Demonstrations on the 4th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq are worldwide. This one was in Heroes Square,
Budapest. AP photo.

Valerie Plame Wilson at Friday's hearing.
AP photo.

Exposing the Masters of Deceit

They lied us into the war that began four years ago today. They said Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and were collecting materials to build nuclear bombs. We now know that they knew there was little evidence that those weapons existed, and the one bit of supposed evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear material was false. They not only insisted it was true--they went to treasonous lengths to keep their lie from being discredited.

In an effort to destroy the credibility of the messenger--Joseph Wilson, who the CIA sent to track down the nuclear rumor--at the interfering insistence of VP Cheney--the White House exposed the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA officer, and falsely accused her of sending her husband to Niger. (As if, by the way, that alone is enough to make the fiction of Iraq's nuclear attempts true.)

On Friday, Rep. Henry Waxman began his hearings into security breaches with a statement in which General Hayden, current head of the CIA, affirmed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent when her name was published, having been distributed to the press no fewer than 20 times by multiple members of the Bush administration. In her testimony, Plame said under oath that she had been on covert status, that she had in fact travelled outside the U.S. as a covert agent within five years (a technicality in the law protecting the identity of covert operatives), and that her outing had destroyed her 20 year career investigating weapons of mass destruction programs that might threaten the U.S.

Despite President Bush's statements that he would investigate the leak of her name, and fire anyone involved, there was further testimony from the Director of the White House Office of Security that there was no investigation whatever. And Karl Rove, one of the leakers, is still an official force in the White House.

Plame under oath denied that she had "sent" her husband on this mission (she didn't have that authority) and even that she had suggested him. Plame said that she knew that her identity might be discovered and exposed by a foreign government. She never imagined it would be exposed by high officials of her own government.

Still, the supporters of Bush, the right wing TV and radio babbleheads, continue to insist that Plame was not covert, and that this is mere politics. Which leads to the question: if killing more than 3,000 American soldiers and maiming thousands more, as well as killing and maiming countless thousands in Iraq as well as destroying that society, all based on lies, and the outing of a U.S. covert agent for political purposes, and the continung defense of these acts by means of more lies--if all this is not treason, what is?

Oregon/California. BK photo.

It Can Happen Here (Latest Chapter)

The Bushite scandals come so fast they are hard to keep track of, and start becoming indistinguishable, but the latest is worth isolating for its meanings and implications.

What is it? A number of federal attorneys--at least 7, probably more--were fired by the Bush Justice Department, officially by the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. After some local news stories and blogger investigations, congressional hearings revealed that many of them appear to have been fired for not being sufficiently zealous on behalf of Republicans, in several cases after improper questions and pressure on their current investigations--suggestions that they ought to be prosecuting Democrats (for "voter fraud") and not prosecuting Republicans (for corruption.)

At first, Gonzales denied to Congress there were any political considerations--these were personnel matters, based on performance. When evidence of good performance reviews etc. appeared, Republicans changed their tune to: the President has the right to fire these officials, and all Presidents do it on a political basis. But, in fact (they said) it wasn't political, at least the White House wasn't involved, specifically Karl Rove.

Now it's come out that this was a political decision from the beginning, going back to early 2005, and that Gonzales was involved even before he was Attorney General, when he was on the White House staff, and that Rove was involved--in fact (according to emails revealed Thursday), he was a chief instigator.

What's the underlying problem with this? Presidents often change federal prosecutors at the beginning of their terms, as Bush did--they are in that sense political appointments. But firing prosecutors selectively based on how they are prosecuting Republicans or not prosecuting Democrats strikes at the heart of the justice system, already admittedly weakened by the political appointee tradition. What the Bush White House is doing in this instance, as in others, appears to be unprecedented. It's also unusual to replace one Republican appointee with another because Karl Rove wants a pal in his place--especially when the office is in Little Rock, where yet another round of investigations into the Clintons could begin, just as Hillary runs for President.

What else is behind this? Howard Fineman for MSNBC points to the practices and intents of Rove and the other Bushites as far back as Texas:

Judges are elected in Texas. Karl Rove made his fortune not by running George W. Bush for office, but by training, building and running slates of conservative Republican judges.

The Austin Gang – Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers – saw the legal world as something to control, if for no other reason than if they did not, the Trial Lawyers – the backbone of the modern Texas Democratic Party – would.

Gonzales made his bones literally keeping Bush out of court when, as governor, Bush was called to jury duty. Had Bush been subject to questioning by attorneys over his suitability to serve, he would have had to reveal that he had been arrested for drunk driving. Not a good thing to do before a presidential campaign. Gonzales managed to get the Boss out of the jury pool.

But it's even more specific, according to a New York Times editorial:

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

The integrity of the election system, the integrity of the justice system--just two attacks on the integrity of the Constitution that characterize this Bush administration. I don't know if it is possible, but impeachment is more warranted now than ever.

On this assertion, here's this update from Craig Crawford of Congressional Quarterly :

Of all the scandals that have increasingly bedeviled George W. Bush’s presidency, none has more direct ties to the president than the flap over the firing of federal prosecutors. Any remaining doubt about that was cleared away last week, when the White House press secretary acknowledged that the president had a conversation with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October about complaints regarding some of the U.S. attorneys who were fired weeks later in what critics are calling a politically motivated, inappropriate purge.


(Here are specifics from the Times editorial:

Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups. They have intimidated Native American voter registration campaigners in South Dakota with baseless charges of fraud. They have pushed through harsh voter ID bills in states like Georgia and Missouri, both blocked by the courts, that were designed to make it hard for people who lack drivers’ licenses — who are disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minorities — to vote. Florida passed a law placing such onerous conditions on voter registration drives, which register many members of minorities and poor people, that the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its registration work in the state....

The United States attorney purge appears to have been prompted by an array of improper political motives. Carol Lam, the San Diego attorney, seems to have been fired to stop her from continuing an investigation that put Republican officials and campaign contributors at risk. These charges, like the accusation that Mr. McKay and other United States attorneys were insufficiently aggressive about voter fraud, are a way of saying, without actually saying, that they would not use their offices to help Republicans win elections. It does not justify their firing; it makes their firing a graver offense. )

Elsewhere

Master of Space! Hero of Science! Captain of the Video Rangers! The 1950s Saturday Morning Sci-Fi review continues at The Boomer Hall of Fame.

Waiting for water in Darfur. EU photo.

Darfur and the World

While hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered, and millions driven from their homes in Darfur, the world has found plenty of ways to look away. Now slowly, slowly they turn. According to an AP story:

A U.N. human rights team investigating crimes against humanity in Sudan's Darfur region zeroed in on the international community Monday for the first time, accusing the world's governments of an "inadequate and ineffective" response to widespread atrocities. In one of the hardest-hitting and most explicit reports in a series submitted to the world body, the team called for U.N. Security Council intervention, sanctions and criminal prosecution.

The Guardian adds: Headed by the Nobel peace laureate Jody Williams, the UN assessors found the Sudanese government was responsible for waging a ruthless campaign resulting in war crimes and human rights abuses. "The principal pattern is one of a violent counter-insurgency campaign waged by the government of the Sudan in concert with Janjaweed/militia, and targeting mostly civilians. Rebel forces are also guilty of serious abuses of human rights and violations of humanitarian law," Ms Williams's team found.

It calls on member states to raise a protection force in the Sudan. Among its other recommendations are that the UN Security Council "freeze funds, assets and economic resources" of those who commit the violations.

How bad is it? According to Time: If it's possible to degenerate from genocide, Darfur will probably do so in 2007. The four-year war that has caused the world's worst humanitarian crisis has spread and atomized. What was once a war zone the size of France has become an area the size of Western Europe. The 7,000 African Union peacekeepers in Darfur are overwhelmed. The threat of pullout hangs over the aid program in southern Sudan and Chad after persistent attacks on its workers. Last year the journal Science estimated the number killed since 2003 at more than 200,000. If news of another humanitarian crisis in Africa sounds grimly familiar, that's partly because the international response has also conformed to type: divided and ineffectual. China, which has large oil concessions in Sudan, continues to sell the government weapons and block sanctions at the U.N. Darfur is a test of man's humanity to man. So far, we're wanting.

It's not that nobody cares. There are efforts to raise money and awareness, such as Amnesty International's Global Music Activism Project, for which Yoko Ono has donated publishing royalties to the entire John Lennon catalog, to raise money for relief efforts in Darfur. But what little relief efforts are possible there now may be halted completely unless the violence is brought under some control.

While all of this--right down to the benefit concerts--seems sadly familiar, there is one new component: as mentioned in An Inconvenient Truth and supported in more detail by a new article in the Atlantic magazine (via Climate Progress ): one of the major causes of turmoil--the fight over dwindling resources in a prolonged drought--has as a major contributing cause: the Climate Crisis. “This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,” says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.

The article points out two conclusions from this: that the Climate Crisis contribution adds to the moral responsibility we have to address the Darfur genocide, because If the region’s collapse was in some part caused by the emissions from our factories, power plants, and automobiles, we bear some responsibility for the dying. And that, as the Climate Crisis continues and gets worse, this is likely to be only our first Darfur, and the first climate war of the century that may be characterized by them.

If this war now engulfs an area the size of western Europe, it comes close to what we call the First World War. It is in many way the whole world's first war of this century.

The Long Dubai

So after screwing the U.S. taxpayers from here to eternity for their billions in no-bid contracts to serve tainted food to U.S. soldiers, and various other hyperinflated and substandard services in Iraq, Halliburton is getting out of town. Way out. Moving headquarters to Dubai. Yes, that same sandy paradise where corporate capitalism on steroids meets the terrorist network, and where the companies are that the Bushites wanted to put in charge of U.S. ports.

Halliburton, the company that gave its former prez and now ours, Dick Cheney, a $35 million severance package, though its doubtful the severance was all that, shall we say, severe. They are leaving the building. In fact, the whole country.

Gee, what do you think they have in mind? Your first guess may be as good as Hillary Clinton's:

"I think that raises a lot of serious issues we have to look at," said the former First Lady. "Does this mean they are going to quit paying taxes in America? They are going to take all the advantage of our country but not pay their fair share of taxes?"

She continued, "They get a lot of government contracts - is this going to affect the investigations that are going on? Because we have a lot of evidence of misuse of government contracts and how they have cheated the American soldier and cheated the American taxpayer. They have taken the money and not provided the services, so does this mean that we won't be able to pursue these investigations?"

I expect that within a year or two of the move (into the Cheney Complex in Cheney City), they'll quietly change their name and go after U.S. contracts again, although thanks to them there may not be any money left by then. But Senator Frank Lautenberg has even darker thoughts than this: he suspects the move is a way to circumvent U.S. law so that Halliburton can continue to pursue contracts with--get this--Iran. Yeah, the one with the "n" at the end.
It seems a Halliburton subsidiary already in Dubai has been doing business with Iran for years.

There is a possible upside: if Halliburton does get some big contracts for Iran's nuclear program, that's virtually a guarantee that it will be set back for years. If the Iranians think they're the Axis of Evil, they are about to meet the real thing.

cups in place #6. BK photo.

The Great Global Warming Swindle Swindle

The climate crisis deniers are abuzz about a TV show broadcast in England and available on the Internet, called The Great Global Warming Swindle, which has instantly turned out to be itself a swindle.

As the British newspaper the Independent reports: But now the programme - and the channel - is facing a serious challenge to its own credibility after one of the most distinguished scientists that it featured said his views had been "grossly distorted" by the film, and made it clear that he believed human pollution did warm the climate.

Professor Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said he had been "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" on its content. He added that he is considering making a formal complaint.

Professor Wunsch said: "I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled."

The "programme" is further tainted by the fact that charges of distortion similar to this were made in the past against its producer, and the network that commissioned and aired it, called Channel 4, has been forced to apologize for distortions in other recent programs on environmental matters.

People who are making major amounts of money for climate crisis denying (principally from Exxon-Mobil, which continues to break its own records for the largest profits and as the largest company in the history of the planet), or who use it to get attention or political power--these are pretty simple if obviously corrupt motives. They do great harm when they persuade ordinary people that there is enough doubt among scientists to make action unnecessary or unwise, when the science shows that every year we delay, we make the problem so much worse until very soon, it could be literally out of control.

And I guess I can understand people who use ideology to hide from what is not merely inconvenient truth, but very painful facts. Facts that require pervasive change.

But even more sadly, they are intent on ignoring evidence, which at this point is so scientifically overwhelming on the basic points that some scientists say that only things like gravity demonstrate a stronger scientific consensus. One of our local bloggers who seems to think the climate crisis is a slightly silly political conspiracy has admitted that he hasn't even seen An Inconvenient Truth. That's apparently how he knows it's wrong. Not only is it a political conspiracy of some kind, it also involves thousands of climate scientists over half a century. Climate crisis skeptics are one things, but those who refuse to engage the evidence join the climate crisis deniers.

While climate scientists endorse the basic evidence and conclusions in An Inconvenient Truth, the so-called science in The Great Global Warming Swindle has already been debunked on line, and all the major arguments also have been carefully corrected on various other sites. But some people will not be swayed by evidence, even in the unlikely event that they read it, or read the accounts of climate crisis effects already underway.

Of course, an unusually warm day in March, as today was here, is not evidence, nor is snowfall in Washington, DC the other day. But there is plenty of real evidence of real climate disruptions over time, in places like Alaska where entire villages have had to relocate. But U.S. Fish & Game officials aren't supposed to talk about that, nor are they supposed to discuss the plight of polar bears or any of the other evidence the current Administration wants to keep quiet.

I understand the general suspicion of science as well as of politicians, and I believe in being skeptical. But this is denial, which is not often affected by evidence. Obviously, saying that the scientific consensus for civilization's causing a climate crisis is as strong as the consensus for Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not going to be convincing to people who don't believe Darwin either.

But besides religious fundamentalists, the people who by now will not accept the accumulation of evidence that surely should be enough to motivate urgent action, may be beyond my abilities to reach. Which is one reason that on this site I don't normally engage the latest denying. As this latest attempt in England shows, only distorting the evidence provides counter-argument on the basics. In the end, perhaps only the constructive way that the actual problems are approached will persuade them. If their opposition is powerful enough, it could be fatal to our already questionable common future, and that's a heavy responsibility. But our responsibility may be to go forward without them.

Another view of the eclipse, from Scotland.

The Lies That Bind

It's a sad day in a sad time. With the Lewis Libby conviction on obstruction of justice and perjury, we have the spectre of a White House--most specifically, the Vice President's office but also others in the Administration-- that consciously lied to get the country to invade and occupy Iraq, then tried to suppress the truth, then tried to punish Joseph Wilson, the former Ambassador to Iraq under Bush Sr. who actually saved lives there, for exposing one of these lies, by revealing that his wife was a covert operative at the CIA, thus endangering her life and ending her career, as well as ending her decades-long work in uncovering weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the U.S.

President Bush said repeatedly that he would fire anyone who had leaked Valerie Plame's identity. During Libby's trial, several other officials were implicated in doing so, including Rove and the VP. The statement about firing people who committed what some would call treason is currently inoperative.

Lewis Libby obstructed justice and lied to the Grand Jury to protect his boss, VP Cheney, and the White House. Some speculate he did so after being given assurances that he will receive a presidential pardon. A sad-eyed John Dean appeared on "Countdown" to say he expects that Bush will pardon Libby before Libby spends a single day in jail.

The corruption of this White House was further revealed today in congressional hearings that are showing that several federal prosecutors were fired because they didn't play politics with their offices. Other congressional hearings are detailing how this administration, after sending young Americans to Iraq on false pretenses, for brutally long tours of duty, with poor planning, confused mission, and insufficient resources, including insufficient armor and other protection that led to needless serious injuries, failed to provide the proper care to those who were so injured after they returned.

I've said here before that to confront the problems ahead, we need to get away from knee-jerk us/them, either/or responses. We need in many cases to understand the concerns that underlie the otherwise inexplicable positions and behavior. We need to listen to contrary evidence and arguments. We need to honor sincerity. We need to communicate and find common ground.

But we also need to be clear. What this administration has done and is doing is evil. It is corrupt and corrupting, and it is dangerous.

It also goes hand in hand with practices and attitudes by those who identify themselves as conservatives or the Right, that are unacceptable in a civilized society, let alone a democratic one. Though the left is not without its vitriolics, its knee-jerk responses to opposition, I believe Kos was right today in noting that "Michael Savage is the third most popular talk radio host in the country, a hero to millions of conservatives" thanks to venomous rhetoric." Like Coulter, Savage knows what the conservative movement craves and delivers -- a steady diet of hate and rage." In an earlier post, Kos quotes another blogger, Glenn Greenwald on Ann Coulter: [T]he significance lies not just in this specific outburst on Friday but in the whole array of hate-mongering, violence-inciting remarks over all these years. Its significance lies in the critical fact that Malkin expressly acknowledged: "She's very popular among conservatives." The focus of these stories should not be Coulter, but instead, should be the conservative movement in which Ann Coulter -- precisely because of (not "despite") her history of making such comments -- is "very popular."

I heard Coulter herself on TV say that the lesson of this latest flap should be that conservatives need not restrain themselves, because she's done this many times and it hasn't damaged her career at all.

We have reached this point where baseless accusations, open bigotry, and expressions of hate and rage are normal discourse, and this is not unrelated to the ideological justifications for an us/them partisanship that knows no bounds--not the law, not the Constitution, not common decency, and certainly not accuracy or the truth. Our leaders feel justified in doing anything they can get away with, and they are supported loudly by the most watched news network which routinely distorts for ideological effect (Fox's coverage of the Libby conviction was a screenful of "Libby Not Guilty," which applied to one of the five counts, and that, according to a juror, because a single juror voted against that particular count) and by an entrenched ideologically driven political force that has no respect for the truth, and traffics in hate, rage and venom. It's a sad day indeed.

Elsewhere

Kudos to our Congressman Mike Thompson at This North Coast Place.

Notes on a couple of books, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine Hong Kingston, at Skills of Peace and on The American Dream and the Gospel of Wealth at Books in Heat.

Did you see Harold Pinter and/or Mikhail Baryishnikov on Charlie Rose? Read about what they said at Stage Matters.

There's the latest on the just announced new Trek movie at Soul of Star Trek, and memories of Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers at the Boomer Hall of Fame.

Most of Europe and eastern North America got to see a
total eclipse of the moon Friday night. This is one of the
photos, taken by amateur Matt Ohman in West Somerset, England.

The Daily Babble

Bitter Mysteries

The buzz, the chattercable shows are thrashing the issue of poor medical care for soldiers, first in the outpatient services at Walter Reed Hospital and now with congressional hearings into Veterans Administration "facilities." And of course it's all being treated as if it is startling news.
Despite the fact that leftie blogs like E Pluribus Media have been on this issue for months and months, the fact that lots of people have known about this and have been trying to get attention paid to these neglects and abuses for years, including the folks at the GI Hotline as well as veterans groups, this is being treated as a sudden revelation and immediate scandal.

VA hospital care has been notorious since at least Vietnam. Didn't anybody see Oliver Stone's movie, Born on the Fourth of July, or read Ron Kovic's book? It was there in living color and living prose. The excessive bureaucracy as well as neglect and substandard care is yet another reason that the people who nobly call for a new military draft are insane.

But why now? The Washington Post article seems to have sparked this attention, but that couldn't have been predicted. A lot of stories in the Post and the Times and other newspapers are ignored. Nobody paid any attention to the scandal of poverty increasing in a time of economic expansion--McClatchy newspapers found that the number of Americans in severe poverty--with half or less of the income that defines the poverty line--increased by 26% just between 2000 and 2005. And this isn't an exception. According to their report:"Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries."

But even on this topic, all the stories about the scandalous neglect and treatment of soldiers--from the lack of body armor and armored vehicles, the lack of training and the abuse of the National Guard--as well as about treatment once they're back, have been ineffective in sparking this kind of outrage.

Probably the Democratic takeover of Congress has a lot to do with it--that, and the immediate hearings the Democrats are holding, gives permission to our media to do the story without feeling they'll get killed for being unpatriotic. And the Post story was easy to photograph. Still, the Zeitgeist remains a bitter mystery. The other story the babblechannels are hitting hard today is video of a couple of teenagers giving tokes to their siblings, two and four years old. I guess Anna Nicole finally is dead.

Then there's the noisemachine manufactured controversy over the speeches Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton made in Selma, both of them using different--and "southern"--cadences and vocabulary. Pandering to the audience! Hypocrisy! Of course if they didn't fall into those rhythms they would have been "out of touch!"

Above all we want to forget about the human element. Haven't you ever been to a place where people speak differently, and found yourself adopting their speech rhythms and accents? I do it during a telephone call. Please. Can we get serious? I know it's a rhetorical question.

It's also like the headlines about the "medical miracle" of Barry Bonds requiring larger shirt and shoe sizes. Maybe it is evidence of steroidization. Or maybe it's looser shirts (which have become the style in all sports) or swelling feet. My athletic shoe size went from 8.5 to 10.5 or 11 partly because shoe and foot people are now recommending bigger sizes (with more inserts, and more room), and partly because as you get older, your feet swell up more with exertion. But it's spring, and Barry is probably going to be baseball's big story this year, so let's find something to get outraged about preemptively. Because we don't have enough real problems.

cups in place #5. BK photo. (another blue-green alliance?)

The Climate Crisis Future

Moving Heaven and Earth

Note: A version of this essay is frontpaged at the European Tribune.
UPDATE: and now on the "Rescued" list at Daily Kos.

It's hard to be hopeful about the Climate Crisis future. Accepting his Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth on Sunday, Al Gore made his pitch for confronting the climate crisis to one billion viewers worldwide. “We have everything we need to get started,” he said, “with the possible exception of the will to act. That’s a renewable resource. Let’s renew it.” And the Republican/Dirty Energy noise machine has been in high gear ever since, demonizing Gore and his Hollywood supporters, and engaging in even more ferocious Climate Crisis denying. Finding the kind of political will and effective leadership necessary seems only remotely possible.

Still, something pretty hopeful did happen in Washington last week, though little notice was taken. It's worth suggesting what it was and why it is hopeful, before I get to the last essay I planned in this series, speculations on what the future may hold, near and far.

The good news in Washington last week was the Apollo Summit for Clean Energy and Good Jobs, a meeting of the Apollo Alliance. If there is any hope for America's future, it will depend on what Apollo and that summit represents: the blue-green alliance of blue collar and environmentalists, and governors and mayors who make things happen, as well as national legislators who keep at it regardless of where the headlines are.

Doing It

While others argue, governors are acting. They know that most of the world is aware of the Climate Crisis, and that there is a growing need for clean energy technology. Not only because of the Climate Crisis, but the many other environmental and health disasters caused by or exacerbated by dirty energy and its byproducts. They see also the economic consequences of dependence on foreign oil and the loss of good jobs, and they foresee the future that Peak Oil will soon bring. So they are acting.

At the Summit, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick proclaimed his clean energy priority as a total package: "I don't just want the wind farms. I want the companies that build the turbines. I want the ones that assemble the hybrid vehicles and consult on the conservation strategies. I want the companies that design and manufacture the solar panels. The whole integrated industry ought to and can have a place in Massachusetts ... I really believe that if we get this right, the whole world will be our customer. "

Then Colorado Governor Bill Ritter said he had the same goals for his state. These governors have seen what Governor Ed Rendell did in Pennsylvania: his administration brought a company(Gamesa) into the state to build wind farms and manufacture turbines. An early member of the Apollo Alliance, Rendell worked with the Democrats' traditional ally in Pennsylvania, the United Steelworkers union, and he got legislation passed that guaranteed the Commonwealth would buy enough renewable energy to give Gamesa a minimum market base. The result will be 1,000 union jobs, many in manufacturing, and the beginning of a new industry with global implications.

As Rendell told the Summit: "What else can clean the environment, boost the economy, free us up politically in world affairs, make us better able to withstand a terrorist attack or natural disaster, and help us with our trade imbalance? There's nothing else, this ought to be our number one priority."

The Blue-Green (and other colors) Alliance

While these governors talked about jobs and economic opportunities, the important thing in hoping that this alliance can be sustained is that there is a strong committment to the environment as well: it appears to be a true alliance between blue collar and green. Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club, spoke at the Summit, along with Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, who said: "it's time for an environmental intervention."

This is crucial because environmentalists and those in the forefront of warning about the Climate Crisis have long been marginalized as a wealthy overeducated elite out of touch with the American public (an image that the Fox Noise Machine is currently promoting in attacking Al Gore and his "Hollywood" supporters.)

On the ground, many conflicts have arisen when big companies successfully pitted workers against environmentalists (as in the Timber Wars here in California and the Pacific northwest.)
But the blue-green Apollo Alliance shatters those images and those cynically-created conflicts. The blue-green alliance is politically potent, as it could well be the basis for reinstituting and reenergizing the traditional Democratic party blue collar base. But even more importantly, it could be the basis for economic progress as well as giving us a fighting chance for the future threatened by the Climate Crisis.

There's another important part of this alliance that must be noted. Part of the elitist image of the environmental movement has been that it is lilly white. But Jerome Ringo, the inspirational President of the Apollo Alliance, is black. So is Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts.

Alliance at All Levels

We are absorbed by conflict, and such headlines as there were from the summit emphasized the competition for clean energy jobs expressed by the governors. But it's more important to emphasize the strength in partnerships, and the breadth of this alliance and its potential power to transform the country and maybe even the world.

The above named are not the only governors committed to clean energy and battling the Climate Crisis. Nor were those named the only union, environmental organization and government officials present at the Summit.

Trenton, N.J. Mayor Douglas Palmer spoke, (note: that's Trenton, not Beverly Hills),representing more than 372 mayors from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have signed onto the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Among them are mayors who are instituting clean energy programs and efforts to confront the Climate Crisis in their cities. They called for federal block grants to help them in their efforts. "we can no longer behave as if there aren't any consequences from inaction."

U.S. Representative Jay Inslee (WA) called the Apollo Alliance the "most important coalition" in America today, because "this is a matter of our American destiny ... to lead the world in solving this global warming crisis."

Senator Hillary Clinton spoke, as did Senator Bernie Sanders, who has introduced the most aggressive bill against global heating now in Congress. On the blue-green alliance itself, he said: "This is a marriage made in heaven. This is a marriage that will move heaven and earth."

All of this is encouraging and in fact could be crucial. But almost nobody reported on it, and the left blogosphere in particular was quiet about it, including clean energy advocates who have yet to become part of the alliance. Bill Scher of the Campaign for America's Future, a cosponsor of the Apollo Alliance, blogged about it at Huffington Post, which is how I learned about it. But he apparently felt it necessary to attract attention by highlighting the competition between governors for clean energy industries, using "battle royale" in his headline.

But the importance of this alliance isn't about competition (though undoubtedly that will drive some useful efforts)--it's about cooperation: working together in partnerships among groups that were indifferent or hostile to each other in the past.

Yet it is all the noise of charge and countercharge that gets the attention. The left blogs playing into the hands of the right by making Ann Coulter the political equivalent of Anna Nicole Smith, and by covering a convention of conservative Republicans in detail while ignoring this meeting of the hope of the Democratic party as well as the nation and the future.

Here's more on "green collar jobs" at Sentient Times.

Just what the perils may be of all of us ignoring the future is the subject of my final essay in this series.

R.I.P.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a respected biographer of FDR when he became an advisor to John F. Kennedy and then a special assistant to him in the White House. In the early 1960s, he transferred a phrase from Emerson to devise "The Politics of Hope" as a bold assertion that survives Camelot to still speak to some of us today. He was a political player and theorist, judicious and penetrating. In the Kennedy years he showed that an intellectual could provide inspiration as well as guidance in politics, and as a writer he showed that intellectually substantive prose could also be popular. His 60s experience informed his subsequent writing on presidential power, and he also wrote one of the better books on the John F. Kennedy's presidency, and another on Robert Kennedy. He continued his incisive political commentary for the rest of his life--his last book was in 2004. As an elder and an inspiration, I pay my respects to his memory.

This is as close to a snow scene as we've come in Arcata
in a decade. It's actually hail, or maybe sleet. But it's not
snow. Folks in the hills nearby have seen a foot of the real
stuff, though.

Elsewhere

This North Coast Place

New template features, links and a new post at This North Coast Place, and template changes at its companion site, North Coast Texts, which join Captain Future's growing fleet of affordable blogs, patrolling the blogosphere and serving the universe from Secret Squadron Headquarters in Arcata...

And a few new entries in the Saturday Morning Sci-Fi series at the Boomer Hall of Fame.

Beeing There

I've got one more installment planned in my ongoing "Climate Crisis Future" series. These essays have been outlines, speculations on direction and shape of things to come, depending on what is and isn't done today and in the near future. But while some of the Climate Crisis dangers are obviously huge--like Katrina-like storms--and others are very visible over time, like dried-up lakes and buildings sinking into soggy permafrost, there are a lot of very small shifts that can have greater consequences that may not be readily apparent.

The dying off of coral reefs partly or mostly because of hotter oceans is a big thing when you can go and look at it, but coral reefs are remote from most of us. Even harder to see are the effects of animal and plant species going extinct, some even before scientists--let alone the public--know they exist. What we do know about the polar bear and the penguin is clear in terms of the impact on them. But there are lots of species whose place in the ecological chain are still mysterious.

There's a cautionary tale in the news now: the honeybee. Some people know a lot about this species and its place in our food chain. Though few of us are aware of it, much of our food supply is dependent on honeybees pollinating vegetable and fruit plants, and seeds. As stated in this New York Times article, Cornell University estimates honeybees are crucial to about $14 billion worth of foodstuffs annually. And now, suddenly and inexplicably, they are disappearing.

More specifically, bees are leaving their hives and not coming back. Nobody yet knows why, but what is usually a 20% loss of bees in colonies kept by beekeepers has suddenly become 70%. Nobody is yet linking this to global heating, but there is an appropriate point or two here. First, that we're more dependent than most of us think or know on very small and specific aspects of nature, including individual species. And second, our willed ignorance that in part permits mindless exploitation is vast.

We have no idea how bees find their way around, but they do. Creatures with such little brains should not be able to find their own hives after flying around in search of food, but they do. Scientists have even moved the hives and otherwise tried to confuse the bees, but they get back anyway. But not this time.

We don't know why partly because our dogmas tell us bees are stupid and so we didn't really notice this (though beekeepers did, but they don't get grants.) It's the same kind of thinking that has made a recent observation of chimps in Senegal so ignorance-shatttering. These chimps were observed repeatedly fashioning spears from tree limbs, and using them to hunt smaller prey hidden in hollow tree trunks. The human preconceptions that bit the dust include that only humans use tools (that one was obliterated awhile ago--it turns out that even birds use tools), that only humans fashion tools and weapons, and use them to hunt.

There was another preconception punctured as well. It turns out that most of the chimps doing this were female. There goes the male hunter, and all it implies.

It may be that these chimps are unusual in terms of the diet and the prey available to them, but it seems highly unlikely that chimps have sudden acquired the intelligence and skills to do this. But according to this report, scientists have never seen this before. Why not? It may be as ethologist Fran De Waal suggests in his study of peaceful conflict resolution among chimps--scientists never saw it because they weren't looking for it. They had a theory about dominance by the strongest, and never looked beyond it--they just accumulated more "evidence" for it.

What we don't know may kill us. Our self-satisfied blindness may be an even bigger barrier than our self-indulgent denial. We need to get over both.

The Milky Way from planet Earth

The Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 1)

Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 1)

The challenges of the Climate Crisis are formidable. Getting enough awareness, then political will just to begin addressing it here in the U.S. has been difficult enough, and still is. Then there are the conceptual challenges previous posts here have alluded to, and the challenge of overcoming the either/or mentality to accept the "Fix It" need to address now-inevitable effects that global heating will cause for the next generation or more, at the same time going forward with the "Stop It" efforts to severely scale back greenhouse gases and taking other steps to save the farther future from what could become an unstoppable apocalypse.

But the greatest challenge may be the one that nobody wants to talk about. It is the possibility, and perhaps the likelihood, that while conflicts among politicians, corporations and various interest groups prevent effective action or even attention to either track of the Climate Crisis, human civilization will add to its woes with warfare precipitated by effects of global heating. That warfare could easily become so severe that it would swamp positive efforts to address the crises themselves.

Why is war possible? For one thing: water. The Climate Crisis is shifting precipitation patterns, so more places are mired in floods and droughts which threaten to become longterm. Historically, changes in climate that affect food production and living conditions cause migration and warfare as one group moves in on the territory of another. That may well have been behind the fall of the Roman Empire before barbarian tribes, driven away by cold and drought. And spreading drought--probably related to global heating-- may very well now be a contributing factor to the genocide in Darfur.

But consider this as well: all over the world, high mountain glaciers are melting and disappearing. They are the source of water for billions. As Al Gore points out in An Inconvenient Truth, melting of the Himalayan glaciers, among the most affected by global heating so far, threatens the water supply of fully 40% of the world's population. Most of the countries in the world that now possess nuclear weapons are threatened by climatic changes already beginning to occur, and border each other or are near neighbors.

But in order to address the Climate Crisis, the world needs to do more than avoid war--it must engage in unprecedented international cooperation. Some countries are starting to engage in directly addressing global heating issues together, beyond Kyoto, with the notable exception of the U.S. But when the U.S. joins the international community again, that won't in itself solve the problems. One major issue that will soon arise is the role of the developing world, both the growing economic powers of China and India, and the poorer nations. Indeed, in his essay "An Inconvenient Truth Part II,"Tom Athanasiou writes that addressing global poverty is essential to addressing the Climate Crisis (the 2 degree line he refers to is the total temperature rise point of no return--beyond it, civilization is toast):

It will take a heroic effort and almost unimaginable internationalcooperation to hold the 2°C line, but it is still physically possible to do so. This is because already existing technologies, if developed and disseminated with true “global Manhattan Project” urgency, would support huge, rapid efficiency increases and emissions reductions, and buy us time to decarbonize our infrastructures, adopt fairer ,lower-consumption lifestyles and, of course, develop better technologies.The real need here is what Americans, in particular, might call a Global New Deal.

Like the original, it would focus on stabilizing and improving the lives of the vulnerable, restless poor. But this time the institution building and the politics would be global, and this time the background crisis – the threat that demands cooperation and, by so doing, animates the whole effort – would be as much social-ecological as it is socio-economic.

These issues of international cooperation are going to become more and more acute with each passing year, and the need to avoid climate-based warfare could arise at any time, but almost certainly will in the next 30 years. Apart from the conflicts sown by the greedy and the fearful, we have a couple of basic problems here. We don't have the skills. And we're still moving in the wrong direction.

"We don't have the skills" is a bit of an overstatement, because just like people who have been working diligently, even when reviled and mostly out of public notice, on alternative energy and on the Climate Crisis science itself for decades, there are thousands of people who have been working on developing the Skills of Peace--the skills of resolving conflicts through knowledge and communication, of ways of becoming more conscious of the personal and societal psychology that fosters unnecessary violence and ways of dealing with it, and of the skills of cooperation, and dedicated service to the common good.

But in terms of our leadership, and our institutions, we have largely ignored those skills, including even the possibility of developing, acquiring and using them. We don't for a moment dispute that skills are necessary for conducting warfare. We spend vast treasures on developing those skills and training people to use them. We know that war requires strategies, knowledge and communication of all kinds. But when it comes to peace, we seem to think it arises by magic or not at all.

This is partly a product of a dominant view of human nature derived from a perverse Social Darwinist interpretation of natural selection: the dog eats dog, survival of the fittest view. Such a view may even add to the violence, providing excuses to those who foment it, or who enable it with trade in weapons that constantly become more deadly and easier to obtain and use. But that dark view is unbalanced--it simply ignores the contrary evidence we see everyday in our lives and in the natural world, where cooperation, nurture, giving and compassion are as natural and at least as necessary as anything else.

Even science has not escaped the blinders of this bias, which is why these days are suddenly discovering animal behavior they thought impossible, everything from animal empathy to tool use. It's not like animals have just started doing this stuff. It's that human scientists weren't looking for it because they didn't believe it was there.

But this post is getting long, so let's take a photo break and meet on the other side.

Cups in Place # 4. BK photo.

The Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 2)

There's a lot of violence in the world, although the destruction of civilized societies by the power of modern weapons we see around the world today is perhaps a lesson more in technology and profit than in human nature. Civilization depends on peaceful means to address differences, disputes and conflicts, but we don't seem to understand or value this until it is threatened. Too bad, because the Climate Crisis is going to test the potential of civilization to generate even greater skills of peace, and apply them to a global community. Or else civilization, along with most of humankind and the ecosystem that nurtured us, will disappear.

Part of our problem is how routinely our violent instincts are exploited. Leaders exploiting our fears, defining them in simplistic us-or-them terms, and convincing us that they are our only protectors, is the obvious and often repeated example, though having fallen for that again in the 21st century is not an encouraging sign.

This exploitation has become something of a foundation for our culture and economy. As a species, we become instantly alert to threat, poised to fight or flee, because instant recognition of threat and instant impulse to action is a survival instinct. Because threat gets our chemicals going, even the artificial threats of movies and TV shows, they are ideal for grabbing our attention, which is what's needed to sell tickets and commercials. The guaranteed attention and glandular response is one primary reason that our "entertainment" is mostly violent, and that violence not only convinces us the real world is like that (despite much of our everyday experience) but it supports the societal dogma that conflicts are settled by violence.

Of course we have other survival instincts, and survival strategies. They just aren't as easy to exploit to sell us, although that doesn't stop merchandizers and politicians from using them as well.

We are so institutionally addicted to violence that we're killing ourselves with it. Even after more than a decade in which our armed forces are called upon to do what is called "peace keeping" as a significant part of their duties, we still have no significant training for these duties. Instead we devote all our efforts to the tragic transformation of young Americans into killers. It's only one of many tragedies being played out in Iraq, but it's a significant one.

Now when we are going to need these skills of peace more than ever, we are turning in the opposite direction. Experts know that violence alone is never going to stop terrorism. Yet the cowardly use of 9-11 to sow fear and justify needless warfare and torture is the most flagrant evidence of our deterioration. Despite even the military's insistence that torture doesn't work, it has become not only national policy but national entertainment. There were no depictions of torture on U.S. television in 1996 and 1997, but more than 200 in 2003 and at least a hundred in each of 2004 and 2005, most of them on the very popular series, "24," but not exclusively. Conspicuously (and stupidly) violent commercials were noticeably prevalent during this year's Super Bowl.

So far the 2008 presidential campaign doesn't look promising in this regard. Despite all the theories blaming warfare and violence on testosterone and "the patriarchy," the presence of a woman candidate in the race who feels she has to talk tough and rattle sabers to show she's qualified only perpetuates the emphasis on violent approaches to conflict over other possible solutions.

The Skills of Peace allow us to approach conflict with appropriate means. Most of us can conceive of situations in which violence seems necessary, but the point is that it is automatically used in far more conflicts than it is necessary or even useful, partly for lack of commitment, knowledge and skills in employing alternative and more appropriate means. Even the means and moods we've accepted and used for generations are endangered today, especially in our civic life. I was struck by a particularly appropriate example in a news story, about a conflict over the Climate Crisis itself, and Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, nominated for an Oscar to be awarded later today.

When a small town school in Washington state wanted to show An Inconvenient Truth in a 7th grade science class, a parent objected. Not an alarming or impossible to resolve conflict in itself, but the violent terms of it and how it quickly spiraled into a panic have become all too familiar. First, the extreme terms of the objection. According to the Washington Post article, :

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

Out of all the ways the School Board could have chosen to respond, they reacted by not only cancelling the film for that particular class, but for the entire school district, and informing the teacher who had scheduled the film she would receive a disciplinary letter for not clearing a "controversial" film first.

When this hit the news, the public response was swift, national and extreme. According to the Post, "Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion and imposing prior restraint on free speech."

At that point the school board could have reacted by digging in their heels, but they didn't. One member made an impassioned speech, "I am here to foster healing in our community," he said, while noting with sadness that "civility and honest discourse are dying in our country." In the end the teacher was permitted to show Gore's film as long as it was accompanied by "other views" of equal scientific merit, which she apparently was having a lot of trouble finding.

Some may characterize that school board's final decision as backing down under pressure, or perhaps it was only coming to its senses (whether it was being disingenuous or hypocritical in the first place is another question), but it did at least make a plea for civility. The extreme views and extreme demands of the parent are very alarming, but so too was the response, if indeed it was "obscene" and extreme (such claims have been made falsely, but I've seen blogosphere responses to similiar situations that suggest the claims could well be true.) There is no scientific validity to Climate Crisis denying, and the threats to separation of church and state was real. But it's worth recalling that the initial Fundamentalist opposition to Darwinian evolution in the 19th century was the fear that it was being used to devalue the worth of the individual, particularly those who weren't naturally selected to be rich and powerful. They weren't entirely wrong.

People who fear that science can be used to oppress them are not crazy. Science has often been used to oppress people. Science unintentionally created the very Climate Crisis that science now warns us may well destroy us. There are plenty of ironies to go around. The Skills of Peace cannot be successful without an attempt at mutual understanding, the commonly held rules of civility, and the acknowledgement of compassion as a human quality and a human strength. We're going to feel it differently, but the Climate Crisis affects everyone and everything: the whole world, the whole future. It's global, remember? We're all in this together. We're going to have to solve it together. It's civilization's ultimate test, in more ways than one.

the Baiji, one of four freshwater dolphins, now extinct.

Elsewhere

Taegan Goddard's Political Wire is soliciting "reviews" (doubt that he's getting any bad ones--he's offering $100 Amazon gift certificates for his favorites, manna to us book drunks) but even so, the truth is that I've been going to his site first thing for longer than just about anywhere else in the blogosphere.

Political Wire offers nuggets, not just blurbs. It's fun to scan for the political Zeitgeist stuff of the day but what I find most valuable are the summaries of polls and studies, and not just the usual suspects. These sometimes support impressions you get from the news, but sometimes they are quite different, showing that perhaps the conventional wisdom has got it wrong about how voters think and feel.

Again, it's not just that these summaries are short and sweet, with links to the full presentation. It's what's in the summaries. Beyond the obvious headline, they often highlight the most interesting and key facts that may be buried in the data. Political Wire has been my secret weapon for years. Too bad I had to out myself, but that's what the possibility of $100 in books and DVDs will do.

Also elsewhere:

A consideration of playwright Carol Churchill on sexual and other politics at Stage Matters. Some thoughts on regret at the reformatted Blue Voice, and on ergonomics at the reformatted Shopopolis.

The Daily Babble

The Outrage Basket

The Injoy basket is empty, but as usual the Outrage basket is overflowing. A few of the items tumbling over the top and onto the floor:

A federal court Tuesday, in perhaps the most legally torturous (in both senses) decision since the Supremes played Bush V. Gore, formally stripped detainees of their rights. So we're going to continue to pretend that "24" is reality, and that due process is some prissy thing we can't afford anymore, torture is necessary, torture works, and it's good for you, too--although there's the inconveniently authentic account in the Washington Post by Eric Fair, about his own experiences doing his country's dirty work, his current nightmares and self-recriminations:

I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

But at least he's not an amputee dumped in an abandoned motel across from Walter Reed hospital, although judging the relative pain of traumatic stress for life versus traumatic head injuries for life is as debased as this war has always been. The Iraq war is creating a generation of physically, psychologically and mentally maimed people who will be around long after the last haunted Vietnam vet has faded completely out of existence. And there are people who with a straight and noble face are proposing a new Draft.

But then we're deep into government by hyperbole. Countdown quoted some right wing radio nut job as saying that teachers unions are a worse threat that al Qaeda, and a Repub Florida congressman who is also a party campaign official as saying that he doesn't really care if the lies he spread about Speaker Pelosi were true or not. Unfortunately I don't think he's lying about that.

We've heard about the ideological extremes this administration has gone to, in hiring people for those inconsequential jobs reserved for political favors, like running the Iraq occupation and FEMA. But it wasn't until I ran across a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times that I realized there was a playbook involved. (I would read everything Krugman writes online except he's part of the "times select" group of columnists, and I can't bring myself to pay for Dowd and Friedman, who are also a mandatory part of the package.) So I saw this in the print edition. Krugman quotes a Heritage Foundation document that instructs the administration to "make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second." Which of course the Bushites took one step further by eliminating the second consideration altogether.

So it shouldn't be surprising that a story in today's New York Times notes that: Scholars say Mr. Bush has been more strategic than most presidents in sprinkling loyalists throughout the administration. Paul C. Light, an expert in public service at New York University, says it has created an “echo chamber” in which the president gets advice he wants to hear.

Krugman's column (from 2/05) also notes that privatization, another ideologically driven obsession of this administration, may have added to the amount of government work hired out to corporations, but not to the competition for contracts. Competitive contracts have nose-dived from nearly 3/4 of the total to less than 1/2. No word on how many of those Halliburton got. And of course, contractors are often getting paid far more than ordinary employees of government would be. Especially if they don't vote Republican.