Alberta Canada tar sand region before and after mining

This afternoon (Wednesday, January 18th, 2012), the Obama Administration announced that they are denying the permit for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. This news represents a great victory for the environment and our planetary future. In the last Congressional budget action, approval for a two month extension of payroll tax reductions and unemployment insurance was adopted, with a provision tacked onto the bill which forced the President to decide within 60 days whether he would approve the Keystone XL pipeline, presumably feeling confident that putting him in such a box during an election year would increase the likelihood that the project would move forward. The Keystone XL pipeline proposal was designed to carry tar sand oil from Alberta Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, where it was to be refined.  Since big oil supports construction of this pipeline and is used to getting their way through lobbying and campaign donations, it would not have been surprising to anyone if Obama had yielded and approved the 1700 mile pipeline for construction.  But massive demonstrations, largely orchestrated by Bill McKibben’s 350.org, encircling at one point the White House with demonstrators linking arms (attended by arrests),  the environmental opposition beat out the oil lobby and encouraged Obama to deny the permit, an act for which he will face stiff opposition in a re-election year. It is worth noting that our most prominent climate scientist, James Hansen, has termed the Albert Sands project “game over” meaning that with the excessive carbon introduced by burning the dirty tar sands, we will reach a point of no-return on future climate change and very likely see large increases in sea levels as the polar and Greenland ice melts. Although we won the battle, the war isn’t over and it won’t be over until the environment and greenhouse gas emissions are finally recognized as the serious threat they pose to our future climate safety. You can bet that by tomorrow if not sooner, Mitt Romney will jump on this as a major job killer and announce he will reverse the decision once he’s elected to the Presidency. But let’s pause for a few minutes to express our gratitude to Obama for showing the courage necessary to reject the pipeline. It’s a major victory for environmentalists who worked hard to prevent the pipeline from becoming a reality. You can thank him by signing a petition at the NRDC site.

RFM

American Pad and Paper Company: A Bain Capital Story

Mitt Romney has already made my list for his dangerous, reckless attitudes towards Iran, for which he runs the risk of getting us into another war in the Middle East should he be elected President. But Romney also brings big baggage in his defense of our current casino economic model and that is the subject of this posting. Mitt Romney started and ran Bain Capital from 1984-1999; he still gets profits from the company. It has been estimated that 1/4 of the companies bought or managed by Bain during his tenure were driven into bankruptcy.  One of the companies purchased and managed by Bain Capital, under Romney’s leadership, was American Pad and Paper (AmPad), purchased by Bain in 1992.   The accompanying visual representation of the AmPad’s history under Bain is summarized in the elegant, detailed graphic, put together and available as a pdf by the Boston Globe: you can download it, put it on the wall and distribute as an educational blueprint for how private equity firms operate. The story of AmPad has a beginning, when Bain purchased AmPad in 1992 and it has an ending, when AmPad was forced into bankruptcy and liquidation in 2001. In between those bookends is the story of how private equity firms generate profits for their owners and investors, but fail the company that generated those profits and the workers who ran the business. It tells the story of how a private equity firm ran the company into bankruptcy by forcing it to carry a huge debt load  (measured by the negative numbers and the green line), compared to the company’s sales, indicted by the blue line. The management fees Bain collected are illustrated with bright green circles, while the “other payments” and their amounts are represented by the dark green circles. This graph is not an outlier of the performance of private equity firms and how they manage the companies they buy or control as the major share holder. Rather, this is a graphical template of how private equity firms operate. A decent American, someone who is committed to better equity in America’s income distribution, as well as good management practices for American businesses, should be shocked by this story, but the financial industry of America and the Republican Party as its political representative, celebrate this kind of predatory behavior, because it’s the free market economy at work! If they get their way, the future will be more of the same and then some. A huge failure of our own regulatory agencies, including the SEC,  led to the era of corporate raiding, which forms the basis of our failure to support American manufacturing and the jobs that were slowly created through this process. Private equity firms are a festering wound in America’s manufacturing integrity.

Bain’s initial investment for AmPad was $ 5 million, after which they charged the company “advisory fees” for managerial services. As you can tell from their website describing the private equity branch of the firm, Bain specializes in “leveraged buyouts.” These buyouts are accomplished by putting very little money up front to purchase the company, financing the rest, either by using the companies assets if they have any or saddling the company with a substantial debt load, used to payoff the loan to purchase the company  and provide lucrative profits for the new managers–putting the company in debt is the primary means by which private equity firms generate short-term profit for their investors. Leveraged buyouts should be illegal!

The story of AmPad is hardly unique, but it encapsulates the mechanisms by which private equity firms extract money from the companies they purchase and ostensibly “manage.”  They are not interested in job creation. Their interest is purely in short-term profit-making. For Romney to talk about his work at Bain Capital as one of job creation is absurd–no one else in the private equity industry considers that as one of their motivations (see quote below from the LA Times below). The array of profit-making mechanisms imposed on companies is mind-boggling: no businessman committed to a sensible, strategic growth of their business would ever endanger his company with the kind of debt Bains put on AmPad: debt forms include leveraged buyout loans, management fees and when Bain decided to take the company public, the profits earned from the stock sale, as well as the administrative costs of issuing the IPO (Initial Public Offering) were derived from the stock sales or charged to the company. The purpose of the IPO was to was to generate stock with some value: shortly after AmPad went public Bain sold 40% of their shares, making even more money from their ownership. Private equity firms are also inclined to enhance the growth of the company through the purchase of other companies creating further debt and more job loss through additional downsizing, something usually associated with increased stock value. It should be evident that private equity firms manipulate manufacturing firms without any consideration about the future of the firm–instead they are only interested in short-term profit.

Perhaps the one thing that Texas Governor Rick Perry got right in his political campaign for the Presidency this year, was when he described private equity tactics as “vulture capitalism.” By forcing companies to run up huge debts and charging exorbitant “management fees,” companies lose their ability to make plant investments which would keep them more competitive and modernized. In its eagerness to provide a summary soundbite of private equity firms, the mainstream press is completely incapacitated. I watched on PBS news the other night as someone was trying to explain the value of private equity firms, based on whether they had created jobs or lost jobs. But that is only part of the problem–the major question is what are they doing to companies that secure their future and make them more competitive? What have they done to a company that couldn’t be done better by the ownership of the company and how stable was the company when acquired by the private equity firm?  It’s as if private equity firms and leveraged buyouts are an indication that financial institutions who make money through this sordid mechanism, have given up on American manufacturing and act as though it’s time to sell off the country’s assets and that is  a large part of what happened to the American manufacturing in the Neoliberal era (whose cloud hangs over us today). The first leveraged buyout took place in 1968, but gained momentum in the Reagan era. The practice could have been  stopped by the SEC and financial regulatory agencies, but they progressively proved to be emasculated by the frenzy of the corporate buyouts at the time. In addition, a hidden motivation for this strategy was the benefit of breaking the power of unions, whose presence made it more difficult to downsize companies and reduce wages. Wages, benefits and even whole retirement packages have been swallowed by the mechanisms that private equity firms have used to create wealth for a few investors.

Mitt Romney was hugely successful in running Bain Capital; during the time he ran the company, the investment return averaged 88 percent each year–phenomenal profit levels. These years were the fabulous growth years of our financial industry, which in the 1990s became the largest single sector of our economy and began to outpace manufacturing. In fact, the rise of financial America was created by buying, selling and destroying American manufacturing–that is how the financial sector grew–not by growing something new, but by tearing down what we already had built as a manufacturing economy. At one time America was the envy of the world for its manufacturing base. Where did it all go? And where is it written that a private equity company like Bain has people in their management structure that know how to run AmPad, better than the people running the firm in the first place? It is true that AmPad sales had a period of boom, accompanied by plant acquisitions and closures, but those kinds of performances are typically unsustainable: when a slowdown occurs or if good plant management doesn’t exist to make the appropriate investment decisions for maintaining productivity (and keeping the best people around that know what they’re doing), a company loaded with huge debts will show a drop in profits followed by a decline in the value of the stock, at which time it becomes more challenging for the company to stay afloat, something that AmPad couldn’t achieve. Many of the companies infected with the Bain virus were not new and had been around for a very long time. Take for example, Worldwide Grinding Systems (WGS), established in 1888; the went belly-up less than a decade after Bain became its majority stakeholder. Furthermore, WGS had to turn to a federal insurance agency to bailout its pension system, in large part because Bain  forced the company into a very heavy debt load.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times describes Bain Capital as follows:

• Romney and his team also maximized returns by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits. Sometimes Bain investors gained even when companies slid into bankruptcy.
• Romney himself became wealthy at Bain. He is now worth between $190 million and $250 million, much of it derived from his time running the investment firm, his campaign staffers have said.
• Bain managers said their mission was clear. “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”

Private equity firms are predatory capitalists, willing to force the companies they buy or control to take long-term risks for short-term profits. In the process, part of the short-term profit involves down-sizing the companies they own, eliminating jobs, reducing wages and creating conditions that jeopardize the long-term future of the company. The financial interests who run companies into the ground have absolutely no interest in long-term outcomes, whether it’s related to profits way down the road or our planetary future. They are hooked on short-term profits like junkies in search of a new high. We live in a country turned upside down. Too many economists, those with whom we placed a certain level of confidence that they would be our watchdogs and make certain that the country had a healthy economy, vitalized by a concern for important issues like social stability, equitable income distribution, education opportunities and retirement pensions and programs, have abandoned the ship: our faith in them turned out to be completely misplaced. Most economists are completely supportive of the role that private equity firms play in improving the “efficiency” of companies. This word “efficiency” as derived from their vernacular equates to “downsizing” and increased corporate profitability. Few economists of today have a sufficiently broad enough view of their subject to clearly see the destructive social damage that financial investment organizations like private equity firms have created, not only in terms of our economic future,  but also for the future of our species on this planet. We are badly in need of a new discipline, one that fuses our economic future with the environmental crisis that we are in today. We are deeply in need of new kinds of experts for our badly needed new economy–a new compass that takes into account the needs of a shrinking planet. Where will these new experts come from? Not from economics departments–they had their chance and blew it. We need to build a new economy and put in the kinds of safeguards needed to prevent predatory capitalism from destroying these businesses, while at the same time investing appropriately in the infrastructure improvements needed to place the globe on a better trajectory for the future.

Perhaps we will eventually thank Mitt Romney for the social service he is about to perform as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. By forcing the public as a whole to get better educated on the sinister motivations of greed that characterize companies like Bain Capital and how private equity firms create so much wealth for their investors, while actually diminishing the wealth of the Middle Class, Americans might finally wake up to the nature of the country we have become. Americans will also need to come to grip with their own naive trust of financial leaders and see the destructive swath that unfettered capitalism has reaped upon the stability of our society and the uncertain future we face as practicing humans trying to make it on this planet. We do not know how much of our manufacturing base was destroyed by the crazy leverage buyouts over the past thirty years and we can only imagine what kind of country we would have today if our government had intelligently stepped in and prevented these corporate disasters from ever taking place–they helped bring on the casino economy we have today.

In closing, I want to quote from a book by Walter Adams and James W. Brock, “Dangerous Pursuits: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Age of Wall Street” published in 1989, reflecting on the impact of leveraged buyout and the absurdity of the practice:

• “In 1983, Esmark, marketer of Swift meats, Butterball turkeys, Playtex products, and STP oil treatments, spent $1 billion to acquire Norton Simon, producer of Hunt’s tomato products, Wesson oil, Reddi-wip, Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, Johnny Walker Scotch, the Avis car retinal service, and Max Factor cosmetics. The next year, Esmark-Noton Simon was acquired by Beatrice Foods, maker of La Choy, Rosarita, Tropicana fruits drinks, Jolly Rancher candies, Milk Duds, Air Stream motor homes, Samsonite luggage, Stiffel lamps and Culligan water softeners. Two years later, in 1986, Beatrice-Norton Simon-Esmark (which now ranked as the nations’s 26th largest industrial concern) was bought out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in a $6.2 billion deal. And for what purpose? To sell off the various Beatrice-Norton Simon-Esmark divisions that had just been consolidated.”

Leveraged buyouts and corporate merger mania made no rational sense for building continuity in manufacturing experience and expertise. The government under Ronald Reagan helped to issue a new gaming license for a new kind of sport: corporate raiding. The new sport was aided by Reagan’s abandonment of antitrust enforcement, his corporate tax cuts and his relaxation of securities regulation. Reagan followed through with his political slogan that “government was the problem, not the solution.” These forces accelerated a reduced motivation to invest in America for fear of corporate takeover. The financial industry of America  had no problem adapting to this new gaming license and showed no concern for jobs lost, companies shattered or assets sold off for profit. The original corporate raiders and arbitrageurs had names like Ivan Boesky, T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn, who became the new robber barons preying on companies whose stock had been devalued by economic hard times and foreign competition, some of which was induced by the actions of these robber barons themselves. Bain capital is simply another version of the corporate raiders from an earlier era. We can’t afford to allow the continuation of this silly, but destructive behavior. Too much of our future depends on eliminating this disastrous “free-market” childish behavior and getting serious about human survival and our own economic well-being.

If you want to see how private equity funds have endangered the Danish Economy see my article “Borrowing From Denmark”

RFM

Mitt Romney (from Massimo Prandi)

Perhaps nothing can stop Mitt Romney’s destiny as the Republican nominee to face Barack Obama in this year’s run for the Presidency of the United States. After his victory in New Hampshire, it seems unlikely that anyone can put up a competitive race against him and by now the Republican aficionados  are meeting and making phone calls to smooth the pathway for a less confrontational nomination process to keep their powder dry for the general election.  In other words the message will go out to Newt Gingrich: stop bringing up Bain Capital and we will go out and buy several hundred thousand copies of your books–isn’t that why you were running in the first place, as a book salesman? But, no matter who the Republicans nominate, this will be a tense election year in which we have to recognize the possibility that the Republican Party could gain control of all three bodies of our national government and further push the agenda of right-wing fanatics, a step that I believe, could put us on the road to an American version of Nazism, through the invention of new enemies galore: think of global climate change theorists and scientists as terrorists. These people are scary, not because they are innately violent (though they certainly approve of violence against people they don’t like and very few disapproved of Sarah Palin putting gun-sight images on electoral maps of Democratic opponents such as Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona in the 2010 election), but because they are extremely naive ideologues, which means they are susceptible to being co-opted and exploited  by the corporate elites–those forces that more directly control Congress and the Presidency than the voters do–people like the Koch Brothers.  This year, the SuperPacs seem to be in charge of primaries and were apparently responsible for shooting down Newt Gingrich’s brief political resurgence in Iowa.  While Obama has often displayed corporatist leanings in many of his decisions and initiatives, including his healthcare bill (which offers a huge subsidy to the for-profit health care industry), his continuation of the Patriot Act and more recently his willingness, through signing the National Defense Authorization Act, to expose American citizens to the possibility that they can be arrested and detained without access to our Constitutionally guaranteed protections (Obama did issue a “signing statement,” but it’s unclear what that really means because the clause about indefinite suspension of citizen’s rights is now written into law; it is one more step along the pathway of confusing war and terrorism, which are two different things and should always be handled in two different ways–to fuse them is to place us on a path of further erosion of our civilization).

You only have to look what happened to the Tea Party movement, which was initially hostile to corporate complicity in our fiscal meltdown, to see how easily that mistrust of corporate greed got re-channeled into a new cause in which Tea Party members now favor gutting the limited oversight of financial institutions provided by the Dodd-Frank bill. The Tea Party members should be supporters of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but they can’t find the right door to open. The Millennials need to open it for them and perhaps in time they will.

While virtually any Republican candidate can be competitive with Obama for the Presidency (now that Michelle Bachman is out of the race, with Rick Perry soon to follow), it is Mitt Romney that bothers me the most. I believe that if elected,  Romney is capable of promptly sending our country into war against Iran, because he faces the world as a Mormon  ideologue. In my experience (having been a Mormon myself), Mormon ideologues belong to a special class of believers, so inundated with an ideological interpretation of the world, combined with deep suspicions about government, that they coalesce around a belief system that verges on religious hysteria, a mental state that, quite uncharacteristic of the human species in general,  readily accepts the complete absence of any concept of verifiable truth, particularly in their construct of the outside world–they capitulate too easily to their leaders.  I have long accepted the insights of many historical judgements on how naive Presidents have taken us into wars that we had no chance of winning, but, like a child first getting hold of the steering wheel of a super sports car and stepping on the gas pedal, America went zooming into wars that still divide us as a nation and have made an indelible contribution to the polarization of our society. As an indication of the perpetuity of Vietnam into the fabric of American culture, who can forget how John Kerry’s Presidential candidacy was destroyed by the Swift Boat ad campaign that resulted in a majority of voters on election day believing that Kerry did not deserve his Vietnam Medals.

Historian Geoffrey Perret’s book “Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson and Bush Turned Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future” was the subject of two previous postings here and here. In Perret’s excellent book, he describes how Truman, Johnson and Bush shared a completely naive view of the world and, as a result, failed to understand the nature of the conflicts in which they got us involved (without following our Constitution, which says that only Congress can declare war) and under-estimated the deep cultural divide that controversial wars would create within our society. This was especially true of the Vietnam War, when we had a draft and most young males were vulnerable. But our invasion of Iraq, which was perpetrated purely by propaganda for oil and profit, was equally divided along the American political chasm, whose dimensions now deepen and widen because of more fundamental issues, such as the survival of our species on the planet. America seems a binary country on that single dimension–divided into climate change proponents who accept the science and climate change deniers who support the corporatist interpretation of the world: few seem to be on the fence.

Before GWBush was elected President, we didn’t hear from him on the campaign trail about how he wanted to go to war. It was after his election that we learned about his proclivity for making war and his plans  for invading Iraq. But Romney has consistently beaten the drums of war as he promises a more confrontational policy towards Iran; keep in mind that our own government’s best assessment from the National Intelligence Estimate (a summary of all our intelligence information) is that Iran is not making a bomb. But Romney’s advisers are hawks that want to push this issue and Romney promises to raise the military budget over the projections of Obama’s budget. Never mind that Obama’s military budget will still be larger than that of GW Bush. Romney has no experience with war–he never served in the military (neither did Obama, but we know Obama hates war).  So Romney will be more inclined to listen to his advisers, among whom are hawks who promote this more confrontational stance towards Iran and do not want to see America become a shrinking power.  Any war with Iran would lead to an immediate closure of the Strait of Hormuz and very likely would lead to a much wider war, to say nothing about running the risk of collapse in the global economy. Every day 20% of the world’s oil supply, or 17 million barrels of oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, making it, economically, one of the most important passageways on the planet. As Michael Klare points out, we are entering the Geo-Energy-Era in which energy demands are escalating and easy access to oil is diminishing, with fever-pitch efforts by countries and companies to secure more oil contracts. Some analysts claim that blocking the Strait of Hormuz for any significant length of time could dramatically increase the cost of oil by 50% and trigger a global recession or depression.  It probably no longer matters whether there is a glut of oil on the market as the futures trading in oil seems permanently hyped into the perception that, as a planet, we are running out of oil at a time of skyrocketing demands needed to serve the exploding economies of China, India and other parts of Asia. Can we afford to elect a President who is so naive that he  is willing to go to war based on false premises about Iran’s nuclear weapons program? This is what I mean about a President that has no clue about the principle of verifiable truth. Of course it doesn’t help that the Obama administration seems to be hyping the Iran/nuclear bomb threat as well: is that for election purposes, like Kennedy’s famous “missile-gap” charge when running for the Presidency against Nixon in 1960?

If there is any advantage in having Mitt Romney run for President, it will be that finally, the American electorate, will get to know what a private equity firm is and how Mitt Romney, as the head of Bain Capital, managed to destroy many companies for the sake of profit.  Private equity firms, while bringing huge profits to the investors, destroy companies by saddling them with debt used to pay off the buyout of the company or give resources back to the investors and managers of the firm. If a company needs to buy plant equipment to improve their productivity, they cannot do it if saddled with debt, forced on them by their new owners. If you believe that Bain Capital has been good for our economy and jobs, then you should read the Think Progress article on Mitt Romney Job Killer. When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994, just as in today’s campaign, he advocated his record of job creation and his business experience to challenge Kennedy. But Kennedy won that race by illustrating one of Romney’s “success stories” using the example of American Pad and Paper or AMPAD, a company that under Bain’s ownership, cut jobs and reduced wages. Kennedy played television ads featuring interviews with laid-off AMPAD employees and won the race at a time when Romney might have more easily unseated Kennedy.The AMPAD story continued after the election and according to the data presented in Think Progress, Bain invested $ 10 million in  AMPAD, but pulled $100 million out of the company. AMPAD had to cut 385 jobs and with $392 million in debt in 1999, filed for bankruptcy in 2000.  In our current depressed economy, with millions out of work, shedding light on predatory, private equity firms will not enhance Romney’s chances of unseating Obama, but it may help educate voters on whether it’s more important to have good-paying jobs or highly profitable investment firms that form one of the mechanisms by which the middle class shrinks as the wealthy get richer. Today more than ever before in our consumer-based economy, it is important to have good paying jobs in order for people to maintain consumption, create demand and grow the economy. Right now the imbalance of income distribution is slanted in such a way that consumer demand cannot get off the ground and Mitt Romney has no clue on how to fix the problem, unless of course he takes us into war.

RFM

Aftermath of Joplin MO Tornado 2011

It is innately human for us to recall and assess this past year’s major events and review the memories, as the end of the year winds down to the last few days. After that, the new year starts up and we supposedly have something to look forward to, as we turn our heads and point to the future, though not quite putting last year’s memories in a lock box. Whether this transition is cultural or more subtly linked to the events like the Winter Solstice, the transition we make on or about New Year’s day is a change from looking in the rear view mirror for a few moments, to catch a few fading memories and then switching to focus our eyes on the road ahead. Barack Obama will have to do that as he prepares for his re-election campaign. Right now, resting in Hawaii, he is probably soaking up the impact of his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas and trying to estimate how effectively it went down with the Millennial crowd, those for whom it was designed. I agree with other assessments that he will benefit more from the Millennial generation in the coming election compared to any other age group and that’s why his Osawatomie speech was so important. He currently holds a 25 point lead over Romney among Millennials–they alone will hold the key to his re-election and I think he finally knows this–they are strongly in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but he will have to make a few more left turns in order to convince them and keep his big margin, enough so that the millennials will massively get out and vote in November 2012: they went missing in 2010.  This is an historic election coming up. Let’s hope that this election proves to be the year that we put the Republican Party, at least this iteration of it, in our rear view mirror on a more permanent basis.  On the other hand, for the older crowd, those that are in the pre-Baby Boomer generation, many of whom are members of the Tea party,  Obama trails Mitt Romney by a 54-41 margin, a very wide gap. Perhaps he can whittle away and gain a few points with this group, because as soon as Romney gets the nomination, he will shift his focus towards cutting benefits for Social Security and Medicare and eliminating the new healthcare bill he refers to as “Obamacare.” Those are issues that touch many of the Tea Party members–what they are actually mad about is not their benefits, but the idea that illegal immigrants and lazy young people will step in to get a share of the American pie while their own is increasingly at risk–that’s why they are conflicted with Romney’s candidacy. At the very moment Romney gets the nomination, many Tea Party members might be uttering “Hell hath no fury like a former private equity manager running for President.”

Not only do we as individuals assess the recent past, but it makes sense that our government agencies  try to do the same; one assessment among the U.S. government agencies stands out: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tallied the cost of the many weather disasters we have been through in the past year. Justin Gillis reports on this in the New York Times: as he describes it, a typical year in this country for weather disasters usually has three or four incidents which reach the threshold of $1 billion or more each. But this year NOAA has done the math and, while the agency has not yet finished adding it all up, the final cost is likely to exceed $ 50 billion. It includes wildfires, floods, heat waves, dust storms and several deadly tornadoes, the likes of which have not been seen before.  According to  a weather expert who co-founded the website called “Weather Underground,” a search of the historical weather patterns going back to the late 1800s did not reveal anything comparable to 2011 for weather disasters. Though most climate scientists are certain that the heating of the earth from greenhouse gases accounts for many of these catastrophic events, right now it isn’t possible to say which events are global-climate-change-related and which are not. Climate scientists know that we are changing the scale of atmospheric events, because we are putting more energy into the atmosphere. This additional energy has to be dissipated in some way and more frequent and violent interactions with the Earth’s surface, whether over water or land, are about the only options. But things like tornadoes are hard to pinpoint in terms of their genesis because they are relatively small on a global scale and seem random. However, less random is the fact that funnels in some of the recent tornadoes, like that in Joplin Missouri, were a mile wide and touched down for much longer stretches than one’s experience would indicate. This was a violent tornado, destroying virtually everything in its path. Right now climate scientists are retooling climate models to deal with smaller regions and study more effectively the impact that global climate change has on these events. But there is some doubt about the accuracy with which these more refined models can be predictive and with public interest in global climate change at such a low ebb, and the economy in the tank, needed research resources to address these kinds of problems are not available.

In case you were thinking about serious mountain climbing this coming year, you might want to check out what has been happening to the large mountains on the planet, those with glaciers on top, most of which are in full retreat. One climber even reported seeing running water near the top of Mt. Everest, something never reported before. You might want to visit Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa before its glacier completely disappears, perhaps as early as 2015. Glaciers on major mountain tops have had serious erosion during the past few decades and because snow and ice have been the glue that keeps loose rocks and boulders bound together, hiking in many places has become more dangerous. While some climbing can be more accessible, it is often longer and more treacherous. To top it all off, a new report indicates that emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere had the largest increase ever recorded, with an increase of 5.9 percent in 2010.  This contrasts with  the 1.4 percent drop in emissions in 2009, the year the recession generated a significant drop in the economy and greenhouse gas emissions. Most climate scientists agree that we have reached a tipping point in the sense that we will have to live through a significant period of  impact from global climate change and that our planet is likely to change in irreversible ways as this century progresses. Here’s hoping that our fondest memories each year are not related to the weather patterns we enjoyed, but may never see again.

RFM

Apart from all that, Happy Holidays!

Zucotti (Liberty) Park Before the Deluge

RFM

Poster in Osawatomie Kansas

E.J. Dionne, a columnist for the Washington Post, has written an excellent article in TheNationalMemo, based on Obama’s speech earlier this week in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s legendary “New Nationalism” speech 101 years ago. It was in that speech on August 31, 1910 that Roosevelt laid out a plan for the Federal government to initiate radical changes in the services they offered to all citizens, including national healthcare service, social insurance, limited injunctions in strikes, a minimum wage law for women, an eight hour work day, farm relief, injured workers compensation, the introduction of a Federal income tax, women’s suffrage, an inheritance tax and the direct election of Senators. What Roosevelt was really about in that speech was his opposition to the control that big business had in politics, government and unfair labor practices.

Though maybe a bit shy of Roosevelt’s sweeping, revolutionary hopes for a more expansive role of government, I found Obama’s speech highly significant and, as Dionne points out, it “was the Inaugural address Obama never gave”;  its obvious link to Teddy Roosevelt’s speech on progressivism gave Obama a platform to launch his 2012 campaign and, during that speech, he denounced neoliberalism without using that word, but nevertheless cited the failure of the economics of the neoliberal system, including terms like the “free market” economy and “supply-side” economics both still rigidly doctrinaire for Republicans.  The success of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement had a lot to do with shaping Obama’s speech. He finally looked comfortable moving to the left and, at least in his speech content, he effectively  converted to a more progressive shift in his campaign strategy.

With the disintegration of the Republican Party leadership,  and the success of the OWS movement, Obama had little choice but to move towards a more progressive campaign image. He can no longer attempt to triangulate between the Republicans and Democrats–he tried that for nearly three years and what did it get him–he further angered his own base and got zero Republican support. Now he needs to hammer the points he raised in his speech again and again using redundancy as one of the new weapons in the toolbox. In Minnesota, where the Republicans took both the state Senate and the House in 2010 and came within a whisker of winning the governorship, the Chair of the state Republican Party just stepped down, leaving the party in disarray, with as much as $ 2 million  in debt, while they are having a very difficult time raising money–all in less than a year after steamrolling into political power. The rise and fall of Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann probably had a lot do with the party’s downward projection. Her story has been a meteoric rise and fall and her projection into the future seems to have an unlimited bottom; for now it seems her fortunes have been mirrored by those of the state Republican Party. The state of Minnesota is also feeling the remnants of the disastrous leadership of Tim Pawlenty.

With the rise of Newt Gingrich as at least a temporary star in the Republican Presidential nomination process, he will unavoidably defend Neoliberalism (Reaganism) and hopefully that will lead to the national discussion we never had on the subject. Perhaps in the long run, we can rename Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington back to just plain National Airport. I will personally feel a lot safer flying into Washington with a return to the previous name. But, naturally, you are all asking why Roosevelt give a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas?  I looked into that. From the Kansas Historical Society:

• “ON AUGUST 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt delivered what was perhaps the most important speech ever given in Kansas. Surrounded by 30,000 enthusiastic listeners at Osawatomie, he developed a political creed which became a milestone along the road to the modern all-powerful state. This speech, later called the “New Nationalism Address,” evoked a wide variety of responses. It was labeled “Communistic,” “Socialistic,” and “Anarchistic” in various quarters; while others hailed it “the greatest oration ever given on American soil.” What then were the circumstances surrounding the address? What was the Kansas role in the drama at Osawatomie? Why was that town chosen for such an auspicious moment in history? And why did an ex-President devise a comprehensive political program such as the “New Nationalism?“”

You might ask why Osawatomie, Kansas for Roosevelt’s speech–that is also addressed in the same article from the Kansas Historical Society and hinted at with the speech poster image–he was commemorating a park dedicated to the anti-slavery actions of John Brown.

• “The ostensible occasion for the speech was the two-day dedicatory ceremonies at the John Brown Memorial Park. The park, located at the southwestern edge of Osawatomie in the vicinity of a well-remembered skirmish between Proslavery forces and the men led by Brown during the “Battle of Osawatomie,” was a gift to the state from the G.A.R.’s feminine auxiliary, the Women’s Relief Corps. It was the brain child of Anna Heacock, Cora Deputy, and the property’s former owner, Maj. John B. Remington. Remington, allegedly John Brown’s nephew by marriage, had induced Deputy and Heacock to buy the land for their organization and then donate the 22-1/2 acres to the state for the memorial. Not all the ladies supported the proposal as zealously as Commanders Heacock and Deputy. For example, Minnie D. Morgan objected to the way money was subscribed by the corps’ leadership without formal approval from the W.R.C. She also argued against the project since the place had “never been owned by John Brown. He never lived on it. The John Brown cabin…[was] not there, and …while Brown and his men fired upon the gang of pro-slavery men from…[the] locality, no Free State men were injured and no blood was spilled” there. [1] But, these details did not deter Heacock. Long before the $1,800 was raised to purchase the site, she, with the help of Gov. Walter Roscoe Stubbs, had secured formal acceptance of the area from the legislature. [2]“

I found Obama’s speech in Osawatomie was especially strong when he criticized the “supply-side” economic idea that Reagan introduced, from which we have never recovered   [referring to the supply-side argument] they said “if we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. But here’s the problem. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.” When was the last time you heard a Democratic Presidential candidate denounce supply-side economics with such a strong voice? Hubert Humphrey (who came before Reagan of course) would have done something like that, but that was a very different time and place. Obama has denounced one of the pillars of Republicanism–one of their Holy Grail issues and it will be interesting to see if the press picks up on this and whether it becomes an issue in the next Republican debate.

The best thing Obama can do for his own Presidential candidacy is help the Occupy movement grow and borrow from its well-known lines. It would help immensely if he had the courage to denounce the police brutality that has existed in several OWS encampments and also denounce the use of weapons grade pepper spray because it was never developed for application against non-violent First Amendment rights demonstrators. But you don’t have to blame the one percent as sinful practitioners of an evil system–they are operating with a system that got started decades before they arrived. As we went from manufacturing to a financialized country in the 1990s, we allowed the creation of a system that works against our own interests and continues to put our economy at risk of another meltdown. Obama will also benefit from getting more involved in bringing the banking system to account for not renegotiating mortgages instead of foreclosing and making people homeless. He should have taken over the banks when he was elected, but with that opportunity seemingly gone, he needs to revisit the problem and face it for what it is–a major drag on our economic development. As I have said before, I never met a homeless person until Ronald Reagan became President. And I have characterized the Reagan Presidency as the worst in our history because of the more successful system (New Deal) he began to destroy in the stealth manner known to all Republican politicians. We have an immense amount of repair work to do to our economy and our social fabric, but Obama now has some wind at his back and if he continues with this more liberal strategy, his sails will be full and he can move more progressively to the left, reminiscent of what FDR did when he accepted his party’s nomination for a second term, as described in E.J. Dionne’s article.

Of course, we all know what happened to Teddy Roosevelt. Out of office as President, where he served from 1901 to 1909, he was disenchanted with his replacement, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt wanted to see a much more progressive country develop along the lines of his speech in Osawatomie. He tried to take the nomination away from Taft in 1912 and when he failed, he launched the Bull Moose Party. Although Roosevelt lost the election to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, he was the only third-party candidate in history to come in second place, as he got more votes than Taft. So, let’s hope Obama’s electoral future turns out to be different than that of Roosevelt after his Osawatomie speech.  But Roosevelt crystallized the progressive movement that had been going on for years before his speech and he is generally considered to be one of our finest Presidents; that is why his image has been chiseled into Mount Rushmore. You can read more about Roosevelt’s progressive nationalism proposal here.

RFM

Power Generation in Liberty (Zucotti) Park

William Blum has a lot to say about the conduct of American foreign policy and the deceit with which we communicate our international behavior to our citizens. To say we are duplicitous does not quite explain the true situation. We describe how we are doing God’s work abroad and then hide the numbers and details of those who have died and suffered as a consequence of carrying out His wishes–but it’s all in the best interests of “spreading democracy.”  Blum has an excellent bullshit detector and that’s why I read his blog with some regularity. Ordinarily, you don’t go to his website if you are searching for an uplifting message about America, but in his most recent blog, he actually has one! It’s all about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and, as explained therein, Blum is pleasantly surprised and uplifted by their message and their persistence in delivering it.  My son and I had a similar experience when we visited Zucotti Park   a few weeks ago (now renamed by the OWS movement as Liberty Park–its original name) and absorbed the culture of those promoting these ideas.

When you think about the major protest activities we have historically engaged in, against the wars we have entered, beginning with the Vietnam war, they have all been time-limited by the event that initiated them. When the war ended, protests stopped and everybody went home–issue over, if not forgotten, though that event in particular left a deep national scar. Sometimes, as in the case of the war in Iraq, we don’t even wait for it to end before putting it out of our mind–we simply don’t have a way of dealing with wars we start without a good reason. Bury it in a file but in which file cabinet does it belong? The OWS movement is different; it addresses another kind of issue, something that is more inter-generational, more longitudinal in scope and more fundamental, like the backbone to our culture. Yet it began with too much subtlety for us to detect and it remains an insidious force waiting to be full fleshed out. Yes, it’s neoliberalism that we are against,  and while it may have started as an economic change of course, it has become far more than an economic blueprint for a more divisive future–it has crept into every pore of our cultural being and has overtaken the central values of our society. And the politics of neoliberalism are draining to our culture–we get exhausted too easily imagining what the country was like before. Multinational corporations now effectively run governments, in fact they own them.

With the current economic meltdown, we’re beginning to perceive the real core of the problem as an encompassing social, spiritual and economic disaster–a long national nightmare of sorts.  The financial disaster that led to the “Great Recession” (let’s face it, for young people the unemployment picture is at depression levels) was initially viewed as something we could do nothing about–we were too “financialized” to confront the political and social power that controlled our government and made the rules. But the OWS movement has been courageous enough to put up the first STOP sign and begin the process of inoculating the country against this festering contagion of corruption and economic despair.  We can all hope that the movement will continue to grow until its mass reaches a critical threshold such that the  majority of Americans will recognize  we cannot continue with a system that dehumanizes us with too much poverty and too few opportunities to develop and grow as humans–there must be a better way. And so there is! But as the long struggle begins to right our ship, it is only beginning to take shape in our brains and not through identifiable objects around us.

It may have started off as a lack of good paying jobs and high unemployment, but, like the Populist movement of the 1870s, it will hopefully grow until we create a more democratic country, something like the one we quit on in the 1970s. We must radically change our system of government to make it more responsive to our social needs. Then too, we have the additional urgency of saving the planet we live on. We will not do away with our financial system, but one hopes to tame it and make it subservient to the needs of society, rather than the other way around. The neoliberal experiment is over. It didn’t work. It produced too much poverty, destroyed our national creativity, hollowed out our economy  and is completely indifferent if not hostile to the environment–that is just one more arena for corporate exploitation. Those for whom the country does work seem to be the least deserving and least imaginative members of our culture–they must become the new workers in a revised  economy that works better for all of us, including them, though they don’t see it that way right now. It’s more than just hitting the restart button. We can no longer tolerate a system in which our national assets are sold off at fire-sale prices, as employees are stripped of their retirement–that is robbery–we are now confronted with the new robber barons, who are far more sinister than the predecessors for whom they are named. They are on automatic pilot and will not cease until we stop them. One of the best things we can do to tame Wall Street is impose a small tax on every stock market exchange which will not only raise money but also inhibit the rapid, electronic stock exchanges that continue to pose a risk to our economy. America is not broke. In fact the Institute for Policy Studies has outlined several changes in our tax and subsidy policy that could create seven times the amount of money that the failed Super Committee was trying to achieve. And most of us wouldn’t know the difference. The idea that we are broke is simply another example of how the neoliberals have fashioned a corrupt tax code with advantages to the super rich and subsidies to industries that are generating huge profits, for providing energy that does not reflect the true cost of doing business. A sensible Congress could solve these issues simply and effectively.

Each and everyone of us, including the ultra-rich, have a stake in what the OWS movement achieves;  the movement or one of its eventual evolutionary outcomes will hopefully allow us to move peacefully towards a more equitable, better educated and more responsive civil and political society. So far, we have to give the OWS credit for articulating their views effectively and staying on message. “We are the 99 percent” resonates deeply with Americans and you will note that neither political party has much to say about the OWS movement, though Obama’s speech in Kansas yesterday sounded like he was getting ready to jump on the OWS bandwagon.   All Republicans and many Democrats are hoping the OWS movement will be wiped out during a long winter: I am betting that it won’t.

Today, we have the finest congress that money can buy, but it is incapable of responding to simple human needs, like a jobs bill. When my son and I were in Liberty Park, New York, we saw  the elderly and many senior citizens expressing the same kind of hope we see in the OWS movements that have spread throughout major cities in America and in many other countries. Eventually, the movement will have to transition to a more political agenda, but it still needs growth and consistency. The non-violence of the OWS movement, in contrast to the violent tactics of the police, serve as one message that registers with successful templates of past movements, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s actions against British rule in India, Martin Luther King’s leadership in the Civil Rights movement and César Chávez’s protests against treatment of farm workers in California. But those movements are long gone. Now we see a new one emerging that harnesses the energy of youth and has multiple modes of expression, driven in part by the intolerable lack of access to education amidst threats of eliminating of our social safety net. It is not that we can’t afford these things–we are still the richest country in the world.

Like the great populist movement of the 1870s, the OWS movement may take years to develop and along the way, it needs to find a means of effective communication, public education and financing. Like the forces it wants to displace, the OWS movement may have to become inter-generational. The fact that so many young people are burdened with student loans they cannot repay and faced with debts they cannot meet, is a hidden but important organizing feature even if it is one of the more subtle themes of the movement. That is one issue that struck me about young people in Zucotti Park and you can see this issue raised time and time again on the wearethe99percent web site–many of these students have been kept out of advancing their college education because it is too costly and they already have a large college-derived debt burden. Aren’t we telling young people that in today’s complex world a college education is the equivalent of a high school diploma sixty years ago? If so, shouldn’t that be freely provided, just as the high school education was at that time? We have bailed the too big to fail out–now we need to bail out the “too small to notice” to keep the promise of America healthy. Will the educational and communication  needs of the OWS movement be met through the internet communications and the social media, television coverage of the “peoples mic,” or massive public demonstrations? It wil likely involve all them just as it does today. A set of educational tools–teach-ins to discuss and educate how to respond when confronted with police brutality in order to consistently promote the theme of non-violence that seems to be an attractive and compelling part of the OWS movement, but the movement needs to be propagated on a larger scale. The OWS movement has captivated all age groups including that of William Blum and now it needs to ramp up.

I have written previously about Blum. He has authored an indispensable book, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” which is the handbook of our international wars, many of which the government didn’t want you to know about. This is an indispensable reference for understanding the duplicitous nature of our country.  At no time in history have humans ever been able to establish a true democracy. The neoliberals who own our current, inequitable fantasy of a democracy have been trampling on our limited form of democratic government as they try, in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin, to trample further on the fragmented democracy that was originally founded within our shores. A populist movement, like that of the latter half of the 19th  century, is what one hopes might come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is best to seek this new level of democracy without having obvious  external enemies. So before we turn China into a foe rather than a trading partner, let’s formulate new ideas about how to bring about this new, true democracy, something the world has never known. For a vacation from this exercise, we could think about a strategy to save the planet. At some point, planetary rescue and a future of hope from all the OWS movements need to come together to finance a new, more democratic society.

RFM

Iran Hostage Crisis U.S. Embassy Nov 4, 1979

It is the DNA of our foreign policy apparatus that forces us, perhaps in sync with some kind of diplomatic circadian rhythm, to periodically promote the idea that Iran is secretly building a nuclear bomb, in addition to the fact that they are the greatest satanic threat to world peace since the rise of fascism in Europe. Though we don’t officially use the term anymore, GW Bush’s characterization of Iran as part of the axis-of-evil is still emblematic of how we view and diplomatically treat Iran today. We can’t say enough bad things about the country and we are always looking for ways to tighten the sanctions against them we have already imposed (we are going to strengthen our sanctions since the British closed their embassy in Tehran terminated Iran’s foreign office in London). Yes the Iranian regime is a brutal dictatorship and no we don’t want them to develop a nuclear weapon. In fact, we want to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But ever since radicals overthrew the Shah and took our embassy members as hostages (we installed the Shah by overthrowing their democratically elected leader Mossadegh in 1953, as a favor to British oil interests and what eventually became BP (British Petroleum) and is now bp (beyond petroleum)), we cannot shake the fact that we once had the Middle East oil situation fairly well worked out, with rulers who generally did our bidding, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait until Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic in 1979. We just can’t accept the humiliation we suffered in that episode and we want and need the current regime to topple. It’s obvious that the United States will not be happy until Iran goes through a change in leadership and we would obviously prefer someone more compliant with our own interests compared with the today’s intolerable situation: we demand regime change. But the reactionary posture we unavoidably display towards Iran, and refresh with predictable synchrony, is aided by our partner in sinister delusions, Likudian Israel, who shares in this paranoia and regularly feeds us information reinforcing our satanic interpretation of the country. But a definite pause was recently injected into the conversation about Iran: a recent report by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the watchdog of non-weapons nuclear technology transfer, claimed “the possible existence of undeclared nuclear facilities and material in Iran.” This was new because the same agency had reported in 2007 that there was no evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iran (see below). But, that’s all it took. A lead story in the New York Times the day after the IAEA report came out advanced the idea that “United Nations weapons inspectors [IAEA] have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.” You know that when the New York Times comes out with a forceful article like that, the story has legs and war chants begin, typically originating on Faux News (I didn’t check). Yet, later on the same day, the Times came out with a second, more cautionary report admitting “It is true that the basic allegations in the report are not substantially new, and have been discussed by experts for years. Many of them appear to be those first uncovered in the laptop stolen in 2004, said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program.“

I do not remember how many stories I have chased down, trying to discover the facts about these reports as they surface, but one always winds up debunking them as one fictional account after another, each fabricated or over-hyped to bring more sanctions against Iran and rally public opinion about the possibility of war, or at least initiating an air strike against their supposed nuclear facility–of course that would mean we knew where it was, which we don’t. The first story goes back to at least 2004 (I think I said it was 2001), when a “stolen laptop” was obtained that outlined Iran’s nuclear operations at the time, claiming they were developing a bomb. But that laptop was suspect from the time it first surfaced. For one thing it was in English and for another the government refused to have an independent agency check the dates and history of the computer to learn more about its past. After chasing that story down and a few other misfires, I got very tired of the misinformation campaign that our own government had developed, with the able assistance of Israel, such that I stopped looking into each and every threat. I believe that Iran is a suppressive, ruthless dictatorship that does not tolerate dissent, as we witnessed a few years ago in the streets of Tehran. I do not believe that a theocracy can ever achieve democracy. And, while I don’t put Israel in the same class as Iran, I believe that any government nurtured by a religious doctrine will always be in conflict with democracy. Our government has so inculcated us with misinformation about Iran that we are incapable of having a rational discussion on the subject of their intentions.

On many fronts, Iran has cooperated with us. For example we were allowed to land planes and fly over Iran territory when we first went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11.  During the Bush administration, Iran offered to put everything on the table for negotiation with us and Bush refused, presumably because he got more mileage out of Iran as part of the axis-of-evil rather than choosing to have Iran as a negotiating partner. For GW Bush, America needed enemies in many places, but most of all in the Middle East. Why turn an enemy into a friend, when it’s proven that you get more national mobilization ratings out of enemies compared to what you can expect from your partners. But, with the new threat that Iran might be developing a nuclear bomb, based on the most recent IAEA report, and given the election year hype that is bound to come out of this charge (it was a topic in the most recent Republican Presidential debates), I looked into this issue, beginning with my traditional sources of information, including Gordon Prather, a former nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In December 2007, I wrote a piece about the Bush administration and their false claims about the nuclear bomb plans of Iran, based on Prather’s reports and his inside information. I have not found anything by him on this most recent issue, at least not at the www.antiwar.com site where he usually posts his comments. However, the recent IAEA report, because of its departure from previous claims about Iran, requires another round of investigative effort and here is what I think is the likely explanation: To begin with, Syemour Hersh has reported on this issue in his New Yorker blog and reminds us that the two most recent reports from our own people, the National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.)–a summary of all of our intelligence agencies–concluded that, since 2003, Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program. From Hersh’s November 18 article in the New Yorker:

• “I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron [mass spectrometer],” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.“

To better understand the recent IAEA report, it is perhaps worth noting that the agency has had a relatively recent change of leadership. Until his retirement two years ago Mohammed ElBaradei was the I.A.E.A.’s Director General; he was so popular that he was asked to stay on for three consecutive terms (he is currently running for the Presidency of Egypt in their ongoing elections). Although disliked by Washington, his international reputation was one of objectivity and fairness and for his work, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, perhaps as a direct slam against the GW Bush administration who was constantly beating the war drums against Iran at that time. ElBaradei’s replacement is Yukiya Amano of Japan. The evidence points to the idea that Amano is more to the liking of Washington and that he resonates far better with the DNA of our foreign policy urges than ElBaradei ever did. What points us in this new direction–a change of leadership in the IAEA as the source of the problem, has come from an indispensable source of information: Wikileaks published a classified U.S. Embassy cable from Vienna, site of the IAEA headquarters, which revealed the following (taken from Hersh’s article):

• “According to the cable, which was obtained by WikiLeaks, in a meeting in September, 2009, with Glyn Davies, the American permanent representative to the I.A.E.A., said, “Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the group of developing countries], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every strategic decision, from high-level personnel.“ appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

OWS Transition?

For an update on the status of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and perhaps learn something about where it is going, you can visit last Friday’s  Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, where excerpts from a panel discussion can be viewed. The panel discussion was sponsored by The Nation and held in the New School University in New York City, with the title “”Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power.” The participants include film maker Michael Moore, author Rinki Sen, Patrick Bruner (“veteran” OWS organizer), economic journalist William Greider and author Naomi Klein, with moderator Richard Kim. The video consists of excerpts from the discussion of what the movement has accomplished, where it is headed, what it needs to do for future growth and what needs it must fulfill if the bright promise they have aroused, that of changing the world, can gain any more traction. To begin with of course, the latter issue is not trivial and no one comes close to seriously expressing the magnitude of the problem. But so far, the incremental  steps that have been taken, such as the “99 percent” deeply resonate with all ages, and have created thirst for action that is more than just “occupy.”   Historians often express the view that the historical record of public arousal and activism against social injustice are not directly related to hard times per se, but emerge when the narrative that kept people down runs out of explanatory power. When hard times first come, people think they have to double down and work harder to get by (or maybe in the case of many Americans, they align themselves more clearly with God and religion–it’s their fault for not being a better provider–their faith hasn’t been strong enough to be rewarded by God) and finally, when multiple iterations of this strategy have failed, groups are formed that begin to articulate a better vision of tomorrow and coalesce into a more nationally identifiable  movement. That is what the OWS movement has brought to our door–they articulate the long-standing grievances we have with how our civil society has been structured and run in the last several decades.  And, they emphasize that the richest country in the world can afford to do better, can afford to do the things that they are talking about. The most boring among us have become the most rich and powerful and they have their boot on our neck. They want to establish an aristocracy so they can pass on their wealth to their offspring (no more inheritance taxes for one thing). The OWS movement is addressing issues that, economically, began in the 1970s, if not earlier. Let’s face it, at the moment, OWS is the only game in town;  after a little more than two months, the movement seems safely launched: it will surely oscillate a bit with the seasons, but one expects to see a process of growth and continued renewal and the “99 percent” is already a permanent member of our national lexicon. It’s a beautiful cutoff. The movement has already had detectable success in the November elections, particularly in Ohio. Patrick Bruner emphasized that by following Google Trends, the words used by the OWS movement have been sharply on the rise.

Other than recommend viewing the video, reading the transcript, or downloading the podcast,  I will emphasize one point from Naomi Klein’s contribution: it is one that I have been emphasizing for some time as many of you know from previous postings. Klein’s point is that the OWS movement must find a way to integrate into their language and template, the environmental movement while emphasizing the fragile condition of our planet, including the fact that we are at the beginning of a new mass species extinction (I added that last point). For this one, we have no doubt who is responsible.  The Republican party is into denial on these concepts, because, according to Klein, the business model they have for our future cannot exist if substantial effort is going to be put into saving the planet and reducing greenhouse gases; that would be giving up too much control, make us too socialized for their comfort. Furthermore, and perhaps more critically for them, they fear it would reduce their profit margin. Yet, for the OWS movement, fusing their anti-corporate, anti-neoliberal message with a “save the planet” motif will be the only source through which millions of new jobs can be generated to help create a badly needed new economy. A labor shortage needs to be created in America, such that wages will be driven upwards. To do that you need a scale of jobs that only a newly empowered movement can demand–one in which saving the planet generates new kinds of jobs through new investments, if necessary forced onto Wall Street.

Corporatists see the current crisis in some ways as a success, because it has created a labor surplus and a decrease in wage demands.  America needs to start making things again and applying our most creative instincts into this new mode of production. It’s all about infrastructure and the green economy. We cannot export the infrastructure needs of this new economy. The cities and suburbs we built after WW II were put together with long paved roads and big interconnecting highways, but this expansionary  lifestyle was based on oil at $20 a barrel or thereabouts. We should have known this would have to end once we reached our own “peak oil” condition in the 1970s. This suburban sprawl we currently have does not work when oil goes to $150 a barrel and yet, at the moment, it seems you have to practically be a visionary to see the magnitude of this looming failure. Most  believe they can still get by using automobiles and airplanes. With the explosion of the Asian and Indian economies, it is hard to see how gas prices are going to get any cheaper.  In rebuilding our urban and suburban living, we will need much better public transportation, including high speed rail and more electric cars, with electric power coming from sources that do not add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and we will need local markets, including food that do not require massive transportation. Some of these attributes of change, such as local farm markets are already being developed and increasingly available through local “farmers marlets.” Of course, by adopting an environmentalist strategy, the OWS movement will lose all possibility of any corporatist Republican support–but they don’t have that anyway. To convert the Tea Party members to the OWS movement, you have to convince them that government is not the source of the problem, that there is no such thing as a trickle down economy, and that government can actually serve to solve some of the major problems we face. This of course is just the reverse of what they believe now, but the “99 percent” is a catchy phrase. The advantage of the OWS movement over that of the Tea Party, is that the former promotes longitudinal thinking or long-range planning, engaging the frontal lobes of our brains. Repetition may be the best way to reach the frontal lobes of Tea Party persons and eventually things like the threat of global climate change coupled to a closer examination of their children’s future,  may become part of a newly refreshed Tea Party Engram. At the moment, expectations like this seem like a pipe dream, but the Tea Party began in harmony with the OWS movement–it’s just that they then blamed the government for the problem, not the corporations, though for a while, they were in their gunsights until they got co-opted by the Koch brothers.

You might also be interested in reading Michael Moore’s ten suggestions for where the OWS movement should go in terms of being more specific in their demands. When your through reading that, look down at the comments to see a whole bunch of additional suggestions made by readers. Perhaps you have one or two of your own. There’s probably room for something about neoliberalism.

RFM

David Harvey's Crisis of Capitalism on You Tube

For a short but informative historical introduction and analysis of our current fiscal crisis, I recommend David Harvey’s presentation on You Tube. In many circles and for many reasons it is no longer an unforgivable sin to be talking about Karl Marx and his critique of capitalism. When you see the corrupt form of capitalism that has emerged over the past thirty years, especially in America, you have to scratch your head to come up with a sound reason why we went in such a radical direction, except that powerful corporations declared war on the Middle Class and we didn’t offer sufficient resistance.  The main theory of capitalism is greed and complete, unfettered control of money, which turns into handsome lifestyles for the ruling class and no one else. Apart from that, there isn’t any real theory of capitalism. Why is it that brilliant analysts of social economics always seem to favor socialism or communism? They are certainly different: socialism wants to manage capitalism and communism wants to do away with it. If you have never read Karl Marx, I suggest you look at Terry Eagleton’s lively, very readable book “Why Marx Was Right.”  It’s available from Amazon and as a Kindle download. You can also take an on-line course on Marx through David Harvey’s website by clicking HERE. Who in history was a more constructive critic of capitalism than Marx? And when you see on a daily basis how our version of capitalism is perfectly content with seeing the planet blow up, draining every drop of oil and using up tar sands to further pollute the air, all done in the name of profit from excess capital, you realize that the system we have is sheer madness and completely out of control. What’s more it makes so many feel that they have to struggle, turn to religion so they can hear it from their priest or bishop that they failed because they didn’t have enough faith in God, when in reality its our economic system that has failed them.  So we need to begin a new global dialogue about bringing back back sanity in our distribution of wealth and control of runaway corporate power, in the interests of our planetary future and that of our children who will have to inherit the world we leave behind. But what kind of world will allow us to live and save the planet while doing so? The contradictions of capitalism are too many to be ignored and we cannot rely on the current system to solve important issues like healthcare and the environment. But, what system will work and will it work for everyone? Can we create a utopia out of this current fiscal crisis? It’s probably too early for that conversation, but what the hell, let’s have it anyway.  Communism has no chance of working if there is no wealth to redistribute. That’s why the Bolshevik revolution deteriorated into a caricature of communism known as Stalinism. Both Lenin and Trotsky realized that if the Bolshevik revolution was not going to be joined by the rest of the workers of the world, particularly those  in Europe (which had very active communist movements at the time), it was doomed because Russia didn’t have enough wealth for redistribution into a functional society.  That’s why Marx argued that capitalism had to proceed communism or socialism, so that wealth of production could  reach a stage at which more social control could be used to benefit society as a whole. America is decades away from having that kind of dialogue, without things getting a lot worse.   It certainly looks like we are going to lope along, with a few more financial meltdowns likely to occur before America is ready to look at its fiscal house in a serious way.  But at least alternative thinkers, like Karl Marx can now come through the door again and sit in on the conversation.

RFM