Global Warming

2010 Looms: Democrats Crash and Burn in Virginia and New Jersey

dlindorff — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:58:27 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

Exit polls showed that many Obama voters sat out this election in
New Jersey and Virginia, with turnout low in both races. In part that
was because of local conditions, of course. In Virginia, Democrat R.
Creigh Deeds ran as a conservative, and was attacked by the Republican
candidate, former state attorney general Robert McDonnell, as a
tax-happy liberal. With liberal voters in Virginia unenthusiastic about
Deeds, and Republicans revved up, the loss was a foregone conclusion,
even with Obama making two visits to campaign for Deeds, and with the
national Democratic Party pumping in $6 million in campaign funding.

In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat John Corzine was wildly unpopular
for raising taxes, so that even with Democrats holding an almost 2:1
registration advantage in the state (half of all voters are
unaffiliated), he too had no enthusiastic backing from his former base.
No amount of money poured in by the former Goldman Sachs chief
executive could overcome the negative views of his record as governor.

But despite the lackluster candidates in both Virginia and New
Jersey, I think it’s safe to say that there was also clear evidence
that the losses, and the margins of the losses—huge in Virginia’s case,
and significant in normally safely Democratic New Jersey—provide
evidence that the Obama presidency, and the prevailing Democratic
strategy of minimalist legislative initiatives on health care reform,
global warming etc., expanded and unending war in Afghanistan, support
for Wall Street and neglect of the one-in-five Americans who are
unemployed or underemployed, are a political disaster in the making for
Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

The president came into office on a wave of populist enthusiasm and
high expectations for the “change” candidate Obama promised. No change
has been forthcoming now for over nine months, and with the president
now past the first-year anniversary of his historic election victory,
the latest election results suggest that his presidency could already
be headed for the rocks.

2010 is an election year that will see all seats in the House, and
a third of the seats in the Senate up for grabs. Typically, a
president’s party loses seats in that election even when things are
going well. When things are not going well, the losses can be
significant.

Obama had a chance, coming into Washington after a big rout of
Republicans last year, to set out an agenda of major progressive
change. He could have called for expanding Medicare to cover all
Americans. Instead he handed health reform over to Congress and
immediately put out the word that he was open to compromise with
Republicans, thus dooming reform from the outset. He could have
announced a thorough review of America’s two wars, and then set in
motion a withdrawal form both Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he dithered
on Iraq, and added troops in Afghanistan, assuring that both these
disasters inherited from the Bush/Cheney administration became his own
disasters, which will now drag on through his whole term. He could have
declared a global climate emergency, and announced a job-creating crash
program to develop renewable energy in the US and to make the US a
leader in renewable energy R&D. Instead, he did almost nothing in
this critical area. As for the economic crisis, he could have taken a
progressive stand against the abuses of Wall Street, ordered a criminal
investigation of the banking class, broken up the big banks and
established a new regulatory system to put an end to the era of casino
capitalism. Instead, he put the bankers in charge of Treasury and
poured trillions of dollars into the largest banks, allowing them to
grow even bigger and more predatory.

Voters, their collective assets shrunken over the year by $14
trillion, understandably are left wondering how, aside from better
verbal skills, this president differs from the last one. As for the
Democratic Congress, with Democrats pretending that nothing can be done
unless they have not just 60 seats in Congress, but perhaps 70 or 75
(enough to be able to survive the inevitable defection of conservative
members of the party), they can’t do anything of consequence—a claim
that only is true if, as is the case, the party’s leadership and the
president are unwilling to punish those who break rank.

If Democratic and progressive independent voters feel the same way
about Obama and the Democratic Congress next fall, it will be curtains
for the Democrats and for Obama’s presidency, such as it is.

And you know what? It won’t matter much if that happens, because
what we’re seeing is that having Obama in the White House, and
Democrats “in control” of Congress doesn’t get you much in the way of
progressive change.
___________

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

Nationalize Our Natural Resoures

pilot.blake — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:40:54 -0400

Nationalize Our Natural Resources

Nationalizing "OUR" Natural Resources like the Netherlands, (I believe I saw it on PBS) did to preserve and manage their future access to Oil, Timber and other Natural Resources.

The government realized they needed to ask the right question, in order to get the proper and correct answer to: "What type of system do we use to manage our National Resources"?
They then decided, to do the unbelievable! (by American standards) they ask a philosopher for help! with the question. it quickly became obvious that the real question was: "Who Owns the Natural Resources"? and who should be allowed to profit from the sale of the Natural resources, corporations, government, or People?

It also became apparent by asking the philosopher that,
If Corporations and Government where allowed to profit, "Free Market" style, then the resources would not last long and at the current rate of usage wouldn't even allow the current generation to enjoy continued sustainable use. The End, No More.

This is the reason the question was asked in the first place.

The answer was a Legal Trust given to the people of the nation for its use and managed so that no current generation, people, government, or corporation be allowed to sale or use-up the Natural Resources that Future Generations had a Right to, and current government, corporations and people are responsible to preserve future generations Rights, not just the current generation Rights.

So if you have a Limited National Resource and figure-out how long it will last at current usage say... till extinction- then figure how much you must not use, consume or sale. so that the next 50 generations can also enjoy the Natural Resources and extend them also the responsibility and requirements of the National Resource Trust Account Management.

This bins and mandates us to the future by Law to extend the Natural Resources to future generation.

My Wish for All Generations

Blake Van

WTF? Obama Gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

dlindorff — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:13:53 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s not as much of a travesty as when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal of the first order who was an architect of the latter stages of the Indochina War, and was personally responsible for the slaughter of well over a million innocent people, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, while that war was still raging, but the awarding of the latest Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama is travesty enough.

We’re talking about a man whose practically first act upon taking office early this year was to escalate the ugly and pointless war in Afghanistan with the addition of some 20,000 troops, and who, even as the Nobel committee was discussing his award, was meeting with his military and political advisors to consider expanding that war even further, both in Afghanistan and across the border into Pakistan.

The Nobel Committee claimed that during Obama’s short period as president, the US “is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

Well, certainly when compared to the prior presidency of George W. Bush, that statement is correct, but that’s not saying much. After all, under President Obama, Guantanamo’s terrorist prison is still in operation and is holding people whom even the government admits are guilty of nothing. Under President Obama, the US has also blocked the Goldstone Report which condemns Israel of war crimes in its recent assault on Gaza. And under Obama, the US military in Afghanistan has continued to slaughter disproportionate numbers of civilians through its wanton use of aerial bombardment, pilotless Predator drones, and antipersonnel weaponry.

President Obama may have, as the Nobel Committee states, put forward a vision of nuclear disarmament, but his administration at the same time continues to refuse to sign the international anti-landmine treaty (putting America in the wretched company of just Russia, India and China). And under Obama, the US continues its role as not only the leading producer and exporter of arms, but also as the major initiator of wars in the world. Under Obama the US continues to outspend the rest of the world’s nations combined on its military. And don’t forget, Obama, like President Bush before him, continues to threaten to attack Iran, over that nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program—a program the very existence of which remains highly debatable.

As for climate change policy, President Obama in practice has taken a largely hands-off approach to getting Congress to act, not using his considerable political clout to force action on climate change legislation. It is now conceded that the US will go to the international climate conference in December with no bill passed to limit or reduce the nation’s CO2 emissions. Nor is the Obama administration likely to push for any significant program of CO2 reductions in the future.

Nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize closed on Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took the oath of office as President, but the Nobel Committee in Norway had a good nine months since then to observe this president’s actions—and his lack of actions—on the key issues weighing on the decision. In the end, committee members were bamboozled by this president’s rhetoric of hope just as were the American people during the election campaign. As the committee wrote in announcing its decision: "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future."

If Nobel Peace prizes are being awarded to people who are simply giving the world hope, surely the judges could have found any number of worthy speechifiers. Hell, even the dictatorial leaders of China and North Korea can make flowery speeches about peace and human dignity. More to the point, the committee had under consideration at least two far more deserving nominees for the award who were actually acting at great personal risk to further peace and human rights: Chinese freedom-fighter Hu Jia and Afghani women’s rights advocate Simi Samar. It is an insult to the memory of former award winners like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jody Williams, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and others who put their lives and careers on the line to struggle for peace and human dignity to give this award to a man who has accomplished so little, and who, in fact, in his short time in office, has managed to expand one war, to block the international condemnation of the brutality of another, and who has done nothing to reverse his own country’s leading role as a promoter of war and international violence.

Henry Kissinger hung his blood-drenched Nobel Peace Award on his office wall on Wall Street and continued to make obscene sums of money off human suffering in his dotage. One can only hope (ah, that intoxicating word!) that President Obama will take his award seriously, and will use his new status as official man of peace to halt America’s campaign of violence in Afghanistan, calling a regional peace conference to settle that conflict instead of simply expanding the war, that he will announce a major cut in American military spending and a halt to arms exports, that he will sign the landmine treaty and voluntarily end the production and use of antipersonnel weapons of all kinds, and that he will finally have the US join the International Criminal Court of Justice.

Right. Now that’s the audacity of hope.
_______________

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

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

"WE'RE SCREWED": TABLOID HEIST BLANKETS NEW YORK WITH TRUTH ON CLIMATE CHANGE

davidswanson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:45:14 -0400

[Note: I contributed an article, my first ever published in the NY Post. --DS]

MEDIA HEIST BLANKETS CITY WITH "SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST
Tabloid Tells Truth About Climate Change and How It Will Affect City, World

Fake New York Post: http://www.nypost-se.com/
Video News Release: http://www.nypost-se.com/video
City report on climate change: http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2009/NPCC_CRI.pdf
Wake-up call: http://www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

The fake Post's cover story ("We're Screwed") reports the frightening conclusions of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists commissioned by the mayor's office to determine the potential effects of climate change on the City. That report was released in February of this year, but received very little press at the time.
Other lead articles describe the Pentagon's alarmed response to global warming ("Clear & Present Disaster"), the U.S. government's sadly minuscule response to the crisis ("Congress Cops Out on Climate"), China's alternative energy program ("ChinaÕs Green Leap Forward Overtakes U.S."), and how if the US doesn't quickly pass a strong climate bill, the crucial Copenhagen climate talks this December could be a "Flopenhagen."

The paper includes original investigative reporting as well. One article ("Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools") reveals that Deutsche Bank - which erected a seven-story "carbon counter" in central Manhattan - not only invests heavily in coal-mining companies worldwide, but has recently entered the business of coal
trading itself.

The paper has the world's gloomiest weather page, covering the next 70 years rather than just 7 days. The "Around the World" section describes the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer parts of the world, including extreme droughts, floods, famines, water shortages, mass migrations and conflicts. Developing countries will bear the brunt of climate change effects even though they have done very little to cause the problem.

But the paper isn't all doom and gloom. An article called "New York Fights Back" notes that the carbon emissions of Big Apple residents are only one third the national average, and that the city is building 1800 miles of bike paths, planting one million trees, and replacing its fleet of police cars with hybrids. There's also a page of black-humor cartoons (in one, Charlie Brown finds Snoopy drowned),
a gossip section that takes no prisoners, and a number of truly cheerful ads - for sex ("Awesome. No carbon emissions."), tote bags, bicycles, and tap water ("Literally comes right out of your faucet!").

Another ad promotes civil disobedience, encouraging readers to visit
http://BeyondTalk.net and pledge to risk arrest in a planned global action November 30, just before the conference in Copenhagen.

"We need strong action on climate change," said David Solnit of Mobilization for Climate Justice West, one of the partners in BeyondTalk.net. "But history shows that leaders act only when people take to the streets to demand it. That's what needs to happen now."

This paper is one of 2500 initiatives taking place in more than 130 countries as a response to the "Global Wake-up Call" on climate change. For more information, visit www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

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

Stop Complaining About Right-Wing Protests! The Left Should Be (Re)Learning How It's Done

dlindorff — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:50:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

OMG! Those protesters showing up at Democratic “town meetings” to
promote the president’s health care “reform” program are being bused in
from out of town?

Scandal! Que horrible! (Gasp)

But wait! That’s exactly what we on the left always did when we
held demonstrations—at least if we could. Who in the trade union
movement hasn’t called on fellow workers in other unions to join them
in rallies during struggles with an employer, or asked them to join
sparse picket-lines? Who hasn’t pulled out the stops trying to get
people from other cities to attend a local protest?

Okay, if it were shown that the Republicans were hiring
fake protesters to go to those Democratic pep rallies to mess them up,
as was done during the 2000 Florida vote recount, there’d be a good
investigative story, but from the righteous if ignorant anger that is
being expressed by the tea-baggers and anti-government types that I’ve
seen in news reports, these seem like legitimate right-wing cranks, who
are willing to be rallied to the cause of opposing what they see as a
socialist plot. Never mind that you’ve got ignorant numbskulls
demanding that Democrats in Congress “Keep your government hands off my
Medicare!” or that you’ve got right-wing protesters in their 70’s who
are all on Medicare irrationally shouting “Keep government out of
health care!” The point is that confused and ignorant or not, these
people are willing to make the effort to travel fair distances to make
their voices heard, and they’re willing to stand up, shout, and even
scuffle for the chance to make their point.

It’s not as if Democrats haven’t gone to great length to fill those same halls with earnest supporters.

The real question is why is the left in the US so goddamned polite
and domesticated that these Right Wing cranks look positively rowdy.

Back in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement
wasn’t polite and domesticated. It brought activists to events in the
Deep South all the way from New York and Boston. Its members rallied in
the thousands to shut down segregated public and even private
institutions. Its activists occupied buildings on university campuses,
boldly confronting police and police dogs and armed men in white robes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-war protesters in turn shut
down recruiting and induction centers, destroyed draft board records,
tried to close down Washington, DC, got arrested in the hundreds,
incited soldiers to desert and then helped hide them from the law,
exposed the 1968 Democratic Convention as a farce, and faced down armed
police and soldiers repeatedly, at one point in 1970 closing down the
nation’s campuses in a national student strike when soldiers shot and
killed four unarmed students at Kent State University.

Years earlier, when workers were being abused, they occupied
factories, forcibly shutting them down with sit-down strikes, battled
Pinkerton detectives and armed National Guard forces, and set up tent
cities in Washington to make themselves heard.

And they won great victories.

Where is that passion today? For the most part, the left, in all its
various guises—environmentalists, labor unions, civil rights advocates,
health care reform advocates, anti-war activists—have become neutered
office-chair potatoes, sending canned emails to their elected
representatives or to the White House, occasionally marching politely
inside of pre-approved, permitted and police-prescribed routes, and
attending sponsored events like the current round of town meetings,
perhaps to raise polite objections to aspects of a proposed piece of
legislation.

The agenda of the left in today’s America is being written not by
uncompromising radicals in the street as in earlier decades of
struggle, but by the bought-and-paid Democrats in Washington. The left,
such as it is, has become simply a reactive force, trying to make
discrete little improvements in the truly horrible legislation—health
care “reform,” cap-and-trade, the Employee Not-So-Free Choice Act,
continued Iraq and Afghanistan War funding bills--that is being offered
by a wholly corrupt Washington in thrall to corporate lobbyists.

We all need to take a lesson from the Right, and from those lusty,
cantankerous folks who are raising hell at those pathetic “town
meetings.”

How can it be that 10 percent of American workers don’t have a job,
and that the government is expecting that number to keep rising for
another year or more, or that another 7 percent have either given up
even trying to find a job, or have taken part-time work in desperation,
and yet we have not had one mass protest in Washington demanding public
jobs for the jobless!

How can it be that the country has been mired in two wars now for
eight years, and we haven’t had a million people storming the Pentagon
to shut it down (or at least levitate it)!

How can it be that we have 49 million Americans who can’t even
afford to see a doctor when they’re sick, and we’re talking about a
health care “reform” plan that not only won’t fix the problem, but will
actually end up costing us all $600 billion over 10 years without
solving it! And we just write letters to Congress! Why aren’t we
liberating hospitals and opening them up to the uninsured?

How can it be that the ice cap at the North Pole is actually
disappearing, and the whole arctic tundra across Canada, Alaska and
Siberia is starting to boil with the release of prehistoric methane
trapped under now-melting permafrost, threatening the very lives of our
grandchildren, and we’re calmly watching as even the Obama
administration’s pathetic “cap-and-trade” legislation gets stalled by
coal-state Democrats! Why aren’t we on the left lying down on the
tracks to block the coal trains, or tearing up those tracks!

Where is the passion and commitment we once had?

It all seems to be on the Right these days.
__________________

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

David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare: What If All Westerners Were Suddenly Sterile?

dlindorff — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:12:25 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t normally bother commenting on the writings of columnists like David Brooks, but today I can’t help myself.

Brooks earlier this week wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times elaborating on a blog on the site Marginal Revolution,
in which that site’s two economists speculated on what would happen if
a solar event instantly sterilized everyone, male and female, on the
side of the earth that was facing the sun at that moment, and if that
side happened to include both the US and Europe.

Brooks fretted that if the people of these regions (and off course
South America and Africa, which are on the same half of the globe, but
which Brooks conveniently ignores) were suddenly to realize they would
have no descendants, it would be the end of all “grand designs.” There
would, he said, be no more justice, no sacrificing for the future, no
more building of great buildings.

Brooks and the authors of this nightmare fantasy took the view that
if the citizens of what Brooks perceives as “Western Civilization” were
to have no hope of offspring, there would within weeks be an end to all
striving.

After I finished laughing, I started to think seriously about the idea...

For the rest of this column, please go to:
www.thiscantbehappening.net
___________________

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

Say 'Good-bye' to the Nice Health Care Reform, Kids

dlindorff — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:31:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Of course I could be wrong. Congress could turn around and pass
some cockamamie scheme to kick the issue of health care reform down the
road, offering some kind of minimal insurance coverage to a few million
more people, and cracking down on this or that particularly egregious
health provider rip-off, and then staging a “mission accomplished”
photo op.

But real health care reform of the kind that Democratic candidates
were promising during last year’s presidential campaign is dead, killed
by the timidity of the promiser-in-chief, President Barack Obama (and
by the massive corruption of the Democrats in Congress, who hav e
accepted the tainted coin of the health care industry).

Obama could have come to the American people as a newly elected
leader and addressed us as adults, saying: “Look, we know what needs to
be done. Plenty of countries in Canada, Europe and elsewhere have
figured it out already. They set up the government as the single payer
to health providers—doctors and hospitals, etc.—and the government
bargains and sets the prices those private providers of health care can
charge. Of course that means you’ll all pay higher taxes to finance
such a plan, but the record of all those countries shows that you’ll be
saving money over all, because you won’t be paying for health
insurance, your employer won’t be paying for health insurance, you
won’t be paying co-pays and deductibles, and you won’t be getting
gouged for drugs or hospital stays or doctors’ bills. You won’t be
paying state taxes for Medicaid either, nor will your insurance and
local property taxes have to subsidize the hospital care of indigents.
On balance, you’ll all be saving money, and you’ll never have to worry
about disease or injury bankrupting you. Nor will employers be able to
hold you hostage any longer. The reality is that the countries that
have a single-payer plan are spending half of what we spend per capita
for health care, they have no uninsured citizens, and their health
overall, as measured by such things as longevity, infant mortality,
etc., is better than ours.”

The president could have said all this and rallied the tens of
millions of Americans who desperately want a health care system modeled
on the single-payer idea to his side, forcing Congress to go along or
pay the price in 2010.

Instead...

For the rest of this article, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992), and of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

James Lovelock says we can't stop climate change

dinamic — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:09:45 -0400

The Dark Side of Climate Change: It's Already Too Late, Cap and Trade Is a Scam, and Only the Few Will Survive

Lovelock has not arrived at his views lightly. They are the product of years spent carefully considering the known science through the revolutionary and frequently misunderstood lens he began developing 40 years ago while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena. Gaia Theory holds that Earth possesses a sophisticated planetary intelligence that responds to levels of heat from the sun in such a way as to maintain a climate homeostasis supportive of life. In four decades of research and experiment, the most famous being the “Daisyworld” model, Lovelock has overcome the once-widespread skepticism of his peers to officially move Gaia from a Hypothesis to a Theory. He has established that the various components of the biosphere -- plants, animals, minerals, gases, the sun’s heat -- interact in such a way as to create and maintain a climate amenable to life. Far from a passive collection of independent actors responding to conditions, the biosphere’s contents, including humans, form a living web which actively creates and maintains those conditions. Gaia prefers these conditions and will do her best to maintain them. But there is a limit to how much Gaia can do if we keep running over the safety mechanisms -- negative feedback loops -- she puts in our path. Lovelock believes that we have pushed Gaia beyond the point of return. The cold seas, for example, can only pump down so much of our carbon before they cry mercy and turn to acid.