Archive for May 11th, 2007

Odd and Delusional

There are some odd things going on in CNN — the other day, the ticker tape that flies at the bottom of the screen announced the travels of “Pres. Cheney” and last night, CNN International put up a message that said, “Bush Resigns.” While you know how I feel about Dubby, I trust that’s no prophecy, for reasons illumined in the first piece.

The second is another of those oh-crap! moments we’re used to — on the Fort Dix Six … who turn out to be something like the Three Stooges. Are we ever going to “bust up” a plot that doesn’t sound like it was put together late one night at the laundromat, folding undies and under the influence?

Last, a just-plain-odd performance by Fredo … in the last 24 hours, the White House has been told to start telling the truth about the war, and that they’re not going to be able to protect Wolfy much longer — now they have a giggling Attorney General.

Like I said — odd and delusional. Activist/op to restore habeas, last — but first, a Fiori showing us delusion-by-the-numbers.

Jude

Pentagon film fest
Mark Fiore
05.10.07

Cheney warns Iran, assures allies on Gulf visit
Reuters
Fri May 11, 2007

ABOARD USS JOHN C. STENNIS (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney said on Friday the heightened U.S. military presence in the Gulf demonstrated Washington’s resolve in a standoff with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear plans.

“With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike,” said Cheney on a visit to the John C. Stennis aircraft carrier off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, a close U.S. ally.

“We’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region,” he said, speaking from a cavernous hangar bay. Stennis officials said 3,500 to 4,000 of the 5,000 personnel aboard were on hand.

Iran denies any intention to develop nuclear weapons but the United States and Israel have refused to rule out military action if diplomatic efforts to halt its civilian nuclear drive come to nothing. Iran also denies U.S. and British accusations that it is fuelling violence in Iraq.

“I want you to know that the American people do not support a policy of retreat. We want to complete the mission, get it done right, and return with honor,” Cheney said, drawing cheers.

Cheney has said Iran would top his talks with Arab leaders during his regional visit.

“The (Iranians) are obviously a major source of concern not only for the United States but also for most of our friends in the area, who are worried when they see an Iranian government that appears to be operating in a threatening manner… So Iran is a big area of concern,” Cheney told Fox News on Thursday.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shadowing Cheney in the region and is due to visit the UAE on Saturday or Sunday, just after the vice president leaves.

Curious Details Emerge on the Fort Dix Six
MoJo Blog, Mother Jones
5/11/07

MSNBC has an update on the six foreign nationals who were arrested for plotting to attack Fort Dix Army base and it looks like they might have been a bunch of bumblers egged on by over-aggressive FBI informants — leading to speculation that an entrapment defense is upcoming.

As for the bumbling plotters: “The FBI learned of the alleged plot when the men went to a Circuit City store and asked a clerk to transfer a jihad training video of themselves onto a DVD.”

As for the over-aggressive informants: “One of the [accused plotters]… called a Philadelphia police officer in November, saying that he had been approached by someone who was pressuring him to obtain a map of Fort Dix, and that he feared the incident was terrorist-related, according to court documents.”

Also, here’s the description of one of the informants actions: “He railed against the United States, helped scout out military installations for attack, offered to introduce his comrades to an arms dealer and gave them a list of weapons he could procure, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.”

But that might not be enough for an entrapment defense to fly. Entrapment has become extremely difficult to prove in the post-9/11 world, and as one long-time FBI agent told the AP, “If the source talks them into committing a crime, that is entrapment… [but] if they are predisposed to commit a crime, and you give them the opportunity, that’s fine.” Pretty easy case to make.

Now I’m obviously in favor of giving the FBI the space and tools it needs to fight crime and violence, terrorism or no. If these guys legitimately had a plan to kill American servicemen, then throw them in the lock-up. But after the FBI and the Department of Justice strong-armed the prosecutions of the Lackawanna Six, John Walker Lindh, and Jose Padilla, you have to apply a skeptical eye to these things. The case of the Lackawanna Six is particularly instructive.

Gonzales Giggles Through Testimony, Ignores Even More New Evidence
Jonathan Stein, Mother Jones
05/11/07

Yesterday I wrote that a ninth purged U.S. Attorney had been found and that Alberto Gonzales, who was going before the House Judiciary Committee, was going to have to answer some tough questions.

Well, as it happens, Gonzales displayed the same combination of (feigned) cluelessness and (unwarranted) chutzpah as he did when appearing before the Senate last month in order to avoid saying much of anything at all. A major difference? No defensiveness — Gonzales seems to know he can’t or won’t be fired, and has stopped caring what Congress or the American people think of him. He giggled throughout his testimony, in the face of weighty and sometimes damning questions.

He might want to get serious. McClatchy reports new evidence that Karl Rove essentially used Gonzales’ Department of Justice as the enforcement arm for his Machiavellian schemes. Just weeks before the November 2006 elections, Karl Rove and his deputies twice urged the Department of Justice (using Gonzo’s chief-of-staff Kyle Sampson as a primary contact) to investigate voter fraud in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — even though it is DOJ policy not to open such investigations shortly before elections because of the possibility of influencing votes.

But that was the point. The cases that Rove wanted investigated where shams — the allegations of voter fraud in Wisconsin, for example, were two years old and had already been thoroughly investigated, with no results. And obviously the voter fraud Rove wanted investigated was all one-sided stuff — Republicans being disenfranchised by Democrats and not the other way around. How do we know? Rove’s evidence of voter fraud came from a 30-page report compiled by Republican activists.

That’s right — conservative activists on the ground were in direct contact with the president’s top political adviser, who in turn tried to turn the activists’ loony schemes into official Department of Justice policy. Are we a banana republic yet?

Gonzales: ‘I Haven’t Really Thought About’ Habeas Corpus
Think Progress

Under the Bush administration, U.S. citizens can be detained as enemy combatants and arrested without being charged of any crime.

At today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales whether any U.S. citizens are “being held today, for over a month, who have been denied habeas corpus or access to an attorney.” Instead of giving an answer, Gonzales replied, “[Y]ou’re asking me a question I hadn’t really thought about.”

Sherman then followed up and asked whether there any “U.S. citizens being held now by foreign governments or foreign organizations, without access to attorneys, as a result of rendition.” Gonzales again said, “It’s just — quite frankly, I hadn’t thought about this.”

[open link to watch video]

When Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, he claimed that there is “no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.” Today, Sherman asked Gonzales, “Wouldn’t it be your duty as Attorney General to make sure that their [ U.S. citizens'] rights to habeas corpus were honored?” After some hedging, Gonzales finally agreed: “Yes.”

Matt Stoller and Glenn Greenwald have more on the habeas fight. Sign a petition telling Congress to restore habeas corpus HERE.

Transcript:

GONZALES: I don’t believe so, Congressman.

SHERMAN: Wouldn’t it be your duty as Attorney General to make sure that their rights to habeas corpus were honored?

GONZALES: Well, you know, there’s a lot of people in this government and sometimes people do things that they shouldn’t be –

And I’m not suggesting that’s occurring here. But you’re asking me a question I hadn’t really thought about.

SHERMAN: Is there any agency answerable to the Department of Justice –

GONZALES: We’re all answerable to — put the Constitution into our laws, yes.

SHERMAN: Now, are there any U.S. citizens being held now by foreign governments or foreign organizations, without access to attorneys, as a result of rendition, where agents of the administration have taken people into custody and then given them up to foreign officials?

GONZALES: I don’t — Congressman, I don’t know if I have the question to that question either. It’s something I would have to look at.

SHERMAN: Wouldn’t you, as the chief officer responsible for protecting our civil rights, want to know?

GONZALES: Yes. And I’m not suggesting that that is occurring — It’s just — quite frankly, I hadn’t thought about this.

SHERMAN: Would you respond for the record?

GONZALES: I’d be happy. If I can respond to the question, I will.

SHERMAN: Let me move on to another question. You now have focused more on these –

GONZALES: I don’t want the press to run out and say, “Oh my gosh, U.S. citizens are being held by the government secretly, other governments.” I don’t think that’s the case. I just want the American public to understand that.

SHERMAN: I look forward to a definitive answer for the record. Let’s move on.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

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Add comment May 11th, 2007

About the buzzzz

OK, here’s the deal — I adore the first piece here … the one entitled Personal Planets and the Little Prince is a potent illustration of environmental reality … and I despise all the rest — hard to make myself read them … but if we choose not to look, we miss important clues about how to proceed next.

I’ve always thought the Devil was in the details. To put that another way, a friend always tells me, “It’s not the things you worry about that get you, it’s the little things you never consider.” Things like … honey bee’s, for instance.

So — apologies for the downer … but here are bite-the-bullet reads on bee’s, modified food, bio-fuel production and economics. Two are by Morford, and that sweetens them just a bit … clever, honest writing. As you read, remember … although we all appear to be flailing around stupidly at the moment … humans are very intelligent, inventive beings; there are creative answers for these problems floating around in the ether’s, waiting to be grabbed and initiated. As ever, this is about REALIZATION so that we can turn our attention toward honoring life on this planet rather than plummeting thoughtlessly toward destruction. The politics MUST give way so that science has a chance. Pass this post around.

Note: Bill Moyers Journal on PBS tonight looks at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and a historian does a tit/tat on the Charlie Rose happy-talk conversation with Condi Rice. Set your recorder.

Jude

The Hippies Were Right!
Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol’ tie-dyers some respect
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening right now in the newly “greening” America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women or endless vile unwinnable BushCo wars in the Middle East lasting until roughly 2075 because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored sardonic optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient light bulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins and I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and non-phthalates dildos at Good Vibes and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: we have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line because if they don’t start caring they’ll soon be totally screwed on manufacturing and shipping costs at/from all their brutal Chinese sweatshops).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit fitful, bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along. Oh yes they did.

You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMO seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the savage damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for the past 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the “authentic” hippie ethos — the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation — has been totally leeched out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation’s reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it’s taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation’s incredibly obese ass into gear and force consumers to begin to wake up to the savage gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, oh my God, what’s going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon? Of course, without the ’60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we’d be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you’re really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty lazy responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what’s called the reactionary simpleton’s view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proofs are easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the ’60s counterculture are still so intact and potent even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It’s all right there: Treehugger.com is the new ’60s underground hippy zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam to Bright Eyes to NIN to the Dixie Chicks are writing savage anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And oh yes, speaking of good ol’ MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psychospiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire “excessive,” “naive” drug culture of yore in favor of much more “sane” and “careful” scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultra-conservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary old hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now — though that might be due to all the mushrooms he’s been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie crap no one believes in anymore. Right?

Apocalypse Of The Honeybees
How poetically appropriate that the End of Humanity should come from such a
tiny, sweet source
Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 9, 2007

From outta nowhere the tiny ones came, while humanity was busy trembling and sweating in the face of major global cataclysm, of global warming and nuclear war and rainforest devastation and melting ice caps and E. coli outbreaks and Ashlee Simpson and lethal hurricanes and the Apocalypse-hungry Christian right and a simply stupendously vile Bush juggernaut that has threatened all intelligent life everywhere. Onward they came, buzzy and calm and happy to be our very own adorable, unexpected harbinger of doom.

Yes, now we can see it clearly. Now we can be appropriately alarmed and now maybe we can even say, Oh holy hell, maybe we should have seen it coming all along: Of course the end of mankind should come from something as sweet and commonplace and unforeseen as the honeybees.

Have you not heard? Have you not read of the dire honeybee apocalypse and what it might mean for the majority of the delectable food crops in America, how we might soon face a very serious food crisis and might be eating little more than bread and pine cones in the near future, thus inducing widespread panic as we engage in violent bloody wars not for oil or land or God but over asparagus and avocados and those incredible Buddha’s Hand fruits they use to infuse Hangar One Citron?

It’s true. It’s all because of the honeybees, those minuscule, absolutely essential, beautifully pollinating creatures that play such a vital role in our food supply, help nearly all flowering crops grow and therefore provide a simply enormous portion of the global diet including all citrus and many vegetables but excluding that goopy liquefied toxic meat crap they inject into McNuggets, these incredibly designed workhorse creatures that also make the world’s sweetest stickiest natural substance next to Jessica Alba and maybe Shiva’s own bubble bath, these lovely honeybees might, just might be a sign of our ultimate downfall.

It makes perfect poetic sense, don’t you think? After all, are we not long overdue for such a fatal environmental karmic bitch-slap? Has Mother Nature not had just about enough of our arrogant invasiveness? Don’t you already know the answer?

These are (some) of the facts: It appears the honeybee hives are collapsing. And the wild honeybee population is down a staggering 90 percent. In the past few months alone, U.S. beekeepers have lost one quarter of their 2.4 million colonies (five times the normal rate) to what’s been deemed Colony Collapse Disorder (also the perfect nickname for Bush’s America, n’est-ce pas?), and this very serious, inexplicable problem has already spread to 27 states and parts of Brazil, Canada and Europe.

The stories are as alarming and mysterious as they are easy to brush aside as Just Another Essential Natural System We Screwed Up and Now Have to Scramble to Fix. But it might not be so easy. And if the trend continues, if more hives collapse at such a shocking and unprecedented rate and if science can’t figure out a solution rather quickly, well, get used to your wheat toast and clams.

What’s killing all the bees? Is it some sort of new, ultra-resilient parasite? Is it pesticides? Overbreeding? Stress? Pollution and genetic diddering and cell phone towers? Is it Ashlee Simpson? No one has a clue. Check that: A few smart people have a clue or two (it’s a newfangled parasite! says the guy who helped find the cause of SARS), but at this point they’re basically just guessing. Most say it’s likely some complicated tangle of causes, some mishmash problem that won’t be so easy to decipher.

I know what you’re thinking. And yes, chances are very good we’ll figure it all out before the Great Pomegranate Wars of 2010. Surely we’ll manage to finagle and wend and sneak our way out of yet another calamitous man-made (or at the very least, man-assisted) natural catastrophe because, well, this is what we do. We’re a scrappy species. We have science and money and brains that deduce. Surely we’ll find a way to seduce the bees back to life and it’s entirely possible you’ve already read about and then forgotten this disturbing story entirely because, well, what the hell can you really do about it?

I know the feeling. This is, after all, one of those slightly disquieting science tales that you read about and then feel utterly powerless to respond to, and hence all you can really do is hope the PTB are savvy enough to find a solution and essentially save the world and then you take one look at the Bush administration and you get that sickly sinking feeling that surely we are doomed doomed doomed.

No matter. Because here’s the bottom line: Regardless of whether or not we figure it out, Colony Collapse Disorder is merely one more of those charming warning signs, one of those increasingly frequent messages from the gods writ large across the sky of humanity’s arrogance and merciless abuse of nature’s integrity. Hell, it’s an abuse we’ve engaged in for so long we don’t even really think about it anymore. And therein lies our likely demise.

It won’t be from global warming. It won’t be from nuclear war or massive earthquakes or giant angry robots from outer space or an enormous asteroid striking Australia and wreaking atmospheric chaos and it probably won’t be from Jesus returning to this bloody little sandbox and looking around at all the pseudo-Christian hate and proselytizing and warmongering and saying, Oh holy hell, that’s not what I meant at all, and wiping the slate clean.

No, odds are just incredibly good that our ultimate downfall will come from a much more innocuous, unspectacular source, some from seemingly tiny but absolutely critical natural system that we finally manipulated one too many times and nature just went, OK, enough of this, I’m done with you gawky, ridiculous bipeds.

Maybe it will be from the disappearance of, say, some sort of rare, beautiful tree bark that contained an enzyme that was more vital to our genetic health than we ever imagined. Maybe it will be from the mushrooms, those crazy massive underground organisms that serve the life cycle in ways we don’t even fully understand. Or maybe we will find out, just a tad too late, that some odd species of sea grass that our pollution just wiped out actually held the cure to a new, globally lethal disease. Whoops.

See, the sweet, sticky ontological truth is nature doesn’t really give a damn whether our species lives or dies. It is very possible that we are not nearly as essential or significant as we like to believe. Though I imagine if nature had her druthers, she might very well choose to eliminate us like a bad dream and let the honeybees and the ants and the trees and the whales take over.

But hey, maybe that’s just the sardonic fatalism talking. I’m sure we’ll all be just fine for eons to come. Right?

GM crop taints honey two miles away, test reveals
The Sunday Times
September 15, 2002
[thanks, Eileen]

EVIDENCE that genetically modified (GM) crops can contaminate food supplies for miles around has been revealed in independent tests commissioned by The Sunday Times.

The tests found alien GM material in honey from beehives two miles from a site where GM crops were being grown under government supervision. It is believed to have been carried there by bees gathering pollen in the GM test sites.

The disclosure, showing that GM organisms can enter the food chain without consumers - or even farmers - knowing they are present, will undermine assurances by Tony Blair and ministers that such crops can be tested in Britain without contaminating the food chain.

The test results come as ministers, under pressure from the American agrochemical lobby, mount a huge consultation exercise to persuade the public of t he virtues of GM foods. They have previously given assurances that consumers “are not being used as guinea pigs”.

The GM material was found in honey sold from farmer David Rolfe’s hives at Newport-on-Tay in Fife, almost two miles from one of 18 sites holding trials of GM oil-seed rape.

A test carried out by GeneScan, a respected independent laboratory in Bremen, Germany, checked for traces of an NOS terminator, one of four modified genes which make the crop resistant to pesticides. This proved positive.

A second test confirmed that GM material in the honey could have come only from oil- seed rape grown at Wester Friarton, in Newport-on-Tay, by Aventis, one of the world’s biggest biotechnology firms. The fact that the GM material travelled such a distance makes a mockery of the government’s 50m-200m crop-free “buffer” zones that were created around GM sites to protect neighbouring farms. Critics have claimed that the GM crop trial sites are too close to other fa rms. America has buffer zones of up to 400m, Canada up to 800m, and the European Union recommends a 5km (three-mile) zone for GM oilseed rape.

When Rolfe first raised his concerns, government officials said that although it was not possible to rule out cross-pollination, they did not believe it should be “a source of concern”.

“I’m very angry and disappointed,” Rolfe said last week. “I feel I’ve been denied the right and freedom to eat my own GM-free produce. Now we can’t eat the honey or sell it.”

This weekend Defra, the ministry responsible for the crop trials, said: “We have not seen the results of the study but will treat any such findings extremely seriously.”

In the case of GM rape, like most GM products, there is no evidence that contamination poses a health risk. Concern centres on maintaining the integrity of traditionally produced products.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at Thames Valley University, said: “The early assurances from t he industry and the government that a buffer zone would allow safety and choice for consumers are falling apart. It raises environmental health worries, and what we don’t yet know is whether these warnings will translate into a risk to human health.”

Britain has imposed a moratorium on the widespread planting of GM crops until it has analysed the impact of GM crop trials at 18 farm-scale sites around Britain.

However, The Sunday Times’s tests confirm earlier work that was carried by Friends of the Earth, the environmental group, and will increase pressure on the government to scale down its support for the GM industry.

It will also come as a personal setback to Blair, who is determined that British companies will win a share of the potentially lucrative bioscience industry. In May the prime minister attacked GM protesters as part of an “anti-science fashion” in Britain.

The tests will bring pressure on Aventis, which was accused of a “serious breach” of regulations earlier this year after GM trials in 12 sites were contaminated with antibiotic genes. These are controversial because of the danger of gene transfer to bacteria in animals and humans, who could become immune to common life- saving antibiotics.

While the government tends to support the GM lobby, food retailers have been more cautious. The big supermarkets insist that such products are properly labelled and refuse to take honey from within six miles of UK test sites.

In Canada, a leading cultivator of GM crops, sales of honey have plummeted by 50% amid concern that the integrity of the product has been compromised.

A spokesmen for Aventis said: “We would be very interested in looking at both the origin of the honey sample and how the tests were carried out. We would like to look at this further.”

Designer Death — Collapsing Colonies
Are GM Crops Killing Bees?
Gunther Latsch, DER SPIEGEL
[no link available]

A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.

Is the mysterous decimation of bee populations in the US and Germany a result of GM crops?

Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist’s trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that “the very existence of beekeeping is at stake.”

The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein’s apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing — something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers’ association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When “bee populations disappear without a trace,” says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because “most bees don’t die in the beehive.” There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives.

Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that “a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar,” is killing the bees.

Politicians, until now, have shown little concern for such warnings or the woes of beekeepers. Although apiarists have been given a chance to make their case — for example in the run-up to the German cabinet’s approval of a genetic engineering policy document by Minister of Agriculture Horst Seehofer in February — their complaints are still largely ignored.

Even when beekeepers actually go to court, as they recently did in a joint effort with the German chapter of the organic farming organization Demeter International and other groups to oppose the use of genetically modified corn plants, they can only dream of the sort of media attention environmental organizations like Greenpeace attract with their protests at
test sites.

Global Rush To Energy Crops Threatens To Bring Food Shortages and Increase Poverty, Says UN
· Winners and Losers In Huge Biofuel Industry
· Oil Price Will Stabilize But Small Farmers at Risk
John Vidal, The Guardian/UK
Wednesday, May 9, 2007

The global rush to switch from oil to energy derived from plants will drive deforestation, push small farmers off the land and lead to serious food shortages and increased poverty unless carefully managed, says the most comprehensive survey yet completed of energy crops.

The United Nations report, compiled by all 30 of the world organization’s agencies, points to crops like palm oil, maize, sugar cane, soya and jatropha. Rich countries want to see these extensively grown for fuel as a way to reduce their own climate changing emissions. Their production could help stabilize the price of oil, open up new markets and lead to higher commodity prices for the poor.

But the UN urges governments to beware their human and environmental impacts, some of which could have irreversible consequences.

The report, which predicts winners and losers, will be studied carefully by the emerging multi-billion dollar a year biofuel industry which wants to provide as much as 25% of the world’s energy within 20 years.

Global production of energy crops is doubling every few years, and 17 countries have so far committed themselves to growing the crops on a large scale.

Last year more than a third of the entire US maize crop went to ethanol for fuel, a 48% increase on 2005, and Brazil and China grew the crops on nearly 50m acres of land. The EU has said that 10% of all fuel must come from biofuels by 2020. Biofuels can be used in place of petrol and diesel and can play a part in reducing emissions from transport.

On the positive side, the UN says that the crops have the potential to reduce and stabilize the price of oil, which could be very beneficial to poor countries. But it acknowledges that forests are already being felled to provide the land to grow vast plantations of palm oil trees. Environment groups argue strongly that this is catastrophic for the climate, and potentially devastating for forest animals like orangutans in Indonesia.

The UN warns: “Where crops are grown for energy purposes the use of large scale cropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and nutrient leaching. Even varied crops could have negative impacts if they replace wild forests or grasslands.”

But the survey’s findings are mixed on whether the crops will benefit or penalize poor countries, where most of the crops are expected to be grown in future. One school of thought argues that they will take the best land, which will increase global food prices. This could benefit some farmers but penalize others and also increase the cost of emergency food aid.

“Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications”, says the report which was complied by UN-Energy.

“The benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. [Growing biofuel crops] can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food, as they could suffer from even greater pressure on already limited financial resources.

“At their worst, biofuel programs can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty,” it says.

According to the report, the crops could transform the rural economy of rich and poor countries, attracting major new players and capital, but potentially leading to problems.

“Large investments are already signaling the emergence of a new bio-economy, pointing to the possibility that still larger companies will enter the rural economy, putting the squeeze on farmers by controlling the price paid to producers and owning the rest of the value train,” it says.

The report also says the crops are not guaranteed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Producing and using biofuels results in some reductions in emissions compared to petroleum fuels, it says, but this is provided there is no clearing of forest or peat that store centuries of carbon.

“More and more people are realizing that there are serious environmental and food security issues involved in biofuels. Climate change is the most serious issue, but you cannot fight climate change by large scale deforestation,” said Jan van Aken, of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam.

“Bioenergy provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to address climate change, energy security and rural development. [But] investments need to be planned carefully to avoid generating new environmental and social problems,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of UN Environment program yesterday.

Plant power

Biomass energy can be obtained from just about any plant or tree but is most commonly obtained from maize, soya beans, oil palms, sugar cane, sunflower and trees. The carbohydrates in the biomass, which are comprised of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, can be broken down into a variety of chemicals, some of which are useful fuels. At its simplest, plant matter is simply burned but much of the energy is wasted and it can cause pollution.

So, the plant is either heated and refined to break down into gases, fermented and turned into grain alcohol or ethanol, or chemically converted to make into biodiesel.

Personal Planets and the Little Prince
Alex Steffen, World Changing
May 8, 2007

Our friends over at Grist have published a sharp little essay by Michael Tobis called My little world (and yours, too). Essentially, Tobis takes the concept of ecological footprinting, and helps it make sense by asking us to imagine living on our own tiny little planet.

But to know why I think this is cool, you have to know a little about ecological footprints. Ecological footprints give us a metaphor for understanding our impact on the planet and the meaning of sustainability: they boil that impact down to a single number and measure it in terms of land area, often in terms of global hectares. They then compare the metaphorical land area used to provide you and I with our communities, homes and lifestyles with what a globally fair share of the planet actually is.

Ecogeeks seem to argue a lot about whose footprint measurements offer the most accuracy. Their questions are sometimes difficult to parse — does the formula used incorporate the public-sector activity undertaken on our behalf? A thousand considerations bubble up, but I actually have a lot of confidence that the available formulae are pretty decent, and getting
better.

Using those two numbers, our footprints and the footprint everyone could have without destroying our environment (often referred to as a one planet footprint), we can tell more or less how far off from sustainability we are. Generally, we find that if we living average lives in Europe, we need to shrink our footprints by 70 - 80%. If we’re Americans that number is more like 90%. If we’re wealthy, we may need to find even more hectares worth of ecological savings.

And here is where the metaphor goes screwy on us. I don’t think in hectares, and I’d bet you don’t either. I know that a hectare covers about the same area as two (American) football fields, and having spent a fair bit of my misspent youth on sports fields, I can more or less grasp how much real estate that is, but when it comes right down to it, lecturing me about hectares is like talking fashion with a dog.

Tobis takes a slightly different and pretty clever tack:

Let’s tell a slightly different story, with a similar asteroid, a per-capita world. Instead of being one of six billion people on a big planet, let’s suppose you were alone on a comparable asteroid. We’ll give you your six-billionth share of the surface area, your six-billionth share of each of the major landmasses and biomes, your own six-billionth scale Africa, your own little Australia. In other words, you will have exactly the average resource ownership of everyone else on earth.Now we’re talking! Rampaging across my own little Earth like a super-sized Godzilla, that’s something I can understand.

What’s more, Tobis does a great job of taking us on a tour of our private planets:

Since the ocean covers fifteen acres, the land surface covers the remaining six acres.

[T]he area under cultivation is … a bit over a third of an acre. If you push matters to less valuable soil, you might be able to grow things on as much as an acre, but most of your 6 acres are desert or tundra. You even have some substantial ice sheets on your land. There is also the problem that you have built your house, your workshop, your garage, your driveway and many of your industrial outbuildings on the best farmland.About a third of your land under cultivation is irrigated, much of it using depletable groundwater. Some of the groundwater is being contaminated by some of your industrial processes. To a lesser extent, your soils are also being contaminated, but a bigger problem is that as you till them for food they erode much faster than the natural rate of replenishment.

You also like to eat fish, but most of your ocean does not naturally support large fish. From the few areas that do, you have been eating the fish faster than they reproduce. This would astonish your great-grandparents, but of course they lived on a larger world. (Their per capita share was bigger with a smaller population.)

So, there we are, on our personal Earths, spinning around the planet, having a good time but making a bit of a mess of things. So far so good.

But then things start to go a little wrong. Tobis wisely informs us that our ancestors had larger personal Earths than we do because there were fewer of them on the planet — but he neglects to mention another important reason why their personal planets were bigger than ours: they’re the same planets, and they burned through a lot of real estate before we ever inherited them. You and I, for instance, don’t have a sustainable share of time spent swimming with Chinese river dolphins, because there aren’t any more. They’re now extinct.

Indeed, if we do a little research (for instance, by reading WWF’s Living Planet Report), we quickly realize that we have already dramatically disrupted over a third of the planet’s ecosystems. Our personal planets are crumbling away, chunk after chunk flying out from under our feet and off into space.

And because our lives are so resource- and energy-intensive — the average American would need his or her own personal planet and four other people’s as well to feed his or her consumption — we’re breaking off bigger and bigger chunks every day. Every day that passes means our personal planets shrink a bit more.

What is to be done about this dire state of affairs? Pretty important question. And here, unfortunately, Tobis jumps a little wrong and goes hurtling off into space… because it is here that the metaphor of ecological footprints breaks down.

“There is no replacing your six acres, no frontier,” Tobis tells us. “No amount of human ingenuity will make your world’s surface bigger.”

and

“Increasing wealth won’t make your asteroid any bigger…” he says. “No matter how clever our advances, we will never have more than an acre to feed us.”

And here the whole Matrix-world of the metaphor comes crashing down in shards of mental glass. For neither statement is true.

It is manifestly possible for us to increase the biological health and capacity of the planet — not only to preserve what exists, but to add to it. Every time we practice ecological restoration — even being as clumsy a set of practitioners of that art as we are — we increase the vigor of a small patch of the Earth. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that we could not, eventually, get much wiser about restoring ecological function while we reduce our ecological impact, perhaps even eliminating our ecological footprints and beginning to leave instead ecological handprints where we have made the Earth healthier. We can rebuild the surface of our personal planets, replacing acres, perhaps even restoring acres lost before we were even born. It won’t be easy, and we still need to fight like hell to preserve what we have, but all is not lost.

More importantly, Tobis’ views on wealth and ingenuity fly far wide of the mark: while it is mostly true that we “will never have more than an acre to feed us” in the sense that there is a limited amount of tillable land in the world (though even there, I’d place bets that careful stewardship and agricultural innovation could restore much farmland now regarded as lost), it is false in that the yields that acre gives us can vary profoundly: clever advances can in fact offer us the same fruits of prosperity at a fraction of the footprint.

Many old-school environmentalists can’t wrap their heads around this fact. Based on a combination of historical observation (industrial prosperity has so far increased ecological damage, so it must always — a statement about as realistic as saying my niece has always, for the four years of her life, been less than three-and-a-half feet tall, therefore she will be always be a yardling) and a culturally inherited distaste for modernity (with, you know, its dark satanic mills and lack of bears), OSEs love to recite the PAT formula: that environmental impact is equal to the size of the population times its affluence times its technology.

But what we know now is that affluence is a complex concept, not (beyond the meeting of certain essential needs) easily bound to material consumption, because a great many of the things that make us prosperous are in fact intangible or offer ecologically negligible impact, including art, innovation and care.

What’s more, through efficiency and redesign, a great many products and services can, in theory if not current practice, be offered at ecologically meaningless impacts. If I own a bright green car, say one that runs efficiently off electricity from wind turbines, is built of completely non-toxic components, is designed to be disassembled with its materials reused and recycled in a closed loop, and I travel 300 miles to visit grandma, I am doing so at a minute fraction of the footprint that Wally Waster has when he drives his Ford Earthcrusher SUV on a similar journey.

Yes, for all practical purposes, I am just as prosperous.

Which is why the “T” part of the PAT equation is also dumb. Products which are more technologically advanced offer us far greater possibilities for efficiency and ecological sanity. Think, for instance, of the ways in which technology enables us to car share, or design smart green homes which most effectively use natural airflow and light.

If each of us has a personal planet, and on that planet sit miniature personal cars and homes, cities and factories, one of the most encouraging facts I know is that by sharing better ideas with one another and working together to innovate new solutions, we are actually capable of building prosperous lives which leave us living on what feel like much roomier asteroids.

“Are we headed for another Great Depression?”
My talks with Elaine Meinel Supkis
Mike Whitney
May 10 2007

Question: I’ve been getting get more and more e-mails from people who are worried that the policies of the Bush administration will bring about a severe economic downturn or, perhaps, even another Great Depression. Do you believe that the problems in the real estate market, the falling dollar, the massive current account deficit, or the shaky hedge fund industry are likely to cause major meltdown?

Elaine Meinel Supkis: Great Depressions like the one that hit in 1929 are very rare. They usually happen only after two great empires exhaust their finances. WWI involved two of the biggest industrial powers in a massive death-struggle that didn’t destroy their industries but wrecked their currencies and beggared their workers. Russia was a major empire but a minor industrial power so when the workers there revolted, the loss of this sector’s industrial base had much less impact than the collapse of Germany’s currency and its huge war debts.

This chart is from one of my most dog-eared books, one of the greatest works explaining relative power and why empires collapse, ‘The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers’ by Paul Kennedy. The chart shows how England, the leading nation in the world, supposedly the richest, spent the most money during that grinding, depressing stalemate of a war.

Germany spent $3.9 billion less than England. Inflation since 1913 has been ferocious. This probably would represent well over several trillion dollars in today’s currency. Even today, no nation can take a financial hit that big and stay solvent. Europe’s industrial production fell 30% and the US, fattened off of billions of dollars of loans to all parties in Europe, lived high and mighty during the 1920’s. But with industrial production lagging, Europe spiralled downwards. The US cheerfully gave everyone more and more loans and the promise of being repaid was fantastic! Why, these were basically AAA subprime loans.

Then Germany couldn’t pay and kept asking for better terms. This was OK with the US but not with bankrupt England or France. So they demanded full payments and Germany defaulted. This triggered the Great Depression. Even though the US was now the world’s largest manufacturing power, our currency was mostly for home use so the British had to keep the pound strong. Trying to do this made things worse.

And so it is today: our empire won’t retreat from its distant borders but these same borders are bankrupting us for we never recovered from the Vietnam War, we literally papered over the mess which remained and continues to poison our nation. The military/industrial complex is not making us rich, it is making us poorer. And the paper being laid over all this is the same paper the Germans used in 1924 to paper over their own bankruptcy: printed money.

When an empire does what we are doing today, society falls apart. And if this happens, there is no easy way out. Individuals can avoid the worst by avoiding debts but outside of that simple thing, there is no other answer. Of course, the true answer is a strong working class that believes in unity and not underselling each other. Alas, the USA has a long and tragic history of slavery. And the legacy of this culture divides the nation and half loves slavery and enables wretched working conditions and thinks the road to wealth is via cheap labor.

Germany has an advantage here: their recent attempt at slavery, the Nazi empire, was a total disaster and they don’t want a repeat. I only wish the USA felt the same way. For no nation gets very rich for very long if the working class is poor and can’t work their way into the middle class.

Question: Would you explain what is meant by “reserve currency” and how it serves the greater political interests of the United States? Do you think that preserving “dollar hegemony” was an important part of the decision to go to war with Iraq?

Elaine Meinel Supkis: It may sound trite but thinking about great banking matters as if it is one’s own bank account no matter how small, works. Namely, it is dangerous for anyone to live life where everything is juggled and there isn’t a penny to spare. Then something bad happens and boom. You go bankrupt. This is why savings accounts matter and why inflation is so deadly. No one in their right mind keeps a savings account because it can’t grow, it shrinks!

The Federal Reserve was set up to maintain a reserve funds that supposedly wouldn’t be touched by politicians. But alas, this is a fiction. Just like your own bank account, if one is married and sharing an account and one party keeps raiding it and spending it on guns and cars or fur coats or whatever, it runs out of funds and then something bad happens like a hurricane hits, and the cupboard is bare.

In the case of empires, a way to gage solvency is, how big is their own reserves compared to the size of these same currency reserves held by potentially hostile rivals? In the case of the USA, we send dollars out as fast as we can print them. If too many people getting this flood of money, around $800 billion a year now!!!!!! If they don’t keep a big chunk in bank vaults, the value of the dollar drops. So they keep it in reserve, in case of a ‘rainy day’. Like 9/11.

And if we think of these funds as boats, then China has Noah’s Ark, Japan has an aircraft carrier, Europe has a holiday cruise liner, Russia has a very fancy yacht and the USA has a rowboat made out of an old bathtub. That is leaking.

China has $1.3 trillion in its reserves and is therefore, King of the Mountain. Japan has $900 billion and is no longer holding new currency so all the red ink in trade is no longer staying away, it is floating back home to here, as inflation. Europe has about $600 billion and Russia, $330 billion. The USA has only $66 billion and the numbers released today by the Federal Reserve shows that number is DROPPING. Yikes.

Question: President Bush has said that he intends to make his tax cuts “permanent” even though they have produced enormous deficits. At the same time the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates below the real rate of inflation and increased the money supply to approximately 10% per annum. Are these policies designed to maintain a healthy economy with a potential for strong growth or are they the means for transferring wealth from working people to the “very rich”?

Elaine Meinel Supkis: How do they ‘transfer’ wealth? Through unfair taxes. Under Reagan, American workers, worried about the eventual baby boomer retirement event horizon, decided to double taxes on Social Security. This pile of money was instantly, less than a year later, leaped upon and devoured by our corrupt government. They insantly gave unfair tax cuts to the upper incomes and basically used SS excess funds to pay for the government.

This worked OK until Bush took over. He and the GOP have run up debts so high, they added half a trillion a year in red ink and over the last six years, this is nearly $3 trillion and our national debt stands at nearly $9 trillion. During the last major money crisis, the 1972 collapse of the Bretton Woods concord, we had a national debt of not even $1 trillion. We have not had 900% inflation so I would say, this debt that the GOP rang up consisted of taking taxes out of the hides of the working class and handing it on a golden platter to the rich who, incidentally, buy bonds.

But no more! Today, the chief buyer of bonds is the Treasury itself. Next is China!

Question: Will you explain how the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve are causing the stock market to soar and what the potential dangers are for the global economic system?

Elaine Meinel Supkis: Oh, that is so simple! In 2003, interest rates were dropped to 1% despite inflation of 5%. Instantly, the value of all assets shot upwards as bankers moved money along as fast as possible since the Fed undercut their own interest rates! So mortgages were below the rate of inflation. But this didn’t make enough money so banks and other entities offered loans to bad risks who had to pay a higher rate. As inflation rages, they need to give loans to worse and worse customers who pay over 11% interest!

Alas, the fly in this ointment is exactly that: risky customers can’t pay back loans! They go bankrupt and everyone acts like a good little domino and over they fall, one after another. Right now,the crashing sound of dominoes falling is like the hissing of waves on a distant shore but it is rapidly approaching. We can certainly hear it coming.

Question: Last week, reports showed that US manufacturing unexpectedly rose in March. However, the Financial Times said that, “The rise in the ISM index is impossible to square with either the regional surveys released over the past few weeks or our medium-term yield-driven model. We think it is quite likely that in their next iterations the ISM will drop sharply.” Do you think the government is deliberately falsifying data on manufacturing to make the economy look stronger than it really is? Could they be doing this in areas as well, such as money supply, inflation, employment, and GDP?

Elaine Meinel Supkis: Do alligators bite? Of course, they lie all the time. Some things were sacred and they didn’t lie about them. The M3 data that shows how much money the Fed prints as well as how much is in circulation, etc, just last year, they announced, ‘No one is really interested in these numbers and they are too hard to compile.’ Like a drunken, gambling spouse declaring there is no need to balance the check books or look into the bank accounts, so it is here. Many people yelled about the M3 numbers being suppressed but to no avail, of course.

Onwards! Since they are lying about basic bank accounting, they have to lie about everything else or people will figure out, something smells rotten in Denmark, DC.

They redrew the rules for figuring out inflation so it no longer tracks inflation. This is so they can cheat retirees and have fake interest rates and thus, steal from granny and gramps and starve school children while lining their own pockets.

Question: Do you believe that the extraordinary “police-state” measures enacted by the Bush administration (Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, repeal of habeas corpus, NSA “surveillance” of American citizens without court order) are intended to address the threat of terrorism or the social disorder that may arise in response to an economic collapse?

E.M.S.: They planned this for a long, long time. Do note that the ‘war on drugs’ was launched as we lost the Vietnam War. Thanks to inflation and a collapsing currency as well as a sudden hike in oil prices due to the US hitting the Hubbert Oil Peak here in 1972, there was great unrest. I saw some of this right up close. Once, when the lights went out in NYC during a thunderstorm of all things, riots and looting spread like wildfire. My community was nearly burned to the ground and all the businesses destroyed.

This, the rulers fear a lot. But no number of police can stop it if it happens. I have seen up close when a whole city revolts. More than once, including in Europe in 1968. The new, right wing French President will learn this the hard way next year. There will be riots and insurrections there.

Question: Can you explain–in simple “layman’s” terms–the effect of Japan’s low interest “carry trade” on the U.S. stock market? Is this practice inflating the value of securities in foreign markets? What are the risks? How is it affecting the euro?

E.M.S.: Europe lends money for more than 5% interest. So does the USA now although the financiers are getting worried about this and are egging on the Fed to lower rates back down to 1%. This is pure insanity. Japan has near zero inflation because they have decided to utterly destroy the purchasing power of the people in Japan who are living worse and worse off if they are below the top 20%. Many are now homeless. It is pathetic.

The world’s #2 economic power that holds the world’s #2 FOREX reserves can’t give pay raises to anyone earning below $10 an hour because this will ’cause inflation’ and so they get to live on the street and starve. Great. Anyone can eliminate inflation by enslaving the workers. Then they get cut out of the profits entirely and can’t buy things and thus, can’t cause inflation!

This is the plan being readied for us! We get to live in shanties while the rich live in palaces. And we won’t buy anything while they have a zillion servants earning practically nothing. Sort of like England, circa 1914.

Bush and his gangsters hosted the Queen of England who loves him because he is making her very rich via Carlyle. And the royals of England didn’t care if they starved their subjects who lived like savages under the rule of the royals. We are sliding backwards, not moving forwards here.

Question: Consumer spending is 70% of US- GDP, and yet, workers wages have not kept pace with the real rate of inflation. This has led to increased borrowing on the part of the American consumer. Now that housing prices have flattened out; consumers can no longer draw on their home equity for their spending. This has resulted in a huge spike in credit card spending. For example, “first-quarter profits at MasterCard surged 70% to a record $214.9 million following a 19% jump in transactions.” (Peter Schiff) As the weary American consumer is forced to curtail his spending, GDP will shrink and foreign investment will dry up. Are we likely to see “capital flight” from American markets or are foreign investors still confident in America’s resilience?

E.M.S.: In most places, housing prices are falling by 30%! All the people who responded to ads about getting cheap loans are now discovering they can’t use their homes as ATM machines and simply re-finance over and over again. The house is supposed to be an asset: if you have to sell it to pay bills or move because of a job situation, if the debt is greater than the selling price, you go bankrupt. And this is happening all over the place now. And it will impact on buying.

Last year, Americans took out half a trillion in extra loans on the house! The surge in MasterCard (gads, Snidely Whiplash!) charges is because banks are no longer giving loans to people who are too deep in debt. The money that flowed there is flowing into the stock market just like it always does during the first half of an inflationary binge.

The second half is when the stocks collapse like they did in 1974. Then we see a 5 year bear market. Housing markets ALWAYS take 5 years to recover from a bubble. But this last bubble launched by 1% Fed interest rates will take 20 years to recovery in most places.

Question: You have stated in your blog that the Federal Reserve is “buying back its own debt”. Would you explain how this works and whether it is intended to confuse the public about the real value of their currency?

(In your blog you say: “The US is the fulcrum for world trade. As the yen goes down (the yuan is so low, even as it gains, it is very minimal), the euro goes up. This is crushing the dollar because the US is printing money like mad to keep commerce flowing at home since it is bleeding red ink in trade and in government spending. Most of the bonds issued by our own government are bought by our own government. The only entity to buy much of that on the open market today is China. Japan is selling its hoard of US bonds.)

E.M.S.: Yes, aside from forcing Social Security to buy government bonds, the Treasury sells them to the Feds. This is Peter selling to Paul who then gives it back to Peter only it shrinks in value during this time. The Fed and Treasury can play this game to infinity. The only country to nearly reach that upper limit was Germany in 1924. They added more and more zeros to the money they printed every hour, day and night until they ran out of room on the bills. Literally! Then they simply cancelled the money! Bang. It was gone. Forever.
If no one stops us, we will do this just the same way.

Question: Wall Street reacts with wild enthusiasm every time two mega-corporations merge. These mergers always seems to generate boatloads of new credit from maximizing leverage and “creative financing”.. You say in your blog that this is “also a sign of impending collapse. For every pfennig of this is debt-loaded and is seeking a stable currency and high interest rates.” What do you think are the hidden dangers of these mergers?

E.M.S.: That happened in Germany, too. Everyone merged as money moved faster and faster and inflated more and more. Bubbles inflate because currency inflates. They are one and the same. And mergers are caused by money bubbles.

Question: What do you think the real rate of inflation is?

E.M.S.: Inflation is around 10% now. How do we know? The Federal Reserve just demanded banks hold 10% of their currency rather than rush it out the door. This reserve ratio is always a good indicator of inflation. In China, it was raised to 11% last week. Japan sets theirs at 0%, of course. They are insane.

Question: Is there a chance that the dollar could collapse?

E.M.S.: I hate to say this but I have a whole book of dead currencies my family has collected this last 180 years. From 1848 to today, in the USA, Germany, China, Japan, etc. Many ‘pay the holder in gold’ bonds. All worth something as historic documents but all ended up being worthless. Hope springs ever eternal and bad money is like winter: it always is around the corner.

Question: In 1966, Alan Greenspan wrote an article called “Gold and Economic Freedom” in which he described the events leading up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. In his essay he says:

–”When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve’s attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain’s gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.

–The “Fed” succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market-triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930’s.”

Hasn’t the Federal Reserve created similar “speculative imbalances” today through its increases in the money supply, its low interest rates, and the massive liquidity it pumped into the housing bubble? And, haven’t the deregulatory policies of the Fed exacerbated our current account deficit—forcing US exports to compete with countries that artificially lower the prices of their manufactured goods by manipulating their currencies?

If the economic policies of the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration are deliberate, than how can we say that the destruction of the dollar and the subsequent crushing of the American middle class are accidental?

Greenspan’s essay proves that he fully understood the implications of “excess credit” and “excessive paper reserves” and yet he persisted with the same destructive policies for 6 years. So—Is the housing bubble merely the “unintended consequence” of the Fed’s policies or is it the clearly calculated goal?

E.M.S.: Hahaha. The preacher telling us how to avoid the evils of drug abuse and hanging out with prostitutes comes to mind, doesn’t it? The very moralists warning us about our sins are usually the worst sinners.

I’ll never forget Congress praising Greenspan and telling him they should stuff him and use him as a scarecrow for this would mean no one would ever question him about finances! Well, I say, hang him high. He is a criminal. He destroyed our economic might. Treason, it is! And all those people who betrayed us in order to make a mighty empire on our backs and bank accounts should be held accountable! There is no excuse for this mess! It was fixable. But alas, too many people are making too much money off of it the way it is now and they won’t stop no matter what. Just like their latest imperial wars: endless.

I wish I could say something happy here but history is a bitch who laughs at us all. We should listen to her.

Elaine Meinel Supkis (Bio)—Born at Yerkes Observatory, grew up on many observatory mountains and secret government testing grounds, burr under the saddle of the Real Rulers of America since childhood, family black sheep with three bags of wool, pulled down more than one politician in life, winner of the “Struck by Lightning Indoors” award for most hits in lifetime, three direct and seven glancing blows. Now living on a mountain with horses and cats and dogs and chickens and a husband. Yikes.

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