The GOP's McCarthy gene

Think Goldwater is the father of conservatism? Think again.

By Neal Gabler

November 30, 2008

Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

Link

In Maryland, Focus on Poultry Industry Pollution
By IAN URBINA, NY Times

Standing before a two-story-tall pile of chicken manure, Lee Richardson pondered how times had changed. “When I left school and started working the land, this stuff was seen as farmer’s gold,” said Mr. Richardson, 38, a fifth-generation chicken grower, explaining that the waste was an ideal fertilizer for the region’s sandy soil. “Now, it’s too much of a good thing.”

How to handle the 650 million pounds of chicken manure produced in the state each year has sparked a fierce debate between environmentalists and the state’s powerful poultry industry. State officials hope to bring Maryland in line with most other states next month by enacting new rules for where, how and how long chicken farmers can spread the manure on their fields or store it in outdoor piles.

“We don’t let hog or dairy farms spread their waste unregulated, and we wouldn’t let a town of 25,000 people dump human manure untreated on open lands,” said Gerald W. Winegrad, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland who is a former state senator. “So why should we allow a farm with 150,000 chickens do it?”

As the amount of cropland in Maryland has shrunk and the number of chickens raised has grown to 570 million, these mountains of manure have become a liability because the excess is washing into the Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation’s most polluted estuaries, and further worsening the plight of the fishermen who ply its waters.

Link to con.

December 18, 2008

What to Do

By Paul Krugman

What the world needs right now is a rescue operation. The global credit system is in a state of paralysis, and a global slump is building momentum as I write this. Reform of the weaknesses that made this crisis possible is essential, but it can wait a little while. First, we need to deal with the clear and present danger. To do this, policymakers around the world need to do two things: get credit flowing again and prop up spending.

The first task is the harder of the two, but it must be done, and soon. Hardly a day goes by without news of some further disaster wreaked by the freezing up of credit. As I was writing this, for example, reports were coming in of the collapse of letters of credit, the key financing method for world trade. Suddenly, buyers of imports, especially in developing countries, can't carry through on their deals, and ships are standing idle: the Baltic Dry Index, a widely used measure of shipping costs, has fallen 89 percent this year.

Link

(finally someone mentions John Maynard Keynes)

Justice for Indian Country
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In
By STEVE HENDRICKS

Seven years before Tisquantum (Squanto, to most of us) helped the Pilgrims recover from their disastrous first winter in America, he was kidnapped by an English cod fisher and fur trader who was diversifying into the human trade. Tisquantum and other stock were shipped to Spain under hatch, a murderous passage, and most of the survivors were sold into slavery. Tisquantum was among the lucky, rescued by friars before he could be auctioned, though perhaps held a few years to ensure his salvation by Christ. We do not know how Tisquantum made his way to London and finagled a job as guide and interpreter on a ship bound for New England. But in 1619, four years after his abduction, he returned to America only to find his town of Patuxet in ruins and nearly all its 2,000 Wampanoags dead of European pox. When the Pilgrims arrived the following winter, they founded Plymouth on Patuxet's remains--a cruel symbol, that.

We do not hear much of this history on Thanksgiving. We hear instead that in the spring of 1621 Tisquantum taught the Pilgrims to grown corn and catch eel. We hear that come autumn, gratitude suffused the harvest feast, that beautiful gathering of men who had seen Shakespeare in his lifetime and men ignorant of paper but living lives of plenty. These things are indeed true, but a fuller truth is that Tisquantum helped the Pilgrims as much from fear as from charity and that alongside the goodwill at the first Thanksgiving were mutual mistrust and just-restrained hostility. The mistrust, on the Wampanoags' side at least, was well founded, as their destruction by colonial America soon proved.

Link to con.

Russia Today -
Excellent Interview with Dennis Kucinich



(not a perfect video....but the message is the thing)

2,700-year-old marijuana stash found

OTTAWA – Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

Link

Bush administration quietly works to torpedo global warming regulations
Nick Juliano

On his way out the door, President Bush seems to be taking one last shot at torpedoing court-ordered action to restrict global warming.

Top Bush administration figures have been e-mailing sympathetic mayors and other allies encouraging them to oppose Environmental Protection Agency rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The Supreme Court last year ordered the EPA to craft a proposal to limit the emissions under the Clean Air Act, but the White House made clear it doesn't like the idea.

"At the time, President Bush warned that this was the wrong way to regulate emissions. [House Energy and Commerce Committee] Chairman John D. Dingell called it 'a glorious mess,' " Jeremy J. Broggi, associate director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. "And many of you contacted us to let us know how harmful this rule would be to the economies of the cities and counties you serve."

"The Bush administration," Eilperin says, "...is sending out a message to some of its allies: Tell us how much you don't want us to regulate emissions linked to global warming."

Link to con.

As Latinos tilt Democratic, can Texas stay ‘red’?
The Lone Star State is the last big GOP bastion where Hispanics are a sizable voting bloc.
By Michael B. Farrell

When President Bush says so long to Washington on Jan. 20, he’ll return to a much different Lone Star State from the one he left eight years ago. Pickup trucks, Big Oil, and barbecue brisket still reign supreme, but this red state that helped deliver the presidency to Mr. Bush twice and his father once, and that catapulted GOP strategist Karl Rove to the national stage, is suddenly spotted with big pockets of blue.

Dallas is controlled by Democrats; Houston is in their hands, too. It’s all largely because of the state’s growing Hispanic population, which overwhelmingly sided with Democrats this year. “The tide of demography in Texas is moving against the Republicans,” says Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “All the major cities are Democratic and are likely to become more so over time.”

The Pew Hispanic Center reports that Latino voters sided with President-elect Obama over Sen. John McCain by a margin of more than 2 to 1, helping Democrats win crucial states such as Florida, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado. While the overall Hispanic turnout did not rise much – it accounted for 9 percent of the vote this year and 8 percent in 2004 – Latino support for the GOP dropped nine percentage points, according to Pew.

Link to con.

Why Eduardo Galeano Doesn't Get It
Obama in Bedlam
By JOHN ROSS

The Emergency Room at San Francisco General Hospital is an American Bedlam. Now the only trauma center in a city that has suffered nearly 100 violent homicides in the first 10 months of 2008, ER is a snake pit boiling over nightly with gunshot and stabbing victims, those mangled in street confrontations or otherwise mowed down in traffic, damaged gangbangers, raving lunatics, drunks in the throes of the DTs, handcuffed prisoners in Guantanamo-like jumpsuits, snarling cops, and harried if heroically serene medical personal just trying to survive their shifts.

Broken men and women moan and thrash on blood-drenched gurneys so jamming the narrow hallways that treatment is reduced to triage. Some patients are lashed to their impromptu beds, the more comatose hooked up to blinking machines. Bodily fluids are sprayed and spat so rudely that the caregivers are forced to wear plastic face visors.

I arrived in this little corner of Hell courtesy of 911 after I had stopped breathing, a borderline emergency, and was shelved for 25 hours in a war zone hallway while the mayhem surged and ebbed all around me. Twice during my stay, the hospital decreed a red alert and the ER was locked down by armed deputies, a measure a retired nurse tells me is imposed when rival gangs face off in the parking lot.

Link to con.

Monty Python - Argument Clinic

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything.
They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else,"

"But I'll tell you what they don't want, they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security.
They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

-George Carlin

Youssou N'Dour & Neneh Cherry "7 Seconds"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbBSDE-Dywo

and another one

What we eat is making us sick! Guest Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University and author of What to Eat discusses this subject along with Eating Liberally/Huffington Post blogger Kerry Trueman and filmmaker Catherine Gund.

Chomsky: What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World

Part one of four



Part two



You tube has all four parts

(A thanks to the dude for this)
This is change?: Early signs indicate more of the same in Washington
By: George Ochenski

For the last year, we’ve heard nothing from campaigning politicians except how they are the voices for and instruments of change. Coming from both Republicans and Democrats, you’d think Washington, D.C. would be in a froth of re-invention. But from what we’ve seen so far, there’s very little change in who runs the show, who gets the gold and, unfortunately, who gets the shaft.

Let’s start with this week’s greatest example of no change—namely, the decision by the U.S. Senate Democratic leadership to allow Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., to remain as chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Lieberman, as many will recall, is a renegade former Democrat who ran as vice president with Al Gore, lost a Democratic primary for Senate, then won the general election as an independent. He caucuses with the Democrats, but supported Republican John McCain for president against Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Lieberman is also one of the biggest hawks in Congress and an enthusiastic and unapologetic supporter of the disastrous Iraq War. He has also been a strong supporter of action against Iran, including statements such as: “Bombing Iran has an appeal to it.” If you had to be “for or against” George Bush, Lieberman would definitely be in the “for” category.

So why didn’t the Dems have the guts to give the guy exactly what he deserves, strip him of his chairmanship and leave him wandering the halls with no committees, no power and no podium? Good question. If you believe Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., it’s because the Democrats are “looking forward, not looking back.” Maybe that makes sense to the refined intelligentsia of Capitol Hill, but why would you want to put an avowed warmonger in charge of a committee that has, unfortunately, been far too compliant with Bush’s agenda of shredding the constitution through illegal wiretaps and secretly spying on American citizens? How do we follow a new path when we have the same leader who has so misdirected our steps in the past? How do you convince the world that America has a new approach when the same old war hawks remain in power?

Link to con.

A Better Brew
The rise of extreme beer.
by Burkhard Bilger

Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are wired for inebriation.

The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer. Gasparine is a businessman from Baltimore. He owns a flooring company that uses sustainably harvested wood and he sometimes goes to South America to talk to suppliers. On the trip in question, he had noticed that the local wood-carvers often used a variety called palo santo, or holy wood. It was so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings. It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink. The South Americans used it for salad bowls, serving utensils, maté goblets, and, in at least one case, wine barrels.

Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek. (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.” It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries. Gasparine decided to send a note to the owner, Sam Calagione. Dogfish was already aging some of its beer in oak barrels. Why not try something more aromatic, like palo santo?

Link to con.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich- The Bailout is Digging the US to China

Frankenstein in Mesopotamia
By Tom Hayden

The pact being negotiated between the US and Baghdad governments includes a direct rebuff to president-elect Barack Obama's promised policy of withdrawing American combat troops in 16-18 months. The pact instead would leave those troops in place until the end of 2011, a doubling of the timeline to which Obama pledged himself. But that's not all.

The most important things, some say, are the things left unsaid. If so, the unmentionable thing would be the police state America is leaving behind in Baghdad.

Finally, human rights observers agree that there are 40-50,000 Iraqis currently held in detention centers under either US or Iraqi control. Under terms of the pact, "we're getting out of the detainee business", says the US military spokesman in Iraq. The US-run camps, known as Bucca and Cropper, hold at least 17,000 detainees under a US-declared "security detention" doctrine that does not exist in either American or Iraqi law. According to Human Rights Watch, they are held "for indefinite periods, without judicial review, and under military processes that do not meet international standards." Most of them - at least 12,000 - were mistakenly seized in American sweeps or played marginal roles the resistance. Those who are released are often killed by Shi'a death squads.

If the US and Iraqi governments were to seek a renewal of the United Nations reauthorization when it expires on December 31, chances are that accepted human rights standards would be demanded for the Iraqis detainees, such as access to legal council, family members and international observers.

Link to con.

The End of Texas Dominance
From LBJ to Obama
By ROBERT BRYCE

Barack Obama’s historic win has enormous significance for America and its image. It has changed how America sees itself and it has, thankfully, changed how the rest of the world sees America.

But Obama’s election is also concrete proof of the enduring triumph of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Obama’s win is the consummation of two pieces of legislation that Johnson forced through Congress: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Four decades after Johnson left the White House to return to Texas, his voice, his conscience, reverberates in America. The irony is that while Obama’s win was made possible by Johnson, it also marks the end of Texas’s dominance of modern American presidential politics.

Obama ascendance comes at the cost of Texas influence. George W. Bush, the least-popular president in the history of polling, is likely to be the last Texas president for a long time. Obama’s successful campaign was largely based on an effort to tie John McCain to the unpopular Bush at every opportunity. Obama’s single most effective TV commercial may have been the one that shows McCain himself saying that he voted with Bush 90 percent of the time.

Link to con.

Changing With Retreads
The Third Clinton Administration
By RALPH NADER

While the liberal intelligentsia was swooning over Barack Obama during his presidential campaign, I counseled “prepare to be disappointed.” His record as a Illinois state and U.S. Senator, together with the many progressive and long overdue courses of action he opposed during his campaign, rendered such a prediction unfortunate but obvious.

Now this same intelligentsia is beginning to howl over Obama’s transition team and early choices to run his Administration. Having defeated Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primaries, he now is busily installing Bill Clinton’s old guard. Thirty one out of forty seven people that he has named so far for transition or appointments have ties to the Clinton Administration, according to Politico. One Clintonite is quoted in the Washington Post as saying – “This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time.”

Obama’s “foreign policy team is now dominated by the Hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990,” writes Jeremy Scahill. Obama’s transition team reviewing intelligence agencies and recommending appointments is headed by John Brennan and Jami Miscik, who worked under George Tenet when the CIA was involved in politicizing intelligence for, among other officials, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s erroneous address before the United Nations calling for war against Iraq.

Link to con.

Stuff Happens: The Pentagon's Argument of Last Resort on Iraq
by Tom Engelhardt

It's the ultimate argument, the final bastion against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war. It really doesn't matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it's an argument that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.

And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen – the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives – wheeled it into place and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan for US combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, "We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions? Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it safely." Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least "two to three years."

For those who needed further clarification, the Wall Street Journal's Yochi J. Dreazen spelled it out: "In recent interviews, two high-ranking officers stated flatly that it would be logistically impossible to dismantle dozens of large US bases there and withdraw the 150,000 troops now in Iraq so quickly. The officers said it would take close to three years for a full withdrawal and could take longer if the fighting resumed as American forces left the country."

Link to con.

The Lame-Duck Economy
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TImes

Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in voters’ minds, both discredited the G.O.P.’s free-market ideology and undermined its claims of competence. And for those on the progressive side of the political spectrum, these are hopeful times.

There is, however, another and more disturbing parallel between 2008 and 1932 — namely, the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis. The interregnum of 1932-1933, the long stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power, was disastrous for the U.S. economy, at least in part because the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action. And the same thing is happening now.

It’s true that the interregnum will be shorter this time: F.D.R. wasn’t inaugurated until March; Barack Obama will move into the White House on Jan. 20. But crises move faster these days.

How much can go wrong in the two months before Mr. Obama takes the oath of office? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot. Consider how much darker the economic picture has grown since the failure of Lehman Brothers, which took place just over two months ago. And the pace of deterioration seems to be accelerating.

Link to con.

Too Big to Fail?
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park
By P. SAINATH

It's unfair to call the US auto industry dinosaurs, as some now do. It's certainly unfair to the dinosaurs. The 'Terrible Lizards' did not lay the basis for their own extinction or that of myriad other species. The original dinosaurs (who scientists now tell us were neither all that terrible nor lizards), were great examples of success and adaptation, good enough to rule the planet for 150 million years. The US auto industry is the opposite. It's not just that the Terrible Metal Lizards opposed fuel efficiency standards. Of course, they did. They also promoted gas-guzzling SUVs as a lifestyle must. They cranked out cars many did not want to buy. They wielded heavy clout in Congress, and were able to sponge off public funds in the name of saving jobs as they have yet again. Having received $ 25 billion earlier, their hats are in their outstretched hands again.

But that's the easy part. There's a lot more they did, as a major sector of industry - and as part of the larger corporate world of the United States. Over decades, they destroyed both existing and potential public transport. The 'American Dream' so far as the automobile went, was an imposed nightmare. In Detroit itself, you can see the skeletons of a once-alive transport system. All across the country, for decades from the 1920s, they bought up public transport systems and shut them down.

Trains were shifted from electric to diesel engines. Sometimes, they were simply done away with and replaced by buses and then cars. Together with Big Oil, Big Auto converted electric transit systems to fuel-based bus systems. In one estimate: In 1935, electric train engines outnumbered diesel train engines 7 to 1. "By 1970, diesel train engines outnumbered electric ones 100 to 1. And GM made 60 per cent of the diesel locomotives." The electric rail system in and around Los Angeles was almost erased.

Link to con.

(Just another opinion on what to do)
Nationalize America's Car Industry

The best solution to the crisis of the auto industry -- for the workers, for our citizens, and for the future of the world environment -- would be for the U.S. government to take over the auto companies.
Let Congress nationalize these companies but also socialize them by creating a board of union members, environmentalists, and consumers to run them. Let us own and run the auto companies.

To most Americans government ownership of industry sounds like a foreign concept and conjures up images of Soviet industry and its colossal failure.

Certainly after seeing the Bush administration manage the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, the Katrina disaster, and the Veterans Hospitals, we must all have some qualms about what government management would mean.

We should not forget, however, that many countries throughout the world have nationalized industries and run them better than GM has run its auto company. In England, France, Germany and Italy governments owned and managed mines, steel mills, manufacturing plants, and service industries.

Today many developing countries manage nationalized oil and chemical industries.

Even the United States has nationalized industry when the government believed it was in its interest. During World War I the U.S. government nationalized the railroads and, working closely with the railroad unions, ran them more efficiently than their private owners.

Link to con.

(What the f****** nerve to show up like this. How bout they sell the planes to start, maybe give up a couple of their four homes...maybe that one in Vail just has to go. Just urks me...how about you?)
Yet another reason why Big Auto is failing
Chris in Paris

Clueless. Absolutely clueless. Anyone who is serious about keeping their company afloat - let alone snag billions - needs to re-think the way they do business. Management always loves to criticize the unions for costing too much but this royal spending hardly makes sense for an industry in a death spiral.
The CEOs of the big three automakers flew to the nation's capital yesterday in private luxurious jets to make their case to Washington that the auto industry is running out of cash and needs $25 billion in taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy.

The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler may have told Congress that they will likely go out of business without a bailout yet that has not stopped them from traveling in style, not even First Class is good enough.

All three CEOs - Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford, and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler - exercised their perks Tuesday by flying in corporate jets to DC. Wagoner flew in GM's $36 million luxury aircraft to tell members of Congress that the company is burning through cash, asking for $10-12 billion for GM alone.

"We want to continue the vital role we've played for Americans for the past 100 years, but we can't do it alone," Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee.

While Wagoner testified, his G4 private jet was parked at Dulles airport. It is one of eight luxury jets in the GM fleet that continues to ferry executives around the world despite the company's dire financial straits.

"This is a slap in the face of taxpayers," said Tom Schatz, President of Citizens Against Government Waste. "To come to Washington on a corporate jet, and asking for a hand out is outrageous."

Wagoner's private jet trip to Washington cost his ailing company an estimated $20,000 roundtrip. In comparison, seats on Northwest Airlines flight 2364 from Detroit to Washington were going online for $288 coach and $837 first class.

After the hearing, Wagoner declined to answer questions about his travel.

Ford CEO Mulally's corporate jet is a perk included for both he and his wife as part of his employment contract along with a $28 million salary last year. Mulally actually lives in Seattle, not Detroit. The company jet takes him home and back on weekends.
Honestly, don't we all take the jet home for weekends? Isn't this what anyone would do if their industry was falling apart and asking for billions? This is as bad as Wall Street who hand out bonus money to failures even when they're fired for being failures that have lost billions.

Link to con.

Politics in a Crazy Time
Obama and the Iron Cage
By BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI

Can Obama transcend the Iron Cage of the White House?

The short answer to the question is a simple no!

I hoped with all my might that Obama would win the presidency and end the reign of terror that the Bush Administration has inflicted on the world. Much more needs to be said about the historical significance of a White House with black residents, but not here. I am jubilant that he has won and apprehensive about how soon he and his administration will capitulate to the habitual politics of the District of Columbia. Obama has the power to resist the current, but he won’t. To do that, he would have to launch a paradigmatic shift in the way politics is taught, thought of, and practiced in this country.

Obama ran a presidential campaign with an inherent contradiction between its form and substance. In its form––the ways his campaign mobilized different constituencies, the way he appeared in rallies, and in the very intonation of his oratory––he presented himself as a populist candidate advocating radical change. Substantively––in his economic plan, in his understanding of global conflicts, and in his political vision––he differentiated himself by a hair’s breadth from Clinton-era center-right doctrine. History tells us that substance is enduring and form is ephemeral.

Link to con.

Holder, Chiquita and Colombia
By MARIO A. MURILLO

First the good news: We're two months away from President George W. Bush's last full day in the White House. The countdown for the end of the nightmare has begun in earnest. Now the bad news: As Barack Obama puts together his cabinet and eyes a slew of former Clinton officials for key staff positions, it is becoming ever more apparent that all those calls for change coming from progressive circles in the U.S. – and abroad - have fallen on deaf ears.

Most striking, at least for the time being, is the soon to be named position of the top law enforcement official of the country. It looks like the first African-American President will appoint the first African-American attorney general in the coming days, something that on the surface looks like an advance, but should actually sound alarm bells for anybody seeking true change in the way things are done in Washington, especially when it comes to bringing corporate criminals to justice.

Although no final decision has been made, the New York Times reports that the President-elect's transition team has signaled to Eric H. Holder Jr., a senior Clinton Justice Department official, that he will be selected as the next attorney general. Holder helped lead the team that selected Sen. Joe Biden as Obama's VP choice.

Most news accounts about the pending appointment seem to be limiting their criticism of Holder to one of his final acts as President Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general in 2001. At the time, on the last day of Clinton's term, Holder apparently said he was "neutral, leaning toward favorable" for a presidential pardon for Marc Rich, the wealthy commodities dealer whose ex-wife, Denise, was a major donor to the Democratic Party. Clinton's pardon of the tax-evading Rich was criticized as politically motivated, leading to a congressional investigation over the matter.

Link to con.

Tomgram: Mike Davis, Keynesian Shock and Awe

No one should be shocked to discover that, in his transition to the presidency, the "inexperienced" former senator from Chicago has turned to the last Democratic administration that had experience in Washington. It seems, however, that the Obama team is doing so big time. Looking at lists of early appointees for the transition period and the administration to come, from Rahm Emanuel on down, you might be forgiven for concluding that Hillary had been elected president in 2008. Clintonistas are just piling up in the prospective corridors of power.

You might also be forgiven for concluding that just about no one else in America had ever had any "experience." Late last week, the website Politico.com did some counting and came up with the following: "Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration, including all but one of the members of his 12-person Transition Advisory Board and both of his White House staff choices." More have been appointed since then, including, as White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, the lawyer who defended Bill Clinton in impeachment hearings. And, of course, everyone in America now knows that Hillary herself is evidently now being considered for a cabinet post.

What do Washington political and policy types do when their party is kicked out of office? If they want to stay in the Big Town, they tend to go to work for lobbyists, consultancy firms, or think tanks. They raise money. They do what's needed and make good livings until the tide turns. Now, that tide is again rushing in -- and the lobbying money is, of course, rushing in with it. As the Washington Post describes it, there is already a "mini-boom" for Democrats along that lobbying alley, K Street.

Link to con.

(Let another reason to know your farmer/rancher and buy from a local you know is raising healthy products)
Tainted meats point to superbug C. diff in food
Study finds gut germ in 40 percent of grocery meats; CDC says not to worry
By JoNel Aleccia

A potentially deadly intestinal germ increasingly found in hospitals is also showing up in a more unsavory setting: grocery store meats.

More than 40 percent of packaged meats sampled from three Arizona chain stores tested positive for Clostridium difficile, a gut bug known as C. diff., according to newly complete analysis of 2006 data collected by a University of Arizona scientist.

Nearly 30 percent of the contaminated samples of ground beef, pork and turkey and ready-to-eat meats like summer sausage were identical or closely related to a super-toxic strain of C. diff blamed for growing rates of illness and death in the U.S. — raising the possibility that the bacterial infections may be transmitted through food.

“These data suggest that domestic animals, by way of retail meats, may be a source of C. difficile for human infection,” said J. Glenn Songer, a professor of veterinary science at the Tucson school, who talked with msnbc.com about work now under review by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But specialists from the CDC and scientists who study C. diff said the connection between the presence of C. diff bacteria and infection has not been established and that there’s not enough evidence about food transmission to warrant public alarm.

Link to con.

The Bottled Water Con
Buying the Message on the Bottle
By WENDY WILLIAMS

I remember when the name of the game at my gym was pump ’n’ swig. Weight lifters and treadmill sloggers routinely carried with their sweat towels expensive water in plastic bottles.

Drinking commercial water was the cool thing. In 2006, Americans bought 32.6 billion single-serving bottles of water, and another 34.6 billion larger bottles.

With a slew of brands for basically the same product, image marketers have pushed the envelope — the bottle itself. My favorite absurdity: “Bling H2O,” with the motto “More than a Pretty Taste.” You can buy this water in a “Limited Edition” frosted-glass bottle encrusted with crystals for $40.

The surprising truth is that an estimated 25 to 40 percent of bottled water comes from public drinking reservoirs. Pepsico’s Aquafina label shows high-peaked mountains, but the water is from municipal systems, including that of Ayer, Mass., a town next to a military base and a short drive from Boston. Coca-Cola’s brand, Dasani, also uses municipal systems.

Link to con.

How Bush Tried to Bring Down Evo Morales
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia
By ROGER BURBACH

Evo Morales is the latest democratically-elected Latin American president to be the target of a US plot to destabilize and overthrow his government. On September 10, 2008 Morales expelled US Ambassador Philip Goldberg because “he is conspiring against democracy and seeking the division of Bolivia.”
Observers of US-Latin American policy tend to view the crisis in US-Bolivian relations as due to a policy of neglect and ineptness towards Latin America because of US involvement in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. In fact, the Bolivia coup attempt was a conscious policy rooted in US hostility towards Morales, his political party the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the social movements that are aligned with him.

“The US embassy is historically used to calling the shots in Bolivia, violating our sovereignty, treating us like a banana republic,” says Gustavo Guzman, who was expelled as Bolivian ambassador to Washington following Goldberg’s removal. In 2002, when Morales narrowly lost his first bid for the presidency, US ambassador Manuel Rocha openly campaigned against him, threatening, “ if you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of US assistance to Bolivia.” Because he led the Cocaleros Federation prior to assuming the presidency, the US State Department called Morales an “illegal coca agitator.”Morales advocated “Coca Yes, Cocaine No,” and called which for an end to violent U.S.-sponsored coca eradication raids, and for the right of Bolivian peasants to grow coca for domestic consumption, medicinal uses and even for export as an herb in tea and other products.

“When Morales triumphed in the next presidential election,” says Guzman, “it represented a defeat for the United States.” Shortly after his inauguration, Morales received a call from George Bush, offering to help "bring a better life to Bolivians." Morales asked Bush to reduce US trade barriers for Bolivian products, and suggested that he come for a visit. Bush did not reply. As Guzman notes, “the United States was trying to woo Morales with polite and banal comments to keep him from aligning with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.” David Greenlee, the US ambassador prior to Goldberg, expressed his "preoccupation" with Bolivia's foreign alliances, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others at the Pentagon began talking about "security concerns" in Bolivia.

Link to con.

Hillary at Foggy Bottom?
No way! No how! No pasaran!
By Justin Raimondo

In his victory speech, Barack Obama told us: "I will listen to you, especially when we disagree." And, you know what? I believe him. He will listen. That's the one important difference, I think, between the outgoing and incoming administrations: George W. Bush would no sooner listen to ordinary Americans when it comes to the conduct of foreign affairs than he'd consult with Congress – i.e., not at all – whereas Obama… well, at least it's possible, and that is one real big change.

Okay, then, listen up, Mr. President-elect, because I've got a few bones to pick with you.

A Republican in charge of the Pentagon, a pro-torture anti-civil liberties CIA chief, and now Hillary Clinton as secretary of state – is there any principle you've forgotten to sell out?

As my old friend the late, great libertarian economist and social theorist Murray Rothbard used to say: Are we to be spared nothing?

One hardly knows what to say to such a proposal, except to wonder how President Obama intends to implement his own foreign policy platform over the Iron Lady's determined opposition. For Hillary opposed every significant peace initiative he put forward during the campaign, including a timetable to get us out of Iraq and direct negotiations with our adversaries. She derided this last – and very encouraging – stance as "naïve" and "dangerous." Is this the person who will now be expected to take the lead in facilitating those talks? Somehow, I don't think so.

Link to con.

(Yet another reason we need a third party or a new generation of dems that are actually willing to stand up and make radical change instead of walking the center (maybe even center right) bipartisan lines)
Senate Dems vote to let Lieberman keep chair
John Aravosis (DC) (http://www.americablog.com/)

Disgusting.

"Some of the things people have said I said of Senator Obama are simply not true."

Lying weasel to the end.

Maybe we don't need those extra Senate seats in Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia. I mean, I'd love for Begich, Franken and Martin to win, but what's the point? Why bust our asses for these guys, for the party, when people like LIeberman, who actually campaigned AGAINST some of these guys, are rewarded for their betrayal? It's becoming increasingly clear that the current crop of Democrats are genetically incapable of showing, or growing, a spine. The only way to get anything in this party is to publicly betray the party, to beat the living crap out of them, to stick the knife in deep and twist. Lesson duly noted.

Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West
By JIM ROBBINS

On the side of a mountain on the outskirts of Montana’s capital city, loggers are racing against a beetle grub the size of a grain of rice. From New Mexico to British Columbia, the region’s signature pine forests are succumbing to a huge infestation of mountain pine beetles that are turning a blanket of green forest into a blanket of rust red. Montana has lost a million acres of trees to the beetles, and in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming the situation is worse.

“We’re seeing exponential growth of the infestation,” said Clint Kyhl, director of a Forest Service incident management team in Laramie, Wyo., that was set up to deal with the threat of fire from dead forests. Increased construction of homes in forest areas over the last 20 years makes the problem worse. “We’re seeing exponential growth of the infestation,” said Clint Kyhl, director of a Forest Service incident management team in Laramie, Wyo., that was set up to deal with the threat of fire from dead forests. Increased construction of homes in forest areas over the last 20 years makes the problem worse.

In Wyoming and Colorado in 2006 there were a million acres of dead trees. Last year it was 1.5 million. This year it is expected to total over two million. In the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, the problem is most severe. It is the largest known insect infestation in the history of North America, officials said. British Columbia has lost 33 million acres of lodgepole pine forest, and a freak wind event last year blew mountain pine beetles, a species of bark beetle, over the Continental Divide to Alberta. Experts fear that the beetles could travel all the way to the Great Lakes.

Link to con.

(Thanks to "The Dude" for the heads up on this one)
Is water the new oil?
It's the world's most precious commodity, yet many of us take it for granted. But that's all about to change... Special report by Juliette Jowit

It's hard to imagine why humans would have chosen the achingly arid stone desert of Wadi Faynan for their first settlement. But water would have been one important reason, says archaeologist Steven Mithen. When Neolithic men and women arrived 11,500 years ago, things were very different: the climate was cooler and wetter; the landscape was covered in vegetation including wild figs, legumes and cereals, and there would have been wild goats and ibex for meat.

Initially WF16, as it's now called, would have been a seasonal camp. But Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, and his fellow archaeologist Bill Finlayson believe that, gradually, people stayed longer. Sifting evidence from so long ago, the archaeologists can't be sure, but remains of food from different seasons and the scale of 'rubbish' piles suggest that about 10,000 years ago the inhabitants stopped moving altogether. If they are right, it would make this one of the oldest sites ever found where humans made a permanent settlement, learned to farm, and changed the course of human civilisation. But the tiny community drawn to water, which attracted successive waves of settlements, would eventually all but destroy the resource which made life possible. It is a pattern that's been repeated for millennia, around the world, and it now threatens us on a global scale.

First people cut trees for shelter and fuel, until rains swept away the soil instead of seeping into shallow aquifers, and the springs dried up. At least as long ago as the Bronze Age, farmers began mankind's obsession with diverting water for crops to feed the growing population. Meanwhile, the moist, cool climate which encouraged the first settlement was naturally becoming drier and hotter.

Link to con.

Are There Just too Many People in the World?
By Johann Hari

This is a post I don't want to write. Its subject is ugly; it makes me instinctively recoil. I have chastised people who bring it up at environmentalist meetings. The people who talk about it obsessively have often been callous about human life, and consistently proved wrong throughout history. And yet... there is a grain of insight in what they say.

The subject is overpopulation. Is our planet over-stuffed with human beings? Are we breeding to excess? These questions are increasingly poking into public debate, and from odd directions. Phillip Mountbatten -- husband of the British monarch Elizabeth Windsor -- said in a documentary screened this week: "The food prices are going up, and everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food, but it's really [that there are] too many people. It's a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it." He is not alone. A strange range of people have voiced the same sentiments over the past few months, from the Dalai Lama to Hu Jintao, from Conservative mayor Boris Johnson to Democratic Governor Bill Richardson.

They start by listing the sums, which are indeed startling. Every year, world population grows by 75 million people -- equivalent to another Britain and Ireland whooshing fully-populated from the oceans. At the turn of the 18th century, there were 600 million people on earth. At the turn of this century, there were 6.6 billion. By the time I am in my sixties, there will be more than nine billion -- at which point there will be more people alive simultaneously than in the first 17 centuries after Christ combined.

Link to con.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper
by Siv O'Neall

The polarized world

Do we need further proof that greed is not the solution for a sound economy? Do we need further proof that capitalism is foundering? Do we need further proof that ignoring the poor is not the way to make the world go round? That selfish accumulation of wealth is not the key to peace of mind and a life worth living?

The weirdoes who are presently at the helm of the world don't know a thing about what a good life is all about. A half-starving family in India may well have a more meaningful life than high-riding madmen who accumulate riches and who never stop striving for more - the very people who are ruining the lives of the poverty-stricken slum dwellers in the third world, people who were once farmers, poor but self-sustaining. Now they are scavenging on the garbage dumps on the outskirts of the big cities. The goals in the lives of the poor rich people who are ruining the earth couldn't be more out of joint.

There is certainly no beauty in desperate poverty, nothing positive in being deprived of the decent lives of billions of the earth's population. But the poor soulless billionaires who have set as a goal in their lives to destroy the lives of millions, so as to wallow in luxury in their secluded mansions, are the victims of their own selfishness and their disastrous misjudgment of the human psyche.

Link to con.

A Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama
How Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

When biologist Jack Ward Thomas handed President Bill Clinton the final copy of his plan for the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest Forest, Clinton asked only one question: “How much timber will it cut?”

With this revealing query began the bizarre final chapter in the saga of Clinton’s adventure in the rainforests of the Northwest, the home of the salmon and the spotted owl.

In the final two weeks of April 1994, the Clinton administration saw its strategy to reinitiate timber sales in Northwest forests come to a shocking fruition, when most of the key environmental groups in the region agreed to lift the three-year old federal injunction prohibiting new timber sales in spotted owl habitat. At the same moment, one of the nation’s largest forest products companies announced its glowing support for Clinton’s forest plan.

Watch how neatly the pattern of events unfolded.

On April 14, 1994, the Clinton administration submitted the Record of Decision for its Northwest forest plan to federal Judge William Dwyer in Seattle. A disturbing codicil to the original plan (widely known as Option 9), the 200-page Record of Decision granted a series of last-minute concessions to timber interests that were designed to accelerate the preparation of new timber sales in old-growth and keep the plan’s annual timber sale above the one billion board foot mark—the psychological barrier demanded by the timber industry.

Link to con.

Bush cheers “free enterprise” as US capitalism goes bust
By Bill Van Auken

US President George W. Bush came to Wall Street Thursday to deliver a speech extolling the virtues of the "free enterprise" system even as multiple economic indicators made it clear that the so-called "magic of the market" is spelling misery for millions more working people in the US and around the globe.

Bush delivered his paean to American capitalism at Federal Hall, just a stone's throw from the New York Stock Exchange. The historic building was the site of the inauguration of George Washington and the first sessions of the US Congress. The august setting stood in stark contrast to the character of the select audience, which, in the gap between its ideological proclivities and socioeconomic reality, resembled a meeting of the flat earth society.

A total of 175 people turned out for the session, organized by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank that specializes in demonizing the poor while promoting tax cuts, financial deregulation, the dismantling of social programs and the decimation of public education.

The lame-duck president timed his speech for the eve of this weekend's G20 summit in Washington, which will bring together heads of state from the world's major economies for the ostensible purpose of working out a common agenda for confronting the global financial meltdown.

Link to con.

Wall Street's Bailout is a Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene -- Why Aren't the Dems Doing Something About It?
By Naomi Klein, The Nation.

The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.

In a moment of high panic in late September, the U.S. Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed -- a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."

Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

Link to con.

Finding the Best, Local Food Near You Just Got Easier
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet.

Food is making big headlines, and it's about time.

In a year marked by rising food prices and riots throughout the world, we've seen what happens when the reality of our energy, climate and water crises collides with trying to feed a planet.

As Vandana Shiva writes in her newest book, Soil Not Oil, "The era of cheap food and cheap oil is over." Add to this changing precipitation patterns, melting glaciers and increasing drought from climate change, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Michael Pollan has warned the next incoming U.S president, "What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact -- so easy to overlook these past few years -- that the health of a nation's food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention."

While Barack Obama may have his hands full, the rest of us need to be thinking about our plates. Interestingly, one of the ways to start doing this would be to stay right where you are -- in front of your computer, that is. While technology may not always have been the best companion to agriculture (think biotech), the Internet has emerged as an incredible tool for planning the future of food. A Web site called the Eat Well Guide is hoping to help people make good decisions about what they eat and how, with a few clicks of the mouse.

Link to con.

Kucinich to Neel Kashkari...Who are you working for?

How To Save A Major Automobile Company
By Neil Young

Find a new ownership group. The culture must change. It is time to turn the page. In the high technology sector there are several candidates for ownership of a major car and truck manufacturer. We need forward looking people who are not restricted by the existing culture in Detroit. We need visionary people now with business sense to create automobiles that do not contribute to global warming.

It is time to change and our problems can facilitate our solutions. We can no longer afford to continue down Detroit's old road. The people have spoken. They do not want gas guzzlers (although they still like big cars and trucks). It is possible to build large long-range vehicles that are very efficient. People will buy those vehicles because they represent real change and a solution that we can live with.

The government must take advantage of the powerful position that exists today. The Big 3 are looking for a bailout. They should only get it if they agree to stop building autos that contribute to global warming now. The stress on the auto manufacturers today is gigantic. In order to keep people working in their jobs and keep factories open, this plan is suggested:

The big three must reduce models to basics. a truck, an SUV, a large family sedan, an economy sedan, and a sports car. Use existing tooling.

Keep building these models to keep the workforce employed but build them without engines and transmissions. These new vehicles, called Transition Rollers, are ready for a re-power. No new tooling is required at this stage. The adapters are part of the kits described next.

Link to con.

Dennis Kucinich "Racketeering On A Scale This Country Has Never Seen Before!!!"

The Bush Regime's Serial Abuse Of Consumers Is Undermining The Entire Economy

I won a little victory yesterday. Alarm companies, I found out from the California Attorney General's office, have a little scam. Ever read your alarm company contract? No, me neither; and that's a mistake. If you cancel on them you owe them for the rest of the year. I canceled; they came and took the equipment and then continued to bill me. It took 6 months-- and zero help from any consumer affairs departments-- but yesterday they finally told me to shred the bills. A blow against the Empire? One small step for mankind...

A couple days ago the L.A. Times ran a piece about how the Empire is sticking it to all of us... and in so many ways. You think your jar of Skippy Extra Chunky Peanut butter looks the same as it always did? OK, it does look the same. But if you turn it-- or almost anything that comes in a plastic container-- over you'll notice something new and improved: a big ole indentation. And that indentation accounts for 1.7 ounces less extra crunchy peanut butter. Across a wide array of products consumers are getting less for our money.

Link to con.

How Now Brown Cloud
Juan Cole

"Atmospheric brown clouds" stretch from Dubai to Shanghai, intensifying global warming, reduce crop yields by blocking sunlight,and contribute to extreme weather that also hurts agriculture. The polluted clouds come from burning fossil fuels. USA Today says, "The huge plumes have darkened 13 megacities in Asia — including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai and New Delhi — sharply "dimming" the amount of light by as much as 25% in some places."

Among the effects of this phenomenon is a decrease in the monsoon rains over India in recent years, with potentially disastrous effects on the agriculture that sustains over a billion people.

They are hastening the melting of the glaciers in northern Pakistan and India, with perhaps deadly implications for the rivers that flow from those headwaters. Pakistan without the "five rivers" and the Indus would be a wasteland.

And then they say that petroleum is "cheaper" than solar energy! Is anyone figuring in the cost of the atmospheric brown clouds? How many billions of dollars are they costing in higher food prices and extreme climate events?

Link to con.

Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart
Why Americans Shouldn't Go Home
By Tom Engelhardt

On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don't try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush's Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they -- and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings -- officially become the property of President Barack Obama.

That's a sobering thought. He is, in fact, inheriting from the Bush administration a widening war in the region, as well as an exceedingly tenuous situation in devastated, still thoroughly factionalized, sectarian, and increasingly Iranian-influenced Iraq. There, the U.S. is, in actuality, increasingly friendless and ever less powerful. The last allies from the infamous "coalition of the willing" are now rushing for the door. The South Koreans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians -- I'll bet you didn't even know the latter two had a few troops left in Iraq -- are going home this year; the rump British force in the south will probably be out by next summer.

Link to con.

Why We Need the 28th Amendment to the Constitution: Separation of Corporation and State

A New Political Party is Needed
Too Little Political Competition in America

Set aside any Obama euphoria you feel. The other important news is that third-party presidential candidates had a miserable showing this year, totaling just over one percent of the grand total with 1.5 million votes nationwide, compared to some 123 million votes for Barack Obama and John McCain.

It couldn't be clearer that Americans are not willing to voice their political discontent by voting for third-party presidential candidates. The two-party duopoly and plutocracy is completely dominant. The US lacks the political competition that exists in other western democracies.

A key problem is that for many years, third parties have not offered presidential candidates that capture the attention and commitment of even a modest fraction of Americans, unlike Ross Perot (8.4 percent in 1996 and 18.9 percent in 1992), and John Anderson (6.6 percent in 1980).

This year, among the four most significant third-party presidential candidates, Ralph Nader without a national party did the best with 685,426 votes or 0.54 percent of the grand total (a little better than in 2004 with 0.4 percent but much worse than in 2000 running as a Green Party candidate with 2.7 percent). He was followed by Bob Barr the Libertarian Party candidate with 503,981 votes or 0.4 percent of the total (typical of all Libertarian candidates in recent elections, including Ron Paul in 1988), followed by Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party with just 181,266 votes or 0.1 percent, and then Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party with only 148,546 votes or 0.1 percent.

Link to con.

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

Link to con.

Obama, Rahm-bo and the End of the New American Century
Conned Again?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama’s election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.

Rahm Emanuel is a supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, “during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.”

In “Hail to the Chief of Staff,” Alexander Cockburn describes Emanuel as “a super-Likudnik hawk,” who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 “made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates.”

Link to con.

In Latin America, leftist leaders evict US drug warriors
Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela push back on US operations.
By Sara Miller Llana

Bolivia has given US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers three months to leave the country – claiming that agents were stirring up political strife in the deeply divided nation.

This fall, Ecuadorians voted yes to a new Constitution that calls for the closure by next year of one of the most important US operations in its war against drugs.

And for the fourth year in a row, Venezuela was singled out by President Bush – as was Bolivia for the first time – for having "failed demonstrably" in antidrug cooperation.

The US has long had a presence in Latin America to stem the northward drug flow; Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia are the world's largest cocaine producers. The US still boasts strong partnerships with many countries, such as Colombia and Mexico. But in others, particularly those led by leftists who have risen in collective condemnation of Washington, leaders are increasingly severing ties.

Their push for more self-determination could represent an opportunity to improve a strategy seen by many as a failure, says Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network in Bolivia.

Link to con.

MSNBC Keith Olbermann on Prop 8, Marriage and more

Just a Match Away
The Politics of Fire
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Sooner or later all big fires become political events.

Even before becalmed Santa Ana winds and mountain sleet quenched the blazes in southern California, politicians from both parties raced to exploit the charred landscape for their own advantage—a kind of political looting while the embers still glowed.

Republicans, naturally, pointed an incendiary finger at environmentalists, rehashing their tired mantra that restrictions on logging had provided the kindling for the inferno that consumed 3,600 homes (largely in Republican districts) and took twenty human lives (the non-human body count will never be tallied).

Not to be outdone, Democrats parroted a similar line, but in more bombastic tones. They tried to affix the blame on George W. Bush, alleging that our chainsaw president had rebuffed desperate pleas from Gray Davis for money to finance the logging off of beetle-nibbled forests in the parched San Bernadino Mountains.

So here the two parties converge once again, harmonized in their fatuous contention that more logging will prevent forest conflagrations. It didn’t take long for this unity, soldered by the flames of southern California, to find a way to express itself in Congress.

Link to con.

There’s an alternative world... if only we can find it
Democracy’s invisible line
The US writer Noam Chomsky talks about the mechanisms behind modern communication, an essential instrument of government in democratic countries – as important to our governments as propaganda is to a dictatorship.
By Noam Chomsky and Daniel Mermet

DM: Let’s start with the media issue. In the May 2005 referendum on the European constitution, most newspapers in France supported a yes vote, yet 55% of the electorate voted no. This suggests there is a limit to how far the media can manipulate public opinion. Do you think voters were also saying no to the media?

NC: It’s a complex subject, but the little in-depth research carried out in this field suggests that, in fact, the media exert greater influence over the most highly educated fraction of the population. Mass public opinion seems less influenced by the line adopted by the media.

Take the eventuality of a war against Iran. Three-quarters of Americans think the United States should stop its military threats and concentrate on reaching agreement by diplomatic means. Surveys carried out by western pollsters suggest that public opinion in Iran and the US is also moving closer on some aspects of the nuclear issue. The vast majority of the population of both countries think that the area from Israel to Iran should be completely clear of nuclear weapons, including those held by US forces operating in the region. But you would have to search long and hard to find this kind of information in the media.

The main political parties in either country do not defend this view either. If Iran and the US were true democracies, in which the majority really decided public policy, they would undoubtedly have already solved the current nuclear disagreement. And there are other similar instances. Look at the US federal budget. Most Americans want less military spending and more welfare expenditure, credits for the United Nations, and economic and international humanitarian aid. They also want to cancel the tax reductions decided by President George Bush for the benefit of the biggest taxpayers.

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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Looking back on a surreal campaign season
By Bill Ayers

Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

Pass the Vitamin C.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

In years past, I would now and then—often unpredictably—appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam. It was a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.

These media episodes of fleeting notoriety always led to some extravagant and fantastic assertions about what I did, what I might have said and what I probably believe now.

It was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season.

During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.

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Wall Street's 'Disaster Capitalism for Dummies'
14 reasons Main Street loses big while Wall Street sabotages democracy
By Paul B. Farrell

Yes, we're dummies. You. Me. All 300 million of us. Clueless. We should be ashamed. We're obsessed about the slogans and rituals of "democracy," distracted by the campaign, polls, debates, rhetoric, half-truths and outright lies. McCain? Obama? Sorry to pop your bubble folks, but it no longer matters who's president.
Why? The real "game changer" already happened. Democracy has been replaced by Wall Street's new "disaster capitalism." That's the big game-changer historians will remember about 2008, masterminded by Wall Street's ultimate "Trojan Horse," Hank Paulson. Imagine: Greed, arrogance and incompetence create a massive bubble, cost trillions, and still Wall Street comes out smelling like roses, richer and more powerful!

Yes, we're idiots: While distracted by the "illusion of democracy" in the endless campaign, Congress surrendered the powers we entrusted to it with very little fight. Congress simply handed over voting power and the keys to trillions in the Treasury to Wall Street's new "Disaster Capitalists" who now control "democracy."
Why did this happen? We're in denial, clueless wimps, that's why. We let it happen. In one generation America has been transformed from a democracy into a strange new form of government, "Disaster Capitalism." Here's how it happened:

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Too Poor for Bankruptcy
By David Glenn Cox

We, as a country, seem to have little problem saving the wealthy from the clutches of poverty. We’ll bail out banks and insurance companies, mortgage funds. The formerly big three automakers will meet with the new administration this week to arrange a further multi-billion-dollar bailout.

How can we say no? Hundreds of thousands of jobs are dependent on these industries. So I guess we must help them, but our society is so far out of economic whack. Most all of our problems seem to evolve from a falling standard of living in America’s working class, and yet when we call for help for America’s working poor we are told that it can’t be helped. Here in Atlanta a local food pantry advertises that 40% of all its recipients are employed.

Just yesterday I read this: “Liberals are traitors, losers, punks, criminals, baby-killers, homos, and the scum of our country. They are godless, plus they costa lotta money and ya gotta burp em frequently.” How is it that we have come to hate our own people so? Is it then to be assumed that the heads of the banks and insurance companies are liberals? The state of Georgia gave Hyundai motors a $100 million, ten-year tax credit to build its parts distribution site here in Georgia. That's a $25,000 per year per employee subsidy; is that liberal or conservative?

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Citizen Gore Vidal
Elections won’t reverse the decline of American democracy, the prolific literary legend says
By David Barsamian

Gore Vidal is one of the singular literary figures of this era. A scion of a political family, he grew up in a milieu of power and politics. Winner of the National Book Award in 1993 and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, Vidal is the author of scores of plays, screenplays and historical novels, including Lincoln and Julian. He also has written a number of bestselling nonfiction books, including Dreaming War, Imperial America and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. The Washington Post calls him “the master essayist of our age.”

You have a role as a kind of Cassandra of the United States. A couple of years ago, you were talking about the impending economic collapse of the country.

We’re in it. But my predictions — I’m a master of the obvious. If you spend money at this rate on an unjust war — and a war that will have no outcome favorable to us, ever — don’t be surprised.

Bush is insane. We have a better word in Italian. It’s deficente. He’s deficient in the mental department. Deficente. He got applauded when he attacked two innocent countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’ll try it again. “I’ll be popular because I’m going to hit Iran. It’s the source of all evil, heh, heh, heh.” And he starts to whinny like a horse.

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A Stunning Victory. Now What?
In These Times editors around the country react to Barack Obama’s historic victory
By In These Times editors

Obama’s stunning breakthrough election as the first African-American president — at a time when he is the only black U.S. senator — is a testament to his personal qualities and the sophistication of his campaign. It obviously owes a lot to the well-earned unpopularity of Bush’s policies, which contributed to the financial crash.

But America had also changed: young white people are less racist; there’s a growing Latino vote; black voters felt energized and inspired; the growing ranks of highly educated voters are more liberal. It just hasn’t changed enough: a majority of whites voted for McCain (bolstered by Southern whites and thus reflecting a persistence of regional patterns, despite some Obama breakthroughs where the South is changing the most demographically), and older whites, despite their sense of misdirection for the country, also favored McCain.

Although 60 percent of voters earning under $50,000 a year favored Obama, giving him the margin of victory as higher-income voters split evenly, a slim 51 percent majority of lower-income whites favored McCain. Even though Obama did better among whites than Kerry or Gore. Higher-income whites voted by a wider 56 to 43 percent margin for McCain, but Obama failed to capture the share of lower-income whites’ votes he should have, if a variety of cultural issues had not overshadowed their economic interests.

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Is Obama Screwing His Base with Rahm Emanuel Selection?
By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet.

I had really wanted to celebrate Barack Obama's remarkable victory for a day or so before becoming cynical again. I really did.

And yet, less than 24 hours after the first polls closed, the president-elect chose as his chief of staff -- perhaps the most powerful single position in any administration -- Rahm Emanuel, one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.

The chief of staff essentially acts as the president's gatekeeper, determining with whom he has access for advice and analysis. Obama is known as a good listener who has been open to hearing from and considering the perspectives of those on the Left as well as those with a more centrist to conservative perspective. How much access he will actually have as president to more progressive voices, however, is now seriously in question.

Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel is a member of the so-called New Democrat Coalition (NDC), of group of center-right pro-business Congressional Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to moving the Democratic Party away from its more liberal and progressive base. Numbering only 58 members out of 236 Democrats in the current House of Representatives, the NDC has worked closely with its Republican colleagues in pushing through and passing such legislation as those providing President Bush with "fast-track" trade authority in order to bypass efforts by labor, environmentalists and other public interest groups to promote fairer trade policy.

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Pot Wins in a Landslide: A Thundering Rejection of America's Longest War
By Rob Kampia, AlterNet.

On Tuesday, largely under the radar of the pundits and political chattering classes, voters dealt what may be a fatal blow to America's longest-running and least-discussed war -- the war on marijuana.

Michigan voters made their state the 13th to allow the medical use of marijuana by a whopping 63 percent to 37 percent, the largest margin ever for a medical marijuana initiative. And by 65 percent to 35 percent, Massachusetts voters decriminalized the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, replacing arrests, legal fees, court appearances, the possibility of jail and a lifelong criminal record with a $100 fine, much like a traffic ticket, that can be paid through the mail.

What makes these results so amazing is that they followed the most intensive anti-marijuana campaign by federal officials since the days of "Reefer Madness." Marijuana arrests have been setting all-time records year after year, reaching the point where one American is arrested on marijuana charges every 36 seconds. More Americans are arrested each year for marijuana possession -- not sales or trafficking, just possession -- than for all violent crimes combined.

And the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, with “drug czar” John Walters at the helm, has led a hysterical anti-marijuana propaganda campaign. During Walters' tenure, ONDCP has released at least 127 separate anti-marijuana TV, radio and print ads, at a cost of hundreds of millions of tax dollars, plus 34 press releases focused mainly on marijuana, while no fewer than 50 reports from ONDCP and other federal agencies focused on the alleged evils of marijuana or touted anti-marijuana campaigns.

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Foreclosed

The George W. Bush Story
By Tom Engelhardt

They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen -- if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.

When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them -- the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

Indeed.

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The Wrong of Way
Texas highways for lease.
Pat Choate

The administration of President George W. Bush had three major domestic goals: privatize Social Security, transfer federal work to private corporations, and shift the financing, construction, and operation of America’s busiest highways, including the high-traffic parts of the interstate system, from public freeways to privately operated toll roads.

The tolling of major parts of America’s road system is a fundamental shift from traditional U.S. policy of providing the best roads at the lowest cost to a market-based approach that seeks to maximize highway revenues. The resulting costs can be high. In northern Virginia, for instance, a private consortium led by an Australian company is now constructing toll lanes inside the public right-of-way and will charge commuters $1.54 per mile during rush hours. Similar projects are under way in 24 other states.

The two people responsible for implementing the Bush administration’s tolling policies are U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and D.J. Gribbin, the department’s general counsel. Both worked for the Federal Highway Administration during Bush’s first term, and then both left to work for companies involved with tolling. Peters headed consulting at HDR Inc., a major engineering firm. Gribbin was the Washington lobbyist for Macquarie Holdings (USA) Inc., one of the world’s largest toll road operators.

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