snapshots of an upside down world...

Solidaridadpanama.blogspo


Panama: General Strike Against Killings

On July 2, 4500 mostly indigenous workers belonging to the powerful Banana workers union (Sitribana) began a strike at the Bocas Fruit Company in the province of Bocas del Toro.

Workers from nearby farms quickly joined the strike. Other workers set up road blockades and occupied the airport. Employees on the project to widen and deepen the Panama Canal also downed tools.

In response, the government mobilised 1500 police to brutally repress protesters.

The deadly repression left at least 11 people dead and more than 200 injured. The National Front for the Defence of Economic and Social Rights (Frenadeso) said on July 16 that, “following the clashes, corpses were found in rivers and farms”.

“There is talk of at least two children dying due to respiratory problems caused by the large amount of tear gas canisters fired. In the Changuinola morgue, it is still unclear whether some of the corpses there are of citizens who died during the protests.”

The repression continued with the arrest of 30 construction unionists, as well as Professor Juan Jovane, a key left-wing leader.

Protesting students at the University of Panama (UoP) also faced repression, with 157 students detained.

Last week's rain storm which destroyed - yet again - hundreds of people's homes should serve as a wake-up call. According to CNN, only 2% of the $5.3 billion in aid that was promised for the next 18 months at the March 31st UN Donors Conference (see www.refondation.ht for pledges) has actually materialized. Most other reports say 10% - but there is not, to my knowledge or internet access, a site that details the actual disbursement of pledges. Such a site would be welcome and go far to alleviate tension and rumors. France, for example, hasn't paid up - and it vehemently denied a prank that it would pay restitution for the 90 million gold francs Haiti paid its former colonizer from 1825 to 1947 as indemnity. The U.S. has still to pay its $1.15 billion in pledged aid.

Making matters worse, the foreign-led Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission, co-chaired by UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Max Bellerive, is replacing Haiti's elected government now that Parliament has expired, and it postponed its second meeting scheduled for Jul. 22 by a month.

Haiti had some very promising opportunities following the earthquake. First was general goodwill and unity. In the days immediately following the quake, people worked across extreme class and political divisions to survive. And they did. As the urgency wore off, the old divisions came back with a vengeance.

For example, on Jul. 21, the Provisional Electoral Commission (CEP) reiterated its 2009 decision to exclude Fanmi Lavalas, the party of exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from this year's legislative and presidential elections postponed from Feb. 28 to Nov. 28, 2010. The UN has proclaimed April and June 2009 partial Senate elections, in which almost no one voted because Fanmi Lavalas was excluded, a success.

 Assange...

Julian Assange, in or before 2006


Wikileaks: We don't know source of leaked data

Back in London, Assange agreed that the files offered insight into U.S. tactics.

But he said that was none of his concern, and he noted that his Web site already carried a copy of the U.S. Special Forces' 2006 Southern Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Manual, among other sensitive U.S. military documents.

"We put out that stuff all the time," he said.

He seemed irritated when a member of the audience pressed him on whether he believed there were ever any legitimate national security concerns that would prevent him from publishing a leaked document.

"It is not our role to play sides for states. States have national security concerns, we do not have national security concerns," he said.

"You often hear ... that something may be a threat to U.S. national security," he went on. "This must be shot down whenever this statement is made. A threat to U.S. national security? Is anyone serious? The security of the entire nation of the United States? It is ridiculous!"

He said he wasn't interested in the safety of states, only the safety of individual human beings.

The Afghan papers mark the biggest case in the short history of Wikileaks, which he set up in 2006. But for Mr Assange, it was the latest stage in a life of action against vested interests.

His parents met at an anti-Vietnam demonstration. His mother believed that a formal education would instil an unhealthy respect for authority on her son and he moved 37 times before he was aged 14. During one of the moves, he lived opposite an electronics shop and went there to write programmes on an early home computer, quickly learning to crack into programmes. "The austerity of one's interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me," he told last month's New Yorker magazine.

With his sharp mind, growing computer skills and outsider mentality, he entered the nascent world of hacking, setting up a group that came to be known as International Subversives. He is said to have broken into the US Defence Department and other supposedly secure sites.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

The Pentagon Papers were high-level, top-secret documents of decisionmaking estimates. They were alternative strategies. They were being debated, and they were presidential decisions of various kinds. It was a more revealing set of documents about the way in which the country was being deceived into continuing a hopeless war. So, you could say that the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan remain to be revealed, and I hope someone does that. And, for that matter, the Pentagon Papers of Iraq we have yet to see. But this is a very good start. The drama of such a huge volume being released is giving the public media attention and the public attention that President Nixon’s injunctions gave to the Pentagon Papers. So, I’m glad to see the press really is taking the content of these documents seriously so far and not focusing solely on the question of the leak itself or the process.

 Let the dead bury the dead...

Hungry Like the Wolf: Obama's Legacy of Hope and Change in Honduras

In the first year of his presidency, the first year of the "hope and change" he promised to bring to the conduct of American affairs, Barack Obama countenanced -- and abetted -- a coup in Honduras that ousted a mildly reformist, democratically elected president and replaced him with a clique of thuggish elites who now rule, illegitimately, through repression, threat and outright murder.

Since the installation of these throwbacks to the corrupt and brutal 'banana republics' of yore, Obama's secretary of state, the "progressive" Hillary Clinton, has spent a good deal of time and effort trying to coerce Honduras' outraged neighbors in Latin America to "welcome" the thug-clique, now led by Porfirio Lobo, back into the "community of nations." Let bygones be bygones, Clinton says, as Lobo's regime murders journalists (nine so far this year), political opponents and carries on the wholesale trashing of Honduran independence (such as sacking four Supreme Court justices who opposed the gutting of liberties and the overthrow of constitutional order). After all, isn't that Obama's own philosophy: always "look forward," forget the crimes of the past? Every day is a new day, a clean slate, a chance for a new beginning -- indeed, for "hope and change."

In other words: let the dead bury the dead -- and the rich and powerful reap their rewards.

[I]t is the parties that are supposed to be the beneficiaries of government action, and the public whose purpose is to ensure that beneficence by supplying the labor and capital needed to implement government action (or inaction) mandated by the bipartisan directorate. For example, it is the public’s duty to:

* provide a mass base of unthinking public approval for the status quo, such as by voting for Democrats and Republicans only (and so helping decide the biannual and quadrennial local and national contests selecting which partner will be the respective pork barrel meister-in-chief for the term), by manning party and race rallies (to maintain public social disunity), and following directions en masse in the many sanctioned corporate-financed political campaigns;
* supply the living and future dead soldiers for the ongoing foreign wars;
* buy products and services as directed by the entertaining and instructional advertisements in major media;
* assume the tax burden necessary to underwrite the profitability of otherwise failing corporations, which profitability the bipartisan directorate deems to be a “national interest”;
* be an absorptive market for the waste production of national security industries (e.g., assume liability for civilian nuclear power; sustain the use of high-tech para-military cop equipment);
* sustain the operation of a wealth-based adjudication-prison system, a corporate-government partnership and punitive element of social control;
* support by every thought, word and deed the primacy of national security needs, as defined by the Pentagon and the bipartisan directorate, to the access of national resources over any selfish humanitarian or public social considerations (e.g., expending tax revenues — “emergency war supplemental” — to continue funding the bombardments in Central Asia and East Africa, instead of profitless subsidies for continuing unemployment benefits or a variety of public social services);
* remember that the nation is defined by its national security tasks framing its corporate financial capital essence, NOT by the massed and, by definition, petty concerns of its self-absorbed “rubber bumper” population.

At this time in U.S. history, the Republican Party commands the loyalties of those motivated by simple white Judeo-Christian supremacy, finance capital greed, and hegemonic US militarism. Humanitarian, cultural, artistic and environmental considerations are absent, except when seen as impediments. This is the mindset of social inertia supporting exploitation full speed ahead. The Democratic Party captures the hopes of people who want to live like Republicans, but want to think of themselves as nice. It is easy to see how minimal intellect presents few problems in maintaining a Republican mindset, yet how helpful intellectual agility can be for a Democrat, whose self-image can require considerable mental gymnastics to maintain. In both cases, the identification with a party is usually reduced to a habit, because most people try to minimize their amount of thinking (which is sad, because this popular lack of thought is a very useful lever exploited by the manipulators of social control).

 Time for real change?

black agenda report


Tea Partyers, Fox News, "Negativity" Against the President? Are These Really Black America's Most Pressing Problems?

From the established civil rights organizations like the NAACP to legions of elected Democrats and preachers and even people like our good friends at Color of Change, the main activity these days is an endless circling of wagons around the president, defending him against the flood of racist bile that spews daily from the likes of Fox News, the Tea Partyers and naysaying Republicans. But is that really where so much of our energy and creativity should be going? Aren't there other urgent matters more deserving of the attention of black America's political leadership, our pastors and spokespeople and self-described activists? Matters like black mass incarceration, record unemployment, and the sinking of vast resources into multiple wars abroad?

The Democratic Party has made itself people-proof, and activist-proof.

In response to efforts like ours around the country, the Democratic Party, as a vehicle of corporate rule, has evolved mechanisms to protect itself against the democratic influences of its activists and voters. Both houses of every state legislature, and the federal House and Senate, have house speakers and senate presidents, whips, minority and majority leaders. These are not the legislators with the most expansive view of how government can serve their constituents. These party leaders are elected on the basis of who can attract the largest amount in corporate campaign contributions. Some of the funds are used to guarantee the re-election of the Democratic Party leader on the state or federal level, and the party leader distributes the remaining funds to those of his or her fellow legislators most loyal to the corporate agenda. At best, Democrats who listen too closely to their constituents, and to the activist base that makes their elections possible, get nothing. At worst, they find their party's leaders are funneling corporate money to right wing Democrats who oppose them in Democratic primary elections. That's what happened to former Atlanta congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, to name just one example, and it happens scores of times every election cycle on the state and local levels. Rahm Emanuel, now White House Chief of Staff, performed this duty for Congressional Democrats in 2006, ensuring that even if Democrats had a whopping majority during the final years of the Bush Administration, they would pose no effective opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars, or the Bush-Cheney crime wave in general.

 Why are the NY Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel publishing this info?

Leaky Vessels: Wikileaks "Revelations" Will Comfort Warmongers, Confirm Conventional Wisdom

The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw "human intelligence" (i.e., uncorroborated claims and gossip from interested parties and anonymous sources pushing a multitude of agendas), and diplomatic notes passed between the promulgators of the occupation in Washington and their factotums "in country" -- reports which you might imagine also purvey a multitude of agendas ... not least the supreme agenda of all officials involved in a dubious enterprise: ass-covering.

Yet these reports are being treated as if they are the "grim truth" behind the shining picture of official propaganda. But what do these stories in the NYT and Guardian actually "reveal"? Let's see:

* That the occupation forces kill lots of civilians at checkpoints and botched raids, then lie about it afterward.
* That these killings make Afghans angry and fuel the insurgency.
* That elements of Pakistani intelligence are involved with some elements of the many resistance groups known collectively (and incorrectly) in the West as the Taliban.
* That the Americans are using more and more robot drones to kill people.
* That the Americans are running death squads in Afghanistan aimed at Taliban leaders.
* That Afghan officials are corrupt, and that Afghan police and military forces are woefully inadequate.

Is there anything in these breathless new recitations that we did not already know?

After working for years to divert popular hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the safe channel of support for the Democratic Party, the liberal and ex-radical groups that comprised the protest outfits have embraced Obama’s “progressive” agenda, largely accepting the official line that Afghanistan is a “good war.” There is no reason to expect that the massive body of evidence to the contrary disclosed this week will shift that position.

Despite the continuing mass opposition to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, revealed in poll after poll, there is no doubt a degree of discouragement over the inability to shift US policy. Millions went to the polls to vote against war in 2008, only to get an Obama administration that has escalated the reign of terror against the Afghan people, while continuing the Iraqi occupation.

What is required is the organization of a genuine popular antiwar movement. Real opposition to war can be developed only as part of the independent political mobilization of the working class against the profit system—the source of militarism—and both the Democratic and Republican parties, which defend and promote it. This movement must advance the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American and other foreign occupation troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. It must also demand that all those responsible for these wars of aggression—in both the Bush and Obama administrations—be held accountable.

Significantly, none of the publications who broke the story called for opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Guardian editorial called for its indefinite extension. It wrote that the revelations in WikiLeaks’ documents meant that “this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul.”

Sections of the US political establishment are pressing to use the WikiLeaks material to carry out a tactical shift in US-NATO war policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan. US Senator John Kerry published a statement, writing: “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

Kerry is holding hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Afghanistan war today.

The leaking of the documents has been accompanied by a campaign in the US press, denouncing the Pakistani government’s support for Afghan warlord factions opposed to the Karzai regime in Kabul.

 Startling new danger revealed: "self-radicalization with the aid of the Internet"...

Terror's Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

In January, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano even offered a fix for “self-radicalization.” It is called, you guessed it, “counter-radicalization.” Napolitano described the concept:

“How do we identify someone before they become radicalized to the point where they’re ready to blow themselves up with others on a plane? And how do we communicate better American values and so forth … around the globe?”

Has no one told Napolitano, Mullen, Gates and Clapper what can be gleaned from the ample reporting on what was driving Hasan, including his anger over U.S. military interventions in Muslim lands?

And what about the motives of the Christmas bomber, 23 year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab? His friends in Yemen described him as “not overly extremist,” but very angry, nonetheless, over Israel’s actions in Gaza. Does that fit under the rubric of “self-radicalization?”

Have our senior officials learned nothing from reports on the motivation of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian physician of Palestinian origin who used a suicide bomb to kill seven CIA operatives and one Jordanian intelligence officer in eastern Afghanistan on Dec. 30?

Al-Balawi’s widow said her husband “started to change” after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. His brother added that al-Balawi “changed” during the three-week-long Israeli attack on Gaza, which left 1,400 Palestinians dead, an attack defended by Washington as justifiable self-defense.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan may be the most recent example of an increasingly common type of terrorist, said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who studies terrorism.

Hoffman studies people who have become self-radicalized with the aid of the Internet and who commit violence without having to cross borders to reach their targets, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Such cases appear to be growing, with most of them involving people who have no direct ties to overseas terror networks, Hoffman said.

Al-Qaida leaders have encouraged a trend of self-radicalization through voluminous messages on the Web, Hoffman said, citing a shooting at an Arkansas military recruitment center, synagogues targeted for attack in New York and thwarted bombing schemes in Illinois and Texas.

Gates also would give commanders “more comprehensive information on individuals — particularly if there have been behavioral issues that have been noted ... under previous assignments.”

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said military leaders need an “active focus” on transferring information on potential problematic individuals.

“The issue of self-radicalization is one that we have really got to focus on because ... there is clearly more and more of that going on, and how much of it we have in the military is something that we ought to really understand,” Mullen said.

 Katie's Krops...

From Seedlings to Servings: 11-Year-Old Grows Tons of Veggies for the Homeless

It all began in third grade, when Katie Stagliano's 40-pound cabbage fed 275 homeless people. Now, Katie's six gardens have produced over 4,000 pounds of vegetables to feed the needy.

When Katie Stagliano was in third grade, she planted a cabbage in her family's small garden. When it grew to an astounding 40 pounds, she donated it to a soup kitchen, where it was made into meals for 275 people (with the help of ham and rice). "I thought, 'Wow, with that one cabbage I helped feed that many people?'" says Katie, now entering sixth grade. "I could do much more than that."

So Katie started planting vegetable gardens as part of her nonprofit Katie's Krops — she has six right now — including one the length of a football field at her school in her hometown of Summerville, S.C. Classmates, her family and other people in the community help plant and water, and Bonnie Plants donates seedlings. This past year, Katie took her commitment to a new level: she has given soup kitchens over 2,000 pounds of lettuce, tomatoes and other vegetables. Katie and her helpers are now harvesting the spring planting, and another 1,200 pounds will be donated by October.

"She just walks in like a proud little girl with her treasures in her arm," says Sue Hanshaw, CEO of Tricounty Family Ministries, the soup kitchen in Charleston, S.C. where Katie first brought her 40-pound crucifer. "I love what she exudes, caring for others. It's made a big impact on a lot of people."

 a more naked world...

Meadowsweet

One Hand in a Goat, the Other on a Conference Call

It turns out that Arava, who is small and a little younger than I'd like (we also had a critical technology failure - the fence - when getting the girls knocked up) had a mispresentation - a baby goat is supposed to come out diving, with head and two hoofs forward. Unfortunately, Arava had two difficulties. First of all, her baby was the single largest Nigerian Dwarf baby I've ever seen. The second is that one of her hoofs was folded back under her.

The traditional strategy for dealing with this problem is to push the head and hooves back into the birth canal a little bit and unfold the bent hoof, sending the baby through in the proper position. But since this was actually my first mispresentation, and she was coming fast by then, I screwed up - I didn't realize what the positioning was until the baby's head was out and she was already breathing. At that point, you can no longer shove them back in for obvious reasons. So I had to rearrange her feet while the rest of the baby was hanging out, which can't have been pleasant for my goat - the only consolation being that leaving her in was worse (I really, really remember that stage of birth myself, in which the only thing worse than getting on with it is not getting on with it, and thus had a profound sympathy.)

The end result was this. First, I did shit to do improve the status of the proletariat blogger being ground under the heel of management. Fortunately, my awesome colleagues handled that, and we're totally off strike. I have not fully resolved all my own issues with Science Blogging, and I'm not sure what all my longterm strategies are, but I still think Science Blogs has the ability to help me expose a new audience to the real issues of depletion and energy constraints, and I still like it here in many ways. I think Adam Bly and Seed Media are frankly committed to doing what it takes to make this work. And more importantly, you don't negotiate in bad faith - when you ask management to do something, and they comply, it would be bad faith to then say "I'm blowing this taco stand anyway." So, I'm back.

Plants Adapted to Aquaponics: The selection of plant species adapted to hydroponic culture in aquaponic greenhouses is related to stocking density of fish tanks and subsequent nutrient concentration of aquacultural effluent. Lettuce, herbs, and specialty greens (spinach, chives, basil, and watercress) have low to medium nutritional requirements and are well adapted to aquaponic systems.

Plants yielding fruit (tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers) have a higher nutritional demand and perform better in a heavily stocked, well established aquaponic system. Greenhouse varieties of tomatoes are better adapted to low light, high humidity conditions in greenhouses than field varieties.

Fish Species: Several warm-water and cold-water fish species are adapted to recirculating aquaculture systems, including tilapia, trout, perch, Arctic char, and bass. However, most commercial aquaponic systems in North America are based on tilapia. Tilapia is a warm-water species that grows well in a recirculating tank culture. Furthermore, tilapia is tolerant of fluctuating water conditions such as pH, temperature, oxygen, and dissolved solids. Tilapia produces a white-fleshed meat suitable to local and wholesale markets. The literature on tilapia contains extensive technical documentation and cultural procedures. Barramundi and Murray cod fish species are raised in recirculating aquaponic systems in Australia.

Superadobe (sandbag and barbed wire) technology is a large, long adobe. It is a simple adobe, an instant and flexible line generator. It uses the materials of war for peaceful ends, integrating traditional earth architecture with contemporary global safety requirements. Long or short sandbags are filled with on-site earth and arranged in layers or long coils (compression) with strands of barbed wire placed between them to act as both mortar and reinforcement (tension). Stabilizers such as cement, lime, or asphalt emulsion may be added. This patented and trademarked (U.S. patent #5,934,027, #3,195,445) technology is offered free to the needy of the world, and licensed for commercial use.

This concept was originally presented by architect Nader Khalili to NASA for building habitats on the moon and Mars, as “Velcro-adobe”. It comes from years of meditation, hands-on research and development, and searching for simple answers to build with earth. It comes from the concerned heart of someone who did not want to be bound to any one system of construction and looked for only one answer in human shelter, to simplify.

Superadobe ArchCal-Earth believes that the whole family should be able to build together, men and women, from grandma to the youngest child. As such, we have spent many years researching hands-on how to make the process simpler and easier. There should be no heavy lifting or backaches, no expensive equipment, and a flexible and fast construction. The bags are filled in place on the wall using small pots like coffee cans, or even kitchen utensils. You can build alone or as a group.

 Corexit v. the Gulf...

Gulf Dispersants: BP and Nalco Play Toxic Roulette

Shortly after the accident, BP began applying vast quantities of chemical dispersants in an effort to break up the torrent of oil from the mile-deep blowout. By mid-July, BP had released almost two million gallons of the dispersant Corexit.

BP and Corexit manufacturer Nalco claim that the chemicals will reduce the impact of the spill on coastal environments. Their lobbyists and executives say that the chemical is not only essential, but as harmless as dish soap.

But a fundamental question lingers like the petrochemical smell over the gulf: Is Corexit doing more harm than good? Dispersants, all agree, do not lessen the amount of oil in the environment. Rather, they break it into tiny drops that have different, but not necessarily less toxic properties.

"[Dispersants] make the oil more soluble in water, so it won't just sit on the surface," Jackie Savitz, senior scientist with Oceana told CNN. "Whether that's good or bad depends on whether you're a fish or a seabird."

But whether or not the dispersants work as promised, they are effective in other ways, critics charge. By breaking the peanut-butter thick sludge into tiny droplets, Nalco's Corexit has made the oil less visible, thereby disguising the full environmental impact of the spill, and helping BP limit its legal and financial liability. The availability of dispersants also gives the oil industry cover by allowing it to assure government agencies and the public that in the in the "unlikely" event of a spill, there is a quick, safe fix.

The San Francisco Chronical reports, “Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco of Naperville, Illinois. Corexit is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm). "Dispersants have never been applied on this scale, leaving environmental scientists guessing about the consequences. Corexit may have caused seven cleanup workers to be admitted to the hospital with shortness of breath and nausea."

Of course there are also concerns regarding the impact of dispersants on wildlife and undersea plants. According to this study, when applied in small amounts to Mallard eggs, Corexit is as fatal as raw crude oil.

Many have focused their concerns about Corexit (the dispersant BP continues to use despite an EPA order to stop) on what it's doing under the water. But as we know, the oceans are part of a larger precipitation cycle, and scientists are worried that soon the consequences of using dispersants could be falling from the skies....

Russian Scientists have conducted studies on BP’s chemical disbursant. Their conclusion; “Corexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters is designed to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak.”

They further report, “When combined with the heating Gulf of Mexico waters, its molecules will be able to “phase transition” from their present liquid to a gaseous state allowing them to be absorbed into clouds and allowing their release as “toxic rain” upon all of Eastern North America.”

"Dispersants have never been applied on this scale, leaving environmental scientists guessing about the consequences. Corexit may have caused seven cleanup workers to be admitted to the hospital with shortness of breath and nausea."

Of course there are also concerns regarding the impact of dispersants on wildlife and undersea plants. According to this study, when applied in small amounts to Mallard eggs, Corexit is as fatal as raw crude oil.

Many have focused their concerns about Corexit (the dispersant BP continues to use despite an EPA order to stop) on what it's doing under the water. But as we know, the oceans are part of a larger precipitation cycle, and scientists are worried that soon the consequences of using dispersants could be falling from the skies.

 "Top Secret" Story...Why now?

(Washington Post)

Corporate Media Discover Private Spies.

Stop the presses and call the government spokespeople back from Martha's Vineyard. The corporate media have discovered that the United States is radically outsourcing national security and sensitive intelligence operations. Cable news channels breathlessly report on the "groundbreaking," "exclusive" Washington Post series, Top Secret America, a two-year investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin. No doubt there is some important stuff in this series. Both Arkin and Priest have done outstanding work for many years on sensitive, life-or-death subjects. And that is one of the main reasons why this series has, thus far, been incredibly disappointing. Its greatest accomplishment is forcing a discussion onto corporate TV years after it would have had an actual impact.

The misplaced hype surrounding the Post series speaks volumes to the ahistorical nature of US media culture. Next week, if the New York Times published a story on how there were no WMDs in Iraq, there would no doubt be cable news shows that would act like it was an earth-moving revelation delivered by Moses on the stone tablet of exclusive, groundbreaking journalism.

The Post does a fine job of exploring the scope of the privatization and providing some new or updated statistics. It also produces a few zingers from senior officials like Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "This is a terrible confession," Gates said in Tuesday's installment. "I can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense." It was also hilarious to read CIA director Leon Panetta-who just gave Blackwater a brand new $100 million global CIA contract-act like he is anything other than a contractor addict. "For too long, we've depended on contractors to do the operational work that ought to be done" by CIA employees, Panetta told the Post. But replacing them "doesn't happen overnight. When you've been dependent on contractors for so long, you have to build that expertise over time." Panetta told the Post he was concerned about contracting with corporations, whose responsibility "is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict." I wonder if the Blackwater guys working for Panetta can contain their laughter reading those statements. I imagine them taping a post-it note that says "Kick me" on Panetta's back and then chuckling about it with the Lockheed contractors.

The Post is "doing their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence. They're eight years behind and still haven't caught up.... there's virtually nothing in their series about the broader picture-like what it means to have private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our national security."

So that’s our tour. Enjoy the sites. And enjoy the Dana Priest-Bill Arkin series in the Post. It’s about damn time they covered this story: intelligence outsourcing to this extent has only been a fact of life in Washington since, oh, 2002. The real question to be asked of the Post is: why the hell did it take them eight years?

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

 As BP is a legal person, why are its acts not charged as criminal assault? battery? theft? murder?

A sign along the highway near Grand Isle, La., on
July 11, 2010, lays out the problem many struggling
fishing families now face: With their fishing grounds
closed by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, they are
forced to find something other than seafood to feed
their families. (AP Photo/Vicki Smith)


BP's Scheme to Swindle the "Small People"

Gulf Coast fishermen and others with lost income claims against BP are outraged by a recent announcement that the $20 billion government-administered claim fund will subtract money they earn by working on the cleanup effort from any future damage claims against BP. This move, according to lawyers in Louisiana working on behalf of Louisiana fishermen and others affected by the BP oil disaster, contradicts an earlier BP statement in which the company promised it would do no such thing.

Kenneth Feinberg, who was appointed by President Obama as the independent administrator of the Gulf Claims Facility for the $20 billion BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster compensation fund, said yesterday that the wages earned by people working on BP's cleanup will be deducted from their claims against the company....

Attorney Stephen Herman, one of two interim liaison counsel for cases pending in the eastern district of Louisiana before Judge Carl J. Barbier, told Truthout he has spoken with Feinberg and that this recent announcement contradicts an earlier statement made by BP, in which the company clearly said it would not do this.

Grow up on the water, the children of southern Louisiana learn, and you'll never go hungry. As long as you can toss a line, a net or a trap, you can eat - and eat well.

Or you could, until now.

Millions of gallons of oil from the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig have fouled some of the world's richest fishing grounds from Florida to Texas, and even though BP stopped the leak for the first time Thursday, more than a third of the Gulf of Mexico remains closed. For thousands who feed their families from the water, what once seemed like a never-ending, free buffet of high-protein, low-fat shrimp, crabs, oysters and fish is off limits.

It's not that people are starving. With compensation checks from BP and the help of charities such as Second Harvest Food Bank, they're able to stock their pantries with staples - rice and beans, grits and cereal, peanut butter and jelly.

But they're forced to pay for protein they used to get for free. And not the kind they want.

If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil -- and just know that you’re not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.

Even as I was visiting those distant and exotic spill locales via book, article, and YouTube, you were going through your very public nightmare. Three federal appeals court judges with financial and other ties to big oil were rejecting the Obama administration’s proposed drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollution from the BP spill there was seeping into Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. Clean-up crews were discovering that a once-over of beaches isn’t nearly enough: somehow, the oil just keeps reappearing. Endangered sea turtles and other creatures were being burnt alive in swaths of ocean ("burn fields") ignited by BP to "contain" its catastrophe. The lives and livelihoods of fishermen and oyster-shuckers were being destroyed. Disease warnings were being issued to Gulf residents and alarming toxin levels were beginning to be found in clean-up workers.

None of this would surprise inhabitants of either the Niger Delta or the Amazon rain forest. Despite the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, Americans are only now starting to wake up to the fate that, for half a century, has befallen the Delta and the Amazon, both ecosystems at least as rich and varied as the Gulf of Mexico.

 allies...

Don't Fear the Right

We regularly hear warnings about militias and tea parties, but for the most part, these people are not the enemy. Although Tea Party leadership has been largely taken over by Republicans of the Sarah Palin school, many of the rank-and-file are potential class allies. Even some of the local leaders are libertarians who oppose war and defend civil liberties.

Militia members may be even more likely to have things in common with honest leftists and greens. The ideology is different, but the class interests are similar. And don’t forget; the government and their mercenaries have plenty of guns, and they’re not reluctant to use them. If the people are to resist, we may need to ally with people who have some, too.

According to Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason magazine, corporate media and government are conducting a “Brown Scare” against the Right [“Brown” as in Hitler’s brownshirts]. A Brown Scare is similar to a Red Scare and is used for the same reasons, to discredit and divide those opposed to the system, and pave the way to attack them.

“With Brown Scare tactics, serious critiques are delegitimized by being associated with fanatics,” says Walker, while civil liberties are curtailed for everyone.

Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." He railed against a litany of government policies and proposals that form the backbone of Britain's Surveillance State, from ID Card schemes, national identity registers, biometric passports, the storing of Internet and email records, to DNA databases, proliferating security cameras, and repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights. But more striking than these specific positions were the general, anti-authoritarian principles he espoused -- ones that sound increasingly foreign to most Americans. Clegg said:

It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide. It has to stop. . . . And we will end practices that risk making Britain a place where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question. . . . This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state. . . .

And we will, of course, introduce safeguards to prevent the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation. There have been too many cases of individuals being denied their rights . . . And whole communities being placed under suspicion. . . . This government will do better by British justice. Respecting great, British freedoms . . . Which is why we'll also defend trial by jury.

Clegg also inveighed against the oppressive criminal justice system that imprisons far too many citizens and criminalizes far too many acts with no improvement in safety, and also pledged radical reform to the political system in order to empower citizens over wealthy interests. To underscore that this was not mere rhetoric, the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition published their official platform containing all of these proposals, and the Civil Liberties section begins with language inconceivable for mainstream American discourse: "The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties."

“Liberty is something everybody can identify with—President Bush called the Constitution just a goddamn piece of paper,” said Shepard, a 58-year-old security guard for the local zoo and nearby Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. “The Constitution is a contract with the people and the government,” he said with indignation.

With friends up in the mountains “who think the world is going to end,” he said, “I’ve always been more conservative but I’ve found Gwen and the liberal people are more willing to stand up than the John Birch Society and churches. These people wait until their ministers tell them what to think. They support the government and God.”

“Checks and balances—history teaches us what happens when we don’t have it,” he added.

 Taking stock: things look different to a radical than they do to a liberal...

American capitalism’s decline and the tasks of the working class

2. It has been nearly three years since the unraveling of the subprime mortgage bubble in the US, which prompted the collapse of Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers in the summer of 2008 and ushered in the worst breakdown of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

At the time, the Socialist Equality Party in the US warned that “economic restabilization on a capitalist basis could be achieved only through … a catastrophic lowering of the living standards of the working class....” At the same time, we insisted “the improvisational responses of the American ruling class to the economic upheaval will solve nothing. ”

3. Despite the sincere sense of relief in the world’s population over the departure of the Bush administration, and the hopes and illusions generated by the media and the middle class “left” groups over Barack Obama’s election, we insisted that the new occupant in the White House would seek a “solution to the crisis that does not touch the foundations of capitalism and the interests of the financial elite”.

This prognosis has been vindicated in spades. Since coming to office, Obama has been an unabashed servant of the Wall Street bankers and speculators, and has escalated the attack on the American working class carried out by his Republican predecessor. No one has been held accountable for the criminal and semi-criminal activity of the financial elite that brought the US and the world economy to the brink of collapse. The only exception was Bernie Madoff, whose pyramid scheme cost money for some relatively prominent members of the ruling class.

4. In defiance of the sentiments of the vast majority of the American people, Obama handed the keys to the US Treasury to the most powerful financial interests. Trillions in public resources were used to bail out the banks and assure the personal fortunes of billionaires and millionaires. Rather than checking the speculative activities of the banks, let alone restrict the massive salaries of its executives, Obama’s “financial regulatory” measures strengthened the monopoly of the four largest banks—Bank of America, JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo and Citibank—and led to the resumption of the speculation casino. While millions suffer from unemployment, and owe more money on their homes than they could possible get from selling them, the top bankers, executives and traders are once again rewarding themselves with multi-million salaries and bonuses.

Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment. As Mario Cuomo famously observed, candidates campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Still, Obama supporters have been asked to swallow some painfully "prosaic" compromises. In order to pass his healthcare legislation, for instance, Obama was required to specifically repudiate his pledge to prochoice voters to "make preserving women's rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as president." That promise apparently was lost in the same drawer as his insistence that "Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange...including a public option." Labor unions were among his most fervent and dedicated foot soldiers, as well as the key to any likely progressive political renaissance, and many were no doubt inspired by his pledge "to fight for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act." Yet that act appears deader than Jimmy Hoffa. Environmentalists were no doubt steeled through the frigid days of New Hampshire canvassing by Obama's promise that "As president, I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming—an 80 percent reduction by 2050." That goal appears to have gone up the chimney in thick black smoke. And remember when Obama promised, right before the election, to "put in place the common-sense regulations and rules of the road I've been calling for since March—rules that will keep our market free, fair and honest; rules that will restore accountability and responsibility in our corporate boardrooms"? Neither, apparently, does he… Indeed, if one examines the gamut of legislation passed and executive orders issued that relate to the promises made by candidate Obama, one can only wince at the slightly hyperbolic joke made by late night comedian Jimmy Fallon, who quipped that the president's goal appeared to be to "finally deliver on the campaign promises made by John McCain."

 Olive trees have a long life except in Palestine and Afghanistan...

Moises Saman for The New York Times

Severed Trees in Orchards Mirror Afghan History

Mr. Hakim, who is 51 and like many Afghans has only one name, witnessed the farms’ growth as a college student here and was inspired, but never imagined that he would have the chance to direct the farms. The orchards and modern farms seemed to him a kind of utopian dream that had come to life in the rocky Afghan soil.

“I went to visit a relative living on the farm; it had its own houses, schools, theater, cinema, hospital, it had well-organized parks and a bakery, and the dairy produced cream and yogurt,” he said. “It was one of the projects that changed people’s lives.”

Then, in the early 1980s, disaster struck. The mujahedeen movement to oust the Soviets, who by then were controlling the government, started in neighboring Kunar Province, and the regiment of Afghan troops guarding the farms was sent to fight the Afghan rebels.

Security deteriorated and vandals began to maraud at night, stealing farm equipment and even the steel rods used to stabilize the cooperatives’ concrete buildings, said Hajji Hanifullah Khan, the manager of one of the farms that is only now beginning to work again.

The olive tree, a universal symbol of peace has been the object of conflict in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The uprooting of the ancient olive trees, as a by product of war, has had tremendous affects on the Palestinian agriculture, economy, and identity. In Palestine, the olive tree is prized for its historical presence, its beauty, its symbolic significance, and most importantly for its economic significance. Olive trees are a major commercial crop for Palestine, and many families depend on it for their livelihood.

Many products are extracted from the olive tree, these include, olives, olive oil, olive wood, and olive based soap. In fact, olive oil is the second major export item in Palestine; and Olive production contributes to about 38.2% of the fruit trees production income.

Traditionally in Palestine, harvesting the olive trees was a joyous time. However, over the past two years restrictions by the Israeli army and harassment by the settlers have made harvesting almost impossible. Today the Arab Israeli conflict has affected not only innocent human beings but also the environment. The olive tree, a universal symbol of peace has become the unfortunate casualty of war.

 Some ideas from Aspen Ideas Festival...

The Financial Crisis: Will it Lead to America's Decline? (audio)

Niall Ferguson, History and Business professor at Harvard University, (Mort Zuckerman) and David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government discuss the financial crisis in America and around the world.

President of the National Institute of Play, Dr. Stuart Brown presents "The Neuroscience of Play: What Play Does for You--and What Happens if You Don't Play." Brown discovered the essential contributions of play by finding its absence in murderers and felony drunk drivers.

 public service for profit...

Former Top CIA Spy on How US Intelligence Became Big Business

Grenier estimated that "many more than half" of the personnel who worked under him at the CIA's counterterrorism center were private contractors. Contractors "were coming in and they were all over the place," Grenier said of his time at CTC. "Often I would go down and talk to people in my work force and I would say, 'Hey, that was a great job and I saw what you did last night, I saw that cable that you turned up, thank you very much.' And I'd be startled when they would give me a business card."

It is difficult to access detailed information about the extent to which US intelligence activities are privatized, primarily because the budgets of the eighteen intelligence agencies operated by the United States are mostly classified. In 2007, journalist Tim Shorrock, who wrote the definitive book on the privatization of intelligence, Spies for Hire, obtained and published an unclassified document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that 70 percent of the US intelligence budget was spent on private contractors. No documents on these classified budgets have been made public since.

Grenier largely defended the use of contractors, primarily because he said he believes that the government, in a time of war, needs to be able to hire skilled, specialized personnel capable of securing the necessary security clearances. "It's far easier to go through the process to get a contractor if time is an issue than it would be to bring somebody on as a regular employee," Grenier said. He said that when he was running CIA operations in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, he was working with several of his predecessors who had left the CIA, but returned, with their experience and clearances, as independent contractors. Grenier cited another "very prosaic" reason for the reliance on contractors: the federal budgeting process.

In 2003, just 237 interrogators graduated from the United States Army Intelligence Center, headquartered at the fort. Today, plans call for quadrupling the number of qualified interrogators to 1,000 a year by 2006 and the number of soldiers trained in basic intelligence skills to 7,000. This is an astronomical increase, far beyond the current capabilities of the center.

While military contracting for construction or weapons manufacturing is nothing new, the privatization of intelligence instruction is a new and rapidly expanding sector that came about less than four years ago. One estimate in Mother Jones magazine, compiled from interviews with military experts, suggests that as much 50 percent of the $40 billion given annually to the 15 intelligence agencies in the United States is now spent on private contractors.

James Bamford, the author of The Puzzle Palace (an expose of the National Security Agency which is now used as a textbook at the Defense Intelligence College), is worried about this new trend. "While there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community working closely with private industry," he wrote in The New York Times, "there is the potential for trouble unless the union is closely monitored. Because the issue is hidden under heavy layers of secrecy, it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate figures on just how much money and how many people are involved."

Among the many former spooks on Booz Allen's payroll are R. James Woolsey, the well-known neoconservative and former CIA director; Joan Dempsey, the former chief of staff to CIA Director George Tenet and recently executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and Keith Hall, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret organization that oversees the nation's spy satellites.

For his part, McConnell was head of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1996. Prior to that he was the chief intelligence officer for Colin Powell at the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War, where he worked closely with Dick Cheney. On Friday, McConnell told the New York Times that his work at Booz Allen had allowed him to "stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left." That is an understatement. As a senior vice president at Booz Allen, McConnell is in charge of the firm's assignments in military intelligence and information operations for the Department of Defense. In that work, his official biography states, McConnell has provided intelligence support to "the US Unified Combatant Commanders, the Director of National Intelligence Agencies, and the Military Service Intelligence Directors."

And in a relationship that has been completely missed in media coverage of his appointment, McConnell is the chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors. As INSA chairman, I've been told, McConnell is presiding over an initiative to enhance ties between the intelligence agencies and their contractors and domestic law enforcement agencies.

 "Surge" in Uganda...

WAY: Uganda and Somalia might not be on your radar screen but they're certainly on the empire's....Chris Floyd brings us up to date.

Leading by Example: Elites' Apt Pupils Launch 'Surge' in Uganda

Before the American-backed invasion of 2006, Somalia had achieved a precarious but growing level of stability for the first time after many years of anarchy under the violent rule of warlords. But this government was made up of a broad coalition of Islamic groups. And although the coalition, led by moderates, was not remotely as extreme as, say, the sectarians of Saudi Arabia, it was outside the control or clientage of the Potomac Empire, and thus could not be allowed to survive.

And so the CIA's warlords and Washington's Ethiopian proxies went to work. The coalition was destroyed -- and with it the hopes of a moderate, secure, independent Somalia, working out its own destiny, its own path toward development. In the resulting swamp of carnage and suffering, only the extremists were left standing to confront the extreme violence being inflicted by the forces of 'civilization.'

Now the brutal -- and brutalizing -- cycle of violence spins ever more furiously, feeding on its own momentum, lashing out beyond the borders, and creating its own nightmare world where whole generations are being devoured.

As Ditz says, the bombing in Uganda is a contemptible, abominable crime -- as is the killing of all innocent people by the forces of organized violence. But it did not come out of nowhere, it did not spring from some abyss of mysterious, mystical, motiveless evil. It was an entirely rational act within the system adopted -- and imposed -- by the "Great Powers," which holds that the slaughter of innocent people is a perfectly acceptable way to advance your political, economic and ideological agendas.

American forces have bombed fleeing refugees, slaughtered innocent herdsmen and destroyed villages in attempts to assassinate a handful of individual alleged, on shaky and specious evidence, to be "part of" or "associated with" or "linked to" al Qaeda. American agents have seized refugees from the Somali war, including U.S. citizens, and had them "renditioned" to the notorious prisons of the Ethiopian dictatorship. And as we have noted here many times, the Bush Administration has sent in death squads to "kill anyone left alive" after American strikes.

There has been no objection to any of this from any major figure in American politics. Barack Obama doesn't object to it. Hillary Clinton doesn't object to it. Nancy Pelosi doesn't object to it. It goes without saying that John McCain and the Republicans don't object to these latest war crimes by their blood-drenched leader. The entire Washington power structure has lined up to support this hideous project: military aggression, murder, destruction and rampant atrocity. Somalia -- already one of the world's most fragile and ravaged nations -- is being battered into utter destruction before our eyes....and in our names

 24 million lawful Mexican alien crossings in a year for Tucson...

Arizona immigration lawsuit: Police officer Martin Escobar vs. Gov. Jan Brewer

17. In the December 2008 publication prepared by the University of Arizona Eller College of Management for the Arizona Office of Tourism, Mexican Visitors to Arizona: Visitor Characteristics and Economic Impacts, 2007-08, it was reported that over 24 million lawful Mexican alien crossings occurred from Mexico to Arizona from July 2007 to June 2008 and that the City of Tucson is a major destination point for Mexican visitors.

18. The City of Tucson is connected to the border cities of Nogales, Sonora Mexico and Nogales Arizona by Interstate 19, an established part the United States Interstate Freeway system; Interstate 19 is a major corridor of travel between citizens of Mexico and United States who utilize this roadway on a 24/7 basis and number in the hundreds of thousands. Additionally, the I-19 corridor is utilized as a significant commercial corridor for international trade and goods in the hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis.

19. In plaintiff’s experience as a Law Enforcement Officer, proximity to the Mexican border does not provide any race neutral criteria or basis to suspect or identify who is lawfully in the United States.

20. In plaintiff’s experience as a Law Enforcement Officer, neither the racial and linguistic characteristics of Operations Division South or the Mexican national visitors thereto provide any race neutral criteria or basis to suspect or identify who is lawfully in the United States.

21. During the performance of plaintiff’s duties as a Law Enforcement Officer he has daily contact with numerous Hispanics, a number of whom have a skin color and/or physical features that are commonly attributed to Hispanics; In plaintiff’s experience as a Law Enforcement Officer, skin color and/or physical features does not provide any race neutral criteria or basis to suspect or identify who is lawfully in the United States.

 Banks increasing power; people increasing losses...

Public sector workers demonstrate in Spain.
Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters


Child Poverty: Forgotten Casualties of the Recession

Consistently ignored in reporting on the economic crisis is the dramatic toll it’s taking on America’s children. The prevalence of poverty has expanded dramatically in light of growing unemployment, accompanied by state attacks on social welfare spending that benefits the disadvantaged. Child poverty grew nationally to a total of 22 percent of all children in 2010, an all time high for the last two decades, and an increase in five percent over the last four years. Half of the poor are now classified as in “extreme poverty” – described as living in families earning below 50 percent of the poverty line. The percent of children who are food insecure also increased to 18 percent in 2010. This growth translates into an additional 750,000 children nationwide who are malnourished.

Reliance on food stamps increased by 24 percent between August 2008 and August 2009, with the number of children benefitting them growing from nearly 30 million to 37 million. Some localities are suffering under even higher levels of poverty. Throughout Illinois, up to 1.5 million people were reliant upon food stamps as of June 2009 – an increase of 22 percent from 2007. From 2000 to 2008, child poverty increased by 72 percent in Colorado. Overall, more than 30 states saw their reliance on food stamps increase between 2008 and 2009.

Sadly, attention to child poverty isn’t considered “sexy” enough to make the headlines or features in the “paper of record” (New York Times) or other agenda setting media. A review of stories featuring child poverty from August 2008 (at the time of the economic meltdown) through June 2010 finds that the issue was only featured in a single New York Times story and just three stories in the Washington Post.

From Bloomberg News: "European lenders had $2.29 trillion at risk in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain at the end of 2009, including loans to governments, according to the Bank for International Settlements...German banks’ writedowns on loans and securities will probably reach $314 billion by the end of 2010, with state-owned lenders and savings banks facing the bulk of the losses, the International Monetary Fund said in a report in April."

See? The ECB is not buying Greek bonds because of a "sovereign debt crisis". They are buying them so the banks won't lose money. The "sovereign debt crisis" meme is all public relations hype. If it becomes too expensive to fund government operations, Greece can leave the EU and return to the drachma which would give it greater flexibility to settle its debts. That would increase demand for Greek exports and improve tourism. This is the best solution for Greece. So, where's the crisis?

If Greece, Portugal and Spain, leave the EU and restructure their debt, banks in Germany and France will default and bondholders will lose their shirts. In other words, the investors, who took a risk, will lose money---which is how the system is supposed to work.

One thing should be made clear about the situation in the eurozone economies that is not clear at all if we rely on most of the news reports. This is not a situation where countries face a "dilemma" because they have overspent and piled up too much public debt. They do not face "tough choices" that will force them to cut spending and raise taxes while the economy is weak or in recession, in order to "satisfy financial markets".


What is really going on is that powerful interests within these countries – including Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal – are taking advantage of the situation to make the changes that they want. Perhaps even more importantly, the European authorities – including the European commission, the European central bank and the IMF – who are holding the purse strings of any bailout funds, are even more committed than the national governments to rightwing policy changes. And they are further removed from any accountability to any electorate.


In 13 Bankers, by Simon Johnson (a former chief economist at the IMF) and James Kwak, the authors describe the emerging market crises of the 1990s and note that Washington used them to promote changes that it wanted: "When an existing economic elite has led a country into a deep crisis, it is time for a change. And the crisis itself presents a unique, but short-lived opportunity for change." Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, provides an excellent history of how crises have been used to introduce or consolidate regressive and unpopular economic "reforms".

 guardian angels v. hell fire...

US to deploy drones to shore up border with Mexico

The United States currently has four drones patrolling the border with Mexico in Arizona and one in the northern border with Canada in the state of North Dakota, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Napolitano said the new aircraft are part of a reinforcement of border patrol efforts including one thousand additional agents and 60 investigators.

"Over the past 18 months, this administration has devoted more resources -- including manpower, technology and infrastructure -- to the Southwest border than at any point in America's history," she said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry had requested delivery of the planes, which the US used extensively in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

Now it's the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized. It's the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It's the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”

C) Murder by drone. The use of robot aircraft and target takeout by missile fire is modestly controversial in and of itself, perhaps, though the controversy seems to be counterweighted, at least in mainstream reportage, by the military’s enthusiasm for drones. When a potential target is an American who isn’t situated in either Iraq or Afghanistan, the controversy inches upward. I’m sorry, but I still haven’t gotten around on the concept of robot war or the insanity of stalking enemy prey with missiles, even if there was the least bit of precision in the process.

The fact that we often rely on preposterously bad intelligence and wind up killing large numbers of civilians with our missiles strikes me, quaintly, as wrong. And by "wrong" I mean insane, stupid, counterproductive, criminal — a means of murder guaranteed to inflame hatred toward us, complicate our "mission" and prolong the war. But then again, this is a war against evil, so we already know that it’s endless.

All of which brings me back to the New York Times and the helpful, informative sentence quoted above, which I unearthed in a recent Times Online "topics" piece on drones. Mostly the story is from a military point of view and reports on what seems to be the adolescent glee of intelligence and military brass over how disruptive robot air strikes are to enemy operations.

Toward the end of the story, statistics about collateral damage are cited from two sources. The New America Foundation estimated that, since 2006, drones have killed 500 militants and 250 civilians; the ratio was a little better in the Long War Journal, which estimated 885 dead militants, 94 dead civilians. Not cited, for some reason, was a Brookings Institution study, which found that for every militant killed by drones, 10 civilians are taken out. This is a heart-stopping ratio of cruelty that should instantly decommission all future robot assassination missions.

 It ain't robbery, it's a business cycle

Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball

From the outset, capitalism was always about the theft of the people's sustenance. It was bound to lead to the ultimate theft -- the final looting of the source of their sustenance -- nature. Now that capitalism has eaten its own seed corn, the show is just about over, with the nastiest scenes yet to play out around water, carbon energy (or anything that expends energy), soil and oxygen. For the near future however, it will continue to play out around money.

As the economy slowly implodes, money will become more volatile stuff than it already is. The value and availability of money is sure to fluctuate wildly. Most people don't have the luxury of escaping the money economy, so they will be held hostage and milked hard again by the same people who just drained them in the bailouts. As usual, the government will be right there to see that everybody plays by the rules. Those who have always benefited by capitalism's rules will benefit more. That cadre of "money professionals" which holds captive the nation's money supply, and runs things according to the rules of money, can never lose money. It writes the rules. And rewrites them when it suits the money elite's interests. Capitalism, the Christian god, democracy, the Constitution.

It's all one ball of wax, one set of rules in the American national psyche. Thus, the money masters behind the curtain will write The New Rules, the new tablets of supreme law, and call them Reform. There will be rejoicing that "the will of the people" has once again moved upon the land, and that the democracy's scripture has once again been delivered by the unseen hand of God.

 Advice to Bacevich: watch what they do, not what they say...

WAY: one could wish that Silber would be more succinct. But having read Bacevich, and having heard him speak, I can affirm that he is indeed deserving of Silber's criticism, and, so far, only Silber is criticizing...

revealed with a vengeance...

Consider that, throughout Bacevich's article, he will criticize particular leaders and certain policies, but all his criticisms are narrowly circumscribed (Bush is "a well-intentioned fool," Obama doesn't actually want to direct the American Empire on its trajectory of death and destruction, etc.). The leaders don't mean for death, chaos and destruction to result from their actions. They intend for only good to result, but they fail because of stupidity or "incompetence," or because they feel constrained by factors beyond their control. Bacevich will not entertain the possibility that the fault lies within the leaders themselves or in the nature of the system itself. And note how eagerly and with what determination over a lengthy period of years these leaders sought to exercise ultimate power and control within that system. To borrow from myself and part of what I wrote about Irving Kristol's reprehensible efforts to destroy the very concepts of responsibility and judgment in the realm of U.S. foreign policy: it's not as if power was mysteriously foisted upon either Bush or Obama while they were happily minding their own business elsewhere. Both men were notably focused and intent upon achieving ultimate power over a long period of time; given the policies of both, we can say, with full justification, they were viciously intent upon attaining and wielding ultimate power.

 "The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." James Madison

Infinite Jest: State Terror From Nixon to Obama

Poor old Henry Kissinger. All that botheration, all those lies, all the years of gut-churning anxiety about scandal, even prosecution -- and for what? Mere complicity in state murder of foreigners carried out by a foreign government? Why, nowadays, we have U.S. presidents openly ordering the murder of American citizens, and nobody bats an eye. There is no scandal, no prosecution -- there is not even any debate. It's just a fact of life, ordinary, normal, unchangeable: the sun rises in the east, cows eat grass, rain is wet, American presidents murder people. What's the big deal?

Yes, we've come a long way since those bad old days of weird old Nixon. He and Super K had to skulk around, straining to swathe their crimes in clouds of misdirection, implication and winking allusion. Now we have, as Silber aptly puts it in another recent essay, "evil in broad daylight": state murder on tap, cheery admissions of death squads and secret armies operating in 75 countries, free passes for torturers, indefinite detention championed by "progressives," and the bipartisan, widespread, institutional acceptance of Nixon's own pernicious doctrine: "If the president does it, that means it's legal."

So who cares if the American president and his minions ordered the murder of Rene Schneider almost 40 years ago because he tried to defend the democratic system of his country? Who cares if this murder helped pave the way to mass butchery and repression under an American-backed dictator? Who cares if this kind of moral rot is now accepted as normal, even praiseworthy, by the entire American establishment? Who cares if it has led us to a place where a Nobel Peace Prize laureate can order the murder of his own citizens without charges, trial or evidence, while killing multitudes of innocent foreigners each year with drones, with bombs, with midnight raids?

Even the Washington Post gets it. In its article on the criminal charges brought against Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, the sub-headline to the article reads:

U.S. Taking Tough Line on Leaks.

The opening paragraph states that the military charging Bradley Manning

is likely to further deter would-be whistleblowers.

I don't care if it's Bush or Obama at the helm. The biggest crimes of our generation--torture, warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary rendition--would not have come to light but for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. For the hand-wringing "but we can't willy-nilly reveal classified information" crowd, do you think Abu Ghraib wasn't classified?

We are told (though there has been not a shred of evidence other than the government saying this, and even the charges do not reflect this number) that Manning gave some 250,000 classified State Department cables to Wikileaks.org. But all we really KNOW is that the website published a horrific video of an American helicopter massacring unarmed Iraqi civilians and cheering on each other as if it were a video game.

The ACLU clients said they were transferred to CIA "black sites" and tortured while in U.S. custody. The rights advocate said the U.S. government is using the "state secrets" privilege to block developments in the case.

The ACLU called on the Obama administration to follow the leadership displayed by Cameron and reaffirm its commitment to human rights and the rule of law.

The European Court of Human Rights, for its part, said in June it would consider the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri who was subjected to extraordinary rendition allegedly at the hands of the CIA.

I don't give a glimmer of a shadow of the faintest damn about the outcome of incidents of this kind, because the major participants are all war criminals. I have been planning for some time an explanation of an especially unforgivable aspect of the entirely phony moral posturing engaged in by virtually all those who take part in our national discussion. The particular aspect to which I refer is this: almost no one takes the concepts of war crimes and war criminals seriously at all.

I've set out certain key provisions of the Nuremberg Principles before. Read the following again (or for the first time), and as you read it, think about the plain meaning of these words, especially the passages that I've highlighted:

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

1. Crimes against peace:

1. Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

2. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

2. War crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or illtreatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

3. Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principles VI is a crime under international law.

Yes, I've highlighted all of it, because all of it is directly relevant to the war criminals now occupying the highest levels of the Obama administration, as it was directly relevant to the war criminals in the Bush administration.

 a little optimism...

The Biochar Debate: Charcoal’s Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility

It's called biochar, and if you believe its most ardent supporters, then this unassuming, fine black powder is a vital tool in the solutions to some of humanity's most urgent ecological threats, including climate change, peak oil, soil degradation and water pollution due to agrochemicals. However, if you side with biochar's staunch opponents, then it seems like a fledgling, poorly understood technology with real risks, including the displacement of entire communities and the serious jeopardizing of world food security and biodiversity. Which view is correct? That's the question that sustainability expert James Bruges, who is cautiously optimistic about biochar, investigates in his book The Biochar Debate.

Biochar is essentially charcoal made through a process called pyrolysis (which involves burning organic material in the absence of oxygen), and then finely crushed and worked into the earth as a soil amendment.* The pyrolysis process has two byproducts, syngas and bio-oil, which can be used for generating heat and power, hence biochar's appeal to alternative energy enthusiasts. And once the biochar is in the soil, it has an amazing ability to retain nutrients and moisture due to its unbelievably porous structure (a single gram can have twice the surface area of a tennis court). This enables it to dramatically boost crop yields and reduces the need for industrial fertilizers. Thus, biochar has the potential to simultaneously ensure our future food supply and wean croplands off of the poisons in which they must be doused in order for today's mineral-depleted soils to sustain production. Another advantage of biochar is that it can be made from virtually any organic material (from manure to wood to switchgrass), meaning that there would be no shortage of suitable feedstocks, and biochar production could double as a waste recycling scheme.

Most important of all, however—assuming that climate scientists have called it correctly with their warnings of an imminent, irreversible climate tipping point—is biochar's ability to pull substantial quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and trap them underground effectively forever, in human terms. Biochar's oft-repeated sales pitch is that it isn't merely carbon-neutral, it's "carbon-negative." And this capacity for sequestering carbon could, conceivably, allow us to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels within our lifetimes.

Further resources about biochar.

A world beyond petroleum needn't be a scary proposition --it can be something to relish. As we move from a global culture addicted to cheap, abundant petroleum to a culture of compelled conservation, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook provides useful, practical advice for preparing your family and community to make the transition.

Taking a positive, upbeat, and optimistic view of "the Great Change", this book offers recipes for these turbulent times that mend the many rifts that oil culture has spawned. Wide-ranging in scope, topics covered include rebuilding civilization, changing your needs, water and waste disposal, energy and transportation, equipment and tools and food storage and first aid.

Also featuring over 100 playful recipes --some using basic, wholesome foods, some illustrating food growing or preservation, and all emphasizing organic, flavorful and locally grown produce -- this book is about having your catastrophe and eating it too.

Though it's long, dense and heavily documented, the book is clearly organized, well written and crammed with lively anecdotes that made it hard to put down. I also found it profoundly unsettling--not so much because it documents familiar bad news about the dangers of our present course, but more because of its good news of promise and possibility. Reading it makes you ardent to do anything within your power to spread the word and to help bring about the changes it advocates.

Like Rob, I found that this book is particularly suited for where we are right now--at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Its message that "there is no true separation between how we support life economically and ecologically" and its revelation of the environmental, political, and moral significance of good engineering, design, resource management and business practices could lead our university to a new and higher mission statement for its second century of growth.

Each of its fifteen chapters can stand on its own, but cumulatively they build to a climax. The first chapter lays out the overall thesis with a historical perspective and an outline of general principles. Later chapters divide the subject into categories like Transportation, Real Estate and Construction, Agriculture, and Climate. The two penultimate chapters return to more general observations, and the final chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of disseminating the book's ideas on university campuses.

Incidentally, the book can be downloaded chapter by chapter from the website.

Read the book online.

McKibben is an eloquent advocate for deep emissions cuts to slow global warming, but making that case is not the purpose of his latest book. Instead, he aims to alert us that on a planet we have altered so profoundly that it deserves a new name ("Eaarth"), we need to shift our lives in light of new realities.

The book surveys the evidence for climate-driven impacts on the planet's major features, challenges the notion that we can grow our way out of this predicament and celebrates locally based, decentralized approaches that McKibben believes can supply food and comfort on our newly volatile home.

In a chapter titled "Backing Off," McKibben turns to colonial history to argue that the debate between big and small solutions is quintessentially American. James Madison and his fellow Federalists won that debate on behalf of "big" the first time around thanks to a unifying national project, the conquest of the West. That project is finished, McKibben points out, leaving us with "a big national government and smaller national purposes." Scaling back begins to sound almost inevitable.

McKibben is inspired by "the quieter movement for what might be called functional independence," the practical folks developing local food systems, insulating homes and making communities work. He clearly believes that every corner of America harbors similar post-peak patriots.

 Constitution: liberals' pawn or fount of liberties?

Government loses appeal in Guantanamo habeas case

"We agree" with Bensayah's argument that "mere possession and use of false travel documents is neither proof of involvement with terrorism nor evidence of facilitation of travel by others," Ginsburg wrote.

Leon's judgment in Bensayah's case was also flawed because he'd already found that there was no evidence that the people seized with Bensayah had planned to travel to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces there.

"Therefore," Ginsburg wrote, "Bensayah could not have been facilitating their travel for that purpose."

Bensayah's appellate attorney could not be reached Friday.

Ginsburg, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and once was a nominee for the Supreme Court, is generally a reliably conservative member of the D.C. circuit court, which is often called the nation's second-highest court, overseeing many cases involving government actions.

British Prime Minister David Cameron today announced an independent investigation into allegations that U.K. agents were complicit in the torture of detainees in United States custody, and said the U.K. government would compensate torture survivors if the allegations were found to be true. U.K. residents and American Civil Liberties Union clients Binyam Mohamed and Bisher Al Rawi have long claimed that U.K. officials were aware of their CIA-orchestrated rendition and torture.

Following Prime Minister Cameron's announcement, the ACLU called on the Obama administration to broaden its own investigation into the Bush-era torture program to include top-level government officials who may have known about and authorized such abuse. Despite disavowing torture, the current administration continues to shield Bush administration officials from legal scrutiny or accountability for their role in the program. An ongoing Justice Department investigation of the torture program excludes top-level officials.

"An investigation into the role of government personnel in the abuse and torture of prisoners is exactly what the Obama administration should be initiating. And while we welcome Prime Minister Cameron's commitment to ensuring that torture survivors are acknowledged and compensated, this announcement also serves as a reminder of how little has been done here in the United States to reckon with the abuses of the last nine years," said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU Deputy Legal Director. "The Obama administration continues to suppress documents that would allow the public to understand the full scope of the Bush administration's torture program. It continues to use the 'state secrets' privilege to extinguish civil litigation by torture victims. And thus far the only criminal investigation this administration has initiated is one that appears to be focused on interrogators, not on the senior officials who authorized torture."

The Obama administration sued Arizona on Tuesday to throw out the state's toughest-in-the-nation immigration law and keep other states from copying it.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Phoenix said the law, due to take effect July 29, usurps the federal government's "pre-eminent authority" under the Constitution to regulate immigration.

The move sets the stage for a high-stakes legal clash over states' rights at a time when politicians in some other states have indicated they want to follow Arizona's lead.

  Afghanistan as an election manuever...

Petraeus emails show general scheming with journalist to get out pro-Israel storyline

Last March General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, sought to undercut his own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that was critical of Israel by intriguing with a rightwing writer to put out a different story, in emails obtained by Mondoweiss.

The emails show Petraeus encouraging Max Boot of Commentary to write a story-- and offering the neoconservative writer choice details about his views on the Holocaust:

Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome...

It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus’s surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own. An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. “They opened the gate,” he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who’s paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.

And all the while America’s “partner” in this strategy, the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali. In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces, and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his “angry brothers.” As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: “This is our big problem.” They’re talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be “partners” with.

In fact, America’s silent acceptance of President Karzai’s flagrantly fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes -- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won’t be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.

Confirmed and reconfirmed by United States President Barack Obama, the US Senate and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and duly hailed as the new armored Messiah by US mainstream media, "tightly disciplined" political fox and former US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is about to land in Kabul. He will either hit the road to his 2012 Republican presidential nomination, or witness another disaster in a US$7 billion a month (and counting) quagmire.

The myth of Petraeus' "successful surge" in Iraq could not but linger on. The Pentagon never managed not to profit by selling a public relations operation to a gullible American public. Petraeus actually "won" the war in Iraq by disgorging Samsonites full of cash to selected strands of the Sunni resistance who were fiercely fighting the US occupation, while at the same time shielding the American military inside remote bases.

Let's assume that what in effect are mostly Afghan Pashtuns will now also take Petraeus' bundle of cash (after all Afghanistan is the second most corrupt country in the world, only behind Somalia). In this case will he have enough time to buy the whole Afghan resistance before the 2012 US presidential election? It depends on how much cash will flow.

What's certain is that the Pashtuns will be more than happy to take the money and not run, but wait - exactly as the Sunni Iraqis are doing (newsflash: the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war is still on, killing at least 300 civilians every month).

 depression v. "slow recovery" ?

It's going to take a while to bring Wall St. under heel

Mainly, the legislation gives government regulators explicit authority to take tougher measures to curb Wall Street's dangerous behavior, but only if the Fed and Treasury decide it's a good idea. Don't hold your breath. These same agencies failed massively to confront the rampant recklessness that led to collapse (many of them claimed not to have seen the trouble coming).

Once again, the risk-taking is assigned to unwitting citizens and the economy. Washington saved big-dog bankers from failure, but it has not saved the rest of us from the bankers. Some reformers want to make the best of mixed results. The Consumer Federation of America says the banks "won a few battles; they lost the war." I would say it is the other way around: reform won some battles but lost the war.

Some valuable improvements, like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, can lead to tougher rules, but even such worthy accomplishments were diluted in the fine print. The supposedly "independent" consumer agency is to be a "bureau" within the Federal Reserve, where hostile central bankers can find ways to smother the infant in its crib.

Messrs. Barack Obama, Benjamin Bernanke and Timothy Geithner do not understand the real cause of this debt crisis. They are politicians first and economists or students of the market second--if at all. Therefore, it is not wise to count on them to tell us when the Great Recession is over, or to provide a plan to prevent another one in the future.

The cause of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the Great Recession beginning in 2007, was one and the same: an overleveraged economy. Excessive debt levels are the direct result of the central bank providing artificially low interest rates and of superfluous lending on the part of commercial banks.

The easy money provided by banks eventually brings debt in the economy to an unsustainable level. At that point, the only real and viable solution is for the public and private sectors to undergo a protracted period of deleveraging. The ensuing depression is, in actuality, the healing process at work, which is marked by the selling of assets and the paying down of debt.

Unfortunately, our politicians today are focused on fighting this natural healing process by promoting the accumulation of more debt.

“Make no mistake,” he declared, “we are headed in the right direction.” He added that “we are not headed there fast enough for most Americans.”

This statement is a direct falsification of the economic reality, intended to deceive and politically disarm the population. It echoes Vice President Joseph Biden’s declaration last month that this is the “Recovery Summer.”

The jobs report indicates that the economy is headed in the wrong direction, and may be slipping back to negative growth. To talk of the “right direction” under the present circumstances—with unemployment, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies at post-war record levels, and wages, home values and retirement savings being decimated—is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

For those social layers whose interests Obama serves, however, things are going not at all badly. The banks are making near-record profits and rewarding their CEOs with multi-million-dollar pay packages, and corporations across the board are using mass unemployment to drive down wages and drive up labor productivity.

 Can we have a declaration of independence for heirlooms?

You Say Tomato. They Say Phony.

In the kingdom of vegetables, the heirloom tomato is high nobility. Genetically unchanged from one generation to another, it offers an intense flavor prized by gardeners and gourmets.

But it has a reputation for being persnickety in the garden. While modern hybrids are tweaked and improved to resist common diseases, the old stalwarts seem to easily succumb to pathogens that can cause plants to suddenly wilt just as they seem ready to produce.

Now, as gardeners prepare to plant this summer's crop, a number of plant breeders are offering hybrids they claim have the distinct flavors and funky looks of heirlooms but are more disease-resistant and abundantly productive.

To tomato purists, the hybrids amount to heirloom heresy. "I cringe when I hear the term 'heirloom hybrid,' " says Amy Goldman, board chairwoman of the Decorah, Iowa-based nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange. The group champions the tradition of passing along heirloom seed from one generation to the next.

Reading a glowing review of these heirlooms in the Wall Street Journal, I’m bummed to see that the first “innovation” was based on the “classic Brandywine tomato.” A breeder in California has developed the “Brandymaster.” She says it has “more uniformly-shaped fruits and better resistance to diseases.”

One of my neighbors raises brandywines, saving the seeds from year to year. I look forward to seeing her at the market, her boxes full of oddly-shaped tomatoes. I never thought the lack of uniformity was a problem. In fact, it lets me choose the shape I’ll use — big sloppy burger bun tomato? Wedges for a salad?

That first hybrid came out three years ago. This year, almost all the good ones have been hybridized for (according the the Journal) “longer shelf life and making shapes more uniform for ease of packing, and creating more compact plants that are easier to maneuver.”

And here’s the really bad part, for all you that love the idea of gardening and farming as an independent gesture of self-sufficiency: 11,000 of the seed patents are owned by Monsanto. They now have an estimated 85-90% of the seed market in the US.

 Interview with Bob Moriarty...

WAY: we offer a lot of political analysis here. Today we link to an interview with Bob Moriarty, a person in business who will suffer financially if his economic views prove incorrect. He once was a US Vietnam pilot who is now anti-empire, anti-Zionism.

Due for End-of-Empire Do-Over?

BM: That's a really interesting question because, obviously, we need more regulation—some effective regulation. We didn't have it. In this situation, everybody involved was guilty. There will be far more rules on offshore drilling in the future and it will drive the cost of energy up.

TGR: That sounds odd coming from you. Normally you're sort of an anarchist and oppose regulations. You're anti-government—you call government impotent, useless and stupid. But in this case, if we'd had better regulations this wouldn't have happened.

BM: If you want to live in a country with no government regulation, move to Zimbabwe. Government regulation is appropriate in some situations. But it has to be efficient. We are at an end of empire. It couldn't possibly be any clearer—we are losing three and a half wars. We want to go nuke Iran, which is not the enemy of anybody, under the theory that they have nuclear weapons when 16 U.S. government agencies agree they don't. It's end of empire.

We are in a state of entropy. Entropy is when something physical degrades into a state of chaos. A tropical depression hitting Grand Cayman could turn into a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. We could be raining oil on Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida in a week. We could kill everything—all the crops, all the trees, all the fish in a half a dozen states in a week. If we don't do it this week, we'll do it next week or the week after. Oil, literally, is raining on Florida already.

TGR: Will this be the rallying cry to really usher in an era of alternative energies?

BM: Alternative energies are a 3% solution. We have too many people. Look at the curve of energy production and the curve of the population growth. They're identical. Sooner or later, we're going to run out of cheap energy. In fact, we're there.

321energy

321gold

 Too much bellicosity...

Guns of August in the Middle East?

Crazy talk about the Middle East seems to be escalating, backed up by some pretty ominous military deployments. First, the department of scary statements:

First up, Shabtai Shavit, former chief of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, speaking June 21 at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv on why Israel should launch a pre-emptive strike at Iran: “I am of the opinion that, since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of presumption and not retaliation.”

Second up, Uzi Arad, Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security advisor, speaking before the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem June 22 on his belief that the “international community” would support an Israeli strike at Iran” “I don’t see anyone who questions the legality of this or the legitimacy.”

Third up, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi speaking to reporters at the G-8 meeting in Toronto June 26: “Iran is not guaranteeing a peaceful production of nuclear power [so] the members of the G-8 are worried and believe absolutely that Israel will probably react preemptively.”

Fourth up, Central Intelligence Director Leon Panetta predicting on ABC’s “This Week” program June 27 that Iran could have two nuclear weapons by 2012: “We think they [Iran] have enough low-enriched uranium for two weapons…and while there is continuing debate [within Iran] right now about whether or not they ought to proceed with a bomb…they clearly are developing their nuclear capacity.” He went on to say that the U.S. is sharing intelligence with Israelis and that Tel Aviv is “willing to give us the room to be able to try to change Iran diplomatically and culturally and politically.”

But, unfortunately, Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation has better odds than most, so as I go through the headlines, stories likeDebka.com reporting that the "Secret Israeli emissary fails to cool Turkey's animosity" and the J-Post headline "Iran: Sanctions won't stop us" remind me that we're on something of a clock.

While the Dakota Voice headlines today "Another report of Israeli preparations for Iran Strike", recent US ship sailings including the largest ever joint sub deployment from the west coast a few weeks back, all point to this summer being 'break point'; jets and equipment can't be moved up for an attack and then left indefinitely. There's a logistic and maintenance clock now running.

Sorry to begin with such a detailed discussion about something not specifically economics or Second Depression related (although it is, in 72-point bold), but trying to scalp a few bucks out of day trading seems sheer folly and a distraction against the bigger picture - the rock ledge the lemmings are about to run off this fall.

WAY: technology and programming behind "predictive linguistics".

TimeTalk

ALTA Process

 Some loose ends...

Grading Financial Regulatory Reform

This morning, we learned of a huge compromise in regulatory reform. The expectation was that no one was happy with the bill, but the politicians, who all get to go home to the voters and say “Well, at least we passed something.”

Overall, I give this a C minus: There are simply too many Fs to give them a much higher grade.

However, the recent and very large jump in magntitude of the language forecast for the 'israeli mistake', sub set 'active war launch', is too much to ignore. So without regard as to how long it may take, or the many other ramifications, the data streaming in now suggests that the [israeli mistake] that leads to so much planetary misery is on, and likely soon.

Please note that the temporal markers along the way to the [active attack phase (of israeli mistake)] have all been met, and the largest, and closest to the actual manifestation of the [israeli mistake] was the [ranking general faux pas (mal mots)] that we have just seen fulfilled in these most recent news stories about Obama and his General McCrystal.

MANY YEARS ago, when I wanted to ridicule the addiction of our leaders to the use of force, I paraphrased a saying that reflects much of Jewish wisdom: “if force does not work, use brains.” In order to show how far we, the Israelis, are different from the Jews, I changed the words: “If force doesn’t work, use more force.”

I thought of it as a joke. But, as happens to many jokes in our country, it has become reality. It is now the credo of many primitive Israelis, headed by Ehud Barak.

In practice, the security of a state depends on many factors, and military force is but one of them. In the long run, world public opinion is stronger. The pope has many divisions.

In many respects, Israel is still a strong country. But, as the sudden illumination of the flotilla affair has shown, time is not working in our favor. We should deepen our roots in the world and in the region – which means making peace with our neighbors – as long as we are as strong as we are now.

If force doesn’t work, more force will not necessarily work either.

If force doesn’t work, force doesn’t work. Period.