Hail to the Viktors!

I'll confess that most of the past week I haven't paid much attention to the election controversy in the Ukraine. My first reaction was that the Russian-backed declared-victor Viktor Yanukovich was probably the legitimate winner--but that was based solely on the fact that Colin Powell was saying that he wasn't. Next, I was impressed by other bloggers who were impressed by the size and duration of the protests in Kiev. Then, I was a bit frightened by some expert talking on the ABC News on Sunday about how the dispute could lead to civil war. This was backed up by a multi-lingual Hungarian friend of mine, who said this was a real concern, and that Powell might be telling the truth on this one. Then I read Polizero's lengthy and informative post, which suggests that the "protests" in support of Viktor Yushchenko are more along the lines of a combination party and rock concert, well financed by western interests, and that there have been many large rallies in support of Yanukovich that don't get much coverage in the western media. Then, I read Joseph Kay's WSWS article on the subject, which brings me just about back to where I started--Colin Powell and the U.S. government have no standing or credibility in this dispute and should keep their oil-grubbing hands off of it!

So, now I'm a much-better-informed undecided! But one thing I really do want to know is: What happened to Yushchenko's face?



Apparently, things are currently going from bad to worse over there.

Orange Alert!

Tom Ridge is resigning! There is no falsehood to the rumors that he will soon land a cushy job at a duct-tape company.

1256

November has tied and probably broken the record for most members of the U.S. military killed in the Iraq war:

Fueled by fierce fighting in Fallujah and insurgents' counterattacks elsewhere in Iraq, the U.S. military death toll for November equalled the highest for any month of the war, according to casualty reports available Tuesday.

At least 135 U.S. troops died in November. That is the same number as last April, when the insurgence flared in Fallujah and elsewhere in the so-called Sunni Triangle where U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies lost a large measure of control.

Cheney's "remarkable success" is not getting rave reviews from retired military brass:

The nineteen months since the war in Iraq began, some of the most outspoken critics of President Bush's plan of attack have come from a group that should have been the most supportive: retired senior military leaders. We spoke with a group of generals and admirals that included a former supreme Allied commander and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they all agreed on one thing: Bush screwed up.
...
Lt. Gen. William Odom, Director of the National Security Agency, 1985-88:
"It's a huge strategic disaster, and it will only get worse. The sooner we leave, the less the damage. In the months since the invasion, the U.S. forces have become involved in trying to repress a number of insurgency movements. This is the way we were fighting in Vietnam, and if we keep on fighting this way, this one is going to go on a long time too. The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population."

Blogger Problems

Blogger is being very finicky today. I've been getting back in touch with the news and other blogs and so forth, but many of my pithiest comments have been thwarted by bloggerspace--maybe even this one!

The Emperor Will NOT Be Mocked

From the Globe and Mail:

Mr. Bush will be whisked into downtown Ottawa under heavy guard, kept well-insulated from the protesters expected to gather in the city. An enormous security detail has been laid on to ensure that his visit is safe and smooth.

The visit by Mr. Bush comes at a delicate time for the two countries. There are nagging trade irritants, including a border closed to Canadian beef and disputes over softwood, and Mr. Bush's foreign policies are opposed by many Canadians.

Reportedly worried about being heckled by backbenchers in the House of Commons, Mr. Bush decided not to address Parliament.

Why don't we have any backbenchers in our Congress? I'd love to see the Dems give Bush the respect he really deserves at the next state of the union address.

Shopping Insanity Cartoons!

From Ann Telnaes.


From John Deering.


From Rob Rogers.


From Bill Schorr.

Dollar Down, Oil Up

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- The dollar hit a record low vs. the euro after data showed that consumer confidence dropped unexpectedly in November. The dollar was down 0.3 percent at $1.3309 but hit $1.3335 in intraday trading. The buck was off 0.3 percent against the yen at 102.58, lost 0.6 percent vs. the Swiss franc to 1.1351 and slid 0.9 percent against the British pound to $1.9106.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Crude futures climbed above $50 a barrel in New York to trade at their highest level since Nov. 4. OPEC has indicated that it will "either lower production quotas or vow to roll back production to current quotas," said Phil Flynn, a senior analyst at Alaron Trading. "It appears the falling dollar has OPEC wanting the price of oil to go higher as compensation," he said. OPEC is set to meet on Dec. 10 in Cairo. January crude is up 59 cents at $50.35 after trading as high as $50.40 earlier.

Go, Canada!

TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- Organizers expect up to 15,000 activists to march on the Canadian capital Ottawa on Tuesday to protest the policies of U.S. President George W. Bush during his two-day visit to the country.

You think maybe y'all could arrest him for war crimes or something while he's there? We'd really appreciate it.

Is Wal-Mart good for America?

Short answer: No. The longer, very interesting answer comes from PBS' Frontline. The complete video of the show is available online. I just watched it, and recommend it, even though the video stream got interrupted a bunch of times.

Wal-Mart is trying to build a new stupor store in Pittsfield Township, just east of Saline, about eight miles south of Ann Arbor. My nephew's sister-in-law and her husband are part of the battle against it; if I find out anything we can do to keep the Beast of Bentonville out of Saline, I'll let you know! (I assume you're already not shopping at Wal-Mart.)

Way Hersh!

From an American Reporter article on Seymour Hersh, via Michelle:

Hersh's message is simple and frightening: "(George W.) Bush is an ideologue, a Utopian," Hersh said. "He wants to clean out the Middle East and install democracy. He doesn't care how many body bags come back home. There's nothing more dangerous than an ideologue who is completely bonkers and no one is going to tell him."

President Bush is committed to perpetual war, Hersh said.
...
We cannot win in Iraq, Hersh said. "We have no intel. We can't find the insurgents. When they bomb something, we only know about it afterward. We can't figure them out. Someone said, 'We play chess, they play Go.' All we can do is lose. All we can do is bomb."

The United States cannot afford this endless war, Hersh said. The dollar is already falling against the Euro, and the Chinese and Japanese hold trillions of dollars of U.S. debt.

"Soon China and Russia will start buying oil in Euros," Hersh said. "They'll stop buying American in Europe because they hate us so much - Disney in Paris is already going down. Large American corporations doing business abroad are going down. We could see more anti-American violence abroad. The dollar will fall. Billionaires are now telling other billionaires to get out of the stock market and buy foreign currency and stocks."

The stage is set for 2032 Election

From a NY Times article on the use of patrol boats in Iraq.

Stan Goff debates a neocon

Army vet Stan Goff debated a neocon recently, and found it surprisingly easy. Goff has a fairly comprehensive explanation for the war in Iraq and the other neocon and neoliberal crimes currently happening. Compared to which, he says, the neocons got nuthin.' Here's an excerpt from his opening remarks at the debate:

I don't believe the war is the exclusive product of the delusional thinking of the islamophobic clique that surrounds our current presidential mediocrity, as many liberals suggest. I don't believe the war ever had anything at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. I don't believe the very people who call this a War on Terrorism believe it for one minute, and moreover I believe they know perfectly well that the term "war on terrorism" is oxymoronic inasmuch as one cannot prosecute a war against a tactic. I don't believe it is a war to steal anyone's oil, though it has everything to do with oil and more. The fact that half the people in the United States believed at some point that a shattered nation like Iraq constituted a threat to the United States does not compel me for a moment to refrain from pointing out that this is a proposition that was and is idiotic on its face and it is not at all unusual for half of a national population to believe something that is patently idiotic. I am not a conservative, and I am not a liberal, and I am not a politician, and I am not a pacifist, and I am not religious, so I am not in the least compelled or constrained to prop up the polemical foundations of any of the agendas that might be associated with these kinds of affiliations.

I believe that the war in Iraq is symptomatic of a much deeper global crisis, and that it foreshadows a period in which that crisis ­ a crisis of global capitalism ­ will manifest itself not only in war but in rapidly widening social destabilization, the further militarization of the world system, and simultaneous economic and environmental collapse.

From Mousemusings...

From Walt Handelsman.

From Kirk Anderson.

From Boondocks.

Batteries--The Weak Link?

WIIIAI sent me a link to this fascinating column by Matthew Parris about the one thing which has kept electricity from dominating world energy--the lack of a decent battery. Excerpt:

As a medium for the transmission of energy and information, electricity is non-pareil.

One thing holds it back. One thing stands between electricity and world domination, keeping alive its only serious competitor: oil. There is but one reason why fossil fuels retain their grip as sources of heat and (via the internal combustion engine) motion. Our failure — Britain’s and the world’s — to invent an adequate electric battery is the sole cause of our dependence upon fossil fuels. Everything else — air pollution, global warming, rising sea-levels — flows from that.

Parris points out that gasoline has about 100 times the energy density of the typical car battery. So, even though electric motors are much more efficient than internal-combustion engines, they lose their advantage quickly for transportation because they have to lug much heavier "gas tanks" around with them.

Daily Peak Oil Rant

I received the DVD of The End of Suburbia today, and watched it this evening. It basically describes how cheap oil made suburbia possible, and how expensive oil will turn suburbs into slums and then ghost towns. The film features some of the usual peak oil suspects: Richard Heinberg, Michael Klare, Colin Campbell, Kenneth Deffeyes. It also features From the Wilderness' Michael Ruppert (whose book and DVD I haven't received yet). Also contributing is James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere.

Maybe the most intriguing contributor, however, is Matthew Simmons. Simmons is an investment banker, a Republican, and was supposedly a member of Veep from the Deep Cheney's 2001 energy task force. Simmons knows the energy business, and though he's on the other side of the political spectrum from many of the contributors to the film (I get the feeling that Heinberg is pretty much a socialist, for example), he is in complete agreement with all of them as to the imminence of peak oil and the coming of a severe energy crisis within the next ten years. There's a Powerpoint presentation (pdf format) on his web site which outlines his opinions on the subject.

In any case, I recommend The End of Suburbia as an excellent introduction to two issues important to me: curbing sprawl and peak oil.

Buy Nothing Day!

I hope y'all are rejecting the crush of Christmas-crap-crazed consumers today! Today is Adbusters official Buy Nothing Day. I'm still recovering from the Thanksgiving argument with my Bush-supporting sister. She thinks I must be nuts if I can't find a candidate I like among the wide choices of the war-mongering, free-trading, no-universal-health-caring, corporatist Yalie Skull & Boneser Bush and the war-mongering, free-trading, no-universal-health-caring, corporatist Yalie Skull & Boneser Kerry. She's known me all my life, but she values the opinions of Rush and Sean over mine. And no facts will deter her. She thinks my mind has been kidnapped by the evil Ann Arbor brainwashers or something. Something to give thanks for?

Happy Thanksgiving!

I wasn't dreaming of a white Thanksgiving, but I got one! My peace yard sign has taken quite a beating these past two years, but it still stands tall. My two solar panels are soaking up the rays so I can watch the Daily Show without using any fossil fuels. And my beautiful cat Ragu explores the frozen landscape cautiously.

International Standards

The lack of self-awareness on the the part of the Bushies--even the lame-duck Bushies, never ceases to amaze me:

"We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse," Powell said in a statement read to reporters.

--NY Times

Of course, Colin was talking about the Ukraine, not the U.S.:

The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.

The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.

"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

--International Herald Tribune

The Bush administration pretending to support democracy is SUCH a sick joke. They are the single biggest threat to democracy on the face of the earth right now.

CIA knew of coup plot against Chavez

From Newsday:

The U.S. government knew of an imminent plot to oust Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, in the weeks prior to a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week after the putsch.

Yet the United States, which depends on Venezuela for nearly one-sixth of its oil, never warned the Chávez government, Venezuelan officials said.

The Bush administration has denied it was involved in the coup or knew one was being planned. At a White House briefing on April 17, 2002, just days after the 47-hour coup, a senior administration official who did not want to be named said, "The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow - or to get Chávez out of power."

Yet based on the newly released CIA briefs, an analyst said yesterday that did not appear to be the case.

Imagine that--the Bushies lying.

What they said!

Probably like most people, I find that the opinions that I like the best are the ones that most accurately reflect my own. Here's an excerpt from today's WSWS on the stolen election of 2004:

To prove charges of a stolen election in 2004, however, requires more than combining references to 2000 with allegations of undetectable computer manipulation or vote-tampering. There must be a serious and independent investigation of the entire vote. The WSWS will report on whatever findings emerge from ongoing efforts in that direction. But to this point, we find the claims that the election has been stolen unpersuasive. At best, a case can be made that Bush actually lost Ohio—the vote tally there will not be even be finalized until December 6—leaving him an Electoral College loser but a winner of the popular vote, with a majority of over three million. Under those conditions, to declare that John Kerry should rightfully be installed in the White House would be a political travesty.

In our view, those who seek to center their political assessment of the 2004 elections on charges of fraud are clutching at straws. We have no reason to question the sincerity of their opposition to the Bush administration. But they are shying away from the bitter truth: a majority of those Americans who voted in the November 2 election cast ballots for George W. Bush. This included tens of millions of working people. The task of opponents of Bush’s policies of imperialist war and reaction is to conduct a serious political autopsy of this event, which represents, above all, a colossal political failure of the Democratic Party.
...
Bush won reelection, not because of a charismatic personality or mass support for his party and program, but because the so-called opposition party essentially defaulted. The Democratic Party campaign offered nothing that would rouse the masses of working people against the Bush administration. Kerry, married to a billionaire heiress, declared himself a capitalist and boasted of his opposition to wealth redistribution. His “jobs” program consisted of a few tax breaks to American corporations, and even this was to be subordinated to the preeminent Democratic Party demand: balancing the federal budget.

On the most critical issue in the election campaign, Kerry backed the continued US occupation of Iraq and criticized Bush more from the right—not sending enough troops, backing off from the initial assault on Fallujah last April—than from the left. Far from waging an intransigent struggle against a bankrupt and criminal administration, Kerry even banned most criticism of Bush at the Democratic National Convention which formally nominated him.
...
In the course of December 2003 and January 2004, the Democratic Party establishment, backed by the media, moved swiftly to derail the Dean campaign and shift the nomination to Kerry, viewed as the safest alternative among the candidates then trailing Dean in the polls. After Kerry’s victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, he became the frontrunner. From that point on, he dropped any flirtation with an antiwar posture—briefly adopted to combat Dean—and reverted to the position he had taken in the runup to the invasion, in which he backed the Bush administration’s drive to war while calling for more efforts to win international support. In other words, Kerry supported the crime, but sought additional accomplices to ensure success.

Those who focus exclusively on the events of November 2 lose sight of the far more important political fact: the presidential election was manipulated by the US ruling elite, not merely on Election Day, but throughout the whole period leading up to it.

Kerry was installed as the Democratic nominee for one principal purpose: to insure that the legitimacy of the Iraq war would not become an issue in the presidential election. This proved largely successful. Kerry tried his best to avoid any discussion of the war, only turning to the question in mid-September, when the Democratic campaign faced a collapse in the polls which would have utterly discredited both the party and the entire electoral process.

The Democratic and Republican parties are not merely collections of like-minded individuals or associations of politicians seeking public office. They are, in a real, practical and not merely rhetorical sense, institutions which serve as instruments of the American ruling class. This class, which comprises less than one percent of the American population, exercises an effective political monopoly.

For some of my previous rants along these lines, look here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

China and Cuba sign trade deals

Dena sent me the AP story about the meeting yesterday between Chinese President Hu Jintao and Fidel Castro in Havana, where they agreed to a big Chinese investment deal in Cuba's nickel industry, and made other trade deals as well. Surprisingly, I could only find the AP story on the Miami Herald web site; the story was also covered by the BBC, AFP, and UPI. Hu also visited Argentina, Brazil and Chile on his swing through Latin America.

While the U.S. media apparently thinks this is a non-story, I'd guess that some of the Bushies are practically apoplectic over this. Like the previous seven administrations (and like a Kerry administration would have), they have been doing everything possible to undermine Castro and maintain U.S. economic hegemony over Latin America. Now, along comes the number one economic rival to the U.S.--the country that could send ours into a deep depression overnight, our chief opponent in the battle for control of the world's remaining mineral resources--and gives Castro a big lease on life while courting other Latin American countries. I would guess that a subtext for China is that further attempts by the US to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela and turn that country into our own private fuel pump will be met by complete strangulation of the US economy.

PS: I'm reminded of the great "Hu's on first?" joke from a couple of years ago.

President George W. Bush: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?

National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: Sir, I have the report here
about the new leader of China.

Bush: Great. Lay it on me.

Rice: Hu is the new leader of China.

Bush: That's what I want to know.

Rice: That's what I'm telling you.

Bush: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China ?

Rice: Yes.

It goes on!

Economic Armageddon

From the Boston Herald:

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.

But you should hear what he's saying in private.

Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity.

His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic "armageddon."

Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, "it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public."

Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon."

The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

In a nutshell, Roach's argument is that America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants.

The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded.

Less a case of "Armageddon," maybe, than of a "Perfect Storm."

(rest of article)

The dollar hit a new low against the euro overnight. Here's how many euros your buck has been worth for this decade so far:


The chart below shows that over the last six months, while the Dow Jones industrial average (red) has risen some 5%, the dollar has fallen about 8% against the euro. This means that the Dow has actually declined for European investors (and probably for Asian investors as well)--they would have been better off sticking their euros under their mattresses than investing them in the U.S. stock market. But a huge part of the rise of US financial markets since 1993 has come from foreign investment. It seems logical to assume that we're very close to a global run on the bank--the bank being all securities valued in dollars. If you could get 3/4 of a euro for your dollar today, but probably only 1/2 of a euro for it next month, wouldn't you want to make the deal now?



The U.S. economy may the largest house of cards in history, and the wind is picking up just as our "government" is busy removing cards from the foundation. I doubt if there's any way to stop the house from collapsing. We can, however, do our best to survive and see that a much better house gets built in its place.

Buy a human-blood-powered Excursion and we'll make a donation to the Sierra Club!

Okay, I haven't seen an offer quite that bad. But there are plenty of cases out there where progressive organizations are making deals with the corporations which make progressive organizations necessary. Yesterday, I posted a brief rant on this subject at Cyndy's Homeland Absurdity web site, hoping to get a discussion going. I did, sort of. Cyndy replied with a comment, to which I replied with two! That's it, so far. Please go visit and add your 0.0152 euros worth to the discussion!

(Cutting) Taxation without Representation

Readers of this blog who have Republican representatives in the House already know that they have been effectively disenfranchised from the American lawmaking process. Those who, like me, have Democratic representatives, realize that on highly partisan issues they also have lost their say. But WIIIAI points out that we learned this week that we have had our franchise stolen even on issues that don't follow party lines:

[T]his week Hastert killed the intelligence bill (whose worth I’m still agnostic on, by the way), refusing to allow a vote on it because although it would have passed with the support of D’s & R’s, it did not have a majority of Republicans. Commanding the support of a majority of Congress is no longer enough, for Hastert. The corollary of this is that Democratic lawmakers can just stay home, their opinions no longer count. This is a new reading of the constitution, a small but significant revolution.

Did somebody try to Wellstone Bush Senior?

My brother is very suspicious about the fatal crash of a private jet as it was landing in Houston to pick up Poppy and fly him to Ecuador.

I can't find, in a few minutes of googling, any good conspiracy theories out there--yet. I went to twa800.com to see if they had anything--all I found out was that Nelson DeMille has a new novel based on TWA 800.

E-mail scams--Not just for Nigerians anymore!

From my inbox:

Dear Friend,
Naturally, this letter will come to you as a surprise since we have not met, permit me however to introduce myself to you, I am Mrs.Analiza Thomas-Baker,the wife of Late Mr.Thomas Baker(a British Citizen),who died in the Train Bomb blast in Madrid in March this year.I have just recovered from my injuries and presently in my family house in Madrid.We were living in Puerto-Banus,Marbella-Spain before his death.We both travelled to Madrid to see my parents and it was on our way back that he met his death.

All i just want to diclose to you is that before his untimely death,he had a deposit of €U6.3(Six Million,Three Hundred Thousand Euros)with the Marbella Security Company Ltd with me as the next of kin.I have all the deposit documents in our home in Marbella and i have handed them over to our lawyer.All i want you to do is to assist me in making claims of this fund by contacting our family lawyer and the legal department of Marbella Security on my behalf and acting as a foreign business partner to my family or to me.

Gotta admit, the fortune being in euros makes it more tempting right now!

Daily Peak Oil Rant

Today's topic is relocalization, and comes from the Post Carbon Institute:

Without unprecedented preparation and cooperation, however, oil and natural gas depletion will precipitate massive disruptions to essential systems such as food, energy, transportation, security and health care, and almost certainly, a major decrease in the earth's carrying capacity. If mainstream awareness of energy peak occurs during a crisis, we will find ourselves well along the amoral path of endless war for control of dwindling resources, black hydrogen fueled by coal and a reemerging nuclear industry, further restrictions on citizen and human rights, and increasing concentration of wealth through globalization and the money system. During a period of draconian governance in the midst of a permanent energy crisis, all of the gains garnered by environmental and social justice groups in the past 50 years are subject to roll back at best. At worst, recent history is full of examples of what happens when humans with powerful weapons get desperate – they reach for demagogues, Fascism and war.

Though no panacea exists for dealing with the peaking of energy supply, clearly Global Relocalization is a building block; other important parts of the foundation are peace, equitable distribution of a portion of Earth’s bounty, and social justice. Relocalization is the process by which communities localize their economies and essential systems, such as food and energy production, water, money, culture, governance, media, and ownership. This process will require that we rebuild our cities to severely reduce transport needs and support localization of essential systems - ecological city design provides as framework for this transformation. To effectively address energy scarcity and curtail biosphere destruction, relocalization must occur globally and with some degree of integration. Essentially human civilization needs to prepare itself to do less materially with much less energy and fewer natural resources, with the ultimate goal living within what is left of a reasonable carrying capacity, however reduced that may be. Any other approach can be considered a form of assisted suicide – with nature doing the assisting.

The whole article is here.

A company more evil than Halliburton or Enron

Monsanto. The worst of the worst. Their genetically-modified takeover of world agriculture is maybe the biggest, and certainly the most underreported, crime of the past decade. Mike sends me this link which describes how Monsanto is managing to wring profits out of poor South American farmers.

Behind many big promises of "technology transfer" and "feeding the world" lies a brutal truth: biotechnology corporations like Monsanto only care about profits. They are not offering genetically modified (GM) seeds to the South out of charity. They want to take over seed markets and squeeze farmers for as much as they can get - which, even in poor countries, can be a lot. The formula seems to be this: focus on the major cash crops (cotton, soybeans, maize, etc), find an entry point, contaminate the seed supply and then step in to take control. Argentina, the first country outside of North America to start planting GM crops, is a case in point. But the same pattern is being reproduced around the world, as with GM cotton in India and West Africa. The story of what has happened in Argentina should serve as a stark warning of what occurs when GM agriculture takes root.

More...

Iran is not a nuclear threat! Or a nukular one, either!

Mike forwards me this letter to the editors from Jude Wanniski:

Memo To: Editors and reporters
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Please get off your behinds

Now that most of you have apologized for sitting on your duffs while the neo-cons planned and executed the totally unnecessary war against a toothless regime in Baghdad, I suggest you get off your duffs in regard to the neo-con plot to war against Iran. I've been posting memos here for months pointing out that Iran has not done anything to warrant the propaganda directed at it from the Perle Cabal, i.e., Richard Perle's network that is laced through both political parties, Congress and the White House. Iran is in full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has a hundred times publicly pledged to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect any gol-durned site inside its borders if someone has reason to believe it has a secret nuclear program underway. Iranian exile groups pop up from time to time with press conferences about some diabolical site they have discovered, but Iran ALWAYS allows the inspectors to go in, and they find nothing.

The rest of the letter is here.

Wal-Mart workers in China can have a union

From AP.

The unionization drive was the latest attempt by the union -- the sole body permitted to organize workers in China -- to penetrate the most dynamic sector of the economy, shore up its declining membership, and boost its lowly political status.

Branches of the Chinese union are usually toothless management-controlled bodies that work mostly to prevent conflict.

Wal-Mart, which operates 39 stores in China employing 20,000 people, didn't say what specifically prompted its announcement. But it did note recent media coverage about the company's relationship with the union and said the statement was intended to "clarify that relationship."

"Wal-Mart is currently in full compliance with China's Trade Union Law, which states that establishing a union is a voluntary action of the associates," the statement said.

Wal-Mart has no unionized stores, although workers at a Wal-Mart in Canada recently had their union accredited by the local labor board. Wal-Mart was expected to fight that ruling.

The retailer has more than 4,300 outlets in nine countries employing more than 1.3 million people.

So the "communists" have more rights than American workers! Still, the concept of 39 Wal-Marts in China terrifies me. Who the Cheney is making the crap they sell there? American sweatshop workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart because the crap is made by Chinese sweatshop workers. I'd have to guess that Wal-Mart is a "high-end" department store in China for the new capitalist class. They're probably buying the same crap that the working poor buy here.

Another New Low for the Dollar Against the Euro

"$1.3090 against the dollar, a new record high for the European currency"

Also, oil is pushing $50 a barrel again.

Leave Latin America Alone!

Ever since Latin America threw off European colonialism, the U.S. has been trying to recolonize it. For much of the post-World War II era, stopping "communism" was the excuse for intervention. Now, it's "terrorism," something the U.S. has perpetrated in Latin America far more than Latin America (or al Qaeda for that matter) has ever perpetrated here.

From the WSWS:

Washington’s attempt to promote a global “war on terrorism” as the new rationale for its domination of Latin America ran into trouble last week at the meeting of the Defense Ministers of the Americas held in Quito, Ecuador.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld failed to impose an accord that would have turned the Inter-American Defense Board into the hemisphere-wide coordinator of a US-led counterterrorism crusade.

Rumsfeld’s plan called for the creation of multi-national forces capable of intervening anywhere in the region. It envisaged the reinvigoration of many of the relations and policies that gave rise to brutal military dictatorships throughout most of Latin America from the 1960s until the 1980s.

more...

From Corky Trinidad.

From Steve Benson.

Who shot JFK? It could be you!

A new video game puts you on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Repository and lets you take shots at JFK, Jackie, or anyone in the limo. From Slate:

On the surface, the game certainly seems like a loathsome piece of opportunism. The designers, though, claim the game's intent is to educate. The stated goal of JFK Reloaded is to debunk assassination conspiracy theories by buttressing the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and fired only three bullets. So, the game places you in the precise place where Oswald stood—the sixth-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository—and challenges you to re-create his three shots. One shot missed the car entirely; another hit JFK in the neck; and a third hit the president's head, causing what the commission called "a massive and fatal wound." The closer you get to matching those three trajectories, the closer you get to a perfect score of 1,000. (The game designers are also offering a cash prize to the player who gets the highest score.) You can replay the scene as many times as you'd like.

Apparently, however, you can't move around and take a few shots from the grassy knoll. Nor will it give you, as Oswald, a chance to tell your story before you get wasted by Jack Ruby. I wonder if the makers of the game are working on a flight simulator which shows how you can crash a 757 into the Pentagon and make it completely disappear?

Daily Peak Oil Rant

Another web site dealing with peak oil and the aftermath: The Post Carbon Institute.

The Cameraman Speaks

Kevin Sites, the NBC cameraman who filmed the Marine shooting the wounded POW last week, has become an object of intense hatred for the chickenhawk warbloggers of the right. He tells his own story to the Marines.

Who knows where link chasing might lead?

For example, link chasing led me to write this story:

Imagine a college Republican who was too busy campaigning for Bush last month, and has been too busy drinking this month, to finish his term paper for that required humanities class. (Humanities for Republicans--makes your head hurt, doesn't it?) The paper is due tomorrow, so he gets on the web and goes to ExampleEssays.com. Wanting to rub the election results in on that liberal prof, he decides to choose an anti-abortion essay to steal. Of course, ExampleEssays.com "discourages" this practice: "Turning in a paper from our web site as your own is plagerism and is illegal!" (Spelling error in the original.) Also, of course, Young Repug doesn't even know that there is an "Acceptable Use Policy," and he cares even less. So he copies this essay on forced abortions in China. Now, unlike Young Repug, I (Bob) haven't paid the $74.95 for a 180-day membership at ExampleEssays.com, so I can't read the entire essay (or any of the other 101,000 term papers, essays and book reports at ExampleEssays.com). But the sample paragraph indicates that it has enough grammatical and punctuation errors in it to convince most profs that an inebriated young right-winger might have actually written it. (I would have guessed that these errors were entirely intentional if not for the fact that ExampleEssays.com couldn't properly spell "plagiarism" in their Acceptable Use Policy.)

Okay, so far there's no real dilemma for Young Repug. Just as with his hero, George W. Bush, money gets him out of every mess he gets himself into, and it will get him out of this one. He prints the essay out and turns it in. The dilemma occurs the next week when the paper is returned. He gets a B-, and is mad at the professor's liberal bias for not giving him a good return on his investment in ExampleEssays.com. (The prof actually marked the paper down for poor punctuation and grammar, not content, but Young Repug will never believe that.) But then YR sees something at the bottom of the paper which makes his heart skip a beat--the prof has written "See me after class" at the bottom of the paper!

Fearful that his plagerism playjerizm copying of the paper has been caught, he frets through the remainder of the hour. But when he talks to the prof after class, he finds out that not only does she not suspect plagiarism, but she actually AGREES with what the essay says!

"You know, Palmer," she says to him, "I fully support a woman's right to choose. But forced abortion is clearly the exact opposite of that right! I mean, I saw the buttons you were wearing last month, so I suspect that you and I disagree on Roe v. Wade."

Palmer has no idea what she is talking about--"Rovywaid?"--but he does his best to put on what he thinks is his intelligent smile.

The prof continues, "Still, I think you are quite right that the Chinese government should find some other way to deal with the population problem there." YR is thinking to himself "I said what now?"

"Now I'd guess, Palmer," the prof continues, "that you weren't totally pleased with your grade on this essay. The lower grade was based entirely on your numerous spelling and punctuation errors--I thought that both your choice of topic and how you addressed it were first rate. I'd like to give you a chance to raise your grade. If you write me a decent two-page essay on some of the ways that pressure could be brought on the Chinese government to change this policy of forced abortions, and hand it in by next week, I'll change your grade on this paper to an A-. Be sure to run it through spell-check this time--you do have a computer don't you?"

Palmer nearly chokes on this, but then he smiles. Of course he could have a two-page essay ready by next week--ExampleEssays.com to the rescue! But when he gets back to the frat house and searches ExampleEssays.com, he finds nothing about how to put pressure on China. "Kerry!" he swears (the word is now a common expletive across the political spectrum). He tries a few other term-paper cheat sites--no luck. In desperation, he googles "china economic pressure abortion" and comes up with this web site as the first entry. The first two paragraphs read:

China today is a human rights nightmare: every leading democracy activist is in jail or exile; thousands of Chinese are arrested every month for such "crimes" as criticizing the government or distributing Bibles; vast numbers are unjustly imprisoned in forced labor camps. Torture, forced abortion and other abuses are rampant.

The United States could use economic pressure to curb these atrocities. But influential American corporations oppose any policy that might interfere with their ability to do business with China's rulers.

Now Palmer kind of agrees that criticizing the government should be a crime, but he's totally freaked about people being jailed for distributing bibles! And that forced abortion thing, too. And, since crushing those whiny liberal Kerryistas, he's been looking for somebody new to be mad at. And China sounds good! So, empowered by his google success, he continues to google, and finds out that Wal-Mart is by far the leading importer of Chinese manufactured goods in America. Just as he is finishing his "Boycott Wal-Mart to Stop Forced Abortions" essay, of which he wrote a good half himself, his frat brother knocks on the door and says "Going to Wal-Mart to get beer. Wanna come?"

Palmer replies, "Why don't we go to K-Mart instead?"

Hey, it's a start!

So, you might ask, what links did I chase that inspired me to write THAT story? Well, I went to Cyndy's HomelandAbsurdity site, which has a post called Why You Can't Jam the Culture. If you believe everything that post says, you'll be quickly discouraged from taking any consumer actions like I've been recommending lately. Anyway, that article inspired Cyndy to write this satiric post, which inspired this comment: "Point out to our more conservative co-citizens who oppose abortion that they should boycott goods made in China -- a country where abortions are required -- which naturally requires a boycott of Evilco..oops, I mean WalMart."

As you can see, the story practically wrote itself after that (and no, I didn't copy it from ExampleEssays.com!).

By W's own definitions, Chavez is not a dictator

I got an e-mail from Mateo at the Venezuelan Information Office requesting that I send a letter to the editor of the Washington Post in response to Saturday's anti-Chavez editorial. (See my earlier post as well.) I haven't, yet, but what follows is part of what I told Mateo:

One thing we may be able to point out is what Bush said last week in a
press conference:

Q: What if the Iraqis come up with somebody who's not friendly to the United States, is not a democrat, but it's peaceful, is this something you can live with?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, first of all, if there's an election, the Iraqis will have come up with somebody who is duly-elected. In other words, democracy will have spoken. And that person is going to have to listen to the people, not to the whims of a dictator, not to their own desires -- personal desires. The great thing about democracy is you
actually go out and ask the people for a vote, as you might have noticed recently. And the people get to decide, and they get to decide the course of their future. And so it's a contradiction in terms to say a dictator gets elected. The person who gets elected is chosen by the people. And so I don't -- I'm not --

Q You can be elected and be a tyrant.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, you can be elected and then be a strong man, and then you get voted out, so long as you end up honoring democracy. But if you're true to democracy, you'll listen to the people, not to your own desires. If you're true to democracy, you'll do what the people want you to do. That's the difference between democracy and a tyrant.

Now, as usual, I don't fully agree with Bush--I think
democratically-elected dictators are very possible--Hitler being the prime example. I don't think Chavez is anything like Hitler--I think Bush is much worse than Chavez. From what I saw in Venezuela and have read, Chavez has done some things to solidify his position which were of questionable legality--manipulations of the legislature and supreme court and the like (so have most US presidents, to varying degrees). I
saw little evidence of any crackdowns on civil liberties, especially free speech. Most of the TV stations and newspapers attack Chavez relentlessly, and we witnessed huge opposition rallies in the streets.

I do think that all efforts by governments to use their power in order to extend or solidify it, as the Republicans did in redistricting Texas or in the recent rule change allowing DeLay to stay as majority leader, are wrong, and I think that this is the one valid complaint the opposition has with Chavez. But Bush's statement above basically invalidates any other complaints his administration may have with Chavez--he was elected, elected again, and triumphed in the recall referendum. By Bush's own terms, Chavez most definitely IS NOT a dictator. We should hold onto this particular passage by Bush to use the next time he or his administration accuses Chavez of being a dictator. (And the Bushies agreed with Jimmy Carter and the OAS that the recall result was legit.)

From Steve Breen.

From John Cole.

From Nick Anderson.

From Bruce Plante.

Rockin' the vote

From Brian Gable.

Presidential Yacht

Reuters: "The Senate voted 65-30 for the legislation late on Saturday that sets aside funds for a range of priorities including a presidential yacht..."

Rising Hegemon has a naming contest for the yacht. For some reason, I can't comment there, but here are my suggestions:

• Bringemon
• FUBAR
• Excess of Evil
• Your Kids' Money
  

Poncho Dubya

“Onlookers speculated that Mr Bush appeared particularly pleased with his because it is ideal for concealing his radio-controlled prompting device.” -- The London Times, via WIIIAI.

An Unarmy of Billions

Mike Gerber dreams about (Martin Luther King-style dreaming) a Compassion Industrial Complex: "Massive groups of people in the fullness of their vigor, sent off to foreign countries to do good deeds and help other people out."

Back at home, there'd be whole regions whose economies depended on the Compassion Industrial Complex, the influence and scope of which was growing all the time. 'I don't know what we'd do without the free-glasses-for-poor-people factory.' The CEOs of the do-goodingest companies would receive rock-star treatment in the business press, and their shareholders would be endlessly enriched. Innovation would be constant, and while sometimes expensive, always worth it. "We help the Unarmy help you."

There'd be families with generations of members, all serving proudly; soldiers coming home, decorated for acts of brave and conspicuous kindness overseas. 'I'm in the 101st Airborne Coat Delivery--'the Smilin' Kid,' that's our symbol. It's on all our copters. Don't believe the movies, it's nothing like that...Being in an unwar--you can't describe it. My sis drives an unarmored personnel carrier--it's fulla therapists and socialworkers."

There would be highly trained and exotically equipped strike forces, dropped in by paraglider perhaps, to provide marriage counseling or shovel walks for the elderly. 'How'd you do that so fast?' 'Well, ma'am, it's this shovel. It can achieve Mach 4.3. Took a billion dollars to develop, but I think you'll agree, it was worth it." Frogmen in rubber boats would tirelessly sweep the oceans free of choking trash, camoflauged so as not to alarm the fish.

Sort of like the Peace Corps on steroids, I guess, what the Peace Corps might have been if Kennedy's vision for it had been as large as his vision for the Apollo program, or if the expenditures on nuclear missiles and arming the Shah and trying to overthrow Castro and preparing to invade Vietnam hadn't been so much larger than those for the Peace Corps. The Spanish tutor that I hired this past summer, Shayna, is now with the Peace Corps in Togo (a small West-African nation). Not exactly the road to wealth and fame, I'm afraid. Here's an excerpt from her latest e-mail:

Thankfully training will be over in a few weeks... our swear in is December 9th at the Ambassador's house. We will all be glad because technical training (health information) and language training is wearing on everyone. The first girl from our stage left (ET) today... she had an eating disorder and apparently it was getting worse here. There are a few other people here who may or may not leave.. it's kind of like survivor, in a way. Who can take the insects, heat, lack of everything familiar, getting diarrhea and amoebas, getting harrassed by africans who taunt you because you are white, etc., the longest. And you certainly don't win any money... so far the US government has paid me a whopping $270 for my time here. But I do like it here.. I love the people (the ones who get to know you, not the ones who shout profanities) the food, and my village is great.

Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace proposal is along these lines, although it could probably benefit from some of Gerber's hyperbole to really fire people's imaginations.

Thanks to Jonathan Schwartz at A Tiny Revolution for linking to that Gerber post, and to a fine Bob Harris post as well.

For some reason, the words "arrogant prick" come to mind

AWol in Chile, that is. From CNN:

Upon arriving for an official dinner with world leaders gathered for the annual APEC summit on Saturday night, the president stopped after hearing commotion at the door of the Estacion Mapocho Cultural Center.

According to a videotape of the incident, Bush turned around and saw that one of his Secret Service agents was being forcefully restrained from entering by Chilean security guards.

The president dove into the crowd, where people were arguing and pushing one another, and pulled the agent through the door of center.

After the successful rescue, Bush turned around, cocked his head proudly at his maneuver and began to greet his hosts.

Then, today, the Secret Service (aka SS) insisted that all 230 guests invited to a dinner go through a metal detector. Showing more Andean spine than they did yesterday, the Chileans decided to call off the dinner rather than humiliate their guests. And imagine some foreign leader dragging an armed bodyguard past the SS at the White House, then smirking with pride. Hmmm. Maybe that's what Saddam did.

Malnutrition Nearly Double What It Was Before Invasion

From the Washington Post:

Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

This is what Cheney calls an "amazing success:" malnutrition nearly twice as bad as existed under Saddam and sanctions. (Via Under the Same Sun)

The credit squeeze is on

From the NY Times:

When Ed Schwebel was whittling down his mound of credit card debt at an interest rate of 9.2 percent, the MBNA Corporation had a happy and profitable customer. But this summer, when MBNA suddenly doubled the rate on his account, Mr. Schwebel joined the growing ranks of irate cardholders stunned by lenders' harsh tactics.

Mr. Schwebel, 58, a semiretired software engineer in Gilbert, Ariz., was not pleased that his minimum monthly payment jumped from $502 in June to $895 in July. But what really made him angry, he said, was the sense that he was being punished despite having held up his end of the bargain with MBNA.

"I paid the bills the minute the envelope hit the desk," said Mr. Schwebel, who had accumulated $69,000 in debt over five years before the rate increase. "All of a sudden in July, they swapped it to 18 percent. No warning. No reason. It was like I was blindsided."

Mr. Schwebel had stumbled into the new era of consumer credit, in which thousands of Americans are paying millions of dollars each month in fees that they did not expect and that strike them as unreasonable. Invoking clauses tucked into the fine print of their contract agreements, lenders are doubling or tripling interest rates with little warning or explanation.

This year, credit card companies are changing the terms of their accounts at a historically high rate, said Michael Heller, an industry consultant.

I'd guess that most of my readers are not suffering from acute cases of affluenza, running up huge amounts of credit card debt. But most of you probably know someone who is. If there is one step probably more important than any other that these people could take, both for their own sakes and for the sake of bringing down the evil corporations running (ruining) our lives, it would be to get out of debt ASAP.

I read recently in the book Limits to Growth: A 30 Year Update a quote that struck right to the heart of the matter. It went something like this: The billions of dollars in interest payments constantly being made are a pure gift from the poorer segments of society to the wealthiest. Interest always flows up the wealth ladder.

Iraqi Elections Set for January 30

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's Electoral Commission on Sunday set national elections for Jan. 30, and a spokesman said ballots would be cast nationwide, including in areas now wracked by violence.

Of course, we all know they'll actually hold "secret" elections on January 28, and declare Comical Allawi the winner. The situation in Iraq will change not at all from January 27.

Watch the Washington Post

Those bastards are trying to take over Venezuela again. Today's editorial, Watch Venezuela, could easily have been written by the looniest of the many loonies which make up a large part of the opposition to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (and it probably was). The Post berates the Bushies for not having paid enough attention to overthrowing Chavez in the past four years--probably because they were too busy overthrowing Saddam in the bloodiest and most incompetent way possible, to the relentless cheerleading of that same Washington Post.

Whatever problems there are with Chavez and his government, and there are many, the Bush administration has the least standing of anyone to complain, except for maybe the Post itself. They say that Chavez "survived" a recent recall referendum--he got 59% of the vote, compared to the meager 51% that Bush got against the totally hapless John Kerry. And listen to the Post's litany of complaints against Chavez, and see if they don't remind you of a smirky idiot from Texas who's always bragging about his man date:

In the past Mr. Chavez has been assailed by independent media who sympathize with his opposition; he has responded with a new media law that will allow his government to suspend the licenses of radio and television stations for content deemed "contrary to the security of the nation." A new penal code will outlaw most forms of public protest and designate some as terrorism. An expansion of the Supreme Court will allow the president to stack the only judicial body that has retained some independence. A campaign has been launched against civil society groups, beginning with the election monitoring group Sumate, whose organizers are threatened with charges of treason. Mr. Chavez is using Venezuela's oil revenue to fund antidemocratic or populist movements in nations such as Bolivia and to subsidize Mr. Castro's bankrupt regime.

"Independent media who sympathize with his opposition?" Almost all of the major media in Venezuela are OWNED by the opposition. Suspending licenses of radio and TV stations? Our government has been shutting down micro FM stations, and fining radio and TV stations for "indecency." And funding antidemocratic movements? That is pretty much a definition of US foreign policy for the past fifty years.

Venezuela and Cuba have their problems, to be sure. Two of the biggest are in Washington--the US government and the Washington Post.

Over 12 million hungry families in aWol's America

WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 12 million families last year, about the same as in 2002, either didn't have enough food or worried about being able to feed everyone, the government reported Friday.

In about one-third of these 12.6 million families, or about 3.9 million, at least one member experienced hunger because he or she couldn't afford enough food at some time during the last year, said the annual Agriculture Department report.

The other two-thirds of families avoided hunger by reducing the variety of foods they ate, participating in federal food assistance programs or getting supplies from community food banks and emergency kitchens, it said.

I wonder if an extra $20 a day per family would have made a difference. I think so, don't you? Because if you take $20 a day, multiply it by 12 million families, and multiply that by 611 days, you get $146,640,000,000, which is the approximate (monetary) cost to date for the 611 days of the Iraq war.

But our "leaders" thought it was more important to invade a country on bogus pretexts and kill hundreds of thousands of people (i.e. "liberate" them). And our "values" voters thought that was just fine.

Eliminate hunger in America--or eliminate Fallujah? Some values. Totally CHUBAR (Cheney'd up beyond all recognition).

Venezuelan Prosecutor Assassinated

From AP:

President Hugo Chavez's spokesman on Friday accused "terrorists" training in Florida of being behind the assassination of a top prosecutor who intended to try backers of Venezuela's 2002 coup.

Danilo Anderson was killed by two explosions that tore through his SUV as he was driving in the capital just before midnight Thursday. The killing shook this oil-rich South American nation and raised the specter of further violence.

Obviously, I'm in no position to evaluate who might have killed Anderson. But it is certainly reasonable to suspect that Jeb's thugs in Miami might be behind it. It probably isn't so reasonable to jump to the conclusion that they are behind it before any serious investigation. Maybe Chavez and Bush do have something in common. (Recall that the attack on Afghanistan started almost three years BEFORE the conclusion, and well over a year before the start, of an investigation into the facts of 9/11. Thousands of Afghans died in that ugly little war, even though no Afghans were directly involved in 9/11.)