gmane.politics.communism.environmental

[BillTottenWeblog] There Is a Way!

Bill Totten — 2012-05-26T12:33:22

Beyond the Big, Bad Corporation

by Tara Lohan

AlterNet (May 21 2012)

As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In New Economic Visions, a special five-part AlterNet series edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

In September 2011, two Appalachian women traveled to Delaware to deliver a petition to the state's Attorney General Beau Biden. Betty Harrah and Lorelei Scarbro represented thousands who believed that the business charter for coal-mining company Massey Energy should be repealed. The company, mostly operating in Appalachia but incorporated in Delaware, has violated the Clean Water Act 60,000 times. An investigation commissioned by the governor of West Virginia found Massey could have prevented the explosion that claimed the lives of 29 miners, among them Harrah's brother, at the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2010.

Massey, they contended, was simply too dangerous to be in business. But their pleas fell on deaf ears. The company plugs along, despite its shoddy environmental and safety records, churning out profits for its parent company, Alpha Natural Resources.

To many, Massey is not simply one bad apple, but part of an economic system heavy with rotten fruit. Companies like Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, Countrywide, BP, and Walmart epitomize the relentless drive of corporations to maximize profit above everything else, including safety, fair working conditions, clean air and water, healthy communities, and common decency. In doing so, the very word "corporation" has become a dirty word.

Forget bad apples, perhaps we should just raze the entire orchard, right?

Our economy, like our environment, is in trouble. Limitless growth that drives the profit-hungry corporate model today is ecologically impossible. We simply cannot sustain business as usual and the cracks in our system are showing.

"You look at the Arab Spring ... what looked like very stable regimes across the Arab world were suddenly shown to be completely vulnerable and brittle and I think that we may see the same kind of thing in our economy", said Marjorie Kelly, a fellow at the Tellus Institute and author of the new book Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution (2012). "What looks massive and permanent and invulnerable, may show itself quite suddenly to be brittle".

Maybe this doesn't sound heartening but it should. The corporate model we have today hasn't always been around and it doesn't need to remain the dominant way we do business. There is no reason we should be swabbing the decks of a sinking ship - alternatives already exist and they are flourishing.

"What's underway is an ownership revolution. It's about broadening economic power from the few to the many and about changing the mindset from social indifference to social benefit", Kelly writes:

We're schooled to fear this shift, to think there are only two choices for the design of an economy: capitalism and communism, private ownership and state ownership. But the alternatives being grown today defy those dusty 19th-century categories. They represent a new option of private ownership for the common good. This economic revolution is different from a political one. It's not about tearing down but about building up. It's about reconstructing the foundation of ownership on which the economy rests.

Better Business

A common complaint in today's world is one of disconnection. Our industrialized world has resulted in less contact with community - we don't know our neighbors or who grows our food. In the same way that we've lost touch with a deeper sense of belonging and place, many of us have become disconnected from the soul of our work. The corporation-worker structure today is a master-servant relationship. We're slaves to the company, working longer hours for less wages.

"Now mass layoffs to boost profits are the norm, while the expectation of a career with one company is long gone", William Lazonick wrote.

This transformation happened because the US business corporation has become in a (rather ugly) word "financialized". It means that executives began to base all their decisions on increasing corporate earnings for the sake of jacking up corporate stock prices. Other concerns - economic, social and political - took a backseat. From the 1980s, the talk in boardrooms and business schools changed. Instead of running corporations to create wealth for all, leaders should think only of "maximizing shareholder value".

Our economy is dominated by a monoculture business model, Kelly says, driven largely by publicly traded corporations that have built in pressure from Wall Street for maximum short-term earnings. But a healthy, living economy needs biodiversity. We can find this if we begin to look around - across the US and the world - where there are businesses designed not for maximum profit, but with a mission-driven social and economic architecture. One of these models is the "social enterprise".

The Social Enterprise Alliance defines these organizations as "businesses whose primary purpose is the common good. They use the methods and disciplines of business and the power of the marketplace to advance their social, environmental and human justice agendas." And one of the defining characteristics is that "The common good is its primary purpose, literally 'baked into' the organization's DNA, and trumping all others".

Here's an example. Remember Working Assets? Starting out as a progressive-minded credit card company in the 1980s, it added phone service - first long-distance in the 1990s, then cellular in 2000 - and now it has created the subsidiary CREDO Mobile. The company operates as a for-profit business, which is privately owned, with most of the employees owning the stock, so it doesn't have to bow to Wall Street pressures. They use their profits to help support causes they believe in - so far the amount of money donated is $70 million and counting.

Social enterprises can also be nonprofits, like Goodwill Industries, which last year turned donations from 79 million people into revenue that provided job training to 4.2 million people. And by reselling donated clothing, furniture and household goods, they divert an estimated two billion pounds from landfills every year.

The idea of social enterprises is catching on in the business world in the US with the emergence of Benefit Corporations, also known as B Corps, which are designed, "to create a new sector of the economy which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems". B Corps are all for-profit companies that have legal structures mandating that the company is designed to work not for maximum shareholder gain, but for the good of society and the environment.

Currently there are more than 500 companies that have become approved B Corps and legislation has been passed in seven states (Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, Virginia, California, Hawaii and New York) making them official entities. Some are larger corporations, such as Method Products and Patagonia, but many are also smaller companies and business-to-business operations.

B Corps are similar in design to another kind of company called L3Cs. "The L3C is a hybrid between the nonprofit and for-profit models in that it is essentially a profit-generating entity with a socially beneficial mission", writes Ashley Holmes for GreenBlue:

Like an LLC corporation, L3Cs have the same liability protection and are not tax-exempt; however L3Cs have access to forms of capital that traditional corporations don't qualify for, all in order to further social and environmental goals. Americans for Community Development describe the L3C as a company that "combines the best features of a for-profit LLC with the socially beneficial aspects of a nonprofit ... the for-profit with a nonprofit soul.

It's About the Workers

B Corps and L3Cs create a legal foothold for a more sustainable kind of business. But other models get to the heart of the new economy as well and take up the important ideas of ownership and governance. Who gets to make decisions about how our companies are run and who gets to share in the wealth that's created?

The US helped create a system in post-war Germany for works councils, where workers are elected from companies to help manage how the business is run. "That means the councils help determine core issues, like when to open and close the store or office, who gets what shift, and who gets laid off or fired", wrote Jeremy Gantz in a review of Thomas Geoghegan's book Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life (2010). Germany also has co-determined boards, which give workers a voice in governance - companies with more than 2,000 employees have half of their boards composed of workers.

Empowering employees has proved a successful business model elsewhere. The John Lewis Partnership has been around in the UK since 1920 and has grown to over thirty department stores and more than 200 supermarkets, with a revenue of $13.4 billion. The business is employee-owned - all workers get to share the profits and vote for the governing council and company's board.

"This firm has a written constitution, printed up and publicly available, which states that the company's purpose is to support 'the happiness of all its members' ", wrote Kelly:

Now, let me pause and note: this is the only major corporation I've found that declares its purpose is to serve employee happiness. This is so, at JLP, not because it boosts returns for shareholders. At the John Lewis Partnership, employee happiness isn't a path to some other goal. It is the goal.

Employee-owned companies aren't just a British anomaly. "In the United States, the National Center for Employee Ownership reports that there are 11,300 employee-owned firms, with some fourteen million participants", Kelly found. "And in Europe, large companies have nearly ten million employee-owners. Employee ownership has been increasing in such countries as Spain, Poland, France, Denmark, and Sweden."

Organizations can be run with employee owners or other kinds of members. The London Symphony is owned by the musicians who play in it. Barcelona FC soccer team and the Green Bay Packers football team are community-owned. Mutual insurance companies are owned by policy holders and credit unions are owned by depositors.

Employee-owned businesses and cooperatives have emerged in the green business world with great success, as well. Community-owned forests in Mexico support indigenous people, protect the environment and prevent illegal logging. In Denmark community-owned wind farms have jumpstarted wind energy, supplying twenty percent of country's power. In Minnesota, Minwind is a farmer-owned wind development company that's grown to 350 members.

A New Vision

There are different legal and social structures that can help to feed this growing new economy. In Quebec, a "solidarity" or "social economy" was created to help nonprofits and cooperatives, and it gets popular and government support. Spain is home to Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, which is a network of more than 100 cooperatives, employing 100,000 workers. This cooperative model helps support new business ventures. If a firm is struggling in its first few years, interest rates are lowered to help it instead of flagging the business as high risk and then jacking up interest rates like we do here, says Kelly.

Supporting these new ventures is important, but so is holding the companies accountable to their missions. For cooperatives and employee-owned companies, like the John Lewis Partnership, where members get a vote and can elect those who make governing decisions (or run for the positions themselves), there is more power to make sure the company is keeping its word. With privately held businesses, accountability can be much harder. The B Corp certification process is one way that helps get around the blind spots - certified B Corps have to prove themselves to a third-party organization - creating accountability and transparency.

So what can we do in the US to spur the development of socially and ecologically conscious business? "I used to think we needed new federal legislation and corporate chartering and that we could drive change with state and federal law", Marjorie Kelly said. "And I do think we do need an articulation of what a company ought to be in law". But we have to go beyond that, she insists.

"A teacher at Schumacher College posed a question: What kind of economy is suited for living inside a living being?" Kelly said. "It's not an endlessly expanding economy, it's not an economy that's designed to serve the few, at the expense of the many, it is an economy that is generative; that is life-serving in its purposes. How do we generate the conditions for life to continue and to thrive?"

The answer will likely be not one thing, but a compilation and diversity of different business models that are consistent with supporting workers, protecting the environment, and serving the broader social good.

_____

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource (2010). You can follow her on Twitter < at >TaraLohan.

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[BillTottenWeblog] It's a Rich Man's World

Bill Totten — 2012-05-26T01:41:47

How billionaire backers pick America's candidates

by Thomas Frank

Harper's Magazine Essay (April 2012)

While visiting Kansas City last December, I read a local newspaper story lamenting the gradual transformation of Missouri into a reliably Republican citadel - a red state, as we like to say. In the past, I read, Missouri had been different from its more partisan neighbors. It had been a "bellwether" state that "reflected national trends", rather than delivering votes for any particular party. But now all that was over, and I assumed the article would go on to mourn the death of judicious public reason - the tradition of giving rival arguments a hearing and testing them with that famous "Show Me" skepticism.

I was wrong. Forget the death of open-mindedness. What was actually being mourned that day in the Kansas City Star was a possible loss of advertising revenue by the state's TV stations. If Missouri was no longer a battleground state, then the two parties and their various backers would no longer fight their expensive electronic war over the airwaves between Saint Louie and Saint Joe, and "spending on TV ads in the state [would] plummet".

This was the concern, not some airy nonsense about ideology or polarization. That would have been a mere matter of opinion, while this was so hard and so real it came with a price tag. Here is what Missouri's creeping Kansification was going to cost: in the last election cycle, the national candidates and their allied PACs blew almost $21 million on advertising in the state. Given Missouri's tilt to the right, every last penny of a similar windfall might be lost. Even worse: Missourians had squandered their battleground status just before what promises to be the biggest-spending political year ever. As the paper noted, campaign expenditures are predicted to skyrocket between now and November.

Thanks to their own ideological stubbornness, Missourians - or, more accurately, Missouri broadcasters - will now miss out on all that. The Star reassured readers chat the hammer blows inflicted on their local FCC license holders "would not be fatal". Yet the ultimate lesson was clear: political conviction comes at a high cost. Unemployment in Missouri stands at eight percent, and like other Midwestern states, it has been hemorrhaging jobs and industries for decades. Now it has gone and turned away the one bonanza that even loser states, as long as they remain appropriately fickle, have a shot at winning: campaign finance.

When I came across the Star article, I thought it was an outlier - a strange and peculiarly tone-deaf way to approach political questions. Before long, however, I started noticing the same thing elsewhere: a tendency to describe Campaign 2012 exclusively in terms of the massive amounts being spent to sway us. Financial journalists reported dispassionately on "how to play the ad glut", with even the drooping billboard industry preparing for a jackpot. "Without This Year's Elections The Ad Business Would Be Totally Screwed", screamed a January headline on the Business Insider website.

It wasn't just the business press that was fixated on campaign spending. On the night of the Nevada caucuses, for example, CNN anchorman Don Lemon could be seen reporting on economic hardship in that state: the foreclosures, the real estate collapse, the unemployment. The network even trotted out a Nevadan homeless person to make its point. Then, a short while later, Lemon was back with one of those interactive displays, for which CNN is so famous - in this case, a screen tracking outlays by candidates and outside groups on TV commercials.

After recalling what a glorious burst of spending the campaigns had rained down on other states as they prepared to vote, Lemon observed that now it was Nevada's turn. Especially given the level of suffering there, said Lemon, "you would think the candidates may say, 'Hey, you know, we want to put a little money into the economy' ". But now it was the anchorman's duty to report a lamentable fact. Those candidates were actually spending less in long-suffering Nevada than they had elsewhere, and some of them had declined to buy even a single minute of airtime in the Sagebrush State. "They're not add[ing] to the economy here", Lemon soberly noted. The effrontery! The heartlessness!

Political advertising, in other words, might correctly be understood as a modern-day form of largesse. When presidential candidates run TV commercials assailing one another, they are playing the role of aristocrats in some medieval ceremony, throwing handfuls of coins to the toiling masses. And beside these gilded personages stand the commentariat, marveling in song and rhyme at what a fine democratic tableau it all is.

Alternatively, we might see TV commercials as one of the few stimulus programs Republicans fully endorse. They are also just about the only form of redistribution from the billionaire class that the rest of us will ever see. {1}

And what of the ads themselves? After filling us in on how much each campaign had spent, CNN's Lemon shared a few specimens. He told us exactly how many times each commercial had aired in Nevada and Florida, letting us calculate for ourselves the relative stopping power of each salvo. Did people's hatred for Gingrich continue to mount after the fiftieth time an anti-Newt commercial had run, or were there diminishing returns?

There is nothing new about money in American politics. It has twisted the people's will and infuriated the civic-minded for more than two centuries. Efforts to restrict the flow of campaign spending go back as far as 1757, when George Washington was taken to task for ladling out an excess of rum, beer, and hard cider to the voters in his district. Since then, a series of laws - including the Pendleton Act (1883), the Federal Corrupt Practices Act (1910), the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), the Federal Elections Campaign Act (1971, 1974), and the McCain-Feingold Act (2002) - have aimed to disrupt the synergy between cash and electioneering, with mixed success.

But it is different this time, in two ways.

First of all, there is the sheer size of it. Almost every modern election cycle sees a rise in spending over the previous one. This time, however, the increase will be much steeper. Think of the many outrages brought to you over the past decade or so by campaign dollars: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the millions dumped by friendly billionaires into Americans Coming Together; the adventures of the Bush Pioneers, the Bush Rangers, the Bush Super Rangers. These will fade to insignificance when compared with the 2012 onslaught - the "coming tsunami of slime", as journalist Joe Hagan calls it.

How big will the tsunami be? No one knows for sure, since today we are operating under different rules than those that prevailed just four years ago. One way of gauging the wall of filth that is headed our way would be to note that the 2010 congressional elections - the first to be conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - saw more than a fivefold increase in "independent expenditures" over the previous round of midterms. And according to the Center for Responsive Politics, independent spending to date for the 2012 elections is already 108 percent above 2008 levels. At a minimum, then, we can probably look forward to twice as much slime as the last time around.

We have been heading in this direction for a while, thanks to trends in campaign finance that brought us bundlers and PACs and 527s. Citizens United upped the ante by effectively inviting corporations and unions to spend as much as they liked on "electioneering communications". What really changed, however, was neither the abolition of spending limits nor even the touching solicitude paid to corporations by equating their speech with that of human beings. No, Citizens United (and the related SpeechNow case) altered the political landscape most profoundly by ushering in the Super PAC.

What distinguishes the Super PAC from previous electoral-finance innovations is the deniability it affords the candidate it supports. By law, candidates themselves still cannot accept more than $2,500 from an individual. A Super PAC - officially designated as an "independent expenditure-only committee" - suffers from no such handicap. It can raise and spend potentially oceanic amounts of cash, as long as it maintains its nominal "independence" from a candidate. These slush funds are open to contributions from ordinary citizens, of course. But they have become the stalking horse par excellence for billionaire backers, who are now freed from the nickel-and-dime constraints of direct contribution - and much of this money, being theoretically separate from the candidates themselves, has natura
lly been poured into vitriolic TV ads.

It dawned on the world that we had reached a new level of campaign savagery during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses. For a brief moment, you will recall, Newt Gingrich, who had foresworn negative advertising and was behaving in an uncharacteristically congenial manner, took the lead in public-opinion polls. Almost immediately, Mitt Romney - which is to say, Mitt Romney's studiously non-aligned corporate doppelganger, the Restore Our Future Super PAC - blitzed his slow-moving opponent with a storm of derisive TV commercials. The spots ran day and night, and utterly destroyed Gingrich's standing in the polls.

Among people who follow campaign spending closely, this seems to have been a sort of Hiroshima moment: the vast power of a new weapon was finally unveiled. Candidates like Romney could appear to be models of civic virtue, without an unkind or even combative thought in their heads, while their wealthy patrons came together to heap ridicule on their rivals, in unprecedented quantities of advertising and degrees of viciousness. All of the handshaking and diner-visiting and carefully drawn position papers were swept into irrelevance.

Romney's carpet-bombing assault in Iowa triggered an immediate campaign-finance arms race among the surviving candidates. But Restore Our Future retained at least a temporary edge over Gingrich's Winning Our Future and Rick Santorum's Red, White and Blue Fund and Ron Paul's Endorse Liberty. A few weeks later, Romney's secret weapon delivered the Florida primary for the former Massachusetts governor by once again outsliming the hapless Gingrich, reportedly by a factor of five to one.

The rise of the Super PACs, and the sheer volume of cash they enabled candidates to devote to mudslinging without ever dirtying their hands, was something new. Just as new, and equally alarming, was the public's cognitive capitulation to the process. Over the course of the past few decades, the power of concentrated money has subverted the professions, destroyed small investors, wrecked the regulatory state, corrupted legislators en masse, and repeatedly put the economy through the wringer. Now it has come for our democracy itself.

And by and large, we are pretty blase about it. To judge by our society's consensus-approved commentary, the permissible modes of political discussion are narrowing by the day. We speculate about what campaign spending will do for regional economies, or how effective this or that TV commercial is at persuading voters, or (at the outermost limits of journalistic daring) whether that selfsame commercial might contain ... errors of fact. But what this style of commentary virtually requires the media to ignore is that with every juicy morsel of hate, we are becoming more and more a rich man's country.

Newt Gingrich did not take the Iowa defeat lying down. Instead, he turned to a billionaire backer of his own, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, to fill the coffers of Winning Our Future. With his war chest thus replenished, Gingrich began running TV commercials in South Carolina that held Romney responsible for certain unsavory deeds of Bain Capital, the buyout firm he used to run. {2} Largely on the strength of these bludgeoning ads, Gingrich proceeded to win the South Carolina primary.

And if you happened to turn on CNN the night of Gingrich's big win, you would have heard the centrist pundit David Gergen depict the whole electoral process as a kind of card game for billionaires. While Gingrich took his victory lap in a packed South Carolina ballroom, Gergen predicted his next move: "Don't you think he'll call Mr Adelson and say, 'Why don't you double down?'"

The line stuck in my craw. Its obvious but unspoken assumption was that the public may vote as its pleases, but that the parties to whom the candidates ultimately answer are the superrich, who will expect some returns but are also sometimes willing to invest in a sagging candidacy - buying on the dips, as it were. Even more disturbing is the unspoken but obvious follow-up question: What is the payoff for Adelson, or for any other major political contributor, if his long shot comes in?

Adelson himself spoke of Barack Obama's "quest to socialize this country" when Forbes quizzed him about his motives. He also had this to say:

I'm against very wealthy people ... influencing elections ... But as long as it's doable I'm going to do it. Because I know that guys like Soros have been doing it for years, if not decades.

Foster Friess, the mutual-fund tycoon who is plowing money into Santorum's Red, White and Blue Fund, is also happy to discuss his munificence with reporters. And when he does, the conversation seems naturally to gravitate to the language of gambling, investing, and financial speculation.

When Bloomberg's Margaret Brennan interviewed Friess, for example, she persistently framed his patronage as a daring investment and potential ten-bagger. Friess, she explained, was "betting some of [his] fortune on a long shot". This was on January 27, when the campaign of the fresh-faced former Pennsylvania senator seemed to be fading. Brennan wondered whether it was time to diversify or even cash out: "At what point do you cut your losses? At what point do you perhaps back one of the front-runners?"

A couple of weeks later, after Santorum was declared the surprise victor in Iowa and pulled off upsets in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado, Brennan spoke to Friess again. This time she asked, "Can you say at this point that your support paid off this week?"

The constant chatter of long shots and payoffs failed to rattle Friess. He cheerfully played along, noting that although he had contributed less to Santorum than Sheldon Adelson had to Gingrich, he had secured better political results. "I'm an investor", Friess joked, "and Sheldon is a casino guy".

Not that Friess is absolutely locked in to speculative metaphors. He also describes the millions he has put behind Santorum as the result of a political casting call. Musing to ABC News in February, Friess listed the candidate's strengths as if reading from a classified ad:

fifty-three years old, starts each morning with fifty push-ups, is the grandson of a coal miner, has demonstrated the ability to win blue-collar votes by winning in Pennsylvania, which had over one million Democratic registration advantage, and grew up on a Veterans Administration hospital grounds where his father worked, and is a fellow of modest means.

Help Wanted: Working Man with Plutocrat-Friendly Views.

I haven't even touched on the billionaires who are making such an inspiring display of class solidarity behind Mitt Romney - John Paulson, Julian Robertson, Paul Tudor Jones, a Walmart heir or two. Nor have I broached the question that is no doubt vexing many: Where are the liberal billionaires we've heard so much about? Well, as it happens, the nation's number one progressive billionaire, currency speculator George Soros, is reportedly not jazzed about the presidential campaign. He is having trouble distinguishing between Barack Obatna and Mitt Romney, and his failure to take a stake in anybody's Super PAC has been treated as a news story in its own right.

Many efforts to grapple with the Super PAC phenomenon bog down in the slough of advertising criticism, which offers not one but two misleading schools of thought. One holds that advertising is diabolically powerful, capable of transmitting into the minds of the millions whatever views the man with the camera chooses. The other insists that advertising is not effective in the least, that consumers are wily and evasive, always charting their own course. {3}

Both views are clearly inadequate in the present circumstances. The idea that our votes can simply be purchased by a large enough ad expenditure is contradicted by the burnt-out hulks of gold-plated political campaigns that litter recent history - think of the floundering Steve Forbes, or the tongue-tied Rick Perry, or eBay CEO Meg Whitman's fantastically expensive 2010 bid for the California governorship. Yet the other argument, that we remain proud and free and immune to the barrage, is such an obvious rationalization that you hear it advanced only by people who stand to benefit from the present spectacle, or are actually in some way responsible for it.

The latter category would include Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who told an audience of lawyers back in January that "I don't care who is doing the speech - the more the merrier". Then Scalia tossed in one of the great canards of our time: "People are not stupid. If they don't like it, they'll shut it off." All power, in other words, rests in the hand with the remote. Against the scoffing majesty of the American TV viewer, all the assembled efforts of the nation's tycoons are as gentle Mediterranean waves against looming Gibraltar.

As it happens, this kind of clueless optimism contributed to the Citizens United decision itself. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared flatly that "this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption". Got that? Independent expenditures are by definition clean, because those Super PACs are, you know, independent. The court continued unfolding its wisdom:

That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.

History records that when the court made this amazing proclamation on January 21 2010, the electorate was in fact in the throes of a wrenching crisis of faith brought on by precisely the "appearance of influence or access" that Justice Kennedy declared to be impossible: namely, the apparent power of Wall Street banks to get themselves a colossal government bailout, an occurrence that had prompted rallies and protests and talk-show jeremiads by the thousand. All the judges had to do to see how wrong they were was use that all-powerful remote and turn, on the damn TV.

Like the showdown we are edging toward today, the 1896 presidential contest between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan was one of apocalyptic rhetoric and superhuman fund-raising. Like Barack Obama, Bryan was perceived by a certain stratum of Americans as the representative of an alien, revolutionary tradition. With his fiery rhetoric and opposition to the gold standard, he seemed to embody the spirit of anarchism, or maybe Jacobin Paris. And so his opponents came together as a class to drown him under a deluge of money.

In his classic 1938 history of American graft, The Politicos, 1865-1896, Matthew Josephson tells how McKinley's campaign manager, the industrialist and uber-fixer Mark Hanna, visited the New York offices of the nation's great corporations, impressing upon his listeners the "reality of the danger" and demanding from each a percentage of their capitalization in order to put down the Nebraska Robespierre. By and large; Hanna got what he asked. And with it he generated an unprecedented number of pamphlets and lithographs, fielded an army of canvassers, and caused a chorus of "the most violent class hate" to reverberate both in the press and on the lecture circuit. {4} Some speculated that Hanna may have outspent the Democrats by twenty or thirty to one. And money prevailed, of course, even if
McKinley nabbed only 51 percent of the popular vote.

This fall, office parks throughout the land will no doubt ring with Hanna-like calls to take America back from the hands of the Indonesian-socialist usurper. The parallel that really bothers me, though, involves yet another visit to New York City by an enterprising campaign manager. In February, spooked by the success of Romney's Super PAC - and also by a Koch Brothers conference at which conservative funders reportedly pledged $100 million to defeat the Democrats - the Obama campaign abruptly reversed its opposition to Super PACs. According to a Bloomberg News account, campaign manager Jim Messina was then dispatched to New York City to meet with representatives of the "financial services industry" and encourage them to chip in. During the meeting, the article reports, Messina "assured" h
is audience that the president would not "demonize Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his reelection campaign". In other words, to avoid the fate of William Jennings Bryan, the !
president
is apparently prepared to jettison a large chunk of his party's legislative and rhetorical tradition.

Here we begin to see the real consequence of all this getting and spending. It's not that campaign money has direct power over the public mind - that one advertising dollar can be counted upon to yield one vote. Nor is it true that the public is invulnerable, that we judiciously weigh these messages and see through the lies. The problem is that by putting such a price tag on the White House, we have imported market logic directly into our politics. Yes, even the village socialist will still get to vote, not to mention the village idiot. But in order to be a candidate - to be the kind of person who can make those calls to billionaires and get them to "double down" - Americans will have to undergo a far more rigorous process of ideological winnowing and executive training. And anyone who isn
't an absolute zealot about maximizing shareholder value will fail to make the cut.

For some, this seems to have been the idea all along; this is why companies have political action committees in the first place. In Honest Graft, a 1988 history of money in policies, Brooks Jackson tells us how Republican congressman Guy Vander Jagt barnstormed the nation in the 1970s, proselytizing for corporate PACs. This "preacher in the temple of free enterprise", as Jackson describes him, believed there would come a day when corporate money would act at long last in its rational self-interest and deliver up a Republican majority in Congress. When Honest Graft was published, however, the consummation of Vander Jagt's dream was still several years in the future. Corporate PACs had disappointed their prophet and were largely wasting their substance on the conservative faction of the Demo
cratic Party.

To get us where we are today would take hundreds of millions more, a generation of super-lobbyists, and massive K Street projects designed to make the political market function as a political market should. What we ended up with is a system in which politicians answer primarily to the pressures of supply and demand, not to the blunt and obsolete incentives known as votes.

There is a profound irony, of course, in watching the fate of our proudly interconnected world get taken in hand by a collection of ad-hoc propaganda bureaus, broadcasting their top-down messages of gross stupidity via the definitive mass medium of yesterday, the television.

But that is the way the market rolls. There was a period in the first term of George W Bush when the polite-thinking world trembled to hear Republican strategists talk about building a "permanent majority" - a new coalition that would make the GOP the dominant party for decades to come. It is too early to tell, of course, but perhaps with Citizens United they have finally done it. As the syndicated columnist E J Dionne has written, the Supreme Court decision is best understood as part of "a larger initiative by moneyed conservatives to rig the electoral system against their opponents." It will take time before the legislative follow-through is completed, of course, and Republicans will continue to lose elections here and there, but sooner or later, the weight of the money will tell. The ma
rket will speak.

Notes:

{1} A classic example of this redistribution: in Manchester, New Hampshire, one local TV affiliate broadcasts from an unusually luxurious building. According to the political journalist David Frum, the facility is known as the House That Forbes Built, in honor of the lavish ad buys made by Steve Forbes during his 1996 and 2000 campaigns for the presidency.

{2} Again, when I say "Gingrich", I really mean "the Super PAC supporting Gingrich". The candidate himself had absolutely nothing to do with the TV commercials that aired on his behalf.

{3} The aesthetic side of advertising criticism - which would point out that Super PAC ads are, by and large, clunky tirades apparently assembled in a matter of minutes by people armed with cheap editing software - is rarely part of the journalistic conversation.

{4} Naked coercion was also used, in a pattern that might be familiar to us today. According to Josephson, job creators across the country threatened their employees with layoffs and outright closings should Bryan win.

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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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[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".

[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_

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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.

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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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[BillTottenWeblog] Down the Skyscraper

Bill Totten — 2012-05-19T10:11:48

by Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov (May 15 2012)

It was Andrew Lawrence, the inventor of the skyscraper index, who pointed out that the building of the world's tallest buildings is a good proxy for dating the onset of major economic downturns. His index has stood the test of time; the few times when it made an incorrect prediction can be adequately explained by exceptional circumstances, such as the onset of world wars. It is now being put to the test again, and we ignore its advice at our own peril.

In "Skyscrapers and Business Cycles" Mark Thornton writes:

The ability of the index to predict economic collapse is surprising. For example, the Panic of 1907 was presaged by the building of the Singer Building (completed in 1908) and the Metropolitan Life Building (completed in 1909). The skyscraper index also accurately predicted the Great Depression with the completion of 40 Wall Tower in 1929, the Chrysler Building in 1930, and the Empire State Building in 1931.

The Petronas Towers were completed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1997 setting a new record for the world's tallest building at 1,483 feet [452 meters] beating the old record by 33 feet [10 meters] (the two towers were only 88 stories high compared with the 110 story giants built in the early 1970s). It marked the beginning of the extreme drop in Malaysia's stock market, rapid depreciation of its currency, and wide-spread social unrest. Financial and economic problems spread to economies throughout the region, a phenomenon known as the "Asian Contagion".

Thornton then goes on to elaborate why this might be so, based on economic theory:

...the construction of the world's tallest buildings [is] a salient marker of the twentieth-century's business cycle; the reoccurring pattern of entrepreneurial error that takes place in the boom phase that is later revealed during the bust phase.

The world's tallest buildings are generally built when there is a substantial and sustained divergence between the actual interest rate and the natural rate of interest, where the actual rate is below the natural rate as a result of government intervention. When the rate of interest increases, the financial effects all reduce the value of existing structures and the demand to build tall structures and when combined with depressed economic activity, the desire to build at all.

In short, people are born stupid, and this results in a periodic divergence between one artificial parameter not observable in nature and some other artificial parameter not observable in nature. And then people lose the desire to build. If you aren't pleased with explanations of this sort, then here is an alternative one, using just words, without any of the statistical/mathematical hocus-pocus fetishized by the economics profession.

Skyscrapers occur during the terminal stage in the hypertrophy of financial and other control mechanisms. They are optimized for a single function: sucking resources out of the surrounding, low-rise economy, which is actually tied to the natural world in some way, through agriculture or resource extraction or the use of physical human labor. The appearance of very large skyscrapers signals the onset of a new kind of economic vampirism, in which the parasite outgrows the host, and then begins to starve.

Although it is easy to assume that the life blood being sucked out by the vampires is money, it is actually hope. In his novel Empire V (2006 - "V" stands for vampire) Viktor Pelevin describes an entire vampiric ecosystem: the imperial vampires feed not on money but on a metaphysical substance called bablos. Bablos is generated when people, multitudes of them, work for money in pursuit of their hopes and dreams. Bablos is harvested when these hopes and dreams are then shattered. The vampires' bag of tricks includes abstract disciplines such as Discourse and Glamor, which they use to optimize the metaphysical expropriation of the products of human greed and envy. Bablos is administered as part of a special ritual, during which bushels of worn-out currency are burned in a fireplace, but this
is only done to symbolize that the money has served its purpose as a vehicle for harvesting hope via greed.

It is hardly unexpected that high belfries would be inhabited by large bats. Skyscrapers crop up when the economic vampires decisively gain the upper hand and feel exuberant about their ability to endlessly expand their numbers and their reach. But the moment at which they are at their strongest is precisely when their quarry - the base of natural resources made available by human labor - is, correspondingly, at its weakest, and can no longer support the ever-increasing load of parasites. The result is a downturn, or a crash, or a collapse.

The ascent to the top of a skyscraper is normally an exhilaratingly rapid ride in a high-speed lift, but, in an emergency, or a downturn/crash/collapse, the descent can be nothing of the sort. As John Michael Greer writes in The Long Descent (2008):

... as we've climbed from step to step on the ladder of progress, we've kicked out each rung under us as we've moved to the next. This is fine so long as the ladder keeps on going up forever. If you reach the top of the ladder unexpectedly, though, you're likely to end up teetering on a single rung with no other means of support - and if, for one reason or another, you can't stay on that one rung, it's a long way down. That's the situation we're in right now, with the rung of high-tech, high-cost, and high-maintenance technology cracking beneath us. [page 168]

Lofty and proud, often endowed with a literal pinnacle of human ingenuity and industrial might, a skyscraper has but two futures: as a smoldering pit produced by a controlled demolition, or as a rusting, teetering derelict, shed of its plate glass and overgrown with vine, serving as a bird rookery, with only an occasional visitor scaling its lofty heights, swatting away the birds, to scrape up some guano, perhaps pocketing a few eggs along the way. This is the career path of the skyscraper: from the lofty seat of the captains of industry to a mighty bird-shit factory in the sky; or is it bat-shit? Let's just call it "sky-scrapings".

The prospect of collapse is built right into the very concept of the skyscraper. The best case scenario of a controlled demolition requires explosive charges and electronic sensors to be placed in key areas all along its steel frame. The explosions must be triggered in a specific sequence, precise to the millisecond and dynamically adjusted by a computer so as to steer the accumulating avalanche of rubble into the footprint of the skyscraper's basement, to be excavated using heavy machinery once the entire mass stops burning and cools down. Without such precise and active control, things are guaranteed to go sideways because errors multiply rather than cancel. The idea that a skyscraper can collapse down into its own footprint by itself has been disproved by every generation of little chil
dren who played with stacking up blocks and knocking them down: the blocks don't land on top of each other in an neat little pile; they scatter all over the living room floor. The worst cas!
e scenario
is that the entire structure will eventually start to lean a bit, then a bit more, and eventually topple, forming a trench forced with twisted steel. Where the skyscrapers are packed close together, as they are in the many "downtowns" where skyscrapers are to be found, there is a chance of a domino effect, with one skyscraper knocking down others in a chain reaction.

What better metaphor is there for our entire collapse-prone, highly temporary living arrangement than a skyscraper? An update to the ancient Greek myth of Icarus who flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax holding together his wings, causing him to plummet into the sea and drown, the modern skyscraper - a phallic challenge to the heavens - is an object study in failed ambition. Perhaps most significantly, no other type of building intended for human use goes so quickly from comfortable and posh to potentially lethal. Having worked in many of them over the years, I have been forced to watch, and even to participate in, situations that have convinced me that I don't want to spend any significant amount of time either inside or near any skyscrapers.

While working at 100 State Street in Boston, I once witnessed an emergency involving a window washer. One of the two cables holding up the platform that travels up and down the side of the building, allowing the window washers to do their job, snapped. The platform then hung vertically, held by a single cable, with the window washer barely holding on. The various fashion victims who inhabited that floor of the tower (it was in an advertising agency) crowded next to the window and signaled their shock with theatrical gasps and pantomimes of horror. The fire department was called, and the following routine played itself out. First, the entire building was placed under lock-down: nobody could enter or exit the building. Second, a security perimeter was established around it; traffic was stopp
ed and cars parked within the perimeter were towed away. Third, firemen used axes to smash the plate glass window next to the window washer from inside, sending a cascade of glass shards tu!
mbling dow
n to the now empty street below. It took a surprising amount of force to bash through the glass. It sounded like gunfire when it finally broke away in large, irregular-shaped pieces, which, after smashing into the pavement below (I went down to check) looked like coarse sand. Finally, two more firemen standing inside the building grabbed the window washer and pulled him in.

On another occasion, I was working across the street from 1 Broadway in Kendall Square, an MIT-owned building in Cambridge, when that building suffered a transformer explosion in its basement. "Workers described suffocating smoke that smelled like burnt rubber and was so thick in places it was hard to see even a few inches" wrote the Boston Globe. Since lights went out in the entire area, our building was evacuated as well, and I went over to observe. I saw hundreds of people emerge from the building over a period of many minutes, at least a hundred of them bearing the telltale smoke inhalation soot marks under their noses. Some collapsed, some bent over retching, some just stood there trying to catch their breath. What they had inhaled was burned plastic from office carpeting, furniture a
nd partitions (loaded with dioxins) and burned transformer oil (loaded with polychlorinated biphenyls). In a short period of time they had absorbed a load of toxic chemicals which, lodged i!
n their lu
ngs, will last them the rest of their life, hastening its end. Mercifully, this building had only seventeen floors; had it been a scraper, more people - perhaps everyone in the building - would have been forced to breathe smoke for a longer period of time.

You see, skyscrapers are not really like other buildings. They are more like space capsules hanging in the sky, closer to ships and planes than to buildings. But ships have life rafts and lifeboats and planes have oxygen masks in case of decompression and inflatable chutes and life vests in case of a water landing, and buildings have fire escapes and windows reachable by the fire department's ladder trucks, while skyscrapers have ... stairwells. These stairwells are some of the most frightening places in which you might find yourself: featureless, claustrophobic, and endless. Often these stairwells are not accessible from the elevator halls directly, but require going through areas secured by electronic access cards, which require electricity to work: if a power cut finds you in the elevat
or hall, that's where you will stay.

In an emergency, you and your co-workers, two-thirds of whom (in the US) are obese or have bad knees or a bad heart or are wheelchair-bound, are expected to giddily trot down tens of flights of stairs. Since such processions are only as fast as their slowest participants, they progress very slowly. If there is a fire, the stairwells can quickly fill with smoke. Panics, stampedes and jams are not uncommon; beyond a certain density, people form a solid plug of bodies, and then nobody can move. Efforts to simulate the behavior of crowds exiting a skyscraper using fluid dynamics, to try to find a better way, have run into a problem: in such situations, the crowd does not behave as a fluid should. It forms clumps. The state of the art is to simply try to hold people back until the stairwell cle
ars.

What might trigger such an evacuation? There could be many reasons, but the two common ones are a fire and a power outage. A fire automatically triggers a power outage, to avoid the possibility of further fires started by electrical equipment that has been soaked by the sprinklers. Some skyscrapers are equipped with diesel power generators, which can provide emergency power, even in case of a fire, but then only to emergency systems.

If the idea of slowly trudging down an endless stairwell while inhaling toxic smoke does not appeal to you, here are a couple of options. The first is to buy a "Personal Escape Device" (the base model is $500 down plus $50 a month with a ten-year commitment, according to the web site). You will also need an axe to smash out the window, since in a skyscraper none of the windows open; good luck smuggling one past security.

The other option is for the active and adventurous vampire bat: learn BASE jumping, and keep a chute and a wing-suit (and, of course, an axe) with you at all times. This may seem dangerous, but, given the nature of this sport, the list of known fatalities is actually fairly short. No self-respecting skyscraper-dwelling vampire bat should be without a bat-suit. Good luck!

Gazprom Tower

But where is the skyscraper index pointing at the moment? One project worth watching is the Gazprom tower being planned in Lakhta-Center in Saint Petersburg. This is the second attempt to get this project off the ground; the previous attempt was called Okhta-Center, and was sited in Krasnogvardeisky District, where I happened to have grown up. There, the residents proved far too combative for Gazprom's PR machine to handle. The public meetings went very badly, and Gazprom opted for a change of venue. The new site, in Primorsky District, is far on the outskirts, on the Gulf on Finland. Its centerpiece a 96-floor, 470 meter office tower, going up in a city where there are, at present, exactly zero skyscrapers. In fact, the existing height restriction in the zone of the planned construction s
ite is 27 meters. The soil there is soft and boggy, land is still relatively cheap, and so building tall structures there is strictly for the foolish. Nevertheless the planning phase should!
be comple
ted this year, and the project is to be completed by 2018. There is still hope that the unfolding economic debacle in the Eurozone, which is Gazprom's major export customer, will prompt Gazprom to rethink this vanity project. If the project does proceed, then the skyscraper index will come to point squarely at Gazprom, and at the Russian Federation, in an accusatory fashion.

The other project worth watching is the so-called Freedom Tower, aka One World Trade Center, going up in lower Manhattan, on the site of the destroyed twin towers of the World Trade Center. It will be a symbol of your freedom to work an office job until you get laid off. It is going to be 541 meters tall, have 104 floors (plus five more underground), and will dwarf every other skyscraper in Manhattan. It is scheduled to reach full height this summer, and to open for business sometime next year. Given the unhappy history of the site, the project will include a massive blast wall. Security at this location is bound to be very tight; perhaps too tight for you to smuggle in your wing-suit, chute and axe.

Nervous watchers of the skyscraper index may wish to take this opportunity to consider strategies for geographic diversification: away from Manhattan, away from the United States, away from Western financial institutions. As for the rest of us, let us work to diversify away from all of them. Let us stop pinning our hopes and dreams on a paper currency which the vampire bats will use to light their fireplaces once we are done slaving for it.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.jp/2012/05/down-skyscraper.html

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[BillTottenWeblog] Looting the Lives of the Poor

Bill Totten — 2012-05-18T23:01:54

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 suc
ceed (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 hards
hip 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.

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[BillTottenWeblog] Predator Nation

Bill Totten — 2012-05-18T11:16:12

by Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch (May 13 2012)

For TomDispatch Readers: Point of pride - the TomDispatch post a Sunday ago of the last words of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach, "Epistle to the Ecotopians", was chosen as a point of departure for a moving online column by the New York Times' Mark Bittman. In it, this website was termed "essential", a heartwarming word from an admirable columnist.

In addition, a couple of reminders: we're always at the edge, financially speaking, and one good way to help keep us afloat, if you're already an Amazon customer, is to do your shopping via any TomDispatch book link - like this one for Ecotopia: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175541/ .

As long as you arrive at Amazon via a TomDispatch link, we get a small cut of whatever you buy there at no cost to you. In addition, if you're in a generous mood, you can still get a signed, personalized copy of my book, The United States of Fear, in return for a contribution of $75 (or more). Just visit our donation page to check out the offer. Believe me, we appreciate your support in any form! Tom

________________________________________

America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill

On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing

by Tom Engelhardt
________________________________________

Here's the essence of it: you can trust America's creme de la creme, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders.

Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types. In the process, you simply couldn't be better protected.

And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state. Trust them implicitly. They will never give you a bum steer.

You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world - the 30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area - but there's a good reason. That's what's needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.

And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the best authority: the people who are doing it - the only ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated, and remarkable their own work is. They deserve our congratulations, but if we're too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of high-fiving themselves.

We're talking, in particular, about the use by the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) of a growing armada of remotely piloted planes, aka drones, grimly labeled Predators and Reapers, to fight a nameless, almost planet-wide war (formerly known as the Global War on Terror). Its purpose: to destroy al-Qaeda-in-wherever and all its wannabes and look-alikes, the Taliban, and anyone affiliated or associated with any of the above, or just about anyone else we believe might imminently endanger our "interests".

In the service of this war, in the midst of a perpetual state of war and of wartime, every act committed by these leaders is, it turns out, absolutely, totally, and completely legal. We have their say-so for that, and they have the documents to prove it, largely because the best and most elevated legal minds among them have produced that documentation in secret. (Of course, they dare not show it to the rest of us, lest lives be endangered.)

By their own account, they have, in fact, been covertly exceptional, moral, and legal for more than a decade (minus, of course, the odd black site and torture chamber) - so covertly exceptional, in fact, that they haven't quite gotten the credit they deserve. Now, they would like to make the latest version of their exceptional mission to the world known to the rest of us. It is finally in our interest, it seems, to be a good deal better informed about America's covert wars in a year in which the widely announced "covert" killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is a major selling point in the president's reelection campaign.

No one should be surprised. There was always an "overt" lurking in the "covert" of what now passes for "covert war". The CIA's global drone assassination campaign has long been a bragging point in Washington, even if it couldn't officially be discussed directly before, say, Congress. The covertness of our drone wars in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere really turns out to have less to do with secrecy - just about every covert drone strike is reported, sooner or later, in the media - than assuring two administrations that they could pursue their drone wars without accountability to anyone.

A Classic of Self-Congratulation

Recently, top administration officials seem to be fanning out to offer rare peeks into what's truly on-target and exceptional about America's drone wars. In many ways, these days, American exceptionalism is about as unexceptional as apple pie. It has, for one thing, become the everyday language of the presidential campaign trail. And that shouldn't surprise us either. After all, great powers and their leaders tend to think well of themselves. The French had their "mission civilisatrice", the Chinese had the "mandate of heaven", and like all imperial powers they inevitably thought they were doing the best for themselves and others, sadly benighted, in this best of all possible worlds.

Sometimes, though, the American version of this does seem ... I hate to use the word, but exceptional. If you want to get a taste of just what this means, consider as Exhibit One a recent speech by the president's counterterrorism "tsar", John Brennan, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. According to his own account, he was dispatched to the center by President Obama to provide greater openness when it comes to the administration's secret drone wars, to respond to critics of the drones and their legality, and undoubtedly to put a smiley face on drone operations generally.

Ever since the Puritan minister John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon on shipboard on the way to North America, "a city upon a hill" has caught something of at least one American-style dream - a sense that this country's fate was to be a blessed paragon for the rest of the world, an exception to every norm. In the last century, it became "a shining city upon a hill" and was regularly cited in presidential addresses.

Whatever that "city", that dream, was once imagined to be, it has undergone a largely unnoticed metamorphosis in the twenty-first century. It has become - even in our dreams - an up-armored garrison encampment, just as Washington itself has become the heavily fortified bureaucratic heartland of a war state. So when Brennan spoke, what he offered was a new version of American exceptionalism: the first "shining drone upon a hill" speech, which also qualifies as an instant classic of self-congratulation.

Never, according to him, has a country with such an advanced weapon system as the drone used it quite so judiciously, quite so - if not peacefully - at least with the sagacity and skill usually reserved for the gods. American drone strikes, he assured his listeners, are "ethical and just", "wise", and "surgically precise" - exactly what you'd expect from a country he refers to, quoting the president, as the preeminent "standard bearer in the conduct of war".

Those drone strikes, he added, are based on staggeringly "rigorous standards" involving the individual identification of human targets. Even when visited on American citizens outside declared war zones, they are invariably "within the bounds of the law", as you would expect of the preeminent "nation of laws".

The strikes are never motivated by vengeance, always target someone known to us as the worst of the worst, and almost invariably avoid anyone who is even the most mediocre of the mediocre. (Forget the fact that, as Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported, the CIA has recently received permission from the president to launch drone strikes in Yemen based only on the observed "patterns of suspicious behavior" of groups of unidentified individuals, as was already true in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.)

Yes, in such circumstances innocents do unfortunately die, even if unbelievably rarely - and for that we couldn't be more regretful. Such deaths, however, are in some sense salutary, since they lead to the most rigorous reviews and reassessments of, and so improvements in, our actions. "This too", Brennan assured his audience, "is a reflection of our values as Americans".

"I would note", he added, "that these standards, for identifying a target and avoiding ... the loss of lives of innocent civilians, exceed what is required as a matter of international law on a typical battlefield. That's another example of the high standards to which we hold ourselves."

And that's just a taste of the tone and substance of the speech given by the president's leading counterterrorism expert, and in it he's no outlier. It catches something about an American sense of self at this moment. Yes, Americans may be ever more down on the Afghan war, but like their leaders, they are high on drones. In a February Washington Post/ABC News poll, 83% of respondents supported the administration's use of drones. Perhaps that's not surprising either, since the drones are generally presented here as the coolest of machines, as well as cheap alternatives (in money and lives) to sending more armies onto the Eurasian mainland.

Predator Nation

In these last years, this country has pioneered the development of the most advanced killing machines on the planet for which the national security state has plans decades into the future. Conceptually speaking, our leaders have also established their "right" to send these robot assassins into any airspace, no matter the local claims of national sovereignty, to take out those we define as evil or simply to protect American interests. On this, Brennan couldn't be clearer. In the process, we have turned much of the rest of the planet into what can only be considered an American free-fire zone.

We have, in short, established a remarkably expansive set of drone-war rules for the global future. Naturally, we trust ourselves with such rules, but there is a fly in the ointment, even as the droniacs see it. Others far less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and good than we are do exist on this planet and they may soon have their own fleets of drones. About fifty countries are today buying or developing such robotic aircraft, including Russia, China, and Iran, not to speak of Hezbollah in Lebanon. And who knows what terror groups are looking into suicide drones?

As the Washington Post's David Ignatius put it in a column about Brennan's speech:

What if the Chinese deployed drones to protect their workers in southern Sudan against rebels who have killed them in past attacks? What if Iran used them against Kurdish separatists they regard as terrorists? What if Russia used them over Chechnya? What position would the United States take, and wouldn't it be hypocritical if it opposed drone attacks by other nations that face "imminent" or "significant" threats?

This is Washington's global drone conundrum as seen from inside the Beltway. These are the nightmarish scenarios even our leaders can imagine others producing with their own drones and our rules. A deeply embedded sense of American exceptionalism, a powerful belief in their own special, self-evident goodness, however, conveniently blinds them to what they are doing right now. Looking in the mirror, they are incapable of seeing a mask of death. And yet our proudest export at present, other than Hollywood superhero films, may be a stone-cold robotic killer with a name straight out of a horror movie.

Consider this as well: those "shining drones" launched on campaigns of assassination and slaughter are increasingly the "face" that we choose to present to the world. And yet it's beyond us why it might not shine for others.

In reality, it's not so hard to imagine what we increasingly look like to those others: a Predator nation. And not just to the parents and relatives of the more than 160 children the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has documented as having died in US drone strikes in Pakistan. After all, war is now the only game in town. Peace? For the managers of our national security state, it's neither a word worth mentioning, nor an imaginable condition.

In truth, our leaders should be in mourning for whatever peaceful dreams we ever had. But mention drones and they light up. They're having a love affair with those machines. They just can't get enough of them or imagine their world or ours without them.

What they can't see in the haze of exceptional self-congratulation is this: they are transforming the promise of America into a promise of death. And death, visited from the skies, isn't precise. It isn't glorious. It isn't judicious. It certainly isn't a shining vision. It's hell. And it's a global future for which, someday, no one will thank us.

_____

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (2010) as well as The End of Victory Culture (1995), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books, 2011).

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[BillTottenWeblog] America the Serial Killer

Bill Totten — 2012-05-17T23:12:08

by John Feffer

Foreign Policy in Focus (May 15 2012)

Everybody loves Dexter. He's handsome. He's helpful. He works at the Miami Metro Police Department, and he's very good at his job as a blood-splatter analyst. Oh, did I mention that he moonlights as a serial killer? Don't worry: he only kills bad guys. That's part of the code that Dexter's adoptive father, himself a police officer, passed down to his son. As a child who had watched his mother die a horrendous death, Dexter couldn't overcome the murderous impulses that surged within him. His father, channeling those impulses in the only constructive way he could think of, created a better monster of his son's nature: a serial killer of serial killers.

The other essential rule of Dexter's code: don't get caught. He is very precise in the way he dispatches his victims, and he will do almost anything to evade detection. Dexter works for the law, but his second job is most definitely above the law.

During its six seasons on Showtime, the popular TV show Dexter has asked a vexing moral question: can a person do good by doing bad? Let's throw in one more twist. Sometimes Dexter makes mistakes and kills people who don't fit his definition of Really Bad. He must then wrestle with his (rudimentary) conscience and, more importantly, try to resolve the paradoxes of his father's code. One last painful element of the Dexter story: his efforts to wipe out bad guys occasionally endanger and even lead to the death of his own nearest and dearest. Dexter has a serious problem, in other words, with blowback.

By this point, you've probably figured out my theory. Dexter is all about US foreign policy and the moral calculus of a superpower. Our government has likewise been on a killing streak for a long time, and there's no end in sight. But we are also, as a country, conflicted about this propensity toward murder. We try to tell ourselves that we only kill bad guys like Osama bin Laden and his ilk. We maintain that we intervene in the affairs of other countries for only the best and purest of reasons. But we also suspect that we have deviated from our code - many times and with devastating consequences.

The first season of Dexter aired in 2006, and it's tempting to draw the parallels between the serial killer and our serial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. But let's go post-partisan here and instead look at what the Obama team is doing today. "More recently, there has been hope for a more humane set of policies from the Obama administration", writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) senior analyst Adil Shamoo in an excerpt from his new book Equal Worth (2012). "However, such hope has not materialized in the form of a new policy toward the [Middle East]. The Obama administration is bent on proving its 'national security credentials' by following the old policy of vengeance and not of justice." This tension between vengeance and justice, a major preoccupation of Dexter, was on display
last week when a US drone strike killed Fahd al-Quso, a top al-Qaeda operative in Yemen.

Quso helped plan al-Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and he would certainly fit Dexter's definition of Really Bad. He pledged to attack any and all Americans, soldiers and civilians alike. Maybe, you say, we should have apprehended him. Actually, Quso had been apprehended - several times. The FBI interrogated him prior to September 11. He escaped from prison in 2003 only to be recaptured in 2004 and then released by the Yemeni government in 2007. Maybe Washington should have tried extraordinary rendition. But the Obama administration has largely backed out of the business of extraordinary rendition in favor of extrajudicial killing.

Dexter would have no compunction about taking out Quso. Extrajudicial killing is what he's all about. America's favorite serial killer is judge, jury, and executioner all wrapped up in one.

But how do we feel about the US president occupying that role? To make a final judgment, we must consider the legal issues, the foreign policy implications, and finally the practical matter of blowback.

The Obama administration only admitted publicly back in January to the existence of its CIA-directed drone attacks in Pakistan. Talk about open secrets. The New American Foundation estimates that the Obama administration has expanded the drone program sixfold over what the Bush team had initiated in Pakistan. And that doesn't include the expansion of drone warfare to Yemen and Somalia or the drone strikes that the Air Force conducts over Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago, in an effort to increase transparency in one of the most opaque overseas operations the United States conducts, White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan was more expansive about the program. "One could argue that never before has there been a weapon that allows us to distinguish more effectively between al-Qaeda terrorists and civilians", Brennan said. "It's this surgical precision, the ability, with laser-like focus to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it that makes this counter-terrorism tool so essential".

Next time I need surgery, I'm certainly not going to employ Brennan. Tasked with removing a tumor in my toe, he'd lop off my entire leg, remove an arm from an attending nurse, and accidently cut away a couple limbs from patients waiting in pre-op. That's how "surgical" the drone strikes have been. The New America Foundation estimates that they have a seventeen percent error rating (in other words, we've killed 300 to 450 non-militants). This corresponds to the calculations of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has compiled a list of 317 civilians killed by drones in Pakistan.

There are two major categories of drone strikes. The first, dubbed the personality strike, goes after a known bad guy. The second, the signature strike, targets unidentified individuals and groups according to their pattern of behavior. Neither type qualifies as "surgical". In the first case, US drones killed Zabet Amanullah on the presumption that he was a top Taliban commander when in fact he was a human rights advocate. Even Dexter would have felt bad about that. In the second case, the United States is expanding its definition of enemy combatants to include groups in Yemen and Somalia, and this makes even the State Department uncomfortable.

We should all be uncomfortable. It's bad enough when the president directs the extrajudicial killings by handpicking a set of discrete targets. But signature strikes give the CIA even more latitude in drawing up kill lists and racking up "collateral damage". As William Saletan explains in Slate, "in the Pakistani frontier regions, the CIA has license to take out fighters who appear to be involved, or intent on getting involved, in the Afghan insurgency. The drone campaign has spread from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency."

So, the United States doesn't do so well with the first rule of Dexter's code - only kill bad guys. It works a great deal harder to abide by the second rule: don't get caught. It has done its utmost to conceal the drone program and create plausible deniability. "To absolve itself in the most sensitive strikes, the CIA has become skilled at using lawyers to cover its tracks. They use paper when it is going to help them", says the former official. "Or they get on the secure phone. Or they get in an elevator casually with a lawyer and ask for his advice, like, 'There's nothing preventing me from destroying those tapes, is there?'" writes Michael Hastings in an in-depth article on drones in Rolling Stone.

Wait, you might say, what Dexter does is clearly illegal. Murder is illegal. But aren't drone strikes legal? It's a war, they're combatants, we're combatants, we take them out. Why bring in any lawyers?

Back in the 1970s, the United States banned the practice of assassination until Congress passed a law in the wake of 9/11 that empowered the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force" in going after those responsible for the terrorist attacks. But the targeted killing of American citizens, the "collateral damage" inflicted on innocent bystanders who happen to be in the vicinity of targeted drone strikes, and the dispatch of unknown targets based on unreleased evidence of their behavior all raise difficult legal questions. That's a polite way of saying that these are lawsuits waiting to happen.

Moreover, what if other countries made the same claims in assassinating individuals in the United States? Washington might rethink the legality of its actions when China or Russia authorizes a drone attack on a Uygur or Chechen "terrorist" hanging out in Chicago. They too could use the self-defense argument.

So, strictly speaking, targeted killings are legal because the Congress passed a law declaring them legal. But they still fly in the face of international law and establish a dangerous precedent that will one day be used against the United States.

Meanwhile, the blowback continues. In a drone strike last year, the United States killed an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, a leading al-Qaeda militant. A subsequent strike took out two of his close relatives. "The October drone strike that killed Awlaki's sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a US citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes", writes Jeremy Scahill in The Nation.

"I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the US performed a great service for al-Qaeda, because those operations gave al-Qaeda unprecedented local sympathy", says Jamal, the Yemeni journalist. The strikes "have recruited thousands". Yemeni tribesmen, he says, share one common goal with al-Qaeda, "which is revenge against the Americans, because those who were killed are the sons of the tribesmen, and the tribesmen never, ever give up on revenge".

Dexter is an individual driven by his nature to kill. He can't help himself. The United States is not an individual, but rather a collection of institutions subject to the democratic control of more than 300 million individuals. Like Dexter, the United States was baptized in blood - the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans - and has been steeped in blood ever since. But it need not be part of our nature any more than the Holocaust defines Germany today or King Leopold's monstrous crimes compel modern-day Belgium to behave in like manner. If the US government argues, as Dexter does, that the system is broken and the Really Bad act with impunity, Washington can do something Dexter can't - use its unprecedented power and influence to strengthen international law rather t
han undermine it.

If Dexter turns himself in, the show is over. The United States, in its last flush of unipolar glory, fears the same ending should it suddenly adhere to international law. With its expanded drone program, the Obama administration has kept America's serial killer persona on the air for too long. More and more Americans are just saying no, as Medea Benjamin chronicles in her new book on drones. It's time for the United States to stop breaking bad and behave like a proper, law-abiding member of the international community.

Links:

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

http://www.fpif.org/articles/america_the_serial_killer?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FPIF+%28Foreign+Policy+In+Focus+%28All+News%29%29

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of
http://billtotten.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/america-the-serial-killer/
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Fwd: [stopnato] Digest Number 4373 Please read this?

Suzanne de Kuyper — 2012-05-17T19:05:45

Please read this?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk< at >gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 17, 2012 at 9:05 PM
Subject: Fwd: [stopnato] Digest Number 4373
To: a-list< at >greenhouse.economics.utah.edu

The NATO groups training together, meeting for exercises in countries the
new troops have never been in, like Mongolia, is exciting! Sets of grown
Boy Scouts meeting for a bivoac, a jovial beer with new friends and rifle
practice.   Later, fighting a real war, they will customarily drop enriched
Uranium bombs on humans that do not look like them to show them their
foreign lives, identities and futures are over.  All those who do not
protest NATO will be extinct sooner or later.  Now is better.   Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <stopnato< at >yahoogroups.com>
Date: Tue, May 15, 2012 at 8:44 PM
Subject: [stopnato] Digest Number 4373
To: stopnato< at >yahoogroups.com

**
  Stop NATO
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato;_ylc=X3oDMTJlazhmYTFjBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE0ODI5MjQyBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTE2MzUyNwRzZWMDaGRyBHNsawNocGgEc3RpbWUDMTMzNzEwNzQ2Mw-->
 Messages In This Digest (10 Messages)
 1.  Interview: OSCE To Monitor Anti-NATO Protests In
Chicago<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_1>From: Rick Rozoff  2.
 Russia Warns Against Training Syrian Rebels In
Kosovo<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_2>From: Rick Rozoff  3.
 Chronicling NATO's Endless Wars
<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_3>From: Rick Rozoff  4.
 Wither NATO? <#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_4> From: Rick Rozoff  5.  For
Russia, NATO Has Started A New Arms
Race<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_5>From: Rick Rozoff  6.
 For NATO Protesters, A Welcome Mat
<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_6>From: Rick Rozoff  7.
 NATO Chief: Interceptor Missile System To Be
Expanded<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_7>From: Rick Rozoff  8.
 NATO Open Days To Be Held In Turkish Center In
Bosnia<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_8>From: Rick Rozoff  9.
 NATO Moves Into Jordan <#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_9> From: Rick
Rozoff  10.  Britain: Over 60 Fighter Jets In NATO Air Combat
Exercise<#1375c3054fdd5371_13751d0d769b6ea1_10>From: Rick Rozoff
 View All Topics<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages;_ylc=X3oDMTJnYTdtMW9pBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE0ODI5MjQyBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTE2MzUyNwRzZWMDZG1zZwRzbGsDYXRwYwRzdGltZQMxMzM3MTA3NDYz?xm=1&m=p&tidx=1>|
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 1.   Interview: OSCE To Monitor Anti-NATO Protests In Chicago
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/55752;_ylc=X3oDMTJzam9yaHFvBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE0ODI5MjQyBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTE2MzUyNwRtc2dJZAM1NTc1MgRzZWMDZG1zZwRzbGsDdm1zZwRzdGltZQMxMzM3MTA3NDYz>
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<rwrozoff< at >yahoo.com?Subject=+Re%3A%20Interview%3A%20OSCE%20To%20Monitor%20Anti-NATO%20Protests%20In%20Chicago>
 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Mon May 14, 2012 12:50 pm (PDT)

http://english.**ruvr.ru/2012_**05_14/74686323/<http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_05_14/74686323/>

Voice of Russia
May 14, 2012

OSCE to monitor anti-NATO protests at Summit in Chicago
John Robles

Audio at URL above

Interview with Rick Rozoff, the manager of the Stop NATO website and
mailing list and a contributing writer to GlobalResearch.**ca. He will be
debating NATO officials in Chicago on May 17th in a first-ever event where
those opposed to NATO are allowed to voice their concerns.

I heard that on the 17th of May you are planning to debate former NATO
officials and current NATO officials. This is first debate of this type in
history I believe. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that?

Thank you for asking, John. As scheduled, on Thursday evening at 6 o’clock
in downtown Chicago at what’s called the Pritzker Military Library - it’s
probably an apt site for a discussion of NATO - as of last heard, two
spokespeople advocating the NATO position, and those are R. Nicholas Burns,
former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the State
Department, and current NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary for Political and
Security Affairs James Appathurai, are going to be presenting the NATO
position. I’ve been asked to be one of two what are identified in the
Chicago media as protesters who are going to be speaking against NATO.
Initially Andy Thayer, who is a leader in the Coalition Against NATO G8 War
and Poverty Agenda, CANG8, for short, was to be the other speaker from the
anti-NATO position. I now hear that a representative from either Iraq or
Afghanistan war veterans, is going to be speaking instead of Andy Thayer,
so it will be
the two of us.

Can you tell me a little bit of the format?

It's my understanding each of the four of us is going to give a
presentation and then there will be questions fielded from the audience.
It’s going to be a very select group, there are only going to be 100 people
permitted into the library in addition to media.

Who was behind the planning of this event?

It’s sponsored by a local Chicago think tank. Though, it’s my
understanding, John, that somehow, I don’t know who contacted whom, the
prime mover in permitting a discussion that has both sides being heard
emanated from the White House.

You mentioned before we started something about two OSCE parliamentarians.
Are they going to be in attendance?

I heard from another leader in CANG8 that the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) announced that they were going to send two,
perhaps three, European parliamentarians as part of a delegation to monitor
the protests and the city of Chicago’s response to them, which would mark
only the second time that an OSCE delegation has been sent to the United
States - the only previous time was during the 2008 presidential election -
and if in fact that’s the truth and that materializes, that may in part
have led to the White House having to make a concession to allow some form
of public debate on the issue, because to be frank with you, there has been
none up until now. When the decision was made between the White House and
mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel last year there was no debate, there was no
discussion in the City Council of Chicago and the neighborhoods that are
going to be affected pretty adversely, as no community leaders and so
forth were consulted, it was dealt with as a fait accompli.

How did you become involved in this? Were you chosen?

Andy Thayer of CANG8 invited me to join him, initially, as we thought, now
it looks like it may be, again, an Iraq or Afghanistan war veteran and
myself presenting the anti-NATO position.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit of what NATO is doing to promote
their position in the U.S. and why and where all that money is coming from?
So they’ve made a huge PR campaign in the Chicago area, I believe.

There is a host committee for the NATO summit, which is headed up by former
political officials, but there is corporate sponsorship that is - as a
matter of fact if one goes to the website for the NATO Chicago summit,
they’ll have the corporate logos of major Fortune 500-type companies that
have raised an estimated $37 billion (Mr. Rozoff apologized and asked that
billion be corrected to million. Robles) in corporate monies for the summit
in addition to what the federal and the city governments are going to
spend. The argument that many people make, including myself, that NATO is
essentially the international armed wing of the 1% could not be made any
more effectively or vividly than visiting the website for the Chicago
Summit and looking at the corporate logos that stand behind the NATO
meeting on May 20 and 21.

Recently somebody, NATO spokesman I think, said that NATO was the war
machine for any percent.

I believe that comment emanates from Ivo Daalder, who is the U.S.
ambassador to NATO currently, and he is somebody who incidentally six years
ago co-authored an article that was published in the Washington Post
[Foreign Affairs] and also on the website of the Brookings Institution
where Daalder is on leave as a senior fellow, but the title of that article
is “Global NATO”. So, we are talking about somebody who in fact envisions,
and keep in mind he is the envoy for the most powerful member of the
military bloc, the United States, and is somebody who for several years has
been touting in exactly those words the concept of an international,
worldwide NATO that can intervene at will any place it chooses. Any
organization that has waged war in three continents since 1999 as NATO has,
in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya, is certainly a war machine.

What can you tell our listeners about G8 Summit being moved to Camp David
and what’s the relation between that and the NATO Summit happening in
Chicago?

The two were to have occured not simultaneously but back to back. The G8
Summit was to have occurred on the 18th and 19th of this month and the NATO
Summit on the 20th and 21st. And when the news first broke in spring of
last year that Chicago would host them both, the announcement was made
simultaneously. It was, if you will, a package deal. Then several weeks ago
the White House rather abruptly and without any explanation - the accounts
in Chicago are that the mayor himself, Emanual, wasn’t even aware of the
fact that it was being pulled until he heard it on the news.

I can tell you my personal supposition, which is this: that in the interim
between the time it was announced that both the G8 and the NATO summits
were to be held in the United States and the announcement by the White
House they were relocating the G8 summit to Camp David in Maryland, the
Occupy movement sprang into existence in September of last year and I would
assume that the White House was afraid that the demonstrations against both
summits would be large enough to create a political embarrassment, both for
the city of Chicago and for the country, certainly for the administration,
and thought that by relocating the G8 summit they could take attention away
from the NATO demonstration. I believe that it's backfired. Instead there
will be a large public demonstration on the 20th. I am hoping that it will
be possibly the largest counter-NATO demonstration ever held against the
backdrop of a summit. If you recall in Lisbon, Portugal in November 2010,
I’ve heard estimates from 10-30 thousand protesters. It would be my
sincerest wish that the people of Chicago and adjoining states could turn
out a force larger than that.

Larger than 30,000 people?

That would be ideal. Larger that 10,000 would be great.
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  2.   Russia Warns Against Training Syrian Rebels In Kosovo
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/55753;_ylc=X3oDMTJzdWt1MHZwBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE0ODI5MjQyBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTE2MzUyNwRtc2dJZAM1NTc1MwRzZWMDZG1zZwRzbGsDdm1zZwRzdGltZQMxMzM3MTA3NDYz>
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 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Mon May 14, 2012 12:50 pm (PDT)

http://www.interfax**.com/newsinf.**asp?pg=2&**id=331687<http://www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?pg=2&id=331687>

Interfax
May 14, 2012

Moscow opposes plans to train Syrian militants in Kosovo

MOSCOW: The Russian Foreign Ministry is concerned by the reports that
Syrian militants will be trained in Kosovo, and has urged the international
community to prevent that from happening.

"Lately there have been media reports about contacts between Syrian
opposition representatives and the authorities of the so-called Republic of
Kosovo. This is not just about 'exchange of experience' in organizing
separatist movements aimed at toppling existing regimes, it is also about
training Syrian militants in Kosovo," the ministry said in a statement
issued on Monday.

They intend to use areas that are geographically similar to the Syrian
landscape, the ministry said. It is likely that training centers will be
opened at the former bases of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

"Such intentions raise concerns. They run counter to the efforts of United
Nations-Arab League Special Envoy Kofi Annan, backed by the entire
international community. Moreover, turning Kosovo into an international
site for training militants from various militant groups could become a
serious destabilizing factor spreading beyond the Balkan region," the
statement said.

"We are calling on international organizations present in the province to
take whatever steps necessary to foil such schemes," the Russian Foreign
Ministry said.

------------**---------**---------**---------**---------**---------**-

http://en.rian.**ru/russia/**20120514/**173451677.**html<http://en.rian.ru/russia/20120514/173451677.html>

Russian Information Agency Novosti
May 14, 2012

Russia Warns Against Training Syrian Rebels in Kosovo

The Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday urged international bodies operating
in Kosovo to prevent the region from turning into a training ground for
Syrian rebels.

A delegation from the Syrian opposition visited Kosovo in April to
allegedly make a deal on exchanging experience in guerilla warfare against
ruling authorities.

So far, the fractured Syrian opposition has been unable to form a steady
front against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

The Russian ministry said in a statement that the talks covered not only
the ways of organizing armed resistance against authorities but also the
training of Syrian militants in Kosovo.

“There are plans to use the areas [in Kosovo] that resemble the terrain in
Syria. The possibility of setting up training camps at the former bases of
the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] is also being discussed,” the statement
said.

“Transforming Kosovo into an international training ground for armed
militants may become a serious destabilizing factor that could extend
beyond the Balkans,” the document said. “We urge international bodies
operating in Kosovo to take all necessary steps to prevent these plans.”

The ethnic Albanian KLA fought a separatist war against the regime of
President Slobodan Milosevic in 1998-99. About 10,000 people died in the
Kosovo conflict.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008.

Both Serbia and Russia have refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence.
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  3.   Chronicling NATO's Endless Wars
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 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Mon May 14, 2012 6:30 pm (PDT)

http://www.newstips**.org/2012/**05/rick-rozoff-**chronicles-**
natos-endless-**wars/<http://www.newstips.org/2012/05/rick-rozoff-chronicles-natos-endless-wars/>

Newstips
May 14, 2012

Rick Rozoff chronicles NATO’s ‘endless wars’
By Curtis Black

By hosting a self-proclaimed “nuclear alliance” like NATO, Chicago is
violating the spirit if not the letter of the city’s status as a nuclear
free zone, passed unanimously by the City Council in 1986 and signed by
Mayor Harold Washington, says Rick Rozoff.

It’s one of dozens of points that came up in several wide-ranging talks
with Rozoff, a Chicagoan who for 13 years has edited the Stop NATO blog,
almost certainly the most comprehensive source for news and critical
analysis of the alliance in the world.

On Thursday, Rozoff and a representative of Iraq Veterans Against the War
will take the anti-NATO position in a debate with former Undersecretary of
State R. Nicholas Burns and NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary James
Appathurai at the Pritzker Military Library.

Making war around the world

Stop NATO started in 1999, a watershed year according to Rozoff, when NATO
launched its first war, a 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
That’s the point at which NATO moved beyond its posture as a strictly
defensive organization protecting its members’ territories to become “an
active war-making organization” – and when promises of post-Cold War
demilitarization and a “peace dividend” were betrayed, he says.

Since then NATO has conducted wars in Asia and Africa – a brutal
twelve-year slog with heavy civilian casulaties in Afghanistan, NATO’s
first ground war, and a six-month bombing campaign in Libya.

Despite the unprecedented presence of 150,000 troops from 50 nations
(including NATO members and partners) waging war in a single, relatively
small country, Afghanistan is widely viewed as a defeat for the alliance.
NATO claims Libya as a victory, though the nation is now dominated by
fundamentalists and riven by clan wars, with instability spreading to other
African nations, Rozoff points out.

Global expeditionary force

A major function of these wars, he argues, is to integrate the militaries
of NATO members and scores of partner nations into a “global expeditionary
force,” with small countries enlisted in efforts to ensure Western access
to resources and hem in nations with independent foreign policies –notably
Russia, China, and Iran.

NATO’s expanded military alliance “puts smaller countries in the position
of having to respond when the major powers call for assistance,” obliges
them to accept U.S. and NATO bases on their territory, and requires them to
purchase advanced weaponry – which they don’t need and can’t afford – from
Western nations, Rozoff says.

The Chicago summit will deal with transitioning to a new phase of
involvement in Afghanistan, further integrating the forty NATO partner
states that participate in the alliance’s wars, and upgrading the
alliance’s military capabilities. NATO is expected to announce that its
European interceptor missile system has achieved initial operational
capability.

Nuclear tensions

While touted as a defense against attacks from North Korea or Iran, the
missile system seems to be aimed at Russia, destabilizing the continent’s
nuclear balance and ratcheting up tensions. Indeed, Rozoff says the system
“is not to be construed as a defensive project whatsoever,” and ultimately
could be part of a first-strike nuclear system.

Rozoff notes other developments to watch, including U.S. plans to spend $4
billion to modernize its European-based nuclear weapons, NATO’s first move
to acquire drone technology, and calls for NATO to intervene in Syria and
Mali. It’s all covered in detail at Stop NATO, a compilation of
international news reports along with Rozoff’s trenchant commentary.

The Chicago summit “leaves us face to face with the most burning question
of our era,” Rozoff told interviewer Allen Ruff on WORT-FM in Madison
earlier this month. “Which is that 21 years after the end of the Cold War,
we have lived through incessant warfare, there have been wars after wars
after wars, in Iraq and Somalia and Bosnia and Kosovo and Afghanistan, in
Iraq again, in Libya, we’re seeing bombing and missile attacks into
Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen, and on and on and on.

“And it is about time that the people of Chicago, of the United States and
the world, say look: there was a promise 21 years ago when the Cold War
ended, that we would have peace, that we would have disarmament, we would
have a peace dividend that directed funds from killing to fund human needs
and human development.”

He points out that the United States spent $729 billion last year for the
Defense Department — $2,400 for every person living in the country. “There
are better things to do with that money than to kill people.”
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  4.   Wither NATO?
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<rwrozoff< at >yahoo.com?Subject=+Re%3A%20Wither%20NATO%3F>   rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Mon May 14, 2012 8:14 pm (PDT)

http://pakobserver.**net/detailnews.**asp?id=155125<http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=155125>

Pakistan Observer
May 14, 2012

Wither NATO?
Khalid Bin Wakil

====

NATO...not only survived but was actually nurtured through a process akin
to genetic modification.**..Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Slovakia and Slovenia took their seats in 2004, alongside Poland, the Czech
Republic and Hungary, which had become the first three former Warsaw Pact
states to join NATO in 1999. The alliance, thereby, extended its sphere
from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

It may be recalled that the leaders had also approved a 20,000 strong “NATO
response force” to combat “perceived threats around the world”. It will be
noted that the scope of NATO military intervention was thereby expanded
from Europe to “around the world”.

====

With the hullabaloo about the NATO containers passing – or not passing –
through Pakistan’s territory, would it not be relevant to briefly look back
at NATO, what it stood for and what it is up to in Afghanistan and
elsewhere at this point in time? The end of the Cold War (remember?)
signaled the demise of several of its manifestations. To cut a long story
short: the Berlin Wall fell; the Warsaw Pact disappeared into thin air; the
United States and the Russian Federation (remnant of the erstwhile USSR)
embraced each other like long lost friends. The whole world order, in
short, was turned on its head. There was a significant exception, though.
One significant offspring of the Cold War – NATO – was not allowed to
wither on the vine!

NATO, that had come into being essentially for confronting the threat to
Western Europe posed by the formidable war machine of the Soviet Union and
its East European allies, not only survived but was actually nurtured
through a process akin to genetic modification. In one significant
development, NATO leaders threw open the doors of the US-led alliance to
seven former communist East European countries. The defense pact, spawned
by the Cold War, thus made deep inroads into what was once regarded as
‘enemy territory’ as part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Bulgaria,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia took their seats
in 2004, alongside Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which had become
the first three former Warsaw Pact states to join NATO in 1999. The
alliance, thereby, extended its sphere from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The then US President, George W. Bush, was reported to have informed his
fellow leaders at the Prague Summit that, “By welcoming seven members, we
shall not only add to our military capabilities we will refresh the spirit
of this great democratic alliance”. The NATO Secretary General went on to
clarify that the ‘door would remain open’ to more aspirants from the Balkan
region. It may be recalled that the leaders had also approved a 20,000
strong “NATO response force” to combat “perceived threats around the
world”. It will be noted that the scope of NATO military intervention was
thereby expanded from Europe to “around the world”.

The aforementioned gave rise to a most pertinent question: if the perceived
enemy did not lie in Europe, where was it envisaged to be? And what
‘perceived threat’ was it that was goading ‘this great democratic alliance’
to hone its offensive capability in such a blatant manner in an era of
relative peace and calm in Europe? Evidence shows that US was making a
determined attempt to win allied backing for its projected war against
Iraq. But, then, this also presented no more than a restricted vision,
since that alone could hardly be put down as the raison d’etre of a
militarily rejuvenated NATO.

Subsequent events and the meandering course of the War on Terror have
partially lifted the veil from the US and NATO ambitions. Makes an observer
wonder, though, why all the ‘perceived threats around the world’ as viewed
by ‘this great democratic alliance’ are confined to the Muslim world alone.
After all, there are other regions of the world, where ‘perceived threats’
could also be discerned if only the powers that be were to discard their
rose-coloured glasses. And what about the threats posed by blatant human
rights violations by states in more than one regions of the world? Are
these to be ignored just because ‘this great democratic alliance’ prefers
to look the other way?
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  5.   For Russia, NATO Has Started A New Arms Race
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 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Tue May 15, 2012 5:34 am (PDT)

http://www.telegrap**h.co.uk/sponsore**d/russianow/**opinion/9266927/**
Russia-Nato-**arms-race.**html<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russianow/opinion/9266927/Russia-Nato-arms-race.html>

Daily Telegraph
May 15, 2012

For Russia, Nato has started an arms race
This online supplement is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta
(Russia), which takes sole responsibility for the content
Yevgeny Shestakov, special to Russia Now

The Russian public believes the Nato alliance is playing a foul game that
threatens the country's security, says Yevgeny Shestakov.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, arrived for the Russia-Nato
meeting in Brussels just five minutes after US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. Their planes were parked side by side. “Hello, Hillary”, the
Russian minister hailed his American counterpart, as he descended the ramp.

“Hello, Sergei”, Clinton beamed, as she got into her car. And with a
welcoming gesture, she invited Lavrov into the back seat, so that they
could drive to the hotel together.

Well actually, no, it didn't really go like that. Given the current state
of Russian-American relations, neither the Russian foreign minister nor the
American Secretary of State would agree to go to the Russia-Nato meeting in
the same car. For most Russians, the alliance is still the number one
enemy, although the Russian military does not officially consider Nato
countries to be potential enemies.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russian deputy prime minister in charge of modernising the
defence industry, posts daily progress reports on his Twitter page.
Hundreds of billions of roubles are set aside for the defence programme,
which is planned for decades ahead. But these staggering figures, which
will affect the lives of future generations, give people a sense of pride
rather than provoke dismay over money that could otherwise have been used
for social programmes.

Opinion polls show that most Russians approve of the official plans to
spend budgetary funds on modernising defence. Why? The answer is simple:
the Russian public does not trust Nato, believing that the alliance is
playing a game that threatens Russia’s security.

These fears are not without foundation. Moscow points out that the alliance
is establishing its presence close to Russian borders. New military bases
are being set up in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Nato patrols the airspace
above the Baltic states, which was not the case before they joined the
alliance. The combined military budgets of the Nato states are multiples of
what Russia spends on defence.

Nato’s conventional forces in Europe outnumber those of Russia. The
American military is developing new types of weapons, including offensive
systems that will be deployed in Europe and might change the balance of
power in the region.

Despite Russia’s assistance to the alliance in Afghanistan, the American
military is building major military bases there without any prior
consultation with Moscow. These bases, Russian experts say, are
strategically important for controlling Central Asia. The Pentagon’s bases
will remain in Afghanistan even after most Nato troops leave the country, a
prospect Russia does not relish.

Yet the greatest irritant in the relations between Moscow and Nato is
ballistic missile defence. The fact that both the US and Nato leadership
refuse to offer Russia legal guarantees that these systems are not
targeting Moscow’s nuclear potential forces Russia to take retaliatory
measures. All that Washington is ready to do is “to offer safeguards in a
political format”. Moscow, however, does not consider such political
promises sufficient: in military affairs, it is the defence potential and
not the intentions that matter.

Moscow has always tried to avoid becoming involved in an arms race. With
respect to missile defence, Moscow has consistently advocated the so-called
sectoral approach, whereby Nato and Russia would divide zones of
responsibility and pool their defence efforts in countering common missile
threats. That would save billions of defence euros for all the participants
in the group.

Yet Nato has turned down the Russian offer under pressure from the US, the
reason being the treaty signed by Nato in the Cold War. Under its Article
5, the alliance must protect its members independently, without counting on
Russia’s potential. Nato has no intention of changing that article to bring
it into line with current reality and avoid a new arms race.

On the contrary, many Nato countries are modernising their armed forces.
The talk about these changes being routine and not threatening anybody does
not convince Moscow. Russia has to take steps to ensure its own security
under the new conditions and make sure it does not become “a colossus with
feet of clay” in the eyes of its western neighbours. Allocating
considerable resources to modernise the defence industry is an inevitable
response to the military initiatives taking place in Europe.

Is there any way to put a brake on this arms race? Yes, of course. At the
Russia-Nato ministerial meeting in Brussels, Moscow suggested as a first
step that, at its Chicago summit, Nato pledges its “adherence to the rules
of international law” in its final declaration. Such a commitment would
mean that the alliance would respect the jurisdiction of existing
international institutions, and renounce the independent use of force
unless it was authorised by a relevant UN Security Council resolution.

Even so, it cannot be ruled out that Nato will pointedly refuse to change
its agreement with the current international crisis-response mechanisms. If
the refusal is articulated, it would turn Nato, in Russia’s eyes, into the
main threat to international stability. Such a turn of events would force
Russia to think about creating military counterweights to Nato. That would
put paid to any chances of stopping the arms race in Europe.

All of the programmes for co-operation between Moscow and Nato would be
gradually curtailed, as public opinion in Russia would reject any form of
co-operation with a potential enemy. And this is not merely words. The
recent Russian decision to open a transit centre in Ulyanovsk to deliver
non-military cargoes to the coalition forces in Afghanistan has triggered
strong protests at grassroots level.

Nato’s refusal to recognise the world order and its demonstrative refusal
to reckon with Russia’s geopolitical interests render meaningless any joint
initiatives aimed at countering common threats. They merely fuel the arms
race that many European countries want to avoid.

Yevgeny Shestakov is editor of the international politics desk at
Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
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  6.   For NATO Protesters, A Welcome Mat
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<rwrozoff< at >yahoo.com?Subject=+Re%3A%20For%20NATO%20Protesters%2C%20A%20Welcome%20Mat>
 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Tue May 15, 2012 5:37 am (PDT)

http://www.wbez.**org/news/**nato-protesters-**welcome-mat-**99136<http://www.wbez.org/news/nato-protesters-welcome-mat-99136>

WBEZ
91.5 FM
May 15, 2012

For NATO protesters, a welcome mat
As officials batten down hatches for marches that could draw thousands of
out-of-towners, some Chicagoans show hospitality
By Chip Mitchell

With Chicago’s NATO summit just days away, officials are battening down the
hatches for protests that could draw thousands from out of town. But some
other Chicagoans are rolling out a welcome mat for those same protesters.
They’re clearing space in their businesses and churches, allowing tents in
their yards, even opening spare bedrooms. We report from our West Side
bureau.

Officials are planning to close streets and highways. They’re bringing in
state police officers and National Guardsmen and preparing for mass
arrests. They’re ready to roll out a military device that sends
ear-piercing tones over long distances. But over in Chicago’s McKinley Park
neighborhood, there is Lorraine Chavez.

CHAVEZ: And here is another bedroom if someone has an inflatable mattress.
My kids are off to college so I have some empty space.

Chavez is offering two rooms of her cramped century-old house to some
protesters from Florida this weekend.

MITCHELL: What do you know about these guests?

CHAVEZ: Not much [laughs] but I requested older guests.

Chavez says she is taking them in because the protest could bring some
attention to joblessness in this country.

CHAVEZ: I am underemployed myself, despite having a master’s, a career
path, and doctoral work at the University of Chicago. All of the men in my
family who are responsible for college-age kids have all been laid off. If
we did not have wars, we could have investments for jobs. This is the
moment that these demands are being made and heard and I need to be a part
of it.

Chavez got connected to the Floridians through Occupy Chicago. That group
is using its website to collect lodging offers and requests for the NATO
protests. A group called CANG8 has a similar site.

HUNT: If somebody has 20 dogs and someone’s allergic to dogs, that would be
a bad match.

Pat Hunt’s helping run that system.

HUNT: If they’re providing a warehouse space for 50 to 100 people, they’ve
asked us to have somebody there just to make sure that [there will be] no
drugs, no alcohol, no weapons -- basically that type of thing.

The anti-NATO groups say they have fielded offers from about 265 potential
hosts. They include a homeowner who is installing a wheelchair ramp for a
disabled protester. A Latino nonprofit group is taking in guests as long as
they don’t draw police back to the neighborhood, which is full of
undocumented immigrants. A man in DuPage County is letting protesters camp
around a house he is losing to foreclosure. An African-American
congregation is offering its yard for tents.

MARSHALL: It was almost a no-brainer for us. It was just a matter of,
really, logistics and trying to work out the logistics for it.

John Marshall serves on the board of that church, Trinity Episcopal. It’s
just a few blocks from McCormick Place, the site of the NATO summit. He
says hosting protesters is not exactly a stand against the military
alliance.

MARSHALL: It’s the residue of what happens with war, what happens to
refugees, what happens to people who are made poor because of war. Even if
they’re not within the theater of war, there are lots of people who are
poor in the world that we could be helping as opposed to making another B-1
bomber.

Trinity officials say there hasn’t been much fallout for taking that stand
but they are hearing from some neighbors. When the church held an
educational forum about NATO, some nearby homeowners showed up with
questions about the campers.

NEIGHBOR: How are you going to keep your guests on your property and not
coming onto the property of other people who live in the neighborhood?

MARSHALL: We’re going to monitor them. And they’re going to be outside at
their own Porta-Potties and provide their own stuff.

Someone peeing in a neighbor’s yard isn’t the worst thing that could
happen. Pat Hunt, the protester who is running one of the housing websites,
says what worries her is theft or any sort of attack.

HUNT: Either one of the guests takes advantage of the host or a host takes
advantage of one of the guests. Somebody would get hurt. That’s always my
fear.

Hunt says these logistical considerations go beyond this protest against
NATO. She says her movement has to start creating the sort of world it’s
demanding.

HUNT: If what we’re saying is shared resources then we have to model shared
resources.

Hunt thinks this model can work. And, this weekend, we might see if she’s
right.
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  7.   NATO Chief: Interceptor Missile System To Be Expanded
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 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Tue May 15, 2012 5:52 am (PDT)

http://www.chinadai**ly.com.cn/**world/2012-**05/15/content_**15290701.**htm<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2012-05/15/content_15290701.htm>

Xinhua News Agency
May 15, 2012

Missile shield to be expanded: NATO chief

WASHINGTON: The NATO chief said on Monday that the missile shield in Europe
will continue to be expanded toward full operational capability after
leaders of member states meet in Chicago later this month.

The summit slated for May 20-21 will declare "an interim capability" of the
system that brings the contributions from individual member countries
together under NATO command and control, Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrote in The
Wall Street Journal.

"This interim capability will provide the alliance with a limited but
operationally meaningful and immediately available capability against a
ballistic-missile threat," he wrote.

"It is the first step, but a real step, toward providing full coverage for
all NATO populations, territory and forces in Europe," he stated.

The secretary general noted that the military alliance conducted
successfully its first comprehensive test of the new missile defense
capability last month.

"A US ship, radar and satellite, as well as interceptor batteries from
Germany and the Netherlands, conducted a series of simulated engagements to
test the alliance's ability to defend against missile attacks," he wrote.
"The test was successful."

He called the test "a clear demonstration of transatlantic solidarity in
action" as well as NATO's continuing determination to protect its members'
territory and populations from attack and the threat of attack.

"After the Chicago summit, we will continue to expand the system toward
full operational capability," he declared.

Among NATO members, the Netherlands has announced plans to upgrade four
air-defense frigates with missile-defense radar, France plans to develop an
early-warning capability and long-range radar, and Germany has offered
Patriot missile batteries and is hosting the NATO command-and-**control at
Headquarters Alliance Air Command in Ramstein, Rasmussen noted.

"Turkey, Romania, Poland and Spain have all agreed to host U.S. assets. I
expect more announcements in the months and years ahead," he wrote.

The missile shield was agreed on in November 2010 when the NATO leaders
last met in Lisbon, Portugal to guard against threats from countries like
Iran.

Russia and NATO agreed then to seek ways to cooperate on the system but
have failed so far to reach a deal. Moscow wants a legally binding
guarantee that the system will not be used against Russia, while Washington
says it cannot agree to any formal limits on missile defense.

Russia warned again this month that it might use "destructive force"
pre-emptively to take out elements of the missile shield.
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  8.   NATO Open Days To Be Held In Turkish Center In Bosnia
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/55759;_ylc=X3oDMTJzOW1xYnVyBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE0ODI5MjQyBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTE2MzUyNwRtc2dJZAM1NTc1OQRzZWMDZG1zZwRzbGsDdm1zZwRzdGltZQMxMzM3MTA3NDYz>
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 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Tue May 15, 2012 6:11 am (PDT)

http://www.aco.**nato.int/**nato-open-**days-to-be-**held-in-turkish-**
cultural-**center--sarajevo**-.aspx<http://www.aco.nato.int/nato-open-days-to-be-held-in-turkish-cultural-center--sarajevo-.aspx>

North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Command Transformation
May 14, 2012

NATO OPEN DAYS TO BE HELD IN TURKISH CULTURAL CENTER, SARAJEVO

NATO OPEN DAYS is a five day event to be held 15 - 19 May, with the goal to
provide to wider public more information about NATO Alliance, NATO
integrations processes in BiH, activities of NATO HQ SARAJEVO in 2011/2012
period, and to mark 60th anniversary of Turkish membership in NATO.

Specifically, Open Days will engage students and academic community in
public discussions on various NATO related topics.

In the light of NATO Chicago Summit in May, the whole event, and the
opening event in particular will be an opportunity to share with general
public and media information about the Summit, BiH's participation in the
event, including the current phase of NATO integrations processes in BIH.

During NATO Open Days, Turkish Cultural Center premises will offer:

1. Two separate exhibition floors, which will offer a photo exhibition of
NATO HQ Sarajevo activities in 2011/2012 period, and a photo exhibition to
present the NATO – Turkey relationship in past 60 years,

2. In the cinema hall (30 seat capacity) NATO movies will be screened
daily, and the hall will be used for student lectures/round tables.

3. Event will be an opportunity to distribute various NATO promotion
materials to the visitors and wider public.

PROGRAM:

EVENT TOPIC DATE AND TIME
Opening event
15 May 2012, 19:00 hrs – 21:00 hrs
Round Table/Lecture
"NATO and BiH”
"NATO's fight against organised crime and terrorist groups”
"NATO and Gender”
16 May 2012, 12:00 – 13:00 hrs

Round Table/Lecture
"NATO and BiH”
"Role of Strategic Communications in NATO”
17 May 2012, 12:00 – 13:00 hrs
Round Table/Lecture
NATO's New Strategic Concept
"Role of Strategic Communications in NATO”
18 May 2012, 13:00 – 14:30
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  9.   NATO Moves Into Jordan
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<rwrozoff< at >yahoo.com?Subject=+Re%3A%20NATO%20Moves%20Into%20Jordan>   rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Tue May 15, 2012 6:18 am (PDT)

http://www.act.**nato.int/**index.php/**multimedia/**archive/42-**
news-stories/**1015-allied-**command-transfor**mation-extends-**
nato-relations-**with-jordan<http://www.act.nato.int/index.php/multimedia/archive/42-news-stories/1015-allied-command-transformation-extends-nato-relations-with-jordan>

North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Command Transformation
May 14, 2012

Allied Command Transformation extends NATO relations with Jordan
Written by U.S. Army Major Robin L. Ochoa

NATO is all about expansion of friendships and the building of
relationships. NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT) plays a vital
role on this path to future cooperation with non-NATO countries.

In an endeavour to provide more cost effective capabilities to the Alliance
and Partner Nations, extend relationships and build upon an already
positive atmosphere in the Mediterranean Region, NATO's Deputy Supreme
Allied Commander Transformation, Polish Army General Mieczyslaw Bieniek
recently visited Jordan.

Bieniek met with Jordan's Chief of Defence, Lieutenant General Marshal M.
Al-Zaben and his assistant, Jordanian Prince, Lieutenant General Faisal Bin
Al–Hussain and the meeting provided a great opportunity to discuss the
country's already good cooperation with ACT as well as future collaboration
projects.

"The meetings provided a positive and enthusiastic exchange of information
on enhancing the interactions between Jordan and NATO ACT," said Bieniek.
"Jordan is convinced that NATO is engaging well and has the right approach
to cooperation, he added.

During the conversations, Al–Hussain expressed sincere interest from Jordan
and touched upon the Smart Defence initiative which he believes can offer
capabilities for the Alliance and its partners.

Bieniek was given a tour at the King Abdullah II Special Operations
Training Centre, where he was introduced to the vision of the Jordanian
King to build a Counterterrorism Centre of Excellence. US Major General
(Retired) Harrell, General Manager of the Centre leads a group of diverse
and hand-selected instructors and support staff drawn from the world's most
elite special operations units. Collectively, they have experience and
skills learned over the last 35 years in combat operations from all over
the world.

"My aim was to enhance the partnership through expanded and improved
opportunities for partners in education and training," said Bieniek. "I
also thanked Al-Zaben and Al–Hussain for Jordan being one of the most
reliable and active Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) Partners in NATO operations
and activities, as well as being the first MD Nation with an Operational
Capabilities Concept declaration (Mechanised Infantry Battalion).

"Jordan is a very positive actor in the region and is a nation which can
improve regional security and stability," said Bieniek as he also thanked
them for their contribution in Afghanistan and their recent involvement in
Operation Unified Protector in Libya.

Bieniek's invited Jordan to attend NATO's annual Strategic Military
Partnership Conference and the Chiefs of Transformation Conference, both
hosted by ACT.

"I am very convinced that the exchange of views and information will be of
mutual benefit," said Bieniek. "Overall, I found this visit a very
interesting and successful one. I believe it also allowed also Jordan to
better comprehend the most current trends of ACT and NATO work," he said.
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  10.   Britain: Over 60 Fighter Jets In NATO Air Combat Exercise
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 rwrozoff
<http://profiles.yahoo.com/rwrozoff>  Tue May 15, 2012 6:23 am (PDT)

http://www.usafe.**af.mil/news/**story.asp?**id=123301156<http://www.usafe.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123301156>

U.S. Air Forces in Europe
May 15, 2012

Reapers take flight during Frisian Flag 2012
By Staff Sgt. Connor Estes
48th Fighter Wing Public Affairs

ROYAL AIR FORCE LAKENHEATH, England: More than 60 fighter jets from nine
countries participated in the Frisian Flag 2012 exercise at Leeuwarden Air
Base, Netherlands, April 16 - 27, including F-15C Eagles from the 493rd
Fighter Squadron.

The annual exercise is designed to bring fighter pilots from multiple
nations together to work on interoperability, planning and execution.

"The 493rd FS participation in Frisian Flag was a tremendous success," said
Lt. Col. Mike Casey, 493rd FS commander. "The scenarios were challenging
and the ability to integrate with NATO allies from several nations was a
terrific opportunity.**"

Capt. John Koegel, 493rd FS pilot, said Frisian Flag is the largest fighter
exercise in Europe.

"The pilots learn about other nations' capabilities and work together
towards common tactical and operational standards," Kogel added.

Frisian Flag first occured in 1992 and the amount of aircraft involved
makes it similar to the Red Flag exercises held in the U.S.

...

"Frisian Flag is nicknamed 'Red Flag - Europe' due to its mission and focus
being similar to the training we have at Nellis," said Koegel.

Among the more than 60 aircraft involved were F-16s from the Netherlands,
Poland, Norway and Belgium as well as F-18 Hornets from Finland, JAS-39
Gripens from Sweden, German and British Eurofighter Typhoons, U.S. and U.K.
KDC-10 air tankers, a NATO AWACS airborne radar station and the F-15Cs from
the 493rd FS.

"The 493rd FS participated in the exercise from Royal Air Force Lakenheath
to test its ability to operate from a geographically separated location,"
said Koegel. "The exercise tested the Reapers' ability to safely and
successfully participate in combat training scenarios with limited
communication capabilities during the mission planning phase."

Koegel added that the exercise proved U.S. and European allies are ready to
deploy quickly and work together to employ lethal combat airpower.

...
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[BillTottenWeblog] Shale Gas: The View from Russia

Bill Totten — 2012-05-17T11:45:03

by Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov (May 08 2012)

En espanol: http://crashoil.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/gas-de-esquisto-la-perspectiva-desde.html

The official shale gas story goes something like this: recent technological breakthroughs by US energy companies have made it possible to tap an abundant but previously inaccessible source of clean, environmentally friendly natural gas. This has enabled the US to become the world leader in natural gas production, overtaking Russia, and getting ready to end of Russia's gas monopoly in Europe. Moreover, this new shale gas is found in many parts of the world, and will, in due course, enable the majority of the world's countries to achieve independence from traditional gas producers. Consequently, the ability of those countries with the largest natural gas reserves - Russia and Iran - to control the market for natural gas will be reduced, along with their overall geopolitical influence.

If this were the case, then we should expect the Kremlin, along with Gazprom, to be quaking in their boots. But are they? Here is what Gazprom's chairman, Alexei Miller, recently told Suddeutsche Zeitung:

Shale gas is a well-organized global PR-campaign. There are many of them: global cooling, biofuels.

He pointed out that the technology for producing gas from shale is many decades old, and suggested the US turned to it out of desperation. He dismissed it as an energy alternative for Europe. Is this just the other's sides propaganda, or could Miller be simply stating the obvious? Let's explore. I will base my exploration on Russian sources, which is why all the numbers are in metric units. If you want to convert to Imperial, 1 cubic meter = 35 cubic feet, 1 square kilometer = .38 square miles, 1 tonne = 1.1 short tons.

The best-developed shale gas basin is Barnett in Texas, responsible for seventy percent of all shale gas produced to date. By "developed" I mean drilled and drilled and drilled, and then drilled some more: just in 2006 there were about as many wells drilled into Barnett shale as are currently producing in all of Russia. This is because the average Barnett well yields only around 6.35 million cubic meters of gas, over its entire lifetime, which corresponds to the average monthly yield of a typical Russian well that continues to produce over a fifteen to twenty year period, meaning that the yield of a typical shale gas well is at least 200 times smaller. This hectic activity cannot stop once a well has been drilled: in order to continue yielding even these meager quantities, the wells have t
o be regularly subjected to hydraulic fracturing, or "fracked": to produce each thousand cubic meters of gas, 100 kilograms of sand and two tonnes of water, combined with a proprietary chem!
ical cockt
ail, have to be pumped into the well at high pressure. Half the water comes back up and has to be processed to remove the chemicals. Yearly fracking requirements for the Barnett basin run around 7.1 million tonnes of sand and 47.2 million tonnes of water, but the real numbers are probably lower, as many wells spend much of the time standing idle.

In spite of the frantic drilling/fracking activity, this is all small potatoes by Russian standards. Russia's proven reserves of natural gas amount to 43.3 trillion cubic meters, which is about a third of the world's total. At current consumption rates, that's enough to last 72 years. Russian gas production is constrained by demand, not by supply; it is currently down simply because Eurozone is in the midst of an economic crisis. Meanwhile, US production has surged ahead, for no adequately explored reason, crashing the price and making much of it unprofitable.

Let's compare: Gazprom's price at the wellhead runs from US$3 to $50 per thousand cubic meters, depending on the region. Compare that to shale gas in the US, which runs from $80 to $320 per thousand cubic meters. At this price, the US cannot afford to sell shale gas on the European market. Moreover, the overall volume of shale gas being produced in the US, even given the feverish drilling rate of the past couple of years, if cleaned up, liquified, and shipped to Europe in LNG tankers, would not be enough to book up just the LNG terminal in Gdansk, Poland, which is currently standing idle. It seems that Gazprom has little to worry about.

The US, on the other hand, does have plenty to worry about. There has been much talk already about groundwater pollution and other forms of environmental destruction that accompanies the production of shale gas, so I will not address these here. Instead, I will focus on two aspects that are just as important but have received scarcely any attention.

First, what is shale gas? Ask this question, and you will be told: "Shut up, it's methane". But is it really? The composition of shale gas is something of a state secret in the US, but information about the gas produced from the nine Polish shale gas test projects did leak out, and it's not pretty: Polish shale gas turned out to be so high in nitrogen that it does not even burn. Technology exists to clean up gas that is, say, six percent nitrogen, but Polish shale gas is closer to fifty percent nitrogen, and, given high production costs, low yields, rapid depletion and low wellhead pressure, cleaning it up to bring it up to spec (which is one percent nitrogen) would most likely result in a net waste of energy.

Even if shale gas is low enough in nitrogen to burn, the problems do not end there. It may also contain hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic and corrosive and has to be removed before the gas can be stored or injected into a pipeline. It probably contains toluene and other organic solvents - ingredients in the fracking cocktails - which are carcinogenic. Lastly, it may be radioactive. All clays are mildly radioactive, and shale is a sort of heat-treated clay. While Barnett shale is not particularly radioactive, Marcellus shale, which has recently been the focus of frantic drilling activity, is. Thanks to Marcellus shale gas, radioactive radon gas is being delivered directly to your kitchen, via the burners of your stove, or to a power plant smokestack upwind from where you live. This is expect
ed to result in increased lung cancer rates in the coming years.

Second, why is shale gas being produced at all? Natural gas prices have fallen through the roof, and are currently around $2 per thousand cubic feet. This works out to around $70 per thousand cubic meters. If shale gas costs from $80 to $320 per thousand cubic meters to produce, it is unclear how one might make any money with it.

But perhaps making money with it is not the point. What if shale gas is just a PR campaign (with horrific environmental side effects)? Going back to what Alexei Miller said, what if the entire point of the exercise was to increase the capitalization of shale gas exploration and production companies? The number one company in shale gas is Chesapeake Energy, the owner of the Barnett basin and a major player in the Marcellus basin. This company almost went bankrupt in 2009, but then managed to claw its way back to profitability in 2010 and 2011 by drilling, and drilling, and drilling, and then drilling some more. Sixty percent of their revenue is from drilling operations. And now there is a scandal involving Chesapeake Energy's (former?) chairman, Aubrey K McClendon, who apparently awarded hi
mself a stake in each well his company drilled, used them as collateral for billions in loans, and used the loans to bet that natural gas prices will go up (they haven't). In the meantime, !
natural ga
s drilling rig count has dropped to a ten-year low. Given that shale gas wells deplete very quickly, it looks like the shale gas boom is over.

But now that it's over, what was it, exactly? It appears to have been something like the dot-com bubble: companies with no conceivable way of turning a profit using hype to attract investment and drive up their valuations. Since 2008, various kinds of hype-based market manipulations have become the staple of economic life in the US, and so this is nothing new or different.

One interesting question is, What sort of bubble will the US attempt to blow next, if any? There is the Facebook IPO coming up. Facebook is a ridiculous time-waster and, as such, seems a bit overpriced. Are we going to attempt blowing up another dot-com bubble? Another round of subprime mortgages does not seem to be in the works. What's a bubble boy to do? If there are no more bubbles to blow, then it's back to just plain printing money.

So this whole shale gas thing didn't work out as planned, did it? But could it have? Had it turned out to be much better in every way, could it have swung geopolitical influence away from Russia and Iran and back toward the US? Alas, no.

You see, there is no such thing as a global natural gas market. Yes, there are some LNG tankers sailing about, but that is very much a point-to-point trade. There is a closed North American market, a European market, and another market in the Asia-Pacific region. These markets do not interact. The North American market and the European market could have potentially shared just one producer: Qatar. Qatar once wanted to export LNG to the US, but then decided to export it to Europe instead, generating less of a loss, because European gas prices are substantially higher. And the reason Qatar is dumping natural gas in Europe is because it has gas to dump: its northern gas field is a very "wet" field, with a substantial percentage of natural gas condensate. Qatar's OPEC quota is 36 to 37 million
tonnes of oil per year, but natural gas condensate is not considered to be oil and is not covered by OPEC quotas. Exploiting the condensate loophole allows Qatar to export 65.7 million ton!
nes: 77% o
ver quota. The LNG is just concomitant production, and Qatar can afford to export LNG to Europe at a loss. This is a juicy bit of trivia, but really something of a footnote: an exception that proves the general case: there is no global natural gas market.

There is still, however, a global American disinformation and PR hype market, although this too is changing. The view from Russia is that it is pretty clear what this was all along: American propaganda and financial shenanigns. Nothing to see here, people, keep moving.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.jp/2012/05/shale-gas-view-from-russia.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of
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Federal Judge enjoins NDAA

Mitchel Cohen — 2012-05-17T02:56:29

This ruling by Judge Katherine Forrest is the 
first major crack in the Obama Administration's 
attacks on the U.S. Constitution and civil 
liberties in this country. It's about time!

- Mitchel


<http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/federal_court_enjoins_ndaa/singleton/>http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/federal_court_enjoins_ndaa/singleton/


<http://www.salon.com/2012/05/16/federal_court_enjoins_ndaa/singleton/>Federal 
court enjoins NDAA



An Obama-appointed judge rules its indefinite 
detention provisions likely violate the 1st and 5th Amendments

By <http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/>Glenn Greenwald

A federal district judge today, the 
newly-appointed 
<http://abovethelaw.com/2011/05/correction-ex-cravath-partner-nominated-to-s-d-n-y-is-pretty-stinking-rich/>Katherine 
Forrest of the Southern District of New York, 
issued 
<http://sdnyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/12-Civ.-00331-2012.05.16-Opinion-Granting-PI.pdf>an 
amazing ruling: one which preliminarily enjoins 
enforcement of the highly controversial 
indefinite provisions of 
<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detention_bill/>the 
National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by 
Congress and 
<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/obama_to_sign_indefinite_detention_bill_into_law/>signed 
into law by President Obama last December. This 
afternoon's ruling came as part of a lawsuit 
brought by seven dissident plaintiffs -- 
including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam 
Chomsky, and Brigitta Jonsdottir -- alleging that 
the NDAA violates "both their free speech and 
associational rights guaranteed by the First 
Amendment as well as due process rights 
guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution."

The ruling was a sweeping victory for the 
plaintiffs, as it rejected each of the Obama 
DOJ's three arguments: (1) because none of the 
plaintiffs has yet been indefinitely detained, 
they lack "standing" to challenge the statute; 
(2) even if they have standing, the lack of 
imminent enforcement against them renders 
injunctive relief unnecessary; and (3) the NDAA 
creates no new detention powers beyond what the 2001 AUMF already provides.

As for the DOJ's first argument -- lack of 
standing -- the court found that the plaintiffs 
are already suffering substantial injury from the 
reasonable fear that they could be indefinitely 
detained under section 1021 of the NDAA as a 
result of their constitutionally protected 
activities. As the court explained (h/t 
<http://sdnyblog.com/judge-forrest-enjoins-enforcement-of-federal-law-authorizing-indefinite-detention-of-u-s-citizens-who-provide-substantial-support-to-terrorist-groups/>Charles 
Michael):
In support of their motion, Plaintiffs assert 
that § 1021 already has impacted their 
associational and expressive activities and would 
continue to impact them, and that § 1021 is vague 
to such an extent that it provokes fear that 
certain of their associational and expressive 
activities could subject them to indefinite or prolonged military detention.

The court found that the plaintiffs have "shown 
an actual fear that their expressive and 
associational activities" could subject them to 
indefinite detention under the law, and "each of 
them has put forward uncontroverted evidence of 
concrete -- non-hypothetical --- ways in which 
the presence of the legislation has already 
impacted those expressive and associational 
activities" (as but one example, Hedges presented 
evidence that his "prior journalistic activities 
relating to certain organizations such as 
al-Qaeda and the Taliban" proves "he has a 
realistic fear that those activities will subject 
him to detention under § 1021). Thus, concluded 
the court, these plaintiffs have the right to 
challenge the constitutionality of the statute 
notwithstanding the fact that they have not yet 
been detained under it; that's because its broad, 
menacing detention powers are already harming 
them and the exercise of their constitutional rights.

Significantly, the court here repeatedly told the 
DOJ that it could preclude standing for the 
plaintiffs if they were willing to state clearly 
that none of the journalistic and free speech 
conduct that the plaintiffs engage in could 
subject them to indefinite detention. But the 
Government refused to make any such 
representation. Thus, concluded the court, 
"plaintiffs have stated a more than plausible 
claim that the statute inappropriately encroaches 
on their rights under the First Amendment."

Independently, the court found that plaintiffs 
are likely to succeed on their claim that the 
NDAA violates their Fifth Amendment due process 
rights because the statute is so vague that it is 
virtually impossible to know what conduct could 
subject one to indefinite detention. 
Specifically, the court focused on the NDAA's 
authorization to indefinitely detain not only Al 
Qaeda members, but also members of so-called 
"associated forces" and/or anyone who 
"substantially supports" such forces, and noted:
Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on 
their vagueness challenge. The terms upon which 
they focused at the hearing relate to who is a 
"covered person." In that regard, plaintiffs took 
issue with the lack of definition and clarity 
regarding who constitutes an "associated forces," 
and what it means to "substantially" or 
"directly" "support" such forces or, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. . . .
The Government was unable to define precisely 
what "direct" or "substantial" "support" means. . 
. .Thus, an individual could run the risk of 
substantially supporting or directly supporting 
an associated force without even being aware that he or she was doing so.

Perhaps most importantly, the court categorically 
rejected the central defense of this odious bill 
from the Obama administration and its defenders: 
namely, that it did nothing more than the 2001 
AUMF already did and thus did not really expand 
the Government's power of indefinite detention. 
The court cited three reasons why the NDAA 
clearly expands the Government's detention power 
over the 2001 AUMF (all of which I 
<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detention_bill/>previously 
cited when denouncing this bill).

First, "by its terms, the AUMF is tied directly 
and only to those involved in the events of 
9/11," whereas the NDAA "has a non-specific 
definition of 'covered person' that reaches 
beyond those involved in the 9/11 attacks by its 
very terms." Second, "the individuals or groups 
at issue in the AUMF are also more specific than 
those at issue in § 1021 of the NDAA; that's 
because the AUMF covered those "directly involved 
in the 9/11 attacks while those in § 1021 [of the 
NDAA] are specific groups and 'associated 
forces'." Moreover, "the Government has not 
provided a concrete, cognizable set of 
organizations or individuals that constitute 
'associated forces,' lending further 
indefiniteness to § 1021." Third, the AUMF is 
much more specific about how one is guilty of 
"supporting" the covered Terrorist groups, while 
the NDAA is incredibly broad and un-specific in 
that regard, thus leading the court to believe 
that even legitimate activities could subject a person to indefinite detention.

The court also decisively rejected the argument 
that President Obama's 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/31/statement-president-hr-1540>signing 
statement -- expressing limits on how he intends 
to exercise the NDAA's detention powers --- 
solves any of these problems. That's because, 
said the court, the signing statement "does not 
state that § 1021 of the NDAA will not be applied 
to otherwise-protected First Amendment speech nor 
does it give concrete definitions to the vague terms used in the statute."

The court concluded by taking note of what is 
indeed the extraordinary nature of her ruling, but explained it this way:
This Court is acutely aware that preliminarily 
enjoining an act of Congress must be done with 
great caution. However, it is the responsibility 
of our judicial system to protect the public from 
acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights.

I've been very hard on the federal judiciary in 
the past year due to its shameful, craven 
deference in the post-9/11 world to executive 
power and, especially, attempts to prosecute 
Muslims on Terrorism charges. But this is 
definitely an exception to that trend. This is an 
extraordinary and encouraging decision. All the 
usual caveats apply: this is only a preliminary 
injunction (though the court made it clear that 
she believes plaintiffs will ultimately prevail). 
It will certainly be appealed and can be 
reversed. There are still other authorities 
(including the AUMF) which the DOJ can use to 
assert the power of indefinite detention. 
Nonetheless, this is a rare and significant limit 
placed on the U.S. Government's ability to seize 
ever-greater powers of detention-without-charges, 
and it is grounded in exactly the right 
constitutional principles: ones that federal 
courts and the Executive Branch have been 
willfully ignoring for the past decade.


UPDATE: I really should mention the rest of the 
plaintiffs who brought this lawsuit beyond the 
four well-known ones I named above, because each 
deserves immense credit for doing this. Alexa 
O'Brien is an independent journalist who writes 
for WL Central, regarding WikiLeaks, Guantanamo 
and other issues, and founded a website to work 
on America's corrupted elections, 
<http://usdayofrage.org/>U.S. Day of Rage. Kai 
Wargalla is a British activist who founded Occupy 
London and has done extensive work in advocating 
for WikiLeaks. Jennifer Bolen, who along with 
Hedges spearheaded the organization of this 
lawsuit, is an activist with Revolution Truth who 
did substantial work to defeat the NDAA.

Though I knew a fair amount about it as it 
proceeded, I hadn't written about this lawsuit 
before, largely because I did not expect it to 
succeed; I anticipated that it would be dismissed 
on "standing" grounds, the favored tactic (along 
with the State Secrets privilege) for both the 
Bush and Obama DOJs to persuade federal courts 
not to even adjudicate constitutional challenges 
to the War on Terror powers. Serious kudos to all 
of the plaintiffs and lawyers here who persevered 
in what I'm certain they knew would be an uphill battle.





http://www.MitchelCohen.com


Ring the bells that still can ring,  Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen






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[BillTottenWeblog] Paul Krugman’s Economic Blinders

Bill Totten — 2012-05-17T01:09:41

by Michael Hudson

New Economic Perspectives (May 14 2012)

Paul Krugman is widely appreciated for his New York Times columns criticizing Republican demands for fiscal austerity. He rightly argues that cutting back public spending will worsen the economic depression into which we are sinking. And despite his partisan Democratic Party politicking, he warned from the outset in 2009 that President Obama’s modest counter-cyclical spending program was not sufficiently bold to spur recovery.

These are the themes of his new book, End This Depression Now (2012). In old-fashioned Keynesian style he believes that the solution to insufficient market demand is for the government to run larger budget deficits. It should start by giving revenue-sharing grants of $300 billion annually to states and localities whose budgets are being squeezed by the decline in property taxes and the general economic slowdown.

All this is a good idea as far as it goes. But Mr Krugman stops there – as if that is all that is needed today. So what he has done is basically get into a fight with intellectual pygmies. Thus dumbs down his argument, and actually distracts attention from what is needed to avoid the financial and fiscal depression he is warning about.

Here’s the problem: To focus the argument against “Austerian” advocates of fiscal balance, Mr Krugman hopes that economists will stop distracting attention by talking about what he deems not necessary. It seems not necessary to write down debts, for example. All that is needed is to reduce interest rates on existing debts, enabling them to be carried.

Mr Krugman also does not advocate shifting taxes off labor onto property. The implication is that California can afford its Proposition #13 – the tax freeze on commercial property and homes at long-ago levels, which has fiscally strangled the state and led to an explosion of debt-leveraged housing prices by leaving the site value untaxed and hence free to be pledged to banks for larger and larger mortgage loans instead of being paid to the public authorities. There is no hint in Mr Krugman’s journalism of a need to reverse the tax shift off real estate and finance (onto income and sales taxes), except to restore a bit more progressive taxation.

The effect of Mr Krugman’s suggestions is for the government to subsidize the existing financial and tax structures, leaving the debts intact and ignoring the largely regressive, unfair and inefficient system of taxation. It is unfair because the profits of the rich – and even worse, their asset-price (“capital”) gains are taxed at lower rates and riddled with tax loopholes and giveaways. The wealthy benefit from the windfall gains delivered by the public infrastructure investment advocated by Mr Krugman, but there is not a word about the public recouping this investment. Governments are indeed able to create their own money as an alternative to taxing, but some taxes – above all, on windfall gains, like site value resulting from public investment in roads or other public transportation – are justified simply on grounds of economic fairness.

So it is important to note what Mr Krugman does not address these issues that once played so important a role in Democratic Party politics, before the Wall Street faction gained control via the campaign financing process – even before the Citizens United case. For over a century, economists have recognized the need for financial and fiscal reform to go together. Failure to proceed with a joint reform has led the banking and financial sector – along with its major client base, the real estate sector – to scale back property taxes and “free” the economy with taxes so that the revenue can be pledged to the banks as interest to carry larger loans. The effect is to load the economy at large down with private and public debt.

In Mr Krugman’s reading, private debts need not be written down or the tax system made more efficient. It is to be better subsidized – mainly with easier bank credit and more government spending. So I am afraid that his book might as well have been subtitled “How the Economy can Borrow its Way Out of Debt”. That is what budget deficits do: they add to the debt overhead. In Europe, which has no central bank permitted to monetize the deficit spending, this pays interest to transfers to the bondholders (and their descendants). In the United States the Federal Reserve can monetize this indebtedness – but the effect is to subsidize domestic debt service.

Mr Krugman has become censorial regarding the debt issue over the last month or so. In last Friday’s New York Times column he wrote: “Every time some self-important politician or pundit starts going on about how deficits are a burden on the next generation, remember that the biggest problem facing young Americans today isn’t the future burden of debt” {1}. Unfortunately, Mr Krugman’s failure to see today’s economic problem as one of debt deflation reflects his failure (suffered by most economists, to be sure) to recognize the need for debt writedowns, for restructuring the banking and financial system, and for shifting taxes off labor back onto property, economic rent and asset-price (“capital”) gains. The effect of his narrow set of recommendations is to defend the status quo – and for my money, despite his reputation as a liberal, that makes Mr Krugman a conservative. I see little in his logic that would oppose Rubinomics, which has remained the Democratic
Party’s program under the Obama administration.

Many of Mr Krugman’s readers find him the leading hope of opposing even worse Republican politics. But what can be worse than the Rubinomics that Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Rahm Emanuel and other Wall Street holdovers from the Democratic Leadership Committee have embraced?

Perhaps I can prod Mr Krugman into taking a stronger position on this issue. But what worries me is that he has moved sharply to the “Rubinomics” wing of his party. He insists that debt doesn’t matter. Bank fraud, junk mortgages and casino capitalism are not the problem, or at least not so serious that more deficit spending cannot cure it. Criticizing Republicans for emphasizing structural unemployment, he writes: “authoritative-sounding figures insist that our problems are ‘structural’, that they can’t be fixed quickly … What does it mean to say that we have a structural unemployment problem? The usual version involves the claim that American workers are stuck in the wrong industries or with the wrong skills.” {2}

Using neoclassical sleight-of-hand to bait and switch, he narrows the meaning of “structural reform” to refer to Chicago School economists who blame today’s unemployment as being “structural”, in the sense of workers trained for the wrong jobs. This diverts the reader’s attention away from the pressing problems that are genuinely structural.

The word “structural” refers to the systemic imbalances that neoclassical economists dismiss as “institutional”: the debt overhead, the legal system – especially unfair and dysfunctional bankruptcy and foreclosure laws, regulations against financial fraud, and wealth distribution in general. In 1979, for example, I juxtaposed economic structuralism to Chicago School monetarism in my monograph on Canada in the New Monetary Order. I have elaborated that discussion my textbook on Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (new edition 2010). The tradition is grounded in the Progressive Era’s reform program. Correcting such structural and institutional defects, parasitism and privilege seeking “free lunches” is what classical political economy was all about – and what the neoclassical reaction sought to exclude from the economic curriculum. But from the perspective of neoclassical writers through Rubinomics deregulators, the problem of massive, unpayably high debt expa
nding inexorably by compound interest (and penalty fees) simply disappears

So the great problem today is whether to stop the siphoning off of income and wealth to financial institutions at the top of the economic pyramid, or reverse the polarization that has taken place over the past thirty years between creditors and debtors, financial institutions and the rest of the economy. I realize that it is more difficult to criticize someone for an error of omission than for an error of commission. But the distinction was erased a month ago when Mr Krugman got lost in the black hole of banking, finance and international trade theory that has engulfed so many neoclassical and old-style Keynesian economists. But last month Mr Krugman insisted that banks do not create credit, except by borrowing reserves that (in his view) merely shifts lending savings from wealthy people to those with a higher propensity to consume. Criticizing Steve Keen, who has just published a second edition of his excellent Debunking Economics (2011) to explain the dynamics of endogenous
money creation, he wrote:

Keen then goes on to assert that lending is, by definition (at least as I understand it), an addition to aggregate demand. I guess I don’t get that at all. If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else, this doesn’t have to represent a net increase in demand. Yes, in some (many) cases lending is associated with higher demand, because resources are being transferred to people with a higher propensity to spend; but Keen seems to be saying something else, and I’m not sure what. I think it has something to do with the notion that creating money = creating demand, but again that isn’t right in any model I understand.

Keen says that it’s because once you include banks, lending increases the money supply. Okay, but why does that matter? He seems to assume that aggregate demand can’t increase unless the money supply rises, but that’s only true if the velocity of money is fixed {3}.

But “velocity” is just a dummy variable to “balance” any given equation – a tautology, not an analytic tool. As a neoclassical economist, Mr Krugman is unwilling to acknowledge that banks not only create credit; in doing so, they create debt. That is the essence of balance sheet accounting. But writing like a tyro, Mr Krugman offers the mythology of banks that can only lend out money taken in from depositors (as though these banks were good old-fashioned savings banks or S&Ls, not what Mr Keen calls “endogenous money creators”). Banks create deposits electronically in the process of making loans.

Mr Krugman then doubled down on his assertion that bank debt creation doesn’t matter. People decide how much income they want to save, or decide how much to borrow to buy goods that their stagnant wage levels no longer enable them to afford. Everything is a matter of choice, not a necessity (“price-inelastic” is the neoclassical euphemism):

First of all, any individual bank does, in fact, have to lend out the money it receives in deposits. Bank loan officers can’t just issue checks out of thin air; like employees of any financial intermediary, they must buy assets with funds they have on hand.

So how much currency does the public choose to hold, as opposed to stashing funds in bank deposits? Well, that’s an economic decision, which responds to things like income, prices, interest rates, et cetera. In other words, we’re firmly back in the domain of ordinary economics, in which decisions get made at the margin and all that. Banks are important, but they don’t take us into an alternative economic universe.

As I read various stuff on banking – comments here, but also various writings here and there – I often see the view that banks can create credit out of thin air. There are vehement denials of the proposition that banks’ lending is limited by their deposits, or that the monetary base plays any important role; banks, we’re told, hold hardly any reserves (which is true), so the Fed’s creation or destruction of reserves has no effect. {4}

Not only do banks create new credit – debt, from the vantage point of their customers – but in the absence of government spending and regulation along more progressive lines, this new debt creation is the only way that the economy has avoided a sharp shrinking of consumption as real wages have remained stagnant since the late 1970s. The banks offer is one most people can’t refuse: “Take out a mortgage or go without a home”, or “Take out a student loan or go without an education and try to get a job at McDonald’s”. In other words, “Your money or your life”. It is what banks have been saying through the ages. The difference is that they can now create credit freely – and as Alan Greenspan has pointed out to Senate committees, workers are so debt-burdened (“one check away from homelessness”) that they are afraid that if they complain about working conditions, ask for higher salaries (to say nothing of trying to unionize), they will be fired. If they mis
s a paycheck their credit-card rates will soar to about 29%. And if they miss a mortgage payment, they may face foreclosure and lose their home. So the banking system has cowed the population with its credit- and debt-creating power.

Mr Krugman’s blind spot with regard to the debt overhead derails trade theory as well. If Greece leaves the Eurozone and devalues its currency (the drachma), for example, debts denominated in euros or other hard currency will rise proportionally. So Greece cannot leave without repudiating its debts in today’s litigious global economy. Yet Mr Krugman believes in the old neoclassical nonsense that all that is needed is “devaluation” to lower the cost of domestic labor. It is as if he is indifferent to the suffering that such austerity imposes – as Latin American countries suffered at the hands of IMF austerity plans from the 1970s onward. Costs can “be brought in line by adjusting exchange rates” {5}. The problem thus is simply one of exchange rates (which translates into labor costs in short order). Currency depreciation will (in Mr Krugman’s trade theory) reduce labor’s cost and other domestic costs to the point where governments can export enough not only t
o cover their imports, but to pay their foreign-currency debts (which will soar in depreciated local-currency terms).

If this were the case, Germany could have paid its reparations debt by depreciating the mark in 1921. But it did so by a billion-fold, even this did not suffice to pay. Neither neoclassical trade theorists nor Chicago School monetarists get the fact that when public or private debts are denominated in a foreign (hard) currency, devaluation devastates the economy. The past half-century has shown this again and again (most recently in Iceland). Domestic assets are transferred into foreign hands – including those of domestic oligarchies operating out of their offshore dollar or Swiss-franc accounts.

Blindness to the debt issue results in especial nonsense when applied to analysis of why the US economy has lost its export competitiveness. How on earth can American industry be expected to compete when employees must pay about forty percent of their wages on debt-leveraged housing, about ten percent more on student loans, credit cards and other bank debt, fifteen percent on FICA [Federal Insurance Contributions Act], and about ten to fifteen percent more in income and sales taxes? Between 75 and 80 percent of the wage payment is absorbed by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector even before employees can start buying goods and services! No wonder the economy is shrinking, sales are falling off, and new investment and hiring have followed suit.

How will the government running a larger deficit cope with today’s dimension of the debt problem – except by taking Mr Krugman’s suggestion to enable states and localities to spend marginally more revenue and avoid further layoffs, while the military industrial complex steps up its “Pentagon capitalism”? So far, the great increase in recent government debt has been to bail out the banking sector, not to help the “real” economy recover.

Increasing the debt burden of European nations has the same dire consequences. Germany balks at bailing out Greece unless Greece moves to streamline its bloated government and inefficient bureaucracy, stop tax evasion by the wealthy, clean up corruption and, in a word, be more Germanic. The US “Austerian” budget cutters whom Mr Krugman criticizes likewise can point to wasteful government spending, failing to distinguish positive infrastructure investment from pork-barrel “roads to nowhere” and tax loopholes promoted by Congressional politicians whose campaigns are sponsored by special financial interests, real estate and monopolies.

But I fear that Mr Krugman is being drawn into the gravitational pull of Rubinomics, the Democratic Party’s black hole from which the light of clarity dealing with the debt issue and bad financial and legal structures simply cannot escape. The only variables he admits are structure-free: The federal government can indeed spend more and reduce interest rates (especially on mortgages) so that the higher mortgage debt, student debt, personal debt and corporate debt overhead can be afforded more easily. No need to write any of these debts down. That seemingly obvious and sensible structural solution lies outside the scope of Mr Krugman’s neoclassical economics. He fails to recognize that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. This is the immediate problem facing the US and European economies today – and the way in which it is resolved will shape the coming generation.

The problem with Mr Krugman’s analysis is that bank debt creation plays no analytic role in Mr Krugman’s proposals to rescue the economy. It is as if the economy operates without wealth or debt, simply on the basis of spending power flowing into the economy from the government, and being spent on consumer goods, investment goods and taxes – not on debt service, pension fund set-asides or asset price inflation. If the government will spend enough – run up a large enough deficit to pump money into the spending stream, Keynesian-style – the economy can revive by enough to “earn its way out of debt”. The assumption is that the government will revive the economy on a broad enough scale to enable the individuals who owe the mortgages, student loans and other debts – and presumably even the states and localities that have fallen behind in their pension plan funding – to “catch up”.

Without recognizing the role of debt and taking into account the magnitude of negative equity and earnings shortfalls, one cannot see that what is preventing American industry from exporting more is the heavy debt overhead that diverts income to pay Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) expenditures. How can US labor compete with foreign labor when employees and their employers are obliged to pay such high mortgage debt for its housing, such high student debt for its education, such high medical insurance and Social Security (FICA withholding), such high credit-card debt – all this even before spending on goods and services?

In fact, how can wage earners even afford to buy what they produce? The problem interfering with the circular flow between producers and consumers (“Say’s Law”) is not “saving” as such. It is debt payment. And unless debts are written down, the US economy will shrink just as will the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Iceland and other countries subjected to the Washington Consensus of neoliberal austerity.

Notes:

{1} Paul Krugman, “Easy Useless Economics”, The New York Times (May 11 2012).

{2} Ibid.

{3} Paul Krugman, “Conscience of a Liberal” blog (March 27 2012), Minsky and Methodology (Wonkish).

{4} Banking Mysticism, Continued, “The Conscience of a Liberal” (March 30 2012).
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/banking-mysticism-continued/?emc=eta1

{5} Paul Krugman, “The Euro Trap”, The New York Times (April 30 2010).

_____

Michael Hudson’s new book summarizing his economic theories, The Bubble and Beyond, will be available in a few weeks on Amazon.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/05/paul-krugmans-economic-blinders.html#more-2237

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[BillTottenWeblog] A World of Thieving Financiers

Bill Totten — 2012-05-16T11:00:45

Vendor Arithmetic, Underhanded Capitalism

by Professor John Kozy

Global Research (May 03 2012)

The world belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader, kings or religious leaders ... Each country belongs essentially to their own people.

-- Dalai Lama

At times, something seemingly insignificant, when thought about deeply, reveals truths that the establishment seeks to keep hidden, the most important of which is the real purpose of a nation's existence. Most Americans, for instance, believe that America exists for their benefit and they expect the nation's institutions to serve their needs. But astute observers know that history proves otherwise even though the Constitution clearly states what the nation was established to do.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Notice that the phrases, "promote business" and "protect property" do not appear in this paragraph, but "promote the general Welfare" does.

In fact the Constitution to this day contains nothing about Capitalism or any other economic ideology. The document is completely neutral as Justice Holmes, dissenting in Lochner v New York writes:

[A] Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has enshrined laissez-faire Capitalism in constitutional law for much of its history, and Justice Powell made it quite clear in his writing that he considered that to be the Court's primary function.

The disingenuousness of the practice has made obvious injustice legal and the American people into mere means to serve the system's nefarious goals. Whenever and wherever necessary, the people must suffer to preserve the system. The practice violates the Constitution on two accounts: it establishes injustice rather than justice and hinders rather than promotes the general welfare.

To see how this works, consider this simple business claim that most readers will have heard or read numerous times in various forms: An executive of a local electricity provider went on television recently complaining about people stealing electricity by tampering with meters. He said the theft costs honest customers thousands of dollars in higher electricity costs and should be stopped. The same claim is made by merchants about shoplifting and automobile insurance companies about insurance fraud. The claim is accepted silently; I have never heard of anyone questioning it. So let's look at it carefully to see what can be learned from it.

The electric company sells electricity at a published rate of usage. If honest customers are being charged for the losses the company experiences because of thieves, the company isn't losing any money. Why are they complaining? What's happening is that the company is charging honest people for the actions of the dishonest. That's neat for the company but it's hardly just. If a person's home is burglarized, the person can't get back the loss from those honest people who had nothing to do with the burglary. What companies are allowed to do is steal back what they have lost from honest people. If that were made into a general legal principle, it would read something like, you may steal from the innocent what others have stolen from you. Of course, the judicial system contains no such principl
e, but it acts as if it does when a business is involved.

To protect ourselves from theft, ordinary people must buy theft insurance. Why aren't companies required to buy it or else tolerate the losses? Is it because the system exists to protect the property of businesses but not the property of ordinary people? How many people seeking office who flat out told their constituents that do you believe would be elected?

But it's even worse. Remember, the electric company has built the expected losses into its current rate. What do you believe happens when the expected losses fail to materialize? Does the electric company rebate its customers the losses they have been charged for that didn't happen? Sure it does!

So this seemingly innocent story that everyone accepts silently hides two common vendor forms of theft that are protected by the legal system whose justices have enshrined an economic bias into law because they have subverted the Constitution from the goals the founding fathers wrote into it to the almost exclusive promotion of laissez-faire Capitalism. There are countless other similar unjust business practices that are similarly protected by the system.

Capitalist countries everywhere are similarly unjust and exploitive. The nations that make up the European Union are now twisting themselves into contortions so that creditors can be protected by inflicting actual physical and economic pain on their citizens. But when people must not only suffer but be sacrificed to preserve the system, the only moral conclusion is that the system does not deserve to be preserved.

Until the system is discarded, the Dalai Lama's claims are false. The world does not belong to humanity. It belongs to thieving Capitalists who are protected by biased legal systems. And because the legal systems embody thousands of these little seemingly obvious injustices, changing it is virtually impossible. Underhanded Capitalism picks the pockets of common people during every economic transaction. People, you cannot win! Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, the sixteenth century Dutch humanist, called lawyers jackals. Today these wolves are allowed to delineate right from wrong. Try calling that progress!

_____

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the US Army during the Korean War, he spent twenty years as a university professor and another twenty years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

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[BillTottenWeblog] Cesium Red Alert

Bill Totten — 2012-05-15T04:59:45

Dear friends across Japan,

Experts have warned that a pool of dangerous radioactive cesium – 10 times that of the Chernobyl disaster – still sits exposed at Fukushima Daiichi reactor number four. With the Japanese government failing to act, it’s time for us to call for an international intervention.

If this pool were to leak, it could cause a radioactive fire forcing the evacuation of 35 million people in Tokyo! Now 72 civil society groups and experts are calling for a UN-led independent assessment team – with no ties to the dirty nuclear industry – to help ensure our safety. A massive jolt of people-power can help thrust the UN into action.

Let’s make sure we don’t live through another Fukushima disaster. Call on Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to address this urgent emergency immediately. Sign the petition now and forward this to everyone you know. We’ll deliver it straight to the UN headquarters in New York when we reach 50,000 signatures:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/un_for_fukushima_daiichi/?vl

It’s hard to imagine what our lives would be like if Japan were to face another nuclear disaster. Not only would millions of people need to be evacuated from their homes, the economic effects would devastate our country and the terrifying consequences on environment and health would haunt us for generations. As it stands, reactor number four at Fukushima Daiichi is a ticking bomb waiting to explode.

Despite countless warnings over the safety of Fukushima Daiichi, our government has failed to come up with a solution. It has been a year since the accident, yet the pool still lays exposed. Even more, our leaders have failed to keep their promise to set up an independent nuclear regulatory agency by April 1st, and continue to push for the hasty restart of nuclear reactors. When our government fails to protect us, it falls to us to call on the international community to intervene and prevent another nuclear catastrophe.

Let’s make sure Fukushima Daiichi stays in the history books. Call on UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to send a team of experts that can independently assess and put an end to this gargantuan threat. Sign the petition now and forward this to everyone you know, and we’ll deliver it straight to the UN headquarters in New York:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/un_for_fukushima_daiichi/?vl

When faced with the continuing dangers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, it’s easy to feel frightened and discouraged. But we are not alone. By working together can we realize the future we all want.

With hope and determination,

Jamie, Michi, Kya, Emily, Michelle, Ricken, Jooyea, and the whole Avaaz team

More Information

Doomsday scenarios spread about number four 4 reactor at Fukushima plant (Asahi Shimbun)
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201205100051

Concerns mount over the growing threat from Fukushima’s spent fuel (Bellona)
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2012/fukushima_spentfuel

The Need for Independent Assessment of the Fourth Reactor (Akio Matsumura – blog)
http://akiomatsumura.com/2011/10/447.html

Appeal to PM Noda and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (Green Action)
http://www.greenaction-japan.org/modules/wordpress0/index.php?p=96

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