Sunday, April 26, 2009

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Steve Strauss: Making Your Small Business Green, Affordably Top
It seems that everyone is talking about ways to go green right now. And while most businesses like the idea of making their venture more eco-friendly. there also seems to be a common misperception that going green is too expensive, too difficult, or both. Well, I am here to tell you that neither is true. The fact is, not only can greening your business be good for the environment, it also can be good for the bottom line. Here are a few simple ways to make your business greener and save some money at the same time: Around the office : Yes, those funny squiggly bulbs (called CF bulbs) really do make a difference. Sure they cost a bit more, but they are supposed to last up to 15 times longer.Other simple steps include reusing packaging, packing peanuts, and turning old file folders inside out. Even better: Each of these green steps save money. Reduce paper use : Consider getting a printer that offers two-sided printing. By doing so, you cut your paper costs, and paper consumption, in half. For instance, I recently did some work with Brother and was impressed with a printer that automatically prints on both sides of the paper (the MFC-9840.). How easy, and green, is that? Also, buy some recycling bins, mark them, and use them. Install timers and motion sensors : By automatically having lights and computers go off when not in use, you can save lots on energy costs. Buy green : No, green products are not cheaper, but by the same token, these days, they also should not be more expensive since demand for them has reduced prices. You might also want to check into purchasing green power from your local utility. Bottom line: Going green has never been simpler, or more affordable. More on Small Business
 
Danny Miller: Bea Arthur's Perfect Comic Timing Top
I was very sad to hear yesterday that Bea Arthur died here in Los Angeles. I knew the actress was 86 years old and wasn't going to live forever, but it still seems unreal that she's gone. She was such a strong presence on TV for so many years she seemed indomitable. My wife and I saw Arthur's one-woman show a few years ago and despite her advancing years, she still had it. I grew up watching "Maude," the first of Bea Arthur's two ground-breaking sitcoms.The pilot for "Maude" was the 1972 season finale of "All in the Family." Bea had already appeared in an earlier episode of that show as Edith Bunker's ultra-liberal cousin Maude. With Edith's subservience to her husband and Mike Stivic's hysteria over Archie's every move, it was a relief to see someone who could stare Archie down and give him hell. The twist was that Maude, the polar opposite of Archie Bunker, was just as trapped by her extreme attitudes as Archie was. Can you think of a single actress who had better comic timing than Bea Arthur? She could take a so-so line and make it as memorable as Lucy Ricardo's "Vitameatavegamin" routine. I attended a taping of "The Golden Girls" when I first moved out here and in one scene Estelle Getty kept messing up a line so they had to do it over and over again. Every time Bea Arthur repeated her line I burst into laughter as if I was hearing it for the first time. Who needed laugh tracks with that dame? I once wrote to Bea Arthur during her "Maude" days and received this letter in return. Nothing very personal, but today I still marvel that any of those people wrote back at all. Does anyone answer their own fan mail today? Maude Findlay was ostensibly one of TV's first feminists but you had to wonder. In retrospect it seems to me that her husband Walter (played by Bill Macy) was a patriarchal slavemaster of the worst kind. His constant condescension of Maude, her daughter, and her grandson would be hard to stomach today. Maude often told Walter to go to hell ("God will get you for that, Walter!") but when she was getting a little too uppity Walter's trademark bark of "Maude! SIT!" would do the trick every time. Oy. Still, the show broke even more taboos than "All in the Family" and was taken off the air by more stations in protest. It was only a few months after Roe v. Wade when Maude suddenly found out she was pregnant on the show (Bea Arthur was 49 at the time!) and became the first (and last?) TV sitcom character to have an abortion. Think of how daring that was back then. Can you imagine Laurie Partridge, Billie Joe Bradley, or Mary Richards even saying the word abortion? The show also dealt with racism, therapy, menopause, alcoholism, homosexuality, plastic surgery, swinging, the legalization of marijuana, and other topics that would have sent poor Jim and Margaret Anderson of "Father Knows Best" straight to Marcus Welby, M.D. for some emergency care. (On the other hand, I still maintain that Jim and Margaret's 1954 relationship was more equitable than the supposedly enlightened Maude and Walter's.) I also wrote to Maude's daughter, Adrienne Barbeau, and got this postcard reply: "Dear Danny. Thank you for your letter. I'm sorry I'm so late in answering. I hope you are continuing to enjoy the show--I'll bet you liked the one where the girl came to visit us from the ghetto. Another case of reverse prejudice from Maude! My best, Adrienne Barbeau." I remember receiving that postcard and being touched by the "came to visit US," as if she really were Maude's daughter and were telling an anecdote about her crazy mom. That episode stands out, especially the scene where Maude was trying to convince the ghetto girl Francie that she had black friends there in the suburbs of upstate New York. She tries to pawn off her housekeeper Florida Evans (played by the great Esther Rolle ) as her pal: Maude: Francie, this is Florida. My dear, dear friend, probably the best friend I have in the whole world. Florida: I'm the maid. And then later when they're about to sit down for dinner: Maude: Francie, I hope you're hungry. We're having fried chicken for dinner. Francie: Good, I win a buck. Maude: You win a buck? Francie: I bet that dumb brother of mine that you'd have fried chicken for me the first thing off. Maude: Ha ha ha. I love a person with a sense of humor. Excuse me. (Maude turns around and whispers to her daughter) Carol, for Heaven's sake, go into the kitchen and throw out the grits. Recently I saw a jaw-dropping video from a special Bea Arthur did for CBS in 1980, in between her "Maude" and "Golden Girl" runs. This crazy number was performed by Arthur and Rock Hudson on the Emmy-nominated special and when I saw it I just had one little question: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? In the number, Bea and Rock played a couple of boozing, middle-aged suburbanites who were musing about the happy-go-lucky drug-addled kids of the day. Arthur and Hudson seemed to view all forms of recreational drug use with amusement and mirth. Try getting this number past the network censors today: Few people will ever come close to Bea Arthur's perfect timing. In addition to her iconic TV roles as Maude Findlay and Dorothy Zbornak, Arthur had an accomplished stage career, appearing in the original "Threepenny Opera" on Broadway, creating the role of Yenta in "Fiddler on the Roof," and winning a Tony Award in 1966 for her role as Vera Charles in "Mame" opposite her friend Angela Lansbury. Decades later the two repeated their famous number on the Tony Awards. Take a look as we say goodbye to another true original:
 
Sheldon Filger: Does Torture Work? Ask the Nazis Who Interrogated Noor Khan Top
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is on a mission. He has taken to the airwaves, seeking to repair the tarnished legacy that belongs to him and George W. Bush. With the U.S. economy in free fall collapse due in large measure to the catastrophic fiscal policies of the late Bush-Cheney administration, the former Vice President has chosen a rationale that is far removed from the realm of economics. In the perverse logic that only Mr. Cheney seems capable of, he is claiming that his legacy should be revered because he and the 43rd U.S. president were willing to use torture in the so-called war against terrorism, what he and his supporters euphemistically refer to as "enhanced interrogation techniques." The essence of Dick Cheney's argument is that the ends justify the means, the rationalization favored by tyrannies since time immemorial. Torture works, says Dick Cheney. Unquestionably, torture is very effective in obtaining false confessions. The Spanish Inquisition and the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s are among a rogue's gallery of evidence that these "enhanced interrogation techniques" will force most people to admit to virtually anything. Stalin's secret police chief, Beria, once boasted, "give me a man for 24 hours and I'll have him confessing he is the King of England." But as a useful tool for obtaining accurate, vital information, is torture truly efficacious? Dick Cheney, the man who obtained 5 draft deferments during the Vietnam War, is not, in my view, the most authentic judge on this matter. Let us look to the Third Reich, which made use of torture against those it deemed as "security threats" without the least restraint. In particular, we should recall the case of Noor Inayat Khan. A young Muslim woman, Noor Khan was a descendant of Tipu Sultan, the last Mogul Emperor of Southern India. After her family relocated to France, she studied at the Sorbonne, and became a musician and author of children's books. A petite and fragile woman, she was brought up in the Sufi tradition of pacifism, and by all accounts was as gentle and kindly a soul as could be. When the Nazis invaded and occupied France in 1940, Ms. Khan and her family escaped to England. Though a pacifist, Noor was deeply affected by the occupation of her adopted homeland, and the anti-Semitic bestiality of the Nazis. She became convinced that it was her duty to fight the Nazis, even at the cost of her own life. She volunteered for service with the Special Operations Executive of British intelligence, where she was trained as a radio operator. In 1943 she was flown into France, where for four months she was the principal radio liaison between the French Resistance and the SOE, until she was betrayed to the Nazis. In November 1943 she was transported to the notorious Pforzheim prison in Germany, where she endured ten months of sheer hell. Physically and psychologically, Noor Khan was subjected to the ultimate form of Cheney's "enhanced interrogation techniques." The Gestapo was determined to break her, and compel her to reveal every piece of vital information she possessed. To begin with, Noor Khan was placed in solitary confinement on a starvation diet, chained hand and foot, and frequently denied even a scrap of clothing. She was subjected to barbaric beatings and water torture, and that was only the beginning. Survivors of Pforzheim recall often hearing her cries of agony, as Noor was subjected to all the refinements created by man's capacity for inventive inhumanity. The Nazis would subject their most recalcitrant security prisoners to having their bodies suspended until their joints were dislocated, piercing and burning their flesh, ripping out fingernails and crushing the digits of their hands. Female prisoners, in particular, were subjected to electric shocks being applied to the most sensitive regions of their bodies. What Noor endured during those ten months at Pforzheim can scarcely be imagined. It must have been beyond human endurance. Yet this cultured, delicate woman endured the unendurable. She never broke. Noor Khan would not even reveal to the Nazis her true identity. Finally, her captors admitted defeat and sent Noor to her final destination on earth, Dachau concentration camp. On September 13, 1944, in front of other prisoners who witnessed her final hours, Noor Khan was stripped naked and then savagely beaten by SS guards at Dachau. A pistol was pointed at her head. Before the trigger was pulled, Noor's last word ever to be uttered was overheard: "Liberty." The life of Noor Inayat Khan does not prove that torture does not work. What her martyrdom does demonstrate is that torture is only effective when all understanding of the concept of liberty is lost to a nation. More on Dick Cheney
 
Christina Bellantoni: Dems raise money to 'send Cheney packing' back to Wyoming Top
First published at WashingtonTimes.com The Democratic National Committee is going after Dick Cheney with a new fundraising pitch — asking supporters to donate money for a one-way bus ticket to send the former vice president back to Wyoming. The email from Jen O'Malley Dillon, who worked for the Obama campaign before taking the DNC executive director post, pulls no punches. "Have you ever had a guest who overstayed his welcome and wondered, 'why is he still here?' After some of his recent interviews, former Vice President Cheney has shown that he clearly doesn't know when to pack it in," she wrote in the Saturday pitch. Dillon blast Cheney for his recent television interviews, calling them "an effort to tear down President Obama's agenda." "I don't know about you, but I think it's time for him to stop sniping from the sidelines and let President Obama usher in the changes Americans demanded after eight years of Cheney's disastrous policies," she wrote. "That's why I want Cheney to go back home to Wyoming, and why I want you to help me get him there." Dillon says in the email a one-way ticket from D.C. to Jackson, WY costs $202 and asks supporters to "chip in" to send Cheney "packing." "Normally, when a Vice President leaves office with a disastrous legacy and the support of less than one quarter of the public, I'd expect him to keep out of the spotlight," she wrote. "But with the Republican 'Party of No' out of ideas and without any new leaders to provide real solutions, failed leaders like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have once again taken the helm of the GOP." She blasted Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration, saying the Republican has been "bashing" the president. "If there's one person who should understand the crucial need to get this country back on track, it should be the man who took it so disastrously off course — but he doesn't seem to get the message," she wrote. "That's why we need to help him off the national stage and back home to Wyoming. Please take a look at the itinerary we put together and then chip in to get him on a Greyhound bus out of town." Dillon sends supporters here to make the donation. The email includes a graphic showing Cheney riding a bus with his head out of the window.     —   Christina Bellantoni , White House correspondent, The Washington Times Please track my blog's RSS feed here . Find my latest stories  here , follow me on Twitter and visit my  YouTube page . More on Dick Cheney
 
Steve Clemons: Commission on Accountability Should Be Part of Our Response to America's Torture Nightmare Top
I have had a couple of overwhelming weeks and haven't been able to post until now what I would have preferred on this debate about George W. Bush administration torture policy accountability. I have told quite a number of media outlets this last week that despite his best intentions, President Obama cannot impose a psychological equilibrium on the nation when it comes to sorting out the moral travesty of what we saw unleashed during the Bush administration in the management of combat detainees. People being interrogated -- held under our direct control -- were killed, psychologically harmed, abused. . .yes, tortured. That is what the Soviets and the Chinese under Mao and the Pol Pot regime were supposed to have as part of their MO -- not the United States of America. A society's basic norms and values don't really matter when it is easy to wear them. They matter at times of high stress -- and we as a nation have to deal with the fact that under stress, we empowered the likes of Richard Cheney and David Addington to take the nation to what they call "the dark side" -- and to me, this is one of the great outrages of our time. Remind yourself of one corner of this nightmare by watching again Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side , or reading Jane Mayer's excellent book of nearly the same name, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals . We need something like a truth commission in this country to explore how and why America became a nation that embraced torture at the highest levels of political office. We need to understand the routenization and systematization of detainee management policies that violated the Geneva Conventions in far more than the law -- but in the most profound sense of the spirit and meaning of what these conventions were supposed to prevent. Two men waterboarded 266 times in one month? Even if Geneva needed to be modified and modernized to deal with a different kind of war today -- there is no excuse for this in my book. But we need institutions that will help the nation understand -- and hopefully not forget -- and never do such things again. What Barack Obama has done is simply not enough. We need many things to happen to move us forward to deal with this blight on our nation's reputation -- including serious Congressional hearings, serious legal investigations -- and fewer prescriptions of politically contrived outcomes that satisfy neither the torture-embracing Cheney wing of the national security establishment nor the parts of American society who despise them for undermining this nation's position as the world's leading democracy. I support the establishment of an independent, non-partisan commission to look into torture policy accountability -- and Amnesty International, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Carter Center, the Constitution Project, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the National Institute of Military Justice, the Open Society Institute, and numerous other organizations are calling for the establishment of such a commission. From the website, CommissionOnAccountability.org : We call on the President of the United States to establish an independent, non-partisan commission to examine and report publicly on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in the period since September 11, 2001. The commission, comparable in stature to the 9/11 Commission, should look into the facts and circumstances of such abuses, report on lessons learned, and recommend measures that would prevent any future abuses. We believe that the commission is necessary to reaffirm America 's commitment to the Constitution, international treaty obligations, and human rights. The report issued by the commission will strengthen U.S. national security and help to re-establish America's standing in the world. I have sent this site out to a number of my friends -- and I hope you will sign up and forward to others who care about this issue as well. We need numbers on this, and I hope those of you so inclined will help. -- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note
 
William Fisher: Happy Anniversary, Abu Ghraib! Top
This Tuesday, April 28, will mark five years since Americans got their first look at the sickening photographs from Abu Ghraib on "60 Minutes." And a month after that, on May 28, the Department of Justice, acting under a court order, will release several thousand never-before-seen-in-public photographs of U.S. prisoner abuse from Afghanistan and from elsewhere in Iraq. The recent "torture memos" -- which will inform our reaction to these new photos in a way not possible at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal -- were also released as the result of what President Obama called an unwinnable lawsuit - by the same plaintiff, the American Civil Liberties Union, and under the same law, the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. We don't yet know what we'll see in these new images. Some members of Congress, who viewed them in a classified setting, have said they are far worse than the Abu Ghraib images. So on May 28 we will get to see these new photos. We will again be outraged. There will be cries for investigations. Politicians will make statements. Doubtless, they will hold hearings. But the question is "what comes next?" To help answer that question, it might be instructive to remember what happened after Abu Ghraib. In what has to be one of the most iconic - and absurd - statements made since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Army Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros told the press back in 2005 that humane treatment of detainees "is and always has been the Department of Defense standard." Ballesteros was commenting on the so-called "Church Report," one of more than a dozen major reviews, assessments or investigations related to the detention and treatment of war-on-terror detainees. And Ballesteros added: "None of them found that there was a governmental policy directing, encouraging or condoning abuse." And that has pretty much been the history of all these investigations of abuse. They are full of sentences like, "Clearly abuses occurred at the prison at Abu Ghraib. There is no single, simple explanation for why this abuse at Abu Ghraib happened. The primary causes are misconduct (ranging from inhumane to sadistic) by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians, a lack of discipline on the part of the leaders and soldiers... and a failure or lack of leadership...." Or try this one: "The abuses at Abu Ghraib primarily fall into two categories: a) intentional violent or sexual abuse and, b) abusive actions taken based on misinterpretations or confusion regarding law or policy." Or this: "Senior level officers did not commit the abuse at Abu Ghraib (but) they did bear responsibility for lack of oversight of the facility, failing to respond in a timely manner to the reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and for issuing policy memos that failed to provide clear, consistent guidance for execution at the tactical level." Or this "No policy, directive or doctrine directly or indirectly caused violent or sexual abuse. In these cases, soldiers knew they were violating the approved techniques and procedures." Or this, from the investigation led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger: "The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We now know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel. The pictured abuses, unacceptable even in wartime, were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets. They represent deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline. Department of Defense reform efforts are underway and the Panel commends these efforts." In not a single one of these reports was the name of any high-ranking Pentagon official ever uttered. President Bush described the perpetrators in the Abu Ghraib photos as "a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values." He meant grunts like Lynddie England and Charles Graner - the folks who got blamed for carrying out what we now know was U.S. policy Why could the reports of these mostly honorable officers and public servants have all gotten it so wrong? For starters, the scope of each of these investigative assignments was determined by the Pentagon. Thus, the officer heading up the first investigation was ordered to find out what happened within the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade in our military prisons in Iraq- and only in Iraq. That's how Major General Antonio Taguba came to conclude: "I find that the 800th MP Brigade was not adequately trained for a mission that included operating a prison or penal institution at Abu Ghraib Prison Complex... I also concur that units of the800th MP Brigade did not receive corrections-specific training during their mobilization period. MP units did not receive pinpoint assignments prior to mobilization and during the post mobilization training, and thus could not train for specific missions. The training that was accomplished at the mobilization sites were developed and implemented at the company level with little or no direction or supervision at the Battalion and Brigade levels, and consisted primarily of common tasks and law enforcement training." But even given this limitation, Gen.Taguba concluded that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went far beyond the actions of a few sadistic military police officers -- the administration's chosen culprits. His report said 27 military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors committed criminal offenses, and that military officials hid prisoners from the Red Cross. And it's worth noting that for his candor, Gen. Taguba was forced into retirement by civilian Pentagon officials because he had been ''overzealous.'' ''They always shoot the messenger,'' Taguba said. Then, there's the limitation that investigators can only probe down from their rank, not up the chain of command to their superiors. A Brigadier General (one star) cannot investigate a Lieutenant General (two stars); a Lieutenant General cannot investigate a Major General (three stars). And a Major General cannot investigate a General (four stars). It was precisely for that reason that Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, one of the Abu Ghraib investigators, told his superiors that he could not complete his inquiry without interviewing more senior-ranking officers, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. Then there's the pride factor.Most of the folks who carried out these investigations were career officers. They were proud of the military. One can see that pride in the conclusion of the 2004 report conducted by General Fay: "Leaders and Soldiers throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom were confronted with a complex and dangerous operational environment. Although a clear breakdown in discipline and leadership, the events at Abu Ghraib should not blind us from the noble conduct of the vast majority of our Soldiers. We are a values based profession in which the clear majority of our Soldiers and leaders take great pride. A clear vote of confidence should be extended by the senior leadership to the leaders and soldiers who continue to perform extraordinarily in supporting our Nation's wartime mission. Many of our soldiers have paid the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedoms and liberties that America and our Army represent throughout the world." So we saw the photos and learned nothing. But the principal reason we learned nothing is that the Bush Administration wanted us to learn nothing. And a largely compliant media forgot to ask the right questions soon enough. Remember that it was an ordinary soldier who was troubled enough by what he saw at Abu Ghraib to photograph it and put it on a CD that he turned over to his superiors. And remember that it was the military itself that announced, in 2003, that an investigation by the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command was underway into alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. But also remember that, back then, Donald Rumsfeld was a rock star, the darling of the press. Most of the journalists who attended his briefings were acting like stenographers. What they didn't know was that, by the time we got to see the Abu Ghraib photos in 2003, Jay Bybee and John Yoo had already used their contorted legal logic to write their so-called "torture memos" justifying "enhanced interrogation" techniques. By the time the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced on television, the Bush policy was already in place and being implemented. It would be five years before most of the American public began to get a glimmer of what that policy was. Which brings me back to the new photos we're going to see this Tuesday. According to ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, "These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib." She says, "Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse." She is spot on. There is only one purpose in releasing these new photos -- to hold senior officials accountable for the policies that produced the behavior that produced the photos. So who would these officials be? Well, for openers, such names as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Rice spring to mind. They - not the lawyers who wrote the memos -- were "The Iraq Group" - the engines that powered the policies. It is a near-certainty that we will never see any of these people in jail or even on trial. But what we have a right to know is who did what to whom and why. Left to his own inclination and temperament, President Obama is not going to make that happen - unless we force him to make it happen. Unless the public pressure for an independent commission of inquiry becomes strong enough to shape the White House's perception of political reality. That should be the next item on our "to do" list. Yes, we can! More on Afghanistan
 
Kerry Trueman: Let's Ask Marion Nestle: Who Needs Bioterrorism When We've Got Manure Lagoons? Top
(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally's kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics , What to Eat and Food Politics :) Kat: Tom Philpott of Grist reported on Friday that a Chinese company called Cofco--a state-owned food-and-agribiz giant--is thinking of buying out U.S. owned Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer, "at a significant premium to its share price." Of course, that was before the shit hit the spam. Now, we're suddenly facing a swine flu outbreak, which Philpott aptly describes as "a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses. As Philpott subsequently reported on Saturday , the Mexican health agency IMSS suspects the outbreak may be linked to the clouds of flies that thrive in the manure lagoons of the Smithfield-owned industrial hog operations in Vera Cruz, where the swine flu was first detected. With the World Health Organization warning of a prospective global pandemic , I'm not sure that Cofco is going to be so eager to acquire Smithfield. But supposing they were, do you think it's a good idea to have the largest industrial hog operation in the world run by the Chinese government? Dr. Nestle: Whoa. Let's not be too xenophobic about China. China already owns vast amounts of American real estate, holds vast amounts of American debt, and produces vast amounts of the food we eat--globalization in all its glory. We can no longer survive without China so we better figure out quickly how to make this marriage work. We also better figure out how to make our food production system more sustainable and less harmful to farm animals, the environment, farm workers, and consumers. I was a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which released its report last April . Our report fully documented how CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) are not nice to animals; pollute air, soil, and water; turn communities into garbage dumps; and promote transmission of nasty--and often antibiotic resistant--microbial diseases to farm workers, community residents, and everyone else. This time, it's swine flu , a viral disease. I can't tell from the reports whether a Smithfield CAFO in Mexico really is responsible for transmission of this new flu virus from pigs to people, but one thing is clear: Smithfield is in big trouble financially . This means it is for sale to the highest bidder. Our investment system is not in the business of making ethical or moral judgments about such things. Investors are unlikely to care who the highest bidder might be as long as the bid is high. Why China might want to buy Smithfield is an entirely separate question. Its pork operations are still small relative to ours and maybe its pork producers want to learn how to do things bigger. Whatever they do, they will have to follow U.S. rules and regulations. And that is a problem. As the Pew Commission report made clear, we have laws on the books that govern production and emission standards in CAFOs; it's just that nobody bothers to enforce them. Somebody needs to, whether the owners are Chinese or American. Otherwise, this won't be the last of the swine flu scares. More on China
 
David Sassoon: Are Environmentalists and the Fossil Fuel Industry Calling a Truce? Top
There is a deal on the table in Washington with the potential to create a truce between two sides that have been at war for many decades. The deal takes the form of the Waxman-Markey bill -- the framework for federal climate law now moving through Congress. While it is still uncertain whether climate legislation will pass this year, the draft bill contains a formula for compromise that could create an unprecedented handshake between the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists and unite them for the first time in the battle to control greenhouse gases. Testimony on the Waxman-Markey bill kicked off on Earth Day. This year's should be recognized for the perplexing and difficult day that it became: a bittersweet moment in which the contours of political compromise have become stark for all concerned; and a defining moment in which both sides in the historic war are weighing painful agreements. For the fossil fuel industry, it's a mandated cap on carbon that will squeeze roughly 80% of current emissions from the economy by 2050; and for environmentalists, it's accepting the necessity of a still speculative technology called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Both play a prominent role in the bill. Many greens have come around to the opinion that CCS is fundamental to solving global climate change, and the fossil fuel industry realizes it needs federal help developing the technology in order to stay in business. So at this legislative crossroads, the nation is on the verge of deciding to store vast quantities of CO2 -- not in the atmosphere any longer -- but in the Earth instead. It is something worth remarking for the sake of Earth Day 2009. President Obama campaigned promising to support "clean coal" -- the industry messaging term for CCS -- and he has been true to his word, though many had hoped his position would change once he won the election. Steven Chu, the new energy secretary, sees no alternative to developing CCS as soon as possible, and Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey have given a prominent place to the technology in the Clean Energy title of the bill they drafted with help from the business-NGO collaboration USCAP. Most telling of the tectonic shift taking place, however, is that the Reality Coalition -- formed by leading environmental organizations under the leadership of Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection -- has called a partial cease-fire. It's pulling the TV spots that have been informing the public "there is no such thing as clean coal" from the airwaves, in an effort to get four-square behind securing passage of the climate bill known formally as the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The acceptance of CCS is more than a political accommodation designed to buy off the coal states and secure the votes of Blue Dog Democrats; it is a sudden and sobering admission that the environmental problem called global warming is in need of a modern industrial solution. There appears to be no politically palatable way to ratchet down the insatiable global appetite for energy far enough to substantially reduce our dependence on fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, renewables and energy efficiency notwithstanding What this also means is that the oil and gas industries are going to be partners in the effort to save the planet, for without them geologic storage of CO2 will not be possible. They are the only ones capable of managing the task at a scale big enough to make a difference. In order for CCS to reduce emissions by one "wedge" (1 Gt/a C) -- the world will have to be storing 190 billion cubic feet of CO2 a day (Bcf/D). This is not a statistic culled from a naysaying green report, but from an illuminating article that appeared in the Journal of Petroleum Technology called "Geologic CO2 Storage - Can the Oil and Gas Industry Help Save the Planet." The article catalogs the enormous logistical challenges on the CCS road ahead. What does 190 Bcf/D of geologic storage mean, exactly? Steven Bryant, the author of the paper, says it will require replicating the current fossil energy infrastructure all over again. Thus, from the point of view of fluids moving in the subsurface, storing one wedge of CO2 in deep saline aquifers or depleted oil and gas reservoirs would be at the same magnitude as the current global oil business. From the point of view of fluids moving in surface facilities, transporting 1 Gt/a C from sources such as coal-fired power plants to injection wellheads would be comparable to the current global natural-gas business. While a daunting challenge, the author believes it is not beyond the oil industry's capability to meet it, and in fact he says it has "an unrivaled technical advantage." Still, the industry would need to invest about $1 trillion a year in CCS -- an amount equal to what it spends now to renew and maintain hydrocarbon production. But the cost might be less of a prohibitive factor than the simple logistics. Bryant points out: One way to store one wedge (1 Gt/a C) would be to retrofit CO2-capture and -storage facilities on one 1,000-MW coal-fired power plant every week -- for 12 years. Even if each project were a simple off-the-shelf design, this would be a massive undertaking. Bryant's analysis includes consideration of the depth of the global reliance on fossil fuels, and he, like many others since, comes to the conclusion that while CO2 storage by itself cannot reduce emissions sufficiently, without it the world probably does not have a chance to reach the ambitious mitigation targets recommended by science. When CO2 is captured and prepared for storage, it enters what scientists call a supercritical phase: it behaves both like a liquid and a gas. Injected far beneath the surface of the earth, it remains buoyant, seeking to escape. Most projected underground storage formations remain uncharacterized - nobody knows what's really down there -- so no one is quite sure whether the CO2 will stay put. This means that risk assessments of the geologic formations with only minimal available information is crucial to successful storage. Bryant argues that the oil industry is familiar with the challenge, for even "hydrocarbon reservoirs are often poorly characterized" but the industry has developed strategies for managing the circumstance. Similarly, the oil industry is on the leading edge of monitoring storage sites for leaks and lateral migrations of CO2 deposits. It should come as no surprise that if the fossil industry must double the size of its infrastructure and its capital development expenditures in order to accommodate a wedge of CO2 storage, it is also going to need to double its work force. That, Bryant says, is the single largest logistical hurdle in the way of success. Ramping up storage to the level needed to make a difference would require as many people as now work in the oil and gas business. Yet oil and gas operators and service companies are already scrambling to find qualified staff for existing and planned E&P projects. ... it may prove the greatest obstacle to implementing CO2 storage rapidly at a large enough scale to make a difference. Even if the technical, economic, and social challenges described above are addressed successfully, and even if citizens decide they want real GHG mitigation and are prepared to pay for it, geologic storage will not happen without engineers and geoscientists. They are the ones who must identify sites, design processes, certify permits, implement injection, interpret measurements, and carry out myriad other tasks associated with moving hundreds of Bcf/D of CO2 from sources to storage formations. It may be premature to call these potential new jobs in the CCS field as "green jobs", and Bryant does not consider whether opportunities in the incumbent energy industries will compete for workforce attention with the clean energy sector. He does, however, conclude by recognizing that even though the oil industry may be "uniquely qualified to help save the planet," it's ability to profit from CO2 storage will not help its image. Consumers pay the industry once for hydrocarbons to meet their personal transportation needs, and in the process they produce a quarter of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In its most likely implementation, CO2 storage would require consumers to pay the industry again. Indeed, geologic carbon storage will introduce a new kind of relationship for the oil and gas industry. Bryant predicts, "a partnership with coal producers, the transporters of coal, and power generating companies." And another party he did not foresee: environmentalists. More on Earth Day
 
Tom Christopher: Sacred Bull Top
As spring settles in, I've been starting seedlings for this year's vegetable garden. And that has caused me to reflect on Charlie Murphy's bull. From the time I was 8, I spent a large part of every summer on Charlie Murphy's farm in southern Ontario. I'd help with the haying and bringing the cows in for milking, but most of the time I just hung out with Charlie's younger son Michael and his daughter Julie Ann. Agriculturally speaking, Charlie had just enough to make a go of it; one of his few luxuries was a dairy bull. There were other, less expensive expedients for inseminating his cows, but Charlie was proud of his huge bull, which he claimed was a benevolent beast. I never saw much evidence of the bull's good nature, but that undoubtedly had to do with my favorite game. Julie, Mike and I would, each in turn, climb over the fence into the bull's pasture, sneak up behind him, and then nail him in the rear with a hard thrown clod of earth. The competition was to see who, city slicker or country kid, could get closest to the bull before letting fly and still make it back over the fence untrampled. I still find sacred cows (and bull) to be an irresistible target. Which raises the issue of "food miles". This is the presumption, almost universally accepted as fact by the environmentally responsible members of the public, that a foodstuff's cost in fossil fuels, its carbon footprint, is directly related to how many miles it must travel from its point of production to reach its point of consumption. Authorities on the sustainable life style, for example, insist that vegetables and fruits grown in California and Mexico and then shipped to New York are an abomination because the shipping requires the expenditure of so much diesel or gasoline. Judged by this criterion, the tomatoes and lettuces I will grow in my own garden should reflect the ultimately sustainable diet. However, I have an insider's knowledge of those crops. I know how considerable the input of labor is to raise this very modest harvest. I also know how expensive the labor is (my lettuce picker won't live in a migrant worker's dormitory and consumes far more resources of every kind than his colleagues in the Rio Grande and Imperial Valleys). Besides, I've read Pierre Desrocher and Hiroko Shimuzu's report, Yes, We Have No Bananas: A Critique of the "Food Miles" Perspective. This study, published in October of last year by George Mason University's Mercatus Center, explores in depth the issue of food miles and whether the carbon footprint and environmental cost of locally grown foods are actually lower than that of imports from the major agricultural producer nations. What it concluded was that for the principal population centers in northern Europe and the United States, this was simply not the case. Drawing on research United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Desrocher and Shimizu found that in many, if not most cases, the exact opposite was true. This is partly because transport in bulk by rail or ship is so much more energy efficient than moving foods in small quantities from farm to market by truck. Even long-distance bulk trucking is more efficient than short-haul shipping in the back of a pick-up or panel truck. In fact, taking produce home from the market via automobile consumes more fossil fuel and produces more CO2 (the principal greenhouse gas) than shipping it to Britain from producers in another hemisphere. This is true even of many kinds of air-freighted foods: a British consumer driving 6 miles to market to purchase a typical portion of Kenyan green beans, DEFRA calculated, generates more CO2 with his or her car per bean than was generated in flying the bean from Africa to the UK. To reduce the carbon footprint of our food, Desrochers and Shimizu, conclude, individuals can have a far greater impact by better menu planning and food preparation -- currently UK consumers discard 61% of the produce they purchase. And if your goal is only to conserve fossil fuels, the authors suggest, you would do far better to by making only periodic trips to a supermarket to purchase unprocessed ingredients in bulk than to follow the locavore pattern of driving from farm stand to dairy to bakery to butcher. There are many good reasons to patronize local food producers. Charlie Murphy was a good father and (in retrospect) astonishingly patient with visiting children. His farm preserved green space in a area increasingly under pressure from vacation homes and resorts. Cattle, of course, are a notoriously inefficient, polluting means of food production, but one could argue that his grass-fed herd was superior in that respect to most. What Charlie himself discovered was that sacred cows are unsustainable. To my regret, he eventually sold his bull. Likewise, we all need to address environmental issues on the basis of facts, not sentiment.
 
TEDTalks: Behind the News: Why We're Seeing Outbreaks of Swine Flu, and How We Can Stop it Next Time (Video) Top
Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives. Armed with blood samples, high-tech tools and a small army of fieldworkers, Nathan Wolfe hopes to re-invent pandemic control -- and reveal hidden secrets of the planet's dominant lifeform: the virus. Using genetic sequencing, needle-haystack research, and dogged persistence (crucial to getting spoilage-susceptible samples through the jungle and to the lab), Nathan Wolfe has proven what was science-fiction conjecture only a few decades ago -- not only do viruses jump from animals to humans, but they do so all the time. Along the way Wolfe has discovered several new viruses, and is poised to discover many more. Wolfe's research has turned the field of epidemiology on its head, and attracted interest from philanthropists at Google.org and the Skoll foundation. Better still, the research opens the door to preventing epidemics before they happen, sidelining them via early-warning systems and alleviating the poverty from which easy transmission emerges. More on Video
 
Geoffrey R. Stone: Civil Unions and Religious Liberty Top
The Illinois legislature will soon act on the Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, which would legally recognize civil unions in Illinois. The legislation provides that "persons entering into a civil union" will have "the same obligations, responsibilities, protections and benefits" as married persons. Civil unions would be available to adults "of either the same or opposite sex." Traditional "marriage," however, would remain available only to persons of the opposite sex. Such legislation is currently supported by the vast majority of Americans. Recent polls show that Americans favor the legal recognition of civil unions by an extraordinary ratio of 60 percent to 34 percent. There has been a transformation in our thinking on this issue over the past half-century. What would once have been regarded as nothing short of weird now seems perfectly sensible. This is the American story. It is, in part, what makes us great. Over time, we have gradually recognized the common humanity of blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Catholics and gays, all of whom have been the victims of cruel discrimination. The legal recognition of civil unions represents an important step forward in the continuing moral progress of the United States. It is, of course, a compromise, but it is a reasonable compromise at this time in our history. The most vocal opponents of this bill argue that their religious freedom would be impaired by the recognition of civil unions. It is important to consider this concern carefully and respectfully, for it is no doubt heartfelt and sincere. So, the question is: How does the legal recognition of civil unions threaten the religious liberty of those who oppose the legislation? The most obvious tension arises out of the fact that some religious people believe same-sex relationships are inherently sinful and immoral. They therefore insist that the state should not legitimate such relationships. The problem, though, is that in a society that values the separation of church and state, religious doctrine cannot be the source of our secular law. The framers of our Constitution certainly embraced this principle, and as the Supreme Court recognized almost 50 years ago, the state cannot constitutionally use its "power to aid religion." It is not a violation of religious liberty for the state not to impose one group's religious beliefs on other citizens who do not share them. There is, however, a more modest version of the religious liberty objection: that people with sincerely held religious beliefs should not be compelled by the state to act in violation of those beliefs. This is a reasonable position. And it is why the pending Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act expressly provides that nothing in the legislation "shall interfere with or regulate the religious practice of any religious body" and that any religious body "is free to choose whether or not to solemnize or officiate a civil union." This provision accords very broad protection to religious liberty and to the interests of religious institutions whose beliefs and practices are incompatible with the recognition of civil unions. Indeed, this protection goes far beyond what the Supreme Court has held is required by the 1st Amendment. This is a respectful and very substantial acknowledgment of legitimate religious liberty interests, without running roughshod over the fundamental interests in fairness, decency and common humanity that motivate the legislation. As a compromise for our times, the proposed civil-union bill strikes a thoughtful balance between the compelling interests of those who seek to share the joys and responsibilities that come with permanent and stable personal relationships and those who are sincerely concerned about the preservation of religious liberty. It is a wonderful example of groups in a self-governing society finding common ground, where each side acknowledges and respects the interests of the other. It should be enacted quickly and enthusiastically, for it reflects the American spirit at its very best. As President Barack Obama has said, "this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."
 
Mary Mapes: Looking Back at Abu Ghraib 5 Years Later Top
Five years ago, I was at work at CBS News in New York, holding a manila folder to my chest, guarding it with my life. Inside, there were pictures from Abu Ghraib - the pictures - the ones that would soon be seen around the world, the ones that made Americans sick to our stomachs, the ones that very few people knew about at that moment. Hidden in my folder was an image that would become an icon of our enduring shame - the tragic figure of a man in a ragged shift, his head covered with a black hood, his arms outstretched, an electric cord running up his leg - the Statue of anti-Liberty. Among the photos was the unforgettable sneer of a woman with a cigarette dangling from her lips, her fingers pointing tauntingly at a prisoner's genitals. Tucked away in my manila folder was the face of a dead man packed in ice and wrapped in garbage bags. He was battered, his mouth open, his eyes half closed. These were the scenes that would come to represent our country's secret side. This was torture American-style. Along with my hard-working partners, Dan Rather, Dana Roberson and Roger Charles, I had spent months digging out the truth about what had happened behind the imposing walls of the Iraqi prison. We had gathered interviews, anecdotes and documents that indicated American soldiers there were regularly committing acts that violated military law, international treaties and moral boundaries. More ominously, there were signs that these men and women were acting on orders from higher ups. All we needed to prove the story were the awful pictures we'd heard so much about. We knew that graphic photos existed somewhere - of simulated electrocution, detainees stacked like cordwood, a grinning American posing with his fist clenched in the face of a bound inmate, dogs attacking cowering Iraqis. We were told the pictures had been as common as cornflakes among the soldiers serving at Abu Ghraib. One man reportedly showed them off on his computer during meals and used a particularly disturbing shot as a screen saver. Finding the photos - getting someone to give them up and getting them in front of the world became an all-consuming quest. Not because we wanted to hurt the U.S. military, not because we wanted to embarrass the Pentagon, but because we knew the only way to make this right was to make it public. We traveled around the world and across the country, we worked the phones and played the computer like a Wurlitzer, we begged and pleaded and kept at it until it finally paid off. A folder arrived at our office. We all gathered around. This was what we had been waiting for. I remember holding the folder in my hands and, for just an instant, hesitating. Part of me didn't want to open it. That's where this country is right now. Again. In the next few days, we have been told that we will see thousands of new pictures of prisoner abuse, this time released by the Pentagon in response to an ACLU legal filing. This disclosure is sad -- and sadly overdue. These are illustrations of pathological elements of Bush administration policy that should have been made public years ago. I know some people believe that releasing this material further damages our country. They believe that new evidence of torture and abuse will be used as propaganda against us, that shedding sunlight on what we did in the dark will keep America from fixing the other serious problems we face. We confronted a similar dilemma when we tried to air our story five years ago. The Pentagon pleaded that we kill it. Our network delayed it for weeks fearing a backlash. These same arguments are being used to prevent further torture investigations. They are being cited by President Obama, who says he wants to "look forward, not back." These reluctant folks should talk with 81-year-old Ivan Frederick. His son Chip was sentenced to years in federal prison for his actions at Abu Ghraib. Frederick is still livid that his son has paid for the cruel policies of others. He says his boy was ordered to do things that were illegal, that he went along with it because he had no real choice. He says the Pentagon, the CIA and a bevy of mysterious and uncontrolled outside contractors were in charge of what happened at Abu Ghraib. I believe him. I do not think Chip Frederick - or any of the other inexperienced, poorly trained reservists at Abu Ghraib - went to Iraq full of original ideas about how to torment the locals that just happened to match the methods designed by the Pentagon. I believe he and others at the prison were fed a steady diet of these toxic tactics. And they paid dearly for their lack of protest. Chip Frederick is now 42 years old, out of prison and trying to restart his life. Alone. His wife left him when he was sentenced to Leavenworth. He lost his military pension, his medals and his pride. Under orders from the federal government, he cannot speak with anyone in the media for two more years. But his father can. And Dad is mad. Ivan Frederick told me this week that he wants to know where Vice President Dick Cheney's public defense of torture was when his son and the other soldiers from Abu Ghraib were on trial. He wants to know why the Bush administration described the accused soldiers at Abu Ghraib as "a few bad apples" when it was the Bush team itself that had poisoned the barrel. He wants to know why the people who dreamed up these dark policies are walking around free as birds while his son will be dogged by his misdeeds for the rest of his life. Ivan Frederick says he is "an old geezer who loves the flag." He says the country needs more old geezers. He describes himself as "not a Bush man. No way." But he believes in Barack Obama. He is writing letters to the President and Senator Carl Levin, asking for the opening of a new investigation. Most pointedly, he wants to know why CIA members who committed torture are being excused for "just following orders," when his son had to go to prison for doing the same thing. Chip Frederick's attorney, Gary Myers has a different view. He says the convictions of these men and women will not be overturned. "These guys were covered by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they violated it. What we've learned since then doesn't change a damned thing." Myers does believe that everyone in the military ranking above the convicted low-level soldiers at Abu Ghraib could be prosecuted "for dereliction. Anybody wearing a uniform, all the way up to the top. All the way." But Myers doesn't believe it will happen. And like many in the country, he is not at all sure that it should. He sees investigations and trials as paralyzing for a nation in the middle of an economic crisis, at war on two fronts and rebuilding after the catastrophes of the Bush administration. "Everybody knows these guys screwed up. We all know it. It's a mess. But if Obama uncorks this bottle - wow." Our reporting team was honored to win a Peabody for our work on the nightmare of Abu Ghraib. The soldiers who followed orders and broke the law there have suffered mightily for their mistakes. They were labeled as outcasts and had their legal fates left to the stingy mercies of the people who designed and dictated American policies for abusing prisoners. The convicted Abu Ghraib soldiers appear somewhere on the long list of Americans - and others - who have paid and are paying a price for George W. Bush's torture policy. Greg Mitchell has posted on this website a heartbreaking account of a young American soldier who killed herself after being exposed to the way this country was "interrogating" prisoners. Other brave American warriors have died at the hands of those seeking retribution for the sins of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Still more of our men and women have come home from this war with wounds in their souls - because of what they have seen, what they have done, what they didn't do. And dozens and dozens of inmates in American custody have died or disappeared. We cannot, as Peggy Noonan blithely suggests, "just keep walking." This should stop us in our tracks. I know that any public examination of this is going to be awful. All of us are going to be embarrassed and ashamed of the questions we didn't ask, the investigations we didn't launch, the way we looked away. We all like to think that if we had been at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or Baghram Air Base, we would have done the right thing. This is our chance to prove it. Five years after those dramatic days when a few of us at CBS News were the only people outside the Pentagon who knew the full story, I keep going back to that moment when we first got the pictures from Abu Ghraib. I think about holding the folder and deciding to pull it open. It was tempting - as an American and as a human being - not to look, not to know, not to see things I could never forget. That is where we are right now. What will we do with the unexamined package we're holding? Are we brave enough to break it open? Do we have the courage to look at ourselves?
 
Deepak Chopra: We Still Haven't Faced the Full Depth of the Economic Crisis Top
Dear Friends, This post by my friend DK Matai reveals the full extent of this economic crisis. The language may be too technical for some,and the numbers hard to fathom, but it suggests that the current bailout strategy may be of little more help than a band-aid on a corpse. Apparently the derivatives markets were a means to perpetrate theft and deception on the world's wealth on an unprecedented scale. It is unlikely that we can expect a quick-fix solution to this catastrophe aytime soon. Deepak The Quadrillion Playing Submerged Elephant in the Room by DK Matai It is fashionable at present to condemn bank bailouts and to ruminate on hidden losses: billion dollar losses here and billion dollars there! When bloggers and so called 'expert' commentators are being bold -- from Huffington to Taleb and from Ferguson to Roubini -- they talk about a few trillion dollars of bank losses and reference each other. With respect, they are all missing the Quadrillion Playing Submerged Elephant in the Room! This elephant has spawned Eight Bubbles that are collapsing simultaneously as another Giant Bubble -- Government Debt -- is inflated to take away the full buffeting of their simultaneous burst! It is worth noting that the trans-national play of derivatives has grown from USD 1.144 Quadrillion to USD 1.405 Quadrillion, ie, +22% worldwide. This is a staggering increase and most of it is seen in the Over-The-Counter (OTC) category as opposed to exchange traded derivatives. As a result, the global size of the derivatives bubble which was calculated last year at USD 190k per person-on-planet, has risen to USD 206k per person-on-planet. The ever rising commitment of governments for the repeated bailouts of financial institutions is partially linked to various flavours of derivatives exposure settlements and "black hole" losses emanating from off-balance-sheet vehicles. The traditional argument has been to discount derivatives altogether: "On one side of the equation there is a loss, on the other side there is a gain. Nothing disappears. It is just one big shuffle of wealth and assets." However, if this is the case, why has the US tax-payer had to bail out AIG repeatedly in excess of a hundred and fifty billion dollars so that AIG could settle the Credit Default Swap (CDS) and other derivatives claims of the largest trans-national financial institutions in the world? In the ATCA briefing, "The Invisible One Quadrillion Dollar Equation" published in September 2008 we discussed the main categories of the quadrillion dollar derivatives market as partially quoted by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Since then the quantum has grown significantly in certain crucial categories and the latest revised numbers follow: 1. Listed credit derivatives stood at USD 542 trillion, about the same as before; however 2. Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives stood in notional or face value at USD 863 trillion (UP +44%) and include: a. Interest Rate Derivatives at about USD 458+ trillion (UP +16%); b. Credit Default Swaps at about USD 57+ trillion (DOWN -1%); c. Foreign Exchange Derivatives at about USD 62+ trillion (UP +10%); d. Commodity Derivatives at about USD 13+ trillion (UP +44%); e. Equity Linked Derivatives at about USD 10+ trillion (UP +17%); and f. Unallocated Derivatives at about USD 81+ trillion (UP +14%). The myth of the single bubble behind The Great Unwind -- manifest as the global credit crunch -- has essentially been dumped in the last few months and subprime mortgage default, a USD 1.5 trillion challenge within the USD 5 trillion mortgage based assets envelope, is seen as a component of a much larger overwhelming global crisis with unprecedented scale, speed, severity and synchronicity. The global crisis has wiped a staggering USD 50 trillion off the value of financial assets - currency, equity and bond markets worldwide - last year, according to the Asian Development Bank. The truth that there are as many as "Eight Bubbles" [ATCA] at play and in the process of bursting together is understood to a greater extent now than in the past. We have gone from being able to "rescue the world" with less than USD 1 trillion in October 2008 to USD 11.6 trillion commitments in the US alone along with a further announcement of USD 1.2 trillion of quantitative easing by the US Fed in March 2009. There is a realisation worldwide including the G7 + BRIC + MISSAT that this is a USD 20 trillion problem and growing. As time goes by, the full extent of the collateral damage from the Quadrillion Play and 8 Bubbles burst is being revealed. The bursting process is taking the form of deleverage on an unprecedented scale. Even 1929 pales in comparison because the industrial production collapse witnessed over five successive years in the 1930s in the US is now taking place in five to six months, most notably in Japan. At a follow-up on recent ATCA roundtable we posed the following questions for Socratic dialogue: I. If the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen from above 14,000 to below 7,500 as a result of some of the 8 bubbles collapsing, ie a 6,500 points drop or 46% decline, where will the equities market reach by 2010 as other larger bubbles burst? II. If the world government bond market is around USD 35 trillion, how can governments rescue the eight bubbles bursting step by step with an ever larger quantum and momentum? III. How can Quantitative Easing (QE) defy the laws of financial gravity without devaluing paper currencies significantly? IV. What ought to be the focus at the G20 Summit in April to bring about stability in regard to the rising derivatives exposures and use of off-balance-sheet vehicles? We discussed "Eight Bubbles" in play worldwide in November 2008 and their approximate scale, based on latest information in 2009, is as follows: 1. Subprime Mortgage linked Loans & Assets (USD 1.5 trillion) within Mortgage backed Assets (USD 5 trillion); 2. China, India, Eastern Europe and other Emerging Market Loans (USD 5 trillion); 3. Commodities (Commodity Derivatives at about USD 13 trillion); 4. Corporate bonds (USD 18 trillion); 5. Commercial (USD 22 trillion) and Residential property (USD 45 trillion); 6. Credit Cards Outstanding Debt (USD 4.5 trillion); 7. Currencies (Foreign Exchange Derivatives at about USD 62 trillion); and 8. Credit Default Swaps (USD 57 trillion) as a subset of all Derivatives (USD 1,405 Trillion). The relative scale of the world's financial engine is as follows: 1. The entire GDP of the US is about USD 14 trillion and falling. 2. The entire US money supply is also about USD 14 trillion with rising Quantitative Easing in trillions. 3. The GDP of the entire world is USD 45 trillion and falling. USD 1,405 trillion is 31 times world GDP. 4. The real estate of the entire world is valued at about USD 65 trillion. 5. The world stock and bond markets are valued at about USD 70 trillion. 6. The trans-national universal model financial institutions own about USD 150 trillion in derivatives. 7. The population of the whole planet is 6.8 billion people. So the derivatives market represents about USD 206,000 per person on the planet. Assuming a 10% conservative default or decline in asset value, this could be a USD 100 trillion challenge on the base of the Quadrillion Playing Submerged Elephant in the Room! USD 50 trillion of asset decline is already manifest. What are the likely outcomes? "Four Scenarios" have already been suggested by ATCA. We are keen to receive your answers and solutions. Please note that the numbers quoted are a rough guide. Published at Intent.com DK Matai is chairman and founder of ATCA and regularly blogs at Intent.com More on The Bailouts
 
Niall Ferguson On Fareed Zakaria's Show: Discusses Financial Crisis, Agrees With Paul Krugman (VIDEO) Top
Eminent British historian Niall Ferguson appeared on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show to discuss the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. Ferguson had tough criticism for the Obama administration's handling of the crisis, saying he does not really see any difference between the actions of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and current Secretary Tim Geithner, and that the real problem has been the lack of a consistent policy towards a pretty fundamental problem: the, "by most serious measures," insolvency of a few major American banks, such as Citigroup and Bank of America. Ferguson also agreed with advice offered by Paul Krugman (an "unprecedented" event, by Ferguson's own admission) that the "only way to deal with these big insolvent institutions is to take them into temporary conservatorship, let's use that lovely euphemism not nationalization, as happened with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, institutions that they quite closely resemble anyway. It's going to happen; we're going to end up doing this. And you restructure them." [WATCH} Filed by Nicholas Graham More on Video
 
Senate Guru: MN-Sen: Two New Polls Say Minnesotans Want Coleman to Concede Already Top
{ Originally posted at my blog Senate Guru . } Two new polls makes it clear that Minnesotans want Republican Norm Coleman to give them back their second Senate seat that he is holding hostage with his endless appeals. Poll number one : Nearly two-thirds of Minnesotans surveyed think Norm Coleman should concede the U.S. Senate race to Al Franken, but just as many believe the voting system that gave the state its longest running election contest needs improvement. A new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found that 64 percent of those responding believe Coleman, the Republican, should accept the recount trial court's April 13 verdict that Democrat Franken won the race by 312 votes. Only 28 percent consider last week's appeal by Coleman to the Minnesota Supreme Court "appropriate." Large majorities of those polled said they would oppose any further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Should Coleman win at the state Supreme Court, 57 percent of respondents said Franken should concede. And 73 percent believe Coleman should give up if he loses at the state's highest court. "I voted for Coleman, but this thing has gone on way too long," said Mike McCombs, 50, a Lakeville furnace and air conditioning salesman. "Obviously, the Republican Party is trying to keep Franken's vote out of the United States Senate. We should get another [senator] in there." ... Although 57 percent of Republican poll respondents approve of Coleman's appeal to the state Supreme Court, the same portion of Republicans want him to quit should he lose there. Poll number two : A new poll from Grove Insight Research shows that Minnesota voters want Norm Coleman to concede and Gov. Pawlenty to sign the election certificate that will allow Al Franken to be seated -- finally -- in the U.S. Senate. The poll, commissioned by Alliance for a Better Minnesota, showed that 59% of surveyed voters believe Coleman should concede to Al Franken, while just 34% believe he should keep his legal challenge going. Those numbers fit with the 61% who believe the recount and challenge process has been fair and impartial, against just 24% -- the true dead-end of the conservative rump -- who still question the process. 54% now believe that Franken won in November fair and square, while just 26% believe Coleman actually won. Among the remainder, 14% are unsure of who actually came out ahead and 5% believe the two candidates actually tied. As for Governor Pawlenty, there are some potential landmines waiting for him should he decide that he, and not the state Supreme Court, is the Decider: What ought to be of concern to Governor Pawlenty is the fallout should he refuse to sign a certificate of election. A clear majority (58%) believe that failure to certify Franken after the Minnesota Supreme Court rules raises at least "somewhat serious doubts" about Tim Pawlenty. This number grows to 64% when voters are told that the governor is legally required to sign an election certificate. In fact, even four in 10 (40%) self-identified Republicans say they would have "serious doubts" with their Republican Governor should he fail to sign an election certificate after the Minnesota Supreme Court rules. A strong majority of Minnesotans think that the election and post-election recount and trial were properly conducted; a strong majority of Minnesotans think that Senator-elect Al Franken won fair and square; a strong majority of Minnesotans want Coleman to concede and release the Senate seat he is holding hostage. Only about one-quarter of Minnesotans think that Coleman won and that he should press on with his appeals. The will of the voters, for which Coleman keeps saying that he is fighting, is clear in its desire for Coleman to concede. Help put pressure on Coleman to concede by joining the One Dollar a Day to Make Norm Coleman Go Away effort. More on Al Franken
 
Tea Party Twitter Arrest: Daniel Hayden Threatened Mass Murder, Cop Killing Top
An Oklahoma man was arrested by FBI agents earlier this month for posting a series of messages on his Twitter account threatening to use a tax day Tea Party protest to commit politically-motivated mass murder. "The WAR wWIL start on the stepes of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police," wrote Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, according to messages included in the FBI affidavit (posted below). Another Twitter post began "START THE KILLING NOW!" Yet another: "Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps," he wrote in one message. Hayden was arrested for transmitting threats to kill or injure people using interstate communication tools over the internet. The AP reports that it isn't clear whether he's been charged. Special agent Michael S. Puskas said that Hayden posted threats under the Internet name "CitizenQuasar." Puskas says agents also found a MySpace account using the name "Citizen Quasar" and on Blogger.com an online diary using the name "Quasar." Wired.com's Threat Level reports that it "appears to be [the] first criminal prosecution to stem from posts on the microblogging site." Hayden was arraigned on the 16th, and ordered released to a halfway house pending trial -- a move that suggests the magistrate judge does not consider him a genuine threat. Hayden's attorney declined to comment. California-based Twitter did not respond to an inquiry by Threat Level. Here are Hayden's tweets, via the FBI affidavit: 7:59 p.m. "The WAR wWIL start on the stepes of the Oklahoma State Capitol. I will cast the first stone. In the meantime, I await the police." 8:01 p.m. "START THE KILLING NOW! I am wiling to be the FIRST DEATH! I Await the police. They will kill me in my home." 8:06 p.m. "After I am killed on the Capitol Steps like REAL man, the rest of you will REMEMBER ME!!!" 8:17 p.m. "I really don' give a shit anymore. Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the heads and throw the on the State Capitol steps." Become a fan of HuffPost Politics on Facebook , or follow us on Twitter . The FBI affidavit: daniel_knight_hayden_charges - Free Legal Forms More on Tax Day Tea Parties
 
William Fisher: The Last Tuesday in April Top
This Tuesday, April 28, the American people will confront three amazing coincidences. On that day, it will be five years since Americans got their first look at the sickening photographs from Abu Ghraib on "60 Minutes." And, also on that day, the Department of Justice, acting under a court order, will release several thousand never-before-seen-in-public photographs of U.S. prisoner abuse from Afghanistan and from elsewhere in Iraq. The third coincidence is the fact that the recent "torture memos" -- which will inform our reaction to these new photos in a way not possible at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal -- were also released as the result of what President Obama called an unwinnable lawsuit - by the same plaintiff, the American Civil Liberties Union, and under the same law, the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. We don't yet know what we'll see in these new images. Some members of Congress, who viewed them in a classified setting, have said they are far worse than the Abu Ghraib images. So on Tuesday we will get to see these new photos. We will again be outraged. There will be cries for investigations. Politicians will make statements. Doubtless, they will hold hearings. But the question is "what comes next?" To help answer that question, it might be instructive to remember what happened after Abu Ghraib. In what has to be one of the most iconic - and absurd - statements made since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Army Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros told the press back in 2005 that humane treatment of detainees "is and always has been the Department of Defense standard." Ballesteros was commenting on the so-called "Church Report," one of more than a dozen major reviews, assessments or investigations related to the detention and treatment of war-on-terror detainees. And Ballesteros added: "None of them found that there was a governmental policy directing, encouraging or condoning abuse." And that has pretty much been the history of all these investigations of abuse. They are full of sentences like, "Clearly abuses occurred at the prison at Abu Ghraib. There is no single, simple explanation for why this abuse at Abu Ghraib happened. The primary causes are misconduct (ranging from inhumane to sadistic) by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians, a lack of discipline on the part of the leaders and soldiers... and a failure or lack of leadership...." Or try this one: "The abuses at Abu Ghraib primarily fall into two categories: a) intentional violent or sexual abuse and, b) abusive actions taken based on misinterpretations or confusion regarding law or policy." Or this: "Senior level officers did not commit the abuse at Abu Ghraib (but) they did bear responsibility for lack of oversight of the facility, failing to respond in a timely manner to the reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and for issuing policy memos that failed to provide clear, consistent guidance for execution at the tactical level." Or this "No policy, directive or doctrine directly or indirectly caused violent or sexual abuse. In these cases, soldiers knew they were violating the approved techniques and procedures." Or this, from the investigation led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger: "The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We now know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel. The pictured abuses, unacceptable even in wartime, were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets. They represent deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline. Department of Defense reform efforts are underway and the Panel commends these efforts." In not a single one of these reports was the name of any high-ranking Pentagon official ever uttered. President Bush described the perpetrators in the Abu Ghraib photos as "a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values." He meant grunts like Lynddie England and Charles Graner - the folks who got blamed for carrying out what we now know was U.S. policy Why could the reports of these mostly honorable officers and public servants have all gotten it so wrong? For starters, the scope of each of these investigative assignments was determined by the Pentagon. Thus, the officer heading up the first investigation was ordered to find out what happened within the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade in our military prisons in Iraq- and only in Iraq. That's how Major General Antonio Taguba came to conclude: "I find that the 800th MP Brigade was not adequately trained for a mission that included operating a prison or penal institution at Abu Ghraib Prison Complex... I also concur that units of the800th MP Brigade did not receive corrections-specific training during their mobilization period. MP units did not receive pinpoint assignments prior to mobilization and during the post mobilization training, and thus could not train for specific missions. The training that was accomplished at the mobilization sites were developed and implemented at the company level with little or no direction or supervision at the Battalion and Brigade levels, and consisted primarily of common tasks and law enforcement training." But even given this limitation, Gen.Taguba concluded that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went far beyond the actions of a few sadistic military police officers -- the administration's chosen culprits. His report said 27 military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors committed criminal offenses, and that military officials hid prisoners from the Red Cross. And it's worth noting that for his candor, Gen. Taguba was forced into retirement by civilian Pentagon officials because he had been ''overzealous.'' ''They always shoot the messenger,'' Taguba said. Then, there's the limitation that investigators can only probe down from their rank, not up the chain of command to their superiors. A Brigadier General (one star) cannot investigate a Lieutenant General (two stars); a Lieutenant General cannot investigate a Major General (three stars). And a Major General cannot investigate a General (four stars). It was precisely for that reason that Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, one of the Abu Ghraib investigators, told his superiors that he could not complete his inquiry without interviewing more senior-ranking officers, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. Then there's the pride factor.Most of the folks who carried out these investigations were career officers. They were proud of the military. One can see that pride in the conclusion of the 2004 report conducted by General Fay: " Leaders and Soldiers throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom were confronted with a complex and dangerous operational environment. Although a clear breakdown in discipline and leadership, the events at Abu Ghraib should not blind us from the noble conduct of the vast majority of our Soldiers. We are a values based profession in which the clear majority of our Soldiers and leaders take great pride. A clear vote of confidence should be extended by the senior leadership to the leaders and soldiers who continue to perform extraordinarily in supporting our Nation's wartime mission. Many of our soldiers have paid the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedoms and liberties that America and our Army represent throughout the world." So we saw the photos and learned nothing. And the principal reason we learned nothing is that the Bush Administration wanted us to learn nothing. And a largely compliant media forgot to ask the right questions soon enough. Remember that it was an ordinary soldier who was troubled enough by what he saw at Abu Ghraib to photograph it and put it on a CD that he turned over to his superiors. And remember that it was the military itself that announced, in 2003, that an investigation by the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command was underway into alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. But also remember that, back then, Donald Rumsfeld was a rock star, the darling of the press. Most of the journalists who attended his briefings were acting like stenographers. What they didn't know was that, by the time we got to see the Abu Ghraib photos in 2003, Jay Bybee and John Yoo had already used their contorted legal logic to write their so-called "torture memos" justifying "enhanced interrogation" techniques. By the time the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced on television, the Bush policy was already in place and being implemented. It would be five years before most of the American public began to get a glimmer of what that policy was. Which brings me back to the new photos we're going to see this Tuesday. According to ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, "These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib." She says, "Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse." She is spot on. There is only one purpose in releasing these new photos -- to hold senior officials accountable for the policies that produced the behavior that produced the photos. So who would these officials be? Well, for openers, such names as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Rice spring to mind. They - not the lawyers who wrote the memos -- were "The Iraq Group" - the engines that powered the policies. It is a near-certainty that we will never see any of these people in jail or even on trial. But what we have a right to know is who did what to whom and why. Left to his own inclination and temperament, President Obama is not going to make that happen - unless we force him to make it happen. Unless the public pressure for an independent commission of inquiry becomes strong enough to shape the White House's perception of political reality. That should be the next item on our "to do" list. Yes, we can!
 

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