BP Execs May Face Manslaughter Charges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BP declined to comment.

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

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

In the Land of the Regressives

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

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

Uh-oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is anyone beginning to see a pattern here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regressives, get the hell out of my country!

NFL Players and Owners at an Impasse

A Cloud of Dust
By DAVID MACARAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Monsanto the devil is Exploiting the Food Crisis

Pushing GM Corn on Mexican Farmers
By ALFREDO ACEDO

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

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

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

Pressure Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Sovereignty or Food Dependency?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Does the World Think Now?

Obama Raises American Hypocrisy to Higher Level
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

I Give Up - Pay Anything...

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

(Sooooo on the money!--jef)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is a big increase."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

500,000 London Marchers Protest Massive Spending Cuts in Britain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. President, tear down this list

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Federal agency recognizes marijuana for medical use

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

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

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

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

From the Washington Independent:

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

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

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

We Can't Control The Monsters We Create

Pentagon hires contractors to regulate contractors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collective bargaining law published despite court order blocking it

CLAY BARBOUR and ED TRELEVEN |Posted: Friday, March 25, 2011

The drama over Gov. Scott Walker's controversial measure limiting public sector collective bargaining took a sharp turn Friday when the Legislative Reference Bureau published the law — normally the last step before legislation takes effect.

But the surprise publication on the Legislature's website had lawmakers and their attorneys arguing over whether the law will be in force Saturday.

Walker's legislation has been stuck in court ever since he signed it two weeks ago, challenged by critics who say Republicans violated the state's open meetings law to pass the measure.

A restraining order prevented Secretary of State Doug La Follette from publishing the act. But the state constitution says only that laws must be published before they can take effect; it does not specify by whom.

State statutes require the secretary of state to set a publication date no more than 10 working days after a law is signed, while a related statute requires the Reference Bureau to publish legislation within 10 days of enactment.

Bill Cosh, a state Department of Justice spokesman, said no action by the secretary of state was required for the Reference Bureau to act, adding that La Follette did not direct the publication of the law and thus is not in violation of a temporary court order barring him from publishing the law.

And the governor and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said flatly Friday the law will take effect Saturday.

But officials with the nonpartisan Reference Bureau and the Legislative Council — the Legislature's drafting and research agency and its legal service, respectively — said publication of the act online was only an administrative step.

Reference Bureau Director Steve Miller and Legislative Council staff attorney Scott Grosz both said La Follette still needs to designate a date for publication and actually publish the act in the Wisconsin State Journal — something the court order bars the secretary of state from doing.

"This bill has been under a cloud of suspicion since day one," said State Rep. Peter Barca, D-Kenosha. "Today's actions and statements are only perpetuating the problem."

After he was ordered not to publish the law, La Follette sent the Reference Bureau a letter March 18 rescinding his instructions setting Friday as the publication date.

But Fitzgerald said attorneys have told him the letter has no standing.

"Every attorney I have consulted said this will now be law," Fitzgerald said. "It wasn't a secret. I think they left the door open for this."

Still, Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi's March 18 order appears broadly aimed at stopping the law from taking effect until questions about its passage could be addressed.

"I do, therefore, restrain and enjoin the further implementation of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10," Sumi said, according to a transcript. "The next step in implementation of that law would be the publication of that law by the secretary of state. He is restrained and enjoined from such publication until further order of this court."

If the bureau's action did constitute publication, it could make moot the state's appeal of Sumi's order, now before the state Supreme Court.

That could actually simplify the case that District Attorney Ismael Ozanne is seeking to make on the alleged open meetings violation if he doesn't have to worry about whether a judge has the authority to stop legislation before it takes effect, said Madison lawyer Lester Pines.

"I suspect that if Judge Sumi was willing to take up a (temporary restraining order) against publication I suspect she'd do the same thing on enforcement" of the new law, Pines said.

Pines said it would also open up legal channels for other groups who have been waiting to challenge the law but had to wait until it was enacted.

"This is going to unleash a tsunami of litigation," Pines said.

US Finances Rank Near Worst in the World: Study

Posted By: Jeff Cox | CNBC.com Staff Writer

CNBC.com | 24 Mar 2011

 

The US ranks near the bottom of developed global economies in terms of financial stability and will stay there unless it addresses its burgeoning debt problems, a new study has found.

In the Sovereign Fiscal Responsibility Index, the Comeback America Initiative ranked 34 countries according to their ability to meet their financial challenges, and the US finished 28th, said David Walker, head of the organization and former US comptroller general.

"We think it is important for the American people to understand where the United States is as compared to other countries with regard to fiscal responsibility and sustainability," Walker said in a CNBC interview. "Americans are used to rankings and they're used to ranking very high, but frankly in this area we rank very low."

While the news is bad, there is a bright side.

"Here's the good news: Some of the top countries had their own fiscal challenges, made reforms and now rank highly," Walker said. "If we adopt the recommendations of the National Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Commission or ones that have similar bottom-line impact, we move from 28 to 8."

As the US languishes near the bottom, these countries make up the top five: Australia, New Zealand, Estonia, Sweden, China and Luxembourg.

Walker acknowledged that some of the countries that rank ahead of the US do not have the same type of challenges.

But he said policymakers in Washington can learn much from countries like New Zealand, which faced a currency crisis and made the necessary reforms to get back to prosperity.

"First, they're arguing over the bar tab on the Titanic," Walker said. "We need to cut spending. Frankly we need to cut spending more than what has been talked about but over a longer period of time. But what's imperative is that we need to attach some conditions to increasing the debt ceiling limit that will bring back tough budget controls..."

Walker predicted the US will have a debt crisis "within the next two to three years" and implored Washington lawmakers to "wake up."

Bedbugs Have Evolved to Live With Mankind

The rise of bedbugs has followed the rise of mankind living indoors; their latest resurgence illustrates the survival of the fittest.
By Rob Dunn, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on March 24, 2011

Bedbugs sure is evil, they don’t mean me no good. Yeah, bedbug sure is evil, they don’t mean me no good. Thinks he’s a woodpecker and I’m a chunk of wood.” — Bessie Smith (“Mean Old Bedbug Blues”)

Bedbugs are small and sneaky. Bedbugs do nasty things. Bedbugs are also becoming more common, a trend likely to expand and worsen this spring. But none of this is new, not really. The story of the bedbugs in our lives begins no less than 4,000 years ago. It is a kind of parable about the difference between what we want and what we make. We wanted a realm inside our houses, where we would always be happy and might live forever.

Instead, we made the bedbug, a modern chimera we seem unlikely to ever really escape.

It began innocently. Once we were like the birds. The rain fell on our naked shoulders. The sun beat down on our heads. There was no inside or outside. We built our nests of sticks and mud. Then we moved out of the trees. On the ground, the world was more dangerous. Leopards crouched in the darkness between resting spots, venomous snakes hid under leaves. We sought safety, shade and cover and found them all in caves.

Caves changed the world. In moving into caves, we invented the more constant conditions of the “indoors.” No matter that this particular indoors lacked an actual door, it was still the rough seed of what would come. It was the beginning of our efforts to make the place we lived “better” than everywhere else.

It was when we began to try to find even more favorable conditions for ourselves, to engender them even, that we began the process of making bedbugs from the sticks and mud of natural selection. Bedbugs belong to two or three species, depending on exactly how you are counting and who is counting. The most common species is — thanks to a modest failure of scientific creativity — the common bedbug (Cimex lectularius). Bedbugs were originally bat bugs. Their ancestors lived in caves, on bats (where most of their kin still live), and when our ancestors moved into caves, they jumped down onto us. A few found us where we slept. Those that did prospered on our blood as we prospered.

When they moved onto us, many things would have had to change for these bat/cavemen bugs. The platelets in our blood, for example, are wider than those of bats, and so the mouthparts of the bedbugs had to widen so that they wouldn’t clog up with blood. Their mouthparts changed in length, too, because of the thickness of our skin, a thickness through which their mandibles must meander to find blood vessels. Their activity patterns changed, too. Bat bugs feed during the day, when the bats are sleeping. Bedbugs, well, they had to feed at night, when we were sleeping.

Bedbugs changed so much in moving onto us, in fact, that now they are stuck. They can’t easily go back — and why would they want to? They ride us wherever we might lead them, which, it turns out, is all around the world.

Bedbugs evolved more as our culture evolved, changing as we changed and moving as we moved. Early Egypt was dense with bedbugs. Cleopatra would have had them. Aristotle definitely did. Socrates whined about them frequently.

Bedbugs came to take advantage not just of our abundance but also of the new environments we created inside our houses, environments that are similar realms of warmth and predictability whether we live in New Jersey or Cairo. Many valiant attempts were made to control bedbugs. Democritus recommended hanging the feet of a hare at the foot of the bed, presumably with no effect on bedbugs, though with negative consequences for the hare. Cyanide was sprayed around rooms. Rooms were heated to 45 degrees C, all to relatively little permanent avail.

Then, during World War II, scientists pioneered new chemicals for warfare. We used some of those chemicals, in particular DDT, around our apartments and houses in our war with pests. These pesticides appear to have controlled the bedbugs by making the indoor environment more toxic than most bedbugs could stand. This, we hoped, would be good for us. It was certainly bad for the bedbugs, for a while.

It was clear as early as 1947 that bedbugs could evolve resistance, first to DDT and then, one by one, to its chemical descendants. They evolved similar but sometimes unique forms of resistance in many different places all around the world (and in each bedbug species), which is to say that genetically they may have actually diversified. This was possible because we never, ever killed them all. We only killed the weak, and so, just as in those first caves, they evolved once again: They changed when we made them change. Recently, the inevitable has happened. These survivors have started to become abundant again, separately, in different regions of the world. We made our bed and they slept in it.

This is where we find ourselves now, reunited again with the species we have been shaping all these years, our evolutionary masterwork. The bedbugs, after their brief hiatus, seem foreign to us now. News stories call them strange or unusual, which they certainly are. The males have sex with females traumatically (by penetrating their bellies). They smell bad (an odor one scientist described as “an obnoxious sweetness”) so that even if we find them we are unlikely to try to bite them back (speaking for myself, I was never really tempted). Male bedbug nymphs compete with each other by trying to block each other’s sexy smells.

Bedbugs smell us, on the other hand, by the scent of our bodies but also, probably, the scent that the microbes on our bodies emit. All of that is weird, but it is also our fault, the consequence of the world we have created around ourselves, a world just right for us and, once again, for them.

But … you might reasonably contend that we try to control bedbugs. We chase and kill them. That’s true. But all this chasing has not done away with them. It has made them stronger, or better adapted anyway, to our ways and lives. In the process, it may have actually made them more common than they would have been otherwise had we never tried to beat them away. They may be more common because our houses have become ever more warm and because we have become ever better at ferrying them from one place to another. Also, we seem to be getting better and better at killing the other species that live around us, species other than the bedbug (and a handful of other equally sneaky beasts) that have learned to love it this way.

All things being equal, bedbugs would probably be more rare if we were just a little bit sloppier in controlling our environments and keeping species from coming in our door. Take the example of the Pharaoh ant.

The Pharaoh ant, Monomorium pharaonis, like bedbugs, spread with us all around the world and is now on every continent except Antarctica (though it may be there). The Pharaoh ant is a species that we have been able to exclude from our houses relatively well. It is present here and there, but no longer ubiquitous. That is bad news, bad news because the Pharaoh ant is very good at eating bedbugs. During the U.S. Civil War, Pharaoh ants cleaned a camp in Meridian, Miss., of bedbugs “in a single day.” The ants could be seen carrying the bedbugs back to their small, dark queens.

Nor is this ant the only species that is good at eating bugs. So, apparently, are other species of ants, including Argentine ants (Linipithema humile), species of the ant genus, Formica, a fire ant, Solenopsis geminata, and, one presumes, many other species. Nor are the ants alone. Several species of spiders have been reported as bedbug decimators. Then there is the masked assassin bug (Reduvius personatus) that appears to turn up in houses only when bedbugs are present. It may well be a bedbug specialist, feeding specifically on the species that feed specifically on us.

In the caves of our ancestry, Pharaoh ants, masked assassins, spiders and predators more generally were present. With their small arms and mouthparts they ate at bedbugs. In doing so, they may not have gotten rid of them, but they almost certainly made them less common. They were part of a diverse food web that kept the life that plagued (and plagues) us in check, the way the mountain lions, coyotes and their kin once ate the deer that now graze densely in our yards.

This is the secret about bedbugs: From the perspective of our broad history, they are common because we are common but also because we have made decisions that have made them more common, more specialized on us and more uniquely part of our lives. They are common because we have inadvertently given them a place to live, free of parasites or predators, to dine on our ankles and then return to their hiding places, to sleep and mate in their complicated, awful ways.

What we will undoubtedly try to do when the bedbugs begin to unfold out of their eggs in the spring is to figure out new ways to spray our lives down and make the door separating inside from outside more exclusive. I would argue for the opposite, leaving the door just a little more open so that the Pharaoh ants and their kin might walk inside and do what they have been doing since long before we had coffee makers, indoor plumbing or even houses — gathering what they find, one piece or body at a time. To crudely paraphrase the Japanese poet Issa, don’t worry Pharaoh ants, I keep house easily.

In the end, we made the bedbug, generation by generation, what it is today. But we could choose to make something else, a more diverse world around us, whether in our backyards or bedrooms, a world in which there are bedbugs sometimes, yes, but also the predators that chase them from corner to corner hunting them down, the way leopards once pursued us, into caves, where this whole story started.

Owners' Lock Out of NFL Players Raises Some Big Questions

Public employees in Madison and professional football players in Green Bay both face powerful and hostile managements trying to undermine their unions.
By David Morris, AlterNet
on March 24, 2011

What do public employees in Madison earning $40,000 a year and professional football players in Green Bay earning $1.5 million a year have in common? They both face powerful and hostile managements trying to undermine their unions.

The battle between labor and management is always uneven. Up until the 1930s management didn’t even have to negotiate with its workers. Owners could fire union organizers. Courts routinely declared unions an illegal “restraint of trade” and ruled that by trying to negotiate collectively unions were violating the “contract rights” of individual employees and giant corporations to freely negotiate salaries and working conditions.

Only in 1937 did workers finally gain the legal right to form unions and bargain collectively. Corporations were legally required to bargain “in good faith”. Congress established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and gave it judicial authority to enforce labor rights. The NLRB did so enthusiastically for the first few decades, modestly in the 1970s, and not at all after Ronald Reagan took office when he nominated, and Congress confirmed as Chairman of the NLRB Donald Dotson, a man who viewed collective bargaining the way 19th-century courts did, as “the destruction of individual freedom, and the destruction of the marketplace as the mechanism for determining the value of labor”.

Public service unions came of age when private sector unions were strong and the word “union” was a respected word. It was a time when Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower could announce, with widespread approval, "Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of their right to join the union of their choice."

But even when unions were respected by society as a whole, they were rarely as respected by employers, public or private. Only in 1959 did Wisconsin become the first state to allow collective bargaining by public employees at the local level. In the South, public employee unions had to struggle for recognition, especially when they were composed largely of blacks.

We might recall that when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968 he was there to support a strike by sanitation workers. Two months earlier two black sanitation workers had been crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of the trash truck was accidentally triggered. In response to the tragedy, the city’s sanitation department gave each of the grieving families one month’s pay and $500 for funeral expenses. No one from the city government attended the funerals.

On February 12, 1968 more than 1,100 black sanitation workers began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition. King's assassination did not dissipate the workers’ struggle for dignity. As Taylor Rogers, one of the strike’s organizers recalled, “If you stand up straight, people can’t ride your back. And that’s what we did. We stood up straight.”

The sanitation workers won. Their contract included union recognition, higher wages, a dues check-off, and the updating of the antiquated sanitation equipment. Another practice that had infuriated black workers—sending them home on rainy days without pay while white supervisors stayed and collected a paycheck—was also ended.

A Brief History of the Football Players Union

Professional football players also began to organize when private sector union density was at its peak. But neither the respect of neither unions nor the law convinced the team owners to negotiate. In 1956 players on the Green Bay Packers and Cleveland Browns formed an association and made minimal demands on their team owners: a minimum wage, per diem pay to cover expenses and, believe it or not, a request that the teams pay for their uniforms and equipment!

The owners never met with the players and refused to respond to any of their proposals.

As would be the case for the next 40 years, the players turned to the courts for help. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the NFL did not enjoy the same antitrust immunity that Major League Baseball did, opening the door to many NFL rules that limited player mobility and negotiating power to be viewed as illegal restraints of trade. Rather than face that prospect through another lawsuit, the owners granted several of the players' demands, including setting up a minimal pension plan. But the owners refused to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with the association.

In 1968, threatened by the possibility that the players would join the powerful Teamsters union, the owners said they would recognize the NFLPA if the Teamsters were rejected. The players did, but the owners reneged on their promise. The players voted to strike. The owners countered by declaring their first lockout. A few days later the owners relented, but the concessions won by the players were modest. According to Wikipedia, the owners agreed to contribute about $1.5 million to the pension fund but maintained current minimum salaries at $9,000 for rookies, $10,000 for veterans and $50 per exhibition game. The owners refused to allow for independent arbitration of player-management disputes.

In 1970, after the NFL and the AFL merger, their two players’ unions also merged. After a brief lockout, the players went on strike. They returned two days later when the owners threatened to cancel the season. The players did, however, gain the right to bargain through their own agents with the clubs and impartial arbitration but only for injury grievances. They gained some improvements in basic salaries and pensions, and dental care. Following negotiations, the owners retaliated by letting go many union player representatives from their teams.

In 1963, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had unilaterally imposed what became known as the Rozelle Rule. The timing was instructive. That was the year after he negotiated the NFL’s first broadcast contract with CBS--$9.3 million for two years. Each team began the season with $332,000 in the bank, a sum greater than most teams’ payrolls at the time. Thus all teams were guaranteed a profit even before they sold a single ticket or played a single game. Flush with cash, the team owners could have started a bidding war if players were free to sell their services to the highest bidder. The Rozelle Rule all but eliminated free agency by allowing any team that lost a free agent to another team to receive something of equal value from that team. Few teams were willing to risk signing a high-profile free agent only to see their own rosters depleted.

Coincidentally but not accidentally, the agreement by the NFL owners to share national broadcast revenues equally not only opened up the specter of higher player salaries; it also raised the possibility of future Green Bay Packers---non-profit teams in small cities owned by their fans. So in 1963 the League also adopted a rule banning any further such ownership structures.

In 1974 the players again went on strike, this time focusing on the hated Rozelle Rule. The players rallied under the banner, “No Freedom, No Football” but gave up six weeks later. They again turned to the courts for help.

In 1977 John Mackey of the Baltimore Colts became the first NFL player to successfully defeat the League owners in court. Along with 35 other NFL players, he challenged the validity of the Rozelle Rule. The owners argued that the rule was part of a collective bargaining agreement and therefore exempt from antitrust law, a legal argument that, as we shall see, has played an important role in player-management conflicts. The court disagreed, concluding the Rule was not the product of good faith bargaining but had been forced upon a weak players union.

The owners reached a settlement with the union. Impartial arbitration of all grievances was implemented. Some free agent restrictions were ended. But the League’s new version of free agency was almost as restrictive as its first. Indeed, from 1977 to 1987 only one player changed clubs out of the thousands of free agents who were eligible.

In 1982, the players again took on free agency. They went on strike for 57 days. The owners refused to budge. One reason was that their TV contracts with the networks, which provided about 60 percent of the owners' income, guaranteed they would be paid whether games were played or not. The players capitulated.

In 1987 the players again tried to allow individual players to enter a true marketplace for their talents. When no progress was made in the negotiations after two weeks of regular season play, the players voted to strike. The league responded by canceling games and hiring replacement players. The strike was broken. The union voted to return to work.

The day the strike ended, the players once again turned to the courts. The NFLPA filed an antitrust suit in Federal Court. The Court of Appeals ultimately rejected that suit. You might have to be a lawyer to understand the logic, so read closely. The Supreme Court held that even in the absence of current collective bargaining agreement, as long as a bargaining relationship still exists the antitrust immunity holds. In other words, so long as collective bargaining was deemed to be continuing, the antitrust law could not be invoked. The Chief Judge presciently dissented, noting, “this court’s unprecedented decision leads to the ineluctable result of union decertification in order to invoke rights to which players are clearly entitled under the antitrust laws.”

Gabriel Feldman, law professor at the Tulane Sports Law program explains, “Essentially, players are required to choose labor law (and collective bargaining) or antitrust law (and individual bargaining and litigation). If the players choose labor law, an antitrust shield is raised that prevents them from attacking NFL rules under the antitrust laws. To lower the shield and choose antitrust law, the players must end the collective bargaining relationship.”

Forced to make this choice, in December 1989 the players voted to end the NFLPA’s status as the players’ collective bargaining agent. The NFLPA then re-formed as a voluntary professional association.

Since the NFLPA no longer represented the players in collective bargaining, individual union members were free to bring an antitrust action against the NFL challenging its free agency rules as an unlawful restraint of trade. A group of players, led by New York Jets running back Freeman McNeil filed suit challenging the restrictions on free agency. An all-woman jury in Minnesota heard the case in 1992. Pat Bowlen, owner of the Denver Broncos complained to the Rocky Mountain News that he didn’t want “eight women who are basically domestic housewives to decide the future of the National Football League.”

In 1992, they did by ruling in the players’ favor.

That verdict and the threat of a class action suit filed by Philadelphia Eagles player Reggie White on behalf of all NFL players brought the parties back to the negotiating table. Under the auspices of U.S. District Court Judge David Doty, the NFL finally agreed on a formula that permitted free agency. In return, the owners demanded and received a salary cap, albeit one tied to a formula based on players' share of total league revenues.

Once the agreement was approved the NFLPA reconstituted itself as a labor union and entered into a new collective bargaining agreement with the league. Players won unrestricted free agency for the first time and were guaranteed a higher percentage of major league revenues in return for giving the owners a salary cap on payrolls.

The NFLPA and the league have extended their 1993 agreement five times, most recently in March 2006 when it was extended through the 2011 season after the NFL owners voted 30-2 to accept the NFLPA's final proposal. In 2010 the NFL exercised its option to terminate that contract, effective March 3, 2011.

The NFL owners had an ace up their sleeve. Just as they had in 1982, in 2010 they had signed a contract with broadcasters—CBS, ESPN, NBC, and Direct TV—such that the NFL would accept significantly lower revenue in return for a guarantee that it would receive about $4 billion even if the season were not played. This was designed to give them enormous bargaining leverage.

Two days before the lockout, Judge Doty ruled that by insisting on this lockout provision as part of the broadcast contract, and by agreeing to take significantly less money in return, the NFL had breached its collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA, an agreement that required both parties (players and owners) to act in good faith to maximize total revenues that both parties would receive. That stripped away, at least for the time being (the owners have appealed), the owners' $4 billion lockout fund.

They locked out the players anyway. The NFLPA sued, asking for the courts to issue an injunction ending the lockout. A hearing on the issue will be held April 6. Meanwhile the union has again decertified, again to allow its players to challenge the owners under the antitrust law. The owners have filed a complaint to the NLRB, arguing that the decertification is an unfair labor practice.

And that’s where things stand today.

Millionaires vs. Billionaires?

Currently the revenues are split about 50-50 between players and owners. (The net revenues, after the owners subtract some of their expenses from the total, an amount worth more than $1 billion in 2010, are split 57-43 in the players’ favor, a percentage you often read in the media.) The owners want the players to give back about $1 billion that is coming to them under the 2008 contract.

The owners argue that while the players’ percentage will decline, the amount they receive will not if they agree to another of the owners’ demands: extending the regular season to 18 regular games. The current schedule has 16 regular season games, up from 14 in 1977 and 12 in 1960.

Another issue is whether to cap the rookie’s pay scale and if so, what to do with the money saved. Both the players and the owners agree that there should be a rookie pay cap. But the players want half of the estimated $200 million in savings put toward retired players and the other half toward veteran players. The owners want to keep the money.

The media so far is describing the labor battle as millionaires fighting billionaires. And it is true that the median salary across the NFL is a handsome $1.4 million a year. The rookie minimum is $310,000.

But the length of an average NFL player’s career is only 3.6 years. And even a short career takes a heavy toll on their bodies. The owners watch from cushy seats in heated skyboxes. The players are down on a hard, cold field, engaged in a very violent game. In 2010, 350 players were on the injured reserve list for an average of nine and a half games.

At the Superbowl we watched Packer star cornerback Charles Woodson exit the game with a broken collarbone, Packers cornerback Sam Shields leave with an injured shoulder and Steeler star receiver Emmanuel Sanders sit out almost the whole game with a foot injury. Green Bay’s quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, has suffered two concussions this year. The announcers noted he now wears a special helmet.

Each professional football player now has a l0 percent chance of sustaining a concussion in a given season. Mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI), the medical term for concussions, has become the most common specified type of injury in pro football, occurring nearly twice as often as hamstring strains.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that l5 percent of patients diagnosed with MTBI experienced disabling problems on a “persistent” basis.

The long-term health risks associated with NFL injuries include a significantly increased likelihood of Alzheimer’s or dementia.

A 1994 study of 7,000 former players by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health found that football linemen have a 52 percent greater risk of dying from heart disease than the general population.

Essentially, the quality of life of an ex-football player is likely to be diminished from his life on the field. Even more damning, the quantity of his life will also be diminished. The average NFL player who plays for more than five years has a life expectancy of 55 years. If he is a lineman this drops to 52 years. U.S. life expectancy overall is 77.6 years.

To my knowledge, there have been no studies of the life expectancy of NFL owners. But since life expectancy is correlated with wealth it is likely they live longer than the rest of us.

Since a professional football player’s tenure is so short and the probability of debilitating injury so high, a key issue in labor negotiations is the level of medical benefits and pension. NFL pensions are skimpy. The pensions are vested only after four years. (Recall that the average player’s career lasts only 3.6 years.) Even long-term players receive little, especially in comparison to other professional sports leagues like major league baseball. According to former cornerback Bernie Parrish, Major League Baseball pays average pension benefits three times higher than those offered by the NFL: $36,700 vs. $12,165.

Former Packers guard Jerry Kramer gets a pension of $358 per month. Willie Wood, who helped Vince Lombardi win five championships during Wood’s 12 seasons, is now in a wheelchair. He receives a pension of $2,000 a month.

Baseball’s gross income is about $4.3 billion. Last year the NFL grossed over $7 billion. As Parrish says, “There is no excuse not to have the NFL retirement benefits matching MLB’s.”

As for medical care, only in 2007, after enormous public pressure and congressional hearings about the disabilities of professional football players, did the NFL create the “88 plan”. The number refers to the number worn by John Mackey who played for the Baltimore Colts in the 1960s, was the first president of the NFLPA, and was one of those let go by his team because of his role in the 1970 strike. It is also the amount the NFL currently pays for institutional care for an ex-player suffering from Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia: $88,000.

It is possible the issue of disability benefits and medical care will be decided, as have so many other issues, in the courts. An increasing number of NFL players are suing the NFL on these issues. A class action suit would have a powerful impact.

The football players union is not perfect. For one thing, it hasn’t represented well the interests of all its members, focusing instead on enabling ever-higher salaries for its current players. Some 50 years ago the team owners agreed to share equally the network broadcasting revenue but the players have yet to divide up their collective revenue more fairly between current players and retirees.

The NFLPA can also be criticized for not using its member’s fame and influence to assist other workers. NFL stars do not walk the picket lines when other workers strike. They do not honor the picket lines of other workers. This has been starkly emphasized in Madison. To their credit, six members of the Green Bay Packers did sign a letter of support for the public employees that maintained, in part, “When workers join together it serves as a check on corporate power and helps ALL workers by raising community standards.”

But no Packer stars or even, to my knowledge, players in the starting lineup at the Superbowl, have made public their support for other Wisconsin unions.

Indeed, the NFLPA shies away from the word, union. Instead, it calls itself an association. Probably because they believe union has disagreeable connotations in modern America where less than 12 percent of the workforce belongs to a union. Given the polls about public support of unions after the Madison uprising, they might want to reconsider that belief. The word "union" projects a strength and unity of purpose that "association" lacks. And that strength and unity will be crucial when faced with the power and influence of 32 team owners with collective wealth over $40 billion.