US Appeals Court Agrees Tobacco Companies Lied

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Diane Bartz
May 23, 2009 - Reuters

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Cigarette companies systematically lied for decades to hide the dangers of smoking, a U.S. appeals court said on Friday as it upheld a trial judge's racketeering verdict.

Cigarette companies systematically lied for decades to hide the dangers of smoking, a U.S. appeals court said on Friday as it upheld a trial judge's racketeering verdict. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)But in a blow to anti-smoking groups, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia also upheld U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler's 2006 rejection of plans to force the companies to fund smoking cessation programs, which could have cost them billions of dollars.

The appeals court's three-judge panel ruled that the companies, including Altria Group Inc and its Philip Morris USA unit, violated federal anti-racketeering laws by conspiring to lie about the dangers of smoking.

"Defendants knew of their falsity at the time and made the statements with the intent to deceive," the court said in a 92-page ruling. "Thus, we are not dealing with accidental falsehoods, or sincere attempts to persuade; Defendants' liability rests on deceits perpetrated with knowledge of their falsity."

Other companies appealing Kessler's ruling were the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco unit of Reynolds American Inc, Lorillard Inc, Vector Group Ltd's Liggett Group, British American Tobacco Plc and its Brown & Williamson unit, as well as now defunct industry groups: the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute.

The case was filed in 1999 by the Clinton administration, which sought $289 billion in damages.

During the original trial, which began in 2004, the Justice Department under the Bush administration scaled back its demands to $14 billion for anti-smoking campaigns.

Kessler ultimately ruled the companies broke the law and could no longer use expressions such as "low tar" or "light" in their cigarette marketing. But she said she did not have the authority to force them to fund a smoking cessation program.

Philip Morris, Altria and Reynolds said on Friday that they would press on with their legal fight, although they had not yet decided if they would ask for a rehearing before the entire appeals court or ask the Supreme Court to consider the case.

Tobacco companies are already paying billions of dollars a year under a 1998 settlement agreement with state governments that also bars targeting children in cigarette advertising and puts other restrictions on cigarette ads.

Legislation working its way through the U.S. Congress would give the Food and Drug Administration power to control the advertising and manufacture of tobacco products.

CORRECTIVE STATEMENTS

In its ruling on Friday, the appeals court upheld an order requiring warnings on cigarette packages and demanding that tobacco sellers publish "corrective statements" on corporate web sites. They would also have to buy full-page advertisements in thirty-five major newspapers and put at least ten advertisements on a major television network.

In a victory for convenience stores and other retailers, however, the appeals court said the lower court overstepped its authority in requiring merchandisers to add countertop signs with the "corrective statements."

The National Association of Convenience Stores said the requirement would take away valuable counter space and cost the industry $82 million in lost sales annually.

The appeals court was highly critical of the tobacco companies, rejecting their arguments that they had never advertised "light" cigarettes as less dangerous.

The court also pointed to evidence that the companies knew that second-hand smoke was dangerous, dismissing their assertions that there was no "scientific consensus."

"Again defendants miss the point," the ruling said. "Regardless of whether a scientific consensus existed at any point, defendants may be liable for fraud if they made statements knowing they were false or misleading."

The court also found that tobacco companies were deceitful in asserting they were unaware that tobacco is highly addictive, citing numerous findings "all unchallenged --

(which) support the district court's conclusion that defendants were aware that nicotine creates a chemical dependency far stronger than a mere habit."

The decision follows a ruling by the Supreme Court in December that tobacco firms can be sued under state law for deceptive advertising of "light" cigarettes.

That case involved three longtime smokers from Maine who said Philip Morris was deceptive in advertising cigarettes as "light" or with "lowered tar and nicotine."

The Tobacco Products Liability Project said the Supreme Court decision, along with Friday's ruling, should help the 40 or so lawsuits filed nationwide which accuse cigarette companies of deceptively marketing light cigarettes.

"We're delighted with the opinion today," said Edward Sweda, of the advocacy group. "The government's presentation of the evidence provides a roadmap for plaintiff's attorneys."

Zen Moment of the Weekend

"In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill...we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one." -- Plato

Wingnut Radio Host Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture

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May 22, 2009 - Library Grape

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A rightwing radio host set out to prove that waterboarding isn't torture.

Things didn't exactly go accordingly to plan:

And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.

Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on -- actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.

"I want to find out if it's torture," Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture...

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

Last year, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens endured the same experiment -- and came to a similar conclusion. The conservative writer said he found the treatment terrifying, and was haunted by it for months afterward. "Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture," Hitchens concluded in the article.

This from a guy who was described as a younger version of Rush Limbaugh.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Mancow-Takes-on-Waterboarding-and-Loses.html

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

Blue Double Cross

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Paul Krugman
May 22, 2009 - The New York Times

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That didn't take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it's now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda.

So here's the question: Will Mr. Obama gloss over the reality of what's happening, and try to preserve the appearance of cooperation? Or will he honor his own pledge, made back during the campaign, to go on the offensive against special interests if they stand in the way of reform?

The story so far: on May 11 the White House called a news conference to announce that major players in health care, including the American Hospital Association and the lobbying group America's Health Insurance Plans, had come together to support a national effort to control health care costs.

The fact sheet on the meeting, one has to say, was classic Obama in its message of post-partisanship and, um, hope. "For too long, politics and point-scoring have prevented our country from tackling this growing crisis," it said, adding, "The American people are eager to put the old Washington ways behind them."

But just three days later the hospital association insisted that it had not, in fact, promised what the president said it had promised — that it had made no commitment to the administration's goal of reducing the rate at which health care costs are rising by 1.5 percentage points a year. And the head of the insurance lobby said that the idea was merely to "ramp up" savings, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry is busily lobbying Congress to block one crucial element of health care reform, the public option — that is, offering Americans the right to buy insurance directly from the government as well as from private insurance companies. And at least some insurers are gearing up for a major smear campaign.

On Monday, just a week after the White House photo-op, The Washington Post reported that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina was preparing to run a series of ads attacking the public option. The planning for this ad campaign must have begun quite some time ago.

The Post has the storyboards for the ads, and they read just like the infamous Harry and Louise ads that helped kill health care reform in 1993. Troubled Americans are shown being denied their choice of doctor, or forced to wait months for appointments, by faceless government bureaucrats. It's a scary image that might make some sense if private health insurance — which these days comes primarily via HMOs — offered all of us free choice of doctors, with no wait for medical procedures. But my health plan isn't like that. Is yours?

"We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system," says a voice-over in one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that's true, why don't you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it's really that bad?

For none of the reform proposals currently on the table would force people into a government-run insurance plan. At most they would offer Americans the choice of buying into such a plan.

And the goal of the insurers is to deny Americans that choice. They fear that many people would prefer a government plan to dealing with private insurance companies that, in the real world as opposed to the world of their ads, are more bureaucratic than any government agency, routinely deny clients their choice of doctor, and often refuse to pay for care.

Which brings us back to Mr. Obama.

Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a "big table." And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.

But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: "If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I'll run my own ads as president. I'll get on television and say 'Harry and Louise are lying.' "

The question now is whether he really meant it.

The medical-industrial complex has called the president's bluff. It polished its image by showing up at the big table and promising cooperation, then promptly went back to doing all it can to block real change. The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity.

It's up to Mr. Obama to prove them wrong.

Alien Species Eroding Ecosystems and Livelihoods

Australia, with its long history of bad-news invaders like rabbits and cane toads (pictured above), insists that visitors surrender all fresh food, animal and plant products. by J. Polák

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Stephen Leahy
May 22, 2009 - Inter Press Service

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Continent-hopping alien species are worsening poverty and threaten the agriculture, forestry, fisheries and natural systems that underpin millions of livelihoods in developing countries, warn biodiversity experts.

"The livelihoods for 90 percent of people in Africa directly rely on natural resources such as marine coastal biodiversity," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Australia, with its long history of bad-news invaders like rabbits and cane toads (pictured above), insists that visitors surrender all fresh food, animal and plant products. Credit:J. Polák"Around the world more than 1.6 billion people depend directly on forests for their survival," he told IPS from Montreal.

Biodiversity is not just fuzzy animals and pretty birds. It is the diversity of life on Earth that comprises ecosystems which in turn provide vital ecosystem services including food, fibre, clean water and air.

"Biodiversity is poor countries' most precious asset," Djoghlaf stressed.

Alien species are plant, animal, insect and other species that have been introduced outside of their natural habitats. They have become one of the two or three major drivers behind the current extinction crisis.

Today, one in four mammals is on the verge of extinction. Of the 44,838 species catalogued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 38 percent are on their way out. Currently, one species goes extinct every three hours.

And at least 40 percent of all animal extinctions, for which the cause is known, are the result of invasive species.

The scope of this global biological invasion is stunning. New Zealand has more than 20,000 introduced plant species competing with the 2,000 or so endemic plant species. Many of the aliens can't survive outside gardens or farm fields but at least 2,000 aliens have become 'naturalised' and are indeed competing with the locals, causing several documented extinctions of native New Zealand flora that do not exist anywhere else.

"The scale and speed of this is unprecedented in Earth's history," said Anthony Ricciardi, an invasive species biologist at Montreal's McGill University.

"Walk into the Canadian woods and one in five species growing wild will be a non-native," Ricciardi said in an interview.

But doesn't this global shuffling of species produce more biodiversity, or at least keep it the same?

"At the local scale, it can look like there are more species and sometimes there are," he acknowledged.

However. this mass movement of species is reducing overall biodiversity. When the Nile Perch was introduced into Africa's Lake Victoria, 100 to 150 endemic fish species were wiped out.

There are many similar instances but most often the invaders do not directly cause extinctions. Instead they compete for food, habitat and other resources, reducing local species numbers to low levels. And then a bad weather event, disease or some other stress comes along and suddenly the native species is gone, Ricciardi said.

"Every invasive species has an impact but most go undocumented. They are insidious and often subtle in terms of impacts," he said.

Unnoticed, some invaders spread far and wide, adapt to local conditions and then years afterwards become a major problem by degrading or dramatically altering the ecosystems they are in.

"Invasives are a form of biological pollution, but one that can change and adapt," Ricciardi said.

Local species are vulnerable to these invaders because they do not have any evolutionary experience to cope with them. There many examples of large numbers of species on isolated islands decimated by goats, cats and rats simply because those species never lived there until someone introduced them. And that is the key - invasions are tightly connected to human behaviour.

Keeping all aliens out is impossible. The best hope for biodiversity is to know which species are the potential troublemakers and figure out how they are or could be moved around. That is the containment strategy of most countries, where anyone crossing the border is asked if they are carrying plants, seeds or animals.

Australia, with a long history of bad-news invaders like rabbits and cane toads, insists that visitors surrender all fresh food, animal and plant products.

Climate change is also making it easier for some species to shift their traditional ranges and move into new regions where it had been too cold previously. While the initial jump by the West Nile virus from North Africa to New York City in 1999 wasn't climate related, its continued survival and spread ever northwards into central Canada is related to warmer winters in the region. And that virus has reduced populations of a number of bird species and has killed dozens of people.

Invasive species affect all aspects of society just as the loss of biodiversity does, said Ricciardi. "We simply don't know all the impacts of losing species," he added.

There are major studies underway to take a stab at figuring that out, said the CBD's Djoghlaf. "In 2010, we hope to release a Stern-like report on the economic value of the loss of biodiversity."

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change released in 2006 examined the impacts of climate change on the world economy.

"Biodiversity needs to be seen and understood as not just a 'green issue' but an important economic asset in need of protection," Djoghlaf said.

Rx and the Single Payer

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Bill Moyers / Michael Winship
May 22, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, "I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program."

Single payer. Universal. That's health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It's a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one.

There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: "All of you know we might not get there immediately because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take back the House."

Fast forward six years. President Obama has everything he said was needed -- Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. So what's happened to single payer?

A woman at his town hall meeting in New Mexico last week asked him exactly that. "If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense," the President replied. "That's the kind of system that you have in most industrialized countries around the world.

"The only problem is that we're not starting from scratch. We have historically a tradition of employer-based health care. And although there are a lot of people who are not satisfied with their health care, the truth is, is that the vast majority of people currently get health care from their employers and you've got this system that's already in place. We don't want a huge disruption as we go into health care reform where suddenly we're trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy."

So the banks were too big to fail and now, apparently, health care is too big to fix, at least the way a majority of people indicate they would like it to be fixed, with a single payer option. President Obama favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But single payer has vanished from his radar.

Nor is single payer getting much coverage in the mainstream media. Barely a mention was given to the hundreds of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals who came to Washington last week to protest the absence of official debate over single payer.

Is it the proverbial tree falling in the forest, making a noise that journalists can't or won't hear? Could the indifference of the press be because both the President of the United States and Congress have been avoiding single payer like, well, like the plague? As we see so often, government officials set the agenda by what they do and don't talk about.

Instead, President Obama is looking for consensus, seeking peace among all the parties involved. Except for single payer advocates. At that big White House powwow in Washington last week, the President asked representatives of the health care business to reason together with him. "What's brought us all together today is a recognition that we can't continue down the same dangerous road we've been traveling for so many years," he said, "that costs are out of control; and that reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a necessity that cannot wait."

They came, listened, made nice for the photo op. and while they failed to participate in a hearty chorus of "Kumbaya," they did promise to cut health care costs voluntarily over the next ten years. The press ate it up -- and Mr. Obama was a happy man.

Meanwhile, some of us looking on -- those of us who've been around a long time -- were scratching our heads. Hadn't we heard this before?

Way, way back in the 1970's Americans were riled up over the rising costs of health care. As a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter started talking about the government clamping down. When he got to the White House, drug makers, insurance companies, hospitals and doctors -- the very people who only a decade earlier had done everything they could to strangle Medicare in the cradle -- seemed uncharacteristically humble and cooperative. "You don't have to make us cut costs," they promised. "We'll do it voluntarily."

So Uncle Sam backed down, and you guessed it. Pretty soon medical costs were soaring higher than ever.

By the early '90s, the public was once again hurting in the pocketbook. Feeling our pain, Bill and Hillary Clinton tried again, coming up with a plan only slightly more complicated than the schematics for an F-18 fighter jet.

This time the health industry acted more like Tony Soprano than Mother Teresa. It bludgeoned the Clinton reforms with one of the most expensive and deceitful public relations and advertising campaigns ever conceived -- paid for, of course, from the industry's swollen profits.

As the drug and insurance companies, hospitals and doctors dumped the mangled carcass of reform into the Potomac, securely encased in concrete, once again they said don't worry; they would cut costs voluntarily.

If you believed that, we've got a toll-free bridge to the Mayo Clinic we'd like to sell you.

So anyone with any memory left could be excused for raising their eyebrows at the health care industry's latest promises. As if on cue, hardly had their pledge of volunteerism rung out across the land than Jay Gellert, chief executive of Health Net Inc. and chair of the lobbying group America's Health Insurance Plans, assured his pals not to worry abut the voluntary reductions. "We believe that we can do it without undermining the viability of companies," he said, "and in effect enhancing the payment to physicians and hospitals." In other words, their so-called voluntary "reforms" will in no way interfere with maximizing profits.

Also last week, John Lechleiter, the chief executive of drug giant Eli Lilly, blasted universal health care in a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "I do not believe that policymakers have yet arrived at a full and complete diagnosis of what's wrong and what's right with U.S. health care," he declared. "And I am very concerned that some of the proposed policies -- the treatments, to continue my metaphor -- will have unintended side-effects that make our situation worse."

So why bother with the charm offensive on Pennsylvania Avenue? Could it be, as some critics suggest, a Trojan horse, getting the health industry a place at the table so they can leap up at the right moment and again kill any real reform?

Wheelers and dealers from the health sector aren't waiting for that moment. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, they've spent more than $134 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009 alone. And some already are shelling out big bucks for a publicity blitz and ads attacking any health care reform that threatens to reduce the profits from sickness and disease.

The Washington Post's health care reform blog reported Monday that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has hired an outside PR firm to put together a video campaign assaulting Obama's public plan. And this month alone, the group Conservatives for Patients' Rights is spending more than a million dollars for attack ads. They've hired a public relations firm called CRC -- Creative Response Concepts. You remember them -- the same high-minded folks who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the gang who savaged John Kerry's service record in Vietnam.

The ads feature the chairman of Conservatives for Patients' Rights, Rick Scott. Who's he? As a former deputy inspector general from the Department of Health and Human Services told The New York Times, "He hopes people don't Google his name."

Scott's not a doctor; he just acts like one on TV. He's an entrepreneur who took two hospitals in Texas and built them into the largest health care chain in the world, Columbia/HCA. In 1997, he was fired by the board of directors after Columbia/HCA was caught in a scheme that ripped off the Feds and state governments for hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus Medicare and Medicaid payments, the largest such fraud in history. The company had to cough up $1.7 billion dollars to get out of the mess.

Rick Scott got off, you should excuse the expression, scot-free. Better than, in fact. According to published reports, he waltzed away with a $10 million severance deal and $300 million worth of stock. So much for voluntarily lowering overhead.

With medical costs rising six percent per year, that's who's offering himself as a spokesman for the health care industry. Speaking up for single payer is Geri Jenkins, a president of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee -- a registered nurse with literal hands-on experience.

"We're there around the clock," she told our colleague Jessica Wang. "So we feel a real sense of obligation to advocate for the best interests of our patients and the public. Now, you can talk about policy but when you're staring at a human face it's a whole different story."

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Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS.

Green Camo: Seeing Through the Military’s New Environmentalism

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Bryan Farrell
May 22, 2009 - WIN Magazine

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As the single largest consumer of energy in the world, the U.S. military is poised at the center of two of the most life-altering issues of our time: climate change and the height of oil production ("peak oil"). Surprisingly, the Pentagon began taking both matters seriously much sooner than the rest of government, which still has its fair share of skeptics.

A 2007 Pentagon-funded report by 11 high-level retired officers concluded that climate change is a "serious threat to America's national security." A few weeks later, another Pentagon-commissioned report called on the military to "fundamentally transform" its assumptions about energy because the current strategy of global engagement with highly energy consumptive technologies is "unsustainable in the long term."

Before the antiwar movement rejoices in the end of U.S. hegemony and environmentalists celebrate the move toward sustainability, it's important to remember that the Pentagon is still developing solutions to these issues and in the world of warfare things often don't get fixed until they are first completely destroyed (e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan).

At first glance it would appear that the Pentagon is serious about reducing its dependency on oil, if not its greenhouse gas emissions. In the two years since those reports came out, the Pentagon has pledged to get 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. It's already leading the way among all other government agencies with nearly 12 percent of all Department of Defense (DoD) electricity coming from renewable sources. In fact, the Air Force is the number-one consumer of renewable energy in the United States and has built the world's largest solar photovoltaic system at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada. Meanwhile, the Navy operates the largest wind/diesel hybrid plant in the world—located in, of all places, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The DoD also likes to brag that its total site-delivered energy consumption declined more than 60 percent between 1985 and 2006, but when the reasons for this drop are examined the green veneer starts to fade. As energy analyst Sohbet Karbuz noted in a 2007 paper for the Energy Bulletin, "The main factor behind that reduction was the closure of some military bases, privatization of some of its buildings, and leaving some energy related activities to contractors." The most important factor in energy consumption—vehicles, which account for nearly three-quarters of DoD site-delivered energy—went up during that period.

Furthermore, despite all its green efforts, the military has some major—if not insurmountable—hurdles to overcome. For starters, each soldier consumes 25 percent more energy than the average U.S. citizen—who already consumes 15 times more energy than does the average person in a developing country. Seventy-eight percent of the Pentagon's energy consumption comes from oil, and the average U.S. soldier in Iraq uses more than four gallons each day. War and energy expert Michael Klare compared that figure to the one-gallon–per-day oil consumption rate of the average WWII soldier and postulated that "if this rate of increase continues unabated, the next major war could entail an expenditure of 64 gallons per soldier per day."

Back in 2007, when the Pentagon received those two reports, Klare warned of the "green" approach, calling it "an environmentally-friendly facade" that does little to prevent it from maintaining and developing its existing, interventionist force structure. Add to that the inability to prevent more greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere. A 2008 report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that for every dollar Washington allocated to climate change in last year's budget, $88 would be spent on military. And for every dollar spent on researching climate-related technologies, $20 would be spent on developing new weapon systems.

While it's no surprise that the military continually seeks to upgrade its equipment, most of the existing Air Force, Navy, and Army fleets run on oil and are expected to last until 2030. Replacing them would be not only a logistical nightmare, but also extremely expensive. That's why explorations into biofuels and synthetic liquid fuels from natural gas and coal are underway. Unfortunately, merely creating such alternatives emits more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.

This notion plays into Klare's second warning, that of a continuation of the Carter Doctrine, whereby "the Pentagon will increase its efforts to maintain control over foreign sources of supply, notably oil fields and refineries in the Persian Gulf region." Evidence of this scenario can already be seen in Obama's ever-expanding timeframe for withdrawal from Iraq and reluctance to discuss the closure of bases within the country.

So if the military's plan is to invest in enough renewable energy as to give the appearance of progressive green thinking and prolong the life of whatever oil is left, but not invest enough to change its agenda of global dominance by 2030, we are left squarely in the middle of both issues. By most accounts, peak oil is expected to occur somewhere around 2015—right around the time we will know whether the world has averted the tipping points that would send the planet into certain uncontrollable climate change. Of course, avoiding tipping points by keeping emissions down will be impossible if the world's largest consumer of oil and energy continues consuming at even three-quarters its current pace.

By the Pentagon's own figures, the U.S. military uses more fossil fuels than any other single entity. But the Pentagon's figures only take into consideration vehicle transport and facility maintenance. They don't account for the energy needed to build something like the massive imperial embassy or mega-bases in Iraq or reconstruct the rest of the country. They also don't factor in the energy used by related branches, like NASA, the nuclear industry, or the thousands of contractors that make or do things for the military.

In this light, it's hard not to see the military as the reason we may very soon witness a significant sea-level rise, accompanied by droughts, crop failures, and the mass migration of millions from the global south. Yet the U.S. military isn't listed as one of the World Wildlife Fund's "footprint issues." Nor is it mentioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council or Sierra Club as the largest consumer of the "dirty fuels" both lobby against.

How could such an oversight exist? Noted writer and farmer Wendell Berry, who has spent most of his life linking issues of the environment to the many maladies of our society, once said that just as military violence is ignored by most conservationists, violence against the earth is a matter ignored by most pacifists. The antiwar and environmental movements must bond over this common enemy and see, as Berry put it, that we cannot hope to end violence against each other until we end our violence against the earth.

Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought

The wheel above depicts researchers' estimation of the range of probability of potential global temperature change over the next 100 years if no policy change is enacted on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The wheel on the left assumes that aggressive policy is enacted. (Image courtesy / MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change)

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May 20, 2009 - ScienceDaily

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The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that.

The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. The new research involved 400 runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of being correct based on present observations and knowledge. Other research groups have estimated the probabilities of various outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate system itself. But the MIT model is the only one that interactively includes detailed treatment of possible changes in human activities as well - such as the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy use, in different countries.

Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, says that, regarding global warming, it is important "to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science," he says. And in the peer-reviewed literature, the MIT model, unlike any other, looks in great detail at the effects of economic activity coupled with the effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems. "In that sense, our work is unique," he says.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. The difference is caused by several factors rather than any single big change. Among these are improved economic modeling and newer economic data showing less chance of low emissions than had been projected in the earlier scenarios. Other changes include accounting for the past masking of underlying warming by the cooling induced by 20th century volcanoes, and for emissions of soot, which can add to the warming effect. In addition, measurements of deep ocean temperature rises, which enable estimates of how fast heat and carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and transferred to the ocean depths, imply lower transfer rates than
previously estimated.

Prinn says these and a variety of other changes based on new measurements and new analyses changed the odds on what could be expected in this century in the "no policy" scenarios - that is, where there are no policies in place that specifically induce reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Overall, the changes "unfortunately largely summed up all in the same direction," he says. "Overall, they stacked up so they caused more projected global warming."

While the outcomes in the "no policy" projections now look much worse than before, there is less change from previous work in the projected outcomes if strong policies are put in place now to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without action, "there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated," Prinn says. "This increases the urgency for significant policy action."

To illustrate the range of probabilities revealed by the 400 simulations, Prinn and the team produced a "roulette wheel" that reflects the latest relative odds of various levels of temperature rise. The wheel provides a very graphic representation of just how serious the potential climate impacts are.

"There's no way the world can or should take these risks," Prinn says. And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback "is just going to make it worse," Prinn says.

The lead author of the paper describing the new projections is Andrei Sokolov, research scientist in the Joint Program. Other authors, besides Sokolov and Prinn, include Peter H. Stone, Chris E. Forest, Sergey Paltsev, Adam Schlosser, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, John Reilly, Marcus Sarofim, Chien Wang and Henry D. Jacoby, all of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, as well as Mort Webster of MIT's Engineering Systems Division and D. Kicklighter, B. Felzer and J. Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

Prinn stresses that the computer models are built to match the known conditions, processes and past history of the relevant human and natural systems, and the researchers are therefore dependent on the accuracy of this current knowledge. Beyond this, "we do the research, and let the results fall where they may," he says. Since there are so many uncertainties, especially with regard to what human beings will choose to do and how large the climate response will be, "we don't pretend we can do it accurately. Instead, we do these 400 runs and look at the spread of the odds."

Because vehicles last for years, and buildings and powerplants last for decades, it is essential to start making major changes through adoption of significant national and international policies as soon as possible, Prinn says. "The least-cost option to lower the risk is to start now and steadily transform the global energy system over the coming decades to low or zero greenhouse gas-emitting technologies."

This work was supported in part by grants from the Office of Science of the U.S. Dept. of Energy, and by the industrial and foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

TOON

Charlie Crist: Boon or Bain of the GOP?

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Adele Stan
May 21, 2009 - Huffington Post

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Is Charlie Crist the face of a new Republican Party, or a harbinger of the GOP's demise?

He's handsome, personable and popular: a dream candidate for Florida's 2010 Senate race. And Charlie Crist, currently the Sunshine State's Republican governor, will probably win. That makes him a good thing for the Republican Party, right?

Yes and no. The GOP is desperate for another vote -- or 10 -- in the Senate, so Crist's bid sounds like good news to the ears of the party's Senate leaders. With his moderation on fiscal policy, his populist crusade against insurance companies and a rather solid record on right-wing social policy, Crist would seem to be a pretty palatable offering to conservative suburbanites, and perhaps even offers a model for the recovery of the national party -- that is, if his candidacy doesn't smash it up for good.

That's a serious "if". While Crist doesn't quite divide the party six ways to Sunday, his candidacy does slice it up in several. First, there's the Latino problem. Barack Obama's popular victory in 2008 is arguably owed to a significant shift of Latinos from the Republican to the Democratic column, thanks to right-wing demagoguery on immigration. Florida's Latino Republican leaders, reports Politico's Ben Smith, are hopping mad over the early embrace of the Crist candidacy by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, over former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a young Cuban-American conservative.

Then there's the religious right, many of whose members have never forgiven Crist for his role, as Florida's attorney general, in allowing life support to be withdrawn from Terri Schiavo, a woman in a vegetative state whose fate became a cause célèbre of right-wing Catholics and evangelicals. (Crist defines himself as "pro-life", supporting parental notification laws and a ban on certain abortion procedures.) Right-wingers, both religious and secular, are furious with Crist not only for his happy acceptance of federal stimulus money from the Obama plan, but for Crist's decision to stand with the popular Democratic president at a campaign-style rally touting the stimulus.

Florida's business community is none too pleased with Crist's campaign, in the wake of Hurricane Rita, against insurers who appeared to be stiffing their policy-holders. Crist's crusade resulted in the creation of a state-run insurer, the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., which commercial insurers portray as unfair competition.

As if that wasn't enough, Crist's increasing shift to the right on social policy may be canceled out by the documentary film, Outrage, which reports on persistent rumors that Crist is a closeted gay man -- even as he states positions against marriage rights for LGBT people and his support for Florida's ban on adoption by LGBT folks. (Florida's law is the only such adoption ban in the country; some 4,000 adoptable Florida children languish in foster care.) As shown in Outrage, which opened nationwide just days before Crist announced his Senate bid, the allegations of Crist's accusers are likely to rankle not only the right, but stand to alienate voters who may not care whether their governor is gay or straight, but who do care about his veracity and integrity -- or lack thereof.

The film highlights the reporting of Bob Norman of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, who followed a trail of dinner party conversations between sources and a male member of former Rep. Katherine Harris's staff (you remember her as the woman presiding over the recount of Florida's 2000 presidential vote), to fuel a provocative, if inconclusive, story about Crist's orientation. Norman also followed a deposition given by a friend of Norman said to be involved with Crist. "Charlie very smoothly denied that he knew or remembered knowing either of these people," Norman told filmmaker Kirby Dick. Then, Dick says, the two men named in his report left Florida until after Crist won his election.

The film looks more broadly at the cases of other anti-gay politicians who are believed to be gay themselves, or who have been successfully "outed" by their own behavior (Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, former Virginia Rep. Ed Scrock and others) -- most of them exposed by Mike Rogers of BlogActive, who focuses on senators and members of Congress who oppose LGBT rights.

Of anti-gay politicians who are privately having same-sex affairs, Rogers says to Dick, "They are traitors to their people...They are working against the [very] community they then expect to protect them."

In Outrage, Crist is heard in a radio interview saying that he believes marriage to be "a sacred relationship between a man and a woman, like my mother and father had, and like I had before I got divorced." (He is speaking here of his first marriage, which lasted six months; he married again last year, as his name was floated for the vice presidential slot on the McCain ticket.) Later in the film, Crist is heard telling a newscaster that he has "no second thoughts" on Florida's ban on adoptions by same-sex couples.

So far, the accusations seem not to have affected Crist's campaign. As governor, he still enjoys a 64 percent approval rating (Quinnipiac), is all but certain to survive a primary challenge by Rubio, and is a strong contender against Democrat Kendrick Meek, the congressman poised to challenge him in the general Senate election. But once ensconced on Capitol Hill, Crist will doubtless have Rogers on his trail, a perilous fate for any politician who votes against LGBT rights.

Charlie Crist will likely win a Senate seat for the Republican party, but the cost of his win to the GOP may be far greater than the millions that party leaders will pour into making it happen. For a party focused for so long on appeasing the most vituperative voices of its vaunted base, the ascendance of Charlie Crist represents a point of departure from which the GOP will not easily return.

Meltdown 101: Which jobs reports tell full story?

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Christopher Leonard
May 21, 2009 - AP

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One week, a federal report says the number of people filing new claims for unemployment insurance has unexpectedly dropped, pointing to a slowdown in layoffs. Good news, right? Maybe not.

Within weeks, another government report says the unemployment rate has climbed. Bad news? Not so fast: Soon a privately issued report says the labor market appears to be strengthening, news that reassures investors and sends stocks higher.

Confused yet? Don't worry — so are some of the nation's leading economists.

Gauging the labor market, and predicting where it might go, has proven to be an exceedingly difficult task during this fast-moving recession. The unemployment rate has spiked much faster than most analysts thought it would over the last year, and along the way numerous reports has given seemingly contradictory messages about the number of Americans out of work.

So which reports should be trusted, and which ones tell the whole story? Is the report on jobless claims released Thursday — which said that new claims dropped slightly to 631,000 — simply going to be contradicted by the next set of numbers? How do agencies even know how many jobs have been slashed?

Here are questions and answers about the main jobs reports that experts consult to read the labor market.

Q: What are the most important reports that experts watch?

A: Two major government reports get the most attention: the weekly jobless claims report filed by the Department of Labor, and the monthly unemployment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are complemented by a slew of private reports issued by economic consultants like Moody's Economy.com, or Automatic Data Processing, Inc.

Q: What does the report on weekly jobless claims measure?

A: The report captures the number of people who file their first claim for unemployment insurance after being laid off.

This can be a good measure for how many jobs were cut the week before, but it doesn't capture the whole picture. For whatever reason, not everyone who loses their job ends up filing for unemployment insurance benefits, or at least they may not file right away. Still, the rough number can point to upward or downward trends in the labor market between monthly reports filed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Q: What does the monthly unemployment report measure?

A: The monthly unemployment report is based on a Census Bureau survey of 60,000 U.S. households. The survey asks respondents several questions, including whether they have a job, are looking for a job, or are so discouraged that they have quit looking for work altogether.

The report lays out a whole range of unemployment rates. The most-cited rate only counts people actively looking for work; the latest unemployment report, released on May 8, calculated that rate as 8.9 percent. A much broader unemployment rate — 15.8 percent in the latest report — also includes everyone who has dropped out of the labor force or has been forced into part-time work.

Q: Why do these reports seem to contradict each other sometimes?

A: The main reason is that the jobless claims report only catches one piece of the puzzle — the number of jobs being shed. But sometimes, the unemployment rate can climb even if fewer jobs are cut. That's because the unemployment rate also accounts for the all-important factor of job creation.

Even if employers don't shed any jobs, the unemployment rate can climb if they don't create enough new jobs to absorb all the graduates and immigrants who enter the work force each month.

Q: Why don't I hear more about private-sector jobs reports?

A: Investors pay close attention to these reports, like the ADP National Employment Report, which tend to be released before the government reports and can give stock traders a leg up when betting on economic trends. But academics shy away from them in part because companies don't fully reveal their study methodology. (ADP's report, for one, is based on payroll data from about 400,000 of the company's data service clients.)

Government reports, on the other hand, have been used for decades and their methodology is well known.

Q: So which reports should I pay attention to?

A: You can't go wrong by watching the monthly unemployment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said Arindrajit Dube, an economist with the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California at Berkeley.

The unemployment report is the best gauge of the labor market because it measures people's intentions — such as whether they've given up on the job hunt or decided to return to school — in a way payroll figures or jobless claims cannot.

The one downside of the report is that it only comes out monthly, and gives a good picture of where the labor market was last month rather than where it is this week, Dube said. So he watches the weekly jobless claims report to get a contemporary reading on the job market, rather than waiting a full month for the unemployment report. He will also look at reports like ADP's, but mostly as a complement to government issued data.

"I think the short answer is: I look at all of them because they each give a piece of information," Dube said.

TOON

George W. Bush "Kept Us Safe"?

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Jeffrey Feldman
May 21, 2009 - Huffington Post

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Lately, the only thing worse than Dick Cheney's boldfaced lie that the Bush administration policies "kept us safe" is the gaggle of mainstream journalists mindlessly repeating it.

My question for journalists working for CNN, MSNBC, FOX, ABC, CBS, NPR and the like is very simple: Exactly what kind of delusional definition of "kept us safe" is swirling around your cobweb covered newsrooms? That definition must be some kind of crazy, because it accommodates not only the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history and the tragic death of thousands in New Orleans, but dozens of other yikes-we-are-so-not-safe moments, all which happened during George W. Bush's Presidency.

For example:

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, thousands of soldiers died in Iraq--a war we now know without question to have been waged as part of an ideological program, not out of necessity. Those thousands of soldiers each had parents, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, children, and hometowns dragged through the cruel stop-gap policies imposed on service men and women by George W. Bush.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were injured, only to return to the squalid conditions and cruel indifference of a veterans' care medical system that fell through the cracks of America's for-profit healthcare racket. The tragedy of our injured soldiers came to light during George W. Bush's Presidency.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the number of Americans living in abject fear for lack of health insurance reached the tens of millions. As a result of this crisis of fear, a private medical relief agency initially set up to fly doctors to remote jungles in South America began flying relief into poor American communities. This happened during George W. Bush's Presidency.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the NSA spied on the private citizens, thanks to the willing participation of major American telecom companies, a major violation of the most fundamental Constitutional rights Americans thought protected them from KGB-style domestic surveillance.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the citizens of nearly all American foreign allies began to view the United States as a hostile threat to world peace, safety, and security as a result of (1) the preemptive invasion policies of Dick Cheney and (2) the torture-of-prisoners policies of Dick Cheney.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, job security for working communities dropped, underemployment reached historic highs, and earned wages for worker output stagnated.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, Bernard Madoff was arrested for running the largest financial Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding private citizens, retirement funds, and not-for-profit organizations out of billions of dollars.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the United States impeded global cooperation to lower carbon emissions levels, thereby heightening a general fear over the destructive potential of global warming.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the United States economy tipped into the deepest economic crisis since the 1920s, hastening experts to describe the housing and financial market meltdown as a potential global economic 'depression.'

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, pet food produced in China was discovered as the cause of deaths for American dogs and cats contaminated by toxic melamine, resulting in a nationwide panic.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, ecoli contamination killed multiple people who had ate spinach, tomatoes, and peppers.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, elderly Americans panicked over shortages of flu vaccines.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the Republican Party ran political commercials claiming that voting for Democratic Party candidates would lead directly to the death and destruction of small town America by terrorists with nuclear bombs.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, fear and hatred of homosexuality reached a fever pitch in American politics.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the Republican Party ran election campaigns designed to scare Jewish voters into thinking that the election of Democrats would result in another Holocaust.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, civilian planes were hijacked and flown into two of the tallest buildings in the world--the event was broadcast on live television--and when the President was told these events were happening by one of his closest aides, he sat there stone faced and did nothing, while his vice President--Dick Cheney--vanished into an "undisclosed location."

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the country was swept up in fear that terrorists were attacking ordinary citizens by sending the anthrax virus in the form of white powder through the United States Postal system.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, invasive strip searches coupled with racial profiling were introduced to the act of getting onto an airplane.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, a man who looked mentally ill was able to get past airport security, get on a plane, and then light a fuse connected to explosives in his shoes.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, a color-coded system was created to tell Americans via broadcast television that the threat of a terrorist attack was high at all times.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the Republican Party launched a national campaign to convince the public that the Democratic nominee for president was a covert adherent to radical Islam with covert ties to domestic and foreign terrorists.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency--a time lauded and celebrated by the National Rifle Association, who claimed to have "their man in the Oval office"--the largest gun massacre on a university campus occurred at Virginia Tech, resulting in the violent deaths of 5 faculty members and 27 students.

* During George W. Bush's Presidency, the CIA at the bequest of Dick Cheney tortured prisoners using techniques in direct violation of U.S. and international law, dramatically increasing the likelihood that captured U.S. prisoners in the future will also be subject to torture.

And that is just to name a few, but you get the point. So, remind me again: How did George W. Bush's policies keep us safe? Call me crazy, but I just do not see it.

To understand what it means for a President to keep us safe, my advice is to ignore Dick Cheney altogether and listen directly to former President Franklin Roosevelt.

In 1941 FDR gave a speech about "Four Freedoms" which spoke directly to the issue of security for Americans and the rest of the world:

...

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want--which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants--everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941

...

To be fair, George W. Bush did some good work relative to Roosevelt's list of "Four Freedoms," in particular his dedication of a considerable funds to help fight AIDS in African nations. And yet, in his domestic and foreign policies--most of them designed and pushed by Dick Cheney--George W. Bush shrouded American life in a politics of fear. He did not make us more safe. Using the media and the military, George W. Bush made us more afraid, more anxious, and more concerned for our future. Even worse: he sought to profit politically from the fear he created.

If there is ever ranking of Presidents who made us feel the most safe, I will bet you a gas mask and a roll of duct tape that George W. Bush ends up in last place.

So the next time Dick Cheney repeats his big, fat, stinking lie that George W. Bush "kept us safe," I hope journalists have the wherewithal and the basic decency to laugh out loud.

The rest of us are already laughing.

Scathing watchdog report blasts Securities and Exchange Commission oversight

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Darren Barbee
May 15, 2009 - Star-Telegram (Dallas-Ft. Worth)

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The Securities and Exchange Commission abandons investigations for lack of resources, allows corporate wrongdoers to skip fines and drops cases because of a bureaucratic culture of risk aversion, according to a recent federal report.

The list goes on: A lack of support staff is so severe it forces SEC attorneys to send confidential documents to nonsecure copy shops. One attorney spent a day putting together document boxes instead of pursuing cases, according to the scathing report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The report raises questions about how well the SEC can do its job protecting investors with such glaring deficiencies.

The number of SEC enforcement attorneys declined 11.5 percent from 2004 to 2008 while cases were closed prematurely or not investigated at all, the report says. Although a wide range of cases is pursued, "one attorney told us of closing several cases that were promising but which could not be pursued for lack of resources," according to the report.

Other times, lack of specialized experts, such as accountants and those knowledgeable about trading, weren't available, causing delays. Over four years, penalties and disgorgements declined by 84 percent — to $256 million in fiscal 2008, compared with $1.59 billion in 2005.

The report also details problems with the commission's lack of consensus in punishing corporate misconduct.

"Officials acknowledged that there could be flagrant misconduct, but no penalty, if corporate benefit [from the misconduct] cannot be identified through economic analysis," the report states.

According to many investigative attorneys, commission penalty policies have contributed to an adversarial relationship between the enforcement division and the commission. In one case, an enforcement attorney told the GAO that a company offered to pay $1 million to settle a case, but the attorney recommended no penalty because "they did not believe the commission would approve the company offer."

In response to the report, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro wrote that she agreed with the findings and recommendations and that she has asked the new director of the enforcement division to conduct a top-to-bottom review of processes and culture.

Schapiro hired a longtime federal prosecutor to head the division. He and Schapiro will work on management reforms, including harnessing technology, improving risk assessment, and improving training and supervision for law enforcement personnel "so that we can maximize our resources to combat fraud and wrongdoing in our markets."

Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago securities attorney, said the report reveals nothing new about the troubled agency.

"The SEC has been an impotent, toothless tiger pretty much since its creation in the 1930s," he said. "The SEC tends to be more concerned about banging the drum and getting publicity as opposed to stopping stock crooks like Bernie Madoff."

Toon

Republican Disaster -- The Evangelical/Zionist Anatomy of Meltdown

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Frank Schaeffer
May 19, 2009 - Huffington Post

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I was a Republican insider. For instance, the late Jack Kemp was a friend who I often advised on "connecting" with the Religious Right, until I left the Republican Party and the evangelical subculture and slammed the door behind me. During my last call with Jack he hung up on me. (I was backing McCain in 2000 and he was for W.) I want you to understand this context of my "insider's" comments here because they are going to strike you as shocking. So please let me recap some personal history.

My parents and I were the guests of the Reagans, Fords and Bush's in the White House and/or in other private meetings. Jack Kemp was so good a friend that he once interrupted a speech at a fund-raising banquet in Washington that I'd walked into late and walked from the podium to the back of the hall shook my hand introduced me to the assembled Republican leaders, then walked back to the podium and continued his speech. He did this because -- in those days -- I was an important link to the (then) powerful evangelical movement.

I was often in Jack's house with Jack and his wife Joanne who, at that time, was conducting a weekly Bible study group with other congressional wives called the "Schaeffer group," based on my father's books. In those days -- the 1970s and early 80s -- as both a staunch Republican and pro-life leader and the son of the famous evangelist, I was right in the middle of the Republican machine.

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom -- in the 1970s my family was an integral part of bringing the Republican Party under the sway of the emerging Religious Right, particularly because of our support of the antiabortion movement. It was my father who talked Jerry Falwell into "taking a stand" on the "moral issues" of the day, which then morphed into the Moral Majority. Back in the 70s and early 80s Dad and I both appeared on the 700 Club many times, I preached from Jerry Falwell's pulpit and was the keynote speaker at the Religious Broadcasters and Christian Booksellers Association annual events several years running.

There came a day in 1985 (my dad had died in 1984) that I began to take another look at my commitment to the both the far right of Republican Party and the Religious Right. I came to realize that I was in bed with a group of people who were profoundly anti-American. They were professional haters. They wrapped themselves in the flag and "loved America," but it was an America in their imaginations only and cast in their image: white, middle-class, straight, born-again, homophobic and tinged with racism, not to mention misogyny.

The America most Americans lived in; diverse, open, tolerant and multi-ethnic was the America that the right would hardly even acknowledge. They "loved" an America that didn't exist, and hated the real country we live in. (I go into this in detail in two books; Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All -- or Almost All -- of It Back and also in my forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion -- Or Atheism where I lay out an alternative to some very bad choices between the extremes.)

So what went wrong with the Republican Party? Believe me, it's all about religion!

Two religions (in the broadest sense of the term) have destroyed the Republican Party: evangelical Christianity and Christian/Jewish Zionism. Evangelical Christianity created the Religious Right which forever linked the Republican Party to the antiabortion, anti-sex education, anti-evolution and anti-gay crusades. And both Christian and Jewish Zionism linked the Republican Party to what became the neoconservative movement with its roots in such publications as Commentary magazine and their shrill Israel-can-do-no-wrong anti-Arab agenda. (I knew the late editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz quite well, and we met several times to build alliances between evangelicals and the far American Zionist far right. When it came to Arabs, I believe he was a real racist.)

I would not call Zionism per se a religion, but I'm talking about secular goals pursued with religious fervor. I would call Zionism, American-style a politicized version of a religion. I also argue that the neo-con side got traction when religious Jews became Zionists and when religious Christians (evangelicals) hopped aboard to hasten the "Rapture." And I'd like to point out that American Zionists ally themselves with the Israeli hardliners, but that opinion in Israel is much more diverse and often tolerant than that, as is opinion among Jewish Americans, who do not by and large accept the AIPAC point of view uncritically.

The result of the Republican Party being taken over by these religious groups was that we got George W. Bush. His idea of governance was a hands-off, all-government-is-bad-government neglect, combined with an unnecessary war in Iraq inspired by a form of Zionism that sees all Arabs as a threat, Islam as evil, America as an exceptional place duty-bound "by God" to keep the world safe for evangelical Christian "values," on the one hand, and militant Christian and Jewish Zionism on the other. It is a poisonous blend. (It's not just Zionism, or a form of Zionism, that makes Americans hate Arabs. Anti-Arab, anti-Muslim images in America go way back and some right wing evangelicals and Jews merely tap into that racism.)

Evangelical/Christian Zionism has been bad for the State of Israel too. It has helped put that country into a permanent defensive crouch in which there is now perhaps no way out from destruction that comes to all people who see everyone else (from the EU to the UN to the Arabs and Iran) as a threat. The building of the illegal West Bank settlements and turning the Gaza Strip into what amounts to a concentration camp, combined with demographic reality will doom the State of Israel if a two state peace agreement is not reached and reached fast. But Christian Zionists have done all they can to undermine peace in the name of fulfilling "biblical prophecy" as have the far right of the Jewish Zionists, people like my old friend Norman Podhoretz.

With "friends" like the Christian Zionists -- exemplified by the Reverend John Hagee and many others who "support" Israel while eagerly waiting for the "return of Christ" and the destruction of all "unbelieving Jews" -- Israel needs no enemies. Given that the hard-line American Christian Zionists encouraged the Republican Party to become the party of permanent war to keep the State of Israel "safe" they have actually helped set the stage for its destruction. And therefore the Republicans also opened the door to our national economic ruin as well. The two are linked; eternal war and ruin, because our permanent wars (thinly veiled excuses to "keep Israel safe") are never paid for by increased taxes or a draft. (Disclosure: my son served in the Marines and was deployed.)

But attitudes are changing: The results of a new Zogby poll are interesting. They suggest that Obama would have strong support for a US diplomatic effort to forge an Israel-Palestine deal, even if it means tough pressure on Israel. According to the poll, when asked if the United States should "get tough" with Israel in order to back up its call for an end to settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, fully 50 percent of Americans said yes, with just 19 percent saying "do nothing," and 32 percent not sure.

Asked whether the interests of Israel and the US are identical, only 28 percent of Obama voters agreed, while 59 percent disagreed. Among McCain voters, it was the reverse: 78 percent of McCain voters said US and Israel interests were identical (!) and 15 percent said they are not.

So what did the Republicans become? They are the party of unnecessary wars both actual and cultural and the party of the rich -- those who never serve in the military, just put up flags to "support the troops." The actual war in Iraq was (as everyone knew with a wink and a nod, but few dared say) really about our commitment to Christian and Jewish Zionism as it was "understood" by the born-again fool Bush. The culture war is also an unnecessary and unmitigated war that pitted the "real America" (in other words white mostly uneducated, lower-middle-class evangelical/Catholic working Americans) against everyone else.

If you're not a gay-hating, "pro-life," born-again evangelical and/or an ardent Israel-can-do-no-wrong-all-Arabs-are-evil-Jesus-is-coming-back-soon evangelical on the one hand or a neoconservative I-never-met-a-war-I-didn't-like "intellectual" on the other hand, these days you're probably not a Republican. Throw in a college degree or the habit of getting information from any source other than right wing blogs, radio "personalities" like Rush Limbaugh or "authors" like Ann Coulter and you won't be voting Republican again in this lifetime.

What's caused the Republican Party's real meltdown? It's that it has ceased to exist as a political party and is instead a dwindling weirdly eclectic collection of uneducated rubes led by a few fearful angry far right thinkers who talk in media sound bites geared to the types of people who watch Fox News. Jack Kemp was not part of this horrible little "party." He was a smart compassionate man. There used to be more Republicans like Kemp. Today the Republican core constituency is the national village idiot.

With the election of President Obama America has turned the page on the village idiots. We now have a president who is a religious believer himself, who supports Israel (as I do, by the way), but who well understands -- and articulates beautifully as he just did at Notre Dame talking about abortion -- the fact that authentic faith should be a unifying force instead of a divisive one. That's bad news for religious nuts, be they Christians or Jews. That's good news for America and the world, and maybe for our overstretched military too.

The choice for America has always been between inclusive pluralism and exclusion. The kind of religion and Evangelical/Zionist/neoconservative cabal used to take over the interests of the Republican Party is just too small for this big diverse, tolerant and open country of ours. So the Republicans have a choice: become an American political party again serving American interests or continue to serve the narrowly defined religious interests of two angry and fearful Jewish/Evangelical minorities who are themselves bastardized offshoots of their Christian and Jewish traditions.

.....

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. He is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and also author of the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion Or Atheism

Obama Expands the American Warfare State

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Sherwood Ross
May 20, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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Although the U.S. is not in imminent danger of attack from any country, President Obama's first budget further expands the Pentagon's already dominant global operations.

Not even the prospect of a $3.1 trillion combined budget deficit for this year and next deters him. Let them chop the budget for black colleges and police officer death benefits, the Pentagon and its contractors continue to feast at the champagne-and-caviar table.

It's not as though for eight years the Bush Pentagon hadn't nearly outspent the rest of the world combined on designing deadlier weapons and employing them in illegal wars.

Obama's new $664 billion Pentagon budget is $21 billion higher (four percent) than the final Bush budget. It includes $65 billion for Afghanistan and $61 billion for Iraq. Why?

Well, here's what Defense Secy. Robert Gates told the Naval War College April 17th: "The U.S. must not take its current dominance for granted...its battle fleet, by one estimate, is still larger than the next 13 navies combined---and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners."

(Get that? "Larger than the next 13 navies combined." What's more, nearly every world power is our buddy. So where's the urgent need to spend billions on expansion? And notice his use of the word "dominance.")

Gates went on to boast, "In terms of capabilities, the over-match is even greater. No country in the rest of the world has anything close to the reach and firepower to match a carrier strike group. And the U.S. has and will maintain 11 at least until 2040."

Gates seeks an incredible 2,400 new Joint Strike Fighter planes when the U.S. already is undisputed master of the skies. Think of that: 2,400 warplanes in the absence of an enemy!

At 100 million bucks a pop, that air armada will cost taxpayers over $240 billion.

As Sheldon Filger wrote in the May 16 Huffington Post of the Pentagon's fiscal 2009 outlay: "This stratospheric expendure is equivalent to the combined totals for the next 25 largest military budgets on the planet."

The Pentagon claims it needs to be able to fight two wars at once. However, if it did not go around starting wars it would be hard-pressed to find one. From what quarter does Gates expect an attack? Iran, with a puny military budget 1/100th our expenditure? Recall the last successful strike on U.S. soil was achieved not by a great army wielding sophisticated weapons but by a handful of terrorists with box cutters who hijacked airliners and used our own jet fuel for explosives. Yet the Pentagon expands as if gearing up to fight WWII.

"President Obama's budget continues the decade-long uptick in Pentagon spending, which has grown by approximately 40% since 2000," observes military policy analyst Travis Sloan of the Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

He notes the Obama budget "appears surprisingly large at first glance, especially in this economic climate." Yet he sees reason for optimism as he believes Obama "will institute critical foreign and defense reforms that will make us safer and spend our money more wisely." That's his view.

Obama's Pentagon budget, however, is certainly not going to make the people of Afghanistan safer. His buildup there comes as Afghan President Hamid Karzai pleads in the strongest terms "for the U.S. to halt air strikes in his country, following attacks...that Afghan officials said killed 147 people," Reuters reported. "We demand an end to these operations...an end to air strikes," Karzai told CNN. (Demand? Puppets don't pull strings.)

Defense Secretary Gates informed West Point cadets April 21st that Afghanistan is about "striking back at the staging ground of the perpetrators of the September 11th attack," claiming "Afghanistan is widely viewed as a war of necessity."

In fact, USA Today reported just a month earlier that public support for that conflict "has ebbed to a new low," according to a Gallup Poll. Americans who regard the attack on Afghanistan as "a mistake" had increased from 9% in 2001 to 42%, a sea change Gates conveniently chooses not to credit.

Gallup also discovered a shift in public opinion from March, 2007, when it asked if the U.S. was spending too much or too little on defense. Forty-three per cent responded "too much" compared with 20 percent who replied "too little." A decade earlier most Americans didn't think the Pentagon was on a spending binge with their taxes.

It's ironic that to prosecute what is now President Obama's war, the Pentagon is inflicting on Afghan civilians the same cruel deaths terrorists visited on New York City. Human Rights Watch dubbed "inadequate" U.S. military measures to safeguard them.

A like situation afflicts Pakistan, as the U.S.-made Afghan war spills over its borders. According to AP, "Using unmanned aircraft, American forces have carried out dozens of missile attacks in northwestern Pakistan over the last year. U.S. officials rarely confirm the attacks, but say they have killed a string of al-Qaida commanders. Pakistan's government has publicly protested the tactic, arguing that it kills too many civilians and undermines its efforts to turn tribal leaders away from hard-liners." The UN says 1.5 million Pakistanis have fled their homes, a repeat of the Afghan exodus.

America's Afghan war "is not self defense," writes international law authority Francis Boyle in his new book, "Tackling America's Toughest Questions"(Clarity Press). "Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis...(it) constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan."

Boyle recalls that then Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to produce a "white paper" documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda but never did, and that Bush failed to get a UN resolution authorizing military force in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon's aim, he says, is to "direct military control of 50 percent of the world's oil supply" in the Persian Gulf region, which the Fifth Fleet was "set up in Bahrain to police, dominate, and control."

Can the Department of Defense operations be construed "defensive" when it is operating more than 1,000 bases abroad and those 11 mobile carrier attack fleets? According to author Hugh Gusterson, writing in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists of March 10th: "These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup." (If only the Pentagon spilled just that!)

Few realize the Pentagon's collection of bases makes it the world's biggest landlord, about 30-million acres. Excluding Afghanistan and Iraq, USA spends $102 billion a year just to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The Pentagon justifies its appetite for, say, 227 bases in Germany in terms of making the U.S. more secure. In fact, though, "Such forward basing of forces," writes James Carroll in House of War(Houghton Mifflin), "was designed to control, by means of 'regime change' and 'prevention,' emerging political trends around the globe, with the unabashed goal of guaranteeing U.S. dominance everywhere." Indications are the American war machine has triumphed over its closest adversary: the State Department. As Reuters columnist Bernd Debusmann wrote May 14th, "The U.S. armed forces, the world's most powerful, outnumber the country's diplomatic service and its major aid agency by a ratio of more than 180:1, vastly higher than in other Western democracies. Military giant, diplomatic dwarf?"

Debusmann goes on to say, "In terms of money, the U.S. military towers just as tall. Roughly half of all military spending in the world is American. Even potential adversaries in a conventional war spend puny sums in comparison...China's defense budget is $70 billion, Russia's around $50 billion."

The picture emerging is ugly. No "victory" in its spreading wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq ever will begin to compensate for the vast numbers of Middle Eastern folk needlessly maimed, killed, displaced, and pauperized by U.S. military aggression. "Aggression" is the only word for it and the Middle East's oil supply is the only reason for it. The Pentagon is on its way to tighten its control of the world---with the help of our newest imperial president's enabling budget. The American Warfare State marches on!

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Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who has worked for major American newspapers and magazines as well as international wire services.

Our Loss Is BlackRock's Gain

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Robert Scheer
May 20, 2009 - TruthDig

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How much do you know about the BlackRock hedge fund? Better bone up fast, now that the folks at BlackRock are calling the shots in the government's trillion-dollar bailout program. As both The New York Times and The Wall Street journal reported on Tuesday, BlackRock execs are now directing key elements of the government program at a time when they stand to reap great profits from the fallout of a problem they helped create.

The U.S. picked BlackRock to manage the assets once controlled by AIG and Bear Stearns and to analyze the assets of Freddie Mac and Morgan Stanley. And as if that were not enough on its plate, the Treasury Department has just selected BlackRock to be one of the few firms trusted with using U.S. taxpayer dollars to buy toxic assets from the banks and then resell them in a process that presents enormous conflicts of interest with other BlackRock operations.

Bank of America, with a 47% ownership position in BlackRock, is also the owner of what was once Countrywide Financial, which led the pack in selling bad mortgages. The disposition of those failed properties under BlackRock's tutelage will have much to do with BofA's future profitability. As if that were not enough financial incest, the former president and other top executives of Countrywide now run a company created by BlackRock, which is profiting mightily by snapping up the sort of distressed loans that they originally had marketed.

Confused? You're supposed to be. That's the point of a successful hedge fund, a totally unregulated activity in which very rich people pool their money in order to more effectively rip off the rest of us. And BlackRock is at the top of that game, managing $1.3 trillion in assets. But in this round the stakes are far higher because BlackRock, which did a great deal to cause the economic meltdown, has now been put in charge of the government recovery effort.

But don't take my word for it; check out the accounts of BlackRock's leading role in managing the bailout in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

The New York Times: "Can a company that is being paid to price and sell troubled assets for the government buy the same kinds of assets for private clients without showing preference? And should the government seek counsel from a company whose clients stand to make or lose billions if those policies are enacted?"

The Wall Street Journal: "BlackRock helped shape the government's toxic-asset plan, which critics have said helps vulture investors buy assets on the cheap while exposing taxpayers to the bulk of losses if the investments sour."

Leading the pack of vulture capitalists profiting from the misery they inspired is the Private National Acceptance Co. (PennyMac), which BlackRock bankrolled. Stanford L. Kurland, chairman and CEO of PennyMac, is the former president of Countrywide Financial. A New York Times story in March headlined "Ex-Leaders of Countrywide Profit From Bad Loans" noted that Kurland's new outfit was profiting from the misery it had helped cause: "After all, the banking behemoth (Countrywide) made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering."

Countrywide, under Kurland's leadership, specialized in those low "teaser" interest rates that caused people to lose their homes when rates suddenly ballooned. As the Times observed, "Countrywide has become synonymous with the excesses that led to the housing bubble." Now Kurland's new company specializes in buying back those forfeited and at-risk properties for pennies on the dollar and making money off new loans and sales.

"It is sort of like the arsonist who sets fire to the house and then buys up the charred remains and sells it," Margot Saunders, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, told the Times.

"Kurland is seeking to capitalize on a situation that was a product of his own creation," noted Blair A. Nicholas, a lawyer representing Arkansas teachers suing Kurland and his fellow Countrywide executives. "It is tragic and ironic. ... But then again, greed is a growth industry."

And once again the greediest will make out like bandits, with only a few of them ever being held accountable. Kurland sold $200 million in Countrywide stock shortly before the meltdown and, in any case, the spectacular failure of his banking experience only made him all that more employable.

Quoting federal banking officials, the Times reported, "They said it was important to do business with experienced mortgage operators like Mr. Kurland, who know how to creatively renegotiate delinquent loans." Has our president never heard of recidivism?

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Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig.

US Army Paid Bonuses to KBR Despite Questions

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Thomas Ferraro
May 20, 2009 - Reuters

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The U.S. Army paid "tens of millions of dollars in bonuses" to KBR Inc, its biggest contractor in Iraq, even after it concluded the firm's electrical work had put U.S. soldiers at risk, according to a source close to a U.S. congressional investigation.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday to examine KBR's operations in Iraq, and question why the Army rewarded the Houston-based company.

The panel says KBR has been linked to at least two, and as many as five, electrocution deaths of U.S. soldiers and contractors in Iraq due to "shoddy work."

Investigators believe hundreds of other soldiers may have received electrical shocks, the source added. The Army is investigating.

The company denies responsibility for any of the electrocutions, saying it is proud of its work and that its employees make great sacrifices to get the job done.

KBR was part of Halliburton Co until two years ago. Former Vice President Dick Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000, when he became George Bush's running mate.

During the Bush administration, some critics claimed Cheney's deferred compensation from the company represented a conflict of interest and questioned Halliburton's winning of lucrative government contracts in Iraq.

Military reports have criticized KBR's work in Iraq in recent years. Yet afterward, the company received "tens of millions of dollars in bonuses," said the source, who declined to be identified.

"We want to know why," the source said.

The military was invited to send a witness to testify at Wednesday's hearing, but the committee agreed to let it submit a written statement instead, the source said. Witnesses who are expected to attend include a former KBR electrician.

On Tuesday, the Army had no immediate comment when asked about the bonuses.

THREAT OF FIRE

A September 30, 2008, letter to KBR from an officer in the Defense Department's Defense Contract Management Agency had harsh words for the company.

"We cannot overemphasize the significance of the lack of sustained electrical support services being provided by KBR in Iraq to maintain the minimum life, health and safety standards in support of our warfighters," wrote Captain David Graff, an agency commander.

A February 2007 report by the agency also raised concerns about KBR and its subcontractors in Iraq -- while acknowledging the difficulty of working in a war environment.

"Primary safety threat, theater wide, is fire due to the inferior 220 electrical fixtures found throughout Iraq," it said. "Improper installation, substandard equipment purchases (such as light fixtures) and heavy usage appears to be the three primary causes of these fires."

U.S. lawmakers have raised concerns about the U.S. military's increased use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and have said KBR and other companies should be held accountable.

KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said, "KBR remains proud of the work it performs in Iraq."

"We remain committed to engaging in a transparent and more importantly, a fact-based dialogue on this issue while pledging continued full cooperation and support to the military."

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee is the research arm of the Senate Democratic leadership and often conducts investigations of its own.