent. Five million people have been unemployed for more than six months, and the consensus is that even when the recession ends, the employment landscape will remain dismal. A full recovery in employment will take years. With jobless recoveries becoming the norm, there is a real question as to whether the U.S. economy is capable of providing sufficient employment for all who want and need to work. This is an overwhelming crisis that is not being met with anything like the urgency required. We've also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young fighting men and women. Most of us don't want to know. Moreover, we've put the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it undermines much-needed initiatives here at home. There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It's not just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil from coast to coast. It's our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a basket case. The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We've forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship, the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance. The first step, of course, is to recognize that we have a problem. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:45:39 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:45:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Dos Equis for Universal Health Care In-Reply-To: <750856902.1014261252542346962.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1614438369.93941252604739889.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Dos Equis for Universal Health Care http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3EoziMcFvE Steven Lewis is a widely respected consultant based in Saskatchewan. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:54:24 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:54:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Rally Against Wall Street's Health Care Takeover In-Reply-To: <260568581.95641252604917469.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1808790713.100281252605264818.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/01-14 Common Dreams September 1st, 2009 Rally Against Wall Street's Health Care Takeover by Wendell Potter (Wendell Potter has served since May 2009 as CMD's Senior Fellow on Health Care. After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, last year he left his job as head of communications for one of the nation's largest health insurers to try his hand at helping socially responsible organizations -- including those advocating for meaningful health care reform -- achieve their goals.) Saturday, August 29 I had the good fortune to speak at a community rally for health care reform in a city park in downtown Portland, Oregon. It was a broad-based and diverse group with many signs and placards supporting the 'public option' being debated by Congress, and others calling for 'single payer' reform like that working effectively in other countries such as Canada. Here is what I said: I would like to begin by apologizing to all of you for the role I played 15 years ago in cheating you out of a reformed health care system. Had it not been for greedy insurance companies and other special interests, and their army of lobbyists and spin-doctors like I used to be, we wouldn't be here today. I'm ashamed that I let myself get caught up in deceitful and dishonest PR campaigns that worked so well, hundreds of thousands of our citizens have died, and millions of others have lost their homes and been forced into bankruptcy, so that a very few corporate executives and their Wall Street masters could become obscenely rich. But It was only during the last few years of my career that I came to realize the full scope of the harm my colleagues and I had caused, and the lengths that insurance companies will go to increase their profits at the expense of working families. As I told the Senate Commerce Committee two months ago, the higher up the corporate ladder I climbed, the more I could see how insurance companies confuse their customers and dump the sick - all so they can satisfy those Wall Street masters. I described for the senators how insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they make it nearly impossible to understand -- or even to obtain -- information consumers need. I also told the Committee how the industry has conducted duplicitous and well-financed PR and lobbying campaigns every time Congress has tried to reform our health care system -- and how its current behind-scenes-efforts may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans. I noted that, just as the industry did 15 years ago when it led the effort to kill the Clinton reform plan, it is using shills and front groups to spread lies and disinformation to scare Americans away from the very reform that would benefit them most. Make no mistake, the industry, despite its public assurances to be good-faith partners with the President and Congress, has been at work for years laying the groundwork for devious and often sinister campaigns to manipulate public opinion. The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these campaigns hidden from public view. But I know from having served on many trade group committees that industry leaders are always full partners in developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with their ability to increase their companies' profits. My involvement in those activities goes back to the early '90s when insurers joined with other special interests to finance the activities of an organization called the Healthcare Leadership Council, which led a coordinated effort to scare Americans and members of Congress away from the Clinton plan. A few years after that victory, the insurers formed a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a Patients Bill of Rights. While it was touted as a broad-based business group, the Health Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion's share of its funding from Big Insurance. Like most front groups, the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and run out of a big and well-connected PR firm. One of the key strategies developed by the PR firm as the coalition was gearing up for battle in late 1998 was to stir up support among conservative talk radio hosts and other media. The PR firm formed alliances with groups like the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council and persuaded them to send letters to Congress and to appear at press conferences. The firm also launched an advertising campaign in conservative media outlets. The message was that President Clinton owed a debt to the liberal base of the Democratic Party and would try to pay back that debt by advancing the type of big government agenda on health care that he failed to get in 1993. Those tactics worked. Industry allies in Congress made sure the Patients' Bill of Rights would not become law. The insurance industry has funded several other front groups since then whenever the industry has been under attack. It formed the Coalition for Affordable Quality Healthcare to try to improve the image of managed care in response to a constant stream of negative stories that appeared in the media in the late '90s and the first years of this decade. It funded another front group when lawyers began filing class action lawsuits on behalf of doctors and patients. The PR firm the industry hired to create that front group, by the way, had planned and conducted a similar campaign for the tobacco industry a few years earlier. The insurance industry hired that same PR firm again in 2007 to help blunt the impact of Michael Moore's movie, "Sicko." It created and staffed a front group called "Health Care America" specifically to discredit Moore and to demonize the health care systems featured in the movie. Among the tactics the PR firm used once again was to enlist the support of conservative talk show hosts, writers and editorial page editors to warn against a "government-takeover" of the U.S. health care system. The term "government-takeover" is one the industry has used many times over the years to scare people away from reform. Health Care America also placed ads in newspapers. One of those ads carried this message, "In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor." With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for many years, to kill reform this year, or even better, to shape reform so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street investors far more than average Americans. Americans need to be alert to how the industry and its allies are working to influence their opinions and lawmakers' votes. I know from years as an industry PR executive how effective insurers have been in using scare tactics to turn public opinion against any reform efforts that would threaten their profitability. I warned earlier this year that Americans and the media should pay close attention to the efforts insurers and their ideological buddies would undertake to demonize health care systems around the world that don't allow for-profit insurance companies to have the free reign they have here. Americans must realize that the when they hear isolated stories of long waiting times to see doctors in Canada and allegations that care in other systems is rationed by government bureaucrats, the insurance industry has written the script. And Americans must realize that every time they hear we will be heading down the "slippery slope toward socialism" if Congress creates a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, some insurance flack like I used to be wrote that, too. Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call "government-run" health care, remember this: what we have now in this country, and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall Street-run health care. And know that we already have one of the most insidious means of rationing care in the world -- not by people we can hold accountable on election day but by insurance company executives who answer only to a few wealthy investors and hedge fund managers who care far more about earnings per share than your health and well-being. If Congress goes along with the "solutions" the insurance industry says it is bringing to the table and fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to President Obama might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act. Some in the media believe the health insurers have already won. That's not only because the debate over reform seems to have been hijacked recently by insurance company shills and people who believe the lies they have been spewing, but because of the billions of dollars the insurers have been spending to influence votes on Capitol Hill. Folks, it is not too late to keep the insurers from winning, but time is running short. We need to think of the coming weeks as some of the most important weeks in the history of this country. We need to think that way because they will be, and we must redouble our efforts to make sure members of Congress put our interests above those of private health insurers and others who view reform as a way to make more money. If we want to take back control or our health care system from the big for-profit companies that have wrecked it, we must take back control of this debate. We must begin to talk in ways that reach our friends and neighbors who have been influenced by the lies. We need to tell them that we can continue to have a system that allows 20,000 Americans to die every year because they don't have insurance, or we can have a system that will make sure their sons and daughters are not one of them. We should ask the skeptics of a public option, who are afraid that giving people a choice of a government-run plan will lead to socialism, if they would want to go back to the day when Americans had to buy private fire insurance. Tell them if they lived in Ben Franklin's day and they didn't have a shield on the outside of their house indicating they were insured, their town's private fire insurance companies would let their house burn down. The private insurance companies would keep your fire from spreading to your insured next-door neighbor's house, but your house would soon be nothing more than a pile of ashes. We must remind our family members and our friends and neighbors why we are having this debate in the first place. If they tell you they don't think their tax dollars should be used to pay for someone else's coverage, point out to them that they already are paying for the care uninsured people receive when they go to the emergency room and can't afford to pay the exorbitant bills they get from the hospital. Those of us who are insured pay an extra thousand dollars in premiums every year just to cover that uncompensated care. If they say they don't want to saddle their children and grandchildren with additional taxes, ask them if they have thought what might happen to their children and grandchildren if they found themselves among the millions of people without health insurance or, maybe more likely, among the underinsured. Ask them how they would feel if their daughter came down with breast cancer soon after she and your son-in-law moved into their dream house and just as your grandchildren were beginning to think about college. Ask them how they would feel if their daughter and son-in-law learned that the insurance they thought would be there when they needed it required them to pay so much out of their own pockets that they couldn't afford to pay for their daughter's cancer treatments and also make the house payments. Ask them how they would feel if their children and grandchildren were forced out of their dream home and into bankruptcy, and ask them how they would feel if their grandchildren had to give up their dreams of going to college. Ask them how they would feel if their granddaughter fell into the wrong crowd and died of a drug overdose just as her high school friends were graduating from the college she herself had once dreamed of graduating from. Ask them how they would feel when they found out that this all happened because their daughter's private insurance company forced her to pay more for her care than her family could afford just so it could continue to pay its CEO $30 million a year and meet Wall Street's profit expectations. Folks, I believe we Americans by and large are a compassionate people. Yes, we believe in individual responsibility, but we also believe in the Golden Rule. I don't know a single American -- or at least I hope I don't -- who would knowingly wish the future I just described on anyone's family. But the sad reality is that many of the people who have become unwitting spokespeople for the insurance industry -- the people who are objecting to a public insurance option because they have bought into the lies the insurance industry's shills are telling them -- will ensure that that horrific future is a reality for millions of Americans, including their loved ones, if the insurance industry wins this debate again. So over the coming weeks, we must tell our conservative friends who are worried needlessly about a government-takeover of our health care system that what we all should really be concerned about is the Wall-Street takeover that has occurred while we were not paying attention. It is that takeover that has led to more and more working Americans being forced into the ranks of the uninsured. It is that takeover that has forced millions more of us into the ranks of the underinsured because insurers are making us pay thousands of dollars out of our own pockets before they'll pay a dime. It is that takeover that has forced many of our neighbors out of their homes and into bankruptcy. And it is that takeover that is causing more and more small businesses to stop offering coverage to their employees because of the exorbitant premiums that greedy, Wall-Street-driven insurers are charging them. I want to close by thanking you for being here today and for the hard work you've already been doing to try to persuade members of Congress to do the right thing. But as I pointed out earlier, the coming weeks will be some of the most important weeks of our lives. Let's pledge to each other that we will work even harder to ensure that America joins the rest of the developed world in making sure that ALL of its citizens -- our brothers and sisters, our sons and our daughters, our neighbors and our co-workers -- have good coverage we can all have the peace of mind knowing will be there when and if we need it. Thank you. Wendell Potter is the Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin. From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 11:57:06 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:57:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Report on Afghanistan from just-returned American journalist In-Reply-To: <1617104552.951061252535048082.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <795370779.101931252605426205.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.truthout.org/090809H TruthOut September 8, 2009 Men with Guns, in Kabul and Washington By Norman Solomon For those who believe in making war, Kabul is a notable work product. After 30 years, the results are in: a devastated city. A stale witticism calls Afghanistan?s President Hamid Karzai ?the mayor of Kabul.? Now, not even. On block after block in the Afghan capital, AK-47s are conspicuous in the hands of men on guard against a near future. Widely seen as corrupt, inept and -- with massive election fraud -- now illegitimate, Karzai?s government is losing its grip along with its credibility. Meanwhile, a war-stoking mindset is replicating itself at the highest reaches of official Washington -- even while polls tell us that the pro-war spin has been losing ground. For the U.S. public, dwindling support for the war in Afghanistan has reached a tipping point. But, as you?ve probably heard, the war must go on. Kabul?s streets are blowing with harsh dust, a brutal harvest of chronic war that has destroyed trees and irrigation on mountains around the city. Visiting Kabul in late August, I met a lot of wonderful people, doing their best in the midst of grim and lethal realities. The city seemed thick with pessimism. In comparison, the mainline political discourse about Afghanistan in the United States is blithe. A familiar duet has the news media and the White House asking the perennial question: ?Can the war be won?? The administration insists that the answer is yes. The press is mixed. But they?re both asking the wrong question. More relevant, by far, would be to ask: Should the U.S. government keep destroying Afghanistan in order to ?save? it? All over Kabul, men are tensely holding AK-47s; some are pointing machineguns from flatbed trucks. But the really big guns, of course, are being wielded from Washington, where administrative war-making thrives on abstraction. Day to day, it can be easy to order the destruction of what and who remain unseen. Truly, the worst enemy in Afghanistan is poverty. But the U.S. government keeps waving a white flag. Does anyone in the upper reaches of the Obama administration actually grasp what it means that Afghanistan?s poverty is very close to the worst in the world? The current version of the best and the brightest should ponder the kind of data that can be found in the CIA World Factbook, such as Afghanistan?s infant mortality rate -- defined as ?the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year.? The current number is 154. Last year, while the U.S. government was spending nearly $100 million a day on military efforts in Afghanistan, an Oxfam report put the total amount of humanitarian aid to the country from all sources at just $7 million per day. Not much has changed since then. The supplemental funding measure that the White House pushed through Congress a few months ago devotes 90 percent of the U.S. spending in Afghanistan to military expenditures. Dimes to nurture life. Dollars to destroy it. I hate to think of the kind of future that the U.S. war escalation foreshadows for the very thin children I saw in Kabul, flying ragged little kites or playing with toys like an empty plastic soda bottle with a rope tied around its neck. Echoing now is a speech from Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967. If we replace the word ?Vietnam? with ?Afghanistan,? the gist of his message is with us in the autumn of 2009: ?Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Afghanistan. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Afghanistan. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.? ___________________________________________ Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including ?War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,? which has been adapted into a documentary film. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 12:45:48 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:45:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] War/No More Trouble | Playing for Change | Song Around The World In-Reply-To: <1823108342.131311252608124999.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1169664707.133601252608348323.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> War/No More Trouble | Playing for Change | Song Around The World h ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgWFxFg7-GU&feature=fvst From suzannedk at gmail.com Thu Sep 10 13:37:14 2009 From: suzannedk at gmail.com (Suzanne de Kuyper) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:37:14 +0200 Subject: [R-G] Rally Against Wall Street's Health Care Takeover In-Reply-To: <1808790713.100281252605264818.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> References: <260568581.95641252604917469.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> <1808790713.100281252605264818.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: Really fine! On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 7:54 PM, Sid Shniad wrote: > > http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/01-14 > > Common Dreams September 1st, 2009 > > Rally Against Wall Street's Health Care Takeover > > by Wendell Potter > > (Wendell Potter has served since May 2009 as CMD's Senior Fellow on Health > Care. After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, > last > year he left his job as head of communications for one of the nation's > largest health insurers to try his hand at helping socially responsible > organizations -- including those advocating for meaningful health care > reform -- achieve their goals.) > > Saturday, August 29 I had the good fortune to speak at a community rally > for > health care reform in a city park in downtown Portland, Oregon. It was a > broad-based and diverse group with many signs and placards supporting the > 'public option' being debated by Congress, and others calling for 'single > payer' reform like that working effectively in other countries such as > Canada. Here is what I said: > > I would like to begin by apologizing to all of you for the role I played 15 > years ago in cheating you out of a reformed health care system. Had it not > been for greedy insurance companies and other special interests, and their > army of lobbyists and spin-doctors like I used to be, we wouldn't be here > today. > > I'm ashamed that I let myself get caught up in deceitful and dishonest PR > campaigns that worked so well, hundreds of thousands of our citizens have > died, and millions of others have lost their homes and been forced into > bankruptcy, so that a very few corporate executives and their Wall Street > masters could become obscenely rich. > > But It was only during the last few years of my career that I came to > realize the full scope of the harm my colleagues and I had caused, and the > lengths that insurance companies will go to increase their profits at the > expense of working families. > > As I told the Senate Commerce Committee two months ago, the higher up the > corporate ladder I climbed, the more I could see how insurance companies > confuse their customers and dump the sick - all so they can satisfy those > Wall Street masters. > > I described for the senators how insurers make promises they have no > intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect > consumers, and how they make it nearly impossible to understand -- or even > to obtain -- information consumers need. > > I also told the Committee how the industry has conducted duplicitous and > well-financed PR and lobbying campaigns every time Congress has tried to > reform our health care system -- and how its current behind-scenes-efforts > may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than > average Americans. > > I noted that, just as the industry did 15 years ago when it led the effort > to kill the Clinton reform plan, it is using shills and front groups to > spread lies and disinformation to scare Americans away from the very reform > that would benefit them most. > > Make no mistake, the industry, despite its public assurances to be > good-faith partners with the President and Congress, has been at work for > years laying the groundwork for devious and often sinister campaigns to > manipulate public opinion. > > The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these > campaigns hidden from public view. But I know from having served on many > trade group committees that industry leaders are always full partners in > developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with their > ability to increase their companies' profits. > > My involvement in those activities goes back to the early '90s when > insurers > joined with other special interests to finance the activities of an > organization called the Healthcare Leadership Council, which led a > coordinated effort to scare Americans and members of Congress away from the > Clinton plan. > > A few years after that victory, the insurers formed a front group called > the > Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a Patients Bill of > Rights. > While it was touted as a broad-based business group, the Health Benefits > Coalition in reality got the lion's share of its funding from Big > Insurance. > > Like most front groups, the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and run > out > of a big and well-connected PR firm. One of the key strategies developed by > the PR firm as the coalition was gearing up for battle in late 1998 was to > stir up support among conservative talk radio hosts and other media. > > The PR firm formed alliances with groups like the Christian Coalition and > the Family Research Council and persuaded them to send letters to Congress > and to appear at press conferences. The firm also launched an advertising > campaign in conservative media outlets. The message was that President > Clinton owed a debt to the liberal base of the Democratic Party and would > try to pay back that debt by advancing the type of big government agenda on > health care that he failed to get in 1993. Those tactics worked. Industry > allies in Congress made sure the Patients' Bill of Rights would not become > law. > > The insurance industry has funded several other front groups since then > whenever the industry has been under attack. It formed the Coalition for > Affordable Quality Healthcare to try to improve the image of managed care > in > response to a constant stream of negative stories that appeared in the > media > in the late '90s and the first years of this decade. > > It funded another front group when lawyers began filing class action > lawsuits on behalf of doctors and patients. > > The PR firm the industry hired to create that front group, by the way, had > planned and conducted a similar campaign for the tobacco industry a few > years earlier. > > The insurance industry hired that same PR firm again in 2007 to help blunt > the impact of Michael Moore's movie, "Sicko." It created and staffed a > front > group called "Health Care America" specifically to discredit Moore and to > demonize the health care systems featured in the movie. > > Among the tactics the PR firm used once again was to enlist the support of > conservative talk show hosts, writers and editorial page editors to warn > against a "government-takeover" of the U.S. health care system. The term > "government-takeover" is one the industry has used many times over the > years > to scare people away from reform. > > Health Care America also placed ads in newspapers. One of those ads carried > this message, "In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In > government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor." > > With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is up > to > the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for > many years, to kill reform this year, or even better, to shape reform so > that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street investors far > more than average Americans. > > Americans need to be alert to how the industry and its allies are working > to > influence their opinions and lawmakers' votes. I know from years as an > industry PR executive how effective insurers have been in using scare > tactics to turn public opinion against any reform efforts that would > threaten their profitability. > > I warned earlier this year that Americans and the media should pay close > attention to the efforts insurers and their ideological buddies would > undertake to demonize health care systems around the world that don't allow > for-profit insurance companies to have the free reign they have here. > > Americans must realize that the when they hear isolated stories of long > waiting times to see doctors in Canada and allegations that care in other > systems is rationed by government bureaucrats, the insurance industry has > written the script. > > And Americans must realize that every time they hear we will be heading > down > the "slippery slope toward socialism" if Congress creates a public > insurance > option to compete with private insurers, some insurance flack like I used > to > be wrote that, too. > > Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call > "government-run" health care, remember this: what we have now in this > country, and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall > Street-run health care. > > And know that we already have one of the most insidious means of rationing > care in the world -- not by people we can hold accountable on election day > but by insurance company executives who answer only to a few wealthy > investors and hedge fund managers who care far more about earnings per > share > than your health and well-being. > > If Congress goes along with the "solutions" the insurance industry says it > is bringing to the table and fails to create a public insurance option to > compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to President Obama might > as > well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement > Act. > > Some in the media believe the health insurers have already won. That's not > only because the debate over reform seems to have been hijacked recently by > insurance company shills and people who believe the lies they have been > spewing, but because of the billions of dollars the insurers have been > spending to influence votes on Capitol Hill. > > Folks, it is not too late to keep the insurers from winning, but time is > running short. We need to think of the coming weeks as some of the most > important weeks in the history of this country. We need to think that way > because they will be, and we must redouble our efforts to make sure members > of Congress put our interests above those of private health insurers and > others who view reform as a way to make more money. > > If we want to take back control or our health care system from the big > for-profit companies that have wrecked it, we must take back control of > this > debate. We must begin to talk in ways that reach our friends and neighbors > who have been influenced by the lies. > > We need to tell them that we can continue to have a system that allows > 20,000 Americans to die every year because they don't have insurance, or we > can have a system that will make sure their sons and daughters are not one > of them. > > We should ask the skeptics of a public option, who are afraid that giving > people a choice of a government-run plan will lead to socialism, if they > would want to go back to the day when Americans had to buy private fire > insurance. > > Tell them if they lived in Ben Franklin's day and they didn't have a shield > on the outside of their house indicating they were insured, their town's > private fire insurance companies would let their house burn down. The > private insurance companies would keep your fire from spreading to your > insured next-door neighbor's house, but your house would soon be nothing > more than a pile of ashes. > > We must remind our family members and our friends and neighbors why we are > having this debate in the first place. If they tell you they don't think > their tax dollars should be used to pay for someone else's coverage, point > out to them that they already are paying for the care uninsured people > receive when they go to the emergency room and can't afford to pay the > exorbitant bills they get from the hospital. Those of us who are insured > pay > an extra thousand dollars in premiums every year just to cover that > uncompensated care. > > If they say they don't want to saddle their children and grandchildren with > additional taxes, ask them if they have thought what might happen to their > children and grandchildren if they found themselves among the millions of > people without health insurance or, maybe more likely, among the > underinsured. > > Ask them how they would feel if their daughter came down with breast cancer > soon after she and your son-in-law moved into their dream house and just as > your grandchildren were beginning to think about college. > > Ask them how they would feel if their daughter and son-in-law learned that > the insurance they thought would be there when they needed it required them > to pay so much out of their own pockets that they couldn't afford to pay > for > their daughter's cancer treatments and also make the house payments. > > Ask them how they would feel if their children and grandchildren were > forced > out of their dream home and into bankruptcy, and ask them how they would > feel if their grandchildren had to give up their dreams of going to > college. > > Ask them how they would feel if their granddaughter fell into the wrong > crowd and died of a drug overdose just as her high school friends were > graduating from the college she herself had once dreamed of graduating > from. > Ask them how they would feel when they found out that this all happened > because their daughter's private insurance company forced her to pay more > for her care than her family could afford just so it could continue to pay > its CEO $30 million a year and meet Wall Street's profit expectations. > > Folks, I believe we Americans by and large are a compassionate people. Yes, > we believe in individual responsibility, but we also believe in the Golden > Rule. > > I don't know a single American -- or at least I hope I don't -- who would > knowingly wish the future I just described on anyone's family. But the sad > reality is that many of the people who have become unwitting spokespeople > for the insurance industry -- the people who are objecting to a public > insurance option because they have bought into the lies the insurance > industry's shills are telling them -- will ensure that that horrific future > is a reality for millions of Americans, including their loved ones, if the > insurance industry wins this debate again. > > So over the coming weeks, we must tell our conservative friends who are > worried needlessly about a government-takeover of our health care system > that what we all should really be concerned about is the Wall-Street > takeover that has occurred while we were not paying attention. > > It is that takeover that has led to more and more working Americans being > forced into the ranks of the uninsured. It is that takeover that has forced > millions more of us into the ranks of the underinsured because insurers are > making us pay thousands of dollars out of our own pockets before they'll > pay > a dime. > > It is that takeover that has forced many of our neighbors out of their > homes > and into bankruptcy. And it is that takeover that is causing more and more > small businesses to stop offering coverage to their employees because of > the > exorbitant premiums that greedy, Wall-Street-driven insurers are charging > them. > > I want to close by thanking you for being here today and for the hard work > you've already been doing to try to persuade members of Congress to do the > right thing. But as I pointed out earlier, the coming weeks will be some of > the most important weeks of our lives. > > Let's pledge to each other that we will work even harder to ensure that > America joins the rest of the developed world in making sure that ALL of > its > citizens -- our brothers and sisters, our sons and our daughters, our > neighbors and our co-workers -- have good coverage we can all have the > peace > of mind knowing will be there when and if we need it. Thank you. > > > > Wendell Potter is the Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media > and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin. > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Sep 10 13:44:33 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:44:33 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Fw: [SV] TIME/ OBAMA in Mpls: RALLY for SINGLE-PAYER HEALTHCARE Message-ID: <06812C81F0764A11A20490A834CEC753@agingCHS072729> ----- Original Message ----- From: ty To: SOCIALISTVOICE at LISTS.UMN.EDU Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 1:01 PM Subject: Re: [SV] TIME/ OBAMA in Mpls: RALLY for SINGLE-PAYER HEALTHCARE We will stay until he is speaking but people will be lining up from before 8am, and we want to mass leaflet them On Sep 10, 2009 12:06 PM, "Lydia Howell" wrote: President Obama will SPEAK at 12:30pm. Does it make sense to have people rally THREE HOURS BEFORE HE GETS HERE? Do we want to be heard or not? Lydia Howell *** EMERGENCY ACTION *** With Obama coming to the Target Center Saturday, we need to... RALLY for SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE! SATURDAY, 9:00am Corner of 7th St & 1st Ave, opposite the Target Center (on public sidewalk outside the "First Avenue" music venue) *** Bring signs, banners, noise/music-makers, and be ready to be loud! *** Rally/Bannering will last until 12:30pm, when Obama's speech begins, and maybe extend after that. Why We Rally: When Obama comes to Minneaplis this Saturday to promote his health care bill, our city will for a moment become the center of the dramatic national debate over health care reform. With the national media attention, the far-right will undoubtedly mobilize, but will the advocates of a single-payer system - the real "silent majority" - have our voices heard? Will Obama and Congress feel any pressure from the left? That is up to us! Numerous polls this year show a majority of Americans would support a single-payer "Medicare-for-all" system in the U.S., but somehow we are told this is "politically un-viable." Even the "public option" is now treated by Obama as little more than a bargaining chip, and not among the three central policy priorities outlined in his prime-time speech Wednesday. In Washington today, what is "viable" is decided more by corporate campaign contributions than public opinion or public interest. With the health care industry spending $1.5 million a day in lobbying and funneling huge sums into the 2008 elections (giving more to Obama and top Democrats than any candidates in history), any hope that genuine change will come from Washington DC is a pipe-dream. As all history has demonstrated, it is only through mass mobilizations of ordinary people that entrenched moneyed interests can be challenged. So join us Saturday morning for a Rally and Bannering for Single-Payer Health Care! Action initiated by a few individual activists with the MN Universal Health Care Action Network and Socialist Alternative, but not yet formally endorsed by any organization given lack of time! For more info call Ty Moore @ 612-760-1980 ===================================== FOR MORE INFORMATION on Socialist Alternative, or to find out about our local meetings and campaign activities, contact us at: mn at socialistalternative.org 612-760-1980 ===================================== NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LINKS Socialist Alternative's national website is: www.socialistalternative.org We are linked to socialists around the world through the Committee for a Workers' International: www.socialistworld.net ===================================== TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS LIST send an email to LISTSERV at LISTS.UMN.EDU with "signoff socialistvoice" in the body of the message. leave out the quotes. ===================================== ============== Join our alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From shniad at sfu.ca Thu Sep 10 16:00:28 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:00:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Let's Raise Some Hell (to end the war in Afghanistan) In-Reply-To: <1131410021.947870810@org.orgDB.mail.democracyinaction.org> Message-ID: <242851455.235451252620028664.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> September 10, 2009 CODEPINK has never flagged in opposing the Afghanistan war and now public opinion is finally catching up. With 70 percent of Democrats opposing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, President Obama is making a fateful choice. If he escalates, the quagmire deepens and he loses more support among his base. If he refuses to send more troops he will be attacked by the Republicans for losing the war on terror. CODEPINK and the peace movement are calling for an exit strategy that includes NATO/American troop withdrawal, all party talks, regional diplomacy, and continued aid for reconstruction, medical care, education and development, but your voice is not represented in Congress. But we have a proven ability to set off a storm in their districts that makes a difference. We affected the election outcomes in 2006 and 2008, and we must continue to raise hell until they listen and act. Please read, sign and circulate this petition. Double your numbers. Widen your support. Become the margin of difference. Bring down the Predators. Bring home the troops. --Tom Hayden Our friend Tom Hayden has been an important voice for peace for decades. CODEPINK and other activists around the world are joining with Tom now to use our collective voice and power to end war in Afghanistan. As this fantastic article in the New York Times states , the tides are turning in our favor-this fall, the antiwar movement is rallying in solidarity to challenge Obama's misguided policies on Afghanistan. Join the call and sign here --we will deliver your message to Obama, Pelosi & Reid next week! Tomorrow marks the 8th anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 and it's taken until now for the mainstream media to being, finally, to expose some of the true costs of war. They did so recently by printing a photo of a dead US soldier against powerful pressure. Additionally, writers and thinkers as politically diverse as George Will and Chuck Hagel have published thoughtful pieces in the Washington Post on why we need to leave Afghanistan. But it's not enough yet and we can make the media do an even better job. Stay tuned for our upcoming Activist Media Blitz. During the week of Sept 14-18, we'll push the story of the crucial importance of ending military engagement in Afghanistan and we will provide you with the tools you?ll need to be engaged from your phone, computer, freeway over pass, the blogosphere, radio talk shows, letters to editors and more. Please join us to speak up and speak out in unison--lend your voices to the true story so it can be heard loud and clear above the din. Let's take Tom's advice and raise hell (for peace)! Dana, Farida, Gael, Gayle, Janet, Jodie, Medea, Nancy , Paris, Rae and Whitney Tell Obama, Pelosi and Reid to get it right on Afghanistan SUSTAIN PEACE! unsubscribe from this list From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Sep 10 16:20:38 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:20:38 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Expose Chevron's Dirty Tricks in Ecuador Message-ID: <719210A6FC1847C69BE6CDBD1E056E7C@agingCHS072729> [From GlobalExchange.org] News & Action Dear Global Exchange Supporter, The legal battle between indigenous communities in Ecuador and oil giant Chevron is a fight sixteen years in the making. This unprecedented lawsuit holds Chevron accountable for the clean-up of the damages it has done to the once pristine Amazonian rainforest and the people who call it home. Dubbed the 'Amazon Chernobyl', the land inhabited by indigenous communities for generations has been left contaminated beyond imagination. With all the evidence pointing to Chevron's guilt, a judgment of potentially $27 billion was expected to be handed down against the company as early as next month in Ecuador. Chevron - one of the wealthiest corporations in world history - has already said that it will refuse to pay, requiring U.S. courts to enforce any potential fine. Chevron's legal strategy before a U.S. court would almost certainly be centered on convincing the court that the company did not receive a fair trial in Ecuador; thus, Chevron has a strong incentive to build a case now against the Ecuadorian court. This "evidence" magically emerged last week when the oil giant took dirty measures to avoid cleaning up its mess. Chevron appears to have resorted to its own Nixon-style sting operation in an attempt to delay and corrupt trial proceedings by releasing grainy online videos trying to implicate the judge presiding over the trial in a $3 billion bribery scheme. Chevron's attempt at smoke and mirrors would be laughable if the results were not so serious. While asserting that no impropriety occurred, hoping to avert any further effort by Chevron to delay or de-legitimize a ruling, the judge recused himself from the case last week. This "bribery plot" is just the latest in a string of underhanded - and potentially illegal - attempts by Chevron to derail the case and distract from the fact of Chevron's obvious guilt. The timing is also suspicious given this week's release of the groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed documentary film about the case, CRUDE: the real price of oil. TAKE ACTION See "CRUDE: The Real Price of Oil" - http://chevrontoxico.com/crude/ - at a movie theater near you! Visit the ChevronToxico website - http://chevrontoxico.com/take-action/send-chevron-a-message.html - for action steps to take right now! Join Global Exchange on a Reality Tour to Ecuador - http://www.globalexchange.org/tours/1004.html - in November! Attend the West Coast Convergence for Climate Justice & Action - http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/chevronprogram/actnow.html#convergence - to learn more! Thank you, as always, for your work on behalf of peace & justice, Antonia Juhasz, Director, The Chevron Program, Global Exchange ============== Join our alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 10 23:02:26 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:02:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Rude Boy Blows It, Secret Satellite Blast Message-ID: <303705.35302.qm@web43510.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> ? Secret Satellite Launch Decoded. A Bit More On Healthcare, Rude Boy Blows It. I was working late tonight. So this is going to be short and sweet. First I want to say that although I think that Joe whatsits-face from South Carolina didn?t do his state or his party any good by calling the President a Liar in the middle of his speech last night. In fact that comment might have tipped public opinion decisively in favor of the President. People may finally be ready to say enough of this right wing rhetoric. First it was the birthers with that crazy notion that Obama was born in Kenya. After that came the ridiculous statements that the President is a racist. Then there was the deather nonsense with people calling the health plan a secret euthanasia plan. It got so bad that people were grabbing onto the Presidents speech to children as socialist propaganda. Like telling kids to wash their hands and study is some kind of a socialist thing. Real capitalists are dirty and don?t study I guess. When the Congressman made his little noise while the President was speaking, he showed the world exactly what this whole thing is, rude and ignorant. It is the kind of thing you would expect from the British House of Commons, or from some hick from the sticks who hadn?t been taught manners. It basicly sealed the fate of the right wing resistance. Now they have to apologise and that is what this incredible Joe did. Was it racist? Maybe. Was it rude? Definitely. Was it beyond the pale? Not really, just inappropriate. If Obama had been saying the Health Care Bill would give us eternal life, well he might be justified calling that a lie. Personally I have nothing against being rude when it is appropriate. It comes under the rubric of Speaking Truth To Power, but this guy was just showing his ass. All he did was make people feel that maybe these criticisms of the President are off key and irrational. I respect the President. I like his style and agree with most of what his intent is. I simply think he is too conservative, in line with the so called main stream but not what the country needs. I think we need more radical solutions. But we will get what is feasible. I just hope we don?t end up with something that is too much for the corporations and not enough for the people. The liberal media were loving the Obama speech and carefully avoided mentioning the mandatory nature of the new health plan and the optional nature of the public plan. The right wing media is so far out on this I won?t even bother to read it. What we are getting is health care reform the insurance, pharmaceutical and private hospital industry can support. My opinion is we are getting the shaft. We need the reform, we really need a universal health care system, but what we are probably going to get is expanded private coverage. I was scanning the blogs and saw an interesting post on the Spaceflight Now site about a secret government satellite launch. Here is an excerpt. ?Clues Emerge Over Mystery Satellite Soon After Launch By Justin Ray posted: 09 September 2009 02:39 am ET A mysterious spacecraft whose mission is cloaked in secrecy left Cape Canaveral atop the hard-to-miss roar of its Atlas 5 rocket and then revealed a major clue about itself while cruising above a satellite-tracking hobbyist a short time later. The 19-story booster blasted off at 5:35 p.m. EDT, the first moment of the day?s launch opportunity that punctuated a trouble-free countdown. The rocket?s nose cone, adorned with Lockheed Martin?s corporate logo, shrouded the payload as it climbed through the atmosphere and out of sight. The company acknowledged that it had built the communications satellite ? dubbed ?PAN? ? under a commercial arrangement with the government. Yet few other details were released, such as what agency was behind the project or what it would do in orbit. ?Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for the PAN mission, which includes a commercial-based satellite and launch system solution for the U.S. government,? a Lockheed Martin statement released to Spaceflight Now said. The leading theory suggested PAN was a quick-build satellite that would serve as a communications gap-filler between the aging constellation of Ultra-High Frequency Follow-On (UFO) spacecraft and the sophisticated next-generation Mobile User Objective System that?s still being developed. ?We know of no other U.S. satellites in geostationary orbit that use that frequency, ?observation tends to support the UFO-MUOS gap-filler hypothesis,? Greg Molczan said. The east-bound trajectory sent the Atlas into an elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbit, though the power provided by the rocket coupled with the payload?s relatively slim weight, estimated by the observers to be approximately 7,700 pounds, enabled a higher perigee, or low point, than other such launches. A second firing of the Centaur propelled PAN into its targeted deployment orbit with an apogee of 22,230 miles and a perigee of 4,550 miles. The payload?s release an hour and 59 minutes after liftoff successfully completed the ascent. ?The secrecy surrounding PAN may be a clue to the identity of its sponsoring agency. It appears not to belong to the DoD, given that its UFO and MUOS are open programs, as was the U.S. Navy?s ?UHF Hosted Payload? gap-filler solution, which it briefly considered in 2008,? Molczan said. ?The most likely remaining possibility is that a civilian intelligence agency, perhaps the CIA, decided much earlier, about 2005-06, that it could not risk a coverage gap, and obtained approval to rapidly procure and launch a satellite compatible with the UFO satellites,? Molczan added.? Not especially informative, and I have not enough of an idea what they are talking about to know what the satellite does but I am assuming it has to do with spying or command and control. This is what Wikipedia says about UFO-MUOS. ?The Mobile User Objective System is an array of geosynchronous satellites being developed for the United States Department of Defense (DoD) to provide global satellite communications (SATCOM) narrow band (64 kbit/s and below) connectivity for communications use by the United States and allies. Installing a MUOS satellite dish in Hawaii The Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) is an Ultra High Frequency (UHF) (300 MHz to 3 GHz frequency range) SATCOM system, primarily serving the DoD. The MUOS will replace the legacy UHF Follow-On (UFO) system before that system reaches its end of life to provide users with new capabilities and enhanced mobility, access, capacity, and quality of service. Intended primarily for mobile users (e.g. aerial and maritime platforms, ground vehicles, and dismounted soldiers), MUOS will extend users? voice, data, and video communications beyond their lines-of-sight. The MUOS operates as a global cellular service provider to support the war fighter with modern cell phone-like capabilities, such as multimedia. It converts a commercial third generation (3G) Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) cellular phone system to a military UHF SATCOM radio system using geosynchronous satellites in place of cell towers. By operating in the UHF frequency band, a lower frequency band than that used by conventional terrestrial cellular networks, the MUOS provides warfighters with the tactical ability to communicate in ?disadvantaged? environments, such as heavily forested regions where higher frequency signals would be unacceptably attenuated by the forest canopy. The MUOS constellation will consist of four operational satellites and one on-orbit spare. MUOS will provide military point-to-point and netted communication users with precedence-based and pre-emptive access to voice, data, video, or a mixture of voice and data services that span the globe. Connections may be set up on demand by users in the field, within seconds, and then released just as easily, freeing resources for other users. In alignment with more traditional military communications methods, pre-planned networks can also be established either permanently or per specific schedule using the MUOS? ground-based Network Management Center. The Navy?s Communications Satellite Program Office (PMW 146) of the Program Executive Office (PEO) for Space, Communications, and Sensors in San Diego is lead developer for the MUOS Program. Lockheed Martin is the Prime System Contractor and satellite designer for MUOS under U.S Navy Contract N00039-04-C-2009, which was announced September 24, 2004.[4] The cost-plus-incentive-fee-and-award-fee contract award for the MUOS defined a base period-of-performance of seven years valued at $2,110,886,703. The base contract provides for an Initial Operational Capability comprising two satellites with the associated MUOS ground control elements. The contract also defined contract options which, if exercised, would add four years and $1,154,948,927 to the base. Key subcontractors include General Dynamics (Ground Transport architecture), Boeing (Legacy UFO and portions of the WCDMA payload) and Harris (deployable mesh reflectors). The first MUOS satellite is scheduled for launch in late 2009 with on-orbit capability achieved in 2010.? I still don?t know what this is all about. So I searched a little more and found this on the Defense News Site ?Comm Crisis Delay in U.S. Navy Satellite Program Sparks Reviews And Contingency Planning By Todd Neff And Ben Iannotta Published: 10 August 2009 U.S. troops and intelligence operatives working in some of the world?s most remote regions might have to cope with satellite communications dead zones starting in mid-2010 because of a mix of satellite development delays, aging satellites and a decision by the military not to launch more backup transmitters and receivers, defense officials and analysts said. At the moment, the United States cobbles together communications coverage for ?disadvantaged? or ?special? subscribers using eight Ultra-high Frequency Follow-on (UFO) satellites and additional UHF capacity on other spacecraft. Users connect by stopping to set up small, tripod-based satellite antennas connected to their radios. UHF users can converse with commanders or intelligence bosses through bad weather or forest canopy, but because of the UHF system?s limited capacity, they can send video or data only when other users are ordered off the network temporarily. When the United States began launching the UFO satellites in 1993, they were ?manna from heaven,? said retired Army Lt. Gen. Pete Cuviello, a former Army chief information officer. Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and an explosion in demand for tactical communications that was punctuated by a UFO satellite failure in 2005 and another in 2006. The Navy now calculates that there is a 70 percent chance that in May 2010 the UFO constellation will reach an ?unacceptable level of availability.? That was not supposed to be a problem under the Pentagon?s original schedule for the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS), a constellation of four geosynchronous satellites and one spare that would serve more users than the UFO satellites and give many of them the ability to communicate while driving or walking. Now, the Navy, which is managing development of MUOS for the military, has told Congress that the first satellite in development will not be ready for use until February 2011, instead of March 2010. The 11-month delay virtually ensures a gap between the old and new systems, a realization that sparked a flurry of activity from Capitol Hill to Navy headquarters to the Lockheed Martin factory in California, where MUOS ?Space Vehicle 1? has been assembled but is not working properly. The Air Force offered its technical help, but the Navy elected to assemble a broader team of national experts to travel to the factory in California to assess the state of the program. ?Are the problems you?re seeing now what you might expect? Or are there systemic problems?? an official close to the program said of the assessment team?s role. But the satellites? primary mission is to adapt cellular-phone-inspired ?third generation,? or 3G, technology to satellite communications through the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), a network of radios that will bounce signals to MUOS satellites when necessary, for instance, to communicate over mountains or across bodies of water. In the latest twist, Lockheed Martin has asked the Navy for more testing time to ?reduce the risk involved in the first-time integration, assembly and test of this sophisticated satellite.? Meanwhile, the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO) has begun exploring whether defense officials were unwise to turn down opportunities to launch ultrahigh-frequency communications units on commercial satellites - the UHF-Hosted payload option - and whether more technical problems could be lurking. The communications fate of troops and users from ?non-DoD agencies? - a Pentagon euphemism for intelligence operatives - amounts to a gamble about the health of the existing satellites. stakes are high because U.S. narrowband communications already are taxed beyond their capacity. Harris told the committee that the United States could satisfy only 20 percent of the tactical demand during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite allocating 80 percent of narrowband capacity to those wars. Only 600 users can converse over the UFO constellation simultaneously, a number MUOS is intended to expand to about 7,000 by shifting to the Internet Protocol 3G approach. ?Think of the satellite as a very tall cell tower,? said an official from General Dynamics, which is developing the ground element of MUOS together with Ericsson. The nearest MUOS satellite would lock on to the user?s device using codes embedded in the user?s signal, much as a cell phone connects to a cellular tower. The MUOS network would relay the signals through ground stations and other MUOS satellites. ?It?s going to bring the network to its knees,? he said. ?In 2010 and 2011, the demand is going to be that much greater. That?s the problem.? The military has not decided whether the first satellite should be launched into an orbit covering Afghanistan and Iraq, said a representative for Strategic Command, which makes such operational decisions. The first of the new U.S. Wideband Global Satcom spacecraft, for example, was stationed over the Pacific Ocean, where planners reasoned there was a shortage of broadband communications aboard ships engaged in missile defense. The technical hurdles in development of the first MUOS satellite spring mostly from the fact that the satellites must communicate with the UFO-compatible radios carried by U.S. forces today, and also the flat antennas that will be attached to military vehicles under the JTRS program. The Boeing-built Legacy UHF payload must guarantee communications to those UFO radios. The main MUOS 3G payload will serve 10 times more users simultaneously than the UFO satellites, and it will give troops the ability to send and receive data and video. But it is incompatible with the UFO radios and antennas.? So there you have it the answer. Nice and neat. I like it when the answer is found by simply going one what is happening? Two what does it mean? Three why is it happening? That is all I have to say tonight nothing earth shattering. You have to be a techie to love this story, but it is interesting to be able to find out exactly what the government is up to? Tags: Healthcare Industry Loves., Mystery and Solution, Secret Launch of Satellite From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Fri Sep 11 00:36:02 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:36:02 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Economic 9-11 Message-ID: <20090911153602.2d5e717e.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed? by Ellen Brown webofdebt.com (September 07 2009) A year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15 2008, questions still swirl around its collapse. Lawrence MacDonald, whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense came out in July 2009, maintains that the bank was not in substantially worse shape than other major Wall Street banks. He says Lehman was just "put to sleep. They put the pillow over the face of Lehman Brothers and they put her to sleep." The question is, why? The Lehman bankruptcy is widely considered to be the watershed event that changed the rules of the game for those Wall Street banks considered "too big to fail". The bankruptcy option was ruled out once and for all. The taxpayers would have to keep throwing money at the banks, no matter how corrupt, ill-managed or undeserving. As Dean Baker noted in April 2009: "Geithner has supposedly ruled out the bankruptcy option because when he, along with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, tried letting Lehman Brothers go under last fall, it didn't turn out very well. Of course, it is not necessary to go the route of an uncontrolled bankruptcy that Geithner and Company pursued with Lehman ... [But] the Geithner crew insists that there are no alternatives to his plan; we have to just keep giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks ... further enriching the bankers who wrecked the economy." Although Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Monday, September 15 2008, it was actually "bombed" on September 11, when the biggest one-day drop in its stock and highest trading volume occurred before bankruptcy. Lehman CEO Richard Fuld maintained that the 158 year old bank was brought down by unsubstantiated rumors and illegal naked short selling. Although short selling (selling shares you don't own) is legal, the short seller is required to have shares lined up to borrow and replace to cover the sale. Failure to buy the shares back in the next three trading days is called a "fail to deliver". Christopher Cox, who was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2008, said in a July 2009 article that naked short selling "can allow manipulators to force prices down far lower than would be possible in legitimate short-selling conditions". By September 11 2008, according to the SEC, as many as 32.8 million Lehman shares had been sold and not delivered - a 57-fold increase over the peak of the prior year. For a very large company like Lehman, with plenty of "float" (available shares for trading), this unprecedented number was highly suspicious and warranted serious investigation. But the SEC, which was criticized for failing to follow up even on tips that Bernie Madoff's business was a ponzi scheme, has yet to announce the results of any investigation. More Questions Other questions about the Lehman collapse are raised in David Wessel's July 2009 book In Fed We Trust. Why was Bear Stearns saved from bankruptcy but Lehman Brothers was not? How could the decision makers not realize the dire consequences of letting Lehman go down? One possible explanation is that they actually thought the bank would be bought out at the last minute, just as Bear Stearns was. In both cases, the parties worked feverishly over the weekend after the stock's collapse to try to negotiate a deal. For Bear Stearns, the negotiations succeeded, with the help of the New York Federal Reserve, which provided the loan used by JPMorgan Chase to complete the deal. With Lehman, however, the interested buyer was British, and the help that was needed was from the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling. The weekend after the September 11 stock collapse, intense negotiations were pursued with Barclays Bank, which was prepared to underwrite Lehman's debts; but it needed a waiver from British regulators of a rule requiring shareholder approval. Negotiations continued until the market was getting ready to open in Japan on Sunday, but UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling would not give the necessary waiver. He said something to the effect that he did not want to infect Britain with America's cancer. The sentiment was understandable, but the question was, why did he wait until it was too late for the Treasury or the Federal Reserve to move in with other arrangements? The issue takes on more significance in light of the fact that Chancellor Darling played a similar role in another 9-11 collapse the previous year. On September 11 2007, frantic customers were lining up outside Northern Rock, the UK's fifth largest mortgage lender, in the first British bank run in 141 years. The bank's shares plunged 31% in a single day. Like the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US, the bankruptcy of Northern Rock changed the rules of the game. Britain's major banks too would now be saved at any cost, in order to avoid the loss of customer confidence, panic and bank runs that could precipitate a 1929-style market crash. With Northern Rock, as with Lehman Brothers, Alistair Darling could have saved the day but backed down. Northern Rock had a willing buyer, Lloyds TSB; but the buyer needed a loan from the Bank of England, which the Bank's Governor, Mervyn King, had denied. Darling was advised by his staff to overrule the Governor and grant the loan, but this would have cost political capital for UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had been widely lauded for giving the Bank of England its independence in 1997. Brown is criticized domestically for precipitating the financial crisis with errors made as Chancellor of the Exchequer before he became Prime Minister. Critics maintain the British Treasury has abdicated its responsibility as the financial overseer of the British economy to the Bank of England, which in many ways controls the government, because its advice is always followed regarding the British budget. The whole scenario suggests that the much-vaunted virtues of an independent central bank are overblown. Some economists, including Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke, blame poor policymaking by an independent Federal Reserve for bringing on the Great Depression of the 1930s. Shock Therapy? According to Representative Paul Kanjorski, speaking on C-SPAN in January 2009, the collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated a $550 billion run on the money market funds on Thursday, September 18. This was the dire news that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented to Congress behind closed doors, prompting Congressional approval of Paulson's $700 billion bank bailout despite deep misgivings. It was the sort of "shock therapy" discussed by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2007), in which a major crisis prompts hasty emergency action involving the relinquishment of rights or funds that would otherwise be difficult to pry loose from the citizenry. Like the "bombing" of Lehman stock on September 11, the $550 billion money market run was suspicious. The stock market had plunged when Lehman filed for bankruptcy on September 15, but it actually went up on September 16. Why did the money market wait until September 18 to collapse? A report by the Joint Economic Committee pointed to the fact that the $62 billion Reserve Primary Fund had "broken the buck" (fallen below a stable $1 per share) due to its Lehman investments; but that had occurred on September 15, and the fund had suspended redemptions for the following week. What dire reversal happened on September 17? According to the SEC, it was another record day for illegal naked short selling. Failed trades climbed to 49.7 million - 23% of Lehman trades. The Larger Question Is Why? All of this suggests that Lehman Brothers did not just fall over the brink but was pushed. Judge James Peck, who presided in the bankruptcy proceedings, said "Lehman Brothers became a victim, in effect the only true icon to fall in a tsunami that has befallen the credit markets". If Lehman was indeed sacrificed, who pushed it and to what end? Some critics point to Henry Paulson and his cronies at Goldman Sachs, Lehman's arch rival. Goldman certainly came out on top after Lehman's demise, but there are other possibilities as well, involving more global players. The month after Lehman collapsed, Gordon Brown and the EU leaders called for using the financial crisis as an opportunity to radically enhance the regulatory power of global institutions. Brown spoke of "a new global financial order", echoing the "new world order" referred to by globalist banker David Rockefeller when he said in 1994: "We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the new world order." Richard Haas, President of the US Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 2006: "Globalisation ... implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker". Sovereignty is one of these cherished rights that nations will give up only with "the right major crisis". Gordon Brown put it like this: "Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago, can no longer be postponed ... We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age". In April 2009, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling hosted the G20 summit in London, which focused on the financial crisis. A global currency issue was approved, and an international Financial Stability Board was agreed to as global regulator, to be based in the controversial Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. The international bankers who caused the financial crisis are indeed capitalizing on it, consolidating their power in "a new global financial order" that gives them top-down global control. Just some food for thought as September 11 rolls around again. _____ Ellen Brown is an attorney and the author of eleven books, including Web of Debt (2007), Forbidden Medicine (1998), and The Key to Ultimate Health (2000). Her websites are www.ellenbrown.com and www.webofdebt.com . (c) Copyright 2007 Ellen Brown. All Rights Reserved. http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/economic9-11.php TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 10:24:04 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:24:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] =?utf-8?q?The_Trial_of_Israel=E2=80=99s_Campus_Critics?= In-Reply-To: <1101643030.304781252628575961.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <33207.430571252686244567.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.tikkun.org/article.php?story=sept_oct_09_goldberg_makdisi Tikkun Magazine August 14 2009 The Trial of Israel?s Campus Critics by David Theo Goldberg and Saree Makdisi The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most visible political issues on campuses around the nation. A rising level of concern about the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory (now in its fifth decade), as well as the precarious position of Israel's beleaguered Palestinian minority, have been countered by increasingly strident, even furious, attempts to silence or stifle criticism of Israeli policy on American college campuses. Tensions have been heightened especially in the wake of Israel's January 2009 re-invasion of Gaza, the consequent mobilization of protest, and the growing campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. As the tide of public opinion in the United States and around the world continues to turn against Israel's policies of occupation and repression, the response to criticisms of Israeli policy on campus are growing uglier. Off-campus organizations -- many tied to the most assertive Israeli lobby in Washington -- are playing a growing role in on-campus debates. Campus activities, as a result, have been wired directly into national politics, and have become more contentious and infinitely more bitter. And the situation is likely to continue to get worse as Israel's image continues to deteriorate and as its defenders grow more anxious and resort to ever more desperate measures to turn things around. It is an extraordinary fact that no fewer than thirty-three distinct organizations-including AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish National Fund-are gathered together today as members or affiliates of the Israel on Campus Coalition. The coalition is an overwhelmingly powerful presence on American college campuses for which there is simply no equivalent on the Palestinian or Arab side. Its self-proclaimed mission is not merely to monitor our colleges and universities. That, after all, is the commitment of Campus Watch, which was started by pro-Israel activists in 2002. It is, rather (and in its own words), to generate "a pro-active, pro-Israel agenda on campus." There is, accordingly, disproportionate and unbalanced intervention on campuses across the country by a coalition of well-funded organizations, who have no time for -- and even less interest in -- the niceties of intellectual exchange and academic process. Insinuation, accusation, and defamation have become the weapons of first resort to respond to argument and criticism directed at Israeli policies. As far as these outside pressure groups (and their campus representatives) are concerned, the intellectual and academic price that the scholarly community pays as a result of this kind of intervention amounts to little more than collateral damage. We have become increasingly concerned at the ways in which scholarly critics of Israeli policy have been cavalierly and maliciously misrepresented, mostly through ad hominem attacks on their characters, reputations, and careers. We are troubled also by the ways in which academic programs-most notably Middle East Studies programs at major universities-are being attacked as bastions of irresponsible radicalism and anti-American activity. Our concern has been heightened especially in view of the outside pressure being brought to bear on university administrations, some of which seem to have yielded to coercion, even while trying to "balance" calls for responsibility with commitments to academic freedom. Some senior university administrators seem willing to take for granted the misrepresentations and fabrications by boisterous supporters of Israel, and have done so merely on the strident assertion of those making these claims. This is a curious position to take in the name of "balance," a notion about which we will have more to say in a moment. These are not altogether new developments, of course, as the dire threat to a number of academic careers and institutional programs in recent years, particularly in Middle East studies, will attest. Scholars whose work is critical of Israeli policies have been denied jobs, denied tenure (or faced a threat to their prospects for tenure), and in general have had their lives made difficult-not because of academic criteria, but because of political interference from extra-academic forces. Outside political intervention by those who advocate unflinching support for Israel have plunged one American program or campus after another into crisis. The University of California is only the latest in a string of such campuses, following incidents at Columbia University, Barnard College, Yale University, Wayne State University, and DePaul University. Trumped-Up Furor at UCLA For several weeks this spring, considerable pressure was brought to bear on UCLA and especially on its Center for Near Eastern Studies. As the crisis came to a head, Stanley Kurtz, in a National Review Online article, predicted that UCLA's Center was on the way to becoming today's b?te noir of the academy, just as Columbia's Middle East Studies program had been for Israel's strident supporters a few years ago. Kurtz is one of a trio of non-academics (Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes round out the group, and David Horowitz is a kind of associate) who repeatedly chide and harry academic scholars for their criticisms of Israeli policy. It is crucial to note that Kurtz's prediction was fueled by completely falsified accounts of an event the UCLA Center sponsored earlier this year, by ongoing attacks on faculty members who have spoken critically of Israeli policy, and by thoroughly misleading characterizations of them intended at the very least to make others think twice before speaking out. In January 2009, UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted "Human Rights and Gaza," a panel discussion on campus to address the situation in Gaza in the context of human rights and international humanitarian law. One of us attended as an audience member; the other spoke on the panel, alongside professors Richard Falk, Lisa Hajjar, Gabriel Piterberg, and Susan Slymovics (as chair). Each of the panelists had published extensively on this topic, and Richard Falk is, of course, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, and hence the global authority on this matter. The panel discussion was only one of three events on Gaza that took place at UCLA around the same time. The other two, sponsored by the UCLA Israel Studies program, were explicitly intended to bring Israeli perspectives, including that of the Israeli Consul in Los Angeles, to campus, and to justify the bombardment of Gaza. "Human Rights and Gaza," by contrast, was not designed to present a Palestinian perspective (indeed, three of the five participants were Jewish, and one an Israeli); rather, it was meant to restore a sense of intellectual balance and historical context, by offering, in an academic format, a space in which established scholars could address the growing concerns (on campus and more broadly) about the human rights of a population under devastating attack by the Israeli military. That the panel was concerned with violations of human rights and international humanitarian law perhaps explains why no advocate of those violations was added to the panel (after all, advocates of legal and human rights violations are not often forthcoming). The talks by the four speakers were largely uneventful, being interrupted by pro-Israeli jeers just once and briefly. The question and discussion period grew a bit more heated and contentious. But it was hardly uncivil, save for a mostly irrelevant rant read by an insistent member of the Socialist Workers Party who refused to stop even when she was asked to by the chair, and by a couple of Israeli supporters becoming heated. This provoked one ironic and misinterpreted response from one of the panelists to a comment from the floor about the murderous nature of all Arabs (for which the panelist but not the audience member offered an apology). Now if you read the characterizations of this event published in various outlets -- from the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles to the National Review, the Wall Street Journal , and The Los Angeles Times -- you would take away a very different view of things. Repeated descriptions of the event by those who admit that they did not attend it have characterized the proceedings as akin to a "beer hall political rally" and an anti-Semitic lynch mob, and have gone so far -- by the time Stanley Kurtz joined the chorus -- as to charge the panel, apparently working on behalf of Hamas, as having led an increasingly frenzied crowd in chants of "F-ck Israel" and "Zionism is Nazism." Plain Facts: What Actually Took Place at UCLA Both of us were present throughout the entire event, we have listened in the wake of these absurd accusations to the publicly available podcasts of the talks, and we have checked with others present. Nothing could be further from the truth. A testament to the civility of the evening was made evident by the appearance of a campus policeman beside the front stage as discussion grew a little heated. His very presence seemed to cool tempers, and he exchanged smiles and greetings with some audience members. While there was applause at various points, laughter at others -- how different from most academic panels -- at no time was there chanting or invective hurled by the audience (that either of us, or anyone we talked to, witnessed) or by panelists at Israel or at any other state. No panelist called for or led the audience to chant or collectively to chastise Israel. In fact, the most uncomfortable expression of the evening was heard repeatedly at the front stage after the event had ended. A well-known Israeli provocateur from the UCLA neighborhood (neither a student nor a faculty member), who had once been involved in a scuffle with the UCLA campus rabbi (of all people), was marching up and down hissing wildly beneath her breath at one of the speakers on the panel, calling him out by first name and insisting in a tone laced with invective that he should be ashamed of himself. How, then, have hearsay, exaggeration, and sheer fabrication managed to replace a sturdy, robust account of the event based on actual facts? Two accounts of the panel were published shortly after it took place. The first was by a professional journalist writing for UCLA Today , the campus newspaper of record, on January 22. It characterized the forum as "a well-attended public event," and went on to summarize the main arguments of the papers. It made no mention of jeers, chants, or other untoward behavior (because there were none). It is remarkable that in all the discussion of the panel that has subsequently taken place, there are, as far as we can tell, only two links to this article on the entire internet. How the Internet Loves Malicious Fictions The second article, which has proliferated widely through the enchantment of the internet, was written by the education/research director of Stand With Us (one of the most vociferous components of the Israel on Campus Coalition), who sometimes identifies herself as a member of the faculty of UC Irvine (which in fact she is not). Under the headline, "Reviving 1920s Munich Beer Halls at UCLA," she presents an incoherent and rambling account of the talks that fails to convey accurately any of what was actually said (which can be easily verified by comparing her article to the podcasts of the talks at www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/podcasts). She also liberally adds unsupported and indeed unsupportable assertions and wild exaggerations into the mix (e.g., saying that the event amounted to "an academic lynching of Israel," claiming that the speakers "expressed hope that Israel would lose against Hamas," and comparing the talks by four academically distinguished and well-published scholars to "the anti-Semitic rabble rousing of 1920s Munich beer halls"). These baseless assertions (even a quick listen to the podcasts will confirm that that is what they are) have gone on to frame and color the way in which the event has been represented and characterized in almost all of the subsequent discussions. Not only has most of the subsequent discussion been based on this one article, no one relying on it has pointed out its provenance or the inherently unreliable testimony of the author, or the gap between the article and the actual talks as embodied in the live recordings publicly available to anyone in the podcasts. Thus, subsequent discussions -- by, it bears repeating, people who admit that they were not actually at the event -- have followed the pattern taken by the children's game, "telephone." A message is passed on from person to person until, having gone around the room, it bears only a passing resemblance to the original utterance. Only in this case not only does the original message (itself already faulty, given the source) deteriorate, but further layers of exaggeration and hyperbole are added to it at each pass. Pearls of Misinformation Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA and one of Israel's most ardent defenders in Los Angeles, helped to ratchet up the misrepresentations of the event. Pearl began writing about the Gaza panel first in the Wall Street Journal (February 3, 2009), then in another article in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (February 18, 2009) , and then in yet another piece, in The Los Angeles Times. In his first piece he asserts without evidence or justification that the event was essentially "a Hamas recruiting rally" intended -- by Hamas , the reader could be led to believe -- to score "another inroad into Western minds." By the time he published the piece in the Jewish Journal , Pearl had embellished his account further, adding the utterly fictitious allegation that the panelists "led the excited audience into chanting ?Zionism is Nazism,' ?F-ck, f-ck Israel,' in the best tradition of rhino liturgy." What is most interesting about Pearl's many accounts of the event, however, is not their hyperbolic nature, but rather the fact that he was not at the event which he has described in such lurid and varying terms in three different published accounts . His source (as he acknowledges in one of his articles, though not the others) is the Stand With Us article. Later, referring back in seamless circularity to this series of articles sealing itself from the truth, another writer in the Jewish Journal (Tom Tugend, published on February 25, 2009) comes to refer to the event as "the by now notorious UCLA symposium." Character assassination by self-referencing fabrication! The mischaracterizations and fabrications of Pearl's account, themselves building on the unsteady foundation provided by those in the Stand With Us piece, have been repeated ad nauseam by others as the gospel truth. For example, although it is highly unusual -- if not altogether unheard of -- for a university president to criticize his own faculty for expressing their views in an academic setting, in public comments at a Los Angeles synagogue the president of the University of California, Mark Yudof, did just that, chastising the scholars participating in the Center for Near Eastern Studies panel, according to what he had learned of it from Pearl's misrepresentation of the event. Stanley Kurtz's main "evidence" for his characterization of the panel in the National Review Online article also comes from Pearl. In short, the fabrications have become the public record of note, the "truth" of the matter. A Wider Pattern-Barnard College, UC Santa Barbara This broader logic, too, follows a disturbing pattern. In a campaign (initiated by an angry alumna living in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank) against a tenure case at Barnard College two years ago, professor Nadia Abu el-Haj was accused of shoddy scholarship by those who had never read her work. She was falsely charged with writing about Israeli archaeology while knowing no Hebrew, and of falsifying the history of archaeology to anchor an argument about Palestinians' historical claim to the Holy Land (she makes no such argument). Analogous mischaracterizations have been made about the scholarship of other vocal critics of Israel's policies and actions toward Palestinians, equally based on false, misleading, or nonexistent evidence -- or sheer fancy. Public fabrications of other events, including letters of complaint to chancellors, some at sister-UC campuses, have stuffed false, damaging, and demeaning language into the mouths of the critics of Israeli policy; twisted arguments and intentions to something altogether unrecognizable; and sometimes garbled, while refusing to discuss in any way, the substance of the criticisms expressed. Like a growing list of others, we have both repeatedly been subjected to "the treatment." The most recent episode of this kind of distortion involves Professor William (Bill) Robinson of the Sociology Department at UC Santa Barbara. During the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in January 2009, Robinson forwarded to his class on "Globalization and Politics" material that drew comparisons between the Nazi assault on the Warsaw Ghetto and the Israeli assault on Gaza. Two Jewish students in the class, after apparently talking with the Anti-Defamation League, filed a complaint against Robinson for "violating the Faculty Code of Conduct" and dropped the class. It turns out that Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, met (under misleading pretexts) with senior UC Santa Barbara administrators and began to pressure them to investigate and censure Robinson. Foxman also apparently threatened to encourage Jewish donors to the university to withdraw their financial support unless Robinson was censured. Stand With Us -- the same outfit that played such a damaging role in the UCLA incident -- likewise became actively involved, organizing a massive letter writing campaign and threatening to bring pressure to bear to cut off donations to the campus. The most troubling aspect of this case is not that the Anti-Defamation League made the accusation or that Stand With Us jumped into the fray so eagerly, but rather that the UC Santa Barbara administration took the accusation seriously, and apparently succumbed to outside political pressure to have Professor Robinson investigated (http://sb4af.wordpress.com). Evidence mounted of numerous violations of university procedures in the conduct of the investigation. This included, most disturbingly, key committee members (themselves known supporters of Israeli policy) discussing the case privately with Foxman who, it should be emphasized, had no standing to be involved in the investigation at all. And yet the investigation apparently pressed on, in the face of mounting faculty, student, and external criticism of the university's violations of academic freedom and of its own investigative policies. It was only in mid-June 2009, six months after the case was initiated, that Professor Robinson received notice that all charges against him were being dropped. No reason was cited, but the remarkable mobilization of students and faculty against the investigation -- culminating in an uncontested UC Santa Barbara Academic Senate vote to investigate the administration's own mishandling of the entire affair -- no doubt played a key role. Political Effects: the Case of Charles Freeman Perhaps because many of the same organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League, are involved in both cases (via the Israel on Campus Coalition), the situation in the academy has now dovetailed with that outside the academy, and in the world of actual, hard politics centered on Washington. In the recent speech in which he explained his sudden withdrawal from the chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council, for example, Ambassador Charles Freeman said, "It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends." In a message published March 10 on Foreignpolicy.com, Freeman blamed this situation, and his own departure from public life amid a swirl of unfounded allegations, mischaracterizations, distortions, and fabrications, on the dominant elements within the Israeli lobby in Washington: The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors. We should all find alarming that what is taking place in the academy today is an extension of what takes place on Capitol Hill and in the corridors of (real) power. What is at stake is the process of representation, which shapes memory, disposition, and arguably -- in the long run at any rate -- the policy process itself. Many of the same tactics are being used in both situations; and they share the aim to monopolize legitimacy by tarnishing all criticism and questioning it as inherently illegitimate and malevolent. The Most Assertive Israeli Lobby: Dishonorable Tactics, Avoidance of Debate It is worth pointing out that those who resort to the sorts of unbridled and unfounded charges exemplified by the attacks on the UCLA Gaza panel or the Robinson affair at UC Santa Barbara rarely if ever actually engage the arguments of Israel's critics. Counter-arguments are hardly ever mounted, counter-evidence almost never thought necessary. The rhetoric of response is predictable, and it takes the shape of the familiar litany of exhausted assertions that are inevitably recited en bloc , without any reference to what is actually being said; what evidence is being offered; what reasons, arguments, facts, figures, and citations are being assembled. Thus any criticism of Israel and Zionism is treated as criticism of Jews (even if made by Jews, who are then obviously self-hating), and therefore anti-Semitic or worse, as Judea Pearl asserts in his piece in the Los Angeles Times of March 15, 2009. Israel is merely protecting the security of its people; any state under rocket attack would do the same. Hamas, like Hezbollah, is a terrorist organization and Israel, like the United States, has the right to protect itself by all means necessary (a right that in such accounts the Palestinians never seem to possess). And it's not fair-or, better yet, it's inherently anti-Semitic-to single out Israel for criticism when there are places in the world that are far less democratic and far more violent toward their residents than Israel (Darfur, the cause c?l?bre of many pro-Israeli organizations, is often trotted out as an example, though usually without it being noted that the United States does not support, arm, and subsidize the Sudanese government or give its illegal actions political cover in the UN Security Council, let alone that there is no one in the United States -- much less dozens of well-funded organizations and an armada of campus outfits -- actively condoning the atrocities in Darfur). The Pro-Israel Propaganda Handbook It is not surprising, then, given its provenance, that the Stand With Us report on "Gaza and Human Rights" expresses what pro-Israel campus activists refer to using the Hebrew word "hasbara." This means, essentially if not literally, "propaganda." The Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus , which is distributed to campus activists by organizations like Stand With Us (e.g., click "Guides for Activists" on www.middle-east-info.org), explains that it is often better to score points than to engage in actual arguments, and offers an explanation for how, in its own words, "to score points whilst avoiding debate." Point-scoring, the Hasbara Handbook explains, "works because most audience members fail to analyze what they hear. Rather, they register only a key few points, and form a vague ?impression' of whose argument was stronger." Part of the strategy is to recycle the same claims over and again, in as many settings as possible. "If people hear something often enough," the document points out, "they come to believe it." The Hasbara Handbook offers several other propaganda devices, all of which can be seen vividly at play in the coverage of the UCLA Gaza panel and other similar events, including, again, the Robinson affair. "Creating negative connotations by name calling is done to try to get the audience to reject a person or idea on the basis of negative associations, without allowing a real examination of that person or idea ," the handbook states with remarkable bluntness, in advocating that tactic. It also suggests using the opposite of name calling, to defend Israel by what it calls the deployment of "glittering generalities" (words like "freedom," "civilization," "democracy") to describe the country; manipulating the audience's fears ("listeners are too preoccupied by the threat of terrible things to think critically about the speaker's message"); and so on. The point of all this is not to use arguments backed by reason and evidence. It is, instead, to manipulate (the handbook's own term) an audience precisely in order not to examine arguments, not to think critically about what is being said. Which is a rather remarkable approach for a book intended for a university audience. This is precisely, almost to the letter, the approach taken by most of the attacks on scholarly critics of Israeli policy. It matters little what is actually being discussed by critics; the familiar stock-in-trade responses will be brought to bear to terminate the discussion. Or a campaign to silence the critics will be promoted by making life uncomfortable for them or threatening the withdrawal of support for their institutions, or most extremely threatening their very careers, or their very employability (as happened with Norman Finkelstein at DePaul). The less successful the initial attempt to close things down, the louder the next round of condemnation, the more heated the invective, the more extreme the charges, the more gratuitous the escalation. Thus escalates the crescendo of attacks aimed at the UCLA panelists, which now basically has them taking orders directly from Hamas, and leading a chanting mob of anti-Semites. We have both been subjected to similar accusations, in person and in print, mangling what we mean, putting words in our mouths we neither uttered nor thought, meanly misquoting or decontextualizing or partially citing what we write. It matters not that we have repeatedly and publicly endorsed nonviolent forms of protest and counter-action to Israel's violence; that we believe in justice, law, and human rights; that we would have all the people in the promised land enjoy its promise rather than some suffer strangulation at the hands of the others. Unbalanced Calls for "Balance" Undercut the Very Idea of the University Why then can strident supporters of Israel repeatedly resort to these tactics and be taken so seriously without engaging-indeed, while altogether avoiding-actual debate? Critics of the critics of Israeli policy repeatedly call for "balance," assuming that every panel by their opponents -- but not the ones they organize themselves -- should have counter-voices. Of course, the fact that every one-sided panel may be countered by one equally one-sided on the other side suggests that campuses can achieve a broader semblance of balance in other ways, as UCLA Chancellor Gene Block rightly noted in response to attempts by Israel's supporters to silence Israel's critics. We don't hear too many calls for economics departments having to hire Marxist political economists, or (in the opposite political direction) biology departments having to hire intelligent designers, in the name of "balance." Not to worry, we are not attempting to open up new cans of worms! We mean only to point out how one-sided the calls in the case of Israel-Palestine are, how unbalanced in the name of balance. Indeed, how off-balance. We certainly don't recall hearing from these quarters any condemnation of the one-sidedness of, say, Alan Dershowitz. Nor do we hear at a minimum any expression of concern by those so volubly condemning Hamas rockets fired at southern Israel for the devastation wrought by the Israeli bombardment of civilian men, women, and children taking shelter in schools and UN compounds during the recent assault on Gaza. And when Benny Morris, Israel's most renowned revisionist historian, famously insists that if you have to kill or be killed, it would be better to kill, we hear no pro-Israeli voices objecting in the name of "balance" that these are hardly the only options. Posing the issues reductively and solely as ones of survival in terms of physical self-defense so skews the issues as to essentially end the possibility of any debate. But perhaps that's the very point of the claim (as the Hasbara Handbook points out). When President Jimmy Carter was invited to speak by various campuses, including one of our own, after the publication of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid , Alan Dershowitz insisted in the name of "balance" that he share the stage or follow the former president's appearance. No doubt Professor Dershowitz speaks to many groups on his own, pushing his one-sided position. We don't hear calls that his audiences have access to an immediate counter-view. If balance is required in public of a former U.S. president, is it not also to be applied to a "one-sided" professor? And then what -- every lecture on every issue on every campus is to be followed by a counter-lecture? The very idea is absurd. Likewise perhaps with public forums such as National Review Online . In his article, Stanley Kurtz makes a good deal of the lack of balance by public forums giving voice to Israel's critics. And yet he does so in a forum hardly known for publishing pro-Palestinian pieces. Be careful what you call for! In The Trial , Kafka writes that "the charges are never made frivolously, and that the Court, once it has brought a charge against someone, is firmly convinced of the guilt of the accused and can be dislodged from that conviction only with the greatest difficulty." Israel's campus critics are accused without notice, condemned without evidence, convicted without recourse, and sentenced without representation. Israel's most vocal American proponents serve as policeman and accuser, judge and jury. In the end, those convicted are reduced to nothing more than shadow figures, straw persons set afire by the flaming terms of accusation. Those undertaking to place off bounds all criticism of the Israeli state or military regarding treatment of Palestinians by automatically and offhandedly denouncing such criticism as anti-Semitic trivialize any legitimate charge of real anti-Semitism. This accusatory trivialization confronts such strident supporters with a quandary. They seek to de-exceptionalize Israel by insisting that critics do not equally condemn Sudan or China or North Korea for violations of human rights. And yet they exceptionalize the Israeli state by seeking to shield it from any criticism whatsoever. No good ever comes from a state rendered or rendering itself immune from criticism, as the instances cited by Israel's supporters prove without qualification. True to our nature, however, academics as such should live to push ideas, to press difficult points, to debate the ins and outs. As Edward Said repeatedly pointed out, academics and intellectuals have a responsibility not just to speak in clearly articulated ways but also to air ideas even about difficult subjects, to venture where others might avoid going. The misrepresentations formulated by Israel's most vociferous supporters are designed to narrow not just what can be said about a subject but what subject matter can be raised at all. The misrepresentations, the implied silencing, and the insidious implications are not simply pernicious; they seem obviously designed to quash any criticism of Israeli policy. In short, such intervention has the effect of undercutting the very idea of the university. Proposed Guidelines for Debating Israel/Palestine on Campus Here, then, in the spirit of intellectual civility, are some guidelines that we believe will facilitate the discussion of Israel/Palestine on American college campuses. These are the criteria, we suggest, by which criticism -- criticism of Israel and criticism of Israel's critics -- should be assessed. We urge that when there are disagreements that interlocutors be judged by whether they: ? respond to arguments with counter-arguments, not ad hominem accusations; ? respond to evidence with counter-evidence, not mere assertions; ? focus on what is being said and on the extent to which what is being said is supported by evidence, instead of resorting to cries of "imbalance" and "one-sidedness"; ? make every effort not to distort what someone else says: in particular, whether they reconstruct quotations out of context or quote only half-sentences; ? put words in other people's mouths, and try to portray someone who identifies herself as an advocate of peace and justice as in fact secretly-or is it obviously? -- a monstrously racist advocate of violence; ? try to stifle dissent by threatening or jeopardizing the critic's career; ? discount the numbers of dead or injured or the innocence of the dead or injured among those regarded as "the enemy" while justifying the devastation produced by the action in question as "necessary" even if the effects were "unfortunate." ? One other point. There have long been academic centers and teaching programs for Jewish Studies, as well as Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, Arab, and Islamic Studies. In the past, the best of those institutional formations have looked to engage-and to engage across personal and political divides, precisely-the complex relations marked by the segregating political conditions. More recently, as the separationist politics and their ideological rationalizations have hardened on the ground, academic programs have begun to mirror these isolating conditions. For instance, there have begun to emerge programs or research centers solely in Israel Studies, funded largely by private endowments, tending to ignore or lament or rationalize away the relation between conditions in Israel and those in the Occupied Territories. Such programs attempt to consider Israel as though it could be framed as an object of study in isolation from the Palestinians (who make up a fifth of its own population and half of the total population over which Israel rules) and the whole question of Palestine, to both of which Israel is in fact inexorably tied. Imagine trying to frame an American studies program today that consciously (or, worse, unconsciously) excludes any treatment of blacks or Hispanics. Given the complex constitution of the region, accordingly, we consider it imperative that any teaching or research program about Israel-Palestine take seriously the complex and interacting ways that social, cultural, political, legal, and epistemological arrangements are deeply intertwined, that conditions of life and death for some turn relationally on those for others. This entails a different way of thinking not just about the region but also more about institutions of knowledge formation and their institutional arrangements than tends to be the dominant trend today. A Proposal for Tikkun Forums Tikkun has occupied an extraordinarily important progressive and productive position amid the intellectual and political tensions. We consider Tikkun and the communities it is able to reach and address uniquely well-placed, accordingly, to promote a set of forums -- whether online, in print, or face-to-face-designed to promote civil, respectful, but critical engagements across the political divides. Such forums would (and already do) provide the platforms to air difficult positions about the Israel-Palestine divide, to critique and counter-critique without being maligned, and to discuss alternative arrangements without fear of being reduced to ridicule, invective, or even threat. Such forums would be well-placed to establish ground rules and guidelines for criticizing political programs and practices, as well as their supporters and critics, civilly and without engaging in a witch hunt as a consequence of the criticism aired. They would establish the standards similarly for unacceptable disparagement of Jews and of Palestinians, as well as of critics of Israel and the Palestinian cause. And they would set the example for distinguishing between acceptable criticism of Israel's actions and policies and anti-Semitic criticism of Jews as such. This example, in turn, would have the effect of encouraging the major representatives of the Anti-Defamation League to return to its historically crucial role of monitoring not only anti-Semitism but also all forms of bigotry, without reducing criticism of Israel of necessity to anti-Semitism. To put off the table crucial counter-considerations is to unbalance consideration of the alternatives. A forum dominated by those who can shout loudest, have more access, have more resources, or feel more insulted is one-sided and, in the end, destructive. One-sided, self-regarding assertion is no exchange at all. In the final analysis it does no one any good, least of all the people suffering the consequences, on pretty much all sides of the divide. We call, by contrast, for engaging the arguments, for respecting the right to say difficult things, countering without abuse, making criticisms and counter-criticisms without mischievous mischaracterization. Without hasbara . In calling for respectful exchange, for critical engagement, then, we are calling for respecting the positions taken by honest thinkers. In insisting on balance and recalibration, we are agreeing to balance in all the complexity, on all registers and dimensions. The lives at stake-all the lives-are owed nothing less. David Theo Goldberg directs the system-wide University of California Humanities Research Institute ( www.uchri.org ) and is a professor of comparative literature and criminology, law, and society at UC Irvine. Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 11:41:23 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:41:23 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] University professors' petition on situation at Iranian universities In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <1169686053.474761252690883544.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> srahnema at yorku.ca > Dear all, would you be willing to add your name to the list. If you agree > could you also ask or suggest your colleagues sign and send their names to > me. A cultural Revolution is underway in Iran, best saeed > > ------- > Saeed Rahnema, PhD > Professor, > Political Science and Public Policy and Admin > York University, > 4700 Keele St. Toronto, ON > Canada M3J 1P3 > phone+416 736 2100, ext. 66624 > Fax: 416 736 5382 > srahnema at yorku.ca From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 11:54:49 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:54:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Chavez: A Friend to Iran (Washington Post editorial) Message-ID: <2002445613.482821252691689227.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/09/AR2009090902607.html Washington Post September 10, 2009 Editorial A Friend to Iran Does the Obama administration know what Venezuela is doing to assist Tehran 's weapons programs? DEBATES IN Washington about Hugo Ch?vez often end with the dismissive conclusion that the Venezuelan strongman poses no threat to the United States . If that's right, it's not because he isn't trying. For years he has been traveling the world in an effort to build alliances with present or former U.S. enemies, from Cuba to Vietnam . He dreams of standing at the head of a global anti-American military alliance. Most of his efforts have been rebuffed; some have produced mere buffoonery, like his annual, ludicrous love-fest with Belarusan dictator Alexander Lukashenko. But Mr. Chavez has clearly forged a bond with one leader who is as reckless and ambitious as he is: Iran 's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The growing fruits of this relationship, and its potential consequences for U.S. security, have not gotten as much attention as they deserve. Mr. Ch?vez was in Tehran again this week and offered his full support for Mr. Ahmadinejad's hard-line faction. As usual, the caudillo made clear that he shares Iran 's view of Israel , which he called "a genocidal state." He endorsed Iran 's nuclear program and declared that Venezuela would seek Iran 's assistance to construct a nuclear complex of its own. He also announced that his government would begin supplying Iran with 20,000 barrels of gasoline a day -- a deal that could directly undercut a possible U.S. effort to curtail Iran 's gasoline imports. Such collaboration is far from new for Venezuela and Iran . In the past several years Iran has opened banks in Caracas and factories in the South American countryside. Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, who has been investigating the arrangements, says he believes Iran is using the Venezuelan banking system to evade U.S. and U.N. sanctions. He also points out that Iranian factories have been located "in remote and undeveloped parts of Venezuela " that lack infrastructure but that could be "ideal . . . for the illicit production of weapons." "The opening of Venezuela 's banks to the Iranians guarantees the continued development of nuclear technology and long-range missiles," Mr. Morgenthau said in a briefing this week in Washington at the Brookings Institution. "The mysterious manufacturing plants, controlled by Iran deep in the interior of Venezuela , give even greater concern." Mr. Morgenthau's report was brushed off by the State Department, which is deeply invested in the Ch?vez-is-no-threat theory. State "will look into" Mr. Morgenthau's allegations, spokesman Ian Kelly said Wednesday. Meanwhile, Mr. Ch?vez is off to Moscow , where, according to the Russian press, he plans to increase the $4 billion he has already spent on weapons by another $500 million or so. Mr. Ch?vez recently promised to buy "several battalions" of Russian tanks. Not a threat? Give him time. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 13:02:11 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:02:11 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] This rewriting of history is spreading Europe's poison In-Reply-To: <1154627882.290441252626056669.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <987488918.522771252695731427.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/09/second-world-war-soviet-pact The Guardian 9 September 2009 This rewriting of history is spreading Europe's poison Blaming the USSR for the second world war is not only absurd ? it boosts the heirs of the Nazis' wartime collaborators Seumas Milne Through decades of British commemorations and coverage of the second world war ? from Dunkirk to D-day ? there has never been any doubt about who started it. However dishonestly the story of 1939 has been abused to justify new wars against quite different kinds of enemies, the responsibility for the greatest conflagration in human history has always been laid at the door of Hitler and his genocidal Nazi regime. That is until now. Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was "Hitler's accomplice", the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s. In his introduction to this week's Guardian history of the war, the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson declared that Stalin was "as much an aggressor as Hitler". Last month, the ostensibly more liberal Orlando Figes went further, insisting the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was "the licence for the Holocaust" . Given that the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat at the cost of 25 million dead, it's scarcely surprising that Russians are outraged by such accusations. When the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week denounced attempts to draw parallels between the role of the Nazis and the Soviet Union as a "cynical lie" , he wasn't just speaking for his government, but the whole country ? and a good deal of the rest of the world besides. There's no doubt that the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war. You can argue about how Stalin used it to buy time, his delusions about delaying the Nazi onslaught, or whether the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland was, as Churchill maintained at the time, "necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace". But to claim that without the pact there would have been no war is simply absurd ? and, in the words of the historian Mark Mazower, "too tainted by present day political concerns to be taken seriously". Hitler had given the order to attack and occupy Poland much earlier. As fellow historian Geoff Roberts puts it, the pact was an "instrument of defence, not aggression". That was a good deal less true of the previous year's Munich agreement, in which British and French politicians dismembered Czechoslovakia at the Nazi dictator's pleasure. The one pact that could conceivably have prevented war, a collective security alliance with the Soviet Union, was in effect blocked by the appeaser Chamberlain and an authoritarian Polish government that refused to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil. Poland had signed its own non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and seized Czech territory, which puts last week's description by the Polish president Lech Kaczynski of a Soviet "stab in the back" in perspective. The case against the Anglo-French appeasers and the Polish colonels' regime over the failure to prevent war is a good deal stronger than against the Soviet Union, which perhaps helps to explain the enthusiasm for the new revisionism in both parts of the continent. But across eastern Europe, the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, the drive to rewrite history is being used to relativise Nazi crimes and rehabilitate collaborators. At the official level, it has focused on a campaign to turn August 23 ? the anniversary of the non-aggression pact ? into a day of commemoration for the victims of communism and nazism. In July that was backed by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, following a similar vote in the European parliament and a declaration signed by Vaclav Havel and others branding "communism and nazism as a common legacy" of Europe that should be jointly commemorated because of "substantial similarities". That east Europeans should want to remember the deportations and killings of "class enemies" by the Soviet Union during and after the war is entirely understandable. So is their pressure on Russia to account, say, for the killing of Polish officers at Katyn ? even if Soviet and Russian acknowledgment of Stalin's crimes already goes far beyond, for example, any such apologies by Britain or France for the crimes of colonialism. But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery ? or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide ? is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945. The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius's Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as "fighters for independence". Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania ? a member of the EU and Nato ? last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: "People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries' participation in mass murder." As the political heirs of the Nazis' collaborators in eastern Europe gain strength on the back of growing unemployment and poverty, and antisemitism and racist violence against Roma grow across the region, the current indulgence of historical falsehoods about the second world war can only spread this poison. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 13:01:42 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:01:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] (Afghanistan) Obama at the Rubicon In-Reply-To: <1131811332.291441252626254126.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <756588235.522461252695702881.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2009/09/08/obama-at-the-rubicon/ Antiwar.com September 8, 2009 Obama at the Rubicon By Patrick J. Buchanan If the aphorism holds ? the guerrilla wins if he does not lose ? the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in Afghanistan. Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more provinces than ever, and controlling more territory than ever. And their tactics are more sophisticated. Gen. Stanley McChrystal calls the situation ?serious.? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen calls it ?serious? and ?deteriorating.? President Obama thus faces a decision that may decide the fate of his presidency. For if the situation is grave and deteriorating, he cannot do nothing. Inaction invites, if it does not assure, defeat. Does he cut U.S. losses, write off Afghanistan as not worth any more American blood and treasure, and execute a strategic retreat? Or does he become the war president who sends McChrystal the scores of thousands of U.S. troops necessary to stave off a defeat for all the years needed to conscript and train an Afghan army that can and will defend the Kabul regime and pacify the country? Afghanistan is being called Obama?s Vietnam. It could become that, and bring down his presidency as Vietnam brought down Lyndon Johnson?s. But Afghanistan is not yet Vietnam in terms either of troops committed or casualties taken. The 68,000 Americans who will be in Afghanistan at year?s end are an eighth of the forces in Vietnam when Richard Nixon began to bring them home. Vietnam cost the lives of 58,000 Americans. The Afghan war has cost fewer than 1,000. U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are as yet only a fifth of the U.S. losses in the Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902. If we compare Afghanistan to Vietnam, we are about in 1964, when the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed and the bombing of the North began, or December 1965, when the Marines came ashore at Danang. Obama can still choose not to fight this war. But should he so choose, he will be charged by Republicans and neoconservatives with a loss of nerve, with having cut and run, with having lost what he himself has repeatedly called a ?war of necessity,? with having abandoned the noble cause for which many of America?s best and bravest have already paid the ultimate price. And it needs be said: The consequences of a U.S. withdrawal today would be far greater than if we had never gone in, or had gone in, knocked over the Taliban, run al-Qaeda out of the country, gotten out, and gone home. Instead, we brought NATO in, put tens of thousands of troops in and declared our determination to build an Afghan democracy that would be a model for the Islamic world, where women?s rights were protected. After inviting the world to observe how the superpower succeeds in taking down a tyranny and creating a democracy, we will have failed, and we will be perceived by the whole world to have failed. While there was no vital U.S. interest in Afghanistan before we went in, we have invested so much blood, money, and prestige that withdrawal now ? which would entail a Taliban takeover of Kabul and the Pashtun south and east ? would be a strategic debacle unprecedented since the fall of Saigon. But what if Obama approves McChrystal?s request and puts another 20,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops into the war? Certainly, that would stave off any defeat. But what is the assurance it would bring enduring victory closer? The Taliban have matched us escalation for escalation and are now militarily stronger than at any time since the Northern Alliance, with U.S. air support, ran them out of Kabul. About the political consequences of escalation, there is no doubt. Obama would divide his party and country. His support would steadily sink as the roll call of U.S. dead and wounded inexorably rose. He would watch as the NATO allies moved toward the exit and America was left alone to fight alongside the Afghans in a seemingly endless war. Consider. If there were no Americans in Afghanistan today, and the Taliban were on the verge of victory, how many of us would demand the dispatch of 68,000 troops to fight to prevent it? Few, if any, one imagines. What that answer suggests is that the principal reason for fighting on is not that Afghanistan is vital, but that we cannot accept the American defeat and humiliation that withdrawal would mean. Thus Obama?s dilemma: Accept a longer, bloodier war with little hope of ultimate victory, a decision that could cost him his presidency. Or order a U.S. withdrawal and accept defeat, a decision that could cost him his presidency. In such situations, presidents often decide not to decide. Harry Truman could not decide in Korea. LBJ could not decide in Vietnam. Both lost their presidencies. Ike and Nixon came in, cut U.S. losses and got out. The country rewarded both with second terms. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 13:01:01 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:01:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Fascist America: Are We There Yet? In-Reply-To: <2041509511.434251252686657711.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <989046615.521911252695661980.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083205/fascist-america-are-we-there-yet OurFuture.org August 6, 2009 Fascist America: Are We There Yet? By Sara Robinson All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet? And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet. " In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History , Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it. And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground. What is fascism? The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term: "Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline." Elsewhere, he refines this further as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." . Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 13:12:00 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:12:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Israel: A Stalemated Action of History In-Reply-To: <606015896.575831252452086943.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1334237460.527271252696320038.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22435 Znet August 26, 2009 Israel : A Stalemated Action of History By Gabriel Kolko Source: CounterPunch In late 1949 I worked on a boat taking Jews from Marseilles to Haifa, Israel. Jews from Arab nations were in the front of the boat, Europeans in the rear. I was regarded by many of the Europeans as some sort of freak because I had a United States passport and so could stay in the land of milk and honey. One man wanted me to marry his daughter - which meant he too could live in the land of milk and honey. My Hebrew became quite respectable but the experience was radicalizing or, I should say, kept me radical, and I have stayed that way. Later I learned from someone who ran a displaced persons camp in Germany that the large majority of Jews wanted to go anywhere but Palestine. They were compelled to state Palestine or else risk receiving no aid. I understood very early that there was much amiss in the countless Arab villages and homes I saw destroyed, and that the entire Zionist project - regardless of the often venal nature of the Arab opposition to it - was a dangerous sham. The result of the creation of a state called Israel was abysmal. Jews from Poland have nothing in common with Germans and neither has anything to do with those from the Arab world. It is nationality, not religion, that counts most. Jews in Israel, especially the Germans, largely ghettoized themselves by their place of origin during the first generation, when a militarized culture produced the mixed new breed called sabras - an essentially anti-intellectual personality far different from the one the early Zionists, who were mostly socialists who preached the nobility of labor, expected to emerge. The large majority of Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the cultural sense, are scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life and the way people live is no different in Israel than it is in Chicago or Amsterdam. There is simply no rational reason that justifies the state's creation. The outcome is a small state with a military ethos that pervades all aspects of Israel's culture, its politics and, above all, its response to the existence of Arabs in its midst and at its borders. From its inception, the ideology of the early Zionists - of Labor Zionism as well as the rightist Revisionism that Vladimir Jabotinsky produced - embodied a commitment to violence, erroneously called self-defense, and a virtual hysteria. As a transcendent idea, Zionism has no validity because the national differences between Jews are overwhelming. What Zionism confirmed, if any confirmation were needed, is that accidents are more important in shaping history than is all too often allowed. Here was the intellectual caf?, which existed in key cities - Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century or the Lower East Side of New York before World War I - filled with immensely creative people full of ideas and longing for a golden era to come. Ideas - good, bad, and indifferent - flourished. In this heady atmosphere, Zionism was born. But Zionism has produced a Sparta that traumatized an already artificially divided region partitioned after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I led to the Versailles Treaty and the creation of the modern Middle East. The state of Israel has always relied on military solutions to political and sociological problems with the Arabs. The result is constant mobilization. Even more troublesome for peace and stability in the vast Middle East, Zionism has always been symbiotic on some great power for the security of its national project, realized in a state called Israel. Before 1939 it was the British; during the 1950s it was France. Israel has survived since the late 1960s on the influx of US arms and money, and this has allowed it to encourage its fears of annihilation - a fate its possession of nuclear weapons makes most unlikely. But Israel also has an importance far beyond the fantasies of a few confused literati. Today its significance for American foreign policy is far greater because the Soviet Union no longer exists and the Middle East provokes the fear so essential to mobilizing Congress and the US public. "The best hopes and the worst fears of the planet are invested in that relatively small patch of earth" - as George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, put it in his memoir - and so understanding how and why that patch came into being, and the grave limits of the martial course it is following, has a very great, even transcendent value. In July 2003 Foreign Minister Shalom predicted that Iran would have nuclear bomb capability by 2006. It did not have nuclear weapons in 2006, though in fact a successful strike by conventional missiles on Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility, would radioactivate a good part of Israel - and both Iran and Syria have such missiles. Defense Minister Ehud Barak, during Vice-President Dick Cheney's visit in late March 2008, stated that "Iran's weapons program threatens not only the stability of the region, but of the whole world," and he did not rule out a war with it. By spring 2008 Israel was also very concerned about the growing ascendancy of Hizbollah in Lebanon and its greatly increased firepower - mainly in the form of rockets capable of striking much of Israel. It regards Hizbollah as a tool of Iran, and its focus on Iran concerns its control over Hizbollah as well as its ability to challenge Israel's nuclear monopoly. But there can be no doubt that Hizbollah's strength has only grown since Israel attacked it in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel now has an enemy that can inflict immense damage on it, probably resulting in highly skilled Jews migrating far faster than they already are at present - even now, more Jews are leaving Israel than migrating to it. The existence of Israel is scarcely the only reason American policy in the region is as bad as it is. After all, it did not take Zionism to encourage Washington to seek the elimination of British influence in the region, and today no one can tell how long the US will remain mired in the affairs of the Middle East. But Israel is now a vital factor. While the extent of its role can be debated, without it the politics of the entire Middle East would be different - troubled but very different. At least equally nefarious in the long run, Israel's existence has radicalized - but in a negative sense - the Arab world, distracting it from natural class differences that often overcome religious and tribal ties. It has fanned Arab nationalism abysmally and given it a transcendent negative identity. I am very realistic - and pessimistic - about an eventual negotiated solution to the crisis that has surrounded Palestine and Israel. Given the magnitude of the changes needed, the present situation justifies the most dismal conclusions. After all, the Arabs that live under Israeli control will quite soon outnumber the Jewish population, leaving a de facto Jewish state in which Jews are a minority! This fact is becoming deeply troublesome within Israeli politics today, causing former expansionists to reverse their position and leading to more and more internal controversy. Nor will there ever be an administration in Washington ready to do diplomatically what none has ever dared do since 1947, namely compel Israel to make an equitable peace with the Arabs. Neither a one- nor two-state solution will come to pass. But the Jewish population is very likely to decline, and if it falls sufficiently then demography may prove to be a crucial factor. The ratio of Jews to Arabs would then become highly significant. The Jews in Israel are highly skilled and many have gotten out, migrating abroad. The Israeli military is the most powerful in the region because it has been deluged with American equipment, which it has learned to service. But US forces need repairmen to service the very same equipment, more than ever because recruitment into the American military is now lower than it has been in a quarter-century (not to mention its astronomical suicide rate), and skilled Israelis can take jobs with America's armed forces that they are eminently qualified to fill. Moreover, Iran and the other Arab states will eventually develop or acquire nuclear weapons, making Israel incredibly insecure for its highly mobile Jewish population - one exhausted by regular service in compulsory reserves. And as already suggested, destroying Dimona with conventional missiles or mortars would be a cheap way to radioactivate a good part of Israel. Even worse, Osama bin Laden, or someone like him, may acquire a nuclear device, and one nuclear bomb detonated in or near Israel will effectively destroy what is a tiny area. Whoever destroys Israel will be proclaimed a hero in the Arab world. To those with skills, the answer is clear: get out. And getting out they are. There are also Orthodox Jews in Israel but Israeli mass culture is now virtually indistinguishable from consumerism anywhere - in many crucial respects, there is more Judaism in parts of Brooklyn or Toronto than in most of Israel. The Orthodox too may be ready to leave behind the insecurity and troubles confronting those who live in a nation that is, after all, a part of a highly unstable region. Sober and quite rational Israelis exist, of course, and I cite them often enough, but American policy will be determined by factors having nothing to do with them. Unfortunately, rational Israelis are an all too small minority. Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War? and The Age of War: the US Confronts the World and After Socialism. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is World in Crisis, from which this essay has been excerpted. From shniad at sfu.ca Fri Sep 11 13:16:59 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:16:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Seeking the right epithet In-Reply-To: <168233013.528981252696579993.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <958349320.529311252696619339.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.theprovince.com/opinion/editorial-cartoons/index.html From deanosor at mailup.net Fri Sep 11 15:45:52 2009 From: deanosor at mailup.net (dean tuckerman) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:45:52 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> Message-ID: <8D74CC23-A8B3-41DE-AA2E-3424EF052649@mailup.net> Until you can convince people like Caldicott, and Wasserman you'll have no sale. On Sep 7, 2009, at 1:22 PM, Gregory Meyerson wrote: > gary: it's already been built. the most advanced is GE's s prism. > and the demo reactors were built years ago and tested at argonne. > > > you don't what you're talking about, as the comparison with cold > fusion shows. > > > and gen threes are out which have built in passive safety, though not > the efficiency with uranium use. > > > listen: read the stuff I suggested. I know all the anti nuke > arguments backwards and forwards and they're based in ignorance. > don't just read caldicott or wasserman. then you'll be stuck where I > was one year ago, in serious misinformation. > > > I've cc'd tom blees if you're interested . > On Sep 7, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: > >> That new nuclear is so far from reality that it is like Cold Fusion >> a pipe dream. >> >> >> >> >> ________________________________ >> From: gregory meyerson >> To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com >> Sent: Monday, September 7, 2009 7:10:28 AM >> Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity >> Industrialism >> >> there is n't a uranium availability problem with 4th generation >> nuclear. see for a brief but informative reference, James Hansen's >> Letter to Obama. >> >> >> >> for more detail, see barry brook's bravenewclimate site and tom blees >> book, prescription for the planet. >> >> >> the left knows nothing about new nuclear. >> >> >> course, the key problem to solving climate change is capitalist >> social >> relations, but the wind/solar nuclear discussion needs to resemble >> the >> truth. >> >> >> see also david mackay, "sustainability without the hot air," >> available >> on line for free. >> On Sep 6, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: >> >>> Your site and Arch Druids are a pain in the ass to post comments >>> on. I >>> don't know why they are not simple like Wordpress or this is. Anyway >>> this is my comment to his post you can pass it on to him or not I >>> tried twice to post it on his site and it wouldn't let me. It is a >>> good thing I saved my comment first or I would be pissed off. >>> This is an interesting post and >>> I would say first the point about Rare metal export restriction is >>> probably part economic warfare between the USA and China. The US >>> wants >>> to produce cars with rare metal batteries, China wanted to buy GM. >>> They got Hummer, and now they have access to that military >>> technology, >>> even if they had to agree to make it in the USA. Being able to >>> export >>> the batteries puts China in the position to control the market as >>> long >>> as batteries are based on lithium technology. >>> On the other hand there is nothing new about that. China has been >>> the manufacturing plant of choice for the world's capitalists for a >>> couple of decades. >>> The USA has become the great agricultural exporting nation and >>> has >>> been for a century. We were only the worlds center of manufacturing >>> for a few decades when Europe's capacity was devastated by war. >>> This bit about derivatives and the financial markets driving the >>> world economy is part of a temporary bubble that boomed after the >>> Bretton Woods agreement was abrogated in the 1970's when Nixon was >>> forced to let the dollar float. This is literally play money and has >>> nothing to do with the real economy. It was created artificially and >>> it will disappear once people are done playing this version of >>> monopoly. >>> We are not entering a scarcity economy but simply transiting to a >>> non fossil fuel economy. This can be as soft or hard a transition as >>> we want to make it depending on how willing the ruling classes >>> are to >>> simply chuck the oil economy and retool for a solar one. There >>> may be >>> a transition with a nuclear economy but there is the same >>> availability >>> problem with uranium as there is with oil. There is only enough for >>> about 50 years to fuel the world economy. All we need to do is >>> reallocate resources. Since the wealthy won't allow us to take the >>> money from them it will come out of the hides of the workers as is >>> normal but at some point it will happen. They will try to sell it to >>> us as a matter of scarcity but that is only to squeeze more wealth >>> out >>> of the majority of the population. There is no shortage, only >>> problems >>> of allocation. >>> As a former participant in a gnostic community, anarchist >>> communist >>> activist and currently a blogger/activist I find this to be one of >>> the >>> better blogs, even if I have problems with Druidism. - Gary Rumor. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ________________________________ >>> From: Bill Totten >>> To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com >>> Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2009 6:25:48 PM >>> Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism >>> >>> >>> by John Michael Greer >>> >>> The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) >>> >>> Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial >>> society >>> >>> >>> Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so >>> offer >>> a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are >>> setting the >>> future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in >>> the >>> dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed >>> almost >>> unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of >>> these >>> news >>> items seem to have been missed by most observers. >>> >>> The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is >>> planning >>> to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who >>> don't >>> track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have >>> become >>> crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for >>> example, is >>> used >>> in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent >>> magnets >>> used >>> in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and >>> other >>> hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being >>> hyped >>> by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth >>> elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of >>> the >>> world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an >>> imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of >>> speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines >>> outside >>> of >>> China that can produce the same minerals >>> >>> A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to >>> make it >>> into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means >>> minor >>> issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this >>> news; in >>> each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the >>> export >>> quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is >>> the >>> fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products >>> containing >>> rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the >>> raw >>> materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they >>> are no >>> longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a >>> source >>> of >>> raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of >>> somebody >>> else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare >>> earth >>> elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese >>> factories, >>> and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in >>> Chinese >>> hands. >>> >>> As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more >>> denunciations of >>> "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces >>> "resource >>> nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on >>> the >>> control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The >>> problem >>> arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources >>> these >>> days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real >>> estate. >>> >>> Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply >>> one of >>> the >>> consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a >>> century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, >>> with >>> troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took >>> place in >>> very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted >>> the >>> virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a >>> system >>> of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's >>> wealth >>> in >>> London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United >>> States >>> - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture >>> their >>> emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British >>> Empire >>> waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the >>> First >>> World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. >>> >>> We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the >>> role >>> of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing >>> strategic >>> trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own >>> industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we >>> might >>> reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and >>> punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to >>> 1945 >>> transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by >>> America's. >>> Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I >>> want >>> to discuss here points up one of the differences. >>> >>> This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative >>> market >>> has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion >>> dollars. >>> The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the >>> capacity >>> of >>> the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom >>> may >>> well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that >>> costs >>> you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when >>> multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have >>> spent >>> one >>> quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such >>> figures >>> if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. >>> >>> In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two >>> things >>> should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion >>> dollars >>> worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The >>> second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those >>> derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any >>> meaningful >>> sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than >>> more >>> financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report >>> post, >>> derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of >>> abstract >>> numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and >>> has now >>> gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. >>> >>> As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a >>> few >>> words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially >>> a bet >>> regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called >>> the >>> "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands >>> when >>> the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might >>> obligate >>> me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price >>> fixed in >>> advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due >>> determined >>> who >>> profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts >>> themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all >>> the >>> usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite >>> literally be >>> conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in >>> many >>> ways the perfect speculative instrument. >>> >>> It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in >>> derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to >>> run. >>> Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and >>> that >>> other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are >>> produced >>> and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two >>> economies >>> is >>> credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly >>> exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its >>> aftermath >>> offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit >>> produced in >>> the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so, >>> causing >>> apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all >>> that >>> credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives >>> have >>> less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities >>> did, >>> and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives >>> bubble >>> have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more >>> arbitrary >>> than >>> those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent >>> stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not >>> completely >>> impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure >>> abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the >>> real >>> economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. >>> >>> Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial >>> realms >>> of >>> speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and >>> services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on >>> its >>> rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does >>> not >>> exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself >>> suddenly >>> overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows >>> out >>> of the barrel of a gun. >>> >>> This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term >>> Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative >>> hubris. >>> Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel >>> laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it >>> - by >>> a >>> set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its >>> founders, >>> could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like >>> it. >>> The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five >>> years >>> when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its >>> foreign >>> loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect >>> of a >>> default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble >>> stopped >>> bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks >>> had to >>> be >>> strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of >>> dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. >>> >>> The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that >>> politics >>> trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times >>> over >>> the >>> last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to >>> notice. If >>> I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next >>> fifty >>> years or so of history. >>> >>> In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the >>> midst >>> of a >>> transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar >>> to us >>> over >>> the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism", >>> and a >>> new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where >>> abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of >>> cheap >>> abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, >>> scarcity >>> industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. >>> One of >>> the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions >>> that >>> control significant amounts of important resources will find those >>> resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same >>> sort of >>> clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may >>> reclaim >>> in >>> the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or >>> cartels >>> of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. >>> >>> If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to >>> build >>> their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of >>> course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking >>> advantage >>> of >>> the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism >>> dawns. >>> They may well have recognized that in a world that will >>> increasingly be >>> shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own >>> resource >>> bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has >>> already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian >>> government >>> to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- >>> and >>> British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the >>> chaos >>> and >>> corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to >>> learn >>> it as well. >>> >>> The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand >>> many >>> of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be >>> out of >>> place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies >>> might, if >>> they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, >>> and >>> next >>> week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. >>> >>> _____ >>> >>> ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative >>> spirituality >>> movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, >>> including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent >>> (2008). He >>> lives in Ashland, Oregon [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according >>> to the >>> August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". >>> >>> http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity- >>> industrialism.html >>> >>> TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please >>> click >>> on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this >>> essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Rad-Green mailing list >>> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >>> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Rad-Green mailing list >>> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >>> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Rad-Green mailing list >> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Rad-Green mailing list >> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From gmeyerson at triad.rr.com Fri Sep 11 16:36:51 2009 From: gmeyerson at triad.rr.com (gregory meyerson) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:36:51 -0400 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <8D74CC23-A8B3-41DE-AA2E-3424EF052649@mailup.net> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> <8D74CC23-A8B3-41DE-AA2E-3424EF052649@mailup.net> Message-ID: <3c7188168a9b1372d4756551ce240752@triad.rr.com> I don't know what to say to your point except read C and W; then read Blees and follow or participate in the discussions at bravenewclimate site. there's also an interview with Blees and W. and a debate between Blees and Greenpeace. This is what I did and I was convinced by Blees about the technology. and angry at caldicott and especially wasserman (whose side I initially took) for genuine demagogic fear mongering. James Hansen was convinced. Read his letter to obama, as I suggested. He was opposed to nuclear power. our problems of course go way beyond the mere technological questions, but these are important. On Wasserman's enthusiasm about solar and wind, I'd recommend Minqi Li's excellent chapter on the limits of renewables in The Rise of China (he shares the anti nuke position, knowing nothing about IFRs, with C and W). On Sep 11, 2009, at 5:45 PM, dean tuckerman wrote: > Until you can convince people like Caldicott, and Wasserman you'll > have no sale. > On Sep 7, 2009, at 1:22 PM, Gregory Meyerson wrote: > >> gary: it's already been built. the most advanced is GE's s prism. >> and the demo reactors were built years ago and tested at argonne. >> >> >> you don't what you're talking about, as the comparison with cold >> fusion shows. >> >> >> and gen threes are out which have built in passive safety, though not >> the efficiency with uranium use. >> >> >> listen: read the stuff I suggested. I know all the anti nuke >> arguments backwards and forwards and they're based in ignorance. >> don't just read caldicott or wasserman. then you'll be stuck where I >> was one year ago, in serious misinformation. >> >> >> I've cc'd tom blees if you're interested . >> On Sep 7, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: >> >>> That new nuclear is so far from reality that it is like Cold Fusion >>> a pipe dream. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ________________________________ >>> From: gregory meyerson >>> To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com >>> Sent: Monday, September 7, 2009 7:10:28 AM >>> Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity >>> Industrialism >>> >>> there is n't a uranium availability problem with 4th generation >>> nuclear. see for a brief but informative reference, James Hansen's >>> Letter to Obama. >>> >>> >>> >>> for more detail, see barry brook's bravenewclimate site and tom blees >>> book, prescription for the planet. >>> >>> >>> the left knows nothing about new nuclear. >>> >>> >>> course, the key problem to solving climate change is capitalist >>> social >>> relations, but the wind/solar nuclear discussion needs to resemble >>> the >>> truth. >>> >>> >>> see also david mackay, "sustainability without the hot air," >>> available >>> on line for free. >>> On Sep 6, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: >>> >>>> Your site and Arch Druids are a pain in the ass to post comments >>>> on. I >>>> don't know why they are not simple like Wordpress or this is. Anyway >>>> this is my comment to his post you can pass it on to him or not I >>>> tried twice to post it on his site and it wouldn't let me. It is a >>>> good thing I saved my comment first or I would be pissed off. >>>> This is an interesting post and >>>> I would say first the point about Rare metal export restriction is >>>> probably part economic warfare between the USA and China. The US >>>> wants >>>> to produce cars with rare metal batteries, China wanted to buy GM. >>>> They got Hummer, and now they have access to that military >>>> technology, >>>> even if they had to agree to make it in the USA. Being able to >>>> export >>>> the batteries puts China in the position to control the market as >>>> long >>>> as batteries are based on lithium technology. >>>> On the other hand there is nothing new about that. China has been >>>> the manufacturing plant of choice for the world's capitalists for a >>>> couple of decades. >>>> The USA has become the great agricultural exporting nation and >>>> has >>>> been for a century. We were only the worlds center of manufacturing >>>> for a few decades when Europe's capacity was devastated by war. >>>> This bit about derivatives and the financial markets driving the >>>> world economy is part of a temporary bubble that boomed after the >>>> Bretton Woods agreement was abrogated in the 1970's when Nixon was >>>> forced to let the dollar float. This is literally play money and has >>>> nothing to do with the real economy. It was created artificially and >>>> it will disappear once people are done playing this version of >>>> monopoly. >>>> We are not entering a scarcity economy but simply transiting to a >>>> non fossil fuel economy. This can be as soft or hard a transition as >>>> we want to make it depending on how willing the ruling classes >>>> are to >>>> simply chuck the oil economy and retool for a solar one. There >>>> may be >>>> a transition with a nuclear economy but there is the same >>>> availability >>>> problem with uranium as there is with oil. There is only enough for >>>> about 50 years to fuel the world economy. All we need to do is >>>> reallocate resources. Since the wealthy won't allow us to take the >>>> money from them it will come out of the hides of the workers as is >>>> normal but at some point it will happen. They will try to sell it to >>>> us as a matter of scarcity but that is only to squeeze more wealth >>>> out >>>> of the majority of the population. There is no shortage, only >>>> problems >>>> of allocation. >>>> As a former participant in a gnostic community, anarchist >>>> communist >>>> activist and currently a blogger/activist I find this to be one of >>>> the >>>> better blogs, even if I have problems with Druidism. - Gary Rumor. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ________________________________ >>>> From: Bill Totten >>>> To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com >>>> Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2009 6:25:48 PM >>>> Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism >>>> >>>> >>>> by John Michael Greer >>>> >>>> The Archdruid Report (September 02 2009) >>>> >>>> Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial >>>> society >>>> >>>> >>>> Two bits of news circulating on the internet in the last week or so >>>> offer >>>> a useful glimpse at some of the currents of change that are >>>> setting the >>>> future into motion around us. One of them caused a modest flutter in >>>> the >>>> dovecotes of the internet and the mass media, and the other passed >>>> almost >>>> unnoticed. So far, though, the sweeping implications of both of >>>> these >>>> news >>>> items seem to have been missed by most observers. >>>> >>>> The first bit of news was a report that the Chinese government is >>>> planning >>>> to ban the export of rare earth elements. Those of my readers who >>>> don't >>>> track the latest fads in technology may not know that these have >>>> become >>>> crucial to many cutting edge technologies. Lanthanum, for >>>> example, is >>>> used >>>> in high-tech batteries, and neodymium goes into the permanent >>>> magnets >>>> used >>>> in electric motors and wind turbines. The innards of the Prius and >>>> other >>>> hybrids, to say nothing of the as-yet-imaginary electric cars being >>>> hyped >>>> by what's left of the American auto industry, depend on rare earth >>>> elements, and China currently produces well over ninety percent of >>>> the >>>> world's supply of most of them. The report thus sparked claims of an >>>> imminent shortage in these minerals and, predictably, a flurry of >>>> speculative interest in (and hype-ridden articles about) mines >>>> outside >>>> of >>>> China that can produce the same minerals >>>> >>>> A couple of details of the proposed restrictions somehow failed to >>>> make it >>>> into most media and internet accounts, and they are by no means >>>> minor >>>> issues. The first is that there's nothing that new about this >>>> news; in >>>> each of the last three years, the Chinese government has cut the >>>> export >>>> quotas for rare earth elements from China's mines. More important is >>>> the >>>> fact that the Chinese are not preventing the export of products >>>> containing >>>> rare earth elements; they are simply moving to ban the export of the >>>> raw >>>> materials. In effect, what the Chinese are saying is that they >>>> are no >>>> longer willing to accept the Third World's designated role as a >>>> source >>>> of >>>> raw materials and cheap labor to be exploited for the benefit of >>>> somebody >>>> else; if the future is going to run on technologies based on rare >>>> earth >>>> elements, those technologies are going to come out of Chinese >>>> factories, >>>> and the wealth produced by them is going to be concentrated in >>>> Chinese >>>> hands. >>>> >>>> As this reality sinks in, we will doubtless hear more >>>> denunciations of >>>> "resource nationalism". You'll notice that nobody denounces >>>> "resource >>>> nationalism" when the United States imposes political controls on >>>> the >>>> control of its own strategic resources, as of course it does. The >>>> problem >>>> arises, as some wag or other put it, because a lot of our resources >>>> these >>>> days have unaccountably turned up underneath somebody else's real >>>> estate. >>>> >>>> Now to some extent the rise of "resource nationalism" is simply >>>> one of >>>> the >>>> consequences of the decline of America's global empire. Page back a >>>> century or so to the time when Britain was the global superpower, >>>> with >>>> troops garrisoned around the globe, and the same debates took >>>> place in >>>> very nearly the same terms. Britain's Parliament and press trumpeted >>>> the >>>> virtues of free trade, meaning by that comfortably vague phrase a >>>> system >>>> of unequal exchanges that concentrated the bulk of the world's >>>> wealth >>>> in >>>> London, while other countries - among them, ironically, the United >>>> States >>>> - used politically imposed trade barriers and tariffs to nurture >>>> their >>>> emerging industrial economies at Britain's expense. As the British >>>> Empire >>>> waned, so did the global economy of the late 19th century, until the >>>> First >>>> World War finally pushed it over the brink into oblivion. >>>> >>>> We are arguably in a similar situation now, with America playing the >>>> role >>>> of declining empire and China, among other countries, imposing >>>> strategic >>>> trade barriers by political fiat as a means of building up its own >>>> industrial might at our expense. All other things being equal, we >>>> might >>>> reasonably expect a troubled transition lasting several decades and >>>> punctuated by a series of spectacular wars, not unlike the 1914 to >>>> 1945 >>>> transition period that saw Britain's global empire replaced by >>>> America's. >>>> Still, all other things are not equal, and the second bit of news I >>>> want >>>> to discuss here points up one of the differences. >>>> >>>> This was the announcement a few days back that the world derivative >>>> market >>>> has now reached a total paper value in excess of one quadrillion >>>> dollars. >>>> The conventional wisdom has it that such sums are beyond the >>>> capacity >>>> of >>>> the human mind to grasp, and in this case, the conventional wisdom >>>> may >>>> well be right. (If you have the sort of fashionable lifestyle that >>>> costs >>>> you $2000 a day, for example, and you started spending it when >>>> multicellular life first evolved on Earth, you wouldn't yet have >>>> spent >>>> one >>>> quadrillion dollars.) Still, it's important to grapple with such >>>> figures >>>> if only to grasp the fantastic absurdities that have created them. >>>> >>>> In thinking about this particular version of the unthinkable, two >>>> things >>>> should be obvious. The first is that there isn't a quadrillion >>>> dollars >>>> worth of nonfinancial goods and services anywhere on our planet. The >>>> second, which derives necessarily from the first, is that those >>>> derivatives aren't actually worth a quadrillion dollars in any >>>> meaningful >>>> sense, since it's impossible to cash them in for anything other than >>>> more >>>> financial paper. In terms introduced in an earlier Archdruid Report >>>> post, >>>> derivatives exist solely in the tertiary economy, the economy of >>>> abstract >>>> numbers that started out as a representation of real wealth and >>>> has now >>>> gone spinning off into a hallucinatory Wonderland of its own. >>>> >>>> As I am not sure how many of my readers understand derivatives, a >>>> few >>>> words on the subject might be useful. A derivative is essentially >>>> a bet >>>> regarding some asset, index, cash flow, or the like, which is called >>>> the >>>> "underlying". In the early days of derivatives, cash changed hands >>>> when >>>> the bet was settled - for example, a derivatives contract might >>>> obligate >>>> me to buy a hundred carloads of steel next October at a price >>>> fixed in >>>> advance, and the price of steel when the contract came due >>>> determined >>>> who >>>> profited and who lost. More recently, though, derivative contracts >>>> themselves have become hot speculative properties, subject to all >>>> the >>>> usual vagaries of bubble economics. Since they can quite >>>> literally be >>>> conjured out of thin air when needed, with no cash down, they are in >>>> many >>>> ways the perfect speculative instrument. >>>> >>>> It will be interesting to see just how long the current bubble in >>>> derivatives - for that is what it is, of course - can continue to >>>> run. >>>> Substantial gaps already exist between the speculative economy and >>>> that >>>> other, dowdier economy where nonfinancial goods and services are >>>> produced >>>> and consumed; nowadays the main connection between these two >>>> economies >>>> is >>>> credit, which is manufactured in the speculative economy but partly >>>> exported to the real economy. The late housing bubble and its >>>> aftermath >>>> offers a good demonstration of this; vast amounts of credit >>>> produced in >>>> the speculative economy flooded the real economy until 2007 or so, >>>> causing >>>> apparent prosperity; when the speculative economy crashed and all >>>> that >>>> credit dried up, so did the real economy's prospects. Derivatives >>>> have >>>> less contact with the real economy than mortgage-backed securities >>>> did, >>>> and since nearly all the quadrillions of dollars in the derivatives >>>> bubble >>>> have been minted out of twinkle dust by processes even more >>>> arbitrary >>>> than >>>> those used by the US government to conjure the funds for its recent >>>> stimulus programs - and that is saying something - it's not >>>> completely >>>> impossible that the bubble will go zooming off into a realm of pure >>>> abstraction full of quintillion-dollar deals as irrelevant to the >>>> real >>>> economy as the money traded in a game of Monopoly. >>>> >>>> Yet there is another potential connection between the etherial >>>> realms >>>> of >>>> speculative finance and the gritty world of matter where goods and >>>> services are produced and consumed, and China's tightening grip on >>>> its >>>> rare earth elements points toward that connection. Economics does >>>> not >>>> exist in a vacuum, and the power of high finance can find itself >>>> suddenly >>>> overmatched when it has to contend with the sort of power that grows >>>> out >>>> of the barrel of a gun. >>>> >>>> This is the mostly unlearned lesson behind the collapse of Long Term >>>> Capital Management (LTCM), that poster child of 1990s speculative >>>> hubris. >>>> Founded by some of the brightest minds in the market, with two Nobel >>>> laureates on its staff, LTCM made money - for a while, lots of it >>>> - by >>>> a >>>> set of complex mathematical models that, according to one of its >>>> founders, >>>> could not fail within the lifetime of this universe or two more like >>>> it. >>>> The universe ended early; LTCM had been in business for all of five >>>> years >>>> when the Russian government unilaterally suspended payments on its >>>> foreign >>>> loans. LTCM had a lot of money in Russian loans, but the prospect >>>> of a >>>> default wasn't included in the models, and by the time the rubble >>>> stopped >>>> bouncing LTCM was so deep in the red that a consortium of banks >>>> had to >>>> be >>>> strongarmed by US government officials into stumping up billions of >>>> dollars to prevent a run on securities markets. >>>> >>>> The lesson the founders of LTCM learned the hard way is that >>>> politics >>>> trumps economics. It's a lesson that has been repeated many times >>>> over >>>> the >>>> last century, but it's one that very few people seem willing to >>>> notice. If >>>> I'm right, though, it may just be the key to understanding the next >>>> fifty >>>> years or so of history. >>>> >>>> In previous posts here, I've suggested that the world is in the >>>> midst >>>> of a >>>> transformation between the kind of society and economy familiar >>>> to us >>>> over >>>> the last century or so, which I've called "abundance industrialism", >>>> and a >>>> new kind that may as well be called "scarcity industrialism". Where >>>> abundance industrialism was defined by the ready availability of >>>> cheap >>>> abundant natural resources, especially but not only fossil fuels, >>>> scarcity >>>> industrialism will be defined by the scarcity of such resources. >>>> One of >>>> the implications of this shift is that those nations and regions >>>> that >>>> control significant amounts of important resources will find those >>>> resources becoming a potent source of political leverage. The same >>>> sort of >>>> clout OPEC gained from its oil reserves in the 1970s, and may >>>> reclaim >>>> in >>>> the not too distant future, will become accessible to countries or >>>> cartels >>>> of countries with large amounts of any economically vital resource. >>>> >>>> If this is correct, the Chinese are not just using trade barriers to >>>> build >>>> their industrial plant at America's expense; they're doing that, of >>>> course, but it's not all they're doing. They are also taking >>>> advantage >>>> of >>>> the opportunities opening up as the age of scarcity industrialism >>>> dawns. >>>> They may well have recognized that in a world that will >>>> increasingly be >>>> shaped by resource scarcities, those who act to secure their own >>>> resource >>>> bases can thrive while others falter. It's a lesson that Russia has >>>> already learned - witness the successful efforts of the Russian >>>> government >>>> to seize Russia's fossil fuel assets from the handful of American- >>>> and >>>> British-backed billionaires who walked off with them during the >>>> chaos >>>> and >>>> corruption of the Yeltsin years - and other nations are beginning to >>>> learn >>>> it as well. >>>> >>>> The dawn of the age of scarcity industrialism thus promises to stand >>>> many >>>> of the assumptions of the recent past on their heads. It may not be >>>> out of >>>> place, therefore, to discuss some of the ways that societies >>>> might, if >>>> they were minded to do so, deal with some of these new realities, >>>> and >>>> next >>>> week's post will try to peer ahead into this territory. >>>> >>>> _____ >>>> >>>> ?John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative >>>> spirituality >>>> movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, >>>> including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent >>>> (2008). He >>>> lives in Ashland, Oregon [sic] - Cumberland, Maryland according >>>> to the >>>> August 19 2009 Archdruid Report, "Betting on the Rust Belt". >>>> >>>> http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/dawn-of-scarcity- >>>> industrialism.html >>>> >>>> TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please >>>> click >>>> on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this >>>> essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Rad-Green mailing list >>>> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >>>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >>>> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Rad-Green mailing list >>>> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >>>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >>>> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Rad-Green mailing list >>> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >>> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Rad-Green mailing list >>> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >>> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >>> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Rad-Green mailing list >> Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu >> To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From lcm95060 at gmail.com Fri Sep 11 20:29:47 2009 From: lcm95060 at gmail.com (LCM) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:29:47 -0700 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <3c7188168a9b1372d4756551ce240752@triad.rr.com> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> <8D74CC23-A8B3-41DE-AA2E-3424EF052649@mailup.net> <3c7188168a9b1372d4756551ce240752@triad.rr.com> Message-ID: <4AAB079B.5010509@gmail.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 My fear and potential anger is that low costing of operations in the name of capital will lead to more of this: ...the high seas off Somalia's coast are being used as a TOXIC WASTE & NUCLEAR MATERIALS DUMPING GROUND (by the ULTIMATE low cost provider... the Mafia!) ...and not necessarily lead to the use of more the efficient, ALLEGEDLY less dangerous technologies, which in the short run (the only 'run' most industries are truly concerned with nowdays) are VERY VERY EXPENSIVE and take year to get anything resembling an ROI. Look... Hurricane Katrina swept ALL THE REACTIVE WATER from fuel rod storage pools all along the Gulf Coast that were essentially just that... Pools with tin sheds over them into the air, along with the tin sheds that covered those pools. Didn't hear much from the government, ANY health organizations, or media, about that, did we? Here's a recent quote from a Uranium mining operation spokesperson in Malawi: > KAYELEKERA, Malawi, Aug 22 (IPS) - "We are serious about the > integrity of the environment," says Neville Huxham, the country > director for Paladin Energy Africa. > > > "We're taking the uranium out of the ground, we're exporting it to > be used for productive purposes, so we should be getting a medal for > cleaning up the environment." Surely they jest! Not at all... I'm SURE they actually believe that line of reasoning. More on the potential dangers of letting private industry in collusion with industrial governments decide what's 'safe' for the planet's environment (and alternative views on Somali "Piracy") here: http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2009/04/are-they-pirates-or-are-they-volunteer.html gregory meyerson wrote: > I don't know what to say to your point except read C and W; then read > Blees and follow or participate in the discussions at bravenewclimate > site. there's also an interview with Blees and W. and a debate > between Blees and Greenpeace. > > > This is what I did and I was convinced by Blees about the technology. > and angry at caldicott and especially wasserman (whose side I initially > took) for genuine demagogic fear mongering. > > > James Hansen was convinced. Read his letter to obama, as I suggested. > He was opposed to nuclear power. > > > our problems of course go way beyond the mere technological questions, > but these are important. On Wasserman's enthusiasm about solar and > wind, I'd recommend Minqi Li's excellent chapter on the limits of > renewables in The Rise of China (he shares the anti nuke position, > knowing nothing about IFRs, with C and W). > On Sep 11, 2009, at 5:45 PM, dean tuckerman wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKqweaAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysVegH/jsVNkiRxNN6QRiYIAaQ7aSX 7Qnq7xigdR2Z+z/5PmcouKwMlRaRr35nRVwizg2qOylXl2LXjGLY918VSVbeVXVa GdUFFmyBu4p+lcPIhy8YUn28ZFE4p3PYJpJXaYrc9OyDDbik8opgOSl6jV4q/0GE rTGQD0+p2hrOG7czhU9ReBIJ7fuTfJBAz6HlXD//zJ72tbXnSAT5G79lUwMRhpko CMn06EqcXYn4yieCtyZJn5Ug4RZkW6+flLPFrt238lO7YnMrUKacs9nKBsCAhlZx JXdkSMXdHm9aYbOuS4JKx3F0nBwixxHcTVQ4j5dDHrdiTcnc32Tb6o0SYPX/axg= =LvFC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Sep 11 21:23:41 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:23:41 -0500 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> <8D74CC23-A8B3-41DE-AA2E-3424EF052649@mailup.net> <3c7188168a9b1372d4756551ce240752@triad.rr.com> Message-ID: <2108114463AF4B459D371F0761CF73C2@agingCHS072729> The problem with this line of thinking, is it's backwards; you have the cart before the horse. Nuclear power is only the byproduct of the *real* reason for nuclear power plants, with is the production of plutonium. So, if you want a nuclear-bomb-free world, you need to shut down the nuclear plants. It's a frightening thing when otherwise sensible people start pushing for nuclear power, given all the problems -- not just with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and other leaky plants -- but with things like extremely high cancer rates among workers in the industries that manufacture death (see below). Thousands of Nuclear Arms Workers See Cancer Claims Denied or Delayed By Michael Alison Chandler and Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, May 12, 2007; A01 Walter McKenzie's assignment toward the end of the Cold War was to mop up after mishaps at a nuclear weapons factory. With a crew of other laborers from rural Georgia, he swabbed away leaks and spills inside the secret buildings, until one day his body became so contaminated with radiation that alarms at the factory went off as he passed. "They couldn't scrub the radiation off my skin -- even after four showers," McKenzie, 52, recalled of his most terrifying day at the Savannah River nuclear weapons plant near Aiken, S.C. "They took my clothes, my watch and even my ring, and sent me home in rubber slippers and a jumpsuit." Later, when doctors discovered the first of 19 malignant tumors on his bladder, McKenzie followed the same torturous path as thousands of nuclear weapons workers with cancer: He filed a claim for federal compensation. It was denied. Unable to access secret government files, or even some of his own personnel records, McKenzie could not sufficiently prove that he was exposed to something that may have made him sick. Nor can most of the 104,000 other workers, retirees and family members who have sought help from a federal program intended to atone for decades of hazardous working conditions at scores of nuclear weapons facilities around the country. Since its inception in 2000, the compensation program has cut more than 20,000 checks and given long-delayed recognition to workers whose illnesses were hidden costs of the Cold War's military buildup. Yet, of the 72,000 cases processed, more than 60 percent have been denied. Thousands of other applicants have been waiting for years for an answer. Overall, only 21 percent of applicants have received checks. Even as the nation continues to close and dismantle many nuclear weapons sites, a growing number of those who helped build the bombs are turning to lawyers and legislators to argue they are being treated unfairly. Many complain that the compensation process is slow, frustrating, even insulting. "You get exposed to something that's so bad you have to leave your clothes behind," McKenzie said, "then they try to tell you it's not their fault that you got sick." Some evidence suggests the government has tried to limit payouts for budget reasons. Internal memos obtained by congressional investigators show the Bush administration chafing over the program's rising costs and fighting to block measures that would increase workers' chances of compensation. But Labor Department officials who oversee the program say it has been successful, pointing to the large sums distributed: about $2.6 billion in payments in five years, far more than some early estimates. Missing or unreliable records and the murkiness of cancer science, the officials say, make it difficult to satisfy all the claimants. "In a compensation program, you get benefits out to people who are eligible and you inevitably have to deal with the fact that some people are not eligible," said Shelby Hallmark, director of Labor's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs. "As for the assumption that the program is somehow trying to block people from getting compensation, nothing could be further from the truth." David Michaels, a former Energy Department official who helped launch the program in the late 1990s, said it is designed to "bend over backward" to award compensation to deserving workers. "Most of the people who should be compensated are being compensated," said Michaels, now associate chairman of George Washington University's department of environmental and occupational health. Still, Labor's management of the program has drawn bipartisan, and often fierce, criticism from members of Congress. Former congressman John N. Hostettler, an Indiana Republican who chaired a House subcommittee overseeing the program, said at a hearing last December that Labor Department memos reflect a "culture of disdain" toward workers and raise questions about whether the department exceeded its authority by using "legalistic interpretations" to limit eligible workers. "To the bean counters, I would remind you that these aren't normal beans you are counting," Hostettler said. "These funds are a small acknowledgment of the sacrifice by workers whose lives were put at risk to make this country safe." Clear Line on a Murky Issue The compensation plan was unveiled in September 1999 by then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. "We're reversing the decades-old practice of opposing worker claims and moving forward to do the right thing," he said in 2000. The shift was prompted in part by a drumbeat of reports about hazards at nuclear weapons plants, including articles in The Washington Post that showed how the government for years fought lawsuits from workers in Paducah, Ky., who were exposed to plutonium 100,000 times as radioactive as they were trained to handle. Under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, the government agreed to provide $150,000 and medical benefits to claimants who developed certain diseases and cancers. Another part of the program covers those exposed to toxic chemicals. For each claim, government investigators review the evidence and decide whether a worker's illness was more likely than not caused by exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals at work. Under the act, the claim is denied if the probability is ruled to be less than 50 percent. The complex task of coming up with such estimates through reconstructing the conditions inside secret plants as much as 60 years ago was assigned to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH. The estimates are based largely on personnel files and historical radiation measurements at the plants. But the records are often so incomplete and unreliable that it can be impossible to determine a worker's true exposure. For example, workers would sometimes remove the badges they were supposed to wear to monitor their cumulative doses of radiation. "At every site, you hear stories about workers being told to put their badges in their lockers," said Mark Griffon, a radiation-safety expert who advises the government on worker exposure. "If workers wore their badges and ended up exceeding their quarterly radiation limit, they could be laid off or put in a different job." Another obstacle is that records are becoming harder to track as plants are dismantled. Early this year, for example, more than 400 boxes of medical records that had been contaminated by radiation at an Ohio weapons facility turned up in a landfill in Los Alamos, N.M. The government is deciding whether to exhume them.Long Wait in Colorado The compensation program does provide a path for the government to help workers if records are lost or questionable. But critics say officials are reluctant to pursue it. NIOSH and a White House-appointed panel on radiation exposure can recommend groups of workers from a particular site for a "special exposure cohort," making them automatically eligible for compensation if they suffer from leukemia, thyroid cancer or one of 20 other cancers. So far, groups of workers from 18 sites have been added to the special exposure cohort, and petitions are pending for workers from a dozen other sites. The process can be difficult, as people who worked at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant who applied for that status have learned. On the rugged foothills outside Denver, there's little sign now of the sprawling plutonium facility that once employed as many as 7,000 people. The site was dismantled in a $7 billion, 10-year effort that ended in 2005 and is being turned into a wildlife refuge. With the plant gone, many workers are struggling to re-create what happened in the 800-building complex that manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. Thousands of fires were recorded in the plants' 40-year history, including one on Mother's Day 1969 that burned for several hours and released massive amounts of radioactive material. Of the more than 5,100 Rocky Flats claims filed, about 1,400 have been approved. Many applicants who were denied blame missing or inadequate records and petitioned two years ago for special cohort status. NIOSH officials recommended against the special status for Rocky Flats, reasoning that they could account for missing records by altering their models and overestimating exposures. Then, earlier this month, the radiation advisory board recommended the special cohort for a small number of workers -- those employed from 1952 to 1958, when gaps in the recordkeeping apparently were the largest. Advocates for the Rocky Flats workers point to multiple cases to illustrate the difficulty of meeting the government's standard for compensation without being part of the special cohort. One worker, Donald Gabel, contracted a rare form of brain cancer at age 29, after nearly 10 years at the plant, and died in 1980. Months before his death, he testified that his job required him to climb several times a day to the top of a furnace, his head inches from a pipe expelling radioactive exhaust. Government contractors said they could not find his records and could not take new measurements because the pipe had been removed. After Gabel died, his wife requested tests of plutonium levels in his brain, but she says government scientists told her they had lost most of the tissue and could not take an accurate sample. Despite the problems, Gabel's widow, Kae Williams, won a rare victory in a traditional workers' compensation lawsuit, getting about $15,000 for her three children. But when she applied for additional benefits under the new program in 2001, the claim took four years to process and was ultimately denied. A government computer program found only a 41.73 percent chance that her husband's brain cancer was work-related. "They make it sound like they are doing the right thing," Williams said. "For a glimpse, you think they are. And they are not."Ill and Unaided At South Carolina's Savannah River plant, workers may face longer odds than most. They lack the organization and lobbying advantages found at some larger sites where workers tended to be white and represented by strong unions. "Black workers in these plants were put in high-exposure areas without proper protection or monitoring," said Robert W. Warren, a lawyer who represents dozens of Savannah River workers. "They worked in some of the most dangerous places, but there are no records today to show that." When it opened in 1951, the Savannah River nuclear complex was one of the first employers in South Carolina's rural midlands to offer African Americans a shot at relatively good wages and benefits. But not all jobs at the plant were created equal. The jobs offered to black workers in those days were often menial ones: cleaning spills, scraping paint, removing waste, sometimes in the most dangerous parts of the plant, said Wayne Knox, a radiation-safety expert who was a contractor at the Savannah River plant for nearly two decades. In the '50s and '60s, he said, workers often were kept in the dark about risks. "Not just blacks, but also [white] people from poorer neighborhoods were put in a position where they had a lot of unnecessary exposures," said Knox, who now advises some families filing claims. The sprawling, 300-square-mile site still contains one of the highest concentrations of radioactive waste of any weapons plant in the country, most of it in swimming-pool-size tanks. Special exposure cohort status has not been granted for the plant's workers; in a region that remains very poor, there are few advocates available to argue the workers' case in Washington. McKenzie, the Savannah River laborer, was angered when government officials calculated the probability that his work caused his bladder cancer at only 28 percent. He became even angrier when he learned that the plant had been unable to locate many of his files -- including records for the day he became so contaminated his clothes had to be destroyed. "There were whole months where the data is missing," he said. McKenzie has asked a Labor Department appeals panel to reconsider the decision, while he struggles to pay hefty medical expenses that include regular visits to the urologist to see whether his cancer has returned. Having mostly given up hope for a government check, he now works a second job, cleaning up spills and leaks in private homes a few miles from the weapons plant. "At first it looked like I had a good claim, but it didn't go anywhere," McKenzie said wearily. "A person doing it by himself has no wind." ============== Join the free alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== ----- Original Message ----- From: "gregory meyerson" To: "Richard Menec" Cc: "Tom Blees" Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 5:36 PM Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism >I don't know what to say to your point except read C and W; then read > Blees and follow or participate in the discussions at bravenewclimate > site. there's also an interview with Blees and W. and a debate > between Blees and Greenpeace. > > > This is what I did and I was convinced by Blees about the technology. > and angry at caldicott and especially wasserman (whose side I initially > took) for genuine demagogic fear mongering. > > > James Hansen was convinced. Read his letter to obama, as I suggested. > He was opposed to nuclear power. > > > our problems of course go way beyond the mere technological questions, > but these are important. On Wasserman's enthusiasm about solar and > wind, I'd recommend Minqi Li's excellent chapter on the limits of > renewables in The Rise of China (he shares the anti nuke position, > knowing nothing about IFRs, with C and W). > On Sep 11, 2009, at 5:45 PM, dean tuckerman wrote: > >> Until you can convince people like Caldicott, and Wasserman you'll >> have no sale. >> On Sep 7, 2009, at 1:22 PM, Gregory Meyerson wrote: >> >>> gary: it's already been built. the most advanced is GE's s prism. >>> and the demo reactors were built years ago and tested at argonne. >>> >>> >>> you don't what you're talking about, as the comparison with cold >>> fusion shows. >>> >>> >>> and gen threes are out which have built in passive safety, though not >>> the efficiency with uranium use. >>> >>> >>> listen: read the stuff I suggested. I know all the anti nuke >>> arguments backwards and forwards and they're based in ignorance. >>> don't just read caldicott or wasserman. then you'll be stuck where I >>> was one year ago, in serious misinformation. >>> >>> >>> I've cc'd tom blees if you're interested . >>> On Sep 7, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Gary Crethers wrote: >>> >>>> That new nuclear is so far from reality that it is like Cold Fusion >>>> a pipe dream. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ________________________________ >>>> From: gregory meyerson >>>> To: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com >>>> Sent: Monday, September 7, 2009 7:10:28 AM >>>> Subject: Re: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity >>>> Industrialism >>>> >>>> there is n't a uranium availability problem with 4th generation >>>> nuclear. see for a brief but informative reference, James Hansen's >>>> Letter to Obama. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> for more detail, see barry brook's bravenewclimate site and tom blees >>>> book, prescription for the planet. >>>> >>>> >>>> the left knows nothing about new nuclear. (clip) From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Sep 11 21:29:57 2009 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:29:57 -0500 Subject: [R-G] Fw: Bullets, bombs and nuclear power plants Message-ID: <2DB78CD6DE9D41D79522F8B92B9A3684@agingCHS072729> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Menec" To: "COMMON DREAMS" Cc: "ICH" ; "ASHEVILLE GLOBAL REPORT" ; "GLOBALNETNEWS" ; "RADTIMES" ; "ANTIWAR.COM" Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 11:50 PM Subject: Bullets, bombs and nuclear power plants > Until recently, nuclear power plants have been considered to be > unprofitable, but with the recent hikes in energy prices, nuclear plants > are > now profitable and are seen as a solution for the energy crisis by the > world's capitalist classes despite the costs in human life. The United > States capitalist class, the main nuclear polluter throughout the world, > is > in the forefront in advocating nuclear power. > > A recent study by the New York based Radiation and Public Health Project > http://www.radiation.org and published in the Spring edition of > "Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology," examined infant death rates > in > counties within 50 miles and in the prevailing wind direction of five > reactors: Fort St. Vrain (located near Denver, Colo.), LaCrosse (near > LaCrosse, Wis.), Millstone/Haddam Neck (near New London CT), Rancho Seco > (near Sacramento, Calif.) and Trojan (near Portland, Ore). > > In the first two years after the reactors closed, infant death rates of > babies living downwind and within 40 miles from the plants fell 15 to 20 > percent from the previous two years, compared to an average US decline of > just six percent between 1985 and 1996. Since no other nuclear reactors > operated within 70 miles of the closed reactors, the closing of these > reactors made these areas 'nuclear free zones.' > > ********** > http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=197&Itemid=14 > > Bullets, bombs and nuclear power plants > > by Janette D. Sherman, M.D. > > Wednesday, 11 April 2007 > > Imagine the chaotic scene of men shooting into the air. Rat-a-tat-a-tat, > over and over, they aim at nothing in particular. Whether in celebration > or > anger, we do not know. What we do know is that Newton was correct about > gravity: Bullets aimed into the air fall to earth. But where and what do > they hit? The damage is random: a car, a pregnant woman, a child, a man's > lung, the family dog. Is the damage fatal, permanent, repairable or just > an > "inconvenience"? Is the damage greater where the celebrants shoot their > guns > or is the resultant harm farther away? If it is farther away, how far? > > Think of emissions from a nuclear power plant in the same way. Unlike > gunfire, emissions from a nuclear plant cannot be heard, tasted, seen or > sensed as they are released. Twenty-four hours a day, a nuclear power > plant, > quietly running, gives off some 200-plus radioactive isotopes that fall to > earth at various rates, depending upon their weight and size and the wind > direction. > > Isotopes are chemicals with uneven numbers of electrons, protons or > neutrons, which makes them highly unstable. This causes them to change - > or > decay - into a more stable form. During decay, some isotopes form into a > new > chemical with a single change; others go through multiple changes until > they > reach stability. With each step/decay, the element gives off radiation. > This > can be in the form of a beta particle, which is a high-energy electron, an > alpha particle consisting of two protons and two neutrons, or a gamma ray. > Some isotope decays give off all three-forms of energy. > > When an isotope is breathed in or swallowed, it acts like a tiny bullet, > releasing its energy into nearby cells as it circulates throughout the > body, > be it an animal bird, or person. Some isotopes seek specific body areas; > others are dispersed throughout the tissues. Like the harm that comes from > bullets shot into the air, this harm, too, is random. > > When nuclear radiation damages the cell, the body has mechanisms to repair > it, but if the repair portion of the cell's DNA is damaged, then repair > will > not occur, or it will occur in a faulty manner and can result in cancer. > If > the damage is to an egg or sperm, the result will be permanent genetic > damage. Depending upon the timing of exposure and the site where an > isotope > becomes lodged in an unborn child, it can result in overt birth defects, > premature birth, small birth weight, impaired mental functioning or > outright > death of the fetus. This damage, too, is relatively random as to person > and > organ affected. > > Alpha particle radiation is the most harmful as it is the largest in size > and the most strongly ionized. It can cause greater chromosomal damage > than > an equivalent amount of other radiation. Beta particles can travel though > as > many as 300 cells, causing harm along their tracks. This energy, as it > passes through living tissue, injures the contents of the cell. Sometimes > it > kills a cell. If a sufficient number of critical cells are killed, then > death is inevitable. > > Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge NO NUKES! This simple array of a single > windmill and three solar panels generates enough electricity to power a > very > large house and greenhouse operation - in a cold climate. Imagine > declaring > your independence from PG&E - no more bills and no need for power plants > spewing deadly pollution, either from nuclear or fossil fuel. Concern > about > fossil fuels as a cause of global warming has led some people to push once > again for construction of new nuclear power plants. But with the easy > availability of solar and wind power and the certainty that nuclear power > kills people, we must revive the rallying cry, "No nukes!" The San Onofre > nuclear power plant near San Diego, wedged between I-5 and the ocean, is a > disaster waiting to happen. The death in November of Russian Alexander > Litvinenko, a British citizen, unfolded before our eyes on nightly > television as he succumbed to the alpha radiation given off by a minute > amount of Polonium 210. Polonium is in the same family of chemicals as > sulfur, selenium and tellurium and goes to those parts of the body that > normally take up those chemicals. Marie Curie discovered polonium, named > for > her native country, Poland. A Nobel Laureate, she died of leukemia as a > result of exposure to radiation. > > The radiation damage to Mr. Litvinenko was relatively brief before it > killed > him. Death from radiation exposure is rarely as swift. If the result of > exposure is cancer, sickness and debility can extend for years. In the > interim, treatment can involve surgery, pharmaceutical chemicals and, > ironically, more radiation. Still there is no guarantee of cure, and the > cancer plus the "treatment" can severely disable or kill the person. > > Many deaths of those living downwind from the Chernobyl nuclear plant > disaster that occurred in April 1986 are unrecorded, but a conservative > estimate is that in just Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine, the releases > resulted in an estimated 200,000 additional deaths between 1990 and 2004. > Few realize that all who live in the northern hemisphere were exposed to > the > Chernobyl fallout as the radioisotopes circled the globe. > > Unrecorded, too, are the illnesses and deaths of men, women and children > who > live in the vicinity of "normally" functioning nuclear power plants > situated > in our neighborhoods. Epidemiological studies in the U.S. and abroad > clearly > point to increased numbers of cancers occurring in the vicinity of nuclear > emissions. While epidemiological studies are useful, it is difficult to > prove contamination until specific tests are done to determine if nuclear > isotopes are in a person's body. > > The U.S. Atomic Energy Committee and its successor, the Department of > Energy, denied any harm from bomb fallout, but in 1997 the National Cancer > Institute released a report that showed doses of Iodine-131 (I-131) more > than 100 times greater than earlier government estimates. The report had > been completed in 1992, but five years elapsed before the Secretary of > Energy released it. > > The massive 100,000-page report estimates exposure to I-131 from the > Nevada > bomb tests of the 1950s and 1960s. The data are broken down according to > place of residence, birth date, gender and milk consumption. The DOE > admitted that sufficient radioactive iodine had been released from nuclear > tests to account for between 11,000 and 212,000 Americans developing > thyroid > cancer. > > While an admission that significant amounts of radioactive iodine were > released, the report did not account for other radioisotope emissions that > are part of bomb testing and routinely released from nuclear power plants. > These include Cesium-137 (CS-137) with a half-life of 30 years, which is > distributed in all soft tissue, including the breast and pancreas, Tritium > (H-3) and Carbon-14 (C-14) with half-lives of 12 years and 5,175 years. > Yes, > years! These distribute themselves throughout the bodies of all living > things, plants and animals alike. > > If there is a problem from "normally" functioning nuclear power plants, > consider what could happen if one of them is hit by a bomb or airplane, > either by accident or intentionally. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission > ruled > 5-0 against a petition from the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles > nonprofit group that requested nuclear plants be protected by shields made > of steel I-beams and cabling, as well as steps to prevent leaks in case of > an air attack (Washington Post 1/3/07, p. A-4). > > Many isotopes are difficult to measure as they do not last long in the > environment or in the body, but one exception is Strontium-90. Sr90 never > existed anywhere on earth before the first atomic bomb was tested at the > Los > Alamos test site in 1945. Following were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs > and then extensive nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific > and at the Nevada test site. > > Sr90 is carried with the winds and precipitates out with rain and snow > onto > the land and water, entering the food chain. Sr90 belongs to the same > chemical family as calcium, so, like calcium, it is taken up by dairy cows > and excreted in their milk. When a pregnant woman drinks milk, the Sr90 is > carried into her body and then to her unborn child, where it concentrates > in > the developing teeth and bones. When the child sheds those teeth at about > age six, the teeth can be tested for Sr90. > > Indeed such testing was done in the late 1950s in an extraordinary > undertaking in St. Louis, Mo. Some 85,000 baby teeth were collected and > the > Sr90 levels measured. It was determined that the Sr90 levels had increased > with each year as more and more bomb fallout accumulated in the > environment. > > Fortunately, this revelation led to the signing of the aboveground test > ban > by President Kennedy and USSR's Gorbachev. Unfortunately, the accumulation > of Sr90 did not stop as the United States moved to build nuclear power > plants. > > In 2001, Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Group (RPHP) > received a call, telling him that collected, but untested, baby teeth had > been discovered in storage at Washington University in St. Louis. They > were > ultimately transferred to RPHP, and preliminary publicity about the teeth > resulted in several hundred contacts from people who had donated teeth as > children. > > Many reported cancers in themselves and in their children. The most common > type was thyroid cancer, which is strongly linked to bomb test fallout. > But > with no funding available to test the remaining St. Louis teeth, an > opportunity to document the accumulation of radioactive fallout in > American > children was lost. With the nearly four decades that have passed since the > study ended, and with the ability to obtain health information and death > records via internet contacts with tooth donors, it is the perfect time to > complete the study. > > A second opportunity is to monitor the teeth of children born in the > vicinity of all nuclear power plants. This was done by the RPHP until > recently when it became impossible to obtain continued funding, even > though > the test of a single tooth costs less than $100. Results from the RPHP > scientists' studies linking cancer and proximity to nuclear power plants > have been published in peer-reviewed journals. They can be found at > www.radiation.org. > > Is it too costly to test children's teeth for Sr90 fallout? Not when one > considers that the American public evidently finds it reasonable for > advertisers to spend up to $2.5 million for a 30-second spot on the Super > Bowl program. The answer to documenting the link between nuclear radiation > and cancer is at hand. Can it be that government officials and the nuclear > industry are afraid of the results? > > As for the public, how much are we willing to spend to determine the risks > to our children and grandchildren as a result of radiation from bomb > testing > and nuclear power plants? Are we willing to decrease our use of energy and > support non-nuclear and non-oil dependent energy sources? > > Solar and wind power technology is already available with lowered costs. > How > much are we willing to spend to spare our families the tragedy of cancer? > Are we willing to stop bomb testing and nuclear power plants? Will we do > it, > given the economic and political power of what President Eisenhower termed > the " military-industrial complex"? > > At this juncture in our nuclear age, we must realize that the isotopes > from > both bombs and nuclear power plants, like the bullets shot into the air, > are > pulled to earth by gravity. They may be slower and quieter as they enter > our > bodies, but they are just as deadly. > > Janette D. Sherman, M.D., is a physician and toxicologist, specializing in > chemicals and nuclear radiation that cause cancer and birth defects. She > is > the author of "Chemical Exposure and "Life's Delicate Balance: Causes and > Prevention of Breast Cancer." She has worked in radiation and biologic > research at the University of California nuclear facility and at the U.S. > Naval Research Laboratory at Hunters Point in San Francisco. > > From 1976-1982, she served on the advisory board for the EPA Toxic > Substances Control Act. Throughout her career, she has served as a > medical-legal expert witness for thousands of individuals harmed by > exposure > to toxic agents. Dr. Sherman's primary interest is the prevention of > illness > through public education and patient awareness. She can be reached at > www.janettesherman.com > > Rancho Seco, the nuclear power plant near Sacramento in the midst of a > wine > vineyard, was shut down in 1989 by voters objecting not only to its threat > to health but to its cost - it doubled the cost of electricity. > > > **************** NO NUKES! > > by Russell "Ace" Hoffman > > Some Californians want to start building nukes again. The rest of us have > to > stop them. > > Years ago, Californians passed a law specifically prohibiting utility > companies from building new nuclear power plants in the state until the > "high-level nuclear waste problem" is solved. The waste problem is NOT > solved, not even close. And the four nukes we have are old and undergoing > major rebuilding just so they can make MORE nuclear waste for another 20 > or > 30 years - or more. The cost? Billions of dollars per reactor. > > Yucca Mountain, the permanent nuclear waste storage facility located in > Nevada and planned for the past 20 years or so, is just a typical "drive > it > down the road and dump it on Indian land" solution. It is NOT a > technological marvel. It's nearly completely stalled anyway, and rightly > so. > It's a boondoggle. > > Solving the nuclear waste problem is a PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY, not a mere > technicality, not a complex engineering hurdle, not a bureaucratic fumble. > They are not just short on funds. Nor are they short on "great minds" who > have worked on the problem all their professional lives. > > The problem with the nuclear waste problem is that it's "intractable" - > and > NO scientist has ANY PLAN which is workable. That's because when you get > right down to the science of the matter, there is NO physical barrier > which > can be built which will keep radiation out (or in). There is no safe place > to put it. There isn't even a transportation method safe enough to get all > the waste safely to this mythical safe storage location. It's not just > DIFFICULT, it's IMPOSSIBLE. It has taken decades to ADMIT utter failure > and > most politicians don't admit it yet. But solving the nuclear waste problem > has, in fact, been an UTTER FAILURE. > > The solution is NOT to change the law! That's no way to admit defeat! The > solution is to stop creating MORE nuclear waste. Period. > > Instead, now that the Spent Fuel Pools are packed like sardines, nuclear > waste is being off-loaded into "dry casks" at the nuke plant locations. > These casks are NOT designed to be permanent, but they cannot be moved. No > one knows what condition the fuel rods will be in when the casks are > opened, > but I doubt anyone at Southern California Edison or Pacific Gas & Electric > really cares. They figure they'll be retired, if not long dead, when the > quap starts to leak. > > In the meantime, the spent fuel casks are vulnerable both to terrorism and > to the hazards of Mother Nature. Airplanes can fall on them by accident as > well as on purpose. The ensuing unquenchable fire will probably cause > secondary meltdowns at the reactors they are near, since no one will be > able > to come close enough, and survive long enough, to shut the reactors down > safely. > > New dry casks are needed every couple of WEEKS in California, just to hold > newly created waste from the four nuclear power plants we've already got. > And now they want to build more nuclear power plants! > > But in order to do so, the law in California must be amended. If it is, > THOUSANDS of dry casks will be needed, and EACH ONE will be an > environmental > catastrophe just waiting to get out. EACH ONE will be able to destroy tens > of thousands of square miles of property and kill millions. > > With a corrupt, nuke-crazy federal government promising to hand out TENS > OF > BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in funding to any community crazy enough to want to > build a nuclear power plant, naturally, somebody wants the money. > > Oppose AB 719 like your life depended on it. Because it might. > > Send your comments - including, if you like, this letter - TODAY to > Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, chair of the Committee on Natural Resources, > at > aurora.wallin at asm.ca.govThis e-mail address is being protected from spam > bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or by fax to (916) 319-2114 > or > call her office at (916) 319-2014. Also, fax your comments to the > California > Energy Commission in time for their meeting on AB 719 on Monday, April 16, > in Sacramento, to (916) 319-2192. > > Russell "Ace" Hoffman can be reached through his website, > www.animatedsoftware.com > > ============== > ***NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this > material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a > prior interest in receiving the included information for research and > educational purposes.*** > ============== ============== Join our alternative news service - "Fresh Ink" Subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink ============== From realiteee1 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 11 21:55:29 2009 From: realiteee1 at yahoo.com (james m nordlund) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:55:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] LP-DOC Acts: LP: I'm Obama's Political Prisoner Now; etc.. In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <618880.98870.qm@web111503.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Peltier: I Am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now?? :) http://www.counterpunch.org/ September 11-13, 2009 If Only the Government Had Respected Its Own Laws... I Am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now By LEONARD PELTIER T he United States Department of Justice has once again made a mockery of its lofty and pretentious title. After releasing an original and continuing disciple of death cult leader Charles Manson (sic - Lynette Squeaky Fromme) who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, an admitted Croatian terrorist, and another attempted assassin of President Ford under the mandatory 30-year parole law, the U.S. Parole Commission deemed that my release would "promote disrespect for the law." If only the federal government would have respected its own laws, not to mention the treaties that are, under the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land, I would never have been convicted nor forced to spend more than half my life in captivity. Not to mention the fact that every law in this country was created without the consent of Native peoples and is applied unequally at our expense. If nothing else, my experience should raise serious questions about the FBI's supposed jurisdiction in Indian Country. The parole commission's phrase was lifted from soon-to-be former U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley, who apparently hopes to ride with the FBI cavalry into the office of North Dakota governor. In this Wrigley is following in the footsteps of William Janklow, who built his political career on his reputation as an Indian fighter, moving on up from tribal attorney (and alleged rapist of a Native minor) to state attorney general, South Dakota governor, and U.S. Congressman. Some might recall that Janklow claimed responsibility for dissuading President Clinton from pardoning me before he was convicted of manslaughter. Janklow's historical predecessor, George Armstrong Custer, similarly hoped that a glorious massacre of the Sioux would propel him to the White House, and we all know what happened to him. Unlike the barbarians that bay for my blood in the corridors of power, however, Native people are true humanitarians who pray for our enemies. Yet we must be realistic enough to organize for our own freedom and equality as nations. We constitute 5% of the population of North Dakota and 10% of South Dakota and we could utilize that influence to promote our own power on the reservations, where our focus should be. If we organized as a voting bloc, we could defeat the entire premise of the competition between the Dakotas as to which is the most racist. In the 1970s we were forced to take up arms to affirm our right to survival and self-defense, but today the war is one of ideas. We must now stand up to armed oppression and colonization with our bodies and our minds. International law is on our side. Given the complexion of the three recent federal parolees, it might seem that my greatest crime was being Indian. But the truth is that my gravest offense is my innocence. In Iran, political prisoners are occasionally released if they confess to the ridiculous charges on which they are dragged into court, in order to discredit and intimidate them and other like-minded citizens. The FBI and its mouthpieces have suggested the same, as did the parole commission in 1993, when it ruled that my refusal to confess was grounds for denial of parole. To claim innocence is to suggest that the government is wrong, if not guilty itself. The American judicial system is set up so that the defendant is not punished for the crime itself, but for refusing to accept whatever plea arrangement is offered and for daring to compel the judicial system to grant the accused the right to right to rebut the charges leveled by the state in an actual trial. Such insolence is punished invariably with prosecution requests for the steepest possible sentence, if not an upward departure from sentencing guidelines that are being gradually discarded, along with the possibility of parole. As much as non-Natives might hate Indians, we are all in the same boat. To attempt to emulate this system in tribal government is pitiful, to say the least. It was only this year, in the Troy Davis, case, that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized innocence as a legitimate legal defense. Like the witnesses that were coerced into testifying against me, those that testified against Davis renounced their statements, yet Davis was very nearly put to death. I might have been executed myself by now, had not the government of Canada required a waiver of the death penalty as a condition of extradition. The old order is aptly represented by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who stated in his dissenting opinion in the Davis case, "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged 'actual innocence' is constitutionally cognizable." The esteemed Senator from North Dakota, Byron Dorgan, who is now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, used much the same reasoning in writing that "our legal system has found Leonard Peltier guilty of the crime for which he was charged. I have reviewed the material from the trial, and I believe the verdict was fair and just." It is a bizarre and incomprehensible statement to Natives, as well it should be, that innocence and guilt is a mere legal status, not necessarily rooted in material fact. It is a truism that all political prisoners were convicted of the crimes for which they were charged. The truth is the government wants me to falsely confess in order to validate a rather sloppy frame-up operation, one whose exposure would open the door to an investigation of the United States' role in training and equipping goon squads to suppress a grassroots movement on Pine Ridge against a puppet dictatorship. In America, there can by definition be no political prisoners, only those duly judged guilty in a court of law. It is deemed too controversial to even publicly contemplate that the federal government might fabricate and suppress evidence to defeat those deemed political enemies. But it is a demonstrable fact at every stage of my case. I am Barack Obama's political prisoner now, and I hope and pray that he will adhere to the ideals that impelled him to run for president. But as Obama himself would acknowledge, if we are expecting him to solve our problems, we missed the point of his campaign. Only by organizing in our own communities and pressuring our supposed leaders can we bring about the changes that we all so desperately need. Please support the Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee in our effort to hold the United States government to its own words. I thank you all who have stood by me all these years, but to name anyone would be to exclude many more. We must never lose hope in our struggle for freedom. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Leonard Peltier Leonard Peltier #89637-132 USP-Lewisburg US Penitentiary PO Box 1000 Lewisburg, PA 17837 ? Friends Digest Vol. 3, No. 10?? :) *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."-John Adams ?????????????????? *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``' * Call to Action * On August 21, 2009, upon hearing the news that Leonard Peltier had again been denied parole, Friends of Peltier renewed the call for an Executive Review of the Peltier case by the U.S. Department of Justice. Read the surprising background of this action and learn what you can do to help. * Friends' "Working Smart" Series * Last week we provided you with information about how best to correspond with the White House.? This was the first installment of a new series we call "Working Smart," ideas for how we all can be more effective as we work on Mr. Peltier's behalf.? We added a questions and answer section that you might find useful. You can take a look at . The Q&A section is at the bottom of the page. If you have questions about writing to the White House, drop us a line at info at FreePeltierNow.org. * Schedule of Events * On September 12, Mr. Peltier will be 65 years old. Check the calendar for a Peltier event near you. ????????????????? *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* "Never cease in the fight for peace, justice, and equality for all people. Be persistent in all that you do and don't allow anyone to sway you from your conscience." -- Leonard Peltier ????????????????? *'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'*:-.,_,.-:*'``'* Time to set him free... Because it is the RIGHT thing to do. Friends of Peltier http://www.FreePeltierNow.org From garyrumor2 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 11 22:11:34 2009 From: garyrumor2 at yahoo.com (Gary Crethers) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:11:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Helium 3 and nuclear power. Message-ID: <243608.70714.qm@web43506.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> I recently did a post on the Helium 3 option. They were talking about the Reactors that have been tested on a small scale?and the fact that they still use more energy in producing the power than they generate. Another factor is waste. Then there is security and the ultimate problem which was predicted as long ago as the Club of Rome Report in the seventies is the unsustainable. Here is a very optimistic portrayal of it from something called the Artemis Project. http://www.asi.org/adb/02/09/he3-intro.html Then? there is the Bullshit science site that wants you to pay for information. Like knowledge should be sold. What retro thinking. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4D-4VV1BGH-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1008916313&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=e5c86b3bf62124871b7a4fc895aa7f7d There is this from the DOE. It is a patent for an inherently safe Helium 3 Target Canister. http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/757658-6JpUyu/webviewable/757658.pdf This is a Chinese report claiming successful fusion reaction testing 3 years ago. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-09/28/content_5151013.htm This is an abstract from an article from "Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion Vol: 47, Issue: 8, August 01, 2005 pp. 1305-1338 Title: The feasibility of using D?3He and D?D fusion fuels Author: Stott, P Ea Affiliations: a. Association Euratom-CEA, Centre de Cadarache, 13108 Saint Paul lez Durance, France Abstract: Fusion reactor fuel cycles based on the D?3He and D?D reactions have been advocated as alternatives to deuterium and tritium (D?T). In this paper we make a careful assessment of the feasibility of burning these alternative fuels in a fusion reactor. A zero-dimensional model of the energy balance including radial profile effects for plasma temperature and density with accurate algorithms for synchrotron and bremsstrahlung radiation losses is used to calculate the required plasma conditions. Radiation losses and other factors severely restrict the choice of fuel mixtures that can be brought to ignition?and even under the most favourable assumptions, ignition requires plasma conditions in terms of energy confinement time, density, temperature and beta that are significantly more demanding than the conditions required to burn D?T. These requirements are far beyond the best conditions that have been reached in any present-day magnetic confinement experiments. A very serious issue is the stringent limit on the maximum concentrations of impurities and helium ash that can be tolerated. We consider the extent to which neutrons are reduced and briefly discuss the prospects for direct conversion. Finally we look at the serious problem of supplying 3He fuel in sufficient quantities to sustain a worldwide fusion energy programme and discuss the limitations of lunar sources and the difficulties of manufacturing 3He from D?D.Publisher: Institute of Physics Item Identifier: S0741-3335(05)93854-2 ISSN: 0741-3335" This is Helen Caldicott on nuclear power. http://calitreview.com/19 Interestingly enough most of what is available are simple puff pieces. I cannot access any of the peer reviewed material. It is all only available for sale or it is very old from the 1980's. ?? This makes it hard to know if it is realistic or not. The best article I have read is no longer available on the internet. All I can find are these puff pieces. It makes me wonder if there is any real information available to the public. ?? There is a research group at the Fusion Institute and it has been reported that their tests are very small. There is no real information about what is available on the moon. It is hard to know if this is another wet dream or real. ?? The problems caused by excessive energy use from any source is still there and increasing the energy consumption from any source is going to produce repercussions. From shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp Sat Sep 12 03:59:23 2009 From: shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp (Bill Totten) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:59:23 +0900 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] American Casino Message-ID: <20090912185923.33e3440f.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> How Our Nation's Financial Sector Became a Massive and Unregulated Gambling Operation by Joshua Holland, AlterNet AlterNet (September 05 2009) See American Casino movie trailer [1] from Leslie and Andrew Cockburn {2} on Vimeo {3}. The producers of the new documentary, American Casino, don't tell you about the causes of the economic meltdown that's caused so much pain around the world. They don't tell you how Wall Street, having lobbied furiously to free itself from public-interest regulation, created a furious demand for mortgage-backed junk, which they had laundered into supposedly solid investments with an assist from friendly - read "bought off" - ratings agencies. They don't discuss how unscrupulous lenders hawked an array of gimmicky mortgage products to people who weren't qualified to take them out in order to skim off a fat stream of fees. They let those who lived it tell the story - from the "creative" financiers who built the house of cards, to the brokers who pushed their products, and finally, to the people living on "Main Street" USA, whose dreams of homeownership were effectively turned into weapons of mass destruction and detonated in the centers of the global economy. And by opting to not tell a story - by leaving behind the narrator's voice that's so common to the documentary form - the story that gets told is incredibly powerful. AlterNet recently caught up with producers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn to discuss how our nation's financial sector became a massive and unregulated gambling operation and how its ultimate return to reality is causing so many such pain. Joshua Holland: First, I want to know what inspired the film in terms of your understanding of what was lacking in the mainstream coverage of the housing meltdown? I mean, something made you decide to go out and make this documentary. Leslie Cockburn: Well, we started shooting this documentary in January 2008. So there wasn't a lot of coverage of the crisis, so to speak. There was some coverage over here of foreclosures going on in different states, and a little coverage of the kind of problems that had been happening on Wall Street, starting with a little crash that happened in August of 2007. And then the market was going up and down - in these wild swings. And what struck us was, we looked at it and decided that it was not a crisis that was going to be over in three months or four months, but that it was going to be severe. We made a judgment about that and decided to kind of just jump into a film. We'd been looking at some very sort of obscure stuff like bond insurers, who were re-insuring with companies that were broke. There were signs that there was no money backing up a lot of what was going on on Wall Street. There was enormous amounts of leverage that were borrowed. You know, just incredible amounts of leverage in these investment banks. So we decided that it could be a very serious collapse, and that's why we did it. JH: So you did this when ... I guess there were people like Robert Shiller, Karl Case and Dean Baker and a few others saying that this was a very serious collapse, but a lot of economists were writing books and monographs about why the housing market would continue to rise. Andrew Cockburn: Well, that's right. I mean, Ben Bernanke was saying the subprime problem could be contained. That was the mantra that the people who were long on the market were telling each other. You know, we also were talking to people on Wall Street, smart people - of which there are not a lot - who were thinking and actually talking in rather apocalyptic terms. So that was one of the things that influenced us. JH: Now you call the film American Casino, and it starts where the crisis begins - with then-Senator Phil Gramm, Republican-Texas, leading the charge for financial deregulation. Tell me about this idea of the American casino, of Wall Street being a gambling emporium as much as a staid haven for the investor class. We use that term a lot figuratively, but what you're saying is it's quite literal. AC: It is. I mean, it really struck us when we started frequenting Wall Street financial houses, how people talk routinely - and not with any apparent irony - about bets. You know, about the fact that Morgan Stanley had bet on this and the Citadel Hedge Fund had bet on that, or their bet had gone wrong. And the more we understood, the more we realized that much of it is a bet. And I'll give you a literal example, which is the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of December 2000 that you referred to. It involved the legalization, basically, of credit default swaps. Which are a form of gambling. And the reason that the Act specifically protected them from state and local regulation is that otherwise, they would be regulated as a form of gambling. I mean, there are gambling laws in states and localities. And under those, these financial instruments would be illegal. They were made illegal at the time of the Depression because they were literally gambling. JH: So the Nevada Gaming Commission could theoretically have regulated these like a poker game, almost? AC: Well, when we showed the film at the Tribeca Film Festival, a guy stood up and said, "I work in Las Vegas, in a casino". And he said, "There, you know, we regulate it. It's regulated." And the difference between Vegas and Wall Street is that here it's unregulated. JH: Now we go from this idea of a casino ... and you know, it's too bad that David K [sic] Johnston had already taken the name Perfectly Legal (2003) for his book, because once we get past the casino, we start talking about the way that they laundered risk, and they re-laundered risk. And in a sense, once we get past that point in the film, it starts to become more and more clear that we're looking at a crime scene as much as a gambling facility, aren't we? LC: Well, what's shocking is when you really take it on board that we are all living in this casino. I mean, it's a bit like The Matrix (1999). You suddenly think, "Oh my God, I am inside that computer screen. My mortgage is on that computer screen. I, and everyone I know, and everyone in this country, is ... we're chips. We're chips in the casino". And that realization is a very big one. And talking about the crime ... We were told that the people who were taking out these loans were greedy. It's really their fault, or it's all of our ... the crisis is all of our fault. But in fact, it isn't all of our fault. We came across that by really investigating this story at the community level, in cities like Baltimore. First of all, people at lower income levels - they believe in their broker. The broker, to them, is like a dentist or a doctor. There is an assumption that what a broker does or a banker does is regulated. That there are some laws that ... you know, this can't be a scam. If they say to you, "Hey, you can afford this. Your income level is just fine, and you can refinance", you say: "Terrific, that's great. I'm so glad that I can do this." You don't expect that in fact what they're doing ... and we have brokers in American Casino who explain how this is done ... is that you say that your income is $2,500 a month. They write down $2,500 a week, or whatever fits into their computer program. And then that is buried in paperwork, and when you go to the closing, you don't even know what's in all those pages that are as thick as a phone book. These closings were often scheduled at the end of the day so that you'd have to pick up your kids at day care, as one community lawyer in Baltimore points out. This is a crime. This is people being lied to, people being squeezed, people being scammed. It really is shocking when you realize that really good people have been duped, and that they then default. And the people who have given them this mortgage don't care, because they passed it on. It's this whole game of hot potato. You pass it on to the next guy, and then to the next guy. As this incredible banker in the film points out, "There is no skin in the game. Get your fees up front, make a lot of money, pass it on to the next guy." So the only person who is destroyed is the person who was naive enough to believe in the system. The ones who believed that the broker or banker was actually a decent human being doing a job as a professional and giving them good advice. It's a shocking story. JH: Now help us connect these securities based on bad loans - what economic bloggers have called "the shit pile" - and how they were sliced and diced into these pieces that basically make them AAA-rated ... connect that to this lust for selling mortgages that people couldn't afford to service. AC: Well, you know, the idea of mortgage-backed bonds has been around for a while. What really happened in the 2000s was they discovered that instead of diversifying and having bonds that were partly backed by mortgages and backed by other things like aircraft leasing and so on and so forth, that it was much better, much more profitable, there was an extra few basis points in concentrating on subprime. Basically loan-shark loans. So, we have a banker explaining all this in very candid, and I think ... very clear terms, because we just let him explain it. You take all these mortgages and you put them together in a bond. Then you slice it up - you sell slices of that bond, and you get an obliging rating agency, which you are paying and which wants your business as an investment bank. They say, oh eighty percent of these are AAA. And there were only about eight or nine corporations in the United States that were considered AAA at the time - General Electric, Exxon. So suddenly you had thousands of these mortgage bonds being rated AAA, or parts of them. Then you take little bits of those bits that are BBBs, BB, BBB and B. You take those lower-down bits, which are considered more risky. You take those tranches out, you pour them into another instrument called a collateralized debt obligation. You rate the top eighty percent of that AAA. So what was B is now A, magically! Then you could do it all again. You take the B bits out of that, and put it in another one. A CDO-squared, as they called it. And what our banker makes very clear is you were taking garbage and spray-painting it with a can of gold paint, and then calling it gold. JH: Now, one of the people you interview calls this "the civil rights issue of the 2000s". Tell me, what is "reverse red-lining"? What does that mean? AC: Well, originally, whole areas of the population, specifically African Americans and other minorities, were "red-lined". There would literally be a red line around areas on realtors' maps. And you don't make a loan to people living inside those lines. Because they weren't part of the credit system. So when they started hawking these subprime loans, there were these markets ... I mean, people in inner-city Baltimore or other American cities, or minority areas around the country ... they were hungry for credit. They had never had access to loans. So suddenly they were being offered these loans, they were being sold loans. But not prime loans like, you know, white people got. But subprime loans, that is, loans that had predatory rates of interest or balloon payments. And that's what John Rellman, who is a very great civil rights lawyer, discusses in the film; he describes this as reverse red-lining. And as you say, says it's the civil rights issue of the 2000s. LC: It's a civil rights issue because, as he says, "You know, with the Jim Crow laws in the old days, they would say ... 'you can't live here'. Now with this", as he puts it, "you suck the equity out of an area". Minorities in Baltimore, for example, you had areas that were really being spruced up, they were being fixed up. These are inner-city areas, and there were people doing nice things with houses and money coming in. All that money is now gone because of the massive defaults, because of all the subprime loans. There's no money there anymore. These areas have been completely ravaged because these guys have come in with these predatory loans. You know, there's some shocking figures in this film, which point out what happened with minorities. You know, four times as many people of color were given subprime loans. And that isn't because they were poor or anything. They were exactly like their white counterparts. It looks really bad when you look at those figures, and there were a lot of middle-class African Americans who were put into subprime loans, and they certainly could have qualified for prime. And the reason why all this needs investigating is because you could make a strong case that it was fraud. AC: As you can see in the film, we talk about a lawsuit in the city of Baltimore. They are claiming that the Wells Fargo Bank targeted minorities, targeted African Americans in Baltimore for these subprime loans, and now the state of Illinois has just filed suit against Wells Fargo, claiming the same thing. I think they're not the only bank alleged to have done this, but whatever the federal government does or does not do, a lot of states and a lot of local administrations really are very incensed about this and are taking action. JH: And the worse a person's credit, the higher the fees, and as you show in the film, 61 percent of those minorities who got a subprime loan in 2006 would have qualified for prime loans. You also show very beautifully in the film, I think, the impact that this has not only on people who had those mortgages, but on the people who live around them, the communities - the unbelievable blight and decimation that comes to these communities that have had high rates of foreclosure within them. Tell me a little bit about what that was like when you were seeing these things. LC: Well, we saw it in a number of communities. In Riverside, California, for example, we were going around with a mosquito vector-control team. And they were concerned about these neighborhoods where you have every other house in foreclosure. These houses had been built very recently. This is land that had been farm land, dairy farms, big daily farms five years before. And they built these houses badly, and then they built small swimming pools behind a lot of the houses, and the swimming pools of course are now black and full of hundreds of thousands of mosquitos. These houses are also being used widely as meth labs, as grow houses. The community is just completely torn apart. It's very post-apocalyptic, the feel of it. When you see the film, you will really understand how bad it is. And not only should you see the film to see that, but people should go out and look at some of these communities. I mean, it's real devastation. And in these communities, you know, you have one default, and then that drags down the value of house of the person next door who is paying their prime thirty-year mortgage. It's kind of this terrible snowball that destroys the entire community. More and more people end up in foreclosure. And that has not unwound yet. For people to talk about "green shoots" right now is bizarre - you know, every thirteen seconds, there's a foreclosure in this country. JH: Now, the film isn't preachy, per se, but obviously you hope to have some sort of impact with it. Tell me what are you hoping that audiences take away when they walk out of the film. AC: Well, we let people talk. You can hear what they say. And to hear people who have gotten into mortgage trouble describing what happened and what they're trying to do about it, you know, these are not greedy people who were sort of eagerly trying to make a bet that went wrong. And the other idea you hear about is that we're all guilty. We're all living in a bubble. You know, as a society we're all sort of chasing this almost-impossible dream. Well, that's not the case. And again, you get that from the film. The American Casino makes the case very clearly that this was a top-down crime, really. Yes, there were mortgage companies that were lying about people's income and involving people in these sort of situations, but it came from the banks. It was the banks pushing the whole thing to get these loans in so they could then package them, securitize them into these bonds and sell them on. Don't take my word for it. You can hear the banker say in the film that they were encouraged to make more and more aggressive loans. Aggressive loans means basically entangling somebody who really can't afford it in a mortgage. You don't tell them they can't afford it, you tell them they can afford it. But you know they're going to get into trouble, terrible trouble. But that gives you something to securitize and sell on to some Korean bank or whatever. LC: Yes, he goes on to say this was done to feed the CDOs. They needed more and more. There came a point where most Americans who wanted mortgages had them or had already refinanced. So you had to find new people, more and more people to get loans to feed the beast, to package into these CDOs so that you could make a ton of money selling them off to whomever you could dupe with this stuff. This banker, we said to him, "Well, who would buy these CDOs-squared?" And his one-word reply is, "Idiots". And you understand finally that the people on Wall Street knew what was happening, and they continued to do it, because the money was so good. JH: That was one of the most powerful moments of the film, by the way. That one-word answer. Let me ask you to step back from the concrete for one moment. You show snippets of George W Bush talking about the homeownership gap. This is a very long-standing element of our political culture. This idea of homeownership as a road to wealth. To what degree were they capitalizing on these kinds of themes within the American creed? AC: Well, they were. I mean, actually, homeownership as the dream is comparatively novel. It's really come up since the 1930s, when the American government started to subsidize homeownership. Or subsidize money lending for homeownership, with FHA loans and Fannie Mae and then later on, Freddie Mac. And tax relief, and you know ... basically the primary industry of this country became homeownership. Became selling houses or financing homeownership. Lending money for homeownership became an obsession that has now reached this sort of ghastly end that you see in American Casino. LC: But also, people were being really basically tricked into buying these houses that weren't worth the amount they paid. And you could have avoided that by having strict rules for appraisers, strict rules for inspectors for houses. Just putting in more regulation so that you didn't have these ridiculous prices that of course people can't really pay. I think one of the good things about this extreme crisis will be that house prices will come down in the end. That they won't continue to go up. There are a lot of people on Wall Street who would like to create another bubble ... JH: And in Washington ... LC: Yes. They sort of have amnesia about what's happened here. But then you're going to end up with the same terrible disastrous result. JH: OK, I finish all interviews with the same question: What should I have asked you that I did not, if anything? AC: Well, my final thought is that people should take away from this film ... a sense that you know, how huge this is. I mean, this is not just a sort of run-of-the-mill crisis. This is a fundamental turning point in American history. And I think our film, it gives people the opportunity to understand that. Links: {1} http://vimeo.com/3637653 {2} http://vimeo.com/user1430027 {3} http://vimeo.com/ _____ Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. (c) 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. http://www.alternet.org/story/142267/ TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ From gmeyerson at triad.rr.com Sat Sep 12 07:54:58 2009 From: gmeyerson at triad.rr.com (Gregory Meyerson) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:54:58 -0400 Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Dawn of Scarcity Industrialism In-Reply-To: <4AAB079B.5010509@gmail.com> References: <20090907102548.69791cc1.shimogamo@ashisuto.co.jp> <605619.7012.qm@web43507.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <2801e4d7f90ec38b4702a53d3186c8be@triad.rr.com> <901594.78656.qm@web43503.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> <8FA77D10-8205-4A24-86CF-02364FB89EFB@triad.rr.com> <8D74CC23-A8B3-41DE-AA2E-3424EF052649@mailup.net> <3c7188168a9b1372d4756551ce240752@triad.rr.com> <4AAB079B.5010509@gmail.com> Message-ID: <73D4EF81-06C1-4A3A-9E67-6F61327E15DD@triad.rr.com> LCM: First of all, we have to get rid of capitalism. second, why are you conflating new nuclear with gen one nuclear? you can't use horrifying stats concerning chernobyl or somalia to argue against integral fast reactors. to do so is either ignorance or demagoguery. IFRs do not require uranium mining, even if produced on a global, massive scale, for about a thousand years. for a primer, see Hansen's letter to obama (he pleads for the fourth time). Maybe the IFR is a fiction (nope); but you owe it to yourself to actually FIND OUT ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGY FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES. On Sep 11, 2009, at 10:29 PM, LCM wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > My fear and potential anger is that low costing of operations in the > name of capital will lead to more of this: > > ...the high seas off Somalia's coast are being used as a TOXIC WASTE & > NUCLEAR MATERIALS DUMPING GROUND (by the ULTIMATE low cost provider... > the Mafia!) > > ...and not necessarily lead to the use of more the efficient, > ALLEGEDLY less dangerous technologies, which in the short run (the > only 'run' most industries are truly concerned with nowdays) are VERY > VERY EXPENSIVE and take year to get anything resembling an ROI. > > Look... Hurricane Katrina swept ALL THE REACTIVE WATER from fuel rod > storage pools all along the Gulf Coast that were essentially just > that... Pools with tin sheds over them into the air, along with the > tin sheds that covered those pools. > > Didn't hear much from the government, ANY health organizations, or > media, about that, did we? > > Here's a recent quote from a Uranium mining operation spokesperson in > Malawi: > > >> KAYELEKERA, Malawi, Aug 22 (IPS) - "We are serious about the >> integrity of the environment," says Neville Huxham, the country >> director for Paladin Energy Africa. >> >> >> "We're taking the uranium out of the ground, we're exporting it to >> be used for productive purposes, so we should be getting a medal for >> cleaning up the environment." > > Surely they jest! > > Not at all... I'm SURE they actually believe that line of reasoning. > > More on the potential dangers of letting private industry in collusion > with industrial governments decide what's 'safe' for the planet's > environment (and alternative views on Somali "Piracy") here: > http://razedbywolves.blogspot.com/2009/04/are-they-pirates-or-are- > they-volunteer.html > > > > > gregory meyerson wrote: >> I don't know what to say to your point except read C and W; then read >> Blees and follow or participate in the discussions at bravenewclimate >> site. there's also an interview with Blees and W. and a debate >> between Blees and Greenpeace. >> >> >> This is what I did and I was convinced by Blees about the technology. >> and angry at caldicott and especially wasserman (whose side I >> initially >> took) for genuine demagogic fear mongering. >> >> >> James Hansen was convinced. Read his letter to obama, as I >> suggested. >> He was opposed to nuclear power. >> >> >> our problems of course go way beyond the mere technological >> questions, >> but these are important. On Wasserman's enthusiasm about solar and >> wind, I'd recommend Minqi Li's excellent chapter on the limits of >> renewables in The Rise of China (he shares the anti nuke position, >> knowing nothing about IFRs, with C and W). >> On Sep 11, 2009, at 5:45 PM, dean tuckerman wrote: >> > > > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ > > iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJKqweaAAoJEK0+v1xoBEysVegH/jsVNkiRxNN6QRiYIAaQ7aSX > 7Qnq7xigdR2Z+z/5PmcouKwMlRaRr35nRVwizg2qOylXl2LXjGLY918VSVbeVXVa > GdUFFmyBu4p+lcPIhy8YUn28ZFE4p3PYJpJXaYrc9OyDDbik8opgOSl6jV4q/0GE > rTGQD0+p2hrOG7czhU9ReBIJ7fuTfJBAz6HlXD//zJ72tbXnSAT5G79lUwMRhpko > CMn06EqcXYn4yieCtyZJn5Ug4RZkW6+flLPFrt238lO7YnMrUKacs9nKBsCAhlZx > JXdkSMXdHm9aYbOuS4JKx3F0nBwixxHcTVQ4j5dDHrdiTcnc32Tb6o0SYPX/axg= > =LvFC > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > > _______________________________________________ > Rad-Green mailing list > Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green From gmeyerson at triad.rr.com Sat Sep 12 08:21:52 2009 From: gmeyerson at triad.rr.com (Gregory Meyerson) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 10:21:52 -0400 Subject: [R-G] James Hansen and dogmatic environmentalists Message-ID: <85C7E4AC-D865-4686-A62E-D9F5D23925B7@triad.rr.com> Greens love to cite James Hansen. And for good reason as he is one of the world's leading climate scientists. But they don't like to cite this, from H's Letter to Obama: Prompt development of safe 4th generation nuclear power is needed to allow energy options for countries such as China and India, and for countries in the West in the event that energy efficiency and renewable energies cannot satisfy all energy requirements. Deployment of 4th generation nuclear power can be hastened via cooperation with China, India and other countries. It is essential that dogmatic ?environmentalists?, opposed to all nuclear power, not be allowed to delay the R&D on 4th generation nuclear power. Thus it is desirable to avoid appointing to key energy positions persons with a history of opposition to nuclear power development. Of course, deployment of nuclear power is an option, and some countries or regions may prefer to rely entirely on other energy sources, but opponents of nuclear power should not be allowed to deny that option to everyone. Maybe this 4th gen is bullshit. People should find out. If it is bullshit, then nuclear power is not a great option. but neither is wind/solar when you actually look at the numbers (see david mackay, whose excellent book can be downloaded free online--"sustainability: without the hot air.") but lots of us prefer not to look at the numbers or prefer to cherry pick the numbers. we read harvey wasserman's ridiculous, hoax of a book, Solartopia which talks about thousands and thousands of windmills with 400 foot long blades to provide all our power. with no analysis of the production process and whether it is even remotely sustainable (wind uses far, far more concrete and steel per unit of power than the advanced ABWRs) Right now, if you are a solar/wind proponent, and don't know the numbers, you are de facto a supporter of COAL, because only coal combined with natural gas can provide base power--without nuclear. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:14:06 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:14:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] US healthcare sham In-Reply-To: <2104317377.589461252704287136.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <366024607.741351252779246994.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://mondediplo.com/2009/09/ushealthcare Le Monde Diplomatique September 2009 US healthcare sham by Serge Halimi A Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton abolished a welfare programme in 1996 under the (largely fallacious) pretext that it bred fraud, waste and abuse. Thirteen years on, the reforms that Barack Obama is proposing will not fundamentally change the United States? abysmal healthcare system because those who profit from it have been able to buy protection from the lawmakers. The welfare programme ditched in 1996 absorbed about 1% of the US budget; today?s well-ensconced private insurance companies swallow most of the 17% of the budget set aside for healthcare. Paradoxically, the US president is one of the most spirited prosecutors of the system he has chosen to retain. Day after day he recounts how ?we are held hostage by health insurance companies that deny coverage, or drop coverage, or charge fees that people can?t afford for care they desperately need? We have a healthcare system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people? ( 1 ). Obama?s project initially set out with two important objectives. It proposed compulsory health cover for the 46 million Americans outside the system while funding the poorest amongst them. It also suggested the creation of a public insurance system with less prohibitive tariffs than private companies ( 2 ), which commit huge resources to finding legal loopholes (?pre-existing conditions?) allowing them not to pay out when their insured clients fall ill. What is it that so alarms the right? Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, claims that ?any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss, competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business? ( 3 ). Other more telling tales of distress might have concerned him, particularly in Louisiana, one of the poorest US states. American politics is so poisoned by money flowing from industrial and financial lobbies that the only proposals ensured a smooth ride through Congress are those that cut taxes. Banks, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry have almost nothing to fear. Max Baucus, the Democrat chairman of the Senate finance committee, whose approval is needed for reforms to be adopted, is also the lawmaker who receives the most money from private hospitals, insurance companies and doctors. However, his largest donors are hardly worried about the problems of Montana, the small rural state he represents, since 90% of their contributions come from elsewhere in the country, in a perfectly legal and accountable way. Will anyone be surprised to hear that Baucus opposes a complete overhaul of the current medical system? A year after the crash of neoliberalism, the (small-scale) panic that gripped the ruling classes has vanished. The political system remains locked in their favour. From time to time, a more corrupt or unlucky operator goes to jail; the mantra ? morals, ethics, regulation, G20 ? is chanted; then it all starts again. Questioned recently about the huge bonuses awarded to traders at BNP-Paribas, Christine Lagarde, France?s economy minister and a former Chicago business lawyer, had only this to say: ?If we say no more bonuses, the best trader teams will simply move elsewhere.? Cradled in a political system that protects them (and which they in turn protect) and profiting from the public?s widespread cynicism and all-round despair, traders and medical insurance companies can only pursue their parasitic ways. ?Abuse? is not some aberration in their practice, it?s their essence. So a ?reform? they could agree to will not do: what we need is their disappearance. Translated by Robert Waterhouse More by Serge Halimi ( 1 ) Town hall meeting in Montana, 14 August 2009. ( 2 ) In 15 of the 50 states, more than half of the ?market? is held by one private healthcare company. See ?The Tight Grip of Health Insurers,? Business Week , 3 August 2009. ( 3 ) Bobby Jindal, ?How to Make Health-Care Reform Bipartisan?, The Wall Street Journal , 22 July 2009. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:14:33 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:14:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] The Afghanistan Abyss In-Reply-To: <418530305.560771252700441267.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <785884769.741441252779273501.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html?ref=opinion New York Times September 5, 2009 The Afghanistan Abyss By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake. The group's concern - dead right, in my view - is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels. "Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem," the group said in a statement to me. "The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct. "The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome," the statement said. The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center. "We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff," Mr. Miller said. Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don't understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there - possibly even the collapse of Pakistan. These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well. "We've bitten off more than we can chew; we're setting ourselves up for failure," said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as "nonsense." I'm writing about these concerns because I share them. I'm also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn't match what I've found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into "Taliban" or "non-Taliban." Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears. Many Pashtuns I've interviewed are appalled by the Taliban's periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they're a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban's personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai. Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it's a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land - particularly because the foreigners haven't brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated. Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well. In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can't be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers. That may be why the troop increase this year hasn't calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan - with four months left to go. The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban. This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:13:34 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:13:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] US war on crime has nothing to do with crime In-Reply-To: <2091049919.595921252705023731.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <875974981.741271252779214915.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://mondediplo.com/2009/09/06usprisons Le Monde Diplomatique September 2009 US war on crime has nothing to do with crime The land of the unfree One in 35 Americans are caught up in the corrections system and incarceration is on the rise. Why is this when the US crime rate has dropped so remarkably? by Andrew Oxford The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other nation. It has only 5% of the world?s population but 25% of the world?s prisoners. If you count everyone ensnared in the corrections system ? on probation or parole ? millions of Americans (one of every 31) are anything but free in the land of liberty ( 1 ). ?Incarceration is a rich country?s hobby,? says Scott Henson, a Texan journalist and political consultant who has monitored America?s addiction to imprisonment for years and thinks it a pastime of impractical and frivolous consequences. Crime and punishment are disconnected. As funding has increased, more prisons have been built, more of the usual suspects ? drug users, dealers, and petty gangsters ? have been wrangled into newly constructed penitentiaries, and more warders hired to man the guard towers. Crime seems to have fluctuated of its own free will, unaffected by the billions of dollars thrown at it and the policies written to combat it. Although crime declined throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, incarceration rates climbed dramatically, even among the young. Meanwhile, the state of New York saw a dramatic decrease in violent crime as its prison population dropped ( 2 ). State budgets are being leached by rising bills for ever-expanding penal systems ? nearing a cumulative $50bn this year ? and politicians are exacting cuts on education, healthcare and other social services to make up the difference. Between 1988 and 2008, spending on the prison system grew from four to 30 times the budget for public housing ( 3 ). There is a current of racial inequality and strife that runs through America?s history. From slavery to reconstruction, urban migration to ghettos, one of the starkest examples of the lingering racial divide is the over-representation of people of colour in the prison system. While distinct in some ways and eerily parallel in others, the racial and criminal narratives of America became particularly intertwined at a time of cultural conflagration. In the 1960s America mutinied. Long-oppressed racial groups ? blacks, Latinos and the indigenous people ? demanded civil rights, students called for an end to the war in Vietnam, women challenged the assumptions of patriarchy, and environmentalists mobilised against ecological destruction. America was in open revolt against its own culture and Washington responded one of the few ways it knew: it declared a war. ?Tough on crime? With many citizens fearful of the uncertain future, politicians devised policies to win the war on crime and the war on drugs. Writing to Dwight Eisenhower in 1968, Richard Nixon expressed confidence in his ?tough on crime? platform: ?I have found great audience response to this law and order theme in all parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is virtually no race problem and relatively little crime.? ( 4 ) The war on crime has nothing to do with crime. As Dr Bruce Western, professor of sociology at Harvard University, points out: ?Crime rates themselves may not have driven the prison boom but long-standing fears about crime and other social anxieties may form the backdrop for the growth in imprisonment.? ( 5 ) While violent crime did drop remarkably in the 1990s, the role ?tough on crime? policies played is debatable. Instead, changes in local policing tactics and economic growth should be credited. Incarceration rates rose steadily throughout this period thanks to the war on drugs, which received more and more funds from federal authorities. In the 1960s drugs were beginning to emerge in the counter culture and working-class neighbourhoods, and their burgeoning popularity and expanding market were seen as a sign of lawlessness. Lawmakers decided to take the war to the streets and create heavy-handed penalties for even petty possession. These laws remain on the books and are enforced by a wide range of agencies, bureaus and police departments, all receiving increasing sums from the federal government. ?Drugs draw many into the system who do not actively contribute to crime? explains Western. He says the effect incarceration had on crime rates was small. The government has wasted billions on treating as a crime wave what is really a pressing public health issue. Yet despite the lacklustre results of the zero-tolerance ?lock ?em up and throw away the key? approach to drugs and petty crimes, America continues to break records in terms of incarceration rates. Why? ?That?s the $100,000 question,? says Tracy Velasquez, executive director of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute. ?Our political system tends to reinforce an increase in incarceration; [for politicians] there?s a need to be tough on crime.? Ever since the racial and social strife of the 1960s, rehashed for a new generation by the campaign ads Ronald Reagan ran against Michael Dukakis [sic] featuring rapist and murderer Willie Horton, leaders everywhere have been working to appear tougher than their opponents. Henson claims ?if you had to put your finger on it, Reagan set the tone of the debate?. But he is quick to emphasise ? as observers and activists usually are ? that it?s wrong to examine criminal justice policy as a left-right issue, since the left and right have both failed miserably. ?Joe Biden and John Kerry and Tom Harkin are the biggest drug warriors in the Senate,? he claims. ?Obama, in his stimulus package, even wanted to triple funding [for drug enforcement agencies] and ended up doubling it.? Velasquez explained that ?there hasn?t been a downside to being tough on crime? ? a downside when courting votes. But for the millions of Americans locked up for minor crimes and pushed around by well-funded police, the downside has been apparent for some time. There are social issues in the prison system that warrant not just concern but urgent action. Gangs have been using the penal system as a recruiting mechanism and their influence has grown. Inmate populations have segregated themselves along racial lines to further conform to gang culture. Sexual abuse is also prevalent: a recent study found that 60,000 inmates are abused each year with prison staff cited as frequent culprits ( 6 ). Beyond the fences there are other problems: more than half of America?s incarcerated citizens are parents. Occasionally, politicians point to the amenities afforded to some inmates and lament that murderers and rapists are living more comfortably than they should. A sheriff in Arizona garnered press attention for having his prisoners live in tents beneath the desert sun (a move that prompted an investigation by Amnesty International). Such attitudes have created a system that merits shame and disappointment. Cradle to prison In 40 years Americans have asked their leaders only to take those unseemly, typically non-white people on the sidewalks peddling crack, lock them up, and throw away the key. While conservatives like Reagan lamented ?cradle-to-grave? welfare, his and other presidential policies have created a cradle-to-prison system where impoverished communities produce youth who choose to take their chances within the profitable drug or criminal world rather than do a minimum-wage job in the service sector. Police, flush with money from the federal government, round up some of the ?usual suspects? who will face stiff penalties in a legal system they will have little help in navigating. Locked away, they may leave behind families who could use their help, in fact need it. Each inmate is different and each story is complicated but politicians at every level of government seem to have found a solution that is absurdly simple. And yet none of it works. Crime is not falling as a result of tougher laws; the criminal justice system is anything but economical; mass incarceration is creating a wide range of social problems in the communities it has affected; and even after the one million plus people who work in the prisons are paid their wages and more laws are authored, America has little to show for its crusade against crime and drugs. ?It?s not the kingpin but the low-level dealer [who is put] in jail,? Velasquez points out. It?s a lack of alternative work that has drawn millions of Americans into drugs and then jail. While narcotics have also spread to wealthier neighbourhoods, Henson reminds us that ?one side of the [railroad] tracks has taken the brunt. Drugs have spread but not prosecution?. If the problem rests in bipartisan racism, in bipartisan neoliberalism and in bipartisan indifference, a solution seems to be emerging from bipartisan concern. While there are several lawmakers on the left who have worked on this issue for decades, the political climate has marginalised their power. Yet as Republicans scramble to secure their conservative credentials by exercising ?fiscal conservatism?, many have considered ways of diminishing the costs of the corrections system and finding alternatives to incarceration. And as states struggle to balance their budgets, polls reflect more positive attitudes towards the legalisation of marijuana and wardens run out of cells, this could be the perfect moment for debate. LMD English edition exclusive More by Andrew Oxford Andrew Oxford is a writer living in San Antonio, Texas ( 1 ) Pew Center on the States, One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections (Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, March 2009). ( 2 ) Ibid. ( 3 ) Funding for state expenditures on prisons are detailed in One in 31 and other federal and state budget issues are cataloged by The National Priorities Project. ( 4 ) Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis , New York, Verso, 2000. ( 5 ) Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America , New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. ( 6 ) National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, Final Report , Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, June 2009. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:16:43 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:16:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Obama Speaks Loudly But Carries a Small Stick In-Reply-To: <1460983585.231391252619601687.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1497232146.741861252779403983.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/470815/obama_speaks_loudly_but_carries_a_small_stick?rel=emailNation The Nation 09/09/2009 Obama Speaks Loudly But Carries a Small Stick by John Nichols President Obama spoke loudly but carried a small stick Wednesday night , when he outlined what's left of his healthcare reform agenda in a rare address to a joint session of the Congress. Noting that "it has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for healthcare reform," the president told skeptical legislators from both sides of the political aisle. "I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last." That was one of several takeaway lines of the night. Another, delivered to members of the House and Senate who have just returned to Washington after an August of brutal town hall meetings, was: "The time for bickering has passed. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is the time when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together... Now is the time to deliver on healthcare." The president was equally muscular when it came to addressing "scary stories" and "bogus claims" about "death panels" and threats to Medicare that have been spun up by insurance industry front groups in order to thwart meaningful reform. Democrats loved it when Obama told the spin doctors -- in the House and Senate Republican caucuses and their media echo chambers -- that: "If you misrepresent what's in the plan, we will call you out." But for all of its rhetorical flourishes, this was not a to-the-barricades address by a president who was prepared to battle not just the lies about his plan but the compromises that would make universal healthcare the dream deferred. When it came to the task of offering the explanations, arguments and details that have been so hard to come by during a frustratingly unfocused debate about how to develop a functional healthcare system for a country where tens of millions of Americans have no insurance coverage and tens of millions more are underinsured, Obama remained disturbingly vague. He restated his determination to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions. He proposed portability and flexibility. He pledged to bar corporate caps on the amount of care that is provided the sick. And he decried insurance company abuses that even Republicans seemed to agree--at least if applause is any measure -- are "heartbreaking" and "wrong." These consumer protection initiatives could well form the foundation for the legislation that Obama says he is determined to sign this year, since it certainly did not sound Wednesday night like the president was going to fight for the sort of broad reforms that really would provide quality care to all while control costs. "It makes more sense to build on what works... rather than to build an entirely new system from scratch," Obama said, making all too clear his determination to retain the private for-profit system that has failed so miserably to deliver universal care but that has succeeded so monumentally in delivering profits to insurance and pharmaceutical corporation stockholders. Obama still talked about "options" and "choices." But he suggested that they would be offered mainly by insurance companies that would enjoy "incentives" -- i.e., new streams of taxpayer dollars -- if they agree to abide by consumer-friendly regulations and come up with strategies for covering more of the uninsured. The government might step in to help, Obama suggested, but he painted such interventions as temporary rather than permanent. When he spoke of a "public option," as he had to in order to keep progressive Democrats on board, the president still said: "I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business." The "public option" was positioned as something akin to a consumer protection initiative for "those without insurance," a sort of welfare program that would attract only about five percent of Americans and that would be funded by premiums rather than tax dollars. Robust? Not hardly. The president's language, so strong at the start, went soft when he focused in on the public option. He even suggested that he was open to alternatives favored by Republicans and some moderate Democrats. That was something that Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, picked up on when he said after the speech: "(The) president needs to be more direct on what the public option means and what it will do for the American people." The congressman warned that, "President Obama was elected to bring change and progress. I fear that if my party and the President do not appreciate the mandate the American people have given us, the people will lose confidence in the idea that they can vote for change and get what they voted for." Grijalva's point is well taken. Throughout the speech, Obama talked about "the plan" he was presenting. But a lack of clarity or line-in-the-sand commitments to pursue genuine reform of a system he described as "full of waste and abuse" created the most amusing moment of the night. Obama was not going for laughs when he uttered the line "while there remain some significant details to be ironed out..." But he got them. What the president was getting at was the message, repeated several times during the speech, that he was still searching for some kind of middle ground that will satisfy "those on the left" and "those on the right -- even if that means supporting medical malpractice "reforms" that would make it harder for those who are injured by bad doctors, nurses and hospitals to hold the wrongdoers to account. What Americans who have waited "nearly a century" for reform were left with was the prospect that the "great unfinished business of our society" -- as the late Edward Kennedy described the pursuit of universal healthcare in a last letter to Obama--might remain unfinished under a president who means well but does not necessarily fight well. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:16:05 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:16:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] =?utf-8?q?Playing_the_=E2=80=98Anti-Semitism=E2=80=99_Card_?= =?utf-8?q?Against_Venezuela?= In-Reply-To: <1428932893.554941252699707390.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <1509314180.741771252779365236.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> https://nacla.org/node/6106 NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) September 3 2009 Playing the ?Anti-Semitism? Card Against Venezuela Eric Wingerter and Justin Delacour In the early morning hours of January 31, vandals broke into Tiferet Israel, a Sephardic synagogue in Caracas. They strewed sacred scrolls on the floor and scribbled ?Death to the Jews? and other anti-Semitic epithets on the walls, before making off with computer equipment and historical artifacts. Understandably, the incident frightened and upset many in the Venezuelan Jewish community. Right away, U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times and The Miami Herald , linked the incident to Venezuela?s increasingly strained relations with Israel, after the two countries suspended diplomatic relations two weeks earlier over Israel?s bombing of Gaza, then still under way. A Herald editorial went so far as to describe an ?official policy of anti-Semitism? in Venezuela and implied that Ch?vez?s foreign policy had unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic violence in the country, culminating in the assault on the synagogue. 1 Some international NGOs were no more nuanced. Just hours after the break-in, the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was already implicitly comparing the Ch?vez government to the Nazis, calling the synagogue attack ?a modern-day Kristallnacht.? 2 But the Caracas police investigation bore out a different story. Authorities quickly realized that the synagogue?s security fence had been cut from the inside, prompting detectives to investigate the break-in as an inside job. Within the week it became clear that the attack had in fact been a robbery disguised as anti-Semitic vandalism, carried out by the synagogue?s privately contracted security team. Eleven men were arrested for their role in the plot, and their statements to the police indicated that the graffiti and desecration were intended to throw off investigators. 3 Although the arrests helped ease the anxieties of Venezuela?s Jewish community, the international media pressed on with the storyline of a politically motivated attack. The very week that the Venezuelan Israelite Association issued a statement praising the swift and successful investigation, The Washington Post ran an editorial titled ?Mr. Chavez vs. the Jews,? which again blamed the robbery on the government, or, more specifically, on an ugly comment left on a ?pro-government Web site,? demanding ?that citizens ?publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park? and called for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, seizures of Jewish-owned property and a demonstration at Caracas?s largest synagogue.? 4 The editorial concluded that the synagogue was then ?duly attacked.? 5 The idea that the sacking of the Caracas synagogue was based purely on anti-Semitism has persisted, even showing up in a recent piece authored by two academics in the high-brow Boston Review . The authors claim the attack is a sign of ?state-directed anti-Semitism.? 6 Such hyperbolic media coverage exemplifies the tendency of the U.S. press to portray left-leaning Latin American governments as hotbeds of anti-Semitism. In the case of Venezuela, where the government has never made any overtly anti-Semitic public statements, much less enacted policies targeting its Jewish citizens, the storyline has been promoted in three key ways: (1) attributing anti-Semitic acts or statements by private citizens to the government, (2) conflating legitimate criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism, and (3) relying on press statements by U.S.-based Jewish organizations like the ADL or the Simon Wiesenthal Center, often at the expense of Venezuelan Jewish organizations, which regularly complain that their views are misrepresented, even flatly contradicted, by U.S. groups pursuing their own agendas. Perhaps the most egregious example of this disconnect occurred in January 2006, when the New York Daily News , the Los Angeles Times , and The Wall Street Journal all reported that Ch?vez, during a Christmas Eve speech, had invoked an age-old anti-Semitic slur, labeling Jews as Christ killers. 7 The story originated with an alert circulated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but on closer inspection it became clear that the group had deliberately edited the speech to manufacture the slur. The original speech contained a long riff in which Ch?vez decried the unequal distribution of global wealth: The world has enough for everybody, but it turned out that a few minorities?the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bol?var from here, and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia?a minority took possession of the planet?s gold, silver, minerals, water, good lands, oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few: Less than 10% of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world. 8 The reference to the betrayal of Latin American liberation hero Sim?n Bol?var by some leaders after the War of Independence indicates that Ch?vez was speaking metaphorically about wealthy elites in general, rather than any group in particular. But the translation published by the Wiesenthal Center shortened the statement significantly and altered its meaning as follows: ? . . . the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world.? 9 The center?s editing job included quotation marks, implying that it was a direct quote, but failed to include ellipses, which would have signaled to readers that words had been removed. The Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela (CAIV), the nation?s largest Jewish organization, was swift and severe in condemning the Wiesenthal Center, issuing a public letter complaining that the U.S. organization had ?interfered in the political status, in the security, and in the well-being of our community.? The group added: ?You have acted on your own, without consulting us, on issues that you don?t know or understand.? 10 But in the three years since the ?Christ killer? incident, some U.S. NGOs, media, and politicians have continued to neglect Venezuelan Jewish organizations while persisting in their attempts to demonize the Ch?vez government. In May, Representative Connie Mack (R-Fla.) introduced a House resolution condemning the Venezuelan government as anti-Semitic in response to the synagogue break-in. 11 Once again, Venezuelan Jewish organizations were forced to mobilize. As CAIV explained to the Pittsburgh-based Jewish Chronicle , the resolution may have derailed an ongoing dialogue that had been initiated between the Venezuelan government and the Jewish community in the months since the break-in. Fred Pressner, former president of CAIV, pointed out that Venezuela?s government had reacted well to the earlier attacks, noting that ?all of our institutions are protected by the police?we cannot complain about that.? 12 Pressner and the CAIV worked with House Democrats to block Mack?s resolution. In the end, the conservative congressman pulled the language from consideration, but he has indicated that he will seek to reintroduce it again soon, whether or not it is opposed by Venezuela?s Jewish leadership. 13 * This is not the first time that U.S.-based propagandists have sought to portray a left-leaning Latin American government as anti-Semitic. In May 1983, the ADL issued a meagerly sourced report claiming that Nicaragua?s Sandinista government systematically repressed and forced into exile the country?s tiny Jewish community. 14 Eager to garner U.S. congressional funding for a brutal mercenary campaign to topple Nicaragua?s government, President Ronald Reagan promptly added the charge of anti-Semitism to his propaganda offensive against the Sandinistas. However, subsequent investigations by U.S. Jewish leaders found that, among the estimated 50 practicing Jews who lived in Nicaragua at the time of the Sandinista revolution, most had ties to the toppled dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza and left the country of their own accord. 15 Rabbi Gerald Serotta, a Jewish chaplain at George Washington University who traveled with a delegation to Nicaragua in 1984, told The Washington Post that ?there wasn?t one person in the country with whom we met who believes there was special discrimination against the Jewish community.? 16 Serotta added that ?we are convinced that whatever lack of due process there was during the revolutionary period . . . was not especially discriminatory to Jews.? Other sources corroborated Serotta?s observations. For example, the University of Central America?s Historical Institute noted that Nicaraguans with strong ties to Somoza left the country during the revolution, and that ?the Jewish people who left in 1979 were part of a larger exodus from Nicaragua of those who felt their future would be uncertain with changes by the revolutionary government.? 17 At no point was credible evidence presented that religious intolerance and/or ethnic persecution caused the departure of Jews from Nicaragua. In fact, not even Anthony Quainton, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, could produce evidence to support the charges of anti-Semitism. In a confidential cable from Quainton to Secretary of State George Shultz in 1983, the ambassador noted that ?the evidence fails to demonstrate that the Sandinistas have followed a policy of anti-Semitism or have persecuted Jews solely because of their religion.? 18 There are a number of parallels between Reagan?s charges against the Sandinistas and the more recent claims against Venezuela?s government. In both cases, the claims are rooted not in facts but in the desire of interested parties to publicly censure Latin American governments they dislike. In the case of Nicaragua, the Reagan administration methodically tailored its narrative to appeal to various religious constituencies within the United States. 19 Because a factual storyline would have had little propaganda value, the administration favored wild tales about ?Marxist-Leninist? Sandinistas suppressing not only Jews but also Christians. However, leading Evangelicals and Jesuit scholars, like the Jewish delegation that found the charges of anti-Semitism unsubstantiated, rejected Reagan?s assertions that the Sandinistas persecuted Protestants and Catholics for their religious beliefs. 20 Yet given that large segments of the U.S. public have always been poorly informed about Latin America, it was not such a stretch for the Reagan administration to spread outlandish tales of religious persecution as a means of rallying conservative constituencies behind its wars in Central America. In the political culture of the United States during the Reagan years, the Marxist-Leninist label served as an epithet whose purpose was to project an image of a society where all forms of ?freedom??including religious freedom?were under attack. Naturally, Reagan?s propaganda offensive got an important boost from his allies in the media and the foreign-policy establishment. Conservative media fed the hysteria about the Sandinistas? alleged persecution of Jews and Christians, while the ADL continued promoting its storyline in letters to The New York Times . 21 In this regard, the confluence of interests between the ADL and right-wing U.S. politicians has become a marriage of convenience. The ADL and other groups often use charges of anti-Semitism as a form of subterfuge designed to sully the image of governments and intellectuals who criticize the policies of the Israeli government. Meanwhile, right-wing U.S. politicians can use the anti-Semitism claims as a means of attacking the left more generally. As its treatment of Venezuela and Nicaragua suggests, the ADL and likeminded groups tend to make accusations that are not supported by facts, indicating that their motives have less to do with confronting anti-Semitism than with attacking those who do not share their enthusiasm for Israeli policies. Both the Sandinistas and the Ch?vez government have been sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians and critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but their differences with Israel?like their differences with the United States?have deeper roots in U.S.-Israeli complicity in the repression of Latin American social movements and the left. As the NACLA Report made clear in its March/April 1987 issue, Israel provided military assistance to the Somoza dictatorship from the 1950s right up to the Sandinistas? overthrow of Somoza in 1979. 22 The journalist Christopher Dickey once noted that, even as Somoza?s defeated National Guardsmen scurried to leave Nicaragua in July 1979, they ?looked nothing so much as Israeli soldiers, with their Israeli Galil rifles, and for those who had not thrown them away, their Israeli paratrooper helmets.? 23 Then, in the mid-1980s, Israeli arms dealers funneled weapons to right-wing Nicaraguan mercenaries?mostly Somoza?s former National Guardsmen?who fought to overthrow the Sandinistas. 24 Israel?s complicity in Latin American human rights abuses was most glaring in Guatemala, where more than 200,000 people, mostly Mayans, were killed over the course of the country?s 36-year civil war. 25 At the height of the Guatemalan military?s atrocities in the early 1980s, the country?s military government was largely isolated internationally, relying exclusively on Israel for military training and assistance. 26 In February 1983, CBS anchorman Dan Rather pointedly observed that ?Israel has helped [Guatemala] wage a war with no questions asked.? 27 Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist and expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has documented how certain zealous supporters of the Israeli state seek to ?discredit all criticism of Israeli policy as motivated by an irrational loathing of Jews.? 28 But clearly many Central Americans have historical grievances with the Israeli state, grievances that cannot be dismissed as anti-Semitism. Given the legacy of U.S.-Israeli complicity in the repression of the Latin American left, it is hardly surprising that left-leaning governments in the region would tend to empathize with others who have suffered Israeli-sponsored repression. As Finkelstein notes, ?Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve its conflicts with the Palestinians diplomatically or faces a public relations debacle, its apologists mount a campaign alleging that the world is awash in a new anti-Semitism.? 29 Finkelstein makes a strong case that to conflate empathy for the victims of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism is itself a form of defamation, one that helps sustain Israeli repression in the occupied territories. Of course, to point out that some groups misuse charges of anti-Semitism is not to deny the existence of retrograde attitudes toward Jews in Latin America. Indeed, anti-Semitic attitudes and stereotypes are not uncommon in the region. The Ch?vez government, for its part, has consistently drawn a distinction between its criticisms of Israeli policy and the anti-Jewish bigotry that some of the government?s supporters sometimes display. For example, after Venezuela suspended diplomatic relations with Israel over the bombing of Gaza, the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs was careful to point out that Ch?vez ?has always opposed anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination and racism.? 30 Just three weeks before the diplomatic break with Israel, the World Jewish Congress issued a press release congratulating Ch?vez for ?supporting a clear condemnation of anti-Semitism? in a joint declaration with the presidents of Argentina and Brazil. 31 The sad irony is that unsubstantiated charges of anti-Semitism serve very few interests. Certainly the cheap comparison of the Caracas synagogue burglary with the Kristallnacht only trivializes one of the most horrific events of the last century. And by refusing to consult local Jewish leaders?or worse, by directly contradicting them?groups like the ADL and the Wiesenthal Center risk exacerbating the struggles of the communities they ostensibly represent. Moreover, accusing anyone of anti-Semitism without bothering to provide plausible evidence does more harm than good to the cause of fighting anti-Semitism. On the policy front, the problem goes far beyond a simple distortion of history. The deliberate misrepresentation of events in Latin America has had disastrous consequences for the region and its people. In their haste to demonize the Sandinistas in the 1980s, some U.S. media and public figures helped lay the ideological groundwork for a U.S.-sponsored Nicaraguan war, whose legacy of violence and impoverishment persists. To continue making unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism against left-leaning Latin American governments will only generate further misunderstanding today. Eric Wingerter is a freelance writer living in Washington. His blog, BoRev.net, focuses on Venezuela and U.S. media coverage of Latin America. Justin Delacour is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of New Mexico. 1. ?Commentary: Venezuela Sees Rise in Anti-Semitism,? The Miami Herald , February 9, 2009. 2. ?ADL Condemns Violent Attack on Caracas Synagogue,? press release, including statement by Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, January 31, 2009. 3. James Suggett, ?Robbery, Not Anti-Semitism, Motive for Attack on Venezuelan Synagogue,? Venezuelanalysis.com, February 10, 2009. 4. James Suggett, ?Venezuelan Jewish Community ?Profoundly Grateful and Moved? by Government?s Efforts,? Venezuelanalysis.com, February 13, 2009. 5. ?Mr. Chavez vs. the Jews,? editorial, The Washington Post , February 12, 2009. 6. Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael S?nchez, ?United by Hate: The Uses of Anti-Semitism in Ch?vez?s Venezuela,? Boston Review , July/August 2009. 7. ?Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur,? media advisory, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, January 23, 2006. 8. Thierry Meyssan and Cyril Capdevielle, ??Hay que quemar a Hugo Ch?vez?? Voltaire Network, January 18, 2006. 9. For more on this, see Rod Stoneman, Ch?vez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised?A Case Study of Politics and the Media (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008), 103. 10. Marc Perlman, ?Venezuela?s Jews Defend Leftist President in Flap Over Remarks,? The Forward , January 12, 2006. 11. ?Mack Introduces Resolution Supporting Venezuelan Jewish Community,? press release, the office of Congressman Connie Mack, May 12, 2009. 12. Eric Fingerhut, ?Jewish Reps Oppose House Resolution Supporting Venezuelan Jews,? The Jewish Chronicle , June 4, 2009. 13. Ibid. 14. Edward Cody, ?Managua?s Jews Reject Anti-Semitism Charge; Sandinistas, U.S. Embassy Dispute Rabbi?s Widely Circulated Report,? The Washington Post , August 29, 1983. 15. ?Rabbi Disputes Reagan Point About the Jews in Nicaragua,? The New York Times , March 19, 1986. 16. Marjorie Hyer, ?Jewish Group Finds No Anti-Semitism by Sandinista Regime,? The Washington Post , August 25, 1984. 17. Cody, ?Managua?s Jews Reject Anti-Semitism Charge.? 18. Michael McDowell, ?Jesuit Says Sandinistas Backed,? The Globe and Mail (Toronto), October 29, 1983. 19. Cody, ?Managua?s Jews Reject Anti-Semitism Charge.? 20. Marjorie Hyer, ?Nicaraguan Minister Opposes Aid to Contras,? The Washington Post , March 15, 1986; McDowell, ?Jesuit Says Sandanistas Backed.? 21. Morton Rosenthal, ?Nicaragua?s Chance to End Anti-Semitism,? letter to the editor, The New York Times , September 27, 1983; Nathan Perlmutter, ?So Are the Sandinistas Anti-Semitic? Of Course, They Are,? letter to the editor, The New York Times , April 5, 1986. 22. Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, ?Getting Down to Business,? NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 25?38. 23. Christopher Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (Simon and Schuster, 1985), 41. 24. ?The Israeli Connection: Deadly Trade,? NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 13. 25. Weekly News Update on the Americas, ?Rigoberta Mench? Files Genocide Charges in Spain,? NACLA Report on the Americas 33, no. 4 (January/February 2000): 2, 4. 26. Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, ?Guatemala: The Paragon,? NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (March/April 1987): 31?36. 27. Ibid. 28. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xxxiii. 29. Ibid. 30. Tamara Pearson, ?Venezuela Expels Israeli Ambassador in Solidarity With Palestinian People,? Venezuelanalysis.com, January 7, 2009. 31. ?World Jewish Congress Welcomes Clear Commitment by Latin American Leaders,? press release, World Jewish Congress, December 18, 2008. From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:12:41 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:12:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Peace in the Middle East requires Dismantling Israel's Matrix of Control In-Reply-To: <798829319.656421252712404735.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <620728280.741061252779161719.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.merip.org/mero/mero091109.html Middle East Report September 11, 2009 Dismantling the Matrix of Control At this critical juncture, as the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse disappears under the weight of Israeli settlements, there is a great imponderable: Is President Barack Obama genuinely serious about reaching such a solution or is he merely going through the motions familiar from previous administrations? Jeff Halper Jeff Halper?s original article on the ? matrix of control ? appeared in Middle East Report 216 (Fall 2000). For additional background, see Gary Sussman, ? The Challenge to the Two-State Solution ,? Middle East Report 231 (Summer 2004). Almost a decade ago I wrote an article describing Israel?s ?matrix of control? over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It consisted then of three interlocking systems: military administration of much of the West Bank and incessant army and air force intrusions elsewhere; a skein of ?facts on the ground,? notably settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also bypass roads connecting the settlements to Israel proper; and administrative measures like house demolitions and deportations. I argued in 2000 that unless this matrix was dismantled, the occupation would not be ended and a two-state solution could not be achieved. Since then the occupation has grown immeasurably stronger and more entrenched. The first decade of the twenty-first century has so far seen the steady constricting and fragmentation of Palestinian territory through still more wholesale expropriation of Palestinian land, checkpoints and other physical restrictions on freedom of movement, settlement construction, more and more massive highways intended for Israeli settlers, control over natural resources and, most visibly of all, the erection of the separation barrier in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since December 2000, according to the Israeli human rights organization B?tselem, the settler population of the West Bank has grown by 86,000 and that of East Jerusalem by 50,000. Gaza was evacuated of settlers and soldiers in 2005, but Israel retains near complete control over egress and exit of people and goods to and from the coastal strip, regularly cuts supplies of fuel and other necessities to punish the residents and mounts military incursions at will. All the Palestinian territories are subject, to one degree or another, to the measures of house demolitions, ?closures? that halt economic activity, administrative restrictions on movement, deportation, induced out-migration and much more. Indeed, the matrix has reconfigured the country to such an extent that today it seems impossible to detach a truly sovereign and viable Palestinian state from an Israel that has expanded all the way to the Jordan River. Anyone familiar with Israel?s ?facts on the ground,? perhaps first and foremost the settlers, would reach the conclusion that, in fact, the matrix cannot be taken apart in a piecemeal fashion, leaving a few settlements here, a road there and an Israel ?greater? Jerusalem in the middle. The matrix has become far too intricate. Dismantling it piece by piece, with Israel stalling by arguing for the security function of each ?fact on the ground,? would be a frustrating series of confrontations that would eventually exhaust itself. The only way to a genuine two-state solution and not a cosmetic form of apartheid is to cut the Gordian knot. The international community, led by the United States, must tell Israel that the occupation must be ended entirely. Israel must leave every inch of the Occupied Territories. Period. And now, at this critical juncture, as the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse disappears under the weight of Israeli settlements, there is a great imponderable: Is President Barack Obama genuinely serious about reaching such a solution or is he merely going through the motions familiar from previous administrations? The Tea Leaves Many Palestinian, Israeli and international proponents of a just peace took heart in Obama?s early gestures. Beginning with the appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy and continuing through the president?s June 4 speech in Cairo, these proponents allowed themselves, after years of disappointment and struggle, a cautious hopefulness. Some of the speech?s formulations, like the nods to the ?pain of dislocation? felt by Palestinians and the ?daily humiliations? of occupation, had been heard before. But one sentence had not been: Obama said that a two-state solution ?is in Israel?s interest, Palestine?s interest, America?s interest and the world?s interest.? Obama seemed to ?get it,? that is, he seemed to understand that the US is isolated politically by its unquestioning backing of Israel, which is seen as obstructing a solution to the conflict. And, for the first time, a US president actually said that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the vital national interest, not just a nice thing to do. These words significantly raise the bar. Framing the conflict in this way makes it easier for the administration to win Congressional support for tougher demands upon Israel while undermining the ability of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to mount an effective resistance, given American Jewish sensibilities about suspicions of dual loyalty. Since the Cairo speech, however, fundamental doubts about US efforts have resurfaced. The only demand made by Obama upon Israel has been for a settlement ?freeze,? a welcome symbolic gesture, to be sure, yet irrelevant to any peace process. Israel has enough settlement-cities in strategic ?blocs? that it could in fact freeze all construction without compromising its control over the West Bank and ?greater? Jerusalem, the Arab areas to the north, south and east of the city where Israel has planted its flag. Focusing on this one issue -- which, months later, is still being haggled over -- has provided Israel with a smokescreen behind which it can actively and freely pursue more significant and urgent construction that, when completed, will truly render the occupation irreversible. It is rushing to complete the separation barrier, which is already being presented as the new border, replacing the ?Green Line,? the pre-June 1967 boundary to which Israel is supposed to withdraw, by the terms of UN Security Council resolutions, but on which even the most ardent two-staters have long since given up. Israel is demolishing homes, expelling Palestinian residents and permitting Jewish settlement throughout East Jerusalem, measurably advancing the ?judaization? of the city. It is confiscating vast tracts of land in the West Bank and ?greater? Jerusalem and pouring bypass road asphalt at a feverish pace so as to permanently redraw the map. It is laying track on Palestinian land for a light-rail line connecting the West Bank settlement-city of Pisgat Ze?ev to Israel. It is drying up the main agricultural areas of the West Bank, forcing thousands of people off their lands, while instituting visa restrictions that either keep visiting Palestinians and internationals out of the country altogether, or limit their movement to the truncated Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank. ?Quiet,? behind-the-scenes diplomacy is surely taking place, but the few details that have emerged are far from reassuring. The State Department has mocked as ?fiction? a ten-point document given to the Arab press by Fatah figure Hasan Khreisheh that promises an ?international presence? in parts of the West Bank and US backing for a Palestinian state by 2011. The component of this alleged plan that seems more likely is that the US wants a partial freeze on settlement activity from Israel in exchange for a pledge from Washington to push for more stringent sanctions upon Iran for its nuclear research. On August 25, the Guardian quoted ?an official close to the negotiations? saying: ?The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.? By all indications, if the Obama administration does present a regional peace plan, which it is expected by many to do around the time of the UN General Assembly meeting on September 20, it will be nothing more than a ?rough draft.? It is no exaggeration to say a two-state solution will rise or fall on the outlines of this draft -- and may perhaps fall forever if no concrete plan is presented at all, which is also possible. Although the two-state solution has been eulogized many times in the past, Obama represents a best-case scenario. If he presents, in the end, a disappointing peace plan that offers no genuine breakthrough, then the shift to a one-state solution on the part of the Palestinian people and their international supporters will be inescapable. Sovereignty and Viability So how can Obama?s plan be judged if and when it is unveiled? Its chance of success can be predicted by how well it addresses the fundamental needs, grievances and aspirations of the peoples involved. An effective approach to ending the conflict, as opposed to shopworn posturing, rests on at least six elements: national expression for both peoples; economic viability for Palestine; a genuine addressing of the refugee issue; a regional approach; security guarantees; and conformity with human rights norms, international law and UN resolutions. Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are not simply ethnic groups, like, for example, American Jews or Arab-Americans. They are two peoples who, like national groups everywhere, demand self-determination. This reality actually lends credence to a two-state solution, but only if the Palestinian state is truly sovereign and economically viable. One should not forget that, in the days of apartheid, South Africa established ten ?bantustans,? small and impoverished ?homelands? on 11 percent of South African land, seemingly to address the demand of the black population for self-determination but actually to ensure a ?democracy? for the white population on 89 percent of the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?s notion that the Palestinians should get ?autonomy with certain characteristics of a state? on about 15 percent of historic Palestine -- ?autonomy plus-independence minus,? as he called it -- is reminiscent of apartheid. If the Obama administration?s plan does not cut the Gordian knot that is Israel?s matrix of control -- something no plan or initiative has yet succeeded in doing -- it will simply fail to achieve an equitable two-state solution. Only a complete withdrawal of Israel from all the Occupied Territories and the sharing of Jerusalem with no restrictions on movement can avert a Palestinian bantustan. Obama?s plan, like its predecessors, seems destined to leave the major Israeli settlement blocs intact, including those in Palestinian East and ?greater? Jerusalem. Even with so-called territorial ?swaps,? this measure would significantly compromise the sovereignty and economic viability of a Palestinian state. The area designated on Israeli maps for future expansion of the Ma?ale Adumim settlement reaches to the outskirts of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, while the Ariel bloc already extends between the northern West Bank town of Nablus and points south. Taken together, settlements and the highways that interlink them displace Palestinian passenger and commercial vehicles onto a few narrow routes, while the checkpoints intended to protect the settlers snarl traffic on a predictably unpredictable schedule. And then there is the towering wall. It is not a landscape made for easy economic integration. Why, then, leave these massive settlements intact? The argument is that their residents would object to the point of a civil war in Israel. This is patent nonsense. True, these settlement blocs contain 85 percent of Israelis living in the Occupied Territories, but these are not the ideological settlers who claim the entire Land of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Instead, they are ?normal? Israelis who have been attracted to the settlements by high-quality, affordable housing. They would have no objection to resettling inside Israel on the condition that their living standards do not fall, while the Israeli economy, assisted by international donors, would have no problem footing the bill for this population, about 200,000 in number. Settlements in ?greater? Jerusalem, housing another 190,000 Israeli Jews, present no problem whatsoever. Residents are free to stay where they are in a shared and integrated Jerusalem. As for the ?ideological? settlers of the West Bank, only about 40,000 in number (out of almost six million Jews altogether), they can easily be relocated inside Israel, just as were their counterparts in Gaza. Their relocation will be a test of international assertiveness, of course, because the settlers are able to mobilize the support of the right-wing parties in Israel. Since Israel can make no cogent argument as to the security necessity of these tiny settlements, however, internal opposition will simply have to be overruled; the international community cannot allow such frivolous ideological matters to destabilize the entire global system. If the legitimate concerns of the Israeli public over its security are addressed by the international community, which they can be, there is no compelling reason why Israel should not return to the pre-June 1967 border. In fact, if the Gaza episode indicates anything, it is that the Israeli public is willing to remove settlements if it is convinced that doing so will enhance its security. Reminding Israelis that leaving every inch of the Occupied Territories will still leave them sovereign over a full 78 percent of the country -- not a bad deal for what will soon become a minority Jewish population -- should seal the deal. Refugees The Obama platform, should it see the light of day, will probably also adopt the Israeli position that Palestinian refugees can only be repatriated to the Palestinian state itself, not to their former homes inside Israel. This plank would place a weighty economic burden on that tiny prospective state, since the refugees are, by and large, a traumatized and impoverished population with minimal education and professional skills. Add to that another significant fact: Some 60 percent of the Palestinian population is under the age of 18. A Palestinian state without the ability to employ its people and offer a future to its youth is simply a prison-state. Now the need for a viable Palestinian state is recognized and embodied in the ?road map,? the peace initiative propagated by President George W. Bush in 2003, and will probably be acknowledged in a plan from Obama as well. Despite its limited size, a RAND Corporation study concluded that such a state is possible, but only if it controls its territory, borders, resources and movement of people and goods. Israel must be made to understand that while it will remain the hegemonic power in the region, its own long-term security depends upon the economic wellbeing of its Palestinian neighbors. Eighty percent of the Palestinians are refugees, and half of the Palestinians still live in refugee camps within and around their homeland. Any sustainable peace is dependent upon the just resolution of the refugee issue. Technically, resolving the refugee issue is not especially difficult. The Palestinian negotiators, backed up by the Arab League, have agreed to a ?package,? to be mutually agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinians, involving a combination of repatriation in Israel and the Palestinian state, resettlement elsewhere and compensation. The ?package? must contain, however, two other elements, without which the issue will not be resolved and reconciliation cannot take place. First, Israel must acknowledge the refugees? right of return; a resolution of the issue cannot depend solely on humanitarian gestures. And Israel must acknowledge its responsibility for driving the refugees from their country. Just as Jews expected Germany to accept responsibility for what it did in the Holocaust (and Israelis criticized the Pope during his summer 2009 visit for not apologizing enough), just as China and South Korea will not close the book on World War II until Japan acknowledges its war crimes, so, too, will the refugee issue continue to fester and frustrate attempts to bring peace to the region until Israel admits its role and asks forgiveness. Genuine peacemaking cannot be confined to technical solutions alone; it must also deal with the wounds caused by the conflict. Regional Approach, Security and International Law Obama?s edge over his predecessors lies in his understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is part of -- and in some ways the symbolic epicenter of -- a wider regional problem that extends from the neighboring countries to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, indeed, throughout the entire Muslim world and beyond. This understanding lies behind his framing of the conflict?s persistence as being antithetical to vital US interests, and behind his chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel?s statements making a solution for the conflict a virtual precondition for addressing the Iran issue. It is precisely this linkage, long denied by Israel, which insists that the Palestinian issue be handled separately, that the Obama administration seems finally to have embraced. Indeed, even in the confines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the key issues ? refugees, security, water, economic development and others -- are regional in scope. A perfect peace between Israel and Palestine, in which both countries flourish, is not a viable solution for either if they exist as prosperous islands in an impoverished, unstable region. Israel , of course, has fundamental and legitimate security needs, as do the Palestinians and the other peoples of the region. Unlike Israeli governments, the Israeli peace camp believes that security cannot be addressed in isolation, that Israel will not find peace and security unless it enters into a lasting peace with the Palestinians and achieves a measure of integration into the Middle East region. It certainly rejects the notion that security can be achieved through military means. Israel?s assertion that the security issue be resolved before any political progress can be made is as illogical as it is self-serving. Everyone, the Israeli political establishment and the military together with the peace movement and the Palestinians themselves, knows that terrorism is a symptom that can only be addressed as part of a broader approach to the grievances underlying the conflict. Israel, which also must be held accountable for its use of state terror, cannot be allowed to exploit legitimate security concerns to advance a political agenda of permanent control. To the degree that negotiations are entered into, they must have as their terms of reference international law and UN resolutions if the Palestinians are to enjoy even minimal parity with their Israeli interlocutors. The lack of grounding in such principles was the fatal shortcoming of all the preceding attempts to reach an agreement. Once negotiations are based solely on power, the Palestinians lose, the differential being so heavily weighted on the Israeli side, which totally controls Palestinian life and territory. Indeed, a peace agreement rooted in international law and human rights -- in short, a just peace -- would offer the best prospect of working. Trump Cards Put simply, any plan, proposal or initiative for peace in Israel-Palestine must be filtered through the following set of critical questions: Will this plan really end the occupation, or is it merely a subtle cover for control? Does this plan offer a just and sustainable peace or merely an imposed and false quiet? Does this plan offer a Palestinian state that is territorially, politically and economically viable, or merely a prison-state? Does this plan genuinely and justly address the refugee issue? And does this plan offer regional security and development? While one may glean optimism from the fact that a US president finally comprehends the need for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, even if solely for the sake of US interests, it is difficult to be optimistic over the prospects of such a peace. No matter what the plan, Israel will neither cooperate nor negotiate in good faith. A solution will have to be imposed, if not overtly, then in ways that make Israel?s continued hold on the Occupied Territories too costly to sustain. Simply withholding Israel?s privileged access to American military technology and markets, for example, would have that effect. Any attempt to pressure Israel, however, will run into a familiar obstacle: Congress, Israel?s trump card in its encounters with the administration. In the case of Obama, Israeli leaders know well that his own party has always been far more ?pro-Israel? than the Republicans. Already his loss of momentum after the Cairo address (perhaps related to his difficulties over his health care plan) has emboldened the temporarily cowed AIPAC. In early August, the vaunted lobby produced a letter signed by 71 senators from both parties -- led by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Jim Risch (R-ID) -- telling the president to lay off Israel and place more pressures on the Arab states to ?normalize? relations with Israel. Obama had already, in his comments introducing Mitchell as special envoy and subsequently, called for ?normalization? simultaneous with Israeli moves to lessen the burdens of occupation, in contravention of the 2002 Arab League peace plan, which proposed that the Arab states establish ties with Israel after withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. Now AIPAC and its backers in Congress want the administration to push for ?normalization? before any Israeli overtures whatsoever. The Netanyahu government has played its part, as well. In August, its ministers, standing on the strategically crucial site of ?E-1? between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma?ale Adumim, vowed that Israel would continue building settlements anywhere it pleases. On September 7, Israel announced it was beginning work on 500 new apartments in Pisgat Ze?ev and 455 in other West Bank locales. These actions essentially tell Obama to go to hell mere weeks before he is projected to launch his peace initiative. The US replied with an expression of ?regret.? Any plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace that has a hope of succeeding requires both an effective marketing strategy and a level of assertiveness as yet unseen in a US president, excepting, perhaps, Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter. Obama?s only hope of breaking through the wall of Israeli and Democratic Party resistance is to articulate an approach to peace based on clear and accepted principles anchored in human rights and justice and then framed in terms of US interests. A cold, calculating assessment of US interests would certainly push Obama in this direction. Time will tell, though the limp response to the new settlement construction does not bode well. In the meantime, growing opposition to the occupation on the part of the international grassroots is making it increasingly difficult for governments to support Israeli policies. The movement targeting Israel for boycott, divestment and sanctions gains strength by the day, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins to assume the dimensions of the anti-apartheid struggle. But the Palestinians, exhausted and suffering as they may be, possess a trump card of their own. They are the gatekeepers. Until the majority of Palestinians, and not merely political leaders, declare that the conflict is over, the conflict is not over. Until most Palestinians believe it is time to normalize relations with Israel, there will be no normalization. Israel cannot ?win? -- though it believes it can, which is why it presses ahead to complete the matrix and foreclose the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. The failure of yet another peace initiative will only galvanize international efforts to achieve justice for the Palestinians. Only this time the demand is likely to be for a single binational state, the only alternative that fits the single-state, binational reality that Israel itself has forged in its futile attempt to impose an apartheid regime. (Jeff Halper is director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at jeff at icahd.org.) From shniad at sfu.ca Sat Sep 12 12:15:09 2009 From: shniad at sfu.ca (Sid Shniad) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:15:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [R-G] Scheer: A 9/11 Reality Check In-Reply-To: <879022389.559571252700255714.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> Message-ID: <658058751.741541252779309889.JavaMail.root@jaguar8.sfu.ca> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090908_a_9_11_reality_check/ A 9/11 Reality Check By Robert Scheer Truthdig: Sept. 9, 2009 What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law? As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world's experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own. Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn't compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima's mayor two years ago: "That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast-silence-hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted." We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women's breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers. Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our "mistakes." Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express "regret" for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon. In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren't able to find Manhattan on a map. We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them. But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy--although unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite dramatically this last time around. There are those like Joe Wilson, who exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the truth-telling of Ali H. So