Gasoline Prices

Workers Always Lose, Even in Rescue Operations

dlindorff — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:20:23 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What’s wrong with this picture: Four groups invest in a company.
One group puts in a 55% investment, a second puts in a 20-35%
investment, a third puts in an 8% investment and a fourth goes in for
2%. The group putting in the 20-35% stake gets three seats on the
company’s nine-member board of directors, which will be appointing the
new company’s management team. The group investing 8% gets four board
members, and the group investing 2% gets 1 seat. Finally, the group
that will hold the majority stake in the company, 55% of the shares,
gets…the one remaining seat on the board.

Why would anyone buy a majority stake in the company and accept
only a 1/9 representation on the board, and thus virtually no say in
the selection of management or in management decisions?

The answer is that that particular shareholder is the unionized
workforce of the company—in this case Chrysler Corp. One seat is all
the workers were offered in the Obama Administration-brokered deal.

Under the plan worked out by the White House, Chrysler management,
Fiat and the company’s lenders, Fiat, the Italian automaker, will take
a stake of somewhere between 20-35% of the bankrupt American automaker,
getting a third of the board for its efforts. The US government, which
has provided and will continue to provide billions of dollars in loans
and guarantees to underwrite the rescue plan, will get an 8% ownership
but an outsized four members on the board in return, and Canada, for
just a 2% stake, will also get one seat on the board.

Logically, Chrysler workers, who will be covering half of the
company’s $10 billion obligation for retiree health care (putting their
own future health care at risk should the venture fail), and who have
agreed to significant cuts in wages, benefits and work rules that had
been negotiated over years of struggle, should clearly be getting five
of the seats on the board and the right to name the company’s new
management team, but that would smack of socialism, apparently.

Imagine workers actually being in charge! Preposterous, right?

Of course, if you step back a minute and think about it, it was
corporate managers, put in place by boards of directors who represent
the elite of the Wall Street investment crowd, who have run most
American companies, and indeed the whole US economy, into a ditch.
These supposedly smart folks with their fancy MBAs and PhDs and law
degrees have outsourced jobs, pillaged the environment, destroyed
communities, piled on debt, failed to modernize and invest in R&D,
laid off highly skilled workers in favor of lower paid, less skilled
workers, poisoned and injured their own workforces, made stupid
acquisitions motivated by a desire to aggrandize more power or more
market share, rather than to achieve real synergies, and have pilfered
corporate resources to boost their own undeserved obscene levels of
compensation.

How, on reflection, could a worker-run company—and I mean a real worker-run
company where the board is in the hands of the workers, and the workers
chose and hire and fire the managers—do any worse than what we’ve seen
over the last decade?

There is an irony here. Corporate lobbyists have been battling
against the Employee Free Choice Act, a labor law reform bill in
Congress which would eliminate the need for workers to go through a
supervised secret-ballot election in order to win representation of a
union at their workplace, substituting the requirement that organizers
simply obtain signed cards calling for a union from a majority of the
workers at a workplace. The corporate argument against this reform is
that it violates the “sanctity” of “one person, one vote”.

And yet, here we have not only a much larger number of people—the
27,000 unionized workers at Chrysler—but also the holders of a much
greater number of shares than everyone else combined, getting only a
tiny fraction of the vote. That glaring inequity doesn’t seem to bother
the corporate elite and their elected servants in Washington one bit.
And it’s actually even worse than it looks on its face. Chrysler’s
unionized workers don’t even have a direct vote to control their own
shares, which are actually controlled by a trust fund headed by a group
of “independent” trustees not chosen by the workers. (“Independent”
means “not controlled by the workers.”)

Chances are, if Chrysler were really placed in the hands of its
workers, it would be a great success. Workers, after all, need to think
long term. Their key motivation is to have a company that will provide
them with jobs and wages until retirement, and with a decent, secure
retirement pension for the rest of their lives. That is exactly the
kind of motivation that we should have in our companies, and in our
corporate management suites.

It is not what we have right now.

As a long-time business journalist, I can tell you that you would
have to search long and hard to find a management in American business
that is thinking even five years ahead. One or two years would be more
common, and plenty are focused on the short end of that span.

A genuinely worker-run Chrysler would not be putting golden
parachutes in the contracts it offers to new top managers, nor would it
be giving them annual performance bonuses. It would not be paying those
managers 50-200 times what an assembly-line worker makes. It would not
be making gas-guzzling SUVs and high-end sports cars. Instead of trying
for quick sales of high-priced vehicles aimed at boosting earnings for
the next quarter, it would be designing and making cars that Americans
need, and that would propel the company’s sales and earnings for
decades to come.

Actually, we’ve been here before. When Chrysler almost went belly
up the last time, back in the economic crisis of 1979, it was rescued
with a $1.5-billion government loan. At that time, the workers, then
three times more numerous, also took pay cuts and benefit cuts, and in
return were given a seat on the corporate board, held by then UAW
President Douglas Fraser (who died last year at 91), but no real say in
management. Fraser’s appointment—the first ever of a union executive or
representative to a corporate board—was seen as a shocking development,
but he was never more than a token. The company’s management, headed by
Lee Iacocca, proceeded to ignore the 1973 gas crisis and its early
warning about the need for energy-efficient cars, which were in any
event fueling the import surge of cars from Japan and elsewhere, and
went off in the direction of short-term gain, building vans and trucks,
and paving the way for Chrysler’s next crisis in the 1990s, when it
ended up being taken over for a song by the private equity group
Cerberus, then by Germany’s Daimler, finally ending with the current
near-death experience.

Odds are, had Chrysler been worker-run back in 1979, the company would be in a wholly different place today.

The trouble is that what is deceptively called “worker-ownership”
here in America, with the exception of some very small companies and
co-operatives, is in reality just a carefully circumscribed rip-off
scheme, in which workers surrender their assets and swallow pay raises,
and maybe get a token representative on the board, but end up being
systematically excluded from any significant role in managing “their”
company, which is actually run by a board composed of the agents of
banks, institutional investors and other owners.

The only difference this time around is that the governments of the
US and Canada will now have majority control of Chrysler’s board.
Perhaps the board members appointed by those two public investors will
act more in the interests of the workers at Chrysler, and in the
long-term interest of both Chrysler and of the two countries, the US
and Canada. But given that President Obama has put this nation’s
economic management in the hands of the very people who helped bring
the US economy to its knees, and that Canada is currently being run by
a conservative prime minister, the odds of this happening seem pretty
slight.
_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist (and is webmaster
of a worker-owned and run blog called ThisCantBeHappening.net). His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Liveblogging Politico Forum on Climate Change at Starbucks on Capitol Hill

davidswanson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:10:23 -0400

7:10 p.m. ET on Thursday: Mindy Lubber from CERES is one of the speakers, formerly at EPA; also Brad Figel global director of govt. affairs for Nike formerly at Senate finance committee (holding up a "sustainable shoe" and supposedly wanting to push Congress to pass "meaningful" climate legislation this year); (Rep. John Dingell seems to be late).

7:15 Lubber wants to address global warming right away, says "financial leaders" want this, just like Greenpeace and that sort of group. Building a green economy, Lubber says, is answer to environment and economy. I agree with all of this, but there are no details on desirable legislation or citizen action. I doubt anyone in the room COULD POSSIBLY disagree with anything said, with the possible exception of the claim that a sneaker is sustainable.

7:20 Figel is selling more shoes: they now use a non-greenhouse gas for "air cushions" in shoes.

7:22 Lubber likes Waxman's climate bill. She doesn't want the US to show up in Copenhagen without having passed it. She wants a strong bill and soon. Asked about the wisdom of waiting and doing a stronger bill after Copenhagen, she said our hands would be tied in Copenhagen if we don't pass a bill first. This seems to parallel Obama's claim that he can't agree to anything in Copenhagen unless Congress pre-approves a treaty (which is a weird twist on his acceptance of an Iraq treaty made without Congress and his signing-statement claim on treaty power).

7:25 Nike, Gap, Ebay, and lots of other companies listed as the good guys on this. They want Congress to act now.

7:30 No Q&A. Panelists done and off stage. Congressman Dingell now being introduced: has been in Congress since 1955. His wife is here too.

7:33 Politico questioner, Mike Allen I think, asks about healthcare. Dingell says his dad introduced first bill on medicare, but nothing happened until Pres Johnson. Thought that Medicare in '65 would lead to step 2: national health insurance. But no, nothing serious until Clinton. Clinton let Ira Magaziner lead it, which didn't help. Bill didn't come up for months, and insurance company ads were all over tv. But we need it done now for health and economic reasons. The fiercest enemies are fewer now, Dingell says. But note that Dingell has not cosponsored HR 676 and for no apparent reason he just said what a great president Obama is. So, what is he talking about? The "Massachusetts plan"?

7:43 Now Allen turns to climate change. Dingell says we need a shift away from oil for financial as well as environmental reasons. Wants to "do something." Mentions US Cap. Ran out of time last congress to pass a bill. Dingell supports Waxman-Markey bill. But no details on it. When asked to distinguish a serious from a gradual bill, he declines.

7:51 Now Allen is reading pre-submitted audience questions from cards, so I may not get to ask why he's not signed onto HR 676.

I think I'll split.

Politically Viable Ways to Reduce Global Warming

Bob Fertik — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:02:12 -0500

Matt Stoller is gloomy about the two most prominent policies for reducing carbon emissions and hence global warming:

One is a carbon tax, in which you put a price on carbon. The other is called a cap and trade system, where you put an overall economy-wide cap in carbon emissions, issue carbon credits, and let groups trade the 'right to pollute'.

The carbon tax has never been viable because it would take a huge bite out of consumers and businesses. (The only way to make it viable would be to use it to replace other widely-hated taxes like the sales tax, income tax, or payroll tax.)

Cap-and-trade is being tried in Europe, and it's a fiasco

since designing an emissions credit system from scratch, loopholes and all, is proving to be a boon for lobbyists and polluters while not doing so much for carbon emissions.

Neither of these approaches are viable because they've been designed by green-eyeshade economists, not creative public policy experts. What would creative policies look like? Something like this:

Source	Annual Impact in Degrees	Reduction strategies	Politics	Cost to cut 25%	50%	75%
Autos		Raise gas tax Tax credits for higher MPG cars	Set $2 floor?
Trucks		Switch to natural gas	Pickens Plan?
Power Plants		Conservation - consumer Conservation - businesss Wind, solar, wave/current	Appliance stds 72 degree rule utility buy-back
Farms		Ban/tax nitrogen fertilizers
Livestock		Capture/tax methane

1. Identify the sectors that make the biggest contribution to the problem

2. Identify high-impact strategies for reducing output in each sector

3. Calculate the politics and real-world costs of implementing those strategies, each of which is unique - and variable over time.

This is where political creativity comes into play. For example, when the price of gasoline is $2, it would be politically feasible to set an arbitrary price of $2.50 and tax the difference; but when the price goes over $2.50, the entire gasoline tax could be suspended. I believe Americans would understand and support a flexible approach like that.

Here's another example: while wind power is popular, it would take a big investment in long-distance powerlines to transport it from the Great Plains to urban consumers. But new technologies for capturing wave and water-current power can be installed in or near urban areas (which are always on rivers, lakes, or oceans), eliminating those transport costs.

There are lots of creative ideas floating around to reduce global warming; what's needed is for practical political thinkers to quantify and compare those ideas, and figure out which can be "sold" most easily in our complex political system.

Idiots and Bailouts

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:54:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will
vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle
involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it
will fail in the end.

The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.

For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were
going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and
supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed,
a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high
gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that
reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car
market wither.

Now the company, worth about what Starbucks used to be worth, its
stock now down to where it was in the depths of the Great Depression,
has bet the farm on a new car, the Volt, which it promises will, two
years from now, be able to go all of 40 miles purely on electric power.
It will have a motor too, and not a small one, but rather one the size
of what you get in a typical conventional Honda Civic—1.4 ltr. That
motor wouldn’t drive the car; rather it would keep charging the Volt’s
huge lithium-ion battery so the car could keep going for a few hundred
miles.

Wow.

The management wizards at GM obviously don’t do much driving. If
they did, and found themselves in typical commuter traffic, they’d see
that maybe 90% of the cars, or more, have only one person in them.
Occasionally, they’d see a passenger. On a typical 45-minute trip from
the burbs into Philadelphia at rush hour, I can count the number of
cars I see with three or more people in them on my fingers.

So why is GM making the Volt as a full-sized four or five-passenger
car? That’s not where the market for an electric car is. What is needed
is a two-seater little car.

Because GM is trying to make an electric family car, they’ve made
something so big that, if they are lucky, they’ll be able to get it to
40 miles on electric drive only, but at a cost in excess of $40,000 and
perhaps much higher, which will put it out of almost everyone’s reach.
The car is destined to be a bust.

And yet, because President-elect Obama will want to win Michigan
next election, and because Congressional Democrats don’t want to be
seen as ignoring the fate of GM’s workers, GM will be bailed out and
the Volt will be funded right through to its introduction and
subsequent disaster in the market.

I’m not opposed to the idea of government support of industry, but
that support has to involve government input or even control over
decision-making.

Maybe GM wouldn’t make much profit on a little electric commuter
car, but a little two-seater electric commuter car would have a huge
impact on reducing the output of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere,
particularly if efforts were made to increase solar and wind-generated
electricity. A small electric commuter car would also massively reduce
the amount of oil the US imports, making a major contribution to
reducing the nation’s trade deficit. Those are results that justify a
bailout.

Making an overpriced electric family car is not.

At this point, since the Democrats in Congress and the White House
are congenitally incapable of imagining a state-owned or partially
state-owned enterprise, it would be better to just let GM go under, and
maybe Ford too, if it comes to that (another stupid company). The
pieces could be sold off, and allowed to sink and swim on their own.
Maybe one of those smaller, more entrepreneurial fragments would see
the wisdom of developing what the public really needs.

The truth is that the entrepreneurs over at Tesla, a star-up in
California, have already made that car—a high-performance two-seater
commuter car that can go 200 miles on a charge and that doesn’t need an
auxiliary engine. Their problem is that small size and too little
capital have forced them to pimp it up into a high-priced luxury
show-off item for rich people costing $100,000. If they were to team up
with a GM spin-off—say Saturn—they could make a stripped-down version
of that baby and crank out 100,000 of them to start at a price ordinary
people could afford.

Meanwhile, regarding those poor autoworkers, they have a legitimate
complaint. While Republicans like to blame the auto industry’s problems
on them, saying they have demanded too much pay, and too much in
healthcare benefits, it’s not their fault that GM and Ford executives
have been stupid and greedy and short-sighted (besides, the high wages
and benefits that the United Auto Workers won over decades of bitter
struggle helped to set standards that raised the wages of all workers
across the nation). But let’s do the math. There are about 125,000
unionized hourly workers at the two companies. For a lousy $8.7
billion, every one of those people could receive a $70,000 buyout from
Congress. Double that if you want to give them two years to adjust and
find new work at an electric car plant or something else. That would
cost $17 billion, or less than half of what the doomed bailout of GM is
going to end up costing.

And of course, with the rest of us suffering from the massive
mismanagement of the nation’s economy by its corporate leaders and
their puppets in Washington, there’s no reason why our tax dollars
should be subsidizing those particular workers tat that high a level.
After all, companies are failing and will be failing all over the
place, without such largesse. Besides, if the bailout goes ahead, all
it will do is delay the time these workers will be out on the street
anyhow.

The point is, however, there are more cost-effective ways to help
out workers in failing businesses than to have the government simply
subsidize the continued operation of enterprises that have been
destroyed by management. In truth, all the talk in congress and in the
Obama camp about rescuing jobs is just a cover for bailouts that are
really aimed at rescuing managers and investors, not workers.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Auto Industry Bailout

music8200 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:54:07 -0500

Congress will take up the Auto Industry Bailout when they re-convene this week. There is no better time than this moment to PUSH for concessions from the Auto Industry. Time is short. Democrat.com, can you help us act NOW? Here's a copy of a letter I just mailed to Speaker Pelosi: Dear Madam Speaker,

Please make the FLEXFUEL component a MANDATORY requirement for any Auto Industry bailout.
IT ONLY COSTS $100 to install this component on a vehicle during the manufacturing process. The only EPA approved retrofit costs $1300. All cars sold in Brazil are flexfuel ready. All cars that GM sells in Brazil are flexfuel compatible. There is no excuse and there should be no delay in making all cars sold in America flexfuel capable.
THIS IS THE QUICKEST CHEAPEST EASIEST WAY to make rapid reductions in our foreign oil imports.
If ALL cars sold in the US were Flexfuel compatible, alternative fuel manufacturers would gear up without the need for incentives because they would know they have a market for their fuel products.
THEN please help remove the $0.54 a gallon tariff on imported ethanol. That would allow foreign ethanol products to compete in the American market. The American consumer would benefit. We could even lift the economies of Third World Countries by contracting them to grow switchgrass or sugarcane for ethanol fuel.
Ultimately, let's provide incentives for the production of flexfuel plug-in hybrids. These cars would get 500 MILES ON A GALLON OF GASOLINE! We would never need OPEC oil ever again! Perhaps no imported oil at all.
PLEASE PLEASE make the flexfuel component a MANDATORY part of any Automobile Industry Bailout.
If you want good references on this topic, read the testimony of Anne Korin (of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security) before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of May 22, 2008:http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/kor052208.htm(see in particular the section entitled "17x17")
read R. James Woolsey (former director of the CIA) and Anne Korin's article in the National Review:http://energy.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTlmMjFjYWRjOWI3ZGI0MzUxZDJjYTBlMmUzOTc2Mzc=
or watch Anne Korin's lecture on CSPAN:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MVwL2PcCG8(highly recommended)
watch Robert Zubrin's FEW Keynote Address:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0O2YZwSkgM
Thank you and your staff for your time and attention,Scott Lawrence

What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:05:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What nobody in the corporate media is mentioning amid all the
blather about the $700-billion Paulson bailout proposal is the impact
it will have on the US dollar.

We are told that this huge gift to the financial sector—the
assumption, at top dollar, of all the bad debt they’ve piled up--will
be at taxpayer expense, but that’s only the half of it. (Really only
the quarter of it because since the US government is technically
bankrupt already, spending more than it takes in each year, all that
money will be borrowed, and will be added to the national debt, meaning
that just as the real cost of the $500-billion Iraq War is closer to $2
trillion, the real cost of the $700 billion bailout will be more like
$1.5-2.5 trillion.)

But besides the direct bill handed to taxpayers for this gigantic
con, there is the fact that adding that much to the national debt is
also going to drive the dollar down precipitously against foreign
currencies. We’re already seeing that happen, even while they’re just
talking about the bailout. The dollar is falling against all major
currencies—the Euro, the Yen, the Renminbi and the British pound. And
it will continue to fall as the details of the bailout come out.

This will add to already powerful pressures in countries like Saudi
Arabia and China, which hold huge quantities of US dollars and US
dollar-denominated debt, to shift out of dollars and into other
currencies—particularly the Euro and the Yen. Last week, an article in
China’s People’s Daily, which like Pravda in the old Soviet Union, is
the official voice of the leadership in China, called for just such a
move. Russia is also calling for an end to the dollar as the
underpinning of the global economy.

For some years now, many economists have been predicting an end to
the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but this latest plan by the
US Treasury will push such a shift forward from “some day” to “now.”

As long as the dollar has been the reserve currency—the currency in
which key commodities like gold or oil were priced, and the currency
that exporting nations stocked in their treasuries as a store of value
– it was protected against collapse. But once it loses that status,
there will be nothing to prop it up any longer, and it will quickly
slide to a value that it deserves. We got an inkling of what is going to happen today, as crude oil
prices leapt in the course of one hour by 25%, the biggest jump in the
history of the oil market. This was purely a move caused by loss of
confidence in the dollar. There was no oil supply disruption. In fact,
demand for oil has been sinking as the economic crisis grows. Oil
producers and traders simply realized that the dollar is going poof, so
they radically jacked up the cost of oil in dollars.

If you want to see what where the dollar is headed,, look to the
currencies of the debtor nations—countries like Mexico or perhaps
Mozambique. A nation that makes almost nothing, and that imports most
of its needs, cannot have a strong currency.

This might not matter much if we had a functioning domestic
economy, where people could find the goods and services they needed
without turning to sources from abroad. A big country like the US could
simply turn inward and function on by its own domestic economic
standards.

I remember back when the former Soviet Union was in a state of
economic and political free fall in the early and mid 1990s, the
currencies of the constituent countries, like Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus had had collapsed to virtual worthlessness on the international
market. A Byelorussian friend, an engineering professor from Minsk,
living and working near me in China at the time, explained that
although when he traveled the world, he felt like a pauper, things
weren’t so bad back home Belarus, where he and his family would go in
the summer. “My apartment only costs a few dollars a month to rent,” he
explained, “and our food is bought on the local market using rubles, so
it is very affordable.” The same was true for other needs, like
clothing and books for school, he explained. The only problem was
buying gas for his Russian Volga. “Gas,” he explained, “is priced as an
international commodity, so it takes me one month’s wages in Belarus to
buy the gas to drive once to and from our country dacha.”

You can start to see the problem. Since agriculture has been killed
off in most of the US, in favor of giant agribusiness enterprises
situated in the western part of the country and some parts of the
Midwest, most people elsewhere will not have local produce available,
and the cost of transporting food from California to places like New
York or Pennsylvania will be prohibitive once the dollar collapses,
since oil is priced internationally. Meanwhile, goods like TV sets,
computers, phones, cars (or at least the key components of cars),
clothing, etc., are no longer even made in the US, and will thus be
completely unaffordable. As for the service jobs that are supposed to
have replaced our old manufacturing sector, no one will be interested
in buying what they’re offering, because they’ll be scrimping just to
buy the key staples they need to survive, so of course joblessness will
soar.

Eventually, of course, entrepreneurially minded people will begin
establishing local farms again where they once flourished generations
ago, and small factories will be built to provide key essentials, but
all this will take time, and will have to cater to a market of people
operating at a much lower standard of living.

The banking sector, meanwhile, which is the proximate cause of this
monumental disaster, won’t mind any of this, for it will continue
operating on the international stage, shifting its focus to lending
money (no longer dollars, though), to growing economies in Asia and
Latin America and eastern Europe. And this is what, in truth, the
“rescue” of Wall Street is all about.

It’s not about saving Main Street, as Paulson claims. Main Street,
under the bailout, is toast. It’s about helping the banks and
investment banks and insurance companies that brought on this crisis to
ride it out in style, their astronomical losses bankrolled or absorbed
by the American public, so that they can shift their operations
overseas and continue with their rape and pillage of the global economy.

The US will be left behind, a smoking ruin, with Americans, like
Weimar Germans before them, going shopping with wheelbarrows full of
worthless green paper to exchange for a few days’ groceries.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We're a Nation of Lemmings

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:27:20 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Listening to the endless stream of cars passing my house every day,
and knowing, from watching them from my mailbox, that they are almost
all carrying just one person, either commuting to work or running some
kind of errand, I know we are headed for disaster.

Two days ago, there was a report by Agence France Presse
about the ongoing destruction of the world’s remaining wetlands (60
percent have already been destroyed by man over the past century), and
how they contain within them an amount of stored carbon equal to all
the carbon currently in the atmosphere. Global warming and property
development are drying out those remaining wetlands, causing the
release of that carbon, which will more than negate even the most
radical efforts at reducing carbon emissions from power plants,
factories and automobiles.

There are also credible, well-researched reports
that even a few more degrees of temperature rise in the arctic regions
of Siberia and northern North America will melt the permafrost and
release as much 400 gigatons of methane gas trapped in frozen
clathrates for millennia—the release of which would cause global
temperatures to soar to levels not seen in 250 million years (methane
is 20 times as potent a global warming gas as CO2). Vast regions of
Siberia are already bubbling with releasing methane as the permafrost
line moves north.

Now I grant that our corporate media, ever focused laser-like on
important stories like Britney Spears’ return to the stage and on the
latest gaffe of one or the other presidential candidate, have not been
very interested in alerting the masses to these disasters now in
progress that could end humanity’s run on the planet (along with
exterminating most of the rest of the life on the planet too). But that
said, at this point everyone has surely heard enough, and witnessed
enough in person of the dramatic changes taking place in the earth’s
climate, to know that something scary is going on.

And yet, people are not just going about their business as
usual—they are actually, for the most part, complaining not about the
lack of highly energy-efficient transportation, the lack of alternative
and less energy-wasting public transit, and the lack of government
funding for a crash program into researching carbon-free energy
solutions, but rather about the high price for carbon fuels. People are
clamoring for solutions to make gasoline cheaper!

Years ago, back in the 1970s during an Arab-led oil embargo, when
gas prices soared, there were mass campaigns to organize car pools. No
such campaigns are being organized today, and if any are they don’t get
any media attention. Instead we read that geologists are saying that
massive quantities of untapped oil reserves exist in the far north.

Now the last thing we should be wanting to do is take that nicely
sequestered carbon out of the ground and burn it into CO2! But that’s
what many Americans want done. Screw the climate! We want our cheap gas!

There are so many things we could be doing right now to reduce
carbon emissions—as individuals and as a nation. Turning off
air-conditioners would be one. Why should entire houses be cooled by
central air? Cool one room and use it for the hottest part of the day
if need be. Live downstairs during the hottest months and close off the
upstairs when it gets too hot. Ditto in the winter. There’s no need to
occupy and heat an entire house when it gets really cold. Most
Americans’ homes are way too large anyhow, but if you need that much
room, use it when it doesn’t require all that extra energy to heat and
cool. (When I lived in Cambridge, England as a kid, we used to sleep in
unheated bedrooms under cozy comforters, and then in the morning, I’d
go down and light a fire in the living room where we’d be during the
day. It would be cold as hell until the fire started, but not for
long.) Share rides. Plan errands so that many things get taken care of
on one outing, instead of in multiple run-outs. Use bicycles. I have
yet to see, on my own bike rides in town or when driving anywhere,
someone who is actually riding a bike on some errand—carrying a load in
a basket or in a backpack. The only bikers I see are people dressed
like Tour de France racers out for some exercise. What’s the matter
with using bikes for a purpose, instead of the family car?

I’m not trying to criticize, or to say I’m more ecologically
virtuous. I’m looking at this as an unprecedented disaster that is
dooming my kids, or their future children, to a life of strife, misery
and maybe even catastrophe. If I don’t take serious action—and I don’t
just mean individual life changes, but political action—to try and save
their world, I am guilty of a serious crime. And so are we all.

What the hell happened to any sense of shared responsibility, not just for society, but for our own offspring?

Most decent parents are ready to sacrifice in their lifestyles in
order to send their kids to college, or to help them out financially
when they are starting out as young adults. But for some strange reason
nobody seems ready to sacrifice at all when it comes to rescuing their
collective future. This makes no sense.

And yet, this is what our mass culture has done to us. As a nation,
as a people, we cannot think beyond our own noses. We cannot even think
about the need to act in our own and our children’s interest.

Seventeen years ago, I had occasion while living in Shanghai,
China, to visit a rural area in Anhui Province that the year before had
been devastated by a flood so huge that the entire region had been not
just flooded, but put deep underwater. As I neared a county seat town
that was my intended destination, the bus I was on passed a
dike-building project. Thousands of peasants were laboring by hand,
with shovels and wheelbarrows, to erect a 50-foot wall of earth to keep
the river in its banks in the event of another such flood. I got off
the bus and, with my travel companion, started walking towards the
project. When we were spotted, thousands of those workers dropped their
shovels and ran towards us. It was a terrifying moment to have so many
people heading towards and surrounding us, but they were very
friendly—just curious because none of them had ever met a westerner. We
began talking with them, and learned that they were all peasants who
had left their fields to build this colossal new Great Wall of dirt.
They brought us to the worksite and showed us how they would bring
their wheelbarrows to the base of the dike, and then attach a cable,
which was connected to a winch operated by those ubiquitous
one-cylinder, two-stroke kerosene tractors used across rural China. The
winch would whip the barrow up the steep hillside, with a peasant
running up behind keeping it upright. At the last minute, the peasant
would flip the barrow, dumping the dirt and releasing the hook. Then
he’d be off down the hill to collect more dirt.

What struck me, besides their ingenuity, was how all these
thousands of people had left their own fields to labor for the
collective good that year.

I tried at the time to contemplate my fellow Americans doing the same thing, and couldn’t for the life of me imagine it.

Now we’re in that moment. We know the flood is coming, but no one is willing to join the brigade to take preventive action.

No. Buying a Prius is not taking action. Neither is upgrading the
insulation on your house or buying carbon offsets when you fly. We
need, as a nation, to commit to seriously ending our addiction to
fossil fuels, to rapacious development and the concomitant destruction
of forests and wetlands. We need to end our nation’s imperialist
policies and to instead devote the trillion dollars a year spent on war
to saving the planet from ourselves.

A good start would be seeing that people “get it.” That would mean
communities starting to organize around improving mass transit,
arranging for carpooling, and demanding climate-saving action from our
political leaders.

I’m not optimistic.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Paul Krugman and Blindness About the War and the Economy

dlindorff — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:36:00 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In a New York Times column on Monday (“Behind the Bush
Bust”), economics columnist Paul Krugman mused on whether President
George Bush could be blamed for the nation’s economic crisis. His
conclusion was that, yes, to some extent the crisis was Bush’s fault,
but he largely lets the current administration off the hook, instead
blaming Republican policies dating back 10-15 years.

Oddly, Krugman does say that a key cause of economic problems has
been rising energy prices, but he then attributes these to “growing
demand from China and other emerging economies,” and suggests that
prices might have been at least a bit lower had the US, after 9/11,
adopted “higher gas taxes and fuel efficiency standards,” a failing he
attributes to Bush.

The gaping hole in Krugman’s logic is the Iraq War, which the
columnist, incredibly, doesn’t even mention. Yet clearly, the invasion
and subsequent war and occupation of Iraq which was purely the result
of Bush/Cheney machinations, has been a major, if not the major cause
of oil price increases.

By destroying Iraq’s oil production, and by hindering much of
Iran’s production (Iran, seen as an enemy by the US, has been frozen
out of capital markets, blocking it from being able to modernize and
even maintain its own huge oil infrastructure), and putting even
Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s production at risk, the US war in Iraq has
jeopardized about one-third of the world’s oil capacity—a fact not lost
on oil speculators. Every rumor of a longer occupation or a wider war
in the Middle East—especially a possible attack by the US on Iran--has
pushed up oil prices further, as has every attack on a pipeline.

It is no secret why crude oil, over the course of five years, has
soared four or five times in price. Demand has certainly not gone up by
that amount. It hasn’t even doubled. What has happened is that the
Middle East has been thoroughly destabilized by American military
action.

The rise in oil prices has been the major cause of the US dollar’s
stunning collapse, which in turn has limited the hand of the Federal
Reserve, which cannot risk lowering interest rates as much as it would
like to stimulate economic growth, for fear of further undermining the
dollar. This in turn has allowed the mortgage crisis to fester and grow
worse.

At the same time, the massive amount of industrial production that
has gone into the war effort—the building of planes, tanks, armored
cars, etc.—while perhaps producing some jobs, has been wholly
inflationary in its effect, since this is production that cannot add to
available goods and services in the civilian economy. That means that
there are more people with wages and salaries, chasing the same number
of things to buy—a sure-fire recipe for higher prices. Add to that the
huge war budget, all funded by debt, and you have even more downward
pressure on the dollar.

Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq has been, it should be clear, a
huge catastrophe for the US economy, and yet somehow Prof. Krugman
managed to miss it completely. You could read his column and not even
know that the country is and has been, for the past seven years, at war.

I’m not sure what to make of this oversight on Krugman’s part. Is
he trying to downplay the war, figuring it’s soon to become a
Democratic venture? Is he unfamiliar with the argument that war is bad
for economies?

One thing is clear: You cannot look at a nation at war and analyze
its economy without considering the impact of the war, which is what
the usually astute Krugman has done here.

But let’s make the point crystal clear, even if Krugman doesn’t see
it or doesn’t want to see it: The slumping US economy, and the crashing
US dollar, which is heading towards Peso status as a trash currency,
are clearly the direct result of Bush/Cheney policies, aided and
abetted by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who have bought
the story line that war is good.

We will all be paying for this imperialist misadventure for years to come.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush/Cheney and special contracts with Big Oil in Iraq - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

seandiego — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:32:23 -0400

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE TODAY (7/2/08). THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST UNITE TO SHOW THE WORLD WE DID NOT SUPPORT OR APPROVE OF THE INJUSTICES OF THIS ADMINISTRATION AND THE CRIMES IT COMMITTED AGAINST IRAQ, THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD. TO REGAIN OUR STATURE IN THE WORLD, WE MUST CHARGE BUSH AND CHENEY WITH WAR CRIMES BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES IT FOR US. CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS TODAY!

Opening Iraq's oil fields to Big Oil

By Bob Herbert
THE NEW YORK TIMES

July 2, 2008

It's getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. It was the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies also got contracts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn't wait. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, U.S. troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target – the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry – not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry – probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its unusual no-bid contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq's vast oil reserves. As the Times reported Monday, “At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world's largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry.”

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the United States, where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans – in July! – are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

And then there's the so-called war on terror.

The latest news is that al-Qaeda, the terror network that actually did attack the United States, has successfully regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan and has reconstituted its ability to institute terror attacks from the region.

For an administration joined at the hip to the oil industry, the lure of Iraq's enormous reserves was stronger even than the impulse to conquer an enemy that murdered more than 2,700 civilians on Sept. 11, a toll greater than the number of Americans killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Referring to al-Qaeda members who regrouped in Pakistan, the Times reported on Monday:

“Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.”

Who knows how long it will be before the United States disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.

How long will it take before that finally sinks in?

More Blood Money from Our Democratic Congress and Democratic Presidential Candidate

dlindorff — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:49:05 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended
benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to Congressional
Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision onto a bill giving
the president all the money he asked for (and then some) to fund the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through next June. Veterans of the
Iraq War will also be getting tuition benefits equal to the full cost
of in-state public college tuition plus $1000 a year for books and
supplies.

When workers pick up those unemployment checks from their state
Department of Labor offices, though, they should see them as dripping
blood. Those checks have been bought with the blood of American men and
women in uniform who have been sent over and over into harm’s way in
those two countries in misbegotten and criminal adventures that have
nothing to do with defending America and everything to do with boosting
the profits of oil companies and defense contractors, and with getting
Bush re-elected and Republicans elected.

Iraq Vets, too, should not
overlook the blood on their VA education benefits checks, because their
tuition will be paid by the blood of active-duty comrades still left
stranded in battle zones overseas.

It didn’t have to be like this.

For generations, Congress has voted supplemental funding for
unemployment benefits to be extended during economic downturns—not
always willingly, but always eventually, following enough pressure from
workers and the labor movement.

For generations, too, Congress has voted for education benefits for veterans.

This being an election year, passage of a freestanding supplemental
benefits bill for unemployment insurance and a restoration of decent
education benefits for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans would have
been a sure thing. Even Republicans facing the prospect of re-election
campaigns would have signed on to both measures by Labor Day and the
votes would have been there to override any Bush veto. Neither
measure—both important in themselves and badly needed—had to be tied to
a war-funding bill.

But Democrats in the House and Senate leadership weren’t really
thinking about the plight of the unemployed or the needs of returning
veterans in this case. They were, rather, thinking of a way of putting
some “progressive” window-dressing on a war-funding bill that they
wanted to pass without having to take responsibility for it. Their
objective was to push the whole issue of funding the wars out past
Election Day, in hopes of not having to discuss it in the coming
campaign.

Funding Bush’s and Cheney’s war in Iraq especially has, after all,
become a more and more unpopular and difficult affair for Democrats. In
this last go-round, fully 141 House Democrats voted against further
funding of the war—nearly the same number as voted for it (149). At
first, back in mid-May, the measure didn’t even pass, because
Republicans cleverly joined with the anti-war Democrats in blocking the
measure, forcing Democratic leaders to scramble to round up the votes
to pass a bill the second time around.

Americans clearly don’t want the war to continue, and Democrats
don’t want to have to face the voters, as every member of the House and
a third of the Senate have to do this November, being labeled as war
backers. That’s why they come up with these pathetic excuses like, “I’m
opposed to the war but we have to support the troops.”

Any sentient being in the country by now knows that most of the
long-suffering and abused troops, as polls have shown, think that the
best way to support them is to bring them home immediately. A Zogby
poll of active-duty troops in Iraq taken in 2006 found that 72% wanted
the US out within a year, while one in four wanted all US troops out
immediately. Only one in five supported staying “as long as necessary.”
(With many of those troops on yet another rotation, in some cases their
fifth, those numbers are probably even more in favor of immediate
withdrawal today.) Military experts have also written about how all the
troops in Iraq could be pulled out safely in as little as two weeks’
time. All the Pentagon would need to do is start running a constant
convoy of trucks south to Kuwait, carrying troops and weapons systems.
They could leave the porta-potties, the McDonalds stands, the bowling
alleys, the gyms and the barracks to the Iraqis and then blow up
whatever they didn’t want falling into the wrong hands. It would be
easy and fast. There’s no need for Obama’s proposed 16-month staged
withdrawal, which would just mean more unnecessary deaths and killings.

Democrats in Congress know all this, but congenitally spineless and
devoid of principle, they’re afraid if they don’t fund the war they
could be accused by Republicans of being “soft” on defense—as though
the Iraq War had anything at all to do with protecting America.

And so they have come up with this shameless ruse of attaching a
$95-billion domestic spending package, including unemployment funding
measure and a veterans’ education benefits measure, to a $162-billion
atrocity—a measure that assures more death and destruction in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and more dead and maimed American military personnel.
They’re pretending that they “pulled one over” on Bush by forcing him
to sign an unemployment extension bill and a veterans’ bill, when they
know Republicans would have forced him to sign those anyway, later in
the summer.

The real joke is on the American people, and on those very workers
and veterans who will be receiving the unemployment checks and tuition
reimbursements funded as a result of this duplicitous tactic.

The $162 billion that Congress has voted for the continuation of
the two pointless and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together
with the money already allocated for the so-called “War on Terror,” is
all borrowed, and is a major contributor to the collapse of the dollar
and to the resulting soaring of the price of oil, electricity and
imported goods. It is thus a major contributor to the credit crisis and
the collapse in the housing market that has pushed the nation into what
may be the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Furthermore, the blood-money unemployment and tuition checks bought
through his gutless subterfuge by House and Senate Democrats will be
pissed away in no time on higher gas prices spent by workers on
desperate job searches, or on long commutes to distant jobs or commutes
if they are lucky enough to find them. It will be pissed away too for
veteran/students on their commutes to college, and on higher heating
bills for their families at home.

Equally important, the $160 billion wasted in Iraq, along with the
half trillion dollars being wasted every year on military spending for
a military colossus that encircles the globe for no good purpose other
than intimidation of other nations, assures that those Democrats who
control Congress can do nothing of consequence to shore up retirement
funds, to develop a national health program, to improve our dismal
school system, to repair our crumbling infrastructure, or to develop
alternative, non-polluting energy sources that could combat global
warming.

The Democratic Congress has shown itself to be worse than useless.
It is part of the problem. That includes Sen. Barack Obama, who like
Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain, signed onto this
contemptible funding bill.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net