Local Bias

Climate Change Realilty

2011-10-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate

By Eugene Robinson, Published: October 24

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.
The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own. Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California , Berkeley , used to dismiss alarmist climate research as being “polluted by political and activist frenzy.” Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight. Instead, the record set him straight.
“Global warming is real,” Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.
Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
In other words, the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong. Muller’s team, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, rigorously explored the specific objections raised by skeptics — and found them groundless.
Muller and his fellow researchers examined an enormous data set of observed temperatures from monitoring stations around the world and concluded that the average land temperature has risen 1 degree Celsius — or about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit — since the mid-1950s.
This agrees with the increase estimated by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place.
The Berkeley group’s research even confirms the infamous “hockey stick” graph — showing a sharp recent temperature rise — that Muller once snarkily called “the poster child of the global warming community.” Muller’s new graph isn’t just similar, it’s identical.
Muller found that skeptics are wrong when they claim that a “heat island” effect from urbanization is skewing average temperature readings; monitoring instruments in rural areas show rapid warming, too. He found that skeptics are wrong to base their arguments on the fact that records from some sites seem to indicate a cooling trend, since records from at least twice as many sites clearly indicate warming. And he found that skeptics are wrong to accuse climate scientists of cherry-picking the data, since the readings that are often omitted — because they are judged unreliable — show the same warming trend.
Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers — a total of 1.6 billion records — and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.
Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause.
It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.
We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.
Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.
It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud.

Did Tenet Hide Key Info on 9/11?

2011-08-18T18:38:00.000-07:00

Published on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Did Tenet Hide Key Info on 9/11?

by Ray McGovern

With few exceptions, like some salacious rumor about the Kennedy family, the mainstream U.S. news media has shown little interest in stories that throw light on history — even recent, very relevant history. So it comes as no surprise that, when a former White House counter-terrorism czar accuses an ex-CIA director of sitting on information that could have prevented a 9/11 attack, the story gets neither ink nor air.
Bulletin for those of you who get your information only from the New York Times, the Washington Post and other outlets of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM): Former White House director for counterterrorism Richard Clarke has accused former CIA Director George Tenet of denying him and others access to intelligence that could have thwarted the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11.
Deliberately withholding critical intelligence from those who need it, and can act on it, is — at the least — gross dereliction of duty. The more so if keeping the White House promptly and fully informed is at the top of your job jar, as it was for Director of Central Intelligence Tenet. And yet that is precisely the charge Clarke has leveled at the former DCI.
In an interview aired on Aug. 11 on a local PBS affiliate in Colorado, Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld information about two of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 — al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two had entered the United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.
Clarke adds that the CIA then covered it all up by keeping relevant information away from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.
Lying by senior officials is bad enough, and there is now plenty of evidence that former CIA Director George Tenet and his closest agency associates are serial offenders. Think for a minute about the falsehoods spread regarding Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” stockpiles.
But withholding intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been particularly unconscionable — the epitome of malfeasance, not just misfeasance. That’s why Richard Clarke’s conclusion that he should have received information from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, “unless somebody intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution” amounts, in my view, to a criminal charge, given the eventual role of the two in the hijacking on 9/11 of AA-77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.
Tenet has denied that the information on the two hijackers was “intentionally withheld” from Clarke, and he has enlisted the other two former CIA operatives, Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of Blackwater) and Richard Blee (an even more shadowy figure), to concur in saying, Not us; we didn’t withhold.
Whom to believe? To me, it’s a no-brainer. One would have to have been born yesterday to regard the “George is right” testimony from Black and Blee as corroborative.

Tenet’s Dubious Credibility

Tenet is the same fellow who provided the “slam dunk” on the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, as well as the “artist renderings” of equally non-existent mobile laboratories for developing biological warfare agents, based on unconfirmed information from the impostor code-named (appropriately) “Curveball.”
It was Tenet who, under orders from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, ordered up and disseminated a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq, the purpose of which was to deceive our elected representatives out of their constitutional prerogative to authorize war. No small lies.
After a five-year investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman Jay Rockefeller described the intelligence adduced under Tenet to “justify” attacking Iraq as “uncorroborated, contradicted, and non-existent.” Good enough to win Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though. The corruption of intelligence worked just fine for the purposes of Bush and Cheney, thank you very much.
It is a actually a matter of record that Tenet lies a lot — on occasion, displaying what I would call chutzpah on steroids. Recall, for example, Tenet in April 2007 snarling at Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes” — five times, in five consecutive sentences — “We do not torture people.”

Even Under Oath

Tenet has lied about 9/11, too. The joint statement from Tenet, Black and Blee – orchestrated by former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow – concludes: “We testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know. We stand by that testimony.”
Almost made me laugh … almost.
In his sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet said he had not spoken to Bush — even on the telephone — during the entire month of August 2001.
But Tenet did fly down to see the President in Crawford — not once, but twice during August 2001, and briefed Bush again in Washington on the 31st.
After the TV cameras at the 9/11 Commission hearing were shut off, Bill Harlow phoned the commission staff to say, Oops, sorry, Tenet misspoke. Even then, Harlow admitted only to Tenet’s Aug. 17 visit to Crawford (and to the briefing on the 31st).
How do we know Tenet was again in Crawford, on Aug. 24? From a White House press release quoting President Bush to that effect — information somehow completely missed by our vigilant Fawning Corporate Media.
Funny, too, how Tenet could have forgotten his first visit to Crawford on Aug. 17. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet waxes eloquent about the “president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and me trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna.” But the visit was not limited to small talk.
In his book Tenet writes: “A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events.” The Aug. 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief contained the article “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US.” According to Ron Suskind’s The One-Percent Doctrine, the president reacted by telling the CIA briefer, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”
If, as Tenet says in his memoir, it was the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB that prompted his visit on Aug. 17, what might have brought him back on Aug. 24? I believe the answer can be found in court documents released at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the fledgling pilot in Minnesota interested in learning to steer a plane but indifferent as to how to land it.
Those documents show that on Aug. 23, 2001, Tenet was given an alarming briefing focusing on Moussaoui, titled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” Tenet was told that Moussaoui was training to fly a 747 and, among other suspicion-arousing data, had paid for the training in cash.
It is an open question — if a key one — whether Tenet told Bush about the two hijackers, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information from the person who most needed it — White House counter-terrorist czar Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation in his surmise that Tenet was personally responsible. Clarke says:
“For me to this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of over 12 months.”

Enter Harlow

But Tenet’s aide-de-camp Bill Harlow has branded Clarke’s statements “absurd and patently false.” And the statement Harlow shepherded for Tenet, Black and Blee adds “reckless and profoundly wrong … baseless … belied by the record … unworthy of serious consideration.”
And Harlow never lies? Right. I’m reminded of Harlow’s reaction to Newsweek’s publication on Feb. 24, 2003, of the intelligence information provided by Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel when he defected to Jordan in 1995. Kamel brought with him a treasure trove of documents and unique knowledge of Iraq’s putative “weapons of mass destruction.”
Most significantly, he told his U.S. debriefers there were no WMD in Iraq. He knew. He had been in charge of Iraq’s chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs for almost a decade, and he ordered what weapons existed destroyed before the U.N. inspectors could discover them after the war in 1991. In his words:
“I ordered the destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.”
He told the U.S. much more, and the information that could be checked out was confirmed. But Kamel’s information didn’t fit with the Bush administration’s propaganda regarding its certainty that Iraq did have WMD stockpiles and was defying United Nations demands that the WMD be destroyed.
Those pushing the Iraq War juggernaut in early 2003 almost had a conniption when Newsweek acquired a transcript of Kamel’s debriefing and published this potentially explosive story barely three weeks before the invasion.
Newsweek noted gingerly that this information “raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.” It was, in fact, the kind of impeccably sourced documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts and lawyers lust.
But this was not at all what Bush, Cheney, and — by sycophantic extension — Tenet wanted Newsweek readers, or the rest of us, to learn less than a month before the U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq ostensibly to find and destroy those non-existent weapons.
Bill Harlow to the rescue: he told the FCM in no uncertain terms that the Newsweek story was, “incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.” And the media cheerleaders for war breathed a sigh of relief, saying, Gosh, thanks for telling us, and then dropped the story like a hot potato.
By all indications, Harlow is still able to work his fraudulent magic on the FCM, which have virtually ignored this major Clarke v. Tenet story since it broke six days ago.
If Harlow says it’s not true … and hurls still more pejorative epithets and adjectives, in a crude attempt to discredit the very serious charge Clarke has made … well, I guess we’ll have to leave it there, as the FCM is so fond of saying.
No matter Clarke’s well-deserved reputation for honesty and professionalism — and Tenet’s for the opposite. And so it goes.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Democracy Died First in Wisconsin – Long Live the Oligarchs

2011-08-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Published on Wednesday, August 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Democracy Died First in Wisconsin – Long Live the Oligarchs

by Thom Hartmann

The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics.

That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations.
Now we know the result, and it bodes ill for both 2012 and for the tattered future of small-d democracy in our republic.
A few of America’s most notorious oligarchs – including the Koch and the DeVos (Amway fortune) billionaires – as well as untraceable millions from donors who could as easily be Chinese government-run corporations as giant “American” companies who do most of their business and keep most of their profits outside the US – apparently played big in this election.
I say “apparently” because the Supreme Court has ruled that we no longer have the right to know who is really funding our election commercials, or even our candidates themselves.
Thanks to an irrational and likely illegal Supreme Court ruling, we have moved into an era of oligarch-run politics. As much as $40 million of our oligarch’s money was spent in Wisconsin in a handful of local races – a testing laboratory for strategies that will now be used against Democrats nationwide in 2012.
And so now we enter the battle of the oligarchs over the next fifteen or so months.
As the old saying goes, when the elephants fight, the mice get trampled. In this case, the mice aren’t just the voters. It’s democracy itself.
America is now – demonstrably, as proven by Wisconsin – just a few years away from the possibility of a totally corrupted, totally billionaire- and corporate-controlled political system. Political scientists call it oligarchy.
The Citizens United election experiment is over, and the oligarchs won. Long live the oligarchy.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country and an updated edition of "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back." Previous books include: Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture," "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion."

Columnist Opeyemi Parham on Return of Shuttle Atlantis

2011-07-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Atlantis: End of an Era

Being a sci-fi child was unusual, in my family African-American artistic family. My scientific temperament made me feel the black sheep much of the time.

My geeky tendencies were nurtured outside of my family from an early age. Max, my third grade science teacher introduced me to atomic theory. I saw a standard drawing of a nucleus, a proton and an electron and had an epiphany. It represented EVERYTHING. Finding the language of math and science to explore this way of seeing the world was a given for me, from that day onward.

Then there was "A Wrinkle in Time", read aloud by my fourth grade teacher. This mythopoetic story of Meg (clumsy misfit struggling to find her place in the world, suddenly transported into a great struggle to save Earth from Dark Forces) prepared me to believe in miracles, and in the power of love.

It is with very mixed feelings that I have witnessed the end of America's space program. The return of the shuttle Atlantis on July 21-- the same day "we" walked on the moon--IS the end of an era. It was an era that started on the wrong foot. A race AGAINST the Russians. The planting of a flag, CLAIMING the moon for "us".

A poem I wrote in 9th grade still reads true, all these many years later:

"I once heard a Navajo woman,

who was withered,

Like the last leaf of Autumn

Say,

Upon hearing that man had reached the moon,

Very quietly,

Very softly,

'I don't think that man was meant to go to the moon'

And I knew that when she died

A small piece of humanity would die with her.

Because she still saw the moon

As luminous power in a night sky,

As a Goddess, to be respected--

Not a rock on which to plant a flag

Or a dumpsite for discarded LEMs."

Could the millions spent on the space program have been better utilized? What were we humans exporting, anyway? How could we simply leave all our junk up there out in space? Was space becoming the new "away" for throwing things away?

About two weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my geeky MIT grad buddy, the product of parents who are both engineers who work for NASA. His defense of a continued need for the space program boiled down to "having somewhere to do the dangerous experiments".

Hmmm.

Like exploding nuclear bombs? Or biologic warfare tests?

It was not until 1992 that anyone looking like me went into space. Mae Jemison was a dancer, and a doctor, as well as an astronaut. She resigned from NASA in 1993. In 1996, she filed a police brutality report against a Texas police officer, following her arrest for a traffic violation.

That incident alone enforces my belief that we have a lot more work to do "down here" before our government gets back to space exploration.

We'll get there; in the right time in the right way.

With the REAL Right Stuff next time.

--
Opeyemi 413-336-1291
P.O. Box 264

Hadley, MA. 01035 (www.ceremonyheals.com)
check out my essay in Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World http://www.hopebeneathourfeet.com and my CHAPTER in Dancing on the Earth http://www.dancingontheearth.ca./

Financial Markets Exacerbate Economic Problems

2011-07-13T05:55:00.000-07:00

Published on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Why the Euro Is Not Worth Saving

This crisis has exposed the fact that – unlike the EU itself – the eurozone's monetary union was always a rightwing project

by Mark Weisbrot

The euro is crashing to record lows against the Swiss franc, and interest rates on Italian and Spanish bonds have hit record highs. This latest episode in the eurozone crisis is a result of fears that the contagion is now hitting Italy. With a $2tn economy and $2.45tn in debt, Italy is too big to fail and the European authorities are worried.

Although there is currently little basis for the concern that Italy's interest rates could rise high enough to put its solvency in jeopardy, financial markets are acting irrationally and elevating both the fear and the prospects of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The fact that the European authorities cannot even agree on how to handle the debt of Greece – an economy less than one sixth the size of Italy – does not inspire confidence in their capacity to manage a bigger crisis.

The weaker eurozone economies – Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain – are already facing the prospect of years of economic punishment, including extremely high levels of unemployment (16%, 12%, 14% and 21%, respectively). Since the point of all this self-inflicted misery is to save the euro, it is worth asking whether the euro is worth saving. And it is worth asking this question from the point of view of the majority of Europeans who work for a living – that is, from a progressive point of view.

It is often argued that the monetary union, which now includes 17 countries, must be maintained for the sake of the European project. This includes such worthy ideals as European solidarity, building common standards for human rights and social inclusion, keeping rightwing nationalism in check and, of course, the economic and political integration that underlies such progress.

But this confuses the monetary union, or eurozone, with the European Union itself.

Denmark, Sweden and the UK, for example, are part of the EU but not part of the monetary union. There is no reason that the European project cannot proceed, and the EU prosper, without the euro.

And there are good reasons to hope that this may happen. The problem is that the monetary union, unlike the EU itself, is an unambiguously rightwing project. If this has not been clear from its inception, it should be painfully clear now, as the weaker eurozone economies are being subjected to punishment that had previously been reserved for low- and middle-income countries caught in the grip of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its G7 governors. Instead of trying to get out of recession through fiscal and/or monetary stimulus, as most of the world's governments did in 2009, these governments are being forced to do the opposite, at enormous social cost.

Insults have been added to the injury: the privatisations in Greece or "labour market reform" in Spain; the regressive effects of the measures taken on the distribution of income and wealth; and the shrinking and weakening of the welfare state, while banks are bailed out at taxpayer expense – all this advertises the clear rightwing agenda of the European authorities, as well as their attempt to take advantage of the crisis to institute rightwing political changes.

The rightwing nature of the monetary union had been institutionalised from the beginning. The rules limiting public debt to 60% of GDP and annual budget deficits to 3% of GDP, while violated in practice, are unnecessarily restrictive in times of recession and high unemployment. The European Central Bank's mandate to care only about inflation, and not at all about employment, is another ugly indicator. The US Federal Reserve, for example, is a conservative institution but it is, at least, required by law to concern itself with employment as well as inflation.

And the Fed – for all its incompetence in failing to recognise an $8tn housing bubble that crashed the US economy – has proved to be flexible in the face of recession and a weak recovery, creating more than $2tn as part of an expansionary monetary policy. By comparison, the extremists running the European Central Bank have been raising interest rates since April, despite depression-level unemployment in the weaker eurozone economies.

Some economists and political observers argue that the eurozone needs a fiscal union, with greater co-ordination of budgetary policies, in order to make it work. But rightwing fiscal policy is counter-productive, as we are witnessing, even if it were better co-ordinated. Other economists – including this one – have argued that the large differences in productivity among the member economies present serious difficulties for a monetary union. But even if these problems could be overcome, the eurozone would not be worth the effort if it is a rightwing project.

European economic integration prior to the eurozone was of a different nature. Unlike the "race-to-the-bottom" approach of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) – which displaced hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers while contributing to reduced wages and manufacturing employment in the US and Canada – the European Union made some efforts to pull the lower-income economies upward and protect the vulnerable. But the European authorities have proved to be ruthless in their monetary union.

The idea that the euro must be saved for the sake of European solidarity also plays on an oversimplified notion of the resistance that taxpayers in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Finland have demonstrated to "bailing out" Greece. While it is undeniable that some of this resistance is based on nationalist prejudice – often inflamed by the mass media – that is not the whole story. Many Europeans don't like to pay the bill for bailing out European banks that made bad loans. And the EU authorities are not "helping" Greece, any more than the US and Nato are "helping" Afghanistan – to take a somewhat analogous debate where those who oppose destructive policies are labeled "backward" and "isolationist".

It appears that much of the European left does not understand the rightwing nature of the institutions, authorities and especially macroeconomic policies, which they are facing in the eurozone. This is part of a more general problem with the public misunderstanding of macroeconomic policy worldwide, which has allowed rightwing central banks to implement destructive policies, sometimes even under leftwing governments. These misunderstandings, along with the lack of democratic input, might help explain the paradox that Europe currently has more rightwing macroeconomic policies than the United States, despite having much stronger labour unions and other institutional bases for more progressive economic policy.

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis. E-mail Mark:wei

Reagan Beacon of Economic Destruction

2011-07-11T06:09:00.000-07:00

Published on Sunday, July 10, 2011 by Al Jazeera

Reagan Mythology is Leading US Off a Cliff

During Reagan's presidency, the US went from a creditor to debtor nation and marked a take-off for financial inequality.

by Paul Rosenberg

As things stand today, the US is hurtling toward a budget showdown in less than a month. Either President Obama will once again capitulate to extreme Republican budget-slashing demands, making Democrats seem as much of a threat to Medicare as Republicans, and virtually ensuring a GOP electoral sweep in 2012, or the US will default on its debt for the first time in its history, most likely plunging the world economy back into another five-continent recession, also costing Democrats the 2012 elections. These are the options left for a president and a political class completely divorced both from reality, and its own history of how one of the three greatest US presidents of all time steered the country from the brink of collapse eight decades ago

Corporate CowboyEntirely forgetting the real history of how Franklin D Roosevelt used activist government to save American capitalism from itself, the entire US political establishment is instead hypnotized by the false history woven around its most over-hyped president of all time: Ronald Reagan. Idolatry of Reagan's supposed tax-cutting wonders propels the now widespread economic belief that up is down, that cutting government spending is the way out of - rather than into - a severe recession. At the same time, idolatry of Reagan's supposed political wonders propels GOP extremists to ignore all other considerations.

Because of this hypnotism, America's political establishment has barely even begun to notice two unconventional possible ways out that remain, neither of which require anything from Congress, but both of which need bold presidential leadershipala FDR.

The first is to ignore the debt ceiling, relying directly on the 14th Amendment's statement that: "the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned". The second is a proposal from maverick Republican Ron Paul to have the Federal Reserve Board destroy the $1.6 trillion in government bonds that it currently holds, which progressive economist Dean Baker recently wrote, "actually makes a great deal of sense". It might take some arm-twisting on Obama's part, but Congress has no say over the Fed, and central bankers have no great love of spreading financial panic.

In anything close to a sane world, either one of these two bold strokes would be widely hailed for avoiding a reckless threat to the still-fragile world economy. But we do not live in a sane world, and the idolatry of Ronald Reagan is one of the principle reasons why. This is why it behooves us to review some of the principle lies involved with Ronald Reagan's record, focusing specifically on the economy. What follows is but a brief rundown.

The idea that Reagan produced a uniquely booming economy is false

First, Reagan's record on the economy was not just exaggerated by his boosters, it's almost exactly the opposite of what they claim. It was a fairly ordinary time by the most common measurements of economic growth, looking good only in comparison with a selective time-slice of the 1970s. But once you start looking beneath the surface even the tiniest bit, the picture turns very dark indeed.

In terms of the most basic measure of economic growth - increase in gross domestic product (GDP) - the vaunted "Reagan boom" was an unremarkable period of time. If we look at Reagan's eight years, and compare them with Clinton's and JFK/LBJ's, Reagan comes in dead last, with 31.7 per cent compared with Clinton's 33.1 per cent and JFK/LBJ's 47.1 per cent. Only Nixon/Ford's eight years make Reagan look good, with a mere 26.2 per cent growth.

The idea that Reagan brought prosperity is true only for those at the top, not for average American workers

If we examine incomes, we discover that Reagan's eight years marked a real take-off for inequality, while average incomes stagnated. The income growth of the top once per cent was ten times that of everyone else during his term: 61.5 per cent versus 6.15 per cent. Under JFK/LBJ, the bottom 99 per cent actually did better: gaining 30.9 per cent compared with 26.9 per cent for the top once per cent. And while inequality continued to rise under Clinton, the bottom 99 per cent did more than twice as well as they did under Reagan, gaining 16.7 per cent compared with 56.6 per cent for the wealthiest one per cent.

The idea that Reagan was good for the American economy in general is false

Reagan was a disaster for the American economy in at least four fundamental ways:

Debtor Nation Status: Under Ronald Reagan, the US went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years - and we have remained the largest debtor nation ever since. In 1981, Reagan's first year in office, the US was a net creditor to the tune of $140.9bn. By 1984, that had shrunk to just $3.3bn - and the next year, the US shifted from being a creditor nation to a debtor nation for the first time in almost 70 years. By 1987, the US was a net debtor by $378.3bn - the largest debtor nation in the world. The figure rose to $532.5bn by the end of 1988, when Reagan left office.

De-Industrialization: While the percentage of industrial jobs in the economy had been declining since the 1950s, with the growth of the service sector, the raw number of industrial jobs continued to increase right up through 1979, just before the 1980/1982 double-dip recession. From that year onward, the number of industrial jobs began declining, with a smattering of years when the number would increase. In addition to the raw number of jobs declining, the number of unionized jobs and the number of jobs with American companies declined even further.

Personal indebtedness: The income stagnation that began under Reagan has had a devastating impact on personal savings. While it fluctuated considerably, the personal savings rate had more than doubled between 1949 and 1982, from 5.0 per cent up to 11.2 per cent. Ironically, one of the main stated purposes of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts, the basis for Reagan's 1981 tax cut bill, was to boost personal savings. Instead, they plunged precipitously, falling all the way down into negative territory by 2006.

Government Indebtedness: The idea that Reagan was "fiscally conservative" is false. The story of government indebtedness was even more bleak. Before Reagan, debt really wasn't a problem for America. From World War II to 1981, every president had reduced the debt as a percentage of GDP, except for the divided term of Nixon-Ford, which saw a tiny 0.2 per cent increase.

The debt-to-GDP ratio is much more significant than the debt alone, since the GDP represents the nation's total capacity to pay off the debt. And from WWII to 1981, the debt-to-GDP ratio fell from almost 120 per cent down to just down to just 32.5 per cent. The sharpest drop came early on, but even during the supposed "big government" heyday of the Kennedy/Johnson years, the ratio fell by over 16 per cent in eight years. Conservatives then might have complained about the debt - and they certainly did - but no one knowledgeable about economics took them seriously, because the debt grew significantly slower than our ability to repay it.

During Reagan's term, this changed dramatically. The ratio rose by over 20 per cent, and it rose another 13 per cent under his successor, George Bush Sr. It took a Democrat, Bill Clinton, to get the ratio headed down again - by almost 10 per cent during his two terms, before Bush Jr sent it skyrocketing again - by almost 28 per cent. It's rising fast under Obama as well - but that's to be expected as a result of the worst recession since the 1930s.

The idea that Ronald Reagan consistently opposed tax increases is false

The idea that Ronald Reagan always opposed tax increases is completely untrue. He raised taxes dramatically as Governor of California in 1967 - by a whopping 30 per cent. But he also raised them as president - 11 times. Sure, his 1981 tax increase, along with three smaller increases, was much larger than his total tax cuts. But his willingness to raise as well as lower taxes would have made him at least somewhat compatible with President Obama, and totally unacceptable to movement conservatives today, especially Tea Partiers.

Bruce Bartlett was a leading supply-side economist in the 1970s, who helped draft the Kemp-Roth tax bill as a staff economist for Congressman Jack Kemp. He went on to serve in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations. In an April 2010 blog post, listing Reagan's 11 presidential tax hikes and four tax cuts, Bartlett wrote: "It may come as a surprise to some people that, once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, Republicans actually cared enough about budget deficits that they thought raising taxes was necessary to bring them down. Today, Republicans believe that deficits are nothing more than something to ignore when they are in power and to bludgeon Democrats with when they are out of power."

Bartlett was obviously overstating his case, given how the debt skyrocketed under Reagan. But things would have clearly been much, much worse if Reagan had never raised taxes. And if Reagan were around today, he would no doubt be denounced as a "socialist" for all the tax increases he signed onto.

The idea that Reagan's tax cuts spurred job creation is false

As noted in Bartlett's table of tax cuts and increases, Reagan followed up his 1981 tax cuts with increases in 1982 and 1983. And for good reason: The unemployment rate - already high when Reagan took office - continued to skyrocket after his tax cuts were passed - peaking at 11.2 percent in 1983, when the jobless rate finally started to come down. The exact mixture of cause and effect over such an extended period may be subject to debate. But one thing is certain: Reagan's 1981 tax cuts did not magically result in job creation in anything like the way that conservatives nowadays mindlessly claim.

The idea that Reagan changed America's mind about taxes and the role of government is false

Political scientist James Stimson, author of Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, has constructed an index of economic liberalism based on hundreds of public opinion questions asked repeatedly over the years. This index reached a low-point in 1980 and rose dramatically for the next seven years, reaching a plateau at levels not seen since Nixon's first term, as if Reagan's rhetoric were convincing more and more people of the exactly the opposite of what he was saying.

This rise was reflected, for example, in four questions asked in the General Social Survey, the most-cited data source for social scientists after the US Census. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people saying the government was spending "too little" nationally increased 27.4 per cent on health care, 32.9 per cent on education, 67.8 per cent on welfare and 46.7 per cent on the environment. The questions all reminded people that increased taxes might be required if more was spent.

What's more, 20 years after Reagan's election, in 2000, federal tax receipts as a percent of GDP were up 8.4 per cent over what they had been the year Reagan was elected, indisputable proof that government's role had ultimately not decreased across that time-span.

TIME Magazine Cover: Why Obama ♥ Reagan. Feb. 7, 2011The idea that Reagan was a singularly popular president is false

Reagan was quite fortunate in getting re-elected in 1984 when his popularity was particularly high, but that was not true of his record in general. According to Gallup, Reagan's overall average approval rating was only 52.8 per cent, lower than John F Kennedy (70.1 per cent), Dwight Eisenhower (65 per cent), GHW Bush (60.1 per cent), Bill Clinton (55.1 per cent), and Lyndon Johnson (55.1 percent). It's only modestly higher than George W Bush (49.4 per cent) and Richard Nixon (49.1 per cent).

Summing Up

Surveying all these lies in a single panorama, it should be clear that neither Reagan's economic record nor his political one should provide any case at all for embracing conservative economics. Quite the opposite: They clearly point to failure on both counts. What's more, the only reason his mythology is possible at all is because he significantly backtracked by raising taxes, when doing otherwise would have completely exposed the failure of his principal economic intentions.

President Obama is as drunk on Reagan's kool-aid as anyone else in Washington today. It will be difficult indeed for him to break the spell in time to save the country - and himself - from repeating the economic disaster that conservative policies led to just before he was elected.

One thing about Reagan is true, however: His wife did play a significant role in saving him from following ideologues into dangerous folly on a number of occasions. Perhaps Michelle Obama is America's last best hope. Perhaps she can see what her husband thus far cannot.

Invoke the 14th — and End the Debt Standoff

2011-07-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

Invoke the 14th — and End the Debt Standoff

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

On its current course, the United States is four weeks away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history. If that happens, businesses will fail. Financial institutions will fail. Home values will decline. Mortgage rates will skyrocket. Spending and investment will all but disappear. Social Security checks will stop being mailed. Everything from military pay to food inspection will be compromised, if not fully cut off. The millions upon millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed will be joined by millions more.

Across the world, America’s second financial collapse in three years will drag down already fragile economies in Europe, Latin America and Asia, potentially creating a “worldwide depression,” as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described it. In short, we would be thrown back deep into economic turmoil — only this time with even fewer tools to crawl our way out.

In theory, this is unthinkable, and it will be remedied by reasonable political parties making reasonable concessions across the negotiating table. But Republicans have been negotiating in bad faith, unwilling to compromise even an inch on their extremist and absolutist positions.Some are no longer willing to come to the table at all.

With that backdrop, President Obama may find that there is only one course left to avoid a global economic calamity: Invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which says that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” This constitutional option is one that the president alone may exercise.

If the Aug. 2 deadline arrives and no deal has been made, Obama could use a plain reading of that text to conclude — statutory debt ceiling or not — that he is constitutionally required to order the Treasury to continue paying America’s bills. In that sense, this is not just a constitutional option, it is a constitutional obligation, one even the Tea Party will have trouble denying.

There are reasons why such a solution is less than ideal. There ought to be some concern about executive overreach; the very idea of the president deciding which laws are and are not constitutional has disturbing ramifications. And to the extent that the goal of the move is to prevent market panic, it remains an open question as to whether it would succeed. But market panic will surely come with the failure to reach a deal altogether. The consequences of default are simply too severe — and too long-lasting — to take this option off the table. It may not be ideal as an elective choice, but as an option of last resort, it is a necessity.

If Obama does choose to move forward, he will be doing so on strong legal footing. In Freytag v. Commissioner (1991), the Supreme Court held that the president has “the power to veto encroaching laws . . . or to disregard them when they are unconstitutional.” The final word still may lie with the Supreme Court, but in the interim, the president need not wait for its opinion. “As a simple matter of constitutional logic, the president can refuse to enforce a statute he believes violates the Constitution,” said Professor Barry Friedman of NYU Law School in a telephone interview with me. “In fact, he is sworn by oath not to enforce it,” added Friedman, author of the book “The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution.”

It is also unlikely that the action would be successfully challenged in court. Only Congress would have standing to sue, but doing so would require a joint resolution, something a Democratic-controlled Senate would almost certainly block.

President Obama should commit to exercising this obligation — as a last resort. And he should commit publicly, as soon as possible.

Doing so will give him the leverage he lacks in the debt-ceiling negotiations. Right now, Republicans’ willingness to let the economy default, consequences be damned, gives them enormous leverage. But presumably, if a deal is not reached by the deadline, and the president is forced to exercise his constitutional obligation, Republicans will get nothing at all. Not the trillion dollars in cuts already agreed to. Not the additional trillion in cuts they are seeking. The threat, alone, of invoking the 14th Amendment defuses the bomb Republicans have strapped to the hostage.

Most would agree that taking such a step would be out of character for a president who has avoided this brand of confrontation. But great leaders adapt to adverse circumstances, and this is no exception. The president doesn’t just have a political and legal obligation here; he has a moral one, too. A default would be wrenching for the poor and middle class, stripping families of their jobs, their homes and programs they depend on for survival. A debt deal, negotiated entirely on Republican terms, would be devastating too — for everyone who isn’t a hedge-fund manager or private jet owner.

That leaves the president with two choices: He can give in to unthinkable Republican demands or he can choose, instead, to exercise his constitutional authority, end the debt-ceiling standoff and craft a new budget deal, defined, finally, by shared sacrifice.

Book Review: In the Claw of the Tiger

2011-07-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

Cover of In the Claw of the Tiger

"Claw" A Gripping Tale - Book Review by Susanni Douville

POW Camp - Philippines

On a crisp autumn day in October 1940 plucky Franklin J. ("Porky") LaCoste of the small mill town of Athol, Massachusetts and five of his closest friends enlisted in the United States Army, visions of an expenses-paid vacation in Paradise - Hawaii - dancing in their heads. Little did the boys realize that, following an all-too-brief detour to Paradise, they would begin a descent into Hell.

In her powerful, moving novel, In the Claw of the Tiger, author G. Thomson Fraser chronicles the enmeshment of iconic Everyman Porky in the horrors of World War II as he and his compatriots endure the Japanese incursion into the Philippines in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the notorious Bataan Death March, internment in sub-human, malaria-ridden conditions in Japanese-run Philippine POW camps and, finally, transport to Japan in the dark and airless holds of "Death Ships" to toil in ore and copper mines.

Porky (left), Billy and a friend enjoy PI before the war

Improbably, and thankfully for the reading public, the diminutive Porky (who stands only five-feet four-and-a-half inches tall) survived to tell the tale and, many years later, to encounter a particularly keen listener in novelist Fraser, of the neighboring town of Orange, Massachusetts. Fraser, who interviewed Porky periodically over a five-year period and undertook extensive historical research, captures his story with affection, humor and warmth.

Make no mistake: In the Claw of the Tiger is a war novel; Porky and Company come face-to-face with the bloody, the evil and the unsavory, which Fraser does not flinch from describing. Yet it is just as much the story of Porky and his friends; of Athol; of great loyalties and losses; of the silliness and high-jinx of youth, and of sometimes life-saving acts of kindness from quarters least expected, including occasionally enemy quarters. In a certain sense, if you know the story of the Bataan survivors, or of World War II, or of war in general, you know this story. But you don't know it through the eyes of this novel's compelling, likable and hitherto unsung hero, Porky LaCoste, who survived by dint of grit, resourcefulness and, perhaps most valuable of all, an innate kindness to others that in certain critical moments happened to be repaid.

Porky (left), Billy,
and Herman

Fraser's novel is enlivened by the presence of a number of personal photographs of Porky, his family, and the friends who enlisted with him on that fateful fall day in 1940, some depicting their carefree transport to Hawaii and stopover there and early days in the Philippines, before Japanese bombs struck in December 1941. As Fraser does in the text of the novel, she interweaves the personal and historic by adding to the mix a number of public photos depicting the great events that served as backdrop to the boys' adventures and tribulations, including General King's surrender of the Philippines to the Imperial Army.

Visiting grandmother, stepfather and cousin in Athol before the war

In the Claw of the Tiger contains, in an appendix, the full text of three FDR fireside chats, "On the Declaration of War with Japan," broadcast on December 9, 1941; "Report on the Home Front," broadcast on October 12, 1942; and the "State of the Union Message to Congress," broadcast on January 11, 1944.

In his brilliant 1941 speech, President Roosevelt noted: "We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children. We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini. So we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows." It is chillingly apparent that, without the courage, vision and determination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the on-the-ground heroism of another Franklin - Franklin ("Porky") LaCoste - and countless others like him, this promise could not have been kept. In penning this novel, Fraser, who was born in December 1945 - scant months after Porky was liberated from his grueling years of internment and deprivation - provides some small measure of overdue thanks from the Baby Boom generation and all others born since for the world of relative safety, security and freedom we have been privileged to enjoy.

Susanni Douville

Susanni Douville, a resident of Portland, Maine, has copy-edited and written for The Hartford Courant and The Washington Post, among other publications. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Oberlin College, a Master of Science degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a JD from the Yale School of Law. A Baby Boomer herself, Douville is the niece of Fraser - but hastens to add that all opinions expressed herein are sincerely held.

Ignorance is Rampant Among Tea Party Patridiots

2011-07-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

Published on Saturday, July 2, 2011 by The Nation

What Michele Bachmann and Her Teapot 'Patriots' Do Not Know About America

by John Nichols

The unsettling thing about Michele Bachmann’s failed discussion of the founders and slaveryis not that the Tea Party “Patriot” knew so little about the birth of the American experiment that she made John Quincy Adams—the son of a somewhat disappointing founder (John) and the cousin of one of the true revolutionaries (Sam)—into something he was not.

Bachmann has for some time peddled the notion that the nation’s founding fathers worked “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” She is simply wrong about this. The last of the revolutionaries generally recognized by historians as the founders—signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and their chief political and military comrades—passed in 1836, with the death of James Madison. That was twenty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, and twenty-nine years before the finish of the Civil War.

But Bachmann has never bothered by the facts. Until now.

As she has moved from the fringe of the House Republican Caucus—which earlier his yeardismissed her candidacy for a minor leadership role—into serious contention for the Republican presidential nomination, she has finally begun to be called out on some of her more outlandish statements.

Noting that many of the founders were slaveholders, George Stephanopoulos asked Bachmann the other day on ABC News’s Good Morning America to explain how she came to her distinctive view of the nation’s founding. “Well, if you look at one of our founding fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true,” the Minnesota congresswoman chirped. “He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father’s secretary. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery…”

In fact, John Quincy Adams was just 8 when the Declaration of Independence was signed and just 20 when the Constitution was being cobbled together at a convention that agreed to a “compromise” that identified a slave as three-fifths of a human being. He did not sign either document. Nor did he participate in any significant manner in the debates regarding those documents—or the compromises contained in them—until the last years of his life.

John Quincy Adams was not considered a prominent ally of American abolitionists in his teens or his 20s, or his 30s, or his 40s, or his 50s. Only as he approached the age of 70, after finishing his one term as president, did Adams emerge as an outspoken critic of human bondage. When he did so, his was a radical act of departure from the corrupt political consensus that allowed slavery to be maintained. Adams’s courageous stance in opposition to states rights and in favor of a strong federal government with a commitment to liberty and justice for all is surely worthy of note.

But Bachmann got Adams’s story wrong. And she refused to back off her error even when she was offered an opportunity to do so.

That ought to be troubling to anyone who takes seriously the detail and nuance of America’s founding and the progression of the American experiment. But it is not the most troubling thing about her ignorance with regard to the history of the revolutionary moment and its aftermath.

The really unsettling thing about Bachmann’s desperate struggle to explain away her errors and mischaracterizations is that, with a little effort, she could have gotten right the story of the fight over slavery at the point of American beginning.

There were, indeed, founders who objected to slavery. Thomas Jefferson tried to insert anti-slavery language into the Declaration of Independence, only to be rebuked by his fellow Southerners. Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush were relatively active abolitionists, for instance. More significantly, within the founding circle, a genuine foe of human bondage risked his place among the elites to stand, again and again, at the side of the disenfranchised: slaves, Native Americans, the landless masses and women.

Tom Paine, the man who called the United States into being, did not just write Common Sense.

Historians suggest that it was Paine who encouraged Jefferson to include the anti-slavery clause in the declaration.

And historians know that Paine was a regular contributor to the great radical journal of the colonial era, the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, which in 1775 published “African Slavery in America,” the first article proposing the emancipation of African slaves and the abolition of slavery. In his time and to this day, it has been speculated that Paine wrote that pioneering article. Certainly, he associated himself with its values and ideals—particularly the declaration that: “Our Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts: and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.”

Those words were published March 8, 1775.

Barely one month later, on April 14, 1775, the first anti-slavery society in the American colonies was formed in Philadelphia.

Thomas Paine was a founding member.

If Michele Bachmann wanted to talk about a founder who was on the right side of history, she could have done so.

But that would require her to do more than talk about American history. She would have to read it. And she would have to do so with an eye toward understanding America as a work in progress where there have always been debates between progressives, like Paine and his “winter soldiers” of the visionary American revolution, and the “sunshine patriot” conservatives who were—and are—too afraid, or too wrongheaded, to do right by their fellow human beings.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book is The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols' other books include: Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now

2011-06-13T17:19:00.001-07:00

Published on Monday, June 13, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Why the Pentagon Papers Matter Now

While we go on waging unwinnable wars on false premises, the Pentagon papers tell us we must not wait 40 years for the truth

by Daniel Ellsberg

The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)

In other words, today's declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That's because we're mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don't have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it's likely to go.

What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We're not likely to get them; they probably don't yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from.

Yes, the languages and ethnicities that we don't understand are different in the Middle East from those in Vietnam; the climate, terrain and types of ambushes are very different. But as the accounts in the Pentagon Papers explain, we face the same futile effort in Afghanistan to find and destroy nationalist guerrillas or to get them to quit fighting foreign invaders (now us) and the corrupt, ill-motivated, dope-dealing despots we support. As in Vietnam, the more troops we deploy and the more adversaries we kill (along with civilians), the quicker their losses are made good and the more their ranks grow, since it's our very presence, our operations and our support of a regime without legitimacy that is the prime basis for their recruiting.

As for Washington, the accounts of recurrent decisions to escalate in the Pentagon Papers read like an extended prequel to Bob Woodward's book last year, Obama's War, on the prolonged internal controversies that preceded the president's decisions to triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan. (Woodward's book, too, is based on top secret leaks. Unfortunately, these came out after the decisions had been made, and without accompanying documentation: which it is still not too late for Woodward or his sources to give to WikiLeaks.)

In accounts of wars 40 years and half a world apart, we read of the same irresponsible, self-serving presidential and congressional objectives in prolonging and escalating an unwinnable conflict: namely, the need not to be charged with weakness by political rivals, or with losing a war that a few feckless or ambitious generals foolishly claim can be won. Putting the policy-making and the field realities together, we see the same prospect of endless, bloody stalemate – unless and until, under public pressure, Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the executive into a negotiated withdrawal.

To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40 years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.

Yet, we're not likely to get these ever within the time frame they're needed. The WikiLeaks' unauthorized disclosures of the last year are the first in 40 years to approach the scale of the Pentagon Papers (and even surpass them in quantity and timeliness). But unfortunately, the courageous source of these secret, field-level reports – Private Bradley Manning is the one accused, though that remains to be proven in court – did not have access to top secret, high-level recommendations, estimates and decisions.

Very, very few of those who do have such access are willing to risk their clearances and careers – and the growing possibility (under President Obama) of prosecution – by documenting to Congress and the public even policies that they personally believe are disastrous and wrongly kept secret and lied about. I was one – and far from alone – with such access and such views, as a special assistant to the assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs in the Pentagon in 1964-65. (My immediate boss John T McNaughton, Robert McNamara's primary assistant on Vietnam, was another; asdocumented in the recent publication of his personal diary.)

I've long regretted that it didn't even occur to me, in August 1964, to release the documents in my Pentagon safe giving the lie to claims of an "unequivocal, unprovoked" (unreal) attack on our destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf: precursors of the "evidence beyond any doubt" of nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, which manipulated Congress, once again, to pass the exact counterpart of the Tonkin Gulf resolution.

Senator Morse – one of the two senators who had voted against that unconstitutional, undated blank cheque for presidential war in 1964 – told me that if I had provided him with that evidence at the time (instead of 1969, when I finally provided it to the senate foreign relations committee, on which he had served): "The Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee; and if it had been brought to the floor, it would have been voted down."

That's a heavy burden for me to bear: especially when I reflect that, by September, I had a drawer-full of the top secret documents (again, regrettably, not published until 1971) proving the fraudulence of Johnson's promises of "no wider war" in his election campaign, and his actual determination to escalate a war that he privately and realistically regarded as unwinnable.

Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office – which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath "to support and defend the constitution of the United States" – that terrible war might well have been averted altogether. But to hope to have that effect, we would have needed to disclose the documents when they were current, before the escalation – not five or seven, or even two, years after the fateful commitments had been made.

A lesson to be drawn from reading the Pentagon Papers, knowing all that followed or has come out in the years since, is this. To those in the Pentagon, state department, the White House, CIA (and their counterparts in Britain and other Nato countries) who have similar access to mine then and foreknowledge of disastrous escalations in our wars in the Middle East, I would say:

Don't make my mistake. Don't do what I did. Don't wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don't wait until thousands more have died, before you go to the press and to Congress to tell the truthwith documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don't wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.

The personal risks are great. But a war's worth of lives might be saved.

10 Inconvenient Truths About the Debt Ceiling

2011-06-07T17:17:00.000-07:00

June 02, 2011 02:00 PM

10 Inconvenient Truths About the Debt Ceiling

By Jon Perr

ENLARGE

Credit: CBPP

Bolstered by new polls and fresh off their vote to bar an increase in the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling,House Republicans swaggered into the White House Wednesday for the latest negotiation to end theireconomic hostage taking. One, Rep. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, refused to attend and be "lectured to by a president whose failed policies have put our children and grandchildren in a huge burden of debt."
Sadly for Rep. Landry, the nation's mounting debt is largely attributable to wars, a recession and tax policies President Obama inherited from his predecessor. Worse still, the Ryan 2012 budget proposal backed by almost every Republican in both houses of Congress would not only drain another $4 trillion in tax revenue from the Treasury, but fail all of the spending and balanced budget targets they themselves propose. Nevertheless, Republicans who voted seven times to double the debt ceiling under George W. Bush would risk the national economic suicide they admit would come to pass if their demands are not met.
Here, then, are 10 Inconvenient Truths About the Debt Ceiling:
1. Republican Leaders Agree U.S. Default Would Be a "Financial Disaster"
2. Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt
3. George W. Bush Doubled the National Debt
4. Republicans Voted Seven Times to Raise Debt Ceiling for President Bush
5. Federal Taxes Are Now at a 60 Year Low
6. Bush Tax Cuts Didn't Pay for Themselves or Spur "Job Creators"
7. Ryan Budget Delivers Another Tax Cut Windfall for Wealthy
8. Ryan Budget Will Require Raising Debt Ceiling - Repeatedly
9. Tax Cuts Drive the Next Decade of Debt
10. $3 Trillion Tab for Unfunded Wars Remains Unpaid
(Click a link to jump to the data and details for each.)
1. Republican Leaders Agree U.S. Default Would Be a "Financial Disaster"
Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and White House hopeful Tim Pawlenty are among the GOP luminaries who have joined the ranks of what Dana Milbank called the "default deniers." But you don't have to take Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's word for it "that if Congress doesn't agree to an increase in the debt limit by August 2, the United States will be forced to default on its debt, potentially spreading panic and collapse across the globe." As it turns out, Republican leaders (and their big business backers) have said the same thing.
In their few moments of candor, Republican leaders expressed agreement with Tim Geithner's assessmentthat default by the U.S. "would have a catastrophic economic impact that would be felt by every American." The specter of a global financial cataclysm has been described as resulting in "severe harm" (McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi), "financial collapse and calamity throughout the world" (Senator Lindsey Graham) and "you can't not raise the debt ceiling" (House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan). In January, even Speaker John Boehner acknowledged as much:

"That would be a financial disaster, not only for our country but for the worldwide economy. Remember, the American people on election day said, 'we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs.' And you can't create jobs if you default on the federal debt."

2. Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt
Among the Republicans who prophesied the default doomsday scenario was none other than conservative patron saint, Ronald Reagan. As he warned Congress in November 1983:

"The full consequences of a default -- or even the serious prospect of default -- by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar."

Reagan knew what he was talking about. After all, the hemorrhage of red ink at the U.S. Treasury was his doing.
As most analysts predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-setting debt. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."
Forced to raise taxes eleven times to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

It's no wonder the Gipper cited the skyrocketing deficits he bequeathed to America as his greatest regret.
3. George W. Bush Doubled the National Debt
Following in Reagan's footsteps, George W. Bush buried the myth of Republican fiscal discipline.
Inheriting a federal budget in the black and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, President George W. Bush quickly set about dismantling the progress made under Bill Clinton. Bush's $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a $550 billion second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the yawning budget deficits he produced. (It is more than a little ironic that Paul Ryan ten years ago called the tax cuts "too small" because he believed the estimated surplus Bush eviscerated would be even larger.)

Like Reagan and Stockman before him, Bush resorted to the rosy scenario to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009. Before the financial system meltdown last fall, Bush's deficit already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By January 2009, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.
4. Republicans Voted Seven Times to Raise Debt Ceiling for President Bush
"Reagan," Vice President Dick Cheney famously declared in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Not, that is, unless a Democrat is in the White House.

As Donny Shaw documented in January 2010, Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling only began in earnest when Bush left the White House for good.

The Republicans haven't always been against increasing the federal debt ceiling. This is the first time in recent history (the past decade or so) that no Republican has voted for the increase. In fact, on most of the ten other votes to increase the federal debt limit that the Senate has taken since 1997, the Republicans provided the majority of the votes in favor.

As it turns out, Republican majorities voted to raise the U.S. debt ceiling seven times while George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office. (It should be noted, as Ezra Klein did, that party-line votes on debt ceiling increases tied to other legislation is not solely the province of the GOP.) As ThinkProgress pointed out, during the Bush presidency, the current GOP leadership team voted 19 times to increase debt limit. During his tenure, the U.S. national debt doubled, fueled by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the Medicare prescription drug plan and the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Mitch McConnell and John Boehner voted for all of it and the debt which ensued because, as Orrin Hatch later explained:

"It was standard practice not to pay for things."

5. Federal Taxes Now at a 60 Year Low
Even as Vice President Biden leads bipartisan negotiations to trim at least $1 trillion from the national debt, Republican leaders faithfully regurgitate the refrain that tax increases are "off the table." In one form or another, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and just about every other conservative mouthpiece parroted Speaker John Boehner's line that:

"Medicare, Medicaid - everything should be on the table, except raising taxes."

Which purely by the numbers (if not ideology) is an odd position to take. After all, as a percentage of the U.S. economy, the total federal tax bite hasn't been this low in 60 years.

As the chart representing President Obama's 2012 budget proposal above reflects, the American tax burden hasn't been this low in generations. Thanks to the combination of the Bush Recession and the latest Obama tax cuts, the AP reported, "as a share of the nation's economy, Uncle Sam's take this year will be the lowest since 1950, when the Korean War was just getting under way." In January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) explained that "revenues would be just under 15 percent of GDP; levels that low have not been seen since 1950." That finding echoed an earlier analysis from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Last April, theCenter on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded, "Middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data." As USA Today reported last May, the BEA data debunked yet another right-wing myth:

Federal, state and local taxes -- including income, property, sales and other taxes -- consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.

"The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts," says Michael Ettlinger, head of economic policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Or as former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett explained it this week the New York Times:

In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of G.D.P. in both 2009 and 2010.
Yet if one listens to Republicans, one would think that taxes have never been higher, that an excessive tax burden is the most important constraint holding back economic growth and that a big tax cut is exactly what the economy needs to get growing again.

6. Bush Tax Cuts Didn't Pay for Themselves or Spur "Job Creators"
That Republican intransigence persists despite the complete debunking of two of the GOP's favorite myths.
The first tried and untrue Republican talking point is that "tax cuts pay for themselves." Sadly, that right-wing mythmaking is belied by the massive Bush deficits, half of which (as the CBPP chart in section 3 above shows} were the result of the Bush tax cuts themselves. As a percentage of the American economy, tax revenues peaked in 2000; that is, before the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Despite President Bush's bogus claim that "You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase," Uncle Sam's cash flow from individual income taxes did not return to its pre-dot com bust level until 2006.

The second GOP fairy tale, as expressed by Speaker Boehner, is that "The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's {President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."
If so, the Republican's so-called "Job Creators" failed to meet those expectations under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6% during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.
On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The dismal 3 million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

As David Leonhardt of the New York Times aptly concluded last year:

Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7.

7. Ryan Budget Delivers Another Tax Cut Windfall for Wealthy
Looking at that dismal performance, Leonhardt rightly asked, "Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?" At a time of record income inequality which saw the incomes of therichest 400 Americans taxpayers double even as their tax rates were halved, that's a fair question to say the least.
For Paul Ryan and the Republican Party, the answer is simple: because we said so.
As Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman and Steve Benen among others noted, the House Republicans "Plan for America's Job Creators" is simply a repackaging of years of previous proposals and GOP bromides. (As Klein pointed out, the 10 page document "looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.") At the center of it is the same plan from the Ryan House budget passed in April to cut the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25%.
The price tag for the Republican proposal is a jaw-dropping $4.2 trillion. And as Matthew Yglesiasexplained, earlier analyses of similar proposals in Ryan's Roadmap reveal that working Americans would have to pick up the tab left unpaid by upper-income households:

This is an important element of Ryan's original "roadmap" plan that's never gotten the attention it deserves. But according to a Center for Tax Justice analysis (PDF), even though Ryan features large aggregate tax cuts, ninety percent of Americans would actually pay higher taxes under his plan.

In other words, it wasn't just cuts in middle class benefits in order to cut taxes on the rich. It was cuts in middle class benefits and middle class tax hikes in order to cut taxes on the rich. It'll be interesting to see if the House Republicans formally introduce such a plan and if so how many people will vote for it.

We now know the answer: 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators.
8. Ryan Budget Will Require Raising Debt Ceiling - Repeatedly
Largely overlooked in the media coverage of the Republican debt ceiling hostage drama is this: those 235 House Republicans and 40 GOP Senators who supported Paul Ryan's 2012 budget bill voted to add $6 trillion to the U.S. national debt over the next decade. And that means, as Speaker John Boehner acknowledged, Republicans now and in the future would have to increase the debt ceiling - repeatedly.

Of course, you'd never know that based on the incendiary rhetoric from the leading lights of the Republican Party and their right-wing echo chamber. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said his vote to bump up the debt ceiling would come at the cost of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, "the last time we're doing it." His South Carolina colleague Jim Demint threatened to filibuster the increase, even if it meant the GOP's "Waterloo." The number two House Republican Eric Cantor (R-VA) regurgitated that line, telling Democrats the GOP "will not grant their request for a debt limit increase" without major spending cuts or budget process reforms." For his part, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan insisted, "We won't raise, just simply raise, the debt limit," adding, "We will vote to have spending cuts and controls in conjunction with the debt limit increase." As giddy right-wing bloggers like Patterico described the right-wing's scorched earth strategy:

If Republicans are going to vote to raise the debt ceiling -- and not to do so will indeed cause financial chaos -- they have to extract concessions sufficient that they can credibly say: this is the last such vote we will ever have to have.

Sadly, as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post explained last month, "Republicans can't meet their own deficit and spending targets." The Ryan plan to privatize Medicare, slash and convert Medicaid into block grants, and deliver another tax-cut windfall for the wealthy nevertheless "blows through both their spending and debt caps":

House Republicans voted to make the Ryan budget law. But the Ryan budget includes $6 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years, which means that to become law, the Ryan budget would require a substantial increase in the debt ceiling. But before the Republicans agree to increase the debt ceiling so that the budget they passed can become law, Republicans are demanding the passage of either a balanced budget amendment that would make the Ryan budget unconstitutional or a spending cap that the Ryan budget would, in certain years (and if you're using more realistic numbers, in all years), exceed.

It's no wonder Klein's Washington Post colleague Matt Miller deemed the Republican budgetary horror story "The Shining - National Debt Edition" before concluding that Boehner's "awe-inspiring hypocrisy on the debt limit" is one of those moments of "political behavior that can only be dubbed Super-Duper Hypocrisy So Brazen They Must Really Think We're Idiots."
9. Tax Cuts Drive the Next Decade of Debt
"President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying," the New York Times' David Leonhardt explained in 2009, adding, "The economic growth under George W. Bush did not generate nearly enough tax revenue to pay for his agenda, which included tax cuts, the Iraq war, and Medicare prescription drug coverage." That fall, former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett offered just that kind of honesty to the born again deficit virgins of his Republican Party. Noting that the FY2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion was solely due to lower tax revenues and not increased spending, Bartlett concluded:

"I think there are grounds on which to criticize the Obama administration's anti-recession actions. But spending too much is not one of them. Indeed, based on this analysis, it is pretty obvious that spending - real spending on things like public works - has been grossly inadequate. The idea that Reagan-style tax cuts would have done anything is just nuts."

Which is exactly right. Thanks to the steep recession, as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and others have documented time and again, the overall federal tax burden as a percentage of GDP is now down to levels not seen since Harry Truman was in the White House. (The two-year tax cut compromise in December didn't help any, adding $400 billion to the deficit this year and next.) But is the Bush tax cuts themselves, which Republicans want to make permanent and then (as the Ryan budget mandates) lower further, which account for much of the revenue drain into the future.
As a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed (see chart at top), over the next decade the Bush tax cuts account for more of the nation's debt than Iraq, Afghanistan, TARP, the stimulus, and revenue lost to the recession combined:
10. $3 Trillion Tab for Unfunded Wars Remains Unpaid
Over the next ten years, the costs of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will decline as the U.S. commitments there come to an end. But almost ten years, 6,000 U.S. dead and over a trillion dollars after the attacks of September 11, it's time to pay for our wars.
In May, the National Journal estimated that the total cost to the U.S. economy of the war against Al Qaeda will reach $3 trillion. In 2008, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put the price of the Iraq conflict alone at $3 trillion.
But by 2020 and beyond, the direct cost to U.S. taxpayers could reach $3 trillion. In March, theCongressional Research Service put the total cost of the wars at $1.28 trillion, including $806 billion for Iraq and $444 billion for Afghanistan. For the 2012 fiscal year which begins on October 1, President Obama asked for $117 billion more. (That war-fighting funding is over and above Secretary Gates' $553 billion Pentagon budget request for next year.)
But in addition to the roughly $1.5 trillion tally for both conflicts through the theoretical 2014 American draw down date in Afghanistan, the U.S. faces staggering bills for veterans' health care and disability benefits. Last May, an analysis by the Center for American Progress estimated the total projected total cost of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans' health care and disability could reach between $422 billion to $717 billion. Reconstruction aid and other development assistance represent tens of billions more, as does the additional interest on the national debt. And none of the above counts the expanded funding for the new Department of Homeland Security.
But that two-plus trillion dollar tab doesn't account for the expansion of the United States military since the start of the "global war on terror." As a percentage of the American economy, defense spending jumped from 3.1% in 2001 to 4.8% last year. While ThinkProgress noted that the Pentagon's FY 2012 ask is "the largest request ever since World War II," McClatchy explained:

Such a boost would mark the 14th year in a row that Pentagon spending has increased, despite the waning U.S. presence in Iraq. In dollars, Pentagon spending has more than doubled in 10 years. Even adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65% in the past decade.

Even as the World Trade Center site was still smoldering, Republicans insisted Al Qaeda represented an existential threat to the United States. President Bush repeatedly compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and his war on terror to World War II. But he never asked Americans to join the military or sacrifice at home. Instead, Bush told us to go shopping and "get down to Disney World."
From a public policy standpoint, post-9/11 America in no way resembles FDR's response to Pearl Harbor.George W. Bush was the first modern president to cut taxes during wartime. Barack Obama was the second.
Its time, as Bernie Sanders, Al Franken and the Congressional Progressive Caucus each proposed, to begin paying for the unfunded conflicts fought in our name.
(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

Fraser Assails Sheehan on Anti BioMass Efforts

2011-05-31T17:25:00.000-07:00

An Environmental Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing:

Leading Anti-Biomass Proponent Tied to Oil/Gas/Coal and Mining Industry

Journalist, Genevieve Fraser

By Genevieve Fraser

Margaret Sheehan, a lawyer with EcoLaw, a volunteer group promoting renewable energy policy and chair of the Stop Spewing Carbon Campaign, which sponsored a proposed 2010 ballot initiative aimed at stripping biomass-derived energy of its label as renewable, has ties to world-wide oil, gas, coal and mining industries as well as with the world's largest producer of vinyl compounds and a leading North American producer of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), through her association with the Sheehan Family Foundation, according to tax records on file at the National Center for Charitable Statistics.

Along with shares from corporations such as Merck and Abbot Laboratories, the Foundation has millions of dollars in shares tied to fossil fuels and other polluting industries. The Foundation also receives major donations from family members and the L. Knife & Sons, a family owned corporation. Their tax records can be viewed electronically athttp://nccsdataweb.urban.org/orgs/profile/043197325?popup=1#forms

The Sheehan Family Foundation was established in 1992, according to a Foundation press release, “Its mission is to protect the environment and enhance the quality of education including youth serving programs.” Though the Foundation has a geographic focus in eastern Massachusetts, it has expanded in recent years to include Haiti and other international projects. Grants made by the Foundation from 1992 to 2007 totaled over $10 million. But despite the obvious good it does, many of the Foundations financial dealing run counter to its expressed mission.

The Foundation’s mining interests include 2,200 shares from the Newmont Mining Corporation, recipient of the “Hall of Shame 2009 Public Eye Award” for its Akyem project in Ghana. “According to the jury it had destroyed unique natural habitats, carried out forced resettlement of local people and polluted soil and rivers,” the Public Eye states. Newmont was also the subject of a 2005 Frontline expose of South American activities, “Peru – The Curse of Inca Gold.” That same year, the company was cited for illegal toxic waste dumping in Indonesia. The Foundation sold its shares in 2007.

The Foundation also has maintained over 10,500 shares of the Southern Copper Company which is 75 percent owned by Mexican mining conglomerate Gropo Mexico. The company is a major producer and refiner of copper, molybdenum, zinc, silver, lead, and gold, and operates mines and smelters inMexico and in Peru, in the Andes mountains southeast of Lima. In 2003, a lawsuit was filed (02-9008. Docket No.) under the Alien Tort Claims Act (“ATCA”), 28 U.S.C. in which plaintiffs claimed that the defendant's conduct violates the “law of nations”-commonly referred to as “international law” or, when limited to non-treaty law, as “customary international law.” They brought personal injury claims “alleging that pollution from SPCC's copper mining, refining, and smelting operations in and around Ilo caused plaintiffs' or their decedents' severe lung disease. Plaintiffs in this case are residents of Ilo,Peru, and the representatives of deceased Ilo residents. In particular, they asserted that defendant infringed ---upon their customary international law “right to life,” “right to health,” and right to “sustainable development.”

Harvard Forest logging operation

Anti-biomass activist Margaret Sheehan is a native of Plymouth and former Executive Director of the Sheehan Family Foundation which has also provided grants to theManomet Center for Conservation Sciences as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars to environmental organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Environmental League of Massachusetts, and Earthwatch among others.

In 2008, with Sheehan serving as Executive Director, the Sheehan Family Foundation lists their “net value of non-charitable use assets” at $7,655,764, according to their 2009 tax return. A significant portion of these assets were derived from sales of coal, oil and gas industry stocks. In 2007, the Foundation’s 24,970 shares of Exxon Mobile stock sold for $2,016,55; their 1,295 shares of Chevron Corporation stocks commanded a sale price of $104,718, while their 1,240 Occidental Petroleum Corporation shares netted $61,510.

By 2008, the Sheehan Family Foundation sold 5,125 shares of Yanzhou Coal Mining Co Ltd stocks which they had held since 2006 for $77,573, but the sale listed a net loss of $21,758. The Chinese-based company, the forth largest inChina, is mainly engaged in coal production, preparation and processing, marketing and railway transportation. According to their website, two large coalfields of Yanzhou and Jinig East owned by the Company contain six large-scale modern coal mines. In 2007, the Company produced 34.66 million tones of raw coal, of which 7.25 million tones were exported. Though China’s coal mining industry is considered to be the largest and deadliest in the world in terms of human safety, the Yanzhou Company claims that they are in compliance with all safety regulations; however, pollution emanating fromChina’s coal burning power plants is notorious.

Despite the 2007 coal, oil and gas divestments, the following year the Foundation lists 4,400 shares of ConocoPhilips corporate stock with a book value of $348,844. ConocoPhilips boasts of extracting hydrocarbons fromCanada’s oil sands which constitutes “one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world,” according to their website.

In 2009, The Nature Conservancy received a $110,000 contribution from the Foundation, while the Massachusetts Audubon Society received a $160,000 grant. This was in addition to the hundreds of thousands from years past. For example, in 2008, The Nature Conservancy received $210,696 from the Foundation, and MA Audubon received $80,000; whereas, in 2007, The Nature Conservancy received $85,000, and MA Audubon received $80,000. Whether or not these funds impacted their receptivity to Sheehan’s anti-biomass message and whether or not these environmental organizations knew of the source of much of the Foundation’s wealth can only be assessed by the many agencies who were the recipients of the Foundation’s largess.

In addition to coal, oil and gas companies, the Sheehan Family Foundation maintains millions of dollars worth of shares in companies that provide infrastructure and transport to these industries. Their vast holdings include DryShips, Inc., owner and operation of a world-wide drybulk carrier and offshore oil deep water drilling operations; National Oilwell Varco, a multinational, Texas-based corporation which manufactures land-based and off-shore oil drilling rigs as well as all the major mechanical components for such rigs; Pioneer Natural Resources Co., an Irving, Texas-based oil and gas company that has expanded internationally and has made major investments in Tunisia and South Africa and is also active in Alaska; and Pride International, Inc., which provides contract drilling and related services to oil and gas companies worldwide and operates a global fleet of 26 rigs. In 2009, SeaHawk Drilling was added to the Sheehan Family Foundation assets.

On November 10, 2009, Sheehan sent a letter addressed to the president of the ManometCenter, John M. Hagan regarding the “Biomass Study.” The Manomet biomass report was released seven months later on June 10, 2010, without peer review, and became the basis of the Administration’s about-face regarding their support of biomass as a green, renewable energy resource.

In her letter to the Manomet director, Sheehan closed with the following, “...As I indicated in my phone message to you, I am a native of Plymouth and former Executive Director of the Sheehan Family Foundation of Kingston, which has provided grants to MCCS over the years. It would be unfortunate if MCCS proceeded with this study without an understanding of full range of public health and environmental impacts of biomass burning as a means of generating electricity. Even though these impacts may be beyond the scope of work for the study, the study is intertwined with critical policy and regulatory issues that effect the future of our citizens and the planet.”

An electronic copy of the Sheehan correspondence to the MCCS director was submitted to Ian Bowles, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs,Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by electronic mail, and to his Chief of Staff at EOEEA, Jane Corr. The correspondence has since circulated widely.

Following the firestorm of support and protest which erupted after the release of the Center’s “Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study,” Manomet released a statement which reads, in part, “There has been much press coverage of our study about using forest biomass for energy in Massachusetts. This study was commissioned and funded by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER). Many of the resulting press articles have oversimplified the results. Indeed, a key lesson of the study is that understanding the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts and benefits of using wood for energy is more complex than most people have assumed, and that a lifecycle assessment is needed in order to assess these GHG costs and benefits...”

“One commonly used press headline has been ‘wood worse than coal’ for GHG emissions or for ‘the environment.’ This is an inaccurate interpretation of our findings, which paint a much more complex picture. While burning wood does emit more GHGs initially than fossil fuels, these emissions are removed from the atmosphere as harvested forests re-grow. ....the timing and magnitude of the recovery is a function of forest productivity, land management choices, and technology and fuel characteristics...”

Despite the Manomet Center’s attempt to clarify the report and end the controversy surrounding its release. The Stop Spewing CarbonCampaign collected over 130,000 signatures from Massachusetts’ voters, and Sheehan, as Chair of the Campaign issued a statement on July 7, 2010. “Today, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian Bowles issued a letter saying his agency will change our state laws to bring them in line with current science and public policy requiring biomass incinerators to meet strict standards for forest protection, greenhouse gas emissions, and efficiency,” Sheehan stated.

“This is a groundbreaking development that means an end to commercial biomass electric power plants in Massachusetts. Science confirms that the greenhouse gas emissions of burning forests are worse than coal and there’s no reason to subsidize this form of energy,” Sheehan said. Sheehan had won the battle and so withdrew the 2010 Ballot Petition from consideration.

On May 2, 2011 Final regulations were issued by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources which would severely restrict Renewable Energy Credits (RECs)—a taxpayer and ratepayer funded subsidy under the state Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS)—for biomass electricity. Meg Sheehan once again took credit for the DOER restrictions.

Proposed Palmer Renewable Energy: Springfield Biomass Plant

On May 17, 2011, union laborers were out in force to jeer biomass opponents who were holding a protest rally on the steps of Springfield City Hall during a public hearing on a proposal to revoke a special permit granted in 2008 to Palmer Renewable Energy (PRE). Despite a written legal opinion presented by City Solicitor Edward Pikula — who warned the 13-member City Council that it doesn’t have “just cause” to revoke a special permit issued in 2008 for a proposed 35-megawatt biomass power plant — the City Council voted 10-2 against the project.

“We’ve got $5 million in development costs invested here,” Lawyer Frank Fitzgerald, speaking for Palmer Renewable Energy stated. “And we’ve played by the rules.” The economic benefits to the City of Springfield were estimated to be in excess of one million dollars a year, and would have provided 50 full-time employment opportunities. PRE plans to litigate the matter which may prove quite costly to the city.

Along with creating havoc within the biomass industry, the regulatory restrictions have had a significant economic impact on the wood products industry which claims that if they are to avoid “high grading,” cutting only the most valuable trees, they need to integrate forest improvement cuttings to the mix. Biomass, when harvested within the forest is typically low grade wood that can be costly to remove unless there is a market for it. The use of biomass as a fuel source creates an economic value that helps justify the cost of its removal.

Foresters and the wood products industry also argue that sustainably harvested wood allows for new growth and provides vitally needed wildlife habitat. Most species are wholly or partially dependent on early successional or young forest growth. Also, diseases and insects are now infesting the forest. Over 90% of the Massachusetts forest is now mature forest cover (older trees). These woods are badly in need of thinning with infested wood burnt and destroyed, not left in place or transported and sold as wood chips or other products.

Biomass is also created from power line and roadside cuttings as well as land clearings for development. When disposed of in landfills, woody biomass generates methane, a major greenhouse gas. Decomposition in forests also releases CO2.

Meanwhile fossil fuels, which are not sustainable because they were created eons ago and are not a living, breathing part of our atmosphere, continue to spew carbon, hydro-chemicals, radionuclides and heavy metals that impact air quality, soil and water. Though renewables such as hydro, wind, solar, biomass and geothermal are now part of the energy mix, for the most part, fossil fuels still power electrical generation, cars, buses, trucks, trains, planes, boats, plus most of our homes and industry in the United States and across the globe.

According to a recently released report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history.”

“After a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt. In addition, the IEA has estimated that 80% of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in place or under construction today,” the report stated.

In terms of fuels, 44% of the estimated CO2 emissions in 2010 came from coal, 36% from oil, and 20% from natural gas, according to the IEA.

And though Margaret Sheehan talks an environmental talk, she has, through the Foundation, financially supported to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, companies that pollute the earth in every conceivable fashion.

Take for instance the Foundation’s 100,000 shares of the Geon Company, the leading producer of vinyl compounds, including polyvinyl chloride (PVC), that have been linked to exposures in the womb. Hyperactivity, learning disabilities, asthma, reproductive health issues, obesity and a host of other ills including cancer are believed to be linked to these products.

As for the environmental impact of coal, oil and natural gas extractions which destroy forests, remove mountaintops, and pollute our waters, these concerns have been the subject of thousands of research projects, books and articles, and now movies such as “Gasland” which explores the many problems associated with choosing natural gas as an alternative to oil. Yet the Sheehan Family Foundation supports these and other industries such as the cigarette giant Philip Morris (SFF owned 5,147 shares valued at 223,945 in 2008) that have pitted adverse impacts to human health and the planet against the greater good of increased profits.

What Sheehan’s real motives are only time will tell. But for the record, humans have been building with, cooking with, and heating with wood since the dawn of creation. Our homes, furniture, paper and a myriad of other products are created with wood. If the impact of woody biomass is as bad as Sheehan and her cohorts claim it is man would be extinct!

Published at www.FarmFieldForest.org

--------------------------

Genevieve Fraser, a resident of Orange, MA, is a professional writer, former Exhibits Developer for the New England Science Center, and Environmental Technical Writer. In 1984-85, Genevieve was the state-wide coordinator for the Massachusetts Acid Rain Awareness Weeks and received an Environmental Commendation from the Massachusetts Secretary of the Environment for her efforts. In 1997, she was commissioned by the Commonwealth to write the EcoTheater drama, "Giants in the Wilderness with John Muir," which toured as part of the Centennial Celebration of the Massachusetts State Forest and Park System.

Contact FraserGenevieve@gmail.com or cal (978) 544-1872 for further information.

One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street

2011-05-18T18:06:00.000-07:00

Published on Wednesday, May 18, 2011 by TruthDig.com

One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street

by Robert Scheer

The fix was in to let the Wall Street scoundrels off the hook for the enormous damage they caused in creating the Great Recession. All of the leading politicians and officials, federal and state, Republican and Democrat, were on board to complete the job of saving the banks while ignoring their victims ... until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along. Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. (AP / Frank Franklin II)
Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount.
In a deal that had the blessing of the White House and many federal regulators and state attorneys general—a settlement probably for not much more than the $5 billion pittance the top financial institutions found acceptable—the banks would be freed of any further claims by federal and state officials over their shady mortgage packaging and servicing practices and deceptive foreclosure proceedings.
At the same time, the SEC and other federal regulatory bodies are making sweetheart deals with the bankers to close off accountability for creating and collecting on more than a trillion dollars’ worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the nation’s economic meltdown—a meltdown that has seen the national debt grow by more than 50 percent, stuck us with an unyielding 9 percent unemployment and left 50 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure or clinging desperately to underwater mortgages. On top of which an all-time high of 44 million people are living below the official poverty line and fewer new homes were started in April than at any other time in the past half century. With housing values still in free fall, we continue to make the bankers whole.
As Gretchen Morgenson reported in The New York Times, the Justice Department division responsible for checking for fraud in the bankruptcy system has found a widespread pattern of deception by banks foreclosing homes, and she concluded: “So an authoritative source with access to a lot of data has identified industry practices as not only pernicious but also pervasive. Which makes it all the more mystifying that regulators seem eager to strike a cheap and easy settlement with the banks.”

Not really surprising given both the enormous hold of Wall Street money over the two major political parties and the revolving door through which executives travel between firms like Goldman Sachs and the top positions in the U.S. Treasury Department and elsewhere in the government. The financial crisis occurred only because Republicans and Democrats passed the laws that Wall Street lobbyists wrote ending reasonable banking industry regulation installed in the 1930s in response to the Depression. And when the greed they enabled threatened the foundations of our economy, under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it was the bankers who were assisted into lifeboats that had no room for ordinary people.

Not surprising then to find all of the power players in on the latest deals: the Obama administration that had bailed out the banks but not troubled homeowners; the regulators and Fed officials who all looked the other way when the housing bubble was inflated; and the state attorneys general who backed away from going after the perpetrators of robo-signed mortgages and other scams used to foreclose homes.

But now Schneiderman has a chance to derail the deals, given that he is supported by the state’s tough 1921 Martin Act, which one of his predecessors as New York state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, had used to good advantage in exposing the financial behemoths that are so heavily based in New York. The Wall Street Journal describes the Martin Act as “one of the most potent prosecutorial tools against financial fraud” because, as opposed to federal law, it doesn’t carry the more difficult standard of proving intent to defraud.
Last week, it was revealed that Schneiderman’s office has demanded an accounting from Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as to the details of their past practice of securitizing those mortgage-based packages that proved so toxic. Maybe he will fail against such powerful forces, as did Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo after him, but it is a test worth watching, since no one else, from the White House on down, seems to be concerned with holding the bailed-out banks accountable for the massive pain and suffering they inflicted on the public.

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Puns for Educated Minds

2011-05-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

Puns for Educated Minds

1. The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian .

3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'

13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'

15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

17. A backward poet writes inverse.

18. In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.

20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris , you'd be in Seine .

21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'

23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.'

25. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

Let's Join Japan and Junk New Nukes

2011-05-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

Published on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Let's Join Japan and Junk New Nukes

by Harvey Wasserman

Japan will build no new nuclear reactors. It's a huge body blow to the global industry, and could mark a major turning point in the future of energy. (Photo: Toru Namayaka/Getty Images)
Says Prime Minister Naoto Kan: "We need to start from scratch… and do more to promote renewables."
Wind power alone could--and now probably will--replace 40 nukes in Japan.
The United States must join them. Axing the $36 billion currently stuck in the 2012 federal budget for loan guarantees to build new reactors could do the trick.
Wind potential alone between the Mississippi and the Rockies could produce 300% of the nation's electricity. That doesn't include solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, sustainable bio-fuels and the many more renewable sources poised to re-shape the Amercian energy future once the prospect of new nukes is discarded.
Japan was set to build 14 new nukes before Fukushima. Six of Japan's total of 55 reactors were shut by the earthquake and tsunami. Three at Kashiwazaki remain shut from the seven that were hit by an earthquake less than five years ago. Kan wants three more closed at Hamaoka, also in an earthquake/tsunami zone.
Japan's reactor fleet remains the world's third-largest, behind the US and France. The General Electric and Westinghouse nuclear divisions, builders of nearly all the commercial reactors in the US, are at least partly controlled by Japanese companies. Reactor Pressure Vessels and other major components are built there.
Four California reactors also sit in earthquake zones vulnerable to tsunamis. San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego, has 7.5 million people living within a 50-mile radius. Its two operating and one dead reactor sit less than a mile from the high tide line.
Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, sits near a series of earthquake faults, including one newly discovered less than two miles from the two reactor cores there.
Numerous other US reactors are perilously close to earthquake faults, including two operating at Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan. The Perry reactor, on Lake Erie east of Cleveland, was damaged by an earthquake in January, 1986.
Massive quantities of heat have poured into the global eco-system from the multiple explosions, partial melt-downs and spent fuel fires at Fukushima, contributing significantly to global warming.
Highly radioactive fallout has been found miles from the site. Millions of gallons of extremely contaminated water have poured into the ocean.
Radioactive fallout has also been detected in rainwater, milk and on vegetables throughout the United States, threatening the health of millions of Americans, especially small children and embryos in utero.
Now Fukushima Unit Four appears to be on the brink of physical collapse. Fission may be continuing in at least one spent fuel pool, and possibly in one or more cores. Radiation levels are high enough at the site to guarantee certain near-term death to workers, many of whom have come to consider work at Fukushima to be a virtual suicide mission. A definitive end to the disaster could be years away.
Kan's decision to shut Hamaoka and then to cancel future nukes came as a shock. Widely criticized for weakness in the wake of Fukushima, he has now redefined Japan's energy future.
Though dependent on imported fossil fuels, major Japanese corporations have substantial investments in wind, solar and other Solartopian technologies. This will push them to the forefront of Japan's energy future.
Likewise Germany. In the wake of huge public demonstrations and a major electoral defeat, Prime Minister Angela Merkel has shut seven old reactors and says ten more will go down by 2020, making Germany nuke-free. For decades Germany has been pushing wind, solar and other green technologies harder than any other industrial nation, with enormously profitable results.
In the US, renewables are also booming, while the reactor industry has been taking hard hits. Just this week a major French-operated component factory proposed for Virginia has been pushed back two years--which means likely cancellation. A $5 billion taxpayer-funded facility in South Carolina to produce plutonium-based Mixed Oxide reactor fuel faces a lack of customers, and growing doubts about the project's viability or real purpose.
Overall, Fukushima has complicated an already dark financial picture. A Texas project meant for Japanese financing is now all but dead. So, too, is one proposed for Maryland by the French.
While the Obama Administration continues to push for those $36 billion in loan guarantees, it's unclear what reactor projects are in credible shape to accept them.
Meanwhile ferocious battles to shut old reactors in Vermont, New York, New Jersey and elsewhere are heating up. With roughly two dozen of similar design to Fukushima Unit One now operating in the US, the public demand for more shut-downs continues to escalate.
We need to finish the job and get to a green-powered Earth.
Nuclear power makes global warming worse, and spells economic as well as ecological doom.
The industry can't get private financing, can't get meaningful liability insurance, can't deal with its wastes, can't compete in the marketplace, can't guarantee us we won't suffer a Fukushima of our own, can't provide a reliable energy supply into the future.
What lies before us once we kill these loan guarantees is a Solartopian reality powered by the sun, wind, tides, waves, earth's heat and more.
Those countries like Germany, Denmark and now Japan that head definitively toward a nuke-free future are in the process of turning toward survivability and prosperity.
Let's kill that loan guarantee package, shut the dying nukes like Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, and join them in truly green-powered future.

Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org. He and Bob Fitrakis have co-authored four books on election protection, including Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?, As Goes Ohio: Election Theft Since 2004 , How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, and What Happened in Ohio

Setti Seeks Senate Seat?

2011-05-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

TPMDC

Setti Warren Launches Senate Bid To Take On Incumbent Scott Brown

Jon Terbush | May 9, 2011, 5:15PM

2digg

Newton Mayor Setti Warren (D)

Newton Massachusetts Mayor Setti Warren (D) formally added his name to the growing list of Democrats aiming to take on incumbent Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) when he seeks reelection next year in one of the nation's bluest states.
In a campaign video posted to his website, Warren talked at length about his parents' lives as civil rights activists, and how they founded in him a sense of "shared responsibility." Warren often returned to that theme throughout the five-minute video, taking some direct swipes at Brown along the way.
"I believe Scott Brown is an honorable man, but he has not been the independent voice in the Senate that so many expected him to be," Warren says in the video.
In particular, he accused Brown of voting against policies that would help some of the state's most needy individuals.
"Scott Brown admits that he doesn't think about his own life when he votes against the very same programs that helped lift him as a troubled teen out of poverty," Warren says.
"We can never forget the sacrifices that others have made on our behalf," he adds.
Democrats see the Massachusetts Senate race as an important opportunity to wrest back control of a longtime Democratic seat, despite Brown being enormously popular with his constituents. Brown assumed office last year after winning the special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who had held the seat for nearly a half century.
Several polls have shown Brown cleaning up in hypothetical head-to-head contests. A Suffolk university poll released last month showed Brown trouncing the virtually-unknown Warren, 52% to 9%.
Warren, the mayor of an affluent Boston suburb, is the first incumbent politician to enter the race so far. City Year co-founder Alan Khazei, attorney Marisa DeFranco, and local activist Bob Massie have all thrown their hats in the ring, though some big-name Democrats -- including Boston Mayor Tom Menino and Gov. Deval Patrick -- have stayed on the sidelines.
Despite being the first African American to win a mayoral election in Massachusetts, Warren is still relatively unknown, even in Massachusetts. A Suffolk poll last month found that over 70% of Massachusetts voters didn't know who he was.
Warren addressed that anonymity up front in his campaign video, hearkening back to how Brown seemingly came out of nowhere to win the 2010 election.
"Many of you don't know me," Warren says. "I'm probably about as well known as Scott Brown was two years ago."

How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

2011-05-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

Published on Monday, May 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How Do Wrong Economic Ideas Become Conventional Wisdom?

by Peter Dreier

The ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) are making a comeback, in large part due to Glenn Beck, who has touted the libertarian economist and philosopher's views on his TV show. The essence of Hayek's views -- spelled out in his most well-known book, The Road to Serfdom -- is that government stifles freedom and liberty. With a few exceptions, he viewed almost any governmental intervention in economic affairs as a slippery slope toward totalitarian socialism. No wonder that Beck has been hawking Hayek.
Now comes Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative political scientist, who uses the pages of the New York Times Book Review to hawk his own version of government-bashing. Unfortunately, Fukuyama, who claims to be something of a student of Hayek's ideas, hasn't done his homework.
In his review of the new edition of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, published in the Review on Sunday (May 8), Fukuyama off-handedly comments that three of Hayek's ideas "have become broadly accepted by economists." But it so happens that economists don't agree on these three ideas. Moreover, the policy conclusions that Fukuyama draws happen to be untrue.

First, Fukuyama claims that "labor unions create a privileged labor sector at the expense of the nonunionized." It is true that unionized employees earn better wages and benefits than their nonunion counterparts, even those with comparable experience and education. But economists know that it is also true that unions raise wages and benefits for nonunionized workers. The higher the "density" of union workers in an industry or area, the more likely it is that employers will increase the wages and benefits of nonunion employees in order to stave off a union drive. Thus, unions lift the floor for everyone, not just union members, contrary to Hayek.
Second, Fukuyama claims that economists agree with Hayek that "rent control reduces the supply of housing." Economists differ on the wisdom of price controls in general, but it helps to test economist theories in the real world. There is absolutely no empirical evidence for the statement that rent control -- which some cities use to maintain a supply of affordable housing -- reduces the housing supply in general or even rental housing in particular. Every study of rent control in U.S. cities (except those funded by the real estate industry) -- including those that compare similar cities with and without rent control -- shows that rent control has no impact on either the level of new housing construction or the level of housing abandonment. Local rent control laws exempt new construction and allow landlords to raise rents annually based on expenses. Cities with various forms of rent control are often in "hot" markets in which developers want to build rental and other forms of housing. The evidence is clear that rent control does not dampen private investment.
Finally, Fukuyama claims that economists agree that "agricultural subsidies lower the general welfare and create a bonanza for politicians." Again, there is no evidence for this statement. The impact of farm subsidies depends on who gets them, what they are used for, and the general economic condition of the period. During the Depression, subsidies saved many family farmers from going under, helped stabilize prices, and kept entire farm communities, and the nonfarm jobs that depended on agriculture, alive. Today, the vast majority of federal farm subsidies go to large agribusiness conglomerates like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill that don't need them rather than small family farmers. President Obama campaigned on a pledge to limit individual farm payments to $250,000 to ensure family farms and not "corporate agribusiness" got the money. This is still a good idea. But food stamps, which are an indirect subsidy to farmers, clearly improve the general welfare by dramatically reducing the incidence of hunger and malnutrition.
Hayek's ideas may be making a comeback, as Fukuyama asserts, but it is not because his economic ideas have been proven correct by empirical research, but because they've been promoted by the likes of Glenn Beck to justify a conservative ideological and political agenda.
If conservatives don't like labor unions, they are entitled to their opinions. But when they attack unions by arguing that they actually hurt working people, they don't have the facts on their side. They are crying wolf.
Echoing Hayek and Beck, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, House Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Darrell Issa, and the Tea Party can fulminate all they want that government policies to make corporations behave more responsibly -- such as the minimum wage, consumer and environmental protection laws, rules to improve workplace safety, regulations to restrain Wall Street abuses, and health care reform -- are "job killers." But repeating this libertarian mantra doesn't make it true.

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect.

Fraser Opposes Amendment #106

2011-04-21T06:48:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Editor,

Though the practice of forest clear-cutting may be less aesthetically desirable for the public, it creates preferred habitat for many species. Regenerating and young forest habitats created through forest management, including clear-cutting, provide food, shelter and breeding habitat and contain a greater diversity of wildlife species than any other forest age class.

Over 90% of Massachusetts forest is now mature forest cover which shelters certain wildlife, but most are also wholly or partially dependent on early successional (young) forest habitat. If the thick canopy is not opened soon by environmentally-sound harvesting (logging), we may soon witness further decline and eventual extinction of a number of species. Early successional habitat is absolutely essential for birds such as grouse and woodcock. It is also essential for other species that although not officially listed as rare, are experiencing sharp population declines due, in part, to habitat loss- birds such as prairie warbler, brown thrasher and whip-poor-wills to name a few.

It is for this reason I believe Amendment #106 to the Massachusetts House budget must be defeated. It would ban clear-cutting in state forests including Department of Fisheries and Wildlife lands where vitally needed habitat is established and protected. Today, less than 5% of the Massachusetts forest is early successional. Though small forest openings allow certain songbirds to perch and sing, they cannot mate and need additional acreage if they are to survive and thrive. Clear-cut areas are critically needed, despite public opposition. Please contact your legislators to defeat budget amendment #106.

Genevieve Fraser

211 Dana Road

Orange, MA 01364

(978) 544-1872

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