We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Fuel Companies

Bill McKibben writes an important article in the Rolling Stone: 

Nations have agreed to a nonbinding resolution that "the increase in global temperature should be below two degrees Celsius."  Scientists conclude that "two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster" (NASA scientist James Hansen).  Island nations and arid ones could be destroyed with two degrees of warming.  "We've increased the Earth's temperature by 0.8 degrees so far. . . . If we stopped increasing CO₂ now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere."

"Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees."

"The amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies is 2,695 gigatons:" five times the amount that might be burned and keep warming within two degrees Celsius. (The Carbon Tracker Initiative – led by James Leaton).  These companies and countries plan to use it all.  They're working to do so as fast as possible.

"The planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. . . . We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. 'Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices,' says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. 'But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do.' "

It's not the fossil nature of the fuel that is the problem.  All widely available fuel produces greenhouse gases.  Carbon dioxide (bad as it is) is the least-harmful combustion product possible.  Incomplete combustion of smouldering damp vegetation or used fryer oil gives off soot, carbon monoxide, and other smoke more harmful to the atmosphere and to health.  Burning plants for fuel also stops those plants from absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  If we have to burn something, about the least-harmful fuel is natural gas.  (Of course, fracturing the bedrock your town is built on, to release the gas, can destroy the town.)  (Hydrogen burns with only water as a combustion product--but hydrogen for fuel is scarce.  We have to use more energy to break down water to get hydrogen, than we get back by burning the hydrogen.)  (Growing corn, and turning it into ethanol, require vast amounts of energy and fertilizer.  It's done only because the government subsidizes it.)

TomRW

Only Money Has Free Speech

As it is now, advertisers make the decisions about the media, not the people, because the media exist for the purpose of making money. . . .

The fact that people with money can hire lobbyists to represent them in Washington limits equity in the political system. Poor people don’t have the money for this—if they spent everything they had, they couldn’t get enough money together to equal the lobbying power of the rich. After an election, people don’t have access to government, because lack of money prevents them from having equal access to the people in power. That’s an inequity that’s built into the system. That’s where money is more powerful than people.

People do have a right to vote. But whom do they have a right to vote for? They have a right to vote for whoever is chosen. That’s our dilemma right now. It starts with how much it costs to run for office—it now costs $3 million to run for governor in Tennessee. That rules out a lot of people. So the choice is between two people who are willing to spend $3 million, which is not a democratic choice. You can say that the people have a right to vote, but they only have the right to choose between two millionaires or people whom other people with money are willing to back.

—Myles Horton, The Long Haul, © 1990, pp. 169-170

ALEC Corporations: Boycott Them

Corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council write model legislation and pressure state legislatures to adopt it. These laws break unions, take away worker protections and environmental regulations, capture control of government for use of corporate interests at the expense of the public good. They include: AT&T, Kraft Foods, UPS, Walmart, Amazon.com, FedEx, Frito-Lay, HP, JC Penney, McDonalds, Microsoft, Miller Brewing Company, Outback Steakhouse, Sprint Nextel, Sony, Time Warner, United Airlines, Verizon, Visa, American Express, KFC/Taco Bell, Walgreens, and hundreds of others. Money you spend there will be used as weapons against democracy, against the middle class, against the environment, against civil liberties. Check the list before you buy. Shop at the smallest, most local places.

What Does Columbus Have to Do with Me?

Today in my Facebook newsfeed I’ve seen lots of “Rethink Columbus Day” posts. Rethinking Columbus Day is an excellent idea. Yes, let’s do. Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day sounds great to me. But let’s give indigenous peoples—and our children—more than just a day off in the fall.

The “Ocean Blue” story so many of us were told about Columbus was not just a story about someone who lived in the fifteenth century. It was a story about ourselves. Here’s how the story goes: We, Americans of western European descent, are explorers, adventurers, and, yes, conquerors. We are bold and sophisticated, excelling in written language, technology, and learning. We are the good guys in the white hats. We are rugged individualists who rely on our own ingenuity and resourcefulness to cross the ocean, the continent, the world.

But just under the surface of the myth lies the bloody truth: western Europeans raped and pillaged the people Columbus “discovered”; they terrorized them with their brutality and forced them into slavery. The truth should make us squirm. This is a discomfort we need to sit with for a while.

We are not who we were told we are. We are not who we thought. No white horses, no white hats. We are descendants of arrogant, avaricious imperialists who thought the only possible value of indigenous peoples of any continent was their monetary value as slaves. I am not saying that we are culpable for our ancestors sins, but I am saying that we are still living with their effects. And until we realize that, and soberly weigh our ancestors’ beliefs and culture—and our own, which stem at least in part from theirs—we will not be able to adequately address the violence, greed, and arrogance from which we sprang.

No, not everything we inherited from our predecessors’ culture is bad. But neither is it nearly so squeaky clean nor so heroic as we once believed. If we believe the lies we tell about our ancestors, we will believe the lies we tell about ourselves. But if we honestly and soberly assess our forebears, we’re much more likely to be able to honestly and soberly assess ourselves. Imperialism is not just a sin of the past. It has not vanished; it has changed its form and focus. Neither are racism, arrogance, and greed confined to the past. There is no virtue in wallowing in guilt or angst, but a sober and truthful assessment of who we were and who we are is necessary if we are to make real progress in the things that really matter. And I believe that when all is said and done, what really matters is how we treat each other, and by “each other” I mean our fellow human beings.

If how you see your ancestors affects how you see yourself (and it does), then so too does how you treat others—all others. If you treat all those you encounter in your life—whether in person, online, in the media, or even just in your imagination—with respect and openness, if you assume that everyone is worthy of your time and attention, then you will also know that you too are worthy. We are not defined by the sins of our ancestors. But the sins of our ancestors will live on until we look at them squarely and see them for what they really are. Then, perhaps, we will be free to cultivate respect and humility and compassion—not only for others, but for ourselves and for our children.

USPS: Vultures Roosting in the Eagle's Nest

The vultures on the verge of destroying the US Postal Service are not merely circling. They've landed in the nest, ready to plunder and privatize, having fully captured USPS management and oversight. It's clear to many that the the Post Office has enemies in Congress, to wit Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), among others. But it's also apparent that there are those in management and oversight who are just as determined to destroy the Post Office, who are in the service not of the American people but of those who consider the USPS their competition and who are eager to devour the advantages it currently maintains.

The postmaster general plans to make drastic cuts that will do away with first-class service, give the pickings to FedEx and the like, and continue propping up bulk mailers (who currently pay less than what it costs the USPS to process and deliver their junk mail). Those cuts will devastate small towns and inner cities, reduce the USPS to a third-class bulk mailer, and replace its middle-class workforce with a workforce of the working poor. All this for what?

Abdicating 6-day delivery to private postal services would, by Government Accountability Office estimates, save costs of only 4 percent of the USPS budget. USPS management has admitted that it wiped one small-town post office off the map because it "'cost' the USPS $1,500 a year more than it made in sales of stamps and money orders." Never mind the mandate that the USPS serve all Americans. Never mind that the USPS is not meant to make a profit but rather to be a self-sustaining service to the American people. Never mind that closing a post office because it is not "profitable" is against the law.

The devastating cuts proposed by the postmaster general—the projected savings of which are absurdly small—will serve only to weaken the USPS, not strengthen it, not put it on firm financial footing. All of the aspects of USPS service that are on the chopping block—6-day delivery, half the distribution network, half the retail network, half the workforce—represent USPS's greatest assets. So why proceed when the financial savings are so small and the resulting loss so devastating? The only conceivable answer is that the intent is not to save money or alleviate the USPS's financial difficulties, but to serve the interests of the vultures ready to devour this national treasure.

The planned devastation of the USPS is based not on need but on greed. The claim of financial emergency is a pretext to break the USPS up and feed the choice bits to the private mailing industry.

The postmaster general says he expects to close 16,000 post offices in six years—that's half of the nation's post offices! And he plans to close or consolidate as many as 313 of the 487 processing plants by 2013—destroying first-class service while estimating the destruction would "save" costs equal to only 4 percent of USPS's budget. When this happens—and USPS management is proceeding fast, in violation of federal law—there will be no more 44-cent postage. Only FedEx rates. There will be no more service to rural, remote, and distressed areas. Newspaper and magazine delivery will be eliminated.

The Internet could be the biggest source of new business imaginable. Customers could e-mail documents to the USPS, which would then print and deliver them from the destination post office. This would be a hugely popular service: next-day delivery anywhere in the country, of anything you can send to a printer. Fast, cheap, and hard copy. All it would require is leadership interested in providing a service to the public.

But what we have now is leadership more interested in providing profit to private moneyed interests than in serving the American people. That is the end result of setting up a public service to function "more like a business," as was done in changing the U.S. Post Office Department to the US Postal Service in 1970-71.

The United States Postal Service is a national treasure that needs to be saved from the formidable forces arrayed against it. And those forces are not only in Congress, but in the USPS itself. Those who seek to save the USPS will not succeed unless they recognize the threat within, and they must do so very quickly or it will be too late.

~~~

John Nichols writes good Save the Post Office columns in The Nation and The Capital Times. And there's always a lot of good information at Save the Post Office, which Steve Hutkins puts together.

The Price of Inequality

This article, adapted from The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do, by Eduardo Porter, explains that wider communications, bigger companies, and deregulation are creating a pay structure where fewer and fewer people are taking more and more of the money, leaving the vast majority with no hope of sharing the benefits. This is a natural process. Wealth concentrates until the only people who can buy anything don’t need to, and the economy collapses. Both that article and this one point out that, in Frank Rich's words, "America can’t move forward until we once again believe . . . that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because a private party has rented out Tomorrowland." Bob Herbert points out that in the recession of 2008 to the present, many unemployed people have lost that hope. As Paul Krugman says in The Conscience of a Liberal 2007 (p. 18), “Middle-class societies don’t emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be created through political action.” The political actions we need are progressive taxation, regulation to prevent abuse of economic power, public education, and a social safety net. And we should focus not on Gross Domestic Product, which harmfully accrues disproportionately to the wealthy, but on the average income of the poorest half or poorest 35% of the people, as recommended by Muhammad Yunus, "banker to the poor" and Grameen Bank founder.

Too, corporate executive pay often is more plunder than compensation.

Greed Kills

According to this story in the Health section of the New York Times on Saturday, "Neither the system meant to make the meat safe, nor the meat itself, is what consumers have been led to believe."

Deadly e coli strains from shitty hamburger sicken hundreds. Some are incapacitated for life. To save 20 cents a pound, grinders use scraps bought from many different slaughterhouses, and mix them all together. Slaughterhouses refuse to sell to grinders that test incoming scraps for E. coli. If grinders were to test, slaughterhouses would have to recall contaminated meat. That would lose them the sale of that contaminated meat. Instead they demand that grinders not test. Grinders comply. The USDA is okay with this.

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the [USDA’s] Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. 'I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,' Dr. Petersen said. [emphasis added]

The Food Safety and Inspection Service must be moved from the USDA to the Food and Drug Administration. Only by removing inspectors from the control of an agency tasked with promoting its industry will those inspectors be free to fulfill their purpose of protecting the public.

In the post-Reagan United States, the highest good is seen as company profit. Food safety, worker safety, and environmental protection are to be done away with. This first became clear to me in 1994 when Newt Gingrich trumpeted his contract on America. That it continues under Democratic administrations is worse still.

~~~~~

Mary's 2 cents: Over and over again our government sanctions greed and profit, protecting corporations and shielding them from accountability, risking considerable and serious harm to individual consumers.

Clearly we have become a government by the corporations, for the corporations, and of the corporations. Makes me sick, and I don't even eat meat.

I refuse to live in a country like this anymore—and I am not leaving.
—Michael Moore

Let the Revolution Begin!

I refuse to live in a country like this anymore—and I am not leaving.
—Michael Moore

Haven't seen Capitalism: A Love Story yet? Stop everything and make haste to the nearest movie theater. You really don't want to miss this, and the sooner you see it, the sooner you can get with the program. Moore is audacious. He's gutsy. He's irreverent. He's right.

Our root problem as a nation is that we are being run—and overrun—by corporations whose only value, whose only vision is the bottom line. Do we want to be a country run and bullied by greedy bastards? Or do we want to be a people who does their best to respect each other, to treat each other fairly, to protect the most vulnerable in our midst for no reason other than that they are our most vulnerable. They are our people. Not just strangers down on their luck or unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. They are our people, and we are a people who do what we can to support and protect each other.

We can do better. Much better. And we must do better. If we disengage, things will get much, much worse in a big ol' hurry. And there will be much more suffering before we get ourselves on a better path.

We've been fed a lot of assumptions and propaganda about capitalism. It's time to reexamine them and to examine the alternatives.

I don't always agree with Noam Chomsky, but he never fails to be thought-provoking. So here's a start on examining the alternatives to capitalism.



We'll look at more alternatives, more ways to get involved, and more ways to move the Revolution (with a capital R) along in the coming weeks.

We Need a New Bottom Line

Andrew Weil is right: Even if health care reform with a public option sails right through Congress without a hiccup, it won't begin to approach an accurate or useful diagnosis when it comes to the United States and health care. According to Weil,

What's missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what's even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn't fulfill its prime directive -- it does not help people become or stay healthy. It's not a health care system at all; it's a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly.

I would go further. The problem with the current system is that it is driven not by the need to provide care and promote health but by the need to make a profit. That's not to say that the people who participate in the system hold this value, but the system itself is designed to promote profit for its stakeholders. That some people may be helped in the process is incidental to the drive for an attractive bottom line.

Fundamentally, at the very heart of what troubles us as a nation is that we have placed the drive for profits way ahead of the well-being of ordinary people. The people decrying health care reform are defending not the needs of people but the needs of corporations. Our agriculture and food systems value profits to the exclusion of the well-being of people and the planet.

The corporations that continue devouring each other and the people and communities who get in their way are absurdly wealthy. They are like a gaping black hole that must be fed regardless of the consequences to the nation and the planet.

Look at the term "bottom line": its original meaning was "the essential or salient point," but now it has come to mean "financial considerations." When are we going to learn to make the well-being of people, families, and communities our national bottom line?

Weil ends his blog as follows:

Washington needs to take a step back and re-examine the entire task with an eye toward achieving the most effective solution, not the cheapest and most expeditious.

Actually, way before Washington steps back, we the people must step back and take a long, hard look at ourselves and what we value. Are we willing, at long last, to put people before profits?

All the loony right-wing scare tactics about "death panels" don't compare with the nightmare that is the current system. Do you really want a corporate bottom-line driving whether your child is able to get a life-saving surgery? Why would a profit-driven entity be more trustworthy than the United States government, which at the very least has the potential for accountability and reform.

Are we ready to turn the corner, to turn off the spigot that dumps all of our hopes and dreams into the endlessly greedy profit-driven black hole? Are we ready to make the well-being of our families, our neighbors, our communities, our nation, the world, and the planet our new bottom line, regardless of how our efforts affect corporate profit margins?