Statespeak And The Cartobamic War

"We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."

--- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, in a French interview of Jan. 1998, acknowledging that "it was July 3, 1979 (6 months before the Russian intervention in Afghanistan) that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention..."

There is a terrible symmetry in the leveraging of Afghanistan's modern agony by a former Democratic administration in 1979 and---at this moment when the former cracker president is resurrecting his role as the conscience of the nation---the current quandary effectively created by the Elected One in his craven effort to wage the right (politically effective) war.

On the heels of some significant recent troubles for our allies---notably, the disastrous call by German officers for airstrikes in Kunduz and yesterday's slaughter of a half-dozen Italian soldiers in Kabul---Karzai's fraudulent election, and overall deterioration despite the personally gratuitous contributions of Prince Harry, Obama, facing requests for more troops, has to grunt or get off the crapper.

But having just abandoned the missile defense system, he is unlikely to offer his jugular to the Republicans or suggest some defect in his own campaign bravado, by winding down the AfPak horror. So he sits there with his pants down around his ankles, trying to pass off scatalogical procrastination as studious deliberation.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

Fighting al Qaida In Queens---And King

From CBS:

"...Congressman King was one of several senior lawmakers in Washington D.C. in a classified briefing with the FBI on Monday night, following an early morning raid on four apartment homes in Flushing.

"...A federal search warrant mentioning bomb-making components such as powder, gel, TNT, and nitroglycerin were among the items to be seized.

"In all, authorities said Monday night there were no arrests, and that they have not detected a specific plot or target."

Or any explosives. Who knows what got the FBI excited? But friends of liberty will be gratified to know of our congressman's support for such actions:

"'I would characterize this raid as preventative. There was no imminent action that they attempted to stop,' King said."

Preventative raids? No arrests? No specific plots or imminent actions?

Constitutional concerns, anyone? Maybe, even, from a president who called the inconsequential Cambridge police actions on a middle class front porch, "stupid?"

Thanks to D for this one.

http://wcbstv.com/local/fbi.raid.queens.2.1183160.html

Europe: Obama Weakening Climate Treaty

From the Guardian:

"Europe has clashed with the US Obama administration over climate change in a potentially damaging split that comes ahead of crucial political negotiations on a new global deal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

"...The treaty will be negotiated in December at a UN meeting in Copenhagen and is widely billed as the last chance to save the planet from a temperature rise of 2C or higher, which the EU considers dangerous.

"...Europe is unlikely to stand up to the US (which has)...yet to offer full details on how its scheme might work, though a draft 'implementing agreement' submitted to the UN by the Obama team in May contained a key clause that emissions reductions would be subject to 'conformity with domestic law'.

"...The US has not ratified a major international environment treaty since 1992 and President Clinton never submitted the Kyoto protocol for approval, after a unaminous Senate vote indicated it would be rejected on economic grounds..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/15/europe-us-copenhagen

-God Of Big Ag-

---disguised as a midwestern water tower

Responding To Conservancy's Alarm At Biofuel Sprawl

Articles reviewing the Nature Conservancy's new report on biofuel sprawl suggest a number of concerns, including the nature of the Nature Conservancy.

We should take special note of some of the Conservancy's positions apparent in these reviews:

1. As Kate Galbraith's remarks suggest in her August 26 NY Times piece, the Conservancy study limited itself to domestic land use concerns, ignoring vast, off-shored impacts;

2. The Conservancy entertains nuclear and coal plants---rationalizing their comparatively small landprints;

3. The Conservancy dismisses "maximal estimates" for solar installations;

4. The Conservancy endorses cap and trade---but what else would you expect from an organization the Chairman of the board of which was Hank Paulson, bush's secretary of the treasury and former Goldman CEO:

"...Steve McCormick, president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy highlighted the leadership of out-going Nature Conservancy Board Chairman Henry M. Paulson, who today was nominated by President Bush to be the next Secretary of the Treasury." (1)

In fact, the succeeding leadership of that organization did not survive a scandal raised by reports of its own elitest practices in loaning contributors' funds to its staff and arranging sweetheart land deals:

"Steven J. McCormick who has served as president of the Nature Conservancy since 2001, abruptly stepped down from his post today after a controversial tenure in which the organization came under fire for land transactions and its relationships with for-profit businesses.

"...Mr. McCormick earned $375,000 in 2006, according to the charity’s Internal Revenue Service filings.

"...The (Washington Post) said that in some cases the charity had purchased environmentally sensitive land, placed development restrictions on it, and resold it to trustees and supporters at a reduced cost. The purchasers then gave the conservancy cash donations that were about the same size as the discount they received — an approach that allowed them to take income-tax deductions for their charitable contributions, deductions they would not have received had they instead paid the assessed price for the properties.

"...Mr. McCormick himself repaid a $1.5-million loan he received from the organization to help him buy a house." (2)

The wealthy who play into the Conservancy's game of elitest real estate transactions include some interesting personalities, like Annie Proulx (author of Brokeback Mountain) and her Conservancy-acquired preserve of "640 acres with a mile of riverfront on the lazy North Platte. To get here you ascend from Laramie through the Snowy Mountains and the Medicine Bow National Forest. Then you're in grasslands." (3)

Of course, Ms. Proulx promptly domiciled herself in a big, new, modern, glassy edifice overlooking the water---preferable, we must imagine, to a proletarian village of mud huts.

We should expect contradictory and elitest positions from an organization keeping intimate company with financiers and industrialists. Here is its own account of major acquisitions in the Adirondacks:

"International Paper and The Nature Conservancy today announced a historic agreement...

"The Nature Conservancy will assure that a significant portion of these lands remain available for private commercial working forest ownership. These lands will be subject to conservation easements that restrict future development and allow for sustainable forestry practices, thereby supporting the continued health of the Adirondacks' forest-based economy. As part of this strategy, The Nature Conservancy may retain ownership to a portion of these lands.


"...International Paper continues its presence in the Adirondacks and the state of New York. With the recent realignment of our printing papers business, our Ticonderoga (N.Y.) Mill is taking on an expanded role which is important to that business. In fact, the Ticonderoga Mill is announcing a capital investment in one of its paper machines this afternoon." (4)


Long before the Conservancy's present alarm about biofuels sprawl, any idiot knew biofuel was an obscene concept captured by the vested interests of big ag. Even John McCain, in his mavericky days---before it dawned on him that he had to make nice with the politico-economic establishment in order to advance his personal ambitions---remarked on the folly in his 2003 Senate testimony:


"Ethanol is a product that would not exist if Congress didn’t create an artificial market for it. No one would be willing to buy it. Yet thanks to agricultural subsidies and ethanol producer subsidies, it is now a very big business -- tens of billions of dollars that have enriched a handful of corporate interests - primarily one big corporation, ADM.


"...ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase energy independence and nothing to improve air quality.

"As far as reducing fuel consumption, it requires 70% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it provides when combusted." (5)


But the Conservancy focuses on the phenomenon of sprawl, which threatens its special notion of environmentalism. Now i have no problem rescuing vulnerable acreage (including the Conservancy's stewardship of a parcel of hemlocks just outside my own village), but the larger issue here---aside from the Conservancy's elitest corruption---is how its special mission, shaped by and serving special interests, contradicts and splinters the general environmental cause---and why there is no cohesive movement. Sierra's romance with T. Boone is a comparable problem.

i think the shape of the environmental movement may be so amorphous and contradictory that the phrase is oxymoronic. Environmentalism cannot be splintered into a hundred different, compromised compartments, and it cannot be separated from politics, economics, education, foreign policy, and the phantoms of faith.

And conservation of energy---to which the Conservancy pays the usual lip service---appears a joke, considering the general lifestyles of the wealthy consumers who too often shape these organizations.

As one of the great feminists remarked a century ago regarding true reform, "an entire revolution in all existing institutions is inevitable." (6)

1.
http://www.nature.org/pressroom/press/press2464.html

2.
http://philanthropy.com/news/updates/3160/nature-conservancy-president-resigns

3.
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:QHDYLM8m8YAJ:articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/18/entertainment/et-proulx18+annie+proulx+nature+conservancy&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

4.
http://www.nature.org/pressroom/press/press131.html

5.
http://mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressOffice.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=faed0c9b-6d5c-46dd-acd2-3163891b6685&Region_id=&Issue_id=79a48974-2bd4-4888-be97-e8a445366a84

6.
http://books.google.com/books?id=5GF5vh6s13cC&pg=PR7&lpg=PR7&dq=stanton+woman%27s+bible+introduction&source=bl&ots=OdDRi1OrZs&sig=-0Cy0DwhnJ_NI0SoX_9RTKh18IY&hl=en&ei=KFOZSremMoGe8Qb7nPStBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=stanton%20woman%27s%20bible%20introduction&f=false

Afghan Horror Quote Of The Day

“I am telling all enemies of Afghanistan, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, to gather one day and use all power against the Afghan people and kill us in one go. That would be kind to all Afghans — they are killing us every day, which is painful — kill us in one go.”

---Niamatullah the schoolteacher, Kandahar, quoted in the NYTimes

Way to go with the hope, O.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/world/asia/27kandahar.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

-What Health Insurance?-

Refusing The Public Option

"...a system obviously unworthy of a country that purports to be developed."

---Favilla, on American health care, in Les Echos, trans. Leslie Thatcher, Truthout (1)

i read that in an article this morning, and it reminded me that everyone in the world---even the Swiss, who were so late to the table---knows our for-profit system of financing health care is immoral, exploitative, and/or untenable---with the possible exception of a large, gullible, manipulated segment of our own population. i say possible exception because it may yet be that these citizens willingly add this burden to their yoke as long as they believe they are better off than some deprived Other---in this case, as usual, the lazy poor and the swarthy illegals, neither of whom they deem deserving of care for which they won't or can't pay (their children are sometimes and begrudgingly excepted).

So much, then, for what passes as the national spirit of independence and competition with which the Frenchman tempers his indictment of our practice (along with emphasizing manipulation by predatory corporate interests).

But is the liberal point of view any more authentic?

On what experience or evidence is based the hope that a public option will emerge with any meaningful impact? The biggest danger in advocating for a PO is that we will get one that is designed to fail, reinforcing the case for private insurance. In other words, any reasonable advocacy has to specify the nature of the PO program---a difficult and telling prospect for "movements" that tend to organize around conceptual simplicity and reduce causes to slogans. Not that our elected officials note such things...

To grasp what an effective PO would likely entail, and what the current legislation offers, i refer to Hacker's analysis, a link to which is provided below.(2) Hacker is, of course, an academic, and readers need to distinguish when he is talking about the provisions of pending legislation vis-a-vis his own concept. The piece is about 16 pages long, plus annotation, and for those with not much time, i recommend skipping even the exec summary and going straight to the succinct chart on page 16.

The chart lists 6 key requirements for an effective PO and scores the 4 current legislative proposals. None of them meets Hacker's 6 requirements (assuming he's got this right) but the House Ways and Means E&L comes close at 5. Unfortunately, 5 entails a major shortfall in preventing the PO (and Medicare) from negotiating drug prices (shades of bushbama).

Comparatively, the Senate proposals are a disaster. So the first question is, why and how do you advocate for a PO that at any rate consists at present of 4 inadequate, contrary versions pending floor votes and conferencing, and that many of us deem a red herring in the first place? And second, what is the real agenda of organizations urging you to support an undefined program that may yet emerge in counter-productive form? Would they then urge a grass-roots movement against the PO? (We were for it before we were against it...)

Hacker concludes with this sober reminder:

"...the Senate Finance Committee appears unlikely to produce a bill that contains a true public plan...If, as expected, the Committee endorses federally promoted health cooperatives, they should be understood for what they are: an effort to kill the public plan and, with it, the prospect of an effective competitor to consolidated insurance companies that have too often failed to provide affordable health security."

Of course, advocating for SP avoids those problems and is morally and fiscally responsible. i won't repeat postings to that effect. The question for liberals who say they want SP, is, why don't they go for it, instead of supporting a limited, compromised or rejected PO? The usual given answers will be ones of the politically possible, the lesser evil, incrementalism, and habitual partisan fealty AKA hijacked hope. i will not undertake their ungiven reasons here.

The only defensible motive for supporting the PO is an intent to promote the collapse of an untenable system---which is only a matter of time anyway, as our rulers know better than we; as with Wall Street finance and fossil energy, this game aims to wring every dollar of profit out of a half-dead victim for as long as it can. They already know we will follow the Swiss eventually to the inevitable crow-fest.

i will speak plainly to my liberal Democratic friends and colleagues: you are being coopted by your belief in a corrupt party headed by corrupt leaders intent on protecting the insurers from you.

For your efforts in following MoveOn, DFA, etc. in supporting their health "reform" you will get little or no better than you got by electing those Democratic right-of-center majorities in Congress and the corporatist poseur in the White House---

Instead of an end to the Iraq occupation, you got an expanded war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, complete with robot bombers that don't come home with PTSD.

Instead of alternative and mass transit, you got cash for clunkers.

Instead of revitalized local economies, you got more layoffs, evictions, and massive foreign and future debt.

Instead of an enlightened Latin American policy, you got more treachery in Honduras and Colombia.

Instead of reform and regulation of criminal finance, you got Wall Street bailouts.

Instead of alternative energy, you got clean coal, more mountain top removal, pipelines for Canadian oil sands, and eNG, courtesy the Pickens Plan.

Instead of an administration of change, you got the same old clintonian hacks (plus the Clintons).

Instead of agricultural and food reform, you got a handful of organic tomatoes at the White House and Hillary plowing industrial ag into Africa.

Instead of responsible foreign policy, you got more war on terror.

Instead of a post-racial society, you got an energized base of hate.

...Of course, we could get lucky, despite such pyrrhic activism.

"I inherited a painting and a violin which turned out to be a Rembrandt and a Stradivarius. Unfortunately, Rembrandt made lousy violins and Stradivarius was a terrible painter."

---Tommy Cooper

1.
http://www.truthout.org/082509X?n

2.
http://www.ourfuture.org/files/Hacker_Public_Plan_August_2009.pdf

Clintobama Administration's Latest African Farm Scam

The cheap ribbon on the foul package this time is "revitalization of small- and medium-holder farming."

Taking aim at the world's remaining large reserves of arable land, the present initiative rationalizes "a bottom-up approach targeting Angola's subsistence farmers."

"This latest MOU builds on a 2002 MOU between Chevron, USAID and others for the $56 million Angola Partnership Initiative...

"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is using her trip to Africa to promote agricultural development as an approach to food aid which she has described as a 'signature element' of the new Obama administration’s foreign policy.

"...In Angola, banana giants Chiquita and Dole Food are hoping to set up plantations in the [sic] with a view to growing for export to Europe. Earlier this year a group of U.S. businesses visited Angola to look at, among other things, opportunities for exporting agricultural equipment. 1.

God help the Africans.

In the 90's, as part of their relentless drive to deregulate and corporatize global operations, the Clintons largely transformed USAID into an opaque contracting agency. For an interesting critique and history, penned during Rice's 2006 efforts at "reform," see the AEI's article linked below. 2.

And for the classic survey of USAID's mission to push GM crops, GRAIN's annotated briefing remains indispensable and worth occasional review during the present days of Dupedom. From the introduction:

"In 1990, two Monsanto executives got in touch with Joel Cohen, the Senior Biotechnology Specialist for USAID (the US Agency for International Development).[2] Monsanto wanted USAID to help develop a GM crop for Africa that would give GMOs a good name. Cohen, who had come to the agency from the US seed industry, turned to USAID's most trusted research institute in Africa-- the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI). The three men set up a meeting with KARI and began to put their plan into action.

"They decided to work on sweet potato...[and] hired [KARI's Florence] Wambugu to work in the United States on a GM sweet potato resistant to the Sweet potato feathery mottle virus. Fourteen years later, it is pretty clear that Wambugu's sweet potatoes are far from ready for the fields of Kenya's farmers; in recent field studies the GM crop failed to resist the virus and underperformed the non-GM local varieties.[5]

"But getting the GM sweet potato out to farmers was not the real intention anyway. The overriding goal was to open doors to GM, and in this it was a great success..."

What was true then remains the template for Hillary's latest trim:

"Increasingly the US government uses multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements and high-level diplomatic pressure to push countries towards the adoption of many key bits of corporate-friendly regulations related to GM crops. But this external pressure must be complimented by internal pressure to be effective."

A useful condensation is also linked in GRAIN's briefing. 3.

1.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48031

2.
http://www.aei.org/article/24440

3.
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=191

NEA Blasts Obama Ed Policy

"The nation's largest teachers union sharply attacked President Obama's most significant school improvement initiative on Friday evening, saying that it puts too much emphasis on a 'narrow agenda' centered on charter schools and echoes the Bush administration's 'top-down approach' to reform.

"'...We find this top-down approach disturbing; we have been down that road before with the failures of No Child Left Behind,' the union wrote in its comments..."

REFUSE GOV SUPPORT OF NON-PUBLIC SCHOOLING

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/08/21/nea_breaks_with_administration.html

oge Pickets A Town Hall

During Congressman Murphy's town hall in Franklin (Delaware County, NY) Tuesday, his survey of the group found a majority in support of Single Payer health insurance. (Democrat Murphy, for those outside the 20th CD, won election to Kirsten Gillibrand's House seat when the guv appointed her to Hillary's unexpired Senate term.)

The oge tried to reinforce that position with a picket outside. i did get a few minutes face to face with the congressman, and a few more with his aide. My argument and focus, as framed by some analysts, could be seen as the difference between negotiation and challenge.

The weaknesses of negotiation in current politics include:

1. Negotiation assumes functional parity between the participating interests. But there is no parity between the political status quo and the electorate. The political process is reduced to a duopoly which effectively closes out any competitive alternative candidates, parties, or policies. (In the case of the Franklin Town Hall, the "negotiation" on health care was primarily a survey designed and administered by the politician, and whatever its results, they will be used or not used exclusively on his terms.)

And then there's the question, where does Murphy stand on his own survey? In a real town hall, that would be the starting point, and if the pol didn't stand for SP, then this bloc of voters at least would set about persuading him.

2. Negotiation assumes a common reliance on some accepted standards. But there are no common standards here. The public's interest, both left and right, is generally for what they understand as fair, affordable health care; the political establishment's goal is to protect the profits of the concerned corporations. And even if a rare legislator should be sympathetic to the public's interest (and i have no idea whether Murphy is one of them, since the last thing a freshman congressman can afford to do is reveal his own beliefs, to whatever extent he has any*), he is controlled by his party and its leadership.

3. Negotiation assumes there is time for the process to work. But how much more time do we have, given the misery of so many---and who sets the calendar?

So i reject a posture of negotiation with politicians. They have an insurmountable advantage. It is more useful to regard any politician in the duopoly as, functionally, a narcissist and sociopath. That may be a redundancy, but it underscores two features of much of their behavior. And if you have any experience with these personalities, you know that they are incapable of negotiating in good faith. They respond to what threatens or protects their immediate desires. They learn how to conduct themselves not from any internal conscience or morality, but from trial and error, relying on seduction and manipulation, from mild to extreme exploitation.

We have elected, over and again, congresses and administrations of predators that reinforce and reward not only each other's behavior, but that of the powerful corporatists who fund their campaigns and careers---and increasingly the two groups grow indistinguishable. (One of the greater sins of the Obama administration is the expanded role of czars, consultants, and advisers outside of public process or even subject to the little sunshine that sometimes falls from confirmation hearings.)

So i advocate a posture of challenge, which has the advantages of conveying conviction in our values, insistence on our rights, the subordination of government to the public welfare, and offering a strategic approach that recognizes the motivations of political players.

We are mistaken to think the politicians don't know the "facts," or that it even matters: the people from whom they take direction, know them better than we. We defeat ourselves in believing that facts matter in political persuasion. In one-sided negotiation, they are extraneous. In challenge, we are about changing behavior, not belief. Finally, facts---the tentative atoms of tentative truth---play a relatively minor role in human affairs, far outranked by emotion, instinct, and belief systems.

We have been generally dumbed down by an education system---from K through college---that substitutes the emblems of statist patriotism for responsible civics, that has replaced real rhetoric with report-writing, confused servility with civility, and made skepticism the enemy of respect.

So i told the congressman and his aide that i was not interested in talking to him, i was demonstrating demands; that every developed nation on earth---including, finally, the Swiss---has had to take profit out of health care, and any plan that falls short of that will not control costs, and we will be worse than back to where we are, in a few years.

i find it surprising that someone would believe that a picket advocating SP and opposition to NG drilling would be suspected as a paid outsider, as the oge reportedly was---we should be so lucky to have someone importing those advocates. Has the right's publicity so captured our mindsets now that any protestor must be a paid agent representing the cons and crazies?

Then their campaign worked far better than they could hope.

Last month liberals got forked in one of the most ridiculous plays in recent history. Having surrendered their SP goal for the red herring of a public option in the first place, they then rallied against the silly bugaboo of the right's paid/crazed instigators by fortifying the town hall meetings of the very pols who failed to support their fundamental cause.

They should have manned their own pickets advocating SP. They should have defended their core belief. They should have named it, as Lakoff argues, "The American Plan." RW&B signs. They should have stood with and apart from the cons in a splendid, real triangle that forked the pols.

And then the media would have had two stories to tell, including acknowledging such a thing as SP---which instead has vaporized into yet another missed opportunity.

Here's how Tom Sullivan explains the problem of submissive liberalism, at Huffington:

"Faced with lies, propaganda and intimidation, liberals go to Google to arm themselves with more and better facts. Recent town hall displays...prove again that it's past time that progressives got a clue and stopped bringing letter openers to gun fights.

"...The point is dominance. Nothing more evolved than alpha dog behavior. Bark fiercely enough and get the other dog to roll over and pee in their air just to show who's boss.

"...Conservatives believe -- with justification -- that if they get angry enough and loud enough that liberals will back down from fights like this one.

"...They got game. We got Google..."

*The congressman's aide for some reason found it necessary to volunteer that Murphy is not a blue dog. And it is true that you will not find him, unlike Arcuri, on the official roster, but just to clear up any confusion:

"Murphy also said he plans to be a Blue Dog, just like Gillibrand when she represented the 20th, and has already applied for membership to the caucus." (02.16.09)

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:pnYARDgXfdsJ:www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2009/02/scott-murphys-challenge.html+murphy+also+said+he+plans+to+be+a+blue+dog&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-sullivan/do-progressives-have-what_b_261695.html