the veganarchist's vent

Alberta Tory MLAs Take $70,000 Jaunt to Jasper, at Taxpayers Expense!

2012-02-01T22:48:00.002-07:00

a tory staff member tried to justify this robbery of alberta taxpayers by saying, "companies and organizations often hold off-site retreats. there is value in that you get away from distractions at the office, and you send a message to your team that this is important and we have important work to do."

WHAT? i'm sorry, but to my ears, the words you speak seem to be coming out of your ass. if this just happens all the time and is business as usual for these alberta tory caucus-suckers, doesn't that make it even more egregious?

and for another thing, this isn't just some "company" or "organization", it's OUR government, playing with OUR money, and WE should have a say in how that money is to be spent.

and if it continues to be spent on frivolity like this, then perhaps we should all do as henry david thoreau did, and become conscientious objectors of the inequitable system that allows this to carry on, and stop giving the government our money for these unjust and immoral expenditures.

i suspect the time has come for them to actually cease holding these "off-site retreats" at tax payers expense and show some respect to the voters. it's very easy to live the high life when it's someone else footing the bill.

and last week, another "cabinet tour" by redford's dunderheads cost the alberta taxpayers $100,000. what the fuck is going on here?

this is not why i pay taxes. that money is supposed to be for the benefit of ALL albertans, not so these already rich thieves can go on a little pre-election vacation where they won't be "distracted".

and any funds that are spent on nonsense like this three-day excursion, are taken away from important community necessities like schools, health care, rapid transit, libraries, infrastructure, social programs, and so on.

but oh no, they don't want to be distracted. oh that's rich, that is. jesus christ...hold a meeting in alison redford's basement or something, or better yet, go to the fucking library and study...be among real folks for a change, instead of being so separated from the people you are supposed to represent.

you know, those people who have in good conscience trusted you to act responsibly and with a certain degree of ethical decency.

notice i said people, and not corporations...like the oil and gas industry, who have been accruing obscene amounts of wealth in the last several decades, enabling them to pull the puppet strings of our elected officials, and to buy out the alberta government a long time ago, turning us into nothing short of a petrostate.

i think it's time to #OccupyTheAlbertaLegislature

Oil Consumption Per Capita

2012-01-30T23:42:00.003-07:00

according to nationmaster.com, the united states ranks 22nd in the world in oil consumption per capita at 68.672 bbl/day per 1,000 people. wow, what a bunch of greedy cocksuckers!

but wait, where does canada rank? you know, those people north of the 49th parallel who are always bitching about the wasteful, consumer happy americans, and boasting how "we" are so much better and different than they are?

well, let's see...canada ranks...18th, at 71.009 bbl/day per 1,000 people. what! can it be? ohhhh, the humanity! dear me! i guess it's time to stop patting yourself on the back, canada, for being "better" than the americans. oh wait, you are better...better at being more selfish and greedy! (no real surprise there however...i mean, have you seen the amount of huge gas-guzzling redneck pickups on canadian roads? it's redickle-dog).

now pull your head from out of your hoser ass, take a lesson in humility, and stop rationalizing your own bad behavior by accusing others of acting worse than you.

now, you might say, "well hang on, canada is cold, we need to burn more oil to keep our little fingers warm, while at the same time not wanting to burn them, that's why we double up on tim horton's disposable coffee cups and don't give a shit about the amount of garbage we produce...our fingers are really sensitive you know".

okay then crybaby canuck, who can never accept the truth about himself without making an embarassing stink about it for all the world to behold, let's see where russia ranks, another cold northern country. whoa...what's this? 79th at 20.215 bbl/day per 1,000 people.

hmm. well that's weird. you're way worse than the russians.

now let's take a look at where china and india rank. those nasty countries that are burning oil willy nilly and caused canada to drop out of the kyoto protocol with the whiny excuse that, "if those places don't have to cut emissions, then why should we have to. waa, waa, waa."

because maybe you along with the other rich western nations caused the fucking problem of climate change in the first place so it's your responsibility to take the lead and do something about it? could that be it?

now where was i...oh yea, china is 142nd at 5.733 bbl/day per 1,000 people and india is 163rd at 2.409 bbl/day per 1,000 people.

well how do you like them apples. canada loses again, just like they did to russia (and no, i'm not talking about the world junior hockey championship...that only canadians give a damn aboot).

but wait...here's the real kick in the freshly shorn scrotum.

canada, in its infinite ignorance, avarice and hubris, wants to construct the enbridge northern gateway pipeline though british columbia to the west coast to ship (i nearly typed, "shit") dirty, bottom of the barrel bitumen to, hmm let's see...yup, you guessed it...asian markets! those very people it accuses of polluting the world by burning too much fossil fuel with little or no regulation.

for this, we can thank the myopic son-of-an-oil-executive prime minister, stephen harper and the short-sighted no-one-has-actually-voted-for-me premier of alberta, alison redford.

well to them and the oil companies with whom they share a bed with, i can only say, fuck you! fuck you very much...and give you this friendly heads up. when it comes to believing that this pipeline is pretty much a go-ahead, and the talks, where people from all walks of life (or as natural resources minister, joe oliver, would call them, "radicals") voice their opposition, are but a mere formality to simply brush off, don't start sucking each other's dicks quite yet fellas. there are still a number of canadians around here with enough sense to block this polluting project who cannot be bought or sold with your dirty bitumen bucks. they are endowed with the capacity to recognize that continuing with our current fossil fuel addicted way of life is not only highly immoral, wasteful, destructive, and unjust...but also utterly unsustainable.

i love it when a mass of people come together for political, economic and social justice.

Shit Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Shit Capitalism Tree

2012-01-26T12:54:00.001-07:00

"Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost...workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests"

"creating real change conflicts with secrecy and business goals...there’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything"

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID BARBOZA

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.

Apple, in its published reports, has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of this article, but the company declined to comment. The reporting is based on interviews with more than three dozen current or former employees and contractors, including a half-dozen current or former executives with firsthand knowledge of Apple’s supplier responsibility group, as well as others within the technology industry.

In 2010, Steven P. Jobs discussed the company’s relationships with suppliers at an industry conference.

“I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain,” said Mr. Jobs, who was Apple’s chief executive at the time and who died last October.

“I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”

Others, including workers inside such plants, acknowledge the cafeterias and medical facilities, but insist conditions are punishing.

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

The Road to Chengdu

In the fall of 2010, about six months before the explosion in the iPad factory, Lai Xiaodong carefully wrapped his clothes around his college diploma, so it wouldn’t crease in his suitcase. He told friends he would no longer be around for their weekly poker games, and said goodbye to his teachers. He was leaving for Chengdu, a city of 12 million that was rapidly becoming one of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.

Though painfully shy, Mr. Lai had surprised everyone by persuading a beautiful nursing student to become his girlfriend. She wanted to marry, she said, and so his goal was to earn enough money to buy an apartment.

Factories in Chengdu manufacture products for hundreds of companies. But Mr. Lai was focused on Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.

Foxconn’s factory in Chengdu, Mr. Lai knew, was special. Inside, workers were building Apple’s latest, potentially greatest product: the iPad.

When Mr. Lai finally landed a job repairing machines at the plant, one of the first things he noticed were the almost blinding lights. Shifts ran 24 hours a day, and the factory was always bright. At any moment, there were thousands of workers standing on assembly lines or sitting in backless chairs, crouching next to large machinery, or jogging between loading bays. Some workers’ legs swelled so much they waddled. “It’s hard to stand all day,” said Zhao Sheng, a plant worker.

Banners on the walls warned the 120,000 employees: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” Apple’s supplier code of conduct dictates that, except in unusual circumstances, employees are not supposed to work more than 60 hours a week. But at Foxconn, some worked more, according to interviews, workers’ pay stubs and surveys by outside groups. Mr. Lai was soon spending 12 hours a day, six days a week inside the factory, according to his paychecks. Employees who arrived late were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. There were “continuous shifts,” when workers were told to work two stretches in a row, according to interviews.

Mr. Lai’s college degree enabled him to earn a salary of around $22 a day, including overtime — more than many others. When his days ended, he would retreat to a small bedroom just big enough for a mattress, wardrobe and a desk where he obsessively played an online game called Fight the Landlord, said his girlfriend, Luo Xiaohong.

Those accommodations were better than many of the company’s dorms, where 70,000 Foxconn workers lived, at times stuffed 20 people to a three-room apartment, employees said. Last year, a dispute over paychecks set off a riot in one of the dormitories, and workers started throwing bottles, trash cans and flaming paper from their windows, according to witnesses. Two hundred police officers wrestled with workers, arresting eight. Afterward, trash cans were removed, and piles of rubbish — and rodents — became a problem. Mr. Lai felt lucky to have a place of his own.

Foxconn, in a statement, disputed workers’ accounts of continuous shifts, extended overtime, crowded living accommodations and the causes of the riot. The company said that its operations adhered to customers’ codes of conduct, industry standards and national laws. “Conditions at Foxconn are anything but harsh,” the company wrote. Foxconn also said that it had never been cited by a customer or government for under-age or overworked employees or toxic exposures.

“All assembly line employees are given regular breaks, including one-hour lunch breaks,” the company wrote, and only 5 percent of assembly line workers are required to stand to carry out their tasks. Work stations have been designed to ergonomic standards, and employees have opportunities for job rotation and promotion, the statement said.

“Foxconn has a very good safety record,” the company wrote. “Foxconn has come a long way in our efforts to lead our industry in China in areas such as workplace conditions and the care and treatment of our employees.”

Apple’s Code of Conduct

In 2005, some of Apple’s top executives gathered inside their Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for a special meeting. Other companies had created codes of conduct to police their suppliers. It was time, Apple decided, to follow suit. The code Apple published that year demands “that working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.”

But the next year, a British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, secretly visited a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPods were manufactured, and reported on workers’ long hours, push-ups meted out as punishment and crowded dorms. Executives in Cupertino were shocked. “Apple is filled with really good people who had no idea this was going on,” a former employee said. “We wanted it changed, immediately.”

Apple audited that factory, the company’s first such inspection, and ordered improvements. Executives also undertook a series of initiatives that included an annual audit report, first published in 2007. By last year, Apple had inspected 396 facilities — including the company’s direct suppliers, as well as many of those suppliers’ suppliers — one of the largest such programs within the electronics industry.

Those audits have found consistent violations of Apple’s code of conduct, according to summaries published by the company. In 2007, for instance, Apple conducted over three dozen audits, two-thirds of which indicated that employees regularly worked more than 60 hours a week. In addition, there were six “core violations,” the most serious kind, including hiring 15-year-olds as well as falsifying records.

Over the next three years, Apple conducted 312 audits, and every year, about half or more showed evidence of large numbers of employees laboring more than six days a week as well as working extended overtime. Some workers received less than minimum wage or had pay withheld as punishment. Apple found 70 core violations over that period, including cases of involuntary labor, under-age workers, record falsifications, improper disposal of hazardous waste and over a hundred workers injured by toxic chemical exposures.

Last year, the company conducted 229 audits. There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions.

“If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.”

Apple says that when an audit reveals a violation, the company requires suppliers to address the problem within 90 days and make changes to prevent a recurrence. “If a supplier is unwilling to change, we terminate our relationship,” the company says on its Web site.

The seriousness of that threat, however, is unclear. Apple has found violations in hundreds of audits, but fewer than 15 suppliers have been terminated for transgressions since 2007, according to former Apple executives.

“Once the deal is set and Foxconn becomes an authorized Apple supplier, Apple will no longer give any attention to worker conditions or anything that is irrelevant to its products,” said Mr. Li, the former Foxconn manager. Mr. Li spent seven years with Foxconn in Shenzhen and Chengdu and was forced out in April after he objected to a relocation to Chengdu, he said. Foxconn disputed his comments, and said “both Foxconn and Apple take the welfare of our employees very seriously.”

Apple’s efforts have spurred some changes. Facilities that were reaudited “showed continued performance improvements and better working conditions,” the company wrote in its 2011 supplier responsibility progress report. In addition, the number of audited facilities has grown every year, and some executives say those expanding efforts obscure year-to-year improvements.

Apple also has trained over a million workers about their rights and methods for injury and disease prevention. A few years ago, after auditors insisted on interviewing low-level factory employees, they discovered that some had been forced to pay onerous “recruitment fees” — which Apple classifies as involuntary labor. As of last year, the company had forced suppliers to reimburse more than $6.7 million in such charges.

“Apple is a leader in preventing under-age labor,” said Dionne Harrison of Impactt, a firm paid by Apple to help prevent and respond to child labor among its suppliers. “They’re doing as much as they possibly can.”

Other consultants disagree.

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

‘We Could Have Saved Lives’

In 2006, BSR, along with a division of the World Bank and other groups, initiated a project to improve working conditions in factories building cellphones and other devices in China and elsewhere. The groups and companies pledged to test various ideas. Foxconn agreed to participate.

For four months, BSR and another group negotiated with Foxconn regarding a pilot program to create worker “hotlines,” so that employees could report abusive conditions, seek mental counseling and discuss workplace problems. Apple was not a participant in the project, but was briefed on it, according to the BSR consultant, who had detailed knowledge.

As negotiations proceeded, Foxconn’s requirements for participation kept changing. First Foxconn asked to shift from installing new hotlines to evaluating existing hotlines. Then Foxconn insisted that mental health counseling be excluded. Foxconn asked participants to sign agreements saying they would not disclose what they observed, and then rewrote those agreements multiple times. Finally, an agreement was struck, and the project was scheduled to begin in January 2008. A day before the start, Foxconn demanded more changes, until it was clear the project would not proceed, according to the consultant and a 2008 summary by BSR that did not name Foxconn.

The next year, a Foxconn employee fell or jumped from an apartment building after losing an iPhone prototype. Over the next two years, at least 18 other Foxconn workers attempted suicide or fell from buildings in manners that suggested suicide attempts. In 2010, two years after the pilot program fell apart and after multiple suicide attempts, Foxconn created a dedicated mental health hotline and began offering free psychological counseling.

“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H.P. and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep an arm’s length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.”

BSR, in a written statement, said the views of that consultant were not those of the company.

“My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company’s standards and the expectations of consumers,” wrote Aron Cramer, BSR’s president. Mr. Cramer added that asking Apple to pressure Foxconn would have been inconsistent with the purpose of the pilot program, and there were multiple reasons the pilot program did not proceed.

Foxconn, in a statement, said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address suicides, and “the record has shown that those measures have been successful.”

A Demanding Client

Every month, officials at companies from around the world trek to Cupertino or invite Apple executives to visit their foreign factories, all in pursuit of a goal: becoming a supplier.

When news arrives that Apple is interested in a particular product or service, small celebrations often erupt. Whiskey is drunk. Karaoke is sung.

Then, Apple’s requests start.

Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits.

So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies.

“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues, including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins. Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis.

Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.

Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to fix the ventilation system.

That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to speak with some of them.

Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

Wintek is still one of Apple’s most important suppliers. Wintek, in a statement, declined to comment except to say that after the episode, the company took “ample measures” to address the situation and “is committed to ensuring employee welfare and creating a safe and healthy work environment.”

Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions.

“Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packard’s supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”

The Explosion

On the afternoon of the blast at the iPad plant, Lai Xiaodong telephoned his girlfriend, as he did every day. They had hoped to see each other that evening, but Mr. Lai’s manager said he had to work overtime, he told her.

He had been promoted quickly at Foxconn, and after just a few months was in charge of a team that maintained the machines that polished iPad cases. The sanding area was loud and hazy with aluminum dust. Workers wore masks and earplugs, but no matter how many times they showered, they were recognizable by the slight aluminum sparkle in their hair and at the corners of their eyes.

Just two weeks before the explosion, an advocacy group in Hong Kong published a report warning of unsafe conditions at the Chengdu plant, including problems with aluminum dust. The group, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, or Sacom, had videotaped workers covered with tiny aluminum particles. “Occupational health and safety issues in Chengdu are alarming,” the report read. “Workers also highlight the problem of poor ventilation and inadequate personal protective equipment.”

A copy of that report was sent to Apple. “There was no response,” said Debby Chan Sze Wan of the group. “A few months later I went to Cupertino, and went into the Apple lobby, but no one would meet with me. I’ve never heard from anyone from Apple at all.”

The morning of the explosion, Mr. Lai rode his bicycle to work. The iPad had gone on sale just weeks earlier, and workers were told thousands of cases needed to be polished each day. The factory was frantic, employees said. Rows of machines buffed cases as masked employees pushed buttons. Large air ducts hovered over each station, but they could not keep up with the three lines of machines polishing nonstop. Aluminum dust was everywhere.

Dust is a known safety hazard. In 2003, an aluminum dust explosion in Indiana destroyed a wheel factory and killed a worker. In 2008, agricultural dust inside a sugar factory in Georgia caused an explosion that killed 14.

Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.

Then the screams began.

When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.

At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said.

Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.

“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him.”

“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”

After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.

Foxconn, in a statement, said that at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.

In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.

“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.

For Mr. Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”

Hitting the Apple Lottery

Every year, as rumors about Apple’s forthcoming products start to emerge, trade publications and Web sites begin speculating about which suppliers are likely to win the Apple lottery. Getting a contract from Apple can lift a company’s value by millions because of the implied endorsement of manufacturing quality. But few companies openly brag about the work: Apple generally requires suppliers to sign contracts promising they will not divulge anything, including the partnership.

That lack of transparency gives Apple an edge at keeping its plans secret. But it also has been a barrier to improving working conditions, according to advocates and former Apple executives.

This month, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, including The New York Times, Apple released the names of 156 of its suppliers. In the report accompanying that list, Apple said they “account for more than 97 percent of what we pay to suppliers to manufacture our products.”

However, the company has not revealed the names of hundreds of other companies that do not directly contract with Apple, but supply the suppliers. The company’s supplier list does not disclose where factories are, and many are hard to find. And independent monitoring organizations say when they have tried to inspect Apple’s suppliers, they have been barred from entry — on Apple’s orders, they have been told.

“We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times,” said a former executive in Apple’s supplier responsibility group. “There is a genuine, companywide commitment to the code of conduct. But taking it to the next level and creating real change conflicts with secrecy and business goals, and so there’s only so far we can go.” Former Apple employees say they were generally prohibited from engaging with most outside groups.

“There’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything,” the former executive said.

Some other technology companies operate differently.

“We talk to a lot of outsiders,” said Gary Niekerk, director of corporate citizenship at Intel. “The world’s complex, and unless we’re dialoguing with outside groups, we miss a lot.”

Given Apple’s prominence and leadership in global manufacturing, if the company were to radically change its ways, it could overhaul how business is done. “Every company wants to be Apple,” said Sasha Lezhnev at the Enough Project, a group focused on corporate accountability. “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.”

But ultimately, say former Apple executives, there are few real outside pressures for change. Apple is one of the most admired brands. In a national survey conducted by The New York Times in November, 56 percent of respondents said they couldn’t think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent said the worst thing about the company was that its products were too expensive. Just 2 percent mentioned overseas labor practices.

People like Ms. White of Harvard say that until consumers demand better conditions in overseas factories — as they did for companies like Nike and Gap, which today have overhauled conditions among suppliers — or regulators act, there is little impetus for radical change. Some Apple insiders agree.

“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive.

“And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

Gu Huini contributed research.

Osama bin Laden Is Dead, GM Is Alive

2012-01-25T19:47:00.003-07:00

that may very well be, but which one is responsible for the deaths of more Americans?

Dr. Cornel West - Remaking America: From Poverty to Prosperity

2012-01-21T22:25:00.001-07:00

this video highlights dr. cornel west speaking at the remaking america: from poverty to prosperity talk at george washington university in washington dc on thursday, january 12, 2012.

other panelists included majora carter; barbara ehrenreich; michael moore; suze orman; vicki escarra and roger clay, jr.

the event was moderated by tavis smiley

(the audio on this video is off slightly for the first 48 seconds only. please forgive the quick edits at 4:05; 7:58; 12:16; 13:20; 15:19; 17:25 and 20:06, between dr. west's talks)

watch the full uninterrupted, unedited 150 minute discussion with tavis and all the other guests here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiVR7GhVxA8

the following is from Tavis and Cornel's Solution to Poverty
from http://www.theroot.com/views/tavis-and-cornel-s-solution-poverty

Tavis Smiley: Dr. West and I are working on a book about poverty called The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto that comes out mid-April. The central question that we're wrestling with in this text is how we can get serious in this country about not just reducing but indeed eradicating poverty. There are three things that we're clear about.

Number 1, which answers your question, is that poverty has to be made a priority in this country. At the moment it is not a priority, not just for our government but for the American people. Now one out of two Americans are either in poverty or near poverty — that's half the country — so we are hopeful that our government and the American people in this election year will get more vocal about demanding that poverty be a priority.

Number 2, there must be a plan to eradicate poverty. We keep coming up with these short-term Band-Aids, like the president's payroll-tax cut. A payroll-tax cut is a decent idea, I guess, but it only works if you're on the payroll in the first place. That's just one example; there are all kinds of presidents who, in years past, have tried to come up with these in-the-moment solutions to poverty. There's got to be a real plan.

We're calling in this text for a White House conference. The White House has a conference on everything but poverty, so we're calling to bring all these experts together. Marian Wright Edelman has a plan. Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia has a plan. Catholic Charities has a plan.

Thirdly and finally, whoever the next president is needs to get serious about selling the process to the American people for how this will happen. When the numbers are as significant as they are, I am certain that the American people are interested in a plan to get them out of poverty. The more serious that Republicans and Democrats get about that, the better off we're going to be.

Big Oil & Conservative Government Radicals

2012-01-19T14:25:00.002-07:00

recently, canadian conservative natural resources minister, joe oliver, stated with regard to the enbridge northern gateway pipeline review procss,

jet-setting celebrities threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological ends.

and accused those who are trying to stop the pipeline's construction as being, "radical groups".

today on democracy now, environmental activist and author bill mckibben, said that the real radicals here are the ones who are trying to alter our atmosphere just to make a few bucks,

if you think about it, the degree of radicalism in oil companies is so incredible. they’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere in order to make some more money. there’s never been anything as radical as that.

amen. since when is wanting to have the basic human needs of clean air, clean water, and unpolluted land, been a radical idea?

Alison Redford Does Not Speak For All Albertans

2012-01-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

the premier of alberta, alison redford (who no one except PC party delegates voted for), said today regarding president obama's decision to reject the keystone xl pipeline,

on behalf of albertans, i think i need to say that we are disappointed. we believe this is an important project for alberta. we believe it’s important for alberta’s economy and for canada’s economy.

fuck you alison redford. you do not speak for me. you are an embarrassment to this province and country with your pro-oil & gas, anti-environment stance. you say keystone's important for our economy? don't you mean, terrible for our ecology? what would in fact be good for our economy, is creating jobs in renewable energy today for a cleaner and greener country tomorrow, and not continuing on this dirty, toxic, suicidal path dictated by the oil industry..

she also said,

today’s decision does not mean that america will consume one less barrel of oil. what it means is this: america will continue to import oil from jurisdictions with much weaker environmental policies and who do not share the same values as canadians and americans.

weaker environmental policies? same values? you mean dropping out of the kyoto protocol showed strong values and support for the environment? perhaps countries like china have weaker environmental policies. is that why canada wants to build the northern gateway pipeline through BC and ship alberta's dirty bitumen to china, enabling them to continue polluting just so canada can make a few bucks? shameful and despicable! it's these kinds of values i believe we can all do without, ms redford.

today's decision to reject the pipeline is a small victory for clean air, land and water. the bigger victories lie ahead, when backward thinking people like alison redford and her redneck tory cronies (of which she is the head crone), and stephen son-of-an-oil-executive harper and his band of blue meanies, are ousted from power for good, and replaced with those who actually give a damn about the future of this planet and living sustainably with all those who share it with us.

Food Inc. [2008] (watch the full movie)

2011-12-29T22:13:00.001-07:00

Food Inc. from PC_Alim on Vimeo.

The more people become aware of how our food is produced, the more people will not allow companies like Monsanto and Tyson to continue with the kinds of horrendous abuses of people, animals, and our environment they are currently getting away with.

These companies may have the money to influence and buy our elected officials, many of whom are former members of the very corporations they are supposed to regulate, but once people learn the truth about how these greedy, deceitful manipulators operate, they will act in unison to put the fuckers out of business for good...in a manner similar to the way the tobacco industry has been crippled.

The masses are awakening!

from the movie:

If you take feedlot cattle off of their corn diet, give them grass for five days, they will shed 80% of the E. coli in their gut

But of course that's not what the industry does. The industry's approach is -- when it has a systematic problem like that -- is not to go back and see what's wrong with the system, it's to come up some high-tech fixes that allow the system to survive.

those who make obscene amounts of money off of a system, will do everything in their power to see to it that the system continues working in their favor, in order for them to continue to grow and maximize their profits. government regulations on the oil and gas industry, or the banks, or any other for profit business, are only temporary measures that can easily be undone by future administrations through corporate lobbying.

we must all question and change the very system itself, and indeed ourselves for being complicit in such an unjust and immoral arrangement that would allow an individual or corporation to commit acts of grievous harm upon another sentient, feeling being in the name of financial gain. for if we do not, then as jeff spicoli might say, "we'll just be bogus too", and we will all deserve and suffer the consequences of our thoughtless, cruel, and ignorant actions.

As an environmentalist, it was pretty clear to me that business was the source of all the pollution, business was the source of basically all the things that were destroying this world.

TRANSCRIPT

Kyoto and Canada — We are Better Than This by David Suzuki

2011-12-15T15:24:00.004-07:00

from the David Suzuki Foundation:

Dear friends of the David Suzuki Foundation,

Like all of us at the Foundation, you are likely heartbroken by our government’s reckless decision to break its international commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. Coming on the heels of Canada’s attempts to scuttle the climate talks in Durban, South Africa, earlier this month, this decision may also leave you feeling angry and ashamed of our leaders. We feel that way, too.

We all understand that our future and that of our children and grandchildren hangs in the balance now and that the scales could be tipped by the resolve--or indifference--of the world leaders who recently came together, for the most part, to figure out ways to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change. The world’s scientists have been telling us this for decades, and the growing evidence of our warming biosphere, and its increasingly catastrophic impacts, are now the daily fodder of newscasts and weather reports.

The Kyoto Protocol was not perfect, but it was leading to progressive action on climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions have been going down in Europe, and many countries are shifting from polluting fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources. Awareness has grown worldwide about the threat of climate change. Successive Canadian governments, with their focus on a tar sands economy, ensured that we did not meet even the weak targets that they set. In fact, Canada’s emissions have risen by 30 per cent over 1990 levels, leaving us way above our target of reducing levels by six per cent by 2012.

And, make no mistake, the world has been watching.

Canada’s poor performance at the climate talks in Durban and its decision to become the first country to pull out of the international legal agreement have drawn criticism from people worldwide--and rightly so. That our government would be willing to sacrifice human lives and our future for the sake of short-term profits from a polluting and non-renewable resource is a slap in the face not only to Canadians but to people everywhere.

This is not hyperbole. Climate change and its disastrous effects--droughts, heat waves, flooding, spread of disease--are already killing 300,000 people a year and driving many more into poverty. Hundreds of thousands are becoming refugees as such impacts make their homelands uninhabitable. Experts believe that up to a billion people could become refugees in coming years if the trend continues. Many plants and animals--crucial to our own health and well-being--are going extinct as climate change wreaks havoc on their habitat.

But Canada is much more than its federal government. And our economy is much more than just the oil industry. Canada is you and me and provincial and municipal government leaders. It is businesspeople and union members and retired people and children. It is all of us. And we are making a difference. Some provincial governments have implemented plans to reduce emissions, spur economic activity in the green energy sector and slow climate change. B.C. and Quebec have implemented carbon taxes, Quebec is planning to cap and reduce industrial emissions, and Ontario has its Green Energy Act, a game-changing piece of legislation. Some municipal governments are taking climate change seriously, too. Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Plan includes policies to increase the number of people who cycle or use transit rather than cars and to make homes and buildings more energy efficient.

And you have worked with organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation to put the focus on knowledge and solutions. With your support, we’ve encouraged governments at the municipal and provincial levels to take action, and we’ve worked with opposition parties to speak up for the majority who want a cleaner and healthier future. We’ve also teamed up with the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a range of interested parties, for the Trottier Energy Futures Project--an extraordinary initiative to analyze Canada’s energy sources and options and identify ways to slash emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, through wiser energy choices. And we’ve been working with a wide range of Canadians, including young people and new Canadians, reaching out in different languages to share new ideas and discuss solutions.

You’ve all been a big part of this work, through your amazing support. You’ve written letters, signed petitions, taken part in forums, volunteered, talked to each other, and donated money. Equally important, you’ve walked the talk--taking transit, insulating your homes, buying local, and modelling other behaviour attuned to a sustainable future.

Please stay the course with us.

Canada’s government may be turning its back on the global fight against climate change, but that makes it all the more important for us to take up the slack. We know that reducing emissions and combatting climate change is not just about human health--although that’s important, both from the standpoint of climate change and pollution. We know that our government’s inaction on climate change means more missed opportunities to become part of the burgeoning global green economy, with its focus on clean energy technology and knowledge. And we know that if our government is not willing to listen to the majority--and yes, we are the majority--if it cares more about keeping its friends in the fossil-fuel industry happy, then we must do all we can to make a difference.

In the coming days and weeks, please take action to affirm your convictions. This will embolden others to express their views and act as well. For example, you could:
Comment on this letter
Write to your elected representatives: municipal and provincial as well as federal, demanding to know “What is next?” in the wake of our withdrawal from Kyoto
Deepen your connection to our efforts by becoming a monthly donor or giving what you can. Your donations help us press harder and speak louder.
Talk to your friends and family about the Canada we envisage: one that acts on the understanding that we are interconnected and interdependent with nature
Together, we can mobilize many more Canadians in defence of our biosphere, and once again be proud of our country.
Thank you again,

David Suzuki, on behalf of the entire David Suzuki Foundation team

comment by dwdeclare:

unfortunately, from what i see living in alberta, the majority of people just don't give a damn. they still drive their massive pickup trucks or SUVs; many leave their vehicles idling (even when it isn't cold out); they still buy coffee and fast food garbage in disposable containers, adding to our already overfilled dumps, and very often toss the trash on the ground (tim hortons being the garbage of choice most often seen); they believe they are doing their patriotic duty by continuing to eat meat, even though the cattle industry is a huge greenhouse gas contributor (not to mention ethically indefensible), and will proudly display an, "i heart alberta beef" bumper sticker on their truck to boast about it.

yes, we are more than our government, but our flawed electoral parliamentary system put these jokers in power (even though 60%, of the 61% who bothered to cast a ballot in 2011, voted against them) and unfortunately, they represent this country. and from my experience, as long as people have a car to drive, a home to put their stuff in, and a tim hortons disposable coffee in their hand, they don't care who's in power.

it's not the canadian government's fault kyoto wasn't adhered to, it's the canadian people's fault. millions of people doing little acts of ignorance and thoughtlessness make the world a nasty polluted place.

the opposite could be true if we all did little acts of thoughtfulness and considered the impact we have on our natural world with the way we choose to feed, clothe, house, and transport ourselves, but honestly, i don't see that happening.

it's going to take a real consciousness raising for it to change, and as much as i love the nature of things (now in its 50th season), it depresses the hell out of me when i go outside and it's back to reality breathing car exhaust; listening to how we all must serve our god the economy with jobs and spending to buy more crap; and seeing fast food garbage strewn about the ground.

the exploiting 1% is certainly a problem, but i blame 99% percent of people for destroying this planet.

Somniferous Waves, Goodbye [original song]

2011-12-13T09:05:00.000-07:00

Snow Spider [original song]

2011-12-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

snow spider
snow spider yea yea

something is crawlin'
out in my backyard
when the flakes have fallen
i wonder what you are

snow spider
diggin' your company
snow spider
steppin' out over me

jumpin' around him
all the young girls scream
but he can't hear them shoutin'
he's caught up in his scene

snow spider
diggin' your company
snow spider
steppin' out over me

after the meltin'
i didn't see you here
don't know what happened
baby you disappeared

snow spider
diggin' your company
snow spider
steppin' out over me

snow spider
diggin' your company
snow spider
steppin' out over me

snow spider
snow spider yea yea
snow spider
snow spider yea yea

The Forest [original song]

2011-12-04T22:24:00.001-07:00

i was breathing the forest and drinking some "tea",
then decided to lie by a sibilant stream.
as the colors around me were starting to change,
i heard this song once, then twice over again.

i wondered aloud, "from whence does it come;
from the east or the west, from below or above?"
well long about then passed a grizzly bear cub
with a mouthful of berries and bowlful of grubs.

i said, "do you mind, may i have some to eat?"
he gave me a smile as he shat on my feet.
but there in the mixture of blueberry poo
was a diamond and emerald. he said, "they're for you".

i stood with a start. i was flattered and floored.
a bear never gave me some jewels before.
i said, "that's so kind, i have nothing for you,
except all my love so undying and true."

well wouldn't you know, he was taken aback.
he arose on two feet and then roared with a laugh.
he said, "i'm so happy. i'm loved, i am loved!"
then we sang and we danced and embraced with a hug.

but soon the time came when we had to take leave.
me back to the city and he among trees.
we promised each other that we'd stay in touch,
as we said our good-byes and our see-yas and such.

but that was the last that i saw of my friend.
sometimes i do wonder what happened to him.
i donated both of those jewels he gave
to a group that keeps all of our forests in place.

as more and more habitat's lost for the bears
to greed, and consumption, and those unaware
of the damage we do to our good planet earth,
we must stop all our harm, and start to preserve.

this planet belongs to our animal kin
with two legs or more, or no legs or fins.
it belongs to the flowers, the grass, and the shrubs,
the trees of the forest, and grizzly bear cubs.

this tune from that day is so deeply ingrained,
as it whirls and wriggles around in my brain.
i never did find from the whence it did came,
but i love this song once, and twice over again.

Fuck You BP!

2011-11-29T09:54:00.001-07:00

i saw this ad on msnbc today and i was left dumbstruck when it was revealed who sponsored it:

REALLY? this is how bp is spending their money? on bullshit PR campaigns about how great the gulf coast is now, and how everything is wonderful and back to normal? FUCK YOU! these sons-of-bitches are responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory and now they expect us to believe everything is hunky-dory and back to business as usual?

"come spend your money (and continue to burn oil while you do it)...and don't forget to thank bp for all they've done to make the world a better place for you and your children". when you fuck up the environment, destroying wildlife and people's livelihoods, don't come back to shit in people's mouths and call it a sundae.

all your fucking money won't buy you forgiveness, no matter how you wrap it up. you, along with all the other oil and gas companies have done enough harm to this planet and quite frankly, we have had enough of it. NO MORE! Fuck you BP, Fuck you very much!

the corporatocracy has the audacity to call those who try and stop the destruction of our natural world by blocking bulldozers or sitting in trees to prevent them from being cut down, "ecoterrorists". but when oil and gas companies are polluting our land, air and water, and causing the deaths of both people and wildlife, who are the real ecoterrorists here?

from democracy now headlines, thu, jan. 26, 2012:

Whistleblower: BP Sought to Alter Cleanup Data

A former employee is accusing the oil giant BP of firing him for refusing to alter data about the cleanup of the 2010 Gulf Coast oil spill. In a lawsuit filed in Louisiana, August Walter says he was subjected to "a malicious campaign" after voicing concerns that BP was defying the cleanup requirement mandated by government officials. Walter says a BP executive informed him of "people watching him" to ensure he would not interfere with BP’s plans. According to Walter, BP officials hid data from the U.S. Coast Guard to avoid having to clean up certain areas. Walter was fired from BP last month. He is seeking compensation under the Louisiana Environmental Whistleblower Statute.

Dr. Cornel West Speaks at Occupy Seattle 11-16-2011

2011-11-17T11:59:00.001-07:00

cornel west gives his critical examination of free market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism and escalating authoritarianism in american society today, and how the occupy movements around the country and the world are offering hope against plutocratic control, through the great democratic tradition of civil disobedience, where "the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak".

(thank you to OccupyTVSEA for uploading this wonderful video to youtube)

The Keystone XL Pipeline and Other Injustices of the Corporatocracy

2011-11-14T08:24:00.001-07:00

the decision as to whether the keystone xl pipeline will be constructed was to be delayed until early 2013, until after the american election. but the republicans in their infinite shadiness and greed, and the democrats in their infinite spinelessness, have passed a bill linking a two month extension of the payroll tax cut to an expedited decision on the pipeline by late february 2012.

this pipeline would carry dirty bitumen from alberta to texas to be refined there. it would greatly expand tar sands production in northern alberta, meaning increasing destruction of an already devastated wild nature in canada's boreal forest. it would mean pumping more co2, methane, and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and more toxins into the athabasca river, poisoning those who live downstream. already the people of ft mackay and ft chipewyan have elevated levels of cancer and other illnesses because of tar sands operations.

the proponents of the pipeline, industry and the alberta and canadian governments, have two very untenable arguments in support of it. the first is claiming it will offer energy security. this is total backward thinking, because if half the money used for oil and gas exploration and extraction were used for advancing wind and solar technology for example, we could be well on our way to much safer and cleaner energy security within a few decades, if not just a few years even. and this is far more sustainable than a few decades worth, at most, of dirty, expensive bottom of the barrel, tar sands bitumen, that the new conservative premier of alberta, alison redford is so fond of. meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

the second argument used to justify the pipeline's construction is touting all the economic benefits it will bring. ah yes, the famous jobs ploy. so despite all the environmental damage that is already occurring because of the tar sands (air pollution, leaking tailings ponds, deforestation, killing of wildlife) which would increase and worsen with the new pipeline, not to mention the very real possibility of pipeline spills, this is all somehow acceptable to them because there's money and jobs involved?

funny how even though something is causing a lot of harm to people, wildlife and the environment, government and industry will always praise it so long as there is a vast amount of money to be made. but when you consider that practically all that money is funneled to the top, you realize pretty quickly that they're main concern is not for the welfare of the average laborer, or even his safety for that matter. hell, they're even trying to take away the people's right to collectively bargain. the only thing these corporate executives and their government puppets really give a damn about, is how the workers can fill their already overstuffed pockets with even more cash. this jobs argument then becomes nothing more than the deceptive blatherings of dishonest and greedy scoundrels.

this is all very typical of the canadian government's approach however. whether it's destroying the environment and first nation's livelihoods with the tar sands, or expanding an asbestos mine in quebec to export 200,000 tons of the carcinogenic chrysotile (95% of which is shipped to asia and other mostly poor countries), or clubbing baby seals to sell to the european union, which has recently banned seal products from canada, the canadian government fights tooth and nail to keep these destructive, harmful and downright barbaric practices up and running because all of them have proven to be profitable, and that's all that seems to matter to them. shameful and despicable!

as much as these folks like to praise any industry that is extremely lucrative, there is one area where the lauding is still there, but not quite so overt. that being, the business of crime. let me explain.

there is a new $569-million mega-jail being built in the edmonton region which will house over 2,000 inmates and will cover an area larger than 26 football fields (cfl size football fields i suppose). it's expected to employ over 800 people when it's completed. and with all the construction and other jobs that go along with a project of this magnitude, that's a lot of employment to be had. looks like these criminals who are making this project "necessary" are real job creators. let's applaud them for that.

(audience rises, cheers and applauds)

i guess crime does pay. look at how many people make a living off of it: jailers, judges, police, lawyers, ems workers, and all the other satellite jobs connected with those: office workers, secretaries and so on. would spokespeople from the government and the prison industrial complex like to go on the corporate controlled media and be so bold as to say that crime is a good thing and virtuous because of all the employment it produces? i seriously doubt that.

but why not? could it be because of the harm that we associate with crime? well what about the harm associated with the oil and gas industry? from toxic oil spills to flammable water, from cancer causing emissions to climate change, people are getting sick and dying from this noxious industry. but for some reason, these companies and their bribed government officials, who both stand to make huge profits from contaminating our environment, are always extolling its most blessed merits for the sake of jobs, jobs, jobs and all that yummy money it will bring in. you can just see the dollar signs sparkling in their eyes. as texas governor, and republican presidential nominee, rick perry might say..."gold is good!". yea, but at what cost?

i think the frances mcdormand character, margie, from near the end of the movie fargo, sums it up best when she rebukes one of the two men responsible for the kidnapping and murder of jerry lundegaard's wife, by saying "there's more to life than a little money, you know. don'tcha know that?" well quite frankly, i don't think they do know that. yes, jobs are important, so we can feed, clothe, house, transport and enjoy ourselves. but if our jobs are based upon the destruction of our natural world, and people and wildlife getting sick and dying, then we are one sociopathic lot. just as sociopathic as our friend from fargo, who axed his partner to death and shoved the body into a woodchipper for refusing to give him half the money for the tan sierra. literally, we are mentally ill if we believe that our jobs are more important than our environment and people's lives.

it would be utterly ridiculous to suggest that we don't try to reduce crime by addressing the conditions that often encourage such behavior, because of the large number of people who will financially benefit from crime continuing. but that seems to be precisely what we are doing. we spend billions of dollars on "fighting crime", but we do absurdly little to try and understand and eliminate its root causes, where poverty and the grossly unjust distribution of wealth, lack of education, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence in the home play no small roles.

punishing criminals is big business, and big business means big profits, and big profits mean bigwigs like to keep things the way they are. so sure, let's fight crime...but let's not delve too deeply into why people engage in criminal acts in the first place, we may just discover how to stop it, and that's bad for our current way of doing business.

if the business of this country is business, and nothing more than pandering to the corporate elites whose only purpose is maximizing their own bottom line, then genuine democratic principles, which have at their very core civil disobedient struggle, and noncompliance with illegitimate forces trying to command people's lives, will be annihilated by these mendacious oligarchs even as they profess to be upholding them in the interest of public safety and national security. they will then use all the available tools of physical and psychological control that the state has at its disposal, to forcibly silence any dissenting voices expressing fresh new ideas running counter to the prevailing doctrines of this inequitable system, and the powerless citizenry will be bludgeoned into submissive obedience.

who would not agree that our society would be much better off without everyone having to worry about, and collectively spend billions on, protecting our property or ourselves from the victims of a society that allows all the wealth to accumulate for those near the top, while the rest feed upon the scrapheap? all those who formerly found employment taking advantage of this kind of system will just have to put up with a crime free world and find other ways to make a living. perhaps we can spend more time growing our own healthy food and being satisfied with having less in this new harmonious world where crime has been eradicated.

and our approach to crime is the same as our approach to health care. here again, billions are spent on fighting sickness and disease, but yet we remain incredibly inept and largely ignorant about how to cure these things. how little we know of probably one of the most important factors in reducing health problems...proper nutrition. we eat shit and then wonder why we feel like shit.

imagine if we put all our efforts into real prevention of crime and into real prevention of illness, by educating ourselves and trying to acquire the wisdom and compassion to understand the socioeconomic issues and lifestyle choices contributing to them; by targeting the causes and not the effects. but then that would mean less people to imprison, so less people employed in the field of punishment; it would mean less people getting sick, so less people employed in the pharmaceutical industry; it would mean a disruption and complete overhaul of our present unjust and immoral private property based system which values consumerism, profit and distractive entertainment over sharing, charity and critical examination, so less control for the plutocratic dictators who are currently in command.

if an individual is kept in the dark and unaware of the machinations driving the corporatocracy toward more profit and more power, he will abide, merrily dazed, in mute servility to them, even as they strip the last can of who hash from his scrawny fingers in the name of god and country, and he will patriotically rise and sing along as they do it. but when one is bombarded by a media, culture, and society that is nothing more than an advertisement for commerce, and a salute to empire and might based largely on narrow-minded bigotry and unwarranted fear, what do you expect?

as ridiculous as it would be to suggest that we should not get to the root causes of crime and sickness and attempt to eliminate them all together, because of jobs and economic advantage, it is just as ludicrous to propose that we don't try to prevent the ecological devastation being wreaked by the oil and gas industry, and all the health problems they cause, because of the employment these companies provide.

everyone would be far better off living in a world where the air is cleaner, and the water is uncontaminated, and the land is allowed to remain in its pristine natural state, flourishing with all the plants and animals that call it home. and surely there will be jobs available as we use our brains to come up with greener alternatives in our efforts to live more sustainably with our natural world.

reducing crime, pollution, and harnessing cleaner energy sources, will not be easy. but rarely, nothing worthwhile ever is. we're not demanding a perfect world, just a better one. one where we don't have to rely upon the suffering of another in order to make a buck.

sooner or later we are all going to have to come to the realization that our business as usual attitudes are causing far too much misery and injustice on our planet to allow us to continue on such a misguided and perilous course. crime and pollution are not beneficial things. despite all the money that can be made by allowing them to persist, we are going to need to find ways to reduce them with the eventual goal of trying to eliminate them. we really don't have a choice here, unless of course we like living in fear that someone will steal or damage our stuff, or try to hurt or kill us, or we enjoy breathing poisoned air and consuming contaminated food and water. we will make the world a kinder, cleaner and more ethical place for all, but we are running out of time. so we better, in the words of jean luc picard, "make it so".

(cue closing credits theme for star trek the next generation)

We Are Exploited, We Exploit

2011-11-11T22:37:00.001-07:00

the exploiter doesn't care about the interests and feelings of those who he takes advantage of. to him, they are unworthy of his consideration. he is in a position of power. how he has achieved this power is immaterial. what is important is that he is unwilling to relinquish it, and has the means and the money to maintain it.

to him, those who he uses are his inferiors, and are more often than not vilified and ridiculed by him. which then of course makes their troubles easier to ignore, and perhaps in his eyes, even somehow...deserved.

even if the oppressed have adequate food, shelter and entertainment to keep them preoccupied, they must still live in the shadow of their master who has control over their well-being. one false move, and punishment will be swift and doled out at his discretion.

it may perhaps be easier and simpler to live our lives following orders and doing what we're told, all the while accepting our situation as normal and immutable. responsibility then falls upon those who give the commands, our hands being clean should any problems arise. "i was just doing my job", is the familiar refrain of the obedient lackey when the finger of blame is pointed in his direction.

but we have a deep seated revulsion to having our freedom stripped away and being forced to subjugate ourselves to another, in a way that goes far beyond our human roots, extending well back into our evolutionary past.

and so sooner or later we rise up, either alone or in groups, against our oppressor, be it an unjust man made system or an individual abuser. eventually our boiling point is reached and we demand an end to their tyranny. we are willing to take whatever measures are necessary and accept whatever consequences may come our way, in order to extricate ourselves from their cruel unrelenting domination.

but how many of the abused are also the abuser? how many of the exploited are also the exploiters? we complain bitterly when we are treated unfairly and without respect, but we needn't look any further than our own mirrors to see how we are responsible for causing similar distress to others. where if it were perpetrated against us, we would most assuredly denounce it as unacceptable and an affront to our liberty.

when we discover that our actions have been detrimental to someone else, we usually take the appropriate steps to change our behavior and cease, or at least lessen, the harm we are causing. failing to do so would place us squarely into the realm of the unempathetic, or the sociopathic. what would make us think that we deserve to have our grievances addressed if we cannot, or will not, consider the sorrows of another?

often the excuse we use for why we continue to exploit another is the same as the one used against us. "they are not worthy; their interests must be subordinated to mine because i am more important". why are our feelings more important than theirs? why should our suffering be perceived as somehow more significant?

if we all have the capacity to suffer, both physically and emotionally, and we view it as something misery-inducing and repugnant when it happens to us, how can we in good conscience continue a lifestyle where our actions inflict a similar sort of torment upon another?

here we are, demanding our rights with one fist, while pounding into submission the rights of someone else with the other. we must stop thinking in a hierarchical, vertical fashion where one's position on the ladder is of greater importance than another, and start thinking in horizontal terms of all being united in our ability to feel joy and grief, in our capacity to experience pleasure and pain, and in our lives where our individualities may grow and develop to their fullest potential through careful attention and thoughtful learning, or be allowed to wither and die through reckless ignorance and unmindful neglect.

when we say we demand equality, what do we mean? we mean that as living, feeling beings capable of experiencing a good life or a bad life (that is to say, a life where things can fare well for us, or a life where things can fare poorly for us), to deny a good life for someone else so that we may have one, is grossly unjust. and not only unjust, but flagrantly immoral as well.

the exploiter takes away a good life from the one he exploits. he has chosen to suppress any feelings of empathy regarding the well-being of the one he enslaves, in order to maintain his oppressor status and all the advantages that go along with it. we would most certainly not want to find ourselves on the receiving end of his despotic whims. and we would be just as reprehensible as any tyrant we are struggling to defeat, should we find ourselves holding on to our current lifestyles and luxuries knowing that doing so, denies a good life for another.

so who are we responsible for enslaving? whose rights to exist free of our oppression do we violate? the cultural evolution of humanity is at a point now where we believe, at least in theory if not in practice, that to treat another human being as a slave is to commit a grievous injustice upon him. for some reason however, we still choose to accept the idea that being held in economic servitude as "wage slaves" is somehow permissible because it bolsters our system of production, distribution and consumption.

but there are yet others who we rarely even think about when it comes to our conduct toward them, namely those nonhuman animals who share the planet with us. for as we feast upon the scorched flesh of our murdered animal kin, to satisfy not our need for necessary nourishment, but rather our own petty, gluttonous pleasures of the palate; or as we engage in tortuous experiments upon their sentient bodies, without consent or any restitution for the untold agonies we impose to serve our purposes; or as we confine them for our amusement, as they idly lie or pace back and forth imprisoned in zoos before our gawping eyes; or as we chase and harass them in barbaric exhibitions of shameful entertainment, we exploit them for no other reason than that we falsely believe our interests are of a superior kind to theirs.

we are blindly following without critical examination that most contemptible of tenets which states, "might makes right". a world where people choose to ignore and bury their empathy for the suffering of another, and only obey their selfish desires for personal acquisition and egoistic fulfillment, pitting each against all in a ruthless competition to see who can consume and usurp the most, is a world without peace, a world without caring, and indeed a world...without love.

if we want to stop the choking hands of oppression asphyxiating our freedom and aspire to create a more just and benevolent world, we do so not by emulating our pitiless persecutor, but by opening our hearts and minds to more fully recognize the suffering of another, and imagine what it is like to be in their situation. it is through sympathy, compassionate wisdom, and long experience, that we gain a sense of fairness and justice. and it is through loving kindness and empathetic understanding that our notions of liberty and equality will mature and bloom.

A Message From Tim DeChristopher

2011-10-30T15:09:00.000-06:00

below is a tweet from TarSandsAction october 30, 2011:

and here is that message:

As much as I'm enjoying my time in prison, I'm a little jealous of the folks who get to participate in the uprising that's happening right now. If I wasn't here, I'd probably either be on Wall Street or Freedom Plaza in DC. But on November 6th, I would definitely be outside the White House to show Barack Obama how many people are committed to stopping the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. There's a deep instinctual sense of intimidation that comes from being completely surrounded, and that might be healthy for our president right now.

The date, one year before the election, should be a not-so-subtle hint to Obama that his job is on the line. Dr. James Hansen said that if this pipeline is built and the rest of the tar sands developed, it's "game over" for the climate. That means game over for any young person who would like a livable world to grow old in. If he's willing to risk game over for us, he should know that it will definitely be game over for his presidency.

There's another reason to link hands outside the White House on November 6th. It's an opportunity to meet the people you will be linking hands with in front of a bulldozer if Obama actually signs off on this misguided pipeline. We know that the White House has had plenty of visitors from the fossil fuel industry who have been pushing Obama to allow the Keystone pipeline. If any of those lobbyists happen to be paying a visit on November 6th, they will get a preview of the view from their bulldozers: all of you linking arms. The message should be clear that we're not giving up on our future, even if it's difficult, and we need a president with similar courage.

Have fun storming the castle!

- Tim DeChristopher

Amy Goodman and Me

2011-10-30T00:44:00.000-06:00

it's not every day you get to meet one of your heroes. it was indeed an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to meet amy goodman and hear her give a talk at the university of alberta in edmonton. she is truly one of the giants of social justice.

“when police tell people to turn off their video camera, that’s exactly when they need to turn their video cameras on. . . . we need media in this country that allows people to speak for themselves. ultimately, the media can be the biggest force for peace on earth.” ~ amy goodman

here is the video of amy goodman's speech in edmonton, uploaded to youtube by the edmonton public library who sponsored the event:

Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson

2011-10-28T09:40:00.002-06:00

s. brian willson, a vietnam veteran, who after witnessing the aftermath of a massacre of villagers in vietnam, many of whom were children, realized he could no longer support this idea of war and suppress feelings of empathy for the suffering of others any more. he became a staunch peace activist.

in 1987, he along with fellow activists, attempted to block a train that was carrying weapons and supplies to be shipped to nicaragua to be used against the people who were standing up to the brutal and repressive american backed regime.

the train did not stop. it ran over willson, who as a result lost both of his legs. this democracy now interview from october 28, 2011, tells the story of this remarkable man.

he explains how through tapping in to our ancient archetypes of empathy, mutual respect, cooperation, and equity (our sense of fairness), which despite adopting ideologies that attempt to suppress them, that pretends they're not there, we can recover our humanity and change the world for the better.

his book, blood on the tracks, was released earlier this year.

Walking Through the Leaves [original song]

2011-10-24T09:01:00.002-06:00

i'm just walking through the leaves

and staring at the ground

no one to bother me

no one at all around

Citibank Arrests Customers For Withdrawing Money

2011-10-17T13:37:00.000-06:00

if citibank thinks they are going to get away with this, they've got another thing coming. capitalist tyranny takes on a whole new meaning here.

Anger Makes The World Go Around

2011-10-17T01:04:00.000-06:00

they say anger makes the world go 'round. actually they don't say that, but i do. there are a lot of things to be upset about. i'm no positive spokesperson for any movement, i'm just an angry asshole. here are some things, arranged according to height and popularity, that piss the fuck out of me:

1) fracking. flammable water is not natural, like the alberta government would have you believe. gas companies shitting chemicals into the ground and blasting rock to retrieve the trapped gas releases methane and other carcinogenic concoctions into aquifers and seriously fuck up your well water and the well-being of the community. the alberta government and the oil & gas companies ought not be surprised when someone like wiebo ludwig comes along to stand up against them. you can only poison peeople and lie to them for so long before they take matters into their own hands and say, "enough is enough".

2) the tar sands. air, water, wildlife, your health. if you like one or more of these things, you will be angry at the existence of the tar sands for destroying it.

3a) tim hortons. they don't give a fuck about the environment. if they did, they would not give away those goddamned disposable cups and trays that morons don't even think twice about using.

3b) all fast food disposable shit

4) idling vehicles. really? you're not even in your car asshole. don't be such a thoughtless fuck. it's bad enough you have to drive a fossil fuel burning car, do you have to leave the motherfucking thing running and polluting the air? the worst offenders are pick up truck drivers and bus drivers, both school and city buses, at least around redneck alberta anyway.

5) meat eaters. (see also #17) you may love your dog or your cat or the robin in your birdbath, but the slaughter of a cow, pig or chicken, who is just as sentient, does not seem to faze you as you stuff your fat ugly face. you just can't seem to connect the dots...so fuck you.

6) advertising. fuck you and your brainwashing bullshit here, there and everywhere and using every medium known to man to sell, sell, sell in an effort to get people to consume, consume, consume.

7) walmart. (see #13 and also #19) the high cost of low prices. they treat their employees like shit and they treat the people who make the crap that stocks their shelves like shit.

8) paying for education. that shit should be free from the cradle to the grave (see also #13). a smart society is a thoughtful society.

9) soldiers. (see also #20) support our troops? fuck that, they're the ones who do the killing. without them, war is over and tyrants are powerless.

10) soldiers getting the shaft. so a guy goes off to fight for his country because he believes, erroneously, that he is doing the patriotic thing, gets injured, and then can't even get the proper medical attention he needs when he gets back home? that's fucked up.

11) mob mentality. i didn't say simon says...morons. groups of people working together can do good, but mostly they do harm...global warming is a prime example.

12) the 99%. wow, i bet you weren't expecting that. too many people in the world means overcrowding and too much consumption. it means destruction of the natural world, and 99% of us are responsible for that. i would even make that number higher, 99.9999%. there are maybe .0001% in the world who are compassionate, caring, thoughtful, honest, genuine and decent. peter singer is one, michael moore is a good guy, but he needs to lay off the meat (which i understand he is trying to do) and amy goodman...there are others but i figured i'd just list three out of the possible 700,000 in the world...which quite frankly, seems a bit high.

13) greed. and all its attendant corrupt symptoms and systems: capitalism; centralized communism; corporatism; greed; slavery, etc. people more interested in making money than in seeing to it that the needs of everyone are taken care of. maybe that .0001% of decent people would be higher if most of the world didn't live under a system that drives people to kill for profit.

14a) bigotry. xenophobia, homophobia, patriotism, racism, sexism, religious dogmatism etc...all that shit that divides people, pitting them against one another instead of focusing on how we are all feeling, living beings with a right to exist on this fucking planet.

14b) ignorance. lack of understanding and hatred is what causes ignorance. love gives us wisdom because true love uses compassion and reason to see and understand all. whoever said love is blind is full of shit.

15) lack of government transparency. what the fuck are you guys up to? we elected your ass, we pay taxes, we have a right to know!

16) struggling for fairness. why do we have to struggle for what is right and good and just and kind and decent?...that's bullshit. what kind of world is this anyway? it should just be automatic.

17) not considering how your actions will negatively impact another. from minor incidences like bringing your baby into a movie theater who's gonna start crying, to allowing your dog to bark outside day after day, to major ones like supporting stores who use sweat shop labor, to driving while impaired...it's all part and parcel of the same lack of consideration for others, which sometimes can have fatal results.

18) hypocrisy. saying one thing and doing another. criticizing with one hand while propping up with the other. it's hard to not be a hypocrite in some aspects of your life, but we ought to reduce it to a minimum as best we can. now of course, you can hold some pretty nasty and wicked views on a subject and not be a hypocrite about it, but that in no way makes you a noble person because of it.

19a) exploitation and abuse. of people and nonhuman animals. particularly disturbing is when the person (or animal) does not even have the ability to defend themselves. that's fuckin' evil shit!

19b) rednecks. with their barbaric rodeos, a most foul display of exploitation and cruelty.

20) "i was just doing my job". yea well, how convenient. that completely takes away any responsibility you may have then doesn't it. as long as someone else higher up gives his command, all you need to do is be an obedient, brainless robot and comply. and it doesn't matter who may be harmed or killed in the process, because you were just doing your job. just stick the needle into troy davis's arm. brutal!

...to be continued...

We Are All Each Other

2011-10-16T20:10:00.001-06:00

we want a better world. one that's kinder, more fair and just, and one that considers the needs of all people. we want a world where people respect the environment, a world with clean air, water and land. how each of us consumes plays a huge part in how polluted our world is.

but how can we demand positive changes in the world, if we display a rote disconnect between our actions and a crumbling ecosystem . buying tim hortons disposable coffee cups may seem like a small thing, but millions of people doing "a small thing" can create a huge garbage problem. we all need to consider the impact our actions are having on our planet. and it all starts with you and me and our local community.

how we choose to feed, clothe, house and transport ourselves can go a long way toward creating a better world, or creating one that is much worse.

right off the bat, if we eat meat, we don't care about the well being of nonhuman animals. whether we are talking about so called free range animals, or those raised on factory farms, we are condoning the killing of sentient beings to satisfy our pleasures of the palate. the reduction of suffering is of paramount importance for a kinder world, and for that reason, factory farms, with their overcrowded and inhumane conditions should be boycotted.

but even free range animals are eventually killed, and for what? surely killing, if not done in strict self defense, is an abhorrent evil as well. not only robbing the life of a creature with an emotional existence, but at the same time suppressing that better part of our humanity, namely, empathy for another feeling being.

subsistence hunters, like those in many first nations communities, live that way for their survival, and have done so for thousands of years. but now, thanks to western lifestyles, that native way of life is becoming as extinct as the animals that sustained them. the vast majority of us however, are not subsistence hunters. for us, it is for reasons of gluttony and greed that we raise animals for food.

one might argue that raising animals for food provides jobs, just as, for example, the tar sands provides jobs. but jobs are not an end in themselves. people who steal, injure and murder others provide jobs for police, lawyers, judges, jailers etc, but no one would suggest that we shouldn't lessen the amount of crime in our neighborhoods because it employs people. and why? because these things cause harm to others and our goal as an ethical, thoughtful, caring society is to reduce the amount of harm we cause to others who have the capacity to suffer.

if we want to create a better world, we need to start with one that respects the right of living, breathing, feeling beings to exist without being exploited by us for profit or to fill our bellies.

reducing our consumption, garbage and the pollution we produce, must play pivotal roles in our lives if we are to struggle for improvement in this world. for those who don't do it voluntarily, we must tax the abusers or substantially fine them. polluters like the tar sands would pay heavy fines indeed and owners of huge gas guzzling pick up trucks and SUVs would be taxed so high they couldn't afford to drive them. if a system like capitalism is antithetical to reducing consumption, then we must modify it or dismantle it altogether.

let us occupy the world, but please, let us at the same time be good examples and role models for others to follow, and alter how we choose to live our lives by making more considerate, compassionate and ethical choices. that means not buying coffee in disposable cups, in a disposable bag, placed on a disposable cup holder. we are being overrun with garbage in our consumer based disposable society. consumption and unlimited growth may be good for the economy, but it is terrible for our ecology.

we must begin to care about the other beings we share the planet with, by not raising them for food, or destroying wild habitat because of our growing population.

there are evil external forces beating down upon us that keep us in subjection, just as we keep many nonhuman animals oppressed. maybe they ought to be holding occupy demonstrations against us, but they can't, so we continue our arrogant behavior of "dominion" over them.

oil and gas influencing our government and policy making while quashing attempts to find cleaner, more sustainable energy alternatives is a huge problem today. one that, unfortunately, we are all complicit in. anyone who drives, heats their home, or cooks their food, is a fossil fuel junkie only feeding the beast that is destroying our world.

yesterday at occupy edmonton, there were people on stationary bikes that were hooked up in such a manner to power speakers and a microphone. very cool. if these occupy demonstrations here and around the globe are to mean anything, and are to have a lasting impact, they must not only seek to get rid of the corporate influence in politics and our judicial system, but also implant in everybody's mind the idea of living more ethically and thoughtfully.

the narrative is already changing as issues of the grossly iniquitous distribution of wealth, or money controlling elected officials, or reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, are being discussed around dinner tables all across this country. now we need to translate these discussions into positive and considerate actions. then millions of people doing seemingly small things, like for example, going vegan, or cutting down on the amount of throw-away products that are purchased, or simply driving less, will have a huge impact toward fashioning more loving and mindful communities.

it's not about creating perfection, it's about striving to make the world a better place.

finally, let's remember the words of john lennon, "i am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together". what is it that traces the insuperable line between "they" and "we"? are we not all each other, capable of experiencing a life where things can fare well or ill for us? if we are all troy davis, then we are also all his executioner. we should not deny and hide the worst aspects of ourselves, but rather confront and overcome them through compassion, empathy, understanding...and love.

Occupy Edmonton 10-15-2011

2011-10-15T20:42:00.001-06:00

Some sights from Occupy Edmonton, October 15, 2011

We Are The 99%!

We Will No Longer Remain Silent!

gathering in churchill square

a great sign from one of the beautiful people

this one really sums it up

i like that, "kick the fossils out of politics". government by, for and of the people...not by, for and of the oil and gas companies

alberta and canada have turned into a petrostate

good to see linda duncan there. NDP MP for my riding in edmonton strathcona...YAY! the only non-tory riding in alberta

capitalism is an evil system

take the corporate influence out of politics

"We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity." ~ American physicist Albert Bartlett

amen!

the people have awoken

on the march! We Are The 99%!

anonymous dude

end corporate captivity...and i would add, wage slavery as well

these guys were generating a lot of favorable responses from passing motorists

people of all ages having fun in the new revolution

let's move beyond our polluting addiction to oil toward clean, renewable energy sources

everybody's getting along

a wonderful diversity of people

clean land, air and water belongs to everyone. let's be responsible stewards and care for this planet and all its inhabitants.

one gets the feeling that anything is possible now. from minor reform to total revolution. OccupyTogether!

EnCana Bastards

2011-10-13T11:25:00.001-06:00

you're not going to get away with poisoning people. the alberta government may be on your side but the people are against you and will fight back. we will not rest until you stop! that is a promise.

to all companies fracking our land, you are not welcome! you will be resisted.

the video below is in eight parts and about 80 minutes long. it was Filmed at the POWERS (Protecting Our Water and Ecological Services Society) workshop, held on September 10, 2011, in Cochrane Alberta. Filmed and edited by Will Koop, Coordinator, B.C. Tap Water Alliance and Stop Fracking British Columbia.

it tells the story of jessica ernst in her own words. she describes how her life, near the small southern alberta community of rosebud, has been turned upside down by gas companies using a method called hydraulic fracturing to extract gas from shale. her water has been poisoned with methane and other chemicals as a result of this fracking. yet the government of alberta, who is supposed to regulate these oil and gas companies, has only defended industry.

one good thing about people, they have a tendency to band together in solidarity for those who have been treated unjustly. no one likes it when their own government lies to them and defends a company's interest in making money over the well-being of the community.

Stop Fracking Up Our World!

2011-10-13T00:32:00.001-06:00

Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil And The Future Of A Continent, gives a talk at POWERS (Protecting Our Water and Ecological Resources Society) workshop on Fracking in Alberta, Cochrane Roundhouse, Cochrane Alberta, September 10, 2011.

in 9 parts. duration 1:22:21

Everything you ever wanted to know about the dangers and harm caused by hydraulic fracturing is presented in this lecture, with particular focus on what is happening in Alberta. The province has a horrific environmental record, with government agencies and elected officials using dishonesty, deception and secrecy to defend industry when they should be telling everyone the truth about the effects of oil and gas exploration and extraction. but doing that would mean losing a lot of money...wouldn't it? good to see where your priorities lie alberta. profits over people is your mantra.

Thank you to WillKoop who uploaded these videos to youtube.

Private Property Strips our Freedom and Destroys our Future

2011-10-12T10:34:00.002-06:00

recently, ambassador, author of the pamphlet time for outrage, and concentration camp survivor, stephane hessel, appeared on democracy now! and was asked why there is such an anti-immigrant sentiment in many countries of the world and what impact this has on uniting people. he replied:

I think the word "security" is one of the most dangerous words that can be used by governments. They say, "For reasons of security, we cannot accept this, we cannot do that, we cannot do the other." Security is all right, but freedom is even more important.

and why do we need all this security? to protect private property and personal ownership. accepting the idea of private property and ownership is why people tolerate democracy restricting security measures. we believe our right to personal ownership and the constant buying and consumption of things makes us free. but how can we be free when we are constantly living in fear of someone else who is out to hurt us and take our stuff?

for some reason we have allowed our slavery to property, and all its concomitant violations of freedom, to trump democracy.

yes, funneling wealth to the top does create jobs. jobs for those who maintain this unjust system based on inequality and greed. how much time, effort and money is spent on police, lawyers, judges, jailers, armies etc., all in an effort to protect our things, instead of seeing to it that the needs of all are taken care of? imagine how much brain power and resources we would have available for education, health care and creating clean, livable communities if we weren't so worried about protecting our stuff.

executive director of the labor and worklife program at harvard and member of the democratic socialists of america, elaine bernard, has stated:

Medieval life, was a collectively lived life. It was a brutish, nasty affair. But there was a collective responsibility. People belonged to the land; the land did not belong to people. And in this European world, people, farmed the land in a collective way, because they saw it as a commons.

Beginning with Tudor England, we began to see a phenomenon emerge, and that is the enclosure of the great commons by parliamentary acts in England, and then in Europe. And so, first we began to take the great land masses of the world which were commons and shared, and we reduced those to private property. Then we went after the oceans, the great oceanic commons, and we created laws and regulations that would allow countries to claim a certain amount of water outside their coastal limits for exploitation.

In this century we went after the air, and we divided it into air corridors that could be bought and sold for commercial traffic for airplanes.

With deregulation, privatization, free trade, what we’re seeing is yet another enclosure and if you like private taking of the commons.

One of the things I find very interesting in our current debates is this concept of who creates wealth. That wealth is only created when it’s owned privately.

What would you call clean water, fresh air, a safe environment? Are they not a form of wealth? And why does it only become wealth when some entity puts a fence around it and declares it private property? Well, you know, that’s not wealth creation. That’s wealth usurpation.

the destruction of our ecology, where private industries and multinational oil and gas companies are polluting the air and water and destroying the land and stripping away native hunting rights for indigenous people, is not only a usurpation of what belongs to all beings now, it is also a usurpation of what rightfully belongs to all those who will come after us.

a clean environment is the commons belonging to all creatures of this planet, and we are destroying it in the name of ownership and private profit. we believe we have a right to take and keep, in other words steal, what rightfully belongs to all. and it belongs to all because all are the inhabitants of earth and need a clean, healthy world to survive.

the fact that there are so many fossil fuel burning vehicles on the road, pumping poisonous emissions into the atmosphere, illustrates how we believe we have a right to destroy what belongs to all because of this god-like notion of worshiping private property and personal ownership.

french anarchist pierre joseph proudhon in his book what is property writes:

Then I commenced a most laborious investigation. It was necessary to arrange informal notes, to discuss contradictory titles, to reply to captious allegations, to refute absurd pretensions, and to describe fictitious debts, dishonest transactions, and fraudulent accounts. In order to triumph over quibblers, I had to deny the authority of custom, to examine the arguments of legislators, and to oppose science with science itself. Finally, all these operations completed, I had to give a judicial decision. I therefore declared, my hand upon my heart, before God and men, that the causes of social inequality are three in number:

1. Gratuitous appropriation of collective wealth;
2. Inequality in exchange;
3. The right of profit or increase.

And since this threefold method of extortion is the very essence of the domain of property, I denied the legitimacy of property, and proclaimed its identity with robbery.

property is not only theft, it is destruction. it is destruction of our external world and it is destruction of the internal world of our minds as well. we are witnessing how our desire to own, to make a profit, to accumulate more and more, is causing horrendous stresses on our atmosphere due to industrial pollution, which then has adverse effects on people's health, with increasing cases of cancer for example . it is causing untold suffering in the form of poverty and wildlife habitat loss.

but it is also destruction of the better part of the human mind. the mere fact that we have come to accept the very idea of it as normal and live our lives by it, only serves to allow greed to flourish. greed may or may not be a natural trait, but it doesn't matter, it is harmful to our own and to another's well-being and should be kept in check, not encouraged by systems like free market capitalism. it suppresses our other more beneficial and positive sentiments of sharing and empathy for the suffering of another.

the idea of private property is also destroying our ability to think beyond our current economic arrangements, toward a system of personal governance and social responsibility, where the world's wealth is more equitably distributed among everybody.

we now view, at least in theory if not in practice, the ownership of humans as immoral and unjust because it robs the slave of his freewill and well-being (one day we will also come to the realization, as many already have, that to enslave sentient, thinking and feeling nonhuman animals is wrong as well). but if we do not abolish the idea of taking and keeping for ourselves the essentials of what another requires to live (eg. land, food, water, shelter, clothing, access to transport, tools of communication etc.) then we are still holding people in subjection.

if others do not have access to what they require, to not only sustain their lives, but to give it any sort of personal meaning and enjoyment, because we own it, then we rob them of their lives. we are thieves. we are either forcing them into a position of servitude toward us so that we may give them a few metaphorical table scraps to keep them going, or we are forcing them to unite and take from us, by whatever means necessary, what rightfully belonged to them, what rightfully belonged to all, in the first place.

both slavery and ownership are two sides of the same evil coin. either a person is free to have access to clean air, land, water and nutritious food, without taking away those same things from another, or he is a slave to the ones who have claimed ownership of them.

as humanity grows and matures we will no doubt find fairer and more just ways of distributing the world's wealth, in addition to building cleaner, more sustainable local economies based upon healthier, renewable energy sources. it is not that we don't have enough for everyone, we do. the problem is our reluctance to share because of a system that values and encourages personal fortune and greed over the well-being of all people and taking care of this planet, which all of its denizens call...home.

Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street 10-09-2011

2011-10-10T22:03:00.001-06:00

transcript:

They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, "Hey, look down!"

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffeinated process. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, "Impossible, this means totalitarian state." There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.

Greed Sows the Seeds of Its Own Demise

2011-10-09T01:40:00.000-06:00

a capitalist economy and protection of our natural world are inimical to one another. the former demands us to consume more and continue spending so it can prosper and grow, while the latter requires us to reduce our consumption so it may flourish.

this free market economy is destroying our clean air, water and soil, all in the name of profit, and in so doing it will ultimately destroy itself and us, not to mention countless other innocent creatures in the process. greed sows the seeds of its own demise and it doesn't care who it takes down with it.

stop the wholesale destruction of the natural world which belongs to all beings, not just human, by saying enough is enough. the way we are living now is not sustainable nor is it healthy or conducive to the well-being and happiness of all.

private industry and big business shaping government policy has had its day. it is now time to create a different world, one that is cleaner, juster and more socially responsible to the needs of all.

We Are Part of the 100%

2011-10-09T00:15:00.001-06:00

thinking differently
connection to the world
within
and around

the silence and the music
redounds
and rebounds like a century plant

this could be the time
like a dream in the mind
that lasts outside
much longer than the blink of an eye

fading away
with a smile on his face
then smelling a redolent tune

its orange but more
as he opens the door
to begin where a daisy once bloomed

from the small to the large
on a beach near and far
where the ammonite's soul interjects

but when we went back
there was no need to ask
it was plain that all property's theft

and as the bacon lay dead
from its once living flesh
we mutilate life for the taste

what right do we have
to rob sentience and laugh
away actions we cannot erase

while on the way home
they were laughing and cold
'cause all beauty is ugly and gone

so used to the way
that we work and we play
but now something's horribly wrong

thinking differently
occupation of the world
within
and around

the silence and the drumming
redounds
and rebounds like a century plant

this could be the time
it is real in the mind
that lasts outside
much longer than the blink of an eye

Naomi Klein on Real Limits and Scarcity vs. False Limits and Scarcity

2011-10-06T12:17:00.001-06:00

from democracy now! 10-06-2011

This is one of the contradictions of capitalism, is that it is so destructive that it destroys its own base, whether that’s its base of consumers able to buy its own products, which is why you have to feed them cheap credit, which then becomes a bubble that pops and destroys the economy, or whether it’s the destruction of the ecosphere, I mean, whether it’s the destruction of the natural systems on which we depend. And this is why I think we need the economic and ecological crisis as absolutely intertwined, if not the same crisis, that has their roots in unfettered greed and an inability to say, enough, and an inability to understand that there are limits; that there is such a thing as scarcity in the natural world. And this is one of the things—-there is such a thing as a limit in what our atmosphere can absorb in terms of the pollution that we put out.

Our understanding of limits is so twisted, because we don’t understand those limits. We don’t understand the real limits imposed on us by physics and chemistry, but we impose these absolutely false limits, when it comes to economics. This is one of the themes that really struck me talking to demonstrators yesterday at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, was the theme of false scarcity, that we are living in this age were everybody is told there’s not enough. There’s not enough money for people to have decent health care. There’s not enough money for people to have decent housing. There’s not enough space in the country for immigrants because there’s not enough. We’re told this all the time. We live with this, and that’s what is so powerful and so symbolic about the decision to go to Wall Street, to go to this space of abundance and expose the lie of scarcity. But, at the same time as we expose that lie of scarcity, and to show yet, no, actually this is an abundant society, we have a crisis of distribution in this society, we also have to recognize where there are real limits. The limits of our natural systems to absorb the tremendous stresses that we’re putting on them, and climate change is only one part of those stresses.

The Occupied Wall Street Journal

2011-10-05T10:35:00.002-06:00

Click On Pictures To Enlarge

download a pdf copy here
download 2nd edition here

The Dying Remains of Free Market Capitalism

2011-10-04T01:16:00.000-06:00

there are those who are always on the side of the system. there to support prisons, police, jailers and judges. there to praise industry, corporations, bosses and bigotry. perhaps out of fear or maybe out of ignorance, citing tradition as a justification for keeping things the way they are. but the main reason, i believe, that many people want to keep propping up a cruel and corrupt system, is because they think that it works for them, and they believe they can count on it to protect what they have, or would like to have, namely piles and piles of money.

but for the most part, the vast majority of people don't have piles and piles of money and nor are they ever likely to have it. but they cling to this idea that our current economic arrangement will make them rich, with a tighter grip than a gambler's hand on a one armed bandit. and just like that gambler, they are oblivious to the reality of what's going on around them. so mesmerized are they with the ringing bells of riches, and the promise of profit that their dazed mind keeps them transfixed on that ever elusive pot of gold at the end of the capitalist rainbow.

and as they keep plugging their time and energy into this economic slot machine, that may spit out a nickel or two here and there to keep them coming back for more, the real winners in all of this are the wall street casino swindlers and the multibillion dollar transnational corporations. they're the ones who have the power and the cash to influence our elected officials and even our judicial system, with a quid pro quo contract, whose only purpose, it would seem, is to make it easier for these rapacious plutocrats to accumulate even more money.

but as the chasm between the rich and the rest grows deeper and wider, the chances of making that leap to luxury grows more and more difficult. not only that, but by busting our asses with longer hours for less real money as we continue to make our employers wallet fat, we only prop up a system that has no concern for us and our day to day lives, or the homeless person on the street, or our rapidly disappearing natural world. no, the system we prop up only serves to regard the interests of the wealthy, the interests of the consuming greedy.

when prices on everything from groceries to gas, from electricity to earmuffs keeps rising bit by bit, month by month, and year to year, our wages never seem to keep pace. but surely the labor of millions of people must be making somebody a lot of money somewhere. it sure is, but it sure ain't 99% of us.

you want to go to school, work hard, have a rewarding career and make a decent dollar, i think that's great. unfortunately, that is getting harder and harder to accomplish as more and more people are drowning in debt from such things as ridiculously high student loans. and with no guarantee of a decent job even after completing years of university.

but hey, if you can accomplish this "american dream", more power to you. maybe the system works in your favor. but as one person takes, another has something taken away, and that's just not right.

"well i'm successful, they can be too. all they have to do is work hard. they're just lazy and want a handout."
really? is that what you think? fuck you! yea that's right. fuck you, you arrogant piece of shit! just because somebody is poor or hasn't achieved your level of success, that doesn't mean they're lazy or want a handout from you. but if you want to talk about people begging for handouts, then let's mention the billions of dollars in corporate welfare bailout money that the banks and auto makers received in 2008.

there are many working poor in this country who have multiple jobs to try and make ends meet. there are many more who cannot find work through no fault of their own. there are many with mental illnesses who are literally thrown out of heath care facilities for lack of funding, and are forced out onto the street with no friends or family and nowhere to turn.

not everybody was born into a situation that enables them to have the success of others because their basic human needs are not met. they don't have enough to eat, they don't have the same access to quality medical care that you or i may have. and if a person is hungry and sick they have difficulty concentrating in school and so their education suffers. perhaps there is violence in the home or substance abuse.

everyone is different and everyone has different needs. we don't all act the same under similar circumstances. but if we try and level the playing field and attempt to understand the needs of all individuals of all backgrounds, and appreciate how our choices and actions affect the well-being of others, perhaps we can eradicate this cancer called poverty from not only this country but across the whole world.

but when corporations and environment-destroying industries are pulling the strings controlling our politicians, concern for social programs, education and health care, which serves the needs of all the people and is the whole reason for having a government in the first place, suddenly becomes less of a priority. then it is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of private industry, by private industry and for private industry.

it takes compassion, understanding and sharing to resolve the world's problems, not wars, secrecy and holding fast to a system that doesn't benefit all of its citizens. if one person suffers because of our unjust economic arrangement, then that's one too many and we need to change it, not make excuses or devise ways to maintain it.

as countries across the world struggle with trillion dollar debts, and austerity measures near and far put a deeper bite into people's lives, and banks are getting bailed out with billions of dollars to keep them operating while the CEOs receive millions in bonuses, people are fed up. they are demanding a fairer distribution of wealth that serves everyone, not just the upper 1%. they are angry and they are voicing that outrage in the streets. it is time we all join together and become the conscientious objectors of an inequitable economic system. we must all heed the call to create a juster, cleaner, kinder, more radiant and democratic world, that will flourish upon the dying remains of free market capitalism.

Lawrence O'Donnell on Police Brutality at Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-26T20:52:00.002-06:00

from the last word with lawrence o'donnell 09/26/2011

full clips of the clash between demonstrators at occupy wall street and the police.

apparently, the cop who pepper sprayed the girl in the video is Deputy Inspector Anthony V. Bologna.

those "peace" officers who stand idly by while innocent people are being mistreated, give their tacit consent to the violence being perpetrated by their fellow cops. they are therefore just as guilty as those who commit these heinous acts.

even if we grant that the "few bad apples" who carry out the clubbing, pepper spraying and roughing up of individuals are not the majority of those who make up the police force, the number of officers who allow this kind of brutality to take place by not stepping in to prevent it, surely are, as this video demonstrates, the vast majority.

it is the responsibility of the police to protect people from those who would cause them harm, but when it is the police who are doing the harming (sanctioned by the state and the courts), where are the people to turn?

calling all cops who still have a conscience and a sense of moral justice...come out, come out wherever you are! protect and serve. stand up for what is right! stand up for the democratic principles which make your nation great! the people demand it, and more importantly, honesty, integrity and a world where all have a right to exist without fear of exploitation, oppression and having their voices and interests silenced demands it!

Alberta Government...Wolf Killers

2011-09-16T08:21:00.000-06:00

There are a number of factors contributing to the declining woodland caribou populations in Canada. David Suzuki has summed up the dire situation in his piece entitled, Woodland caribou are at a crossroads, where he spells out the need to take action now to protect these beautiful animals.

A not insignificant player in the decreasing numbers of woodland caribou is none other than...you guessed it, the tar sands operation in northeastern Alberta. Just another example of how this poisonous project is destroying our natural world.

Now, in order to protect some of the caribou, the government of Alberta has come up with a most brilliant plan where it "has spent more than $1 million poisoning wolves with strychnine and shooting them from the air."

Out-rageous! How dare they spend my tax dollars on this inhumane, barbaric and vicious program. It makes me utterly ashamed to be a Canadian when I hear of such an idiotic and cruel activity like this taking place.

Do people even give a damn though? In an article from the Edmonton Journal, Senseless Slaughter of Wolves, dated June 11, 2011, veteran wolf biologist Lu Carbyn, who has written and edited several books on wolves is quoted as saying,

More and more, it seems, people are drifting away from the natural world. Part of it is due to urbanization. Part of it may be due to the fact that the new generation has found other ways of entertaining themselves. But I think that the connection we have to the natural world is weakening.

It's not just people who live on this planet you know. We seriously need to come to the realization that we share it with many other creatures who have just as much of a right to exist on it as we do. But then sharing the earth isn't really paramount on most people's minds right now, is it? Especially when it comes to nonhuman animals and especially it would seem, rich, white people. No one gives a damn about indigenous communities and no one gives a damn about nonhuman animals, unless they can be exploited to make a buck or two.

Let me digress a bit and give you just one example, and trust me there are many, of the arrant lack of consideration given to the native communities in this bigoted province. On April 28, 2006, there was a problem at the Syncrude tar sands operation where a toxic cloud of ammonia was released (and in all likelihood, other nasty chemicals as well). The winds that day blew it north to the Cree community of Fort MacKay. The gas entered into the school's ventilation system where as a result, many of the children suffered from nausea, eye irritation, headaches and several had to be rushed to the hospital.

Syncrude said, "Oops", and claimed to fix the problem. The provincial government did nothing.

Weeks later, another noxious cloud was released, but this time the wind carried it south to Fort McMurray. Oh, oh, I hear there's lots of white people there...WITH MONEY! When the people of Fort McMurray complained, the government sent in mobile units which detected high levels of ammonia. MLA Guy Boutilier ordered the plant shut down. The cloud dispersed and thankfully no one was seriously harmed.

But hang on, how come when the people of Fort MacKay complained of the exact same thing nothing was done? Oh, I see, because they're just a bunch of indigent Indians and nobody gives a fuck about them. Well thank you for clearing that up government of Alberta (fuckin' rednecks!).

When natural systems begin to collapse all around us, that means that sentient, feeling, living, breathing individual creatures are dieing. They are being killed, either directly, in the case of this ridiculous Alberta government wolf murdering program (or another pride of Canada, the seal hunt), or because of habitat destruction, due to mega projects like the rotten tar sands.

All in the name of jobs and the economy. Jobs, economy, jobs, economy, so goes the mantra, as we wander like zombies eating up everything in our path. Sure, the economy is important, but good God man, so is the natural world! Is it so difficult to behave in such a manner where we actually pause to consider the interests of all those who will be affected by our actions, including wildlife, before we decide to act?

"It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it", someone once said. Bullshit! What kind of sociopathic approach is that? "Well, here I am working at the tar sands driving a big dump truck responsible for raping the earth, but Goddammit am I ever good at what I do." It's absolutely what we do that matters. Our actions have consequences, and when those actions hurt or kill others we have a moral obligation to stop what we're doing and change our conduct. Then find a more ethical way to make a living.

As more and more people decide to have more and more babies there is less and less space on this world for everyone. Not only for us but for our nonhuman animal kin as well. And in the battle for space on this planet, it's the animals who lose, time after time after time. People just can't seem to divest themselves of that vile biblical refrain,

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

What a crock of shit. What a tremendously ignorant and arrogant way of looking at the natural world, and people still believe that garbage...even many atheists. And oh how we have heeded those words. It's what drives our precious economy. Exploit, destroy, get government off our back so there's no regulation, use up, move on.

And the band played on.

Here is the story from the Edmonton Journal Senseless slaughter of wolves June 11, 2011

Noam Chomsky on Why Republicans Want to Destroy Social Security

2011-09-13T20:12:00.002-06:00

from democracy now 9/13/2011

But I think, myself, that there’s a more subtle reason why they’re opposed to it, and I think it’s rather similar to the reason for the effort to pretty much dismantle the public education system. Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient. And I suspect—I don’t know how to measure it exactly, but I think that that’s a considerable part of the drive on the part of small, privileged sectors to undermine a very efficient, very effective system on which a large part of the population relies, actually relies more than ever, because wealth, personal wealth, was very much tied up in the housing market. That was people’s personal wealth. Well, OK, that, quite predictably, totally collapsed. People aren’t destitute by the standards of, say, slums in India or southern Africa, but very—suffering severely. And they have nothing else to rely on, but what they—the, really, pittance that they’re getting from Social Security. To take that away would be just disastrous.

Magnitude 5.9 Earthquake Hits Virginia

2011-08-23T12:33:00.000-06:00

You don't suppose fracking and mountaintop mining played a role in the earthquake...do you? Hmm, humans having a negative impact on the environment? Nah, couldn't be...that's just crazy talk. And climate change is a hoax.

(keep it up assholes)

Air Pollution in Alberta

2011-08-14T13:22:00.004-06:00

Here is a pollution map of Canada from 2009
According to the EPA, methane leakage from oil & gas wells makes up more than one quarter of the total methane emissions to the atmosphere. There are more than 300,000 oil & gas wells in Alberta with some 60,000+ coal bed methane wells planned for the future. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

click to enlarge

The air pollutant emissions data was compiled in collaboration with provincial, territorial and regional environmental agencies using the latest emission estimation methodologies and statistics available, and data reported by facilities to the National Pollutant Release Inventory. It represents the most comprehensive information on emissions of key air pollutants available in Canada. ~ Environment Canada

Here is a pollution map of North America from 2005

This map shows the locations of almost 35,000 industrial facilities in North America that reported on releases or transfers of pollutants in 2005. ~ Commission for Environmental Cooperation

Big Think Interview with Richard Dawkins - 10/21/2009

2011-08-08T20:15:00.000-06:00

Richard Dawkins: Yes. I'm Richard Dawkins, former Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth, among others.
Question: How would you correct the understanding that evolution is a theory?
Richard Dawkins: The word “theory” can be used to mean something speculative and tentative. In everyday speech it probably usually is used in that sense. Scientists very often use it in a much more positive sense. I think the easiest way is to use the ordinary language word “fact”. In the ordinary language sense of the word fact, evolution is a fact.
Question: What is the evidence that evolution is a fact?
Richard Dawkins: The evidence that makes it a fact is partly fossil evidence, partly comparative evidence, looking at modern species and comparing their bones, their organs, their structures generally, and especially their molecules, their genes, at a molecular level. This is extremely persuasive and powerful evidence. You compare the genes of animals and plants. You find that the pattern of resemblance is a tree, a branching tree. And that branching tree could only be a family tree. Other very persuasive evidence is the geographical distribution of animals and plants on islands and continents: they're exactly where we should expect them to be if evolution were a fact.
Question: What is the central tenet of your book, The Selfish Gene?
Richard Dawkins: Natural selection chooses among self-replicating entities. Those self-replicating entities have some kind of power over their probability of being copied, of being replicated, of being passed on. In practice that almost always means choosing between alternative DNA genes. So it's about the natural selection, the disproportionate -- it's about the unequal survival of genes through generations. That is natural selection. We see it in the form of changes of phenotypes; that's to say changes in bodies, because it's through the changes in the bodies that the genes induce, that they insure their survival or fail to survive. The ones that are good at surviving are the ones that are good at building bodies that are good at surviving and reproducing.

Question: What does it mean that we’re gene machines?
Richard Dawkins: We’re gene machines in the sense that a body is constructed by genes that have been successful in surviving in the past; they're good at surviving because they're good at constructing machines in which they survive. So a body is a machine for the propagation of the genes that built it.
Question: What are some of the remaining mysteries of evolution?
Richard Dawkins: One important active area is the origin of sex and why we have sex at all. It's controversial and interesting and unsolved. Another one I think would be the evolution of consciousness, especially human consciousness. Another one would be the embryological roots by which genes influence bodies.
Question: What is the main mystery of sex?
Richard Dawkins: Well, the mystery there is that, on the view the selfish gene, every animal is trying to maximize the number of genes that it passes on. And so mixing half your genes with those of a sexual partner seems like an odd thing to do, and on the face of it it's throwing away half your genes with every child you have. So it needs an explanation, and various explanations have been suggested.
Question: What is the most popular explanation for the act?
Richard Dawkins: I supposed the most fashionable one now is the one that's associated with the name of W. D. Hamilton, my former Oxford colleague. He took the view that parasites are the most important selection pressure bearing on creatures, and that parasites, because they are -- especially bacteria -- evolving so incredibly rapidly, the genes that any one individual needs in order to survive in the present generation of parasites may not be the genes that are needed in future generations. So there needs to be an extremely rapid turnover, extremely rapid changing, of gene pools. And sex may be -- well, sex certainly will do that. And the only question is whether the pressure from parasites is sufficiently great to compensate the so-called twofold cost of sex, the fact that sexual reproduction does throw away half the genes in each generation.
Question: Why can’t we understand the basis of consciousness?
Richard Dawkins: Well, both what it is -- it clearly has something to do with brains, and it's something that emerges from brains. When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge. As to what it is, that's a philosophically very difficult question, which biologists are no more equipped to deal with than anybody else.
Question: Is there a certain brain capacity necessary for the development of consciousness?
Richard Dawkins: Oh, nobody knows, because we don't know which animals are conscious. We don't actually, technically, even know that any other human being is conscious. We just each of us know that we ourselves are conscious. We infer on pretty good grounds that other people are conscious, and it's the same sort of grounds that lead us to infer that probably chimpanzees are conscious and probably dogs are conscious. But when we come to something like earthworms and snails, it's anybody's guess.
Question: How can science have a unique insight into cognizance?
Richard Dawkins: Well, that's a very difficult question since we can't actually measure whether creatures are conscious. So I guess science has as much insight as any other subject, but I don't think I can answer that question directly. Maybe computer science has as much insight into it as any other science.
Question: When did you first realize you were an atheist?
Richard Dawkins: I think first the realization that there are lots of different religions, and they can't all be right. And the Christian one in which I was brought up was clearly only one of many. But that didn't finally make me into an atheist. What finally made me into an atheist was the realization that there was no scientific reason to believe in any sort of supernatural creator. And that came with the understanding of Darwinian evolution.
Question: Do scientists ever need faith?
Richard Dawkins: Not in the sense of faith as meaning belief in something for which there is no evidence. There are various senses of faith in which we do -- scientists do participate. There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do. And so when I say something that physicists tell me, such as that there was nothing before the big bang -- they're not allowed to talk about the word "before" in the context of the big bang -- I sort of have faith that physicists understand enough to be allowed to say that, even though I don't understand why they're allowed to say that. But it's not blind faith; it's not faith in the absence of evidence. It's faith that's based upon confidence in the scientific method, in the scientific peer review process, the fact that I know that there are other physicists who can test, verify, criticize the views of any one physicist. So it's not the same as religious faith, which is based upon no evidence at all.
Question: Why do so many people on earth have religious faith?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it's certainly true that so many people do have religious faith, not just individual people. Not all individual people do, but all cultures -- I think I'm right in saying that all peoples -- in the plural -- have had faith, religious faith of some kind. They believe in some kind of supernatural gods or goddesses or leprechauns or whatever it might be. Why do they have it? Well, I think it's very tempting -- when you don't really understand what's going on, when you're ignorant of the world, when you find yourself surrounded by a wonderful world, a puzzling world, a mysterious world, a frightening world -- it must be quite tempting to put your faith into a supernatural being of some kind.
Question: Did you know that you were going to be a scientist from a young age?
Richard Dawkins: No, I didn't know I was going to be a scientist from a young age. I suppose I was interested in science. I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things. I wasn't much of a biologist as a child. My father had been and gave me all the right influences, and my mother too. I went into the biological stream at school, pretty much drifted in. I suppose it was about my best subject, but it wasn't an obsession with me like it is with many birdwatchers and bug hunters, people like that.
Question: When did you decide you would devote your life to science?
Richard Dawkins: I never really decided that until I was at Oxford, at the age of about twenty, I suppose. So it wasn't at school. At school I kind of drifted into the biology sixth form, and then I knew I was always going to try to get into Oxford. And I did get into Oxford to read zoology, but I didn't really become fired up and realize that this is how I want to spend my life until about my second year at Oxford; I must have been about 19.
Question: What was your first scientific discovery?
Richard Dawkins: My doctorate, my D.Phil. at Oxford, was about decision-making in animals. And I happened to work with baby chicks, but it could have been anything. And I suppose my first discovery was of a mechanism that plausibly could be going on inside the head of a chick or any other animal when making a choice between two alternatives. It was not a piece of neurological research, which it might well have been. I mean, one could have been looking at cells in the brain and looking for mechanisms of decision-making there. But my method was more the black box method, where you don't open up the animal at all; you watch its behavior and you develop theoretical models, deduce mathematically predictions from your theoretical models, and then test those predictions against the facts -- do experiments to see whether they're true. And that's a sort of classic scientific method, the black box technique. And I used that and really rather successfully. I developed a model, used some simple algebra to deduce predictions from the model, and then did experiments which extremely accurately fulfilled those predictions.
Question: What is your favorite research project you’ve done?
Richard Dawkins: Well, my original doctoral research -- oh no, I'll talk about something else. With my first wife, Dr. Marian Stamp Dawkins, we worked on what it means to say that an animal has made a decision. If you watch the muscular movements of an animal -- we were working again on chicks, particularly drinking behavior in chicks. When a chick -- indeed, when any bird, pretty much -- drinks, it puts its bill into the water, and then it kind of scoops the water up in the bill in a rather graceful curve, and then the water kind of trickles down the gullet. And that's a very stereotyped movement. We filmed it; we filmed chicks doing this. And then we analyzed the movement frame by frame. Our definition of a decision was based upon the idea that decisions occur at the beginning of fixed action patterns, which are sequences of movements which are very stereotyped and which don't vary.
So something like that drinking movement -- down into the water and then curve up -- is a fixed action pattern. Once it starts, we conjectured, it won't stop. So a decision is the beginning of a fixed action pattern, which determines the next however many it is frames of film on our frame-by-frame analysis. So if you looked at the frames of film, you could actually measure -- and we did this -- the predictability of each frame as a function of the preceding frames. We plotted a graph of the predictability measured in information theory, measured in bits of information -- the predictability of each frame as a function of the preceding frames. And we found that when the chick began a fixed action pattern such as drinking, the predictability shot up and stayed up during the duration of the fixed action pattern. And then it shot down again, and the behavior became unpredictable; you couldn't tell what was going to happen next for a while, until it entered another fixed action pattern, when the predictability again shot up. This was a quantitative measure -- obviously, drinking itself is not of great interest -- but what is of interest is that you can quantitatively measure and express what you mean by a decision in a continuous stream of animal behavior.
Question: Have you ever started any projects that were did not complete?
Richard Dawkins: Yes. I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things. And some of them were looking quite promising. For example, I began a project on the song of crickets; this was when I was still working in a department of animal behavior. Crickets sing by vibrating their wings against each other, and different species of crickets have a different pattern of song, which they control by the movement of the wings. And I was working on South Pacific crickets -- not in the South Pacific; I had a colony of them in Oxford. And this particular cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, has a rather complicated song. It says PRR-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr, PRR-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr, PRR-prr-prr-prr-prr-prr. And that just goes on and on and on. And I wanted to know how important the details of that song were. Did it really have to have that particular pattern? And the answer was probably yes, because it was unique to that species. Related species have a different kind of song. For example, Teleogryllus commodus, a related species, said PRR-prr, PRR-prr, PRR-prr. And presumably the difference between those two crickets was significant. What I did was to write a computer program to make a computer sing like a cricket, and in which you could easily program in, using a simple sort of language which I devised, for making any cricket song you like.
So, I was able to program quickly the song of Teleogryllus oceanicus, Teleogryllus commodus, various species of gryllus and so on. And then I devised a method for measuring the attractiveness of these songs, and it was a very light seesaw made of sort of balsa wood, very light balsa wood, and at each end of the seesaw was a loudspeaker which could be made to play artificial cricket song. And you put a cricket inside the seesaw. As the cricket walked along the seesaw towards the song, the seesaw tilted and made an electrical contact, which was counted as one approach to that loudspeaker. At that point or shortly afterwards, the computer would change to making the song come out of the other loudspeaker, whereupon the cricket would turn around and walk the other way, and then the seesaw would tilt the other way. So the number of tilts of the seesaw was a measure of the attractiveness of the song. So I had it all set up to measure the rival attractiveness of different kinds of song. But then I can't remember what happened, and I switched to some other piece of research. So that piece of research was never actually done. But the apparatus that I developed and the computer program that I wrote to sing like a cricket was all working. Now it's lost for ever because it was done on now-outdated computers. You can't get that kind of computer any more. And so that's gone.
Question: Can science shed light on any moral issues?
Richard Dawkins: Science is not in the business of shedding light on moral debates, but I think it can do sometimes -- the whole subject of moral philosophy, of examining moral questions in a logical way to expose inconsistencies, for example. When you're looking at moral questions, so-called moral questions, like abortion or euthanasia, you can show that people who take a very strong absolutist line may be being inconsistent with themselves because they are taking a strong line on one thing while at the same time inconsistently not taking a similarly strong line on another. So that would be a scientific way of thinking; it's not science per se. It's moral philosophy, but it's a kind of scientific way of thinking. But also I think scientific facts can illuminate moral debate. In the case of abortion again, for example, a scientist might contribute to the debate information about at what point during the development of an embryo the nervous system comes into being. And presumably, before the nervous system comes into existence there is no ability to feel pain or to suffer. And so maybe something important happens at the moment when the nervous system comes into being.
On the other hand, you might say, well, even when a human embryo develops a nervous system and develops the capacity to perhaps suffer, it's still a much smaller nervous system than the nervous system of an adult cow. And so what about balancing the suffering of a human embryo against the suffering of an adult cow when it's being slaughtered for meat. An absolutist moralist would say, well, humans are just plain special, and cows are not humans, so they don't deserve the same moral consideration. But a scientist might come along and say, well, what do you mean by that? I mean we are, after all, all evolved; we're all cousins.
At what point in the evolution -- since we know evolution is a fact -- at what point in the evolution of humans would you suddenly draw the line and say, all right, from now on they're all human and before that they're not? In the evolutionary progression from the common ancestors with chimpanzees, who lived about six or seven million years ago, to modern humans, going through creatures which might have looked a bit like Lucy, might have looked a bit like the newly discovered fossil Ardi, would you have given special human moral ethical consideration to Lucy? Or would you count Lucy as though she was a chimpanzee? Does this perhaps suggest to you that we shouldn't be in the business of drawing lines between species in this kind of way, and maybe these lines should be regarded as more fuzzy and less clear cut. Our absolutist moralities that do draw hard and fast lines between humans and all other species -- even taking a human fetus and calling that human, whereas an adult chimpanzee is not and doesn't deserve the same moral consideration -- is that consistent with science? These are ways that science can at least inform moral discussions.
Question: Is there ever a point where scientific reasoning can harm society?
Richard Dawkins: You can, I suppose, make a utilitarian justification for obnoxious practices. You could make a utilitarian justification for torture. Moral philosophers sometimes pose the hypothetical case where the world is about to be blown up. Only one person knows the secret password to stop the doomsday bomb going off. This one person is a suicide bomber who refuses to give up the password. Are you right to torture him? And most people, I think, say you are. I mean, it's a horrible thing to torture somebody, but under those extreme conditions, to save the world you would torture somebody. And that would be a utilitarian justification for an otherwise obnoxious practice such as torture.
Question: Are our debates over ‘big’ issues effective?
Richard Dawkins: Well, some of them are. I mean, if they're debates between two intelligent and educated people, they are conducted effectively. But if they're conducted between an intelligent, educated person on the one hand and Bill O'Reilly on the other, they're probably not, no.
Question: How could we better our public discussions?
Richard Dawkins: Perhaps have more intelligent people as television interviewers, rather than people like Bill O'Reilly, for a start. That might not be great for ratings, I suppose, but perhaps we should become less influenced by ratings. [
Question: How would our public discourse change in a world without religion?
Richard Dawkins: Well, in the moral sphere I think they would be based upon criteria such as suffering, instead of absolutist criteria like all killing of humans is wrong, for example, including killing of early human embryos. We would instead say, well, who's suffering? At what point in the balance does the suffering switch over to the other side, when there's a choice? If we got rid of absolutist moral criteria, we might stop saying human life is absolutely sacred, and you can't put a monetary value on it. And you actually do put a monetary value on it all the time, because you know, whenever you make a decision like shall we have another kidney machine, or shall we -- to what safety standards shall we build airliners, one could always make airliners a little bit safer, but it would cost a lot more money. And so we do already take decisions about that. Military aircraft are built to a less risk-averse standard than civilian aircraft. We already do make judgments of this kind. So that would be the moral -- that kind of thing would change in the moral sphere. In the scientific sphere we'd be able to get on with our science as science, and not have to worry about whether we are giving offense to people who get their beliefs from holy books rather than from evidence, which we at present have to worry about. In the field of education, we could go in for science education free to actually teach children the best science we know and teach children to use the scientific method of thinking. And once again not have to pay lip service to, or respect, the dopey beliefs of their parents who try to interfere with their scientific education.

Question: Why do humans engage in so many impractical activities?
Richard Dawkins: There are many things that humans do that have nothing to do with contributing to the survival of the individual, at least nothing obvious to do with it. So when we do mathematics and when we do poetry and when we do ballet dancing and all the things that make life worth living, it's very hard to make the case that this contributes to individual survival; it clearly doesn't. What you can make a case for is that the possession of the kind of brain that's capable of doing those things contributed to individual survival in our ancestral past. So it's not the mathematics itself; it's not that doing algebra helps anybody to survive. But having the kind of big brain that incidentally proves itself capable of doing algebra -- having that kind of big brain probably did improve our survival, whether because it literally made us better at -- I don't know -- catching prey or finding nuts or something of that sort. Or whether, in accordance with the sexual selection theory you just mentioned, it's attractive to the opposite sex.
Question: Can you elaborate on the theory of sexual selection?
Richard Dawkins: This is a theory of a man called Geoffrey Miller, who is a very interesting evolutionary psychologist. And he -- we do have a bit of a puzzle as to why the human brain did get so big, really rather suddenly; it's actually one of the more rapid pieces of evolution that we know. Over the last three million years or so the human brain has swelled up enormously. And there are various theories as to why this should be. Geoffrey Miller's theory is that, as you say, the mind is a kind of human peacock's tail, and "being clever is sexy" would be one way to put it. But it would manifest itself in the ability to -- I don't know -- remember epic poetry or something of that sort. I mean, there are all sorts of different ways in which, in particular cultures, it might manifest itself
Question: How do you feel about recent attempts to end aging?
Richard Dawkins: It's easy to see why people might wish to prolong their own lives. It's a rather selfish pursuit unless you recognize and do something about the fact that birth rates are not declining in the world as a whole, and the population is rising rapidly. There may be more people alive today than there are dead people, so to speak. I mean, it may be -- if you add up the total number of people alive and then say, how far back would you have to go in time if you integrated all dead people backwards until you reach the same number as are now alive, it would be an astonishingly long time ago. So to prolong human life in an irresponsible, profligate way would be indeed irresponsible unless you at the same time reduced birth rates. If everybody lived for ever, then we'd better stop any new people being born. Otherwise we're going to be hideously overcrowded. And it's a rather presumptuous, arrogant thing to do, some might say, to say, right, well, the present generation are the last ones to reproduce. We'd better all just sit here and enjoy our lives for thousands of years. We're obviously a long way away from that now, but I know there are some people who see that as a kind of ideal, and they certainly need to think seriously about what to do about population size.
Question: What excites you most in science today?
Richard Dawkins: I suppose in my own field of biology it would be molecular genetics. It has enormous potential. It's advancing at an extremely rapid rate, coupled with computer science, which is also advancing at an extremely rapid rate. And the two are genuinely coupled; that's no accident. Moore's Law in the world of computer science states that computer power measured in various ways increases exponentially, and its doubling time is something like eighteen months.
There's another law which I've coined Hodgkin's Law, which says that sequencing genomes, the power to read genomes, increases exponentially, and the doubling time is not quite as fast as that; it's more like twenty seven months. But Hodgkin's Law and Moore's Law are related because genetic sequencing is -- the technology is very dependent upon computers. And so part of what has fed into the increase in the rate of -- in the increase in the power to sequence genomes has been the increase in computer power, which is Moore's Law.
So the two together are rendering our world ever stranger ever faster. And the Internet as we now know it would have totally astounded me if -- when I first started using computers in the 1960s, I dimly thought that something like the Internet, mass communication, might come about. But I never thought it would be anything like as powerful as it is. I would have been just blown over backwards if somebody had suddenly plunked me in front of a modern -- pushed me forward in time to 2009 and showed me a modern computer and the modern Internet connection. The same thing is happening and is going to happen to biology with respect to genome sequencing. And it's going to become possible to sequence the genome of an individual of any species for very little money, very fast. And that's going to open up enormous vistas for biological research.
And for medicine, because it means that, for example, doctors, instead of prescribing a sort of generic treatment for the disease you've got, for an average person, will prescribe the particular treatment that you as an individual need because of the particular fingerprint of genes that you've got. And that's going to be a radical change in medicine. In biological research it means that we can just sequence the genome of any species we like very quickly. Biologists of the future may be able to catch an animal or plant in the wild, stick a probe into it and immediately read out off a sort of iPhone dial its genome. This would be an astonishing leap in research power
Question: How close do you think we are to this ability?
Richard Dawkins: Well, it's becoming -- it's coming closer all the time. It's already possible to sequence a genome for a few -- I forget how -- I forget what it is -- but I mean it's a manageable number of dollars. It's still a lot, but by 2050 it'll be possible to sequence the genome of an individual for probably tens of dollars. And that would be quite an extraordinary state of affairs.
Question: What keeps you up at night?
Richard Dawkins: I can't claim it's the state of the world. I think -- know that does keep some people up, keep them awake. With me it's more personal. It's not -- it's things like I've just founded a couple of charitable foundations, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, both in Britain and America, and sort of the future of those foundations, how to run them, how to manage them. Things like that keep me awake at nights. A book that I've got to finish may keep me awake. I mean, I'm not making sufficiently fast progress in the work that I'm supposed to be doing -- that's the kind of thing that troubles me at night.
Question: Who are your heroes?
Richard Dawkins: Darwin obviously. Wallace, who's the unsung hero who independently thought of the idea. Many great scientists of the past. Peter Medawar -- I admire his writing style very much. Carl Sagan. Yes, many -- I mean, I admire great poets as well. I'm not sure that I'd call them exactly heroes. I mean, Shakespeare affects me when I read his extraordinary command of language; I admire it hugely. Yeah I suppose he is -- so he is a hero, yes, whoever he was.
Question: What makes a good scientist?
Richard Dawkins: Well, that's very interesting. You asked me who my heroes were, and I said Darwin. Darwin, I think, misdiagnosed his own character traits rather. He said, I've become nothing more than a machine for grinding theories out of facts. I don't think Darwin was that at all. Darwin was a great hypothesis-former. Darwin thought of ideas; he dreamed up ideas, which is the way scientists ordinarily do work. So I think you need to be imaginative. You need to have the imagination to put together ideas which other people haven't had. You do need to be able to work hard. Sir Hans Krebs, who discovered the Krebs Cycle, once in my presence was asked, how do you get a Nobel prize -- which he had. And he said, it's easy: you come into the lab at nine o'clock in the morning, and you leave at six o'clock in the evening every day for thirty five years, or words to that effect. I don't think that's how you do it either. No doubt that's part of it. But you need a combination of that and genuine inspiration, which is akin to poetry; it's akin to great art; it's the inventive, creative leap which great scientists have.
Recorded on: October 21, 2009. Interviewed by Paul Hoffman.

Never Trust a Junkie...or a Pusher

2011-08-05T14:39:00.039-06:00

There is a scene from the movie Sid & Nancy, where Nancy Spungen, played flawlessly by Chloe Webb, is outside leaning against a brick wall in tears, upset after having had a drink thrown in her face at the pub by some fucker who ripped her off for 50 quid. She turns to Sid, who has followed her there from the pub trying to offer comfort, and confides, "Never trust a junkie". One could also add to that, “Never trust a pusher”.

The Alberta government is just such a pusher. They, along with their partners in crime, the federal Tories (and many Liberals I might add) and the multinational oil and gas companies, want to build yet another pipeline vein into the American arm and fill it not with heroin but with bitumen, a dirty, ultra-heavy, viscous hydrocarbon, in order to keep the junkie hooked.

I would not hesitate to say that oil, in all it's forms and methods of extraction and combustion, is responsible for much more suffering and far more deaths than heroin is. And to be sure, no one in their right mind would ever defend heroin abuse.

But the Alberta and Canadian governments time and again are on the side of industry, defending the exploitation of bitumen. Touting and praising the benefits of this dirty oil to keep the user using.

Often they will downplay or outright deny any science that runs counter to what they choose to believe about the harm caused by bitumen extraction and transport. Of course they would say that. There is a lot of money at stake for them.

The pusher and his business customer, the junkie, who is too fucked up to make rational decisions, will do anything they can to keep the drug going. They will lie, cheat and steal, and come up with all sorts of justifications for why they need the drug.

In Canada, these justifications for the oil drug invariably involve those two heroes of capitalism, jobs and the economy.

Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than someone who defends heroin abuse by saying that it keeps many people employed (the growers, those who ship it, those who sell it, etc.) therefore it is good for the economy and good for us? And the reason we would find it so absurd is because we are aware of the harmful effects of heroin addiction.

Here we see that the pushers, the ones who have the most to gain and of course the most to lose, cannot be trusted to tell us the truth about their drug.

When highly respected and reputable scientists like University of Alberta Professor, Dr. David Schindler, or Treeline Environmental Research Ecologist, Dr. Kevin Timoney, et al., have illustrated irrefutable evidence on the detrimental effects of the tar sands on water quality and quantity, wildlife, the environment, and public health, one would reasonably expect that rational human beings when confronted with such data would take a step back and say, “Gee, we better change what we’re doing in order to minimize the harm caused”.

Then laws may be implemented in order to facilitate the lifestyle changes that need to take place, to see to it that individuals and society are kept safe and healthy.

That’s what reasonable people would do. But those in the Alberta government (I'm specifically looking at you Rob Renner, dishonourable Minister of the Environment) take a different approach. They scoff at facts and manufacture lies in order to keep the drug flow of oil moving.

They pretend there is controversy in the evidence where in fact, none exists. If you keep the drug user confused or withhold information from him, he will continue on his merry way of stupefied oblivion and buy your junk.

Usually the truth sets you free, but only if you act on the knowledge you have gained. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. True. But is the horse just being obstinate, or have you led him to drink from Syncrude’s tailings pond? Perhaps if we all had to drink the foul effluvium that leaks from these dozen or so pools into the Athabasca River (some estimates put it at 67 litres/second from just one pond) we would all be more inclined to act.

Just as surely as heroin addiction figured prominently in the deaths of Sid and Nancy, our addiction to oil, where we are now literally scraping the dirtiest, most foul part of the needle to get every last drop out of it, will spell the end of us. And in the process, we will be dragging countless other innocent creatures along with us to our grave.

It doesn't have to be this way. We could be creating healthier societies based upon cleaner, renewable and more sustainable energy sources. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, are just a few examples just waiting to be fully tapped, if only we would show the will and the desire to make it happen.

Most importantly, whatever form the future takes in how we choose to harness energy, reducing our consumption must play a key role in protecting our environment and maintaining any sort of balance with nature.

The American physicist, Professor Albert Bartlett, has summed the problem up this way:

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity.

But, to quote another line from Sid & Nancy, as long as we’re addicts…we’ll be full of shit!

Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner Spouts Fucking Dishonest Bullshit

2011-08-04T12:20:00.021-06:00

Watch this series of videos by ecologist Kevin Timoney of Treeline Ecological Research, where he spells out the evidence for the tar sands polluting the Athabasca River system, and decide for yourself who is more credible...impartial biologists who do hard science, or the Alberta & Canadian governments who are nothing more than mouthpieces for multinational oil & gas companies.

This petrostate Alberta government is acting similar to the way the Bush administration acted when it came to invading Iraq or using torture. Both of these right-wing regimes employ the strategy of looking for so called "experts" to tell them what they want to hear, and if they don't receive it, they will simply manufacture the information in order to fulfill their agenda.

It makes you wonder, when these politicians time and again deny or downplay the harmful effects of the tar sands on the environment and people, how much money they are receiving from these companies to be their puppets.

It was the same when there was the mad cow scare several years back, with the meat and dairy industry ever present in the back pockets of the politicians. Rather than looking into what caused the problem, the Alberta government tried to dismiss it and launched a campaign to brainwash easily manipulated Albertans by giving away "I Heart Alberta Beef" bumper stickers. The people lapped it up like they were doing their patriotic duty as good obedient Albertans believing what their government tells them.

And why was this done? Because the exploitation and slaughter of animals is very profitable in this province. Oh sure, we love our cats and dogs (although that's not strictly true either, given the number of them who are neglected or fill our shelters) and the little birds who twitter at our feeders. But how we so easily and callously can turn a blind eye to the suffering of an animal we have learned to refer to as "food', and is not our pet. You better not have any empathic feelings toward other creatures who have the capacity to feel pain...that's just anti-Albertan.

That feeling of disrespect for nature and animals spills over into how we treat the First Nations people of this province. Don't think that bigotry doesn't play a significant role in why the government doesn't give a shit about the higher cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan being caused by tar sands pollution (though they refuse to admit that industry is responsible). The amount of racist talk I hear from narrow-minded rednecks around Alberta against native people is insidiously reflected in the kind of leadership we have.

If it were rich white people who were affected by rare cancers in anything resembling the numbers we see in Fort Chip, I guarantee you there would be more of an outcry.

And so here we are with much protest in many parts of the world over dirty Alberta bitumen. But instead of doing proper science to monitor and regulate the tar sands to ensure some level of health and safety for everyone affected, the government is handing out leases to oil companies faster than (insert jocular metaphor here).

Funny how they cannot find the money to study what the harmful effects of the tar sands really are, but they can sure as hell find the cash to indoctrinate people, like the leaders of some dangerous religious cult, into thinking this operation is all hunky dory, by launching propagandic ad campaigns that attempt to show how wonderful and beneficial the tar sands are for both people and the environment.

Well to anyone with half a brain who knows the difference between scientific facts and political manipulation, these tactics won't work...unless of course we all get a free bumper sticker saying, "I Heart Alberta Oil". That would convince me.

One thing that may play a role in halting this massive assault on water quality and quantity, wildlife, the environment, and public health, is a class action lawsuit against the Alberta and Canadian governments and the companies responsible for bringing about this end of nature, by anyone and everyone who has suffered the consequences.

Downstream (2009) - Alberta Tar Sands Documentary

2011-08-03T11:17:00.005-06:00

If we could reverse the flow of the [Athabasca] and people in Fort McMurray had to drink the water that people in Fort Chipewyan drink, can you imagine what the reaction would be? ~ Dr. John O'Connor quoted from Tar Sands - Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk

Michael Moore on His New Book, "Here Comes Trouble"

2011-07-13T16:09:00.002-06:00

from May 25, 2011 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. His new book will released in September.

Yet Another Goddamned Oil Spill

2011-07-07T09:20:00.017-06:00

from Democracy Now! July 7, 2011

Listen here to what Montana farmer, Alexis Bonogofsky, has to say about the devastating impact the Exxon oil spill is having on the area where she lives, about 10 miles from where the rupture occurred this past Friday.

Hear how she is getting the royal runaround from Exxon-Mobil and how the company refers to this disaster as "an inconvenience".

The president of the oil pipeline company even went on to say that none of the air or water sampling has indicated any problems. WHAT THE FUCK?!

Bonogofsky says that no one has even been around to test the air and water quality around where she lives or done any soil sampling.

It would appear that Exxon is spouting these boldfaced lies merely to appease the public so it doesn't have a riot on its hands, or as Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) said on The Rachel Maddow Show (see Ed Markey on The Rachel Maddow Show July 8, 2011 below), when these disasters happen the companies responsible are more concerned about protecting their own liability than protecting the livability of the area they have polluted.

Exxon-Mobil, and the entire oil industry, is full of shit!

and from The Rachel Maddow Show July 6, 2011

Ed Markey on The Rachel Maddow Show July 8, 2011

42 thousand gallons of oil spilled into the Yellowstone river in Montana on Friday. This past May, over 1 million gallons of crude burst from a pipeline across the Peace River watershed in northern Alberta. How many more times are we going to put up with these multi-billion dollar oil & gas companies polluting the planet before we say, "enough is enough" and finally get off our addiction to this vile, filthy form of energy?

The Canadian Association of Journalists 2011 Conference

2011-07-06T11:00:00.000-06:00

CPAC - Video on Demand

On May 13^th to 15^th, 2011, in Ottawa, the Canadian Association of Journalists held its 2011 annual conference. This May 15^th panel examined the state of the media and foreign reporting. The Participants were Sonia Verma (The Globe and Mail), Murray Brewster (The Canadian Press), Kathy Gannon (The Associated Press) and Tom Clark (Broadcaster and Journalist).

How Many More? - original song

2011-06-28T14:28:00.008-06:00

how many more

angry people do there have to be
raising their fist in defiance
and uniting in the street

how many more
policemen on the beat
are gonna brutalize our brothers and sisters
just for demanding their equality
how many more

how many more
lies do we have to hear
before we can know what is real
and overcome imaginary fears

how many more
chances are we gonna get
to correct the mistakes we have made
before it's too late and we're dead
how many more

we're profiting from poisoning ourselves
it's off to war creating our own hell
to keep the rich securely at the top
but we're the only ones to make it stop

how many more
hungry people do there have to be
living on a dirty city corner
'cause of somebody else's greed

how many more
things to worship do we need
never mind the other who has nothing
just protect my property
how many more

how many more
fucking times are we gonna drill
so that a few can get even richer while there
are millions that'll be killed

how many more
days are gonna pass us by
before we consider what we're doing
and stop to question why
how many more

Bill McKibben on Democracy Now! - Global Warming Right Now Is The Most Difficult Problem We Face

2011-05-26T11:22:00.001-06:00

350 is the most important number in the world. The NASA scientists told us three years ago that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. That is strong language. It’s stronger still when you know that everywhere, outside your studios, up on top of Mount Everest, in the Antarctic, right now we’re at about 390 parts per million CO2 and gaining fast. That’s why this is not some future problem. It is the most pressing present crisis that we have. ~ Environmentalist Bill McKibben on Democracy Now!

Companies Responsible For Causing Environmental Destruction Subvert Democracy

2011-05-25T08:32:00.001-06:00

Wherever you see widespread environmental injury, you’re also going to see the subversion of democracy. And West Virginia is really the template for that dynamic. You’ll see the destruction of the public process at the local level, where people no longer have a say in the allocation of the public trust, the resources of the commons. You’ll see the destruction of transparency in government. You’ll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become—in West Virginia, the West Virginia DEP has become the sock puppet for the industry that it’s supposed to regulate. You’ll see the widespread corruption of public officials, which you’ve also seen. Virtually every relevant public official in the state of West Virginia is now an indentured servant for the coal industry. And you’ll also see the destruction of the press and the role of the fourth estate. And again, in West Virginia you see the press largely blind, holding a blind eye to this wholesale destruction of the landscapes. ~ Robert Kennedy, Jr. on coal mining in West Virginia

This is exactly what is happening in Alberta with the environmental devastation caused by the tar sands.

Golf Courses in Edmonton's River Valley Destroy Nature

2011-05-21T23:54:00.007-06:00

In the thin strip of "wilderness" along the North Saskatchewan river from Devon to Fort Saskatchewan, approximately 60 kms as the river winds, there are a total of twelve golf courses, or an average of one golf course every 5 kms. Wild nature is already tenuous in this so called ribbon of green and is eroded even further by these destructive playgrounds for the wealthy.

Not only do golf courses destroy natural habitat by the tremendous amount of space they require but the pesticides and fertilizers used further pollute and poison the natural environment.

Going for a walk south, on the west side of the river across from Fort Edmonton, your nature path amongst aspen poplar, rose bushes, red osier dogwood, squirrels, hares, deer, hawks and garter snakes will be disrupted by a golf course. Impeding further advancement of you and stripping away the wild habitat.

If you walk south of Terwillegar Park on the east side of the river, then past the Anthony Henday bridge, suddenly you come upon a sign stating, "private property, no trespassing". Once again the rich person's playground has taken away what rightfully belongs to all...wild nature. (When I saw that sign I thought of the line form Jefferson Airplane's We Can Be Together, "All your private property is target for your enemy, and your enemy is we.")

It may seem upon first appearances that Edmonton's river valley is a vast swath of trees and wildlife; and going for a walk along some of the trails can indeed give the illusion of unspoiled nature, but it is just that...an illusion. For what isn't steep eroding cliffs (some with million dollar plus homes perched precariously atop them patiently awaiting their turn, like so many others before them, to succumb to the geological forces that shaped the valley) is really just a narrow, fragile band of green that is pushed to the brink by surrounding development and an ever expanding population demanding more and more space for itself.

In the battle between profit and exploitation versus wilderness protection, the dollar wins every time. And whatever a human desires, irrespective of the detrimental impact it may have on other creatures, his interests trump all others.

In southern British Columbia, there is a proposal on the table to make the South Okanagan-Similkameen region a national park to protect the fragile dry plateau desert ecology, but there is opposition to it coming from ranchers, wineries and other exploitative interests such as those who want to develop golf courses.

One rancher remarked he opposed the creation of a national park because it would mean that "his" cattle could not graze there. He went on to say, there needs to be a balance between the interests of the naturalists and the people in the area who make money off of the land.

I agree. A balance is what is needed. A balance implies fairness and a just, equal weight. Well right now there is a gross imbalance when it comes to money making ventures and the natural world. Pollution, global warming, entire species of plants and animals becoming extinct or pushed to the brink of extinction, all because mankind has tipped the scale in favor of himself at the expense of the other creatures he shares the planet with.

We are at a crucial point in our history, we may have even surpassed the tipping point, where natural, wild areas are being gobbled up and eaten away by private, monied interests so fast that right now all that remains are small pockets and slivers of what were once vast areas of an ecological and vibrant diversity of flora and fauna. And even these areas are not safe when surrounded on all sides by a human population that continues to push wild nature further and further into submission by causing more and more pollution, all in the name of making money.

What right do we have to kill other beings to serve our ends? It seems there are two kinds of beings in the world, us (humans) and them (all other living creatures) and any one of them that gets in the way of whatever it is we want or if we choose to enslave and kill them for profit, then we have taken it upon ourselves as our deluded right, where religion and the bible play a not insignificant role in our thinking (Gen 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.), to treat them as though their interests do not matter.

If we do not have a consciousness raising and begin to treat other beings' interests as equal to our own, then whatever terrible fate awaits us is more than deserved. We can however change our attitude toward the natural world and the other beings we share the planet with and learn to live in harmony, respecting each individuals right just to be able to exist and be themselves, just as we would want for ourselves.

Ignorant Rednecks Get Stuck by North Saskatchewan River

2011-05-16T12:54:00.004-06:00

in the southwest corner of edmonton toward the end of 199 st around woodbend and big island, there is an area near the north saskatchewan river with wetlands, poplar forests and wildlife. it is here that a company, kanata, wants to create a gravel pit to extract sand to build roads or whatever it is one does with extracted sand.

the company is a metis cultural enterprise that says this project will create jobs. fucking sell-outs. once again it is monied interests that win out over pristine nature. i thought native people were supposed to care about the environment, not rape the earth for the sake of a dollar.

at any rate, i wanted to check out the area in question for myself so i went down to take a look at it. it's hard to get to because private property blocks the way to the river and there are many signs that say no trespassing. i guess as long as you have the money, you can take away what rightfully belongs to all, namely the enjoyment of wild nature.

i saw more than a few signs that said "stop the gravel pit", but it seems to me that the rich property owners around there care more about "not in my backyard" than they do about not destroying nature. if they cared about nature they wouldn't have these huge properties and houses that are responsible for already displacing much of the wildlife.

when i finally did find a spot to walk to the river, the area was crisscrossed with rutty 4X4 tracks; and here and there lay empty beer cans and cardboard cases. it was a real pity. this was indeed a beautiful place but this didn't seem like wild nature to me.

wherever there is something beautiful in the natural world, businesses are out to exploit it, or fucking rednecks are out to destroy it. the ignorant redneck way of "enjoying nature" is drinking beer outside and killing animals.

and then i came upon these two beer-swilling cunts who got a little more than they bargained for from mother nature...

The Majority of Canadians Said "NO!" to Stephen Harper

2011-05-02T23:12:00.000-06:00

Hey, Stephen Harper! You can take your "majority government" and your environment destroying redneck policies and shove them straight up your ass!

And another thing...just wait until the next election!

The Problem With Canadian Democracy

2011-05-02T21:26:00.005-06:00

60% of Canadians don't want the Conservatives in power, yet Stephen Harper has a majority government. What's wrong with this picture?

And even with the 167 of 308 seats in the House of Commons, 54.2% is not exactly an overwhelming mandate to implement or kill any policies or bills they feel like.

No matter how much Stephen Harper and his band of right-wing Blue Meanies harp on about what Canadians want, or how the people have spoken, there are nearly 34 million Canadians; 24 million of whom are eligible to vote, and of the 15 million who cast their ballots, only 6 million voted Conservative.

Yes, Stephen Harper, the people have spoken and they overwhelmingly rejected you and your party's policies. Yet here we are with a Conservative majority.

In 2008, the Conservatives had 37.6% of the popular vote and 143 seats. In this election they had 39.6% of the popular vote and 167 seats. A 2% increase in votes and a 24 seat gain? That just 'aint right!

This is not even a tyranny of the majority. It's a tyranny of the misguided, greedy and ignorant minority and now the 28 million Canadians who were either ineligible to vote; didn't vote; or voted for someone else, have to suffer the consequences of our seriously flawed electoral system and a Harper pro-corporate, anti-environment regime for at least the next 4 years.

This is not what democracy should look like.

This Royal Wedding Frenzy Should Embarrass Us All

2011-04-29T08:49:00.003-06:00

from Democracy Now! 4/29/2011

If we're going to spend $100 million on this, we have to spend a comparable amount of money distributing anti-nausea tablets across the world to all the people who can't bear to see all this! ~ Johann Hari, columnist at The Independent of London

Gov. Rick Snyder Corporatizing, Privatizing & Profitizing Michigan's Public School System

2011-04-28T22:04:00.000-06:00

...and wall street can't wait to sink their fangs into it! Lansing, MI Mayor Virg Bernero on The Rachel Maddow Show 4/28/2011

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell Shuts Up Idiot Birther Orly Taitz

2011-04-28T08:42:00.000-06:00

from The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell 4/27/2011

Tim DeChristopher Powershift 2011 - What Level of Injustice Do We Have To Condone Before We Fight Back?

2011-04-22T22:29:00.000-06:00

Vandana Shiva & Maude Barlow on Democracy Now! 4/22/2011

2011-04-22T22:06:00.002-06:00

AMY GOODMAN: As the world celebrates Earth Day, Bolivia is about to pass the world’s first law that grants nature equal rights with humans. The Bolivian delegation to the United Nations urged the global body to adopt a similar law during this week’s Harmony with Nature conference.

DAVID CHOQUEHUANCA: [translated] The United Nations is revolutionizing the way we look at our planet. At the moment, various issues are being receded in the United Nations, and we have begun to discuss the idea of declaring an official International Day of Mother Earth. And we will also soon be discussing what are the rights of Mother Earth.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Bolivian foreign minister speaking in New York City about the Harmony with Nature dialogue at the United Nations.
This week also marks the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill; next week, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Radiation levels around the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan remain high. As these disasters multiply, Latin American countries such as Bolivia have taken the lead in adopting measures to protect the environment. Ecuador has also adopted a resolution protecting nature.
We speak with two renowned environmental justice activists: Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva. Maude Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. Barlow is also co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and chair of the board of Food and Water Watch. Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader, feminist and thinker from India, is the author of many books, including Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development.
I started our conversation by asking Vandana Shiva about the nuclear catastrophe in Japan and what it has meant for India, where major anti-nuclear protests have been sparked, in which one protester was killed. I asked her to explain what happened.

VANDANA SHIVA: We have a very, very strong anti-nuclear movement in India. And the difference between the Indian movement and any other movement is it’s not just about the stupidity of splitting the atom to boil water, which is what nuclear power ultimately is, creating huge amounts of radiation hazard in the process, but in India it involves the typical violence of land grab. And one of the most fertile parts of India in the Western Ghats, the Ratnagiri district, this planning to set up the biggest-ever nuclear power plant of the world, being built by a French company, AREVA, violating every right of the people, including local democracy, where people have a right to decide what happens. All the local authorities have resigned. And the protests continue. And just two days ago, there was a killing, when the police fired on peaceful protesters. So, in India, the costs are even higher, because the human costs join with the costs of nuclear hazard. And from 23rd to 26th, a march is being organized—and I’m part of the organizing group—from Tarapur, which is the oldest nuclear power plant of India, to Jaitapur, which is where this giant mega nuclear power park is being set up.

AMY GOODMAN: And people live there. They will be displaced?

VANDANA SHIVA: People live there. I mean, typical of such things, they claimed it was barren land and nobody was there. It’s one of the most fertile. That’s where this wonderful Alphonso mango comes from, this amazing, giant-sized, delicious mango. Good fisheries, amazing horticulture, and well-to-do people, because nature is abundant. It’s the Western Ghats, where the monsoon just pours the water. And coastal regions are usually just the more productive, more fertile.

A similar protest is happening around a steel plant called POSCO, a Korean plant, but it’s not owned by the Koreans anymore, it’s owned by Wall Street. It’s owned by the financial institutions of this city, who brought down the world’s economy. And it was very interesting that Warren Buffett was in India about giving, you know, creating the art of giving, and he has huge shares in the steel plant which will displace large numbers of people. And for six years, people have been saying, "No, we will not give our land."

And I think that’s so important, that we need to realize that, first, we don’t give rights to nature. Nature has rights. And more often than not, nature’s rights and people’s rights are allied as one in most places of the world, where, in places like Jaitapur or places like the POSCO area, people are saying, "This land is our mother." This is not an esoteric idea. It’s the most relevant, potent, democratic idea of our times.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a man you probably would agree with on a number of issues, George Monbiot. He, we recently had on, debating the issue of nuclear power. This is what he had to say.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, obviously, what happened—what’s happening in Fukushima concerns me a lot about the area surrounding Fukushima. It’s a horrible, dangerous, extremely traumatic series of events that we are seeing there.
But I’m very worried that the global response to what’s happening in Fukushima will be to shut down nuclear power stations around the world and to cancel future nuclear power stations, and that what will happen is that they will be replaced by coal. Now, coal is hundreds of times more dangerous than nuclear power, not just because of climate change, though, of course, climate change is a big one, but also because of industrial accidents and because of the impacts of pollution on local people. If we just look at industrial accidents alone, these massively outweigh both the fatalities and the injuries caused by any nuclear accident we’ve ever seen. In China alone, last year, 2,300 people were killed in industrial accidents to do with coal mining; purely by coal mining accidents, 2,300 killed. That’s six people a day. That means that in one week, the official death toll from coal in China is greater than the official death toll from Chernobyl in 25 years. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of people contracting really unpleasant lung diseases, which will cause them a very slow and painful and terrible death.
So, what I’m calling for here is not complacency. I think it’s absolutely appropriate to be very concerned, indeed, about what’s happening in Fukushima. But I’m calling for perspective, and I’m saying that we must not replace a bad technology with a much, much worse one, because, unfortunately, that is what’s likely to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: So that was the well-known British columnist George Monbiot, who is in favor of nuclear power, says it’s simply cleaner than coal, and if we’re talking about climate change, which he’s deeply concerned about, nuclear is the answer.

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, what we really need is a coal-free and nuclear-free future, because the sun’s energy is so abundant, and we’ve not even started to tap it in sensible ways. Alternative renewable energies, if only we would put the investments in that direction, would be affordable, would be decentralized. Nuclear must be a centralized system. And as we are witnessing in Jaitapur with the protests, with the shootings and the killings and the place turned into a total police state where nobody can gather, even the elected officials can’t hold meetings, where democracy has to be sacrificed, that’s not the kind of option we need for energy.

And I think it’s wrong of George Monbiot to rubbish the point of view of millions of people around the world, including governments, like the government of Germany said, "We won’t build any more nuclear power plants," China, which has put everything on hold. Now, these countries aren’t crazy. They aren’t a fringe. And I personally get disappointed when friends like George Monbiot think they are the wisest ones on this planet. And just because they have a column, they can switch everyone’s way of thinking. There is an ancient recognition of the hazards of nuclear. I began my life in the nuclear industry of India, and it’s when my sister woke me up to the damages. I wasn’t ever taught radiation biology. We were just taught physics, fission physics. And I realized it was very partial knowledge.

AMY GOODMAN: You are a physicist.

VANDANA SHIVA: Yes. And then I did theoretical physics, and eventually I did foundations of quantum theory. And what I love about the rights of Mother Earth is we’re overcoming the separation between humans and nature that was built into the Cartesian thinking that nature is out there and we are out here, but also the kind of divisive separatedness that Cormac [Cullinan] pointed out yesterday at the United Nations conference on Harmony with Nature. He said, "I began my life fighting apartheid, and apartheid means separateness—separateness on the basis of color." I think separateness is the disease of the past. It’s the dinosaur in the intellectual frame. Separateness was a very artificial imposition. Most civilizations of the world, for most of human history, have seen the world in terms of relatedness and connection. And if there’s one thing the rights of Mother Earth is waking us to, is we are all connected. And it’s in that connection we can’t have arrogant solutions, like nuclear is clean. Just because you don’t see the radiation doesn’t make it clean. Fukushima has become like Chernobyl, and that, the Japanese government is recognizing.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Maude Barlow, why are you here in New York at the United Nations on this Earth Day?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, there’s been the debate this week—an interactive dialogue, it’s called—at the United Nations on a resolution on Harmony with Nature that was introduced by the Bolivian ambassador to the U.N. but was adopted by the General Assembly. So we’re beginning the discussion and dialogue at the United Nations on the concept of the right to water. A number of us were in Cochabamba a year ago, this Mother Earth Day, when we finalized this draft of this Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. And so, basically, we’re here to introduce it to the U.N. The concept—we eventually want the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to be a companion piece to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we’re not there yet. We understand that. But that’s the goal, both within nation states at the United Nations and then just organizationally. We want people to adopt it and start talking about it. And we have a wonderful new book called The Rights of Nature: The Case for the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. So, this is a beginning of a real process to have a larger dialogue on exactly what Vandana’s saying.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the threat to water in the world today?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, the threat to water, while just speaking about nuclear, is a wonderful example. It was interesting. I just—and it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about when we say that we have to recognize nature’s rights—and Vandana is right: it’s not giving, it’s recognizing—is a report I saw the other day on the fish, you know, touched by the radiation contamination from the nuclear plant in Japan, and said, "Don’t worry. By the time it gets to humans, it won’t be harmful." And it was like that’s all that mattered. You know, it’s this human-centric notion that we’re all that matters, that other species of the planet doesn’t matter.

The biggest threat to water in our world is that humans, modern humans, quote, "civilized" humans, see water as a huge resource for our pleasure, profit and convenience, and we do what we want with it. We dump whatever we want in it. We grow whatever we want, wherever we want. We move it wherever we want. And we are running out. There’s a brand new report, says by 2030 the demand in our world for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent. And I don’t know if people can get their heads around how a horrific statistic that is and the suffering that that’s going to cause. You know, you can come at this as some—and, you know, people are already joking: "Oh, you’re talking about rights for ticks and rights for rats." That was—you know, this is the right wing mocking what we’re doing. We’re talking about survival here. We’re talking about human and other species’ survival on this planet, if we don’t change the way we see the world, the way we see nature, the way we see water. It is not a big resource for us. It is the essential—these are the essential elements of a living ecosystem that gives us all life, and this is about survival.

AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest advocacy group, and Vandana Shiva, environmental leader from India. Among her books, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. We’ll come back to this Earth Day conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Washington, D.C., on this Earth Day. We rejoin our conversation with Vandana Shiva, the renowned scientist and environmentalist from India, and Maude Barlow. She’s head of the Council of Canadians, and, well, among her books, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water.

AMY GOODMAN: We saw you in Cochabamba last year when we were covering the conference, the gathering of tens of thousands of people around the rights of Mother Earth, Pachamama, as they said there. Why is Bolivia and Ecuador taking the lead here?

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, partly because they have governments that actually represent a lot of the will of their people. And I can’t imagine what that feels like. We’re going through an election in Canada, and we’re just tearing our hair out, because we’re going to get a bad government again. So I think, partly, you’ve just got a government closer to the needs of the people.

But the Andes are melting. I mean, we have a crisis. A brand new study last week from the Foundation of U.S. Scientists said that La Paz, which is the capital of Bolivia, is in great crisis with a terrible drought threatening the two million inhabitants because of climate crisis. And unless something dramatic changes in a very short period of time, they don’t see any way around this. So it’s affecting their food, it’s affecting their access to water. So it’s very immediate. When you have this kind of immediacy, I think people like the president of Bolivia, Morales, and his ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón, just say, "I don’t care if you like me or not. I’m not particularly here for a popularity contest. I’m here because we’re talking about life and death of the people where we live. And we need to get that urgency out there." And that was—it was Bolivia that led the charge on getting the right to water recognized. And so, similarly, very interesting that it would be the same government—it was Bolivia that said no to the so-called consensus that happened in Cancún, which was based on a market model for the so-called solution to climate. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s wrong with the market model?

MAUDE BARLOW: The market—well, Vandana will have so much to say, too. But basically, the—and the U.N. has just put a huge price tag on nature now. The whole answer, not just to climate crisis, but to the water crisis and the forest crisis, is to put a dollar figure on nature and bring nature into the market system, so that basically all of nature has to compete with other uses for it in order to survive. And it basically—it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for the wealthy of the world and the powerful within countries claiming, well, they’re, you know, so much more than others and so much more than nature.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, you’ve been taking on corporations in India and around the world, but talk about the corporatization of nature.

VANDANA SHIVA: I think the consequences of the corporatization of nature is, first and foremost, that at a time where we should be recognizing the integrity of nature, the prior rights of nature, nature’s generosity, the generosity of the earth to provide us life itself, we are going headlong into the path of hallucination, where we’ve assumed we are not just separate, but we are continuing the idea of mastery and conquest over nature, adding to the technological tools, like the idea that we can control nature through nuclear power. Now we want to control nature through market mechanisms and commodification.

Why is that wrong? Firstly, it’s wrong because nature is too rich, too diverse. We know too little about it. So, whatever price we’ll put will be partial. It’ll never catch the whole story. We have not even begun to find out the soil organisms that give us food. We don’t know how different species hang together in a forest to create that amazing biodiversity of the forest. So it will be linear. It will just be just carbon functions, when that’s not the only function of a forest. And it will definitely not take into account the integrity of species. I started Navdanya and saving seeds when I found out that corporations wanted to patent life, when life is not created by them. It is created sui generis. It is part of creation.

But there’s a second problem with the commodification of nature. And that is that it gives a new legitimacy to appropriate and alienate the resources that support people’s lives, especially the resources of the poor. So, what do we see with this new thinking of commodification of nature? We see the biggest land grab that Africa has ever seen, much worse than anything that happened during colonialism. In India, the land grab for mining, for nuclear power plants, for steel plants, is literally becoming a war zone. There’s a green hunt that’s being implemented. Our dear, dear friend, Dr. Binayak Sen, someone like us, was thrown into jail for life imprisonment. Thank goodness the Supreme Court just a few days ago granted him bail, saying that if you carry literature on Marx, it doesn’t make you a Naxalite, just as much as carrying Gandhi’s biography doesn’t make you a Gandhian.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait. Stop for a second, because very few people follow this story. And Democracy Now!'s Anjali Kamat went and spent the weekend at the Sens', has been bringing us reports on Dr. Binayak Sen. But in a nutshell, explain his case and the significance of it.

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, Dr. Binayak Sen, as I said, is a dear friend, a medical doctor who has worked to serve the tribals all his life. He was a gold medalist from one of the leading medical colleges of India, but decided instead to go to the villages. He and his wife, Ilina, have worked with the tribals. I’ve worked with them to help set up community seed banks for seed conservation, like we do in Navdanya. Binayak has been working to set up primary healthcare initiatives. And he was also the head of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties.

Now, the commodification and globalization of the resource grab has meant that this area where he worked, which is now called Chhattisgahr, a new state—it’s a very mineral-rich area—that’s where the corporations are going for iron ore. That’s where they’re going for coal mining. And that means they’re violating the rights of the tribals that are institutionalized now in our constitution. We have a Panchayati Raj extension to scheduled areas, which basically means the tribals decide what happens to their land. And when they started to decide—and I was at these public hearings in the early days when, in the '90s, when this law was passed, one after the other, tribals would say, "We don't want money. We want our land. We want our forest. We want our home. We want to live with Mother Earth." That’s when the violence started. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a global advising system going on. But now there are private militias in addition to 70,000 paramilitary troops that have been deployed in tribal areas, in the name of controlling the Maoists, but really to flush out the tribals, create an empty land, so the minerals can be grabbed.

Binayak wrote a report for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, being the vice president, and said this militia was killing innocent tribals. It became the first report. That’s what really got the government very angry with him. And they were targeting him for very long. Eventually they arrested him, planted fake evidence, like putting some letters into someone else’s bag and saying they were handed over by Binayak. It’s a long story; I won’t go into details. But Binayak, who is a medical hero of India, he’s a civil liberties hero of India, he is as good as you can live a life for the people, in service of the people, thrown into prison for life imprisonment. And that’s why his case is so significant, because it’s like, you know, in the Nazi time, you remember that poetry that the priest wrote: "I wasn’t a unionist, so I didn’t speak. And I wasn’t a"—

AMY GOODMAN: "First they came for the unionists; I didn’t speak."

VANDANA SHIVA: Yeah, yeah. And it’s exactly like that. They’ve made a test case of Binayak to say, "Any of you who stand for the rights of Mother Earth, who stand for the rights of people to their resources, watch out. If we can do this to a Binayak, we can do it to you." And that’s why I really believe we are at this watershed. We’ll either go the democratic route, recognizing the rights of Mother Earth, living within the limits of the planet, living a good life with less wastage of resources, or we will go very fast into the path of fascism, militarization. And commodificaton of nature has to be a militarized commodification in today’s time.

AMY GOODMAN: What does "earth democracy" mean, Vandana Shiva?

VANDANA SHIVA: For me, earth democracy means, first, recognizing the fundamental fact that we are part of nature, that human rights and nature’s rights are not separate, because we are just one strand in this amazing mystery and miracle that the earth has created in terms of life. But earth democracy also means democracy in the everyday life of people, exercised daily by ordinary people, not the once in a five-year or four-year election, because everywhere around the world, we are seeing, you can bring someone to power, and they don’t represent your will anymore.

So, democracy under corporate control has mutated from "of the people, by the people, for the people" into "of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations." In this country, I watched how Wisconsin suddenly became a playground for destruction of democracy and destruction of the fundamental rights of collective bargaining and public services and public domain, only because there is this corporate pressure on privatizing everything and preventing people from exercising their democratic rights. So, it’s the democratic rights of the people and the earth versus the fictitious corporate rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, and now they’re costing the earth and people too much. They’re bringing nothing in return. It used to be the case that when General Motors put out a car, it gave employment. It even gave salaries so people could buy that car. Today, the corporations give nothing back to society. They just take from nature, take from society, and want to rubbish this planet and rubbish our lives. And I think people are getting fed up. The entire rising in the Arabic world is part of that fed-upness.

AMY GOODMAN: It is also, Maude Barlow, the first anniversary of the BP oil disaster. You come from Canada. There was just a protest around fracking, around BP, around tar sands. Can you talk about what we should understand about where we are headed? In this year, offshore drilling, President Obama said it could resume. People in the United States hardly know what tar sands is, though we get much energy, oil, from Canada.

MAUDE BARLOW: Well, at current rate of growth, the tar sands will become, in the quite soon foreseeable future, the worst site of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Enormous amounts of water is being destroyed. They’ve taken down a forest, this boreal forest the size of Greece. And there are children in the downstream First Nations communities with bile duct cancer at the age of four. I mean, it is an absolute horror. And what Americans need to know is that it’s coming to a community near you in the form of this dirty oil, the bitumen actually being piped by pipeline over the Ogallala Aquifer to be refined in the Gulf, or there are other pipes now taking it and more to be built to take it to the American side of the Great Lakes. It is corrosive, it’s poison, and it will destroy the water systems if it leaks, which I promise it will.

We also have gas fracking all over North America. This has become just an absolute obsession with people who know about the danger to water, because, of course, what you’re required to do is put massive amounts of chemicals into the water and then steam-blast it into the rock horizontally and to release the gas. And we’re even seeing operations along the Saint Lawrence River, and even the Quebec government has just given operations the OK to explore right within the Saint Lawrence River. And that’s not allowed on the American side, by the way. Usually we say, "Oh, it’s worse on the U.S. side," but it’s not in this case. It’s worse on the Canadian side.

I think the point here, to make the connection to the rights of nature, is that while our governments make noise about caring about the environment and make—on Earth Day, will all make, you know, strong statements about this, all of their actions belie this, from trade agreements, which we continue massively to promote around the world—the bilaterals, there are close to 3,000 of them now—to these big new CETAs, they’re called, Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreements, which are not just national procurement, but sub-national procurement. That’s water systems and roads and mining operations and municipalities and schools. It’s everything. It’s the next level down, where corporations are going to actually be able to dictate the conditions under which local funding is—how you spend your local money and on what values, and be able to stop fair trade bans and that kind of thing. All of that is galloping along. And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth.

And what we’re trying to say is that if we’re really going to survive as a species, and if the planet is to survive in any condition as we understand it, we have to shift our thinking and stop thinking of ourselves as being above nature and stop thinking of ourselves as having the rights that no other species has or no other form of the earth has. We just have to change. What would the world look like if we could see it differently? Right now, for most environmentalists, the best we ever get is that we negotiate the amount of toxics being dumped into a particular system, or in the tar sands, all we’re—I mean, all we’ve ended up doing is having a series of reports, which just tell us how bad it is, but we haven’t—we have not managed to stop one pipeline. We have not managed to stop one government expansion, one corporate expansion, in the tar sands in all the years we’ve been fighting it. And I don’t see, frankly, Amy, how we’re going to do that, unless we have a mindset change. I really—I think right now it’s just a negotiation about how much of this toxic waste we’re going to allow and dump into our waters and our air and how much genetic damage we’re going to do as—

AMY GOODMAN: And the mind shift would be what? What do you see needs to happen?

MAUDE BARLOW: The mind shift is that we are a species like any other and that we will not survive unless we place our rights in tandem with the rights of the earth, and then we understand that we come from the earth. Everything we have, everything we wear, everything we eat, everything we touch comes from the earth. And if we don’t change our minds, if we don’t change the way we see the world, if we don’t stop thinking of ourselves as superior, we’re not going to survive. And I see it as an evolutionary step, a human—an evolutionary step in our human development, if we could actually come to this.

And I think that there’s a comparison to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, because they fought really hard for that. And people will still say, "Well, what did it mean?" because human rights are still being violated. Well, just because a universal value is broken doesn’t mean it’s not a universal value to have. And we have to add to the universal value of the right of humans, these fundamental rights of humans, the right of the earth to survive and for us to survive together.

VANDANA SHIVA: And I think the more key issue, Amy, is, actually, this is a majority perspective. Most of the indigenous cultures of the world, most of the non-industrialized cultures of the world, most of the non-Western cultures of the world live in the consciousness that we are part of nature and the earth is a mother. We are fighting against dams on the Ganges. And it’s a very real discourse that the Ganges is a divine mother. She has her own standing. And the government cannot block her flow. She has a right to flow free. It’s a real serious discussion in India today. That’s the basis of fighting the dams, not only the environmental impact in terms of displacement. All the work we’ve done against patenting of life, bringing back the integrity of species.

And I think if you really start to connect the dots, you realize that we are at the kind of moment where we were when slavery was being abolished, people. There were crazies then who thought it was right to trade in human beings and own them as property. A few people thought it was wrong. It took a while, but we would never today imagine it’s right to own other human beings. Well, property in nature, property in life forms, patents on life, privatizing water, commodity trading of carbon pollution, the emissions treaty, all of that is as insane and as mad as slavery was. And we need to get out of this bondage, which has been created by a very tiny minority, who have lots to gain by raping the earth and destroying the rights of people.

AMY GOODMAN: One last question, and we just have a minute. Your assessment, as we move into the 2012 presidential election in the United States, of President Obama, from Canada, from India? Maude Barlow?

MAUDE BARLOW: I wish he would stand up for what I think is deepest in his heart, and I wish he would stop giving the other side’s line to the world. We don’t need him to describe or promote the compromises that he’s made. We really desperately need leadership. And I just hope that he understands that that’s the most important thing he can do for us all.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva?

VANDANA SHIVA: Well, you know, President Obama has often said Gandhi is his big inspiration. And Gandhi had told us the earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for a few people’s greed. When Obama came to India, instead of talking Gandhi, instead of building a common world from U.S. to India on that Gandhian vision of everyone living well with less, he came only to seek $50 billion deals for corporations, for fighter jets, for India joining hands for the invasion of Africa for land grab and the so-called green revolution. I do wish that Obama would exercise the policies that have brought him the inspiration that brought him to power.

AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, thanks so much for joining us on Earth Day.

MAUDE BARLOW: Thank you.

VANDANA SHIVA: Happy Earth Day!

AMY GOODMAN: Environmental leader Vandana Shiva, among her books, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. And Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians. Coming up, Van Jones, Tim DeChristopher, Bill McKibben. We’ll be back in 30 seconds.

Gov. Rick Snyder Kills Democracy in Benton Harbor, Michigan

2011-04-18T21:35:00.002-06:00

From The Rachel Maddow Show 4/18/2011

The kind of feudalism that people had come to this country to escape in Europe, was being created by this new corporate aristocracy. For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing those kinds of economic concentrations return to our country. At the same time, something really dangerous, we’ve seen the destruction of the American press as a formidable player in reinforcing the institutions of our democracy. The press has devolved, so that instead of informing us about the issues that are critical to us making rational decisions in democracy, it appeals now to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip. So, Americans today are the best entertained and the least educated people, and least informed people, probably on the face of the earth. And you can’t have democracy for very long if you don’t have an informed community. ~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Antonia Juhasz - Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill

2011-04-18T10:01:00.004-06:00

From Democracy Now! 4/18/2011

AMY GOODMAN: This week marks the first anniversary of the worst maritime oil spill in history. Last year on April 20th an oil rig leased by petroleum giant BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers, releasing nearly 200 million gallons of oil, tens of millions of gallons of natural gas and 1.8 million gallons of chemicals.

At the BP shareholders meeting last week in London, security officers blocked the entrance of a delegation of four fishermen and women from the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast area heavily damaged by last year’s oil spill. Environmental groups and residents argue BP has yet to fulfill its financial and legal obligations. Maritime life and communities in the area remain devastated.

JOHN HOCEVAR: Most of the oil is still there in the Gulf today. It’s in the water. It’s on the sediment. It’s on the seafloor. A lot of it’s washed up into the wetlands, and it’s still there. It’s still being eaten by marine life today.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by a guest who says the largest oil disaster in history could happen again. Antonia Juhasz is the author of Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, a book that’s just been published this week. She’s also director of the Energy Program at Global Exchange. Antonia attended the BP shareholders meeting last week and spoke on behalf of Gulf Coast residents denied entry.
BP did not respond to Democracy Now’s repeated requests for comment.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what happened last week.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: I went to the London BP annual shareholder meeting, the first meeting of shareholders since the disaster happened one year ago. There were five representatives from the United States Gulf Coast who came, including the head of the Louisiana Oystermen’s Association, the head of the Louisiana Shrimpers Association. We came in order to address the shareholders, the CEO, the board of directors, to make sure that they all understood that the Gulf oil disaster is far from over, BP is far from adhering to its legal obligations.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to that clip of you confronting BP executives last week.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Sure, sure.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have waves that roll in, and oil rolls in with it. We stick a stick in the sand, and there’s still oil there. What we don’t have at the bottom of the ocean is the light that is supposed to be there.

AMY GOODMAN: That, thanks to UNI Films. Antonia?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, so the representatives from the Gulf Coast were denied access into the meeting, even though they held legal proxies. I was able to get in, because I own shares, and address the audience. And while I was there, I made sure that BP knew that we were still holding them to account, but also delivered a message that I had been sent to London to read, which was a statement by Keith Jones, the father of Gordon Jones, who is one of 11 men who died aboard the Deepwater Horizon. He wanted to make sure that the company knew that he knew why the disaster happened, and that was because they were cutting costs, they were cutting corners, and they did not know how to do the operations in the deep water that they set out to do. And what I added to the shareholders was, neither does any other company actually know how to do these deepwater operations, and nothing has changed since the disaster to make us any more certain that such a deepwater disaster won’t happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your journey through the Gulf after the oil spill and all that you have found.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Spent eight months embedded in those communities most directly impacted by this disaster, sleeping in people’s homes, going to their churches, walking on their beaches. What I learned in that period of time was that 210 million gallons of oil don’t disappear. We saw oil everywhere, but we continue to today. So oil is on the bottom of the ocean. A layer of dispersant is coated above it. And people have been fighting this oil now for a year, and it has made them sick, the combination of the oil and the dispersant. It has made them exhausted. It has made them frustrated, because one year later the rest of the nation seems to have forgotten this tragedy, and our policymakers, one year later—not a single piece of legislation—not one—written to respond to the disaster has become law. And the money that BP is supposed to be paying has not come to the ground. The care—the claims that are supposed to be filled, the health provisions, the environmental provisions, none of it is there right now, and the U.S. Gulf Coast is still suffering under this glut of oil and chemicals.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who is in charge? Who’s in charge of the compensation? The news reports now, as we come on the first anniversary, about how, with ExxonMobil—the Exxon Valdez oil spill, how they didn’t compensate people right away, but BP didn’t even have to, and they did.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, BP set up a claims process right away, and that’s because, as a result of the Exxon Valdez disaster, we had a great piece of legislation passed: the Oil Pollution Act. We need legislation like that now. One of the things the Oil Pollution Act did was require an immediate claims process to be established. BP set that up. But at this date, one year later, less than 40 percent of the claims that have been filed have even been processed, much less paid out.

When BP was in control of the process, they made it incredibly difficult, incredibly bureaucratic. People were not getting their payments. They’ve been out of work for a year. They also can’t eat what they harvest, which is—this is a subsistence area. People fish not just to make money, but to live on that fish. And people haven’t been able to eat their fish or sell it.

Then the process was taken over by Kenneth Feinberg, supposedly an independent process, and it’s continued to drag on. Feinberg has actually said that of the $20 billion that was pledged—and let’s just remember, it was pledged—only about $3.5 billion has actually been paid, that he expects he’ll only pay out about half of that money.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the reports that have come out since then. I think there’s very much a sense that it’s not as bad as everyone thought.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: The reports have actually been damning, especially the presidential commission on the Deepwater Horizon. Actually, every investigation that has gone into this disaster has said, one, five million barrels of oil were spilled. That oil does not disappear. One of the amazing people I covered in my book was Dr. Samantha Joye. She has, from the beginning, been going deep into the water, studying oil on the bottom. She’s one—part of the team that discovered the oil plumes. She is deeply aware that five million barrels were released, and the oil still remains in the Gulf.

But what each of the commissions have found is that this is a systemic problem within the oil industry, that the oil industry itself was moving beyond its own capacity to do its operations, but even more so, that federal regulators have no clue what they’re doing. They do not know how to regulate this industry, and the industry has pushed beyond its own capacity. And every report that has come out has said that. It’s been universal, that this is a serious, ongoing, devastating disaster in the Gulf Coast, but that the industry is to blame—BP, Transocean, Halliburton, Cameron most immediately in this disaster—but all of the oil companies were involved. Remember, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, they all sat down at a table after the explosion and said, "Wow! How do we cap a deepwater blowout? Oh, boy, it turns out we actually don’t know how to do that, even though we have 148 deepwater wells around the world. Boy, we said that we could handle a 300,000-gallon-a-day—or barrel-a-day oil spill. Boy, it turns out we couldn’t even handle 80,000 barrels a day." None of them know what they’re doing. And the federal regulators don’t know, either. And every report has been—has concluded those outcomes.

AMY GOODMAN: BP has requested permission to resume offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, less than a year after the oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers. They want to resume in 10 existing wells in the Gulf by July, the request to U.S. regulators coming just a week after the Department of Justice confirmed the company is facing potential manslaughter charges and other civil and criminal penalties in connection with the explosion and the deaths of the workers.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: They absolutely should face criminal charges, I believe. If every report has demonstrated just utter failure—managerial failure, operational failure, cost cutting—on the fact—on the part of BP. But it’s not just BP. Transocean, which is the owner and operator of the rig—and the vast majority of the employees on the rig worked for Transocean—is the largest owner and operator of all offshore rigs in the country. Their failures need to make us worried about all operations. But yes, BP is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the United States. They have massive holdings all across the country, all across the Gulf. One of the things that the oil industry tried to do as a result of the disaster was isolate BP and make this look like a BP problem: it’s just this rogue British company. Well, BP definitely has very problematic operations, and I do not believe that they should be given the right to continue to produce those wells. We need to think very seriously about their operations.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the Obama administration, that has said that offshore drilling can resume?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: We shouldn’t be allowing offshore drilling to continue, particularly—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what it is and why it’s allowed in this country.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: There’s—let’s see. Deepwater drilling, most offshore drilling historically has occurred at about 400 feet below the ocean surface. Deep offshore drilling in this well is 5,000 feet below the ocean surface to the ocean floor. Then this well, another 13,500 feet below that. One of the deeper wells—not the deepest—right now in the Gulf is as far down as Mount Everest is up. This is technological wonders that is so wondrous we actually don’t know how to do it. But the reason why they’re pushing out this far deep is that there’s a lot of oil out there, and they want to get to it.

What we know, however, is that they have not—they don’t have the technology to do it. So, when the Deepwater Horizon—when the blowout happened on the Macondo well, the oil industries tried to apply the technology for that 400-feet shallow water operations to operations that were 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. It turns out they didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t know how to cap it. They didn’t know how to clean it. They applied, as you said, two million gallons of chemical toxic dispersant to try and separate out the oil. They burned it on the ocean surface. They allowed this chemical-oil cocktail to spill. And the federal regulators had no idea what to do while the disaster was happening. And they still do not remotely have the capacity to address continued operations.

So, if we recall, it was about a week before the Macondo well blowout and the Deepwater Horizon explosion happened that President Obama implemented a Bush policy, which was lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling. We have the moratorium—we had it, because in 1969 there was a huge offshore blowout off the coast of Santa Barbara. Activists organized all across the country in response. They got the Clean Air Act. They got the Clean Water Act. And about 10 years later, they got a moratorium on offshore drilling. That moratorium has been picked away at. And the one place it didn’t exist was in the Gulf of Mexico. A week before this disaster, President Obama lifted much of the moratorium. Nothing had changed in terms of the technology, when he did it. There just had been enormous pressure from the oil industry to put it into place.

Nothing has changed in terms of the technology since the disaster happened, yet the offshore drilling has begun again. And the presidential commission on the Deepwater Horizon, President Obama’s own commission, has said, you know, federal regulators don’t have the capacity, they don’t know what they’re doing in these instances. And what we also know is that the cost is so very high, because there is so much oil and the distance is so great to get to it and try and address it, that there is no reason to believe that this much oil wouldn’t be released again in the case of another blowout.

AMY GOODMAN: You had this surreal moment, Antonia Juhasz, with Transocean, the company that owned the offshore rig that exploded, being awarded—awarding its top executives these bonuses, and in doing so, saying—it described the, quote, "best year in safety performance in our company’s history." The bonus for the Transocean CEO Steve Newman was $400,000. Amidst tremendous criticism, he said he would give it to the families of the—

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Part of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, he said he would give a part of it to the families of the dead workers. What are those families saying? And what about this, Transocean rewarding their executives for the best year in their history?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Nine of the 11 men who died aboard the rig worked for Transocean. I interviewed and spent a good amount of time with Sherri Revette, whose husband Dewey died aboard the rig. They do not believe that Transocean had its best safety year ever. They do not believe that its executives and CEO should be given bonuses. What they feel is that this is an affront to their loss, but most important, that it’s a symbol that Transocean hasn’t learned and accepted that massive, massive errors occurred, and that by awarding those bonuses, and by awarding them for safety, what has been clearly demonstrated is that Transocean has not learn the lessons of this disaster and Transocean, the largest owner and operator of offshore rigs in the country, hasn’t changed its policies, which means we have a lot to be worried about when Chevron, when Shell, when Exxon, when all of the companies continue their operations in the deep water.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, what has to happen now, from cleanup to prosecutions? What do you feel, after writing this book over this past year?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: It’s the one-year anniversary of the disaster. This is our opportunity as activists to apply massive pressure. We need fundamental policy change, and it’s only going to happen if people continue to feel the passion they did when the oil was flowing, to push now as the oil still remains. We have to have payments go out to those who have filed claims. We have to have restoration of the Gulf. We have to have BP actually pay the full amount of money it owes, not fight us to say they owe—we know they owe $20 billion just for the oil spill. BP is trying to pay just $3 million. We need the Obama administration to ensure that charges are made, that BP’s policies are forced to be changed, and that BP is held fully to account. And for the listeners out there, this is the opportunity, the one-year anniversary, to come together and really push and to show that the public is still paying deep attention and will hold BP to account and make sure the Obama administration helps us and that the Congress helps us in that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, congratulations on the release of your book, Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. You’ll be speaking tonight at powerHouse Arena at 37 Main Street in Brooklyn, on its release. Antonia Juhasz.

Antonia Juhasz at the BP annual general meeting April 14, 2011

Near the end of the clip the representative from BP states, "BP does disagree with the amount of oil. There has been no study that has confirmed the amount of oil that leaked into the ocean".

Leaked? Like a bit of a runny nose I guess. Here, let's just put a Kleenex on it. That ought to take care of the leak. Why not just say dripped? Can we all just agree that it was a hell of a lot of oil? That it was enough to seriously fuck up the environment for many years to come?

Hearing him dispute the amount of oil that gushed into the gulf for three months, reminds me of the way holocaust deniers dispute the amount of people who were sent to the gas chambers in WWII.

The issue is not trying to determine an exact amount for the massive quantity of oil that devastated the gulf region. The issue now is making sure that this never happens again and that BP pays the $20 billion it now owes in compensation for this disaster.

Mark Hertsgaard: Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth

2011-04-15T10:32:00.000-06:00

Author Mark Hertsgaard on Democracy Now! talks about climate change and how many republican members of congress continue to turn a blind eye to the scientific evidence surrounding global warming in order to financially benefit environmental polluters.

Congressman Kucinich Calls Governor Scott Walker on His Fucking Dishonest Bullshit 4-14-2011

2011-04-14T11:00:00.000-06:00

Dennis Kucinich on The Ed Show Talks About Obama Speech 4/13/2011

2011-04-13T23:34:00.000-06:00

President Obama's Budget Speech (with transcript) 4-13-2011

2011-04-13T22:42:00.004-06:00

Thank you very much. Please have a seat. Please have a seat, everyone.

It is wonderful to be back at GW. I want you to know that one of the reasons that I worked so hard with Democrats and Republicans to keep the government open was so that I could show up here today. I wanted to make sure that all of you had one more excuse to skip class.You're welcome.

I want to give a special thanks to Steven Knapp, the president of GW. I just saw him — where is he? There he is right there.

We've got a lot of distinguished guests here — a couple of people I want to acknowledge. First of all, my outstanding Vice President, Joe Biden, is here. Our Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, is in the house. Jack Lew, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Gene Sperling, Chair of the National Economic Council, is here. Members of our bipartisan Fiscal Commission are here, including the two outstanding chairs — Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson — are here. And we have a number of members of Congress here today. I'm grateful for all of you taking the time to attend.

What we've been debating here in Washington over the last few weeks will affect the lives of the students here and families all across America in potentially profound ways. This debate over budgets and deficits is about more than just numbers on a page; it's about more than just cutting and spending. It's about the kind of future that we want. It's about the kind of country that we believe in. And that's what I want to spend some time talking about today.

From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America's wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.

But there's always been another thread running through our history -– a belief that we're all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

And so we've built a strong military to keep us secure, and public schools and universities to educate our citizens. We've laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce. We've supported the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire new industries. Each of us has benefitted from these investments, and we're a more prosperous country as a result.

Part of this American belief that we're all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. "There but for the grace of God go I," we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We're a better country because of these commitments. I'll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments.

Now, for much of the last century, our nation found a way to afford these investments and priorities with the taxes paid by its citizens. As a country that values fairness, wealthier individuals have traditionally borne a greater share of this burden than the middle class or those less fortunate. Everybody pays, but the wealthier have borne a little more. This is not because we begrudge those who've done well -– we rightly celebrate their success. Instead, it's a basic reflection of our belief that those who've benefited most from our way of life can afford to give back a little bit more. Moreover, this belief hasn't hindered the success of those at the top of the income scale. They continue to do better and better with each passing year.

Now, at certain times -– particularly during war or recession -– our nation has had to borrow money to pay for some of our priorities. And as most families understand, a little credit card debt isn't going to hurt if it's temporary.

But as far back as the 1980s, America started amassing debt at more alarming levels, and our leaders began to realize that a larger challenge was on the horizon. They knew that eventually, the Baby Boom generation would retire, which meant a much bigger portion of our citizens would be relying on programs like Medicare, Social Security, and possibly Medicaid. Like parents with young children who know they have to start saving for the college years, America had to start borrowing less and saving more to prepare for the retirement of an entire generation.

To meet this challenge, our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit — three times. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush, then made by President Clinton, by Democratic Congresses and by a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice. But they largely protected the middle class; they largely protected our commitment to seniors; they protected our key investments in our future.

As a result of these bipartisan efforts, America's finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.

But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program -– but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts -– tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.

To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation's checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.

But that's not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more.

In this case, we took a series of emergency steps that saved millions of jobs, kept credit flowing, and provided working families extra money in their pocket. It was absolutely the right thing to do, but these steps were expensive, and added to our deficits in the short term.

So that's how our fiscal challenge was created. That's how we got here. And now that our economic recovery is gaining strength, Democrats and Republicans must come together and restore the fiscal responsibility that served us so well in the 1990s. We have to live within our means. We have to reduce our deficit, and we have to get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt. And we have to do it in a way that protects the recovery, protects the investments we need to grow, create jobs, and helps us win the future.

Now, before I get into how we can achieve this goal, some of you, particularly the younger people here — you don't qualify, Joe. Some of you might be wondering, "Why is this so important? Why does this matter to me?"

Well, here's why. Even after our economy recovers, our government will still be on track to spend more money than it takes in throughout this decade and beyond. That means we'll have to keep borrowing more from countries like China. That means more of your tax dollars each year will go towards paying off the interest on all the loans that we keep taking out. By the end of this decade, the interest that we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion. Think about that. That's the interest — just the interest payments.

Then, as the Baby Boomers start to retire in greater numbers and health care costs continue to rise, the situation will get even worse. By 2025, the amount of taxes we currently pay will only be enough to finance our health care programs — Medicare and Medicaid — Social Security, and the interest we owe on our debt. That's it. Every other national priority -– education, transportation, even our national security -– will have to be paid for with borrowed money.

Now, ultimately, all this rising debt will cost us jobs and damage our economy. It will prevent us from making the investments we need to win the future. We won't be able to afford good schools, new research, or the repair of roads — all the things that create new jobs and businesses here in America. Businesses will be less likely to invest and open shop in a country that seems unwilling or unable to balance its books. And if our creditors start worrying that we may be unable to pay back our debts, that could drive up interest rates for everybody who borrows money -– making it harder for businesses to expand and hire, or families to take out a mortgage.

Here's the good news: That doesn't have to be our future. That doesn't have to be the country that we leave our children. We can solve this problem. We came together as Democrats and Republicans to meet this challenge before; we can do it again.

But that starts by being honest about what's causing our deficit. You see, most Americans tend to dislike government spending in the abstract, but like the stuff that it buys. Most of us, regardless of party affiliation, believe that we should have a strong military and a strong defense. Most Americans believe we should invest in education and medical research. Most Americans think we should protect commitments like Social Security and Medicare. And without even looking at a poll, my finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes they should be paying higher taxes.

So because all this spending is popular with both Republicans and Democrats alike, and because nobody wants to pay higher taxes, politicians are often eager to feed the impression that solving the problem is just a matter of eliminating waste and abuse. You'll hear that phrase a lot. "We just need to eliminate waste and abuse." The implication is that tackling the deficit issue won't require tough choices. Or politicians suggest that we can somehow close our entire deficit by eliminating things like foreign aid, even though foreign aid makes up about 1 percent of our entire federal budget.

So here's the truth. Around two-thirds of our budget — two-thirds — is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Two-thirds. Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans' benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20 percent. What's left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That's 12 percent for all of our national priorities — education, clean energy, medical research, transportation, our national parks, food safety, keeping our air and water clean — you name it — all of that accounts for 12 percent of our budget.

Now, up till now, the debate here in Washington, the cuts proposed by a lot of folks in Washington, have focused exclusively on that 12 percent. But cuts to that 12 percent alone won't solve the problem. So any serious plan to tackle our deficit will require us to put everything on the table, and take on excess spending wherever it exists in the budget.

A serious plan doesn't require us to balance our budget overnight – in fact, economists think that with the economy just starting to grow again, we need a phased-in approach – but it does require tough decisions and support from our leaders in both parties now. Above all, it will require us to choose a vision of the America we want to see five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road.

Now, to their credit, one vision has been presented and championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party's presidential candidates. It's a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

These are both worthy goals. They're worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we've known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we've known throughout our history.

A 70 percent cut in clean energy. A 25 percent cut in education. A 30 percent cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That's the proposal. These aren't the kind of cuts you make when you're trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget. These aren't the kinds of cuts that the Fiscal Commission proposed. These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can't afford the America that I believe in and I think you believe in.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It's a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can't afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can't afford to send them.

Go to China and you'll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. They're scrambling to figure out how they put more money into education. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but on biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the American people, the United States of America -– the greatest nation on Earth -– can't afford any of this.

It's a vision that says America can't afford to keep the promise we've made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you're a 65-year-old who's eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn't worth enough to buy the insurance that's available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck -– you're on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

It's a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody's grandparents — may be one of yours — who wouldn't be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down's syndrome. Some of these kids with disabilities are — the disabilities are so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we'd be telling to fend for themselves.

And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though Americans can't afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can't afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That's who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm President. This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. Ronald Reagan's own budget director said, there's nothing "serious" or "courageous" about this plan. There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill. That's not a vision of the America I know.

The America I know is generous and compassionate. It's a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other; for the country we want and the future that we share. We're a nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and we saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives. That's who we are. This is the America that I know. We don't have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit our investment in our people and our country.

To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I'm President, we won't.

So today, I'm proposing a more balanced approach to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years. It's an approach that borrows from the recommendations of the bipartisan Fiscal Commission that I appointed last year, and it builds on the roughly $1 trillion in deficit reduction I already proposed in my 2012 budget. It's an approach that puts every kind of spending on the table — but one that protects the middle class, our promise to seniors, and our investments in the future.

The first step in our approach is to keep annual domestic spending low by building on the savings that both parties agreed to last week. That step alone will save us about $750 billion over 12 years. We will make the tough cuts necessary to achieve these savings, including in programs that I care deeply about, but I will not sacrifice the core investments that we need to grow and create jobs. We will invest in medical research. We will invest in clean energy technology. We will invest in new roads and airports and broadband access. We will invest in education. We will invest in job training. We will do what we need to do to compete, and we will win the future.

The second step in our approach is to find additional savings in our defense budget. Now, as Commander-in-Chief, I have no greater responsibility than protecting our national security, and I will never accept cuts that compromise our ability to defend our homeland or America's interests around the world. But as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, has said, the greatest long-term threat to America's national security is America's debt. So just as we must find more savings in domestic programs, we must do the same in defense. And we can do that while still keeping ourselves safe.

Over the last two years, Secretary Bob Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again. We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but we're going to have to conduct a fundamental review of America's missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. I intend to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review, and I will make specific decisions about spending after it's complete.

The third step in our approach is to further reduce health care spending in our budget. Now, here, the difference with the House Republican plan could not be clearer. Their plan essentially lowers the government's health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead. Our approach lowers the government's health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself.

Already, the reforms we passed in the health care law will reduce our deficit by $1 trillion. My approach would build on these reforms. We will reduce wasteful subsidies and erroneous payments. We will cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare's purchasing power to drive greater efficiency and speed generic brands of medicine onto the market. We will work with governors of both parties to demand more efficiency and accountability from Medicaid.

We will change the way we pay for health care -– not by the procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to prevent injuries and improve results. And we will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services that seniors need.

Now, we believe the reforms we've proposed to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid will enable us to keep these commitments to our citizens while saving us $500 billion by 2023, and an additional $1 trillion in the decade after that. But if we're wrong, and Medicare costs rise faster than we expect, then this approach will give the independent commission the authority to make additional savings by further improving Medicare.
But let me be absolutely clear: I will preserve these health care programs as a promise we make to each other in this society. I will not allow Medicare to become a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry, with a shrinking benefit to pay for rising costs. I will not tell families with children who have disabilities that they have to fend for themselves. We will reform these programs, but we will not abandon the fundamental commitment this country has kept for generations.

That includes, by the way, our commitment to Social Security. While Social Security is not the cause of our deficit, it faces real long-term challenges in a country that's growing older. As I said in the State of the Union, both parties should work together now to strengthen Social Security for future generations. But we have to do it without putting at risk current retirees, or the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans' guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market. And it can be done.

The fourth step in our approach is to reduce spending in the tax code, so-called tax expenditures. In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can't afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.

Beyond that, the tax code is also loaded up with spending on things like itemized deductions. And while I agree with the goals of many of these deductions, from homeownership to charitable giving, we can't ignore the fact that they provide millionaires an average tax break of $75,000 but do nothing for the typical middle-class family that doesn't itemize. So my budget calls for limiting itemized deductions for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans — a reform that would reduce the deficit by $320 billion over 10 years.

But to reduce the deficit, I believe we should go further. And that's why I'm calling on Congress to reform our individual tax code so that it is fair and simple — so that the amount of taxes you pay isn't determined by what kind of accountant you can afford.

I believe reform should protect the middle class, promote economic growth, and build on the fiscal commission's model of reducing tax expenditures so that there's enough savings to both lower rates and lower the deficit. And as I called for in the State of the Union, we should reform our corporate tax code as well, to make our businesses and our economy more competitive.

So this is my approach to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. It's an approach that achieves about $2 trillion in spending cuts across the budget. It will lower our interest payments on the debt by $1 trillion. It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in tax expenditures — spending in the tax code. And it achieves these goals while protecting the middle class, protecting our commitment to seniors, and protecting our investments in the future.

Now, in the coming years, if the recovery speeds up and our economy grows faster than our current projections, we can make even greater progress than I've pledged here. But just to hold Washington — and to hold me —- accountable and make sure that the debt burden continues to decline, my plan includes a debt failsafe. If, by 2014, our debt is not projected to fall as a share of the economy -– if we haven't hit our targets, if Congress has failed to act -– then my plan will require us to come together and make up the additional savings with more spending cuts and more spending reductions in the tax code. That should be an incentive for us to act boldly now, instead of kicking our problems further down the road.

So this is our vision for America -– this is my vision for America — a vision where we live within our means while still investing in our future; where everyone makes sacrifices but no one bears all the burden; where we provide a basic measure of security for our citizens and we provide rising opportunity for our children.
There will be those who vigorously disagree with my approach. I can guarantee that as well. Some will argue we should not even consider ever — ever — raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It's just an article of faith to them. I say that at a time when the tax burden on the wealthy is at its lowest level in half a century, the most fortunate among us can afford to pay a little more. I don't need another tax cut. Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut. Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare. Or by cutting kids from Head Start. Or by taking away college scholarships that I wouldn't be here without and that some of you would not be here without.

And here's the thing: I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me. They want to give back to their country, a country that's done so much for them. It's just Washington hasn't asked them to.

Others will say that we shouldn't even talk about cutting spending until the economy is fully recovered. These are mostly folks in my party. I'm sympathetic to this view — which is one of the reasons I supported the payroll tax cuts we passed in December. It's also why we have to use a scalpel and not a machete to reduce the deficit, so that we can keep making the investments that create jobs. But doing nothing on the deficit is just not an option. Our debt has grown so large that we could do real damage to the economy if we don't begin a process now to get our fiscal house in order.

Finally, there are those who believe we shouldn't make any reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, out of fear that any talk of change to these programs will immediately usher in the sort of steps that the House Republicans have proposed. And I understand those fears. But I guarantee that if we don't make any changes at all, we won't be able to keep our commitment to a retiring generation that will live longer and will face higher health care costs than those who came before.

Indeed, to those in my own party, I say that if we truly believe in a progressive vision of our society, we have an obligation to prove that we can afford our commitments. If we believe the government can make a difference in people's lives, we have the obligation to prove that it works -– by making government smarter, and leaner and more effective.

Of course, there are those who simply say there's no way we can come together at all and agree on a solution to this challenge. They'll say the politics of this city are just too broken; the choices are just too hard; the parties are just too far apart. And after a few years on this job, I have some sympathy for this view.

But I also know that we've come together before and met big challenges. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill came together to save Social Security for future generations. The first President Bush and a Democratic Congress came together to reduce the deficit. President Clinton and a Republican Congress battled each other ferociously, disagreed on just about everything, but they still found a way to balance the budget. And in the last few months, both parties have come together to pass historic tax relief and spending cuts.

And I know there are Republicans and Democrats in Congress who want to see a balanced approach to deficit reduction. And even those Republicans I disagree with most strongly I believe are sincere about wanting to do right by their country. We may disagree on our visions, but I truly believe they want to do the right thing.

So I believe we can, and must, come together again. This morning, I met with Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress to discuss the approach that I laid out today. And in early May, the Vice President will begin regular meetings with leaders in both parties with the aim of reaching a final agreement on a plan to reduce the deficit and get it done by the end of June.

I don't expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today. This a democracy; that's not how things work. I'm eager to hear other ideas from all ends of the political spectrum. And though I'm sure the criticism of what I've said here today will be fierce in some quarters, and my critique of the House Republican approach has been strong, Americans deserve and will demand that we all make an effort to bridge our differences and find common ground.

This larger debate that we're having — this larger debate about the size and the role of government — it has been with us since our founding days. And during moments of great challenge and change, like the one that we're living through now, the debate gets sharper and it gets more vigorous. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. As a country that prizes both our individual freedom and our obligations to one another, this is one of the most important debates that we can have.

But no matter what we argue, no matter where we stand, we've always held certain beliefs as Americans. We believe that in order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own happiness, we can't just think about ourselves. We have to think about the country that made these liberties possible. We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community. And we have to think about what's required to preserve the American Dream for future generations.

This sense of responsibility — to each other and to our country — this isn't a partisan feeling. It isn't a Democratic or a Republican idea. It's patriotism.

The other day I received a letter from a man in Florida. He started off by telling me he didn't vote for me and he hasn't always agreed with me. But even though he's worried about our economy and the state of our politics — here's what he said — he said, "I still believe. I believe in that great country that my grandfather told me about. I believe that somewhere lost in this quagmire of petty bickering on every news station, the 'American Dream' is still alive...We need to use our dollars here rebuilding, refurbishing and restoring all that our ancestors struggled to create and maintain... We as a people must do this together, no matter the color of the state one comes from or the side of the aisle one might sit on."

"I still believe." I still believe as well. And I know that if we can come together and uphold our responsibilities to one another and to this larger enterprise that is America, we will keep the dream of our founding alive — in our time; and we will pass it on to our children. We will pass on to our children a country that we believe in.

Thank you. God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

RT (Russia Today) Interview with Jesse Ventura - "We Need A Revolution In Our Country"

2011-04-13T14:10:00.000-06:00

Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s Address to Congress on the War in Libya

2011-04-13T13:46:00.008-06:00

Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s Address to Congress on the War in Libya
As Prepared for Delivery
United States House of Representatives
March 31, 2011

Mr. Speaker. The critical issue before this nation today is not Libyan democracy, it is American democracy. In the next hour I will describe the dangers facing our own democracy. The principles of world democracy are embodied in the UN Charter, conceived to end the scourge of war for all time. The hope that nations could turn their swords into plowshares reflects the timeless impulse of humanity for enduring peace and with it an enhanced opportunity to pursue happiness.

We are not naïve about the existence of forces in the world which work against peace and against human security, but it is our fervent wish that we shall never become like those whom we condemn as lawless and without scruples. For it is our duty as members of a democratic society to provide leadership by example, to not only articulate the highest standards but to walk down the path to peace and justice with those standards as our constant companions. Our moral leadership in the world depends chiefly upon the might and light of truth and not shock and awe, and ghastly glow of our 2,000 lb bombs.

Our dear nation stands at a crossroads. The direction we take will determine not what kind of nation we are but what kind of nation we will become. Will we become a nation which plots in secret to wage war? Will we become a nation that observes our Constitution only in matters of convenience? Will we become a nation which destroys the unity of the world community painstakingly pieced together from the ruins of World War II, a war which itself followed a war to end all wars?

Now, once again we stand poised at a precipice -- forced to the edge by an Administration which has thrown caution to the winds and our Constitution to the ground.

It is abundantly clear from a careful reading of our Declaration of Independence that our nation was born from nothing less than the rebellion of the human spirit against the arrogance of power.

More than 200 years ago it was the awareness of the unchecked arrogance of King George III that led our Founders to deliberately and carefully balance our constitution by articulating the rights of Congress in Article I, as the primary check by our citizens against the dangers they foresaw for our republic. Our constitution was derived from the human and political experience of our Founders who were aware of what happens when one person takes it upon himself or herself to assume rights and privileges which place them above their fellow citizens.

“But where,” asked Tom Paine in his famous tract, Common Sense, “…is the king of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal of Britain . . . . so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

The power to declare war is firmly and explicitly vested in the Congress of the United States under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Let us make no mistake about it, dropping 2000 lb bombs and unleashing the massive firepower of our air force on the capital of a sovereign state is in fact an act of war and no amount of legal acrobatics can make it otherwise.

It is that same arrogance of power which the former Senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, saw shrouded in the deceit which carried us into the abyss of the war in Vietnam. We determined we would never again see another Vietnam. It was the awareness of the unchecked power and arrogance of the executive which led Congress to pass the War Powers Act.

The Congress through the War Powers Act provided the executive with an exception to unilaterally respond only when the nation was in actual or imminent danger; to “repel sudden attacks.”

Today we are in a constitutional crisis because our chief executive has assumed for himself powers to wage war which are neither expressly defined nor implicit in the Constitution, nor permitted under the War Powers Act.

This is a challenge not just to the Administration, but to Congress itself:
The President has no right to wrest that fundamental power from Congress - and we have no right to cede it to him.

We, Members of Congress can no more absolve our president of his responsibility to obey this profound constitutional mandate then we can absolve ourselves of our failure to rise to the instant challenge that is before us today.

We violate our sacred trust to the citizens of the United States and our oath to uphold the constitution if we surrender this great responsibility and through our own inaction acquiesce in another terrible war.

We must courageously defend the oath that we took to defend the Constitution of the United States of America or we forfeit our right to participate in representative government.

How can we pretend to hold other sovereigns to fundamental legal principles through wars in foreign lands if we do not hold our own presidents to fundamental legal principles at home?

We are staring not only into the maelstrom of war in Libya, but also the code of behavior we are establishing today sets a precedent for the potential of evermore violent maelstroms ahead in Syria, Iran, and the horrifying chaos of generalized war throughout the Middle East. Our continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan makes us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to being engulfed in this generalized war.

In two years we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.

This Administration is now asserting the right to go to war because a nation may threaten force against those who have internally taken up arms against it. Our bombs began dropping even before the UN’s International Commission of Inquiry could verify allegations of murder of non-combatant civilians by the Gaddafi regime.

The Administration deliberately avoided coming to Congress and furthermore rejects the principle that Congress has any role in this matter. Yesterday we learned that ‘The Administration would forge ahead with military action even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission.’

This is a clear and arrogant violation of our Constitution. This is war. Even a war launched for humanitarian reasons is still a war. And - only Congress can declare war.

We saw in the President’s address to the nation on March 28, 2011 how mismatched elements are being hastily stitched together into a new war doctrine:

1. Executive privilege to wage war

2. War based on verbal threats

3. Humanitarian war

4. Preemptive war

5. Unilateral war

6. War for regime change

7. War against a nation whose government this Administration determines to be illegitimate

8. War authorized through the UN Security Council

9. War authorized through NATO and the Arab League

10. War requested by a rebel group against its despised government.

But not a word about coming to the representatives of the people in the United States Congress to make this decision. At this moment sailors and marines aboard the USS Bataan are headed to a position off the coast of Libya. The sons and daughters of our constituents put their lives on the line for this country. We owe it to them to challenge a misguided and illegal doctrine which could put their lives in great danger. For we have an obligation to protect them as they pledge to defend our nation.

The Administration’s new war doctrine will lead not to peace, but to more war. It will stretch even thinner our military. In 2007 the Center for American Progress released a report on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the multiple deployments on our Armed Forces. The report cited a lack of military readiness. It cited high levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and suicide.

The report was released just before President Bush’s surge in Iraq. Just one year after the surge in Afghanistan and after eight years in Iraq, the President commits an all volunteer army to another war of choice. If the criteria for military intervention in another country is government-sponsored violence and instability, over commitment of our military will be virtually inevitable and our national security will be undermined.

It is clear that the Administration planned a war against Libya at least a month in advance. But why? The President cannot say that Libya is an imminent or actual threat. He cannot say that war against Libya is in our vital interest. He cannot say that Libya had the intention or capability of attacking the United States. He has not claimed Libya had weapons of mass destruction to be used against us.

We are told our nation’s role is limited, yet, at the same time, it is being expanded.

We have been told the administration does not favor military regime change, but then they tell us the war cannot end until Gaddafi is no longer the leader. Further, two weeks earlier the President signed a secret order for the CIA to assist the rebels who are trying to oust Gaddafi.

We are told that the burdens of the war in Libya would be shared by a coalition, but the United States is providing the bulk of the money, the armaments and the organizational leadership.

We are told that the President has legal authority for this war under the UN Security Council Resolution 1973. But this resolution specifically does not authorize any ground elements. Furthermore, the administration exceeded the mandate of the resolution by providing the rebels with air cover. Thus this war against Libya violated our Constitution and has even violated the very authority which the administration claimed was sufficient to take our country to war.

We are told the Gaddafi regime has been illegitimate for four decades. But we were not told that in 2003 the U.S. dropped sanctions against Libya. We were not told that Gaddafi, in an effort to ingratiate himself with the West in general and with America in particular, accepted a market-based economic program led by the very harsh structural adjustment remedies of the IMF and the World Bank. This led to the wholesale privatization of his state enterprises, contributing to unemployment in Libya rising above 20%. CNN reported on December 19, 2003 that Libya acknowledged having a nuclear program, pledged to destroy weapons of mass destruction and pledged to allow international inspections.

This was a decision which President George W. Bush has praised saying Gaddafi’s actions “made our country and our world safer.”

We are told that Gaddafi is in breach of UN Security Council Resolutions but now our own Secretary of State is reportedly considering arming the rebels, an act which would be a breach of the UN Security Council resolution which established an arms embargo.

We are told we went to war at the request of and with the support of the Arab League but the Secretary General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa began asking questions immediately after the imposition of the “No Fly Zone” stating that what was happening in Libya “differs from the aim of imposing a No Fly Zone . . . . what we want is the protection of civilians and not the shelling of civilians.”

Even the Secretary General of NATO, an organization which the United States founded and generally controls, expressed concern saying “We are not in Libya to arm people but to protect people.”

Is this is truly a humanitarian intervention? What is humanitarian about providing to one side of a conflict the ability to wage war against the other side of a conflict, which will inevitably trigger a civil war turning Libya into a graveyard?

The Administration has told us they do not really know who the rebels are, but they are considering arming them nonetheless. The fact that they are even thinking about arming these rebels makes one think they know exactly who the rebels are.

While a variety of individuals and institutions may comprise the so called opposition in Libya, in fact one of the most significant organizations is the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) along with its military front, the Libyan National Army. The NFSL’s call for opposition to the Gaddafi regime in February was a catalyst of the conflict which precipitated the humanitarian crisis which is now used to justify our armed intervention.

But how spontaneous was this rebellion?

The Congressional Research Service in a 1987 analysis of the Libyan opposition wrote:

“Over twenty opposition groups exist outside Libya. The most important in 1987 was the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF) formed in October 1981….The LNSF claimed responsibility for the daring attack on Gaddafi’s headquarters at Bab al Aziziyah on May 8, 1984. Although the coup attempt failed and Gaddafi escaped unscathed, dissident groups claimed that some eighty Libyans, Cubans and East Germans perished.”

Significantly the CRS cited various “sources” as early as 1984 which claimed “. . . the United States Central Intelligence Agency trained and supported the LNSF [Libyan National Salvation Front] before and after the May 8 operation”.

By October 31, 1996, according to the BBC translation of Al-Hayat, an Arabic journal in London, a Colonel Khalifah Hiftar, who was the leader of the Libyan National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the LNSF was quoted as saying “force is the only effective method” in dealing with Gaddafi.

Move forward to March 26, 2011. The McClatchy Newspapers reported that the “new leader of Libya’s opposition military, left for Libya two weeks ago”, apparently around the same time that the President signed the covert operations order. The new leader spent the past two decades of his life in suburban Virginia where he had no visible means of support. His name: Colonel Khalifah Hiftar. One wonders when he planned his trip and who is his travel agency.

Congress needs to determine whether the United States, through previous covert support of the armed insurrection driven by the American-created NFSL, potentially helped create the humanitarian crisis was used to justify military intervention?

If we really want to understand how our constitutional prerogative for determining war and peace has been preempted by this Administration, it is important that Congress fully consider relevant events which may relate directly to the attack on Libya.

Consider this: On November 2, 2010 France and Great Britain signed a mutual defense treaty, which included joint participation in “Southern Mistral” a series of war games outlined in the bilateral agreement and surprisingly documented on a joint military web site established by France and Great Britain. Southern Mistral involved a long-range conventional air attack, called Southern Storm, against a dictatorship in a fictitious southern country called “Southland,” in response to a pretend attack on France by “Southland”. The joint military air strike was authorized by a pretend United Nations Security Council Resolution. The “Composite Air Operations” were planned for the period of March 21-25, 2011.

On March 20, 2011 the United States joined France and Great Britain in an air attack against Libya, pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1973.

Have the scheduled war games simply been postponed, or are they actually under way after months of planning, under the name of Operation Odyssey Dawn? Were opposition forces in Libya informed by the US, the UK or France about the existence of Southern Mistral/Southern Storm, which may have encouraged them to actions leading to greater repression and a humanitarian crisis? In short was this war against Gaddafi’s Libya planned or a spontaneous response to the great suffering which Gaddafi was visiting upon his opposition? Congress has not even considered this possibility.

NATO, which has now taken over enforcement of the no-fly zone, has morphed from an organization which pledged mutual support to defend North Atlantic states from aggression in military operations reaching from Libya to the Chinese border in Afghanistan. We need to now ask what role the French Air Force General Abrial and current Supreme Allied Commander of NATO for Transformation may have played in the development of Operation Southern Storm and in discussions with the U.S. in the expansion of the UN Mandate into a NATO operation. What has been the role of the US African Command and Central Command in discussions leading up to this conflict? What did we know and when did we know it?

The United Nations Security Council process is at risk when its members are not fully informed of all the facts when they authorize a military operation. It is at risk from NATO which is usurping its mandate without specific authorization of Security Council Resolution 1973. The United States pays 25% of the military expense of NATO and NATO may be participating in the expansion of the UN mandate.

The United Nations relies not only on its moral authority, but on the moral cooperation of its member nations. If America exceeds its legal authority and determines to redefine international law, we journey away from an international moral order and into the amorality of power politics where the rule of force trumps the rule of law.

What are the fundamental principles at stake in America today?

First and foremost is our system of checks and balances built into the Constitution to ensure that important decisions of state are developed through mutual respect and shared responsibility in order to ensure that collective knowledge, indeed the collective wisdom of the people, is brought to bear. Two former Secretaries of State, James Baker and Warren Christopher have spoken jointly to the “importance of meaningful consultation between the President and Congress before the nation is committed to war.”

Our nation has an inherent right to defend itself and a solemn obligation to defend the Constitution. From the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam to the allegations of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq we have learned from bitter experience that the determination to go to war must be based on verifiable facts carefully considered.
Finally, civilian deaths are always to be regretted. But, we must understand from our own Civil War more than 150 years ago that nations must resolve their own conflicts and shape their own destiny internally.

However horrible those internal conflicts may be, these local conflicts can become even more dreadful if armed intervention in a civil war results in the internationalization of that conflict.

The belief that war is inevitable makes of war a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The United States, in this new and complex world wracked with great movements of masses to transform their own government, must itself be open to transformation, away from intervention, away from trying to determine the leadership of other nations, away from covert operations to try to manipulate events, and towards a rendezvous with those great principles of self-determination which gave us birth.

In a world which is interconnected and interdependent. In a world which cries out for human unity, we must call upon the wisdom of our namesake and Founding Father, George Washington, to guide us in the days ahead.

“The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”

Washington also had a wish for the future America: “My wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.”