Saturday, December 10, 2011
30 Major U.S. Corporations Paid More to Lobby Congress Than Income Taxes, 2008-2010
by Ashley Portero - December 9, 2011
By employing a plethora of tax-dodging techniques, 30 multi-million dollar American corporations expended more money lobbying Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, ultimately spending approximately $400,000 every day -- including weekends -- during that three-year period to lobby lawmakers and influence political elections, according to a new report from the non-partisan Public Campaign.
Despite a growing federal deficit and the widespread economic stability that has swept the U.S since 2008, the companies in question managed to accumulate profits of $164 billion between 2008 and 2010, while receiving combined tax rebates totaling almost $11 billion. Moreover, Public Campaign reports these companies spent about $476 million during the same period to lobby the U.S. Congress, as well as another $22 million on federal campaigns, while in some instances laying off employees and increasing executive compensation.
The Public Campaign report expanded on a newly released analysis on corporate tax dodging by the liberal-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-profit research and advocacy group, as well as lobbying expenditure data provided by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Citizens for Tax Justice, the sister organization to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, reports that 68 of the 265 most consistently profitable Fortune 500 companies did not pay a state corporate income tax during at least one year between 2008 and 2010, while 20 of them paid no taxes at all during that period.
"Our report shows these corporations raked in a combined $1.33 trillion in profits in the last three years, and far too many have managed to shelter half or more of their profits from state taxes," Matthew Gardner, Executive Director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the report's co-author, said in a statement. "They're so busy avoiding taxes, it's no wonder they're not creating any new jobs."
According to the report, titled Corporate Tax Dodging in the Fifty States, 2008-2010, state corporate tax revenues have been declining for 20 years, due to the passage of multiple state tax subsidies, as well federal tax breaks that further reduce state corporate income tax revenues since states usually accept corporations' federal tax. Moreover, Gardner said multi-state corporations are constantly "devoting their money and legal firepower to coming up with tax avoidance schemes."
Between 2008 and 2010, the 265 companies analyzed paid state income taxes equal to only 3 percent of their U.S. profits, half of the statutory 6.2 percent state corporate tax rate. As a result, these companies avoided a total of $42.7 billion in state corporate taxes over three years.
"As recently as 1986, state corporate income taxes equaled 0.5 percent of nationwide Gross State Product (a measure of nationwide economic activity)," states the report. "But in fiscal year 2010, state and local corporate income taxes were just 0.28 percent of nationwide GSP, equaling the low-water mark set in 2002."
Companies' Laying Off Workers While Receiving Tax Rebates, Raising Executive Pay
Among the 20 companies who paid zero or less in state corporate taxes are utility provider Pepco Holdings, the pharmaceutical company Baxter International, and Intel Corporation (INTC).
Baxter International (BAX) and Intel are among the corporations that Public Campaign reports did not did not pay federal incomes during the same three-year period.
Of those companies, General Electric (GE) spent the most on lobbying, expending about $84 million on lobbying while paying a federal income tax rate of negative 45 percent on more than $10 billion in U.S. profits. PG&E Corp. followed General Electric, spending almost $79 million on lobbying, while paying a negative 21 percent tax rate on $4.8 billion of U.S profits, and Verizon Communications, which spent $52 billion on lobbying while paying a negative 3 percent tax rate on $32.5 billion of profits.
A negative effective tax rate means that a company enjoyed a tax rebate, usually obtained by carrying back excess tax deductions and credits to an earlier year, thereby allowing the company to receive a tax rebate check, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
U.S. House Deputy Whip Kevin Brady, R-Tex., is currently making a last-ditch effort to include a corporate tax repatriation holiday on legislation to extend a payroll tax cut, an extension that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said could put an extra $1,500 into the pockets of middle class families each year. While those in favor of the corporate tax repatriation provision -- which would give U.S. businesses a temporary tax break on as much as $1 trillion in overseas income -- insist it would boost the nation's sluggish economy and make it easier for corporations to create jobs, the Congressional Budget Office reports tax repatriation holidays ranks dead last among 13 policy options for creating jobs. The CBO estimates that over the 2012-2013 period, a repatriation holiday would, at best, create the equivalent of one-full time job for every $1 million in federal costs.
Even while dodging most of their state and federal taxes between 2008 and 2010, Verizon (VZ) laid off more than 21,000 U.S. employees, while Boeing, Wells Fargo, General Electric, American Electric Power, and FedEx also let go of thousands of workers. Because companies can be reluctant to make data changes in U.S. employment available, Public Campaign reports it was not able to find up-to-date employment statistics for many of the companies evaluated in the report.
Moreover, as it was laying off employees, General Electric gave their top executives a 27 percent pay raise between 2008 and 2010 -- executives received more than $75 million in compensation in 2010. Wells Fargo increased executive pay by a whopping 180 percent, upping executive compensation from $17.8 million in 2008 to almost $50 million in 2010, while Boeing, FedEx and American Electric Power also instituted lavish executive pay raises while laying off thousands of lower-level workers.
In fact, 2010 year was a record year for executive compensation. The CEO's of some of the largest U.S. corporations made, on average, $11.4 million in 2010, about 343 times more than workers' median pay, according to an analysis by the American Federation of Labor, the widest gap between executive and employee pay in the world. CEO pay has skyrocketed since 1980, when chief executives were only paid about 42 times more than the average blue collar worker.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income fell $3,719 between 2000 and 2010, when measured in 2010 dollars.
Public Campaign released its report on Wednesday, just as thousands of unemployed Americans from across the nation swarmed K Street in Washington, D.C., the lobbying center for some of the world's most profitable corporations. The march was part of "Take Back the Capitol," a four-day series of events aimed at persuading Congress to pass comprehensive job creation measures that will benefit their constituents, rather than special interest groups.
29 Major Corporations Paid No Federal Taxes, 2008-2010
Of the 30 companies analyzed in the report, which include corporate giants such as General Electric, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo (WFC), Mattel (MAT) and Boeing (BA), 29 of them managed to pay no federal taxes from 2008 to 2010. Only FedEx, which raked in about $4.2 billion in profits during that period, paid a three-year tax rate of 1 percent -- totaling $37 million -- far less than the statutory federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent.
By employing a plethora of tax-dodging techniques, 30 multi-million dollar American corporations expended more money lobbying Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, ultimately spending approximately $400,000 every day -- including weekends -- during that three-year period to lobby lawmakers and influence political elections, according to a new report from the non-partisan Public Campaign.
Despite a growing federal deficit and the widespread economic stability that has swept the U.S since 2008, the companies in question managed to accumulate profits of $164 billion between 2008 and 2010, while receiving combined tax rebates totaling almost $11 billion. Moreover, Public Campaign reports these companies spent about $476 million during the same period to lobby the U.S. Congress, as well as another $22 million on federal campaigns, while in some instances laying off employees and increasing executive compensation.
The Public Campaign report expanded on a newly released analysis on corporate tax dodging by the liberal-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-profit research and advocacy group, as well as lobbying expenditure data provided by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Citizens for Tax Justice, the sister organization to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, reports that 68 of the 265 most consistently profitable Fortune 500 companies did not pay a state corporate income tax during at least one year between 2008 and 2010, while 20 of them paid no taxes at all during that period.
"Our report shows these corporations raked in a combined $1.33 trillion in profits in the last three years, and far too many have managed to shelter half or more of their profits from state taxes," Matthew Gardner, Executive Director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the report's co-author, said in a statement. "They're so busy avoiding taxes, it's no wonder they're not creating any new jobs."
According to the report, titled Corporate Tax Dodging in the Fifty States, 2008-2010, state corporate tax revenues have been declining for 20 years, due to the passage of multiple state tax subsidies, as well federal tax breaks that further reduce state corporate income tax revenues since states usually accept corporations' federal tax. Moreover, Gardner said multi-state corporations are constantly "devoting their money and legal firepower to coming up with tax avoidance schemes."
Between 2008 and 2010, the 265 companies analyzed paid state income taxes equal to only 3 percent of their U.S. profits, half of the statutory 6.2 percent state corporate tax rate. As a result, these companies avoided a total of $42.7 billion in state corporate taxes over three years.
"As recently as 1986, state corporate income taxes equaled 0.5 percent of nationwide Gross State Product (a measure of nationwide economic activity)," states the report. "But in fiscal year 2010, state and local corporate income taxes were just 0.28 percent of nationwide GSP, equaling the low-water mark set in 2002."
Companies' Laying Off Workers While Receiving Tax Rebates, Raising Executive Pay
Among the 20 companies who paid zero or less in state corporate taxes are utility provider Pepco Holdings, the pharmaceutical company Baxter International, and Intel Corporation (INTC).
Baxter International (BAX) and Intel are among the corporations that Public Campaign reports did not did not pay federal incomes during the same three-year period.
Of those companies, General Electric (GE) spent the most on lobbying, expending about $84 million on lobbying while paying a federal income tax rate of negative 45 percent on more than $10 billion in U.S. profits. PG&E Corp. followed General Electric, spending almost $79 million on lobbying, while paying a negative 21 percent tax rate on $4.8 billion of U.S profits, and Verizon Communications, which spent $52 billion on lobbying while paying a negative 3 percent tax rate on $32.5 billion of profits.
A negative effective tax rate means that a company enjoyed a tax rebate, usually obtained by carrying back excess tax deductions and credits to an earlier year, thereby allowing the company to receive a tax rebate check, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
U.S. House Deputy Whip Kevin Brady, R-Tex., is currently making a last-ditch effort to include a corporate tax repatriation holiday on legislation to extend a payroll tax cut, an extension that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said could put an extra $1,500 into the pockets of middle class families each year. While those in favor of the corporate tax repatriation provision -- which would give U.S. businesses a temporary tax break on as much as $1 trillion in overseas income -- insist it would boost the nation's sluggish economy and make it easier for corporations to create jobs, the Congressional Budget Office reports tax repatriation holidays ranks dead last among 13 policy options for creating jobs. The CBO estimates that over the 2012-2013 period, a repatriation holiday would, at best, create the equivalent of one-full time job for every $1 million in federal costs.
Even while dodging most of their state and federal taxes between 2008 and 2010, Verizon (VZ) laid off more than 21,000 U.S. employees, while Boeing, Wells Fargo, General Electric, American Electric Power, and FedEx also let go of thousands of workers. Because companies can be reluctant to make data changes in U.S. employment available, Public Campaign reports it was not able to find up-to-date employment statistics for many of the companies evaluated in the report.
Moreover, as it was laying off employees, General Electric gave their top executives a 27 percent pay raise between 2008 and 2010 -- executives received more than $75 million in compensation in 2010. Wells Fargo increased executive pay by a whopping 180 percent, upping executive compensation from $17.8 million in 2008 to almost $50 million in 2010, while Boeing, FedEx and American Electric Power also instituted lavish executive pay raises while laying off thousands of lower-level workers.
In fact, 2010 year was a record year for executive compensation. The CEO's of some of the largest U.S. corporations made, on average, $11.4 million in 2010, about 343 times more than workers' median pay, according to an analysis by the American Federation of Labor, the widest gap between executive and employee pay in the world. CEO pay has skyrocketed since 1980, when chief executives were only paid about 42 times more than the average blue collar worker.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income fell $3,719 between 2000 and 2010, when measured in 2010 dollars.
Public Campaign released its report on Wednesday, just as thousands of unemployed Americans from across the nation swarmed K Street in Washington, D.C., the lobbying center for some of the world's most profitable corporations. The march was part of "Take Back the Capitol," a four-day series of events aimed at persuading Congress to pass comprehensive job creation measures that will benefit their constituents, rather than special interest groups.
29 Major Corporations Paid No Federal Taxes, 2008-2010
Of the 30 companies analyzed in the report, which include corporate giants such as General Electric, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo (WFC), Mattel (MAT) and Boeing (BA), 29 of them managed to pay no federal taxes from 2008 to 2010. Only FedEx, which raked in about $4.2 billion in profits during that period, paid a three-year tax rate of 1 percent -- totaling $37 million -- far less than the statutory federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent.
Obama Will Not Veto NDAA Military Detention of Americans Because He Requested It
Ralph Lopez - December 10, 2011
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on Senate floor explaining it was Obama who requested the provision for indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial. Senator Diane Feinstein recently confirmed that she was unable to excise Section 1031 in an email:
Senator Feinstein Confirms President and Military Can Detain US Citizens Without a Trial Like you, I oppose these provisions. Section 1031 is problematic because it authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens without due process. In this democracy, due process is a fundamental right, and it protects us from being locked up by the government without charge. For this reason, I offered an amendment to prohibit the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial or charge. Unfortunately, on December 1, 2011, this amendment failed by a vote of 45-55.
I was, however, able to reach a compromise with the authors of the defense bill to state that no existing law or authorities to detain suspected terrorists are changed by this section of the bill. While I would have preferred to have restricted the government’s ability to detain U.S. citizens without charge, this compromise at least ensures that the bill does not expand the government’s authority in this area.
Anonymous Message
Transcript: Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes!
In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.
The National Defense Authorization Act is being called the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn't apply to Americans, but toward the end of the bill, it essentially says it can apply to Americans "if we want it to..." FULL TRANSCRIPT AT YOUTUBE
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell
Rich People DON'T Create Jobs: 6 Myths That Have to Be Killed for Our Economy to Live
These zombie talking points aren't just wrong; they're dangerous. If we're ever going to revive the economy, we've got to tackle them head on.
By Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Posted on December 10, 2011
In the movie Groundhog Day,
Bill Murray's character is forced to relive a single day over and over
and over—waking up to the same song every morning, meeting the same
people, having the same conversations—until, after thousands of
repetitions, he finally realizes what a shmo he's been his entire life.
With that epiphany, the calendar starts to flip forward again. His life
reboots, and he once again gets to hear new songs, meet new people, and
have entirely new conversations.
Unfortunately, these zombie talking points aren't just wrong; they're dangerous. If we're ever going to revive the economy, we've got to tackle them head on. Here are six of the worst.
MYTH #1: THE STIMULUS FAILEDFor the first four years of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt tackled the Great Depression with inflation, easy monetary policy, and government spending. But in 1937, FDR's advisers persuaded him to reverse gears. After all, interest rates had been close to zero for years, commodity prices were climbing, and fear of inflation was on the rise.
Bust or Boost?
What happened next is now called the "Mistake of 1937" (PDF). Federal spending was cut and monetary policy was tightened up, with disastrous results: GDP immediately began to plummet, and industrial production fell by a third. Within a year everyone had had enough. In 1938 the austerity program was abandoned, and the economy started to grow again.
The truth is that stimulus worked in 1933 and it worked in 2009. So why is our economy still in such bad shape? For one, partly due to political considerations and partly because it was rushed through Congress, the 2009 stimulus wasn't as well designed as it could have been. It was also sold badly. If the bill passed, administration economists predicted, unemployment would peak at 8 percent and then start declining (PDF). But the recession was far worse than the White House originally thought. Unemployment peaked in the double digits, and that's made the stimulus a fat target for Republican critics ever since.
But as awkward as it is to argue that things would have been worse without the stimulus—"Not as bad as it could have been!" isn't a winning slogan—well, the truth is that things would have been a lot worse without the stimulus. Everyone from the nonpartisanCongressional Budget Office (PDF) to private-sector forecasting firms have concluded that it increased economic growth, reduced unemployment, and put millions of people back to work. It just wasn't big enough, or long-lasting enough. Unfortunately, this has given conservatives an opening to demand tighter money and lower spending—exactly the same mistake we made in 1937.
MYTH #2: THE DEFICIT IS OUR BIGGEST PROBLEMIf your credit card company offered you $30,000 interest-free to buy a car, would you take the deal? Sure you would. It's a three-way win: You replace your clunker, the auto industry keeps its assembly lines humming, and the credit card company is happy to have made a safe loan, even at no interest. Apparently, they think you're a pretty good credit risk.
The Bush Effect
This is pretty much the situation the US government is in now. If our national debt were really at dire and unsustainable levels, as conservative economists and Republican leaders have taken to arguing, nervous investors would be driving up interest rates on federal borrowing. But just the opposite has happened: As I'm writing this, 10-year real treasury yields are at 0.00 percent. The seven-year rate is actually negative. Apparently, the financial markets think we're a pretty good credit risk.
It's true that the United States needs to address its long-term deficit problem—a problem almost entirely due to Medicare and other health care expenditures. (Domestic, defense, and Social Security spending have actually decreased as a percentage of GDP over the past 40 years, and there's no reason to think that's about to change.) But that's in the long term. Right now, our problem is a sluggish economy and too many people out of work. The real answer to future deficits is to spend money now to get the economy growing again.
America's infrastructure is crumbling, there are people who could be put to work fixing it, and banks are practically begging us to take their money. A trillion dollars in infrastructure spending would be good for our economy today, good for economic growth tomorrow, and thanks to those low interest rates (and the increased revenue that would come from growth), it wouldn't even increase our debt much. As they say, only an idiot turns down free money.
Only an Idiot Turns Down Free Money
MYTH $3: LOWER TAXES ARE THE BEST WAY TO GROW THE ECONOMYThere's no greater orthodoxy in the Republican Party than unconditional fealty to tax cuts. In a recent GOP debate, when the candidates were asked whether they'd walk away from a deficit deal that included just $1 in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts, every single hand shot up.
Taxes have been the third rail of American politics ever since the California tax revolt of 1978. Even Democrats are nervous about touching them: President Obama has famously called for letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire, but he's always careful to make it clear that he wouldn't change rates for anyone earning less than $250,000 per year. In other words, he'd repeal less than a quarter of the Bush tax cuts.
This fear is easy to understand. No one likes paying higher taxes. But do lower taxes actually spur economic growth? Bruce Bartlett, an economist in the Reagan administration, has compared tax rates in various rich countries in 1979 to each country's growth rate since then. His conclusion? There's virtually no correlation.
Recent US history backs this up too. Bill Clinton raised tax rates in 1993, and Republicans insisted it would cripple the economy. Instead, the economy boomed. In 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush lowered taxes and Republicans insisted the economy would flourish. Instead, we got the weakest expansion of the past century. Republicans are simply wrong about taxes: Within reason, high tax rates don't hinder growth, and low tax rates don't stimulate it.
But don't high taxes reduce the incentive for people to work? Actually, no: For ordinary wage earners, participation in the job force and total hours worked barely respond to taxes at all. (According to tax specialists Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija, this is "a rare example of a question on which there is a broad consensus among economists.") The same is true for rich people. As a trio of prominent economists concluded last year after reviewing the literature, "there is no compelling evidence to date of real economic responses to tax rates" (PDF). Even capital gains rates have virtually no impact: During the past few decades, they've bounced up and down from 40 percent to their post-Depression low of 15 percent. The effect on business investment is nil.
If a Tax Rate Falls...
Will the Economy Notice?
When McClatchy reporter Kevin Hall went out and asked small-business owners about this, he got a clear answer. "Absolutely, positively not," said one. "Government regulations are not choking our business," said another. In its most recent quarterly survey (PDF) of small-business trends, the National Federation of Independent Business reports that sales—i.e., lack of demand—is the No. 1 concern, beating out taxes, regulations, inflation, and everything else.
The Bottom Line Is the Bottom Line
In any case, regardless of what the Wall Street Journal editorial page says, the Obama administration has hardly been a whirlwind of regulatory activity. Its health care reform will have very little effect on either small businesses (which are exempt) or large businesses (which mostly offer health plans already) and only a modest effect on medium-size businesses (PDF). Its financial reform bill affects only the financial sector. Its proposed new air-quality regulations will mostly affect old coal-fired electrical plants that would have shut down anyway (PDF).
Dumb and outdated regulations are no friends to the economy—and the Obama administration has undertaken a regulatory review that's projected to save an estimated $10 billion during the next five years. But as welcome as that is, our economy's biggest problem right now isn't regulatory uncertainty. It's economic uncertainty.
MYTH #5: the President IS DEBASING THE DOLLARIn one of the most infamous moments of his young candidacy, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry decided to tee off on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last summer. "If this guy prints more money between now and the election," he told an enthusiastic audience in Cedar Rapids, "I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."
Bernanke's sin? Pumping money into the banking system after the collapse of 2008. Although this is widely credited with helping prevent a second Great Depression, tea partiers and gold bugs are convinced that Bernanke's actions have debased the dollar. There are two problems with that claim. First, it's not true. Second, we'd be better off if it were.
First things first: Has the dollar lost value under Bernanke and Obama? No. The usual measure for the strength of the dollar is called "trade-weighted value." In July 2008, just before the financial crisis erupted in earnest, the greenback's value stood at 95.4. As I'm writing this in mid-September, it has gone up, then down, and is currently sitting at 96.1.Taking a longer view, the dollar lost value under Reagan and Bush I, gained value under Clinton, lost value under Bush II, and has mostly stayed steady under Obama. There's just no basis to the claim that Obama and Bernanke have debased the currency.
And that's unfortunate. As economist Dean Baker is fond of pointing out, if we want to get our national savings rate up and our long-term budget deficit down, there's only one way to do it: by fixing our massive trade deficit. We have to import less and export more, and one way to make that happen is with a weaker dollar. A weaker dollar makes foreign goods more expensive, so we'll buy less of them, and makes American goods cheaper, so others will buy more of them.
The truth is that we'd be better off if we ditched the loaded "strong/weak" terminology and just talked about an "export dollar" (weak) and an "import dollar" (strong). Sometimes one is good, and sometimes the other is. The Chinese, for example, have done well for decades with an export yuan. Likewise, an export dollar would be our friend right now.
Bad News for Tourists...
Is a Holiday for Manufacturers
MYTH #6: IF YOU UNSHACKLE THE RICH, THEY'LL REV UP THE ECONOMYThink of this as the supermyth—the one underlying so many other fallacies. For decades, America's economic policies have been based on the notion that catering to corporations and the wealthy is the way to stimulate the economy. Republicans routinely insist that we need to bail them out, lower their taxes, allow them to repatriate hundreds of billions in overseas profits, and free them from annoying government meddling. If we don't, the "job creators" will stay in a funk, and the economy will stay in a rut.
But here's a pesky fact neither corporate America nor the GOP establishment is trumpeting: After-tax corporate profits are currently at an all-time high. The problem businesses face isn't lack of cash but rather a lack of confidence that consumer demand will pick up in the future. So they're not expanding or hiring at the rate they should be.
Rich people don't create jobs when we hand them big windfalls. They create jobs when the economy is growing and they have customers for their businesses. And the key to solving that problem, at least during a deep economic slump like the one we're in now, is to focus like a laser on more stimulus, easier money, higher inflation, and a weaker currency. Unless we want to relive 1937 over and over and over again. As Bill Murray said,
"Anything different is good."
Wall Street's Gain...
Main Street's Pain
Gingrich Calls Palestinians 'Invented' People
Saturday, December 10, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English
Republican presidential hopeful defends Israel and says Palestinians are Arabs who "had a chance to go many places".
Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich has stirred
controversy by calling the Palestinians an "invented" people who could
have chosen to live elsewhere.
Gingrich mocked the US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling it 'out of touch with reality'.
The former House of Representatives speaker, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race, made the remarks in an interview with the US Jewish Channel broadcaster released on Friday.
Asked whether he considers himself a Zionist, he answered: "I believe that the Jewish people have the right to a state ... Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century, "I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community.
"And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic."
Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment in 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.
Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 UN plan for ethnic partition of the then-British ruled territory of Palestine which Arabs rejected.
More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their lands by Zionist armed groups in 1948, in an episode Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or "catastrophe".
'Irrational hostility'Gingrich's comments drew a swift rebuke from a spokesman for the American Task Force on Palestine, Hussein Ibish, who said:
Sabri Saidam, adviser to the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera, "This is a manifestation of extreme racism and this is a reflection of where America stands sad, when Palestinians don't get their rights...this is sad and America should respond with a firm reaction to such comments that, if let go, more of which will come our way."
"Let me ask Newt Gingrich if he would ever entertain the thought of addressing Indian Americans by saying that they never existed, that they were the invention of a separate nation, would that be tolerated?"
"Let's also reverse the statement; let's put ourselves in "the shoe of Jews who are listening now. Would they ever accept such statements being made about them?"
Saidam said, "I think it's time that America rejects such statements and closes the door to such horrendous and unacceptable statements."
Gingrich also sharply criticised US President Barack Obama's approach to Middle East diplomacy, saying that it was "so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit."
He said Obama's effort to treat the Palestinians the same as the Israelis is actually "favouring the terrorists".
"If I'm even-handed between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day, that's not even-handed, that's favouring the terrorists," he said.
He also said the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, share an "enormous desire to destroy Israel".
The Palestinian Authority, which rules the occupied West Bank, formally recognises Israel's right to exist.
President Mahmoud Abbas has long forsworn violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the UN.
Gingrich, along with other Republican candidates, are seeking to attract Jewish in the US support by vowing to bolster Washington's ties with Israel if elected.
He declared his world view was "pretty close" to that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and vowed to take "a much more tougher-minded, and much more honest approach to the Middle East" if elected.
Gingrich mocked the US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling it 'out of touch with reality'.
The former House of Representatives speaker, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race, made the remarks in an interview with the US Jewish Channel broadcaster released on Friday.
Asked whether he considers himself a Zionist, he answered: "I believe that the Jewish people have the right to a state ... Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century, "I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community.
"And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic."
Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment in 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.
Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 UN plan for ethnic partition of the then-British ruled territory of Palestine which Arabs rejected.
More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their lands by Zionist armed groups in 1948, in an episode Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or "catastrophe".
'Irrational hostility'Gingrich's comments drew a swift rebuke from a spokesman for the American Task Force on Palestine, Hussein Ibish, who said:
"The idea that Palestinians are 'an invented people' while Israelis somehow are not is historically indefensible and inaccurate.
"Such statements seem to merely reflect deep historical ignorance and an irrational hostility towards Palestinian identity and nationalism."
Sabri Saidam, adviser to the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera, "This is a manifestation of extreme racism and this is a reflection of where America stands sad, when Palestinians don't get their rights...this is sad and America should respond with a firm reaction to such comments that, if let go, more of which will come our way."
"Let me ask Newt Gingrich if he would ever entertain the thought of addressing Indian Americans by saying that they never existed, that they were the invention of a separate nation, would that be tolerated?"
"Let's also reverse the statement; let's put ourselves in "the shoe of Jews who are listening now. Would they ever accept such statements being made about them?"
Saidam said, "I think it's time that America rejects such statements and closes the door to such horrendous and unacceptable statements."
Gingrich also sharply criticised US President Barack Obama's approach to Middle East diplomacy, saying that it was "so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit."
He said Obama's effort to treat the Palestinians the same as the Israelis is actually "favouring the terrorists".
"If I'm even-handed between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day, that's not even-handed, that's favouring the terrorists," he said.
He also said the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, share an "enormous desire to destroy Israel".
The Palestinian Authority, which rules the occupied West Bank, formally recognises Israel's right to exist.
President Mahmoud Abbas has long forsworn violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the UN.
Gingrich, along with other Republican candidates, are seeking to attract Jewish in the US support by vowing to bolster Washington's ties with Israel if elected.
He declared his world view was "pretty close" to that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and vowed to take "a much more tougher-minded, and much more honest approach to the Middle East" if elected.
TEPCO: Fukushima Radiation Isn’t Our Problem
In the amoral milieu of the corporate bottom line, you can’t blame Tokyo Electric Power Co. for trying.
Tepco owns the 6-reactor Fukushima complex that was wrecked by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and smashed by the resulting tsunami. It faces more than $350 billion in compensation and clean-up costs, as well as likely prosecution for withholding crucial information that may have prevented some radiation exposures and for operating the giant station after being warned about the inadequacy of its protections against disasters.
So when the company was hauled into Tokyo District Court Oct. 31 by the Sunfield Golf Club, which was demanding decontamination of the golf course, Tepco lawyers tried something novel. They claimed the company isn’t liable because it no longer “owned” the radioactive poisons that were spewed from its destroyed reactors.
“Radioactive materials that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not Tepco,” the company said. This stunned the Court, the plaintiffs and the press. An attorney for the golf club said, “We are flabbergasted….”
The court rejected Tepco’s notion that its cancer-causing pollution is owned by the areas it contaminated. But you have to hand it to Tepco. For brash balderdash there’s hardly a match in the world.
Even Union Carbide, whose toxic gas in Bhopal, India killed 15,000 people in 1984, hasn’t tried that one. Dow Chemical, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, is still fighting India’s demand for $1.7 billion in compensation. Perhaps Dow could try Tepco’s dodge: “The gas belongs to the breather now, since possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
Meanwhile, babies in Japan may be in for a life of debilitation and disease because radioactive cesium-137 and cesium-134 was recently found in infant milk powder. A December 6 announcement by the Meiji Holdings Company, Inc. said it was recalling 400,000 cans of its “Meiji Step,” powdered milk for babies older than 9 months. The powder was packaged in April — at the height of Fukushima’s largest radiation releases — distributed mostly in May and has an October 2012 expiration date.
The amount of cesium in one serving of the milk powder was about eight percent of the total contamination allowed by the government. But no one knows how much formula individual babies may have consumed prior to the recall. It is well known that fetuses, infants, children and women are harmed by doses of radiation below officially allowed exposures. Most exposure standards have been established in view of radiation’s projected effect on “Reference Man,” a hypothetical 20 to 30 year old white male, rather than women and children, the most vulnerable.
Even tiny amounts of internal radioactive contamination can damage DNA, cause cancer and weaken the immune system. Fukushima’s meltdowns dispersed radioactive contamination found in vegetables, milk, seafood, water, grain, animal feed and beef. Green tea grown 250 miles from Fukushima was found contaminated. Rice harvested this fall from 154 farms in Fukushima Prefecture was found in November to be poisoned with cesium 25 percent above the allowable limit. Shipments of rice from those farms were banned, but not before many tons had been sold. Presumably, that radiation is now the property of each consumer under the inventive assertion of Tepco’s corporate attorneys.
Tepco owns the 6-reactor Fukushima complex that was wrecked by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and smashed by the resulting tsunami. It faces more than $350 billion in compensation and clean-up costs, as well as likely prosecution for withholding crucial information that may have prevented some radiation exposures and for operating the giant station after being warned about the inadequacy of its protections against disasters.
So when the company was hauled into Tokyo District Court Oct. 31 by the Sunfield Golf Club, which was demanding decontamination of the golf course, Tepco lawyers tried something novel. They claimed the company isn’t liable because it no longer “owned” the radioactive poisons that were spewed from its destroyed reactors.
“Radioactive materials that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not Tepco,” the company said. This stunned the Court, the plaintiffs and the press. An attorney for the golf club said, “We are flabbergasted….”
The court rejected Tepco’s notion that its cancer-causing pollution is owned by the areas it contaminated. But you have to hand it to Tepco. For brash balderdash there’s hardly a match in the world.
Even Union Carbide, whose toxic gas in Bhopal, India killed 15,000 people in 1984, hasn’t tried that one. Dow Chemical, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, is still fighting India’s demand for $1.7 billion in compensation. Perhaps Dow could try Tepco’s dodge: “The gas belongs to the breather now, since possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
Meanwhile, babies in Japan may be in for a life of debilitation and disease because radioactive cesium-137 and cesium-134 was recently found in infant milk powder. A December 6 announcement by the Meiji Holdings Company, Inc. said it was recalling 400,000 cans of its “Meiji Step,” powdered milk for babies older than 9 months. The powder was packaged in April — at the height of Fukushima’s largest radiation releases — distributed mostly in May and has an October 2012 expiration date.
The amount of cesium in one serving of the milk powder was about eight percent of the total contamination allowed by the government. But no one knows how much formula individual babies may have consumed prior to the recall. It is well known that fetuses, infants, children and women are harmed by doses of radiation below officially allowed exposures. Most exposure standards have been established in view of radiation’s projected effect on “Reference Man,” a hypothetical 20 to 30 year old white male, rather than women and children, the most vulnerable.
Even tiny amounts of internal radioactive contamination can damage DNA, cause cancer and weaken the immune system. Fukushima’s meltdowns dispersed radioactive contamination found in vegetables, milk, seafood, water, grain, animal feed and beef. Green tea grown 250 miles from Fukushima was found contaminated. Rice harvested this fall from 154 farms in Fukushima Prefecture was found in November to be poisoned with cesium 25 percent above the allowable limit. Shipments of rice from those farms were banned, but not before many tons had been sold. Presumably, that radiation is now the property of each consumer under the inventive assertion of Tepco’s corporate attorneys.
Occupied Media: Foreclose on the Corporate Fourth Estate
Saturday, December 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Beneath the ever-expanding Occupy umbrella, one of the broad
messages is this: people are fed up going through the regular political
channels.
Politicians have – intentionally or otherwise – immersed themselves into the corporate toilet for the wholly unacceptable reason of retaining their political position and their life of privilege.
Metaphorically, our two-party political system is a giant decomposing carcass, where elected officials are imprisoned within its ribcage, expecting further sustenance from us. But they’ve had their feast. If the Occupy Movement becomes it's own living and breathing entity, the inevitable will be accelerated: these politicians will devour each other. Let them.
There is, however, another industry verging on this sort of cannibalism, the corporate media. A body politic now eschews The Fourth Estate, dismissing part (if not all) of what it’s become.
This is materializing in more of an opaque and organic way than the 99's denunciation of our political system and, to some degree, the Fourth Estate is now Occupied, being reconstructed and utilized to reestablish the public's trust. The mainstream media may not quite be a decomposing carcass, as there are still quality sectors and true professionals, but the distrust has placed the profession on life-support.
Citizens are not simply searching for alternative news sources, they’re creating their own media prism for an issue, story or an event to pass through.
For sometime now the Internet and the utilization of social networking has been facilitating a citizen's ability to devise useful ways on how information is gathered and disseminated. It was not until the inchoate days of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, however, that we have seen it taken to such a level in the United States (a nod to the Arab Spring, here). The mainstream media, seemingly, cannot keep up.
At an award's ceremony this past November 22, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather accepted his award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and challenged his colleagues to do a better job:
During many of the recent Occupy marches, the 24/7 media colossus has
been outmaneuvered by this amorphous trend; Unpaid people reporting,
co-producers, becoming credible sources of information. Often armed
with whatever recording device available, consumers are becoming the
courageous ones, the ones who are putting the public's interest first
and constructing information ecosystems throughout social media
portals.
Some call it Citizen Journalism or Collaborative Journalism others would rather not use the word "journalism" because, like the word "reality," we've surrendered the actual meaning of it. At best, the word "journalist" has lost it's real substance, cheapened by those who present opinion as fact, create the news rather than report it, frame hate propaganda behind a gauze of faux reportage.
Dan Rather, in that same acceptance speech:
Mr. Rather may be overdue in revealing his inner thoughts on his
former industry (and, as it was pointed out to me, made a substantial
living, thus making it easy for him to rage against the same machine
where he was once a huge cog). But Dan Rather is right: for the sake of
ratings facts are often beside the point. And many journalist and media
professionals know it, loath it, turn a blind eye and cash their
paychecks to it. Begs the question: shouldn't we call the corporate
media exactly what it is, a paid advertisement?
When the news is owned and driven by corporations, packaged for the sole purpose to grab eyeballs for profit, the result isn't so much fact but entertainment. Many of the TV news programs have devolved into a carnival, complete with fancy graphics, dramatic music stings, pseudo-punditry and the exaggerated energy of an infomercial.
So is it too late "to get back to work," as Dan Rather suggested to his colleagues? Of course not. And it’s unfair to indict the entire profession; some "real" journalists haven't stopped working and are stellar. But the shift is clear, beyond the tsunami of cyber-garbage on the web, new and unlikely sources are presenting credible and honest alternative forms of news. From the hors d'oeuvres tapped out on Twitter to the live feeds of Ustream and Livestream, so the whole world can watch.
The danger, here, is that these feeds and social networks (and the entire Internet) become corporatized and then censored (some argue that that is already happening).
In mid-November, CNN laid off 50 of its staff members, citing the growth of “citizen journalism” as the reason. Stephen Colbert subsequently lampooned this alternative brand of news on his November 28, 2011 show, an utterly hilarious bit, generating hundreds of Facebook re-postings and comments praising Colbert for supporting “real” journalists, for telling it like it is.
In watching the Colbert piece, however, the presumption is that we have "real" journalist delivering reliable and accurate news. That’s hard to reconcile, especially since an astonishing number of people claim to actually gettheir news from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It's Shakespearean: The court jester and the fool are the tellers of truth, the wisest of us all.
This is not a pejorative dig to Colbert and Stewart. It’s a message actually: in the public's eyes the media profession is loosing its credibility, creeping toward irrelevant.
Just as the Occupy movement is not about a particular electorate constituency (it’s about redesigning our dead system), the citizens feel that the media is not being held accountable for – intentionally or otherwise – screwing up the Public’s narrative.
As Liberty Square was being eviscerated in the wee hours of November 15, 2011, the mainstream media, due in part to a coordinated censoring by the NYPD, missed a great deal of it which, frankly, is not a mortal sin; not every story can be captured. It’s impossible.
But what happened later that day, at 11:30 a.m., is a one small example of why a negative perception lingers about “real” journalist.
After the park had been power-cleaned and barricaded, a court order deemed the eviction unlawful and therefore the protesters were attempting, as the law allowed, to re-enter, the threat of rain notwithstanding. The NYPD were blatantly ignoring the court order, prompting police and protesters to engage like inexperience rugby players.
One such scrum was directly between the cordoned-off park and the police approved press area, where all the press vans and their crew had returned from their eviction and set up just like they had been the weeks prior. None of the "real" journalist captured this particular confrontation: a 54-year-old woman and mother of 4 getting punched in the head by a police officer.
It is, however, documented in this video (shaky footage and all): Police Brutality Explained and Specific. And it was shot by three strangers (Casey Neistat, Dennis Trainor Jr., and myself) whereby, a couple of days after the incident, we sought each other out on the Internet and created the piece.
Police Brutality Explained and Specific from Nigrotime on Vimeo.
The mainstream media didn’t catch this small skirmish. Again, it’s impossible to capture every moment. CNN, however, jumped on the story after the fact, wrangled the mother of four for an interview. And though many proffered and pointed out the offending officer, the other side of the story, the “real” news crew neglected to investigate further.
The reporter went back to a production crate, sat down and began reapplying her makeup. If only at that moment the sky opened up. Their umbrellas, resting against their media bulk, looked so small.
Politicians have – intentionally or otherwise – immersed themselves into the corporate toilet for the wholly unacceptable reason of retaining their political position and their life of privilege.
Metaphorically, our two-party political system is a giant decomposing carcass, where elected officials are imprisoned within its ribcage, expecting further sustenance from us. But they’ve had their feast. If the Occupy Movement becomes it's own living and breathing entity, the inevitable will be accelerated: these politicians will devour each other. Let them.
There is, however, another industry verging on this sort of cannibalism, the corporate media. A body politic now eschews The Fourth Estate, dismissing part (if not all) of what it’s become.
This is materializing in more of an opaque and organic way than the 99's denunciation of our political system and, to some degree, the Fourth Estate is now Occupied, being reconstructed and utilized to reestablish the public's trust. The mainstream media may not quite be a decomposing carcass, as there are still quality sectors and true professionals, but the distrust has placed the profession on life-support.
Citizens are not simply searching for alternative news sources, they’re creating their own media prism for an issue, story or an event to pass through.
For sometime now the Internet and the utilization of social networking has been facilitating a citizen's ability to devise useful ways on how information is gathered and disseminated. It was not until the inchoate days of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, however, that we have seen it taken to such a level in the United States (a nod to the Arab Spring, here). The mainstream media, seemingly, cannot keep up.
At an award's ceremony this past November 22, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather accepted his award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and challenged his colleagues to do a better job:
"But now, we see our fellow citizens taking to the streets. And, that my friends, is our cue to get back to work. As the People of our nation begin rising up, they expect the business of news to be about inquiry and accountability."
Some call it Citizen Journalism or Collaborative Journalism others would rather not use the word "journalism" because, like the word "reality," we've surrendered the actual meaning of it. At best, the word "journalist" has lost it's real substance, cheapened by those who present opinion as fact, create the news rather than report it, frame hate propaganda behind a gauze of faux reportage.
Dan Rather, in that same acceptance speech:
"Today, how we look and how we "present" information has become far more important than how we gather it. It's upside down and backwards. And, the worst part is ... we have gotten used to it."
When the news is owned and driven by corporations, packaged for the sole purpose to grab eyeballs for profit, the result isn't so much fact but entertainment. Many of the TV news programs have devolved into a carnival, complete with fancy graphics, dramatic music stings, pseudo-punditry and the exaggerated energy of an infomercial.
So is it too late "to get back to work," as Dan Rather suggested to his colleagues? Of course not. And it’s unfair to indict the entire profession; some "real" journalists haven't stopped working and are stellar. But the shift is clear, beyond the tsunami of cyber-garbage on the web, new and unlikely sources are presenting credible and honest alternative forms of news. From the hors d'oeuvres tapped out on Twitter to the live feeds of Ustream and Livestream, so the whole world can watch.
The danger, here, is that these feeds and social networks (and the entire Internet) become corporatized and then censored (some argue that that is already happening).
In mid-November, CNN laid off 50 of its staff members, citing the growth of “citizen journalism” as the reason. Stephen Colbert subsequently lampooned this alternative brand of news on his November 28, 2011 show, an utterly hilarious bit, generating hundreds of Facebook re-postings and comments praising Colbert for supporting “real” journalists, for telling it like it is.
In watching the Colbert piece, however, the presumption is that we have "real" journalist delivering reliable and accurate news. That’s hard to reconcile, especially since an astonishing number of people claim to actually gettheir news from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It's Shakespearean: The court jester and the fool are the tellers of truth, the wisest of us all.
This is not a pejorative dig to Colbert and Stewart. It’s a message actually: in the public's eyes the media profession is loosing its credibility, creeping toward irrelevant.
Just as the Occupy movement is not about a particular electorate constituency (it’s about redesigning our dead system), the citizens feel that the media is not being held accountable for – intentionally or otherwise – screwing up the Public’s narrative.
As Liberty Square was being eviscerated in the wee hours of November 15, 2011, the mainstream media, due in part to a coordinated censoring by the NYPD, missed a great deal of it which, frankly, is not a mortal sin; not every story can be captured. It’s impossible.
But what happened later that day, at 11:30 a.m., is a one small example of why a negative perception lingers about “real” journalist.
After the park had been power-cleaned and barricaded, a court order deemed the eviction unlawful and therefore the protesters were attempting, as the law allowed, to re-enter, the threat of rain notwithstanding. The NYPD were blatantly ignoring the court order, prompting police and protesters to engage like inexperience rugby players.
One such scrum was directly between the cordoned-off park and the police approved press area, where all the press vans and their crew had returned from their eviction and set up just like they had been the weeks prior. None of the "real" journalist captured this particular confrontation: a 54-year-old woman and mother of 4 getting punched in the head by a police officer.
It is, however, documented in this video (shaky footage and all): Police Brutality Explained and Specific. And it was shot by three strangers (Casey Neistat, Dennis Trainor Jr., and myself) whereby, a couple of days after the incident, we sought each other out on the Internet and created the piece.
Police Brutality Explained and Specific from Nigrotime on Vimeo.
The mainstream media didn’t catch this small skirmish. Again, it’s impossible to capture every moment. CNN, however, jumped on the story after the fact, wrangled the mother of four for an interview. And though many proffered and pointed out the offending officer, the other side of the story, the “real” news crew neglected to investigate further.
The reporter went back to a production crate, sat down and began reapplying her makeup. If only at that moment the sky opened up. Their umbrellas, resting against their media bulk, looked so small.
Austerity and Social Unrest
Whatever the long-term fate of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS)
movement, it has made two major contributions to the warming 2012
political climate.
First, OWS put the concept of economic and social (in)equity, of the haves and have-nots, the 99%-ers, of class, center stage in national political discourse. This is no insignificant accomplishment. For the last half-century, there has been an unstated ban on acknowledging the concept of class in political discourse. It was an agreement shared in politics, education/academia, the media and the labor movement. “Workers” became the “middle class” and the sins of capitalism forgiven.
OWS’s second contribution has been to recover direct action, particularly mass social mobilization, as a valid form of political engagement. There is a growing perception that petition signing, marches and voting mean little, rituals confirming predetermined outcomes. People on all sides of the growing number of political and social issues (including grassroots Tea Partyers) are discovering their voices, mobilizing and getting busted. Not surprising, activists often use high-tech communications media to accomplish miracles. Direct action is likely to take still new and unexpected forms as the economic crisis deepens, drags on and social unrest mounts.
The U.S. has a different political culture than, say, Europe (e.g., the UK, Italy and Greece) or North Africa (e.g., “Arab Spring” countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya). And a different political culture leads to different forms of social unrest, whether expressed in anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, riots, political assassinations or attempted revolutions. In each geo-political region and each country within it, social contradictions are played out differently, uniquely. In the U.S., it found expression in the now-global slogan, “We are the 99%!”
In the U.S. during the 20th century, there were two major periods of massive social unrest. The first was born from the failure of the Great Depression and led to widespread union organizing. The second grew out of the promise of the Great Society and was expressed in the social struggles over civil rights, the Viet Nam war and popular culture. In addition, during the last century the U.S. witnessed repeated assassinations and assassination-attempts of presidents and other officials; however, there were no attempted revolutions.
Today’s struggle, whether occupying Wall Street, London or Cairo, is an attempt to address yet another crisis of capitalism. In the U.S., the powers-that-be and their enforcers, including many within the media, are playing the race card, characterizing the crisis as the consequence of foreclosures resulting from suspect mortgages awarded to lower-class people of color by complicit government agencies. While oft repeated, few believe this lie. As has become evident to increasing numbers of Americans, the only ones who made out like bandits were the bandits … the bankers, mortgage brokers and rating agencies.
The OWS movement highlights the deepening antinomies of austerity and prosperity that define early-21st century capitalism. More social wealth was created during the last century than any time in history. Much of it was squandered in wars and other forms of social madness. However, over the last quarter century, social wealth has been increasingly unevenly distributed. OWS taught Americans a moral lesson, reminding us that there’s something wrong when so many suffer for the benefit of so few.
Unrest throughout the world is driven by one underlying, shared (if unstated) perception: Today’s economic (i.e., financial) recession represents a structural crisis of capitalism. More than money is at stake; global capitalism is being realigned; American society is being restructured.
More inchoate is the sense that the powers-that-be are using the state apparatus to save the banking and financial sector while letting the rest of American to sink or swim on their own. The nearly all-powerful 1% is using the crisis to further redistribute social wealth … upwards.
The recent period of more equitable distribution of social wealth, from the post-WW II period through the 1970s, is popularly known as the “American Century.” It was an era in which, for many, prosperity fueled optimism. The period suggested that post-modern society had the means to create an ecologically-grounded, post-scarcity nation. OWS and other insurgencies across the globe are reigniting the great utopian promise that capitalism claims as its historic legitimacy and could be its undoing.
In the U.S. and Europe, austerity is the new religion of the corporate state, its virtues endlessly extoled by the media. Finance capital is in crisis and social wealth is being plundered; the victims are told they are the cause of the crisis. And, as the crisis intensifies, academics and policy analysts throughout the world are starting to analyze the relationship between austerity and social unrest. The coordinated campaign by police forces throughout the country against local OWS improvisations is a sign of the further militarization of American life.
Two Spanish scholars, Jacopo Ponticelli (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
and Hans-Joachim Voth (Center for Economic Policy Research), recently
published a very influential study on the relationship between the
economy and social unrest, “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009.” It’s a bloody tale of 20th
century social crisis. One of their key findings is cuttingly simple:
“Economic conditions can deteriorate further and faster if political
and social chaos follows attempts to reign in spending.” They insist
that there is a direct link between cuts in social spending and an
increase in social unrest. As they insist: “With every additional
percentage point of GDP in spending cuts, the risk of unrest increases.”
A second model of popular unrest is the “Predictive Societal Indicators of Radicalism Model of Domestic Political Violence Forecast.” It was developed by Sam Bell, with Amanda Murdie, both at Kansas State University, and David Cingranelli, of Binghamton University (NY). Most illuminating as to the current state of state-supported academic research, the forecast was developed for Milcord, of Waltham, MA, a company that “builds knowledge management solutions for federal agencies.” It claims to have “predicted” civil unrest in Peru, Ireland, Ecuador, Italy and Tunisia; Iran is on its watch list. Most disturbing, it has also developed unrest models for Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Italy and 35 other countries.
One can only assume it has developed one for the U.S., but it is the property of the FBI, DoJ, Homeland Security or another federal agency.
Anticipating concerns regarding social unrest and austerity, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) was formed in 1994. It proclaims itself to be “a panel of scholars and methodologists that was originally formed … at the request of senior policymakers in the United States Government.”
Patricia Justino, a professor at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (UK), has intoned with the authoritative voice only an academic could utter: “Rises in economic and social disparities between the poor and the rich, systematic social exclusion and other forms of perceived unfairness in social relations often result in the accumulation of discontent to a sufficiently high level to break social cohesion.”
Justino, along with most scholars of social unrest, warn that governments tend to first resort to unpredictable civil unrest in a predictable manner: they use of police and military forces. She warns: “This can be a counterproductive measure since it does not address direct causes of conflict.”
Academics are not alone in their concern about the relationship between austerity and social unrest. In 2008, the U.S. Army War College published a study, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development.” This is a very scary document. It calls for the U.S. military to prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States.” Such actions would violate a long-established precept of American democracy, the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385) of 1878, that keeps the military out of domestic affairs. The study advocates that “[u]nder the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.”
Some at the heart of the Obama administration share this perception. Dennis Blair, the former Director of National Intelligence, argued: “The global economic crisis … already looms as the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries … Economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they are prolonged for a one- or two-year period.”
Most surprising, people under 50 years of age think unrest is more likely and a third of those of surveyed believe that further tax hikes and stock market instability will contribute to social uprisings.
The OWS movement has pushed social unrest to a new level. Mass popular assembly has been growing as a tactic since the Seattle days-of-rage in 1999 opposing the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was further adoption as a strategy during the Republican conventions held in New York in 2004 (when over 1,800 people were arrested) and again in St. Paul in 2008 (when nearly 300 people, including many journalists, were busted).
In responses, local police forces and federal agencies have been actively coordinating their respective plans to contain or halt social unrest. In the wake of Oakland OWS police actions, Mayor Jean Quan acknowledged that she had participated in a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities discussing tactics to suppress popular assembly. In addition, an official with the Department of Homeland Security revealed that that agency and the FBI were working with local municipal officials to plan how to shut down OSW protests.
As the social crisis intensifies and austerity and class become increasingly more compelling electoral issues, social unrest is likely to mushroom. Popular recourse to OWS-style direct action initiatives will likely draw even more coordinated responses from local police and federal authorities. Be prepared for the worse.
First, OWS put the concept of economic and social (in)equity, of the haves and have-nots, the 99%-ers, of class, center stage in national political discourse. This is no insignificant accomplishment. For the last half-century, there has been an unstated ban on acknowledging the concept of class in political discourse. It was an agreement shared in politics, education/academia, the media and the labor movement. “Workers” became the “middle class” and the sins of capitalism forgiven.
OWS’s second contribution has been to recover direct action, particularly mass social mobilization, as a valid form of political engagement. There is a growing perception that petition signing, marches and voting mean little, rituals confirming predetermined outcomes. People on all sides of the growing number of political and social issues (including grassroots Tea Partyers) are discovering their voices, mobilizing and getting busted. Not surprising, activists often use high-tech communications media to accomplish miracles. Direct action is likely to take still new and unexpected forms as the economic crisis deepens, drags on and social unrest mounts.
The U.S. has a different political culture than, say, Europe (e.g., the UK, Italy and Greece) or North Africa (e.g., “Arab Spring” countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya). And a different political culture leads to different forms of social unrest, whether expressed in anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, riots, political assassinations or attempted revolutions. In each geo-political region and each country within it, social contradictions are played out differently, uniquely. In the U.S., it found expression in the now-global slogan, “We are the 99%!”
In the U.S. during the 20th century, there were two major periods of massive social unrest. The first was born from the failure of the Great Depression and led to widespread union organizing. The second grew out of the promise of the Great Society and was expressed in the social struggles over civil rights, the Viet Nam war and popular culture. In addition, during the last century the U.S. witnessed repeated assassinations and assassination-attempts of presidents and other officials; however, there were no attempted revolutions.
Today’s struggle, whether occupying Wall Street, London or Cairo, is an attempt to address yet another crisis of capitalism. In the U.S., the powers-that-be and their enforcers, including many within the media, are playing the race card, characterizing the crisis as the consequence of foreclosures resulting from suspect mortgages awarded to lower-class people of color by complicit government agencies. While oft repeated, few believe this lie. As has become evident to increasing numbers of Americans, the only ones who made out like bandits were the bandits … the bankers, mortgage brokers and rating agencies.
The OWS movement highlights the deepening antinomies of austerity and prosperity that define early-21st century capitalism. More social wealth was created during the last century than any time in history. Much of it was squandered in wars and other forms of social madness. However, over the last quarter century, social wealth has been increasingly unevenly distributed. OWS taught Americans a moral lesson, reminding us that there’s something wrong when so many suffer for the benefit of so few.
Unrest throughout the world is driven by one underlying, shared (if unstated) perception: Today’s economic (i.e., financial) recession represents a structural crisis of capitalism. More than money is at stake; global capitalism is being realigned; American society is being restructured.
More inchoate is the sense that the powers-that-be are using the state apparatus to save the banking and financial sector while letting the rest of American to sink or swim on their own. The nearly all-powerful 1% is using the crisis to further redistribute social wealth … upwards.
The recent period of more equitable distribution of social wealth, from the post-WW II period through the 1970s, is popularly known as the “American Century.” It was an era in which, for many, prosperity fueled optimism. The period suggested that post-modern society had the means to create an ecologically-grounded, post-scarcity nation. OWS and other insurgencies across the globe are reigniting the great utopian promise that capitalism claims as its historic legitimacy and could be its undoing.
In the U.S. and Europe, austerity is the new religion of the corporate state, its virtues endlessly extoled by the media. Finance capital is in crisis and social wealth is being plundered; the victims are told they are the cause of the crisis. And, as the crisis intensifies, academics and policy analysts throughout the world are starting to analyze the relationship between austerity and social unrest. The coordinated campaign by police forces throughout the country against local OWS improvisations is a sign of the further militarization of American life.
* * *
A second model of popular unrest is the “Predictive Societal Indicators of Radicalism Model of Domestic Political Violence Forecast.” It was developed by Sam Bell, with Amanda Murdie, both at Kansas State University, and David Cingranelli, of Binghamton University (NY). Most illuminating as to the current state of state-supported academic research, the forecast was developed for Milcord, of Waltham, MA, a company that “builds knowledge management solutions for federal agencies.” It claims to have “predicted” civil unrest in Peru, Ireland, Ecuador, Italy and Tunisia; Iran is on its watch list. Most disturbing, it has also developed unrest models for Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Italy and 35 other countries.
One can only assume it has developed one for the U.S., but it is the property of the FBI, DoJ, Homeland Security or another federal agency.
Anticipating concerns regarding social unrest and austerity, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) was formed in 1994. It proclaims itself to be “a panel of scholars and methodologists that was originally formed … at the request of senior policymakers in the United States Government.”
Patricia Justino, a professor at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (UK), has intoned with the authoritative voice only an academic could utter: “Rises in economic and social disparities between the poor and the rich, systematic social exclusion and other forms of perceived unfairness in social relations often result in the accumulation of discontent to a sufficiently high level to break social cohesion.”
Justino, along with most scholars of social unrest, warn that governments tend to first resort to unpredictable civil unrest in a predictable manner: they use of police and military forces. She warns: “This can be a counterproductive measure since it does not address direct causes of conflict.”
Academics are not alone in their concern about the relationship between austerity and social unrest. In 2008, the U.S. Army War College published a study, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development.” This is a very scary document. It calls for the U.S. military to prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States.” Such actions would violate a long-established precept of American democracy, the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385) of 1878, that keeps the military out of domestic affairs. The study advocates that “[u]nder the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.”
Some at the heart of the Obama administration share this perception. Dennis Blair, the former Director of National Intelligence, argued: “The global economic crisis … already looms as the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries … Economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they are prolonged for a one- or two-year period.”
* * *
The perception that austerity contributes to social unrest is growing
among ordinary Americans. An August 2011 Rasmussen survey found that
nearly half (48%) of all Americans believe that government spending cuts
will lead to civil unrest on a scale similar to London’s spring
uprising; 13 percent felt that social unrest was very likely.Most surprising, people under 50 years of age think unrest is more likely and a third of those of surveyed believe that further tax hikes and stock market instability will contribute to social uprisings.
The OWS movement has pushed social unrest to a new level. Mass popular assembly has been growing as a tactic since the Seattle days-of-rage in 1999 opposing the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was further adoption as a strategy during the Republican conventions held in New York in 2004 (when over 1,800 people were arrested) and again in St. Paul in 2008 (when nearly 300 people, including many journalists, were busted).
In responses, local police forces and federal agencies have been actively coordinating their respective plans to contain or halt social unrest. In the wake of Oakland OWS police actions, Mayor Jean Quan acknowledged that she had participated in a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities discussing tactics to suppress popular assembly. In addition, an official with the Department of Homeland Security revealed that that agency and the FBI were working with local municipal officials to plan how to shut down OSW protests.
As the social crisis intensifies and austerity and class become increasingly more compelling electoral issues, social unrest is likely to mushroom. Popular recourse to OWS-style direct action initiatives will likely draw even more coordinated responses from local police and federal authorities. Be prepared for the worse.
Deliver Occupy From Its “Friends” & Dumb Reasons NOT to Support Occupy
Mainstream liberals and the Institutional Left frequently
criticize the Occupy movement for its lack of public spokespersons and
its lack of clear demands. But according to David Graeber, it came very
close to having those things — and to being just another protest that
fizzled out after a few days.
Graeber, an anarchist University of London anthropology professor, showed up for a preliminary meeting held in early August to prepare for the next month’s Occupation. As he recounts, it was shaping up as a typical top-down movement controlled by the usual suspects of the Institutional Left. Adbusters, which posted the original call for a September 17 Occupation, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, and the Workers World Party (which created the International ANSWER coalition at the outset of the Iraq War in 2003), between them pretty well had things sewn up.
My guess is that had those groups kept control, Occupy would have had all the public spokespersons and demands anyone could want — and would have been in the news for maybe a week.
Fortunately, Graeber and some friends began talking with other “horizontals” — Wobblies, veterans of the Greek and Spanish protests, etc. — who, like him, had been hoping for something on the libertarian model of the Spanish indignados’ protest. They quickly coalesced into a General Assembly and bypassed the power grab of Workers’ World et al.
Those who object miss the point. A large share of those participating in OWS have learned that playing by the normal rules of “progressive” politics — getting out the vote and organizing pressure groups — doesn’t work. They tried that in 2008, electing the most “progressive” president of a lifetime with the biggest majority since LBJ, and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. And then they were betrayed as Obama revealed himself to be either totally ineffectual or, worse yet, a conscious stooge of Wall Street.
As Graeber says, “Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.”
So this time they’re not playing by the old rules. What, exactly, are they trying to accomplish? I believe their significance has to more to do with their form of organization itself — a distributed, self-organized network — as a model of the society they hope to build, than with any concrete demands. In Rowan Wolf’s elegant phrase, “the organizational model … is the carrier wave of the movement.”
As Graeber points out, it’s their lack of specific demands that gives them strength. Despite op-ed jabbering to the contrary, it’s hard to miss what their main focus is: Hatred for Wall Street, for the concentration of wealth, for crony capitalism, and for the unholy alliance between Big Business and the state.
That common set of values is the basic operating platform of the movement. Beyond that, the specific agendas built on that platform are beyond counting. It includes everyone from libertarian communists to social democrats and conventional liberals to left-wing market anarchists like me, and quite a few Paulistas who want to abolish the Fed.
Occupy, with its organizational style and the cultural memes it propagates, is a source of strength for all those individual agendas. The loosely allied subgroups are modules operating on a common platform. The very fact that so many different groups share a common brand, united only by their enmity toward plutocracy, is the movement’s source of power.
That’s the same stigmergic model of organization used by the open source software community. The basic platform can support as many modular utilities as there are developers. The utilities themselves reflect the needs and concerns of individual developers. Likewise, there are as many sub-movements piggybacked on Occupy as there are reasons for hating Wall Street, ways of being affected by it, and walks of life among the Occupiers.
In Occupy, like other stigmergically organized projects ranging from Linux and Wikipedia to al Qaeda, nobody needs “permission” from “leadership” to try out ideas. And whatever idea works for one node instantly becomes property of the whole network. “Occupy Our Homes,” which sprang up almost overnight, is one example of such stigmergic innovation. Other groups are likely to arrive independently at innovative ideas, like flash-mobbing the homes and country clubs of politicians, CEOs and plutocrats. As they used to say in the civics textbooks, Occupy is a “laboratory of democracy.”
If you want to see “leadership” and unified agendas, go back fifty years and look at GM or the CBS evening news. We don’t need it. “Leadership” is so 20th century.
Five Dumbest Reasons Not to Support the Occupy Movement
Reality check: That’s the kind of people you want to suck up to—people who would be offended by a peaceful occupation of a park? With friends like these…
*It’s divisive. It sets up a separation between some kinds of human beings and others, between the 99% and the 1%. It’s not Buddhist enough. It’s not Zen. It’s not spiritual.
Reality Check: The super rich don’t want you. They don’t like you. They don’t need your sympathy. They’ve hired guys to beat you up. They’re not impressed by your attempt at brotherhood. You have lice. That limo coming at you? It isn’t going to slow down.
*They think they’re the first people to ever do this? Where were they back in [whenever] when we were [young]. They have no sense of history. We’ve been slogging away in the trenches all these years.
Reality check: Seriously? You want to emphasize how humorless and old you are? As they say on the television machine, “can I ask you a question? Shut up!”
*I feel left out.
Reality check: Go to a general assembly and tell everyone you need a lot of hugs.
*The Occupiers don’t have clear demands that a capitalist society can enter in a concise capitalist-style checklist and present on TV.
Reality check: Yeah. And yet there they are. Kind of unnerving, isn’t it?
*Dirty hippies. Who’s going to pay the costs of throwing out the personal belongings of the Occupiers? Hazmat suit deployment isn’t cheap.
Reality check: Nazi eugenicists shared your pain in the 1920’s. Obsession with cleanliness, ja. Racial hygiene, check. Nordic purity, check. Dirty Jews, jawohl. Everyone’s dirty who isn’t on our team. We’re pure, and the blond hair with highlights doesn’t hurt. Zer iz uh poopie in ze toilet and vee must scrub it and retain zee anal formation.
*Supposed to get a permit. Supposed to tell your Congressperson. Supposed to get approval. Supposed to think about votes. Supposed to do it the way it’s always been done. Supposed to have leaders.
Reality check: Daddy said no. Now what, little boy?
*Occupying land as an expression of free speech is a non-starter in the courts.
Reality check: Occupying a seat in the front of the bus was a non-starter in white courts. And yet we have all these black people in the fronts of buses now. Funny thing happened on the way to the front of the bus. The most important point about leaders and people who think they’re allowed to judge others is that they’ll follow when they have to. We occupy the space because it’s ethical, not because some rich judge surrounded by lackeys or because some politician surrounded by suitcases of cash from K Street gives permission. You think your soft-palate little democracy ga-ga goo-goo arrangement is the only arrangement of human affairs that exists? We didn’t sign on to yours.
*I want a different percentage number than 99. Some of those 99 are jerks too, you know.
Reality check: Yes dear. Thank-you for sharing. 69 isn’t quite the same somehow.
*OWS is a joke. More bleating. It will fail miserably. Nothing will change. The reason is obvious: the whole point of OWS is to further reinforce the idea that the real power is with the 1%. We have to beg them to change things. We have to demand change from them. They have to agree to it. But it is not the 1% who are bruising us with batons, burning us with chemical sprays, electrocuting us with stun guns, and worse. Who are these cops hiding behind the armor and masks? Are they not our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers and cousins? Are they not us?
My response: Ouch. This is the sleeper embedded here in the middle of the article.
Hopefully the difference in font size will come through to indicate “sleeper.” Embedded in the article. Embedded, perhaps, in the middle of the movement. The words are those of a man in Argentina with the middle initial F, and the words aren’t dumb. Personally I take the 99/1 split to be about wealth distribution and spectacular greed, but if the movement means that the 99/1 split is that we’re the 99 kids and we have to supplicate the daddy leader, then Middle-F’s right and the power of the movement will be neatly diverted back to the belief in daddies and voting. Back to K Street. Back to the belief that it was Hitler who actually killed people rather than his willing executioners. Back to the belief that Bush was pure evil and tremendously important and we have to get the big O (as Lacan might say) to save us.
Seventy-five folks braved rain Wednesday night, for example, to occupy or Occupy the Supremes. Oh-O—the big O again. Reminds me of the great O-Bum in the sky, our anal savior, ja. If these folks were occupying the street because it’s right to get in the way of car culture and its massive systemic violence, and it is, or because it’s fun to walk down the street in the rain, and it is, or they’re occupying some building because there are idiots in it who think they’re the Supremes, and apparently there are, then we have a movement. But if they’re just off to daddy’s house to beg and supplicate, then we’ve got a problem.
Washington is a city filled with people who never grew up. These lesser gods are the last people to whom anyone should send pleas, petitions, supplications, or indeed any form of prayer at all. On a purely practical note, it is for this reason that seewalk-the-ungoogleable thinks that while occupying everywhere is a good idea, Washington should be the last place where we should bother. Now back to our regularly scheduled article:
*Plenty of these people in these Occupy encampments are on drugs, use needles, and have mental health problems.
Reality check: Isn’t it great? What a wonderful testimony to the kind of people who Occupy, that the downtrodden and the towntrodden and the messed up feel a sense of belonging and solace here, where there are so many people who can help direct them to social services in a supportive, caring way, or offer a bowl of soup, or just hang out.
*You people can’t count. You said five reasons.
*I can’t walk my dog in the park.
Reality check: Oh, you have a dog that doesn’t like kisses and getting petted? That probably is a problem.
Graeber, an anarchist University of London anthropology professor, showed up for a preliminary meeting held in early August to prepare for the next month’s Occupation. As he recounts, it was shaping up as a typical top-down movement controlled by the usual suspects of the Institutional Left. Adbusters, which posted the original call for a September 17 Occupation, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, and the Workers World Party (which created the International ANSWER coalition at the outset of the Iraq War in 2003), between them pretty well had things sewn up.
My guess is that had those groups kept control, Occupy would have had all the public spokespersons and demands anyone could want — and would have been in the news for maybe a week.
Fortunately, Graeber and some friends began talking with other “horizontals” — Wobblies, veterans of the Greek and Spanish protests, etc. — who, like him, had been hoping for something on the libertarian model of the Spanish indignados’ protest. They quickly coalesced into a General Assembly and bypassed the power grab of Workers’ World et al.
Those who object miss the point. A large share of those participating in OWS have learned that playing by the normal rules of “progressive” politics — getting out the vote and organizing pressure groups — doesn’t work. They tried that in 2008, electing the most “progressive” president of a lifetime with the biggest majority since LBJ, and a Democratic super-majority in Congress. And then they were betrayed as Obama revealed himself to be either totally ineffectual or, worse yet, a conscious stooge of Wall Street.
As Graeber says, “Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.”
So this time they’re not playing by the old rules. What, exactly, are they trying to accomplish? I believe their significance has to more to do with their form of organization itself — a distributed, self-organized network — as a model of the society they hope to build, than with any concrete demands. In Rowan Wolf’s elegant phrase, “the organizational model … is the carrier wave of the movement.”
As Graeber points out, it’s their lack of specific demands that gives them strength. Despite op-ed jabbering to the contrary, it’s hard to miss what their main focus is: Hatred for Wall Street, for the concentration of wealth, for crony capitalism, and for the unholy alliance between Big Business and the state.
That common set of values is the basic operating platform of the movement. Beyond that, the specific agendas built on that platform are beyond counting. It includes everyone from libertarian communists to social democrats and conventional liberals to left-wing market anarchists like me, and quite a few Paulistas who want to abolish the Fed.
Occupy, with its organizational style and the cultural memes it propagates, is a source of strength for all those individual agendas. The loosely allied subgroups are modules operating on a common platform. The very fact that so many different groups share a common brand, united only by their enmity toward plutocracy, is the movement’s source of power.
That’s the same stigmergic model of organization used by the open source software community. The basic platform can support as many modular utilities as there are developers. The utilities themselves reflect the needs and concerns of individual developers. Likewise, there are as many sub-movements piggybacked on Occupy as there are reasons for hating Wall Street, ways of being affected by it, and walks of life among the Occupiers.
In Occupy, like other stigmergically organized projects ranging from Linux and Wikipedia to al Qaeda, nobody needs “permission” from “leadership” to try out ideas. And whatever idea works for one node instantly becomes property of the whole network. “Occupy Our Homes,” which sprang up almost overnight, is one example of such stigmergic innovation. Other groups are likely to arrive independently at innovative ideas, like flash-mobbing the homes and country clubs of politicians, CEOs and plutocrats. As they used to say in the civics textbooks, Occupy is a “laboratory of democracy.”
If you want to see “leadership” and unified agendas, go back fifty years and look at GM or the CBS evening news. We don’t need it. “Leadership” is so 20th century.
~~~~~~~~
Five Dumbest Reasons Not to Support the Occupy Movement
My God, what’s happened?*We could alienate the very people who might be our supporters.
—Princess Diana
Reality check: That’s the kind of people you want to suck up to—people who would be offended by a peaceful occupation of a park? With friends like these…
*It’s divisive. It sets up a separation between some kinds of human beings and others, between the 99% and the 1%. It’s not Buddhist enough. It’s not Zen. It’s not spiritual.
Reality Check: The super rich don’t want you. They don’t like you. They don’t need your sympathy. They’ve hired guys to beat you up. They’re not impressed by your attempt at brotherhood. You have lice. That limo coming at you? It isn’t going to slow down.
*They think they’re the first people to ever do this? Where were they back in [whenever] when we were [young]. They have no sense of history. We’ve been slogging away in the trenches all these years.
Reality check: Seriously? You want to emphasize how humorless and old you are? As they say on the television machine, “can I ask you a question? Shut up!”
*I feel left out.
Reality check: Go to a general assembly and tell everyone you need a lot of hugs.
*The Occupiers don’t have clear demands that a capitalist society can enter in a concise capitalist-style checklist and present on TV.
Reality check: Yeah. And yet there they are. Kind of unnerving, isn’t it?
*Dirty hippies. Who’s going to pay the costs of throwing out the personal belongings of the Occupiers? Hazmat suit deployment isn’t cheap.
Reality check: Nazi eugenicists shared your pain in the 1920’s. Obsession with cleanliness, ja. Racial hygiene, check. Nordic purity, check. Dirty Jews, jawohl. Everyone’s dirty who isn’t on our team. We’re pure, and the blond hair with highlights doesn’t hurt. Zer iz uh poopie in ze toilet and vee must scrub it and retain zee anal formation.
*Supposed to get a permit. Supposed to tell your Congressperson. Supposed to get approval. Supposed to think about votes. Supposed to do it the way it’s always been done. Supposed to have leaders.
Reality check: Daddy said no. Now what, little boy?
*Occupying land as an expression of free speech is a non-starter in the courts.
Reality check: Occupying a seat in the front of the bus was a non-starter in white courts. And yet we have all these black people in the fronts of buses now. Funny thing happened on the way to the front of the bus. The most important point about leaders and people who think they’re allowed to judge others is that they’ll follow when they have to. We occupy the space because it’s ethical, not because some rich judge surrounded by lackeys or because some politician surrounded by suitcases of cash from K Street gives permission. You think your soft-palate little democracy ga-ga goo-goo arrangement is the only arrangement of human affairs that exists? We didn’t sign on to yours.
*I want a different percentage number than 99. Some of those 99 are jerks too, you know.
Reality check: Yes dear. Thank-you for sharing. 69 isn’t quite the same somehow.
*OWS is a joke. More bleating. It will fail miserably. Nothing will change. The reason is obvious: the whole point of OWS is to further reinforce the idea that the real power is with the 1%. We have to beg them to change things. We have to demand change from them. They have to agree to it. But it is not the 1% who are bruising us with batons, burning us with chemical sprays, electrocuting us with stun guns, and worse. Who are these cops hiding behind the armor and masks? Are they not our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers and cousins? Are they not us?
My response: Ouch. This is the sleeper embedded here in the middle of the article.
Hopefully the difference in font size will come through to indicate “sleeper.” Embedded in the article. Embedded, perhaps, in the middle of the movement. The words are those of a man in Argentina with the middle initial F, and the words aren’t dumb. Personally I take the 99/1 split to be about wealth distribution and spectacular greed, but if the movement means that the 99/1 split is that we’re the 99 kids and we have to supplicate the daddy leader, then Middle-F’s right and the power of the movement will be neatly diverted back to the belief in daddies and voting. Back to K Street. Back to the belief that it was Hitler who actually killed people rather than his willing executioners. Back to the belief that Bush was pure evil and tremendously important and we have to get the big O (as Lacan might say) to save us.
Seventy-five folks braved rain Wednesday night, for example, to occupy or Occupy the Supremes. Oh-O—the big O again. Reminds me of the great O-Bum in the sky, our anal savior, ja. If these folks were occupying the street because it’s right to get in the way of car culture and its massive systemic violence, and it is, or because it’s fun to walk down the street in the rain, and it is, or they’re occupying some building because there are idiots in it who think they’re the Supremes, and apparently there are, then we have a movement. But if they’re just off to daddy’s house to beg and supplicate, then we’ve got a problem.
Washington is a city filled with people who never grew up. These lesser gods are the last people to whom anyone should send pleas, petitions, supplications, or indeed any form of prayer at all. On a purely practical note, it is for this reason that seewalk-the-ungoogleable thinks that while occupying everywhere is a good idea, Washington should be the last place where we should bother. Now back to our regularly scheduled article:
*Plenty of these people in these Occupy encampments are on drugs, use needles, and have mental health problems.
Reality check: Isn’t it great? What a wonderful testimony to the kind of people who Occupy, that the downtrodden and the towntrodden and the messed up feel a sense of belonging and solace here, where there are so many people who can help direct them to social services in a supportive, caring way, or offer a bowl of soup, or just hang out.
*You people can’t count. You said five reasons.
*I can’t walk my dog in the park.
Reality check: Oh, you have a dog that doesn’t like kisses and getting petted? That probably is a problem.
Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy
Friday, December 9, 2011 by The Nation
Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council,
the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative
state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended
result.
For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.
That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally outside the New York headquarters of the Koch Brothers to begin a march for the renewal of voting rights in America.
For the Koch Brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns, with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious "Public Safety and Elections Task Force," that while it wants to dismantle any barriers corporate cash and billionaire bucks influencing elections, it wants very much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.
That crude calculus, usually cloaked in bureaucracy and back-room dealmaking, came into full view in 2011.
Across the country, and to a greater extent than at any time since the last days of southern resistance to desegregation, voting rights were being systematically diminished rather than expanded.
ALEC has been organizing and promoting the assault, encouraging its legislative minions to enact rigid Voter ID laws and related attacks on voting rights in more than three dozen in states.
With their requirements that the millions of Americans who lack drivers licenses and other forms of official paperwork go out and purchase identification cards in order to cast ballots, the Voter ID push put in place new variations on an old evil: the poll tax.
“We are in the midst of the greatest coordinated legislative attack on voting rights since the dawn of Jim Crow,” says NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. “Voter ID laws are nothing but reincarnated poll taxes and literacy tests, and ex-felon voting bans serve the same purpose today as when they were created in the wake of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing ex-slaves the vote—suppressing voting numbers among people of color.”
Voter ID laws represent only the beginning of the assault on voter rights. In states across the country in 2011, conservative governors and legislators who had swept to power in the 2010 election moved to restrict access to the polls in other ways. They ended election-day registration programs in state such as Maine, ending a practice that had allowed new voters to come to the polls, fill out a simple form and cast a ballot. They restricted early-voting in states such as Ohio, making it dramatically harder for citizens to cast ballots in the run-up to an election. They scrapped weekend-voting in Ohio, where working men and women had been able to cast ballots on their days off. They placed new restrictions on voting by students at colleges and technical schools, even going so far in Wisconsin as to move the primary election date to when most students were on summer break. They reduced the number of polling places in some states, making it harder for voters who lack transportation to get to the polls. And after they established the Voter ID requirements in Wisconsin, and said that citizens had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get the proper paperwork, they tried to reduce the number of DMV offices.
“For nearly a century, there were Jim Crow laws in place that discouraged people of color from voting, explains Wade Henderson, the president and CEO of The Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights. “Today, there are different laws, but the objective is the same—to prevent millions from exercising their right to vote.”
No one who is serious about voting and elections misses the point of the project.
The point is not just to make it harder to vote. The point is to make it harder for citizens to elect legislators, governors, members of Congress and presidents who will regulate and tax multinational corporations such as Koch Industries, while at the same time establishing programs that meet the needs of the great mass of Americans. “Now, just as before, they are seeking to block us from voting in order to make it easier to come after our other rights,” says Mike Mulgrew, President of the United Federation of Teachers. “Everything we care about is at stake, from the right to a quality education to the right to a fair wage.”
It is with all of this in mind that the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund and allied civil rights and civil liberties organizations, churches and unions have endorsed the “Stand for Freedom” voting rights campaign, which will launch with a march Saturday from the offices of the Koch Brothers to the United Nations. At the United Nations, the groups will mark Human Rights Day by calling for an end to assaults on voting rights in the United States.
The choice of the Koch Brothers office as a starting point is not symbolic. It is practical. For decades, the Koch Brothers and their foundation have funded ALEC and other groups that are now driving the attack on voting rights in states across the country.
The people are pushing back. In November, Mainers voted by an overwhelming margin to restore election-day registration. In other states, voting rights has become a central political issue. And, now, that issue is being raised at the headquarters of the Koch Brothers -- and the United Nations.
“From the beginning of our nation’s founding, Americans have understood that voting was fundamental to their pursuit of freedom and equal opportunity,” says Lillian RodrÃguez López, President of the Hispanic Federation. “Any attempt to undermine the right to vote, especially when that effort is directed at historically marginalized groups, must be treated as an attack on the very ideals that created our country: democracy and equality. And that is why we stand up for freedom and continue to fight for the right to vote for all Americans.”
For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.
That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally outside the New York headquarters of the Koch Brothers to begin a march for the renewal of voting rights in America.
For the Koch Brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns, with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious "Public Safety and Elections Task Force," that while it wants to dismantle any barriers corporate cash and billionaire bucks influencing elections, it wants very much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.
That crude calculus, usually cloaked in bureaucracy and back-room dealmaking, came into full view in 2011.
Across the country, and to a greater extent than at any time since the last days of southern resistance to desegregation, voting rights were being systematically diminished rather than expanded.
ALEC has been organizing and promoting the assault, encouraging its legislative minions to enact rigid Voter ID laws and related attacks on voting rights in more than three dozen in states.
With their requirements that the millions of Americans who lack drivers licenses and other forms of official paperwork go out and purchase identification cards in order to cast ballots, the Voter ID push put in place new variations on an old evil: the poll tax.
“We are in the midst of the greatest coordinated legislative attack on voting rights since the dawn of Jim Crow,” says NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. “Voter ID laws are nothing but reincarnated poll taxes and literacy tests, and ex-felon voting bans serve the same purpose today as when they were created in the wake of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing ex-slaves the vote—suppressing voting numbers among people of color.”
Voter ID laws represent only the beginning of the assault on voter rights. In states across the country in 2011, conservative governors and legislators who had swept to power in the 2010 election moved to restrict access to the polls in other ways. They ended election-day registration programs in state such as Maine, ending a practice that had allowed new voters to come to the polls, fill out a simple form and cast a ballot. They restricted early-voting in states such as Ohio, making it dramatically harder for citizens to cast ballots in the run-up to an election. They scrapped weekend-voting in Ohio, where working men and women had been able to cast ballots on their days off. They placed new restrictions on voting by students at colleges and technical schools, even going so far in Wisconsin as to move the primary election date to when most students were on summer break. They reduced the number of polling places in some states, making it harder for voters who lack transportation to get to the polls. And after they established the Voter ID requirements in Wisconsin, and said that citizens had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get the proper paperwork, they tried to reduce the number of DMV offices.
“For nearly a century, there were Jim Crow laws in place that discouraged people of color from voting, explains Wade Henderson, the president and CEO of The Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights. “Today, there are different laws, but the objective is the same—to prevent millions from exercising their right to vote.”
No one who is serious about voting and elections misses the point of the project.
The point is not just to make it harder to vote. The point is to make it harder for citizens to elect legislators, governors, members of Congress and presidents who will regulate and tax multinational corporations such as Koch Industries, while at the same time establishing programs that meet the needs of the great mass of Americans. “Now, just as before, they are seeking to block us from voting in order to make it easier to come after our other rights,” says Mike Mulgrew, President of the United Federation of Teachers. “Everything we care about is at stake, from the right to a quality education to the right to a fair wage.”
It is with all of this in mind that the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund and allied civil rights and civil liberties organizations, churches and unions have endorsed the “Stand for Freedom” voting rights campaign, which will launch with a march Saturday from the offices of the Koch Brothers to the United Nations. At the United Nations, the groups will mark Human Rights Day by calling for an end to assaults on voting rights in the United States.
The choice of the Koch Brothers office as a starting point is not symbolic. It is practical. For decades, the Koch Brothers and their foundation have funded ALEC and other groups that are now driving the attack on voting rights in states across the country.
The people are pushing back. In November, Mainers voted by an overwhelming margin to restore election-day registration. In other states, voting rights has become a central political issue. And, now, that issue is being raised at the headquarters of the Koch Brothers -- and the United Nations.
“From the beginning of our nation’s founding, Americans have understood that voting was fundamental to their pursuit of freedom and equal opportunity,” says Lillian RodrÃguez López, President of the Hispanic Federation. “Any attempt to undermine the right to vote, especially when that effort is directed at historically marginalized groups, must be treated as an attack on the very ideals that created our country: democracy and equality. And that is why we stand up for freedom and continue to fight for the right to vote for all Americans.”
Where Will the Jobs Come From?
In Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men,
Barack Obama is reported in 2008 to have argued to his economic
advisors that the unfolding labor market catastrophe was the result of
“productivity gains” rather than the economic crisis. That is, with
800,000 jobs per month being lost, Mr. Obama thought the cause to be an
economy that was performing as it should. The relevant difference was
that there was a role for government when job losses were caused by an
economic crisis, but much less so when they are due to productivity
gains.
Assuming for a moment that he had correctly diagnosed the reason for the job losses, in what world would the country losing 800,000 jobs per month not be a problem requiring government attention, if only through cynical political calculations? And considering the timing of the job losses, what is the likelihood that massive, job killing productivity gains suddenly took hold in the midst of an economic collapse? Even neoliberal ideologues saw the danger to the continued implementation of their program in that circumstance. In 2008 the IMF (International Monetary Fund) offered a public mea culpa for the decades of economic misery that they had caused before jumping back onto the austerity bandwagon so as not to be irrelevant to the dissolution of the European Union.
My point here is not to dump on Mr. Obama who is busy re-inventing himself as an economic populist, most probably because pollsters informed him that citizens who vote haven’t yet joined his view that mass unemployment can be a good thing. But it is to ask the question: if job losses of the like seen in 2008 fit into one’s narrative of how the economy is supposed to function, what are the conditions under which it would be deemed not to be functioning? The question is of course rhetorical. The neoliberal worldview, of which Mr. Obama is an apparent acolyte, is deductive and therefore only subject to challenge where facts don’t matter, at the premises.
The useful reason for trashing the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last forty years, in addition to that it feels so good, is that the only way around it for purposes of recovering civil society to solve the problems that unemployment, among other social ills, is causing, is to run right over it. Again, assume that the job losses of the Lesser Depression were the result of productivity gains, an erstwhile “good” in the neoliberal worldview. What possible offset would be needed for non-true believers to deem it to be such? Job gains overseas?
America has been set up for the employed. Americans have mortgages, school loans, car payments and food costs money. Of what value is a theoretical systemic benefit when the world consists of actual human beings with economically embedded lives?
When not acting as an obstacle, the political leadership in the West has rendered itself irrelevant to solving the social problems that we face. Democrats will bust a populist move for a few months and get a few of you excited but in the end it will turn out to be the same misdirection that they have served up for forty years. Libertarians like Ron Paul will appear attractive until you put their economic prescriptions next to Wall Street’s and see that they are identical. Be that as it may, the problems remain. So while it only wastes a few minutes to vote, looking for salvation in the existing political order is absolutely life defeating.
If the political system could be recovered, real possibilities do exist: as FDR demonstrated, every unemployed person who wants a job could be given a job tomorrow doing things that need to be done. The health care infrastructure could be converted from care-denial insurance schemes to a public health care system that provides cradle-to-grave health care for everyone. Public education could be re-engineered so that all citizens receive high quality education from pre-school through graduate school. And a massive publicly funded effort could shift economic production from a path of environmental suicide toward sustainability.
The seemingly impenetrable wall between what is and what could be today is the same one faced in the West in the 1930s. Of help back then was that an alternative system, socialism, stood ready to fill the void should capitalism implode from its own weight. FDR saved capitalism by smoothing its sociopathic excesses with programs that served human needs.
It took fifty years for the West to forget the snarling beast that capitalism is. It took only a bit less time for capitalism to remind us of what we had forgotten. Whatever happens with this rebellion or that, the die has been cast. Tens of millions of unemployed and dispossessed have no other choice than to rebel. With no FDR on the horizon, perhaps we will get it right this time.
Assuming for a moment that he had correctly diagnosed the reason for the job losses, in what world would the country losing 800,000 jobs per month not be a problem requiring government attention, if only through cynical political calculations? And considering the timing of the job losses, what is the likelihood that massive, job killing productivity gains suddenly took hold in the midst of an economic collapse? Even neoliberal ideologues saw the danger to the continued implementation of their program in that circumstance. In 2008 the IMF (International Monetary Fund) offered a public mea culpa for the decades of economic misery that they had caused before jumping back onto the austerity bandwagon so as not to be irrelevant to the dissolution of the European Union.
My point here is not to dump on Mr. Obama who is busy re-inventing himself as an economic populist, most probably because pollsters informed him that citizens who vote haven’t yet joined his view that mass unemployment can be a good thing. But it is to ask the question: if job losses of the like seen in 2008 fit into one’s narrative of how the economy is supposed to function, what are the conditions under which it would be deemed not to be functioning? The question is of course rhetorical. The neoliberal worldview, of which Mr. Obama is an apparent acolyte, is deductive and therefore only subject to challenge where facts don’t matter, at the premises.
The useful reason for trashing the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last forty years, in addition to that it feels so good, is that the only way around it for purposes of recovering civil society to solve the problems that unemployment, among other social ills, is causing, is to run right over it. Again, assume that the job losses of the Lesser Depression were the result of productivity gains, an erstwhile “good” in the neoliberal worldview. What possible offset would be needed for non-true believers to deem it to be such? Job gains overseas?
America has been set up for the employed. Americans have mortgages, school loans, car payments and food costs money. Of what value is a theoretical systemic benefit when the world consists of actual human beings with economically embedded lives?
When not acting as an obstacle, the political leadership in the West has rendered itself irrelevant to solving the social problems that we face. Democrats will bust a populist move for a few months and get a few of you excited but in the end it will turn out to be the same misdirection that they have served up for forty years. Libertarians like Ron Paul will appear attractive until you put their economic prescriptions next to Wall Street’s and see that they are identical. Be that as it may, the problems remain. So while it only wastes a few minutes to vote, looking for salvation in the existing political order is absolutely life defeating.
If the political system could be recovered, real possibilities do exist: as FDR demonstrated, every unemployed person who wants a job could be given a job tomorrow doing things that need to be done. The health care infrastructure could be converted from care-denial insurance schemes to a public health care system that provides cradle-to-grave health care for everyone. Public education could be re-engineered so that all citizens receive high quality education from pre-school through graduate school. And a massive publicly funded effort could shift economic production from a path of environmental suicide toward sustainability.
The seemingly impenetrable wall between what is and what could be today is the same one faced in the West in the 1930s. Of help back then was that an alternative system, socialism, stood ready to fill the void should capitalism implode from its own weight. FDR saved capitalism by smoothing its sociopathic excesses with programs that served human needs.
It took fifty years for the West to forget the snarling beast that capitalism is. It took only a bit less time for capitalism to remind us of what we had forgotten. Whatever happens with this rebellion or that, the die has been cast. Tens of millions of unemployed and dispossessed have no other choice than to rebel. With no FDR on the horizon, perhaps we will get it right this time.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
"Fracking" for Shale Gas: Neither Clean nor Green
Monday, December 5, 2011 by Tierramérica / Inter Press Service
DURBAN, South Africa - Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is
being used to tap the last remaining natural gas deposits across large
areas of the United States and western Canada, fueling continued
dependence on hydrocarbons instead of a shift to genuinely clean energy
sources to cool the planet.
Called shale gas, these deposits represent a new and enormous source of fossil fuel.
"Fracking is driving exploration and drilling all over the United States," said Gwen Lachelt of the non-governmental organisation Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project.
"The oil and gas industry is marching across America from Texas to North Dakota and from the east coast to California," Lachelt told Tierramérica.
There may be as much as 23,427 billion cubic metres (bcm) in recoverable gas from U.S. shale formations, according to the Annual Energy Outlook 2011, released in April by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The United States will consume 650 bcm of natural gas this year, the EIA projected. Globally, it estimates reserves of "unconventional gas" - the oil and gas industry term for shale gas and coal bed methane - at 915,000 bcm, with 100,000 bcm in Latin America.
However, that estimate is already out of date due to developments in fracking technology and exploration. The EIA estimate of shale gas in the United States in 2009 was less than half the 2011 estimate.
Fracking uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing with high pressure water and chemicals to fracture gas-bearing shale rock.
Holes are drilled vertically as little as 100 metres and as much as 3,000 metres into the shale, and then horizontally 1,000 metres along the shale formation. Chemicals and large amounts of water are pumped underground at high enough pressure to fracture the shale, releasing the gas into the pipeline.
The "dash for gas" as the industry pundits like to say is being driven by potential exports to Asia and the mistaken belief that natural gas is the "transition fuel" from coal to a low-carbon economy.
It is true that natural gas is "cleaner" in that it releases about 40 to 45 percent less carbon dioxide than coal does to produce the same amount of energy.
However, gas from fracking has a higher carbon footprint because more energy is needed to get the gas and because methane leaks out. Methane has 25 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide.
Switching from coal to gas as an energy source could result in increased global warming, not less, according to the study "Coal to Gas: The Influence of Methane Leakage", released in September by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
This is mainly due to the methane leakage problem, which is common but unregulated.
Natural gas is mainly methane, so even if leaks are limited to one to two percent, it would only be slightly better than continuing to burn coal.
"Relying more on natural gas would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, but it would do little to help solve the climate problem," said study author Tom Wigley, a researcher at NCAR, in a press release.
In a report published Nov. 18, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Subcommittee on Shale Gas Production urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finally regulate fracking emissions of methane and other air pollutants.
While industry began fracking for gas in the late 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in 2005, after the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) exempted fracking from regulations under the U.S. Clean Water Act. In recent years shale gas production has grown 48 percent annually, according to the EIA.
"Fracking has never been regulated. There is no real oversight of what they are doing," said Lachelt, who is from the central U.S. state of Colorado, one of the fracking hotspots.
People living near wells have long complained about contamination of their drinking water with chemicals and shown pictures of flames coming from their taps. But contamination is hard to prove because the fracking companies are not required to disclose the contents of the "fracking fluids" they use to keep the gas flowing, said Lachelt.
Fracking fluids are a mix of water, sand and a wide range of chemicals, some toxic like diesel fuel, she said.
With the public outcry growing, the oil and gas industry continues to claim fracking has never contaminated an underground aquifer. However, the industry has settled a number of claims with landowners over the years, but all of these have been sealed from the public and government officials.
Surprisingly, after more than 20 years of fracking, the EPA is conducting its first in-depth study of the risks to drinking water.
The results won't be known until the end of next year. However, preliminary results have shown that drinking water in some communities is contaminated by benzene, a known carcinogen, and that fracking was responsible, said Lachelt.
Meanwhile, some of Canada's most pristine wilderness in northeastern British Columbia is the home to a new shale gas industry that sends its gas across the Rocky Mountains to the Alberta tar sands to boil oil out the sands.
Almost all of the gas produced in British Columbia is for export to Alberta or the United States. Now there is a massive expansion underway with the recent approval to build a liquefied natural gas plant on the West coast to ship gas to lucrative Asian markets, said Tria Donaldson of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, an environmental NGO based in Vancouver.
"Fracking is using huge amounts of fresh water in a region that suffers water shortages," Donaldson told Tierramérica. Millions of liters of water are needed for each well and the industry has obtained rights to take 275 million liters from local rivers, lakes and streams every day.
Sixteen companies were fined in October for failing to account for how much water they were taking. According to media reports the fines were less than 1,000 dollars.
"Northeastern British Columbia is a key habitat for grizzly bears, caribou and others. Fracking operations are moving into untouched areas, building roads, drill pads and wastewater ponds," said Donaldson
"There is nothing clean or green about shale gas as an energy source."
Called shale gas, these deposits represent a new and enormous source of fossil fuel."Fracking is driving exploration and drilling all over the United States," said Gwen Lachelt of the non-governmental organisation Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project.
"The oil and gas industry is marching across America from Texas to North Dakota and from the east coast to California," Lachelt told Tierramérica.
There may be as much as 23,427 billion cubic metres (bcm) in recoverable gas from U.S. shale formations, according to the Annual Energy Outlook 2011, released in April by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The United States will consume 650 bcm of natural gas this year, the EIA projected. Globally, it estimates reserves of "unconventional gas" - the oil and gas industry term for shale gas and coal bed methane - at 915,000 bcm, with 100,000 bcm in Latin America.
However, that estimate is already out of date due to developments in fracking technology and exploration. The EIA estimate of shale gas in the United States in 2009 was less than half the 2011 estimate.
Fracking uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing with high pressure water and chemicals to fracture gas-bearing shale rock.
Holes are drilled vertically as little as 100 metres and as much as 3,000 metres into the shale, and then horizontally 1,000 metres along the shale formation. Chemicals and large amounts of water are pumped underground at high enough pressure to fracture the shale, releasing the gas into the pipeline.
The "dash for gas" as the industry pundits like to say is being driven by potential exports to Asia and the mistaken belief that natural gas is the "transition fuel" from coal to a low-carbon economy.
It is true that natural gas is "cleaner" in that it releases about 40 to 45 percent less carbon dioxide than coal does to produce the same amount of energy.
However, gas from fracking has a higher carbon footprint because more energy is needed to get the gas and because methane leaks out. Methane has 25 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide.
Switching from coal to gas as an energy source could result in increased global warming, not less, according to the study "Coal to Gas: The Influence of Methane Leakage", released in September by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
This is mainly due to the methane leakage problem, which is common but unregulated.
Natural gas is mainly methane, so even if leaks are limited to one to two percent, it would only be slightly better than continuing to burn coal.
"Relying more on natural gas would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, but it would do little to help solve the climate problem," said study author Tom Wigley, a researcher at NCAR, in a press release.
In a report published Nov. 18, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Subcommittee on Shale Gas Production urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finally regulate fracking emissions of methane and other air pollutants.
While industry began fracking for gas in the late 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in 2005, after the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) exempted fracking from regulations under the U.S. Clean Water Act. In recent years shale gas production has grown 48 percent annually, according to the EIA.
"Fracking has never been regulated. There is no real oversight of what they are doing," said Lachelt, who is from the central U.S. state of Colorado, one of the fracking hotspots.
People living near wells have long complained about contamination of their drinking water with chemicals and shown pictures of flames coming from their taps. But contamination is hard to prove because the fracking companies are not required to disclose the contents of the "fracking fluids" they use to keep the gas flowing, said Lachelt.
Fracking fluids are a mix of water, sand and a wide range of chemicals, some toxic like diesel fuel, she said.
With the public outcry growing, the oil and gas industry continues to claim fracking has never contaminated an underground aquifer. However, the industry has settled a number of claims with landowners over the years, but all of these have been sealed from the public and government officials.
Surprisingly, after more than 20 years of fracking, the EPA is conducting its first in-depth study of the risks to drinking water.
The results won't be known until the end of next year. However, preliminary results have shown that drinking water in some communities is contaminated by benzene, a known carcinogen, and that fracking was responsible, said Lachelt.
Meanwhile, some of Canada's most pristine wilderness in northeastern British Columbia is the home to a new shale gas industry that sends its gas across the Rocky Mountains to the Alberta tar sands to boil oil out the sands.
Almost all of the gas produced in British Columbia is for export to Alberta or the United States. Now there is a massive expansion underway with the recent approval to build a liquefied natural gas plant on the West coast to ship gas to lucrative Asian markets, said Tria Donaldson of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, an environmental NGO based in Vancouver.
"Fracking is using huge amounts of fresh water in a region that suffers water shortages," Donaldson told Tierramérica. Millions of liters of water are needed for each well and the industry has obtained rights to take 275 million liters from local rivers, lakes and streams every day.
Sixteen companies were fined in October for failing to account for how much water they were taking. According to media reports the fines were less than 1,000 dollars.
"Northeastern British Columbia is a key habitat for grizzly bears, caribou and others. Fracking operations are moving into untouched areas, building roads, drill pads and wastewater ponds," said Donaldson
"There is nothing clean or green about shale gas as an energy source."
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