The Future of Agriculture

Garden as If Your Life Depends On It--Because It Will
By ELLEN LaCONTE

Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has 'riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more expensive—or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can't afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it's 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread—and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it— will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.

What's for Supper Down the Road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect

* the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again,

* prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,

* some foods to become very expensive compared to what we're used to

* and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

Why's Gardening So Important Now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the US around 1971. Lest you've missed the raging (http://www.postcarbon.org), that's the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We've shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter. There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules, "The ABC's of Peak Oil" which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn't leave much. (See Beth Terry's website, for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil that's hard to get because it's located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones. Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that system's going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 that's escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or there abouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat and soy for human and animal consumption—i.e., food—to production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and . . . Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive. Some energeconomy geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel, which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, "The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year." Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore's deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.

Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food. Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that's seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read "First" world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland—if its farmers didn't go organic a while back—is comprised of dead soils. Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution impossible, which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition. Half the Earth's original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries. China's soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Basket's soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isn't coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.

3) Monoculture: We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop. At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the world's wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times. Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed "Ugh."

4) Climate instability. Bad -- uncongenial -- weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe we've passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests, intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what's being farmed for. The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we've been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it. When a whole nation's or region's staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn't the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (See (www.ellenlaconte.com/excerpts-from-life-rules/#chpfour) for that.) No pundits, talking-heads or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs won't be coming back. The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we're going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it. Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each other's food as seriously as we've taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us won't have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what's our recourse?

Gardening Like Everybody's Business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We've become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about the have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, we'll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally. Gardening -- and small-scale farming -- while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion will be less about doing business than about everyone's having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.

The GOP's Absurd Plan for the Economy: Lowering YOUR Wages

The GOP is embracing some very dangerous voodoo economics
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
March 29, 2011

Earlier this month, House Republicans laid out a perverse plan to lower working Americans' wages, supposedly in a bid to get employers to hire more of them (PDF). One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of the “race to the bottom.”

Republican staffers on the Joint Economic Committee released the study in response to widespread criticism that the deep public sector cuts they've advocated threaten to derail an already anemic “recovery” -- economist Mark Zandi estimated last month that if enacted, the spending cuts would cost the U.S. economy 700,000 jobs through 2012.

So, as Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley wrote in the National Journal, the GOP report “makes the party’s ... case that fiscal consolidation (read: spending cuts) can spur immediate economic growth and reduce unemployment.”

The paper calls for cuts that are “large, credible, and politically difficult to reverse once made,” and offers a typical conservative fantasy about shuttering entire federal agencies. But topping the list of what should be on the Republicans' chopping block is “decreasing the number and compensation of government workers,” which the staffers say will spur job creation because “a smaller government workforce increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.”

“Labor costs,” of course mean “wages” – Americans' paychecks. So, a central plank in the GOP's economic recovery plan is to flood the market with yet more unemployed people in order to drive wages (which have stagnated for an extended period) further down.

That's part and parcel with a larger assault on the middle class. Cutting public employees also means laying off workers in a sector with a 38 percent unionization rate, and forcing them to compete against those toiling in corporate America with its 7 percent union density -- last year, more working people belonged to a union in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private (7.4 million), despite the fact that corporate America employs five times the number of wage-earners.

With state and local budgets hit hard by the economic crash, and the right painting public sector workers as the 21st century-version of Ronald Reagan's mythic welfare queens, this process is already underway. Last year, Fed Reserve Chairmen Ben Bernanke estimated that the public sector had laid off a quarter million workers since 2007. According to a Labor Department report, state and local governments beat every other sector in terms of the number of workers laid off last summer. 30,000 were laid off last month alone, and, as the conservative noted, “the troubles at the state and local levels promise to be a fixture for some time to come.”

The GOP's paper is based on some remarkable voodoo economics. As Fernholz and Tankersley note, their response to critics “is that 'non-Keynesian' effects — increased business and consumer confidence that their taxes won’t rise as a result of government retrenchment—will provide immediate positive results across the economy.” This is based the popular and wholly false conservative meme that “uncertainty” about future taxes and regulations is keeping employers from hiring.

Numerous surveys have found that it is a lack of customers, and not “uncertainty” about future taxes that is leading employers not to hire. It's entirely consistent with a huge drop in demand in our consumer-driven economy following the housing market crash. As economist Dean Baker wrote last month, the recession “reduced consumption through what is known as the “housing wealth effect.”

The housing wealth effect is estimated at five to seven cents on the dollar, meaning that homeowners will on average increase their annual consumption by between five and seven cents for every additional dollar of housing they own. This means that the $8 trillion of housing-bubble wealth implied an increase in annual consumption of between $400 and $560 billion. Now that most of the bubble wealth is lost, so is this consumption.

The total reduction in annual demand as a result of the collapse of the bubbles in residential and non-residential real estate is close to $1.2 trillion, or 8 percent of GDP. There is nothing in the economist’s bag of tricks that easily replaces such a large loss in demand.

With consumer demand recovering very gradually – it was up 0.3 percent when adjusted for inflation in February, but much of that was simply a matter of households spending more for fuel – putting downward pressure on wages and sending more people to the unemployment line is about the worst thing lawmakers could do.

But the Republican staffers insist their plan is grounded firmly in empirical evidence. And they insist the evidence shows not only that the deficit must be reduced, but also that it has to be done through spending cuts rather than tax hikes (last year, the federal government collected the lowest share of the economy in tax revenues since 1950). “A growing body of empirical studies,” wrote the staffers, “proves that fiscal consolidation programs based predominantly or entirely on government spending reductions are far more likely to be successful” at stabilizing deficits than hiking taxes.

But the “evidence” they cite is dubious at best. Economist James Galbraith told Fernholz and Tankersley, “Much of this study relies on the growth performance of a few (very) small open economies — Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, notably — after 1994.” He added, “it’s easy to look good if you are a small country with a freshly devalued currency selling into a world boom. The ‘lessons’ will not apply to the United States, which cannot just contract domestically, devalue the dollar (sacrificing our reserve-currency position) and expect the rest of the world to bail us out by buying our exports.”Economists at the International Monetary Fund say that many of the studies cited in the Republican staffers' report are flawed. The IMF warned last year that cutting spending “typically reduces output and raises unemployment in the short term.”

Chad Stone, chief economist for the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy priorities, added that “one of the key deficit-reduction measures in the 1990s was raising taxes on top earners, over Republican warnings that that would wreck the economy. The JEC Republican report’s claim that spending cuts are the only way to reduce the deficit and that tax increases 'are the bane of economic growth' is deja voodoo all over again.”

Why Our Standard of Living Has Stalled Out - The Real Story of Our Economy

For more than a quarter century after WWII the fruits of America's productivity were shared with average working people, year in and year out. Not anymore. 

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
March 29, 2011

Do public sector workers earn more than private sector workers? Who cares? This boneheaded question has us fighting over the crumbs. (And the answer is no -- all credible studies show that when you account for educational levels, the total compensation packages are about the same.) 

The real question is: Why have most workers seen their standard of living stall over the last generation?  

The answer is both obvious and appalling. More and more of our nation’s wealth is going to the few, while the many have seen their real wages actually decline. It’s a disgrace. 

It wasn’t always so. For more than a quarter century after WWII the fruits of America's productivity were shared with average working people, year in and year out. But what exactly was being shared? 

What’s productivity and who gets its benefits?

Productivity is a crucial economic measure of the total output of goods and services in our economy per hours worked. It’s not based on pay levels, only on hours worked in the economy as a whole. In effect, it measures how much human labor power it takes to produce everything we have. It makes a real difference to our standard of living if it takes 10,000 hours rather than 1,000 to build a house.  

Output per working hour, although imprecise, is the best way we have to measure our level of technique, organization, skill, effort and intellectual firepower. Sure, this measure has significant flaws because it doesn’t really measure our health or environmental quality. But it does indeed measure the material side of our standard of living. When productivity grows, a society has the means to solve many problems and the means to enhance working and living conditions…but only if the fruits of productivity are shared somewhat fairly.  

Productivity and who gets it is the story of the last two generations of the American middle class – one that saw a tremendous rise in its standard of living, and one that saw its way of life stall and even crumble. 

From 1947 to 1975, our output per worker hour grew by more than 75 percent. At the very same time, the real wages of the average worker rose by nearly the same amount. The rise of productivity and the rise in real wages turned our working people into the largest, most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. This dramatic upward movement in material conditions gave America its supreme bragging rights in the Cold War. No one could deny that democratic capitalism delivered the goods to working people, not just to elites.  

Until it didn’t. 

Neo-liberalism and the stalling of middle-class income

This upwardly mobile economy changed during the 1970s, and it wasn’t an accident. That’s when our nation’s leaders embarked on a series of policies that were supposed to break down stagflation and rebuild our economic miracle. We now call it neo-liberalism. That’s when we decided to unleash innovation through deregulation, especially financial deregulation. That’s when we lowered taxes on the wealthy. That’s when we pushed forward globalization. That’s when we stopped raising the minimum wage. That’s when we undercut the labor movement. All this was supposed to make the economy boom and reignite the post-WWII economic miracle. 

These policies, not the blind actions of markets, broke open the cookie jar of productivity. And there was plenty in there to take: Since 1975, productivity increased by nearly 180 percent – meaning that we almost tripled what we could produce per hour of labor. But unlike the post-WWII period, it wasn’t shared. Here are the brutal facts:

• The average real wage of the non-supervisory production workers (which comprise 82.4 percent of total private non-farm employees) actually declined by 9 percent between 1975 and 2010.

• Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw their share of national income rise from 8 percent in 1975 to 23.5 percent in 2005

• More amazing still, the wage gap between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker jumped from $45 to $1 in 1970 to an unbelievable $1,723 to $1 in 2006

• Today after the crash, financial incomes are so enormous that in 2010, John Paulson, the top hedge fund manager, earned $2.4 million an HOUR (not a misprint), and his tax rate is less than yours

I like Ike

These statistics turned me into an Eisenhower communist. I realized that our great, conservative general and president stood for policies that would never have let our nation’s productivity cookie jar get robbed. Under Ike, those earning $3 million or more (in today’s dollars) faced marginal tax rates of over 90 percent. (Yes, there were loopholes that bought the effective rates down to 70 percent. But, what’s the effective rate on the rich today? About 16 percent.) And Ike ended the Korean War. And he named and took on the military-industrial complex, which today would probably get you impeached. 

Of course, the '50s weren’t nirvana. Segregation and sexism haunted all areas of society. (And besides, we only had three TV channels and no Facebook.) But our standard of living was rising as were our expectations. We expected society to improve and this formed the basis of the explosion in social equality that swept the country, starting with the Civil Rights movement in the South under Ike’s rule.  

But after Vietnam damaged our economy and social cohesion, Democrats and Republicans alike drank the Kool Aid of neo-liberalism. A few sips and you could believe that markets would solve everything. Sip some more and you realized that you didn’t need to govern at all. You only needed to get government out of the way (while also undercutting labor laws, removing trade barriers, permitting mega-mergers, destroying Glass-Steagall, passing tighter rules on debtors, etc.). Then out you go to make some real money. It the '50s, it was fabulous to become a millionaire. By the 1980s that was chump change. Unless you’re Bernie Sanders, becoming a politician put you on the fast track to Wall Street. 

It’s not just that theft of society’s productivity is unfair. It’s also incredibly dangerous. We learned both in 1929 and in 2008 that when you combine financial deregulation with too much money in the hands of the few you get a casino, a bubble, and then a crash. In the most recent crash, the super-rich had so much capital they ran out of real investments in goods and services. So Wall Street came up with new exotic bets on subprime loans to soak up the excess capital. But the fundamental cause was that the super-rich walked off with years and years of productivity gains that should have gone to working people in the form of higher wages and benefits. Show me a worker who invests in synthetic CDOs.

Watching politicians pit public and private employees against each other is the cruelest joke of this entire crash. 

First of all, there would be no state and local budget gaps were it not for the fact that the Wall Street crash destroyed more than 8 million jobs in a matter of months. In any rational world, the Wall Street gamblers would be paying reparations for the damage they’ve caused, rather setting record profits based on our bailouts.   

Second, the richest hedge fund honchos are the glorious beneficiaries of a tax loophole that allows them to pay a maximum federal rate of 15 percent instead of 35 percent. Closing that loophole on just the 25 richest hedge fund managers produces twice the revenue as does Obama’s wage freeze on two million federal employees. 

So join me in waving Chairman Ike’s little red book. Close the hedge fund loophole and jack up the top income tax rates – way up to where they belong. Raise the minimum wage and index it permanently to inflation. Invest in infrastructure and education to put our people back to work. And stop wasting our resources on war and weapons that no one needs, or on wasteful arguments about how many teachers and cops to fire. 

Ike was a staunch capitalist and usually believed in the invisible hand of the market. But he wouldn’t be letting it give us the finger.  

 

Low-level radiation in three Southern states' air

Reuters - CHARLESTON, South Carolina | Mon Mar 28, 2011

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) - Low levels of radioactive iodine believed to be from Japan's disaster-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been detected in the atmosphere in South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida, officials said on Monday.

There is no current threat to public safety, said Progress Energy spokesman Drew Elliot.

Monitors at Progress Energy's nuclear plants in Hartsville, South Carolina, and Crystal River, Florida, picked up low levels of radioactive iodine-131. So did Duke Energy's monitors at its two nuclear facilities in South Carolina and the plant in Huntersville, North Carolina.

"If there were radiation coming from one our own sites, we would be seeing other types of radiation than iodine-131," Elliot said. "Other nuclear stations throughout the East Coast all started picking this up within the last week. It all points to something coming from overseas.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency both say it poses no threat to public safety," he said.

Trace amounts of radioactive iodine have also turned up in rainwater samples in Massachusetts, California, Pennsylvania and Washington State.

Japan on ‘Maximum Alert’ as Nuclear Crisis Deepens

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by the Associated Press 
by Mari Yamaguchi and Yuri Kageyama

TOKYO—Japan’s prime minister insisted Tuesday that the country was on “maximum alert” to bring its nuclear crisis under control, but the spread of radiation raised concerns about the ability of experts to stabilize the crippled reactor complex.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan told parliament that Japan was grappling with its worst problems since World War II.

“This quake, tsunami and the nuclear accident are the biggest crises for Japan” in decades, said the wan but resolute Kan, dressed in one of the blue work jackets that have become ubiquitous among bureaucrats since the tsunami.

He said the crises remained unpredictable, but added: “We will continue to handle it in a state of maximum alert.”

The magnitude-9.0 offshore earthquake on March 11 triggered a tsunami that slammed minutes later into Japan’s northeast, wiping out towns and knocking out power and backup systems at the coastal Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

Police said more than 11,000 bodies have been recovered, but the final death toll is expected to exceed 18,000.

Hundreds of thousands remain homeless, their homes and livelihoods destroyed. Damage could amount to $310 billion — the most expensive natural disaster on record, the government said.

Against the backdrop of the humanitarian disaster, the drama at the power plant has unfolded, with workers fighting fires, explosions, radiation scares and miscalculations in the frantic bid to prevent a complete meltdown.

The plant has been leaking radiation that has made its way into vegetables, raw milk and tap water as far away as Tokyo. Residents within 20 kilometres of the plant were ordered to leave and some nations banned the imports of food products from the Fukushima region.

Highly toxic plutonium was the latest contaminant found seeping into the soil outside the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

Safety officials said the amounts did not pose a risk to humans, but they said the finding supports suspicions that dangerously radioactive water is leaking from damaged nuclear fuel rods.

“The situation is very grave,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters Tuesday. “We are doing our utmost to contain the damage.”

Kan, meanwhile, faced stinging criticism from opposition lawmakers over the handling of a nuclear disaster stretching into a third week.

“We cannot let you handle the crisis,” lawmaker Yosuke Isozaki said in parliament. “We cannot let you be in charge of Japan’s crisis management.”

Edano admitted Tuesday that Japanese safety standards were not enough to protect the complex against the tsunami’s power.

“Our preparedness was not sufficient,” Edano told reporters. “When the current crisis is over, we must examine the accident closely and thoroughly review” safety standards.

An AP investigation following the tsunami found that TEPCO officials had dismissed scientific evidence and geological history that indicated that a massive earthquake — and subsequent tsunami — was far more likely than they believed.

The plant was pounded by water far higher and stronger than the complex was prepared to endure, the investigation found.

The urgent mission to stabilize the Fukushima plant has been fraught with setbacks.

Workers succeeded last week in reconnecting some parts of the plant to the power grid.

But as they pumped water into units to cool the reactors down, they discovered pools of contaminated water in numerous spots, including the basements of several buildings and in tunnels outside them.

The contaminated water has been emitting radiation exposures more than four times the amount the government considers safe for workers and must be pumped out before electricity can be restored to the cooling system.

That has left officials struggling with two crucial but sometimes-contradictory efforts: pumping in water to keep the fuel rods cool and pumping out contaminated water and safely storing it.

Nuclear safety official Hidehiko Nishiyama said cooling the reactors had taken precedence over concerns about leakage.

“The removal of the contaminated water is the most urgent task now, and hopefully we can adjust the amount of cooling water going in,” he said, adding that workers were building sandbag dikes to keep contaminated water from seeping into the soil outside.

The discovery of plutonium, released from fuel rods only when temperatures are extremely high, confirms the severity of the damage, Nishiyama said.

Plutonium is a highly toxic substance which breaks down very slowly, remaining dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

“If you inhale it, it’s there and it stays there forever,” said Alan Lockwood, a professor of Neurology and Nuclear Medicine at the University at Buffalo and a member of the board of directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an advocacy group.

BP Execs May Face Manslaughter Charges

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Reuters
by Tom Bergin and Dominic Lau

LONDON - Shares in oil major BP (BP.L) fell 2.0 percent on Tuesday after a media report that the company's managers may face manslaughter charges following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and an analyst downgrade.

U.S. prosecutors are considering whether to pursue manslaughter charges against BP managers for decisions made before the explosion on the rig that killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore spill in U.S. history, a report from Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.

BP has admitted mistakes in the run-up to the rig blast but has denied accusations that it was "grossly negligent", a charge that could add tens of billions to the final bill it pays for the disaster.

"A manslaughter charge makes a charge of gross negligence more likely," one dealer said.

If BP is found to be grossly negligent, the maximum possible fines it faces would rise to over $21 billion from around $5 billion.

Also, this may mean the company is unable to force its partners in the well to pay their 35 percent share of the total clean-up bill -- now estimated at $42 billion.

It could also open the floodgates to legal claims worth many billions.

BP declined to comment.

Another dealer said a downgrade from Collins Stewart also weighed on the shares. The brokerage cut BP to "sell" from "hold", partly due to the spat between the company and its oligarch partners in its Russian joint venture TNK-BP (TNBP.MM), traders said.

BP shares traded down 2.0 percent at 0950 GMT (5:50 a.m. ET), against a 0.8 percent drop in the STOXX Europe 600 Oil and Gas index .SXEP.

In the Land of the Regressives

Get the Hell Out of My Country!
By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

America is, in fact, exceptionally bad when it comes to any of a whole host of measures, such as health, longevity, economic equality, crime, pollution, etc. Over there in Sweden, on the other hand, the application of socialist ideas has turned out slightly differently than what those nice conservatives in America would have you believe. Europeans, especially Swedes, kick America’s ass on basically any measure of quality of life one can imagine.

Uh-oh.

That whole fact thing that we in “the reality-based community” rely upon for intelligent analysis and policy prescription is almost always a disaster for regressives. You know, sorta like, “Iraq has WMD, therefore we should invade, and it will be a great war, fast, easy, cheap, and it will bring democracy to the Middle East (even though all our other policies there are about preventing it at all costs, but pay no attention to that)”. That kinda thing. When that little riff smacked up against the ugly reality-based community known as the real world, it, uh – how shall we say it? – didn’t fare so very well. Nor did the insistence that radical tax cuts for the rich would boom the economy and simultaneously actually increase revenues to the federal treasury. Oops. Now the very same people who made that promise are screaming about how we have to slash spending on health and education to make up for the massive debt that was produced when their fantasies met reality. Then there’s global warming...

I could go on and on here. There is a very real pattern, which twenty minutes of watching Glenn Beck would immediately reveal to anyone who didn’t already know better. Regressives hide from reality. It’s that simple. Nor is it a mystery why. Facts don’t support the policies they’ve already ferociously embraced before – not after – they’ve done their ‘analysis’, policies they cling to so strongly because they either benefit them personally or assuage their rampant fears. That’s how it works, and that’s why this country is in the disastrous state that it’s in. We’ve been following so-called conservative policies for thirty years now (yes, very much including those periods in which Democrats were in the White House and ruled Congress). These policies are astonishingly destructive, which is why regressives have to pretend when it comes to reality, and which is why they almost always do, more so in this current era of Bachmann-Palin overdrive than ever.

I mention all this because a couple of folks reacted to the blizzard of comparative facts in my last piece in the usual regressive way: through obfuscation, distortion and deceit. No surprise there. One particular response caught my eye, however, and nearly knocked me off my chair. A couple of folks noted that, yes, America does poorly on all these statistics compared to other countries, but only if you count minorities. If you compare American whites only, they argue, then the US does much better.

Excuse me?!?! What’s that?!?! Did you really just say that?!?!

It’s hard to imagine all the ways in which this is nonsensical. More to the point, it’s difficult to determine whether at the end of the day it is characterized more by its unmitigated stupidity or its sheer offensiveness.

Why? Let’s start with the most benign criticism we might imagine, which is that – Hello! – other countries have minorities too. There are lots of folks who could be dropped from Sweden’s or France’s or Germany’s population if we are in the business of cherry-picking statistics. Of course, if on the other hand you’re just desperately trying to win a debate that otherwise makes you look stupid, then you would only cherry-pick on one side of the comparison.

Second, where in the world do nice, shiny white folks get off making a point like this, anyhow? Have they forgotten that there’s the small matter of how American minorities wound up in the condition they’re in to consider? You don’t suppose that, say, four centuries of white-imposed slavery and Jim Crow might have had anything to do with that, do you? I mean, I’m just thinking out loud here, and I know it might just be a really big coincidence and all, but just the same...

Third, what does race have to do with statistics that compare the health care systems, or the degree of government corruption, or the percentage of women in parliament, or the propensity to go to war, or carbon emissions, or the number of hours worked per week, or worker safety, or any number of other measures? The answer, of course, is nothing. At all. None of those factors would be changed by omitting one portion of American society from the comparison, and all of them reveal how exceptional the US is – exceptionally backward, that is.

But, finally, and most egregiously, what the hell is up with this concept of comparing only part of a country, anyhow? Are blacks and Hispanics somehow less American in the eyes of regressives? Do they somehow not count for as much? I think we all pretty much know the real answers to those questions, right-wing protestations that conservatives aren’t racist notwithstanding.

But let’s just go with their concept, shall we? Just for fun. What if there was one part of America that was dragging down the rest of us? Shouldn’t we exclude them from the country, or at the very least treat them with the contempt they so fully deserve for polluting the otherwise unblemished exceptionalism of our nation? Aren’t regressives really right about this? Shouldn’t we ditch these losers, so the rest of us can shine like we deserve to?

For example, let’s talk about health. What if I told you that a 21-factor health index statistic revealed that the following states are the ten most healthy in America, in order: Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Maine, Iowa, Utah, Hawaii, Nebraska and Connecticut? Now what if I told you that the following states are the ten least healthy on that same ranked list: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Nevada, New Mexico, Mississippi, and worst of all, Louisiana?

Might you notice anything interesting in that pattern? For instance, that almost all of the most healthy states are blue states – including Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Connecticut, four of the bluest states in the union? Or that Vermont and Massachusetts, the healthiest and third healthiest states in America, respectively, have the most socialized health care systems in the country? Or perhaps you’d find it remarkable that among the ten least healthy states in the country there are no blue states and just two purple ones. Indeed, with the exception of Utah, that list includes all our most conservative states, places like Texas and Mississippi and South Carolina. They’re as red as they come.

So, how about it, my regressive friends? Are you still on board for the idea of dropping the national detritus off the list in order to boost America’s statistics and restore its rightful comparative place? Think how much better we’d look compared to the Europeans if we just ditched the Terrible Ten listed above! What do you say?

Oh well, no worries. You’ll have plenty of other opportunities. We’re just getting started.

Let’s look at some other measures of heath, for example. How about obesity? Here are the ten fattest states, in order: Mississippi, West Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and Missouri. Not exactly paragons of liberalism, are they? No, for that you’d have to look to the list of the least obese states, which are: Hawaii, Utah, Florida, Montana, Arizona, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and best of all, Colorado. Most of these are, of course, blue states.

Well, maybe we should look at infant mortality rates, that key indicator in measuring the quality of health in any given polity. Those American states with the worst scores are: Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, West Virginia, Delaware, Missouri and Arkansas. On the other hand, those states who do best on this measure are: Utah, Alaska, California, Minnesota, Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine and New York. Louisiana’s infant mortality rate is 10.3 per 1000 live births. New York’s is less than half that, at 4.0.

Is anyone beginning to see a pattern here?

How about crime? These ten states had the highest per capita incidence of violent crime in 2006: South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico and Michigan. On the other hand, the safest states were: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Rhode Island, Utah, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, and best of all, Maine. These lists are a bit more mixed than others we’ve seen, but there is still a clear tendency for the red states to be more violent. Should we drop them from America?

But surely the conservative parts of America do better economically, right? No doubt fiscal conservatism has raised the standard of living in red states, while the blue states are dragging down the US average, eh? Here are the ten states in America with the highest median family income: New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Alaska, Hawaii, Minnesota, Virginia and Illinois. With the exception of purple Maryland and Virginia and red Alaska, they are all blue states. And, since Alaska gets such a huge chunk of its income from federal government and oil giveaways, it shouldn’t even be on the list. On the other hand, here are the ten poorest states in America: North Carolina, Idaho, Alabama, Montana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas and bottom-feeder Mississippi. See a pattern, anyone? There’s not a single liberal state on that list. Mississippi, with a median family income of $39,319, is only slightly better than half as rich as New Jersey, at $73,973.

Same is true of bankruptcies. Those states with the highest per capita number of filings include: Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Michigan, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. Those with the lowest are: Wyoming, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, California, Maine, Alaska and best of all Hawaii. Once again, it is mainly Regressiveland that is dragging down the United States.

These figures are even clearer if we look at poverty. If you want to go somewhere in America where the poverty rate is really high, here are your choices: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, Alabama, South Carolina and Oklahoma. On the other hand, those states sporting the lowest poverty rates are: Delaware, Iowa, Virginia, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey, Minnesota, Alaska, Connecticut, and best of all, New Hampshire. It’s an extremely clear pattern. The conservative states are the poorest. In Mississippi, 21.6 percent of people are living below the poverty line (no wonder Governor Haley Barbour is running for president with that proud record), while in New Hampshire it’s about a third of that amount, at 7.6 percent.

Education is no different. Here are the ten states in America with lowest percentage of folks having a high school diploma or better: Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, California, Rhode Island, North Carolina, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and least educated of all, Texas. On the other hand, these states do best on that same measure: Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, New Hampshire, Vermont, Alaska, Iowa and Washington.

How about per capita occupational fatalities? Wyoming has the worst record, followed by Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Kentucky, West Virginia, South Dakota, Mississippi, New Mexico and Alabama. The safest ten states for workers are: Maryland, Arizona, New York, California, Michigan, Maine, Delaware, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and on top, Rhode Island.

Or divorce rates? They are highest in Nevada, Arkansas, Alabama, Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi. On the other hand, those states with the lowest rates are: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Illinois, Massachusetts and Georgia.

The pattern repeats itself over and over, with respect to almost any indicator of social welfare or standard of living one cares to examine. The upshot is simple: You do not want to live in red states. You will be poorer, fatter, less safe, less healthy, less married and less educated if you do.

In fact, about the only thing red states are better at is going to church. The ten states with the highest percentage of children attending religious services each week are: Mississippi, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Nebraska. On the other hand, these states have the lowest rates on that same measure: Connecticut, Montana, Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Nevada, Washington, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and lowest of all, Vermont.

Hmmm. That’s interesting. It would almost appear that god doesn’t love conservatives very much. And imagine how badly she’d treat them if they weren’t so busy praying to her every week!

Oh well, that’s a subject for another essay.

But what we can say to our conservative friends right now is that, for once, they were correct (in addition to being right) about something. Well, sorta, anyhow. Yes, they were spot on in noting that there is a segment of America dragging the country down, and ruining its otherwise exemplary exceptionalism.

So, okay, fair enough. Credit where credit is due. Perhaps we can all agree with the folks on the right that America would be better off without these deadbeats diluting our national greatness, even though some of us used to think we’re all one country in it together and we should support each other.

Okay, okay, I concur. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s cut bait. Let’s restore America’s greatness by ditching he precise group of people dragging the rest of us down.

Regressives, get the hell out of my country!

NFL Players and Owners at an Impasse

A Cloud of Dust
By DAVID MACARAY

Within hours of the NFL’s collective bargaining talks breaking down, the owners initiated their anticipated Plan B, locking out the players (on March 12). And it wasn’t long after the lockout was announced that TV sports commentators began criticizing both sides for having “given up too soon.”

They chided both the team owners and the NFLPA (National Football League Players Association) for abandoning negotiations after utilizing a FMCS (Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service) mediator for “only sixteen days.” Those sixteen days of mediation were alluded to in utter disbelief, as if common sense told us that sixteen days weren’t anywhere near long enough.

What these commentators didn’t seem to realize is that union-management disputes aren’t like diplomatic negotiations or congressional hearings. This wasn’t a summit meeting between North and South Korea, where, after sixteen days, they’re still arguing over the seating arrangements.

Union-management negotiations are a whole other deal. Because labor disputes are all about money (as with the NFL, where the two sides are at odds over the players’ share of total revenue), and tend to be brutally direct, there is very little foreplay—and virtually none of the pompous rhetoric and public grandstanding we’ve come to associate with politics and diplomacy.

Sixteen days with a federal mediator in the room? That’s an eternity. If NLFPA executive director DeMaurice Smith were candid, he’d likely tell us that fourteen of those days were a total waste of time.

During a strike I was involved in some years ago, we met with an FMCS mediator (an ex-Steelworker rep named John Courtney) a grand total of three times. The first meeting lasted four hours and it occurred two days before we shut down the facility; the second occurred a month later, and it lasted eight hours; and the third and final meeting occurred on the 56th day of the strike. We spent 22 consecutive hours at the table before reaching a tentative agreement.

With all due respect to Courtney and his boss, Sam Sachman (who joined us at 11:00 P.M. on the final night), mediation played a very small part in the process. Although the mediators put their hearts into it, neither side paid much attention to them. What ended the strike—what got the union to return to work after 57 days—was the same thing that ends most strikes: the combination of austerity, fatigue, despair and resignation.

As for the football dispute, it will be surprising if it continues beyond the next two or three weeks. For one thing, there’s simply too much money to be made (and lost) by both sides. After all, this is a battle between millionaires and billionaires. For another, April 28 is college draft day, and the closer they get to that date, the higher the sperm count will be raised. The NFL doesn’t want to see the draft come and go without a settlement.

On March 22, the League made a slight tactical blunder when Commissioner Roger Goodell ominously suggested that the owners’ last offer “may not be on the table” the next time the parties meet. Besides Goodell having no business posing as an objective third party (he clearly represents the owners, who hired him and can fire him), his remarks scared no one. All he did was antagonize the Players Association.

When management puts a good faith offer on the table, they’re not only announcing to the union that it’s an agreement they can live with, they are, in effect, exposing their hand. They’re showing the union exactly what they consider important, how much they’re willing to pay, how far they’re willing to move, and what they’re willing to give up.

And you don’t go backwards. Management can’t suddenly withdraw that offer and pretend it never existed simply because they’ve grown impatient. They can’t pretend that the union’s negotiating team hasn’t already etched the terms of that offer indelibly on their brains….not if they’re serious about reaching a settlement.

Roger Goodell’s pathetic threat only succeeded in further alienating the players; and given how sensitive these bargains can be, that’s the last thing he wanted to do. Some advice for the commissioner: Stick to your administrative tasks, and leave the negotiating to the negotiators.

How Monsanto the devil is Exploiting the Food Crisis

Pushing GM Corn on Mexican Farmers
By ALFREDO ACEDO

At a press conference, the transnational's Latin American President José Manuel Maduro went even further by blaming restrictions on GM corn production in the country for the high level of post-NAFTA imports of the staple. "Mexico's decisión to not move forward [on transgenics] has led to the importation of 10 million tons of corn, a situation that demands a swift response."

That Monsanto the devil would use the boogeyman of food dependency to scare Mexico into accepting GM corn shows the company's immense cynicism. Now according to Monsanto the devil , the reasons that Mexico lost corn self-sufficiency and start importing millions of tons annually had nothing to do with agricultural policies that support transnationals, or an unjust free trade model that favors imports and has abandoned the majority of national producers. Instead, it's because the country has not embraced the commercial use of transgenic corn.

As the food crisis looms, the real danger – for the nourishment, health and culture of the country – is in choosing the Monsanto the devil agenda over strengthening national agriculture. The cultivation of transgenics will accelerate the loss of Mexico's food sovereignty and contaminate vital native strains of corn.

Pressure Campaign

Monsanto the devil 's diligent PR hard work is paying off. After originally denying authorization for a pilot program to cultivate its GM corn in Sinaloa last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) just gave the company the green light to plant genetically modified yellow corn resistant to the herbicide glyphosate as a part of a pilot program in Tamaulipas' current agricultural cycle.

According to the National Commission for the Use and Understanding of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Tamaulipas is home to 16 of the 59 remaining strains of native corn. A recent study by the CONABIO concluded that releases of transgenic corn should be handled "only by public institutions adequately trained in security, and carried out in low-risk areas." The study was financed by SAGARPA and was announced at the same time as the permit for the Tamaulipas pilot project, going against its own recommendations. Tamaulipas, like the rest of the northern region and all of Mexico, is a center of origin for corn.

There is an intense PR campaign to open the door to transgenics in Mexico: industrial farmers in the north are pushing the government to ease the establishment of commercial transgenic corn operations and the national press is not short on people willing to echo Monsanto the devil 's sound bites.

This year's International Book Fair in Mexico City was invaded by the campaign's propaganda, cloaked in scientific jargon. The fair, sponsored by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, included a series of conferences designed to convince the public about the benefits of GMOs, led by all-star biotech cheerleader, Luis Herrera-Estrella. The Mexican scientist, hailed as a co-inventor of transgenics, has become a defender of Monsanto the devil 's efforts in spite of the fact that, as he tells it, the company commandeered his patent for the technology.

Herrera-Estrella has been accused of doing Monsantothe devil 's dirty work. The relationship between CINVESTAV, where the researcher works, and the transnational is public knowledge. After Berkeley Professor Ignacio Chapela revealed GM contamination in corn crops in Calpulapan, Oaxaca in the fall of 2001, Monsanto the devil launched a smear campaign against him. After years of persecution and when two international Berkeley reviewers had recommended tenure, Chapela's contract was suspended after the university received a letter against him from an expert. The author was Luis Herrera-Estrella.

The conferences at the book fair only presented a favorable view of transgenics, leading to complaints from some members of the public. The president of the Union of Socially Concerned Scientists Elena Álvarez-Buylla presented a brief critical perspective on transgenic biotechnology, including information about a French scientist recognized for his independent research into the risks of GMOs, who recently won a suit against biotech groups that carried out a smear campaign to discredit him. Álvarez-Buylla was cut off by Herrera-Estrella, who was clearly annoyed by the criticisms and insisted that as the conference organizer he should be the sole presenter. Another attendee challenged the failure to mention the proven health risks posed by glyphosate, a Monsanto the devil herbicide associated with one of its transgenic corn strains.

The aggressive PR operation to promote the introduction of GM corn in Mexico comes after the company reported declining profits last year and a drop in its share price due to shrinking sales of Roundup and GM soy and corn seeds in South America and Europe.

The Mexican market represents potential earnings of $400 million annually for Monsanto the devil and for some government officials that's enough to turn a blind eye toward any risk to native corn species, the economy or Mexican health.

Meanwhile in the European Union, according to a report from Friends of the Earth International released several weeks ago, transgenic crops are plummeting at the same time that more and more countries are prohibiting them.

Seven EU member states prohibit the planting of Monsanto the devil 's transgenic corn due to mounting evidence about environmental and economic impacts, and to apply the precautionary principle that stipulates that when impact on human health is unknown precaution is warranted. Polls show that public opposition to transgenics is as high as 61 percent.

Unexpectedly, and not without contradictions, the Mexican federal government denied Monsanto the devil's permit for a pilot project of 100 acres of GM corn in the northeastern state of Sinaloa. Pilot projects are the second regulatory phase, following the experimental phase and preceding commercial production, of the three phases established by the Law of Genetically Modified Organism Biosecurity.

Beginning in October of 2009, a few months after a meeting between Felipe Calderón and Monsanto the devil President Hugh Grant, the federal government approved 29 applications for experimental transgenic corn plots, breaking a decade-long moratorium. Most of the licenses were issued to Monsanto the devil and Dow Agro Science to test corn strains resistant to herbicides and blight on more than a dozen hectares.

Last year, after keeping the sites secret and without adequately disclosing the results of the experimental plantings in violation of the Biosecurity Law, the government accepted 20 more applications from the aforementioned transnationals, plus Syngenta. If all these permits are authorized, there would be more than 1,000 hectares planted with transgenic corn.

The contradictions and waffling in the government's original position to at first deny permits for pilot projects in Sinaloa and then approve the quarter-hectare project in Tamaulipas are probably due to the fast-approaching electoral season – crucial for the ruling party, which will try to avoid the political costs of its decisions. The actions of peasant farmer organizations and the important work of expert groups like the UCCS have played an important role in holding back the mass cultivation of GMOs in Mexico.

Since the end of 2009, The National Union of Regional Autonomous Campesino Organizations (UNORCA) started a campaign with the slogan "No to transgenic corn! Monsanto the devil out of Mexico!" that includes the use of forums, mass media and public spaces to inform debate on GMOs in Mexico. Public forums were held in Navojoa (a few miles from one of the centers of transgenic experimentation), Chilpancingo y Zacatecas. Last year in Guadalajara and Morelia, the forums condemned transgenic corn experimentation as a crime against humanity.

There are now many voices speaking out against the imposition of GMOs: from the UCCS to the city council of Tepoztlán in the southern state of Morelos, which filed a constitutional challenge against the planting of transgenic corn in the country.

Food Sovereignty or Food Dependency?

The national head of UNORCA, Olegario Carrillo, asserts that Mexico doesn't need to embrace Monsanto the devil to regain corn self-sufficiency. Giving in to the transnational's pressure to gain control over Mexico's agro-genetic wealth would mean deepening the debilitating food dependence brought on by NAFTA; food imports already constitute more than 40 percent of what Mexico consumes, according to data from the Chief Auditor of the Federation.

The fundamental problem is not technological, but that the Mexican government lacks policies to promote rural development or goals in domestic food production. The neoliberal regime has chosen to promote imports and support the transnationals that have been taking over the production process.

Monsanto the devil is lying when it implies that its biotechnology can resolve Mexico's food crisis: it is amply documented that transgenics don't increase yields. Transgenic corn strains weren't designed to increase yield. The vast majority of transgenic crops are designed to resist the application of herbicides also manufactured by Monsanto the devil . They actually create more dependency due to the need to buy seed and the contamination of native varieties. They also damage the environment, the economy and human health.

On the other hand, annual corn harvests in Mexico could be doubled if agricultural policy were reformed to support small farmers and to encourage cultivation of more acres in the south and southeast where there is sufficient water. The genetic wealth of Mexican corn could raise production, with farmers saving seed and not required to pay royalties to Monsanto the devil, because the 60 native species and thousands of varieties are adapted to local soils and climates.

Monsanto the devil denies the risk of transgenic contamination of native species, despite evidence that the coexistence of transgenics and biodiversity is impossible. Hiding the truth has been an integral part of Monsanto the devil 's corporate strategies throughout its history, as the company seeks to protect profits at the expense of human health, the environment and general well-being.

The UCCS, based on FAO and UNESCO reports, affirms that transgenics not only do not increase yields, they have the negative impacts of raising agrochemical levels and destroying the soil. These studies also show few or no benefits to poor farmers or consumers. Additionally, GM crops contribute to the climate crisis because they reinforce an oil-dependent agricultural model. Peasant farmer organizations and committed scientists propose an alternative sustainable model, based on conservation of biodiversity, nutrient recycling, crop synergy, conservation of soil and strategic resources (such as water), and incorporating new biotechnologies compatible with sustainable systems.

Scientists have concluded that the Mexican countryside has the resources necessary to guarantee food sovereignty without adopting transgenic technology. According to researcher Antonio Turrent Fernández, small-scale producers, ejido members and communal landowners can play a key role in the production of basic foods and the management of Mexico's diverse genetic resources. But this requires public investment in infrastructure, research, technology transfer and services – that is to say a radical change in the dominant model and budget priorities. It also requires the reinstatement of the moratorium on transgenic corn.

What Does the World Think Now?

Obama Raises American Hypocrisy to Higher Level
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

What does the world think?  Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia.  In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the embattled ruler, Gadhafi, was using air strikes to put down a rebellion.  

Gadhafi has been a black hat for as long as I can remember.  If we believe the adage that “where there is smoke there is fire,” Gadhafi is probably not a nice fellow. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the current US president and the predecessor Bush/Cheney regime have murdered many times more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Gadhafi has murdered in Libya. 

Moreover, Gadhafi is putting down a rebellion against state authority as presently constituted, but Obama and Bush/Cheney initiated wars of aggression based entirely on lies and deception.  

Yet Gadhafi is being demonized, and Bush/Cheney/Obama are sitting on their high horse draped in cloaks of morality. Obama described himself as saving Libyans from violence while Obama himself murders Afghans, Pakistanis, and whomever else. 

Indeed, the Obama regime has been torturing a US soldier, Bradley Manning, for having a moral conscience. America has degenerated to the point where having a moral conscience is evidence of  anti-Americanism and “terrorist activity.” 

The Bush/Cheney/Obama wars of naked aggression have bankrupted America.  Joseph Stiglitz, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that the money wasted on the Iraq war could have been used to fix America’s Social Security problem for half a century.   Instead, the money was used to boost the obscene profits of the armament industry. 

The obscene wars of aggression, the obscene profits of the offshoring corporations, and the obscene bailouts of the rich financial gangsters have left the American public with annual budget deficits of approximately $1.5 trillion. These deficits are being covered by printing money.  Sooner or later, the printing presses will cause the US dollar to collapse and domestic inflation to explode. Social Security benefits will be wiped out by inflation rising more rapidly than the cost-of-living adjustments.  If America survives, no one will be left but the mega-rich.  Unless there is a violent revolution. 

Alternatively, if the Federal Reserve puts the brake on monetary expansion, interest rates will rise, sending the economy into a deeper depression. 

Washington, focused on its newest war, is oblivious to America’s peril. As Stiglitz notes, the costs of the Iraq war alone could have kept every foreclosed family in their home, provided health care for every American child, and wiped out the student loans of graduates who cannot find jobs because they have been outsourced to foreigners.  However, the great democratic elected government of “the world’s only superpower” prefers to murder Muslims in order to enhance the profits of the military/security complex.  More money is spent violating the constitutional rights of American air travelers than is spent in behalf of the needy. 

The moral authority of the West is rapidly collapsing.  When Russia, Asia, and South America look at Europe, Australia and Canada, they see American puppet states that contribute troops to the aggressive wars of the Empire. The French president, the British prime minister, the “president” of Georgia, and the rest  are merely functionaries of the American Empire.  The puppet rulers routinely sell out the interests and welfare of their peoples in behalf of American hegemony. And they are well rewarded for their service. One year out of office former British prime minister Tony Blair had a net worth of $30 million. 

 

In his war against Libya, Obama has taken America one step further into Caesarism. Obama did Bush one step better and did not even bother to get congressional authorization for his attack on Libya.  Obama claimed that his moral authority trumped the US Constitution.  The hypocrisy reeks.  How the public stands it, I do not know: 

“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and--more profoundly--our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves  before taking action.”

This from the Great Moral Leader who every day murders civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and now Libya and who turns a blind eye when “the great democracy in the Middle East,” Israel, murders more Palestinians. 

The American president, whose drones and air force slaughter civilians every day of the year went on to say Libya stands alone in presenting the world with “the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.”  Obviously, Obama thinks that one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and an unknown number of murdered Afghans is just a small thing. 

The rest of Obama’s speech showed a person more capable of DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink than Big Brother and the denizens of George Orwell’s 1984.

I Give Up - Pay Anything...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
 I Give Up - Pay Anything...

(Sooooo on the money!--jef)

Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Agence France Presse
GE 'Zero' US Tax Furor Reignites Calls for Reform

Revelations that General Electric paid no US taxes last year, despite bagging a $14 billion profit, have reignited debate in Washington about tightening up corporate levies.

A protester holds up a sign in front of a Bank of America branch in Washington in February during a demonstration against the bank having not paid any federal income taxes in 2009 despite having received US$45 billion in bailout money from the government in 2008 and 2009. No one, it seems, is very fond of the US corporate tax system.

Businesses bemoan the 35 percent minimum rate that is among the highest in the world, and taxpayers are furious at how easily big firms seem to pay much less.

But in recent months the issue has been overshadowed by multiple global crises and a fierce argument over government spending.

It resurfaced with a bang last week, when it emerged that manufacturing titan GE paid no taxes to the US government in 2010.

"GE did not pay US federal taxes last year because we did not owe any," spokeswoman Anne Eisele told AFP, rejecting suggestions the United States' fourth largest company was gaming the system.

But as millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet, and the Federal government fails spectacularly to do the same, that disclosure has caused consternation.

"The wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit," Democrat-allied Senator Bernie Sanders said Sunday.

Supporters of reform, from big business to the White House, are re-polishing their arguments.

The White House argues an overhaul could help bring down unemployment. Big business agrees a lower rate would aid growth.

Despite this broad coalition, experts say the prospect of a quick deal is illusory.

They argue the government has few options if it wants to substantially lower the minimum rate and not add to the deficit: Expand the number of people paying corporate taxes, or get more revenue.

"If you want to get the corporate tax rate down from 35 to 28 percent -- that is a 20 percent cut in the tax rate -- you have to have increase the tax base by 20 percent, or offset it," said Alan Auerbach, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"That is a big increase."

President Barack Obama has leaned heavily toward closing loopholes, arguing that "revenue neutral" reform must spell an end to some antiquated, but much-loved, tax breaks.

"I don't think there is anyway to do this without winners and losers," said Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Cutting roughly four billion dollars a year in oil and gas sector subsidies are a regularly cited example of cuts, so too is tightening manufacturing deductions that are used well beyond the sector.

But the most lucrative target for the Internal Revenue Service may be cracking down on overseas tax shelters.

Under current rules US firms pay tax on foreign subsidiaries only when profits are sent back to the United States.

Treating subsidiaries as domestic businesses for tax purposes could spell vastly higher tax bills for firms like GE.

While the company says much of this year's tax savings come from losses at GE Capital, even before other write-offs its effective US tax rate was just over seven percent -- thanks in part to some profits being kept overseas.

"If you just look at our statutory rate, it's high," said Annette Nellen, an accounting professor at San Jose State University, but "the effective tax rate for many companies is a lot lower."

Outrage or not, tough bargains will need to be reached if a reform deal is to be reached.

"It is going to depend on who all steps forward to say 'oh no, no, we can't get rid of the research credit, we can't get rid of that work opportunity tax credit,'" said Nellen.

"If you get enough people stepping forward to say you can't get rid of this stuff, then Congress I think will just step back and say, we'll leave the rate where it is."

500,000 London Marchers Protest Massive Spending Cuts in Britain

Saturday, March 26, 2011 by Los Angeles Times
It was one of the biggest demonstrations since rallies in 2003 against the Iraq war.
by Henry Chu

LONDON – Tens of thousands of demonstrators whistled, chanted, drummed and marched their way through the heart of London on Saturday to protest massive government spending cuts that threaten to leave almost no part of British society untouched.

Over 500,000 Brits turnout for the anti-cuts march in London, Saturday, March 26, 2011. It was one of the biggest public demonstrations in Britain since 2003, when antiwar rallies were held across the country before the invasion of Iraq. Organizers said up to 500,000 people participated in the march, whose carnival-like atmosphere was briefly marred by black-clad anarchists who smashed a few shop windows, flung paint bombs and attacked luxury icons such as the Ritz Hotel.

The protesters gathered here from all corners of Britain to express their outrage over a whopping $130 billion in cutbacks that the government insists are necessary to tame a runaway budget deficit. The retrenchment is expected to result in a radical shakeup of bedrock social services such as welfare and healthcare and in the elimination of nearly half a million public-sector jobs.

"It's our right to march and to say we don't accept any of this," said Corinne Drummond, 37, a nurse from East London who joined several colleagues for the demonstration, which began in the morning and lasted for hours.

On a gray and occasionally drizzly spring day, a huge of column of protesters snaked its way along some of London's best-known streets, past landmarks such as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and through Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus.

They were a motley crowd of civil servants, environmentalists, prison officers, academics, feminists and young parents with toddlers on their shoulders. "Don't believe in the deficit," some placards exhorted, while other signs and T-shirts called for a "general strike now" and exhorted Britons to "make tea, not war."

In Hyde Park, the leader of the opposition Labor Party ridiculed Prime Minister David Cameron's vision of a "Big Society" full of citizen volunteers who plug the holes left by cuts in government spending.

"You wanted to create a Big Society. This is the Big Society, the big society united against what your government is doing to our country," Ed Miliband said in a speech that invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement. "We stand today not for the minority. We stand today for the mainstream majority of Britain."

The Labor Party, which was kicked out by voters in May after 13 years in power, acknowledges that some cuts are unavoidable to shrink a deficit built up largely under its watch. But it says the scale and pace of the austerity plan put forward by the Conservative Party-led government will strangle Britain's fledgling economic recovery and hurt the most vulnerable members of society.

Effects of the belt-tightening will begin to be felt more acutely next month, when libraries start closing down, youth programs disappear, social workers get laid off and fewer buses ply the streets. In the northern city of Manchester, police are bracing for the elimination of nearly 3,000 jobs – a quarter of the department's workforce.

Analysts say the spending cuts could change the fabric of British society in a way not seen since the free-enterprise revolution of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

"It's changing the whole ethos of everything," said nurse Rikke Albert, 37. "That's not what I signed up for when I did my training."

U.S. expansion of biometric tech poses ‘grave danger,’ says ACLU

U.S. expansion of biometric tech poses ‘grave danger,’ ACLU tells Raw Story
By Stephen C. Webster - RAW Story
Friday, March 25th, 2011

A recent announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigations detailing plans to embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon has the American Civil Liberties Union on red alert.

In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, attorney Chris Calabrese, an ACLU's legislative counsel in Washington, D.C., warned that this move in particular was indicative of a fast approaching mass surveillance state that poses a "grave danger" to American values.

The FBI's forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.

To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven't been arrested or convicted of a crime.

"We think rolling out these kind of invasive measures is really another step toward mass surveillance of the population," Calabrese told Raw Story. "I mean, now if you're just walking around on the street, do you think that automatically police should be able to check your fingerprint? Seems very invasive to us."

But it's more than just invasive, he suggested: it's a fundamental revolution in American values.

"Facial recognition is one of the most invasive biometrics because it allows surreptitious tracking at a distance," Calabrese continued. "They can secretly track you from camera to camera, location to location. That has enormous implications, not just for security but also for American society. I mean, we are now at a point where we can automatically track people. Computers could do that. That's what, we think, is a grave danger to our privacy."

And it's not just a rhetorical threat, where -- as many a police officer has said -- if you aren't doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide. It could actually go so far as changing the culture of law enforcement as a whole, Calabrese said.

"Law enforcement's focus should stay where it's been for a 100 years: finding bad guys, but since 9/11 the focus has shifted toward terrorism. It's suddenly this idea that's like, well, let's scrutinize the whole U.S. population before trying to find bad guys."

He went on: "In the United States, you're innocent until proven guilty for a reason. You're supposed to have the right and the ability to live your life free of government scrutiny. That's fundamental to American values.

"That's what we're really talking about here: a shift in American values, from a place where you can live your life unencumbered by government scrutiny to one where you really have to worry whether the government is watching you either through a video camera, or a police officer who could step up and potentially ask you for a fingerprint at any time."

Mr. President, tear down this list

Another item in the FBI's announcement that alarmed civil libertarians was the creation of yet another database dedicated to tracking certain individuals. The FBI said this latest database, called the "Repository for Individuals of Special Concern," would only focus on wanted criminals, registered sex offenders and "suspected terrorists."

But considering the Obama administration's secretive policy which strips Miranda rights from U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism -- a policy issued in January and revealed yesterday by The Wall Street Journal -- that database could become a flashpoint.

Miranda rights are what allows suspects to remain silent in the face of police questioning, and have an attorney present for their interrogation. The Obama administration's policy says that law enforcement may deny these rights if they deem the situation "exceptional," even if it doesn't pertain to any immediate threat.

While Calabrese did not address the issue of Obama's Miranda policy, the ACLU at-large did issue a statement yesterday, condemning the administration.

"It is important to remember that no change in FBI interrogation policy can alter the constitutional imperative that information gained without Miranda warnings is inadmissible against a defendant in a court of law where no public safety exception exists," they said. "This principle is fundamental to the American system of justice."

But what about these lists? And specifically, the "Individuals of Special Concern," which is now only likely to grow in importance as a database containing some individuals who the president potentially considers to be unprotected by the U.S. Constitution.

"The biggest problem with the terrorist database is not having a separate database of people," Calabrese said. "There may be situations where you have high value targets, you know, you want to make sure you can immediately get a ping-back on. The problem is how people get on those lists. Have they been connected to a crime? Is there an arrest warrant out for them? In situations like that, obviously it's fine. We want the police to be able to find dangerous people. Once there's a warrant out for a person's arrest, obviously we want to give law enforcement the tools they need to capture those people."

Unfortunately, he added, that's not a reflection of today's U.S. law enforcement.
"What we have instead is secret watch lists, where people don't know they're on the list, they don't know the standard for putting them on the lists and there's no way to get off the lists," Calabrese said. "That's a serious problem."

"We're not opposed to technology, but we are seeing technology advancing rapidly and often times legal protections aren't keeping up. When it's now technologically possible to do things like capture a facial recognition image and use the various cameras across a city to track somebody using that image automatically ... When that's technologically possible, the only barrier between us and widespread mass surveillance is legal protections. They don't exist right now, in many cases."

Sen. Sanders calls for eliminating corporate tax loopholes and tax breaks

(Go Bernie! The IRS will hunt people like you and me down and ruin our lives if we're late paying our taxes, but they let big corporations dodge taxes for a decade or more without even investigating them. Come on! If that doesn't define who controls our government, nothing does.--jef)

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Sen. Bernie Sanders calls for eliminating corporate tax loopholes and tax breaks

By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Sunday, March 27th, 2011

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) called for closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies Sunday after reports that General Electric and other giant corporations pay nothing or almost nothing in federal income taxes.

According to The New York Times, General Electric made $14.2 billion in profit last year, $5.1 billion of which was made in the United States. The corporation received $3.2 billion in tax benefits, but did not pay any money in taxes.

"We have a deficit problem," said Sanders. "It has to be addressed, but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We've got to talk about shared sacrifice."

Oil giant Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009, but paid no federal income taxes, according to the senator. Instead, the corporation received a $156 million rebate from the IRS.

Sanders has introduced legislation that would establish a surtax on millionaires and strip tax deductions for oil companies -- a proposal he claims would cut the deficit by about $50 billion.

The Emergency Deficit Reduction Act would accomplish this by raising taxes by 5.4 percent on annual income over $1 million.

Sanders said it was grossly unfair for Republicans to propose massive cuts to Head Start, Pell Grants, the Social Security Administration, nutrition grants for pregnant low-income women and the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring the fact that many corporations pay nothing in federal income taxes.

Meanwhile, Congressman Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has said he hopes to cut the tax rate for the richest individuals and corporations to 25 percent and would like to see many popular deductions cut or completely eliminated.

Sage Eastman, deputy staff director for the Ways and Means Committee, claimed the plan would create the same level of revenue while making the tax code less complex.

"You're not getting a tax cut because those credits in the code are artificially altering those rates," Eastman told MLive. "The plan is to continue with that same level of revenue, but do it in a more efficient way."

A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found late February that 81 percent of Americans believe a surtax on millionaires is an acceptable way to close the budget shortfall.

Federal agency recognizes marijuana for medical use

By David Ferguson - RAW Story
Sunday, March 27th, 2011

Medical marijuana dispensaries currently under fire from the IRS may have been handed a critical new weapon in their fight to stay open. The National Cancer Institute, one of the many federal agencies who make up the National Institute of Health, has ruled that marijuana does in fact have medical benefits, making it the first federal agency to do so.

The NCI has issued a statement that in clinical trials, cancer patients successfully treated nausea and vomiting, sleeplessness, pain, and loss of appetite using marijuana.  It stated that cannabis was being investigated as having not only a palliative effect on symptoms, but also a possible "direct antitumor effect".

The IRS has been citing § 280E of the federal tax code as a means of disallowing years of business deductions for marijuana dispensaries, which, if allowed, would effectively put many of them out of business. § 280E states that no business deductions will be allowed for businesses "trafficking in controlled substances".

From the Washington Independent:

The new NCI assessment could have an impact on the classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the harshest possible drug classification, which has resulted in a prison population in which 1 in 8 prisoners in the U.S. is locked up for a marijuana-related offense. One of the principal criteria for a Schedule I determination is that there be “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” The U.S. Justice Department may have a hard time maintaining that claim if challenged, considering a federal agency now recognizes marijuana’s medical use in cancer treatment.

The Independent also reports on a white paper (PDF) issued by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) stating that because marijuana is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, doctors should be censured for prescribing it in states where it is legal.  The report cites marijuana use as a health risk in that the drug's primary method of consumption is through smoking.

Marijuana advocates like Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization for Marijuana Legalization (NORML) believe that the physician-directed ASAM has a vested interest in keeping marijuana illegal.  St. Pierre is quoted in the Independent as saying, "These doctors are making a fortune off of marijuana prohibition.  They have a financial, proprietary interest to maintain the status quo."

We Can't Control The Monsters We Create

Pentagon hires contractors to regulate contractors

(Every so often, a story comes along which epitomizes the term "ridiculous." This...is one of those stories.--jef)

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Pentagon hires contractors to regulate contractors
PressTV - Fri Mar 18, 2011

Instead of keeping watch itself, the Department of Defense today relies on contractors to monitor the work of other contractors, a risk strategy that became cemented during the Iraq War thanks to a politically-connected-and powerful-company with ties to the Bush White House.

In late 2004, the U.S. Army command overseeing logistical support for troops in Iraq had a serious problem on its hands. Army officials had hired KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Vice President Dick Cheney had helped lead, to supply soldiers with food and other supplies. But at least $1 billion in billing by KBR was questioned by the Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency, resulting in the Army deciding to withhold 15% of its payments to KBR.

Company officials fought the withholding and pressured both the Defense Department and Congress to release the money it claimed it was owed. So the Army removed those who had raised alarms over the billing and hired another company, consulting firm RCI, to conduct its own audit of KBR costs.

RCI didn't find any problem with KBR's billing and the contractor got most of its money.

"This was a form of buying the audit that you want and the Army, who was relying on KBR for the major troop support in Iraq, gave this contractor a green light for business as usual ... running up as much costs as possible with the war as an excuse," wrote Charles M. Smith and Robert H. Bauman, two former Pentagon oversight and investigative personnel, for Truthout in recalling the KBR controversy. AllGov

• Last August, the Congressional Research Service reported that the Department of Defense workforce has 19% more contractors (207,600) than uniformed personnel (175,000) in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the wars in these two countries the most outsourced and privatized in U.S. history. World Press

• In the 1st quarter FY 2011, the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) reported approximately 176,161 contractor personnel working for the Department of Defense. World Press

• The heavy reliance on contractors in Afghanistan signals that a situation which defense planners once considered temporary has become a standard fixture of U.S. military operations. WSJ

• According to a U.S. Senate report in October 2010, heavy U.S. reliance on private security in Afghanistan has helped to line the pockets of the Taliban.