The day that changed the climate

by Colin Brown and Rupert Cornwell in Washington

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

Independent.co.uk Online Edition (October 31 2006)


Climate change has been made the world's biggest priority, with the publication of a stark report showing that the planet faces catastrophe unless urgent measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Future generations may come to regard the apocalyptic report by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, as the turning point in combating global warming, or as the missed opportunity.

As well as producing a catastrophic vision of hundreds of millions fleeing flooding and drought, Sir Nicholas suggests that the cost of inaction could be a permanent loss of twenty per cent of global output.

That equates to a figure of GBP 3.68 trillion - while to act quickly would cost the equivalent of GBP 184 billion annually, one per cent of world GDP.

Across the world, environmental groups hailed the report as the beginning of a new era on climate change, but the White House maintained an ominous silence. However, the report laid down a challenge to the US, and other major emerging economies including China and India, that British ministers said cannot be ignored.

Its recommendations are based on stabilising carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at between 450 and 550 parts per million - which would still require a cut of at least 25 per cent in global emissions, rising to sixty per cent for the wealthy nations.

It accepts that even with a very strong expansion of renewable energy sources, fossil fuels could still account for more than half of global energy supplies by 2050.

Presenting the findings in London, Tony Blair said the 700-page document was the "most important report on the future" published by his Government. Green campaigners said that at last the world had woken up to the dangers they had been warning about for years.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and likely next Prime Minister, assumed the task of leading the world in persuading the sceptics in the US, China and India to accept the need for global co-operation to avert the threat of a global catastrophe. He has enlisted Al Gore, the former presidential candidate turned green evangelist, to sell the message in the United States, with Sir Nicholas.

While the Bush administration refused to be drawn on the report, US environmental groups seized on it to demand a major change in policy. "The President needs to stop hiding behind his opposition to the Kyoto protocol and lay a new position on the table", said the National Environmental Trust, in Washington. The Washington Post said in an editorial that it was "hard to imagine" that the "intransigence" of the administration would long survive its tenure. "Will [Mr Bush] take a hand in developing America's response to this global problem", it asked, "Or will he go down as the President who fiddled while Greenland melted?"

Sir Nicholas's report contained little that was scientifically new. But British ministers are hoping his hard-headed economic analysis will be enough to persuade the doubters in the White House to curb America's profligate use of carbon energy.

In the Commons, Environment Secretary, David Miliband, confirmed that ministers were drawing up a Climate Change Bill, which would enshrine in law the Government's long-term target of reducing carbon emissions by sixty per cent by 2050. But he declined to go into any detail.

Mr Blair said the consequences for the planet of inaction were "literally disastrous".

"This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime", he said. "We can't wait the five years it took to negotiate Kyoto - we simply don't have the time. We accept we have to go further [than Kyoto]."

Sir Nicholas told BBC radio: "Unless it's international, we will not make the reductions on the scale which will be required".

Pia Hansen, of the European Commission, said the report "clearly makes a case for action".

"Climate change is not a problem Europe can afford to put into the 'too difficult' pile", she said. "It is not an option to wait and see, and we must act now".

Charlie Kronick, of Greenpeace, said the report was "the final piece in the jigsaw" in the case for action to reduce emissions. "There are no more excuses left, no more smokescreens to hide behind, now everybody has to back action to slash emissions, regardless of party or ideology", he said.

The CBI director general Richard Lambert said a global system of emissions trading was now urgently needed as a "nucleus" for effective action. "Provided we act with sufficient speed, we will not have to make a choice between averting climate change and promoting growth and investment".

Copyright (c) 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1943294.ece

_____


A global catastrophe of our own making

by Steve Connor, Science Editor

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

Independent.co.uk Online Edition (October 31 2006)


Average global temperatures have increased by less than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, but they are projected to increase by up to five degrees Celsius over the coming century if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise without restraint. With each one degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures, the Stern Review portrays progressively more serious scenarios.

The five degrees of disaster

One degree Celsius: Smaller mountain glaciers disappear in Andes, threatening water supply of fifty million people. More than 300,000 people extra die from increase in climate-related diseases in tropical regions. Permafrost melting damages roads and buildings in Canada and Russia. One in ten species threatened with extinction, eighty per cent of coral suffers regular bleaching.

Two degrees Celsius: Water scarcity increases in southern Africa and the Mediterranean. Significant decline in food production in Africa, where malaria affects up to sixty million more people. Up to ten million extra people affected by coastal flooding each year. Arctic species, such the polar bear, face extinction along with fifteen to forty per cent of world's remaining wildlife. Gulf Stream begins to weaken and Greenland ice sheet begins to melt irreversibly.

Three degrees Celsius: Serious droughts in southern Europe occur once every ten years. Between one and four billion people suffer water shortages and a similar number suffer from floods. Many millions of people at risk of malnutrition, as agricultural yields at higher latitudes reach peak output. More than 100 million people are affected by the risk of coastal flooding. Mass extinction of animals and plants accelerates.

Four degrees Celsius: Sub-Saharan Africa and the southern Mediterranean suffer between thirty and fifty per cent decrease in availability of water. Agricultural yields decline by 15-35 per cent in Africa. Crops fail in entire regions. Up to eighty million extra people are exposed to malaria. Loss of around half of the Arctic tundra. Many nature reserves collapse. Giant West Antarctic Ice Sheet begins to melt irreversibly, threatening catastrophic increases in global sea levels.

Five degrees Celsius: Possible disappearance of the large glaciers of the Himalayas, affecting the water supply of 25 per cent of population of China and hundreds of millions more in India. Ocean acidity increases with threat of total collapse in the global fisheries industry. Sea levels rise inexorably, inundating vast regions of Asia and about half of the world's major cities, including London, New York and Tokyo.

Arctic sea ice: current computer models suggest that floating summer sea ice of the northern hemisphere could disappear completely by the year 2070. Some experts believe that this summer polar ice could disappear even earlier this century with accelerating warming trends - making the polar bear extinct.

The Asian monsoon: In India the monsoon provides between 75 and 90 per cent of annual rainfall. Global warming is projected to increase the severity and possibly the unpredictability of the monsoon, increasing the risk of severe flooding or even monsoon failure at the time of year when it is needed most.

West Antarctic ice sheet: as global average temperatures rise then so does the risk of crossing a threshold beyond which the world's biggest ice sheets being to melt irreversibly. This would commit sea levels to a rise by between five metres and twelve metres over the coming centuries. Currently 270 million people live in coastal areas threatened by a five metre rise in sea levels.

Sub-Saharan Africa: this region will bear the brunt of climate change. Scientists predict a thirty per cent decline in annual water availability. Droughts will increase crop failures and malnutrition. Many tens of millions of extra people will be exposed to lethal tropical disease such as malaria.

Australia: many regions of the world will become too hot for cereal crops if average global temperatures rise to four degrees Celsius. Vast tracts of Australia's richest agricultural land will become no-go areas for arable farming.

Amazon rainforest: continued deforestation of the tropical rainforests increases the amount of carbon dioxide circulating in the atmosphere. As temperatures continue to rise, scientists fear that local droughts and soil erosion could cause the complete collapse of the remaining rainforests.

Siberian permafrost: as temperatures rise, the permanently frozen tundra of the northern hemisphere begins to melt, releasing its vast store of methane - a greenhouse gas which is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Buildings and roads built on the permafrost collapse - but this is one area of the world that could otherwise benefit from warmer temperatures and a longer growing season.

Gulf Stream: The thermohaline circulation is like a conveyor belt in the North Atlantic Ocean bringing huge amounts of heat from the tropics to north-western Europe. As sea temperatures rise, there is a risk that the cold, salty "engine" of the circulation slows down or even stops, blocking the flow of the warm Gulf Stream that keep British winters mild.

Malnutrition: Around 800 million people (twelve per cent of the global population) are currently at risk of hunger and malnutrition. Temperature rises of between two and three degrees Celsisu could increase this number by between thirty million and 200 million. A further one degree Celsius rise would add an extra 500 million to the number of people at risk of malnutrition.

Ocean acidification: Extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dissolves in seawater causing an increase in ocean acidification. The predicted increase in acidification over the next century have not been experienced for hundreds of thousands of years. One outcome could be the death of many marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs. More than one billion people worldwide currently rely on fish as their primary source of animal protein.

Flooding: A rise in average temperatures of three or four degrees Celsius is projected to cause an increase in sea levels of between twenty and eighty centimetres. This means that between twenty million and 300 million extra people will be flooded out of their homes each year. South East Asia is particularly vulnerable because of poor coastal defences.

Mass extinction: Species living in vulnerable regions, such as alpine ecosystems and tropical mountain habitats, are likely to disappear with even quite modest increases in global temperatures. A increase of three degrees Celsius could threaten between twenty and fifty per cent of animals and plants with extinction - the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth and the only one to be caused by another species, man.

Extreme weather: A warmer world is expected to increase the frequency and severity of heatwaves, storms and hurricanes. Winds speeds of tropical storms for instance increase by between fifteen and twenty per cent for a three degrees Celsius increase in tropical sea temperatures. More violent winds and storms will significantly increase the damage to buildings and other valuable infrastructure.

Copyright (c) 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1943296.ece

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Selling Indulgences

The trade in carbon offsets is an excuse for business as usual

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 18 2006)

www.monbiot.com (October 19 2006)


Rejoice! We have a way out. Our guilty consciences appeased, we can continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet. How has this magic been arranged? By something called "carbon offsets". You buy yourself a clean conscience by paying someone else to undo the harm you are causing.

The Co-op's holiday firm Travelcare has just started selling offsets to its customers. If they want to fly to Spain, they pay an extra GBP 3. Then they can forget about their contribution to climate change. The money will be spent on projects in the developing world, such as building wind farms and more efficient cooking stoves. In August, BP launched its "targetneutral" scheme, enabling customers to "neutralise the carbon dioxide emissions caused by their driving" {1}. The consequences of an entire year's motoring can be discharged for just GBP 20. Again, your money will be invested in the developing world - "a biomass energy plant in Himachal Pradesh; a wind farm in Karnataka, India and an animal waste management and methane capture program in Mexico" - and you need have no further worries about what you and BP are doing to the atmosphere (or, for that matter, to the people of West Papua or the tundra in Alaska).

It sounds great. Without requiring any social or political change, and at a tiny cost to the consumer, the problem of climate change is solved. Having handed over a few quid, we can all sleep easy again.

This is not the first time that such schemes have been sold. In his book The Rise of the Dutch Republic, published in 1855, John Lothrop Motley describes the means by which the people of the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries could redeem their sins. "The sale of absolutions was the source of large fortunes to the priests ... God's pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed, was advertised according to a graduated tariff. Thus, poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats, six livres tournois. Absolution for incest was afforded at thirty-six livres, three ducats. Perjury came to seven livres and three carlines. Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper. Even a parricide could buy forgiveness at God's tribunal at one ducat; four livres, eight carlines." {2}

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.

The problem is this. If runaway climate change is not to trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the global temperature rise must be confined to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. As the figures I have published in Heat show, this requires a sixty per cent cut in global climate emissions by 2030, which means a ninety percent cut in the rich world. Even if, through carbon offset schemes carried out in developing countries, every poor nation on the planet became carbon-free, we would still have to cut most of the carbon we produce at home. Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.

Any scheme that persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay. The big cuts have to be made right now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home. They are telling us that we don't need to be citizens; we need only be better consumers.

BP and Travelcare, like other companies, want to keep expanding their business. Offset schemes allow them to do so while pretending they have gone green. Yet aviation emissions, to give one example, are rising so fast in the UK that before 2020 they will account for the country's entire sustainable carbon allocation {3}. A couple of decades after that, global aircraft emissions will match the sustainable carbon level for all economic sectors, across the entire planet. Perhaps the carbon offset companies will then start schemes on Mars and Jupiter, as we will soon need several planets to absorb the carbon dioxide we release. Offsets, in other words, are being used as an excuse for the unsustainable growth of carbon-intensive activities.

But these are by no means the only problems. A tonne of carbon saved today is far more valuable in terms of preventing climate change than a tonne of carbon saved in three years' time. Almost all the carbon offset schemes take time to recoup the emissions we release today. As far as I can discover, none of the companies which sell them uses discount rates for its carbon savings (which would reflect the difference in value between the present and the future). This means they could all be accused of unintentional but systemic false accounting.

And while the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and verifiable, the carbon absorbed by offset projects is less attestable. Many will succeed, and continue to function over the necessary period. Others will fail, especially the disastrous forays into tree-planting that some companies have made. To claim a carbon saving, you also need to demonstrate that these projects would not have happened without you - that Mexico would not have decided to capture the methane from its pig farms, or that people in India would not have bought new stoves of their own accord. In other words, you must look into a counterfactual future. I have yet to meet someone from a carbon offset company who possesses supernatural powers.

At the offices of Travelcare and the forecourts owned by BP, you can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction. But you cannot buy the survival of the planet.

_____

George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published by Penguin. He has also launched a website - www.turnuptheheat.org - exposing the false environmental claims of companies and politicians.


References:

1. See http://www.targetneutral.com

2. John Lothrop Motley, 1855. The Rise of the Dutch Republic: Part 2, Chapter 11. http://historicaltextarchive.com/books.php?op=viewbook&bookid=60&cid=11

3. Extrapolated from Alice Bows, Paul Upham and Kevin Anderson, 16th April 2005. Growth Scenarios for EU & UK Aviation: contradictions with climate policy. Report for Friends of the Earth Trust Ltd. Tyndall Centre for Climate Change. http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/aviation_tyndall_research.pdf

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/selling-indulgences/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Savage Extreme of a Narrow Policy Spectrum

[This is a bit old but may be helpful to those who think or hope the upcoming election has any chance of making the empire any less evil.]

Five Questions with Noam Chomsky

by Merlin Chowkwanyun

CounterPunch (July 31 2004)

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky is one of the world's most perceptive social critics. I had the opportunity recently to ask him some questions concerning a range of subject matter. Professor Chomsky's latest book is Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (Metropolitan Books, 2003). Other works, many recently reissued, include American Power and the New Mandarins (New Press revised edition, 2002), Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon reprint, 2002), and Deterring Democracy (Hill & Wang reissue, 1992).

Merlin Chowkwanyun: One scholar and activist whom you've cited (and whom I wish more people knew about and read) is Seymour Melman, who more than two decades ago articulated the concept of a "permanent war economy". What was Melman describing, and how does it limit or shape a chief executive's foreign policy?

Professor Noam Chomsky: The term "permanent war economy" is attributed to Charles Wilson, CEO of GE, who warned at the end of World War II that the US must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a "permanent war economy" of the kind that was so successful during the war: a semi-command economy, run mostly by corporate executives, geared to military production. Among other very important contributions, Melman has written extensively on the harmful effects of gearing much of the economy to military production rather than to civilian needs. What he describes is correct and important, but there are other dimensions to be considered. After World War II, most economists and business leaders expected that the economy would sink back to depression without massive government intervention of the kind that, during the war years, finally overcame the Great Depression. The New Deal had softened the edges, but not much more. Business understood that social spending could overcome market catastrophes as well as military spending, but social spending has a downside: it has a democratizing and redistributive effect while military spending is a gift to the corporate manager, a steady cushion. And the public is not involved. People care about hospitals and schools, but if you can "scare the hell out of them", as Senator Vandenberg recommended, they will huddle under the umbrella of power and trust their leaders when it comes to jet planes, missiles, tanks, et cetera. Furthermore, business was well aware that high-tech industry could not survive in a competitive free enterprise economy, and "government must be the savior", as the business press explained. Such considerations converged on the decision to focus on military rather than social spending. And it should be borne in mind that "military spending" does not mean just military spending. A great deal of it is high-tech R&D. Virtually the entire "new economy" has relied heavily on the military cover to socialize risk and cost and privatize profit, often after many decades: computers and electronics generally, telecommunications and the Internet, satellites, the aeronautical industry (hence tourism, the largest "service industry"), containerization (hence contemporary trade), computer-controlled machine tools, and a great deal more. Alan Greenspan and others like to orate about how all of this is a tribute to the grand entrepreneurial spirit and consumer choice in free markets. That's true of the late marketing stage, but far less so in the more significant R&D stage. Much the same is true in the biology-based sectors of industry, though different pretexts are used. The record goes far back, but these mechanisms to sustain the advanced industrial economy became far more significant after World War II.

In brief, the permanent war economy has an economic as well as a purely military function. And both outcomes - incomparable military force and an advanced industrial economy - naturally provide crucial mechanisms for foreign policy planning, much of it geared to ensuring free access to markets and resources for the state-supported corporate sector, constraining rivals, and barring moves towards independent development.


Chowkwanyun: The coup in Haiti occupied headlines for about a month this past spring, but a scan through the major news archives reveals a lack of follow-up stories since, save for the recent minor surge of articles on the US new investigation of Aristide's alleged corruption. What preliminary interpretations can we make about the general US press coverage of Aristide's fall from power? And how can we situate what happened in Haiti in historical context?

Chomsky: As press coverage has declined, serious human rights violations increase, a matter of no interest since Washington attained its goals. Previous press coverage kept closely to the officially-determined parameters: Aristide's corruption and violence in a "failed state", despite the noble US effort to "restore democracy" in 1994. It would have been hard to find even a bare reference to Washington's fierce opposition to the Aristide government when it took office in 1990 in Haiti's first democratic election, breaking the pattern of US support for brutal dictatorship ever since Wilson's murderous and destructive invasion in 1915; or of the instant support of the Bush I and then Clinton administrations for the vicious coup leaders (extending even to authorization of oil shipments to them and their rich supporters in violation of presidential directives); or of the fact that Clinton's noble restoration of democracy was conditioned on the requirement that the government must adopt the harsh neoliberal program of the defeated US candidate in the 1990 election, who won fourteen percent of the vote. It was obvious at once that this would have a devastating effect on the economy, as it did. Bush II tightened the stranglehold by barring aid, and pressuring international institutions to do the same, on spurious pretexts, therefore contributing further to the implosion of the society. No less cynical was the contemptuous refusal of France, which preceded Washington as the primary destroyer of Haiti, even to consider Aristide's entirely legitimate request of repayment of the outrageous indemnity that Haiti was forced to pay for the crime of liberating itself from French tyranny and plunder, the source of much of France's wealth. All of this was missing, replaced by lamentations about how even our remarkable magnanimity and nobility were insufficient to bring democracy and development to the backward Haitians, though we would now try again, in our naive optimism.

This illustration of abject servility to power is not, regrettably, unique. But the spectacle is particularly disgusting when the world's most powerful state crushes under its boot, once again, the poorest country in the hemisphere, as it has been doing in one or another way for 200 years, at first in understandable fear of a rebellion that established the first free country of free men right next door to a leading slave state, and on to the present. It is a depressing illustration of how a highly disciplined intellectual class can reframe even the most depraved actions as yet another opportunity for self-adulation.


Chowkwanyun: Recent films and books from establishment liberal circles focus almost entirely on actions of the Bush Administration both abroad (the Iraq venture on false pretenses) and at home (the Patriot Act, for example). Should the analysis incorporate more events than that, and if so, how far back? How sharp a cleave does there really exist between the Clinton years and the current people in the executive branch? Is there more continuity than the recent works are suggesting?

Chomsky: The Bush administration is at the extreme savage and brutal end of a narrow policy spectrum. Accordingly, its actions and policies came under unprecedented criticism in the mainstream, in conservative circles as well. A good illustration is the reaction to the National Security Strategy announced in September 2002, along with the virtual declaration of war against Iraq, and the onset of a highly successful government-media propaganda campaign that drove the frightened population far off the spectrum of world opinion. The NSS was condemned at once in the main establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, as a new "imperial grand strategy" that was likely to cause harm to US interests. Others joined in sharp criticism of the brazen arrogance and incompetence of the planners: Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the rest. But the criticism was quite narrow, more concerned with style and implementation than substance. Typical was the reaction of Madeleine Albright, also in Foreign Affairs. Like others, she criticized the Bush planners. She added, correctly, that every president has a similar strategy, but doesn't smash people in the face with it, antagonizing even allies. Rather, he keeps it in his back pocket to use when needed. She knew of course that the "Clinton doctrine" was even more extreme than the NSS, declaring that the US would resort to force unilaterally if necessary to ensure access to markets and resources, without even the pretexts of "self-defense" conjured up by Bush propagandists and their acolytes. But Clinton presented the doctrine quietly, and was careful to carry out his crimes, which were many, in ways that would be acceptable to allies and could be justified or concealed by elite opinion, including the media.

Continuities are real, and go back long before. After all, policies are largely rooted in institutions, and these are quite stable. But there are also differences, and even small differences can translate into substantial outcomes in a system of enormous power.


Chowkwanyun: Even though day-to-day conditions and structural realities in Latin America are generally worse than those in the United States, political progress in Latin America of the past few years is inspiring, especially given the stacked odds in countries like Brazil. What accounts for these successes? Do you see an opportunity for more solidarity between American activists and counterparts in other countries, and in general, more global approaches to activism?

Chomsky: Brazil is a remarkable and illuminating case. It is instructive to compare the two largest and most important countries of the hemisphere.

In the forthcoming presidential elections in the US, there is a choice: between two candidates who were born to wealth and political power, attended the same elite university, joined the same secret society that instructs members in the style and manners of the rulers, and are able to run because they are funded by largely the same corporate powers. The Public Relations industry, which basically runs the campaigns, makes sure that they keep away from "issues" (except in vague and obscure terms) and focus on "qualities" - "leadership", "personality", et cetera. The public is not unaware of its purposeful marginalization. On the eve of the 2000 election, about 75% of the public regarded it as largely meaningless - prior to Florida shenanigans, the Supreme Court, et cetera, which were mostly an elite concern. In 2004, more appears to be at stake and interest is greater, but there is a continuation of the long process of disengagement mainly on the part of poor and working class Americans, who simply do not feel that they are represented. The Harvard University project that monitors these matters currently reports that "the turnout gap between the top and bottom fourth by income is by far the largest among western democracies and has been widening".

In Brazil, in dramatic contrast, there was an authentic democratic election. The organized public were able to elect their own candidate, a person from their own ranks, despite barriers far higher than in the US: a very repressive state, tremendous inequality and concentration of wealth and media power, extreme hostility of international capital and its institutions. They were able to do so because of decades of serious organizing and activism by very significant popular organizations: the Landless Workers Movement, the Workers Party, unions, and others. These are all lacking in "failed states" with democratic forms that have little in the way of substance, in which we have elections of the kind taking place in November 2004.

It is also striking to compare the US reaction to the election in Brazil today and the election of a moderately populist candidate, with much less support and much less impressive credentials, forty years ago. That deviation from good form led to intervention by the Kennedy administration to organize a military coup, carried out shortly after the election, instituting a neo-Nazi National Security State of extreme brutality, hailed by Washington liberals as a great victory for democracy and freedom. Today nothing like that is considered. Part of the reason is that the activism of the intervening years has led to much more civilized societies in both countries. The US population is not likely to tolerate the unconcealed criminality of the Kennedy and Johnson years, nor would Brazilians easily capitulate. Another reason is that establishment of murderous dictatorships is no longer necessary. It should hardly be a secret that neoliberal mechanisms are well designed to restrict very narrowly the threat of democracy. As long as Brazil accepts them, the elected President must reject the program on which he was elected, and follow the orders of the international financial powers and investors even more rigorously than his predecessor, so as to "establish credibility" with the masters of the world. One of Clinton's impressive achievements was forging these bonds more firmly, so as to guard wealth and power from the threat that democracy might actually function.

Of course, none of this is graven in stone. In the 1980s, for the first time in the history of Western imperialism, solidarity movements developed in reaction to Reaganite crimes in Central America, which went far beyond protest; thousands of people joined the victims, to help them, and to provide them with some limited protection from the US-run state and mercenary terrorist forces that were ravaging the region. Still more strikingly, they were rooted in mainstream circles, including significant participation from church-based organizations, among them evangelical Christians. These movements have since extended to many other regions, with actions of great courage and integrity, and heroic victims, like Rachel Corrie. Beyond that, for the first time ever, there are really significant international solidarity movements, based mainly in the South, but with increasing participation from the North, drawing from many walks of life and much of the world. Included are the global justice movements (ridiculously called "anti-globalization" movements) that have been meeting in the World Social Forum in Brazil and India, and have spawned regional and local social forums over much of the world. These are the first serious manifestations of the kind of international solidarity that has been the dream of the left and the labor movements since their modern origins. How far such developments can reach we can, of course, never predict. But they are impressive and highly promising.

Bitter class warfare in the West is by and large restricted to the highly class-conscious business sector, which is often quite frank about its objectives and understands very well what its publications call "the hazard facing industrialists in the rising political power of the masses". But while they have had great success in dominant sectors of power in the US, and other industrial countries, they are no more invulnerable than they have been in moments of comparable triumphalism in the past.

Chowkwanyun: A common trope these days holds that academics are too "liberal", "leftist", or "radical", et cetera. What are your thoughts on this interpretation and on the state of contemporary academia in general?

Chomsky: I have to admit that I have an irrational dislike of the word "trope", and other postmodern affectations. But overcoming that, this "trope" hardly merits comment. It can stand alongside of the charge that the media are "too liberal". These charges are not entirely untrue. For quite good reasons, the doctrinal systems try to focus attention on "social and cultural issues", and in these domains, it is largely true that professionals (academic, media) are "liberal"; that is, they have a profile similar to CEOs. Much the same is true when we shift to the issues that are of major concern to the population, but are systematically excluded from the electoral agenda and largely swept to the side in commentary. Take, for example, the misleadingly named "free trade agreements". They are supported by a substantial elite consensus, and generally opposed by the public, so much so that critical analysis of them or even information about them has to be largely suppressed, sometimes in remarkable ways, well documented. The business world is well aware of this. Opponents of these investor-rights versions of economic integration have an "ultimate weapon", the Wall Street Journal lamented: the public is opposed. Therefore various means have to be devised to conceal their nature and implement them without public scrutiny. The same is true of many other issues. It is, for example, widely agreed that a leading domestic problem is escalating costs for health care in the most inefficient system of the industrial world, with far higher per capita expenditures than others and poor outcomes by comparative standards. The reasons are understood by health professionals: privatization, which imposes enormous inefficiencies and costs, and the immense power of the pharmaceutical industry. Polls regularly show strong public support for some form of national health care (eighty percent in the most recent poll I have seen), but when that is even mentioned, the "too-liberal press" dismisses it as "politically impossible" (New York Times). That's correct: the insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry are opposed, and with the effective erosion of a democratic culture, it therefore doesn't matter what the population wants. The same is commonly true on international issues. One finds little difference, I think, between the academic world and other sectors of the professional and managerial classes, to the extent that broad generalization is possible.
_____

Merlin Chowkwanyun is a student at Columbia University. His e-mail is mc2028@columbia.edu.

He also hosts a radio show on WBAR 87.9 FM NYC (www.wbar.org).

http://www.counterpunch.org


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Trust, Then Crucify

What We Expect Democrats To Do If They Take Congress

by Ted Rall

www.rall.com (October 24 2006)


"A second marriage", wrote Samuel Johnson, "is the triumph of hope over experience". Last week I explained that the Beltway politicians running the Democratic Party don't plan major changes should they win big in the midterm elections. Nancy Pelosi and her fellow neo-nons are so scared of being called weak on national security that they'll continue to waste billions of dollars and thousands of bodies on Afghanistan and Iraq. There won't be any investigations of the Bush Administration's actions over the last six years, much less impeachment hearings.

We have every reason to expect nothing from the Dems. Nothing is exactly what they gave us the last time we put them in charge. If the polls are correct, we're going to vote for them anyway. One more time: the triumph of hope over experience.

If Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress, it won't be thanks to their soaring rhetoric or sub-basement ambitions but rather to the millions of Americans who formerly supported the GOP but now reject Bush and his works. "I voted for Bush twice", a forty-year-old supermarket clerk told columnist Bob Herbert in South Bend, Indiana, a conservative stronghold. "Now I just want him gone".

Independent voters, key to a right-wing surge that began with Ronald Reagan's win in 1980, are deserting the Republican Party. Two out of three plan to go Democratic this year, finds the latest Washington Post - ABC News poll. Swing voters cite Iraq as their primary concern, more than the economy, by a widening margin. But the DC Democrats shouldn't take their newfound indie supporters for granted.

"About half of those independents saying they plan to vote Democratic in their district said they were doing so primarily to vote against the Republican candidate rather than affirmatively in support of the Democratic candidate", found the Post poll. "Just 22 percent of independents voting for Democrats are doing so 'very enthusiastically'".

Current modeling projections depict the Senate results as a toss-up and the House of Representatives almost certainly going Democratic. If, as seems likely, Democrats take the House, independents will expect - and have the right to expect - their Democratic-majority Congress to pull out all the stops in the fight to bring an end to the Bushists' six-year reign of error.

Among the top items the wish list of pro-Democratic voters (yellow-dog diehards and newfound indies alike):

Get Out of Iraq Now: Bob Corker, a Republican running a notably dirty campaign for Senate in Tennessee, favors "break[ing] down this discussion that's either a 'cut and run' strategy or a 'stay the course' strategy. Somewhere in between, we've got to figure out new ways of solving the problems that we have in Iraq." But "in between" is pure fantasy. 71 percent of Iraqis want us out of Iraq in less than a year. Why wait to pull out when the only result will be more dead and wounded?

Roll Back the Police State: Most pundits think Republicans are unbeatable on the "war on terrorism". They're wrong. More Americans trust Democrats to fight terrorists than Republicans, by a six-point margin in the latest Newsweek poll - 47 to 41 percent.

People understand that the Bush Administration doesn't care about fighting terrorists. Instead of searching for Osama they've exploited fear of another 9/11 to strip away the rights and freedoms that define America. Most recently, Bush signed a bizarre "Military Commissions Act" (MCA) that legalizes torture and allows the president or secretary of defense to throw any American citizen into prison without cause or charging him with a crime.

"The legislation signed by the president today violates basic principles and values of our constitutional system of government", said Democratic senator Russ Feingold. "It allows the government to seize individuals on American soil and detain them indefinitely, with no opportunity to challenge their detention in court. We look back on this day as a stain on our nation's history."

Nice speech. But voters want Democrats to do more than talk next spring if they regain majority control. All of the Bush-era attacks on freedom and decency must go: the MCA, Detainee Treatment Act, Terrorist Surveillance Program Act legalizing spying on our phone calls and e-mail without a warrant, and the USA-Patriot Act. Concentration camps at Guanta'namo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, as well as the CIA's "secret prisons" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the vile program of "extraordinary renditions" (torture outsourcing) should be closed at once.

Impeach Bush. I was one of the few lefties to say it at the time: Bill Clinton deserved to be impeached. He lied under oath and he lied to the American people. George W Bush makes Clinton look like a rank amateur. He stole two presidential elections, at least in part by hiring thugs to prevent black people from voting. He repeatedly told lies to deceive the public into fighting a disastrous, losing war. It's late and it's insufficient punishment, but if Bush doesn't merit impeachment, who does?

This year, casting your vote for a Democrat isn't enough to end the neo-fascist nightmare. The real work begins next spring, if and when Democrats assume control of Congress. It's up to us to hold them accountable - and vote them out if they let us down.

_____


Ted Rall is the author of the new book Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? (Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2006), an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Copyright (c) 2006 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Cult of the Heroic Animal

The Disneyfication of war allows us to ignore its real savagery

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 24 2006)

www.monbiot.com


Most of our memorials sentimentalise war. Few commemorate the horror. But now we have a new category, whose purpose seems to be to trivialise it.

Last week a vast bronze sculpture was unveiled in Montrose on the east coast of Scotland by Prince Andrew. It depicts a hero of the second world war, wearing a seaman's cap, who was decorated with "the equivalent of the George Cross". It's a bit late, perhaps, but otherwise unsurprising - until I tell you that the hero was a dog. The statue depicts a St Bernard called Bamse, which reputedly rescued two Norwegian sailors. It is the latest manifestation of the new Cult of the Heroic Animal.

The Imperial War Museum is currently running an exhibition called "The Animals' War". It features stuffed mascots, tales of the "desperate plight" of 200 animals trapped by the fighting in Iraq, and photos of dogs wearing gas masks. It tells us about the "PDSA Dicken Medal - the Animals' Victoria Cross", which has been awarded to 23 dogs, 32 pigeons, three horses and one cat for "acts of conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in wartime". The museum resounds with cries of "aaah!" and "how sweet!". War is now cute.

Last year, Disney released an animation called Valiant, about the heroics of a group of messenger pigeons in World War Two. In 2004, a vast sculpture was unveiled by Princes Anne in Park Lane in London, called "Animals at War". It cost GBP 1.5 million {1}, and it is dedicated "to all the animals that served and died alongside British and Allied Forces in wars and campaigns throughout time ... From the pigeon to the elephant they all played a vital role in every region of the world in the cause of human freedom. Their contribution must never be forgotten." In Liverpool there are now two statues commemorating a dog - Jet - used to find victims of air raids in the Second World War {2}.

I have no objection to remembering the suffering of animals. If someone started a subscription for a statue of a battery pig or a broiler chicken (conveniently forgotten by almost everyone) I might even contribute. But the emphasis given to animals' suffering in war suggests a failure to acknowledge the suffering of human beings. The tableau in Park Lane carries the justifying motto "They had no choice". Nor did the civilians killed in Iraq, the millions of women raped over the centuries by soldiers, or the colonial subjects who died of famine or disease in British concentration camps. You would scour this country in vain for a monument to any of them {3}.

Bamse has been dead for 62 years. Both the Park Lane memorial and the exhibition at the Imperial War Museum were inspired by a book by Jilly Cooper - the patron saint of English bourgeois sentiment - called Animals in War {4,5}. But it was first published in 1983. It is only since the invasion of Iraq that this disneyfication of war seems to have become a major industry.

Animals have featured in war memorials for at least four thousand years. But they have, for the most part, been used as representations of human dominance and courage. The tableau in Park Lane, depicting a weary shire horse, two exhausted pack mules and an Irish setter seeking his master, could almost be a response to Landseer's insouciant lions in Trafalgar Square. If these beasts were conceived, like his, with anthropomorphic intent, they would represent the mute, trudging foot soldiers of the imperial army, prey to Trafalgar Square's top predators. The inscription might have read "What passing-bells for these who die like cattle?" But they weren't. No metaphor is intended here; we are asked to concentrate on the suffering of the animals, not the infantry.

The monument has an interesting list of sponsors. Alongside the RSPCA, Battersea Dogs' Home, the Household Cavalry and the Amalgamation of Racing Pigeons is an odd collection of industrialists. There's Sir Anthony Bamford, who runs JCB and who was exposed a few days ago as the president of the Midlands Industrial Council (MIC), which has donated almost GBP 1 million to the Conservative Party {6}. The Labour Party accuses the MIC of exploiting a loophole in electoral laws, which oblige donors to reveal their identity. There's Lord Ballyedmond, who, both directly and through his company Norbrook Laboratories, gave GBP 1.1 million to the Tories in 2001 {7}. They are joined by the PR company Spa Way (best known for representing the "private security contractor" Tim Spicer); the late property developer and former Conservative councillor Sir Stanley Clarke; and Eva and Kirsten Rausing, the niece and daughter-in-law of the Swedish industrialist Hans Rausing, whose tax affairs have caused some controversy here {8}, and who has donated GBP 343,000 to the British Conservative party {9}.

Perhaps the most interesting name on the list is William Farish III. An old friend of the Bush family's, he is a major donor to the Republican Party and was US ambassador to London between 2001 and 2004. One of his tasks here was justifying the war with Iraq. He inherited much of his money from his grandfather, the Texan oil millionaire William Farish II.

In 1942, William Farish II pleaded "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis {10}, and was denounced by Senator Harry Truman for behaviour which "approaches treason" {11}. Through the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, of which he was president, he was alleged to have run a cartel with the German company IG Farben {12}. Farben manufactured Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers, and ran a plant using slave labour at Auschwitz. Among other deals, William Farish II had agreed to share patents for making synthetic gasoline and artificial rubber with Farben, while withholding them from the US Navy {13}. He was fined and died soon afterwards. His son died a few weeks later in an air accident, leaving the family fortune to William Farish III.

So what is going on? What is so appealing about these memorials to the members of the royal family who agreed to unveil them, to the crowds who have packed the new exhibition, and to the rightwing multi-millionaires who financed the giant tableau? Why, when the war we started in Iraq appears to have killed hundreds of thousands of human beings, have we become obsessed by the non-human victims of conflict?

I'm not sure, but the last panel in the museum's exhibition offers a possible explanation. It reproduces the inscription on a monument erected by the British in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, raised to commemorate "the animals that died in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902". This was a war of almost unprecedented brutality, in which the British beat the Boers by burning down their homes and herding them into the world's first large-scale concentration camps, where over 40,000 people died. "The greatness of a nation", the inscription says, "consists not so much in the number of its people or the extent of its territory as in the extent and justice of its compassion".

This is a worthy index, on which Britain would have been placed close to the bottom; unless we were judged by our compassion - or sentiment - for animals. These monuments, perhaps, permit us to see ourselves as kind people, even as unspeakable acts are commited on our behalf.
_____

George Monbiot has launched a new website - www.turnuptheheat.org.


References:

1. Carol Phillips, November 2004. Animals in War: They Had No Choice. Horse and Hound magazine.

2. See http://www.ukniwm.org.uk/server/show/conMemorial.52653/fromUkniwmSearch/1 and http://www.ukniwm.org.uk/server/show/conMemorial.15397/fromUkniwmSearch/1

3. The UK National Inventory of War Memorials catalogues the 53,000 known war memorials in the United Kingdom. Nothing in these categories is listed.

4. Lizzie Guilfoyle, November 2004. The Animals in War Memorial. http://www.indielondon.co.uk/events/att_animals_warmemorial.html

5. Eg Imperial War Museum, 11th July 2006. Life-Saving 7/7 Police Dog Attends Launch of The Animals' War Exhibition. http://www.iwm.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.4104

6. Robert Winnett and Holly Watt, 15th October 2006. Tories forced to name club of millionaire supporters. The Sunday Times.

7. The Electoral Commission, 2001. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/tables/0,,641830,00.html

8. Nick Davies, 14th October 2002. Tax avoiders beat off Brown's attack. The Guardian.

9. Greg Hurst and Catherine Boyle, 22nd August 2006. Wealthy backers put Conservatives on the defensive. The Times.

10. William Lowther, 18th February 2001. US Ambassador's wealth built on deal with Nazis. The Mail on Sunday.

11. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, 1991. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Executive Intelligence Review. Extract available at http://www.padrak.com/alt/BUSHBOOK_1.html#Nazi_Commerce

12. ibid.

13. William Lowther, ibid.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/24/the-cult-of-the-heroic-animal/#more-1025


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Liberals Answer Tony Judt's "Useful Idiots" Charge

by Edward Herman

www.zmag.org (October 23 2006)


Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have replied to Tony Judt's "Bush's Useful Idiots ... The Strange Death of Liberal America" (London Review of Books, September 21 2006) {1}, in a piece entitled "We Answer to the Name of Liberals" (American Prospect, Web Exclusive, October 18 2006) {2}. Many liberal signatories have added their names to this reply {3}.

What in particular elicited this reply was Judt's statement that liberals have "acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy", which Ackerman-Gitlin say is as nonsensical as the rightwing claim that liberals are "stooges for Osama bin Laden". Contrary to Judt, claim Ackerman-Gitlin, "most" liberals have "stayed the course ... [and] consistently and publicly repudiated the ruinous policies of the Bush administration", adhering firmly to the "liberal principles" Bush has repudiated. This short comment examines that claim.

First, Ackerman-Gitlin say that "We have all opposed the Iraq war as illegal, unwise and destructive of America's moral standing. This war fueled, and continues to fuel, jihadis whose commitment to horrific, unjustifiable violence was amply demonstrated by the September 11 attacks ..." It should be noted that the "all" who have signed on here (through October 23rd) as opposing the war does not include a large number of prominent liberals, including Paul Berman, David Corn, George Packer, Jean Beth Elshtain, Michael Walzer, Marc Cooper, Peter Beinart, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Berube, among others.

There is also the question of the form and intensity of opposition to the war. Quite a few liberals, including Todd Gitlin, distanced themselves from the antiwar protests that took place before the war on the grounds of their improper leadership (ANSWER), and spent a great deal of time on, and got excellent mainstream media coverage of, their criticisms of the protests. In an article on "The Liberal Quandry Over Iraq", in the New York Times Magazine of December 8 2002, George Packer stressed the "serious liability" of the ongoing antiwar protest "that will just about guarantee its impotence". It is controlled by "the farthest reaches of the American Left", people who don't feel it necessary to explain how "to keep this mass murderer [Packer means Saddam, not Bush] and his weapons in check." Packer concludes that "This is not a constructive liberal antiwar movement". His liberal interviewees were also in a quandary and agreed with Packer on the sorry state of the organized war opposition. Their opposition to the war, in short, was compromised at best.

Note also that Ackerman-Gitlin don't assert that the Iraq war itself represented "horrific, unjustifiable violence"; that language is confined to the jihadis; the US war is merely "unwise". Ackerman-Gitlin's stress is on the feedback effects of the war on "Americans and our allies", not on the Iraqi victims of aggression (a word Ackerman-Gitlin carefully avoids). Wouldn't liberal principles demand that violence flowing from an aggression in violation of the UN Charter get a more forceful condemnation, a willingness to use a clearly applicable word, and explicit mention of the gross violation of international law?

Second, as regards the Middle East, Ackerman-Gitlin state that "We believe that the state of Israel has the fundamental right to exist, free of military assault, within secure borders close to those of 1967", and that the US government has a special responsibility to achieve peace. "Fundamental right to exist" as a Jewish state with racist laws, or to be free from aggression? Tony Judt has been accused of supporting opponents of Israel's "right to exist" in his questioning the racist base of Israeli society and policy. The ambiguous use of this language by Ackerman-Gitlin feeds into this criticism of Judt by the defenders of racist principles. The notion that Israel faces any threat to its existence otherwise is not compelling, although the threats of the militarized Israeli state to Palestinian national existence and to the existence of a fragile state like Lebanon are very real.

Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians, assaulting them with their vastly superior military power, building a racist society, and violating international law and International Court decisions for decades, yet instead of focusing on the primary victims Ackerman-Gitlin express concern only for the oppressors. There is not a word about any Palestinian rights to be free of military assault, land and water theft, and racist discrimination. This reflects the deep bias built into the US political system and culture, but it is in fundamental conflict with liberal principles of equality and humanity and hostility to racism.

Note also that Ackerman-Gitlin criticize only the Bush policies toward Israel and Palestine, not that of the Clinton and earlier US administrations, which have all been supportive of Israeli ethnic cleansing and racism, and via their unstinting military and diplomatic support of Israel have been co-responsible for the many-decades-long failure to implement an international consensus on the solution. Despite this collusion, Ackerman-Gitlin say that the United States "has a special responsibility toward achieving a lasting Middle East peace". Is it consistent with liberal principles to pretend that the United States is not part of the problem, and to avoid explicit mention of the fact that the solution will require a turnabout in US thinking that does not, as this liberal statement does, focus first on Israeli interests, and that is willing to confront interest group power shaping US policy?

Third, the "liberal answer" stresses that although "war must be a last resort", the use of force is sometimes justified, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, wars that the signers explicitly approve. However, the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan were carried out in straightforward violation of the UN Charter (see Article 2, Chapter I, Charter of the United Nations, June 1945) {4}, so that insofar as liberal principles call for adherence to law, Ackerman-Gitlin and their associates have supported the violation of those principles in these cases. Furthermore, both of these wars helped establish an assumed right on the part of US leaders to resort to violence at their own discretion, and liberal support for these illegal wars was therefore an important feature of the breakdown of a traditional barrier to violence. Contrary to Ackerman-Gitlin's claims, this support of the use of force and illegality contributed to making Bush's "ruinous policies" acceptable.

The Ackerman-Gitlin notion that in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan wars were "a last resort" rests on a deep misunderstanding of recent history. In Bosnia, the United States sabotaged the important Lisbon agreement of 1992 that would have ended the Bosnian war early, it never sought any settlement in Kosovo and used the Rambouillet Conference solely to firm up arrangements for war as the Serbs "needed a little bombing", and its attack on Afghanistan was vengeance-driven, illegal, and was hardly designed to capture bin Laden. The notion that any of these three wars was either a "last resort" or "humanitarian intervention" rests on plain ignorance and a will to believe (for compelling evidence, see Bosnian war negotiator Lord David Owen's Balkan Odyssey [Harcourt Brace: 1995], and Canadian law professor Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder [Pluto press: 2004]).

The "liberal answer" claims next that Bush's "emphatic reliance on military intervention is illegitimate and counterproductive", it "degrades the national defense", and ignores the "imperative necessity of building an international order that peacefully addresses the aspirations of rising power in Asia and Latin America". But Ackerman-Gitlin do not challenge the immense military budget of the United States, although opposition to the "tyranny of armaments" is featured in L T Hobhouse's classic Liberalism (1911) {5}, and the threat of militarism to liberal principles should be obvious. Ackerman-Gitlin fail to recognize that military interventions flow from a gigantic military establishment, and they would surely never quote Madeleine Albright's question to Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military ... if we can't use it?" But the US political economy is now built on an immense military establishment, with US military expenditures running at about half of the global war-making total, and with both the Democrats and Republicans supporting it, so Ackerman-Gitlin and their colleagues take it as a given also, in violation of basic liberal principles.

One of the signers of the Ackerman-Gitlin statement, Michael Tomasky, executive editor of The American Prospect, has explained that the Democrats need to prove themselves on national security by vigorously supporting "democracy promotion" as a national objective (in his chapter in George Packer, The Fight Is For Democracy [Harper Perennial: 2003]). Presumably in the hands of the Democrats there will be no "misapplications" in the use of force, and the Albright statement suggestive of a ready willingness to use force can be ignored. This will help justify the built-in vast military budget, and will provide a cover for an imperial projection of power under proper auspices (Bush is keen on democracy promotion also, but tends to misapplications). So the power structure dictates an interventionary foreign policy and the problem for the liberals is to construct their own distinctive rationale for interventionism that is presumably compatible with liberal values and will not be "a prescription for empire". (See my "George Packer and the Struggle to Support Imperialism", ZNet Commentary, January 28 2005) {6}

Ackerman-Gitlin say that "The misapplication of military power also imperils American freedom at home". Presumably its approved application - approved by Ackerman-Gitlin - poses no threat to American freedom. But the "good guys" (the Democrats) are not always in power, and they are always under pressure to show that they are not weak on "security", so that, contrary to Ackerman-Gitlin and Tomasky, they can "misapply" military power as often as the Republicans (a Democrat escalated the Vietnam War in 1962 and a successor Democrat got us into that war on a full scale in 1965).

In short, an imperial and militarized state will use its military power relentlessly, and the feedback effects of this chronic warfare are inevitably going to entail encroachments on domestic freedom. But Ackerman-Gitlin can't confront this deeper relationship and challenge militarism and the imperial state. They adapt to it, and in the process "liberal principles" are compromised and thrust aside, and the liberals do in fact serve as the imperial state's "useful idiots".

Notes

{1} http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/judt01_.html

{2} http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12124

{3} http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12123

{4} http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/chapter1.htm

{5} http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobhouse/liberalism.pdf

(6) http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-01/28herman.cfm


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-10/23herman.cfm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Fighting Back? Don't Count On It!

Win or Lose, Democrats Plan Another Wimp-Out

by Ted Rall

www.rall.com (October 17 2006)

If you're a registered Democrat like me, you're getting deluged with junk mail, both paper and electronic. The message is the same it was two years ago and four years ago: STOP THE REPUBLICANS! HELP US FIGHT BACK! (Send us money!) If Dick Morris, a Republican who is the most brilliant pollster alive, is right, the plea is working: he predicts a Democratic sweep of both the House and the Senate in November's midterm elections.

The question is: should Democratic voters care? After all, the last time the Democratic Party controlled Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court, there was precious little fighting back. Reagan-era and Bush 41-era budget cuts in education and social programs remained in force under President Clinton, whose major legislative achievements - welfare reform and the NAFTA and WTO free trade deals - were Republican-sponsored.

According to the October fundraising mailers, Democratic voters and a lot of independents and Republicans are MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! They're angry about the endless, costly and losing wars against Iraq and Afghanistan while Osama bin Laden releases videos more often than Britney. They're disgusted at corrupt and perverted Congressmen. They're sick and tired of hearing Republicans talk up the economy when gas is $2.50 a gallon, they can't sell their houses or find a decent job. But should they trust the Democratic Party to articulate their rage?

Democrats, reports The New York Times, have taken note of polls that show that 66 percent of Americans think we're losing in Iraq (duh) and that it's Bush's fault (double duh). Democratic challengers "have seized on Iraq as a central issue. In debates and in speeches, [Congressional and Senatorial] candidates are pummeling Republicans with accusations of a failed war."

If Republican Congressmen hadn't caused the deaths of so many people, it would almost be possible to feel sorry for them. A recent Johns Hopkins University study estimates that US forces have thus far killed 600,000 Iraqis since the March 2003 invasion. (Without offering a specific critique of the survey's statistical methodology or offering a number of his own, Bush said he disagreed with the estimate. But with over a hundred bodies a day turning up bound and tortured to death in the streets of Baghdad alone, the number seems reasonable.) The lives of nearly 2,800 US troops and the staggering sum of $250 billion have been wasted. Under these circumstances "stay the course" - the sole Republican strategy since the beginning - is hardly a winning sales pitch.

And it's all they have. "We can't afford to leave until the job is finished", says GOP strategist Russ Scriefer. "Stay the course means keep doing what you're doing", Bush stumbled again last week. "My attitude is, don't do what you're doing if it's not working - change. Stay the course also means don't leave before the job is done. We're going to get the job done in Iraq."

The trouble for Bush and his party is that they've been saying that for three years. Meanwhile, things in Iraq have gotten worse. "Everything's being discolored by people's view of the war and what's going on in Iraq, and as a result, you know, all of our [poll] numbers look pretty bad", House majority leader John Boehner of Ohio told Fox News. "And there's no question that there's a jet stream in our face".

So Democratic sharks are circling. They're running attack ads that mock Republicans for wanting to "stay the course" while displaying gruesome footage of car bombings and blood-splattered bodies. "For the first time in modern memory", says Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, "Democrats are actually on the offensive when it comes to national security".

Of course, Democrats share the blame for those 600,000 slaughtered Iraqis. When Bush's Iraq war resolution came up for a vote in October 2002, Democrats in the Senate voted yes, 29 to 21. Even worse, they've signed onto the "stay the course" cult. As recently as June 2006, 42 House Democrats crossed party lines to vote against a measure that called for an end to the war. It's unlikely that even a "Democratic Revolution" in both houses of Congress would bring a conclusion to the bloodshed any time soon. The last thing victorious Dems would want to do two years before a presidential election is to open themselves to attacks for "cutting and running".

If the Democrats were to recapture control of the House of Representatives, they would theoretically be able to hold George W Bush accountable for lying to Congress and the American people about, among other things, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and tapping Americans' telephones and reading their email. But Republicans who might be feeling guilty about felonious or even treasonous acts needn't worry about getting frog-marched: impeachment investigations are "off the table", assures minority leader and lead sell-out Nancy Pelosi. Republican candidates "are in such desperate shape [in the polls]", said her spokesman, "we don't want to give them anything to grab on to".

You may be mad as hell, but - even if Democrats win - they're going to take it evermore.

_____


Ted Rall is the author of the new book Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? (Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2006), an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Copyright (c) 2006 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Putting the State on Trial

Protesters who have damaged military equipment are walking away from the dock

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 17 2006)

www.Monbiot.com


In the early hours, two days before the attack on Iraq began, two men in their thirties, Phil Pritchard and Toby Olditch, cut through the fence surrounding the air base at Fairford in Gloucestershire and made their way towards the B52 bombers which were stationed there. The planes belonged to the US air force. The trespassers were caught by guards and found to be carrying tools and paint {1}. They confessed that they were seeking to disable the planes, in order to prevent war crimes from being committed. This year they were tried on charges of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, which carries a maximum sentence of ten years. Last week, after long deliberations, the jury failed to reach a verdict.

The same thing happened a month ago. Two other activists - Margaret Jones and Paul Milling - had entered the same RAF base and smashed up over twenty of the vehicles used to load bombs onto the B52s. The charges were the same, and again the jury failed to agree {2}. In both cases the defendants claimed to be putting the state on trial. If I were in government, I would be starting to feel uneasy.

The defendants had tried to argue in court that the entire war against Iraq was a crime of aggression. But in March this year the Law Lords ruled that they could not use this defence: while aggression by the state is a crime under international law, it is not a crime under domestic law {3}. But they were allowed to show that they were seeking to prevent specific war crimes from being committed - principally the release by the B52s of cluster bombs and munitions tipped with depleted uranium.

They cited section five of the 1971 Criminal Damage Act, which provides lawful excuse for damaging property if that action prevents property belonging to other people from being damaged, and section three of the 1967 Criminal Law Act, which states that "a person may use such force as is reasonable in the prevention of a crime". In summing up, the judge told the jurors that using weapons "with an adverse effect on civilian populations which is disproportionate to the need to achieve the military objective" {4} is a war crime. The defendants are likely to be tried again next year.

While these non-verdicts are as far as the defence of lawful excuse for impeding the Iraq war has progressed in the UK, in Ireland and Germany the courts have made decisions - scarcely reported over here - whose implications are momentous. In July, five peace campaigners were acquitted after using an axe and hammers to cause $2.5 million worth of damage to a plane belonging to the US Navy. When they attacked it, in February 2003, it had been refuelling at Shannon airport on its way to Kuwait, where it would deliver supplies to be used in the impending war. The jury decided that the five saboteurs were acting lawfully {5}.

This summer, the German Federal Administrative Court threw out the charge of insubordination against a major in the German army. He had refused to obey an order which, he believed, would implicate him in the invasion of Iraq. The judges determined that the UN Charter permits a state to go to war in only two circumstances: in self-defence and when it has been authorised to do by the UN Security Council. The states attacking Iraq, they ruled, had no such licence. Resolution 1441, which was used by the British and US governments to justify the invasion, contained no authorisation. The war could be considered an act of aggression {6}.

There is no prospect that the British prime minister could be put on trial for war crimes in this country (though as the international lawyer Philippe Sands points out, there is a chance that he could be arrested and tried elsewhere) {7}. Even so, the government appears to find these legal processes profoundly threatening.

When the Fairford protesters took their request to challenge the legality of the war to the court of appeal, Sir Michael Jay, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, submitted a witness statement which seems to contain a note of official panic. "It would be prejudicial to the national interest and to the conduct of the Government's foreign policy if the English courts were to express opinions on questions of international law concerning the use of force ... which might differ from those expressed by the Government". Such an opinion "would inevitably weaken the Government's hand in its negotiations with other States. Allied States, which have agreed with and supported the United Kingdom's views on the legality of the use of force, could regard such a step as tending to undermine their own position." {8}

It doesn't seem to matter how many journalists, protesters or even lawyers point out that the British government had no legal case for attacking Iraq, that the Attorney General's official justification was risible and that Blair's arguments were mendacious. As long as the government has a majority in parliament, the support of much of the press and an army of spin doctors constantly weaving and re-weaving its story, it can shrug off these attacks. It can insist, with some success, that we "move on" from Iraq. But an official verdict, handed down by a court, is another matter. If a ruling like that of the German Federal Administrative Court were made over here, it could be devastating for Blair and his ministers.

The prosecutors have lost before. In 1999, a sheriff (a junior Scottish judge) at the court in Greenock instructed the jury to acquit three women who had boarded a Trident submarine testing station on Loch Goil and thrown its computers into the sea. They had argued that the deployment of the nuclear weapons the submarines carried contravened international law. The sheriff said she could not "conclude definitively" whether or not this was true, but that she had "heard nothing which would make it seem to me that the accused acted with criminal intent" {9}. The court of session in Edinburgh later overturned her ruling. Now campaigners against nuclear weapons will be mounting further legal challenges, as they try to sustain a continuous peaceful blockade of the Trident base at Faslane for a year (see www.faslane365.org ).

In 1996, four women were acquitted of conspiracy and criminal damage after disabling a Hawk jet which was due to be sold by BAE to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. They argued that they were using reasonable force to prevent crimes of genocide that the Indonesian government was committing in East Timor {10}. Their acquittal might have helped persuade Robin Cook to seek to introduce an "ethical dimension" to foreign policy in 1997 (he was, as we now know, thwarted by Blair).

It is true that such verdicts (or non-verdicts) impose no legal obligations on the government. They do not in themselves demonstrate that its ministers are guilty of war crimes. But every time the prosecution fails to secure a conviction, the state's authority to take decisions which contravene international law is weakened. These cases cannot reverse the hideous consequences of the crime of aggression (the "supreme international crime", according to the Nuremberg tribunals) that Mr Blair and Mr Bush committed in Iraq. But they do make it harder to repeat.
_____

George Monbiot's book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published by Penguin.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. See http://www.b52two.blogspot.com/

2. See http://www.bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=25379

3. House of Lords, 29th March 2006. Judgments - R v. Jones (Appellant).

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldjudgmt/jd060329/jones-1.htm

4. See http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=35337841&postID=116049609842175978&quickEdit=true

5. Indymedia Ireland, 25th July 2006. Not Guilty. The Pitstop Ploughshares All Acquitted on All Charges. http://www.indymedia.ie/article/77460

6. Justus Leicht, 27th September 2005. German court declares Iraq war violated international law http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/iraq-s27.shtml

7. John Crace, 14th February 2006. Philippe Sands: Weapon of mass instruction. The Guardian

8. Sir Michael Hastings Jay, 29th June 2004. Witness Statement: R v Jones and Milling, Olditch and Pritchard, Richards. http://www.b52two.org/SirMichealJayWitnessstatement290604.pdf

9. See http://www.tridentploughshares.org/article1080

10. George Monbiot, 30th July 1996. Hawks and Doves. The Guardian http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1996/07/30/hawks-and-doves/

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/putting-the-state-on-trial/#more-1020


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Anti-Empire Report

Some things you need to know before the world ends

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (October 19 2006)


The jingo bells are ringing

"Who really poses the greatest danger to world peace: Iraq, North Korea or the United States?" asked Time magazine in an online poll in early 2003, shortly before the US invasion of Iraq. The final results were: North Korea 6.7%, Iraq 6.3%, the United States 86.9%; 706,842 total votes cast. {1}

Imagine that following North Korea's recent underground nuclear test neither the United States nor any other government cried out that the sky was falling. No threat to world peace and security was declared by the White House or any other house. It was thus not the lead story on every radio and TV broadcast and newspaper page one. The UN Security Council did not unanimously condemn it. Nor did NATO. "What should we do about him?" was not America Online's plaintive all-day headline alongside a photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Who would have known about the explosion, even if it wasn't baby-sized? Who would have cared? But because all this fear mongering did in fact take place, www.vote.com was able to pose the question - "North Korea's Nuclear Threat: Is It Time For An International Economic Blockade To Make Them Stop?" - and hence compile a 93% "yes" vote. It doesn't actually take too much to win hearts and mindless. Media pundit Ben Bagdikian once wrote: "While it is impossible for the media to tell the population what to think, they do tell the public what to think about".

So sometime in the future, the world might, or might not, have nine states possessing nuclear weapons instead of eight. So what? Do you know of all the scary warnings the United States issued about a nuclear-armed Soviet Union? A nuclear-armed China? And the non-warnings about a nuclear-armed Israel? There were no scary warnings or threats against ally Pakistan for the nuclear-development aid it gave to North Korea a few years ago, and Washington has been busy this year enhancing the nuclear arsenal of India, events which the world has paid little attention to, because the United States did not mount a campaign to tell the world to worry. There's still only one country that's used nuclear weapons on other people, but we're not given any warnings about them.

In 2005, Secretary of War Rumsfeld, commenting about large Chinese military expenditures, said: "Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment?" {2} The following year, when asked if he believed the Venezuelans' contention that their large weapons buildup was strictly for defense, Rumsfeld replied: "I don't know of anyone threatening Venezuela - anyone in this hemisphere". {3} Presumably, the honorable secretary, if asked, would say that no one threatens North Korea either. Or Iran. Or Syria. Or Cuba. He may even believe this. However, beginning with the Soviet Union, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington's ability to threaten them or coerce them declined, which is of course North Korea's overriding reason for trying to become a nuclear power; or Iran's if it goes that route.

Undoubtedly there are some in the Bush administration who are not unhappy about the North Korean test. A nuclear North Korea with a "crazy" leader serves as a rationale for policies the White House is pursuing anyway, like anti-missile systems, military bases all over the map, ever-higher military spending, and all the other nice things a respectable empire bent on world domination needs. And of course, important elections are imminent and getting real tough with looney commies always sells well.

Did I miss something or is there an international law prohibiting only North Korea from testing nuclear weapons? And just what is the danger? North Korea, even if it had nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and there's no evidence that it does, is of course no threat to attack anyone with them. Like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, North Korea is not suicidal.

And just for the record, contrary to what we've been told a million times, there's no objective evidence that North Korea invaded South Korea on that famous day of June 25 1950. The accusations came only from the South Korean and US governments, neither being a witness to the event, neither with the least amount of credible impartiality. No, the United Nations observers did not observe the invasion. Even more important, it doesn't really matter much which side was the first to fire a shot or cross the border on that day because whatever happened was just the latest incident in an already-ongoing war of several years. {4}


Operation Because We Can

Captain Ahab had his Moby Dick. Inspector Javert had his Jean Valjean. The United States has its Fidel Castro. Washington also has its Daniel Ortega. For 27 years, the most powerful nation in the world has found it impossible to share the Western Hemisphere with one of its poorest and weakest neighbors, Nicaragua, if the country's leader was not in love with capitalism.

From the moment the Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the US-supported Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Washington was concerned about the rising up of that long-dreaded beast - "another Cuba". This was war. On the battlefield and in the voting booths. For almost ten years, the American proxy army, the Contras, carried out a particularly brutal insurgency against the Sandinista government and its supporters. In 1984, Washington tried its best to sabotage the elections, but failed to keep Sandinista leader Ortega from becoming president. And the war continued. In 1990, Washington's electoral tactic was to hammer home the simple and clear message to the people of Nicaragua: If you re-elect Ortega all the horrors of the civil war and America's economic hostility will continue. Just two months before the election, in December 1989, the United States invaded Panama for no apparent reason acceptable to international law, morality, or common sense (The United States naturally called it "Operation Just Cause"); one likely reason it was carried out was to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua that this is what they could expect, that the US/Contra war would continue and even escalate, if they re-elected the Sandinistas.

It worked; one cannot overestimate the power of fear, of murder, rape, and your house being burned down. Ortega lost, and Nicaragua returned to the rule of the free market, striving to roll back the progressive social and economic programs that had been undertaken by the Sandinistas. Within a few years widespread malnutrition, wholly inadequate access to health care and education, and other social ills, had once again become a widespread daily fact of life for the people of Nicaragua.

Each presidential election since then has pitted perennial candidate Ortega against Washington's interference in the process in shamelessly blatant ways. Pressure has been regularly exerted on certain political parties to withdraw their candidates so as to avoid splitting the conservative vote against the Sandinistas. US ambassadors and visiting State Department officials publicly and explicitly campaign for anti-Sandinista candidates, threatening all kinds of economic and diplomatic punishment if Ortega wins, including difficulties with exports, visas, and vital family remittances by Nicaraguans living in the United States. In the 2001 election, shortly after the September 11 attacks, American officials tried their best to tie Ortega to terrorism, placing a full-page ad in the leading newspaper which declared, among other things, that: "Ortega has a relationship of more than thirty years with states and individuals who shelter and condone international terrorism". {5} That same year a senior analyst in Nicaragua for the international pollsters Gallup was moved to declare: "Never in my whole life have I seen a sitting ambassador get publicly involved in a sovereign country's electoral process, nor have I ever heard of it". {6}

Additionally, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) - which would like the world to believe that it's a private non-governmental organization, when it's actually a creation and an agency of the US government - regularly furnishes large amounts of money and other aid to organizations in Nicaragua which are opposed to the Sandinistas. The International Republican Institute (IRI), a long-time wing of NED, whose chairman is Arizona Senator John McCain, has also been active in Nicaragua creating the Movement for Nicaragua, which has helped organize marches against the Sandinistas. An IRI official in Nicaragua, speaking to a visiting American delegation in June of this year, equated the relationship between Nicaragua and the United States to that of a son to a father. "Children should not argue with their parents", she said.

With the 2006 presidential election in mind, one senior US official wrote in a Nicaraguan newspaper last year that should Ortega be elected, "Nicaragua would sink like a stone". In March, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the UN under Reagan and a prime supporter of the Contras, came to visit. She met with members of all the major Sandinista opposition parties and declared her belief that democracy in Nicaragua "is in danger" but that she had no doubt that the "Sandinista dictatorship" would not return to power. The following month, the American ambassador in Managua, Paul Trivelli, who openly speaks of his disapproval of Ortega and the Sandinista party, sent a letter to the presidential candidates of conservative parties offering financial and technical help to unite them for the general election of November 5. The ambassador stated that he was responding to requests by Nicaraguan "democratic parties" for US support in their mission to keep Daniel Ortega from a presidential victory. The visiting American delegation reported: "In a somewhat opaque statement Trivelli said that if Ortega were to win, the concept of governments recognizing governments wouldn't exist anymore and it was a 19th century concept anyway. The relationship would depend on what his government put in place." One of the fears of the ambassador likely has to do with Ortega talking of renegotiating CAFTA, the trade agreement between the US and Central America, so dear to the hearts of corporate globalizationists.

Then, in June, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said it was necessary for the Organization of American States (OAS) to send a mission of Electoral Observation to Nicaragua "as soon as possible" so as to "prevent the old leaders of corruption and communism from attempting to remain in power" (though the Sandinistas have not occupied the presidency, only lower offices, since 1990).

The explicit or implicit message of American pronouncements concerning Nicaragua is often the warning that if the Sandinistas come back to power, the horrible war, so fresh in the memory of Nicaraguans, will return. The London Independent reported in September that "One of the Ortega billboards in Nicaragua was spray-painted 'We don't want another war'. What it was saying was that if you vote for Ortega you are voting for a possible war with the US." {7}

Per capita income in Nicaragua is $900 a year; some seventy percent of the people live in poverty. It is worth noting that Nicaragua and Haiti are the two nations in the Western Hemisphere that the United States has intervened in the most, from the 19th century to the 21st, including long periods of occupation. And they are today the two poorest in the hemisphere, wretchedly so.


Don't look back

The cartoon awfulness of the Bush crime syndicate's foreign policy is enough to make Americans nostalgic for almost anything that came before. And as Bill Clinton parades around the country and the world associating himself with "good" causes, it's enough to evoke yearnings in many people on the left who should know better. So here's a little reminder of what Clinton's foreign policy was composed of. Hold on to it in case Lady Macbeth runs in 2008 and tries to capitalize on lover boy's record.

Yugoslavia: The United States played the principal role during the 1990s in the destruction of this nation, republic by republic, the low point of which was 78 consecutive days of terrible bombing of the population in 1999. No, it was not an act of "humanitarianism". It was pure imperialism, corporate globalization, getting rid of "the last communist government in Europe", keeping NATO alive by giving it a function after the end of the Cold War. There was no moral issue behind US policy. The ousted Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, is routinely labeled "authoritarian" (Compared to whom? To the Busheviks?), but that had nothing to do with it. The great exodus of the people of Kosovo resulted from the bombing, not Serbian "ethnic cleansing"; and while saving Kosovars the Clinton administration was servicing the Turkish massacre of Kurds. NATO admitted (sic) to repeatedly and deliberately targeting civilians; amongst other war crimes. {8}


Somalia: The 1993 intervention was presented as a mission to help feed the starving masses. But the US soon started taking sides in the clan-based civil war and tried to rearrange the country's political map by eliminating the dominant warlord, Mohamed Aidid, and his power base. On many occasions, US helicopters strafed groups of Aidid's supporters or fired missiles at them; missiles were fired into a hospital because of the belief that Aidid's forces had taken refuge there; also a private home, where members of Aidid's political movement were holding a meeting; finally, an attempt by American forces to kidnap two leaders of Aidid's clan resulted in a horrendous bloody battle. This last action alone cost the lives of more than a thousand Somalis, with many more wounded.

It's questionable that getting food to hungry people was as important as the fact that four American oil giants held exploratory rights to large areas of Somali land and were hoping that US troops would put an end to the prevailing chaos which threatened their highly expensive investments. {9}


Ecuador: In 2000, downtrodden Indian peasants rose up once again against the hardships of US/IMF globalization policies, such as privatization. The Indians were joined by labor unions and some junior military officers and their coalition forced the president to resign. Washington was alarmed. American officials in Quito and Washington unleashed a blitz of threats against Ecuadorian government and military officials. And that was the end of the Ecuadorian revolution. {10}


Sudan: The US deliberately bombed and destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum in 1998 in the stated belief that it was a plant for making chemical weapons for terrorists. In actuality, the plant produced about ninety percent of the drugs used to treat the most deadly illnesses in that desperately poor country; it was reportedly one of the biggest and best of its kind in Africa. And had no connection to chemical weapons. {11}


Sierra Leone: In 1998, Clinton sent Jesse Jackson as his special envoy to Liberia and Sierra Leone, the latter being in the midst of one of the great horrors of the 20th century - an army of mostly young boys, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), going around raping and chopping off people's arms and legs. African and world opinion was enraged against the RUF, which was committed to protecting the diamond mines they controlled. Liberian president Charles Taylor was an indispensable ally and supporter of the RUF and Jackson was an old friend of his. Jesse was not sent to the region to try to curtail the RUF's atrocities, nor to hound Taylor about his widespread human rights violations, but instead, in June 1999, Jackson and other American officials drafted entire sections of an accord that made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, the vice president of Sierra Leone, and gave him official control over the diamond mines, the country's major source of wealth. {12}


Iraq: Eight more years of the economic sanctions which Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, called "the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed on a nation in the history of mankind", {13} absolutely devastating every aspect of the lives of the Iraqi people, particularly their health; truly a weapon of mass destruction.


Cuba: Eight more years of economic sanctions, political hostility, and giving haven to anti-Castro terrorists in Florida. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first forty years of this aggression. The suit holds Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others.


Only the imperialist powers have the ability to enforce sanctions and are therefore always exempt from them.

As to Clinton's domestic policies, keep in mind those two beauties: The "Effective Death Penalty Act" and the "Welfare Reform Act". And let's not forget the massacre at Waco, Texas.


Three billion years from amoebas to Homeland Security

"The Department of Homeland Security would like to remind passengers that you may not take any liquids onto the plane. This includes ice cream, as the ice cream will melt and turn into a liquid."

This was actually heard by one of my readers at the Atlanta Airport recently; he laughed out loud. He informs me that he didn't know what was more bizarre, that such an announcement was made or that he was the only person that he could see who reacted to its absurdity. {14} This is the way it is with societies of people. Like with the proverbial frog who submits to being boiled to death in a pot of water if the water is heated very gradually, people submit to one heightened absurdity and indignation after another if they're subjected to them at a gradual enough rate. That's one of the most common threads one finds in the personal stories of Germans living in the Third Reich. This airport story is actually an example of an absurdity within an absurdity. Since the "bomb made from liquids and gels" story was foisted upon the public, several chemists and other experts have pointed out the technical near-impossibility of manufacturing such a bomb in a moving airplane, if for no other reason than the necessity of spending at least an hour or two in the airplane bathroom.


NOTES

{1} Time European edition online: http://www.time.com/time/europe/gdml/peace2003.html

{2} Washington Post, June 4 2005

{3} Associated Press, October 3 2006

{4} William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II (2004), chapter 5

{5} Nicaragua Network (Washington, DC), October 29 2001 - www.nicanet.org/pubs/hotline1029_2001.html - and New York Times, November 4 2001, page 3

{6} Miami Herald, October 29 2001

{7} The remainder of the section on Nicaragua is derived primarily from The Independent (London), September 6 2006, and "2006 Nicaraguan Elections and the US Government Role. Report of the Nicaragua Network delegation to investigate US intervention in the Nicaraguan elections of November 2006" - www.nicanet.org/pdf/Delegation%20Report.pdf

See also: "List of interventions by the United States government in Nicaragua's democratic process". - www.nicanet.org/list_of_interventionist_statments.php

{8} Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (2000); Diana Johnstone, Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (2002); and William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2005), see "Yugoslavia" in index.

{9} Rogue State, pages 204-5

{10} Ibid, pages 212-3

{11} William Blum, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, chapter 7

{12} Ryan Lizza, "Where angels fear to tread", New Republic, July 24 2000

{13} White House press briefing, November 14 1997, US Newswire transcript

{14} Story related to me by Jack Muir

_____

To make a financial donation to support the work of the Anti-Empire Report you can use the following address. But if you are not in pretty good shape financially, please do not donate. Thanks.

William Blum
5100 Connecticut Avenue, NorthWest #707
Washington, DC 20008-2064


William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
(Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
(Common Courage Press, 2004)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6@aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

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Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

America's Nuremberg Laws

The End of the US as a Civilized Nation

by Ted Rall

www.rall.com (October 10 2006)


Students of historical hysteria immediately saw 9/11 as America's version of the Reichstag Fire. Both incidents were organic acts of terrorism (contrary to popular misconception, the Nazis didn't set the 1933 fire) seized upon by power-hungry government officials to justify the crushing of political dissent and the rolling back of civil liberties. Hitler began marching his people into the abyss immediately upon seizing power in 1933, but Nazi Germany's fate as a rogue nation wasn't sealed until two years later, in the late summer of 1935.

Before then there had been heinous violations of human rights. Nazi authorities detained thousands of socialists and communists in concentration camps (death camps weren't built until 1941). Many were tortured; some died in custody. Stormtroopers enforced state-sanctioned boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. Brownshirts beat Jews in the streets as the police stood by and watched. Ignoring Germany's treaty obligations, Hitler poured millions into the armed forces and threatened to use them against Germany's neighbors. No one could doubt that Germany was in the hands of militaristic right-wing thugs.

Until 1935, however, the home of Goethe and Beethoven had not entirely abandoned the universal values accepted by civilized states. True, top German officials and street-level Nazi Party members were breaking all sorts of laws, including constitutional protections against racial and religious discrimination. That's precisely the point: the law endured. Pre-Nazi legal infrastructure and laws, including the 1920s-era "Weimar" Constitution - still the Western world's gold standard for protecting individual rights and privileges - remained in force. Technically, anyway.

Had there been the political will, Hitler and his goons could have been arrested and tried under German law. The German government was a lost cause, but the German nation still had a (slim) chance. Until 1935.

That's when Germany officially codified the Nazis' uncivilized anti-Semitism by passing the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were stripped of citizenship and banned from marrying or dating non-Jews. The laws were a form of legalized harassment, prohibiting Jews from displaying German flags or shopping in stores at certain times. Turning Jews into legal pariahs paved the way for the Holocaust. More immediately, the barbaric ipso facto policies of the Nazi government had corrupted Germany's lofty and admirable system of legal guarantees. Even though German law hadn't been of much help to Jews before - well, there had been the occasional arrest and prosecution of a brownshirt who had gone "too far" - now there was every reason for them to succumb to hopelessness. Germany was no longer a civilized nation in the clutches of gangsters. It had become a gangster nation.

Similarly, the recently passed Military Commissions Act removes the United States from the ranks of civilized nations. It codifies racial and political discrimination, legalizes kidnapping and torture of those the government deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas corpus - the ancient precept that prevents the police from arresting and holding you without cause - a basic protection common to all (other) modern legal systems, and one that dates to the Magna Carta.

Between 2001 and 2006, George W Bush worked tirelessly to eliminate freedoms and liberties Americans have long taken for granted. The Bush Administration's CIA, mercenary and military state terrorists kidnapped thousands of innocent people and held them at secret prisons around the world for months and years at a time. These people were never charged with a crime. (There was good reason for that. As the government itself admitted, fewer than ten had actually done anything wrong.) Yet hundreds, maybe even thousands, were tortured.

Under American law these despicable acts were illegal. They were, by definition, un-American. Although it didn't help the dozens of Bush torture victims who died from beatings and drowning, the pre-Bush American judicial system worked. The Republican-controlled US Supreme Court handed down one decision after another ordering the White House to give its "detainees" trials or let them go. For a brief, shining moment, it looked like there was hope for the US to find its way back to the light.

Now, thanks to a gullible passel of Republican senators and an unhinged leader who is banking that Americans are just as passive as the Germans of the mid-1930s, we have our own Nuremberg Laws.

Under the terrifying terms of the radical new Military Commissions Act, Bush can declare anyone - including you - an "unlawful enemy combatant", a term that doesn't exist in US or international law. All he has to do is sign a piece of paper claiming that you "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States". The law's language is brilliantly vague, allowing the president to imprison - for the rest of his or her life - anyone, including a US citizen, from someone who makes a contribution to a group he disapproves of to a journalist who criticizes the government.

Although Bush and his top officials ordered and endorsed torture, the courts had found that it was illegal under US law and treaty obligations. Now torture is, for the first time, legal.

"Over all", reports The New York Times, "the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president". Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale, notes that the MCA trashes the centuries-old right of a prisoner to petition to the courts: "If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened".

How did we get here? Good Germans - and many of them were decent, moral people - asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who should have known better - journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are more loyal to their country than their party - allowed Bush and his neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren't as bad as Bush. They just couldn't see the big picture.

Just as no single rollback led marked the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, no event is individually responsible for America's shocking five-year transformation from beacon of freedom to autocratic torture state. It wasn't just letting Bush get away with his 2000 coup d'e'tat. It wasn't just us standing by as he deliberately allowed his family friend Osama bin Laden to escape, or as he invaded Afghanistan, or as he built the concentration camps at Guanta'namo and elsewhere, or even Iraq. It was all of those things collectively.

The Military Commissions Act signals that our traditional system of beliefs and government has irrevocably devolved into moral bankruptcy. Memo to Senator McCain: You don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't compromise with torturers.

It doesn't matter how much food aid we ship to the victims of the next global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or whether we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts. The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.

We are done.

_____

Ted Rall is the author of the new book Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East? (Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing, 2006), an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Copyright (c) 2006 Ted Rall

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20061010


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Absolute Powerpoint

Can a software package edit our thoughts

by Ian Parker

New Yorker (May 28 2001)


Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren't listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So, one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft's PowerPoint program, and typed:

Family Matters
An approach for positive change to the
Wyndham family team

On a new page, she wrote:

* Lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members.
* Disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life.
* Disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family.

Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing key - the key to success. The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the Wyndham girls burst into tears.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn't seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it - you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion - an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion - about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world. One feature of this is the AutoContent Wizard, which supplies templates - "Managing Organizational Change" or "Communicating Bad News", say - that are so close to finished presentations you barely need to do more then add your company logo. The "Motivating a Team" template, for example, includes a slide headed "Conduct a Creative Thinking Session":

Ask: In what ways can we ... ?

* - Assess the situation. Get the facts.
* - Generate possible solutions with green light, nonjudgmental thinking.
* - Select the best solution.

The final injunction is "Have an inspirational close".

It's easy to avoid these extreme templates - many people do - as well as embellishments like clip art, animations, and sound effects. But it's hard to shake off AutoContent's spirit: even the most easygoing PowerPoint template insists on a heading followed by bullet points, so that the user is shepherded toward a staccato, summarizing frame of mind, of the kind parodied, for example, in a PowerPoint Gettysburg Address posted on the Internet: "Dedicate portion of field-fitting!"

Because PowerPoint can be an impressive antidote to fear - converting public-speaking dread into moviemaking pleasure - there seems to be no great impulse to fight this influence, as you might fight the unrelenting animated paperclip in Microsoft Word. Rather, PowerPoint's restraints seem to be soothing - so much so that where Microsoft has not written rules, businesses write them for themselves. A leading US computer manufacturer has distributed guidelines to its employees about PowerPoint presentations, insisting on something it calls the "Rules of Seven": "Seven (7) bullets or lines per page, seven (7) words per line".

Today, after Microsoft's decade of dizzying growth, there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes. In darkened rooms at industrial plants and ad agencies, at sales pitches and conferences, this is how people are communicating: no paragraphs, no pronouns - the world condensed into a few upbeat slides, with seven or so words on a line, seven or so lines on a slide. And now it's happening during sermons and university lectures and family arguments, too. A New Jersey PowerPoint user recently wrote in an online discussion, "Last week I caught myself planning out (in my head) the slides I would need to explain to my wife why we couldn't afford a vacation this year". Somehow, a piece of software designed, fifteen years ago, to meet a simple business need has become a way of organizing thought at kindergarten show-and-tells. "Oh, Lord", one of the early developers said to me. "What have we done?"

Forty years ago, a workplace meeting was a discussion with your immediate colleagues. Engineers would meet with other engineers and talk in the language of engineering. A manager might make an appearance - acting as an interpreter, a bridge to the rest of the company - but no one from the marketing or production or sales department would be there. Somebody might have gone to the trouble of cranking out mimeographs - that would be the person with purple fingers.

But the structure of American industry changed in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Clifford Nass, who teaches in the Department of Communication at Stanford, says, "Companies weren't discovering things in the laboratory and then trying to convince consumers to buy them. They were discovering - or creating - consumer demand, figuring out what they can convince consumers they need, then going to the laboratory and saying, 'Build this!' People were saying, 'We can create demand. Even if demand doesn't exist, we know how to market this.' SpaghettiOs is the great example. The guy came up with the jingle first: 'The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon.: And he said, 'Hey! Make spaghetti in the shape of small circles!'"

As Jerry Porras, a professor of organizational behavior and change at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says, "When technologies no longer just drove the product out but the customer sucked it out, then you had to know what the customer wanted, and that meant a lot more interaction inside the company". There are new conversations: Can we make this? How do we sell this if we make it? Can we do it in blue?

America began to go to more meetings. By the early nineteen-eighties, when the story of PowerPoint starts, employees had to find ways to talk to colleagues from other departments, colleagues who spoke a different language, brought together by SpaghettiOs and by the simple fact that technology was generating more information. There was more to know and, as the notion of a job for life eroded, more reason to know it.

In this environment, visual aids were bound to thrive. In 1975, fifty thousand overhead projectors were sold in America. By 1985, that figure had increased to more than a hundred and twenty thousand. Overheads, which were developed in the mid-forties for use by the police, and were then widely used in bowling alleys and schools, did not fully enter business life until the mid seventies, when a transparency film that could survive the heat of a photocopier became available. Now anything on a sheet of paper could be transferred to an overhead slide. Overheads were cheaper than the popular alternative, the 35-mm slide (which needed graphics professionals), and they were easier to use. But they restricted you to your typewriter's font - rather, your secretary's typewriter's font - or your skill with Letraset and a felt-tipped pen. A businessman couldn't generate a handsome, professional-looking font in his own office.

In 1980, though, it was clear that a future of widespread personal computers - and laser printers and screens that showed the very thing you were about to print - was tantalizingly close. In the Mountain View, California, laboratory of Bell-Northern Research, computer-research scientists had set up a great mainframe computer, a graphics workstation, a phototypesetter, and the earliest Canon laser printer, which was the size of a bathtub and took six men to carry into the building - together, a cumbersome approximation of what would later fit on a coffee table and cost a thousand dollars. With much trial and error, and jogging from one room to another, you could use this collection of machines as a kind of word processor.

Whitfield Diffie had access to this equipment. A mathematician, a former peacenik, and an enemy of exclusive government control of encryption systems, Diffie had secured a place for himself in computing legend in 1976, when he and a colleague, Martin Hellman, announced the discovery of a new method of protecting secrets electronically - public-key cryptography. At Bell-Northern, Diffie was researching the security of telephone systems. In 1981, preparing to give a presentation with 35-mm slides, he wrote a little program, tinkering with some graphics software designed by a Bell-Northern colleague, that allowed you to draw a black frame on a piece of paper. Diffie expanded it so that the page could show a number of frames, and text inside each frame, with space for commentary around them. In other words, he produced a storyboard - a slide show on paper - that could be sent to the designers who made up the slides, and that would also serve as a script for his lecture. (At this stage, he wasn't photocopying what he had produced to make overhead transparencies, although scientists in other facilities were doing that.) With a few days' effort, Diffie had pointed the way to PowerPoint.

Diffie has long gray hair and likes to wear English suits. Today, he works for Sun Microsystems, as an internal consultant on encryption matters. I recently had lunch with him in Palo Alto, and for the first time he publicly acknowledged his presence at the birth of PowerPoint. It was an odd piece of news: as if Lenin had invented the stapler. Yes, he said, PowerPoint was "based on" his work at Bell-Northern. This is not of great consequence to Diffie, whose reputation in his own field is so high that he is one of the few computer scientists to receive erotically charged fan mail. He said he was "mildly miffed" to have made no money from the PowerPoint connection, but he has no interest in beginning a feud with an old friend. "Bob was the one who had the vision to understand how important it was to the world", he said. "And I didn't".

Bob is Bob Gaskins, the man who has to take final responsibility for the drawn blinds of high-rise offices around the world and the bullet points dashing across computer screens inside. His account of PowerPoint's parentage does not exactly match Diffie's, but he readily accepts his former colleague as "my inspiration". In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, Gaskins was Bell-Northern's head of computer-science research. A former Berkeley PhD student, he had a family background in industrial photographic supplies and grew up around overhead projectors and inks and gels. In 1982, he returned for a six-month overseas business trip and, with a vivid sense of the future impact of the Apple Macintosh and of Microsoft's Windows (both of which were in development), he wrote a list of fifty commercial possibilities - Arabic typesetting, menus, signs. And then he looked around his own laboratory and realized what had happened while he was away: following Diffie's lead, his colleagues were trying to make overheads to pitch their projects for funding, despite the difficulties of using the equipment. (What you saw was not at all what you got.) "Our mainframe was buckling under the load", Gaskins says.

He now had his idea: a graphics program that would work with Windows and the Macintosh, and that would put together, and edit, a string of single pages, or "slides". In 1984, he left Bell-Northern, joined an ailing Silicon Valley software firm, Forethought, in exchange for a sizeable share of the company, and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. They began work on a program called Presenter. After a trademark problem, and an epiphany Gaskins had in the shower, Presenter became PowerPoint.

Gaskins is a precise, bookish man who lives with his wife in a meticulously restored and furnished nineteenth-century house in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. He has recently discovered an interest in antique concertinas. When I visited him, he was persuaded to play a tune, and he gave me a copy of a forthcoming paper he had co-written:"A Wheatstone Twelve-Sided 'Edeophone' Concertina with Pre-MacCann Chromatic Duet Fingering". Gaskins is skeptical about the product that PowerPoint has become - AutoContent and animated fades between slides - but he is devoted to the simpler thing that it was, and he led me through a well-preserved archive of PowerPoint memorabilia, including the souvenir program for the PowerPoint reunion party, in 1997, which had a quiz filled with in-jokes about font size and programming languages. He also found an old business plan from 1984. One phrase - the only one in italics - read, "Allows the content-originator to control the presentation". For Gaskins, that had always been the point: to get rid of the intermediaries - graphic designers - and never mind the consequences. Whenever colleagues sought to restrict the design possibilities of the program (to make a design disaster less likely), Gaskins would overrule them, quoting Thoreau: "I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad".

PowerPoint 1.0 went on sale in April 1987 - available only for the Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies. (This was before laptop computers and portable projectors made PowerPoint a tool for live electronic presentations. Gaskins thinks he may have been the first person to use the program in the modern way, in a Paris hotel in 1992 - which is like being the first person ever to tap a microphone and say, "Can you hear me at the back?") The Macintosh market was small and specialized, but within this market PowerPoint - the first product of its kind - was a hit. "I can't describe how wonderful it was", Gaskins says. "When we demonstrated at trade shows, we were mobbed". Shortly after the launch, Forethought accepted an acquisition offer of fourteen million dollars from Microsoft. Microsoft paid cash and allowed Bob Gaskins and his colleagues to remain partly self-governing in Silicon Valley, far from the Microsoft campus, in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft soon regretted the terms of the deal; PowerPoint workers became known for a troublesome independence of spirit (and for rewarding themselves, now and then, with beautifully staged parties - caviar, string quartets, Renaissance-period fancy dress).

PowerPoint had been created, in part, as a response to the new corporate world of interdepartmental communication. Those involved with the program now experienced the phenomenon at first hand. In 1990, the first PowerPoint for Windows was launched, alongside Windows 3.0. And PowerPoint quickly became what Gaskins calls "a cog in the great machine". The PowerPoint programmers were forced to make unwelcome changes, partly because in 1990 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint began to be integrated into Microsoft Office - a strategy that would eventually make PowerPoint invincible - and partly in response to market research. AutoContent was added in the mid-nineties, when Microsoft learned that some would-be presenters were uncomfortable with a blank PowerPoint page - it was hard to get started. "We said, 'What we need is some automatic content!'" a former Microsoft developer recalls, laughing. "'Punch the button and you'll have a presentation'". The idea, he thought, was "crazy". And the name was meant as a joke. But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name - a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers.

Gaskins left PowerPoint in 1992, and many of his colleagues followed soon after. Now rich from Microsoft stock, and beginning the concertina-collecting phase of their careers, they watched as their old product made its way into the heart of American business culture. By 1993, PowerPoint had a majority share of the presentation market. In 1995, the average user created four and a half presentations a month. Three years later, the monthly average was nine. PowerPoint began to appear in cartoon strips and everyday conversation. A few years ago, Bob Gaskins was at a presentations-heavy conference in Britain. The organizer brought the proceedings to a sudden stop, saying, "I've just been told that the inventor of PowerPoint is in the audience - will he please identify himself so we can recognize his contribution to the advancement of science?" Gaskins stood up. The audience laughed and applauded.

Cathleen Belleville, a former graphic designer who worked at PowerPoint as a product planner from 1989 to 1995, was amazed to see a clip-art series she had created become modern business icons. The images were androgynous silhouette stick figures (she called them Screen Beans), modelled on a former college roommate: a little figure clicking its heels; another with an inspirational light bulb above its head. One Screen Bean, the patron saint of PowerPoint - a figure that stands beneath a question mark, scratching its head in puzzlement - is so popular that a lawyer at a New York firm who has seen many PowerPoint presentations claims never to have seen one without the head-scratcher. Belleville herself has seen her Beans all over the world, reprinted on baseball caps, blown up fifteen feet high in a Hamburg bank. "I told my mom, 'You know, my artwork is in danger of being more famous than the Mona Lisa'". Above the counter in a laundromat on Third Avenue in New York, a sign explains that no responsibility can be taken for deliveries to doorman buildings. And there, next to the words, is the famous puzzled figure. It is hard to understand the puzzlement. Doorman? Delivery? But perhaps this is simply how a modern poster clears its throat: Belleville has created the international sign for "sign".

According to Microsoft estimates, at least thirty million PowerPoint presentations are made every day. The program has about ninety-five per cent of the presentations-software market. And so perhaps it was inevitable that it would migrate out of business and into other areas of our lives. I recently spoke to Sew Meng Chung, a Malaysian research engineer living in Singapore who got married in 1999. He told me that, as his guests took their seats for a wedding party in the Goodwood Park Hotel, they were treated to a PowerPoint presentation: a hundred and thirty photographs - one fading into the next every four or five seconds, to musical accompaniment. "They were baby photos, and courtship photos, and photos taken with our friends and family", he told me.

I also spoke to Terry Taylor, who runs a Web site called eBibleTeacher.com, which supplies materials for churches that use electronic visual aids. "Jesus was a storyteller, and he gave graphic images", Taylor said. "He would say, 'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow', and all indications are that there were lilies in the field when he was talking, you know. He used illustrations." Taylor estimates that fifteen per cent of American churches now have video projectors, and many use PowerPoint regularly for announcements, for song lyrics, and to accompany preaching. (Taylor has seen more than one sermon featuring the head-scratching figure.) Visitors to Taylor's site can download photographs of locations in the Holy Land, as well as complete PowerPoint sermons - for example, "Making Your Marriage Great":

* Find out what you are doing to harm your marriage and heal it.
* Financial irresponsibility
* Temper
* Pornography
* Substance abuse
* You name it!

When PowerPoint is used to flash hymn lyrics, or make a quick pitch to a new client, or produce an eye-catching laundromat poster, it's easy to understand the enthusiasm of, say, Tony Kurz, the vice-president for sales and marketing of a New York-based Internet company, who told me, "I love PowerPoint. It's a brilliant application. I can take you through at exactly the pace I want to take you." There are probably worse ways to transmit fifty or a hundred words of text, or information that is mainly visual - ways that involve more droning, more drifting. And PowerPoint demands at least some rudimentary preparation: a PowerPoint presenter is, by definition, not thinking about his or her material for the very first time. Steven Pinker, the author of "The Language Instinct" and a psychology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that PowerPoint can give visual shape to an argument. "Language is a linear medium: one damn word after another", he says. "But ideas are multidimensional ... When properly employed, PowerPoint makes the logical structure of an argument more transparent. Two channels sending the same information are better than one."

Still, it's hard to be perfectly comfortable with a product whose developers occasionally find themselves trying to suppress its use. Jolene Rocchio, who is a product planner for Microsoft Office (and is upbeat about PowerPoint in general,) told me that, at a recent meeting of a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, she argued against a speaker's using PowerPoint at a future conference. "I said, 'I think we just need her to get up and speak'". On an earlier occasion, Rocchio said, the same speaker had tried to use PowerPoint and the projector didn't work, "and everybody was, like, cheering. They just wanted to hear this woman speak, and they wanted it to be from her heart. And the PowerPoint almost alienated her audience."

This is the most common complaint about PowerPoint. Instead of human contact, we are given human display. "I think that we as a people have become unaccustomed to having real conversations with each other, where actually give and take to arrive at a new answer. We present to each other, instead of discussing", Cathy Belleville says. Tad Simons, the editor of the magazine Presentations (whose second-grade son used PowerPoint for show-and-tell), is familiar with the sin of triple delivery, where precisely the same text is seen on the screen, spoken aloud, and printed on the handout in front of you (the "leave-behind", as it is known in some circles). "The thing that makes my heart sing is when somebody pressed the 'B' button and the screen goes black and you can actually talk to the person", Simons told me.

In 1997, Sun Microsystems' chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, "banned" PowerPoint (a ban widely disregarded by his staff). The move might have been driven, in part, by Sun's public-relations needs as a Microsoft rival, but, according to McNealy, there were genuine productivity issues. "Why did we ban it? Let me put it this way: If I want to tell my forty thousand employees to attack, the word 'attack' in ASCII is forty-eight bits. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 90,112 bits. Put that same word in a PowerPoint slide and it becomes 458,048 bits. That's a pig through the python when you try to send it over the Net." McNealy's concern is shared by the American military. Enormously elaborate PowerPoint files (generated by presentation-obsessives - so-called PowerPoint Rangers) were said to be clogging up the military's bandwidth. Last year, to the delight of many under his command, General Henry H Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an order to US bases around the world insisting on simpler presentations.

PowerPoint was developed to give public speakers control over design decisions. But it's possible that those speakers should be making other, more important decisions. "In the past, I think we had an inefficient system, where executives passed all of their work to secretaries", Cathy Belleville says. "But now we've got highly paid people sitting there formatting slides - spending hours formatting slides - because it's more fun to do that than concentrate on what you're going to say. It would be much more efficient to offload that work onto someone who could do it in a tenth of the time, and be paid less. Millions of executives around the world are sitting there going, 'Arial? Times Roman? Twenty-four point? Eighteen point?'"

In the glow of a PowerPoint show, the world is condensed, simplified, and smoothed over - yet bright and hyperreal - like the cityscape background in a PlayStation motor race. PowerPoint is strangely adept at disguising the fragile foundations of a proposal, the emptiness of a business plan; usually, the audience is respectfully still (only venture capitalists dare to dictate the pace of someone else's slide show), and, with the visual distraction of a dancing pie chart, a speaker can quickly move past the laughable flaw in his argument. If anyone notices, it's too late - the narrative presses on.

Last year, three researchers at Arizona State University, including Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and the author of "Influence: Science and Practice", conducted an experiment in which they presented three groups of volunteers with information about Andrew, a fictional high-school student under consideration for a university football scholarship. One group was given Andrew's football statistics typed on a piece of paper. The second group was shown bar graphs. Those in the third group were given a PowerPoint presentation, in which animated bar graphs grew before their eyes.

Given Andrew's record, what kind of prospect was he? According to Cialdini, when Andrew was PowerPointed, viewers saw him as a greater potential asset to the football team. The first group rated Andrew four and a half on a scale of one to seven; the second rated him five; and the PowerPoint group rated him six. PowerPoint gave him power. The experiment was repeated, with three groups of sports fans that were accustomed to digesting sports statistics; this time, the first two groups gave Andrew the same rating. But the group that saw the PowerPoint presentation still couldn't resist it. Again, Andrew got a six. PowerPoint seems to be a way for organizations to turn expensive, expert decision-makers into novice decision-makers. "It's frightening", Cialdini says. He always preferred to use slides when he spoke to business groups, but one high-tech company recently hinted that his authority suffered as a result. "They said, 'You know what, Bob? You've got to get into PowerPoint, otherwise people aren't going to respond'. So I made the transfer."

Clifford Nass has an office overlooking the Oval lawn at Stanford, a university where the use of PowerPoint is so widespread that to refrain from using it is sometimes seen as a mark of seniority and privilege, like egg on one's tie. Nass once worked for Intel, and then got a PhD in sociology, and now he writes about and lectures on the ways people think about computers. But, before embarking on any of that, Professor Nass was a professional magician - Cliff Conjure - so he has some confidence in his abilities as a public performer.

According to Nass, who now gives PowerPoint lectures because his students asked him to, PowerPoint "lifts the floor" of public speaking: a lecture is less likely to be poor if the speaker is using the program. "What PowerPoint does is very efficiently deliver content", Nass told me. "What students gain is a lot more information - not just facts but rules, ways of thinking, examples".

At the same time, PowerPoint "lowers the ceiling", Nass says. "What you miss is the process. The classes I remember most, the professors I remember most, were the ones where you could watch how they thought. You don't remember what they said, the details. It was 'What an elegant way to wrap around a problem!' PowerPoint takes that away. PowerPoint gives you the outcome, but it removes the process."

"What I miss is, when I used to lecture without PowerPoint, every now and then I'd get a cool idea", he went on. "I remember once it just hit me. I'm lecturing, and all of a sudden I go, 'God! "The Wizard of Oz"! The scene at the end of "The Wizard of Oz"!'" Nass, telling this story, was almost shouting. (The lecture, he later explained, was about definitions of "the human" applied to computers.) "I just went for it - twenty-five minutes. And to this day students who were in that class remember it. That couldn't happen now: 'Where the hell is the slide?'"

PowerPoint could lead us to believe that information is all there is. According to Nass, PowerPoint empowers the provider of simple content (and that was the task Bob Gaskins originally set for it), but it risks squeezing out the provider of process - that is to say, the rhetorician, the storyteller, the poet, the person whose thoughts cannot be arranged in the shape of an AutoContent slide. "I hate to admit this", Nass said, "but I actually removed a book from my syllabus last year because I couldn't figure out how to PowerPoint it. It's a lovely book called Interface Culture (Perseus, 1999), by Steven Johnson, but it's very discursive; the charm of it is the throwaways. When I read this book, I thought, My head's filled with ideas, and now I've got to write out exactly what those ideas are, and - they're not neat". He couldn't get the book into bullet points; every time he put something down, he realized that it wasn't quite right. Eventually, he abandoned the attempt, and instead of a lecture, he gave his students a recommendation. He told them it was a good book, urged them to read it, and moved on to the next bullet point.

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/group/powerpt.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Presidential Neglect

by Charley Reese

King Features Syndicate (October 20 2006)


The president concentrated so hard on the two members of his infamous "axis of evil" that didn't have nuclear weapons that he neglected the one that does. North Korea announced that it would test a nuclear weapon, and now it has done so.

I'm sure the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, said, "Woe is me" when he heard such words as "provocative" and "unacceptable" tossed at him as if words were weapons. By the way, how can a fact be unacceptable? The fact exists whether the president likes it or not.

It's a good idea not to call anything unacceptable that you aren't prepared to prevent, and, of course, the president was not prepared to prevent the nuclear test. I seriously hope he didn't believe that mere words would deter the North Koreans.

A nuclear-armed North Korea represents a failure of American diplomacy. For the sake of fairness, it should be said that the most skilled diplomats in the world might have failed to dissuade the North Koreans from pursuing nuclear weapons. The president's stumblebum, lead-footed style of diplomacy, however, virtually guaranteed that the North Koreans would develop nuclear weapons.

For example, he included North Korea in his stupid axis of evil, a phrase coined by David Frum, a fanatic neoconservative who at the time was a White House speechwriter. Next Bush announces a US policy of preemptive wars. He tells the whole world, "You're either with us or against us".

He then proceeds to launch two pre-emptive wars, on Afghanistan and Iraq. Even as he remains bogged down in those two countries, he launches a verbal war against Iran. At the same time, his so-called negotiations with North Korea had been reduced to threats and demands.

Well, if you were North Korea's "Dear Leader", what would you conclude? The logical conclusion is that the US eventually plans to attack North Korea. The best deterrence against that is to have nuclear weapons. The North Korean leader might strike us as odd or even comical, but he's not stupid. Nobody who can survive in the midst of all those grim-faced generals is stupid.

Diplomacy is not molecular biology. It is simply negotiations. The first mistake Bush made was to include Japan. Koreans, North and South, hate Japan because its half-century occupation of the Korean peninsula was so brutal. Bush should have asked Japan to sit out the negotiation process.

Russia, China and South Korea are the three countries most likely to have influence with North Korea. Working closely with these countries, Bush should have presented the North Koreans with a menu of incentives and disincentives. Instead, he refused everything they asked for, such as one-on-one talks and a security guarantee, and simply made threats.

Well, North Korea has called the president's bluff. Other than bluster, the president is not going to do anything. Even without nukes, North Korea is a little dragon with a lot of very sharp teeth. A military attack on North Korea would unleash a blood bath involving scores of thousands of casualties.

One view of history is that it is a record of political leaders making decisions. If they are smart and make good decisions, good things happen. If they are stupid and make bad decisions, then disasters can befall innocent people.

We have elected ourselves a president who is not very smart when it comes to foreign affairs and, even worse, seems to have no real interest in them. Instead of seeking wise counsel, he has surrounded himself with neoconservative ideologues who think the US can bully the rest of the world into doing what they want it to do.

I'll be glad when he retires to Crawford, Texas, and I'm reasonably sure the rest of the world will feel the same way. In the meantime, nuclear nonproliferation is a dead issue.
_____

Write to Charley Reese at Post Office Box 2446, Orlando, Florida 32802.

Copyright (c) 2006 by King Features Syndicate

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20061020/index.php


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Ban It Now!

Friends Don't Let Friends Use PowerPoint

by Thomas A Stewart

Fortune (February 05 2001)


Nearly a decade ago I met with Jack Welch in the office he keeps in Manhattan, high up in Rockefeller Center. I'd just made a swing around the company, visiting GE businesses in must-see spots like Erie, Pennsylvania, Schenectady, New York, and Burkville, Alabama.

"What did you learn?" Welch asked as we sat at a round table.

"Well", I began, "I saw how GE could save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year". His alert-status instantly ratcheted up. I continued: "Ban overheads".

He laughed: "You should have seen how much they cost before we got Macs".

Neither of us knew it, but we were seeing the first signs of an epidemic that threatens the cerebrums of business more than bovine spongiform encephalopathy does Elsie and her ilk. GE had those Macs (since replaced with PCs) because Macs, and at the time only Macs, could run an application called PowerPoint.

The time has come to think the unthinkable, say the unsayable, and then, gulp, do the undoable: Ban PowerPoint. Make up one last slide that reads: FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS USE POWERPOINT. Then stop. Just say no. Whip inflation now. Expunge it. Find the application. Select it with the mouse. Drag it to the trash. Then make sure your machine empties it.

Here's why.

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's a monopoly.

PowerPoint was the brainchild of a company called Forethought, which Microsoft bought in 1987. Programmers for the Evil Empire took the application, then Mac-specific, made a PC version, steadily improved it, and put it into Office. There is now no realistic alternative. The other day someone at IBM said, "I think Lotus" - which IBM owns - "makes some kind of presentation software". But he couldn't remember its name - and he joined IBM in the Lotus acquisition. (It's called Freelance Graphics. There are other applications, including one from Corel, the limping maker of WordPerfect. Microsoft just invested in Corel, keeping it afloat and creating the simulacrum of competition.)

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's a monopoly. It's inescapable.

I go to a lot of conferences, do a lot of speaking. I used to use no graphics, but that meant I got a zero where speaker-evaluation forms ask the audience to rate the speaker's graphics, and it was bringing down my grade. So like any student who studies for the test rather than for the joy of learning, I learned to use acetate graphics and an overhead projector. But these days conference organizers say, "We'll put them on PowerPoint for you. We want a uniform look."

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's a monopoly. It's inescapable. It's monotonous.

Why in the world would you want a uniform look? The price of giving a lot of speeches is having to listen to a lot of them. They're all the same. One speaker finishes, his last slide saying thank you and giving his e-mail address. There is applause. The lights go up, he unplugs his laptop and leaves the podium, the emcee introduces the next speaker. She walks up, mumbles inconsequentially while she plugs in her laptop. The lights dim and she shows her first slide. It reads good morning. This starts at eight, goes to twelve, resumes at one, and ends at five. Somewhere a bird must be singing.

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's intellectually suspect.

Never put more than three bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, experts say. It confuses people. Keep it simple. You know, the way life is. In "The American Scholar", Emerson warned against the tendency to believe something just because it is written down. How much greater the danger when it is also boiled down.

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's intellectually suspect. Complexity exists, really. It disguises tone of voice and point of view. In real life, bullet points kill.

I was at a conference in Boston when a speaker proposed as a best practice something that was directly the opposite of advice given by a speaker the day before. An irate member of the audience rose during the Q&A and insisted that this be sorted out then and there. "I paid good money to come here", he said, "and I want to know what to do". The speaker had no slide giving the right answer - "Think for yourself".

Nor does PowerPoint allow for idiosyncrasy. See, for example, what happens to the Gettysburg Address when it's converted into a PowerPoint presentation, http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/ . Only by thinking and acting differently from the competition can you perform differently from it.

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's intellectually suspect. It's business television.

If this is Thursday, this must be ... Loews Coronado Bay in San Diego? The Turnberry Isle in Aventura, Florida? The Pointe Hilton South Mountain in Phoenix? Wherever you are, half the audience arrived last night from at least two time zones away. Another half - to some degree the two groups overlap - was up way late, drinking and carousing. By all means, fire up PowerPoint and dim the lights. These guys need their beauty sleep. Besides, they'll have a hard copy of your presentation to puzzle over on the plane ride home.

WHY BAN POWERPOINT? It's intellectually suspect. It's business television. It discourages questioning.

Wherever you are, note where you're not: Pebble Beach or the Greenbrier. Your boss is there, drinking better wine and eating better food. PowerPoint is very rare at CEO conferences. Like Supreme Court justices, captains of industry like to see a speaker think, not watch him read.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your frames! Thank You!

tstewart@fortunemail.com

Copies of this presentation are available at the back of the auditorium.


Copyright (c) 2001 Time, Inc.

http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/WRIT465/management/juliakeller1.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation

The Onion | Issue 41.06 (February 09 2005)


Portland, Oregon - Project manager Ron Butler left behind a 48-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining his tragic decision to commit suicide, coworkers reported Tuesday.

"When I first heard that Ron had swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills, I was shocked", said Hector Benitez, Butler's friend and coworker at Williams+Kennedy Marketing Consultants. "But after the team went through Ron's final PowerPoint presentation, I had a solid working knowledge of the pain he was feeling, his attempts to cope, and the reasons for his ultimate decision".

"I just wish he would've shot me an e-mail asking for help", Benitez added.

Butler broke his presentation into four categories: Assessment Of Current Situation, Apologies & Farewells, Will & Funeral Arrangements, and Final Thoughts.

According to Williams+Kennedy president Bradford Williams, finalgoodbye.ppt was "clear, concise, and persuasive".

"After everyone left the room, I sat down and went through Ron's final presentation in slide-sorter view", Williams said. "Man, I gotta tell you, it blew me away. That presentation really utilized the full multimedia capabilities of Microsoft's PowerPoint application."

"We're really gonna miss Ron around here", Williams added.

In the presentation's first section, a three-dimensional bar graph illustrated the growth of Butler's sorrow during the two years since his wife and only child died in a car accident.

"We all got Ron's message loud and clear when that JPEG of his wife wipe-transitioned to a photo of her tombstone", coworker Anne Thibideux said.

The first section closed with a review of key objectives and critical success factors. The two-column text display was enlivened by colorful background wallpaper and clip-art question marks depicting Ron's confusion over his choice.

The second portion of the presentation comprised an ordered list of goodbyes to colleagues and apologies to friends.

"The colors in Apologies & Farewells were perfectly calibrated for digital-projector display", IT director Bill Schapp said. "I think Ron was the only guy at W+K who understood the importance of running the Gretag-Macbeth Eye-One Beamer on presentations".

The third segment, Will & Funeral Arrangements, included a list of Butler's friends and family indexed with phone numbers, a last will and testament, and scrolling-text instructions for the dissemination of his ashes.

"To Ron's credit, it was one helluva way to go out", human resources manager Gail Everts said. "Ron clearly spent a lot of time on that presentation. If the subject matter weren't so heavy, we'd probably use it to train his replacement."

Copywriter Gita Pruriyaran said the presentation "had room for improvement".

"I felt some of the later transitions were weak", Pruriyaran said. "The point of a transition is to maintain audience interest and lighten the mood. To me, the door-closing sound effects in Will & Funeral were repetitive and heavy-handed. But Ron's choice to end with that Hamlet quote and then fade to black was really powerful. There wasn't a dry eye in the room when Hector flipped off the projector and brought up the lights."

Coworkers were shocked to learn that Butler's document was initially created on August 8 2004.

"I should have seen this coming, but I didn't", Benitez said. "When Ron started deleting all of his old files last week, I thought he was worried about another hard-drive crash. I never imagined he was, you know, preparing."

"If only we'd all paid more attention to Ron during the Microsoft Project workshop he held last month", Benitez added.

Butler is survived by his parents Gerald and Martha Butler, who described their relationship with their son as "distant".

"Ron would e-mail us photos and home movies, but we're not very good with computers", said Gerald, 71, a retired postal worker. "We tried to stay close, but we just never learned how to open up those files. At the very end, Ron was sending us his suicidal thoughts, but we didn't get the instant message - until it was too late".

Williams+Kennedy vice president Vivien Esterhaus said Butler "will not be forgotten".

"We have made arrangements for his PowerPoint presentation to be stored in the W+K off-site secure file-storage archive", Esterhaus said. "Barring a virus or major computer malfunction, his final words will always be accessible. If only Ron could've been saved, too."

_____

The late Ron and his slides are shown at URL below.
_____


(c) Copyright 2006, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30903


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

PowerPoint: Killer App?

by Ruth Marcus

Washington Post (August 30 2005)


Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft "presentation software" has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.

Perhaps I've sat through too many PowerPoint presentations lately, but I think the trouble with these critics is that they don't go far enough: The software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those of us who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts.

PowerPoint's failings have been outlined most vividly by Yale political scientist Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information. In a 2003 Wired magazine article headlined "PowerPoint Is Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Graphics Press, 2006), Tufte argued that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information.

Exhibit A in Tufte's analysis is a PowerPoint slide presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in the air and the agency was weighing the risk posed by tile damage on the shuttle wings. Key information was so buried and condensed in the rigid PowerPoint format as to be useless.

"It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation", the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, citing Tufte's work. The board devoted a full page of its 2003 report to the issue, criticizing a space agency culture in which, it said, "the endemic use of PowerPoint" substituted for rigorous technical analysis.

But NASA - like the rest of corporate and bureaucratic America - seems powerless to resist PowerPoint. Just this month a minority report by the latest shuttle safety task force echoed the earlier concerns: Often, the group said, when it asked for data it ended up with PowerPoints - without supporting documentation.

These critiques are, pardon the phrase, on point, but I suspect that the insidious influence of PowerPoint goes beyond the way it frustrates scientific analysis. The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America - the PowerPointing of the planet, actually - is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese.

I experienced a particularly dreary example of this under a starry Hawaiian sky this year, listening to a talk on astronomy. It was the perfect moment for magical images of distant stars and newly discovered planets. Yet, instead of using technology to transport, the lecturer plodded point-by-point through cookie-cutter slides.

The soul-sapping essence of PowerPoint was captured perfectly in a spoof of the Gettysburg Address by computer whiz Peter Norvig of Google. It featured Abe Lincoln fumbling with his computer ("Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7?") and collapsing his speech into six slides, complete with a bar chart depicting four score and seven years.

For example, Slide 4:

Review of Key Objectives & Critical Success Factors

* What makes nation unique

-- Conceived in liberty

-- Men are equal

* Shared vision

-- New birth of freedom

-- Gov't of/by/for the people.


If NASA managers didn't recognize the safety problem, perhaps it's because they were dazed from having to endure too many presentations like this - the inevitable computer balkiness, the robotic recitation of bullet points, the truncated language of a marketing pitch. Hence the New Yorker cartoon in which the devil, seated at his desk in Hell, interviews a potential assistant: "I need someone well versed in the art of torture - do you know PowerPoint?"

Like all forms of torture, though, PowerPoint degrades its practitioners as well as its victims. Yes, boring slides were plentiful in the pre-PowerPoint era - remember the overhead projector? Yes, it can help the intellectually inept organize their thoughts. But the seductive availability of PowerPoint and the built-in drive to reduce all subjects to a series of short-handed bullet points eliminates nuances and enables, even encourages, the absence of serious thinking. Really, why think at all when the auto-content wizard can do it for you?

The most disturbing development in the world of PowerPoint is its migration to the schools - like sex and drugs, at earlier and earlier ages. Now we have second-graders being tutored in PowerPoint. No matter that students who compose at the keyboard already spend more energy perfecting their fonts than polishing their sentences - PowerPoint dispenses with the need to write any sentences at all. Perhaps the politicians who are so worked up about the ill effects of violent video games should turn their attention to PowerPoint instead.

In the meantime, Tufte, who's now doing consulting work for NASA, has a modest proposal for its new administrator: Ban the use of PowerPoint. Sounds good to me. After all, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the perils of PowerPoint.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444_pf.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

PowerPoint: Shot With Its Own Bullets

by Peter Norvig

http://www.norvig.com/lancet.html


Imagine a world with almost no pronouns or punctuation. A world where any complex thought must be broken into seven- word chunks, with colorful blobs between them. It sounds like the futuristic dystopia of Kurt Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron, in which intelligent citizens receive ear-splitting broadcasts over headsets so that they cannot gain an unfair advantage over their less intelligent peers. But this world is no fiction - it is the present-day reality of a PowerPoint presentation, a reality that is repeated an estimated thirty million times a day. {5}

Stanford University's Cliff Nass was quoted in the New Yorker {1} saying that PowerPoint "lifts the floor"; it allows some main points to come across even if the speaker mumbles, forgets, or is otherwise grossly incompetent. But PowerPoint also "lowers the ceiling"; it makes it harder to have an open exchange between presenter and audience, to convey ideas that do not neatly fit into outline format, or to have a truly inspiring presentation. This is what I was getting at when I created the Gettysburg PowerPoint presentation {2}, a parody that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of frustrated PowerPoint sufferers. I used PowerPoint's AutoContent Wizard (which Parker {1} calls "a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers"), adding only the slide "Not on Agenda!" to the standard format.

Nobody should be surprised that PowerPoint does not measure up to the great speeches of history, such as Lincoln's Gettysburg address. And it is certainly a shame when a potentially interesting presentation is dumbed down by another formulaic over-application of PowerPoint. But when PowerPoint leads not just to boredom but to bad decisions, it is a tragedy, not just a shame.

For an example of excellent decision-making without PowerPoint, consider the agenda of Apollo programme-manager George Low, on August 9 1968. {3} At 0845, Low met with Houston center-director Robert Gilruth to recommend that the Apollo 8 mission attempt a lunar orbit, an ambitious change from previous plans. Gilruth agreed. At 0900, Low met with flight-director Chris Kraft, who verified the technical feasibility. At 0930 Low, Gilruth, and Kraft agreed to present the idea to Werner von Braun. They flew to Huntsville to meet von Braun and others at 1430 that afternoon. The lunar orbit plan was tentatively approved that day. Just four months later, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, sending back the first photograph of an Earthrise over another world.

Think what Low accomplished in the time that many present-day beaurocrats take to select their fonts and backgrounds. He achieved consensus on a billion- dollar decision about one of the most complex engineering projects of all time, with enormous implications for national security. PowerPoint cannot help you do that.

In current-day NASA, the need to cram complex facts into PowerPoint's limited format may have contributed to poor decisions in the Columbia tragedy, according to a recent essay by the graphic designer, Edward Tufte. {4} Tufte points out that the limited resolution of PowerPoint slides makes it impossible to fit complex charts and graphs, or even full English sentences. As a result the intended meaning of a presentation may be obscured.

How can you make informed decisions like George Low's? The key seems to be to gather experts who are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter, and have them cooperatively discuss a series of questions designed to explore the limits of technical feasibility. They must strive to reach the best decision rather than to persuade each other. The Chicago Tribune {5} quotes Sherry Turkle, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "a strong [PowerPoint] presentation is designed to close down debate, not open it up".

Design your presentations and your meetings to take advantage of the people gathered there, not to bore them. If everyone has set their remarks in stone ahead of time (all using the same templates) then there is little room for the comments of one to build on another, or for a new idea to arise collaboratively from the meeting. Homogeneity is great for milk, but not for ideas. Use visual aids to convey visual information: photographs, charts, or diagrams. But do not use them to give the impression that the matter is solved, wrapped up in a few bullet points.

Peter Norvig
2400 Bayshore Parkway, Mountain View, California 94043, USA
e-mail: peter@norvig.com


Notes

{1} Parker I. Absolute Powerpoint. New Yorker magazine (May 28 2001).

{2} Norvig P. The Gettysburg Powerpoint presentation (January, 1999) http://norvig.com/Gettysburg (accessed July 02 2003).

{3} Wade M. Decision that Apollo 8 should be a lunar orbital mission. SpaceDaily (June 26 2002) http://www.astronautix.com/details/dec17988.htm (accessed July 02 2003).

{4} Tufte E. The cognitive style of PowerPoint (May 2003) http://www.edwardtufte.com (accessed July 02 2003).

{5} Keller J. Is PowerPoint the devil? Chicago Tribune (January 22 2003).


Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

- Abraham Lincoln

http://www.norvig.com/lancet.html

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

PowerPoint Is Evil

Power Corrupts.
PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.

by Edward Tufte

Wired Magazine Issue 11.09 (September 2003)


Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware - computer programs for presentations - is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today's slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. But the format has become ubiquitous under PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft. PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of ten to twenty words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides - a total of perhaps eighty words (fifteen seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows forty words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers.

The charts discussed in the previous and next paragraph are illustrated at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html .

Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

_____

Edward R Tufte is professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale. His new monograph, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, is available from Graphics Press, www.edwardtufte.com .

Copyright (c) 1993-2004 The Conde' Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas

by Gore Vidal

Chapter Three of Imperial America (Nation Books, 2005)


On September 16 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire was as dead, theoretically, as its predecessor, the British. Our empire was seventy-one years old and had been in ill financial health since 1968. Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy. {1}

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's supremacy in the money markets. Then, in 1914, New York replaced London as the world's financial capital. Before 1914, the United States had been a developing country, dependent on outside investment. But with the shift of the money power from Old World to New, what had been a debtor nation became a creditor nation and the central motor to the world's economy. All in all, the English were well pleased to have us take their place. They were too few in number for so big a task. As early as the turn of the century, they were eager for us not only to help them out financially, but to continue, on their behalf, the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race: to bear with courage the white man's burden, as Rudyard Kipling not so tactfully put it. Were we not - English and Americans - all Anglo-Saxons, united by common blood, laws, language? Well, no, we were not. But our differences were not so apparent then. In any case, we took the job. We would supervise and civilize the lesser breeds. We would make money.

By the end of the Second World War, we were the most powerful and least damaged of the great nations. We also had most of the money. America's peaceful hegemony lasted exactly five years. Then the cold and hot wars began. Our masters would have us believe that all our problems are the fault of the Evil Empire of the East, with its satanic and atheistic religion, ever ready to destroy us in the night. This nonsense began at a time when we had atomic weapons and the Russians did not. They had lost twenty million of their people in the war, and eight million of them before the war, thanks to their neo-conservative Mongolian political system. Most important, there was never any chance, then or now, of the money power shifting from New York to Moscow.

What was - and is - the reason for the big scare? Well, the Second World War made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic, with many a wink, in the people's name. In order to maintain a general prosperity (and enormous wealth for the few) they decided that we would become the world's policeman, perennial shield against the Mongol hordes. We shall have an arms race, said one of the high priests, John Foster Dulles, and we shall win it because the Russians will go broke first. We were then put on a permanent wartime economy, which is why close to two-thirds of the government's revenues are constantly being siphoned off to pay for what is euphemistically called "defense".

As early as 1950, Albert Einstein understood the nature of the rip-off. He said, "The men who possess real power in the country have no intention of ending the cold war". Thirty-five years later they are still at it, making money while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per-capita income, to forty-sixth place in literacy and so on, until last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to $2 trillion in debt. Then, in the fall, the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that looked to be the end of our empire. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as the world leader, and we - the white race - have become the yellow man's burden. Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him. {2} In any case, if the foreseeable future is not nuclear, it will be Asiatic, some combination of Japan's advanced technology with China's resourceful landmass. Europe and the United States will then be, simply, irrelevant to the world that matters, and so we come full circle: Europe began as the relatively empty uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun is setting in our West and rising once more in the East.

The British used to say that their empire was obtained in a fit of absentmindedness. They exaggerate, of course; on the other hand, our modern empire was carefully thought out by four men. In 1890 a US Navy captain, Alfred Thayer Mahan, wrote the blueprint for the American imperium, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (Dover Publications; New Ed edition, 1987). Then Mahan's friend, the historian-geopolitician Brooks Adams, younger brother of Henry, came up with the following formula: "All civilization is centralization. All centralization is economy." He applied the formula in the following syllogism: "Under economical centralization, Asia is cheaper than Europe. The world tends to economic centralization. Therefore, Asia tends to survive and Europe to perish." Ultimately, that is why we were in Vietnam. The amateur historian and professional politician Theodore Roosevelt was much under the influence of Adams and Mahan; he was also their political instrument, most active not so much during his presidency as during the crucial war with Spain, where he can take a good deal of credit for our seizure of the Philippines, which made us a world empire. Finally, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt's closest friend, kept in line a Congress that had a tendency to forget our holy mission - our manifest destiny - and ask, rather wistfully, for internal improvements.

From the beginning of our republic, we have had imperial longings. We took care - as we continue to take care - of the indigenous American population. We maintained slavery a bit too long, even by a cynical worlds tolerant standards. Then, in 1846, we produced our first conquistador, President James K Polk. After acquiring Texas, Polk deliberately started a war with Mexico because, as he later told the historian George Bancroft, we had to acquire California. Thanks to Polk, we did. And that is why to this day the Mexicans refer to our southwestern states as "the occupied lands", which Hispanics are now, quite sensibly, filling up.

The case against empire began as early as 1847. Representative Abraham Lincoln did not think much of Polk's war, while Lieutenant Ulysses S Grant, who fought at Veracruz, said in his memoirs, "The war was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering the justice in their desire to acquire additional territory". He went on to make a causal link, something not usual in our politics then and completely unknown now: "The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."

But the empire has always had more supporters than opponents. By 1895 we had filled up our section of North America. We had tried twice - and failed - to conquer Canada. We had taken everything that we wanted from Mexico. Where next? Well, there was the Caribbean at our front door and the vast Pacific at our back. Enter the Four Horsemen - Mahan, Adams, Roosevelt, and Lodge.

The original republic was thought out carefully, and openly, in The Federalist Papers: We were not going to have a monarchy, and we were not going to have a democracy. And to this day we have had neither. For two hundred years we have had an oligarchical system in which men of property can do well and others are on their own. Or, as Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or bribe the powerless majority. The so-called Great Society bribed; today coercion is very much in the air. Happily, our neo-conservative Mongoloids favor authoritarian if not totalitarian means of coercion.

Unlike the republic, the empire was worked out largely in secret. Captain Mahan, in a series of lectures delivered at the Naval War College, compared the United States with England. Each was essentially an island state that could prevail in the world only through sea power. England had already proved his thesis. Now the United States must do the same. We must build a great navy in order to acquire overseas possessions. Since great navies are expensive, the wealth of new colonies must be used to pay for our fleets. In fact, the more colonies acquired, the more ships; the more ships, the more empire. Mahan's thesis is agreeably circular. He showed how small England has ended up with most of Africa and all of southern Asia, thanks to sea power. He thought that we should do the same. The Caribbean was our first and easiest target. Then on to the Pacific Ocean, with all its islands. And, finally, to China, which was breaking up as a political entity.

Theodore Roosevelt and Brooks Adams were tremendously excited by this prospect. At the time, Roosevelt was a mere police commissioner in New York City, but he had dreams of imperial glory. "He wants to be", snarled Henry Adams, "our Dutch-American Napoleon". Roosevelt began to maneuver his way toward the heart of power, sea power. With Lodge's help, he got himself appointed assistant secretary of the navy, under a weak secretary and a mild president. Now he was in place to modernize the fleet and acquire colonies. Hawaii was annexed. Then a part of Samoa. Finally, colonial Cuba, somehow, had to be liberated from Spain's tyranny. At the Naval War College, Roosevelt declared, "to prepare for war is the most effectual means to promote peace". How familiar that sounds! But since the United States had no enemies as of June 1897, a contemporary might have remarked that since we were already at peace with everyone, why prepare for war? Today, of course, we are what he dreamed we would be, a nation armed to the teeth, hostile to everyone and eager to strike preemptively, at presidential command. But what with Roosevelt was a design to acquire an empire is for us a means to transfer money from the Treasury to the various defense industries which, in turn, pay for the elections of Congress and president.

Our turn-of-the-century imperialists may have been wrong, and I think they were. But they were intelligent men with a plan, and the plan worked. Aided by Lodge in the Senate, Brooks Adams in the press, Admiral Mahan at the Naval War College, the young assistant secretary of the navy began to build up the fleet and look for enemies. After all, as Brooks Adams proclaimed, "war is the solvent". But war with whom? And for what? And where? At one point England seemed a likely enemy. There was a boundary dispute over Venezuela, which meant that we could invoke the all-purpose Monroe Doctrine (the invention of John Quincy Adams, Brooks's grandfather). But as we might have lost such a war, nothing happened. Nevertheless, Roosevelt kept on beating his drum: "No triumph of peace", he shouted, "can equal the armed triumph of war". Also: "We must take Hawaii in the interests of the white race". Even Henry Adams, who found TR tiresome and Brooks, his own brother, brilliant but mad, suddenly declared, "In another fifty years ... the white race will have to reconquer the tropics by war and nomadic invasion, or be shut up north of the 50th parallel". And so at the century's end, our most distinguished ancestral voices were not prophesying, but praying for war.

An American warship, the Maine, blew up in Havana harbor. We held Spain responsible; thus, we got what John Hay called "a splendid little war". We would liberate Cuba, drive Spain from the Caribbean. As for the Pacific, even before the Maine was sunk, Roosevelt had ordered Commodore Dewey and his fleet to the Spanish Philippines - just in case. Spain promptly collapsed, and we inherited its Pacific and Caribbean colonies. Admiral Mahan's plan was working triumphantly.

In time we allowed Cuba the appearance of freedom while holding on to Puerto Rico. Then President William McKinley, after an in-depth talk with God, decided that we should also keep the Philippines, in order, he said, to Christianize them. When reminded that the Filipinos were Roman Catholics, the president said, Exactly. We must Christianize them. Although Philippine nationalists had been our allies against Spain, we promptly betrayed them and their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. As a result it took us several years to conquer the Philippines, and tens - some say hundreds - of thousands of Filipinos died that our empire might grow.

The war was the making of Theodore Roosevelt. Surrounded by the flower of the American press, he led a group of so-called Rough Riders up a very small hill in Cuba. As a result of this proto-photo opportunity he became a national hero, governor of New York, McKinley's running mate and, when McKinley was killed in 1901, president.

Not everyone liked the new empire. After Manila, Mark Twain thought that the stars and bars of the American flag should be replaced by a skull and crossbones. He also said, "We cannot maintain an empire in the Orient and maintain a republic in America". He was right, of course. But as he was only a writer who said funny things, he was ignored. The compulsively vigorous Roosevelt defended our war against the Philippine population, and he attacked the likes of Twain. "Every argument that can be made for the Filipinos could be made for the Apaches", he explained, with his lovely gift for analogy. "And every word that can be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull. As peace, order and prosperity followed our expansion over the land of the Indians, so they will follow us in the Philippines."

Despite the criticism of the few, the Four Horsemen had pulled it off. The United States was a world empire. And one of the horsemen not only got to be president but, for his pious meddling in the Russo-Japanese conflict, our greatest apostle of war was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One must never underestimate Scandinavian wit.

Empires are restless organisms. They must constantly renew themselves; should an empire start leaking energy, it will die. Not for nothing were the Adams brothers fascinated by entropy. By energy. By force. Brooks Adams, as usual, said the unsayable: "Laws are a necessity" he declared. "Laws are made by the strongest and they must and shall be obeyed". Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, thought this a wonderful observation, while the philosopher William James came to a similar conclusion, which can also be detected, like an invisible dynamo, at the heart of the novels of his brother Henry.

According to Brooks Adams, "The most difficult problem of modern times is unquestionably how to protect property under popular governments". The Four Horsemen fretted a lot about this. They need not have. We have never had a popular government in the sense that they feared, nor are we in any danger now. Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system", he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses". But none of this was for public consumption. Publicly, the Four Horsemen and their outriders spoke of the American mission to bring all the world freedom and peace - through slavery and war, if necessary. Privately, their constant fear was that the weak masses might combine one day against the strong few, their natural leaders, and take away their money. As early as the election of 1876, socialism had been targeted as a vast evil that must never be allowed to corrupt simple American persons. When Christianity was invoked as the natural enemy of those who might limit the rich and their games, the combination of cross and dollar sign proved - and proves - irresistible.

During the first decade of the disagreeable twentieth century, the great world fact was the internal collapse of China. Who could pick up the pieces? Britain grabbed Kowloon; Russia was busy in the north; the Kaiser's fleet prowled the China coast; Japan was modernizing itself and biding its time. Although Theodore Roosevelt lived and died a dedicated racist, the Japanese puzzled him. After they sank the Russian fleet, Roosevelt decided that they were to be respected and feared even though they were our racial inferiors. For those Americans who served in the Second World War, it was an article of faith - as of 1941, anyway - that the Japanese could never win a modern war. Because of their slant eyes, they would not be able to master aircraft. Then they sank our fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Jingoism aside, Brooks Adams was a good analyst. In the 1890s he wrote: "Russia, to survive, must undergo a social revolution internally and/or expand externally. She will try to move into Shansi Province, richest prize in the world. Should Russia and Germany combine ..." That was the nightmare of the Four Horsemen. At a time when simpler folk feared the rise of Germany alone, Brooks Adams saw the world ultimately polarized between Russia and the United States, with China as the common prize. American maritime power versus Russia's landmass. That is why, quite seriously, he wanted to extend the Monroe Doctrine to the Pacific Ocean. For him, "War [was] the ultimate form of economic competition".

We are now at the end of the twentieth century. England, France, and Germany have all disappeared from the imperial stage. China is now reassembling itself, and Confucius, greatest of all political thinkers, is again at the center of the Middle Kingdom. Japan has the world money power but needs a landmass; China now seems ready to go into business with its ancient enemy. Wars of the sort that the Four Horsemen enjoyed are, if no longer possible, no longer practical. {3} Today's true conquests are shifts of currency by computer and the manufacture of those things that people everywhere are willing to buy.

I have said very little about writers because writers have figured very little in our imperial story. The founders of both republic and empire wrote well: Jefferson and Hamilton, Lincoln and Grant. TR, and the Adamses. Today public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them, either.

Yet at the dawn of the empire, for a brief instant, our professional writers tended to make a difference. Upton Sinclair and company attacked the excesses of the ruling class. Theodore Roosevelt coined the word "muckraking" to describe what they were doing. He did not mean the word as praise. Since then a few of our writers have written on public themes, but as they are not taken seriously, they have ended by not taking themselves seriously, at least as citizens of a republic. After all, most writers are paid by universities, and it is not wise to be thought critical of a garrison state which spends so much money on so many campuses.

When Confucius was asked what would be the first thing that he would do if he were to lead the state - a never-to-be-fulfilled dream - he said, Rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. Finally, words must be so twisted as to justify an empire that has now ceased to exist, much less make sense. Is rectification of our system possible for us? Henry Adams thought not. In 1910 he wrote: "The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions". Then he added, "From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it". Since then consent has grown frayed; we have become poor; our people sullen.

To maintain a thirty-five-year arms race it is necessary to have a fearsome enemy. Not since the invention of the Wizard of Oz have American publicists created anything quite so demented as the idea that the Soviet Union is a monolithic, omnipotent empire with tentacles everywhere on earth, intent on our destruction, which will surely take place unless we constantly imitate it with our war machine and secret services.

In actual fact, the Soviet Union is a Second World country with a First World military capacity. Frighten the Russians sufficiently and they might blow us up. By the same token, as our republic now begins to crack under the vast expense of maintaining a mindless imperial force, we might try to blow them up. Particularly if we had a president who really was a twice-born Christian and believed that the good folks would all go to heaven (where they were headed anyway) and the bad folks would go where they belong.

Even worse than the not-very-likely prospect of a nuclear war - deliberate or by accident - is the economic collapse of our society because too many of our resources have been wasted on the military. The Pentagon is like a black hole; what goes in is forever lost to us, and no new wealth is created. Hence, our cities, whose centers are unlivable; our crime rate, the highest in the Western world; a public education system that has given up ... you know the litany.

There is now only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make common cause with the Soviet Union. The bringing together of the Soviet landmass (with all its natural resources) and our island empire (with all its technological resources) would be of great benefit to each society, not to mention the world. Also, to recall the wisdom of the Four Horsemen who gave us our empire, the Soviet Union and our section of North America combined would be a match, industrially and technologically, for the Sino-Japanese axis that will dominate the future just as Japan dominates world trade as of today. But where the horsemen thought of war as the supreme solvent, we now know that war is worse than useless. Therefore, the alliance of the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere will double the strength of each and give us, working together, an opportunity to survive, economically, in a highly centralized Asiatic world. {4}


Notes

{1} Could it have been these words of mine that stimulated a small group of radicals, soon to call themselves "neo-conservatives", to conspire to propagandize us toward perpetual war to gain military primacy globally to compensate for loss of economic primacy?

{2} Believe it or not, this plain observation was interpreted as a racist invocation of "The
Yellow Peril"!

{3} Our ongoing failures in Iraq and Afghanistan prove this fact.

{4} The suggestion that the United States and the USSR join forces set alarm bells ringing in Freedom's Land. The Israel lobby, in particular.

_____

Originally published in The Nation (January 11 1986)


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Just Think

by Charley Reese

King Features Syndicate (October 16 2006)


The foremost duty of a citizen, especially in dangerous times, is to think. Without independent thinkers who are also economically independent of the government, democracy doesn't work.

Remembering and imagining are not thinking. Emotional reactions or ideological reactions are not thinking. Belief in the "word magic" of labels is not thinking. Faith is not thinking.

Thinking is the use of reason to determine the truth as best we can. To do that, we have to shuck emotions, desires and wishes and look at the world in its nakedness as it is, not as we wish it were or as someone else has told us it is.

Reality is not affected by our desires or by our comprehension. We glean data from our senses of that world outside our bodies and use our brains to draw inferences from the data. We have to conform to it; reality will not conform to us.

Clear thinking today is especially difficult, because the present generations of human beings are exposed to information in an unprecedented flood. Some years ago, it was estimated that the average American was exposed to about 15,000 messages per day. I'm sure that number has increased.

Advertising is pervasive with labels, point-of-sale displays and ads in newspapers and on television, radio and the Internet, as well as signs and billboards. Information - much of it false or self-serving or incomplete or trivial - pours out of print publications, television, radio and the Internet.

Information is not truth. It is bits of data that might be true or false or completely useless to know. I've often recommended that people take an information break. Go a week without watching television, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or magazines or surfing the Net. It might be difficult at first, but if you persist, you will be surprised by how normal the world appears once you've cut out the political chatter and the daily roundup of the world's pain and misery.

Another exercise in mind control is that when you are driving, make a conscious effort not to read signs or billboards. Look instead at trees and other natural features. Work for the goal of being able to give someone directions to your house like this: Go three blocks north of the giant magnolia tree, turn east and look for two crab-apple trees.

The most important point is to realize that your mind belongs to you. It is your principal means of survival. Don't rent it out to politicians or political parties or anybody else, including columnists and commentators. All leaders of whatever stripe desire is to persuade you to adopt their agenda. Don't do it. Arrive at your own independent agenda. If your own agenda coincides with theirs, then cooperate. If it doesn't, go your own way.

Next, you should start editing the information that is presented to you. Do you really need to know that Mel Gibson said he's been sober for 65 days? Not unless you're kin or a personal friend. Do you need to know there has been a coup in Thailand? Not unless you plan to visit that country.

Despite all the talk about globalism, in most cases our true interests are local - family, community, region, state and our own country. We should concentrate on these, for here we can make a difference.

While global busybodies worry about rain forests, tribal conflicts in the Sudan and poverty in Africa, our own infrastructure, including public education, is deteriorating. Celebrities who want to hold poor black babies don't have to go to Africa. There are plenty of poor babies of all colors in the US.

Think, folks, think.

_____


Write to Charley Reese at Post Office Box 2446, Orlando, Florida 32802

Copyright (c) 2006 by King Features Syndicate

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20061016/index.php

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Truth About the "Embargo" on Cuba

An Economic War

by Ricardo Alarcon

CounterPunch (October 05 2006)

"To bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government"

-- State Department (April 06 1960)


A few weeks from now, the UN General Assembly will pass, with practical unanimity, a new resolution, the number 15, condemning the blockade on Cuba, which Washington tries to describe as barely an "embargo". The United States Government will try to justify its policy once again without success. They have been doing this for almost half a century now, concealing the truth behind their fabrications and lies.

The truth is, however, contained in documents that were kept secret by Washington until 1991. More than an embargo or blockade, it is in fact an act of "economic warfare", as the then secretary of state, Christian Herter, said in 1959. An economic warfare that began with the triumph of the Revolution in January of 1959 and it is still in force today, a war which has always had the same genocidal purpose: to bring about hunger, misery and desperation among the people of Cuba.

Dictator Fulgencio Batista and his main accomplices plundered the Republic's Treasury and upon fleeing Cuba in January of that year they took with them more than 424 million dollars which came to rest in the United States and form the economic basis of a mafia often hailed by the US press as "successful businessmen" of Miami. For Cuba the situation was critical and Washington knew it. The Department of State described it as such, saying in February 1959 that:

"the serious threat to the stability of the Cuba peso which results from the fact that following the departure of the Batista administration it was determined that the currency reserve of the country is depleted", something which, "would tax the governing abilities of any of the best leaders".

The Central Bank of Cuba sent a team of experts to Washington to seek a modest loan that would alleviate such a crisis. The issue was analysed by the National Security Council on February 12 1959. The decision was unequivocal: they would listen to the Cubans but offer them nothing at all. They didn't grant any kind of loan. They didn't even promise to look into the matter. Needless to say, not one cent of the money stolen from the Cuban people was ever returned.

The dispossession of Cuban bank reserves, which constitutes a blatant act of economic aggression, took place long before any revolutionary measure was adopted on the Island (the first being the Law of Agrarian reform, passed on May 17 of that year).

On March 26 1959, the National Security Council also discussed the Cuba situation. At this meeting CIA's director, Allen Dulles, said that: "it was quite possible that the US Congress would do something which would affect the sale of Cuban sugar in the US". Depriving Cuba of its main source of income, sugar exports to the US market, would become a recurrent theme of Washington's secret meetings before, long before, relationships with the Soviet Union were re-established and before socialism was proclaimed to be Revolution's goal. They did that when sugar was still being grown on large landed estates and processed in factories - many of which were US owned - that had not been expropriated and were still in the hands of the Island's oligarchy and foreign companies.

US Government officials were aware of the consequences of such action. A report from the Department of State acknowledged that: "If Cuba were deprived of its quota privilege, the sugar industry would promptly suffer an abrupt decline, causing widespread further unemployment. The large numbers of people those forced out of work would begin to go hungry."

But they weren't just talking about sugar: "if we were to cut the Cubans off from their fuel supply, the effect would be devastating on them within a month or six weeks".

Nobody in Washington claimed to have been deceived. They knew that the actions taken against the Revolution would cause pain and suffering to all the Cuban people. They did it with premeditation and full knowledge of the effect, converting the act of genocide into a malicious political instrument. An analysis from this same Department, dated April 6 1960 and approved with the signature of Assistant Secretary, Roy Rubottom, offers us explicit proof of this policy.

In this analysis it is flatly affirmed that:

"The majority of Cubans support Castro. The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship ... it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba ... it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."

Note that they acknowledged they should act in a manner "as adroit and inconspicuous as possible", something that fits with a criminal behaviour, and not just any crime, but rather one that has been particularly condemned by humankind: the crime of genocide clearly defined by the Geneva Convention of 1948 as any attempt to cause total or partial damage to any human group. What is this if it isn't precisely that: an attempt at "bringing about hunger and desperation" among all Cubans?

It is probably the most prolonged act of genocide in history. It began before the majority of Cubans alive today were born, meaning that they have spent their entire lives under the blockade.

Soon it will be condemned again by humankind as a whole. Once again the US administration will reveal its arrogance and ignore the demand being made worldwide. When will it end?

_____

NB: All quotes are from the official documents compiled in the book published by the Department of State: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960 Volume VI Cuba, United States Goverment Printing Office (Washington, 1991).

Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada is Cuba's Vice President and President of its National Assembly.

http://www.counterpunch.com/alarcon10052006.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The War Against Wages

by Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor

The New York Times (October 06 2006)


Should we be cheering over the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has finally set a new record? No. The Dow is doing well largely because American employers are waging a successful war against wages. Economic growth since early 2000, when the Dow reached its previous peak, hasn't been exceptional. But after-tax corporate profits have more than doubled, because workers' productivity is up, but their wages aren't - and because companies have dealt with rising health insurance premiums by denying insurance to ever more workers.

If you want to see how the war against wages is being fought, and what it's doing to working Americans and their families, consider the latest news from Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart already has a well-deserved reputation for paying low wages and offering few benefits to its employees; last year, an internal Wal-Mart memo conceded that 46 percent of its workers' children were either on Medicaid or lacked health insurance. Nonetheless, the memo expressed concern that wages and benefits were rising, in part "because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases".

The problem from the company's point of view, then, is that its workers are too loyal; it wants cheap labor that doesn't hang around too long, but not enough workers quit before acquiring the right to higher wages and benefits. Among the policy changes the memo suggested to deal with this problem was a shift to hiring more part-time workers, which "will lower Wal-Mart's health care enrollment".

And the strategy is being put into effect. "Investment analysts and store managers," reports The New York Times, "say Wal-Mart executives have told them the company wants to transform its work force to forty percent part-time from twenty percent". Another leaked Wal-Mart memo describes a plan to impose wage caps, so that long-term employees won't get raises. And the company is taking other steps to keep workers from staying too long: in some stores, according to workers, "managers have suddenly barred older employees with back or leg problems from sitting on stools".

It's a brutal strategy. Once upon a time a company that treated its workers this badly would have made itself a prime target for union organizers. But Wal-Mart doesn't have to worry about that, because it knows that these days the people who are supposed to enforce labor laws are on the side of the employers, not the workers.

Since 1935, US workers considering whether to join a union have been protected by the National Labor Relations Act, which bars employers from firing workers for engaging in union activities. For a long time the law was effective: workers were reasonably well protected against employer intimidation, and the union movement flourished.

In the 1970s, however, employers began a successful campaign to roll back unions. This campaign depended on routine violation of labor law: experts estimate that by 1980 employers were illegally firing at least one out of every twenty workers who voted for a union. But employers rarely faced serious consequences for their lawbreaking, thanks to America's political shift to the right. And now that the shift to the right has gone even further, political appointees are seeking to remove whatever protection for workers' rights that the labor relations law still provides.

The Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board, which is responsible for enforcing the law, has just declared that millions of workers who thought they had the right to join unions don't. You see, the act grants that right only to workers who aren't supervisors. And the board, ruling on a case involving nurses, has declared that millions of workers who occasionally give other workers instructions can now be considered supervisors.

As the dissent from the Democrats on the board makes clear, the majority bent over backward, violating the spirit of the law, to reduce workers' bargaining power.

So what's keeping paychecks down? Major employers like Wal-Mart have decided that their interests are best served by treating workers as a disposable commodity, paid as little as possible and encouraged to leave after a year or two. And these employers don't worry that angry workers will respond to their war on wages by forming unions, because they know that government officials, who are supposed to protect workers' rights, will do everything they can to come down on the side of the wage-cutters.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/opinion/06krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Americans Want It All,

... and Hang the Consequences

by Andrew Gumbel

Published by the Independent / UK (October 11 2006)


In the 1970s film Five Easy Pieces, Toni Basil plays a hippie who is hitch-hiking to Alaska (in Jack Nicholson's car) because it's the only place she can think of that is still clean. The rest of the US, she frets, is filling up with more and more "crap". "They got so many stores and stuff and junk full of crap, I can't believe it", she says. "Pretty soon, there won't be any room for man".

The film came out in 1971 and coincided almost exactly with the birth of the modern environmental movement, the launch of Earth Day, and the realisation that the limitless consumption of the capitalist-era American Dream simply could not go on forever. In the intervening years, the accumulation of rubbish has continued pretty much unabated - not helped by a population increase of almost 100 million people, and an orgy of environmental deregulation of industry. But so too has the level of anxiety about the consequences.

Today's counterparts to Toni Basil's character are still relatively marginal figures, if less eccentric in their obsessions. They also tend to be rich and successful - environmental consciousness now carries a high price tag.

Of course, they go to open-air farmer's markets to seek out pesticide-free organic fruit and vegetables supplied by small, family growers but they also pay a premium for it. They might drive energy-efficient, low-emission hybrid cars but they also pay more for their fancy petrol-electric engines than they are likely to recuperate in petrol savings over the lifetime of their car.

The same is true for many other aspects of environmental consciousness. Who uses washable cloth nappies rather than throwaway ones? Who has solar panels installed on their roof? Only those who can afford them.

The severely limited impulse to conserve is not only about economics. It is also deeply cultural. The United States is a place where the prevailing instinct is to want it all, no matter the consequences. Sure, there may be wars in the Middle East, Islamic militants on the march, smog in the air, pollutants in the water, hurricanes, floods and other tangible side-effects of global warming but that's not going to stop most people from hankering after a big car and a big house with state-of-the-art gadgets.

Cutting back is not cool or sexy. Given the choice between laboriously reviving old city centres with apartment renovations and corner shops, or ripping up cornfields to create suburban developments with huge houses and monster shopping malls, most Americans opt for the monster.

People certainly have mixed feelings. At the height of the Iraq war, it was not uncommon to see huge, gas-guzzling four-wheel-drives sporting "No Blood for Oil" stickers. Americans aren't happy about their obesity epidemic or their tendency to overspend in grocery stores or over-order in restaurants, even while they consume 200 billion calories a day more than they need and throw away around 200,000 tons of edible food each day.

But will anything ever change? Telling Americans to consume less doesn't work. Giving them environmentally smarter versions of the same things - more fuel-efficient cars, better insulated houses, less heavily packaged food - may be a more promising avenue. Until the government, however, gets serious about forcing manufacturers to produce these things, the age of the more rational American consumer will remain a distant prospect.

Copyright (c) 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views06/1011-27.htm


Comment by the person who sent this to me:

This is an excellent essay on the disastrous environmental consequences of the North American economic system (though he refers specifically only to the USA), but it is grossly misnamed. It is not Cubans who "want it all", it is not Venezuelans who "want it all", it is not Jamaicans, Guyanese, Paraguayans, Mexicans or Brazilians who "want it all"; it is only one American ethnic group, which is a minority (admittedly a large one) of the population of the American continent, that "wants it all": they are the North American people, that is, the English-speaking people north of Mexico: Canadians and US-Americans. To call North Americans "the Americans" is just as misleading as to call South Africans "the Africans". It is also Euro-centric, verging on racism: of all the peoples of America, only the North Americans are majority European-origin. The other main American ethnic groups - the Hispanics, the Brazilians and the English-speakers of the Carribean - are mostly Black, Amerindian or mixed.


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Water Boom Is Over

Global freshwater supplies could start to determine
whether or not we can feed ourselves

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 10 2006)


It looks dull, almost impenetrable in places. But if its findings are verified, it could turn out to be the most important scientific report published so far this year. In this month's edition of the Journal of Hydrometeorology is a paper written by scientists at the Met Office, which predicts future patterns of rainfall and evaporation {1}.

Those who dispute that climate change is taking place, such as Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, like to point out that the predicted effects of global warming rely on computer models, rather than "observable facts" {2}. That's the problem with the future - you can't observe it. But to have any hope of working out what might happen, you need a framework of understanding. It's either this or the uninformed guesswork that Philips seem to prefer.

The models can be tested by means of what climate scientists call backcasting - seeing whether or not they would have predicted changes which have already taken place. The global climate model used by the Met Office still needs to be refined. While it tracks past temperature changes pretty closely, it does not accurately backcast the drought patterns in every region. But it correctly reproduces the total global water trends over the past fifty years. When the same model is used to forecast the pattern over the 21st Century, it uncovers "a net overall global drying trend" if greenhouse gas emissions are moderate or high. "On a global basis, drought events are slightly more frequent and of much longer duration by the second half of the 21st century relative to the present day". {3} In these dry, stodgy phrases, we find an account of almost unimaginable future misery.

Many parts of the world, for reasons which have little to do with climate change, are already beginning to lose their water. In When the Rivers Run Dry, Fred Pearce, who is New Scientist's environment consultant, travels around the world trying to assess the state of our water resources {4}. He finds that we survive today as a result of borrowing from the future.

The great famines predicted for the 1970s were averted by new varieties of rice, wheat and maize, whose development is known as the "green revolution". They produce tremendous yields, but require plenty of water. This has been provided by irrigation, much of which uses undergound reserves. Unfortunately, many of them are being exploited much faster than they are being replenished. In India, for example, some 250 cubic kilometres (a cubic kilometre is a billion cubic metres or a trillion litres) are extracted for irrigation every year, of which about 150 are replaced by the rain. "200 million people [are] facing a waterless future. The groundwater boom is turning to bust and, for some, the green revolution is over."

In China, 100 million people live on crops grown with underground water that is not being refilled: water tables are falling fast all over the North China plain. Many more rely on the Huang He (the Yellow River), which already appears to be drying up as a result of abstraction and possibly climate change. Ninety percent of the crops in Pakistan are watered by irrigation from the Indus. Almost all the river's water is already diverted into the fields - it often fails now to reach the sea. The Ogallala aquifer which lies under the western and south western United States, and which has fed much of the world, has fallen by thirty metres in many places. It now produces half as much water as it did in the 1970s.

All this was known before the new paper was published. While climate scientists have been predicting for some time that the wet parts of the world are likely to become wetter and the dry parts drier, they had assumed that overall rainfall would rise, as higher temperatures increase evaporation. At the same time - and for the same reason - soils could become drier. It was unclear what the net effects would be. But the new paper's "drought index" covers both rainfall and evaporation: overall, the world becomes drier.

Even this account - of rising demand and falling supply - does not tell the whole grim story. Roughly half the world's population lives within sixty kilometres of the coast. Eight of the ten largest cities on earth have been built beside the sea. Many of them rely on underground lenses of fresh water, effectively floating, within the porous rocks, on salt water which has soaked into the land from the sea. As the fresh water is sucked out, the salt water rises and can start to contaminate the aquifer. This is already happening in hundreds of places. The worst case is the Gaza strip, which relies entirely on underground water which is now almost undrinkable. As the sea level rises as a result of climate change, salt pollution in coastal regions is likely to accelerate {5,6}.

As these two effects of climate change - global drying and rising salt pollution - run up against the growing demand for water, and as irrigation systems run dry or become contaminated, the possibility arises of a permanent global food deficit. Even with a net food surplus, 800 million people are malnourished. Nothing I could write would begin to describe what a world in deficit - carrying nine billion people - would look like.

There are four possible means of adapting to this crisis. One is to abandon regions that are drying up and shift production to the wettest parts of the world - the Amazon and Congo Basins, for example. But as these are generally the most forested places, this will lead to a great acceleration of climate change, and of the global drying it's likely to cause, as the carbon in the trees is turned to carbon dioxide. Another is to invest in desalination plants. But even the new desalination technologies produce expensive water, and they use a great deal of energy. Again this means more global warming.

Another is to shift water, on a massive scale, to the drying lands. But vast hydro-engineering projects have seldom succeeded in helping the poor. Giant dams and canals - like the Narmada system in India, the Three Gorges in China and Colonel Gaddafi's "Great Man-made River" - are constructed at stupendous cost. Then, when no further glory can be extracted by the government officials and companies who built them, the fiddly work of ensuring the water reaches the poor is forgotten, and all the money is wasted. As Fred Pearce shows, perhaps the best method, which in the past has kept cities alive even in the Negev desert, is the small-scale capture of rainwater in ponds and tanks {7}.

But to stand a high chance of averting this catastrophe, we must ensure that the drying doesn't happen. The predictions in the new paper refer to global warming in the middle or at the high end of the expected range. Beneath that point - two degrees Celsius of warming or so - a great global drying is less likely to occur. As the figures I've published show, to keep the temperature rise below this level requires a global cut in carbon emissions of sixty per cent by 2030 - which means a ninety per cent reduction in rich nations like the United Kingdom {8}. It sounds impossible. But then you consider the alternative.
_____

George Monbiot's book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published by Penguin.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. EJ Burke, SJ Brown, and N Christidis, October 2006. Modeling the Recent Evolution of Global Drought and Projections for the Twenty-First Century with the Hadley Centre Climate Model. Journal of Hydrometeorology vol 7, no 5, pages 1113-1125.

2. Eg Melanie Phillips, 12th January 2004. Global Warming Or Global Fraud? Daily Mail.

3. EJ Burke, SJ Brown, and N Christidis, ibid.

4. Fred Pearce, 2006. When the Rivers Run Dry. Eden Books, Transworld, London.

5. VEA Post, 2005. Fresh and Saline Groundwater Interaction in Coastal Aquifers: is our technology ready for the problems ahead? Hydrogeology Journal, vol 13, pages 120-123.

6. Gualbert H P Oude Essink, 2001. Improving fresh groundwater supply: problems and solutions. Ocean & Coastal Management vol 44, pages 429-449.

7. Fred Pearce, ibid.

8. George Monbiot, 2006. Heat: how to stop the planet burning. Penguin, London.


Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/10/the-water-boom-is-over/#more-1019


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Small is Useless

Micro generation can't solve climate change

by George Monbiot

Published in New Scientist (October 03 2006)


In seeking to work out how a ninety per cent cut in carbon emissions could be achieved in the rich nations by 2030, I have made many surprising findings. But none has shocked me as much as the discovery that renewable micro generation has been grossly overhyped. Those who maintain that our own homes can produce all the renewable electricity and heat they need have harmed the campaign to stop climate chaos, by sowing complacency and misdirecting our efforts.

Last year, the environmental architect Bill Dunster, who designed the famous BedZed zero-carbon development outside London, published a brochure claiming that "up to half of your annual electric needs can be met by a near silent micro wind turbine" {1}. The turbine he specified has a diametre of 1.75 metres. A few months later Building for a Future magazine, which supports renewable energy, published an analysis of micro wind machines. At four metres per second - a high average wind speed for most parts of the UK - a 1.75 metre turbine produces about five per cent of a household's annual electricity {2}. To provide the fifty per cent Bill Dunster advertises, you would need a machine four metres in diametre {3}. The lateral thrust it exerted would rip your house to bits.

Turbulence makes wind generators even less efficient. To avoid it, you must place them at least eleven metres above any obstacle within 100 metres {4}. On most houses, this means constructing a minor hazard to aircraft. The higher the pole, the more likely you are to inflict serious damage to your house. In almost all circumstances, micro wind turbines are a waste of time and money.

In his book Half Gone, Jeremy Leggett, the chief executive of Solar Century, claims that "even in the cloudy UK, more electricity than the nation currently uses could be generated by putting photovoltaic roof tiles on all suitable roofs". {5} This is a big claim, so you would expect it to come from a good source: a peer-reviewed journal, perhaps. Here is the reference Leggett gives: "'Solar Energy: brilliantly simple', BP pamphlet, available on UK petrol forecourts" {6}.

The Energy Technology Support Unit (now Future Energy Solutions) calculated that if solar electricity could somehow achieve an efficiency of twelve to fifteen per cent at all points of the compass, the "maximum practicable resource" in 2025 would be 266 terawatt hours per year {7}. Total electricity demand in the UK is currently 407 terawatt hours {8}. But Leggett's claim is far more misleading than this suggests.

The first reason is that solar panels facing north are less efficient than solar panels facing south. The second is that seeking to generate all our electricity by this means would be staggeringly and pointlessly expensive - there are far better ways of spending the same money. The International Energy Agency's MARKAL model gives a cost per tonne of carbon saved by solar electricity in 2020 of between GBP 2200 and GBP 3300. Onshore macro wind power, by contrast, varies between a saving of GBP 40 and a cost of GBP 130 a tonne {9}.

The third problem is that the supply of solar electricity is poorly matched to demand. In the UK, demand peaks on winter evenings. Even if we could produce 407 terawatt hours a year from solar panels on our roofs, only some of it could be used. There would be a surge of production in the summer, during the middle of the day, and very little in the winter. While solar panels might reasonably supply five to ten per cent of our electricity, the size and inefficiency of the energy storage and standby power system required makes a purely solar network impossible.

Similar constraints affect all micro renewables: a report by a team at Imperial College shows that if fifty per cent of our homes were fitted with solar water heaters, they would produce 0.056 exajoules of heat, or 2.3% of our total demand {10}; while AEA Technology suggests that domestic heat pumps could supply only 0.022 exajoules of the UK's current heat consumption, or under one per cent {11}. This doesn't mean they are not worth installing, just that they can't solve the problem by themselves.

Some campaigners accept that micro generators can make only a small contribution, but argue that they are still useful, as they wake people up to green issues. It seems more likely that these overhyped devices will have the opposite effect, as their owners discover how badly they have been ripped off and their neighbours are driven insane by the constant yawing and stalling of a windmill on a turbulent roof.

Far from shutting down the national grid, as the Green MEP Caroline Lucas has suggested {12}, we should be greatly expanding it, in order to produce electricity where renewable energy is most abundant. This means, above all, a massive investment in offshore windfarms. A recent government report suggests there is a potential offshore wind resource off the coast of England and Wales of 3,200 terawatt hours {13}. High voltage direct current cables, which lose much less electricity in transmission than an AC network, would allow us to make use of a larger area of the continental shelf than before. This means we can generate more electricity more reliably, avoid any visual impact from the land and keep out of the routes taken by migratory birds. Much bigger turbines would realise economies of scale hitherto unavailable.

The electricity system cannot be run on wind alone. But surely it's clear that building giant offshore windmills is a far better use of our time and money than putting mini-turbines in places where they will generate more anger than power.

_____

George Monbiot's book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published this week by Penguin.


References:

1. Bill Dunster Architects, 19th March 2005. Zedupgrade: an introduction to refurbishment systems for existing homes. http://www.zedfactory.com/ZEDupgrade_A4_Brochure.pdf

2. Derek Taylor, Winter 2005/6. Potential outputs from 1-2 metre diametre wind turbines. Building for a Future, special wind power feature. This is extracted from the graph, and describes output at an average annual windspeeds of four metres per second. The previous article in the same edition, by Nick Martin, explains that in built-up areas "Very few installations are likely to experience more than the equivalent of four metres per second average windspeed".

3. Nick Martin, Winter 2005/6. Can We Harvest Useful Wind Energy from the Roofs of Our Buildings? Table 2. Building for a Future, special wind power feature.

4. ibid.

5. Jeremy Leggett, 2005. Half Gone: oil, gas, hot air and the global energy crisis, page 201. Portobello Books.

6. ibid, note 253, p290.

7. Energy Technology Support Unit, 1999. New and renewable energy: prospects in the UK for the 21st century - supporting analysis, page 141. ETSU, Harwell.

8. Department of Trade and Industry, DUKES, Table 5.2. http://www.dtistats.net/energystats/dukes5_2.xls

9. Republished by Department of Trade and Industry, 2003. Energy White Paper - Supplementary Annexes, page 7. www.dti.gov.uk/energy/whitepaper/annexes.pdf

10. Jeremy Woods, Robert Gross and Matthew Leach, December 2003. Innovation in the renewable heat sector in the UK: Markets, opportunities and barriers. Centre for Energy Policy and Technology, Imperial College, London. http://www.dti.gov.uk/renewables/policy/iceptinnovationbarriers.pdf

11. Future Energy Solutions, AEA Technology, April 2005. Renewable Heat and Heat from
Combined Heat and Power Plants, page 39. http://www.defra.gov.uk/farm/acu/energy/fes-renewable-chp.pdf

12. Caroline Lucas, 4th August 2006. Let's shut down, not melt down. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/caroline_lucas/2006/08/real_energy_security_means_shu.html

13. Department of Trade and Industry, 2005a. Offshore Renewables - the Potential Resource. http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/leg_and_reg/consents/future_offshore/chp2.pdf

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/06/small-is-useless/

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)


www.kunstler.com


A Hard Place (October 02 2006)

I don't think it's accurate to call it a "war" anymore. It was one briefly back in 2003, and it may become a wider one again in the region. But for now the American situation in Iraq has degenerated into a dangerous, half-assed policing operation. We're not really fighting anyone, just getting in the way of factions fighting each other. A large part of our failure in this project has been our inability to get the electricity and water running properly. Any group of Americans might be equally pissed off and crazy after three years of that.

President Bush has done a bad job of articulating the strategic purpose of our presence there. It's certainly not about "freedom". It is in human nature to prefer simple order to some abstract notion of freedom, and the Iraqis had simple order under Saddam. Anyway, the kind of trashy freedoms that Americans enjoy - freedom to gamble in Las Vegas, freedom to buy pornography, freedom to enter into ruinous mortgage contracts - might not seem so appealing to people in an Islamic society.

The purpose of our Iraq project was to stabilize the Middle East by creating a successful buffer state between Iran and Pakistan to the east and the nations west of Iraq, especially Saudi Arabia. Why? To preserve the status quo in our oil deliveries from the region.

Ironically, this last item is the only thing that we have succeeded in - so far. And one of the reasons the Democratic opposition to Bush has been so unsuccessful is precisely because for all our failure over there, America has not yet experienced a cut-off of Middle East oil - while anti-war media stars on the Left like Al Franken and Harry Shearer still get to hop in their cars and drive wherever they like without a second thought.

The sentiment among the American public runs increasingly against our adventure in Iraq. But just as no politician has articulated our reason for being there, no one has expressed any coherent idea of what might happen if we had no military presence in the Middle East. I will try to outline a picture of this now.

Possession of the largest reserve of the world's crucial resource, oil, has no doubt driven the people of the Middle East crazy. It has fed the resurgence of a militant Islam that seeks to punish and antagonize the Judeo-Christian West (and, call it whatever else you will, the 9/11 attack was certainly an act of antagonism). It has also caused populations to swell far beyond the carrying capacity of the region, with predictable results. But with most of the Middle East nations now at or past peak oil production - including Iran and Saudi Arabia - we can expect only more dangerous behavior.

Whatever else might motivate Iran, control of the adjoining southern Iraq oil fields centered around Basra, and the oil facilities offshore in the Persian Gulf, must be high on the list. And a US withdrawal from Iraq would certainly lead to that outcome. Next on Iran's list is the wish to drive a Shiite wedge westward across Iraq to Saudi Arabia, which contains a large Shia population of its own, conveniently occupying the Persian Gulf coastal region where most of Saudi Arabia's oil comes from. The purpose of this "Shiite wedge" would be to bring down the ruling Al Saud family and replace it with an Islamic fundamentalist government. All of these moves are predicated on Iran assuming nominal leadership among the Islamic nations of the region. And all of it would bode ill for American oil supplies.

An American withdrawal from Iraq would leave US bases marooned in the landlocked backwaters of Asia - with outposts in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The purpose of these bases so far has been for staging operations from Afghanistan westward toward Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula. These bases happen to be next door to China, to the east. Would these tiny bases in Asia be used to stage operations against China in some future conflict? Good luck. They would last about five minutes.

Pakistan has been off the radar screen of the American media for years. It is arguably the most dangerous state in the region. It has a thousand recent years of Muslim experience on top of perhaps 100,000 previous years of other influences. The people of Pakistan are not ethnically Arabs or Persians, yet they are even more violently anti-western. Pakistan is overpopulated to the extreme. It has no oil but owns at least twenty nuclear bombs. Very little stands between the current government of General Pervez Musharraf and either complete chaos or an Islamic fundamentalist government. If Musharraf fell, would the US try to insert itself in a meltdown of Pakistan? Good luck on that one. For the moment, only fear of a nuclear exchange with its neighbor, India, stands to modify or influence Pakistan's behavior.

Let's say the US did withdraw from Iraq. This would leave us with bases in Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. These present a full frontal opposition to Iran, but would have meaning only if we went to war with that country. Such a war would probably leave the oil infrastructure of the Persian Gulf in utter ruin. Which is to say it would do nothing to advance America's strategic interest in maintaining the oil lifeline from the Middle East.

Sooner or later America will lose its ability to influence the people and events in the Middle East, and at the same time we will probably lose access to the oil of the region. Yes, oil is a "fungible" resource that finds its way through markets. But the markets themselves will be badly destabilized by the economics of post-peak production. Do not expect on-time delivery.

The US will withdraw back into the Western hemisphere. We have about 25 billion barrels of conventional crude left of our own. We currently use seven billion a year. Canada has been our largest source of oil imports. They will be left with little besides the tar sands of Alberta. Whatever else might be said of them, the tar sands will make for very expensive oil products. (Ditto the oil shale of the Rockies.) We will not be able to maintain our current living arrangements on these things, nor on coal liquefaction.

The Canadian producers have substantial contracts with China for the products of the tar sands. I have no doubt the US will invoke the Monroe Doctrine to cancel those contracts. Expect a pissed off China. The same goes for Venezuela. Anyway, that nation is way past its production peak and the oil it has left is low quality heavy crude. Mexico is on the verge of an especially steep oil production decline. The low-hanging fruit of the Western hemisphere is gone. Colombia and Ecuador are not going to save American Happy Motoring. Don't get too excited about Chevron's "Jack" discovery in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Even at its most fantastical extrapolation, it would represent about two years of US oil consumption, and it would be expensive to a laughable extreme.

The bottom line is that the only meaningful project for the US now is to turn its attention and remaining resources to the job of preparing for civilized life without oil. This is the topic that is absent from our political discourse on all sides and at all levels. The anti-war community is itself either lost in raptures of Bush-hatred or preoccupied with fantasies for running the interstate highways on used french-fry oil. We have to talk about things beyond just running our cars by other means.

We are a profoundly unserious nation, for all our pretensions.


Shit Unhappens (September 25 2006)

The story this coming week, I think, will be how much the collapse of the Amaranth hedge fund may end up infecting other "playas" in the big leagues of finance. Hedge funds being what they are - rackets using "leverage", or other people's promises to pay, to make bets on "spreads", or differentials in other people's bets on the price of things - there are a lot of other people out there who might get sucked through the event horizon of one big fund's black hole of bad betting.

So far - through the weekend of the 23rd and 24th - the banks and other manipulators of capital have been successfully quarantined from the Amaranth infection. Sunday night, as I write, the business desk reporters are waddling back to the fridge for a second bowl of Chunky Monkey. Many of them will go to sleep in a few hours thinking that the price of gasoline is headed down further and all is right with the world.

But the Amaranth fiasco has made about six (or is it eight?) billion of somebody's dollars disappear. Either those dollars have meaning, and those somebodies will suffer from the loss of them, and so will the people who the somebodies owe money to, or else the dollars will have had no meaning per se - they may not have been dollars so much as IOUs denominated in dollars, or loans of bundles of IOUs, or promises of future loans of bundles of IOUs - in which case their value as a medium of exchange will be perceived to be less than was previously assumed.

This is what comes of living in an economy of hallucinated finance instead of an economy of wealth-generating work. It all seems to add up until the old assumptions just don't add up, and then things break down.

This is the season when crashes like to happen. Perhaps it's something about the frost on the pumpkin, those premonitions of the dark and freezing nights ahead, that provoke hard-wired human brains to get real. When people get real and the basis of their currency looks more and more unreal, shit will happen. And unhappen.

Some commentators, such as Doug Noland, at Prudentbear.com, think that the liquidity game - of evermore loans based on other loans based on promises to pay based on IOUs - can keep this alternative universe of rackets going for a while longer. (At least that's what Doug said in an interview with Jim Puplava this weekend.)

Myself, I think something's gotta give. There are too many real things that are going wrong. A tapped out public with no savings. A glut of houses sinking the sprawl-meisters. Nobody buying cars. Balance of payments steadily worse. Overseas adventures failing ...

Despite temporary appearances, the energy predicament has not gone away. Worldwide oil production is on track to go down three percent in 2006. If it keeps on going that way, the 84.5 million available to the world now will shrink to something like fifty million in 2015. Ultimately that will determine the fate of our economy and the financial infrastructure that is supposed to serve it.

A world of increasing energy scarcity will be a world that generates fewer things of value, less "wealth". All the paper "instruments" that represent our hopes that society is bound to produce more wealth will be discredited. This is a fundamental fact of peak oil, and perhaps the most implacable reality. Not only will there be less wealth, and fewer paper certificates that can be construed to represent wealth, but promises to pay back loans of putatively existing wealth will lose their credibility too. The long chains of promises to pay back this debt and that loan will be broken, and all the paper associated with those promises.

If, however, America could find some way to harness the energy in the smoke it blows up its own ass every day, we would never face an energy crisis. Wouldn't that be the day?


A Wild Hair (September 18 2006)

To find any news on the cable news networks these days is getting as hard as finding a pay telephone in an airport. This weekend I went to MSNBC three separate times to see if anything was going on in the world, only to find Matt Lauer interviewing Deborah LeFavre, the blonde babe Florida schoolteacher who got down-and-funky with a fourteen-year-old student. ("He wanted it; I gave it to him".) I guess the network execs could not resist running the segment nearly around the clock. If they could show porn instead, perhaps they would be even happier. Elsewhere around the cable menu, CNN-Headline has passed the baton to geeks like Glen Beck and Nancy Grace, who offer the equivalent of biting the heads off chickens, CNBC ran a seemingly endless loop of cops-in-cars-chasing-lowlife around (pick it) Florida, Las Vegas, or Phoenix, while over at regular-CNN Larry King was discoursing with Sean Penn on world politics (in lieu of someone who actually works in government or foreign policy).

This is an interesting case of the diminishing returns of technology, the stealth disease that is corroding our economy and our culture. The concept is not as abstruse as it seems. It is related to Gresham's law of economics, which states that "bad money drives out good". If you have a society on a gold standard of circulating money, and you introduce silver as an acceptable medium of exchange, Gresham said, the gold will all disappear from circulation due to hoarding, until only silver is left in circulation. Likewise, there is a tendency with the layering of technologies to diminish the real value of whatever these technologies are applied to in our culture, like broadcast news - the more cable channels, the worse we are informed.

The most obvious example of the diminishing returns of technology is something that probably drives millions of Americans batshit every hour of the day - the inability to connect to a live human being on the telephone. This situation has come about precisely because of the investments made in computer upgrades of telephone systems since the 1980s. All over America, in companies, banks, colleges, doctors' offices, machines now answer the phone and the caller must submit to the absurdity of negotiating with a robot (usually a perky female robot). At best, these systems waste a quarter-hour of your time. At worst, I daresay a few poor souls have literally killed themselves over a failure to connect to some crucial person at a crucial moment. I don't know for sure, but my guess is if all these companies, offices, and institutions had just continued to pay salaries for a few receptionists each over the years, instead of investing an equivalent amount of money in the latest technology, we would be a much happier nation - and at least a couple of million people (probably women) would have decent jobs intelligently and swiftly routing caller's needs to the right person in their organization.

Getting back to the original matter of the television news, what was going on around the world this weekend was not very much of anything. The Pope was the latest in a long line of individuals who spoke their minds about something (in this case, the implacably violent ideology of Islam), and then tried to take it back when a few mullahs affected to be offended. But aside from the Pope acting like an Ivy League university president called on the carpet by vengeful correctniks, not much was actually happening in the world.

Which leads me to the real subject of this Monday blog, which is the question of oil prices. Cheerleaders for an obsolete reality, such as Michael Lynch and Forbes Magazine, are hailing the current drop from the mid $70-range to the low $60-range as an epochal tide-turning return to the salad days of cheap oil. (Lynch predicts it will go down to the $20s.)

Here are some of my current theories. For one thing, being at-or-near peak does not remove price volatility from the picture. It may, in fact, increase volatility as oil markets - like any large-scale complex system - are likely to be destabilized by the uncertainties of what peak will do to all the other big complex systems in our hyper-connected world.

What we've probably seen over the summer, with oil prices entering record territory, is large users laying in inventories in fear of even higher prices. Most of this fear premium revolved around the anticipation of another wild hurricane season, which so far failed to materialize. It was also pegged to the Israel-Hezbollah war, which further induced dread of a wider Middle East war, a showdown with Hezbollah's sponsor, Iran, and the threat of disruptions to oil exports out of the Persian Gulf.

Now, a matter of speculation circulating in the rumor-stream of the Internet is the idea that some large entity (that is, the US government) has managed to manipulate the oil markets in order to calm the voters down prior to the fall elections. Personally, as I have expressed countless times, I am allergic to conspiracy theories. Oil prices are not actually set by the oil companies or the exporting nations. Prices are set on the futures and spot markets, where major buyers of crude bid on either short-term or long-term contracts for the stuff, in order to run their enterprises in a rational, businesslike way. Earlier this summer they bid the prices up.

Some buyers may have simply dropped out as the price of oil exceeded their practical ability to pay - and by this I mean mainly the governments of Third World countries. This would represent significant demand destruction, but the pain incurred by people in Third World economies would likely occur off the "radar screen" of the US news media. (How many Americans, for instance, are up-to-speed on the horrific economic suffering in Zimbabwe?).

Don't look at China for demand destruction. Its oil consumption actually grew by fifteen percent this year.

If there is demand destruction in the US, it has not shown up yet in the overcooked and overspiced statistics emanating from the federal agencies - though the housing slump-or-crash-or-whatever is beginning to make an impression on economy-watchers. There is otherwise no evidence that fewer cars are clogging the Capital Beltway or the Santa Monica Freeway.

But here's one thing I wonder: what if the number one user of oil products in the US had laid in huge inventories of the stuff earlier in the year and has lately withdrawn from bidding in the futures and spot markets? I am speaking of the US Military. It would make sense, against the background of Iran rattling its nuclear capabilities, and the Israel / Hezbollah affair, that the US armed forces filled their tank farms to the max this summer and are now stepping back from bidding on any additional oil for the time being. This could be easily "managed" by the people who run this massive organization - namely, the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the rest of the civilian authorities based in the executive branch of the government. They don't have to consult with congress on their oil purchases.

I apologize for veering into conspiracy territory on this - and I don't have a shred of evidence that this is happening. It's just a thought, a caprice, a "wild hair", a theory. Surely there is some enterprising graduate student or trust fund nerd on the peak oil web sites who might investigate this dark notion. Has the US military gone on an oil-buying vacation as we head toward the elections?

http://www.kunstler.com/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Why US Leaders Intervene Everywhere

by Michael Parenti

Chapter 5 of The Terrorism Trap (City Lights, 2002)


Washington Policymakers claim that US intervention is motivated by a desire to fight terrorism, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace and stability in various regions, defend our national security, protect weaker nations from aggressors, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, and the like. But if US leaders have only the best intentions when they intervene in other lands, why has the United States become the most hated nation in the terrorist's pantheon of demons? And not only Muslim zealots but people from all walks of life around the world denounce the US government as the prime purveyor of violence and imperialist exploitation. {75} Do they see something that most Americans have not been allowed to see?


Supporting the Right

Since World War II, the US government has given some $240 billion in military aid to build up the military and internal security forces of more than eighty other nations. The purpose of this enormous effort has been not to defend these nations from invasion by foreign aggressors but to protect their various ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. That is what some of us have been arguing. But how can we determine that? By observing that (a) with few exceptions there is no evidence suggesting that these various regimes have ever been threatened by attack from neighboring countries; (b) just about all these "friendly" regimes have supported economic systems that are integrated into a global system of corporate domination, open to foreign penetration on terms that are singularly favorable to transnational investors; (c) there is a great deal of evidence that US-supported military and security forces and death squads in these various countries have been repeatedly used to destroy reformist movements, labor unions, peasant organizations, and popular insurgencies that advocate some kind of egalitarian redistributive politics forthemselves. {76}

For decades we were told that a huge US military establishment was necessary to contain an expansionist world Communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow (or sometimes Beijing). But after the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist nations in 1989-1991, Washington made no move to dismantle its costly and dangerous global military apparatus. All Cold War weapons programs continued in full force, with new ones being added all the time, including the outer-space National Missile Defense and other projects to militarize outer space. Immediately the White House and Pentagon began issuing jeremiads about a whole host of new enemies - for some unexplained reason previously overlooked - who menace the United States, including "dangerous rogue states" like Libya with its ragtag army of 50,000 and North Korea with its economy on the brink of collapse.

The real intentions of US national security state leaders can be revealed in part by noting whom they assist and whom they attack. US leaders have consistently supported rightist regimes and organizations and opposed leftist ones. The terms "Right" and "Left" are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators - and with good reason. To explicate the politico-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and usually democratic goals, making it much harder to demonize them. The "Left", as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that oppose the privileged interests of wealthy propertied classes, while advocating egalitarian redistributive policies and a common development beneficial to the general populace.

The Right too is involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction. Rightist governments and groups, including fascist ones, are dedicated to using the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of countries as so much fodder for the enrichment of the owning and investing classes. In almost every country including our own, rightist groups, parties, or governments pursue tax and spending programs, wage and investment practices, methods of police and military control, and deregulation and privatization policies that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what defines and distinguishes the Right from the Left.

In just about every instance, rightist forces are deemed by US opinion makers to be "friendly to the West", a coded term for "pro-capitalist". Conversely, leftist ones are labeled as "anti-democratic", "anti-American" and "anti-West", when actually what they are against is global capitalism.

While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious rightwing autocracies in history, governments that have tortured, killed or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), and Portugal (under Salazar).

Washington also assists counterrevolutionary groups that have perpetrated some of the most brutal bloodletting against civilian populations in leftist countries: Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, the contras in Nicaragua, the Khmer Rouge (during the 1980s) in Cambodia, the mujahideen and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the rightwing drug-dealing KLA terrorists in Kosovo. All this is a matter of public record although seldom if ever treated in the US media.

Washington's support has extended to the extreme rightist reaches of the political spectrum. Thus, after World War II US leaders and their Western capitalist allies did nothing to eradicate fascism from Europe, except for prosecuting some top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. In short time, former Nazis and their collaborators were back in the saddle in Germany. Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States and Latin America, either living in comfortable anonymity or employed by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War. {77}

In France, very few Vichy collaborators were purged. "No one of any rank was seriously punished for his or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps". {78} US military authorities also restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations. In South Korea, police trained by the fascist Japanese occupation force were used after the war to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army, some of whom had been guilty of horrid war crimes in the Philippines and China. {79}

In Italy, within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been valiantly fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed. Allied authorities initiated most of these measures. {80} In the three decades after the war, US government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy. From 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military and civilian intelligence agencies, along with various secret and highly placed neofascist groups embarked upon a campaign of terror and sabotage known as the "strategy of tension", involving a series of kidnappings, assassinations, and bombing massacres directed against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left. In 1995, a deeply implicated CIA, refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating this terrorist campaign. {81}

In the 1980s, scores of people were murdered in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe by rightwing terrorists in the service of state security agencies. As with the earlier "strategy of tension" in Italy, the attacks attempted to create enough popular fear and uncertainty to undermine the existing social democracies. The US corporate-owned media largely ignored these events.


Attacking the Left

We can grasp the real intentions of US leaders by looking at who they target for attack, specifically just about all leftist governments, movements, and popular insurgencies. The methods used include (a) financing, infiltrating, and coopting their military, and their internal security units and intelligence agencies, providing them with police-state technology including instruments of torture; (b) imposing crippling economic sanctions and IMF austerity programs; (c) bribing political leaders, military leaders, and other key players; (d) inciting retrograde ethnic separatists and supremacists within the country; (e) subverting their democratic and popular organizations; (f) rigging their elections; and (g) financing collaborationist political parties, labor unions, academic researchers, journalists, religious groups, nongovernmental organizations, and various media.

US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments - "guilty" of introducing egalitarian redistributive economic programs in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other nations - were overthrown by their respective military forces funded and advised by the US national security state. The intent behind Washington's policy is seen in what the US-sponsored military rulers do when they come to power. They roll back any reforms and open their countries all the wider to foreign corporate investors on terms completely favorable to the investors.

The US national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against reformist or revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, Egypt, Cambodia, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In many cases the attacks were terroristic in kind, directed at "soft targets" such as schools, farm cooperatives, health clinics, and whole villages. These wars of attrition extracted a grisly toll on human life and frequently forced the reformist or revolutionary government to discard its programs and submit to IMF dictates, after which the US-propelled terrorist attacks ceased.

Since World War II, US forces have invaded or launched aerial assaults against Vietnam, Laos, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and most recently Afghanistan - a record of direct military aggression unmatched by any communist government in history. US/NATO forces delivered round-the-clock terror bombings on Yugoslavia for two and a half months in 1999, targeting housing projects, private homes, hospitals, schools, state-owned factories, radio and television stations, government owned hotels, municipal power stations, water supply systems, and bridges, along with hundreds of other nonmilitary targets at great loss to civilian life. In some instances, neoimperialism has been replaced with an old-fashioned direct colonialist occupation, as in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia where US troops are stationed, and more recently in Afghanistan.

In 2000-2001, US leaders were involved in a counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrilla movements in Colombia. They also were preparing the public for moves against Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, is engaged in developing a popular movement and reforms that favor the poor. Stories appearing in the US press tell us that Chavez is emotionally unstable, autocratic, and bringing his country to ruin, the same kind of media hit pieces that demonized the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, Allende in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Qaddafi in Libya, Milosevic in Yugoslavia, and Aristide in Haiti, to name some of the countries that were subsequently attacked by US forces or surrogate mercenary units.

Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence, or apply some significant portion of their budgets to not-for-profit public services, are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of US intervention. The designated "enemy" can be (a) a populist military government as in Panama under Omar Torrijos (and even under Manuel Noriega), Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser, Peru under Juan Velasco, Portugal under the leftist military officers in the MFA, and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez; (b) a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; (c) a social democracy as in Chile under Salvador Allende, Jamaica under Michael Manley, Greece under Andreas Papandreou, Cyprus under Mihail Makarios, and the Dominican Republic under Juan Bosch; (d) an anti-colonialist reform government as in the Congo under Patrice Lumumba; (e) a Marxist-Leninist government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; (f) an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Omar Qaddafi; or even (g) a conservative militarist regime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein if it should attempt an independent course on oil quotas and national development.

The goal of US global policy is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, well-organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or medical plans or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profits.

While described as "anti-West" and "anti-American", just about all leftist governments - from Cuba to Vietnam to the late Soviet Union - have made friendly overtures and shown a willingness to establish normal diplomatic and economic relations with the United States. It was not their hostility toward the United States that caused conflict but Washington's intolerance of the alternative class systems they represented.

In the post-World War II era, US policymakers sent assistance to Third World nations, and put forth a Marshall plan, grudgingly accepting reforms that produced marginal benefits for the working classes of Western Europe and elsewhere. They did this because of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the strong showing of Communist parties in Western European countries. {82} But today there is no competing lure; hence, Third World peoples (and working populations everywhere) are given little consideration in the ongoing campaigns to rollback the politico-economic democratic gains won by working people in various countries.


After the Counter-Revolution

One can judge the intentions of policymakers by the policies they pursue in countries that have been successfully drawn back into the Western orbit. Consider Grenada. In 1983, US forces invaded the tiny and relatively defenseless sovereign nation of Grenada (population 110,000) in blatant violation of international law. The Reagan administration justified the assault by claiming it was a rescue operation on behalf of American students whose safety was being threatened at the Saint George medical school. The White House also asserted that the New jewel revolutionary government had allowed the island to become a Soviet-Cuban training camp, harboring a large contingent of Cuban troops and "deadly armaments" "to export terror and undermine democracy". It was further charged that the New Jewel government was planning to build a Soviet submarine base and Soviet military air base that would use Grenada to control crucial "choke points" along oil tanker lanes that came to the United States, thereby bringing us to our knees. {83} When these charges proved to be without foundation, {84} some critics concluded that White House policy toward Grenada therefore had been unduly alarmist and misguided. But the fact that officials offer alarmist and misleading rationales is no reason to conclude ipso facto that they are themselves misled. It may be that they have other motives which they prefer not to enunciate.

Under the Grenadian revolutionary government, free milk and other foodstuffs were being distributed to the needy, as were materials for home improvement. Grade school and secondary education were free for everyone for the first time. Free health clinics were opened in the countryside, thanks mostly to assistance rendered by Cuban doctors. Measures were taken in support of equal pay and legal status for women. Unused land was leased to establish farm cooperatives and turned agriculture away from cash-crop exports and more toward self-sufficient food production. {85}

The US invasion and. occupation put an end to almost all these programs. Under US hegemony, unemployment in Grenada reached new heights and poverty new depths. Domestic cooperatives were suppressed or starved out. Farm families were displaced to make way for golf courses, and the corporate controlled tourist industry boomed. Grenada was once more firmly bound to the privatized free-market world, once again safely Third Worldized.

The same process occurred after the US invaded Panama in December 1989, supposedly to bring Manuel Noriega, described as a drug-dealing dictator, to justice. With Noriega and his leftist military deposed and the US military firmly in control, conditions in Panama deteriorated sharply. Unemployment, already high because of the US embargo, climbed to 35 percent as drastic layoffs were imposed on the public sector. US occupation authorities eliminated pension rights and other work benefits, ended public sector subsidies, privatized public services, shut down publicly owned media, and jailed a number of Panamanian editors and reporters critical of the invasion. The US military arrested labor union leaders and removed some 150 local labor leaders from their elected positions within their unions. Crime, poverty, drug trafficking, and homelessness increased dramatically. {86} Free-market Third Worldization was firmly reinstated in Panama under the banner of "democracy".

The same reactionary pattern was discernible in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. For decades we were told by US leaders, media commentators, and academic policy experts that the Cold War was a struggle against an expansionist world communism, with nothing said about the expansionist interests of world capitalism. But immediately after communism was overthrown in the USSR in 1991, US leaders began intimating that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former "captive nations" - namely free markets. Getting rid of communism, it became clear, meant getting rid of public ownership of the means of production. Of what use was political democracy, they seemed to be saying, if it allowed the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? So the kind of polity seemed to weigh less than the kind of economy. The goal was, and continues to be, totally privatized economies that favor rich investor interests at the expense of the people in these countries.


When Words Speak Louder than Actions

It should not go unnoticed that US leaders occasionally do verbalize their dedication to making the world safe for the transnational corporate system. At such times words seem to speak louder than actions, for the words are an admission of the real intention behind the action. For example, as President Woodrow Wilson contemplated sending US troops as part of the expeditionary force of Western nations to overthrow the newly installed revolutionary socialist government in Russia in 1917, his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, recorded in a confidential memorandum the administration's class concerns. Lansing ignored all the blather that US leaders were publicly mouthing about Lenin and the Bolsheviks being German agents. Instead he perceived them to be revolutionary socialists who sought "to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth". The Bolsheviks wanted "to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country". Their appeal was to "a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than by individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order [that is, capitalism] in all countries." The danger was that it "may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors". {87} Almost four decades later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower uttered a forbidden truth in his State of the Union message: "A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for [private] investment in foreign nations". {88}

In 1982, the elder George Bush, then vice-president in the Reagan administration, announced, "We want to maintain a favorable climate for foreign investment in the Caribbean region, not merely to protect the existing US investment there, but to encourage new investment opportunities in stable, democratic, free-market oriented countries close to our shores". Not only close to our shores but everywhere else, as, General Gray, commandant of the US Marines, observed in 1990, saying that the United States must have "unimpeded access" to "established and developing economic markets throughout the world". {89}

President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: "Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world's community of market-based democracies". {90} And over the past decade US policymakers have repeatedly and explicitly demanded "free-market reforms" in one country after another in the former communist nations of Eastern Europe.

Far from being wedded to each other, as US leaders and opinion makers would have us believe, capitalism and democracy are often on a fatal collision course. US leaders find electoral democracy useful when it helps to destabilize one-party socialism and serves as a legitimating cloak for capitalist restoration. But when, it becomes a barrier to an untrammeled capitalism, democracy runs into trouble. This was demonstrated when the US national security state overthrew popular democratic governments in Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Greece in 1967, Indonesia in 1965, and a score of other countries.

The most recent example is Yugoslavia. Multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was once a regional industrial power and economic success, with a high annual growth rate, free medical care, a literacy rate over ninety percent, and a relatively equitable and prosperous economic life for its various peoples. While Yugoslavia was not, after the 1970s, a strictly socialist country, US policymakers knew that the economy was still 75 percent publicly owned and still had a large and egalitarian public service sector that was out of line with the push toward free-market Third Worldization.

As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued US National Security Decision Directive 133: "United States Policy towards Yugoslavia", labeled "secret sensitive". It followed closely the objectives laid out in an earlier directive aimed at Eastern Europe, one that called for a "quiet revolution" to overthrow Communist governments while "reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market" (that is, global capitalism). The economic "reforms" pressed upon Yugoslavia by the IMF and other foreign creditors mandated that all socially owned firms and all worker-managed production units be transformed into private capitalist enterprises. {91}

In February 1999, US officials at Rambouillet made their determined dedication to economic privatization perfectly clear. Chapter 4a, Article 1, of the Rambouillet "agreement", actually an ultimatum imposed upon what remained of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), stated in no uncertain terms: "The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles". There was to be no restriction on the movement of "goods, services, and capital to Kosovo", and all matters of trade, investment and corporate ownership were to be left to the private market. {92}

In 2000, the "Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe", called for "creating vibrant market economies" in the Balkans. It was hailed by the Clinton administration for offering "advice on investment" to all the countries of Southeast Europe. That same year, the Overseas Private . Investment Corporation (OPIC) inaugurated a fund to be managed by Soros Private Funds Management. Its purpose, as stated by the US embassy in Macedonia, is "to provide capital for new business development, expansion and privatization". {93} Meanwhile the Agency for International Development (USAID) announced its intention to undertake "assistance programs to support economic reform and restructuring the economy ... to advance Montenegro toward a free market economy". {94}

Along with the words came the actions. A decade of IMF restructuring, years of US-led, boycott, embargo, wars of secession, and weeks of massive bombing in 1999 left the Yugoslav economy in ruins. In April 2001, according to the London Financial Times, the newly installed "pro-West" rulers of Yugoslavia, beneficiaries of millions of dollars in US electoral funds, launched "a comprehensive privatization program as part of economic reforms introduced following the overthrow of former president Slobodan Milosevic". This included the sale of more than 7,000 publicly owned or worker controlled companies to private investors. {95}


"Conspiracy", "Incompetence", and "Inertia"

All of us are expected to make plans and intentionally pursue certain goals in life, and we recognize that throughout history other nations have defined objectives that they have carried through with resolve. But when one suggests that the US national security state operates with foreordained intent, mainstream social scientists and media pundits dismiss such a notion as "conspiracy theory". Policies that produce unfortunate effects on others are explained away as "unintended consequences". Of course, unintended consequences do arise, and upheavals do sometimes catch US leaders off guard, but there is no reason to reduce so much of policy outcome to stochasticism, to argue that things almost always occur by chance; stuff just happens, as innocently befuddled leaders grope about unburdened by any preconceived agenda.

To say, as I do, that US national security leaders know more, intend more, and do more than they let on is not to claim they are omnipotent or omnicompetent. It is to argue that US policy is not habitually misguided and bungling, although mistakes are made and indeterminancies certainly arise. Generally, US foreign policy is remarkably consistent and cohesive, a deadly success, given the interests it represents.

Sometimes the policymakers themselves seize upon incompetence as a cover. In 1986 it was discovered that the Reagan administration was running a covert operation to bypass Congress (and the law), using funds from secret arms sales to Iran to finance counterrevolutionary mercenaries (the "contras") in Nicaragua and probably GOP electoral campaigns at home. President Reagan admitted full knowledge of the arms sales, but claimed he had no idea what happened to the money. He was asking us to believe that these operations were being conducted by subordinates, including his very own National Security Advisor, without being cleared by him. Reagan publicly criticized himself for his slipshod managerial style and lack of administrative control over his staff. His admission of incompetence was eagerly embraced by various commentators who prefer to see their leaders as suffering from innocent ignorance rather than to see deliberate deception. Subsequent sworn testimony by his subordinates, however, revealed that Reagan was not as dumb as he was pretending to be, and that he had played a deciding role in the entire Iran-contra affair. {96}

Throughout its history, the CIA and other agencies of the national security state have resorted to every conceivable crime and machination, using false propaganda, sabotage, bribery, rigged elections, collusion with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, death squads, terror bombings, torture, massacres, and wars of attrition. At the same time, US leaders have pretended to have had nothing to do with such things. No less a political personage than Henry Kissinger repeatedly pretended to ignorance and incompetence when confronted with the dirty role he and his cohorts played in East Timor, Indochina, Chile, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. Kissinger's writings and speeches are heavily larded with exhortations about the importance of maintaining the efficacy of US policy and the need to impress the world with the mettle of US resolve. "Yet in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in political crimes, he rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional servants, suggesting that they know little, care less, are poorly informed and easily rattled by the pace of events". {97}

Sometimes outcomes are explained away as the result of a disembodied organizational inertia. Interventions are said to occur because a national security agency wants to prove its usefulness or is simply carried along on its own organizational momentum, as supposedly happened with the CIA and Pentagon intervention in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. To be sure, organizational modes of operation do come into play, but to see them as the predominant force behind policies is like claiming that the horses are the cause of the horse race.


The "Other Variables" Argument

US leaders may be motivated by all sorts of concerns such as advancing their nation's prestige, maintaining national security against potentially competing capitalist nations, developing strategic military superiority, distracting the American public from, domestic problems and scandals, advancing the heroic macho image of the president, and the like. But these purposes almost always dovetail with dominant capitalist interests, or certainly do not challenge those interests in any serious way. Thus, while a US president might be interested in promoting his macho image, he would never think of doing so by supporting the cause of socialist reformation in this or any other country.

That officeholders seek to achieve many other purposes, Ralph Miliband once noted, "should not obscure the fact that in the service of these purposes, they become the dedicated servants of their business and investing classes". {98} The point is not that nations act imperialistically for purely material motives but that in addition to other considerations, policymakers will not move against the system-sustaining material interests of the dominant corporate class.

In sum, when trying to understand the events of September 11 we need to remember that US politico-corporate elites have resorted to every conceivable subterfuge, coercion, and act of terrorist violence in their struggle to make the world safe for transnational corporate capital accumulation; to attain control of the markets, lands, natural resources, and cheap labor of all countries; and to prevent the emergence of revolutionary socialist, populist, or even nationalist regimes that challenge this arrangement by seeking to build alternative productive systems. The goal is to create a world populated by client states and compliant populations open to transnational corporate penetration on terms that are completely favorable to the penetrators. It is not too much to conclude that such a consistent and ruthless policy of global hegemony is produced not by dumb coincidence but by conscious design.


Notes

75 "Imperialism" is a term not normally applied by mainstream commentators and academics to anything that US leaders do. So perhaps it needs a definition: imperialism, as used here, is the process whereby the rulers of one country use economic and military power to expropriate the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of another country in order to attain ever greater capital accumulations on behalf of wealthy interests at home and abroad.

76 For evidence in support of this see Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995); Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality, 2nd edition (New York: Saint Martin's, 1993); William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (New York: Black Rose Books, 1998); and the writings of James Petras, Morris Morely, Edward Herman, and various others. For Petras's latest treatment of imperialism and capitalism, see his "Neo Mercantilist Empire in Latin America: Bush, ALCA and Plan Colombia" (unpublished monograph, 2001).

77 See Ingo Muller, Hitler's Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), part 3, "The Aftermath"; and Jon Wiener, "Bringing Nazi Sympathizers to the US", Nation, March 6 1989, 306-309. Nazi war criminals have been aided by Western intelligence agencies, business interests, the military, and even the Vatican. In October 1944, German paratroop commander Major Walter Reder, slaughtered 1,836 defenseless civilians in a village near Bologna, Italy as a reprisal against Italian partisan activities. He was released from prison in 1985, after Pope John Paul II, among others, made an appeal on his behalf-over the strenuous protests of families of the victims.

78 Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 290.

79 Hugh Deane, "Korea, China and the United Sates: A Look Back", Monthly Review, February 1995, 20 and 23.

80 Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), passim.

81 La Repubblica, April 9 1995; Corriere della Sera, March 27 and 28 1995, April 12 1995, and May 29 1995.

82 Peter Gowan, "The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy", New Left Review, March-April 1999, 103-104.

83 Network news reports, October 27 to November 4 1983; New York Times, November 6 to 20, 1983; John Judis, "Grenadian Documents Do Not Show What Reagan Claims", and Daniel Lazare, "Reagan's Seven Big Lies about Grenada", both in In These Times, November 6 1983.

84 See the discussion of Grenada in my Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, 2nd edition (New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1993 - now available through Wadsworth), 148-151.

85 "A Tottering Structure of Lies", Sojourner, December 1983, 4 5; and Michael Massing, "Grenada Before and After", Atlantic Monthly, February 1984, 79-80.

86 See "Special Report", Labor Action (publication of the Labor Coalition on Central America, Washington, DC), July/August 1990; Clarence Lusane, "Aftermath of the US Invasion", CovertAction Information Bulletin, Spring 1991, 61-63.

87 Quoted in William Appleman Williams, "American Intervention in Russia: 1917-1920", in David Horowitz (editor), Containment and Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 36, 38.

88 New York Times, February 3 1953.

89 Quoted in Richard Barnet, "The Uses of Force", New Yorker, April 29 1991, 90.

90 When the text of Clinton's speech was printed the next day in the New York Times, the sentence quoted above was omitted. Observers who heard the speech reported the disparity.

91 Sean Gervasi, "Germany, US and the Yugoslav Crisis", CovertAction Quarterly, winter 1992-93, 41-42. Michel Chossudovsky, "Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia", CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1996; and Chossudovsky's "Banking on the Balkans", THIS, July-August 1999.

92 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-government in Kosovo (the "Rambouillet Agreement"), February 23, 1999, reproduced in full in full in The Kosovo Dossier, 2nd edition (London: Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 1999).

93 Gregory Elich, "The CIAs Covert War", CovertAction Quarterly, April-June 2001, 35-36.

94 Elich, "The CIAs Covert War", 38-39.

95 Financial Times, April 11 2001; and a communication to me from Barry Lituchy, editor of Eastern European Review.

96 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scoti, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston: South End, 1988); Report of the Congressional Committee Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1987).

97 Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London & New York: Verso, 2001), 98-99.

98 Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 84 (italics in the original).

99 Lawrence Korb, "Perfect Time to Cut Military Spending", San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2001.



Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Speaking very gently about die-off

John's ongoing peak oil odyssey

by John Siman

Culture Change (September 30 2006)


I expect that just about everyone who knows more than a little bit about Global Peak Oil is familiar in one way or another with Richard Heinberg's book of three years ago, The Party's Over. And agrees with it. And admires it. I am now, however, and with the greatest respect for Heinberg's book, going to emphasize that the party's not over, not quite yet - that the party is in fact peaking - that Global Peak Oil is here, and it is the high tide of the ultimate consumerist blow-out. Ultimate does, of course, mean final, and after Peak the days of reckoning do of course ensue - apre`s ca, le deluge, totally - but here in the USA things are whizzing along faster than they ever have, and I'm whizzing right along with them.

So naturally enough, I began my Peak Oil Odyssey by driving around the USA, listening to white tribal music and visiting a variety of eco-villages and intentional communities (with an Earth First! Action thrown in for good measure), powered by overpriced vegan food and fossil fuels - all this in a Detroit-made Chevrolet. What better response to the imminent collapse of two and a half centuries of exponential economic growth in the First World than to go on an extended, energy-intensive vacation?

Certainly the story of the summer of 2006 was one of hiatus, of collapse postponed - of the party prolonged. Instead of rising past eighty dollars a barrel, oil almost fell under sixty. The war between Hezbollah and Israel did not spread into Syria or Iran, as many of us had feared back in July. Despite record high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, no category five hurricanes formed.

Furthermore, and in my own defense, let me point out that, even as I vacationed, I gave my car away to a friend whom I met on The Farm in Tennessee - at the Eco-Village Training Center there - and am right now, via Amtrak, on the Left Coast of the USA, visiting a variety of places where people seem to be working towards the sustainable and the permanent. These include the Regenerative Design Institute in Marin County, California and the Permaculture Army in Berkeley, where Bill Mollison's textbook on the topic is read as a sort of bible. Furthermore, as I write this, somewhere in rural Oregon, at the home of the author of the Oilempire.us and Permatopia.com websites, I note that Heinberg is himself on an extended working vacation right now, touring Australia with David Holmgren, the co-founder (with Mollison) of the Permaculture movement. And that Jim Kunstler has just returned from New Zealand, where he was speaking of how to deal with the Long Emergency.

So I can say that, even though I still can whiz around in comfort, I am on message, and the first half of the message is this: as Global Peak Oil and its fraternal twin, Global Climate Change, bear down upon us, austerity - a permanent austerity - is right around the corner. And the second half of the message therefore revolves around the fateful question of how we prepare ourselves, and it is only too easily answered with the intellect: we must live a hundred times more slowly, a hundred times more gently and simply. In the face of permanent austerity, we must find a graceful way to - let's use Heinberg's word - powerdown. For our only other option is catastrophe.

We as a society are, of course, not making any such preparations - just the opposite. And, more to the point, even those of us who hope for the possibility of a non-catastrophic powerdown are, by and large, lethargic. For what is easy for the intellect is not so easy for the person who claims to be its owner. Good, clear logic isn't really all that persuasive. It takes a harsh and sudden jolt of fear to set the body in motion, to ignite the bio-chemical spark plugs in our souls.

And so we come to the topic of die-off.

For when we study Global Peak Oil, we learn quickly that an unprecedented economic discontinuity - let's call it PetroCollapse - seems imminent as supplies of fossil fuels fall forever shorter and shorter of demand. And when we study Global Climate Change, we learn that an unprecedented environmental discontinuity - something hideously in accord with the vengeful justice of the Gaia Hypothesis - is now all but unavoidable as more and more ancient carbon is un-earthed, and burned, and re-deposited into the atmosphere. We study these discontinuities and learn of worst-case scenarios. We are confronted with the fact that die-off is a real possibility. We see that there is an abyss beneath our feet, an abyss of our own creation.

"Of all the generations of humans that have walked the surface of the Earth - for 100,000 years, going back when we first left Africa - the generation now alive is the most important", as the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku observes. "The generation now alive, the generation that you see, looking around you, for the first time in history, is the generation that controls the destiny of the planet itself".

But are we really the generation of destiny? Can we really control the planet's future - or anything much at all? Can our consciousness of our predicament grow and cause us to evolve? Or is our consciousness merely a tantalizing epiphenomenon? Are we, to quote a rhetorical question posed by the world-weary members of a Peak Oil group who meet in the hypertrophied suburbs of Washington, DC, smarter than yeast?

For like yeast contained in a vat and energized by huge quantities of fermenting sugars, the human population, contained on this one planet and engorged by huge quantities of smoking fossil fuels, has grown exponentially. We have exceeded the carrying capacity of our container and have begun to suffocate ourselves as we wallow in our own waste. We are therefore, like yeast in a vat, about to undergo the very natural process of ecological die-off.

But unlike yeast in a vat, some of us can see the abyss of our own creation.

And we who can see it have the moral obligation to warn everyone we meet. Warn them that they are headed for die-off. Frighten them.

But frighten them gently. Even with a bit of humor. For too much fear can bring despair, and with it paralysis. Too much fear can turn activists into victims and idealists into defeatists. Talking about die-off is justifiable only to the extent that it motivates us to undertake the building of more permanent societies.

And so the party's not over, but it soon will be - forever. We can start to plan for a different sort of party though - a party which will not be fueled by a global trade in oil, a party at which you will not be able to eat genetically-modified fast food or even long-distance certified-organic tofu, a party which you won't be able to drive to. You'll have to walk. Or ride your bicycle. Or your horse. Because if there's going to be a party in the future, it will be a sustainable party.

Here's a haiku for you to share when you go:

Dew sparkles on grass
Morning light brings magic here
Oh shit, there's die-off.

_____

John Siman can be reached at emai address jsiman@ntelos.net

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=73&Itemid=2#cont


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Invisible Corporate Shadow

by David Cromwell

ZNet Commentary (October 06 2006)


The Australian social scientist Alex Carey summed up the evolution of political power in the last century as follows:

"The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." {1}

The power of the state has also grown, a major factor in facilitating the rise of corporate dominance. As we have noted before in our media alerts, the projection of the West's military might around the globe is undertaken for profit and control. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it bluntly:

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." {2}

Little wonder that America's leading social philosopher, John Dewey, described politics as "the shadow cast on society by big business".

In their documentary, The Corporation, Canadian film-makers Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan note that corporations are legally and structurally bound to pursue profits at any cost:

"Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath." {3}

A new report by the Oxford-based Corporate Watch casts a critical eye on the corporation as an entity with powerful and malign impacts on society. Activist Claire Fauset rightly describes the propaganda tool of "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) as:

"an effective strategy for: bolstering a company's public image; avoiding regulation; gaining legitimacy and access to markets and decision makers; and shifting the ground towards privatisation of public functions. CSR enables business to propose ineffective, voluntary, market-based solutions to social and environmental crises under guise of being responsible. This deflects blame for problems caused by corporate operations away from the company, and protects companies' interests while hampering efforts to tackle the root causes of social and environmental injustice." {4}

The notion of "corporate social responsibility" - endlessly promoted by big business, news media and even green groups - is a dangerous myth. But there are plenty of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which are actively involved in partnerships with corporations. One recent example is the Aldersgate group, which has coalesced around the issue of climate. Amazingly, the group sees the Green Alliance and even Friends of the Earth sitting cosily alongside business giants Tesco, Shell, Vodafone, Unilever and BAA. {5}

Corporate Watch asks: "Why are NGOs getting involved in these partnerships?" One important factor is "follow the leader":

"For many NGOs, the debate on whether or not to engage with companies is already over. The attitude is 'all the major NGOs engage with companies so why shouldn't we?' While in many organisations internal debate continues, there is a sense that, right or wrong, engagement is the current tack so there is little point in questioning it". {6}

Sadly, NGOs rarely address the fundamentally destructive nature of corporations. In January 2002, we wrote to Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK. We recognised Greenpeace's excellent campaigning and research but suggested there was a gaping hole at the heart of its work:

"... let us see Greenpeace (and other pressure groups) doing more to oppose, not so much what corporations +do+, but what they +are+; namely, undemocratic centralised institutions wielding illegitimate power". {7}

Missing the point, Tindale replied:

"We will continue to confront corporations where necessary - as in our current campaign to force ExxonMobil to change its stance on climate change. Since we have taken on the most profitable corporation in the world we cannot be accused of ducking conflict with corporations. But we are an environmental group, not an anti-corporate group. We will therefore work with companies when we can do so to promote our campaign goals. But we will do so on the basis of complete financial independence." {8}

But we weren't asking Greenpeace about its financial independence from corporations or whether it was willing to "confront" them. The reality is that Greenpeace and other NGOs largely accept the ideological premise that corporations can be persuaded to act benignly. To question that premise - never mind to point out the illegitimate power and inherent destructive nature of the corporation - is anathema for most pressure groups.


A Classic Liberal Herring: 'Good People Work For Corporations, Too'

We have already seen that major environmental and social justice groups, and even the Green Party, almost wholly overlook the corporate nature of the news media {9}. Such groups appear unmoved by rational analysis, backed by evidence aplenty, indicating that corporate media filter out any serious challenges that such groups might ever make. Once again, the corporation - as an entity with immense undemocratic power, whether in the media industry or elsewhere in the global economy - is simply accepted as an immutable fact of the universe.

Likewise, mainstream journalists do sometimes raise questions about corporate behaviour but only within the constraints set, for example, by the media's huge dependence on corporate advertising revenue {10}. Bad corporate practice might be fair game, but not the psychopathic nature of the corporation. This blindness afflicts even those journalists we are supposed to regard as champions in the fight for climate protection: the environment editors.

On September 4 we emailed John Vidal, veteran environment editor at the Guardian:

"Earlier this year, one of our readers challenged you about your article 'Big water companies quit poor countries' (The Guardian, March 22 2006). You were asked:

"Why do you assert as fact that the multinationals 'intended to end the cycle of drought and death'. They exist to maximize profits, not public health." {11}

"In your email response you wrote:

"'... do not underestimate the essential humanity of the people who work for them [the corporations]. I'm always amazed at how within the body corporate, there are people at all levels, who do feel and act responsibly with the best of intentiosn [sic]. I have had long, long talks with several water companies at all levels and some are clearly better/worse than others. Equally, there are some small (water) companies who are rigfhty [sic] bastards and will sell their grandmothers. Size seems to have nothing to do with morality etc '" {12}

We suggested to Vidal that was a classic example of what we've called a "liberal herring" (that is, a red herring deployed by journalists in the liberal media); it misses the structural determinism of the corporate system.

Canadian law professor Joel Bakan explains that the entity known as a "corporation" was legally transformed into a "person", possessing its "own identity, separate from the flesh and blood people who were its owners and managers". If one examines corporate behaviour, as Bakan did, it clearly matches the clinical definition of a psychopath.

As Noam Chomsky said in an interview:

"When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. But the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine - benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves, caring about other people. I mean as individuals they may be anything. In their institutional role, they're monsters, because the institution's monstrous. And the same is true here." {13}

Using the Lexis-Nexis database, we have conducted an extensive newspaper search of John Vidal's articles in the Guardian since 2003. To date, he has never mentioned Joel Bakan, his 2004 book The Corporation {14} (or the 2003 film of the same name), or seriously addressed the evidence that "corporate social responsibility" is an oxymoron and that corporate behaviour is essentially psychopathic. We asked Vidal:

"What reason(s) do you have for not addressing such important arguments in your journalism? Surely these are crucial points in reporting the potentially terminal fate that faces us in this age of climate chaos?" {15}

We have received no response.

We sent a similar email to the Guardian's economics editor, Larry Elliott. We welcomed one of his articles which had been about Sir David King, chief government scientist, sounding the "death knell" for "economic growth". Elliott had written:

"The argument that business would not be able to cope with curbs on greenhouse gases is a fallacy; the longevity of capitalism is due almost entirely to its ability to adapt to any regime. What business lacks now is a clear steer; it has the expertise." {16}

We challenged Elliott:

"This suggests that corporations, indeed global capitalism, will be part of the solution to the climate crisis. Can you point to any of your articles that question this ideological framework?"

In an earlier article, Elliott had written:

"Corporate social responsibility is an optional extra in many cases, seen as desirable until it affects the bottom line". {17}

The Guardian's economics editor sees "corporate social responsibility", at worst, as an "optional extra", rather than as an insidious falsehood.

A newspaper database search indicates that Elliott has never mentioned Joel Bakan, The Corporation, or exposed "corporate social responsibility" as propaganda. Nor has he reported that corporate behaviour is essentially psychopathic, and that this may well have terminal consequences for humanity and millions of other species on this planet.

We asked Elliott:

"What reason(s) do you have for not addressing such important arguments in your journalism?" {18}

Again, we received no response.

The pattern at other papers is similar, notwithstanding some glimpses of scepticism here and there - such as in the Independent on Sunday, courtesy of Abigail Townsend. In an article on "CSR" earlier this year, Townsend wrote:

"All companies want a bigger market share and bigger profits, it's what they do - and they will push the limits of what's acceptable to achieve it. And therein lies the problem whenever companies start talking about corporate social responsibility: there's too big a whiff of empty spin about it." {19}

This scepticism is welcome. But, again, an endemic problem is no more than a "whiff of empty spin" to the nose of yet another corporate newshound.

In a recent article focusing on BP's ongoing problems, Townsend again showed the limits of acceptable analysis in the mainstream:

"People want environmentally aware, socially responsible companies ... So business adapts - or at least it almost does ... Politicians are the only ones who can bring about change. And when the G8 leaders can't even ensure that their own carbon-offsetting scheme gets off the ground, it doesn't bode well for the rest of us. So, spin or not, companies are to be applauded for at least moving in the right direction." {20}

And once again, a newspaper database search indicates that Townsend has never mentioned Joel Bakan, the book or film The Corporation, or dismissed "corporate social responsibility" as a lethal falsehood (not merely "spin"), or addressed the argument that corporate behaviour is psychopathic. The same applies to the journalism of Jeremy Warner, business editor at The Independent. Our email to Warner on September 4 has also not been answered.

Outside of a tiny handful of television listings, film and book reviews, mention of the inherently destructive and illegitimate system of corporate power has been entirely overlooked by the corporate press in the UK. This should surprise nobody who values rational analysis. But once again, the costs of such media silence are enormous.


Notes

{1} Taking the Risk Out of Democracy (University of Illinois Press, 1995), page ix

{2} Quoted from John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (Verso, 2001), page 114)

{3} http://www.thecorporation.tv

{4} Quoted from Corporate Watch, 'What's Wrong with Corporate Social Responsibility?', page 2, 2006 http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=2670

{5} Larry Elliott, "Blue chips see the green light", The Guardian (June 12 2006)

{6} Corporate Watch, op cit, page 23

{7} Email from David Cromwell (January 17 2002)

{8} Email to David Cromwell (January 28 2002

{9} See 'Silence is Green' (February 03 2005) http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050203_silence_is_green.php

{10} See 'Beyond Propaganda' (September 05 2006) http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060905_beyond_propaganda.php

{11} Email forwarded to Media Lens (March 22 2006)

{12} John Vidal, replying to a Media Lens reader (March 22 2006)

{13} Noam Chomsky interviewed in Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, The Corporation http://www.thecorporation.tv

{14} The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004)

{15} Email from David Cromwell (September 04 2006)

{16} Elliott, 'Winds of climate change are about to make their impact felt in many a boardroom: Top science adviser sounds death knell for theory that insists growth is good', The Guardian (February 06 2006)

{17} Elliott, 'Analyse this: corporate culture is in a midlife crisis', The Guardian (March 31 2003)

{18} Email (September 07 2006)

{19} Townsend, 'So companies should be nicer', Independent on Sunday (June 18 2006)

{20} Townsend, 'Rust in the pipes is corroding BP's shiny reputation', Independent on Sunday (August 13 2006)

_____

David Cromwell is co-author with David Edwards of Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media (Pluto Books, 2006). For further details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here: http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-10/04cromwell.cfm

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Planet Earth ... but not as we know it

by Mark Lynas

New Statesman (October 09 2006)


You may find it hard to believe, but most environmentalists are optimists. Their doom-monger image is actually the opposite of the truth: their most consistent message is not that we are doomed, but that we have the time and the technology to avoid the worst calamities, if we act now. This insistence on human agency irritates true doom-mongers, such as John Gray, who, reviewing George Monbiot's new book Heat (New Statesman, 18 September), complained: "The assumption that we can stop [global warming] becomes less scientifically tenable by the day, and is in fact not much more than a green version of anthropocentrism". In this, Gray was echoing James Lovelock, who told the New York Times of 12 September that solar panels and wind turbines are "largely gestures", but "no answer at all to the problem" of global warming, which is already essentially out of control.

To environmentalists, this is little short of heresy. But what if Lovelock is right? What if the global warming "tipping point" has already been passed, and escalating "positive feedbacks" indicate that accelerating climate damage is now inevitable? The current scientific consensus suggests that, because of the great thermal inertia of the planetary system, roughly another degree of further warming is already in the pipeline, whatever we do with emissions.

However, no scientific computer modelling study has suggested that irreversible positive feedbacks are already in operation; nor will the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make such a suggestion. Lovelock's bleaker analysis stems more from a gut feeling than from verifiable data.

Yet this does not mean he should be ignored: Lovelock's Gaia theory - now accepted as the basis for earth system science - was also initially rejected because it differed sharply from the drift of mainstream science. Lovelock's strength is that he eschews reductionism: by analogy, he is a General Practitioner , checking the health of the patient as an entire organism, while most scientists are experts solely in the heart, or lungs or brain.

This is slightly unfair to climate science - the best computer models now integrate almost every aspect of the earth system. Yet I share with Lovelock the suspicion that, far from overemphasising the earth's plight, these models are too conservative. This is not through any unique scientific insight, but because the news coming in suggests that our climate is changing faster than any model simulation yet designed.

Moreover, it is important to remember that there is no single "tipping point" after which it will be too late to save the planet. Rather, there are multiple tipping points for different aspects of the earth system. The biggest Antarctic ice sheets, for example, are stable, and it would take dramatic worldwide warming to melt them. But, for the more fragile Arctic, I suspect the critical threshold has indeed been crossed.

On 14 September Nasa reported that perennial Arctic sea ice had declined by fourteen per cent in a single season between 2004 and 2005: astonishing, and a finding which suggests a flip to an ice-free North Pole is already under way. This will mean open water at the pole within a decade or two, wiping out polar bears and drastically altering northern-hemisphere weather patterns decades sooner than modellers have projected. Because white ice is much more reflective than blue sea, the ice cap also acts as a giant solar mirror. Once it has melted, the planet will absorb more of the sun's heat, giving a boost to global warming.

Recent news of thawing Siberian permafrost is also alarming. On 7 September, researchers reported that five times more methane was leaking from melt-water ponds than had been supposed. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Greenland, too, may have crossed an important line: a Nasa study shows that ice loss from the island has doubled since 2004.

None of these findings, however, tells me to stop campaigning for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if the cliff is closer than we thought, it still makes sense to take our collective foot off the accelerator. True, if we're already over the cliff, it may not make much difference - but even just slowing the rate of warming might give wildlife and human civilisation valuable time to adapt, reducing the extent of the mass extinction that is taking place. Yet the fact has to be faced: temperatures are within a degree of their highest levels in a million years, and a new geological era has begun. Whatever we do, a new planet is coming into existence, a planet different from the one we thought we inhabited.

Copyright (c) New Statesman 1913 - 2006

http://www.newstatesman.com/200610090022


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

As Crazy As It Sounds

by Charley Reese

King Features Syndicate (September 27 2006)


As crazy as it sounds, President George Bush might be planning to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.

There are two currents of speculation flowing through Washington these days. One current says that the Bush administration is planning the bombing campaign, but only as a bluff to force the Iranians to negotiate. The other current says that the Bush administration actually plans to launch the attack.

Unfortunately, I think the latter is the accurate one. So far, the Bush administration has eerily followed the exact same pattern it used to justify the attack against Iraq. Bush keeps insisting, without a shred of evidence, that Iran, despite its denials, is seeking nuclear weapons. Remember how he kept insisting that Iraq had huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?

Secondly, he has set up the diplomatic efforts to fail. By demanding that Iran suspend its uranium-enrichment program as a precondition for talks, he guarantees, of course, that Iran will reject that offer. It's like a wife telling her husband, "Sign over the house, the car and half your income, and then we'll talk about a divorce settlement".

Thirdly, Bush knows Russia and China will veto any UN effort to impose sanctions. Therefore, one night he will go on national television and say we tried diplomacy and that failed, we tried the UN and that failed, so I'm ordering American forces to take out Iran's nuclear-weapons facilities.

The scariest part of this scenario is that Bush and his war hawks seem to believe that the Iranian people will blame their own government for the American attack, overthrow it and install a new government that will be eager to jump into bed with the US and Israel. That's really nuts.

It's the old "They will greet us with flowers and sweets and dancing in the streets" routine. You would think that 2,600 dead Americans and 20,000 wounded in Iraq would have convinced even the most ideologically blinded that you can't win hearts and minds by bombing bodies to bits. The Iranian people will do what human beings always do rally around their government and prepare to fight the foreign invader. It will end all hope of a democratic reform movement.

There is no question that we have the air power to substantially damage Iran's nuclear facilities, even though they are dispersed and some are underground. Iran doesn't have much of an air force, and I doubt its air-defense system would last more than a day. We will kill a lot of civilians in the process.

What would be the consequences? I don't know exactly, but I believe they would be very bad for us. According to polls, most of the world already thinks we're a greater threat to world peace than either Iran or North Korea. I think it would reduce our influence in Europe and in other parts of the world to zero.

The price of oil would certainly hit $100 or more a barrel, and that would have a devastating impact on the world economy.

Iran would retaliate as best it can. It would launch its missiles at US forces in the region, and probably at Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel. How effective they would be remains to be seen. Ernie Hemingway once quipped that the outcome of war is always uncertain unless, of course, you've decided to go to war against Romania. Iran might attack the oil facilities in the Arab countries or try to sink a tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. Shiites in Iraq might attack US forces.

Pakistan might break relations with us or see its government overthrown. I imagine the Muslim world would see an attack on Iran as "the last straw". Syria might figure it was next and launch against Israel. Ditto North Korea. If you were on Bush's "axis of evil" list and you'd seen two countries also on the list pre-emptively attacked, what would you think?

The irony of it all is that despite the smear talk of Hitlers in the Middle East, the leader whose thinking process most resembles Hitler's is our own president. Like Hitler, Bush's ideological beliefs have blinded him to reality, and like Hitler, he seems impervious to advice that conflicts with his beliefs. There the resemblance ends, of course, but it is bad enough. Hitler learned that he couldn't win a two-front war, and Bush will learn that he can't democratize the Middle East with bombs and bullets.

Copyright (c) 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20060927/index.php


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Why Bush Will Nuke Iran

by Paul Craig Roberts

Information Clearing House (September 26 2006)


The neoconservative Bush administration will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of US (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.

The US has lost the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Generals in both war theaters are stating their need for more troops. But there are no troops to send.

Bush has tried to pawn Afghanistan off on NATO, but Europe does not see any point in sacrificing its blood and money for the sake of American hegemony. The NATO troops in Afghanistan are experiencing substantial casualties from a revived Taliban, and European governments are not enthralled over providing cannon fodder for US hegemony.

The "coalition of the willing" has evaporated. Indeed, it never existed. Bush's "coalition" was assembled with bribes, threats, and intimidation. Pervez Musharraf, the American puppet ruler of Pakistan, let the cat out of the bag when he told CBS "60 Minutes" on September 24 2006, that Pakistan had no choice about joining the "coalition". Brute coercion was applied. Musharraf said Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the Pakistani intelligence director that "you are with us" or "be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age." Armitage is trying to deny his threat, but Dawn Wire Service, reporting from Islamabad on September 16 2001, on the pressure Bush was putting on Musharraf to facilitate the US attack on Afghanistan, states: "'Pakistan has the option to live in the 21st century or the Stone Age' is roughly how US officials are putting their case".

That Musharraf would volunteer this information on American television is a good indication that Bush has lost the war. Musharraf can no longer withstand the anger he has created against himself by helping the US slaughter his fellow Muslims in Bush's attempt to exercise US hegemony over the Muslim world. Bush cannot protect Musharraf from the wrath of Pakistanis, and so Musharraf has explained himself as having cooperated with Bush in order to prevent the US destruction of Pakistan: "One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that's what I did". Nevertheless, he said, he refused Bush's "ludicrous" demand that he arrest Pakistanis who publicly demonstrated against the US: "If somebody's expressing views, we cannot curb the expression of views".

Bush's defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel's defeat by Hezbollah in Lebanon have shown that the military firepower of the US and Israeli armies, though effective against massed Arab armies, cannot defeat guerillas and insurgencies. The US has battled in Iraq longer than it fought against Nazi Germany, and the situation in Iraq is out of control. The Taliban have regained half of Afghanistan. The King of Saudi Arabia has told Bush that the ground is shaking under his feet as unrest over the American/Israeli violence against Muslims builds to dangerous levels. Our Egyptian puppet sits atop 100 million Muslims who do not think that Egypt should be a lackey of US hegemony. The King of Jordan understands that Israeli policy is to drive every Palestinian into Jordan.

Bush is incapable of recognizing his mistake. He can only escalate. Plans have long been made to attack Iran. The problem is that Iran can respond in effective ways to a conventional attack. Moreover, an American attack on another Muslim country could result in turmoil and rebellion throughout the Middle East. This is why the neocons have changed US war doctrine to permit a nuclear strike on Iran.

Neocons believe that a nuclear attack on Iran would have intimidating force throughout the Middle East and beyond. Iran would not dare retaliate, neocons believe, against US ships, US troops in Iraq, or use their missiles against oil facilities in the Middle East.

Neocons have also concluded that a US nuclear strike on Iran would show the entire Muslim world that it is useless to resist America's will. Neocons say that even the most fanatical terrorists would realize the hopelessness of resisting US hegemony. The vast multitude of Muslims would realize that they have no recourse but to accept their fate.

Revised US war doctrine concludes that tactical or low-yield nuclear weapons cause relatively little "collateral damage" or civilian deaths, while achieving a powerful intimidating effect on the enemy. The "fear factor" disheartens the enemy and shortens the conflict.

University of California Professor Jorge Hirsch, an authority on nuclear doctrine, believes that an American nuclear attack on Iran will destroy the Non-Proliferation Treaty and send countries in pellmell pursuit of nuclear weapons. We will see powerful nuclear alliances, such as Russia/China, form against us. Japan could be so traumatized by an American nuclear attack on Iran that it would mean the end of Japan's sycophantic relationship to the US.

There can be little doubt that the aggressive US use of nukes in pursuit of hegemony would make America a pariah country, despised and distrusted by every other country. Neocons believe that diplomacy is feeble and useless, but that the unapologetic use of force brings forth cooperation in order to avoid destruction.

Neoconservatives say that America is the new Rome, only more powerful than Rome. Neoconservatives genuinely believe that no one can withstand the might of the United States and that America can rule by force alone.

Hirsch believes that the US military's opposition to the use of nuclear weapons against Iran has been overcome by the civilian neocon authorities in the Bush administration. Desperate to retrieve their drive toward hegemony from defeat in Iraq, the neocons are betting on the immense attraction to the American public of force plus success. It is possible that Bush will be blocked by Europe, Russia and China, but there is no visible American opposition to Bush legitimizing the use of nuclear weapons in behest of US hegemony.

It is astounding that such dangerous fanatics have control of the US government and have no organized opposition in American politics.

_____

In accordance with Title 17 USC Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15118.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Profiteering

by Mark Fiore

http://www.markfiore.com/animation/profiteer.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Lionhearts

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine (September 2006)

In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. - Rainer Werner Fassbinder


Although the reports from Baghdad this summer might seem to suggest that all is not well with Operation Iraqi Freedom - the city a blood-smeared ruin, the American Army hiding in holes - the impression is misleading. Understand the war on terror as free-market capitalist enterprise rather than as some sort of public or government service, and in the nightly newscasts we see before us victory, not defeat.

As is usual and to be expected, the witless liberal media get the story wrong, mistaking innovative business practice for waste and fraud, grotesquely characterizing superior sales technique as a crime against humanity. The biased commentary misconstrues both the purpose and the high quality of the work in progress. Measure the achievement by the standards that define a commercial success - maximizing the cost to the consumers of the product, minimizing the risk to the investors - and we discover in the White House and the Pentagon, also in the Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, not the crowd of incompetent fools depicted in the pages of the New York Times but a company of visionary entrepreneurs, worthy of comparison with the men who built the country's railroads and liberated the Western prairie from the undemocratic buffalo. Heed the message served with every Republican banquet speech - that the private interest precedes the public interest, that money is good for rich people, bad for poor people - and who can say that the war in Iraq has proved to be anything other than the transformation of a godforsaken desert into a defense contractor's Garden of Eden?

The winning numbers posted in the profit margins light the paths to glory. During the five years since the striking down of the World Trade Center towers, the United States Congress has appropriated well over $300 billion for the Bush Administration's never-ending war against all the world's evildoers. Now flowing eastward out of Washington at the rate of $1.5 billion a week, much of the money takes the form of no-bid contracts, cost-plus and often immune from audit - at least $12.3 billion to Halliburton; $5.3 billion for Parsons Corporation; $3.7 billion for Fluor Corporation; $3.1 billion for Washington Group International; $2.8 billion for Bechtel Corporation. The contracts specify the repair and reconstruction of Iraq's depleted infrastructure - roads, power plants, hospitals, oil fields, pipelines, schools, mosques, and sewer systems - but because so many of the project sites have been deemed unsafe for visitors, the invoices translate into art objects, intricately and lovingly decorated with surcharges for undelivered concrete and nonexistent electricity.

So also the goods and services with which private security companies supplement the American military effort in Iraq. The Pentagon furnishes 130,000 troops, many of them National Guard Reservists, poorly paid, inadequately equipped, and held against their will for extended tours of duty; the private companies field an additional 50,000 personnel, some of them earning upward of $150,000 a year for driving trucks, cleaning latrines, flying helicopters, pitching tents. Unhampered by US Army regulations or by Iraqi law, the military guest workers are most conspicuously employed as bodyguards for the cadres of American middle management requiring, in the words of one of the advertising brochures, "discreet travel companions" or a "heavily armored high profile convoy escort". For a discreet companion armed with an assault rifle and a record of prior service under the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Blackwater USA charges $600 a day, plus a 36 percent markup for expenses - travel, weapons, insurance, hotel room, ammunition.

For the friends of the free market operating in Iraq it doesn't matter who gets killed or why; every day is payday, and if from time to time events take a turn for the worse - another twenty or thirty Arabs annihilated in a mosque, a BBC cameraman lost on the road to the airport - back home in America with the flags and the executive compensation packages, the stock prices for our reliably patriotic corporations rise with the smoke from the car bombs exploding in Ramadi and Fallujah - Lockheed Martin up from $52 to $75 between July 2003 and July 2006; over the span of the same three years, Boeing up from $33 to $77; ExxonMobil up from $36 to $65; Chevron up from $36 to $66; Halliburton up from $22 to $74; Fluor up from $34 to $87.

In a country that recognizes no objective more worthwhile than the one incorporated in the phrase "to make a killing", I don't know why so many people insist on withholding their applause. Were it not for the vapid hypocrisy that muddles the national political debate with idle moralizing - about the withdrawal of American troops or the disappearance of Iraqi children - the Republican politicians auditioning hairstylists for their November election campaigns could afford to tell the truth, to remind the voters that our greatness as a nation stems from what Upton Sinclair knew to be "those pecuniary standards of culture which estimate the excellence of a man by the amount of other people's happiness he can possess and destroy". Unfortunately, we live in a society that no longer remembers Sinclair's name, forgets that since the days of the ancient Romans it has been on their way to war that men have found the road to wealth.


The loss of historical perspective follows from the debasement of our better universities, the once vigorously imperialist curricula softened into sentimental platitude by two generations of English professors telling their students that the arms trade is neither a gentleman's profession nor a wise career choice. The lesson is both politically and economically incorrect. The medieval age of chivalry rejoiced in the exploits of brilliantly costumed horsemen faring forth to lay waste the countryside, murder the peasantry, strip precious ornaments from the bodies of the celebrity dead, hold as captives kings and popes from whom they could extort the ransom of a fortune or a crown. The undertaking was a private venture, not a public service. The noble knight supplied his own weapons, bore his own expenses (grooms, horses, squires, armor, et cetera), took his own risks, paid his own pipers. When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

Unlike our latter-day writers of romantic movie scripts, the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer was under no illusion as to the whereabouts or meaning of the Holy Grail, and among the figures present in his Canterbury Tales, he draws the portrait of a perfect, gentle knight more inclined to rob a church or sodomize a nun than to retrieve the bones of a departed saint. The poet knew whereof he spoke. During the Hundred Years' War, Chaucer served in France with the English armies famous for their brutality, and of whom it was said that they went forth to war with the eager anticipation of guests invited to a wedding or a feast. The memory of the work done in the blood-soaked fields of Agincourt and Poitiers, the lords temporal dismembering one another with sword and axe, still lingers in the language of instruction learned at America's better business schools - asset stripping, war chest, target audience, corporate raider, downsized labor force.

The upgrading of the weapons technology in the late Middle Ages (heavier cannons, the English longbow) brought with it the appearance of private armies that in their forms of organization set the template of the modern corporation. The British historian Frances Stonor Saunders points up the similarities in a recent book, The Devil's Broker (Fourth Estate, 2005), in which she quotes a letter, from a fourteenth-century captain of mercenary soldiers to the papal legate in Italy, that if rendered as a procession of stately bureaucratic acronyms might as well have been sent by the president of Blackwater USA to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Our manner of life in Italy is well known - it is to rob, plunder and murder those who resist. Our revenues depend on ransoms levied in those provinces that we invade. Those who value their lives can buy peace and quiet by heavy tribute. Therefore, if the Lord Legate wishes to dwell at unity with us then let him do like the rest of the world - that is to say, pay! pay!"


The words "merchant" and "mercenary" ultimately derive from the same root, and in Renaissance Italy Saunders finds the combined interests of the two allied professions giving rise to the entrepreneurial revolution that enriched the world with capital markets for the manufacture of fear and the sale of death. Chartered as joint stock companies known as societies of adventure or acquisition, the mercenary armies offered their services to the highest bidder (to the Duke of Milan for a raid on Siena, to a Pope at Avignon or Rome for the siege of Pisa); everybody made contracts - the soldiers with their captain (guaranteeing term of service, wage, portion of the loot); the captain with his client prince or cardinal (specifying payment in Florentine or Hungarian florins) - and in the long train of executive assistants traveling with the corporate picnic in the Tuscan countryside, none were more highly prized than the clerks who kept the accounts, named the price for a man's horse or a woman's life, supervised the cash flows, and attended to the distribution of silver goblets, fine linens, and Venetian ducats.

Made sacred by the Catholic Church and codified by Niccolo Machiavelli rediscovering the military history of ancient Rome, the notion of government-sponsored terrorism as lucrative private enterprise strengthened the advance of Western civilization for the next 400 years. The rulers of the nation-states emerging in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed professional armies to extend their land holdings, replenish their finances, add luster to their bloodlines. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed the business of colonial empire to regulate the trade in Asian spices, American fur, and African slaves. The cost of the increasingly expensive weapons made it impossible for individual entrepreneurs to compete with the larger corporate interests, but even when enlisted under the banners of an English king or a French dynast (among them Napoleon, who informed Austria's Prince Metternich, "You can't stop me. I spend 30,000 men a month"), an enterprising mercenary still could look forward to a fair return on his investments - a share of the prize money, the beginnings of an art collection, a chance to rape good-looking women.


Our American forefathers understood the rules of the game. The first settlers of the New England wilderness constituted themselves as a society of acquisition as well as a community of God. A seventeenth-century governor of New York bankrolled Captain William Kidd's Caribbean expeditions in exchange for a share of the pirate's takings under primitive laws of eminent domain; the old spirit of adventure manned the American privateers plundering British merchant ships during the Revolutionary War, fortified the real-estate speculation otherwise known as the Mexican War, ensured the elimination of the Indians on the trans-Mississippi frontier, backed the 1898 raid on Cuba, drummed up Wall Street's enthusiasm for America's participation in President Wilson's war to end all wars.

The twentieth century's two world wars obscured the primacy of the profit motive as the only casus belli deserving the consideration of true patriots. Over the course of the thirty-one years between 1914 and 1945, so many people were killed to no apparently remunerative purpose that the world's spiritual advisers and political theorists were put to the task of coining expensive idealisms to explain the lack of an owner's commercial interest on the part of the innumerable decedents. Voices of conscience on five continents contributed an impressive range of consumer choices - fascism, liberalism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, racism, Nazism, socialism, Serbian irredentism, et cetera - but so great was the confusion in the minds of men living under the shadow of nuclear extinction that it needed another thirty-five years, thirty-five years and the coming to the White House of the blessed Ronald Reagan, before the Americans could find their way home to the meaning of warfare as it was understood in the age of chivalry.

How better to describe our reunion with the wisdom of the Renaissance than as the triumph of American conservatism, the happy return to the smile of immortal selfishness that shines forth in the face of President George W Bush. The smile is well and truly earned. His administration has so improved the business of making war - broadening the market for the product, relocating the costs and exporting the collateral damage, coming up with innovations both technological and aesthetic - that none of the principal beneficiaries need go to the trouble of learning how to lift a sword or ride a horse. The dying is done by the hired help, by our now privatized and outsourced army, or by entire regiments of auxiliary civilians deployed as targets for the staging of Pentagon air shows. None of the combatants demand a share of the spoils, which accrue on clean well-lighted computer screens far from the fear and smell of death. More politically sophisticated than the condottieri of the Italian Renaissance, our own military industrial elites not only extract tribute from foreign legates in distant provinces but also hold to ransom the citizenry of their own country, accepting payment in the form of taxpayer contributions to the Holy Grail otherwise known as the federal military budget. Lionhearts one and all, as bold as Chaucer's knight, as generous as Napoleon, deserving of an equestrian statue and a portrait in the Louvre.

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Defend Our Ranting Homophobes

People should be as offensive as they wish.

But in Britain the police can decide whose views to ban.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 03 2006)


Stephen Green represents everything most readers of the Guardian loathe. As head of the organisation Christian Voice, he sought to have Jerry Springer: The Opera banned from theatres and the BBC and prosecuted for blasphemy. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, he issued a press release claiming that it was God's judgement on the city's celebration of "fetishism, sadism, promiscuity, indecency, obscenity and all the other tawdry aspects of homosexual life ... Purity blew into New Orleans and purity broke the levees and flooded the city". {1} He wants to re-introduce the death penalty and impose "restorative justice on the Biblical model" {2}.

More entertainingly, he claims that Pakistan lost the last Test series because he prayed that God would punish Yousuf Mohammed for his conversion to Islam. "The way in which the umpires handled the initial alleged offence of tampering with the ball, and then the massive umbrage Pakistan took ... is the sort of unexpected event which only Almighty God can bring about". {3}

Yet we should be pleased that the charges he faced last week have been dropped. Stephen Green is offensive, intolerant and illiberal. But so is the law under which he was arrested.

Green had been handing out leaflets to the revellers at the Mardi Gras gay and lesbian festival in Cardiff at the beginning of September. By his standards they were pretty mild. They quoted Leviticus and Romans, compared homosexuality to incest and claimed that "By faith in Jesus it is even possible to be healed of homosexual desires ... you do have a choice as to whether you continue in a lifestyle which leads to hell, or whether you decide to put yourself right with God through belief in the Lord Jesus Christ". {4}

He was arrested and charged under the Public Order Act 1986 with using "threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby". On Thursday, however, the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop the case.

It is not clear why the CPS let him go, but it is probably because it knew the prosecution would fail. Green's leaflets, though offensive to gays and lesbians, used no threatening or abusive words, and he did nothing but seek to persuade people to take them. So it was dim of the police to have thrown the Public Order Act at him. Had they tried the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 or the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, they might have got their man.

The Protection from Harassment Act allows the Crown to prosecute anyone causing a person "alarm or distress" if this involves "conduct on at least two occasions". Conduct, it tells us, "includes speech" {5}. Under this law, in other words, it is not necessary to demonstrate "threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour" to secure a prosecution. If Green had tried twice to persuade the same person to take one of his leaflets, and if that person was distressed by his actions, he might have been deemed to have offended the act. If found guilty, he could have been banged up for six months and given an order preventing him from repeating the offence, at pain of five years behind bars.

The act, or so the government told us, was designed to protect people from stalkers, and this was a worthy aim. But when it was drafted, several of us warned that could just as well be used against protesters. We were ignored. The act listed defences - seeking to prevent or detect a crime or to protect yourself or your property - but protest was not one of them. Our predictions came true sooner than we imagined: the first three people prosecuted were all peaceful protesters. It is now used routinely against non-violent animal rights protesters and people demonstrating peacefully outside military bases and at arms fairs.

The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act would have been even more useful. Buried in the middle of this enormous piece of legislation, and missed by every MP who debated the bill, is a section on "harassment intended to deter lawful activities". Under this act, the definition of a "course of conduct" is broadened to include causing alarm or distress to "two or more persons" {6}. In other words, Green would only have had to approach two revellers once to have fallen under suspicion of breaching the act. It appears to have been deliberately designed to criminalise protest. "Harassment" now involves seeking "to persuade any person ... not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or to do something that he is not under any obligation to do". {7} Again, there is no defence for peaceful protest.

This act, then, appears to permit the police to ban anyone from protesting about anything. And not just the police. "Any person who is or may be a victim of the course of conduct in question ... may apply to the High Court or a county court for an injunction restraining the relevant person". If I disagree with what you say, I could take you to court.

Luckily, the police - fuddled like everyone else by the size and complexity of the act - have not yet grasped its full implications, though they have used another of its sections, which bans us from demonstrating near parliament without their permission. But it can't be long before they realise how powerful they have become. When they do, they will abandon the acts passed under the Conservative governments by bleeding liberal hearts like Leon Britain and Michael Howard, in favour of the much more draconian laws propelled through a dozy parliament by Tony Blair.

The irony of Stephen Green's case is that he has sought to deny to others the freedoms he rightly claims. As well as trying to shut down Jerry Springer: The Opera, he sought a prosecution for blasphemy against Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi {8}, and threatened to sue Channel 4 over its plans to screen Gunther von Hagens's (admittedly pointless and stupid) crucifixion of a corpse {9}. In justifying his attack on the Jerry Springer play, he argued that "free speech is not an unqualified human right, it is limited. It brings responsibilities, and the causing of gratuitous offence is hardly the hallmark of a civilised society." {10} If by "civilised" Green means just, he is wrong. Only just societies permit people to cause offence without fear of prosecution or punishment. Only just societies leave it to public opinion, rather than the law, to decide whether or not the offence is gratuitous. A just society is one in which Stephen Green may freely rant, however much the rest of us dislike what he has to say.

But we have no such protections here. The law permits the police to decide who may speak and what he may say. Even if they don't secure prosecutions, they can use the new laws to shut people up and cart them away. If we object to this, what can we do? Register our protest? Only if the police allow it.

Our lazy, frightened, incompetent MPs let this legislation pass. Will they now be brave enough to call for its repeal?

_____

George Monbiot will be launching his book Heat at 7pm on Wednesday night at the Conway Hall in London. No tickets are required.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Christian Voice, 13th September 2005. Purity Comes to New Orleans. Press release.
http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/Press/press010.html

2. Christian Voice, 17th May 2005. The Queen's Speech (as it should be!). http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/queen.html

3. Christian Voice, 21st August 2006. Prayer Scuppers Pakistan. http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/Press/press017.html

4. Christian Voice, 2nd September 2006. Same-Sex Love - Same-Sex Sex: What Does The Bible Say? http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/media/Same-Sex%20Sex.pdf

5. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1997/1997040.htm

6. Sections 125-127. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts2005/20050015.htm

7. Section 125 (2c).

8. Stephen Green, no date given. Corpus Christi. http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/corpus_christi.html

9. Robert Stansfield, 22nd September 2006. Crucifixion of Corpse on TV.
http: //www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=17800103&method=full&siteid=94762& headline=crucifixion-of-corpse-on-tvﾁ\name_page.html

10. Christian Voice, no date given. Jerry Springer: The Opera: What's the background? http://www.christianvoice.org.uk/springer.html

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

A Reflection on Cities of the Future

by James Howard Kunstler

Energy Bulletin (September 28 2006)


Back in the early 20th Century, when the cheap oil fiesta was just getting underway, and some major new technological innovation made its debut every month - cars, radio, movies, airplanes - there was no practical limit to what men of vision could imagine about the future city, though often their imaginings were ridiculous. The representative case is Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; 1887 - 1965), the leading architectural hoodoo-meister of Early High Modernism, whose 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris proposed to knock down the entire Marais district on the Right Bank and replace it with rows of identical towers set between freeways.

Luckily for Paris, the city officials laughed at him every time he came back with the scheme over the next forty years - and Corb was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter. Ironically and tragically, though, the Plan Voisin model was later adopted gleefully by post World War Two American planners, and resulted in such urban monstrosities as the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects of Chicago and scores of things like it around the country.

Other visions of that early period involved Tom Swiftian scenes of Everest-size skyscrapers with Zeppelin moorings on top, linked to zooming air trams, while various types of personal helicopters swooped between things. Virtually all these schemes had one thing in common: the city of the future they depicted was vibrant. We know now, here in the USA anyway, that this was the one thing they got most wrong. By 1970, many American cities were stone dead at their centers, especially the industrial giants of the Midwest. Ten years later, the American city of the future was the nightmare vision of Blade Runner, an acid rain-dripping ruin fit only for androids.

These days, a new generation of mojo architect savants such as Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are retailing an urban futurism that is basically warmed-over Corbu with an expressionist horror movie spin, featuring torqued and tortured skyscrapers, made possible by computer-aided design, clad in Darth Vadar glass or other sheer surfaces, with grim public spaces exquisitely engineered to induce agoraphobia. There's more than a tinge of sadism in all this, though Koolhaas is much more explicit in his many writings than the less-voluble Libeskind about consciously surrendering to a zeitgeist of cruel alienation. But these are also very rarified exercises among a tiny group of mutually-referential fashionista narcissists, while the general public itself - at least the fraction that thinks about anything - only grudgingly goes along with it as a sort of drear obeisance to the religion of art.

An alternate awful urban vision of the future, advanced by public intellectuals such as author Mike Davis (The Ecology of Fear), is actually more about the city of the present: the third world mega-slum as embodied by such ghastly organisms as present-day Lagos, Lima, and Karachi. This is a vision of plain toxic hypertrophy with no particular artistic or architectural overlay to it. These cities have organized according to a simple logarithmic progression of horrible conditions - more people, more pollution, more poverty - nourished by cheap energy globalism, with the expectation that they will only continue along that path and get worse.

Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than science fiction, politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is worth emulating - by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic. Their work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos's declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently become historical in its own right, and the more this is true, paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience which cannot be healthy.

The New Urbanists are also disdained for their modesty of ambition. They are not interested in the biggest this or that. Their plans are typically scaled to the quarter-mile walk and rarely include super-sized buildings. The cutting edge holds no attractions for them in and of itself. They want to create neighborhoods and quarters, not intergalactic space ports. They want the streets, squares, and building facades to provide decorum, legibility, and even beauty, while the latest crop of Modernists seek to confound our expectations about the urban environment as much as possible, in the service of generating anxiety rather than pleasure. The Modernists use the lame adjective edgy to describe their methods. It is supposed to signify excitement, novelty, and especially innovation, but mostly they have managed to innovate only new ways to make people feel bad about where they are.

. . . . .

The future direction of urban experience depends a great deal on an understanding of history, and of recent history in particular, because the hyper development of the past two hundred years has followed the arc of increasing energy resources and, above all, we are now facing the world-wide depletion of energy resources.

As the industrial age gained traction in the early 19th century, so did the demographic trend of people increasingly moving from the farms and villages to the big cities. Industrial production was centralized in the cities and recruited armies of workers insatiably. Meanwhile, mechanized farming required fewer farmers to feed more people. The railroad, by its nature, favored centralization. By 1900, cities such as London and New York had evolved into mega-urbanisms of multiple millions of people. Around the same time, electrification was generally complete and with it came skyscrapers serviced by elevators. Over the next twenty years, oil moved ahead of coal as the primary fuel for transport and, especially in the US where oil was cheap and abundant, led to mass automobile ownership. That, in turn, sparked the decanting of households into massive new suburban hinterlands, and to the extreme separation of activities by zoning law there, which climaxed - with interruptions for depression and war - in the evolution of the late 20th century car-dependent metroplexes like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and Atlanta. That is where things stand now.

Now my own view is that we face severe energy problems in the decades ahead and they will not be ameliorated by any combination of alternative fuels or schemes for running them. This permanent global energy crisis will have all kinds of consequences, most particularly on our cities. These looming circumstances imply several major trends which contradict conventional expectations, especially of continued urban growth.

One certain impact will be the contraction of industrial activity per se and of the financial sector whose instruments and certificates represent the expectation of growth in accumulated wealth. This alone will comprise a basic challenge to industrial capitalism - apart from the sociopolitical strife that such financial catastrophe is apt to generate.

I hasten to add it is a mistake to suppose that the US industrial economy has already been replaced by a so-called "information" economy or a consumer economy. In reality, manufacturing activities have been insidiously replaced over the past twenty years by a suburban-sprawl-building economy - and the mass production of suburban houses, highways, strip malls and big box stores is just a different sort of manufacturing than making hair driers and TV sets. The sprawl industry also drove a reckless debt creation racket and multiple layers of traffic in mortgages and spinoffs of mortgages (such as the derivatives trade based on bundled, securitized debt) which represents, at bottom, hallucinated wealth that in turn has spread false liquidity through the equity markets and is certain to affect them badly sooner or later. All this is what we have been calling the "housing bubble" and it is now beginning to fly apart with deadly effect.

Much of the suburban real estate produced by this process is destined to lose its supposed value, both in practical and monetary terms as energy scarcities get traction. So, on top of the sheer distortions and perversities of the glut in bad mortgage paper, America will be faced with the accelerating worthlessness of the collateral - the houses, Jiffy Lubes, and office parks - as gasoline prices go up, and long commutes become untenable, and jobs along with incomes are lost, and the cost of heating houses larger than 1500 square feet becomes an insuperable burden.

All this is to say that the suburban rings of our cities have poor prospects in the future. They therefore represent a massive tragic misinvestment, perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is hard to say how this stuff might be reused or retrofitted, if at all, but some of it, perhaps a lot, may end up as a combined salvage yard and sheer ruin.

Another major impact of the coming energy scarcity will be the end of industrial agriculture. Without abundant and cheap oil and gas-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuels for running huge machines and irrigation systems, we will have to make other arrangements for feeding ourselves. Crop yields will go down - a big reason, by the way, to be skeptical of ethanol and bio-diesel alternative fuel schemes based on corn or soybean crops. We will have to grow food closer to home, on a smaller scale, probably requiring more human and even animal labor, and agriculture is likely to come closer to the center of economic life than it has within memory - at the same time that mass production homebuilding, tourism based on mass aviation, easy motoring, and a host of other obsolete activities fade into history.

I think this will lead to an epochal demographic shift, a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and rural places to the big cities. Instead, I believe we will see is a substantial contraction of our cities at the same time that they densify at their cores and along their waterfronts. A preview of this can be seen in Baltimore today. The remaining viable fabric of the pre-automobile city is relatively tiny and concentrated in the old center around a complex harbor system. With little need for industrial workers, vast neighborhoods of row housing built for them are either abandoned or inhabited now only by such economically distressed people that abandonment is inevitable. The pattern of contraction may not be identical in all American cities.

In some it will be a lot worse. Phoenix, Tuscon, and Las Vegas will just dry up and blow away, since local agriculture will not be possible, and they will be afflicted with severe water problems on top of all the other problems growing out of energy scarcity and an extreme car-dependent development pattern. Cities in the "wet" sunbelt such as Houston, Orlando, and Atlanta, will probably still be there but revert to insignificance for the additional simple reason that a lack of cheap air conditioning will make them unbearable.

It is worth keeping in mind that cities generally are located on important geographical sites - harbors, rivers, railroad junctions - and some kind of urban settlement is likely to persist in many of these places, unless climate change drowns them. In recent years, most waterfront property has been reassigned from industrial and commercial uses to condominium sites, and greenways. This will not continue. If we are going to have any kind of commerce between one place and another, we will have to reactivate our waterfronts for shipping - and not necessarily of the automated steel container variety. Like virtually everything else in the coming energy scarce world, maritime trade will have to be rescaled. It may even have to rely on wind power again to some extent. These operations will require wharves, warehouses, cheap quarters for sailors and all the other furnishings typically required through history.

Those who are infatuated with skyscrapers are going to be disappointed. I do not think we will be building many more of them further along in this century. We will have trouble running the ones we have, since most of the glass towers built after 1965 have inoperable windows, and even the ones that have them would have to be retrofitted for coal furnaces, and a less than absolutely reliable electric power grid may make life in a twenty-fifth floor apartment impossible when the elevators go out. In short, I think we will discover that the skyscraper was purely a product of the cheap oil and gas age. Exciting as they may be, we might have to live without them.

The process I have described will probably be messy. Social turbulence should be expected. For instance, the urban underclass will be squeezed even harder than the suffering middle classes, and they already have a nascent warrior culture that could easily redirect its energies from hip hop entertainments to real guerilla warfare if the competition for resources became desperate. Economic distress in the US is also likely to only aggravate unfavorable conditions in Mexico, sending increased streams of impoverished migrants north. Meanwhile, the faltering US middle classes may be so inflamed by the loss of their entitlements to an easy motoring existence that they will vote for maniacs and venture into scapegoating. I certainly expect the American public and their leaders to mount a vigorous defense of suburbia, even if it proves to be a gigantic exercise in futility and a waste of precious resources.

We will be lucky if we can make the transition from our current circumstances to a future of re-sized, re-scaled cities and a reactivated productive rural landscape outside them, with a hierarchy of hamlets, villages, and towns in between, and some ability to conduct commerce and manufacturing. This would, in effect, be a reversion to prior living arrangements, and to some extent it is a model proposed by the New Urbanists - or at least a template they would understand as fundamental. Many things might stand in the way of this. The physical disaggregation of civic life in our small towns is now so extreme that nothing might avail to repair it, especially since we will have far less capital to work with. The suburbs running from Boston through New Jersey to Washington have paved over some of the best farmland in the nation's most populous region and it may be centuries before it is restored to productivity, if ever. Physical security may become so tenuous that people will sell their allegiance for protection, or take to living behind fortifications. In earlier periods of history when societies got into trouble - for instance, the plague years in Europe - rural places were beset by banditry and lawlessness, adding another layer of difficulty to food production on top of the loss of the peasant labor.

We don't know how any of these things may actually play out. I have not even mentioned the potential for geopolitical mischief, which could skew the picture a lot more.

But the urban future isn't what it was cracked up to be when we were riding high, surfing the big waves of cheap energy in the seemingly endless summer of oil. It won't be fun fun fun 'til Daddy takes the T-bird away. It won't be a Herbert Muschamp smorgasbord of delicious, rarified architectural irony. The Koolhaas celebration of alienation will not seem worth partying for. The metaphysics of Libeskind and Peter Eisenman will stand naked in the transparency of their phoniness. By and by, even the mega slums of the third world will contract as the surplus grain supplies of the formerly-developed nations are reduced to nothing and export ceases.

I often wonder what people will think decades from now if they are able to view those old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies of the mid 20th century. Invariably these stories took place in a Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with tail fins, and companies that ruled the world, and men and women who had come back from a World War full of confidence that there was no limit to what people with good intentions could do and nothing that they couldn't handle. We are their children and grandchildren and it is a different world now.

http://www.energybulletin.net/20963.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Reading the Gas Pump Numbers

What Do Falling Oil Prices Tell Us about War with Iran,
the Elections, and Peak-Oil Theory

by Michael T Klare

TomDispatch (September 27 2006)


What the hell is going on here? Just six weeks ago, gasoline prices at the pump were hovering at the $3 per gallon mark; today, they're inching down toward $2 - and some analysts predict even lower numbers before the November elections. The sharp drop in gas prices has been good news for consumers, who now have more money in their pockets to spend on food and other necessities - and for President Bush, who has witnessed a sudden lift in his approval ratings.

Is this the result of some hidden conspiracy between the White House and Big Oil to help the Republican cause in the elections, as some are already suggesting? How does a possible war with Iran fit into the gas-price equation? And what do falling gasoline prices tell us about "peak-oil" theory, which predicts that we have reached our energy limits on the planet?

Since gasoline prices began their sharp decline in mid-August, many pundits have attempted to account for the drop, but none have offered a completely convincing explanation, lending some plausibility to claims that the Bush administration and its long-term allies in the oil industry are manipulating prices behind the scenes. In my view, however, the most significant factor in the downturn in prices has simply been a sharp easing of the "fear factor" - the worry that crude oil prices would rise to $100 or more a barrel due to spreading war in the Middle East, a Bush administration strike at Iranian nuclear facilities, and possible Katrina-scale hurricanes blowing through the Gulf of Mexico, severely damaging offshore oil rigs.

As the summer commenced and oil prices began a steep upward climb, many industry analysts were predicting a late summer or early fall clash between the United States and Iran (roughly coinciding with a predicted intense hurricane season). This led oil merchants and refiners to fill their storage facilities to capacity with $70-80 per barrel oil. They expected to have a considerable backlog to sell at a substantial profit if supplies from the Middle East were cut off and/or storms wracked the Gulf of Mexico.

Then came the war in Lebanon. At first, the fighting seemed to confirm such predictions, only increasing fears of a region-wide conflict, possibly involving Iran. The price of crude oil approached record heights. In the early days of the war, the Bush administration tacitly seconded Israeli actions in Lebanon, which, it was widely assumed, would lay the groundwork for a similar campaign against military targets in Iran. But Hezbollah's success in holding off the Israeli military combined with horrific television images of civilian casualties forced leaders in the United States and Europe to intercede and bring the fighting to a halt.

We may never know exactly what led the White House to shift course on Lebanon, but high oil prices - and expectations of worse to come - were surely a factor in administration calculations. When it became clear that the Israelis were facing far stiffer resistance than expected, and that the Iranians were capable of fomenting all manner of mischief (including, potentially, total havoc in the global oil market), wiser heads in the corporate wing of the Republican Party undoubtedly concluded that any further escalation or regionalization of the war would immediately push crude prices over $100 per barrel. Prices at the gas pump would then have been driven into the $4-5 per gallon range, virtually ensuring a Republican defeat in the mid-term elections. This was still early in the summer, of course, well before peak hurricane season; mix just one Katrina-strength storm in the Gulf of Mexico into this already unfolding nightmare scenario and the fate of the Republicans would have been sealed.

In any case, President Bush did allow Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to work with the Europeans to stop the Lebanon fighting and has since refrained from any overt talk about a possible assault on Iran. Careful never explicitly to rule out the military option when it comes to Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, since June he has nonetheless steadfastly insisted that diplomacy must be given a chance to work. Meanwhile, we have made it most of the way through this year's hurricane season without a single catastrophic storm hitting the US.

For all these reasons, immediate fears about a clash with Iran, a possible spreading of war to other oil regions in the Middle East, and Gulf of Mexico hurricanes have dissipated, and the price of crude has plummeted. On top of this, there appears to be a perceptible slowing of the world economy - precipitated, in part, by the rising prices of raw materials - leading to a drop in oil demand. The result? Retailers have abundant supplies of gasoline on hand and the laws of supply and demand dictate a decline in prices.


Finding Energy in Difficult Places

How long will this combination of factors prevail?

Best guess: The slowdown in global economic growth will continue for a time, further lowering prices at the pump. This is likely to help retailers in time for the Christmas shopping season, projected to be marginally better this year than last precisely because of those lower gas prices.

Once the election season is past, however, President Bush will have less incentive to muzzle his rhetoric on Iran and we may experience a sharp increase in Ahmadinejad-bashing. If no progress has been made by year's end on the diplomatic front, expect an acceleration of the preparations for war already underway in the Persian Gulf area (similar to the military buildup witnessed in late 2002 and early 2003 prior to the US invasion of Iraq). This will naturally lead to an intensification of fears and a reversal of the downward spiral of gas prices, though from a level that, by then, may be well below $2 per gallon.

Now that we've come this far, does the recent drop in gasoline prices and the seemingly sudden abundance of petroleum reveal a flaw in the argument for this as a peak-oil moment? Peak-oil theory, which had been getting ever more attention until the price at the pump began to fall, contends that the amount of oil in the world is finite; that once we've used up about half of the original global supply, production will attain a maximum or "peak" level, after which daily output will fall, no matter how much more is spent on exploration and enhanced extraction technology.

Most industry analysts now agree that global oil output will eventually reach a peak level, but there is considerable debate as to exactly when that moment will arise. Recently, a growing number of specialists - many joined under the banner of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil - are claiming that we have already consumed approximately half the world's original inheritance of two trillion barrels of conventional (that is, liquid) petroleum, and so are at, or very near, the peak-oil moment and can expect an imminent contraction in supplies.

In the fall of 2005, as if in confirmation of this assessment, the CEO of Chevron, David O'Reilly, blanketed US newspapers and magazines with an advertisement stating, "One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over ... Demand is soaring like never before ... At the same time, many of the world's oil and gas fields are maturing. And new energy discoveries are mainly occurring in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically. When growing demand meets tighter supplies, the result is more competition for the same resources."

But this is not, of course, what we are now seeing. Petroleum supplies are more abundant than they were six months ago. There have even been some promising discoveries of new oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico, while - modestly adding to global stockpiles - several foreign fields and pipelines have come on line in the last few months, including the $4 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey's Mediterranean coast, which will bring new supplies to world markets. Does this indicate that peak-oil theory is headed for the dustbin of history or, at least, that the peak moment is still safely in our future?

As it happens, nothing in the current situation should lead us to conclude that peak-oil theory is wrong. Far from it. As suggested by Chevron's O'Reilly, remaining energy supplies on the planet are mainly to be found "in places where resources are difficult to extract, physically, economically, and even politically". This is exactly what we are seeing today.

For example, the much-heralded new discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron's Jack No 2 Well, lies beneath five miles of water and rock some 175 miles south of New Orleans in an area where, in recent years, hurricanes Ivan, Katrina, and Rita have attained their maximum strength and inflicted their greatest damage on offshore oil facilities. It is naive to assume that, however promising Jack No 2 may seem in oil-industry publicity releases, it will not be exposed to Category 5 hurricanes in the years ahead, especially as global warming heats the Gulf and generates ever more potent storms. Obviously, Chevron would not be investing billions of dollars in costly technology to develop such a precarious energy resource if there were better opportunities on land or closer to shore - but so many of those easy-to-get-at places have now been exhausted, leaving the company little choice in the matter.

Or take the equally ballyhooed BTC pipeline, which shipped its first oil in July, with top US officials in attendance. This conduit stretches 1,040 miles from Baku in Azerbaijan to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, passing no less than six active or potential war zones along the way: the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan; Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia; the Muslim separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia; and the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Is this where anyone in their right mind would build a pipeline? Not unless you were desperate for oil, and safer locations had already been used up.

In fact, virtually all of the other new fields being developed or considered by US and foreign energy firms - ANWR in Alaska, the jungles of Colombia, northern Siberia, Uganda, Chad, Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East - are located in areas that are hard to reach, environmentally sensitive, or just plain dangerous. Most of these fields will be developed, and they will yield additional supplies of oil, but the fact that we are being forced to rely on them suggests that the peak-oil moment has indeed arrived and that the general direction of the price of oil, despite period drops, will tend to be upwards as the cost of production in these out-of-the-way and dangerous places continues to climb.


Living on the Peak-Oil Plateau

Some peak-oil theorists have, however, done us all a disservice by suggesting, for rhetorical purposes, that the peak-oil moment is ... well, a sharp peak. They paint a picture of a simple, steep, upward production slope leading to a pinnacle, followed by a similarly neat and steep decline. Perhaps looking back from 500 years hence, this moment will have that appearance on global oil production charts. But for those of us living now, the "peak" is more likely to feel like a plateau - lasting for perhaps a decade or more - in which global oil production will experience occasional ups and downs without rising substantially (as predicted by those who dismiss peak-oil theory), nor falling precipitously (as predicted by its most ardent proponents).

During this interim period, particular events - a hurricane, an outbreak of conflict in an oil region - will temporarily tighten supplies, raising gasoline prices, while the opening of a new field or pipeline, or simply (as now) the alleviation of immediate fears and a temporary boost in supplies will lower prices. Eventually, of course, we will reach the plateau's end and the decline predicted by the theory will commence in earnest.

In the meantime, for better or worse, we live on that plateau today. If this year's hurricane season ends with no major storms, and we get through the next few months without a major blowup in the Middle East, we are likely to start 2007 with lower gasoline prices than we've seen in a while. This is not, however, evidence of a major trend. Because global oil supplies are never likely to be truly abundant again, it would only take one major storm or one major crisis in the Middle East to push crude prices back up near or over $80 a barrel. This is the world we now inhabit, and it will never get truly better until we develop an entirely new energy system based on petroleum alternatives and renewable fuels.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=124698

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15133.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html