The Green Party of Tennessee met in a smoke-free back room at Nashville’s Italian Market last Saturday.  I’d like to say we decided the future of Tennessee, with Party co-chair Katey Culver playing the part of capa di tutti capi, but overall I’m afraid our effect on Tennessee politics is just not that powerful.

The party is, however, beginning to make itself felt.  Chris Lugo, who is once again the party’s candidate for US Senate, reported that the two months he spent as the only person seeking the Democratic nomination finally shamed the Democrats into running somebody against Lamar Alexander, who has been all but endorsed by our so-called Democratic governor.  It’s a bad news/good news situation for Chris–while he’ll be in competition with a Democrat, candidate Bob Tuke is calling for a slow, “phased withdrawal” from Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving Chris as the “get out now/settle by non-military means” candidate.  The rising tide of frustration with the war and the Democrats’ failure to end it, plus the fact that this is Chris’s second run, will hopefully improve his showing.

The party nominated TSU political science professor John Miglietta to run against 5th District Congressman Jim Cooper.  John has a tremendous advantage over just about anybody else the Green Party could run, because he is not now, and never has been, a hippie, unlike most of the rest of the party.  If most of us got anywhere close to mounting a serious challenge to the two-party system, the Demopublicans would have no trouble finding dancing skeletons in our closets, which they would use to fan the flames of voter hysteria, and, if necessary, have us arrested or at least publicly humiliated for daring to think for ourselves.  But John, bless his heart, is just as square as they come, and he still sees things our way.  That means a lot to me. For him, it means he could go all the way to the top.

One of my old hippie teachers used to talk about the importance of acceptance of our ethos by “honest squares.”  This is actually quite scientific; if the hippie/Green world view can be arrived at by someone through a process completely independent of the counterculture, that amounts to independent validation of the results of the decades long “thought experiment,” to borrow a phrase from Einstein, that was originally launched by the late and much lamented trio of Dr. Hoffman, Dr. Leary, and Aldous Huxley.  Well, this doesn’t have much to do with our current race for political office and against time, and will probably embaras the hell out of many Greens, but I just had to go and open my big mouth, now, didn’t I?  Well, I’m not responsible for the fact that the Green Party’s lineage goes back through the North American Bioregional Congress to the Haight-Ashbury Diggers to the San Francisco Mime Troupe.  I just think we should be proud of it, that’s all.

Back to the subject at hand!  We also selected delegates to the party’s national convention, and determined who they should vote for–five out of eight are committed to Cynthia McKinney, with Kent Mesplay, Kat Swift, and “uncommitted” each getting a delegate.  I have a hard time getting excited about Green Party Presidential candidates.  In my view, it’s just a publicity stunt unless we’ve got a shot at getting a majority in Congress.  We’re a grassroots organization, know what I mean?

Anyway, Cynthia is black, she’s a woman, and she hasn’t sold out.  I wish her well.

Speaking of grass roots,  I wish I had a whole lot more candidate news for you.  I wish we had a crew of people running for the state legislature, where many races are uncontested, but we are awfully thin in the ranks.  However, we do have a plan afoot that could change that.

The plan is our Ballot Access Lawsuit.  The Demoplublicans have written the rules for getting on the Tennessee ballot in such a way that it is virtually impossible for any other parties to get their party name printed on the ballot.  The only problem is, that’s unconstitutional, according to a court in Ohio, where the laws were about as tortuous and monopolistic as they are here.  The Tennessee legislature could have changed that, but, being made up of Demopublicans and Republicrats, they had more important things to do, like allow mountaintop removal in Tennessee.  So, we are having  to sue in Federal court to overturn Tennessee’s laws.  Since it’s the same Federal Court that overturned Ohio’s laws, we think we have a reasonable chance for success.

The State Attorney General, being a committed Demopublican, doesn’t want to let the Green Party on the ballot, and so he is doing everything he can to drag this case out past this year’s election, just as the state’s election officials are doing everything they can to stall legislation that will replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with equipment that will produce a verifiable, recountable paper trail.  Put that together with the fact that the US has more people in prison than any other country in the world, a quarter of the world’s known prison population, in fact, and you can get downright cynical about what a wonderful, free country this is.

Well, anyway, the Ballot Access lawsuit will put our party name on every ballot in the state, even if the newspapers won’t give us the time of day.  That could just be the little match that starts the big fire.  Maybe that’s a lot to hope for, but the future of the human race is at stake.  “Once more unto the breach, good friends…..”

Why Gas in the U.S. Is So Cheap

by Steve Hargreaves
Friday, May 2, 2008 provided by

Relatively low taxes have kept pump prices far below most other developed nations, which some say is precisely why the current runup is so painful.

Despite daily headlines bemoaning record gas prices, the U.S. is actually one of the cheaper places to fill up in the world.

Out of 155 countries surveyed, U.S. gas prices were the 45th cheapest, according to a recent study from AIRINC, a research firm that tracks cost of living data.

The difference is staggering. As of late March, U.S. gas prices averaged $3.45 a gallon. That compares to over $8 a gallon across much of Europe.

The U.S. has always fought to keep gas prices low, and the current debate among presidential candidates on how to keep them that way has been fierce.

But those cheap gas prices - which Americans have gotten used to - mean they feel price spikes like the ones we’re experiencing now more acutely than citizens from other nations which have had historically more expensive fuel.

Cheap gas prices have also lulled Americans into a cycle of buying bigger cars and bigger houses further away from their work - leaving them more exposed to rising prices, some experts say.

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Revenues from Europe’s high gas taxes are used to fund a variety of things. One thing they have built is better public transportation, said Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial, a Calgary-based private equity firm.

They gave people an alternative to driving, something we don’t have in North America,” said Tertzakian.

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Americans have taken advantage of cheap gas prices to do other things - like buy bigger cars and bigger houses further away from city centers, said Schipper.

On a per capita basis, Americans use three times more oil than Europeans, he said. That means Americans are more exposed to rising gas prices than their counterparts across the Atlantic.

“Five-thousand square feet in the suburbs, that’s much rarer in Europe,” said Schipper, referring to big homes. “We dug our hole.”

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and that hole’s only going to get deeper….from the Oil Drum, a prediction of $1000 a barrel oil by 2020  (let’s see, that translates out to $30/gallon for gasoline, doesn’t it?  and everything else that’s oil dependent will jump in price by more or less a factor of ten, too….)

This is a guest post by Phoenix, an engineer working in the energy sector, and a friend of mine for well over 3 decades.

In January 2006 Phoenix emailed me a spreadsheet that predicted an oil price of $100/barrel by 2008, followed by an ongoing geometric rise in oil prices. I remember immediately phoning him to point out that the scenario was impossible because it is unsustainable - $100/barrel would cause economic havoc comparable to the oil shock of the 1970s and if a geometric price progression followed, then no economic recovery would be possible and… well, I recall using the phrase “rioting in the streets inside of 18 months”.

As we know, oil hit $100 in January 2008 and kept climbing, surpassing even Phoenix’s predictions. So when Phoenix offered to explain the model that generated those numbers, I leapt at the opportunity. Here is the story of how Phoenix became Peak Oil aware and generated his Price Calculator.

Click to Enlarge

Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths, U.S. Says

By Avram Goldstein

May 5 (Bloomberg) — The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government’s top psychiatric researcher said.

Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven’t provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Washington.

Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- traumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.

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apparently, many soldiers suffering from PTSD don’t seek treatment because they think that seeking treatment will be worse for them than suffering ….another example of why authoritarian power structures don’t work….

Oil is expensive because oil is scarce

from the UK Telegraph

By David Strahan

Polishing the portholes on the Titanic hardly does it justice. This week saw ministers giving an uncanny impersonation of Corporal Jones urging calm over the Grangemouth refinery strike; lorry drivers protesting in Park Lane over a two pence rise in fuel duty; and much righteous indignation over the level of profits reported by Shell and BP. All of which entirely misses the point. These issues are trifling compared to global oil depletion, where there have been several distinct turns for the worse in the last month.

The idea that oil companies are somehow ‘to blame’ for record oil prices and rising fuel costs is seductive but absurd. For all their power and profits, the international oil companies are in fact in trouble. They may still be swimming in cash, but no longer in oil. Despite vast investment in exploration and production, these days they generally fail to replace the oil they produce each year with fresh discoveries, or even to maintain current levels of output. Shell’s oil production has been falling for six years, BP’s seems to have peaked 2005, and this week even the mighty Exxon was forced to admit its output dropped 10% in the first quarter of the year.

None of this should come as a surprise since all the evidence now suggests the world is rapidly approaching “peak oil”, the point when global oil production goes into terminal decline for fundamental geological reasons. Annual discovery of oil has been falling for over forty years, and now for every barrel we find we consume three. Oil production is already shrinking in 60 of the world’s 98 oil producing countries – including Britain, where output peaked in 1999 and has already plunged by more than half. When an individual country peaks it only matters for that country – Britain became a net importer of oil in 2006 – but when global supply starts to shrink the effects could be ruinous for everybody.

JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER INTERVIEWED IN BUSINESS WEEK

Why is suburbia now threatened?
Cheap oil is what made suburbia possible. But we’ll run into problems with spot shortages. As we get into trouble with these supplies, our economy will suffer. Major instabilities in the system will present themselves much sooner than we are led to believe. And by that I mean the way we produce food, the way we conduct commerce, and the way we move around.

When will all that happen?
The rise and fall of oil production is asymmetrical. In other words, it’ll be a steeper, rockier tumble down than the steady increase going up. My own sense of things is that we will be in very serious trouble inside of five years.

Won’t it help to cut back on gas?
I get people who come up to the podium after a speaking engagement to tell me they’ve just gotten a Prius, expecting brownie points. It’s not that we’re driving the wrong cars. It’s that we’re driving cars of any size, incessantly.

What about biofuels?
We will use all of them, probably. But we will be greatly disappointed by what they can do for us. We certainly aren’t going to run Wal-Mart (WMT), Disney World (DIS), and the highway system on any combination of solar, wind, nuclear, ethanol, biodiesel, or used french-fry oil.

Isn’t it a bit radical to declare game over for Wal-Mart?
It is part and parcel of the suburban predicament. How long can they maintain their warehouse-on-wheels as the price of motor fuels goes up?

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so, while the price of gas has tripled in the US, it’s less than doubled in Europe….because the dollar is worth less….

If we take Autumn of 2000 as our base point when the euro was trading at its low of 0.8252 relative to the US dollar and oil was trading at $35 dollars per barrel, we get the following results: The increase in price of oil in euros has been 74% since 2000, while it has been a 237% increase in US dollars.

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Gasoline May Soon Cost a Sawbuck

Big New Shock at the Pump Forecast by Two Analysts

Get ready for another economic shock of major proportions — a virtual doubling of prices at the gas pump to as much as $10 a gallon.

Gas at that price range would make diesel even more expensive, which would make trucking/shipping almost prohibitive.  And then there’s chemical fertilizer and “all the marvelous ways/they’re using plastics nowadays,” as Tom Lehrer used to sing….like, “the American way of life is not negotiable”?  OK, then we’ll just cancel it outright….

from PR Watch:

The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week’s exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

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And the MSM echoes Cheney, saying “So?”:

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?

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?

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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