Loss of seagrasses 'accelerating'

Loss of seagrasses 'accelerating'

Nearly 30% of global seagrass beds have been lost since records began, and the rate of loss is accelerating, according to a new study.

Marine biologist Professor Gary Kendrick, of the University of Western Australia in Perth, and colleagues report their findings this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The losses have been quite substantial," says Kendrick. "Every year we're losing about 110 square kilometres of seagrasses globally."

He and colleagues found that since 1980, 29% of seagrass has disappeared and the overall rate of loss has accelerated from 0.9% a year, before 1940, to 7% a year, since 1990.

In the largest study of its kind, Kendrick and colleagues analysed 215 studies of seagrass beds in shallow coastal waters from around the world.

They found seagrass is being lost from east and west North America, the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Europe, parts of East Asia, Southeast Asia, as well as tropical and temperate Australasia.
Nutrient culprit

Nutrients in sewage and run-off from agriculture and industry are the major cause of seagrass death, says Kendrick.

These nutrients trigger the growth of algae, plants and animals that grow above or on seagrass, and stop it from getting the sunlight it needs.

"In Western Australia, in Cockburn Sound, we've lost 80% of our seagrasses. Over 1200 hectares of seagrasses have been lost in the last four decades," says Kendrick.

"The loss of seagrass there can be tied directly to nutrient input in the form of nitrogen."
Lungs of the ocean

Kendrick says the rate of seagrass loss is comparable to the loss of tropical rainforest.

He says studies have found seagrass fixes as much carbon dioxide as tropical forests, and is also a crucial part of the ocean food chain.

About 75% of seagrass feeds bacteria, which are the bottom of the ocean food chain, says Kendrick: "They actually feed the whole food web."

He says the other 25% of seagrass is eaten directly by animals such as dugongs, green turtles, fish, snails and crustaceans, as well as birds like geese and swans.

Is Spain's high unemployment rate "partly because of spending" to promote green jobs

Is Spain's high unemployment rate "partly because of spending" to promote green jobs
SUMMARY: Despite George Will's history of misinformation on global warming, The Washington Post published a column by Will citing a widely disputed study that was "supported" by an oil-industry-funded think tank and rejected by the Spanish government to suggest that Spain's high unemployment rate is "partly because of spending" to promote green jobs.


Despite George Will's history of misinformation on global warming, The Washington Post published a column by Will on June 25 that cited a widely disputed study "supported" by an oil-industry-funded think tank and rejected by the Spanish government to suggest that Spain's high unemployment rate is "partly because of spending" to promote green jobs, and thus suggest the Obama administration should not pursue similar policies. This follows a pattern in which The Washington Post has allowed Will to repeatedly distort data in order to call into question the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming -- distortions that have elicited widespread criticism, including from Post colleague Gene Robinson, Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, and World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

In his column, Will wrote that Gabriel Calzada, "an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda." Will went on to describe Calzada's conclusions:

Calzada says Spain's torrential spending -- no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources -- on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies -- wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries.

However, Calzada's study has been widely disputed:

* In a May 20 letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman, Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, Spain's secretary of state for climate change, stated that "the Spanish Government would like to express its views." She wrote that Calzada's analysis used a "low reliable and non rigorous methodology" and that the data he used are "totally out of keeping with the current reality of the sector." She also wrote:

In Spain, according to the last data of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade the [renewable energy] sector employs 73.900 direct workers, while other report by ISTAS-CCOO (labour union institute of work, environment and health) estimates 89000 direct jobs plus 99681 indirect jobs, against de 52200 direct and indirect jobs to the Calzada's figures (unknown source). According to data of the Ministry of Industy, Tourism and Trade and of the wind power business association, the wind power employed 37730 people instead of the 15000 jobs considered in the Calzada's paper.

Obama Needs More Audacity

Obama Needs More Audacity
When it comes to domestic policy, there are two Barack Obamas.

On one side there's Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues - and ability to explain those issues in plain English - is a joy to behold.

But on the other side there's Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak.

Both Baracks were on display in the president's press conference earlier this week. First, Mr. Obama offered a crystal-clear explanation of the case for health care reform, and especially of the case for a public option competing with private insurers. "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they're offering a good deal," he asked, "then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical."

But when asked whether the public option was non-negotiable he waffled, declaring that there are no "lines in the sand." That evening, Rahm Emanuel met with Democratic senators and told them - well, it's not clear what he said. Initial reports had him declaring willingness to abandon the public option, but Senator Kent Conrad's staff later denied that. Still, the impression everyone got was of a White House all too eager to make concessions.

The big question here is whether health care is about to go the way of the stimulus bill.

At the beginning of this year, you may remember, Mr. Obama made an eloquent case for a strong economic stimulus - then delivered a proposal falling well short of what independent analysts (and, I suspect, his own economists) considered necessary. The goal, presumably, was to attract bipartisan support. But in the event, Mr. Obama was able to pick up only three Senate Republicans by making a plan that was already too weak even weaker.

At the time, some of us warned about what might happen: if unemployment surpassed the administration's optimistic projections, Republicans wouldn't accept the need for more stimulus. Instead, they'd declare the whole economic policy a failure. And that's exactly how it's playing out. With the unemployment rate now almost certain to pass 10 percent, there's an overwhelming economic case for more stimulus. But as a political matter it's going to be harder, not easier, to get that extra stimulus now than it would have been to get the plan right in the first place.

The point is that if you're making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none - but it isn't if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach.

Which brings us back to health care. It would be a crushing blow to progressive hopes if Mr. Obama doesn't succeed in getting some form of universal care through Congress. But even so, reform isn't worth having if you can only get it on terms so compromised that it's doomed to fail.

What will determine the success or failure of reform? Above all, the success of reform depends on successful cost control. We really, really don't want to get into a position a few years from now where premiums are rising rapidly, many Americans are priced out of the insurance market despite government subsidies, and the cost of health care subsidies is a growing strain on the budget.

And that's why the public plan is an important part of reform: it would help keep costs down through a combination of low overhead and bargaining power. That's not an abstract hypothesis, it's a conclusion based on solid experience. Currently, Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance companies, while federal health care programs other than Medicare (which isn't allowed to bargain over drug prices) pay much less for prescription drugs than non-federal buyers. There's every reason to believe that a public option could achieve similar savings.

Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified. Mr. Obama was right: if they really believed their own rhetoric about government waste and inefficiency, they wouldn't be so worried that the public option would put private insurers out of business. Behind the boilerplate about big government, rationing and all that lies the real concern: fear that the public plan would succeed.

So Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress have to hang tough - no more gratuitous giveaways in the attempt to sound reasonable. And reform advocates have to keep up the pressure to stay on track. Yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good; but so is the not-good-enough-to-work. Health reform has to be done right.
© 2009 The New York Times

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.

South Carolina Governor Sanford Compares Himself to King David

South Carolina Governor Sanford Compares Himself to King David
And the South Carolina governor started out by using an interesting comparison to respond to calls for his resignation. King David didn't back down after his own sex scandal, he told his colleagues, and neither will I.


Said Sanford:

I have been doing a lot of soul searching on that front. What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily, he fell in very very significant ways. But then picked up the pieces and built from there.

As King of Israel and Judea, David saw Bathsheba in the bath (he was walking on the roof at the time, goes the story) and immediately had to have her. After getting her pregnant, he tried to conceal it by ordering her husband Uriah to return from war and sleep with Bathsheba, so that the baby would be thought of as Uriah's.

But Uriah preferred to remain at war. So David gave an order that Uriah should be abandoned in battle, ensuring his death. Then he married Bathsheba.

When all this came out -- thanks to an intrepid reporter from the Bethlehem-based State, who was tipped to emails exchanged between David and Bathsheba, then staked out David at the Jerusalem airport -- David refused to resign as king of Judea. His presidential hopes also took a hit.

What Did You Sacrifice to Afford Health Care?

What Did You Sacrifice to Afford Health Care?
Sometimes, when you're up to your chin in alligators, it's hard to focus on the fact that there's a big, broad, alligator-free world waiting somewhere out there, beyond the edge of the swamp.

In this case, it's hard for most Americans to even imagine that nobody in the rest of the developed world lives this way. We've been living inside the restrictions and making the trade-offs required to hang onto our all-important health care coverage for so long that we don't even realize that we're cutting those deals, or what we're giving up, or how thoroughly those choices have come to dominate and limit our lives.

If you're an American under 40, you can't remember a time that the health care system didn't work this way -- or that keeping coverage wasn't a dominant factor in making your life choices. If you're older than that, the memory of another, happier era beyond the swamp is dim, and fading fast.

This was one of the things that struck me hardest when I arrived in Canada five years ago. The swamp-blindness was so dark and deep that it took a while to adjust to a world without alligators. It's almost impossible to describe to folks back home how different life is when health insurance simply doesn't factor at all into how you choose to live your life. There's almost no language for it. Rather than even attempt it, I sometimes just ask my American friends and relatives to open up their imaginations, and answer the question for themselves:

* How would your life be different if you never had to worry about getting, keeping, or affording health care again?
* What other choices might you have made?
* Where else would you be right now?
* How would it change your plans for the future?

I've seen people reduced to tears of rage and frustration by these questions. When you really stop and think about it -- pause for a few minutes to take it all in, past, present, and future -- it becomes clear that the full absurdity and the sheer enormity of the sacrifices we have to make for an almighty health care card are the greatest obstacle to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that most of us are burdened with today.

Polls say most Americans who have health care are satisfied with it. But nobody ever asks them if they're satisfied with what they've had to do to get it, keep it, or afford it.

What would you do differently? I watch my Canadian neighbors live their lives, and the world beyond the swamp comes into sharp and stunning focus.

My neighbors go to the doctor when they need to -- and often, when they don't. If they're just feeling funky for a day or two, they go. If the splinter is too big to handle with a needle, they go. Anything goes a little bit sideways -- they go.

By American standards, they're probably overusing the system. (My husband once asked an employee who was nursing a cough, "Have you seen a doctor about that?" The guy just looked at him, confused. Of course he'd seen a doctor. Up here, only an American would ask such a stupid question.)

But the upshot is that the small symptoms of really big things -- little lumps, creeping blood pressure, wounds that don't heal right, coughs that don't go away -- are caught and diagnosed early in a GP's office, instead of months or years down the road in a full-blown crisis at the ER, which is now the American way. And this is central to cost containment: getting emergent problems calmly headed off right away in a $30 office visit is a lot more cost-effective than having to deal with the full catastrophe later on in a $3,000 emergency-room drama scene. And it allows people to maintain their good health through the years, instead of delaying treatment until it's too late to recover it and permanent damage is done.

My neighbors heal, recover, and go on with their lives. The U.S. disability rate last year was 19.1 percent, and rising fast. In Canada, it's 14.3 percent -- and Statistics Canada believes that the only reason their stats are creeping up these days is that people who once hid their disabilities are now more willing to admit them.

That disability rate affects the country's economic competitiveness. Americans just don't have the time or money to spend on a proper recovery after a major event, or get the full course of treatment that a chronic condition requires to be truly well-managed. Fearing for our income or our jobs, we hurry back to work too soon. Our insurance doesn't cover necessary follow-up therapies, so things may not heal thoroughly or properly. We can't afford the drugs, so we cut the pills in half, or stop taking them entirely.

The result is that too many of us end up far more impaired than we need to be -- and may, in fact, never be quite right again. Deferred maintenance -- which is what this is -- takes a ferocious toll on the American workforce, which is now being forced to compete with workers around the world who get better care, make better recoveries, and are able to return to work at full strength.

My neighbors start small businesses. Americans routinely stay chained to jobs they hate because they can't afford to lose coverage. Canada has an exuberant entrepreneurial culture, fueled by favorable tax structures for small business and a preference for Main Streets over malls. Canadians may bet the house and the kids' college funds on a new venture; but they never think twice about whether or not they can afford to leave BigCo because they'll lose their insurance, or what will happen to the new business if they get hit by a delivery truck, or how they'll afford some kind of minimal coverage for their new employees. Unburdened by health care costs or concerns, their ventures are far more likely to thrive.

My neighbors go back to school. Low-cost government-subsidized universities combined with assured health care make it easy for people to make mid-course career adjustments, pursue their passions, and expand their horizons. The upshot is a better-educated, more capable workforce that's constantly improving its skills.

My neighbors quit jobs they hate. "Take this job and shove it" is a lot easier -- and sweeter -- when your boss isn't holding an almighty health care card over your head. Bosses know this, too, and working conditions are often better as a result.

My neighbors stay home with their kids. They can afford to do that, because they're not wholly dependent on whichever breadwinner can manage to find a job with a decent health care plan.

My neighbors invest. They've got stable household budgets that aren't being thrown off by surprise health events. Because Canada doesn't have a mortgage interest deduction, most Canadians reduce interest costs by taking out 10- or 15-year mortgages. The payments really squeeze the family budget for that decade -- but by their 40s a lot of them own their homes outright, something most Americans will never achieve. Home ownership, college savings and retirement funds are all big-money investments that you simply can't commit to if you're liable to be hit with five-figure medical bills at any moment.

My neighbors travel. Americans don't get vacation time; and when they do get it, they tend to stay in-country. A lot of Canadians take three weeks off in the winter to go somewhere fabulous and warm (understandable, given the climate). The sheer variety of these escapes boggles me yet: They fly off to build schools in Guatemala, or take holiday jobs in New Zealand, or learn French in Morocco. Even the guy who paints my house can afford to do this, because he's not spending half his annual income on health care premiums. That $15K-a-year savings will buy a whole lot of margaritas in Cancun.

The result is a population with broad global awareness, and extensive global ties -- a necessary thing for a country whose economy depends completely on trade. And it may be an important factor in keeping Canada progressive. According to Diana Kerry, who ran her brother John's overseas campaign in 2004, Americans who own passports vote Democratic three to one. So travel makes you liberal. Who knew?

My neighbors seldom go bankrupt. The Canadian bankruptcy rate has soared in the past year to 4.3 per thousand. In the U.S., it's 11.1 per thousand. The entire difference between these two figures is accounted for by the fact that 62 percent of all U.S. bankruptcies were driven at least in part by medical expenses.

But tidy numbers like this elide a harder reality: Bankruptcy doesn't just cost us financially. It also destroys the foundations of our social capital. When the house, the dreams, and the future are gone, very often the marriage is the next thing that goes, too. Bankruptcy travels in close company with domestic trouble, divorce, drug use, homelessness, and broken families. (After medical-bill refugees, the second most common people in bankruptcy courts are recently divorced women.) If, as conservatives like to remind us, the family is the basic unit of civilization, then our health care system is directly making its profits by pulling down our social foundations -- and ultimately undermining our ability to hold our civilization together.

My neighbors have never seen anyone die because they didn't have health care. With 22,000 Americans dying every year due to a lack of health insurance -- that's one every 24 minutes -- there aren't many of us who don't know someone who lost a loved one because they couldn't get the treatment they needed. (For me, it was my father.)

But when I share this factoid with Canadians, they invariably do a long double take. They lean back, squint, stare, and pause to reassess my credibility (if not my sanity). It's literally unbelievable. They can't even process it. I must be making it up, or at least exaggerating. It's just beyond the realm of imagining that a rich nation like America would let that kind of thing happen -- let alone let it happen sixty times a day, for years on end.

And yet, they know things are bad down here, because everybody who goes South buys travel insurance before they cross the border. Everybody has heard scary stories about people who got sick or hurt and ended up in an American ER with a five-figure bill to pay. It's just a stupid risk, and they're not willing to take it.

What would you have done differently if you'd never had to worry about health insurance? How would life be different now? How would it change your plans for the future?

Go ahead. Think about it. Let yourself get good and angry. The current system has robbed an entire generation of Americans of their full potential. It has made us serfs. It has narrowed our horizons. It has undermined our families and communities. It has deprived us of the chance to save, to own a home, to educate ourselves and our children, to see the world, to retire in comfort, and to live to a healthy and robust old age.

It has left us in this swamp, chin-deep in alligators. And the first step in getting back out is getting very clear in our own minds that there are other places where people don't live this way -- and then angry enough to lean on our leaders, and make it just as clear to them that we don't intend to live like this any more, either.
Your representatives need to hear from you. Today.

Because your future is still out there -- and the most important thing you need to get there is a health care plan nobody can ever take away.

Sara Robinson is a Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.
© 2009 Campaign for America's Future All rights reserved.

GOP Thinks $2 Billion F-22 Project Is Funded By Monopoly Money

Barney Frank: GOP Thinks $2 Billion F-22 Project Is Funded By Monopoly Money
Barney Frank at his deskLast week, over the objections of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Obama administration, the House Armed Services Committee restored funding for the basically useless F-22 fighter jet, in the process stripping funding for nuclear waste cleanup efforts. Last night, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) filed an amendment to restore the waste cleanup funds and eliminate the money for the F-22. The move came after months of Republicans issuing dire warnings about the consequences of suspending the F-22 program: Frank Gaffney, for example, declared it would lead to “diminished military capability, emboldening enemies, and alienating our friends.”

On a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund this afternoon, Frank pointed out Republicans’ hypocrisy in railing against the deficit while simultaneously funding a $2 billion air force jet that has never once flown a mission in Afghanistan or Iraq. Frank said so-called deficit hawks act as though the Pentagon is funded with “Monopoly money”:

I am of course struck that so many of my colleagues who are so worried about the deficit apparently think the Pentagon is funded with Monopoly money that somehow doesn’t count.

Frank also dismissed concerns that eliminating the F-22 will cost jobs:

These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.

Supreme Court Pulls Teeth From the Voting Rights Act

Supreme Court Pulls Teeth From the Voting Rights Act
Once an election is done, it is hard to undo.

That's true in Iran, and it's also true in the United States.

This is why it is important to get the rules by which elections are held right before elections are held.

For this reason, one of the essential components of the Voting Rights Act -- arguably its most powerful tool for combating discrimination and disenfranchisement -- has long been a requirement that officials get approval from the Department of Justice before they change the way in which elections are conducted.

Allow states, counties, municipalities or school districts in the 16 states that are wholly or partially with historic patterns of discrimination to opt out of the review, and they will be able to organize and hold elections that renew those patterns. That's why the requirement has been referred to by law professors as "one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement."

Foes of the Voting Rights Act have long focused on weakening Section 5 of the act, the provision that requires election officials in the states covered by the act to obtain federal permission before making changes to voting procedures, moving polling-place locations, requiring so-called "citizenship checks" and redrawing voting district lines. They rightly argued that to do so would remove the teeth from the measure that has long been disdained by southerners pining for the days before what former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott referred to as "all the laws of Washington" changed the way things were done in Dixie.

On Monday, the Supreme Court tarnished the crown jewel, giving state and local officials new flexibility to "opt out" of the requirement that they obtain permission when changing election rules. The court ruling does not invalidate the Voting Rights Act -- as some had feared -- but it does undermine it.

The court, with only one justice (Clarence Thomas) in partial dissent, said that the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 in Austin, Texas, can avoid the advance approval requirement.

The ruling is being interpreted as a signal all local jurisdictions in a Voting Rights Act state can at least apply for what is referred to as "a statutory bailout."

That was a reversal of a lower federal court that had preserved the Voting Rights Act as it was intended to operate.

That's a dangerous move, say civil rights supporters.

As Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who has watched the court's deliberations closely, says, "No one can deny the fact we've made progress. But that's not the question. That's not the issue. The issue is we need this tool to guard against the possibility of reverting back to our dark past."

Lewis is right. Invalidating the Voting Rights Act would be a shock to the body politic. But dismantling the measure tooth by tooth should still be recognized for what it is: a judicial assault on history, and on the future.

The Voting Rights Act is still on the books -- despite evidence from recent hearings that Chief Justice John Roberts and some of his conservative activist colleagues would like to do away with it. Voters can still sue under its provisions when they believe they are victims of discrimination. Unfortunately, notes Laughlin McDonald, who directs the ACLU's voting rights project, few plaintiffs will have the financial resources to pursue these complex cases.

So the high court has taken a big whack at the Voting Rights Act.

Now it falls to the Obama administration's Department of Justice -- which has sent good signals regarding its commitment to enforcing voting rights protections -- and the Congress to put the teeth back in the act.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, has warned that any attempt by the court to strike down the Voting Rights Act "would be conservative activism pure and simple."

The same goes for pulling the act apart tooth by tooth.

Glenn Beck Embarks On Another ACORN Smear-a-thon

Glenn Beck Embarks On Another ACORN Smear-a-thon, This Time With A Heavy Dose of Obama Conspiracy Theory

Glenn Beck must still be feeling the sting of his epic fail at Wednesday night’s ACORN party. Last night (6/19/09), he ramped up the attacks on the party-goer he had smeared the night before, declared ACORN a socialist organization working to destroy, then recreate the American economy, and baselessly suggested that President Obama is actively involved in the conspiracy. With video.

Beck began the discussion by once again attacking ACORN party-goer Heather Booth whose only crime was to speak politely to ambush-reporter Griff Jenkins after being waylaid outside the party.

“So who is this woman?” Beck asked, with sinister implications. He enlisted the services of Matthew Vadum who, like Beck seems to have a special axe to grind against ACORN. Once again, there was nobody to defend Booth nor any voice to counter the inflammatory rhetoric coming from Beck and Vadum. Very fair and balanced - not!

Beck, with his customary exaggerated self-importance, went to a dry erase board with a diagram of a tree to “prove” that because Booth's husband had once been connected to the radical 60’s group SDS (and Bill Ayers, “Professor” Beck neatly threw in), that meant ACORN was “socialist nonsense” connected to violent revolution. For good measure, Beck threw in an attack on President Barack Obama: “Anybody who says, ‘Well, he just knows Bill Ayers; you know he was just a neighbor of Bill Ayers... He knows (his emphasis) all of these people.’” At the top of ACORN’s tree were, as Vadan put it, “the money men who shower ACORN with funds” such as George Soros, “the toxic mortgage king and queen, Herb and Marion Sandler,” Roseanne Barr, and Barbra Streisand.

“Remember... all socialist,” “Professor” Beck instructed. Then, turning to face the camera, he said pompously, “This is why this is important.” He sighed with exaggerated concern. And then moved in for the ultimate smear. “Barack Obama, we’ve never known who he is, right? He’s, he’s, he’s FDR, he’s JFK, he’s Lincoln. No, he’s not. No, he’s not. He’s a community organizer.” Beck’s voice rose melodramatically. “There are new acorns on the tree!” He started drawing. “My theory is that Barack Obama is building a country, almost software, it’s like the Matrix. It’s running on top of the software of the Constitution or the republic that we have. He’s got a new framework. There’s a new skeleton being built slowly but surely - and invisibly!”

“It’s a new, radical, left-wing political infrastructure,” Vadum added. “And so by creating these structures and funding them with tax dollars... you create a loyal army of followers. It’s also happens to be the Chicago way of graft and corruption.” He spoke condescendingly, perhaps hoping that if he acted self-important, maybe nobody would dare ask for any proof.

“Professor” Beck lectured again. “In the 1960’s, the idea was to create a structure... then collapse the economy of the United States, so that structure would be in place. 1960’s theory.” Mugging for the camera, he said sarcastically,”Sure that’s not what’s in anybody’s mind.”

“This is not some wild-eyed conspiracy theory,” Vadum added gravely.

Mind you, neither he nor Beck had offered a single fact to show that ACORN was socialist, revolutionary or in any way disreputable, much less show any connection between it and Obama or even Ms. Booth in 2009. But on a day when Beck’s sensitive widdle feewings were obviously still tender from the massive ego hit he took two nights before at the party, maybe smearing others with unproven conspiracy theories was his way of telling himself he's still a big man, after all.

via Newshounds

9 Conservative Myths About Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

9 Conservative Myths About Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism
By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media try to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did.

I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative mythmaking that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

I've actually had every one of the following myths pitched to me by on-air interviewers, phone-in callers and/or online commenters over the last two weeks. Most of them have come up over and over, which suggests to me that you're likely to encounter them, too. So let's walk 'em through:

1. These are just "lone wolf" psychos who are acting alone. You can't hold anybody else responsible for what crazy people decide to do.

True and false. But mostly false.

It's true that every one of the nine right-wing terrorists who've made the news since Jan. 20 had a history of mental illness, domestic violence, and/or drug abuse. Several were military veterans who were having a really hard time adjusting to civilian life. None of these people could reasonably be considered sane; and, for whatever twisted reasons, they made a personal choice to do what they did.

But it's not true that they were acting alone. People who are dealing with these kinds of demons are often drawn into movements that offer a strong narrative that helps them make sense of a world that never seems to add up right for them. They're usually drawn into organizations like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen that are nominally nonviolent, but which also indoctrinate them into a worldview that justifies and motivates people to commit terrorist acts. They come to believe that they must do this to save the world, to serve God and to be the heroes they desperately want to be.

They're already walking sticks of dynamite. But it takes the heat of that apocalyptic, dualistic, eliminationist, pro-violence narrative to light their fuses and make them explode.

Unfortunately, these groups also make it easy to take that final step over the line, because they often have close ties to other, more secretive groups that do advocate and plan terrorist violence as a solution. Operation Rescue teaches that killing abortion doctors is justifiable homicide, and then feeds its most extreme members into the Army of God.

The Aryan Nations and several other white nationalist groups supplied the nine members of The Order, a racist terrorist group that killed two people (including left-wing talker Alan Berg) and stole over $4 million during a nine-month spree in 1984. Al-Qaida got many of its recruits from the nominally nonviolent (but still radical) Hizb al-Tahrir. Of course, when violence actually occurs, these groups always denounce it -- but they also usually have a very good idea of who was involved, because they've been hanging around with the perpetrators for quite a while themselves.

One of the things the public is finally beginning to understand is that the "lone wolf" story has never been accurate, because these guys are never really alone in the world. Every one of them was well-marinated in large, long-established subcultures that put them up to terrorism and promised to make heroes out of them if they succeeded.

2. These terrorists are really left-wingers, not right-wingers. Because everybody knows that fascism is a phenomenon that only occurs on the left.

False does not even begin to cover the absurdity of this claim.

Fascism has always been a phenomenon of the right. Every postwar academic scholar of fascism -- Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, Umberto Eco and onward -- has been emphatically clear about this. Benito Mussolini admitted as much. It's part of the very definition of the word.

Jonah Goldberg has gotten a lot of traction on the right for his argument that fascism is somehow a left-wing tendency; but in his badly argued, barely researched tome Liberal Fascism, he gets here by taking logical leaps that no college professor would accept from the greenest freshman.

The worst, perhaps, is the way he conflates "fascism" with "totalitarianism." There is such a thing as left-wing totalitarianism: Stalinism and Maoism both qualify. But they were communist, not fascist, movements. It's only when totalitarianism happens on the right that we call it fascism.

Still, this idea has caught on like wildfire and is being widely promoted by right-wing talkers like Glenn Beck. If you want the full takedown on this, I refer you to Dave Neiwert's exhaustive series of debunking articles, which are linked to in the sidebar at Orcinus.

3. Public right-wing groups like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen don't advocate violence, so these acts have absolutely nothing to do with them.

As noted above: These groups may not engage in violence themselves, but they do provide the narrative and worldview that convinces people that terrorism is the only available means of getting what they want. As I wrote here, these narratives have a very specific structure that sets people up for terrorism:

Long before they turn dangerous, political and religious groups take their first step down that road by adopting a worldview that justifies eventual violent action. The particulars of the narrative vary, but the basic themes are always the same. First: Their story is apocalyptic, insisting that the end of the world as we've known it is near. Second: It divides the world into a Good-versus-Evil/Us-versus-Them dualism that encourages the group to interpret even small personal, social or political events as major battles in a Great Cosmic Struggle -- a habit of mind that leads the group to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. This struggle also encourages members to invest everyday events with huge existential meaning, and as a result sometimes overreact wildly to very mundane stuff.

Third: This split allows for a major retreat from consensus reality and the mainstream culture. The group rejects the idea that they share a common future with the rest of society, and curls up into its own insular worldview that's impervious to the outside culture's reasoning or facts. Fourth: Insiders feel like they're a persecuted, prophetic elite who are being opposed by wicked, tyrannical forces. Left to fester, this paranoia will eventually drive the group to make concrete preparations for self-defense -- and perhaps go on the offense against their perceived persecutors. Fifth: Communities following this logic will also advocate the elimination of their enemies by any means necessary in order to purify the world for their ideology.

Once people have accepted these ideas as truth, terrorist violence begins to seem like an unavoidable imperative -- and lone wolves, smelling blood, will start to hunt for targets.

More Then Most of Us Want to Know About IG Gerald Walpin

More Then Most of Us Want to Know About IG Gerald Walpin
President Obama’s decision to fire the Inspector General of the AmeriCorps Gerald Walpin is a snooze fest, but the Right seems to think this is the worse abuse of Presidential power since Watergate. They conveniently ignore the HUD scandals of the Reagan administration, Iran-Contra, Bush’s use of the US Department of Justice as a tool of the RNC for vote caging and conservative crony welfare. Proving once again that the new Republican party, like the old Republican party cannot get its priorities straight. First there was an objection to the way Walpin was terminated. President Obama straightened that out by suspending Walpin for thirty days with full pay. Time in which members of Congress like Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa who has shed more tears over poor Gerald then he has over the troops that died in Iraq for Bush’s lies.

As we all know the average rightwing skull is resistant to any reality that does not bend to the “alternate reality” spun by such rags as the Washington Times and Fox News. Walpin was removed after a unanimous request from the AmeriCorps board of directors where the co-chair is a Republican. Norm Eisen, the president’s ethics counsel reported “The Board’s action was precipitated by a May 20, 2009 Board meeting at which Mr. Walpin was confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions and exhibited other behavior that led the Board to question his capacity to serve.” Again, if Walpin or his supporters have evidence compelling enough to get a reversal of the Broad’s and the presidents opinion, they have time to do so. We also know that a Bush appointee Acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of California, Lawrence Brown “had filed a complaint about Mr. Walpin’s conduct with the oversight body for Inspectors General, including for failing to disclose exculpatory evidence.” – in regards to Walpin’s investigation into St Hope and some federal funds they received. Perhaps most starling about Walpin’s conduct of which little is mentioned is that he wrote two editorials ran by the SacBee in which Walpin played trial by media. He appointed himself judge and jury. He laid out what evidence he thought he had. IGs authority extends to investigating and reporting their findings to the DOJ and Congress, not to carry on what appeared to be a kind of vendetta against Mayor Kevin Johnson ( while Johnson is a Democrat, from what research I’ve done into his governing style and policy positions I can’t say I’m a big fan. Why he wanted to get into politics is beyond me – it doesn’t suit his personality). Anyway imagine a Democratic IG writing editorials about a Republican mayoral candidate just before an election. Creating a situation in which the Republican has no recourse to defend himself in the legal arena of a courtroom where he can face his accusers and charges with appropriate legal counsel. Walpin was not willing to had off his findings to the California branch of the DOJ for them to evaluate and proceed with criminal charges, Walpin decided to side step our legal system and hold his own little court. Walpin did all of this without even conducting a proper audit as claimed by a Republican US attorney,

In August 2008, Walpin referred the matter to the local U.S. attorney’s office, which said the watchdog’s conclusions seemed overstated and did not accurately reflect all the information gathered in the investigation.

“We also highlighted numerous questions and further investigation they needed to conduct, including the fact that they had not done an audit to establish how much AmeriCorps money was actually misspent,” Acting U.S. Attorney Lawrence Brown said in an April 29 letter to the federal counsel of inspectors general.

Walpin’s office made repeated public comments just before the Sacramento mayoral election, prompting the U.S. attorney’s office to inform the media that it did not intend to file any criminal charges.

In settling the case, the government agreed to lift its suspension of any future grants to the academy and Johnson agreed to immediately repay $73,000 in past grants. The academy was given 10 years to repay the remaining $350,000.

Brown said at the time of the settlement that prosecutors determined there was no fraud, but rather a culture of “sloppiness” in St. HOPE’s record-keeping.

Kevin Hiestand, chairman of the board of St. HOPE Academy, said in a statement it was “about time” Walpin was removed. “Mr. Walpin’s allegations were meritless and clearly motivated by matters beyond an honest assessment of our program,” he said.

Its also difficult not to connect the dots between Walpin’s past statements and his zealous fixation on Mayor Johnson and disrespect toward the President,

Romney also took heat yesterday when he did not swiftly disavow the remarks of Federalist Society member Gerald Walpin, who introduced Romney by praising him for fighting against what he called the ”modern-day KKK . . . the Kennedy-Kerry Klan.”

”Today, when most of the country thinks of who controls Massachusetts, I think the modern-day KKK comes to mind, the Kennedy-Kerry Klan,” Walpin, who sits on the society’s board of visitors, said to hearty laughter.

Thus far Walpin wants the Right, the media or anyone that will listen to ignore his sloppy gathering of evidence regarding St Hope – according to the US Attorney’s office lacked any evidence of maliciousness or corrupt intent. Walpin wants everyone to ignore his rabid Right behavior in describing two distinguished US senators, both decorated veterans. Walpin wants everyone to ignore that he thought it was just fine to phone in his work from home. Walpin wants everyone to ignore his erratic behavior, confirmed by a Republican board member. Walpin also wants everyone to believe he is being attacked because he was out to save the tax payers money – if that was his motivation why did someone with such an extensive legal resume do such an alarmingly careless job of fact finding and violating the legal guidelines of his job with his trial by media campaign.

Union Busting Ended My Love Affair with a Beer

Union Busting Ended My Love Affair with a Beer By Mike Elk
Over many years, I have developed an intimate relationship with the sweet, lager taste of Yuengling Black & Tan. After moving to the cutthroat world of Washington, D.C. politics, I found that Yuengling always comforted me with memories of my working class roots and the world of flannel hunting jackets, wedding receptions at union halls, 4th of July barbecues, and tailgate parties that represented my native Western Pennsylvania. I took pride in introducing my friends to this beauty of a beer—cheap, delicious, and made by union workers back home in Pennsylvania. Women had come and gone, dogs had died, but Yuengling had always been there for me - until now.

This past weekend when I discovered that Yuengling had illegally busted their union, I was emotionally devastated. I had just bought a case of Yuengling earlier that same day and had it sitting at home in the refrigerator waiting for me. What would I do? I was broke and couldn't possibly afford to buy another case of beer, but at the same time I couldn't possibly enjoy drinking a Yuengling knowing what they had done to their workers. So instead, I found myself at home, watching a baseball game on a Saturday night, and enjoying a nice, cold glass of milk as I struggled to deal with how Yuengling had betrayed not only its workers, but me.

Quickly I found my outrage shifting from beyond Yuengling to the lack of U.S. labor law protecting workers from such abusive, unfair practices. It turns out that the company had petitioned for a decertification election to kick the union out of the brewery when the contract of the union expired. Dick Yuengling, the owner of Yuengling Brewery, gathered all the workers and told them that "the writing was on the wall". He said that if they didn't vote to kick the union out, he would close the plant, and ship the work to a non-union facility in the South. The workers, scared of losing their job in a region with high unemployment, voted to ditch their union and save their jobs.


While threatening to close a plant if a union wins such an election is highly illegal, the Yuengling Company has been able to get away with due to the weakness of U.S. labor law. According to a study recently released by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University, employers threaten to close facilities in 57% of union elections if workers choose a union, despite the fact that this threat is carried out only 2% of the time. This is because under U.S. labor law the penalty for threatening to close plants or firing workers during a union election is that the boss merely has to post a piece of paper saying they broke the law.

As one longtime union organizer once put it to me "If the penalty for robbing a bank was you had to post a piece of paper saying you robbed a bank, we’d all be bank robbers!"

Under current U.S. Labor Law, employers can freely violate the law without serious penalty. As a result, workers are fired from their job in 34% of union elections and companies illegally threaten to close a facility in 57% of all union elections. In this economy, losing one's job is tantamount not just to losing more than just a job, but also to losing home to foreclosure and more gravely - one's health insurance. As a result of the ability of bosses to freely intimidate with such Gestapo-style tactics, 58% percent of workers indicate they would like to join a union, but only 8% of private sector employees are members of one out of the fear of what their bosses might do to them for trying to join a union.

The Employee Free Choice Act would give U.S. labor law real teeth - leveling heavy fines against employees who unlawfully intimidate or threaten workers. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to join unions free of intimidation a process of majority sign where workers merely would have to get 50% of their co-workers to sign a card to be part of a union.

Currently, The biggest obstacle to the passing the Employee Free Choice Act is quite ironically the very Senator who represents the workers at Yuengling Brewing - "Democrat" Arlen Specter. Quite ironically, Arlen Specter, who had in previous years voted for the Employee Free Choice Act, has fallen victim to the same type of corporate intimidation and flipped his position to being against the Employee Free Choice Act. Its time that Arlen Specter show solidarity with the 20,000 workers that are fired every year for attempting to join a union. Arlen Specter needs to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would protect the rights of workers to freely join unions that the overwhelming majority of his constituents favor especially the once unionized workers of a once dear friend - Yuengling.

A chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts

Stay the Course
The debate over economic policy has taken a predictable yet ominous turn: the crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts. For those who know their history, it's déjà vu all over again - literally.

For this is the third time in history that a major economy has found itself in a liquidity trap, a situation in which interest-rate cuts, the conventional way to perk up the economy, have reached their limit. When this happens, unconventional measures are the only way to fight recession.

Yet such unconventional measures make the conventionally minded uncomfortable, and they keep pushing for a return to normalcy. In previous liquidity-trap episodes, policy makers gave in to these pressures far too soon, plunging the economy back into crisis. And if the critics have their way, we'll do the same thing this time.

The first example of policy in a liquidity trap comes from the 1930s. The U.S. economy grew rapidly from 1933 to 1937, helped along by New Deal policies. America, however, remained well short of full employment.

Yet policy makers stopped worrying about depression and started worrying about inflation. The Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy, while F.D.R. tried to balance the federal budget. Sure enough, the economy slumped again, and full recovery had to wait for World War II.

The second example is Japan in the 1990s. After slumping early in the decade, Japan experienced a partial recovery, with the economy growing almost 3 percent in 1996. Policy makers responded by shifting their focus to the budget deficit, raising taxes and cutting spending. Japan proceeded to slide back into recession.

And here we go again.

On one side, the inflation worriers are harassing the Fed. The latest example: Arthur Laffer, he of the curve, warns that the Fed's policies will cause devastating inflation. He recommends, among other things, possibly raising banks' reserve requirements, which happens to be exactly what the Fed did in 1936 and 1937 - a move that none other than Milton Friedman condemned as helping to strangle economic recovery.

Meanwhile, there are demands from several directions that President Obama's fiscal stimulus plan be canceled.

Some, especially in Europe, argue that stimulus isn't needed, because the economy is already turning around.

Others claim that government borrowing is driving up interest rates, and that this will derail recovery.

And Republicans, providing a bit of comic relief, are saying that the stimulus has failed, because the enabling legislation was passed four months ago - wow, four whole months! - yet unemployment is still rising. This suggests an interesting comparison with the economic record of Ronald Reagan, whose 1981 tax cut was followed by no less than 16 months of rising unemployment.

O.K., time for some reality checks.

First of all, while stock markets have been celebrating the economy's "green shoots," the fact is that unemployment is very high and still rising. That is, we're not even experiencing the kind of growth that led to the big mistakes of 1937 and 1997. It's way too soon to declare victory.

What about the claim that the Fed is risking inflation? It isn't. Mr. Laffer seems panicked by a rapid rise in the monetary base, the sum of currency in circulation and the reserves of banks. But a rising monetary base isn't inflationary when you're in a liquidity trap. America's monetary base doubled between 1929 and 1939; prices fell 19 percent. Japan's monetary base rose 85 percent between 1997 and 2003; deflation continued apace.

Well then, what about all that government borrowing? All it's doing is offsetting a plunge in private borrowing - total borrowing is down, not up. Indeed, if the government weren't running a big deficit right now, the economy would probably be well on its way to a full-fledged depression.

Oh, and investors' growing confidence that we'll manage to avoid a full-fledged depression - not the pressure of government borrowing - explains the recent rise in long-term interest rates. These rates, by the way, are still low by historical standards. They're just not as low as they were at the peak of the panic, earlier this year.

To sum up: A few months ago the U.S. economy was in danger of falling into depression. Aggressive monetary policy and deficit spending have, for the time being, averted that danger. And suddenly critics are demanding that we call the whole thing off, and revert to business as usual.

Those demands should be ignored. It's much too soon to give up on policies that have, at most, pulled us a few inches back from the edge of the abyss.
© 2009 The New York Times

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics.

Bulldoze the Ghost 'Burbs, Return Them to Nature

Bulldoze the Ghost 'Burbs, Return Them to Nature
The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, Michigan, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 percent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM's founder – is a symbol of the city's decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint's decline began.

Regarded as a model city in the motor industry's boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that "big is good" and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: "The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing."

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn't downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

Flint's recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

The local authority has restored the city's attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again."

Today's Electronics, Tomorrow's Garbage Heap

Today's Electronics, Tomorrow's Garbage Heap
The pile of televisions waiting for recycling at the Eastern Sanitation Yard in Baltimore - many of them wrapped in wood paneling popular in decades past - is likely to get larger today when the nation completes its switch to digital TV.

[ Old televisions, computers and other electronics await recycling at the Eastern Sanitation Yard on Bowleys Lane in Baltimore. (Baltimore Sun photo by Kim Hairston / June 10, 2009) ] Old televisions, computers and other electronics await recycling at the Eastern Sanitation Yard on Bowleys Lane in Baltimore. (Baltimore Sun photo by Kim Hairston / June 10, 2009)
City officials hope so. The rate of electronic waste, or e-waste, is growing, but more than 80 percent of unwanted TVs and computers nationwide are still thrown into the trash, and watchdogs worry that more will end up there. Or that the e-waste, which contains a number of toxic materials, will not be recycled responsibly, a huge problem documented by activists and journalists.

Americans have been creating up to 50 million tons of e-waste in recent years as they upgrade their technology. Now that tens of millions of old TVs have little or no value, they, too, may get tossed.

Local officials aren't exactly sure how much more will come after the switch because all recycling is voluntary in Maryland, but they are ready, said Hilary Miller, Maryland's program manager for recycling and operations. "Many counties report that they have been seeing a lot of TVs coming in, but they don't anticipate being overwhelmed," she said.

Miller said most of the counties contract with in-state recyclers to dispose of their e-waste and officials have visited the facilities. But she acknowledged there isn't a permitting process or official inspection.

The only state law on the subject requires manufacturers selling electronics here to register and pay a $10,000 fee, which goes to counties as grants for recycling programs. Incomplete data for 2008 shows Maryland counties collected more than 7.4 million pounds of e-waste. More than 9 million pounds were collected in 2007.

Baltimore City contributed about a million pounds in 2008, more than double the amount in previous years, according to Tonya Simmons, recycling coordinator. It's hauled to Computer Donation Management Inc. in Southwest Baltimore, where electronics are broken down or refurbished. Some are given to charity.

"We have them pick up electronics three times a week now from the five city drop-off centers, and if we need them more, we make a phone call," she said. "Our goal is to keep this stuff out of the landfill."

That's a tough task, according to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, which says the nationwide rate of recycling was about 18 percent for the 27 million TVs and 206 million computers disposed of in 2007. And e-waste is the nation's fastest growing municipal waste stream. Consumers bought 500 million electronic items last year, according to industry data.

Barbara Kyle, the coalition's national coordinator, said recycling goes up when there are strong laws and outreach, such as in Minnesota, where manufacturers must collect the same weight they sell in a year. Also helping are take-back programs launched by at least a half dozen major producers.

Keeping e-waste from being exported to poor countries overseas is even harder because federal laws are weak and enforcement is lax, Kyle said. For individuals to ensure proper recycling, they would have to follow each load through the process. Investigators have done that and often found the worst case scenario: e-waste in the bare hands of poor adults and children, who rip apart and burn it for gold, copper and other valuables while exposing themselves and the ground to mercury, lead, flame retardants, cadmium and other toxic substances.

"It's a big problem, frankly," Kyle said. "Proper disposal means not exporting it."

Federal law does not ban exporting, and those in the industry say not all exporting is bad. And federal law does cover export of lead-filled cathode-ray tubes, or CRTs, found in TVs and computer monitors. The law requires exporters to get permission from the Environmental Protection Agency and the receiving country before shipping. But if the CRTs are going to be reused, the exporters need only notify the EPA. Even this isn't always done, according to an August report by the Government Accountability Office.

Kyle said there is a cost to proper recycling and consumers should be wary of for-profit and even nonprofit groups that take items for free. Baltimore City and surrounding counties, for example, pay 5 cents a pound to have e-waste recycled.

The coalition and the Basel Action Network keep a list of companies pledging responsible recycling, and there are plans for a certification program next year. Kyle is also pushing for products to be designed with recycling in mind.

That is something the industry is supporting, according to congressional testimony last year by Eric Harris, associate counsel for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. He said disassembling e-waste is difficult. But many in foreign countries clamor to recycle it, responsibly and otherwise, because pay is good for raw materials, particularly in Asia, where many electronics are made. The group said producers should recycle their own household e-waste, and work on better design.

Dell already is, according to Mark Newton, senior manager of environmental sustainability there. The company takes back its own brand from consumers through a mail and drop-off system that includes some Goodwill stores. It has a global network of recyclers that it polices.

The company also is working on better design, largely by reducing materials and parts. Newton said the company has also reduced packaging and its carbon footprint by buying energy from renewable sources. He said some of the efforts save money and some, like the take-back program, are costly. (Dell makes the program profitable by selling services such as data scrubbing to commercial customers.)

But ultimately, Newton said, the equipment has Dell's name on it, and the company is trying to "find every way to get this stuff back."

House GOP energy plan declares that impact of global warming ‘shall not be considered for any purpose.’

House GOP energy plan declares that impact of global warming ‘shall not be considered for any purpose.’

House Republicans today introduced their alternative energy plan. Developed by the Republican American Energy Solutions Group, the American Energy Act is billed as an “all of the above” energy program. But as The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson notes, the legislation looks more like an attempt to legislate the threat of global warming “out of existence.” Indeed, the bill specifically states that at no point in implementing their energy plan can the effects of global warming on the environment “be considered for any purpose”

WSJ column's falsehood: Bush admin did not make claims about jobs "saved or created"

WSJ column's falsehood: Bush admin did not make claims about jobs "saved or created"
Criticizing the Obama administration, a Wall Street Journal column included the false claim that the Bush administration never touted its initiatives in terms of how many jobs would be "saved or created." In fact, Bush's Agriculture Department did so repeatedly.



In a June 9 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, News Corp. vice president William McGurn, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote that Tony Fratto, a former Bush communications aide turned CNBC on-air contributor, "sees a double standard at play" regarding the Obama administration's statements about the number of jobs the economic stimulus program has "saved or created." McGurn wrote that Fratto told him: "We would never have used a formula like 'save or create.' ... To begin with, the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' And if we had tried to use something this flimsy, the press would never have let us get away with it." In fact, Bush's Department of Agriculture repeatedly stated that its economic initiatives had "saved or created" a specific number of jobs, or would in the future.

Fratto made a similar claim in a June 2 CNBC.com blog post titled, "The White House 'Jobs-Saved' Deception," writing: "If I -- or even my predecessors in the Clinton Administration -- had tried to pull off this ridiculous gimmick we would have been run out of town. I don't even believe it's possible to look back and accurately measure the 'job-saving' impact of Bush or Clinton Administration policies, let alone to measure in real time, or project into the future."

In fact, examples of the Bush administration touting initiatives in terms of jobs "saved or created" include:

* June 24, 2004, remarks by then-Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman (retrieved from Nexis, emphasis added):

Our Rural Development programs also help communities with infrastructure such as electricity, water and telecommunications and with economic development assistance. We have estimated that our rural development programs have saved or created more than 500,000 jobs just since the Bush Administration took office in January of 2001. Recently we have seen more positive numbers showing that the U.S. economy created nearly a quarter of a million jobs last month alone for a total of 1 million jobs created in the last three months and about 1.5 million jobs in the past nine months.

* A quotation from Mike Johanns -- who replaced Veneman as agriculture secretary -- in a March 24, 2005, Agriculture Department news release (emphasis added):

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced the selection of 26 loan and grant recipients in 14 states that will receive $9.2 million in rural business development funds.

"I applaud the local community leadership for their efforts to secure these investments, which are needed to create economic opportunities and improve the quality of life available in their community," said Johanns. "These funds are part of the Bush Administration's ongoing efforts to spur economic development in rural areas and will help save or create more than 1,800 jobs."

The grants and loans are awarded through USDA Rural Development to electric and telecommunications cooperative organizations, which in turn provide loans or grants to support local economic or community development efforts. These funds are also part of an important leveraging effort. The $9.2 million in USDA investments will be matched with $59.7 million in additional investments to support a variety of businesses and community ventures, including community facilities and infrastructure, improving access to local medical care and other projects that encourage a favorable climate for jobs and growth.

Bailing out the big US banks has done nothing to improve them

Bailing out the big US banks has done nothing to improve them
With all the talk of "green shoots" of economic recovery, America's banks are resisting efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil really is in the details - and the banks will muster what muscle they have left to ensure that they have ample room to continue as they have in the past.

The old system worked well for the banks so why should they embrace change? Indeed, the efforts to rescue them devoted such little thought to the kind of post-crisis financial system we want, that we will end up with a banking system that is less competitive, with the large banks that were "too big to fail" even larger.

It has long been recognised that the US banks that are too big to fail are also too big to be managed. That is one reason the performance of several has been so dismal. When they fail, the Government engineers a financial restructuring and provides deposit insurance, gaining a stake in their future. Officials know that if they wait too long, zombie or near-zombie banks - which have little or no net worth, but are treated as if they were viable institutions - are likely to "gamble on resurrection". If they take big bets and win, they walk away with the proceeds, if they fail, the Government picks up the tab.

This is not just theory; it is a lesson learned, at great expense, during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. In a financial restructuring, shareholders typically get wiped out, and bondholders become the new shareholders. Sometimes, the government must provide additional funds, or a new investor must be willing to take over the failed bank.

The Obama Administration has, however, introduced a new concept: "too big to be financially restructured". The Administration argues that all hell would break loose if we tried to play by the usual rules. Markets would panic. So, not only can't we touch the bondholders, we can't even touch the shareholders - even if most of the shares' existing value merely reflects a bet on a government bail-out.

This judgement is wrong. The Obama Administration has succumbed to political pressure and scare-mongering by the big banks and, as a result, has confused bailing out the bankers and their shareholders with bailing out the banks.

The Obama strategy's current and future costs are very high - and so far, it has not achieved its limited objective of restarting lending. The taxpayer has had to pony up billions, and has provided billions more in guarantees - bills that are likely to come due in the future.

Rewriting the rules of the market economy - in a way that has benefited those that have caused so much pain to the entire global economy - is worse than financially costly. Most Americans view it as grossly unjust, especially after they saw the banks divert the billions intended to enable them to revive lending, to payments of outsized bonuses and dividends.

This ersatz capitalism, where losses are socialised and profits privatised, is doomed to failure. Incentives are distorted. There is no market discipline. The too-big-to-be-restructured banks know that they can gamble with impunity - and, with the Federal Reserve making funds available at near-zero interest rates, there is ample money to do so.

Some have called this "socialism with American characteristics". But socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the US has provided little help for the millions of its people who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benefits, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most also lose their health insurance.

America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance, and now to cars, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of long-standing corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the Government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.

We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks; there is no evidence that these behemoths deliver societal benefits that are commensurate with the costs they have imposed.

This raises another problem with America's too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-be-restructured banks: they are too politically powerful. Their lobbying efforts worked well, first to deregulate, and then to have taxpayers pay for the clean-up. Their hope is that it will work again to keep them free to do as they please, regardless of the risks for taxpayers and the economy. We cannot afford to let that happen.
© 2009 The Age

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University. Among many books, he is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for research on the economics of information. Most recently, he is the co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.