Max Keiser: Your ’stimulus’ check will cost you more than it’s worth

By Max Keiser
Huffington Post
Sunday, April 27, 2008

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-keiser/why-you-shouldnt-spend-yo_b_988…

I’ll explain two reasons why you Americans should not spend your economic stimulus check: the first applies to people who work regular jobs for wages, the second applies to people who work in investment banks for bonuses.

If you work for wages (or live on a pension), consider this: If every American said “No, thank you” to President Bush’s stimulus check and refused to cash them, the value of the dollars in your pocket right now, in terms of their purchasing power would go up by a factor greater than the face value ($600) of the stimulus check. In other words, if you didn’t spend these checks, you’d be the richer for it.

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War Crimes Start at the Top

Professor John Yoo Should be Dismissed From Boalt Law School–And Prosecuted

By CARLOS VILLARREAL

War crimes start at the top. The torture and deaths at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; the humiliation of Iraqi and Afghani detainees in the field; extraordinary rendition; the indiscriminate killing by rifles and cluster bombs; these are becoming the new norms of war for which the leaders in the United States are responsible. And as with the war crimes of the past, the spilling of blood began with the spilling of ink. The most culpable are not the young foot soldiers in fatigues holding a naked prisoner with a dog leash; they are the men and women in suits who craft the policies.

John Yoo is one of those men in suits, and it is disgraceful that he is paid by the people of California to shape the law and young minds at one of our most distinguished law schools. As an organization, the National Lawyers Guild released a press release in April stating that Yoo ought to be tried as a war criminal and dismissed by the University of California Berkeley - Boalt Hall, where he is currently a law professor.

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There is precedent for criminal liability against attorneys in circumstances not unlike the Yoo case. Philippe Sands, among others, has recently revisited the Nuremberg case of United States v. Altstoetter in a scathing two-part story in Vanity Fair called “The Green Light.” Sands writes that the case “had been prosecuted by the Allies to establish the principle that lawyers and judges in the Nazi regime bore a particular responsibility for the regime’s crimes.” The principal defendant in that case was imprisoned for five years, primarily for performing as an attorney - giving legal advice (or more accurately legal cover) for the “disappearing” of political opponents of the Nazi regime.

John Yoo created a legal framework that would allow torture; and just like the lawyerly work that led to convictions in Altstoetter, it wasn’t done as a purely academic or philosophical exercise. He created this framework to enable torturers; to give cover and help set in motion policies that would directly lead to the pain, suffering and death of prisoners held by the United States against accepted international law. This is why Yoo ought to be dismissed by Boalt, disbarred, and prosecuted for war crimes.

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only five years for Yoo?  That’s a slap on the wrist!  And, speaking of war criminals:

…Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has publicly claimed that the torture of prisoners does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Scalia’s comment came during an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Justice Scalia: I don’t like torture. I’m—although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But, I mean, who’s in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the—everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution.

Lesley Stahl: If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression, ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ doesn’t that apply?

Justice Scalia: “No, no.”

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more on the American legal climate:

Lawyers fear feds eavesdrop on talks with terror suspects

By PHILIP SHENON

The New York Times

PORTLAND — Thomas Nelson, an Oregon lawyer, has lived in a state of perpetual jet lag for two years. Every few weeks, he flies from Portland to the Middle East to meet with a high-profile Saudi client who cannot enter the United States because he faces charges here of financing terrorism.

Nelson says he does not dare to phone this client or e-mail him because of what many prominent criminal-defense lawyers say is a well-founded fear that all of their contacts are being monitored by the U.S. government.

Because he is constantly shifting time zones to see his client face to face, “I just don’t sleep normally anymore,” Nelson said. “But I don’t have a choice. It’s very clear to me that anything I say to my client or to other lawyers in this case is being recorded.”

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guilty until proven guilty, eh?

North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008

By CATHERINE BRAHIC

April 27, 2008 —

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

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Meanwhile, there is a new fishery of sorts opening in the Arctic, thanks to sea ice receding from the north coast of Alaska that is making way for new fish hangouts. Salmon, among other fish, are beginning to show up north of the Bering Strait as they migrate in search of cooler waters that are disappearing in the more southern parts of the ocean. The catch: commercial fishing boats will follow, unless all fishing north of the Bering Strait is banned as proposed by scientists, environmentalists and even the fishing industry itself.

“We don’t know the full scope and effect as sea ice recedes and climate changes,” says David Benton, executive director of the Marine Conservation Alliance, a Juneau, Alaska–based industry group. “We need to close the Arctic until we understand what the effects are going to be in the environment.”

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Costs killing Maine farmers

By Sharon Kiley Mack
Friday, April 25, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

LEVANT, Maine - Dairy farmer Brian Call doesn’t have a fancy milking parlor. He hand-carries the portable milking machine to each of his 30 cows, wiping their teats with pages ripped from an old telephone book. “Another way to save money,” he comments.

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In her letter to the congressional delegation and Maine’s dairy industry members, Gibson wrote, “People need to be concerned that small farms and small businesses are closing their doors, as they are the backbone of our economy and they fuel rural communities. We are becoming ghost farms and ghost towns, the end of an era and the start of a vacuum to be filled by monopolies, a form of economic totalitarianism.”

By telling her family’s personal financial story, Gibson hopes solutions will be found to save Maine’s small, family farms.

“I will tell you that we realize no profit from our dairy farm, nothing,” she said.

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Peak Farmers: A Guest Post by Elaine Solowey

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Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.

Peak farmers.

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.

Some were driven off their land by the vast illegal enclosure actions of wealthy landowners in South American nations.

The Nazis in WWII swept up the farming inhabitants of Russian and Polish and Jewish villages and worked them to death in the factories that fed their war machine.

Millions of farmers were displaced by dams financed by the World Bank

Millions more were removed from agriculture by the policies of the WTO.

Some had their farms were taxed out from under them and the land tuned over to developers who built cheap houses and strips malls on it.

And more were eliminated by agricultural globalization, the belief that every farmer should specialize and produce as much of their single product as possible (to the neglect of everything else) - then we would all merrily cross- ship these things to each other for ever.

Still others were “sanitized” out of business. The small dairies and animal husbandry operations could not afford the large and expensive machines needed to raise animals and process milk and meat under the rules of “modern” hygiene.

These small operations were declared to be inefficient and dirty, never mind the fact that modern “hygienic” production units for meat and milk are nightmarishly cruel, filthy, and squalid. (Indeed, a backyard pigpen or chicken coop is a relative paradise compared the confining “crush” pens of the modern pig farm or the cage batteries of the modern poultry house.)

So farmers were eliminated, one after another, by murder, displacement, bankruptcy, by taxes that would not let land be passed from generation, by on- farm prices that left farmers unable to feed their own families, by subsidies that favored farms beyond human scale.

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Independence Days: My First Challenge

It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy.  And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.

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I challenge myself and all of you to work on creating food Independence Days this year - that all of us try to do one thing every day  to create Food Independence.  That means in each day or week, we would try to:

1. Plant something.  Obviously, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere and having spring are doing this anyway.  But the idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly.  Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil.  Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

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3. Preserve something.  Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be.  It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter.  And it adds up fast.  The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later.  Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.  Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket.  Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal.  Sort out and inventory your pantry.  Make a list of tools you need.  Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does.  Fix your bike.  Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it.  Plan for next year’s edible landscaping.  Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go. Clean, mend, declutter, learn a new skill.  Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

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The Politics of Food is Politics

By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

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My own…anecdotal evidence….using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

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We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as “political.” We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.

The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through “facts-on-the-ground.” Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to. Fortunately, we do. Some of them have just been recited above. We just need to point to them with more urgency now. Because the facts-on-the-ground of the present capitalist system, as we can see, have slammed into something like the end of an unexpected cul-de-sac. The epidemic of dollar hegemony has torn through the world like a plague; but plagues burn themselves out when all who are susceptible have been wiped out.

The airlines have run into the deep impasse of tooling and organization… and so has our food system. Our system has arrived decisively at what Ivan Illich called its second watershed: all our “cures” have become the disease. We are in a state of accelerating iatrogensis. The capitalist/extractive/technomanagerial system can only prescribe more of the same medicine that is killing us… or new medicines to treat the symptoms of the last medicine. This is not a metaphorical treadmill, but a downward spiral… and there is a bottom.

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Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.

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Canada’s C-51 Law May Outlaw 60% of Natural Health Products; Big Pharma Pushing to Criminalize Supplements

(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website: http://www.stopc51.com

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…and the devil take the rest of us….

White House undermines EPA on cancer risks, GAO says

By H. JOSEF HEBERT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger - often secret - role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

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Penis theft panic hits city..

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

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Just more proof that ignorance is not bliss…I guess when people feel powerless about living in a failed state, they tend to personalize it…

from those radical socialists at Newsweek:

…America’s top car dealer says what we really need in this country is high gas prices—something in the neighborhood of $6 a gallon—if we ever really want to tackle the critical issues of the day: global warming and our oil addiction. “The biggest lie in America politics today is to say you care deeply about global warming and advocate for the price of gas to go down,” says Mike Jackson, CEO of the AutoNation car dealer chain. “Those are mutually exclusive concepts.”

The fact is, as much as we gripe about gas prices, we’re pumping just as much of the precious liquid into our tanks as ever. Every day in America we burn through 391 million gallons of motor fuel. That burn rate is the same as last year, when gas prices were 70 cents per gallon lower. And gas consumption is up 18 percent from a decade ago. The federal Energy Information Administration just predicted we would finally begin to curb our consumption this year for the first time since 1991—by an underwhelming 0.3 percent.

What’s driving this demand? Our lust for large cars and long trips.

meanwhile…

Norwegian automaker Think Global said Monday it planned to sell low-priced electric cars to the masses and will introduce its first models in the U.S. by the end of next year.

The battery-powered Think City will be able to travel up to 110 miles on a single charge, with a top speed of about 65 mph, the company said. It will be priced below $25,000…..

What I want to know is, when can I get a plug-in electric beater pickup truck that i can  take out in the woods and use for hauling firewood, manure, and other dirty stuff?  Twenty-five grand buys a lot of bus tokens, if all you’re trying to do is schlep your ass around town.  You want privacy? Wear shades and carry an mp3 player!  Of course, you’ve gotta have a public transportation system that works, and you’ve gotta have communities that are organized so that public transportation works, and we have neither here in the states.  Ever since the automobile companies bought up the interurban railroads in order to shut them down, this country has been on a private-car ego trip that is now in a high-speed collision with reality.

Furthermore, consumer credit is in the toilet.  Who’s gonna be able afford to buy these things?

The Housing Market is Nowhere Near Bottom

Housing is what started the current mess me are in. Thanks to record low interest rates from the Federal Reserve, the US consumer went on a debt-induced home buying binge. That binge is now coming home to roost. And it’s not going to let up for the foreseeable future.

Let’s start with supply. First, there are a ton of existing homes on the market — right around 4 million (charts are from Calculated Risk).

And this is before we get into the issue of foreclosures.

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Michael Pollan on the Revolutionary Act of Gardening

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

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Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

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Food crisis telegraphing the future
It’s pretty fortunate that the world’s largest oil exporters tend to be ones with small’ish populations. It won’t be very long, maybe a few years, maybe a decade before oil producers start reverting to mercantilist leanings, and start limiting the export of oil in favor of subsidized and affordable domestic consumption. Though it may not seem obvious on the face, oil and natural gas are absolute requirements for survival in the modern world, as inputs for pesticides for our monoculture crops, transportation fuel, and the manufacture of NPK derived fertilizer. The interlocking of petroleum and food security cannot be undone. You can’t feed the world with wind, nuclear and solar. It’s inevitable that food production will take priority over optional transportation, and costs of food and fuel will skyrocket in tandem.

One of the second order effects of the rise in the price of oil is that seed, fertilizer, and pesticide costs are all skyrocketing. Crop yields in many poorer nations are down severely, because farmers simply can’t afford to plant, and it devolves into a vicious cycle which drives supply down even further in a time when inputs are all skyrocketing.

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The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

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