DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

Poor Walmart. They so desperately want to be seen as the good guys, especially since Al Gore came and laid the word on them. They’ve gotten religion, but they still haven’t figured out that it’s not what they do that’s the basic problem, it’s what they are that’s the basic problem. Know what I mean?

F’rinstance, they figured out that if they could just sell one compact florescent light bulb to each of their estimated hundred million American customers, it would be the energy equivalent of taking 1.3 million cars off the road every year—and every American home has 40-50 light sockets in it, most of which could be filled by compact fluorescents. Walmart is willing to put its not inconsiderable promotional muscle behind persuading Americans to switch to compact florescent bulbs—although this will ultimately cut deeply into their light bulb sales, since a compact florescent bulb, in addition to using a quarter of the electricity of an incandescent bulb, also lasts 8-10 times longer.

This is where it starts to get interesting. The net effect of such a switch will be to practically end light bulb production in the US, since virtually all compact florescent bulbs are made in China—because the swirl of glass that is one of their distinguishing features still needs to be handmade, and only at Chinese wage levels are handmade compact florescent bulbs price competitive with incandescent bulbs. Even with all the American glassblowers put out of work by the DEA, we still lose the deal to China, and more American factories bite the dust.

Now, I have no complaint about shutting down factories per se. It’s good for the environment. I think there are whole industries that could be shut down, such as the cosmetics industry, that would leave us all better off. But importing all our light bulbs from China? This falls into the domain of unintended negative consequences. How much worse will this tilt our balance of payments with China? How much energy will it take to get all those energy-saving light bulbs here? What will we do if we can’t get any more light bulbs from far across the sea?

“and she hands you a light bulb that comes all the way from China…” excuse me….

So much for what they’re doing. Like I said, it’s what Walmart is that’s the problem. By the company’s very nature, it destroys communities and the neighborhood businesses that serve them. That ain’t ecological. Walmart sucks money out of its host towns, rather than circulating it within them like a locally owned business. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the Walton family is one of the major beneficiaries of the Bush junta’s estate tax cuts. How do you think they got that way?

Oh, it would just tear me up if the Waltons had to sell their family farm….that little house on the prairie…right. The Walton family is one of America’s premier vampire clans, and selling energy-saving light bulbs won’t change that.

OK, now…how many Walmarts does it take to screw up a light bulb?

music: James McMurtry, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore”

I was gratified to see the lead editorial in this week’s Nashville Scene devoted to the dearth of differences between Demopublican Howard Ford, Jr., and Republicrat Bob Corker. Which would you prefer—an anti-abortion, anti-immigration, pro-war Democrat, or an anti-abortion, anti-immigration, pro-war Republican? Oh, wait—Ford is in favor of letting big pharma play with stem cells for fun and profit, while Corker’s agin it. What a difference!

It is sad and embarrassing to see so many of my “liberal”friends lining up behind Ford—I guess they think it would be uncouth not to support him ’cause he’s black, kind of. Ford voted for the bankruptcy revocation act and supported privatization of social security, both of which are totally against the interests of his supposed constituents. The guy is almost as much of an embarrassment as Ken Blackwell. Can you say, “Uncle Tom,” boys and girls? Martin Luther King must be spinning in his grave.

That we should be faced with such a non-choice is indicative of the bankruptcy of the American political process, especially since there is a candidate who offers a genuine alternative to the failed policies shared by Ford and Corker. But it is for just that reason that Green Party Senate candidate Chris Lugo gets no traction in the media. Gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer has the same problem—running against a Dempopublican incumbent who’s slashed health care and a Republicrat who wants to cut it even further, his “health care for all” campaign deserves far more attention that it’s getting.

It’s a dilemma—anyone who is a corporate whore isn’t worth voting for, but anyone who’s not a corporate whore can’t get elected because the corporate media won’t pay any attention to them. Hey, it’s simple self-preservation. If enough people who were not beholden to the corporate overlords got in positions of power, we might reverse the doctrine of corporate personhood and put the corporate structure back in its proper place, as our servant. Somehow, I doubt that the Democrats will ever do that.

Meanwhile, for the benefit of those who yearn for the return of the Democratic party, let me remind you of some details of the good cop party’s activities:

Bill Clinton tried to pass an anti-terrorism bill very similar to what Bush has put in place; conservative Republicans shot it down as being a threat to civil liberties—and the freedom of companies like Enron to launder money just like Al Qaeda.

Mike McCurry, Bubba Bill’s former chief of staff, is now with the lobbying firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc., where he serves as head of the astroturf group, Hands off the Internet, which wants the government to get its hands off the internet so that private companies can take it over and turn it into the moral equivalent of cable TV. You know, one underfunded, closely monitored, little-watched public access channel, with the rest of it reserved for big boys with money. They are perilously close to succeeding.

Jack Quinn was Al Gore’s chief of staff for a while, then became Clinton’s chief legal counsel. Since leaving the White House, Quinn has formed a lobbying firm, Quinn-Gillespie, with former Republican National committee chairman Ed Gillespie, a friend and supporter of Tom Delay. OK, that’s guilt by association, but here are some of the lobbying activities Quinn has undertaken:

He’s worked for Enron. I hardly need to say more, but…he’s worked to lift bans on offshore oil drilling, subvert tighter regulation of nursing homes, weaken consumer credit protection laws, keep unhealthy food in school lunch programs, and lower corporate taxes still further.

Mark Penn, one of Clinton’s principal pollsters, still associated with that great Demopublican hope, Hillary Clinton, has lobbied against tighter smoking regulations, against allowing obesity-related lawsuits against fast-food restaurant chains, and on behalf of big pharma, Shell Oil, and the Iraqi National Congress-which, in case you’ve forgotten, was basically a vehicle for scamming money from the CIA. Oh, and he’s also argued against holding Dow/Union Carbide responsible for the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Victims of that corporate crime, the ones that are still alive over twenty years later, still have not seen any compensation from the corporate person that killed their families or left them crippled for life. We would not put up with such irresponsibility from an individual. The capital punishment crew would be howling for blood; but when there’s no blood, just money, they’re strangely silent.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can read the rest of the story at The Real News Project.org, where it is listed under the title “25 Democratic Consultants.” Twenty five. And yes, I know that consultants aren’t legislators, but they’re the brains, mouths, arms and legs of legislators. If a legislator hires a whore for sex, it’s a scandal; if a legislator hires a whore for the corporate agenda, that’s just business as usual.

And even when grassroots Democrats get it right, their leadership does its best to shut them down. In California, the predominantly Democratic state legislature has passed a bill establishing universal public health care in the state. Although the bill passed by a wide margin, the Democratic candidate for governor won’t support it, calling instead for mandatory enrollment in private health care a la Massachusetts. That’s like mandating that everyone pay protection money to the mafia—sure, it’ll make things more peaceful for most people, but at what price?

Business as usual politics, although it’s the only kind that can get any airplay, is approaching the end of the line. Whether it’s business as usual in health care or business as usual in energy and conservation policy, soon we will be far from the realm of the usual, like it or not, prepared or not. The Green Party seems to be the only political entity in the country that is willing to fully acknowledge this.

music: Bob Marley, “Top Rankin“

So, about thirty-four percent of Americans think the government at least allowed the World Trade Center attacks to happen, and the other sixty-six percent are still living in la-la land, a world where the important news is whether Jon-Benet’s murderer has finally been found, and a Mormon polygamist somehow rates inclusion on the FBI’s ten most wanted list for schtupping underage girls. Next thing you know, Woody Allen will be in their crosshairs. Soap! That’s what these kind of stories are! They’re not news, they’re soap!

Speaking of soap and strategically placed distractions, the so-called breakup of the so-called plot to create liquid explosives from household items smuggled on airplanes is ludicrous from so many dimensions I hardly know where to begin. First of all, most of the people arrested didn’t have passports, let alone airline tickets, at the time they were arrested. There was no evidence most of them had even applied for passports.

As for making liquid explosives on board an airplane, columnist/cartoonist Ted Ralls quoted Britain’s highly respected technology magazine, The Register, to this effect:

“First,” wrote The Register, “you’ve got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water…Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drink bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It’s all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don’t forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked “perishable foods”), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You’re going to need them.

“It’s best to fly first class and order champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate…Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide/acetone mixture into the ice water bath (champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you’ll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you’ll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

“After a few hours–assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven’t overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities–you’ll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.”

The Register’s opinion of those who believe they have thwarted a terror plot?

“Certainly, if we can imagine a group of jihadists smuggling the necessary chemicals and equipment on board, and cooking up TATP in the lavatory, then we’ve passed from the realm of action blockbusters to that of situation comedy.”

THIS is the substance of a terror threat? This is the kind of shibboleth Bush is waving about to keep his junta in power? And most American critics of the Bush junta’s trumpeting of this comedy of errors are merely pointing out that the Brits cracked the story by “old fashioned police work,” and not with the dubiously constitutional tools of the Patriot Act? They’re not pointing to the flimsiness of the “plot,” itself?

In spite of the fact that the majority of the American press is willing to accept having objects like this stuck up their rectums, there are honest, idealistic, crusading journalists who are dedicated to getting the truth to the public. And for you, the fearless few, the Bush junta has plans.

Back in 1917, at the height of war hysteria—this was the last time antiwar activists were actually lynched, in case you didn’t know—Congress passed a law called “The Espionage Act” which cranked up the penalties for disclosing government secrets. There was, to Congress’s credit, a debate on whether journalists should be exempted from the law, and journalists were, in fact, exempted. But now comes Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, he who called the Geneva Conventions “quaint,” and says the government is considering whether to prosecute journalists under this law anyway. Hey, he’s opted out of the “reality-based community,” AND he’s the AG, he can do whatever he wants, right? Fly, walk on water, imprison people for years without bringing charges against them, prosecute people under laws that don’t apply, leap over tall buildings in a single bound,whatever. But, I digress.

Here’s something: this government is making things secret that didn’t used to be secret. Details about the US missile program from the fifties, that have been in the public domain for decades, are now top secret again. If you have that information and publish it, you could be prosecuted. Hey, terrorists might use them to make missiles. And another thing: time and time again the government has stonewalled investigations and prosecutions of their illegal conduct “because they could compromise national security.” Under this doctrine, they could prosecute those bringing the suits for mentioning the matter in the first place. Plus, I just found out that journalist Greg Palast is under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for the newly criminal offence of taking pictures of an oil refinery. Watch where you point that camera, folks.

Meanwhile, the news that a judge has found that the National Security Administration is acting in violation of the constitution can still be swamped in the media by a ten-year old murder case. With such voluntary censorship by burial in trivia, do we really need the heavy-handed kind? Mr. Cheney apparently thinks so.

OK, the good news/bad news—only a third, or nearly a third, of Americans are highly suspicious of the official twin towers story. When we started in on all this, not even a third of our population thought the Iraq war was unnecessary, but now a majority understand, at least, that it’s a bad idea. May the educating process continue.

music: Jackson Browne, “Lives In the Balance”

This month’s Truth in Strange Places award goes to congressional candidate Dr. Mary Maxwell, a Republican candidate in a primary election that will be held this coming Tuesday in New Hampshire. Dr. Maxwell has distinguished herself by telling her interviewers at the Nashua Telegraph that the US government had a role in the 9-11 attacks, either by allowing the plot to proceed or by actually fomenting it. She refuses to state which of those she thinks most likely.

This news snippet got my attention—a Republican is rushing in where the Democrats fear to tread? I did some research. Her credentials are outstanding. She lived in Australia for eight years and earned a PhD in—politics, of all things, while she was there, and she served as President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. She spent five years in the United Arab Emirates with her pediatrician husband, while he helped start a medical school there, and says she found “found Arab people to be exactly like the rest of us.” She lost her husband to cancer in 2000. Since then she has worked towards a law degree, published several books on ethics in international relations (lauded by no less than Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson), served as a visiting scholar in the school of Law and Religion (what a combination!) at Emory University, and been a Summa Cum Laude scholar at Mannheim University in Germany. She would definitely bring more to the House of Representatives than someone who had been, say, an exterminator, dontcha think?

So—she’s been living out of the country quite a bit, getting real news instead of the corporate Prozac that American TV watchers get dosed with. Yeah, yeah, I know Australia is Rupert Murdererdoch’s home turf, but Ms. Maxwell is obviously someone who thinks for herself.

And, oh yeah—she’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the primary.

But she’s not alone in thinking that the twin towers was an inside job. According to recent surveys, about a third to half of all those polled agree with her. But you’d better not try too hard to prove it, and you can bet nobody that knows is going to step forward. Let me tell you a couple of stories about why.

Our first story concerns an Italian man named Adamo Bove, who was head of security at Telecom Italia, Italy’s largest telecommunications company. Bove had recently used mobile phone records to uncover how the CIA and Italy’s equivalent agency, SISMI, had illegally conspired to kidnap an Egyptian cleric and have him tortured in Cairo. It seems Bove’s bosses were conducting illegal wiretapping and doing their best to cover it up, but Bove’s help with the investigation had already forced one of Telecom Italia’s executives out, and it looked like, with Bove’s help, more indictments would be on the way. Then a funny thing happened….Adamo Bove apparently jumped to his death from a freeway overpass. He had not been suicidal; he left no note.

The next story takes us just across the Adriatic to Greece, where, a little over a year earlier, just before the Athens Olympics, Costas Tsalikidis, a software engineer for Vodaphone, Greece’s leading telephone company, discovered that the company’s mobile network was bugged, enabling somebody to eavesdrop on sensitive government discussions, as well as members of the opposition, journalists, and, oh, gee, Arab businessmen! The bug, he discovered, fed the tapped calls to several antennae located suspiciously near the American embassy, and yes, that’s highly circumstantial, but it is not circumstantial that the antennae transmitted to a telephone number in Laurel, Maryland, right here in the USA, which—just circumstantially, y’understand, happens to be the hometown of America’s National Security Agency.

Tsalikidis was psyched about discovering this. He felt he was on to something big. And then, one morning, his mother, poor woman, found him hung from some water pipes in his apartment, his feet a tantalizing, too distant three inches off the floor. He left no suicide note, just a deeply bereaved fiancee.

The next day, the head of Vodaphone reported the bug to the prime minister; but he made sure the bug was destroyed first, although that destroyed the way to prove the unfortunate Mr. Tsalikdis’ allegations.

The prime minister then made sure the story was buried, as he did not want to sour his country’s relations with the U.S.

Investigating these cases, I’ve come up with a third suspicious “suicide” in Italy, that of Michele Lanzi, in Tivoli in 2002, but all the googling I can do, all the searches of European newspapers, reveal no further reference to this than a mention in a discussion of the Adamo Bove case. Can any of you hard-core conspiracy theorists out there help me on this one?

The Bove discussion also revealed that the Italian verb for “suicide” has a transitive form, as in, “The Mafia suicided him.” Or the CIA. Are these the kind of “War on Terror” tactics the Bush-Cheney cabal would like to bring home?

music: Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”

Comments

I really like your views, relative to the articles I’ve read. I’d like to know how you come up with the voting habits of members of congress and the senate?
Posted by ochipwa on 09/12/2006 12:53:03 AM

Now it’s time for the whether report, when we look at whether we are going to continue to have a planet capable of supporting human life. The indicators are not good. Scientists have recently excavated ice cores from Antarctica that date back eight hundred thousand years, and—guess what? There’s more carbon dioxide in the air now than there has been at any time in the last eight hundred thousand years! We’re number one!

Eight hundred thousand years ago, our prehuman ancestors were just getting the hang of controlling fire.

The study also revealed that the amount of carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere in the last seventeen years is unparalleled. There is 30 ppm more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was in 1990. Typically, it has taken a thousand years for a 30 ppm fluctuation to occur. That is probably why current planetary temperatures aren’t quite the warmest in 800,000 years—it will take the planet a little while to catch up. Meanwhile, the increasing heat is freeing methane and CO2 from thawing arctic tundra at a faster rate than calculated just a few months ago. The weather along the north Pacific coast is getting too warm for the native tree species, and massive forest dieoffs are starting to occur.

This year’s hurricane season has so far not been too intense, unless you live in Baja California, which got its first hurricane ever. I’m grateful the folks on our south coast have gotten a little breathing room, but I hope they don’t let it go to their heads. Time is not on their side.

Dr. James Hansen, in Federal Court testimony, has sworn that we must act decisively in the next ten years if we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change—as if what’s going on already isn’t catastrophic enough. If we continue at the rate we’re going, he predicts a 50-100 foot rise in sea level over the next century or two, displacing hundreds of millions of people. Even if we succeed in slamming the brakes on, we’re still going to lose some coastline.

Two experts from City College of New York’s Clean Fuels Institute estimate the cost of stopping global warming in the U.S. at 200 billion dollars a year. Gee, too bad that between Bush’s tax cuts for the rich—which, gosh, amount to about 200 billion a year–and the Iraq war, which costs upwards of 70 billion a year, we can’t afford it. So that’s what they mean by pre-emptive war. It pre-empts our ability to do what we really need to do to save our asses.

So—enjoy the simple pleasures of your life—the trees, birds, beaches, mountains, streams, flowers, children, old people, hot water, good food, your friends and your ability to visit with them—feel the poignancy, the transitoriness, of it all—because it’s poised to change far beyond our capacity to imagine, and possibly beyond our capacity to adapt. Maybe we can prevent catastrophe. Maybe. Maybe.

music: The Persuasions, “Ship of Fools”