gmane.politics.communism.environmental

Fwd: The man with too many faces

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-25T17:22:41

Real power never has to ask, never.  Looks like he went too far and power
has been pulled.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 7:20 PM
Subject: Fwd: The man with too many faces
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

Well, well, no wonder Steve Jobs is no longer with us billions who loved
and lionised him.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brasscheck TV <news< at >brasschecktv.com>
Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:03 AM
Subject: The man with too many faces
To: Suzanne <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>

===========================================
NOTE to Brasscheck TV subscribers:
Anytime you want to unsubscribe just click
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Suzanne,

There's President Obama, Candidate Obama, Obama the Author, even a
Rebellious Youth Obama, and more.

But these different personas don't demonstrate the evolution of a
man's character, they demonstrate the unraveling of a fictitious
character.

Who exactly IS the man we call Barry Soetoro, or Barack Obama, or
Mr. President?

Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/10679.html

Goodman Green
- Brasscheck

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Re: Fwd: GE Apples Coming to Canada?

Romi Elnagar — 2012-05-25T11:20:52

Thanks for this, Suzanne, but you don't need to trouble yourself to forward anything from the R-G list to me.  I'm on it, but I've been preoccupied with family matters for a while.  I'll start to post again when things settle down here.

Best,
Romi

________________________________
 From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
To: bluesapphire48< at >yahoo.com 
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 12:30 AM
Subject: [R-G] Fwd:  GE Apples Coming to Canada?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 7:30 AM
Subject: Fwd: [R-G] GE Apples Coming to Canada?
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

Rejecting these GE seeds and seedlings is almost impossible to stop they
are so far along.  Draconian, universal, laws must be made to criminalise
the process by which they are made. Then create the forces needed to stop
them and reverse the present damage, although that may no longer be
possible. One of the things needed most is a free and open internet world
wide, which the US made ACTA, TPP, SOPA ect. will ensure does not remain
available just in order to sell those very seeds world wide!  Think that
one through, please. Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Menec <bookfind< at >mymts.net>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 2:58 AM
Subject: [R-G] GE Apples Coming to Canada?
To: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Cc: RAD TIMES <resist< at >comcast.net>, RAD GREEN <
rad-green< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu>, ICH <emailtom< at >cox.net>, ALTERNET <
feedback< at >alternet.org>, COMMON DREAMS <editor< at >commondreams.org>,
COUNTERCURRENTS <editor< at >countercurrents.org>

http://climate-connections.**org/2012/05/24/ge-apples-**
coming-to-canada-apples-that-**wont-go-brown-coming-soon/<http://climate-connections.org/2012/05/24/ge-apples-coming-to-canada-apples-that-wont-go-brown-coming-soon/>

BY GLOBAL JUSTICE ECOLOGY PROJECT | MAY 24, 2012

GE Apples Coming to Canada?
Apples that won't go brown coming soon?

Note: A new movement against GMO foods, trees and other crops is emerging
just in time to confront industry's attempts to shove more unlabeled
engineered foods down our throats.  What will be the impact of these GE
apples on children?  This is unknown.  The GE industry doesn't test for the
risks and the government rarely requires them to, which is why citizen
vigilance is crucial.  See the previous post about the town of Richmond, BC
rejecting GMO foods and trees.

-The GJEP Team

Cross-Posted from the Toronto Sun, MAY 23, 2012

A new genetically engineered apple may be making its way to Canada.
(Handout) Apples that won't go brown could be could be planted in Canada as
early as 2014.

Canadian biotech company Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc. has applied to the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency for permission to grow and market its
'arctic granny' and 'arctic golden' apples.

The genetically engineered fruit, initially developed in Australia, was
created with its gene responsible for enzymatic browning turned off, or
"silenced."

There are other varieties of apples, such as empires, that keep their white
flesh even when exposed for several hours, but the arctics are completely
non-browning, and will remain white for several days, even weeks.

Okanagan Specialty Fruits hopes to complete the approval process by this
summer in Canada and the United States so it can begin planting its trees
next year.

The company said test fruit could be expected the year after.

"Our focus right now is working with the industry to . allay their
concerns," said Okanagan's founder and grower, Neal Carter.

He said the benefits of an all-white, all-the-time apple are sure to
outweigh the concerns of the public about genetically modified fruit.

Growers, for instance, will be able to sell more apples because they won't
be throwing out bruised and brown fruit. That means packers will get more
apples at higher grades. And fresh-cut processors won't have to chemically
treat the fruit, and juice processors will get clearer juice.

The arctic apple "has all the GM baggage," said Carter, but "at the end of
the day, it's just a very nice apple that doesn't go brown."

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Fwd: GE Apples Coming to Canada?

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-25T05:30:35

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 7:30 AM
Subject: Fwd: [R-G] GE Apples Coming to Canada?
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

Rejecting these GE seeds and seedlings is almost impossible to stop they
are so far along.  Draconian, universal, laws must be made to criminalise
the process by which they are made. Then create the forces needed to stop
them and reverse the present damage, although that may no longer be
possible. One of the things needed most is a free and open internet world
wide, which the US made ACTA, TPP, SOPA ect. will ensure does not remain
available just in order to sell those very seeds world wide!  Think that
one through, please. Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Menec <bookfind< at >mymts.net>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 2:58 AM
Subject: [R-G] GE Apples Coming to Canada?
To: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Cc: RAD TIMES <resist< at >comcast.net>, RAD GREEN <
rad-green< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu>, ICH <emailtom< at >cox.net>, ALTERNET <
feedback< at >alternet.org>, COMMON DREAMS <editor< at >commondreams.org>,
COUNTERCURRENTS <editor< at >countercurrents.org>

http://climate-connections.**org/2012/05/24/ge-apples-**
coming-to-canada-apples-that-**wont-go-brown-coming-soon/<http://climate-connections.org/2012/05/24/ge-apples-coming-to-canada-apples-that-wont-go-brown-coming-soon/>

BY GLOBAL JUSTICE ECOLOGY PROJECT | MAY 24, 2012

GE Apples Coming to Canada?
Apples that won't go brown coming soon?

Note: A new movement against GMO foods, trees and other crops is emerging
just in time to confront industry's attempts to shove more unlabeled
engineered foods down our throats.  What will be the impact of these GE
apples on children?  This is unknown.  The GE industry doesn't test for the
risks and the government rarely requires them to, which is why citizen
vigilance is crucial.  See the previous post about the town of Richmond, BC
rejecting GMO foods and trees.

-The GJEP Team

Cross-Posted from the Toronto Sun, MAY 23, 2012

A new genetically engineered apple may be making its way to Canada.
(Handout) Apples that won't go brown could be could be planted in Canada as
early as 2014.

Canadian biotech company Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc. has applied to the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency for permission to grow and market its
'arctic granny' and 'arctic golden' apples.

The genetically engineered fruit, initially developed in Australia, was
created with its gene responsible for enzymatic browning turned off, or
"silenced."

There are other varieties of apples, such as empires, that keep their white
flesh even when exposed for several hours, but the arctics are completely
non-browning, and will remain white for several days, even weeks.

Okanagan Specialty Fruits hopes to complete the approval process by this
summer in Canada and the United States so it can begin planting its trees
next year.

The company said test fruit could be expected the year after.

"Our focus right now is working with the industry to . allay their
concerns," said Okanagan's founder and grower, Neal Carter.

He said the benefits of an all-white, all-the-time apple are sure to
outweigh the concerns of the public about genetically modified fruit.

Growers, for instance, will be able to sell more apples because they won't
be throwing out bruised and brown fruit. That means packers will get more
apples at higher grades. And fresh-cut processors won't have to chemically
treat the fruit, and juice processors will get clearer juice.

The arctic apple "has all the GM baggage," said Carter, but "at the end of
the day, it's just a very nice apple that doesn't go brown."

______________________________**_________________
Rad-Green mailing list
Rad-Green< at >greenhouse.**economics.utah.edu<Rad-Green< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu>
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
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Fwd: The largest demonstration in Canadian history

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-25T05:20:48

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 7:20 AM
Subject: Fwd: [R-G] The largest demonstration in Canadian history
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

This is the first serious challenge to the Israeli/Harper Government.  I
categorise this government Israeli as they have come out more than the US
to champion all Israeli wish lists that now dominate the US/EU world agenda
forcing the five hundred million of the EU and the 300 million of the US to
wage nuclear, regime change, genocidal, wars on the Middle East, Africa,
Russia, and China, or on an approximate total of 6 billion humans by less
than one billion humans.  A war that will only be won by species
extinction.  I think the Montreal students got that. Twenty-first century
empire means just this, no-one will survive.

Bhopal, The Gulf of Mexico BP oil eruption, Chernoble and Fukushima, large
drones, butterfly drones, the nuclear bombs dropped as normal munitions by
European Union North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member vassal states of
the United States with the full approval of the United Nations set up to
promote peace, the seeds of life, seeds engineered genetically to kill all
who live on their produce sold as if normal by the US State Department
itself. The most powerful country in the world.  We in the streets are the
only chance to stop the inevitable end of the species.  The brain dead
infants of Fallujah, Iraq from the US Uranium bombs in 2003-2004 will be
repeated in the infants born after the 2011 tons of enriched Uranium bombs
dropped by the US/NATO/UK in 2011.  They are our future.

Canada was where the US war protestor students used to flee 30 years ago
the induction into the US military machine in order to survive and have
lives with futures. Canadian government is now the reverse of what it was.
Making those numbers "Over one billion humans are supporting the erasure of
6 billion humans, an unsustainable equation.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Menec <bookfind< at >mymts.net>
Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 4:10 PM
Subject: [R-G] The largest demonstration in Canadian history
To: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Cc: RAD TIMES <resist< at >comcast.net>, RAD GREEN <
rad-green< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu>, ICH <emailtom< at >cox.net>, ALTERNET <
feedback< at >alternet.org>, COMMON DREAMS <editor< at >commondreams.org>, DISSIDENT
VOICE <editor< at >dissidentvoice.org>, COUNTERCURRENTS <
editor< at >countercurrents.org>, "ANTIWAR.COM" <egarris2< at >antiwar.com>,
ASHEVILLE GLOBAL REPORT <emartin< at >agrnews.org>

http://rabble.ca/blogs/**bloggers/ethan-cox/2012/05/**
500000-streets-quebecs-**students-are-winning<http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/ethan-cox/2012/05/500000-streets-quebecs-students-are-winning>

400,000+ in the streets? Quebec's students are winning...

BY ETHAN COX | MAY 24, 2012

Tuesday started out looking like a bad day for a protest. A constant
drizzle fell on Montreal's streets throughout the morning, turning my shoes
into a soggy mess before I even reached the demo. In the wake of Loi 78
many expected a record turnout to celebrate the student strike's 100th day,
and rage against the infringements of our civil liberties contained in the
"Special Law", but with the rain I wasn't so sure.

I should have known my fellow Quebecois are made of sterner stuff! Rather
than a wet dud, Tuesday turned out to be the largest demonstration in
Canadian history. A moment in time I'm sure I will be telling my
grandchildren about one day.

I started to realize the immensity of the day four or five blocks away,
when I realized the sidewalks on both sides of the street were packed with
one way traffic. Arriving at Place des Festivals at 2PM on the dot, I found
a sea of humanity as far as the eye could see. The entire Place, from St.
Catherine to Président Kennedy, was packed too densely to allow much
navigation. I made my way to a raised photographer's platform which allowed
a better view of the enormity of the crowd. From there I could see that it
filled St. Catherine in both directions, and the double lanes of De
Maisonneuve and Président Kennedy all the way to St. Urbain.

Wave after wave of new arrivals joined the crowd, hundreds at a time. The
rain had finally stopped and an oppressive and unexpected heat had people
shedding layers left and right. The mood was festive, but determined, as
signs read "This is only the beginning..." and "Bring it on".

Crossing paths with a trade unionist I know, he reminded me that when half
of Place des Festivals was equally packed for a free Arcade Fire show,
media had estimated the crowd at 100,000. We agreed that there were likely
200,000 people there, with more joining by the minute.

If anyone believed this to be an exclusively student movement, the crowd on
Tuesday would have set them straight. As I did my best to circulate through
the sardine can, I was struck by how closely the protesters resembled a
cross section of Quebec society. Students were clearly in the minority, as
grey hair and strollers were everywhere. I noticed a large number of high
school age students, some in distinctive school uniforms.

Sometime after 2:30 the protest set off up Jeanne Mance, where I bumped
into the CUTV crew. For those who don't know, Concordia University
Television (CUTV) have been revolutionizing the way in which citizens
interact with social movements by livestreaming almost all student protests
through their website: CUTVMontreal.ca. Despite a shoestring budget they
have been the eyes and ears of the population, frequently risking injury to
stay at the front lines and drawing audience numbers that would be the envy
of any cable news channel.

The readily available livestream, coupled with francophone Quebeckers
sudden embrace of Twitter, have allowed those at home to participate in
demonstrations, report injuries and events as they see them live, and
interact directly with demonstrators. This has done wonders to spread the
movement outside of its Montreal base, and contributed to regular
demonstrations in places like Sherbrooke and Trois Rivières, which are
unaccustomed to them.

As the march hit Sherbrooke there was a moment of indecisiveness as
contradictory commands of "left" and "right" were shouted out. Eventually
the march, which was classified as the CLASSE march in media reports,
turned left, spurning the route submitted to police and choosing to embrace
civil disobedience.

I stayed near the front, chatting with friends as we went along Sherbrooke
before turning down Peel, a good ten blocks West of where we started. A
friend called as we marched down Peel, informing me he'd just arrived at
Place des Festivals and it remained packed with protesters as those leaving
on the march were replaced with late arrivals. From there we descended to
René Levesque and returned East. As we marched I bumped into a good friend
who works as a journalist covering the protests. He was estimating the size
of the crowd at around 50,000, a number I scoffed at. As we passed Jeanne
Mance we looked up to see the Place des Festivals was still packed with
people. There were twenty blocks of marchers behind us, yet our starting
point remained a mob scene. My friend the journalist started to revise his
estimate upwards. This was clearly unlike anything we had ever seen before.

Chants alternated between a mocking "we are more than 50" in reference to
the illegality of marches over that size in Loi 78, and a variety of
colourful descriptions of the "special law". The mood became more and more
festive as marchers realized the size of the statement being made with the
numbers in the street. An almost party-like atmosphere swept us up, with
smiles on every face.

The march continued along René Levesque, before turning up Berri. As the
crowd hit the Berri overpass, I ran up on top of the overpass for a better
view. The street was full, from one side to the other, as far as we could
see. The large apartment building overlooking the overpass was festooned
with red square banners and dozens of people hung out their windows,
banging on pots and pans. I've confirmed with several journalist friends
who have attended all the demos that they have noticed a striking change
since the passage of Loi 78. The number of motorists honking in support,
and residents cheering as a march passes by, has increased exponentially.
Even in Westmount, an evening march was cheered along the well-to-do
streets, with middle aged women running out to distribute water bottles.

Quebeckers who might not care deeply about the student cause, are outraged
at the "special law", and made their support felt throughout the day
Tuesday, as passersby waved and cheered at the demo constantly.

As the march turned right on Cherrier, a whimsical chant of "The people,
enrolled, will never be defeated!" was taken up. People danced in the
streets and the crowd buzzed with news that CTV had reported over 400,000
on air. As we reached the massive and sprawling Parc Lafontaine I received
a tweet from my journalist friend: "I am prepared to cook my hat and eat
it". He now agreed there were over 400,000 in the streets.

As we descended into the park a large contingent from the front of the
march continued on through the park, while the bulk of people milled
around. We sat down and took a breather, watching the seemingly never
ending march continue to file in. After around 30 minutes we decided to
take a walk back to see what was happening. A stranger asked to borrow my
phone, and reported that he had spoken with a friend further back in the
protest, who was only now passing Central Station at Berri and De
Maisonneuve. A friend who had left texted me from the Berri overpass to
inform me there were still protesters down Berri as far as the eye could
see, this almost an hour after we had passed under it with the head of the
march. "This may be a 400,000 person demo alright", he wrote "in walking
back through the march it's f'ing enormous".

When we left, some time later, the march had still not ceased its steady
flow of people into the park. Unfortunately a brief but violent rainstorm
drove most to leave, while several other marches departed in different
directions.

We retreated from the rain to Else's, a quiet neighborhood bar on Roy St.
Joined there by four or five journalist friends, from both independent and
mainstream outlets, we agreed that the march was easily in the territory of
a half million people. But as smart phones appeared, and news sites were
canvassed a series of outraged cries went up. "This article says "tens of
thousands!", "So does CBC!"

A friend who works for a mainstream media outlet counseled patience. "Those
are early estimates, don't worry, the headlines tomorrow will be hundreds
of thousands". But as time passed and more people joined us, more stories
cited the tens of thousands figure. This led to a heated debate about
journalistic ethics.

The same journalist noted that journos are bound by what they're told, not
what they see. Therefore he argued that they would publish what the police
told them, even if they thought it wasn't true. He also explained that
journalists have a system for crowds, one which only applies to protests,
and not any other type of gathering. Because tens of thousands could mean
80 or 90,000, a demonstration below that threshold will often be described
as "several thousand" if it is in the area of 20 or 30,000. By the same
token, tens of thousands is a safe estimate that, it can be argued, would
apply to crowds as large as 200 or 300,000, so it will be used even if a
journalist believes the crowd to be over 100,000.

We argued that since no one but journos knows this code, they are
misinforming their audience about the single most salient fact of any demo,
its attendance. We argued that a reader who sees "several thousand" will
assume that means 2 or 3,000, not 20,000 and a reader who sees "tens of
thousands" will assume it means 20 or 30,000, not over 100,000.

He reassured us that notwithstanding this, today's demo had been so huge
they would report, at a bare minimum, hundreds of thousands. He accepted a,
perhaps drunken, challenge to wear a red square pinned to his crotch at the
next demo if he was wrong, and headed out to the night demo. Sadly, he'll
be wearing that red square. Although Journal de Montreal published the
number 150,000 on their front page, most other papers, including The
Gazette and National Post published tens of thousands. As did CBC, CTV and
other outlets online. The Globe's print edition estimated between 100 and
250,000, but its online content continues to say tens of thousands.
Meanwhile La Presse cites "Police sources" as saying there were over
100,000. So if the police are telling reporters over 100,000, where does
"tens of thousands" come from?

Alternative outlets meanwhile, universally published estimates between 400
and 500,000 people, in line with the initial estimates on CTV and in other
MSM outlets, which were subsequently revised heavily downward. Several
papers cited CLASSE's estimate, for its march only, which did not include
the large FEUQ/FECQ and labour union march, of 250,000.

If all you knew about the protest was what you got from mainstream media,
you would logically conclude there were around 30 or 40,000 people there. I
have yet to speak to a journalist who believes there were "tens of
thousands" there, but they all printed it.

Whatever the excuse, that's wrong. People deserve the truth, or as close as
a journalist can get to giving it to them. Is it hard to tell the
difference between 300,000 and 400,000? Sure. Between 20,000 and 400,000?
Not so much.

As for this writer, I attended the Iraq war demo in 2003 when between 200
and 300,000 took to the streets. I was at the Arcade fire concert and I've
seen most of Quebec's big demos. This was larger than all of them, by
several orders of magnitude. I don't know if it was 400,000 or 500,000, it
might even have been closer to 300,000. But it sure as hell wasn't "tens of
thousands".

And coming as it did on the heels of a poll showing an 18 point shift in
public opinion from the government to the students, it was the second
serious body blow Charest took in 24 hours. For my money, Charest is
reeling, and trying to get out of this mess without losing face. If the
students press their advantage now, they'll win. How big a victory remains
to be determined. At this point I'm not even sure Charest will survive till
the next election.

Hundreds of thousands in the streets is a message to the rest of this
province that the students fight is their fight too. The next poll will
show an even more dramatic shift of public support. Charest will either
back down or be driven from office. Notwithstanding the hard work that
remains to be done, the students have won, and yesterday it was clear that
they knew it too.
___
I will be publishing my take on why the students are right, and this
struggle is so important, in the next few days on rabble.ca and
forgetthebox.net, keep an eye out for it!

You can follow Ethan on twitter, where he posts regularly on the student
strike, at < at >EthanCoxMTL

Ethan Cox is a 28 year-old organizer, comms guy and writer from Montreal.
He cut his political teeth accrediting the Dawson Student Union against
ferocious opposition from the college administration and has worked as a
union organizer for the Public Service Alliance of Canada. He has also
worked on several successful municipal and federal election campaigns, and
was a member of Quebec central office staff for the NDP in the 2011
election. Most recently he served as Quebec Director and Senior
Communications Advisor on Brian Topp's NDP leadership campaign. You can
follow him on twitter < at >EthanCoxMtl

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Fwd: 'Non-polio' paralysis increases after polio vaccinations

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-25T04:39:51

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 12:21 AM
Subject: Fwd: 'Non-polio' paralysis increases after polio vaccinations
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

An example of the common and careless homicidal tendencies of the US
International Corporations.  Just as Westinghouse makes Nuclear reactors
just for export, more cheaply made with short cuts in making it to shave
expenses, like the defective ones they had built in Fukushima 40 years ago,
medical corporations do the same thing, with the same results, horrible
deaths.  They have never, ever, been held accountable. Just imagine what
our globe will look like after one thousand years of Corporate rule.
 Please.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brasscheck TV <news< at >brasschecktv.com>
Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 6:35 PM
Subject: 'Non-polio' paralysis increases after polio vaccinations
To: Suzanne <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>

===========================================
NOTE to Brasscheck TV subscribers:
Anytime you want to unsubscribe just click
the link at the very bottom of this e-mail.
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Suzanne,

Even as they tell us that polio is being eradicated largely due to
vaccination campaigns, the number of 'non-polio' paralysis cases
skyrocket in vaccinated areas of India.

In neighboring Pakistan, of the 136 children that came down with
actual polio in 2011, 107 of them had had received the oral polio
vaccine. That's over 78% of them.

This is the news from India...

Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/10687.html

Goodman Green
- Brasscheck

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GE Apples Coming to Canada?

Richard Menec — 2012-05-25T00:58:39

http://climate-connections.org/2012/05/24/ge-apples-coming-to-canada-apples-that-wont-go-brown-coming-soon/

BY GLOBAL JUSTICE ECOLOGY PROJECT | MAY 24, 2012

GE Apples Coming to Canada?
Apples that won't go brown coming soon?

Note: A new movement against GMO foods, trees and other crops is emerging
just in time to confront industry's attempts to shove more unlabeled
engineered foods down our throats. What will be the impact of these GE
apples on children? This is unknown. The GE industry doesn't test for the
risks and the government rarely requires them to, which is why citizen
vigilance is crucial. See the previous post about the town of Richmond, BC
rejecting GMO foods and trees.

-The GJEP Team

Cross-Posted from the Toronto Sun, MAY 23, 2012

A new genetically engineered apple may be making its way to Canada.
(Handout) Apples that won't go brown could be could be planted in Canada as
early as 2014.

Canadian biotech company Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc. has applied to the
Canadian Food Inspection Agency for permission to grow and market its
'arctic granny' and 'arctic golden' apples.

The genetically engineered fruit, initially developed in Australia, was
created with its gene responsible for enzymatic browning turned off, or
"silenced."

There are other varieties of apples, such as empires, that keep their white
flesh even when exposed for several hours, but the arctics are completely
non-browning, and will remain white for several days, even weeks.

Okanagan Specialty Fruits hopes to complete the approval process by this
summer in Canada and the United States so it can begin planting its trees
next year.

The company said test fruit could be expected the year after.

"Our focus right now is working with the industry to . allay their
concerns," said Okanagan's founder and grower, Neal Carter.

He said the benefits of an all-white, all-the-time apple are sure to
outweigh the concerns of the public about genetically modified fruit.

Growers, for instance, will be able to sell more apples because they won't
be throwing out bruised and brown fruit. That means packers will get more
apples at higher grades. And fresh-cut processors won't have to chemically
treat the fruit, and juice processors will get clearer juice.

The arctic apple "has all the GM baggage," said Carter, but "at the end of
the day, it's just a very nice apple that doesn't go brown."

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[BillTottenWeblog] False Choices

Bill Totten — 2012-05-24T23:51:58

by Damien Perrotin

A Breton's perspective on the world

The view from Brittany (March 10 2012)

It is election time in France. Five weeks from now, we will elect our president for the next five years and unless he does something really stupid, the socialist pretender, Francois Hollande, will win in a landslide - albeit not necessarily with the insane margin polls predict. The most striking feature of this election, however, is not the unpopularity of the incumbent president but the similarity of their worldview.

French Presidents are chosen in a two-round runoff election, with the candidates falling into four categories. First you have the two or three contenders, who have a realistic chance of being elected. Generally those are the candidate of the Socialist Party and whoever dominates the moderate right at that particular moment. This time it will be Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Then you have the outsiders who most probably won't make it to the second round, but might under the right circumstances. This time, it will be Francois Bayrou (center), Jean-Luc-Melenchon (Left Front) and Marine Le Pen (National Front).

Behind them stand the marginal candidates : Eva Joly (Greens), Jacques Cheminade (the local Larouchie) Nathalie Arthaud (troskyist), Philippe Poutou (another brand of troskyism) and Dominique de Villepin (moderate right, with a serious grudge against Sarkozy).

Finally, there are those who will be denied ballot access because they don't have at least 500 signed presentations from elected officials. They are too numerous to be listed and their programs are often masterworks of involuntary comedy.

All of them, however, want to restart growth.

Of course, there are differences, often significant ones. The Greens, for instance, want a Green Growth, fueled by renewable energy. The socialists want to lower nuclear share in our energy mix to a mere fifty percent. The Naional Front wants a French Growth in French Francs (muslim people need not apply). Nicolas Sarkozy ... well, Nicolas Sarkozy badly needs some growth to be reelected, but that does not sound likely.

The idea that sustained growth might be a thing of the past, however, is not something responsible people mention in a polite conversation, even if those people happen to be green.

There are many reasons for that, but one of them is the way the Green movement developed in France. Political ecology first entered French politics during the early seventies, with the candidacy of Rene Dumont at the 1974 presidential elections, two mere years after the founding of the first ecological magazine La Gueule Ouverte. Nobody talked about the climate then - it was assumed that at some point in the future it would become colder, but that hardly mattered. The subjects du jour were resource depletion, runaway pollution, demographic explosion and of course nuclear warfare.

The Meadows report had just been published, and contrary to what is assumed today, it triggered a huge debate within French society. Ecological themes nearly became mainstream and in 1978 an educational animated TV series called Once Upon a Time... Man was broadcast on the third channel. A whole generation of children watched it, notably the last episode, which described the future of our civilization ... and its demise because of pollution and resource wars.

Yet this concern faded during the eighties and when the Greens resurfaced as a cultural and political force, they had gone over to standard upper middle class environmentalism. Ironically, one of the main causes of this devolution was the 1973 oil shock. It convinced the French elites that dependence on foreign oil was a dangerous thing. They quickly found a solution : nuclear.

At the time, it was not as stupid as it sounds now. Chernobyl was still in the distant future and the only alternative was importing gas from the USSR or Algeria. We still produced uranium at that time, and there were in Africa a number of producer countries both friendly and able to control their territory.

Besides, everybody knows that accidents are unfrench and that our borders are radiation-proof.

The Greens, of course, opposed this move, as well as some other movements. It was a huge fight, but outside Brittany, they lost. Only the Breton nuclear plants were canceled when the Socialist Party won the elections in 1981 but the fight itself focused the Green movement on the nuclear industry and away from sustainability.

Meanwhile, France began to experience high unemployment during the late seventies, the result of the first oil crisis, but also of the more or less deliberate choice of favoring high wages and pensions over full employment. The Keynesian policies of the first years of the presidency of Francois Mitterand did not help either, and France was stuck with an unemployment rate permanently over eight percent.

France was, and is still, a welfare state and unemployment benefits can be quite generous - they depend on how much you were paid before you lost your job. They don't last for ever, however, and when they do end, the fall can be quite brutal and people who wonder whether they will still have a home at the end of the year tend to put environment very low on their list of priority.

The Greens having failed to make the connection between resource depletion and economic decline, green politics became restricted to the left wing upper middle class - in French, we call them the "bobos". Of course, the upper middle class has its own demands and concerns. It wants to keep its privileged position within the society, but wants also to be seen as the progressive good guys. This has resulted in a focus on societal issues and policies which look superficially left wing but actually reinforce the status-quo, such as free immigration (aka brain and manpower pump) or "fair trade", which in fact locks poor countries in their role of provider of underpriced raw material.

The hedonistic world-view of the bobos, means that they will oppose any policy aiming at reinforcing communities - as the Archdruid has stated, healthy communities come to a price, a price the upper middle class is not in a hurry to pay.

The result has been an ideological disaster mixing tokenism and, since the bobos have a lot to lose from a true relocalization of economy or from a true simplification of the society, an insistence that all our problems can be solved if we invest heavily in the right green technologies and create a lot of green jobs for the self-appointed green elite.

I am afraid those delusions won't survive their, arguably unfortunate, collision with reality.

Curiously, a few parts of the traditional left may be more aware of the problems ahead.

Less than a month ago, Michel Rocard published a book titled Mes points sur les i - Propos sur la presidentielle et la crise, where he explains that growth won't return and that the European Union is a non-entity in international politics. For those who don't know French politics, Michel Rocard is the closest thing to a an elder statesman we have. During the seventies, he was the main rival of Francois Mitterand within the Socialist Party and his prime minister from 1988 to 1991. He probably spared France a colonial war in New Caledonia, but he and his followers were progressively marginalized in the following years and he was finally exiled to the European Parliament.

Having become a non-entity in French politics, he can now speak his mind and say what other politicians cannot. That Francois Hollande prefaced his book shows he is listened to, if not necessarily heeded.

Of course, Michel Rocard speaks from within the ideology of progress. He sees the future as a time of difficulties, not as the long descent it will be. Unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge the limits of our uranium supply, he advocates keeping our nuclear plants "lest we enter degrowth", and of course, his goal is not to accompany the coming descent, so as to make it less brutal, but to keep the status quo as long as possible.

This half-lucidity will certainly influence my vote next month, especially when I compare it to the Greens' delusions, but it makes the curtailed character of our political choices painfully obvious. It is not that we cannot see the coming crisis - Michel Rocard sees it clearly enough and the Greens, for all their delusions are somewhat aware of it. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of us shy away from its logical consequences, because they contradict our ideology.

In fact, we have, during the last decades, more or less consciously chosen to put our faith in progress before the survival of our civilization, and this choice has made all other political choices, if not irrelevant - a fascistic or communist regime in France would be an unmitigated disaster - at least without long term consequences.

The only horizon is now collapse. The only question is how our communities will adapt to it locally, far from the political rallies and the golden halls of the senate.

http://theviewfrombrittany.blogspot.jp/2012/03/false-choices.html

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the appropriate link at the top or bottom of
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[BillTottenWeblog] The Twilight of Protest

Bill Totten — 2012-05-24T13:24:13

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (May 16 2012)

Over the last four months or so, as this blog has sketched out the trajectory of empires in general, and then traced the intricate history of America's empire in particular, I've been avoiding a specific issue. That avoidance hasn't come from any lack of awareness on my part, and if it had been, comments and emails from readers asking when I was going to get around to discussing the issue would have taken care of that in short order. No, it's simply a natural reluctance to bring up a subject that has to be discussed sooner or later, but is guaranteed to generate far more heat than light.

The subject? The role of protest movements in the decline and fall of the American empire.

That's an issue sufficiently burdened with tangled emotions and unstated agendas that even finding a good starting place for the discussion is a challenge. Fortunately I have some assistance, courtesy of Owen Lloyd, who is involved with an organization called Deep Green Resistance and recently wrote a review {1} of my book The Blood of the Earth (2012). It's by no means a bad review. Quite the contrary, Lloyd made a serious effort to grapple with the issues that book tried to raise, and by and large succeeded; where he failed, the misunderstandings were all but inevitable, given the differences between his views and mine. Thus it's all the more striking that his review points up so precisely the reasons why protest movements have by and large been spinning their wheels in empty air for thi
 rty years, and will almost certainly continue to do so while America's empire crashes and burns around them.

The point that matters here is the review's denunciation of one of the central points of the book, which is that those who want to change the world need to start by changing their own lives. According to Lloyd, we don't have time for that, since the biosphere is in dire peril; what's needed instead are the standard tools of contemporary activism - "direct action, community building, and outreach", in his convenient summary. His reasoning is logical enough, as far as it goes; if your house is on fire, after all, it's a little late to install sprinklers and smoke alarms. If the situation is as urgent as Lloyd claims, all other considerations have to take a back seat to an all-out effort to deal with the immediate crisis with the most effective means available.

It's a common enough claim in the contemporary activist community; Derrick Jensen had an article in Orion Magazine {2} a few years back making essentially the same argument. Still, there's a problem with that argument, because the responses Lloyd, Jensen, and other activists are promoting here have been standard across the spectrum of activist groups for more than three decades now, and that's more than enough time to see how well they work. The answer? Well, let's be charitable and say "not very well".

For years now, leading environmentalists have been bemoaning how much ground is being lost year after year, and how little the environmental movement has been able to do even to slow that down. They are quite correct in that assessment, of course. It's standard these days to insist that this simply shows the power differential between the corporate interests that profit from environmental destruction and the citizen groups that are trying to fight them. That argument seems convincing, too, so long as you do what most people these days are taught to do, and ignore the lessons of history.

Glance back to a slightly earlier period and at least one of those lessons stands out in bold relief. In the 1970s, environmental activists facing equally powerful and well-funded corporate interests built a mass movement and forced through landmark legislation. In the United States, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a bevy of less famous but equally important environmental bills crashed through a wall of corporate opposition and became the law of the land. That sort of success is something that today's environmental activists can only daydream about, and it was accomplished using the same tools that activists use today - with one important addition: the environmental activists of that time recognized that the most effective way to advocate any given change was to make tha
 t change in their own lives first. That awareness was not limited to the environmental movement; it was pioneered by the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, who turned it into a core!
  principle
 of their movement - "the personal is political" - and leveraged it efficiently to bring about dramatic if still incomplete gains in women's rights. They recognized, as did many other activists in those years, that if your lifestyle supports a system, and depends on that system, any efforts you may think you're making to force significant change on that system will be wasted breath.

It will be wasted breath because most people, reasonably enough, want to see that there's a life worth living on the other side of the changes your activist movement wants to make, and the best way to give them a glimpse of that life is to enact it yourself. It will also be wasted breath because most people have a tolerably good nose for hypocrisy, and are highly familiar with the kind of demagogy that calls on everybody else to make sacrifices and get by with less so the demagogue doesn't have to do so. Talk to Americans who didn't support either the climate change movement or its corporate opposition, and you'll find that for a good many of them, it was when word of Al Gore's air-conditioned mansion and frequent-flyer miles got around that they decided that global warming was yet another
  manufactured threat, meant to stampede people into acquiescing with somebody's political agenda.

Finally, it will be wasted breath because if the system you think you want to change is also the system that supplies you with a comfortable middle class lifestyle, with all the comforts and conveniences that such a lifestyle supplies, the changes you will push the system to make will pretty reliably be limited to those that will not affect your continued access to the lifestyle, comforts and conveniences in question. The Breton peak oil blogger Damien Perrotin has commented amusingly {3} on the influence of what, in France, are called bobos - that is, bourgeois bohemians (the acronym works equally well in both languages), members of the liberal upper middle classes. Bobos are terribly eager to see themselves as the saviors of the world - that's the bohemian side - and will do absolutely a
 nything to fulfill this role, so long as it doesn't require them to give up any of the benefits of their privileged status - that's the bourgeois side.

I hope the term catches on in this country, because we have a lot of bobos over here, too. Last week's discussion of captive constituencies has a special relevance in any discussion of the species Bobo americanus, because being active in the captive constituency of some otherwise mainstream political faction is a very popular way to play the role of saving the world without risking disruption to the system that gives bobos their privileged status. There are also substantial personal rewards available for those who take leadership positions in captive constituencies, and help keep them captive. It's a role bobos are well qualified to fill, especially those who come from the upper end of the class hierarchy and so have the connections and skills for the job. That's where you get the executiv
 es of mainstream environmental groups who draw six-figure salaries, maintain cordial relationships with corporate sponsors, and show an obvious willingness to settle for whatever scraps may!
  fall from
 the tables of wealth and power onto their corner of America's unwashed kitchen floor.

Still, the bobo-ization of American radicalism is not limited to such obvious cases. When you hear activists loudly insisting that it's possible to save the world without being an ascetic - and I'm sorry to say that, yes, that well-worn trope turned up in the Owen Lloyd book review cited above - you're hearing the echoes of bobo influence, in the form of the popular but profoundly wrong notion that it must somehow be possible to maintain today's unsustainable lifestyles on a sustainable basis. That's not going to happen, for reasons that reach right down into the laws of thermodynamics; no amount of handwaving is going to make it happen; and the sooner we get used to living with a lot less, the less damage we will do to ourselves, each other, and the Earth as the industrial economy sputter
 s to a halt.

Now of course that suggestion is anathema to the existing order of things, in America and elsewhere. It's usually anathema in a declining imperial society. James Francis' useful study Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (1994, 2008) chronicles how the imperial Roman government came to treat the asceticism of Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers as an unendurable threat to its authority. They were quite correct to do so; a system that maintains itself in power by bribing the lower classes with panem et circenses and the middle and upper classes with the more lavish entertainments chronicled in Petronius' Satyricon has no convenient lever with which to control those who have no interest in these things.

Thus it's probably safe to assume that there will be no effective opposition to the status quo in this country until some movement arises that in practice - not just in theory - embraces an essentially ascetic approach. My guess, for what it's worth, is that the first movement to do so will be a revived Marxism. I'm no fan of Karl Marx, and even less a fan of the various ideologues who filled out the framework of his system, but Marxism has features that will give it powerful appeal in the decades ahead. It gives the poor someone to blame for their misfortunes, and does so in a far more detailed manner than (say) the vague rhetoric of the Occupy movement; it is among the few ideologies that manage to fuse a rigorous intellectual tradition with a utopian future vision of religious intensity
 ; and it has a strong ascetic element - the figure of the Marxist revolutionary, lean, passionate, doctrinaire, and contemptuous of material goods except insofar as they might help further !
 the cause,
 was a common social type in Europe for close to a century.

Marxism also has an advantage just now that no amount of money could buy it: the extraordinary campaign of unintended propaganda that the Republican party is currently carrying out on its behalf. Right now, even the most moderate and revenue-neutral attempts to use the powers of government for the benefit of American citizens are being lambasted by the GOP as communism. It's an embarrassing admission of intellectual poverty - one gathers that the American right spent so long belaboring the Red Peril that it really has no idea what to say now that communism isn't around any more - but it also guarantees a familiar kind of backlash. Fundamentalist churches that spend too much time denouncing Satanism, complete with lurid descriptions of Satanic living replete with wild parties and orgiastic 
 sex, get that kind of backlash; that's why they so often find that they've merely succeeded in making devil worship popular among local teens.

In the same way, if the Republicans succeed in rebranding, say, public assistance and food safety laws as Marxist, the most likely result of that campaign will be to convince a great many Americans of otherwise moderate political views that Marx might have had something going for him after all. As suggested above, I don't consider this a good thing; in theory, Marxist revolution leads to the glorious worker's paradise of the future via the inevitable workings of the historical dialectic, but in practice the dictatorship of the proletariat reliably turns into just another dictatorship, with the usual quota of gulags and unmarked mass graves. Still, in a country where most people are frighteningly ignorant of history, and are being driven to the wall by a corrupt and spectacularly mismanaged
  imperial economy in headlong decline, it's unpleasantly unlikely that this point will be remembered.

Still, other forces are pushing American society toward a crisis that its existing political and economic arrangements are unlikely to survive, and the rehabilitation of Marxism is unlikely to proceed fast enough to reach any sort of critical mass before that crisis hits in earnest. It's probably a safe bet that the more mainstream groups will increasingly side with the established order of things - I've long suspected that before all this is over with, the Sierra Club will come out in favor of strip mining the national park system so long as it's done in, ahem, an environmentally sensitive way. Outside the bobosphere, things are much less clear, for the twilight years of a disintegrating political system tolerably often create a fiercely Darwinian environment for ideologies and political 
 movements, in which the only thing that matters is which set of beliefs and personalities can build the strongest coalition at the right time, absorb or marginalize the largest fraction of !
 opposing g
roups, and make the most successful bid for power. As that bubbling cauldron of competing belief systems boils over in violence and systemic disruption, it's anyone's guess who or what will come out on top.

Whoever ends up more or less in charge of what's left of the United States of America when the flames die down and the rubble stops bouncing, though, will have to face a predicament far more difficult than the ones encountered by the winners in 1932, or 1860, or for that matter 1776. All three of these past crises happened when the United States was still a rising power, with vast and largely untapped natural resources, and social and economic systems not yet burdened with the aftermath of a failed empire; the winning side could safely assume that once the immediate crisis was resolved, the nation would return to relative prosperity, pay off its debts, and proceed from there.

That won't be happening this time around. When the crisis is over, whatever form it takes, the United States - or whatever assortment of successor nations end up dividing its territory between them - will be a shattered, bankrupt, resource-poor Third World failed state (or collection of failed states) that will likely have to struggle hard even to regain basic levels of political and economic stability. That struggle will be pursued in a world in which energy and other resources are getting scarcer each year, energy- and resource-intensive technologies are being abandoned by all but a very few rich and powerful nations, and unpredictable swings in temperature, rainfall, and other climatic and ecological factors make life a good deal more difficult for everyone. In that not-so-far-future Am
 erica, the comforts and conveniences most of us now take for granted will be available only to the rich and powerful, if they can be had by anyone at all.

That's the world our choices over the last three decades or so have been preparing for us, and for our grandchildren's grandchildren. In such a world, the people who will have the most to offer their communities, their societies, and the biosphere that supports all our lives will be those who have the courage, now, to walk away from the consumer economy and its smorgasbord of dubious pleasures, and learn, now, how to get by with less, use their own capacities of body and mind, and work with the patterns and processes of nature. For the time being - specifically, until we get close enough to the crisis period that even the most nonviolent challenge to the existing order calls down massive violence in response - protest can still accomplish goals worth pursuing, especially if activists wake 
 up once again to the power of personal example; over the longer run, though, it's the change on the individual, family, and community level that so many of today's activists reject as point!
 less that 
have the most to offer the world.

______________________________

End of the World of the Week #22
______________________________

Comets are fascinating things, and they have an ancient reputation as omens of trouble. Still, you might expect the industrial world in 1973 to have responded with a little less frenzy to the appearance of the much-ballyhooed Comet Kohoutek. It was discovered by Czech astronomer Lubos Kohoutek on March 7 of that year, while it was still a very long way from the sun, and back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that it might put on a spectacular show. The mass media proceeded to lose the word "might" and fill headlines with claims that Kohoutek would be "the comet of the century".

That was all it took to catch the attention of the apocalyptically minded. David Berg aka Moses David, leader of the Children of God sect, did the most to publicize a Kohoutek apocalypse; his proclamation that the comet would destroy the world in January of 1974, printed on bright orange flyers, was handed out by his followers to people all over North America. (I think I may still have one in a file box in the basement.) All through the last months of 1973, the comet had something of the same cachet that the supposed end of the Mayan calendar has today.

As it turned out, though, the prophets were wrong, and so was the media. Far from being "the comet of the century", Comet Kohoutek turned out to be a very modest spectacle indeed, barely visible in the night sky above my backyard - I think we were too close to the streetlights or something. Fans of apocalyptic prophecies quickly found some new prediction of doom to discuss, and the phrase "Comet Kohoutek" had a brief moment of fame as a synonym for "dud".

Fwd: James F. Tracy: FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPRESSING INFORMATION: Public Opinion in America's 21st Century Police State

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-24T06:36:31

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 8:36 AM
Subject: Fwd: James F. Tracy: FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPRESSING INFORMATION: Public
Opinion in America's 21st Century Police State
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

That framework, set up through the constant Wall Street, Goldman Sachs
fiscal manipulation, for suppressing information in Europe depends on
actively removing from view and hearing, EU, BBC news programs and
newspapers that give balanced actual news.  In Netherlands the careful
efficiency with which this has been done since 9/11 is fully on view.
Euronews is a fine television program covering world news from the EU
perspective. It gives regular information on how to access International
Human Rights law that each EU citizens is eligible for. For instance, it
was shown in gyms on the running and bicycling machines in 2008, 2009, 2010
and before...but in 2011, as the US induced  fiscal crisis intensified,
Greece's best fleeing their own country never to return, the desperate
committing suicide, CNN replaced the BBC World and Euronews reporting on
all machines.   As the NATO meeting in Chicago, IL, USA became overheated
with military fighting planes buzzing the vast city advertising what they
do best, terrify, CNN briefly showed a clip of a BBC reporter asking a
cogent question to the panel of NATO dignitaries during that open question
time. It lasted two seconds to be replaced with sports 5 minute clip, then
cooking classes in Burma lasting another 7 minutes.  The crucial NATO
question and answer period gone never to return on that monolithic 'news'
program from Atlanta, Georgia, US.    Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Global Research E-Newsletter <crgeditor< at >yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, May 23, 2012 at 1:02 PM
Subject: James F. Tracy: FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPRESSING INFORMATION: Public
Opinion in America's 21st Century Police State
To: suzannedk< at >gmail.com

Having trouble viewing this email?
Click here
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=o8b4necab&v=001jt41QcDym6DtQD0ylQJVC5680U6W16fed8kNbAR0W3onooUk7-iQpNXiQpRl9fkLXUR_pk7UdtihxlJVRNquHwv5yqfqNJ_RTMqoW6qPxU4%3D
THE FRAMEWORK FOR SUPPRESSING INFORMATION: Public Opinion in America's 21st
Century Police State

By Prof. James F. Tracy

Global Research, May 20, 2012

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30947

The police state’s framework for suppressing information and opinion
arguably threatens all forms of independent thought and appears poised to
intensify as the “war on terror” continues. As the recent emergence of US
plans for indoctrination in reeducation camps reveals, Western governments’
actual enemy is the capacity for a people to exercise critical thought en
route to intervening in and altering political-economic processes.

Public opinion—defined by 19th century English political thinker William
MacKinnon as “that sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by
the best informed, most intelligent, and most moral persons in the
community”—is fundamentally at odds with police state prerogatives also
exemplified in recent US Department of Homeland Security documents.

The technocratic mindset of agencies such as the DHS and Federal Bureau of
Investigation that oversee federal, state, and local policing procedures
seeks to short-circuit and quell dissent by identifying transgressive
thought that deviates from an assumed normalcy, then interlinking it with
perceived threats or violent actions against the state. In a grand
governmental exercise of Freudian-style projection, the DHS’s usage of
inflammatory terms such as “terrorist” and “extremist” are routinely
utilized to emphasize the nature and degree of various activist groups’
alleged deviant ideologies. This practice proceeds in light of the fact
that most every “terrorist” act within the US since 9/11 has been carefully
guided by the FBI or, as was the case with the initial “underwear bomber,
Western intelligence agencies likely working in concert.

A November 2011 DHS document, “Domestic Terrorism and Homegrown Violent
Extremism Lexicon”, is the agency’s recent codification of terms intended
to instruct and aid government officials in recognizing “threats of
terrorism against the United States by facilitating a common understanding
of the terms and conditions that describe terrorist threats to the United
States [sic].”

Then, in a fashion that will be familiar to those who understand the
tactics of groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, an untenable
array of activist pursuits spanning the political spectrum—“Anarchist
Extremists”, “Animal Rights Extremists”, “Anti-Abortion Extremists”,
“Environmental Rights Extremists”—are libelously lobbed together and
defined alongside designations including “Racist Skinhead Extremists”,
“Homegrown Violent Extremist”, “Radicalization”, and “Terrorism”.

As with the phalanx of totalitarian-like legislation such as the PATRIOT
Acts that potentially pit the militarized security state against the US
population, through intentional ambiguity Homeland Security’s definitions
of “terrorism” and “radicalization” come perilously close to classifying
critical thought and expression of almost any sort as terrorism.

“Terrorism” is defined as “any act that is dangerous to human life,
critical infrastructure, or key resources ... and appears to be intended to
intimidate or coerce a civilian population to influence the policy of a
government by intimidation or coercion [sic]” (author’s emphasis). Under
such a definition social protest—speech protected under the First
Amendment—is impermissible. After all, any effective protest seeks through
various ways to effectively petition authorities for a redress of
grievances.

The curious term “radicalization” will be of special interest to academics
and journalists capable of engaging with and examining controversial issues
and concerns that their students or readers may become passionate enough to
weigh in on in some consequential way. According to DHS, a person is
“radicalized” through indoctrination “from a non-violent belief system to a
belief system that includes the willingness to actively advocate,
facilitate, or use violence as a method to effect societal or political
change.”

Alongside DHS’s vague definition of terrorism and the broader prerogatives
of police state ideology and practice, “violence” may be conceived in a
number of ways, such as a person with of a certain racial demarcation
peacefully sitting in the front of a segregated bus, or a concerned citizen
occupying the lobby of a zombie bank.

In reality the actual target of such policing metrics is the small
percentage of the population that have somehow escaped the enforced process
of “de-radicalization”—those who, in other words, still possess the
capacity to think and act critically on meaningful political matters.

Indeed, it is not beyond reason to point out that America is one serious
terrorist attack or mass civil disturbance away from the implementation of
policies to seriously limit or curtail the traffic of ideas, made all the
more easy for authorities through the internet’s centralized configuration.
Society will then be left with the corporate media and their custom
inability (or refusal) to honestly examine and publicize the corrupt nature
and practices of the national security state.

With alternative media outlets providing a broad spectrum of analyses and
perspectives the tiny demarcation between critical thinking and terrorism
outlined in the government’s missives is understandable. Minds not fully
regulated and that risk awakening (radicalization) through an intellectual
epiphany triggered by a professor, journalist, or author prone to
encouraging thought crimes may become "radicalized" and carry out
“terrorist” activities. They may, for example, recognize and critique the
“war on terror” as an extravagant and monstrous deception.

Moreover, individuals capable of possessing, articulating, and acting upon
meaningful ideas and information—of exercising an informed and
self-determined opinion in furtherance of their shared security and
welfare—have no need for a police state to "protect" them, which in all
likelihood is why critical thought and public opinion are the New World
Order’s greatest enemies.

James F. Tracy is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic
University.

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Fwd: suzannedk< at >yahoo.com has shared: Israeli Military Leaders Speak Out Against Iran Strike

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-23T23:13:27

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 1:13 AM
Subject: Fwd: suzannedk< at >yahoo.com has shared: Israeli Military Leaders
Speak Out Against Iran Strike
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

*The men, august in their own country, flatly state that neither Netanyahu
nor his military leader are responsible, trustworthy leaders!  So my gut
instinct has been right after all!  How is it, why is it, the US House and
Senate are so easily bought, and by insane men?*
*What has America become?   Suzanne
*
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: suzannedk< at >yahoo.com <suzannedk< at >yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, May 24, 2012 at 1:04 AM
Subject: suzannedk< at >yahoo.com has shared: Israeli Military Leaders Speak Out
Against Iran Strike
To: suzannedk< at >gmail.com

  Pass on   Israeli Military Leaders Speak Out Against Iran Strike
<http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8350>
 Source: therealnews.com

Retired and outgoing officers express lack of confidence in Natanyau and
his push to attack Iran
<http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8350>
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Fwd: Hip and cool, the President on drugs

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-23T16:37:28

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Wed, May 23, 2012 at 6:37 PM
Subject: Fwd: Hip and cool, the President on drugs
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

Powerful!  Looks like Obama has a serious OOPs factor.   Several in fact.
Steve Jobs told him in a private interview that he is a one term US
President. Unless the US Corporations buy him his next four years, one of
the other jokers may take over.   They, all but one, want to please Israel
then pulverise the Middle East and Africa so the Pentagon should not mind
the change of faces too much.
Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brasscheck TV <news< at >brasschecktv.com>
Date: Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:03 AM
Subject: Hip and cool, the President on drugs
To: Suzanne <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>

===========================================
NOTE to Brasscheck TV subscribers:
Anytime you want to unsubscribe just click
the link at the very bottom of this e-mail.
===========================================

Suzanne,

That's right, the President was on 'Late Night w/ Jimmy Fallon' once
again admitting that he has used drugs recreationally in the past,
but still refuses to end the War on Drug Users.

The President admits to having smoked 'weed' and done "a little
blow" (that's marijuana and cocaine, for anyone not hip to the
lingo), but still wants to put people in jail for it.

One very articulate comedian has decided to call Obama out on his
hypocrisy and declare that "...it's no joke!"

"...if he had done time in prison, time in federal prison, time for
his 'weed' and 'a little blow,' he would not be President of the
United States of America."

He makes a good point.

Here's more...

Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/10678.html

Goodman Green
- Brasscheck

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Fwd: [BillTottenWeblog] A History of the world, BRIC by BRIC

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-22T10:29:34

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:53 AM
Subject: Fwd: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A History of the world, BRIC by BRIC
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

Seeing as the "paralysis of the European Continent' is the doing of the US
and Goldman Sachs Wall Street, this might contribute substantially to the
considerable and increasing loss of the importance of the US dollar world
wide. The suicides from sudden poverty
in Greece have moved on to Italy and Spain.  As was probably planned by the
US, Greece may default and leave the Euro, beginning the actual shattering
of the block.  The blowback on the population of the world could be
astronomical.  One possible bright spot might be that as the EU reforms in
order to strengthen the block, looming structural poverty may force the
NATO vassal countries to pull out of that military, war making group as too
expensive in lives, military hardware, philosophy and sovereign civil
humanitarian law.S

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Totten <shimogamo< at >ashisuto.co.jp>
Date: Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:12 AM
Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A History of the world, BRIC by BRIC
To: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>

Neoliberal dragons, eurasian wet dreams, and robocop fantasies

by Pepe Escobar

Le Monde diplomatique (May 08 2012)

Goldman Sachs - via economist Jim O'Neill - invented the concept of a
rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South
Africa). Some cynics couldn't help calling it the "Bloody Ridiculous
Investment Concept".

Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost
forty percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to
include four of the world's top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey,
Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS? Despite its
well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring
along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept. (It stands for
the next eleven emerging economies.)

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS
a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Yale's canny historian Paul Kennedy (of "imperial overstretch" fame) is
convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a
"historical watershed" taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar
world of "the sole superpower". There are, argues Kennedy, four main
reasons for that: the slow erosion of the US dollar (formerly 85% of global
reserves, now less than sixty percent), the "paralysis of the European
project", Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the
decrepitude of the United Nations.

The Group of Eight (G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20,
which includes the BRICS, might, however, prove to be the real thing. But
there's much to be done to cross that watershed rather than simply be swept
over it willy-nilly: the reform of the UN Security Council, and above all,
the reform of the Bretton Woods system, especially those two crucial
institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

On the other hand, willy-nilly may prove the way of the world. After all,
as emerging superstars, the BRICS have a ton of problems. True, in only the
last seven years Brazil has added forty million people as middle-class
consumers; by 2016, it will have invested another $900 billion - more than
a third of its GDP - in energy and infrastructure; and it's not as exposed
as some BRICS members to the imponderables of world trade, since its
exports are only eleven percent of GDP, even less than the US.

Still, the key problem remains the same: lack of good management, not to
mention a swamp of corruption. Brazil's brazen new monied class is turning
out to be no less corrupt than the old, arrogant, comprador elites that
used to run the country.

In India, the choice seems to be between manageable and unmanageable chaos.
The corruption of the country's political elite would make Shiva proud.
Abuse of state power, nepotistic control of contracts related to
infrastructure, the looting of mineral resources, real estate property
scandals - they've got it all, even if India is not a Hindu Pakistan. Not
yet anyway.

Since 1991, "reform" in India has meant only one thing: unbridled commerce
and getting the state out of the economy. Not surprisingly then, nothing is
being done to reform public institutions, which are a scandal in
themselves. Efficient public administration? Don't even think about it. In
a nutshell, India is a chaotic economic dynamo and yet, in some sense, not
even an emerging power, not to speak of a superpower.

Russia, too, is still trying to find the magic mix, including a competent
state policy to exploit the country's bounteous natural resources,
extraordinary space, and impressive social talent. It must modernize fast
as, apart from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, relative social backwardness
prevails. Its leaders remain uneasy about neighboring China (aware that any
Sino-Russian alliance would leave Russia as a distinctly junior partner).
They are distrustful of Washington, anxious over the depopulation of their
eastern territories, and worried about the cultural and religious
alienation of their Muslim population.

Then again the Putinator is back as president with his magic formula for
modernization: a strategic German-Russian partnership that will benefit the
power elite/business oligarchy, but not necessarily the majority of
Russians.

Dead in the woods

The post-World War Two Bretton Woods system is now officially dead, totally
illegitimate, but what are the BRICS planning to do about it?

At their summit in New Delhi in late March, they pushed for the creation of
a BRICS development bank that could invest in infrastructure and provide
them with back-up credit for whatever financial crises lie down the road.
The BRICS know perfectly well that Washington and the European Union (EU)
will never relinquish control of the IMF and the World Bank. Nonetheless,
trade among these countries will reach an impressive $500 billion by 2015,
mostly in their own currencies.

However, BRICS cohesion, to the extent it exists, centers mostly around
shared frustration with the Masters of the Universe-style financial
speculation that nearly sent the global economy off a cliff in 2008. True,
the BRICS crew also has a notable convergence of policy and opinion when it
comes to embattled Iran, an Arab Sprung Middle East, and Northern Africa.
Still, for the moment the key problem they face is this: they don't have an
ideological or institutional alternative to neo-liberalism and the lordship
of global finance.

As Vijay Prashad has noted, the Global North has done everything to prevent
any serious discussion of how to reform the global financial casino. No
wonder the head of the G-77 group of developing nations (now G-132, in
fact), Thai ambassador Pisnau Chanvitan, has warned of "behavior that seems
to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neocolonialism".

Meanwhile, things happen anyway, helter-skelter. China, for instance,
continues to informally advance the yuan as a globalizing, if not global,
currency. It's already trading in yuan with Russia and Australia, not to
mention across Latin America and in the Middle East. Increasingly, the
BRICS are betting on the yuan as their monetary alternative to a devalued
US dollar.

Japan is using both yen and yuan in its bilateral trade with its huge Asian
neighbor. The fact is that there's already an unacknowledged Asian
free-trade zone in the making, with China, Japan, and South Korea on board.

What's ahead, even if it includes a BRICS-bright future, will undoubtedly
be very messy. Just about anything is possible (verging on likely), from
another Great Recession in the US to European stagnation or even the
collapse of the eurozone, to a BRICS-wide slowdown, a tempest in the
currency markets, the collapse of financial institutions, and a global
crash.

And talk about messy, who could forget what Dick Cheney said, while still
Halliburton's CEO, at the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999: "The
Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is
still where the prize ultimately lies". No wonder when, as vice president,
he came to power in 2001, his first order of business was to "liberate"
Iraq's oil. Of course, who doesn't remember how that ended?

Now (different administration but same line of work), it's an
oil-embargo-cum-economic-war on Iran. The leadership in Beijing sees
Washington's whole Iran psychodrama as a regime-change plot, pure and
simple, having nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Then again, the winner
so far in the Iran imbroglio is China. With Iran's banking system in
crisis, and the US embargo playing havoc with that country's economy,
Beijing can essentially dictate its terms for buying Iranian oil.

The Chinese are expanding Iran's fleet of oil tankers, a deal worth more
than $1 billion, and that other BRICS giant, India, is now purchasing even
more Iranian oil than China. Yet Washington won't apply its sanctions to
BRICS members because these days, economically speaking, the US needs them
more than they need the US

The world through Chinese eyes

Which brings us to the dragon in the room: China.

What's the ultimate Chinese obsession? Stability, stability, stability.

The usual self-description of the system there as "socialism with Chinese
characteristic" is, of course, as mythical as a gorgon. In reality, think
hardcore neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics led by men who have
every intention of saving global capitalism.

At the moment, China is smack in the middle of a tectonic, structural shift
from an export/investment model to a services/consumer-led model. In terms
of its explosive economic growth, the last decades have been almost
unimaginable to most Chinese (and the rest of the world), but according to
the Financial Times, they have also left the country's richest one percent
controlling forty to sixty percent of total household wealth. How to find a
way to overcome such staggering collateral damage? How to make a system
with tremendous inbuilt problems function for 1.3 billion people?

Enter "stability-mania". Back in 2007, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was
warning that the Chinese economy could become "unstable, unbalanced,
uncoordinated, and unsustainable". These were the famous "Four Uns".

Today, the collective leadership, including the next Prime Minister, Li
Leqiang, has gone a nervous step further, purging "unstable" from the
Party's lexicon. For all practical purposes, the next phase in the
country's development is already upon us.

It will be quite something to watch in the years to come.

How will the nominally "communist" princelings - the sons and daughters of
top revolutionary Party leaders, all immensely wealthy, thanks, in part, to
their cozy arrangements with Western corporations, plus the bribes, the
alliances with gangsters, all those "concessions" to the highest bidder,
and the whole Western-linked crony-capitalist oligarchy - lead China beyond
the "Four Modernizations"? Especially with all that fabulous wealth to loot.

The Obama administration, expressing its own anxiety, has responded to the
clear emergence of China as a power to be reckoned with via a "strategic
pivot" - from its disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to Asia. The
Pentagon likes to call this "rebalancing" (though things are anything but
rebalanced or over for the US in the Middle East).

Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been focused on China as its
future global enemy number one. Then 9/11 redirected it to what the
Pentagon called "the arc of instability", the oil heartlands of the planet
extending from the Middle East through Central Asia. Given Washington's
distraction, Beijing calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two
decades in which the pressure would be largely off. In those years, it
could focus on a breakneck version of internal development, while the US
was squandering mountains of money on its nonsensical "Global War on
Terror".

Twelve years later, that window is being slammed shut as from India,
Australia, and the Philippines to South Korea and Japan, the US declares
itself back in the hegemony business in Asia. Doubts that this was the new
American path were dispelled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's
November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, none too subtly labeled
"America's Pacific Century". (And she was talking about this century, not
the last one!)

The American mantra is always the same: "American security", whose
definition is: whatever happens on the planet. Whether in the oil-rich
Persian Gulf where Washington "helps" allies Israel and Saudi Arabia
because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered
to a growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China,
it's always in the name of US security. In either case, in just about any
case, that's what trumps all else.

As a result, if there is a 33-year Wall of Mistrust between the US and
Iran, there is a new, growing Great Wall of Mistrust between the US and
China. Recently, Wang Jisi, Dean of the School of International Studies at
Peking University and a top Chinese strategic analyst, offered the Beijing
leadership's perspective on that "Pacific Century" in an influential paper
he coauthored.

China, he and his coauthor write, now expects to be treated as a
first-class power. After all, it "successfully weathered ... the 1997-98
global financial crisis" caused, in Beijing's eyes, by

   deep deficiencies in the US economy and politics. China has surpassed
Japan as the world's second largest economy and seems to be the number two
in world politics, as well ... Chinese leaders do not credit these
successes to the United States or to the US-led world order.

The US, Wang adds

   is seen in China generally as a declining power over the long run ... It
is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before
China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world ...
part of an emerging new structure. (Think: BRICS.)

In sum, as Wang and his coauthor portray it, influential Chinese see their
country's development model providing

   an alternative to Western democracy and experiences for other developing
countries to learn from, while many developing countries that have
introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder
and chaos.

Put it all in a nutshell and you have a Chinese vision of the world in
which a fading US still yearns for global hegemony and remains powerful
enough to block emerging powers - China and the other BRICS - from their
twenty-first century destiny.

Dr Zbig's Eurasian wet dream

Now, how does the US political elite see that same world? Virtually no one
is better qualified to handle that subject than former national security
adviser, BTC pipeline facilitator, and briefly Obama ghost adviser, Dr
Zbigniew "Zbig") Brzezinski. And he doesn't hesitate to do so in his latest
book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (2012).

If the Chinese have their strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr
Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured. He is now arguing
that, for the US to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on
an "expanded West". That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially
in energy terms), while embracing Turkey, which he imagines as a template
for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia, politically and
economically, in a "strategically sober and prudent fashion".

Turkey, by the way, is no such template because, despite the Arab Spring,
for the foreseeable future, there are no new Arab democracies. Still, Zbig
believes that Turkey can help Europe, and so the US, in far more practical
ways to solve certain global energy problems by facilitating its "unimpeded
access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia's oil and gas".

Under the present circumstances, however, this, too, remains something of a
fantasy. After all, Turkey can only become a key transit country in the
great energy game on the Eurasian chessboard I've long labeled
Pipelineistan if the Europeans get their act together. They would have to
convince the energy-rich, autocratic "republic" of Turkmenistan to ignore
its powerful Russian neighbor and sell them all the natural gas they need.
And then there's that other energy matter that looks unlikely at the
moment: Washington and Brussels would have to ditch counterproductive
sanctions and embargos against Iran (and the war games that go with them)
and start doing serious business with that country.

Dr Zbig nonetheless proposes the notion of a two-speed Europe as the key to
future American power on the planet. Think of it as an upbeat version of a
scenario in which the present Eurozone semi-collapses. He would maintain
the leading role of the inept bureaucratic fat cats in Brussels now running
the EU, and support another "Europe" (mostly the southern "Club Med"
countries) outside the euro, with nominally free movement of people and
goods between the two. His bet - and in this he reflects a key strand of
Washington thinking - is that a two-speed Europe, a Eurasian Big Mac, still
joined at the hip to America, could be a globally critical player for the
rest of the twenty-first century.

And then, of course, Dr Zbig displays all his Cold Warrior colors,
extolling an American future "stability in the Far East" inspired by "the
role Britain played in the nineteenth century as a stabilizer and balancer
of Europe". We're talking, in other words, about this century's number one
gunboat diplomat. He graciously concedes that a "comprehensive
American-Chinese global partnership" would still be possible, but only if
Washington retains a significant geopolitical presence in what he still
calls the "Far East" - "whether China approves or not".

The answer will be "not".

In a way, all of this is familiar stuff, as is much of actual Washington
policy today. In his case, it's really a remix of his 1997 magnum opus The
Grand Chessboard in which, he once again certifies that "the huge
Trans-Eurasian continent is the central arena of world affairs". Only now
reality has taught him that Eurasia can't be conquered and America's best
shot is to try to bring Turkey and Russia into the fold.

Robocop rules

Yet Brzezinski looks positively benign when you compare his ideas to
Hillary Clinton's recent pronouncements, including her address to the
tongue-twistingly named World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference. There,
as the Obama administration regularly does, she highlighted "NATO's
enduring relationship with Afghanistan" and praised negotiations between
the US and Kabul over "a long-term strategic partnership between our two
nations".

Translation: despite being outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency
for years, neither the Pentagon nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing
out of their holdings in the Greater Middle East. Already negotiating with
President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul for staying rights through
2024, the US has every intention of holding onto three major strategic
Afghan bases: Bagram, Shindand (near the Iranian border), and Kandahar
(near the Pakistani border). Only the terminally naive would believe the
Pentagon capable of voluntarily abandoning such sterling outposts for the
monitoring of Central Asia and strategic competitors Russia and China.

NATO, Clinton added ominously, will "expand its defense capabilities for
the twenty-first century" including the missile defense system the alliance
approved at its last meeting in Lisbon in 2010.

It will be fascinating to see what the possible election of socialist
François Hollande as French president might mean. Interested in a deeper
strategic partnership with the BRICS, he is committed to the end of the US
dollar as the world's reserve currency. The question is: Would his victory
throw a monkey wrench into NATO's works, after these years under the Great
Liberator of Libya, that neo-Napoleonic image-maker Nicolas Sarkozy (for
whom France was just mustard in Washington's steak tartar).

No matter what either Dr Zbig or Hillary might think, most European
countries, fed up with their black-hole adventures in Afghanistan and
Libya, and with the way NATO now serves US global interests, support
Hollande on this. But it will still be an uphill battle. The destruction
and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime was the highpoint of the
recent NATO agenda of regime change in MENA (the Middle East-Northern
Africa). And NATO remains Washington's plan B for the future, if the usual
network of think tanks, endowments, funds, foundations, NGOs, and even the
UN fail to provoke what could be described as YouTube regime change.

In a nutshell: after going to war on three continents (in Yugoslavia,
Afghanistan, and Libya), turning the Mediterranean into a virtual NATO
lake, and patrolling the Arabian Sea non-stop, NATO will be, according to
Hillary, riding on "a bet on America's leadership and strength, just as we
did in the twentieth century, for this century and beyond". So 21 years
after the end of the Soviet Union - NATO's original raison d'etre - this
could be the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with NATO, in
whimpering mode, still fulfilling the role of perpetual global Robocop.

We're back once again with Dr Zbig and the idea of America as the "promoter
and guarantor of unit". in the West, and as "balance and conciliator" in
the East (for which it needs bases from the Persian Gulf to Japan,
including those Afghan ones). And don't forget that the Pentagon has never
given up the idea of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance.

For all that military strength, however, it's worth keeping in mind that
this is distinctly a New World (and not in North America either). Against
the guns and the gunboats, the missiles and the drones, there is economic
power. Currency wars are now raging. BRICS members China and Russia have
cordilleras of cash. South America is uniting fast. The Putinator has
offered South Korea an oil pipeline. Iran is planning to sell all its oil
and gas in a basket of currencies, none dollars. China is paying to expand
its blue-water Navy and its anti-ship missile weaponry. One day, Tokyo may
finally realize that, as long as it is occupied by Wall Street and the
Pentagon, it will live in eternal recession. Even Australia may eventually
refuse to be forced into a counterproductive trade war with China.

So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely
as a confrontation between the US/NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on
every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full
Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or
Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be able to shoot back.

This article was first published in TomDispatch, 26 april 2012:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175534/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar%2C_a_full_spectrum_confrontation_world/

_____

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, a TomDispatch
regular, and a political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is
Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

More by Pepe Escobar: http://mondediplo.com/_Pepe-Escobar_

http://mondediplo.com/openpage/a-history-of-the-world-bric-by-bric

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[BillTottenWeblog] Copyright and the TPP

Bill Totten — 2012-05-21T23:33:03

The Big Picture

by Jodie Griffin, Public Knowledge Staff Attorney

Public Knowledge (May 12 2012)

As Public Knowledge dives into the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) secret negotiation process and the details of its copyright provisions, it is useful to periodically step back and consider how the intellectual property chapter of the TPP fits into the framework of the TPP as a whole. The copyright provisions of the TPP, as based on the text proposed by the US {*} that was leaked in February 2011, would contradict the TPP’s overall goal of creating a seamless Pacific market and would chill innovation to the detriment of both consumers and businesses.

{*} http://keionline.org/sites/default/files/tpp-10feb2011-us-text-ipr-chapter.pdf

The TPP generally is an ambitious effort to open trade and encourage investment among the countries that border the Pacific Ocean. That is why the TPP covers so many different areas of the economy, like agriculture, textiles, environmental protections, and intellectual property.

Intellectual property (IP), however, fits uneasily into the trade agreement framework. When countries negotiate an IP chapter in a trade agreement, they don’t negotiate tariffs, as in traditional trade negotiations. Instead, the countries agree to alter their domestic laws so that particular companies can enjoy stronger protections in the countries that are party to the agreement.

When it comes to copyright, the goal of the negotiation is usually not persuading each country to treat foreign persons and companies equal to domestic entities (as when countries agree to lower tariffs against each other’s goods). That goal has already been achieved through IP agreements negotiated under the World Trade Organization framework. All the TPP countries are party to that agreement and are already obliged to treat foreign IP owners on par with their domestic IP owners. Instead, the stated goal of the US, in the TPP, is to ratchet up copyright protection and enforcement in other countries.

The idea is not to achieve a level playing field: it’s to entrench and protect incumbent business models, regardless of the consequences for consumers and new businesses.

If the US’s goal is to encourage innovation and leave breathing room for innovative new businesses to experiment and thrive, it must stop demanding copyright provisions whose only practical effect is to protect existing business models and discourage anyone else from trying something new.

In the copyright space, we have seen how copyright owners can use strong copyright protection and harsh enforcement provisions to chill innovation. Particularly, incumbent distribution intermediaries, like major record labels, have used the copyrights they obtain from the actual artists to stifle the development of upstart distribution competitors. Major labels have used their copyright catalogs to thwart new digital distributors - which would actually benefit musicians by offering them more ways to reach fans - by denying them licenses to large portions of today’s most popular music, or by requiring new distributors to give the labels enormous advances or disproportionately high royalties in return for the licenses.

For example, when the digital music startup Beyond Oblivion filed for bankruptcy this past January, the company owed Sony Music Entertainment and Warn Music Group $50 million each.

Note: Beyond Oblivion was forced to shut down before they even launched their service, so the company owed $100 million in advances before a single user had listened to a single song. These types of demands increase barriers to new digital distributions start-ups and discourage investors from funding new distribution companies.

But distributors have to play this game because they can see from the example of companies like Veoh that even if they are not liable for copyright infringement, the costs of litigation may put them into bankruptcy. Veoh, an internet video platform, was sued by Universal Music Group for copyright infringement in 2006. Veoh was ultimately vindicated in court and found not liable for copyright infringement, but by the time the litigation had finished the company had already been forced into bankruptcy due in part to high litigation costs.

This is just one example of how unbalanced copyright laws and unreasonable enforcement measures that fail to respect due process and basic fairness only serve to preserve and promote the power of incumbents instead of allowing new businesses to compete with existing corporate copyright owners.

If the US wants to strike a deal that creates a seamless international market that welcomes new market entrants to thrive in a global marketplace, then the US must consider all interests at stake: incumbent businesses, new businesses, and consumers. Until then, the copyright provisions of the TPP will only work against the negotiators’ goals.

As the TPP negotiations in Dallas continue, Public Knowledge will continue blogging to keep you up-to-date on this important agreement. For more information and updates visit www.tppinfo.org.

_____

This blog post was written by Public Knowledge Staff Attorney Jodie Griffin.

http://tppinfo.org/2012/05/12/copyright-and-the-tpp-the-big-picture/

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[BillTottenWeblog] Before and After SOPA

Bill Totten — 2012-05-21T11:10:55

by Glyn Moody

Computerworld UK Open Enterprise Blog (May 14 2012)

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference {1} with the title "Before and After SOPA". Much of it will be familiar to readers of this blog, since it was reviewing the events around the extraordinary anti-SOPA Internet Blackout Day on January 18, which has now emerged as a turning-point in Net activism, and exploring what might happen now. As usual, I've embedded my slides below, and they may also be viewed online {2} and downloaded {3}.

The defeat, even if only temporary, of SOPA and PIPA was surely one key factor in the sudden upswelling of protests against ACTA, which until that point had seemed almost certain to be ratified in the EU. The actions against SOPA and ACTA have led to renewed analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), currently being negotiated behind closed doors in Dallas. It's too early to hope that a similar victory may result there, too, but it's certainly the case that more people are becoming aware of TPP and its appalling proposals.

A new site {4} has been created by Public Knowledge to detail these in the area of copyright, which has also put together a good introduction to the treaty {5}, which I recommend to anyone who wants to get up to speed here.

Links:

{1} http://rdfc.is/

{2} http://www.slideshare.net/glynmoody/glyn-moody-before-and-after-sopa

{3} http://www.slideshare.net/glynmoody/glyn-moody-before-and-after-sopa/download

{4} http://tppinfo.org/category/TPP/

{5} http://tppinfo.org/2012/05/12/copyright-and-the-tpp-the-big-picture/

_____

Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The  blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old  and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and  developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/05/before-and-after-sopa/index.htm

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[BillTottenWeblog] A History of the world, BRIC by BRIC

Bill Totten — 2012-05-21T01:12:38

Neoliberal dragons, eurasian wet dreams, and robocop fantasies

by Pepe Escobar

Le Monde diplomatique (May 08 2012)

Goldman Sachs - via economist Jim O'Neill - invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn't help calling it the "Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept".

Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost forty percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world's top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS? Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept. (It stands for the next eleven emerging economies.)

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Yale's canny historian Paul Kennedy (of "imperial overstretch" fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a "historical watershed" taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of "the sole superpower". There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for that: the slow erosion of the US dollar (formerly 85% of global reserves, now less than sixty percent), the "paralysis of the European project", Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the decrepitude of the United Nations.

The Group of Eight (G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20, which includes the BRICS, might, however, prove to be the real thing. But there's much to be done to cross that watershed rather than simply be swept over it willy-nilly: the reform of the UN Security Council, and above all, the reform of the Bretton Woods system, especially those two crucial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

On the other hand, willy-nilly may prove the way of the world. After all, as emerging superstars, the BRICS have a ton of problems. True, in only the last seven years Brazil has added forty million people as middle-class consumers; by 2016, it will have invested another $900 billion - more than a third of its GDP - in energy and infrastructure; and it's not as exposed as some BRICS members to the imponderables of world trade, since its exports are only eleven percent of GDP, even less than the US.

Still, the key problem remains the same: lack of good management, not to mention a swamp of corruption. Brazil's brazen new monied class is turning out to be no less corrupt than the old, arrogant, comprador elites that used to run the country.

In India, the choice seems to be between manageable and unmanageable chaos. The corruption of the country's political elite would make Shiva proud. Abuse of state power, nepotistic control of contracts related to infrastructure, the looting of mineral resources, real estate property scandals - they've got it all, even if India is not a Hindu Pakistan. Not yet anyway.

Since 1991, "reform" in India has meant only one thing: unbridled commerce and getting the state out of the economy. Not surprisingly then, nothing is being done to reform public institutions, which are a scandal in themselves. Efficient public administration? Don't even think about it. In a nutshell, India is a chaotic economic dynamo and yet, in some sense, not even an emerging power, not to speak of a superpower.

Russia, too, is still trying to find the magic mix, including a competent state policy to exploit the country's bounteous natural resources, extraordinary space, and impressive social talent. It must modernize fast as, apart from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, relative social backwardness prevails. Its leaders remain uneasy about neighboring China (aware that any Sino-Russian alliance would leave Russia as a distinctly junior partner). They are distrustful of Washington, anxious over the depopulation of their eastern territories, and worried about the cultural and religious alienation of their Muslim population.

Then again the Putinator is back as president with his magic formula for modernization: a strategic German-Russian partnership that will benefit the power elite/business oligarchy, but not necessarily the majority of Russians.

Dead in the woods

The post-World War Two Bretton Woods system is now officially dead, totally illegitimate, but what are the BRICS planning to do about it?

At their summit in New Delhi in late March, they pushed for the creation of a BRICS development bank that could invest in infrastructure and provide them with back-up credit for whatever financial crises lie down the road. The BRICS know perfectly well that Washington and the European Union (EU) will never relinquish control of the IMF and the World Bank. Nonetheless, trade among these countries will reach an impressive $500 billion by 2015, mostly in their own currencies.

However, BRICS cohesion, to the extent it exists, centers mostly around shared frustration with the Masters of the Universe-style financial speculation that nearly sent the global economy off a cliff in 2008. True, the BRICS crew also has a notable convergence of policy and opinion when it comes to embattled Iran, an Arab Sprung Middle East, and Northern Africa. Still, for the moment the key problem they face is this: they don't have an ideological or institutional alternative to neo-liberalism and the lordship of global finance.

As Vijay Prashad has noted, the Global North has done everything to prevent any serious discussion of how to reform the global financial casino. No wonder the head of the G-77 group of developing nations (now G-132, in fact), Thai ambassador Pisnau Chanvitan, has warned of "behavior that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neocolonialism".

Meanwhile, things happen anyway, helter-skelter. China, for instance, continues to informally advance the yuan as a globalizing, if not global, currency. It's already trading in yuan with Russia and Australia, not to mention across Latin America and in the Middle East. Increasingly, the BRICS are betting on the yuan as their monetary alternative to a devalued US dollar.

Japan is using both yen and yuan in its bilateral trade with its huge Asian neighbor. The fact is that there's already an unacknowledged Asian free-trade zone in the making, with China, Japan, and South Korea on board.

What's ahead, even if it includes a BRICS-bright future, will undoubtedly be very messy. Just about anything is possible (verging on likely), from another Great Recession in the US to European stagnation or even the collapse of the eurozone, to a BRICS-wide slowdown, a tempest in the currency markets, the collapse of financial institutions, and a global crash.

And talk about messy, who could forget what Dick Cheney said, while still Halliburton's CEO, at the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999: "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies". No wonder when, as vice president, he came to power in 2001, his first order of business was to "liberate" Iraq's oil. Of course, who doesn't remember how that ended?

Now (different administration but same line of work), it's an oil-embargo-cum-economic-war on Iran. The leadership in Beijing sees Washington's whole Iran psychodrama as a regime-change plot, pure and simple, having nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Then again, the winner so far in the Iran imbroglio is China. With Iran's banking system in crisis, and the US embargo playing havoc with that country's economy, Beijing can essentially dictate its terms for buying Iranian oil.

The Chinese are expanding Iran's fleet of oil tankers, a deal worth more than $1 billion, and that other BRICS giant, India, is now purchasing even more Iranian oil than China. Yet Washington won't apply its sanctions to BRICS members because these days, economically speaking, the US needs them more than they need the US

The world through Chinese eyes

Which brings us to the dragon in the room: China.

What's the ultimate Chinese obsession? Stability, stability, stability.

The usual self-description of the system there as "socialism with Chinese characteristic" is, of course, as mythical as a gorgon. In reality, think hardcore neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics led by men who have every intention of saving global capitalism.

At the moment, China is smack in the middle of a tectonic, structural shift from an export/investment model to a services/consumer-led model. In terms of its explosive economic growth, the last decades have been almost unimaginable to most Chinese (and the rest of the world), but according to the Financial Times, they have also left the country's richest one percent controlling forty to sixty percent of total household wealth. How to find a way to overcome such staggering collateral damage? How to make a system with tremendous inbuilt problems function for 1.3 billion people?

Enter "stability-mania". Back in 2007, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was warning that the Chinese economy could become "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable". These were the famous "Four Uns".

Today, the collective leadership, including the next Prime Minister, Li Leqiang, has gone a nervous step further, purging "unstable" from the Party's lexicon. For all practical purposes, the next phase in the country's development is already upon us.

It will be quite something to watch in the years to come.

How will the nominally "communist" princelings - the sons and daughters of top revolutionary Party leaders, all immensely wealthy, thanks, in part, to their cozy arrangements with Western corporations, plus the bribes, the alliances with gangsters, all those "concessions" to the highest bidder, and the whole Western-linked crony-capitalist oligarchy - lead China beyond the "Four Modernizations"? Especially with all that fabulous wealth to loot.

The Obama administration, expressing its own anxiety, has responded to the clear emergence of China as a power to be reckoned with via a "strategic pivot" - from its disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to Asia. The Pentagon likes to call this "rebalancing" (though things are anything but rebalanced or over for the US in the Middle East).

Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been focused on China as its future global enemy number one. Then 9/11 redirected it to what the Pentagon called "the arc of instability", the oil heartlands of the planet extending from the Middle East through Central Asia. Given Washington's distraction, Beijing calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two decades in which the pressure would be largely off. In those years, it could focus on a breakneck version of internal development, while the US was squandering mountains of money on its nonsensical "Global War on Terror".

Twelve years later, that window is being slammed shut as from India, Australia, and the Philippines to South Korea and Japan, the US declares itself back in the hegemony business in Asia. Doubts that this was the new American path were dispelled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, none too subtly labeled "America's Pacific Century". (And she was talking about this century, not the last one!)

The American mantra is always the same: "American security", whose definition is: whatever happens on the planet. Whether in the oil-rich Persian Gulf where Washington "helps" allies Israel and Saudi Arabia because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered to a growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China, it's always in the name of US security. In either case, in just about any case, that's what trumps all else.

As a result, if there is a 33-year Wall of Mistrust between the US and Iran, there is a new, growing Great Wall of Mistrust between the US and China. Recently, Wang Jisi, Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and a top Chinese strategic analyst, offered the Beijing leadership's perspective on that "Pacific Century" in an influential paper he coauthored.

China, he and his coauthor write, now expects to be treated as a first-class power. After all, it "successfully weathered ... the 1997-98 global financial crisis" caused, in Beijing's eyes, by

deep deficiencies in the US economy and politics. China has surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy and seems to be the number two in world politics, as well ... Chinese leaders do not credit these successes to the United States or to the US-led world order.

The US, Wang adds

is seen in China generally as a declining power over the long run ... It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world ... part of an emerging new structure. (Think: BRICS.)

In sum, as Wang and his coauthor portray it, influential Chinese see their country's development model providing

an alternative to Western democracy and experiences for other developing countries to learn from, while many developing countries that have introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos.

Put it all in a nutshell and you have a Chinese vision of the world in which a fading US still yearns for global hegemony and remains powerful enough to block emerging powers - China and the other BRICS - from their twenty-first century destiny.

Dr Zbig's Eurasian wet dream

Now, how does the US political elite see that same world? Virtually no one is better qualified to handle that subject than former national security adviser, BTC pipeline facilitator, and briefly Obama ghost adviser, Dr Zbigniew "Zbig") Brzezinski. And he doesn't hesitate to do so in his latest book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (2012).

If the Chinese have their strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured. He is now arguing that, for the US to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on an "expanded West". That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially in energy terms), while embracing Turkey, which he imagines as a template for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia, politically and economically, in a "strategically sober and prudent fashion".

Turkey, by the way, is no such template because, despite the Arab Spring, for the foreseeable future, there are no new Arab democracies. Still, Zbig believes that Turkey can help Europe, and so the US, in far more practical ways to solve certain global energy problems by facilitating its "unimpeded access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia's oil and gas".

Under the present circumstances, however, this, too, remains something of a fantasy. After all, Turkey can only become a key transit country in the great energy game on the Eurasian chessboard I've long labeled Pipelineistan if the Europeans get their act together. They would have to convince the energy-rich, autocratic "republic" of Turkmenistan to ignore its powerful Russian neighbor and sell them all the natural gas they need. And then there's that other energy matter that looks unlikely at the moment: Washington and Brussels would have to ditch counterproductive sanctions and embargos against Iran (and the war games that go with them) and start doing serious business with that country.

Dr Zbig nonetheless proposes the notion of a two-speed Europe as the key to future American power on the planet. Think of it as an upbeat version of a scenario in which the present Eurozone semi-collapses. He would maintain the leading role of the inept bureaucratic fat cats in Brussels now running the EU, and support another "Europe" (mostly the southern "Club Med" countries) outside the euro, with nominally free movement of people and goods between the two. His bet - and in this he reflects a key strand of Washington thinking - is that a two-speed Europe, a Eurasian Big Mac, still joined at the hip to America, could be a globally critical player for the rest of the twenty-first century.

And then, of course, Dr Zbig displays all his Cold Warrior colors, extolling an American future "stability in the Far East" inspired by "the role Britain played in the nineteenth century as a stabilizer and balancer of Europe". We're talking, in other words, about this century's number one gunboat diplomat. He graciously concedes that a "comprehensive American-Chinese global partnership" would still be possible, but only if Washington retains a significant geopolitical presence in what he still calls the "Far East" - "whether China approves or not".

The answer will be "not".

In a way, all of this is familiar stuff, as is much of actual Washington policy today. In his case, it's really a remix of his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard in which, he once again certifies that "the huge Trans-Eurasian continent is the central arena of world affairs". Only now reality has taught him that Eurasia can't be conquered and America's best shot is to try to bring Turkey and Russia into the fold.

Robocop rules

Yet Brzezinski looks positively benign when you compare his ideas to Hillary Clinton's recent pronouncements, including her address to the tongue-twistingly named World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference. There, as the Obama administration regularly does, she highlighted "NATO's enduring relationship with Afghanistan" and praised negotiations between the US and Kabul over "a long-term strategic partnership between our two nations".

Translation: despite being outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency for years, neither the Pentagon nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing out of their holdings in the Greater Middle East. Already negotiating with President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul for staying rights through 2024, the US has every intention of holding onto three major strategic Afghan bases: Bagram, Shindand (near the Iranian border), and Kandahar (near the Pakistani border). Only the terminally naive would believe the Pentagon capable of voluntarily abandoning such sterling outposts for the monitoring of Central Asia and strategic competitors Russia and China.

NATO, Clinton added ominously, will "expand its defense capabilities for the twenty-first century" including the missile defense system the alliance approved at its last meeting in Lisbon in 2010.

It will be fascinating to see what the possible election of socialist François Hollande as French president might mean. Interested in a deeper strategic partnership with the BRICS, he is committed to the end of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The question is: Would his victory throw a monkey wrench into NATO's works, after these years under the Great Liberator of Libya, that neo-Napoleonic image-maker Nicolas Sarkozy (for whom France was just mustard in Washington's steak tartar).

No matter what either Dr Zbig or Hillary might think, most European countries, fed up with their black-hole adventures in Afghanistan and Libya, and with the way NATO now serves US global interests, support Hollande on this. But it will still be an uphill battle. The destruction and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime was the highpoint of the recent NATO agenda of regime change in MENA (the Middle East-Northern Africa). And NATO remains Washington's plan B for the future, if the usual network of think tanks, endowments, funds, foundations, NGOs, and even the UN fail to provoke what could be described as YouTube regime change.

In a nutshell: after going to war on three continents (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya), turning the Mediterranean into a virtual NATO lake, and patrolling the Arabian Sea non-stop, NATO will be, according to Hillary, riding on "a bet on America's leadership and strength, just as we did in the twentieth century, for this century and beyond". So 21 years after the end of the Soviet Union - NATO's original raison d'etre - this could be the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with NATO, in whimpering mode, still fulfilling the role of perpetual global Robocop.

We're back once again with Dr Zbig and the idea of America as the "promoter and guarantor of unit". in the West, and as "balance and conciliator" in the East (for which it needs bases from the Persian Gulf to Japan, including those Afghan ones). And don't forget that the Pentagon has never given up the idea of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance.

For all that military strength, however, it's worth keeping in mind that this is distinctly a New World (and not in North America either). Against the guns and the gunboats, the missiles and the drones, there is economic power. Currency wars are now raging. BRICS members China and Russia have cordilleras of cash. South America is uniting fast. The Putinator has offered South Korea an oil pipeline. Iran is planning to sell all its oil and gas in a basket of currencies, none dollars. China is paying to expand its blue-water Navy and its anti-ship missile weaponry. One day, Tokyo may finally realize that, as long as it is occupied by Wall Street and the Pentagon, it will live in eternal recession. Even Australia may eventually refuse to be forced into a counterproductive trade war with China.

So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the US/NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be able to shoot back.

This article was first published in TomDispatch, 26 april 2012:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175534/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar%2C_a_full_spectrum_confrontation_world/

_____

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, a TomDispatch regular, and a political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

More by Pepe Escobar: http://mondediplo.com/_Pepe-Escobar_

http://mondediplo.com/openpage/a-history-of-the-world-bric-by-bric

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Fwd: Washington's Blog: The Truth About JP Morgan's $2Billion Loss

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-20T12:54:49

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 20, 2012 at 2:54 PM
Subject: Fwd: Washington's Blog: The Truth About JP Morgan's $2 Billion Loss
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

The solution here, at the end of this article is what the experts under US
President Roosevelt inthe 1930s recommended and he mandated but for the
rule that conglomerate monopolies are criminal.   I saw the beginning of
the end when in the 60's and the 70's the banks were all merging.   Both
the US Pentagon and the US State Department are hand in glove with Timothy
Geithner, formerly the top thief from Goldman Sachs and with the many top
Goldman employees, are throughout the steering departments of the Obama
White House.
Common sense protests by removing funds from all regular banks depositing
in the main healthy one in Dakota would spread alarm to the obese banks
that their end days are nigh. I am sure there are better ideas out there.
 Since the obese banks can no longer see their feet, (humans) alarming them
lawfully is cooler than cool. The only choice we have left.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Global Research E-Newsletter <crgeditor< at >yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, May 20, 2012 at 1:01 PM
Subject: Washington's Blog: The Truth About JP Morgan's $2 Billion Loss
To: suzannedk< at >gmail.com

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The Truth About JP Morgan’s $2 Billion Loss

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, May 16, 2012
Washington's Blog

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30859

Before we can understand what’s really going on with JP Morgan’s loss
(which will probably end up being a lot more than $2 billion), we need a
little background.

JP Morgan:

Is the world’s largest publicly-traded company
Is the largest bank in the U.S. ... the biggest of the too big to fail
banks which are killing the American economy
Is the largest derivatives dealer in the world (and see this), and
derivatives are inherently destabilizing for the economy
Essentially wrote the faux “reform” legislation for derivatives, which did
nothing to decrease risk, and killed any chance of real reform
Is the creator of credit default swaps – which caused the 2008 financial
crisis, and is the asset class which blew up and caused the loss
Has had large potential exposures to credit default swap losses for years
Has replaced the chief investment officer who made the risky bets with a
trader who worked at Long Term Capital Management ... which committed
suicide by making risky bets
Went completely insolvent in the 1980s
... and again in 2007  ( and was saved both times by the government at
taxpayer expense)
Heads – with Goldman Sachs – the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee,
which helps set government financial policy
Has a reputation of being the most risk-averse of the big Wall Street
players
Was kept alive by a huge government bailout ... but used the money to
invest in India and other projects which won’t really help Americans
Has made a killing by kicking companies (and see this) and governments (and
here) when they are down, engaging in various types of fraud (update),
allegedly manipulating the silver market, and profiting on misery by acting
as the largest processor of food stamps in America
In addition, JPM’s CEO Jamie Dimon:

Is a Class A Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is the
chief bank regulator for Wall Street (including JPM).  Indeed, Dimon served
on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the same time that
his bank received emergency loans from the Fed and was used by the Fed as a
clearing bank for the Fed’s emergency lending programs. In 2008, the Fed
provided JP Morgan Chase with $29 billion in financing to acquire Bear
Stearns.  At the time, Dimon persuaded the Fed to provide JP Morgan Chase
with an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital
requirements. He also convinced the Fed to take risky mortgage-related
assets off of Bear Stearns balance sheet before JP Morgan Chase acquired
this troubled investment bank
Has a reputation of being the “golden boy” and smartest guy on Wall Street
Has been the chief spokesman and advocate for deregulation of banks, and
has lectured, scolded and cajoled everyone who has questioned his banking
practices
Jokes about a new financial crisis happening “every five to seven years”
What Does It Mean?
Pundits and consumers alike are reacting to JP Morgan’s loss like a
startled herd of sheep.

They somehow believed that the “best of the breed” bank and CEO – the
biggest boy on the block – was immune from losses.  Especially since JPM
has been so favored by the Feds, and Dimon was so favored that he was being
groomed for Secretary of Treasury.

And the fact that the head cheerleader for letting banks police themselves
has egg on his face is making a lot of people nervous.

And that the biggest of the too big to fails could conceivably fail.

The government says its launching a criminal probe into JPM’s trades.

Ratings services have downgraded JPM’s credit, and many commentators have
noted that other banks may be downgraded as well.

Elizabeth Warren is calling for Dimon to resign from the New York Fed:

Even CNBC is now calling for Glass-Steagall to be put back in place.
Banking expert Chris Whalen writes:

Someone at the Fed should have at least secondary accountability for the
JPM losses if the VaR model/process was faulty. Is there any accountability
for incompetent, badly managed federal bank regulators? As our colleague
Janet Tavakoli wrote in the Huffington Post: “The U.S. can count on
JPMorgan to continue both long and short market manipulation and take its
winnings and losses from blind gambles. Shareholders, taxpayers, and
consumers will foot the bill for any unpleasant global consequences.”

We think that the loss by JPM is ultimately yet another legacy of the era
of “laissez-faire” regulation and even overt Fed advocacy for the use of
OTC derivatives by US banks. Fed officials such as Pat Parkinson, who
retired as head of the Fed’s division of supervision and regulation in
January, were effectively lobbyists for the large banks and their
derivatives activities. It seems a little ridiculous for the same Fed
officials who caused the problem over the years to now be tasked with
investigating JPM, much less regulation of large bank dealings in OTC
instruments.

And Reuters correctly notes:

JP Morgan Chase’s loss is the perhaps inevitable result of the interaction
of two policies: too big to fail and zero interest rates.

***

Too big to fail, the de facto insurance provided by the U.S. to financial
institutions so big their failure would be disastrous, provides JP Morgan
and its peers with a material advantage in funding and as counterparties.
Depositors see it as an advantage, as do bondholders and other lenders.
That leaves TBTF banks flush with cash.

At the same time, ultra-low interest rates make the traditional business of
banks less attractive, naturally leading to a push to make money elsewhere.
[See this.] With interest rates virtually nothing at the short end but not
terribly higher three, five or even 10 years out, net interest margins,
once the lifeblood of large money center banks, are disappointingly thin.
Given that investors are rightly dubious about the quality of bank
earnings, and thus unwilling to attach large equity market multiples to
them, this puts even more pressure on managers to look elsewhere for
profits.

Investors believe, rightly, that the largest banks won’t be allowed to
fail; what they also appear to believe is that they very well may not be
able to prosper and that to the extent they do shareholders won’t fairly
participate.

What would you do if you had a built-in funding advantage but little demand
for your services as a traditional lender, i.e., one which borrows short
and lends long? If you are anything like JP Morgan Chase appears to be you
will put some of that lovely liquidity to work in financial markets, hoping
to turn a built-in advantage into revenue.

JP Morgan stoutly maintains that the purpose of the trades was to hedge
exposure elsewhere, as opposed to being proprietary trading intended to
generate profits. That’s contradicted by a report from Bloomberg citing
current and former employees of the chief executive office, including its
former head of credit trading.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-14/dimon-fortress-breached-as-push-from-hedging-to-betting-blows-up.html

The Volcker Rule, now being shaped, is intended to stop such speculative
trades, though in practice debating what is a hedge and what isn’t is a
sort of angels-dancing-on-the-heads-of-pins argument which makes effective
regulation almost impossible.

***

The keys are motive, opportunity and ability. Profits – and the investment
office is reported to have made considerable ones in the past – provide a
more believable motive than simple hedging. Opportunity is afforded by the
combination of a privileged funding cost combined with poor alternative
places to put money to work elsewhere in the banking business. While there
may be some active borrowers, and TBTF banks enjoy an unfair advantage in
serving their needs, the trans-Atlantic balance-sheet recession means
households and businesses are showing a preference for paying back loans
rather than taking them out.

Bruce Lee, chief credit officer of Fifth Third Bancorp, which isn’t TBTF,
was frank about this recently, saying that the value of deposit funding was
now at its lowest in his career.

Finally there is ability, and like common sense all bankers believe they
have the ability to trade successfully despite the wealth of historical
evidence to the contrary.

While events show clearly that JP Morgan wasn’t able to adequately manage
its own business, an attack on it engaging in speculation doesn’t actually
hinge on that.

There is clearly a public policy outrage here because should JP Morgan find
itself in difficulties due to speculation the taxpayer will end up paying
the freight. That’s probably not even the worst of it. All of the profits
that TBTF banks make through speculation have been subsidized and enabled
by the taxpayer. It is obvious that managers and employees have an
incentive to take risks because, after all, TBTF may not be forever but
they will capture 35 or 40 percent of the inflated takings so long as it
lasts. Even if JP Morgan never blew up speculative trades, we should still
oppose them so long as they are made possible and profitable by government
policy.

Raising interest rates in order to remove an incentive to speculation
probably wouldn’t work; low rates are the result of too much debt as well
as a palliative for that disease.

The Volcker Rule won’t be effective; it is impossible to distinguish hedges
from speculation and either can blow up banks.

The better alternative is to end the policy of too big to fail, preferably
while at the same time forcing all banks out of the business of market
speculation through a revival of the kind of Glass-Steagall-like policy
which encouraged a small and useful financial sector for decades, forcing
those that want government insurance to act like utilities, taking
deposits, processing payments and making simple loans.

Let the investment banks take their risks, take their chances and suffer
their losses – as separate entities.

Please support Global Research
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[BillTottenWeblog] The US Department of Double Standards

Bill Totten — 2012-05-20T11:56:52

Corporate criminals go free while the Justice Department targets those without expensive lawyers and lobbyists.

by Leonard C Goodman

In These Times (May 16 2012)

On April 21, The New York Times reported that Wal-Mart de Mexico paid $24 million in bribes to local land use officials in exchange for allowing the company to build stores in virtually every corner of the country, and to make environmental objections vanish. Although its top executives apparently approved of and helped conceal the bribery scheme - in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act - the chances that any of them will face criminal prosecution is remote.

It's not that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn't criminally prosecute people who pay bribes to avoid land-use restrictions on their property. Rather, the feds prefer to bring such cases against people who don't have access to corporate lobbyists - or even to private lawyers. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, just one in five felony defendants has private counsel.

Consider the case of Dumitru Curescu, a former janitor who recently faced two federal trials for the crime of paying $10,000 to an expediter for help obtaining a permit to build two additional garden apartments in his thirteen-unit building on Chicago's North Side. Curescu, an immigrant from communist Romania who became a naturalized US citizen in 1988, was advised by his architect in 2006 to hire the expediter Catherine Romasanta, when he did his first renovation project. But when he called her again in 2007, she was working as an informant for the feds and recording their calls.

In the fall of 2007, Curescu paid Romasanta the agreed-upon fee and received his building permit. Seven months later, with the renovations nearly complete, federal agents arrested Curescu and his wife Lavinia and seized their building. The feds charged both husband and wife with five counts of bribery and conspiracy.

Financially ruined, the couple chose to fight the case; I was Curescu's court-appointed counsel. During a three-week jury trial, federal prosecutors played tapes of Curescu's negotiations with Romasanta and argued to the jury that he and Lavinia knowingly passed a bribe through Romasanta to a city official to get around Chicago's zoning restrictions.

The jury acquitted Lavinia on all charges but failed to reach a verdict on her husband. The government decided to try again. At the retrial, the prosecutors elicited false testimony from Romasanta about the number of apartments Dumitru Curescu had added during his first renovation project in 2006, thereby making a tape-recorded comment by Curescu about the fees he had paid her sound like a comment about a bribe payment. The prosecutors then falsely argued to the jury that this comment was proof that Curescu knew that his expediter bribed officials. Curescu was convicted on two of five counts and sentenced to six months in prison.

On March 21, Curescu's appeal was denied. In a groundbreaking opinion authored by Judge Richard Posner, the US Court of Appeals ruled that federal prosecutors may present false testimony to prove their case "hoping the error would not be caught" as long as they can establish on appeal that the "error [did not] reduce the defendant's likelihood of being acquitted". "Judges are not to use reversal to punish governmental misconduct", Posner declared.

New York Times columnist James B Stewart has written extensively about corporate executives at companies such as Wal-Mart and Tyson Foods, which regularly pay bribes to avoid troublesome regulations. In his recent column about the Wal-Mart scandal, Stewart reports that he "couldn't find a case of an executive at a major American-based, publicly traded company who was successfully prosecuted and sent to jail".

Yet the feds spared no expense or ethical restraints to make sure that Curescu went to jail, despite the testimony of his architect that the former janitor had "no knowledge" about the permitting process.

On April 2, after two lengthy and expensive federal trials and an unsuccessful appeal, Curescu entered a federal prison in Oxford, Wisconsin. Three weeks later his bank sent notice that it is foreclosing on the Curescus' home where Lavinia lives with their three children. Meanwhile, in a recent SEC filing, Wal-Mart predicted its bribery scandal will not have a "material adverse effect on [its] business ... or cash flows".

_____

Leonard Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul University.

Please support independent media by subscribing and/or donating to In These Times magazine:

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Fwd: Suggestion from S.M. De Kuyper

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-20T11:48:04

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 20, 2012 at 1:47 PM
Subject: Fwd: Suggestion from S.M. De Kuyper
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: S.M. De `kuyper <suzannedk< at >yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, May 20, 2012 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Suggestion from S.M. De `kuyper
To: suzannedk< at >gmail.com

Hi Suzanne de Kuyper,

S.M. De Kuyper visited World Socialist Web Site
and suggests you go to the following URL:

  http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/pers-m19.shtml

S.M. De Kuyper says:

This is huge. The US Pentagon and the US State Department would have
ordered Mrs. W. Clinton to set up the confrontation with "diplomatic" power
trips to order obedience to US plans and wishes.  That the main debtor
nation confronting and militarily encircling it's creditor nation is a
recipe for world financial disaster seems not to have concerned the US
Pentagon nor the US State Department nor the US Secretary of State, the
wife of the former two term US President, William Clinton, unable to keep
his-pecker-in-his-pocket, rather Strauss Kahn-ishly.  Well, we, the 99%
rest of us 7 billion humans, are very concerned.  Her credentials to set up
such confrontations look more and more shaky after each attack she
spearheads in CNN world-wide technicolour.  Diplomacy it is not.

World Socialist Web Site

http://www.wsws.org/
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Fwd: TRNN This Week May 13 - May 18

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-20T11:16:21

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 20, 2012 at 1:15 PM
Subject: Fwd: TRNN This Week May 13 - May 18
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu


Israeli PM Forms New Coalition is a must see as it mirrors the police
take-over of US rights to protest across America mirrors the gifting o
rights to influence the US vote by way of corporate unlimited electoral
funding.  Suzanne


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Real News Network <contact< at >therealnews.com>
Date: Sat, May 19, 2012 at 2:01 PM
Subject: TRNN This Week May 13 - May 18
To: suzannedk< at >gmail.com


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for Wisconsin
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2009 Honduran coup and subsequent fraudulent elections that brought Lobo to
power
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organized first major demo of the year, police targeted leaders
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Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBB:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBC:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Student Debt and Education as a
Right<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBC:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
As debt mounts students forced into job choices just to make payments
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBC:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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May 15<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBD:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* JP Morgan Debacle Shows Deep Systemic Risk
Unchanged<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBD:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
Bill Black: Billions of derivative bets cannot be called a hedge but might
be allowed under weakend Volker rule
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBD:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBE:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* The Struggle Over UNCTAD (and Why It
Matters)<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBE:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
Vijay Prashad: Southern countries defend mandate as the "North" pushes a
"global supply chain" that could obliterate smaller countries
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBE:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
Go
to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBF:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Two Billion Dollar Tip of Banking
Iceberg<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBF:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
Gerald Epstein: J.P. Morgan debacle shows systemic risk unchanged; breaking
up big banks, reform Fed and public banking urgently required
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFBF:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
May 14<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC0:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Spain's "Indignados" Mobilize Against
Austerity<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC0:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
With the highest unemployment rate in Europe, the Spanish people take to
the streets in Madrid and elsewhere to mark one year since the massive
demonstrations that caused ripples around the world. They're calling for a
global revolution, but who will respond?
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC0:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC1:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Corporate Media and the Austerity
Campaign<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC1:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
Bill Black: Most media treats austerity as a necessary solution, not a
means to enforce the interests of finance
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC1:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
May 13<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFB9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Israeli PM Forms Large Coalition, Police Repress
Protest<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFB9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
Leader of Kadima Party Shaul Mofaz joins Prime Minister Netanyahu's
Coalition, effectively crushing opposition and stirring protests
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<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC2:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Massive Protests Fill the Streets of
Madrid<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC2:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
Tens of thousands of Spaniards joined protestors in dozens of other
European cities to mark the 1-year anniversary of the "Indignado" movement,
and to demand an end to the austerity measures taken in response to the
economic crisis (Full report expected tomorrow).
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC2:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC3:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
* Quebec's Maple
Spring<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC3:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
May 1st in Montreal was a display of how the student strike is part of
Quebec's larger struggle against neo-liberalism
Go to story<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC3:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>|
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to homepage<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFC9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
 *The Promise<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCA:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
*
What you have been seeing on TRNN is just a taste of what's to come; we
need your support
now<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCA:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
view<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCA:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
------------------------------
  The Occupy Movement
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCB:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
NATO protesters march through
Chicago<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCC:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Occupy G8: Peoples' Summit Confronts World
Leaders<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCD:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Fortress Chicago prepares for NATO
summit<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCE:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Undocumented and Unafraid Portland
Oregon<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFCF:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Nurses, Robin Hood & Tom Morello in Chicago   Best of the web
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD0:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Rachel Maddow - Fox News helps raise money for Romney with fake
scandal<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD1:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Pakistan anger as NATO Afghanistan routes
reopen<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD2:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
How many has the US wrongfully
executed?<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD3:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Monumental Ruling on NDAA Indefinite
Detention<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD4:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Why JPMorgan's big loss matters to anyone with a bank account   Political
Humor
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD5:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Santorum Now Viciously Condemning Homosexuals, Minorities, Women For
$100000 Speaking
Fee<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD6:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
George W. Bush $25 Book on ECONOMIC GROWTH!
HAH!<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD7:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Gay marriage: Obama gets on the right side of
history<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD8:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Mitt Romney's Wreckonomics<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFD9:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Michele Bachmann Rejects Swiss Citizenship 2 Days Later   Global Warning
<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFDA:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Arizona Fire Covers 12 Square
Miles<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFDB:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Living in the Shadow of the
Stacks<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFDC:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Wildfires scorch land in Tonto National Forest,
Arizona<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFDD:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
People Everywhere Connect the Dots on Climate
Change<http://premiere.whatcounts.com/t?r=1664&c=911313&l=36646&ctl=16AEFDE:CBAFE6C01F6992F32895415C8442A7C2EDC3615173C7E546&>
Labeling GMO Food, Fair Trade & US War on Hemp
------------------------------
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Fwd: [New post] Looting the Lives of the Poor

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-20T10:35:21

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 20, 2012 at 12:34 PM
Subject: Fwd: [New post] Looting the Lives of the Poor
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

An idea in order to claw back some of the old laws of privacy:  Start a
group interested in removing the airport naked scanners and target your
local airport. Look up "Chertoff, Alan" the first head of the US Homeland
Security Agency and take notes of his involvement in the spread of the
scanners.  Use them, they are dynamite.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Totten's Weblog <donotreply< at >wordpress.com>
Date: Sat, May 19, 2012 at 12:58 AM
Subject: [New post] Looting the Lives of the Poor
To: suzannedk< at >gmail.com

**
          New post on *Bill Totten's Weblog*
<http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>  Looting the Lives of
the Poor<http://billtotten.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/looting-the-lives-of-the-poor/>
by
Bill Totten <http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>

*by Barbara Ehrenreich*

*TomDispatch (May 17 2012)*

*Gordon Gekko, the infamously cutthroat capitalist and lead character in
Oliver Stone's *Wall Street*, captured the heady years of the 1980s with a
single, indelible line: Greed is good. Today, it is Edward Conard, a friend
and former colleague of Mitt Romney's at the private equity firm Bain
Capital, who has offered a new mantra for the one percent, *a cri de
coeur*for the Gekkos of the twenty-first century: Inequality is good.
*

*In his new book *Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told
About the Economy Is Wrong* (2012), Conard argues that gaping income
inequality is an indication of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The more
unequal we are, Conard told the *New York Times Magazine*, the better off
we all will be. Why? Because economies grow and thrive when smart people
devise solutions to our thorniest problems by inventing or perfecting goods
and services. Conard singled out a group of twentysomethings sitting at a
Manhattan coffee shop one afternoon, deriding them as lazy "art-history
majors". Those people should be out creating businesses and taking risks,
he insisted, because that's how societies prosper. And the way to encourage
that risk-taking is the promise of obscene wealth for those who succeed
(and, implicitly, dismal poverty for those who don't).*

*How obscene should that wealth be? In 2008, the top one percent commanded
21% of all income in America. Conard says our society would improve if only
that figure were doubled.*

*Needless to say, there is no shortage of Conard critics. The more
respectful ones ask: Teachers do not fit Conard's entrepreneurial ideal -
are they no use to society? What about judges? Government regulators?
Others dismiss Conard as an out-of-touch millionaire living in a fantasy
land. For instance, Conard claims that wages for American workers have
climbed in recent decades; in fact, as liberal economist Dean Baker notes,
wages have barely kept pace with inflation. "We'll leave it to his shrink",
Baker quipped, "to determine whether the problem is that Conard is deluded
or dishonest".*

*It's not hard to imagine how members of the working poor would react to
Conard's message. Here he is urging them to take the leap and design more
efficient soda cans or search engines, when, as TomDispatch regular Barbara
Ehrenreich makes strikingly clear, the working poor who dare share food
with the down-and-out or kick up their feet on a subway seat can land in a
debtor's hell created for them by state and local governments and law
enforcement agencies. Unlike Conard, Ehrenreich, the author of the
bestselling *Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America* (2001), had
an actual urge to help those in trouble.  She's just launching the Economic
Hardship Reporting Project, which will "will pay laid-off and/or
underemployed journalists who are themselves caught in the maw of economic
hardship to produce compelling stories". -- Andy Kroll*

*_________________________________________________________*

*Preying on the Poor*

*How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks*

*by Barbara Ehrenreich*
*_________________________________________________________*

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons.
Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a
janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime
scene. But as *Business Week* helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in
aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a
business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and
almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for
example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each
paycheck, or they can require workers to show up thirty minutes or more
before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have
taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging
the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees
(themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can
be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

It's not just the private sector that's preying on the poor. Local
governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining
tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent
defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a
suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money,
given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions
have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price
of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have
to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for
failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her
sixteen-year-old son's incarceration. When she received a back paycheck,
she thought it would allow her to pay for her son's jail stay. Instead, it
was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.

*Government Joins the Looters of the Poor*

You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts
that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no
official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to
independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of *Wage Theft in
America*(2008), who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least
$100 billion
a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending
industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote *Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc
- How the Working Poor Became Big Business* (2010), says the poor pay an
effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products
they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards,
subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.

These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of
magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributes
about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single
cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the
same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more,
through wage theft.

And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of
dollars in exorbitant interest that businesses charge the poor, it is
notably chary with public benefits for the poor. Temporary Assistance to
Needy Families, for example, our sole remaining nationwide welfare program,
gets only $26 billion a year in state and federal funds. The impression is
left of a public sector that's gone totally schizoid: on the one hand,
offering safety-net programs for the poor; on the other, enabling
large-scale private sector theft from the very people it is supposedly
trying to help.

At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the
looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, I first started hearing
complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of
law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get
arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a
stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each
of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.

And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines
has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country - from California
and Texas to Pennsylvania - counties and municipalities have been
toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes
going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school
hours. In New York City, it's now a crime to put your feet up on a subway
seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman
spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime
of having a "messy yard". Some cities - most recently, Houston and
Philadelphia - have made it a crime to share food with indigent people in
public places.

Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the
states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a
landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you
fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for
your arrest. And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have
been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding
bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage - a practice so common that
the industry even has a term for it: "sewer service". In a sequence
that *National
Public Radio* reports is "increasingly common", a person is stopped for
some minor traffic offense - having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake
light - at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting
offender is whisked off to jail.

*Local Governments as Predators*

Each of these crimes, neo-crimes, and pseudo-crimes carries financial
penalties as well as the threat of jail time, but the amount of money thus
extracted from the poor is fiendishly hard to pin down. No central agency
tracks law enforcement at the local level, and local records can be almost
willfully sketchy.

According to one of the few recent nationwide estimates, from the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 10.5 million misdemeanors were
committed in 2006. No one would risk estimating the average financial
penalty for a misdemeanor, although the experts I interviewed all affirmed
that the amount is typically in the "hundreds of dollars". If we take an
extremely lowball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that eighty to
ninety percent of criminal offenses are committed by people who are
officially indigent, then local governments are using law enforcement to
extract, or attempt to extract, at least $2 billion a year from the poor.

And that is only a small fraction of what governments would like to collect
from the poor. Katherine Beckett, a sociologist at the University of
Washington, estimates that "deadbeat dads" (and moms) owe $105 billion in
back child-support payments, about half of which is owed to state
governments as reimbursement for prior welfare payments made to the
children. Yes, parents have a moral obligation to their children, but the
great majority of child-support debtors are indigent.

Attempts to collect from the already-poor can be vicious and often, one
would think, self-defeating. Most states confiscate the drivers' licenses
of people owing child support, virtually guaranteeing that they will not be
able to work.  Michigan just started suspending the drivers' licenses of
people who owe money for parking tickets.  Las Cruces, New Mexico, just
passed a law that punishes people who owe overdue traffic fines by cutting
off their water, gas, and sewage.

Once a person falls into the clutches of the criminal justice system, we
encounter the kind of slapstick sadism familiar to viewers of *Wipeout*.
Many courts impose fees without any determination of whether the offender
is able to pay, and the privilege of having a payment plan will itself cost
money.

In a study of fifteen states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University found fourteen of them contained jurisdictions that charge a
lump-sum "poverty penalty" of up to $300 for those who cannot pay their
fees and fines, plus late fees and "collection fees" for those who need to
pay over time. If any jail time is imposed, that too may cost money, as the
hapless Edwina Nowlin discovered, and the costs of parole and probation are
increasingly being passed along to the offender.

The predatory activities of local governments give new meaning to that
tired phrase "the cycle of poverty". Poor people are more far more likely
than the affluent to get into trouble with the law, either by failing to
pay parking fines or by incurring the wrath of a private-sector creditor
like a landlord or a hospital.

Once you have been deemed a criminal, you can pretty much kiss your
remaining assets goodbye. Not only will you face the aforementioned court
costs, but you'll have a hard time ever finding a job again once you've
acquired a criminal record. And then of course, the poorer you become, the
more likely you are to get in fresh trouble with the law, making this less
like a "cycle" and more like the waterslide to hell.  The further you
descend, the faster you fall - until you eventually end up on the streets
and get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a
sidewalk.

I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the
poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously
even when it's committed by millionaire employers. No one should be
incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting
their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any
long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net.
Before we can "do something" for the poor, there are some things we need to
stop doing to them.

*Links:*

The original version of this article, at the URL below, contains several
links to further information not included here.
_____

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of *Nickel and
Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America* (now in a tenth anniversary edition
with a new afterword). She is most recently the founder of the
just-launched Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports
innovative journalism on poverty and economic hardship.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter < at >TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich

(c) 2012 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175543/
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[BillTottenWeblog] Plutonomy and the Precariat

Bill Totten — 2012-05-20T00:17:57

On the history of the US economy in decline

by Noam Chomsky

Le Monde diplomatique (May 18 2012)

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There's never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead - because victory won't come quickly - it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it's an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That's another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I'm just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s - although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today - nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that "we're gonna get out of it", even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that "it will get better".

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world - you could see it in the business press at the time - because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, "we're gonna get out of it".

It's quite different now. For many people in the United States, there's a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it's quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the working class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you're a worker in manufacturing today - the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression - and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren't going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy - a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it's no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise - producing things people need or could use - to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian. The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles - what's called the "middle class" here, the "working class" in other countries - but it was real. And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn't benefit the economy - it probably harms it and society - but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On politics and money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact. Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn't really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There's a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it's been pretty harsh - and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the one percent and even less - the 0.1% - it's just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they're concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won't run through the corruption, but it's pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances". It urged investors to put money into a "plutonomy index". The brochure says, "The World is dividing into two blocs - the Plutonomy and the rest".

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that's where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don't really care about them. We don't really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they're sometimes called the "precariat" - people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it's not the periphery anymore. It's becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still "Saint Alan" - hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) - was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called "growing worker insecurity". If working people are insecure, if they're part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they're not going to make demands, they're not going to try to get better wages, they won't get improved benefits. We can kick 'em out, if we don't need 'em. And that's what's called a "healthy" economy, technically speaking. And he wa
s highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat - in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the one percent and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That's where we're heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it's going to be necessary to face the fact that it's a long, hard struggle. You don't win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward worker takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that's just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place. In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn't win. But with enough popular support, they could have won. It's a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there's a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that's the basis for a real revolution. That's how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn't profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don't think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce - which owned it anyway - turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that's a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there's a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it's very serious. It not only affects people's lives, but the economy. In that regard, here's a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours. I don't know if you've ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it's operating at about the same speed it was sixty years ago when my wife and I first took it. It's a scandal.

It could be done here as it's been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can't happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate change and nuclear weapons

I've kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we've discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It's kind of a miracle that we've escaped it. That's the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn't being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we're in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it's not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it's pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. "Why pay attention to these scientists?"

We're really regressing back to the dark ages. It's not a joke. And if that's happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn't going to be averted - and in a generation or two, everything else we're talking about won't matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It's not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures. It's inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

This article was first published in TomDispatch, 8 may 2012: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175539/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky%2C_a_rebellious_world_or_a_new_dark_age/

More by Noam Chomsky: http://mondediplo.com/_Noam-Chomsky_

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects (2010), Making the Future (2011), and Occupy (2012), published by Zuccotti Park Press, from which this speech, given last October, is excerpted and adapted. His web site is www.chomsky.info.

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