Bad American

Stan Cox in Alternet writes about the fallacy of believing that anything you buy labeled as “green” in our predatory market capitalistic system will be of ultimate good for you or the earth.

Cox does a pretty good job of laying out the previous scams and the big scam to come when “going green” will be ruthlessly packaged into one last great big speculative bubble for the only people in the world that count - the investor class. And, like locusts, once the bubble bursts, these insects will go back to the government to have the taxpayers bail them out, exactly what is happening now with the housing bubble.

Until these people do the lamppost swing, nothing will change. With the giant green scam, it’s like watching a train wreck about to happen from 50 miles away. You’ve got plenty of time to fix the problem before it explodes but the investor class already owns the trains, the tracks and the regulatory systems and they have a vested interest in making the trains eventually crash.

Cox talks about the biggest green scams we know about - Body Shop (whose energetic yet lying-through-her-teeth founder I interviewed once), Ben and Jerrys and Tom’s of Maine (my sons grew up using this product) among others.

Basically my view on this is it’s a folly for the American consumer to believe anything they’re being sold as green or organic. The only way you can count on what you eat being truly organic is to either grow or raise it yourself or buy locally and directly from someone who does.

Even so-called farmer’s markers aren’t immune. One popular market in Cedar Rapids featured produce imported from elsewhere, i.e. outside the state. Most people just shook their heads and bought it anyway.

Aside from that, the way conventional food prices are rising out of sight due to worldwide food shortages and the fuel expense of bringing produce to market, the whole idea of green/organic food is going to cease being an issue for people rather quickly. It will only be an issue for well-to-do do-gooders who view their purchases as a testament to their character and yet another thing to brag about to their friends.

What we really should be doing is encouraging the return of small-scale gardens like the ‘Victory Gardens’ of World War II. It makes perfect sense for people to start learning how to actually cultivate their own food and it’s a great way to get outside and get some exercise as well. And Monsanto won’t control your seeds either.

As far as companies like BP scamming people with green advertising, well, I can’t believe, even with my 45 years, that sentient beings believe ANYTHING corporate America tells them anyway. All of these claims of greening should be dismissed out of hand and if the information contained in the above referenced article isn’t enough, I don’t know what would be.

Cox’s final paragraph alludes to the lifelong cultural brainwashing Americans are subjected to:

Of all religions, the one to which Americans cling most tightly is the doctrine of the free market. No belief is more deeply held than the one that says markets will always satisfy people’s needs in the best and most efficient way. That belief persists, unaffected by the market economy’s repeated, spectacular failures to perform as advertised. If green energy and green consumption remain as they are — as sects within the religion of the market — they also are doomed to fail.

Truer words were never written. And they will fail - but not after the right people make money, our bought and paid for government allows them to get away with it, and the public are left weaker and more vulnerable than before - more victims of our rapacious predatory capitalism.

If you read nothing else today, read these two stories:

New York Sun:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

snip

An employee at the Costco store in Queens said there were no restrictions on rice buying, but limits were being imposed on purchases of oil and flour. Internet postings attributed some of the shortage at the retail level to bakery owners who flocked to warehouse stores when the price of flour from commercial suppliers doubled.

The curbs and shortages are being tracked with concern by survivalists who view the phenomenon as a harbinger of more serious trouble to come.

“It’s sporadic. It’s not every store, but it’s becoming more commonplace,” the editor of SurvivalBlog.com, James Rawles, said. “The number of reports I’ve been getting from readers who have seen signs posted with limits has increased almost exponentially, I’d say in the last three to five weeks.”

snip

Spiking food prices have led to riots in recent weeks in Haiti, Indonesia, and several African nations. India recently banned export of all but the highest quality rice, and Vietnam blocked the signing of a new contract for foreign rice sales.

“I’m surprised the Bush administration hasn’t slapped export controls on wheat,” Mr. Rawles said. “The Asian countries are here buying every kind of wheat.” Mr. Rawles said it is hard to know how much of the shortages are due to lagging supply and how much is caused by consumers hedging against future price hikes or a total lack of product.

“There have been so many stories about worldwide shortages that it encourages people to stock up. What most people don’t realize is that supply chains have changed, so inventories are very short,” Mr. Rawles, a former Army intelligence officer, said. “Even if people increased their purchasing by 20%, all the store shelves would be wiped out.”

Saudis Finally Fess Up (sort of)

Financial Times

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, has put on hold plans to increase long-term production capacity from its vast oil fields beyond existing proposals, its most powerful policymakers have said.

In a series of statements, including one by the king himself, the kingdom has warned consumers it does not reckon there is a need for further expansion beyond 12.5m barrels a day, an assumption disputed by the world’s biggest developed countries.

The realisation Saudi Arabia will not increase production to 15m barrels a day as quickly as important consumers and the markets had assumed could put further pressure on oil prices, which touched fresh records last week.

snip

Abdullah Jum’ah, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil company, said in a closed door meeting with oil ministers and executives in Rome on Sunday that market signals were ’imperfect’ and that there were uncertainties created by the move away from oil, the world’s worsening economic outlook and the recent turbulance in the financial markets, according to one person who took notes at the discussions. This has impacted Saudi Arabia’s view on the profitability of investing billions of additional dollars into its industry at this point, Gulf sources said.

In a recent interview with Argus, an industry newsletter, Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, made clear Saudi Arabia had “no plans” to embark on its next phase of expansion. “We are idling at around 9m bpd and we will reach capacity of 12.5m bpd by 2009.”

He added: “That is substantial spare capacity. As far as I know, all the latest projections, at least up to 2020, do not require anything higher than that.”

Forecasts by the International Energy Agency, the watchdog of the main consuming countries and an important participant in the forum, reach a different conclusion.

Most recently the group calculated that, even if all the policies to increase renewable fuels and to use oil more efficiently were to be enacted on Tuesday, the world would still need Opec’s daily production to increase by 11.5m barrels by 2030, the bulk of which would have to come from its biggest members, such as Saudi Arabia.

That is a tall order. It is more than 50 per cent more than Opec has managed to increase output during 1980 to 2006.

Recent announcements will harden the view of those sceptics who argue the kingdom is unable to boost production because of the high decline rates at its fields – a view that is still in the minority among those in the industry and one Riyadh emphatically rejects.

Sorry, it’s the truth and I’ve been saying and writing it for several years now. If you’ve been watching what the Saudis SAY they’re going to do in terms of boosting production and what they have ACTUALLY DONE you see the disconnect.

And now this - a virtual admission, cloaked in bullshit-speak, that the Saudis won’t increase their capacity.

BECAUSE THEY CAN’T.

And if THEY can’t neither can anyone else.

Peak Oil is real, it is here and it is starting to eat our collective lunch.

And the Bush administration AND the current crop of candidates AND the government in general WILL NOT admit it to the American people.

But people seem to be starting to understand the age of oil is coming to a close.

The war in Iraq was all about access to what was left of the world’s largest reserves of crude. It didn’t work out the way Washington had hoped for and neither will bellicosity with Iran.

I have written about all of this until my fingers figuratively bled and I’m tired of reciting this. This story should end all doubts.

Coming next for the American consumer - spot shortages of gasoline, probably by the end of the year if not sooner. And over $4 a gallon gas - easily.

The Bush administration and the American establishment have always been playing for time on this issue, but time is now running out. Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy summit in 2001 was all about this issue and that’s what led eventually to the invasion of Iraq. You can’t keep lying about things and talking about ‘energy independence,’ ‘biofuels’ and other pie in the sky lies for too much longer.

Of course, Bush would have had the full throated support of the American people had he told them we were invading Iraq to preserve our way of life vis a vis oil. But Wall Street would have tanked. He tried to have it both ways by lying and now the chickens are about to come home to roost.

Surprise - Food Rationing!

In a spectacular one-two punch the New York Sun now talks about the rationing of rice (and soon other staples like corn) in the USA. It’s sporadic and here and there now, but just wait. I wrote about the rice riots on this blog earlier and now, thanks to the global economy, Americans are now discovering that what happens in Indonesia can affect us as well. Foreign countries are now cutting back on food exports to feed their own people and we will feel the effects of that.

And now we’re cashiering our food crop of corn to put it in our gas tanks causing the price of that staple to start soaring not just here but all over the world.

Are you beginning to get the picture America?

Have you notice the skyrocketing price of food to go with those gas prices?

Worried a little? You should be.

It’s that other little time bomb that the right doesn’t want you to believe in called global climate change AND ecological catastrophe.

By the way, the bees are still dying.

You may say they’ll pry my non-negotiable American lifestyle from my cold dead hands but rest assured - that’s exactly what mother Earth is doing right now. You could have sacrificed before the deluge and changed your ways but now change will be thrust upon you and it will not care whether you are a conservative or liberal, Christian or no.

And as long as Obama, Clinton and the media keep their eyes on who wears the fucking flag lapel pin or puts their hand over their heart for the anthem, we will get exactly what we deserve - and good and hard.

But there’s more to this. . .

James Howard Kunstler, in his latest missive, cries to high heaven for the restoration of America’s passenger rail system:

Now get this: we are sleepwalking into a transportation crisis. As I already said, the airline industry is dying. The price of petroleum-based aviation fuel is killing it. And forget the fantasies about running it on bio-diesel or used french-fry oil. Driving cars will not be an adequate substitute, either. It’s imperative that this country gets serious about restoring the passenger rail system. We can’t not talk about it for another year. We must demand that the candidates for president speak to this issue. If you who are reading this are active reporters or editors in the news media, you’ve got to raise your voices behind this issue.

I like Kunstler: he’s one of my heroes. But he’s missing something here. There is a very good reason why no one in government or politics is discussing revitalizing the American passenger rail system.

To understand that, let me ask a dark little question:

If you are going to have to control a population where oil and gas as well as food and even water are going to have to be rationed, how are you going to do it?

Will you facilitate the transport of the hungry masses of say, New York City, to the sylvan haunts, of, oh, I don’t know, Saratoga Springs, New York?

Or would it be best to be able to keep that population right where it is by any means necessary?

Think about it.

If the shit is truly going to hit the fan in the coming years, the LAST thing the government in charge is going to want is a mobile population. It’s why cutting off transportation of ordinary people is part of the plot line of every futuristic, apocalyptic and sci-fi movie dealing with the issue.

You know you can call me insane or a fear monger. But the writing is now clearly on the wall for all who have eyes to see. In fact, both the food and the oil stories were linked to The Drudge Report.

If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. But I’ll also, in the future, will be the one to say I told you so. And as far as I’m concerned, if I’m going to blog about important things, I have to say what I have to say. Someone has to.

So if you think there’s any truth behind what I’ve said to the above links and stories you might, just might, want to start preparing you and your loved ones for the future NOW.

The London Independent

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

Isn’t it ironic that it takes a British newspaper to tell the truth to the American people? You don’t have to look to the British press to know how bad it is on Main Street. I see the pain around here every day and it’s getting worse. And I’m in a small town that is still fairly flush by comparison with similar small towns in adjacent counties.

Let no one look down their nose in the checkout lines at people using food stamp cards anymore. There are a growing number of people who never in a million years thought they would need the food assistance program - but here they are.

I’m going to be blunt here - George Carlin once said: “we’re all Nixon’s ni**ers now.” Well guess what - We’re all George W. Bush’s ni**ers now.

More from the story:

Richard Enright, the manager at this Morgan Williams, says the numbers of customers on food stamps has been steady but he expects that to rise soon. “In this location, it’s still mostly old people and people who have retired from city jobs on stamps,” he says. Food stamp money was designed to supplement what people could buy rather than covering all the costs of a family’s groceries. But the problem now, Mr Enright says, is that soaring prices are squeezing the value of the benefits.

“Last St Patrick’s Day, we were selling Irish soda bread for $1.99. This year it was $2.99. Prices are just spiralling up, because of the cost of gas trucking the food into the city and because of commodity prices. People complain, but I tell them it’s not my fault everything is more expensive.”

The US Department of Agriculture says the cost of feeding a low-income family of four has risen 6 per cent in 12 months. “The amount of food stamps per household hasn’t gone up with the food costs,” says Dayna Ballantyne, who runs a food bank in Des Moines, Iowa. “Our clients are finding they aren’t able to purchase food like they used to.”

Ladies and gentlemen, what we are seeing is just the beginning of what will be PERMANENTLY VERY BAD TIMES. The price of most foodstuffs are spiraling out of control for a number of reasons, chief of which are the rising fuel costs (costs to bring to market), and corn, especially, is being grown for ethanol production rather than food. Also, global climate change is starting to hurt certainly growing areas.

In fact there are now rice riots in several Southeast Asian countries as governments are putting an end to exporting rice since its needed for domestic consumption. This is going to happen in countries all over the world and, even in the United States, we’re going to have to shelve all the ‘global marketplace’ crap and start thinking about what we can do to feed ourselves more efficiently in the age of rising oil prices which also affect fertilizer products which make mass agriculture possible.

The most obscene part of all of this is that neither Bush, nor the three remaining candidates are being straight with the American people on what we face and will face in the near future. There is no room for any Churchillian “blood, sweat, toil and tears” speeches. They wouldn’t play well in focus groups.

But there will come a time in which no lies will be sufficient. The people will KNOW that things are very bad and, hopefully, will not tolerate being fed any more bullshit by their elected leaders. Someday soon, they will be forced, kicking and screaming, to tell the truth. Oil, water, food - its all in peril over the long run. We need to get real and start thinking about the world we’ll leave our children, before it’s too late.

In the meantime, if Americans want to read the truth about their own country, sadly, they will have to go to the foreign press. American journalism is dead - bought, paid for and ruthlessly controlled by corporate America.

Cleveland’s Village Idiot in the Pain Dealer

I tried, I have really tried to keep paying for delivery of the Pain Dealer.

I’ve almost canceled a few other times - once during the Wide Open Blog fiasco, and then the last O’Brien column when Kevin mocked Democrats after he and his fellow thugs debased the electoral process by taking Dem ballots and voting for Clinton.

But O’Brien’s latest column debasing global climate change scientists is the last straw.

It is clear that after all these years that the PD doesn’t fire O’Brien because at some deep level they have to agree with what he’s writing AND he remains the deputy editorial page director. His choices influence the Op-ed page of the PD, which is already an industry joke and a local embarrassment. It’s about as thin as the reasoning O’Brien uses.

I had hoped that Susan Goldberg might change things at the PD but it is evident that’s same old same old at the Daily Disappointment that this newspaper has become.

It is, and will remain, nothing more than a corporate rag sheet.

As for O’Brien’s latest column, suffice it to say that, in his bully boy way, being a stenographer to power, he believes that since global climate change advocates use anecdotal evidence than its OK for him to do the same. This, apparently, is how he views journalism.

For the record, most Americans, including O’Brien, are totally clueless on global climate change. Some want to remain willfully clueless because, well, they see the whole thing as some kind of ’socialist plot’ to separate them from the SUVs and outdoor gas grills.

Well fine. You know, if that’s what its going to come down to, let the Earth burn. I just hope I’m dead and my kids are dead before the worst hits - and that my sons don’t reproduce.

I got the skinny on the whole issue about 10 years ago on a Midway Airport shuttle in Chicago. I sat next to a research meteorologist for the Argonne National Laboratories. I made a comment on the snow in March having something to do with global warming and he kindly set me straight.

He said the correct term, which I have used ever since, is global climate change. To focus on the ‘warming’ was missing the point by a mile, he told me.

The point is that there was not going to be a steady climb in what we would perceive as heat in the atmosphere at ground level, he said. The Earth was simply too big and complex for that.

What would happen, he said, is that the weather would become increasingly unpredictable and more violent over time as the Earth’s mean temperature increased. Some violently snowy winters would occur and some unusually cold periods in summer would also happen, he said.

But eventually the ice sheets would melt and eventually there would be climatological  feedback mechanisms kicking in. It wouldn’t happen quickly, but when the feedback mechanisms starting kicking in, things would accelerate but nothing along the lines portrayed in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.

And, in fact, he confided to me that the public misconception about the process and the political aspects of trying to ameliorate the effects of global climate change worried him and other research meteorologists greatly. Because the effects required a fairly complex scientific explanation, he feared that people would simply not listen and that politicians could exploit that ignorance to ignore the problem until it was too late.

I think he was thinking about people like Kevin O’Brien and his ilk.

I’m always reminded of the Ogden Nash ditty about people like that:

Oh you can’t say when to company men,

For it’s always when to they,

They were doing fine in ‘29

And they’re doing fine today. 

You could check out another article in today’s International Herald Tribune if you need to breathe the fresh air of real science after reading the choking ignorance of Kevin O’Brien. Those who don’t get their whole news feed from the American corporate controlled media know what the score it. Were it that other Americans took advantage of the amazing resource of the Internet and learned how the world really sees us and the problems our planet faces.

The Plain Dealer can print whatever their corporate chieftains want them to print. I don’t have to pay for it.

And so it ends, a lifelong love affair with print journalism. For the first time since I was 10-years-old, I will have no newspaper delivered to where I am.

It would be patently unfair to blame the PD for the ills of the business. There’s a lot of blame to go around, of course. First and foremost, I blame corporate America for destroying journalism in this country and turning a precious 1st Amendment resource into yet another profit stream for Wall Street. And by destroying the basic nature of  journalism, AND ignoring the impact of citizen journalism and the Internet, they have guaranteed themselves their coming obsolescence.

The second blame is the people in the craft themselves who, by and large, accepted cozy middle class lifestyles in exchange for becoming stenographers to power and lifestyle writers. The whole point of being a journalism was not come to work in a shirt and tie and brag about your political connections at the fern bar. It was to inform the public on the critical issues of the day and give them that ‘light’ so that they could find their own way (yeah, from the Scripps-Howard logo, once a Cleveland Press employee, always one).

But the whole craft pretty much sold out for a little comfort and J schools generally followed the emasculation that came with ‘professionalism.’ Now the best journalism, hands down, is being done by small independent newspapers and on the Internet. Newspapers have watched themselves become primarily a conduit for advertising, comics, sports and movie listings. Most big city American newspapers have become very cozy with being part of the local power structure rather than a check and balance on that power. They just don’t care and it shows.

Journalism, real journalism, was supposed to help lead society, not mirror its worst biases and prejudices. But no one is leading anymore. Instead, we get columnists like Kevin O’Brien.

And the American people are also to blame. Generally our own society enthusiatically participated in our collective dumbing down. And because of that, we refused to read newspapers if they didn’t dumb their content down for us. Television didn’t kill newspapers directly, but when Americans wanted their news in the simple language of television, newspapers, fearing losing market share, followed suit and the downward spiral started.

People didn’t clamor for anything better. And then after media consolidation in the 1990s, ownership no longer cared about those who wanted print journalism to live up to its ideals. Newspapers were now house organs for corporate America editorially. Marketing took over to serve Wall Street and newspapers began to resemble sports and lifestyle magazines more than news organs. The cry has always been ‘we had to do that to survive.’ My retort is: you’re doing that and dying anyway.

So enough. Our society gets pretty much both the media and government it deserves and it seems like we’re getting both lately good and hard as H. L. Mencken would have said.

The last best hope of what passes for journalism today is the Internet. For all its faults and wonderful lack of media gatekeepers, the truth is not to be found on the pages of your local corporate rag but right here on your screen, provided YOU take the time and effort to find it.

It’s completely understandable that the average news browser doesn’t quite know who or what to believe in when it comes to global climate change.

Independent (UK)

Nine ways in which the Earth could be tipped into a potentially dangerous state that could last for many centuries have been identified by scientists investigating how quickly global warming could run out of control.

A major international investigation by dozens of leading climate scientists has found that the “tipping points” for all nine scenarios – such as the melting of the Arctic sea ice or the disappearance of the Amazon rainforest – could occur within the next 100 years.

The scientists warn that climate change is likely to result in sudden and dramatic changes to some of the major geophysical elements of the Earth if global average temperatures continue to rise as a result of the predicted increase in emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.

Most and probably all of the nine scenarios are likely to be irreversible on a human timescale once they pass a certain threshold of change, and the widespread effects of the transition to the new state will be felt for generations to come, the scientists said.

“Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change. Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic [man-made] climate change,” they report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pretty much jives with what a lot of us have been hearing and reading. Now comes this:

The New York Times

Suppose that the pessimistic forecasts of global warming are accurate. Suppose that the planet’s temperature rises according to the high-end scenario of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and that we experience the economic and social impacts (like hunger, malaria and coastal flooding) projected by the much-publicized Stern Review sponsored by the British government.

Does that mean our best course of action is to quickly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases?

That’s the question addressed in a new report by Indur Goklany for the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that has taken issue with many of the dire predictions about global warming. What’s interesting about this report is that it works from the assumption that the dire forecasts are accurate, even the Stern Review, which has been severely criticized for exaggerating the economic costs of global warming. (See, for instance, the critiques by the Yale economist William Nordhaus in the journal Science and in this article article from the Journal of Economic Literature.) Dr. Goklany accepts the Stern Review’s grim numbers and looks at the I.P.C.C.’s various scenarios, which project different levels of warming and sea-level rise depending on the the rate of economic growth, energy use and other factors.

“The surprising conclusion using the Stern Review’s own estimates,” Dr. Goklany writes, “is that future generations will be better off in the richest but warmest” of the I.P.C.C.’s scenarios. He concludes that cutting emissions will do much less good than encouraging sustainable development in poor countries and policies of “focused adaptation” to deal with disease and environmental problems like coastal flooding. For a fifth the cost of the Kyoto Protocol, he calculates, these adaptation policies could yield more immediate and also long-term benefits than would a policy that entirely halted global warming (which would cost far, far more than Kyoto). He argues that this path isn’t merely an economic but also a moral imperative:

For the foreseeable future, people will be wealthier—and their well-being higher—than is the case for present generations both in the developed and developing worlds and with or without climate change. The well-being of future inhabitants in today’s developing world would exceed that of the inhabitants of today’s developed world under all but the poorest scenario. Future generations should, moreover, have greater access to human capital and technology to address whatever problems they might face, including climate change. Hence the argument that we should shift resources from dealing with the real and urgent problems confronting present generations to solving potential problems of tomorrow’s wealthier and better positioned generations is unpersuasive at best and verging on immoral at worst.

This particular view seems to believe that if we allow the current rates of consumption and exhaustion, future generations will be able to develop the technological know-how to achieve a quick fix.

In short, the ‘technology will save us’ theory, expanded to a few generations.

Willing to take that risk? I’m not. Especially in light of the information hard science provides us from the Independent story.

Dr. Goklany, from what I’ve read, also doesn’t take into account the rise of new strains of viruses and bacterias that are coming from a newly warmed environment. There are several vectors affecting the sustainability of life of earth and I believe the balance is delicate in nature, as do many scientists. Goklany seems to see the world as durable for the sustainment of enough human potential and capital for at least a few more generations.

This is playing ‘beat the clock’ with the future of humankind. And what Western nations are going to be “encouraging sustainable development in poor countries?” Wanna bet on THAT?

And in the end, irreversible is, well, irreversible.

George W. Bush is an enemy of the American people. 

PD Sunday Editorial

E-check, unfortunately, is still with us.

The federal government would have withheld more than $1 billion in federal highway dollars if the Ohio General Assembly had rebelled and axed the justly maligned vehicle emissions test.

But the sneaky way state lawmakers went about its renewal - slipping it into an unrelated bill and resorting to anonymous voice votes - should make them cringe when they look in the mirror.

Over the years, it has become painfully clear that E-check is a fraud. It is a tiresome box that the Environmental Protection Agency checks off - a token effort to comply with federal air quality standards. And as cars and light trucks become cleaner, even the token effort gets harder to sell.

That’s not to belittle the importance of cleaning Ohio’s air. It’s just an admission that E-check isn’t the answer.

You can read the rest at the link, but I agree with it all. It was a scam almost from the beginning but the PD is right to point out the sneaky way this was snuck through back in to law.

In the beginning of the program, there seemed to be a serious effort to really test vehicles. They put all the cars on that treadmill like apparatus and, as you might remember, a few cars went ‘off the rails’ so to speak and crashed into the walls. The process was lengthier and I knew of people who failed and had to have remedial work done on their exhaust systems.

Well, after 10+ years out of Ohio, I came back and found that to get a license plate, I had to go back to the same E-Check facility on Auburn Road.

What a difference from a decade ago.

Now, bored employees literally wave you through the process and my car, from 2002, didn’t even go on the treadmill. They just stuck the probe in the pipe and waved it through - about 5 minutes, barely enough time for a cup of coffee.

And its free.

And its a joke.

In the editorial, the PD actually states the state should sue the Feds and make a literal Federal case out of it. I’m all for that but know that Ohio doesn’t have the guts to do so anyway, even in the age of Bush.

The one thing I think the PD should do in this case is follow the money. This being Ohio, I’m sure there is some kind of cozy contract worked out here and someone politically is benefiting from the continuance of a sham environmental program.

Its really an insult to those who really care about the environment to see the E-check system in operation now as opposed to how it was sold.

And the process the bill was slipped through is another black eye to good honest government in this state.

Silja JA Talvi on MRSA in the prisons in Alternet

This is the bad-ass of viruses and Talvi talks at length about the peril it presents in prisons and jails, because:

Given this level of justifiable media and public attention to the dangers of MRSA, it’s remarkable to note how little attention is being paid to the kinds of facilities where the superbug thrives and spreads the fastest: poorly ventilated living and sleeping quarters; overcrowded rooms; shared mattresses, toilets and showers; and a preponderance of people who arrive with poor health, drug problems and severely compromised immune systems. Homeless shelters and emergency rooms serving indigent populations are among them, but there is no question that the biggest incubators of all are the nation’s 5,000-plus prisons and jails.

Read that paragraph carefully. I appreciate Talvi’s call to action on behalf of the prison population. But there is one more place that fits exactly his criteria from the paragraph above and just might make Americans care more about this problem than they ordinarily would:

Military barracks.

Let me tell you a tale of basic training, Fort Jackson, South Carolina late fall, early winter 1987. Imagine around 50 men sleeping, showering, using the restroom, etc. in a space, modern as it may be, about the size of a meeting room at the Holiday Inn.

The Army does an excellent job at stressing daily showering and proper care and maintenance of the body as well as the equipment. I remember having to wear Plaxtex gloves to clean the showers with lime-away because, well, that stuff eats at your skin as well. But throughout the entire cycle - from mid-September to mid-December, there wasn’t one of us that didn’t come down with what was commonly referred to as ‘basic training hack’: a nasty throaty phlegm laden cough that hounded us through our eight weeks.

Its of some note that while we were not allowed to buy candy and sweets at our closely supervised PX visits, cough drops were excluded. And even then, they did little for the constant hack.

The cumulative effects of all of our germs and all the other microbes we brought back from the field was a massive attack of strep throat that hit not only our barracks but the entire battalion, right on the eve of graduation.

I got it and remember standing, unsteadily, on the parade field that December graduation, praying I’d make it through, graduate, and get out of Fort Jackson. I didn’t know what was wrong with me until I got back home and saw a doctor.

Some didn’t make it. During graduation, I head the loud THUMP twice of bodies keeling over and hitting the turf hard. The Drill Sergeants hissed: “keep your ranks! Eyes forward!” while they scrambled to carry off the wounded.

And this was despite the most systematically enforced cleaning regimen I have ever witnessed. In addition, there was much multi-vitamin taking and other supplements were freely consumed and shared with the usual cough and cold formulas also making the rounds. Every morning I subjected myself to a 30 second Listerine gargle and I was far from the only one.

All to no avail.

So perhaps if Mr. Talvi thinks the American people aren’t paying enough attention to this threat because, well, only criminals will get sick and why should we care about ‘bad’ people, maybe he should turn his attention to the training sites of the US Armed Forces here and around the world.

Maybe he’ll get more attention paid.

No link yet on CNN.com but if you watch the network long enough today, you’ll probably see a story on the Freegan movement (Freegan is a combination of ‘free’ and ‘vegan’). I’m amazed that a Freegan spokesperson was even allowed on CNN but, not surpringly, the story hook was very simple:

“Oh my God! These people EAT out of dumpsters!!”

Oh, yes they do and for good reason - American companies (restaurants and supermarkets) throw out perfectly good and edible food by the metric ton every day. The Freegan spokesperson was able to get some points out about our waste in the brief time the interview gave her but there is so much more to the Freegan movement than just the dumpster diving.

You can find out everything you need to know here: Freegan.info

Here are some basic concepts which are, obviously, anathema to The American Way:

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.

Wow. Is that un-American or what? I love it.

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.

Obviously these folks are leaving a small carbon footprint and are serving a useful function as the scavengers of our society. In this case, scavenger is a good term! We need people to cull the largess of the American economy that wastes so much and provide this food and other consumer durables, to people who can put them to use instead of continuing to gorge our landfills. This is good.

We live in an economic system where sellers only value land and commodities relative to their capacity to generate profit. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already have because this increases sales. This practice of affluent societies produces an amount of waste so enormous that many people can be fed and supported simply on its trash. As freegans we forage instead of buying to avoid being wasteful consumers ourselves, to politically challenge the injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, and to reduce the waste going to landfills and incinerators which are disproportionately situated within poor, non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma.

Of course this philosophy is diametrically opposed to capitalism but these folks are spot on. We are brainwashed into believing that wasteful practices are our birthright and are evidence of the superiority of our system and non-negotiable way of life. So we create artificial demand based on ego and status reasons and it fuels an economy that is slowly poisoning both ourselves and the planet we live on.

Here’s some more of what gets reclaimed:

By recovering the discards of retailers, offices, schools, homes, hotels, or anywhere by rummaging through their trash bins, dumpsters, and trash bags, freegans are able to obtain food, beverages, books, toiletries magazines, comic books, newspapers, videos, kitchenware, appliances, music (CDs, cassettes, records, etc.), carpets, musical instruments, clothing, rollerblades, scooters, furniture, vitamins, electronics, animal care products, games, toys, bicycles, artwork, and just about any other type of consumer good. Rather than contributing to further waste, freegans curtail garbage and pollution, reducing the over-all volume in the waste stream.

I would direct Freegans to the dumpsters of every Half Price Bookstore in America where daily, metric tons of perfectly good books, CDs, cassettes (many new and unused) and other materials every day. What I saw thrown away at the store I worked at would be enough to turn the stomach of any lover of literacy. And yes, we did have dumpster divers but they weren’t Freegans - they would either try to sell the discards back to the store or sell them on Ebay.

Now let’s not forget one of my favorite recycling habits - composting:

Because of our frequent sojourns into the discards our throwaway society, freegans are very aware of and disgusted by the enormous amounts of waste the average US consumer generates and thus choose not to be a part of the problem. So, freegans scrupulously recycle, compost organic matter into topsoil, and repair rather than replace items whenever possible. Anything unusable by us, we redistribute to our friends, at freemarkets, or using internet services like freecycle and craigslist.

And yes, they try not to drive either:

Freegans recognize the disastrous social and ecological impacts of the automobile. We all know that automobiles cause pollution created from the burning of petroleum but we usually don’t think of the other destruction factors like forests being eliminated from road building in wilderness areas and collision deaths of humans and wildlife. As well, the massive oil use today creates the economic impetus for slaughter in Iraq and all over the world. Therefore, freegans choose not to use cars for the most part. Rather, we use other methods of transportation including trainhopping, hitchhiking, walking, skating, and biking. Hitchhiking fills up room in a car that would have been unused otherwise and therefore it does not add to the overall consumption of cars and gasoline.

This is tough to do in a society that was largely laid out for the car culture. So anytime you can get around without burning fuel, its a good thing. Walking is wonderful exercise by the way.

And here is a big one for me:

Freegans believe that housing is a RIGHT, not a privilege. Just as freegans consider it an atrocity for people to starve while food is thrown away, we are also outraged that people literally freeze to death on the streets while landlords and cities keep buildings boarded up and vacant because they can’t turn a profit on making them available as housing.

I see that in Chardon where I live and own a business. Landlords continue to keep jacking up rents for local businesses (and renters) and seem not to care one whit that months and months go by without anyone renting their properties which remain vacant with “for rent” signs prominently displayed, which hurts the community’s ability to attract and keep smaller home-grown businesses. A small advertising agency across the street from my shop just had their rent jacked up and were forced to leave their business space and run their business from their house. Now another vacant cavity exists in a business block that already has several such cavities facing the street.

And the landlords just don’t seem to care enough about the community to reasonably work with renters to keep their businesses alive and in town. There’s a shopping strip down the street that is owned by a company in east surburban Cleveland that charges rents so high for their spaces that no locally originated business could turn a profit renting them. And certainly corporate franchises won’t locate in an aging strip shopping center.

I believe there must be some sort of tax advantage built into our tax code for these companies that allow them to literally make money on empty storefronts. There must be since there seems to be no concern for perfectly good retail space that stands empty for months and in some cases, years.

Freegans are, understandably, more concerned with housing people than businesses:

Squatters are people who occupy and rehabilitate abandoned, decrepit buildings. Squatters believe that real human needs are more important than abstract notions of private property, and that those who hold deed to buildings but won’t allow people to live in them, even in places where housing is vitally needed, don’t deserve to own those buildings. In addition to living areas, squatters often convert abandoned buildings into community centers with programs including art activities for children, environmental education, meetings of community organizations, and more.

So its no surprise that you didn’t (and wouldn’t) hear these concepts spoken of during the CNN interview. Dumpster diving, of course, serves to get viewers’ attention and also is a convenient way to suggest that Middle America discredit these people. The representative of the Freegan group that spoke had to have known that was going to be the thrust of the CNN story but took the chance anyway knowing that perhaps, enough people would Google ‘freegan’ and learn the serious and useful purposes of the movement.

Laugh at these people if you will, they are learning survival skills that will help their communities survive in the coming post Peak Oil age. The sooner we all learn and practice the habits, skills and ethics of Freegans, the better we will be able to transition to a way of life that will soon be forced upon us.

“We’ve Hit A Remarkable Moment”

Associated Press

I have to admit the first thing I thought of was how the right will spin this as some kind of socialist plot against swimming pools owned by the moneyed class.

I say that advisedly - my family had an in the ground swimming pool which proved to be a $5,000 folly that was destroyed by the earthquake of 1985. But I digress.

Anyway, its very hard to spin this as much of Georgia and the Piedmont states are down to about 60 days worth of water supply. If Atlanta runs out of water, not all the bottled water in the world is going to help a metro area of 4 million people.

From the story:

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

“Is it a crisis? If we don’t do some decent water planning, it could be,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the Denver-based American Water Works Association.

Water managers will need to take bold steps to keep taps flowing, including conservation, recycling, desalination and stricter controls on development.

“We’ve hit a remarkable moment,” said Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The last century was the century of water engineering. The next century is going to have to be the century of water efficiency.”

The price tag for ensuring a reliable water supply could be staggering. Experts estimate that just upgrading pipes to handle new supplies could cost the nation $300 billion over 30 years.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not going to be any more cheap water,” said Randy Brown, Pompano Beach’s utilities director.

It’s not just America’s problem — it’s global.

That first paragraph of the story segment is the one most likely to drive the capitalist right nuts. What? Sprawl?! Sprawl is GOOD! The right people make money, which is next to Godliness! People WANT sprawl! Our whole economy depends on suburban sprawl. This is obviously some socialist plot to destroy our sacred non-negotiable way of life!

They will gladly take the world down with them, of course. And let’s not forget how many of these folks believe the human race cannot destroy the planet because, well, only God can do that. Right?

The biggest problem will be being honest with the American people. You cannot save our ‘non-negotiable way of life.’ It is ending and will end. We can do this the hard way and be in denial until it becomes a catastrophe or we can sober up and make some painful but necessary changes in our lifestyles for the sake of our children and future generations.

The other specter is the very real possibility that oil wars will be subsumed by water wars as countries with ‘non-negotiable’ lifestyles fight world wars for water.

We need brave leadership in Washington and, again, hate to be cynical but I won’t hold my breath. Perhaps Atlanta has run dry before people in this country will wake up.

Ok, fine, its all a socialist plot. Ten years from now, you can tell your children that and see how comforting it is to them.

London Telegraph:

From the story:

A weakening in the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere means that global warming is happening faster than we thought, scientists said yesterday.

Scientists thought that concentrations of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere would grow in line with the world economy.

The latest figures show, however, that over the past seven years CO2 concentrations have grown 35 per cent faster, partly because the ability of the Southern Ocean and other carbon “sinks” such as vegetation and forests to take it up has been reduced. 

snip

The study’s author Dr Corinne Le Quere, of UEA and the British Antarctic Survey, said the results had come as a shock.

“We expected that emissions would grow because of the expansion in the world economy but not because of a weakening in the sinks. Only the most extreme climate models predicted this. We didn’t think it would happen until the second half of the century,” she said.

From all that I have read, it seems that Earth has started an accelerated feedback mechanism which means, despite some optimism that the effects can be mitigated, its probably already too late. I wonder why the right hasn’t embraced the ‘its too late anyway’ view of things since at that point, the attitude probably would be ‘we might as well enjoy the ride down.’

Maybe its already happening:

London Telegraph: Gordon Brown advised to U-turn on renewable energy targets

The Prime Minister has been advised his Cabinet colleague, Business Secretary John Hutton, to wriggle out of a promise to generate 20 per cent of all Europe’s energy from renewable sources such as wind, wave or solar power by 2020.

Mr Hutton has warned Mr Brown that boosting Britain’s renewable power from the current level of two per cent to nine per cent of energy generation, under the half the EU target, will cost £4 billion.

It’s not the end of the world, but I believe you can see it from here.

Of course, we’ll not do anything.

It would cost some people too much.

I really do believe that there are powerful people in the know who do understand what is happening. They simply believe that a world in which wealth is not generated by fossil fuels is one in which they do not wish to live.

And so we will continue on our merry way until it is too obvious and too late to do anything about it.