Economic Entropy as Revolutionary Redistribution

Let the Free Market Eat the Rich!
by Jeremy Weiland
Anarchy and Distribution

Civil society has become so confused with the institution of the State that anarchists often find it difficult to extricate one from the other when positing a voluntary society. The effects of privilege permeate our culture, our infrastructure, our economic relationships, and our thinking. Therefore, the ability to describe a coherent and distinctive picture of a post-state, post-privilege world is crucial in that it throws contemporary constructs of privilege into stark relief. While disputes about proper means towards a stateless society abound in the anarchist milieu, the most striking distinctions can be discovered by examining the varied predictions of the likely ends of anarchism. Perhaps nothing sets these approaches apart and divides efforts more than competing visions of just property distribution.

A long running debate among anarchists, especially between the individualist and collectivist schools, centers around the justice of wealth disparities. Certainly the existence of the State serves to enrich particular interests at the expense of others, but in anarchy would the rich dominate society - just as they do with the State? Should private property be abolished altogether to force an egalitarian society into existence? Or will private property be the basis for a new, voluntary order where the wealth gap will no longer matter? Even if we could immediately switch off the institutions that forcibly manipulate society, many fear that the legacy of privilege and accumulated wealth could persist for some time, distorting markets and continuing the frustrate the balance of power between individuals.

Individualist anarchists have had a variety of responses to the problems of historical property and wealth maldistribution. Even anarcho-capitalists who see large scale social coordination as the natural direction of society have different views, such as Hans Hermann Hoppe's theory of a natural elite and Murray Rothbard's support of syndicalist takeover of State-supported corporations. On the other side of the coin, left-leaning individualists also entertain a variety of approaches: from agorist advocacy of revolutionary entrepreneurship as a leveling force to mutualists such as Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson speculating about the possible need for short term State sponsored redistribution and reform.

At the root of all these competing theories, the key question for anarchists remains: what does a stateless society look like? What exactly are we working towards? It is this difference of vision that divides the efforts of anarchists much more than purely strategic differences. Is a more ecumenical anarchism possible - one that can bring the schools together, at least for activist purposes, not by fighting over predictions and visions but by agreeing on the means by which a voluntary society is achieved?

In the midst of all this theorizing, it is easy to forget that anarchy is - anarchy becomes defined by - however humans naturally interact, not how we wish they would interact. In other words, true anarchy is an empirical reality, and we have only to discover it by removing privilege. Arguing over what it shall be and shall not be presumes we can dictate how humans interact, a positively authoritarian concept. Whatever human nature might be, any anarchism worth pursuing starts there, and the kernel of proportionality and balance that could inform this matter may be sought there as well. Given this approach to anarchism, what can human nature tell us about distributive justice?

In any statist society, those who benefit from the status quo rely first and foremost on the stability and security of the social order. How they achieve this defines politics as we experience it. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how large scale aggregations of wealth require an outside stabilizing force and defensive agency to maintain, and how in a free, dynamic market there are entropies that move imbalances back to equilibrium. There is also a proposed basis for a relative equilibrium among people once privileges are abolished. This investigation will identify two main institutions that arise from state intervention in capitalist society: corporations and personal estates.

The Modern Corporation

The modern corporation is a legal entity chartered by the State. Corporations benefit from an arsenal of privileges, such as fiat entity status, personhood and limited liability, which serve to set the rules of the market on terms favorable to corporate investors and managers. The trend has always been to correct any perceived problems with big business by large, top-down regulation, rather than to reexamine the legal constructs that give these institutions such outsized power in our society.

For instance, it is conceivable that a firm could argue effectively in front of a judge for certain of the rights of being a human citizen on a case by case basis, but current established law mandates a clumsy legal equivalence between living human beings and abstract organizations of people and assets (which is historically dubious). The benefit to big business, of course, is to regularize and simplify business legal proceedings, setting aside the legal advantages this gives corporations over individual humans. In the United States, for instance, the ability to exercise first and fourth amendment rights as if the firm were a human being results in corporate campaign contributions and protection from random inspections. It is interesting to see the framers' document limiting government prerogative used to defend not merely the rights of human beings but those of the government's own abstract inventions.

Yet while human rights are invoked, privileges granted by the State to corporations that no human can claim, such as limited liability, represent a fiat subsidy. Imagine the cost of privately insuring the value of the total market capitalization of the world's corporations! But the utility of the subsidy goes even further, because it allows investors to hire managers who have a legal mandate to pursue profits while maintaining a distance from the way the profits are pursued. Highly capitalized firms, who by their sheer size wield far more potential for harm than any single individual, essentially obfuscate the way decisions are made so that if third parties to the stockholder-manager relationship are harmed, stockholders cannot lose more than their investment.

The imbalance of responsibility this enables cannot be underestimated, for it goes to the very heart of corporate economic behavior. What would be different about business, socioeconomics, and politics if stockholders knew that their managers' activities would leave them fully liable for the actions of the corporation and could lose their savings, their car, their house? Limited liability and corporate personhood make possible a way of doing business in a far riskier way than normal people would. How do we know this? Because few people, anarchist or not, would limit the liability of regular human beings, knowing that it is the consequences of undesirable behavior such as violence or theft that helps prevent it.

In a free market, corporations would not be able to rely on the State for their very existence. Any ability to do business as an entity would come from the consent and cooperation of the market - customers, suppliers, contractors, service providers, banks, but most importantly management. Without a Securities and Exchange Commission and intrusive reporting requirements, oversight, and regulatory enforcement, it would be very hard to protect the shareholders at firms of any appreciable size and organizational complexity from outright fraud in a variety of ways. The well-understood legal relationships that govern so much capital finance and business activity would become much more ad hoc and peculiar. Shares in corporations would become even less uniform constructs from business to business, since their terms could vary wildly and they couldn't simply be traded as almost fungible commodities. Unpredictability and risk would skyrocket, which is a much more favorable environment for the small-time entrepreneur than the big, clumsy, bureaucratic corporation.

Think about the huge stabilizing effect of the federal government for making big business anything less than a total ripoff for investors right from the start. Think about the ways government regulation rationalizes markets to make them safe for large industries to exploit and oligopolize. Think about how much leeway the modern CEO is afforded to run the business in pursuit of short term gain, with stockholders often supporting them even as they engage in questionable activities. Enron's reckless destruction of shareholder value is hardly remarkable, when you think about the level of complexity in which they schemed and strategized - the fact that it doesn't happen more often is (until you check your tax bill and realize you're subsidizing the stability and security of others' investments!).

The Personal Estate

Obviously the most direct way in which people benefit from the institutional character of our statist society is through direct ownership. While there are few (if any) rich people who aren't heavily and diversely invested in corporate capitalism and share in its redistribution of wealth and special favors from the government, there are additional State provisions to benefit individuals. Unlike corporate privileges, those which govern the stability of personal estates arguably serve the interests of more modest individuals, especially the middle class. However, I intend to show that the rich benefit far more from fiat stability and socialized security than the rest of us.

The biggest subsidy enjoyed by the wealthy lies in government regulation of finance. By regulating banking through inspections, audits, and the centralized monetary maintenance practiced by the Federal Reserve System, depositors enjoy a level of stability in the system that is quite unrivaled in history. Of course, regular joes like you and I prefer our current experience to frequent crashes and bank runs, but there's a catch: we don't pay for this "service" in proportion to our deposits (or the interest we earn!). Instead, we help subsidize the regulation and maintenance of the financial system from which the elite depositors benefit disproportionately.

Rich depositors are more likely to invest in instruments and accounts which yield higher interests rates. Plus, they're more likely to earn a greater amount of their income directly from the interest on their deposits. The barriers to entry in banking prevent individuals from forming their own mutual banks and force them to rely on the aggregated wealth of big depositors at some level of the hierarchical financial establishment. And because the rich can afford to pay for maintenance of their wealth by managers, accountants, and brokers, they are more likely to anticipate and capitalize upon market shifts than us.

Keep in mind that central regulation and maintenance of markets, groomed and rationalized by the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and other departments encourages the sort of investment patterns that count on steady profits and interest - phenomena much more likely to benefit the wealthy than those of us investing in 401-Ks and IRAs. By lowering risks, any entrepreneurial profit opportunities for the little guy that regulation kills translate into the stability of markets and the steadiness of investment income. Of course, that benefits those who've already accumulated capital much more than those of us who've yet to achieve our fortune.

However, the extent of State intervention to benefit the rich extends beyond finance into the very real area of asset security. The rich depend on the stability and predictability of systems that ensure and protect their title to their property, but again their benefit from these phenomena dwarfs ours. For example, they count on the government keeping a central repository of property titles to justify excluding others. This takes property off the market and thus raises the value of their property. While it is true that middle class homeowners benefit from these systems, it does not benefit them to nearly the degree it does the rich. Socializing the costs of kicking people off one's land necessarily favors those who have more land to guard.

Police patrols of moneyed neighborhoods provide an example of socialized security, where defense and sentry costs are not paid directly by the beneficiaries. Sure, many wealthy types hire security guards, but they would have to hire many more - and pay much higher insurance premiums - if it were not for public law enforcement at least helping to defend their property, nor the extensive, expensive system of socialized criminal investigation that makes it less likely property will stay stolen and criminals remain at large.

The Entropy of Aggregated Wealth

As I stated earlier, we may find the answer to the problem of persistent wealth imbalances in human nature. Two aspects of that nature are greed and envy. In a market without socialized regulation, stockholders are in constant danger of management and employees siphoning off profits and imperiling the long term viability of the business. Rich individuals face similar uncertainties of theft and fraud by those they employ to maintain and protect their assets. Because the lack of a State would force these costs to be internalized within the entity rather than externalized onto the public, it is highly likely that the costs of maintaining these outsized aggregations of wealth would begin to deplete it.

The balance of power between the rich and non-rich is key here. Direct plundering of wealth, though fraud or theft, threatens the rich in a crippling way. It raises their costs directly in proportion to their wealth, either through insurance costs, defense costs, or losses. They have to worry not just about outside threats, but also the threats posed by their servants, employees, and even their family members. Because the wealth is centralized around one individual or one management team, it is near impossible to find any fair way to distribute the responsibilities of stewardship without distributing the wealth itself. Having a lot of stuff becomes more trouble than it's worth.

Meanwhile, less rich people economize on these costs by banding together with other modest individuals to either hire outside defense (socializing protection on their own, voluntary terms) or by personally organizing to defend property (via institutions such as militias). Because the ratio of person to wealth is relatively greater, there are more interested individuals wiling to play a role in defense and maintenance of property. The distribution of the wealth over more people necessarily eases its protection. And since everybody has basically the same amount of stuff, nobody has an interest in taking advantage of, nor stealing from, others.

In fact, normal human greed suggests that there will always be an element of society that wishes to steal and cheat others. In anarchy, the wealthy offer themselves as easy targets to such criminals, because big estates are harder to defend and so invite more opportunities for plunder. Additionally, it is far more likely that wealthy estates will be targeted because, for instance, it is easier to steal a million dollars worth of cash or property from one location such as a bank or mansion than it is to rob a thousand or so common people. The larger the disparity in wealth, the more intensively the wealthy will be targeted by criminals.

On the other hand, normal people would necessarily be less likely to be targeted by the criminal, for a few reasons. First, since the ratio of human bodies to wealth in a modest community would be much greater, the deterrent effect would be insurmountable to all but the most stupid crooks. Second, once statist regulations and privileges stop making an honest living less of a bad deal, the criminal elements in a modest community are more likely to share in the legitimate wealth of the economy, easing their need to prey on their neighbors. Markets freed from dehumanizing, deracinated centralization imposed for corporate convenience would be fathomable, with plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurship. While by no means a utopia, a genuinely free market would ease the pressures on the lower and middle classes.

The Free Market as Egalitarian Equalizer

This phenomenon of disadvantaged rich and advantaged poor, brought about by the costs of estate and business management, suggests an interesting dynamic. It may be that in a free market there will exist a natural, mean personal wealth value, beyond which diminishing returns enter quickly, and below which one is extremely disposed towards enrichment. If this is true, then that means that normal, productive, and non-privileged people will tend to have similar estate values. This wide distribution of wealth will tend to reinforce bottom-up society and a balance of power unrivaled in history (except maybe in frontier experiences).

In a stateless society, institutions for business and personal organization must derive their permanence from their usefulness not just to an elite few, but from the respect of the entire community - customers, suppliers, neighbors, etc. An entity that can operate efficiently and deliver a steady stream of income, whether an estate or a corporate business, becomes less viable the larger it grows because internal transaction and maintenance costs start to skyrocket. This is a function not of wealth itself, but rather of the inherent difficulty in convincing those with less to honor and defend the property of those with more. The more people benefit from a body of wealth, the more people will support it.

Indeed, the State can be seen as a mechanism for acquiring the consent of the governed to sign onto a program of stabilization that is inherently artificial, precisely due to its disproportionate dividends to established elites. The State co-opts authentic community support or opposition and channels it into modes that are predictable and stable, establishing its institutional identity as indispensable mediator between the very interests in which it promotes opposition. But authentic community stability is no harder to realize in a genuine, stateless society where people participate only in voluntary organizations. Similarly, inauthentic, imposed stability usually benefits those who cannot maintain their position without outside help. Wealthy interests use the State as a way to marshal public support without yielding control or spreading the wealth, as it were.

A truly free market without subsidized security, regulation, and arbitration imposes costs on large scale aggregations of assets that quickly deplete them. I do not think they would be able to survive for very long without the State, even if "natural elites" exist or some form of social darwinism is proven correct, because natural hierarchies such as those would not need State intervention to maintain their cohesion. One can chalk this up to the fickle and often dark side of human nature, but it's a phenomenon that we cannot just wish away - indeed, we should see a place for these dynamics in the legitimate, bottom-up society.

This theory is not an ironclad prescription of how anarchy must emerge. It is merely a demonstration of how individualist and collectivist visions can both be served without compromising either's interests. Markets and egalitarian distribution of property and wealth are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Perhaps authentic libertarian means of genuinely free markets, taken to their logical conclusion, can effect far more egalitarian and redistributionist ends than we ever dreamed - not as a function of any central State, but rather as a result of its absence.

Saving the Warfare-Welfare State

The difference is over means not ends.
Sheldon Richman
April 15, 2011

Why does everyone think Washington is plagued by excessive partisanship? The contest over how to address the fiscal debacle says otherwise: Both divisions of the uniparty (Democrat and Republican) agree that the warfare-welfare state must be saved. It’s the means not the end that divides them.

Rep. Paul Ryan, who leads the Republican side, declares that his goal in seeking a balanced budget (someday) is to save the three pillars of the welfare state—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for “our children’s generation.” “I support these missions,” he says. He would “voucherize” Medicare and give states discretionary Medicaid block grants because, he says, the alternative is insolvency. He would maintain Social Security, while permitting people under 55 to put one-third of their Social Security taxes into government-guaranteed accounts. (They would still have to pay current retirees’ Social Security benefits.) His substitute for Obamacare would give a cash subsidy—he uses the Washington gobbledygook “refundable tax credit”—to “[ensure] universal access to affordable health insurance.”

So, although couched in the rhetoric of liberty and self-reliance, Ryan’s plan aims at saving the welfare state from itself, while giving insurance and investment companies more of a role, not to mention a cut of the taxpayers’ money.

Growth Path

Likewise, Ryan’s plan would leave military spending—misleadingly called “defense” spending—on its growth path, even though it has doubled in the last decade. With the government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in three overt and several covert wars, Ryan shows no inclination to question the global military policy that milks the taxpayers, wreaks destruction abroad, and creates a desire for revenge.

As former Reagan administration Pentagon official Lawrence Korb noted, “Apparently Ryan was taken in by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s claims that he has already proposed $178 billion in savings in defense spending. These were not real cuts. Gates plowed $100 billion of his ‘savings’ back into the budget for other programs while the remaining $78 billion merely reduced projected growth in the defense budget.”

Ryan’s package has other ingredients, such as cutting the top rate for the individual and corporate income tax to 25 percent, while broadening the tax base. He would also reportedly trim some corporate and agricultural welfare, but he leaves the principle in place.

Ryan thus reveals himself as not as one who has rethought the U.S. government’s current domestic and global missions and understands the need for a radical revision, but rather as one who seeks to fortify those missions by preventing insolvency and forced liquidation. The ruling establishment would have little reason to be concerned if Ryan prevailed.

Obama Response

In response, President Obama has now offered an outline — not much detail yet — of an alternative plan to cut the deficit, however, again the differences with Ryan are over means not ends. He too seeks to preserve the warfare-welfare state but would do so with fewer spending cuts than Ryan, higher taxes on the wealthy, an end to the business tax preferences he dislikes (while keeping those he approves of), and no operational changes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

On defense, Obama calls for the elimination of Pentagon waste (edgy!), however, every president does that and it never amounts to much. (The Department of Defense is routinely unable to account for billions of dollars.) Obama says the government will “have to conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions,” but how serious can he be? He’s just led NATO forces into Libya on an undefined, open-ended military adventure, while overt and covert wars continue to rage throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. He shows no willingness to rethink the unipartisan global-policeman policy that accounts for so much of the fiscal burden (over a trillion a year) and creates the need for bloated and costly “homeland security” that undermines our liberty. As Korb says, “The Obama administration already plans to spend 20 percent more on defense than was spent on defense during the Bush administration.”

Satisfying the Base

Thus we see Obama’s basic agreement with Ryan’s wing of the uniparty, though the latter would rely on the tax-funded “private” sector more than the former would. Of course each side highlights the differences to make them appear to be matters of kind rather than degree or method. This way each can keep its base rhetorically satisfied (or try). Obama’s team talks about the need for the rich to sacrifice to the middle class and poor, while Ryan’s team counters that the private sector is where the action should be. Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to end Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (they don’t), while Republicans accuse Democrats of being Marxian socialists (they’re not).

But here’s the thing: Both seek to retain the fundamental status quo in which the State parcels out favors to reigning interests while providing succor to the vulnerable in a combined spirit of charity and fear. Fear of what? In the case of the elderly, fear of their political clout at the ballot box; in the case of those shut out the economic system because of lousy government schools, occupational licensing, and cartelization via the subsidy and regulatory regime, fear of a frustration that could turn into unrest.

Globally the Obama side emphasizes the supposed humanitarian rationale for military intervention while his internecine rivals emphasize the security rationale. But they agree on the premise — that it is the proper job of the U.S. government to police the world, at least where there is oil and other things coveted by the ruling elite.

Thus The Charade continues.

Mystery illnesses plague Louisiana oil spill crews

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, April 17th, 2011

RACELAND, Louisiana — Jamie Simon worked on a barge in the oily waters for six months following the BP spill last year, cooking for the cleanup workers, washing their clothes and tidying up after them.

One year later, the 32-year-old said she still suffers from a range of debilitating health problems, including racing heartbeat, vomiting, dizziness, ear infections, swollen throat, poor sight in one eye and memory loss.

She blames toxic elements in the crude oil and the dispersants sprayed to dissolve it after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010.

"I was exposed to those chemicals, which I questioned, and they told me it was just as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid and there was nothing for me to worry about," she said of the BP bosses at the job site.

The local doctor, Mike Robichaux, said he has seen as many as 60 patients like Simon in recent weeks, as this small southern town of 10,000 bordered by swamp land and sugar cane fields grapples with a mysterious sickness that some believe is all BP's fault.

Andy LaBoeuf, 51, said he was paid $1,500 per day to use his boat to go out on the water and lay boom to contain some of the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed from the bottom of the ocean after the BP well ruptured.

But four months of that job left him ill and unable to work, and he said he recently had to refinance his home loan because he could not pay his taxes.

"I have just been sick for a long time. I just got sick and I couldn't get better," LaBoeuf said, describing memory problems and a sore throat that has nagged him for a year.

Robichaux, an ear, nose and throat specialist whose office an hour's drive southwest of New Orleans is nestled on a roadside marked with handwritten signs advertising turtle meat for sale, says he is treating many of the local patients in their homes.

"Their work ethic is so strong, they are so stoic, they don't want people to know when they're sick," he said.

"Ninety percent of them are getting worse... Nobody has a clue as to what it is."

According to a roster compiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a total of 52,000 workers were responding to the Gulf oil spill as of August 2010.

The state of Louisiana has reported 415 cases of health problems linked to the spill, with symptoms including sore throats, irritated eyes, respiratory tract infections, headaches and nausea.

But Bernard Goldstein, an environmental toxicologist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said the US government's method of collecting health data on the workers is flawed.

For instance, a major study of response workers by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was not funded until six months after the spill, a critical delay that affects both the biology and the recall ability of the workers.

"It is too late if you go six months later," he told AFP.

Benzene, a known carcinogen present in crude oil, disappears from a person's blood within four months, Goldstein said.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, are pollutants that can cause genetic mutations and cancer. They are of particular interest in studying long-term health, but without a baseline for comparison it is difficult to know where they came from -- the oil spill or somewhere else in the environment.

"They last in the body for a longer period of time but they also get confounded by, if you will, obscured by, other sources of PAHs," like eating barbecued meat or smoking cigarettes, said Goldstein.

Further blurring the situation, Louisiana already ranks very low in the overall health of its residents compared to the rest of the United States -- between 44th and 49th out of the 50 states according to government data.

Some similar symptoms, including eye irritation, breathing problems, nausea and psychological stress, have been seen among responders to the Prestige oil tanker spill off Spain in 2002 and the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 off Alaska.

Local chemist Wilma Subra has been helping test people's blood for volatile solvents, and said levels of benzene among cleanup workers, divers, fishermen and crabbers are as high as 36 times that of the general population.

"As the event progresses we are seeing more and more people who are desperately ill," she said.

"Clearly it is showing that this is ongoing exposure," Subra said, noting that pathways include contact with the skin, eating contaminated seafood or breathing polluted air.

"We have been asking the federal agencies to please provide medical care from physicians who are trained in toxic exposure."

She said she has received no response.

Asked for comment, BP said in an email that "protection of response workers was a top priority" and that it had conducted "extensive monitoring of response workers" in coordination with several government agencies.

"Illness and injury reports were tracked and documented during the response, and the medical data indicate they did not differ appreciably from what would be expected among a workforce of this size under normal circumstances," it added.

Any compensation for sick workers would fall under state law, and "BP does not make these determinations, which must be supported by acceptable medical evidence."

For Simon, her way of life has been completely altered. She said she takes pain relievers every day just to function.

A couple of weeks ago, she read in a local newspaper that other ex-cleanup workers were feeling sick too, and her grandmother urged her to see a doctor.

"I never put the two together. I am just realizing that this is possibly related," she said.

One View of the American Crisis

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Consortium News
by Robert Parry
Some readers tell me that I devote too much time to the historical context of the American political/media crisis. They say I should focus more on its current manifestations, especially when there are so many to address. And these readers have a point.

However, I think that without the context – and without understanding how the various U.S. political/media forces evolved over the past several decades – much of what is happening today doesn’t make sense, nor are the solutions readily apparent.

Only by analyzing how the country got into its current mess can there be any hope of figuring a way out. In that sense, this history is like the thread that the Greek hero Theseus unrolled as he made his way through the Minotaur’s maze and then rewound the thread to guide himself out.

So, from my six-plus decades on this planet and my three-plus decades as a Washington-based journalist, here is my ground-level view of what has happened to the United States:

Generally speaking – and with a number of glaring exceptions – the post-World War II period was a time when the institutions of the Republic functioned along the lines of what we learned in our public school civics classes.

The federal government drew from the lessons of the Great Depression and the New Deal to improve the country’s general welfare by creating conditions that helped expand the middle class.

After World War II, government programs helped veterans buy homes and get educated. Construction projects, like President Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, brought the country together and increased productivity.

President John Kennedy’s space program pushed the scientific frontiers, propelling the United States into the world lead in computer technology. President Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare for senior citizens whose health needs were being ignored by for-profit insurance companies.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal courts also began to address the shameful history of racial segregation, as a violation of the U.S. Constitution and particularly the 14th Amendment’s mandate for equal protection under the law. As the civil rights movement pressed the issue in the streets, the courts began striking down Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination.

In the 1960s and well into the 1970s, the U.S. press corps also functioned closer to its ideals of skepticism toward power. Correspondents covering the Vietnam War warned the nation of the folly, and the New York Times and other newspapers braved the wrath of President Richard Nixon by publishing the Pentagon Papers, with the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Nixon’s anger over the Pentagon Papers spilled into his political paranoia, the White House “plumbers” were soon planting bugs in Democratic headquarters at the Watergate. After Nixon’s burglars were arrested and the President mounted a cover-up, the Washington Post led the way in defying White House power and exposing the scandal.

With Congress conducting serious Watergate investigations and federal prosecutors demanding Nixon’s internal tapes of his own conspiracy, the Supreme Court again sided with the institutions of justice, rejecting Nixon’s arguments of an imperial presidency. Nixon was forced to resign.

Functioning Institutions

So, by the mid-1970s, it could be said that the institutions of the Republic were operating, more or less, as intended. There were real checks and balances. The rights of citizens, especially racial minorities and women, were finally being protected; the press was exposing wrongdoing; accountability was imposed on the Executive for constitutional and legal violations.

Of course, these institutions had been pushed by popular movements, millions of citizens demanding redress of longstanding grievances. There was also a vibrant “underground press” and other outlets for disseminating information when the mainstream media didn’t. It was Dispatch News that exposed the My Lai massacre and Ramparts that revealed CIA penetration of student groups.

Yet, while this progress toward a more perfect union made undeniable headway in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the changes also bred resentment in the South and in many white areas of the North.

The demand for racial justice was viewed as infringing on traditions of white preference and superiority. Many men objected to the women’s movement, too. Meanwhile, social conservatives hated the “counter-culture” and the sexual revolution.

As early as the 1950s, the pushback from the Right was evident in calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the physical assaults on blacks seeking to integrate schools, lunch counters and other public institutions. White segregationists denounced the press as “liberal” for its coverage of the civil rights struggle. The federal government was viewed as infringing on states’ rights.

The resistance grew in the 1960s as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other right-wingers rallied blue-collar whites against “hippies,” feminists, “uppity” blacks, academics, environmentalists and “unpatriotic” journalists. These Americans saw their traditional way of life under siege, and they were backed by wealthy businessmen who worried that their dominance of the economy might be threatened.

Though the Right decried the national press corps as “liberal,” it actually was run by businessmen who were mostly conservative and protective of the establishment. Many top news executives chafed against the era’s progressivism and the anti-establishment tone of reporters as much as other businessmen did.

By the 1970s, the American Great Backlash was gaining strength. Well-placed conservatives, such as Lewis Powell (who later became a Supreme Court justice) and William Simon (who was Nixon’s Treasury Secretary), were calling for massive investments in a right-wing infrastructure of media, think tanks and attack groups to reverse the nation’s progressive trends.

Simultaneously, as the Vietnam War was winding down, the Left largely dismantled its own media infrastructure that had become a powerful grassroots force in the 1960s and early 1970s but was deemed too expensive.

In a short time, the vibrant “underground press” of the Vietnam era disappeared; flagship publications, like Ramparts and Dispatch News, were closed; popular radio outlets, like WBCN in Boston, were bought up by media conglomerates; key liberal outlets, like The New Republic, fell into the hands of neoconservatives.

Much of the Left bought into the notions that media was not essential; that working inside the Washington system was corrupting; and that “local organizing” was the key to the future. Other leftists fell victim to the vanity of perfectionism, putting their own political purity ahead of any practical idea for improving the lives of average citizens.

Competing Trends

So, in the mid-to-late 1970s as the Right was shifting its focus to national battles and investing more and more in getting its messages out to every corner of the country, the Left was dismantling its media, decamping from Washington, and dreaming that somehow “organizing” around local issues would create a grassroots movement for revolutionary change.

These two trends – the rise of the Right’s national propaganda machine and the collapse of the Left’s ability to reach the broad public – consolidated with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Though now viewed through the gauzy mythology that surrounds his legacy, the real Reagan was a rigid right-winger who had opposed many of the social advancements of the era.

Reagan denounced Medicare as socialist tyranny; he cracked down on the anti-war movement while governor of California; he aided and abetted right-wing death squads in Latin America; he opposed environmentalism and other government regulations; he worked to roll back civil rights, especially affirmative action aimed at ameliorating the legacy of discrimination against minorities and women.

Upon taking office in 1981, with the Senate under Republican control, Reagan and his team began systematically deconstructing the institutional safeguards that had defined the New Deal and post-World War II-era.

The Reagan administration took special aim at the federal appeals courts, especially the most influential one in the District of Columbia, installing right-wing and neocon ideologues as judges, the likes of Laurence Silberman. Reagan also appointed environmental “regulators” who detested regulations and civil rights attorneys who opposed efforts to improve the lot of blacks and other minorities.

Reagan emphasized, too, expanding the Right’s propaganda capabilities, coordinating with the growing network of right-wing media and attack groups that went after troublesome journalists and intimidated political critics.

Meanwhile, without the competitive pressure from the “underground press,” the mainstream media charted its own rightward course following the prevailing winds, often with a conservative or neoconservative at the helm.

At the Associated Press, where I worked, the top executive, general manager Keith Fuller, hailed Reagan’s election in 1980 as a worthy repudiation of the excesses of the 1960s:

“As we look back on the turbulent Sixties, we shudder with the memory of a time that seemed to tear at the very sinews of this country,” Fuller said during a 1982 speech in Worcester, Massachusetts, adding that Reagan’s election had represented a nation “crying, ‘Enough.’ …

“We don’t believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and Eve in the eyes of Creation. We don’t believe that people should cash welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don’t really believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest in the classroom.

“We’re sick of your social engineering. We’re fed up with your tolerance of crime, drugs and pornography. But most of all, we’re sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.”

Fuller’s sentiments were common in the executive suites of major news organizations, where Reagan’s reassertion of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy also was widely welcomed.

At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal, an early neocon, vowed to steer his newspaper back “to the center,” by which he meant to the right. At the Washington Post, neocons also began asserting control over the editorial policies of that newspaper.

Losing the Thread

In short order, the institutions of the Republic, which had checked Nixon’s crimes, ceased to function in that way. Instead, the institutions reversed roles, becoming cheerleaders – and enforcers – for the powerful.

The “professionals” of Official Washington quickly sniffed the change in the air. Many learned to survive by honing their senses on where the safe boundaries were. Those who didn’t or wouldn’t go along – ethical journalists, diligent civil servants and some independent-minded members of Congress – soon found themselves on the outs.

Yet, even as the nation’s institutions stopped providing meaningful checks and balances in the 1980s, some individuals continued to do their jobs.

During much of the decade, the failure of the Republic’s institutions was masked somewhat by the fact that some individuals stepped into the breach. There were still a few courageous investigators on Capitol Hill; a handful of journalists who would risk their careers to get out important stories; and some civil servants who believed in doing their jobs honestly.

Perhaps the most striking case of this was the work of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, a traditional Republican conservative who nevertheless took seriously his responsibility to investigate the Reagan administration’s worst scandal, the secret sale of weapons to Iran and the diversion of profits to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

Despite Walsh’s establishment pedigree, Official Washington turned on him en masse. Especially after he broke through the Iran-Contra cover-up in 1991, he was subjected to withering attack – from leading Republicans, such as Sen. Bob Dole, and from the right-wing news media led by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times.

But Walsh also faced ridicule from the mainstream news media, such as the Washington Post where he was mocked as some crazed Ahab pursuing a white whale or as some out-of-control weirdo who would leave Washington a “perceived loser.”

Indeed, by the early-to-mid-1990s, there was little distinction between the mainstream news media and the right-wing press. Even when documented evidence emerged shedding light on the criminality of Reagan and his team, there were no institutions – and by then few individuals left within those institutions – daring to take note.

First the institutions failed; then the individuals who had dared to fight on disappeared.

Planting a Flag

It became clear to me that trying to get the mainstream news media to publish important information was a losing battle if that information went against the grain of right-wing orthodoxy or mainstream conventional wisdom.

In fact, I had grown tired of trying to convince editors and producers who feared losing their jobs that they had a responsibility to take on such stories and such risks. Beyond exhaustion, I felt guilt when I looked into their eyes and saw how scared they had become, a fear that would sometimes translate into anger at even the suggestion.

My reaction to this grim reality was to look for a place where the flag of honest journalism could be planted and defended. I thought I might have found such a spot with the emergence of the Internet and our creation of the Consortiumnews.com Web site in 1995.

Of course, the downside was that the journalism would not have the large audiences that my work did when I was at the AP or Newsweek or PBS “Frontline.” But I thought readership might grow significantly if I were able to raise the necessary money to ensure that our stories got more attention.

That, however, proved more difficult than I had expected. Wealthy progressives remained locked into the thinking of the late 1970s, which held that expenditures on information were wasteful; that reporting the news was somebody else’s job. Maybe they believed – or wanted to believe – the Right’s propaganda about the “liberal” media that, in reality, didn’t exist.

Instead, they favored either direct giving (such as helping the poor or buying up endangered wetlands) or support for "organizing" efforts (such as seeking some regulatory change, like curbing money in politics).

I argued instead that the scarce money available should be invested in creating honest content and courageous outlets.

While direct giving was surely noble, it ignored the power of the Right’s propaganda machine to undermine any worthy cause. By destroying the New Deal and Great Society, right-wing legislators could create more poor people than any well-intentioned liberal benefactor could feed and house.

Regulation, like restricting money in politics, also might sound good but was either impractical or easily reversible by right-wing judges and politicians. All the money that progressive foundations invested in campaign finance reform was negated in 2010 by one 5-4 decision of a Supreme Court dominated by appointees of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.


The hard truth is that there are no shortcuts to correcting the imbalance that now exists in the U.S. political/media system. It will take money, time and energy to build an infrastructure that can successfully challenge the propaganda from the Right. It will also require many on the Left to admit that their judgments over the past three decades have been faulty.

But the consequences of the Right’s strategy – and the Left’s miscalculations – are apparent in the audacity of today’s congressional and statehouse Republicans in proposing the virtual repeal of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and even Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive era.

The Right feels it is strong enough to impose its Ayn Rand vision of a winner-take-all society and deploy its vast resources to prevail on Election Day.

It is possible that the Republicans have overreached this time, with their ambitious agenda of slashing domestic spending, replacing Medicare with a voucher system, and lavishing more tax reductions on the rich.

But the fact that the Republicans and the Right would even dare undertake such a radical approach is itself proof of how far they believe they have come in controlling government institutions and media outlets, how successfully they have negated the Republic's checks and balances.

To find a route out of this political/media maze, the Democrats and the Left may have to start rewinding the string of history and retracing the steps that got them so lost in the first place.

Carcinogens Injected into Wells During Gas "Fracking"

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Associated Press
Report: Carcinogens Injected into Wells During Gas "Fracking"

WASHINGTON — Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005-2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday.

The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known-or-suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report was issued by Reps. Henry Waxman of California, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado.

The chemicals are injected during hydraulic fracturing, a process used in combination with horizontal drilling to allow access to natural gas reserves previously considered uneconomical.

The growing use of hydraulic fracturing has allowed natural gas production in the United States to reach levels not achieved since the early 1970s.

However, the process requires large quantities of water and fluids, injected underground at high volumes and pressure. The composition of these fluids ranges from a simple mixture of water and sand to more complex mixtures with chemical additives.

The report said that from 2005-2009, the following states had at least 100,000 gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluids containing a carcinogen: Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana and Utah.

States with 100,000 gallons or more of fluids containing a regulated chemical under the Safe Drinking Water Act were: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi and North Dakota.

The report said many chemical components were listed as "proprietary" or "trade secret."

"Hydraulic fracturing has opened access to vast domestic reserves of natural gas that could provide an important stepping stone to a clean energy future," the report said.

"Yet, questions about the safety of hydraulic fracturing persist, which are compounded by the secrecy surrounding the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids. This analysis is the most comprehensive national assessment to date of the types and volumes of chemical used in the hydraulic fracturing process."

The investigation of chemicals used in fracturing was started in the last Congress by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which then was controlled by Democrats. The committee asked the 14 leading oil and gas service companies to disclose the types and volumes of the hydraulic fracturing products they used between 2005 and 2009 and the chemical contents of those products

No End in Sight for Nuclear Catastrophe in Japan

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Japan nuclear firm aims to end crisis within nine months, but no word when - if ever - evacuees will be able to return
by Justin McCurry

The company at the centre of Japan's nuclear crisis says it hopes to bring the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant under control in six to nine months, but cannot say when tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate the area will be able to return home.

In the first indication of how long it will take to stabilise the plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) revealed on Sunday a two-stage process it hopes will end with the safe "cold shutdown" of the stricken reactors.

TEPCO 's announcement came as the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, arrived in Tokyo to pledge Washington's support for Japan as it recovers from the worst disaster in its postwar history.

"Economically, diplomatically and in so many other ways, Japan is indispensable to global problem-solving," she said. "We are very confident that Japan will recover and will be a very strong economic and global player for years and decades to come."

Clinton pledged steadfast support for Japan in the face of "a multidimensional crisis of unprecedented scope".

Japan and the US announced the creation of a public-private partnership to spearhead reconstruction. "We wish to enhance co-operation between Japan and American businesses," Clinton said.

TEPCO officials say the two most urgent tasks are to prevent hydrogen explosions at three of the six reactors, and to secure storage for tens of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water in the turbine buildings.

The firm has been pumping low-level radioactive water into the sea, angering neighbouring China and South Korea.

It says it needs three months to achieve a steady reduction in radiation, and another three to six months to bring levels firmly under control.

"We will do our utmost to curb the release of radioactive materials by achieving a stable cooling state at the reactors and spent fuel pools," TEPCO's chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, told reporters.

"The company has been doing its utmost to prevent a worsening of the situation. We have put together a roadmap and will put all our efforts into achieving these goals."

The prime minister, Naoto Kan, welcomed TEPCO's roadmap as "a small step forward". Earlier, he said in a newspaper editorial that last month's natural disasters and the nuclear crisis presented Japan with "a precious window of opportunity to secure the 'rebirth of Japan' ".

TEPCO says plans to stabilise the plant are subject to "various uncertainties and risks", and cannot give a time frame for the return of evacuees.

The trade minister, Banri Kaieda, suggested some residents would be able to return as soon as the the plant was stabilised.

But Katsumata, who admitted he was considering resigning over the crisis, said only that he hopes people will be able to return "as early as possible".

TEPCO is to monitor radiation levels in affected towns and villages once the plant is stabilised and liaise with the government about a possible lifting of the evacuation order.

Pressure has mounted on TEPCO and the government to give evacuees an idea of when they might be able to return to their homes. At the weekend, Kan was quoted as suggesting they may have to wait up to 20 years. He later insisted he had been misquoted.

"We would like to present the facts to help the government make a judgment and provide an outlook on when evacuees can go home," Katsumata said.

Super Rich See Federal Taxes Drop Dramatically

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Associated Press
by Stephen Ohlemacher

WASHINGTON – As millions of procrastinators scramble to meet Monday's tax filing deadline, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.

The top income tax rate is 35 percent, so how can people who make so much pay so little in taxes? The nation's tax laws are packed with breaks for people at every income level. There are breaks for having children, paying a mortgage, going to college, and even for paying other taxes. Plus, the top rate on capital gains is only 15 percent.

There are so many breaks that 45 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax for 2010, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

"It's the fact that we are using the tax code both to collect revenue, which is its primary purpose, and to deliver these spending benefits that we run into the situation where so many people are paying no taxes," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the center, which generated the estimate of people who pay no income taxes.

The sheer volume of credits, deductions and exemptions has both Democrats and Republicans calling for tax laws to be overhauled. House Republicans want to eliminate breaks to pay for lower overall rates, reducing the top tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. Republicans oppose raising taxes, but they argue that a more efficient tax code would increase economic activity, generating additional tax revenue.

President Barack Obama said last week he wants to do away with tax breaks to lower the rates and to reduce government borrowing. Obama's proposal would result in $1 trillion in tax increases over the next 12 years. Neither proposal included many details, putting off hard choices about which tax breaks to eliminate.

In all, the tax code is filled with a total of $1.1 trillion in credits, deductions and exemptions, an average of about $8,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent watchdog within the IRS.

More than half of the nation's tax revenue came from the top 10 percent of earners in 2007. More than 44 percent came from the top 5 percent. Still, the wealthy have access to much more lucrative tax breaks than people with lower incomes.

Obama wants the wealthy to pay so "the amount of taxes you pay isn't determined by what kind of accountant you can afford."

Eric Schoenberg says to sign him up for paying higher taxes. Schoenberg, who inherited money and has a healthy portfolio from his days as an investment banker, has joined a group of other wealthy Americans called United for a Fair Economy. Their goal: Raise taxes on rich people like themselves.

Shoenberg, who now teaches a business class at Columbia University, said his income is usually "north of half a million a year." But 2009 was a bad year for investments, so his income dropped to a little over $200,000. His federal income tax bill was a little more than $2,000.

"I simply point out to people, `Do you think this is reasonable, that somebody in my circumstances should only be paying 1 percent of their income in tax?'" Schoenberg said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he has a solution for rich people who want to pay more in taxes: Write a check to the IRS. There's nothing stopping you.

"There's still time before the filing deadline for them to give Uncle Sam some more money," Hatch said.

Schoenberg said Hatch's suggestion misses the point.

"This voluntary idea clearly represents a mindset that basically pretends there's no such things as collective goods that we produce," Schoenberg said. "Are you going to let people volunteer to build the road system? Are you going to let them volunteer to pay for education?"

The law is packed with tax breaks that help narrow special interests. But many of the biggest tax breaks benefit millions of American families at just about every income level, making them difficult for politicians to touch.

The vast majority of those who escape federal income taxes have low and medium incomes, and most of them pay other taxes, including Social Security and Medicare taxes, property taxes and retail sales taxes.

The share of people paying no federal income tax has dropped slightly the past two years. It was 47 percent for 2009. The main difference for 2010 was the expiration of a tax break that exempted the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits from taxation, Williams said.

In 2009, nearly 35 million taxpayers got a tax break for paying interest on their home mortgages, and nearly 36 million taxpayers took the $1,000-per-child tax credit. About 41 million households reduced their federal income taxes by deducting state and local income and sales taxes from their taxable income.

About 36 million families cut their taxes by nearly $35 billion by deducting charitable donations, and 28 million taxpayers saved a total of $24 billion because their income from Social Security and railroad pensions was untaxed.

"As a matter of policy, there would be a lot of ways to save money and actually make these things work better," said Leonard Burman, a public affairs professor at Syracuse University. "As a matter of politics, it's really, really difficult."

BP Anniversary: Toxicity, Suffering and Death

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English
The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster has caused the biggest chemical poisoning crisis in US history, experts say.

by Dahr Jamail - Al Jazeera

April 20, 2011 marks the one-year anniversary of BP's catastrophic oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. On this day in 2010 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, causing oil to gush from 5,000 feet below the surface into the ninth largest body of water on the planet.

 Medical and toxicology experts have told Al Jazeera that the oil spill has triggered environmental and human health disasters that will likely span decades.
(Erike Blumenfeld/Al-Jazeera) At least 4.9 million barrels of BP's oil would eventually be released into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was capped 87 days later.

It is, to date, the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. BP has used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic dispersants to sink the oil, in an effort the oil giant claimed was aimed at keeping the oil from reaching shore.

Critics believe the chemical dispersants were used simply to hide the oil and minimise BP's responsibility for environmental fines.

Earlier this month Transocean Ltd, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon, gave its top executives bonuses for achieving what it described as the "best year in safety performance in our company’s history". Transocean CEO Steve Newman’s bonus was $374,062.

BP has plans to restart deepwater drilling on 10 wells in the Gulf of Mexico this summer after being granted permission by US regulators.

Meanwhile, marine and wildlife biologists, toxicologists, and medical doctors have described the impact of the disaster upon the environment and human health as "catastrophic," and have told Al Jazeera that this is only the beginning of that what they expect to be an environmental and human health crisis that will likely span decades.

The demise of gulf vertebrates

Less than four months after the disaster began, very large fish-kills began to appear along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

On August 18, a team from Georgia Sea Grant and the University of Georgia released a report that estimated 70-79 per cent of the oil that gushed from the well "has not been recovered and remains a threat to the ecosystem". More recent studies estimate that figure could be closer to 90 per cent.

Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has "great concern" about the fish kills over the last year, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.

In recent months, more than 290 corpses of dolphins and their newborn have washed ashore in the areas of the Gulf most heavily affected by the disaster, along with scores of dead endangered sea turtles.

"If we use several models to see what is going on, the sea turtles and neo-natal dolphin deaths, the impacts of the dispersed oil are lingering", Cake told Al Jazeera. "The oil is out there and still coming onto our shores".

On May 20 of last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told BP it had 24 hours to find a less toxic alternative to its dispersants, but the EPA's request was ignored.

Then on May 25, BP was given a directive by the EPA to scale back their spraying of the Gulf of Mexico with dispersants. The US Coast Guard overlooked the EPA's directive and provided BP with 74 exemptions in 48 days to use the dispersants.

A March 1987 report titled Organic Solvent Neurotoxicity, by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), states:

"The acute neurotoxic effects of organic solvent exposure in workers and laboratory animals are narcosisanaesthesiaia, central nervous system (CNS) depression, respiratory arrest, unconsciousness, and death."

The dispersants are banned in at least 19 countries, including the UK.
Cake’s assessment for sea turtle and dolphin populations in the Gulf is bleak.

"The two models of the turtles and dolphins indicate that something is drastically wrong in the marine environment, that I believe point towards the demise of these vertebrates in the Gulf."

Underscoring his concern, a new study published in Conservation Letters this March reveals that the true impact of BP’s oil disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated.

The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed since most carcasses sink before they are spotted.

Cake believes the National Marine Fisheries Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been remiss in determining the cause of the deaths.

"In the year since the spill began, NOAA admits to doing no tissue sampling, which to me is scientifically incredible, for if you have forensic samples, you are bound by protocols to have them analysed right away so they do not degrade, unless your purpose is not to know what is killing these dolphins", he said.

In February the Obama administration, via the National Marine Fisheries Service, issued a gag order to force marine scientists who were contracted to document the spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples to keep their findings confidential.

Bleak prognosis

Dolpins and sea turtles can be considered the canaries in the coalmine in the Gulf since they are at the top of the food chain and directly reflect what is happening to the marine environment in which they live.

Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer, as well as a marine and oyster biologist, has "great concern" about the fish kills over the last year, which he feels are likely directly related to the BP oil disaster.

"Adult dolphins systems are picking up whatever is in the system out there, and we know the oil is out there and working it’s way up the food chain through the food web and dolphins are at the top of that food chain."

Cake explained: "The chemicals then move into their lipids, fat, and then when they are pregnant, their young rely on this fat, and so it’s no wonder dolphins are having developmental issues and still births".

Since last fall, Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has been conducting tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.

"Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline", Subra told Al Jazeera, "We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation."

Cake, who lives in Mississippi, said:

"In the past months we’ve lost the young of the year population of dolphins in this area. We are not seeing any young of the year dolphins in the Mississippi and Alabama coastal area. The question is, for us as humans, could we withstand a similar impact if all our children were born dead because of environmental pollutants? I would say we could not."

It has been more than 31 years since the 1979 Ixtoc-1 oil disaster in Mexico's Bay of Campeche, and the oysters, clams, and mangrove forests have still not recovered in their oiled habitats in seaside estuaries of the Yucatan Peninsula.

It has been over 21 years since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska, and the herring fishery that failed in the wake of that disaster has still not returned.

From a biological oceanographer’s perspective, we are still in the short-term impact stage of BP’s oil disaster. Cake, who is 70-years-old, said:

"I will not be alive to see the Gulf of Mexico recover. Without funding and serious commitment, these things will not come back to pre-April 2010 levels for decades."

Toxic chemicals 'in the air'

Two-year-old Gaven Tillman of Pass Christian, Mississippi, has been diagnosed with severe upper respiratory, sinus, and viral infections. His temperature has reached more than 39 degrees and he has been sick since last September.

"He has been seen by nine different doctors and had twenty-four doctor & ER visits," Shirley Tillman, his grandmother and former BP oil cleanup worker told Al Jazeera, "Some of his diagnoses include severe inflammation of his upper sinuses, upper respiratory infections, ear infections, sore throats, headaches, fever, vomiting & diarrhea."

Both Shirley and her husband Don's blood tested positive for chemicals from BP's crude oil, but now Gaven's blood has tested positive as well.

"We expected to find BP’s toxins in our bodies after working in the VOO [Vessels of Opportunity] program," she added, "But we did not expect our two-year-old grandson to test positive for having them too, with levels higher than ours. He has not been to the beach and has not eaten any seafood. Therefore, it is in the air."

Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist, and Exxon Valdez survivor, told Al Jazeera that: "The dispersants used in BP's draconian experiment contain solvents such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol.

Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber", she continued, "It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known".
"They evaporate in air and are easily inhaled, they penetrate skin easily, and they cross the placenta into fetuses."

"For example, 2- butoxyethanol [in BP’s Corexit dispersants] is a human health hazard substance; it is a fetal toxin and it breaks down blood cells, causing blood and kidney disorders", Ott said.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitization, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia, and cardiovascular damage. They are teratogenic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic.

Since last July, Al Jazeera has spoken with scores of Gulf residents, fishermen, and clean-up workers who have blamed the aforementioned symptoms they are experiencing on the chemicals from BP's oil and dispersants.

"I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body,” 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera.

Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010.

"At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good,” he said, "I’ve been extremely sick ever since.”

According to chemist Bob Naman, these chemicals create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil.

"I’m scared of what I’m finding," Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, added, "This is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe."

Aguinaga’s health has been in dramatic decline.

"I have terrible chest pain, at times I can’t seem to get enough oxygen, and I’m constantly tired with pains all over my body,” Aguinaga explained, "At times I’m pissing blood, vomiting dark brown stuff, and every pore of my body is dispensing water.”

And Aguinaga's friend Vallian is now dead.

"After we got back from our vacation in Florida, Merrick went to work for a company contracted by BP to clean up oil in Grand Isle, Louisiana,” Aguinaga said of his 33-year-old physically fit friend. "Two weeks after that he dropped dead."

Problems will continue

Most of the human blood Dr Subra has tested has toxic chemicals present at levels several times higher than the national average.

"Ethylbenzene, m,p-Xylene and Hexane are volatile organic chemicals that are present in the BP crude oil", she said. "We are finding these in excess of the 95th percentile, which is the average for the entire nation. Sometimes we’re finding amounts five to 10 times in excess of the 95th percentile."

Ethylbenzene is a form of benzene present in the body when it begins to be broken down. m,p-Xylene is a clear, colorless, sweet-smelling, flammable liquid that is refined from crude oil and is primarily used as a solvent.

Al Jazeera asked Subra what she thought the local, state and federal governments should be doing about the ongoing chemical exposures.

"There is a lack of concern by the government agencies and the [oil] industry,” She said, "There is a leaning towards wanting to say it is all fixed and let us move on, when it is not. The crude oil is continuing to come onshore in tar mats, balls, and strings."  "So the exposure continues. There is still a large amount of crude in the marshes and buried on the beaches. As long as that pathway is there for exposure, these problems will continue quite a long time into the future.”

Dr Mike Robicheux is a doctor in Louisiana who has been treating scores of people he says are being made sick from BP’s toxic chemicals.

Robicheux says new patients from the exposure are coming into his office daily, and believes that the broader medical community across the Gulf Coast are either unwilling or unable to deal with the crisis.

Robicheux, who has appealed to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for help, said:

"The medical community has shut this down...They either don’t understand or are afraid to deal with it properly because they are afraid of the oil and gas industry."

"This is the biggest public health crisis from a chemical poisoning in the history of this country," Robicheux told Al Jazeera, "We are going to have thousands of people who are extremely sick, and if they aren’t treated, a large number of them are going to die."

Spill changed little in the Gulf oil industry

April 17, 2011
Despite a ten-month stoppage after Gulf oil spill disaster, a restarted oil industry works under no new regulations
By Mark Strassmann (CBS News)

Wednesday marks the first anniversary of the explosion aboard BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering a leak that took nearly three months to stop.

One year later, CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reports that in some ways, the oil business has changed, and in others, it has not.

After BP's disaster exploded into view, the nation saw that 11 lives were lost, and nearly five million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf. All of it was preventable. Critics vowed never again.

Almost a year later, ten new deepwater wells are underway. Some are already drilling other sites, with rigs on the way. The Gulf is back open for business.

"To see activity again is just great," said Dwayne Rebstock, Allport Services' CEO.

Rebstock's Louisiana company services the oil industry's supply ships. He's happy to re-hire ten laid-off workers, but puzzled by what's really changed.

"I don't see any improvements that were made to any degree or level that justifies the ten months the industry was shut down," Rebstock said.

Even government regulators admit they have a long way to go, despite mandating new disaster plans from drilling operators. From requesting data on worse case spill rates, to updating response time to drill a relief well, in addition to overhauling standards for well design, casing and cementing, and safety.

"The deepwater horizon did come as a wake-up call to the industry. There had been complacency and over-confidence, " said Michael Bromwich with BOEMRE.

BP also displayed a good deal of incompetence. For 87 days, BP could not stop its own leak. Since the spill, industry groups created two new capping and containment systems, now for deepwater drillers in case of another major spill.

One such company is the Marine Well Containment Company. Its centerpiece is a 100 ton stacking cap, designed to collect 60,000 barrels of leaking oil a day.

"We have the equipment. We have the people. We have the pre-defined plan. We're ready to go," said Marty Massey, Marine Well Containment Company's CEO.

Getting this news system in place over a problem well is one of the unknowns. While company officials claim it will take just a few minutes, it is a system that has never been tried before on the sea floor. Every day of delay, a ruptured well could leak thousands of barrels.

Since BP's disaster, Congress has passed no new safety regulation for deepwater drilling.

"Until tough new safety standards are put on the books, then we are still gambling with the livelihoods and the life of the Gulf of Mexico," Said Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.)

No coast was smeared more than Louisiana's, but the state relies on oil jobs. So its officials want more deepwater drilling as soon as possible.

At a Congressional hearing, Louisiana's Natural Resources Director Scott Angelle seemed not to have even read a presidential panel's new safety recommendations.

When asked whether safety recommendations from the president's BP oil spill commission should be implemented, Angelle said: "I'm not familiar with all the safety recommendations."

BP has refused any comment as this anniversary fuels debate about what has really changed in the Gulf.

US Uncut: The New Movement against Austerity and Corporate Tax Cheats

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Brian Tierney

By Monday April 18th most Americans will have finished filing their taxes, helping to boost government revenue at a time when the only thing most politicians care to discuss is how to cut the deficit.


But a large pack of corporate citizens will probably not be worrying about paying their dues; tax day, like any other day for them, will be strictly devoted to growing their bloated profit margins.

Recent reporting that some of the largest U.S. corporations have paid little to nothing in federal income taxes in the past few years hasn’t stopped the upside-down debate in Washington. The beltway budget battle remains focused on one blunt question: how much of a beating should be given to workers and the poor in order to bring down the deficit while leaving the corporate bottom line unscathed?

Beyond Capitol Hill, however, the scope of corporate tax-dodging during a period of devastating budget cuts has inspired the ire of thousands of Americans and given birth to a new people-powered movement to hold big business and their mouthpieces in Washington accountable for the cuts. It’s called US Uncut, a campaign that has produced hundreds of direct actions targeting notorious tax cheats like Bank of America and Verizon while agitating around other major offenders like General Electric and Citigroup.

Thanks to tax breaks, creative accounting schemes, loopholes and off-shore havens, these companies are raking in billions and getting away with systematic tax-evading operations that would land ordinary people in jail.

Launched back in February, US Uncut has so far made Bank of America and Verizon the primary targets of its actions. According to US Uncut, Bank of America’s 2009 pre-tax income was $4.4 billion. As the fifth largest corporation in the world, Bank of America received $45 billion in bailout funds in 2008 and 2009 but didn’t pay a single dime in federal income taxes in 2009. In the same year, Bank of America received up to $1.9 billion in tax refunds.

How did they get away with it? Bank of America has 115 foreign tax-havens where it keeps its income in order to avoid taxes. And Bank of America is not alone. Roughly 25 percent of the largest U.S. corporations don’t pay any federal income taxes.

US Uncut has adopted a model of organizing first used in the U.K. where an organization called UK Uncut has been using hundreds of creatively-themed, non-violent direct actions targeting companies that flout their duty to pay taxes while budget crises are crippling social programs. The “flash mob”-style actions are meant to both pressure companies and galvanize the broader population through attention-grabbing and highly publicized direct actions.

According to its website, “US Uncut is a grassroots movement taking direct action against corporate tax cheats and unnecessary and unfair public service cuts across the U.S.
Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans. That’s unacceptable.”

The approach taken by US Uncut relies heavily on the use of social media and a decentralized, do-it-yourself system for organizing protest actions and posting them on its website.

George Taghi, a leading organizer with US Uncut in Washington DC, explained that US Uncut wants to change the public discourse around the budget and the deficit and engage the public with its approach to activism.

“US Uncut’s goal is to punctuate and change the narrative that says ‘we have a spending problem’ to ‘we have a revenue problem,’” Taghi says.

When asked why US Uncut is focused on tax-dodging companies rather than the lawmakers who enable them, Taghi pointed to the corporations as the real source of power in Washington:

“US Uncut has focused on bringing protests to companies’ storefronts, instead of lawmakers, because that is where the true powers lie. On the whole, for companies to claim ignorance or deny responsibility for our lopsided tax code – that legalizes off-shoring of profits and accounting gimmicks – is a farce.  These companies have lobbied Congress for such privileges and donate to representatives to enact loopholes.”

In addition to Bank of America, US Uncut is shining the spotlight on other corporations like Verizon, which reported a pre-tax income of $24.2 billion last year and was rewarded with a $1.3 billion tax refund. Citigroup has paid zero dollars in taxes in the last four years, according to US Uncut. The company also was the largest recipient of government bailout money, totaling a staggering $476 billion.

The issue of corporate tax-dodging has been pushed into the limelight in recent months. Last month, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders compiled a list of “the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.” The list included companies such as those on the US Uncut target list, in addition to Exxon Mobile, which made $19 billion in profits in 2009, paid no federal income taxes and received a $156 million tax rebate, according to SEC filings. While the official corporate tax rate is 35 percent, Goldman Sachs managed to whittle its tax obligations down to 1.1 percent of its income in 2008.

In March, the New York Times published a front-page article describing how General Electric, the second largest corporation in the world, paid nothing in federal income taxes last year while it reported $14.2 billion in profits. On top of that, GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
“Its extraordinary success,” according to the Times article, “is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

Add to all of this GE’s anti-worker policies – which include plant closures that have eliminated a fifth of GE jobs in the U.S. since 2002 and the company’s drive to cut the wages and benefits of its mostly unionized workforce – and you have what President Obama lauds as a “model” for American business.

On Wednesday that model was the target of a hoax executed by the same activists of US Uncut, in partnership with the “Yes Men,” an anti-corporate group notorious for pulling pranks that parody corporate propaganda. The two groups put out a fake GE press release that announced GE’s plans to return all of its $3.2 billion tax refund in response to public outrage. The stunt brilliantly put GE into an awkward public relations situation in which the company was forced to openly admit that it in fact had no intention of paying anything back. 

Given GE’s relationship with the White House, the egregiousness of its tax-dodging helps to contextualize the willingness of the Obama administration to inflict such harsh cuts like the ones that went through Congress last week to avert a government shutdown. Instead of being sanctioned for its tax cheating, GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was awarded a top position in the Obama administration as chair of the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

So when it comes to spending and budget cuts, forget hope and change. Compromise and capitulation is the catchphrase of this administration, and this should surprise no one who knows the company that Obama keeps. In fact, the president’s “compromise” last week with Republican House Speaker John Boehner cannot even be called that. Democrats and the White House conceded even more in spending cuts than what Republicans themselves originally proposed at the beginning of the year. And it was a “compromise” that Obama applauded as the largest annual spending cut in U.S. history.

On Wednesday Obama delivered a speech in which he seemed to be changing course and finally turning back to the progressive ideals that inspired millions during his campaign. His argument for progressive tax policies, making the wealthy pay more and preserving critical programs like Medicare and Social Security was a rhetorical departure from what we’ve seen from his administration over the past several months of budget wrangling.

Following the speech, liberal commentators voiced their exuberance and suggested that Obama’s disillusioned base can again find some cause for excitement. Others were not as impressed.

“[Obama] has given so many great speeches before, only to disappoint. Unfortunately, he stills adheres to the right’s narrative that spending cuts on domestic programs has to happen to the tune of nearly $1 trillion over ten years,” said Taghi from US Uncut.

The speech also left the door open to unspecified reforms to Social Security and Medicare that will play into the hands of the right-wing tea party-backed Republicans in Congress who want to privatize and destroy those programs.

Last week Congress voted to chop $38 billion dollars from the budget with cuts that will affect health programs, heating assistance to the poor, education programs, the Environmental Protection Agency, and food safety. Funding for essential women’s health services provided by Planned Parenthood just barely made it passed the GOP’s ideological chopping block, but Obama and the Democrats still traded away money for those services for residents of the District of Columbia.

And while the let-them-eat-cake budget cutters are using the deficit to justify these cuts at the federal level, they have also been on the attack at the state level where budgets are being slashed and unions are under assault.

The campaign against unions has helped breathe some life back into the labor movement. But what started as an anti-union crusade in Wisconsin – inspired and funded by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers – has spread to other states, and it’s not just Republicans who are out to make union workers scapegoats for the deficit. Democratic governors in California, New York, and Illinois are using the deficit as an excuse to force major concessions from public sector unions.

In response, unions and labor activists have been mobilizing and fighting back. A national day of action last week on April 4th saw over a thousand union rallies and other actions for labor across the country.

In the midst of this labor upsurge, US Uncut is another component of the progressive fightback, and it’s a campaign that goes directly to the corporate tax-dodgers who are materially and ideologically feeding the narrative about a deficit crisis that can only be solved through budget cuts. A unified progressive fightback – including labor, environmentalist and consumer rights groups – is needed in order to push back against austerity and fight to rebuild the tattered social safety net that Washington is poised to shred altogether.   

The right yearns for capitalism unfettered, and to get there they are relying on a structure in Washington that can only be described as plutocracy. And neither party is willing to consider serious cuts to the massive Pentagon budget. Unpopular wars abroad and unpopular tax cuts at home for the wealthy are all evidently worth the resultant suffering inflicted on millions here in the U.S. under the budget ax.

In Wisconsin and other states where workers have been fighting back, an important example has been set. This class war no longer needs to be asymmetrical. Working people can and must fight back, not just against the budget cutters in Washington, but against their corporate paymasters whose anti-worker and tax-dodging practices have helped set the stage for ruthless austerity.  

We simply cannot defeat the high-powered corporate lobbyists on their own turf. If ever there was a time for progressives and the left to abandon the tired and feeble strategies of lobbying, letter-writing, and petition-signing, that time is now. We need to exert pressure where it will be felt – on the streets and in the workplace through mass mobilizations, strikes, and yes, militant direct actions.

US Uncut called for national days of action on “Tax Weekend,” April 15th to the 17th, and on Friday there were over 130 actions across the country posted on its website through tax day.
It’s time to go directly after the corporate powers using creative direct action and other forms of protest to expose their dirty war against workers and the poor.

DEA head: A thousand dead children means we're winning war on drugs

Friday, Apr 15, 2011
Michele Leonhart, our top drug cop, has a funny definition of victory
By Alex Pareene

Producing and distributing illegal drugs is a profitable business, because there will always be a lot of demand and because illegality allows you to charge a great deal of money. That illegality also means that the people who produce and distribute the drugs are generally not responsible corporate citizens. So thanks to our expensive, terribly ineffective and endless war on drugs, lots of people are dying.

The Washington Post recently reported that the victims of Mexican drug cartel violence increasingly include children, who are being specifically targeted in order to terrorize people and intimidate potential business rivals:

The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes.
[...]
Government figures include all homicides of people younger than 17, capturing victims whose murders might not have been related to drugs or organized crime. In 2009, the last year for which there is data, 1,180 children were killed, half in shootings.

This article is actually almost a week old, but I did not notice, until it was highlighted by Jonathan Blanks, this astounding quote from America's top drug warrior:

U.S. and Mexican officials say the grotesque violence is a symptom the cartels have been wounded by police and soldiers. “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added.

It seems "contradictory" because that is absolutely appalling spin. For one thing, these "caged animals" are actually attacking civilians and children. And they are doing so because the drug war has made their chosen industry both profitable and dangerous enough to make murder and brutality effective means of winning competitive advantages. If this is a sign of success, maybe we should reconsider waging this war.

Leonhart, a DEA lifer, is actually a Bush appointee, reappointed by President Obama. She is, obviously, an inflexible zealot when it comes to drug prohibition. This is easily the worst and most offensive thing she's said that I've read, but she does have a history of asinine remarks.

This is the sort of quote -- dead children are a sign that we're winning! -- that should lead to a resignation. But it probably won't.