Oil spill's scope threatens Gulf's endangered marine life

Oil spill's scope threatens Gulf's endangered marine life | McClatchy

Larry Crowder, a professor of marine biology at Duke University, said the dispersant, Corexit, had kept much of the oil off the beaches, making it "harder to get 'Film at 11' about the effects." Many species that are killed by the oil in the water will die and sink out of sight.

"That may be the preference of the oil companies: to keep the damage out of sight, out of mind," Crowder said.

U.N. Official To Call For End Of CIA Drone Strikes

U.N. Official To Call For End Of CIA Drone Strikes : NPR

They have no legal authority to be killing anyone. They have committed the crime of murder under Pakistan's law.

- David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School, on the CIA's risk of criminal prosecution in the use of drones to target suspected militants.

“Embedded Media” Only Allowed to Cover BP Oil Disaster?

“Embedded Media” Only Allowed to Cover BP Oil Disaster? « Moving Train Media

BP's Photo Blockade of the Gulf Oil Spill

Photographers Say BP Restricts Access to Oil Spill - Newsweek

Photographers say BP and government officials are preventing them from documenting the impact of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Even Reagan Wasn’t a Reagan Republican

Even Reagan Wasn't a Reagan Republican - Newsweek.com

NEWSWEEK's apostasy guide: why every recent GOP president wasn't conservative enough for today's party.

Hightower's "Icky" Awards -- Who Are the Greediest, Grossest Corporate Hogs?

AlterNet: Hightower's "Icky" Awards -- Who Are the Greediest, Grossest Corporate Hogs?

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet
Posted on May 19, 2010, Printed on May 21, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146914/

It's not nearly as well known as an Emmy or Grammy, but the annual awarding of the "Icky" often produces high drama, fierce competition and gasps of surprise.

This coveted corporate prize goes to the group of CEOs whose performances in the past 12 months exhibit the best combination of greediness, goofiness and grossness.

Of course, top Wall Street Bankers were heavily favored to win the 2010 Icky hands-down, having claimed the prize for two years running and continuing to perform at a breathtaking level of hubris and narcissism. Their assertion early this year that they "deserved" the $140 billion in executive bonuses they grabbed for themselves was a stunner, causing even some of Wall Street's former chieftains to gag at the excess. They looked like sure winners.

Last month, however -- from out of nowhere -- an upstart challenger for the Icky literally erupted onto the scene. On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, and the top executives of BP, Halliburton and Transocean suddenly made themselves contenders.

For example, BP's dapper, boyish-looking chief executive, Tony Hayward, has shown a depth of cluelessness that is making him a star performer on Team Oil. On May 14, with the out-of-control well still barfing massive amounts of oil and gas from four miles deep under the Gulf floor, and with the billowing slick threatening the shores of four states, Tony stepped onstage to announce that this blowout is really not that big of a deal. Indeed, chirped the boss of the world's largest oil corporation, the blotch is "relatively tiny."

Tiny? Yes, he explained: "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersants we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."

What a boffo performance! No wonder this guy was paid $4,595,453.31 last year.

But, in going for the Icky, BP and the whole Deepwater Horizon group are a team. On May 11, they were confronted with a U.S. Senate hearing into their oily mess, and the group played it like the pros they are. Tony Hayward couldn't make the gig, but BP America Chairman Lamar McKay slid effortless into the role. At the start of the hearing, he showed his stuff by candidly conceding blame for the catastrophe: Not BP's blame -- it was Transocean's fault, he said, pointing to the corporation that owned the drilling rig.

Then Transocean stepped forward to assure the senators that, in fact, the fault lay with Halliburton, pointing to the notoriously slipshod outfit that was supposed to cap the well a mile down on the Gulf floor. In turn, and not missing a beat, Halliburton professed that its work on the disastrous project had conformed precisely to specifications set by BP, which was drilling the well.

So there it was for the public to see -- a perfect circle of jerks pointing at each other. Bravo! This is the high standard of corporate ethics that the Icky celebrates.

But Team Oil did not quit with this bold triple play. Led by Transocean, the culprits have already begun the lobbying and legal ploys to avoid paying for what they did. Last week, Transocean lawyers filed a petition in a Houston federal court asserting that its financial liability -- for 11 dead workers, destruction of the livelihoods for countless fishing families and other businesses, and for the unfathomable ecological damage still occurring -- comes to (ka-ching!) $27 million.

This amount is set in stone, the lawyers claim, by the "Limits of Liability Act." When was it enacted? In 1851. Before the first industrial oil well was drilled in the U.S.

Transocean didn't mention that it has already collected a $400 million payout from its disaster insurance policy. Yes, this means that this Swiss-based oil-drilling giant could make $373 million profit from the Gulf blowout.

Meanwhile, Transocean executives announced last week that it was rewarding its shareholders (including themselves) with a billion-dollar dividend. Wall Street bankers can only genuflect in admiration of such selfishness.

So this year's Icky is up for grabs.

How LSD Destroyed God's (and Dad's) Rigid Authority and Ended the Dull 1950s

AlterNet: How LSD Destroyed God's (and Dad's) Rigid Authority and Ended the Dull 1950s

Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room

Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room | Print Article | Newsweek.com

Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room

By Jonathan Alter | Newsweek Web Exclusive

May 15, 2010 | Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET May 15, 2010

The first of 10 "AFPAK" meetings came on Sept. 13, when the president gathered 16 advisers in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. This was to be the most methodical national-security decision in a generation. Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.
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The Obama administration was determined to change that. "For the past eight years, whatever the military asked for, they got," Obama explained later. "My job was to slow things down." The president had something precious in modern crisis management: time. "I had to put up with the 'dithering' arguments from Dick Cheney or others," Obama said. "But as long as I wasn't shaken by the political chatter, I had the time to work through all these issues and ask a bunch of tough questions and force people to sharpen their pencils until we arrived at the best possible solution."

Obama's approach in the meetings was the same as always. He was, according to one participant, "clear-eyed, hardheaded, and demanding." More than once the president felt obliged to remind those briefing him that it wasn't 2001 anymore. The United States had been in Afghanistan for eight years, and doing more of the same wasn't going to cut it. The war in Afghanistan was destined soon to pass Vietnam (11 years) as the longest war in American history.

The AfPak sessions led to an explosion of unauthorized disclosures, spin, and cutthroat bureaucratic gamesmanship, including the leak of the McChrystal Report to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. The president later admitted privately that his administration had handled the assigning of the report "stupidly." Instead of simply asking Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, for a status report on the deteriorating situation on the ground, he let Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dispatch McChrystal with a vague assignment that included making recommendations. He figured he should have known that any report would inevitably get out if put on paper.

The flap over the leak did nothing to chasten the Pentagon. In fact, the military, practiced in the ways of Washington, now ran PR circles around the neophytes in the Obama White House, leaking something to the Pentagon reporters nearly every day. The motive for all the leaks seemed clear to the White House: to box the president into the policy that McChrystal had recommended, at least another 80,000 troops and an open-ended commitment lasting 10 years or more.

Admiral Mullen, the son of a Hollywood publicist whose clients included Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart, looked unassuming but knew how to handle himself in the press. Gen. David Petraeus, the CentCom commander, of course was a pro at cultivating reporters. Even before the leaking of the report, McChrystal, working with Mullen's approval, made himself shockingly accessible to the press. He sat for a long, colorful interview with 60 Minutes,appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and dismissed the Biden plan (few troops, targeting Al Qaeda with drones) to NEWSWEEK.

Mullen dug himself in especially deep at his reconfirmation hearings for chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he made an aggressive case for a long-term commitment in Afghanistan. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was enraged at Mullen's public testimony and let the Pentagon know it. When Petraeus gave an interview to Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson on Sept.4 calling for a "fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign," the chief of staff was even angrier. Mullen and Petraeus thought the whole thing was a big misunderstanding. They said that once they heard the policy was under review, they stopped talking. "Hey, Denis, don't worry," Petraeus told NSC chief of staff Denis McDonough, "I get it."

If so, apparently McChrystal didn't get the word. Scheduled to give a speech on Oct.1 before the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, McChrystal wasn't sure if he should make the trip, but Mullen told him he should definitely go; it would help the transatlantic alliance. The speech was unexceptional until the question period, when McChrystal crossed his commander in chief in ways that would have consequences. When a questioner asked if he could support a presidential decision to fight the war with drone aircraft and Special Forces that focused on defeating Al Qaeda, McChrystal replied, "The short, glib answer is no."

If the president sided with Biden, the commanding general couldn't support it? This was insubordination, and the White House was livid. Was McChrystal out of control or just naive? (The consensus was naive.) Obama and his senior staff believed this had Mullen's and Petraeus's fingerprints all over it. They were using McChrystal to jam the president, box him in, manipulate him, game him--use whatever verb you like. The president had not yet decided on a policy and didn't appreciate the military sounding in public as if he had.

Some aides worried at least briefly that Petraeus was politically ambitious and was making an implied threat: decide Afghanistan my way or I just might resign my command and run for president in 2012. It wasn't a crazy thought. Rep. Peter King and various blogs were promoting him for high office. Although he insisted he was uninterested, Petraeus was a registered Republican in New Hampshire and well positioned to run as a Colin Powell-style alternative to Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, or anyone else in the 2012 presidential primaries. When asked about it, Petraeus was, as he later put it, "Shermanesque." Not interested. "What part of 'no' don't you understand?" he said.

On the day after the London speech, McChrystal was summoned to Copenhagen to meet with Obama, who was trying--and failing--to lure the Olympics to Chicago. They talked alone for 25 minutes while Air Force One sat on the tarmac. It was only the second time the two had met since McChrystal took over in June. The president wasn't happy, but he held his temper in check, as usual. By this time the White House had concluded that McChrystal was simply in over his head in the media world, a pawn in Mullen and Petraeus's game.

Obama found that he liked McChrystal personally and thought he had the right approach for completing the mission. Of course he wanted more troops, Obama figured. All battlefield generals do. But Obama was perfectly aware of the box he was now in. He could defer entirely to his generals, as President Bush had done, which he considered an abdication of responsibility. Or he could overrule them, which would weaken their effectiveness, with negative consequences for soldiers in the field, relations with allies, and the president's own political position. There had to be a third way, he figured.

In the meantime it was important to remind the brass who was in charge. Inside the National Security Council, advisers considered what happened next historic, a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century. In the first week of October, Gates and Mullen were summoned to the Oval Office, where the president told them that he was "exceedingly unhappy" with the Pentagon's conduct. He said the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were "disrespectful of the process" and "damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country." In a cold fury Obama said he wanted to know "here and now" if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.

"This was a cold and bracing meeting," said an official in the room. Lyndon Johnson had never talked to Gen. William Westmoreland that way, or George H.W. Bush to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton had all been played by the Pentagon at various points but hadn't fought back as directly. Now Obama was sending an unmistakable message: don't toy with me. Just because he was young, new, a Democrat, and had never been in uniform didn't mean he was going to get backed into a corner.

Mullen described himself as "chagrined" after the meeting. He had always felt strongly about the importance of civilian control of the military, and in 2008 had delivered a message to the armed forces reminding all service personnel to stay out of politics. Now he and Gates pledged support and told the president that the conduct would change, and it did. On Oct. 5, Gates said in a speech to the Association of the United States Army that it was "imperative" that generals provide their advice "candidly but privately." (He felt the White House was just as guilty of damaging leaks as the Pentagon, and he hoped his message of discretion was heard there, too.) Mullen and Joint Chiefs vice chairman Gen. James Cartwright stopped selling the McChrystal plan and told Petraeus and McChrystal to stop talking publicly until the policy deliberations were resolved. "They swore loyalty," said one senior civilian official. "And we chose to believe them."

The Nov. 11 Veterans Day meeting, the eighth on AfPak, would prove pivotal. "I don't want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years," Obama told the group. That day the president gave preliminary approval to the plan presented to him by the military, which called for 40,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan over 21 months. But the timetable stuck in his craw. Already in a snappish mood, he found it appalling that in the world of modern military transport it would take nearly two years to get those boots on the ground. In the Gulf War in 1990-91, the military got half a million troops to the region in less than six months.

"I don't know how we can describe this as a surge," Obama said sharply. The president then turned to Petraeus. "Am I mistaken in remembering that the 30,000 troops in Iraq arrived in a six-month window in 2007?"

"No," Petraeus said, "you're not." The president was treading in a sensitive area. "Any time Iraq was mentioned it was like putting a hot rod under Petraeus. He would practically levitate," said one person in the room. Obama bore in: "So why is this surge taking place over 21 months if that one was done in six months?"

Petraeus replied that the Afghanistan surge was not modeled on Iraq. "Well, your presentation earlier was on Iraq," Obama reminded him.

The general always threw in the caveat that Iraq and Afghanistan were very different countries. Afghanistan would need new runways, ammo storage, billets, and other military infrastructure before many more U.S. troops could arrive. But the whole thrust of his analysis, the basis of his prestige, was that what he had learned in Iraq could be applied to Afghanistan and other nations. They had talked about this for hours in previous meetings and now the president was calling Petraeus's bluff, as one note taker at the meeting put it. "The only way we'll consider this is if we get the troops in and out in a shorter time frame," Obama said.

Obama was moving out of his probing mode and toward conclusions and eventually presidential orders. This would not be a five- to seven-year nation-building commitment, much less an open-ended one. The time frame the military was offering for both getting in and getting out must shrink dramatically, he said. There would be no nationwide counterinsurgency strategy; the Pentagon was to present a "targeted" plan for protecting population centers, training Afghan security forces, and beginning a real--not a token--withdrawal within 18 months of the escalation.

On Sunday, Nov. 29, having made his decision, the president decided to hold a final Oval Office meeting with the Pentagon brass and commanders in the region who would carry out his orders. He wanted to put it directly to the military: Gates, Mullen, Cartwright, Petraeus, and national-security adviser Jim Jones, without any of the others. Obama asked Biden to come back early from Thanksgiving in Nantucket to join him for the meeting.

As they walked along the portico toward the Oval Office, Biden asked if the new policy of beginning a significant withdrawal in 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn't be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes. The president didn't need the reminder. Obama had already learned something about leaving no room for ambiguity with the military. He would often summarize his own meetings in a purposeful, clear style by saying, "Let me tell you where I am," before enumerating points ("One, two, three") and finishing with, "And that's my order."

Inside the Oval Office, Obama asked Petraeus, "David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"

"Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame," Petraeus replied.

"Good. No problem," the president said. "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"

"Yes, sir, in agreement," Petraeus said.

"Yes, sir," Mullen said.

The president was crisp but informal. "Bob, you have any problems?" he asked Gates, who said he was fine with it.

The president then encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly, focus on Al Qaeda, and build the Afghan Army. "I'm not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don't agree with me that we can execute this, say so now," he said. No one said anything.

"Tell me now," Obama repeated.

"Fully support, sir," Mullen said.

"Ditto," Petraeus said.

Obama was trying to turn the tables on the military, to box them in after they had spent most of the year boxing him in. If, after 18 months, the situation in Afghanistan had stabilized as he expected, then troops could begin to come home. If conditions didn't stabilize enough to begin an orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces (or if they deteriorated further), that would undermine the Pentagon's belief in the effectiveness of more troops. The commanders couldn't say they didn't have enough time to make the escalation work because they had specifically said, under explicit questioning, that they did.

It wasn't a secret that someone in the military would likely have been fired had Biden been president. But the vice president admitted to other advisers that it was better that Obama was in charge and showing more mercy toward the Pentagon. The generals thought they were working him over, Biden said privately, but the president had the upper hand. He was a step ahead of them, and as much as some of them thought they had obliterated the July 2011 deadline for beginning a withdrawal, they were mistaken.

When he spoke to McChrystal by teleconference, Obama couldn't have been clearer in his instructions. "Do not occupy what you cannot transfer," the president ordered. In a later call he said it again: "Do not occupy what you cannot transfer." He didn't want the United States moving into a section of the country unless it was to prepare for transferring security responsibilities to the Afghans. The troops should dig wells and pass out seeds and all the other development ideas they had talked about for months, but if he learned that U.S. soldiers had been camped in a town without any timetable for transfer of authority he wasn't going to be happy.

At the conclusion of an interview in his West Wing office, Biden was adamant. "In July of 2011 you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it," Biden said as he wheeled to leave the room, late for lunch with the president. He turned at the door and said once more, "Bet. On. It."

From The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter. To be published on May 18 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. © 2010 by Jonathan Alter.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/238092

Glenn Beck and Rep. Anthony Weiner: A Fight for the Gold

Glenn Beck and Rep. Anthony Weiner: A Fight for the Gold

The Bumbler From BP: How CEO Tony Hayward is making the Gulf oil-spill disaster even worse.

Print

The Bumbler From BP

How CEO Tony Hayward is making the Gulf oil-spill disaster even worse.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, May 17, 2010, at 6:32 PM ET

---

This hasn't been a good few weeks for Tony Hayward, the chief executive officer of BP. In the weeks since the huge oil spill in the Gulf began, he has struck an occasionally Churchillian tone: "We are going to defend the beaches," he proclaimed. "We will fix this." But the British leader he most calls to mind is Ethelred the Unready.

For CEOs in crisis, the playbook includes a proper appreciation of the gravity of the situation, a sense of calm urgency, and confidence-building rhetoric backed by confidence-building action. So far, Hayward is zero for three. From the outset, there's been a sense that Hayward wasn't quite prepared for this and didn't quite grasp what is at stake. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hayward "admitted that the oil giant had not the technology available to stop the leak. He also said in hindsight, it was 'probably true' that BP should have done more to prepare for such an emergency."

As the spill worsened, Hayward fretted that he and BP were its victims. "What they hell have we done to deserve this?" he reportedly told fellow executives. Of course, Hayward isn't the victim here. The sea life, the sea itself, the employees who died, the fishermen who are losing their livelihoods, the tourism industry, responsible drillers—they're the victims. Hayward should have been asking himself: What they hell did they do to deserve this? And what am I going to do fix it?

The private grumbling has been matched by public bumbling. Hayward has used unfortunate metaphors. "We will only win this if we can win the hearts and minds of the local community," he said, apparently unaware that "hearts and minds" is a phrase forever identified with the debacle of the Vietnam War. And in a moment of exquisitely bad taste, Hayward said: "Apollo 13 did not stop the space program. The Air France airplane that fell out of the sky off of Brazil did not stop the aviation industry." Among the many crucial differences between Apollo 13 and this oil spill: Apollo 13 turned out to be a feel-good triumph of engineering, since the astronauts came home alive. The BP spill is simply an epic fail.

At other times, Hayward sounds like a Monty Python character, with understatement that would be comic if it weren't so tragic. Here's how he recently explained BP's response: "It was a bit bumpy to get it going. We made a few little mistakes early on." As this Financial Times article noted, Hayward was proud of the containment effort. "Almost nothing has escaped," Hayward said. And here's the best yet, from the Guardian: "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." Yes, it's just a flesh wound!

Unfortunately for BP, the irregular flow of data is undermining Hayward's case. The New York Times reported on Saturday: "Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given." But, the Times noted, "BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well." Meanwhile, in an interview with the BBC, Hayward was saying: "it's not possible to measure the flow from the leak."

Hayward's sangfroid is impressive. Asked if he felt insecure in his position, he responded. "I don't at the moment. That of course may change." I wouldn't expect him to be storming up and down the barrier islands like Canute, trying to keep the tides away. But by any measure, this has been a monstrous cock-up. Because of its poor planning, BP is wasting resources belonging to its shareholders and to the earth, it's destroying people's livelihoods, and it's poisoning the atmosphere for the industry. Sure, you would expect any CEO worth his golden parachute to try to downplay the damage of such an incident. But listening to Hayward, you don't have much of a sense that he grips how much damage this incident and the poor response to it have inflicted on all of BP's stakeholders.

For some companies, a crisis can turn out to be an opportunity. If BP had managed to shut down the leak immediately, it would have gone a long way toward limiting its reputational and financial damage. But as it drags on, the spill reinforces the popular notion that BP has a poor safety record in North America. And all the while, its CEO comes off as glib, wistful, self-involved, and foolish.

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2254115/

Quest for oil leaves trail of damage across the globe

Quest for oil leaves trail of damage across the globe | McClatchy

By Tom Knudson | McClatchy Newspapers

Like many of her neighbors, Celina Harpe is angry about the oil pollution at her doorstep. No longer can she eat the silvery fish that dart along the shore near her home. Even the wind that hurries over the water reeks of oil waste.

"I get so mad," she said. "I feel very sad."

Harpe, 70, isn't a casualty of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She lives in a remote corner of Alberta, Canada, where another oil field that's vital to the United States is damaging one of the world's most important ecosystems: Canada's northern forest.

Across the globe, people such as Harpe in oil-producing regions are watching the catastrophe in the Gulf with a mixture of horror, hope and resignation. To some, the black tide is a global event that finally may awaken the world to the real cost of oil.

"This is a call to attention for all humanity," said Pablo Fajardo, a lawyer in Ecuador who's suing Chevron over oil pollution in the Amazon on behalf of 30,000 plaintiffs.

"Oil has a price," he added, "but water, life and a clean environment are worth much more."

Others say previous oil disasters haven't changed things much, and this one won't, either.

"We're addicted to oil, so the beat will go on," said Richard Thomas, an environmentalist in Newfoundland, Canada, where drilling rigs pepper the coast. "Oil companies will make absolutely sure we don't check ourselves into hydrocarbon rehab anytime soon."

There's no denying that the rust-red plumes of oil and tar balls in the Gulf of Mexico are a potential ecological calamity for American Southern shores. More than half the petroleum consumed in this country, however, is imported from other countries, where damage from exploration and drilling is more common but goes largely unnoticed.

No one's tallied the damage worldwide, but it includes at least 200 square miles of ruined wildlife habitat in Alberta, more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater spilled into the rainforests of Ecuador and a parade of purple-black oil slicks that skim across Africa's Niger Delta, where more than 2,000 polluted sites are estimated to need cleaning up.

"The Gulf spill can be seen as a picture of what happens in the oil fields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa," Nnimmo Bassey, a human rights activist and the head of Environmental Rights Action, the Nigeria chapter of Friends of the Earth, said in an e-mail.

"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the USA," Bassey added. "In Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments."

Despite calls for more domestic drilling and new sources of energy, America's reliance on foreign oil has climbed steadily over the years, from 44.5 percent of consumption in 1995 to 57 percent in 2008.

"Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oil fields all over the world, and very few people seem to care," said Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and the author of "Amazon Crude," a book about oil development in Ecuador.

"No one is accepting responsibility," Kimerling said. "Our fingerprint is on those disasters because we are such a major consumer of oil."

The United States burns through 19.5 million barrels of oil a day, one-quarter of the world's consumption, more than China, Japan, India and Russia combined. That's 2.7 gallons a day for every man, woman and child, one of highest rates in the world.

The biggest hope for paring the nation's dependence on foreign oil lies in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Alaska and California coasts, but that treasure remains largely untapped. Offshore production has dropped in recent years, from 2.3 million barrels a day in 2003 to 1.8 million in 2008.

The Gulf spill is likely to shrink output even more and increase foreign imports. "We must find a way to do this more safely," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said at a Senate hearing last Tuesday.

If oil production moves abroad, Landrieu said, "We will export some of these problems to countries less equipped and less inclined to prevent this kind of catastrophic disaster."

Others, however, say that such drilling closer to home is too risky. In California, where imports of foreign oil are a record 48 percent, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently pulled his support for an offshore project, citing concerns over the spill in the Gulf. Similar shifts have occurred elsewhere, including Florida and Virginia, where some lawmakers who once supported drilling now are distancing themselves from it.

"You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, 'Why would we want to take that kind of risk?' " Schwarzenegger said at a news conference.

In poor countries such as Ecuador, people don't have a choice.

"The impacts here have been enormous," said Esperanza Martinez, Ecuador coordinator for the international environmental group Oilwatch. "We calculate 1 million hectares" — 2.5 million acres — "have been deforested."

Four decades of spills and leaks by oil companies there, including some from the United States, have fouled thousands of miles of jungle streams and wetland zones.

"What does this all mean to the people? It means high levels of illness in the petroleum zones, where they have 30 percent more cancer," Martinez said. "The worst indicators of poverty are right next to petroleum sites."

For its part, the Western States Petroleum Association, which represents U.S. oil companies, argues that tapping America's offshore oil is more responsible, but the Gulf spill will only make that more difficult, said Catherine Reheis-Boyd, the group's president.

"We have to re-earn the confidence, relearn the lessons and move on to explore and access these resources domestically, so we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil," Reheis-Boyd said.

Much of California's disdain for drilling stems from a 1969 well blowout near Santa Barbara that killed some 3,700 seabirds and captured nationwide attention.

By historic standards, it was a significant but not gigantic spill: More than 3 million gallons leaked, compared with 11 million from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989 and four million gallons so far from the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf.

The Santa Barbara spill had a super-sized impact, however, jump-starting an era of environmental activism and helping to inspire the first Earth Day a year later.

"A lot of the oil ended up on the coast, where people are highly sensitized to their environment and activist by nature," said Tupper Hull, the vice president of strategic communications for the Western States Petroleum Association.

"Oil spills are terrible things to see," he said. "They have a visual and visceral and emotional impact on people that cannot be trivialized."

The Santa Barbara spill "set off a chain of events that created an orthodoxy on this issue," he said. "It was a game-changer, not unlike what's now taking place in the Gulf of Mexico."

The pollution-control efforts in the Gulf are said to be unprecedented. They include the deployment of more than 100 miles of protective booms and the use of more than 400,000 gallons of chemical dispersant to break up the oil. Scores of state and federal agencies are helping, too, including the Army National Guard.

That doesn't happen in Nigeria, the fourth-largest source of foreign oil in the U.S., according to Bassey, the environmental leader.

"Officially, there are over 2,000 oil spill sites that need environmental remediation," he said.

In Nigeria, oil firms "wield the big stick and work with state security to silence complaints," Bassey charged. "Pollution impacts fisheries, agriculture and human health. Thanks to the industry, life expectancy is lowest in the oil communities."

Last year, Amnesty International published a report on the Niger Delta region, saying, "Oil spills, waste dumping and gas flaring are endemic."

Shell, one of the major operators in the Delta, acknowledges that conditions are difficult. On its website it says that most pollution isn't its fault, however. "Most oil spills — 98 percent by volume in 2009 — are the direct result of militancy and other criminal activity," the company said.

However, Omoyele Sowore, a Nigerian environmentalist in the U.S., called West Africa "the wild, wild west of pollution. It's lawless."

Oil companies pollute "with impunity," he said. "There are no consequences."

In northern Alberta, where oil companies are mining tarlike sands, converting them to crude and piping about 830,000 barrels a day south to the United States, indigenous people such as Harpe have complained for years about pollution, illness and the destruction of wildlife habitat.

"It doesn't matter what we say," Harpe said by phone from her home along the Athabasca River in the booming "oil sands" region. "It seems to go in one ear and out the other. We are being ignored."

"What we're seeing in the Gulf is very acute, whereas what's unfolding in the oil sands is much more chronic," said Dan Woynillowicz, the director of external relations for the Pembina Institute, a Calgary environmental group. "As a result, the scale and consequence are not catching the attention of the U.S. media, public and politicians, despite the fact that U.S. oil demand is driving the expansion of oil sands development."

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers says the disturbance is manageable and the mined areas can be reclaimed. "We will mitigate our impact on the land while maintaining regional ecosystems and biodiversity," the group says on its website.

In the Third World, oil companies operate differently from the way they do in Canada or the United States, activists say.

"When they go into a country like Ecuador or Peru, where there is no meaningful regulation, they take advantage of that," charged Kimerling, the law professor. "They are more careless, and go in with an attitude that they can do whatever they want.

"The U.S. government has not shown any interest in the environmental disasters that are being caused by our companies in other countries."

"I think they should," she added. "When we have oil spills in this country we care, we respond, we do everything possible to try to minimize damage.

"But when our companies spill oil in other countries — and those governments don't respond — we don't, either. It sends a chilling message that we don't care."

(Knudson is a staff writer for The Sacramento Bee. Bee Photographer Hector Amezcua contributed to this report.)

Of War and Peace

Of War and Peace

Of War and Peace
By John Cory, Reader Supported News
15 May 2010

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'In-Country-2', a photograph by Bob Lopes of a photograph left in a plastic bag during a rainstorm at the Vietnam Memorial Wall, 11/15/92. (photo: Bob Lopes/The Wall

'In-Country-2', a photograph by Bob Lopes of a photograph left in a plastic bag during a rainstorm at the Vietnam Memorial Wall, 11/15/92. (photo: Bob Lopes/The Wall





Reader Supported News | Perspective

What did you do in the war, Daddy?
Which one, Child?
The one before I was born.
You were born into war, Child.
- John Cory -

ebastian Junger was on the Daily Show talking about his new book, "War." I did that "look inside the book" preview on the net and it was déjà vu all over again for me as I read this passage: "... the first night at the KOP, O'Byrne heard a strange yammering in the forest and assumed the base was about to get attacked. He grabbed his gun and waited. Nothing happened. Later he found out it was just monkeys that came down to the wire to shriek at the Americans."

No matter how much it all changes it all stays the same.

There was a place about five klicks off LZ Stinson between Vinh Loc and the Tra Khuc River we nicknamed Monkey Mountain. It wasn't a mountain really, more of a big pile of rocks and dirt and thran grass and banana shrubs. And it was home to a nasty, ill-tempered, sadistic commune of rock monkeys. The little hairy bastards would wait until dark then toss rocks at us. All night.

The FNG always yelled, "Incoming! Grenade!" We'd laugh and then tell him about the monkeys. The FNG stopped yelling so loud. But everyone knew that one night Charlie might actually lob a Chicom grenade alongside a monkey-rock and then we'd all be fucked.

Vietnam. Afghanistan. Same-same GI. Same-same. Love you long time.

What is war after all, but a classic love story - boy meets gun, boy falls in love with gun; boy and gun live unhappily ever after.

I spent a lifetime one afternoon with my friend Jack M. He was one of Brokaw's "Greatest Generation," a moniker Jack said was bullshit to sell books and had no meaning. Office door locked and a bottle of good bourbon shared between us, Jack pointed at the photos on the wall. The twenty-year-old kid version of Jack stood next to Clark Gable, movie star and bomber pilot - their squadron in WWII England.

One by one across the black and white faces from long ago, Jack conducted roll call. For some he smiled, for others, he spoke reverently, and for a precious few he wept quietly and whispered, "God rest their souls. I remember them as though it was yesterday."

A little over fifty years after the end of his war and over twenty years after the end of my first war, we sat together and remembered what we could not forget.

That war is beautiful should chill our bones. That war is ugly is too gentle an adjective for a process that rips apart human flesh and drowns our soul in blood. War is electric. War is anesthesia. War is vicious and mundane.

The savage nobility, the sacred rite of passage and bonding of war gets portrayed as one of the most intense religious and spiritual experiences a soldier can ever have in this life. We glorify that "band of brothers" fusion of war.

But no one ever questions what that says about us, our society, about how trust and faith and love in one another can only have profound meaning if experienced in the violent carnage that is war. Otherwise, it don't mean nothin'.

In October of 1969 we humped the Big Green wearing black armbands in solidarity with the first Peace/Vietnam War Moratorium. There were over 250,000 people in Washington, DC with an estimated 2 million people across the country in small and big towns who donned black armbands and paid tribute to the soldiers and civilians killed in the war. The Peace Moratorium was the largest demonstration in US history. All they wanted was to give peace a chance.

We don't need an Anti-War movement. We need a Pro-Peace movement.

The thing they never tell you, the lie of all lies, is that you can go to war and then come home.

You can't.

Whenever I write about war, someone (usually a guy) will email me that I'm the reason that we (America) lost Vietnam and thank god things have changed and America now supports the troops - professional troops - not draftees and Communist hippies like me but real soldiers like the guys who won WWII.

Decades down the road we are still fighting Vietnam, still longing for the glory of the last good war, and still demeaning peace as un-American. War is our oxygen and our DNA. How can a soldier come home from war when we are still at war with ourselves?

And what of the REM Riots? My term for the nightmares that wake you in a cold sweat, chasing your breath because you don't know where the hell you are, the Rapid Eye Movements that leap and claw the darkness in search of escape.

What of the village child who wakes screaming at the growling rumble of passing aircraft, remembering the last time she heard that sound it brought her world to an end? Impersonal flying metal death with hi-tech targeting that mistook her parents for insurgents and her village as a safe haven for the bad guys. She wipes her frightened eyes with the stump of an arm where her hand used to be and promises revenge.

And what of the families who watch their spouse and parents go off to war - again. A third and fourth deployment while kids try to figure out where they fit in this society of family values and war. Which kid gives up their childhood to become the caretaker and consoler of the younger brood? Which child cries in the dark, afraid they will forget what their mother's kiss and hug feels like? Which child secretly steals the bottle of aftershave from the bathroom cabinet and sprinkles it on their pillow so at night they can smell dad and maybe dream of him?

My god how did the violent bonding of war become more noble and precious than the bonding of mother and child? Of father and child?

On 18 April 1945, Ernie Pyle was killed on a small island near Okinawa. A draft of a column he wrote for the end of the war in Europe was found in his pocket. Here is part of what he wrote: "... Dead men by mass production - in one country after another - month after month and year after year... Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them."

We have come to accept the monotony of war, the mundane infinity of the dead, and the glory of the cause however vague, however deceitful, as long as it is wrapped in the flag like a soldier's coffin.

But something wicked this way comes. It is already happening, another Pinkville, maybe worse. Sy Hersh tells us it's out there like a diseased corpse waiting to be exhumed.

Don't tell me that war is inevitable, that we've always had war and we always will. That's a cop-out excuse to rationalize turning a blind eye to this garden of evil.

So what do we do, you ask?

I'm not an educated man and I don't have powerful contacts, but if you believe in "We the People" then surely we can ignite a Pro-Peace Movement. Surely we can encourage and vote for candidates who will stop funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if that means a primary challenge to an incumbent - so be it. And we can send letters and emails and petitions to Congress and their staff demanding an end to war.

But here's an idea: A National Picnic For Peace Day!

Why not? We have Twitter and Facebook and blogs and the whole Internet to organize and schedule. Maybe have it on Labor Day? Why couldn't we fill Central Park, Griffith Park, the Mall in DC, Ghirardelli Square and local town squares across the country? 1969 was 2 million people - why not 5 million people today?

Veterans and their families, Union members and non-Union workers, come together in a giant picnic for peace. Mosques and Churches and their congregations.

How American would that be? Burgers and hot dogs and potato salad served up by we the people sharing photos of loved ones and stories of their dreams and hopes in life, even videos for the kids to see from their parent in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just a moment to touch the screen and pretend we're touching love. And who knows, maybe we can get people all around the world to share that day with us - from Amsterdam to Sydney to Kabul to Tokyo, what a message that would send. What a beautiful day that would be!

I know everyone is busy but let me ask you a question: If we're too busy for peace, aren't we're too busy for war?

I can see it in my mind. No politics. No Democratic or Republican signs or slogans. No Hitler pictures. Just a banner that says "Peace." And displays with photos and videos of our loved ones in and out of uniform and families sharing with one another and people celebrating life and hope.

Imagine all the people - to borrow from John Lennon.

Just imagine.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: The myth of the "anti-establishment" candidate.

By Christopher Beam
Posted Thursday, May 13, 2010, at 3:51 PM ET

It's been a rough week for incumbents. First came the ouster of Bob Bennett, who failed to even make it onto Utah's Republican primary ballot after 17-plus years in the Senate. Then Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia went down in Tuesday's Democratic primary after a 27-year career in the House. The AP chalked both defeats up to the country's "anti-establishment mood." Time called Mollohan "anti-incumbency's first real casualty." Politico speculated about which incumbents could be next.

The victors are pushing the anti-Washington narrative, too. Opponents of Bennett and Mollohan painted the incumbents' experience as a liability. "I think he's been in Washington too long," said Tim Bridgewater, the Utah businessman who defeated Bennett and has never held public office. Meanwhile, the West Virginia state senator who defeated Mollohan, Mike Oliverio, called fellow Democrat Mollohan a "corrupt" Washington insider and, for good measure, took shots at the party leadership. "Hopefully, there will be a better candidate [for Speaker] than Nancy Pelosi," he said.

But for all the pitchfork-sharpening, what happens when anti-establishment candidates arrive in Washington? One of two things, usually: Either they quickly adapt to the establishment, or they serve for one term.

The most recent adapter has been Scott Brown. In January, Brown campaigned as a strong conservative, promising to be the 41st vote against health care reform. He never said he would block every piece of the Obama agenda. But he certainly let voters believe it. Democrats played along. (They also benefited from exaggerating his reactionary tendencies.) Chuck Schumer labeled Brown "far-right." The Boston Globe said he was in sync with the national Republican Party—that is, more conservative than Massachusetts Republicans. Tea Partiers, meanwhile, claimed him as their own.

Since then, Brown has let them down. He voted for Obama's jobs bill, despite pledging to rein in spending. He joined Democrats in breaking a Republican filibuster of an unemployment benefits package. Obama has also pegged Brown as a possible ally in the upcoming fight over immigration reform.

No surprises there. For one thing, despite all his anti-Obama rhetoric, Brown has always been a moderate. His voting record in the state senate suggested he was liberal even for a Massachusetts Republican, according to a study conducted at the time by the University of Chicago's Boris Shor. He only busted out the government-takeover rhetoric for the campaign.

Brown isn't alone. Everyone promises to change Washington. And everyone compromises when they get there. It's just politics. "Most outsider candidacies are wildly contradictory," says Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "If you say you're going to make the Senate work and all you do is support filibusters and prevent action, you're not being faithful to what you said you were going to do."

Then there's what Shor calls the "basic re-election imperative." "Whatever you want to accomplish," he says, "you can't do it in a single term." Re-election itself requires becoming part of the Washington establishment—candidates have to raise money for fellow party members in hopes that they'll return the favor, and they have to keep their heads down so as not to tick off the leadership. "Outsider" candidates often say they'll serve only one term, as Bob Bennett did in 1992. But those who have a good shot at re-election almost always take it, as Bob Bennett did in 1998 and 2004.

For any congressional candidate to believe that he or she can "shake up" Washington upon arrival may be unrealistic. But it's not necessarily disingenuous. They may actually believe it. Or they may simply not understand how Washington works. (They're outsiders, after all.) There's little one person can do to derail the legislative train that's been chugging along for 250 years. First-term members of Congress are also the least equipped people to do it. They don't have seniority on their committees, they don't wield personal influence, and they don't have chits with the leadership.

Incumbents, on the other hand, have seniority, respect, and the connections necessary to bring home the loot—a skill set known in election years as "experience." But that often means they've been around long enough to see their district's ideology shift beneath them.

Sure, some anti-establishment types make a career out of being outsiders. But they rarely have much clout within the establishment itself. Take Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. He's known for sticking with his ideals, such as including a public option in health care reform. Same with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who brought a single-payer bill to the Senate floor in December even though he knew it stood no chance. They may force their party to the left now and then. But more often they shout into the void—and ultimately compromise, as both Kucinich and Sanders did on health care reform.

It's also true that outsider candidates do often vote differently from their predecessors. But that not's necessarily because they're outsiders—it's because they have different views from their predecessors (presumably, that's part of the reason they defeated them). Oliverio, for example, would probably have voted against health care reform. Bridgewater would probably have voted against TARP. But neither vote would have had much to do with how long they had spent in Washington.

There's always a tension between the Washington establishment and the district back home. But it's a flexible one. When politicians "make the system work" for their district by bringing home goodies, constituents tend to give them some ideological leeway. Sometimes, though, the ideology gap becomes too great, the rubber band snaps, and suddenly Bob Bennett is looking for a job. His "outsider" replacement might better reflect his district's ideology. But by the time he's in a position to change the way Washington works, he will be, by definition, the establishment.

Are Democrats Screwed in 2010?

David Corn

Columnist
Posted:
05/14/10
If I were a Democratic strategist reading through the latest poll covering voters' preferences for the coming congressional elections, I'd shake my head and mutter, "We're screwed." Or maybe just cry.

A few weeks ago at a breakfast with reporters, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who heads the Democrats' House campaign committee, argued that though this is a difficult year for Democrats, given the anti-incumbent fever in the electorate, the Dems will manage to maintain a majority in the House by reminding voters that they are on the side of average Americans and that Republicans have stood with Wall Street and the Bush tax cuts favoring the wealthy.

The Dems do need a smart strategy, for this year is shaping up to be a throw-the-bums-out orgy. In the past week, the victims have been bipartisan. In Utah, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett was booted by Tea Party types within the state's Republican Party. In West Virginia, the ethics-tainted Rep. Alan Mollohan was ousted by primary voters. But Dems, as the party in power, have much more to fear from anti-incumbent passions than do the GOPers. What is to be done?

Bashing the GOPers as corporate lackeys seems as good an idea as any. Voters are ticked off at Wall Street, right? The Big Finance schemers set up a casino for their own profit, and when it imploded, the rest of the economy -- our economy -- crashed, and 8 million or so Americans lost their jobs. Tie the GOPers to these scoundrels and the voters won't dare go for Republicans. And it's not hard to make such a connection. The House Republicans en masse voted against the Wall Street reform bill last fall.

But getting back to that aforementioned poll -- which was conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal -- there's a slight problem: Americans don't see Democrats as championing their needs over those of corporate interests. The poll asked, when it comes to "problems in the financial markets," are Democrats in Congress "more concerned about the interests of average American or more concerned about the interests of large corporations?" Thirty-five percent said the D's are working for average Joe and Jane; 53 percent put the Dems in the corporate camp.

The Republicans fared worse: 20 percent of those surveyed said GOPers care about commoners; 71 percent said Republicans are champions for corporate interests. But the salient fact is that most Americans don't perceive the Democrats as truly on their side. Not even after the Democratic House passed Wall Street reform and bashed health insurance companies? Not even. (Remember all those earlier bailouts?) How well can a we're-fighting-for-you-against-corporate-interests strategy work, if most voters don't buy the basic premise?

There's other bad news in this poll for Democrats -- which isn't news, for most polls these days contain discouraging indicators for congressional Democrats. Fifty-six percent of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track. Only 21 percent approve of the job that Congress is doing. (Both of these numbers have been relatively steady since last summer.) Americans have a more favorable impression of GM than of the Democratic Party. But the Democrats do score better than BP and Goldman Sachs.

In theory, running as economic populists could boost Democrats in tough economic times and help them cope with anti-incumbent anger. But for this to work, they obviously need to sharpen their messages -- and their actions. Is there time for that?

Robin Hood Psychology

Robin Hood Psychology

We may be predisposed to steal from the rich and give to the poor.
By Zachary Pincus-Roth
Posted Thursday, May 13, 2010, at 10:03 AM ET

Most summer movie heroes have an uncontroversial moral mandate: Beat the bad guys; save the city; "With great power comes great responsibility." Robin Hood's crusade is more divisive: He steals from the rich and gives to the poor, redistributing wealth in favor of a more equitable society.

On opening weekend of Ridley Scott's film adaptation (starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett), the climate for Robin Hood's moral brand seems bleak—"socialism" has become a dirty word in America. But while Robin Hood's ideals are politically controversial, researchers in psychology and related fields are finding that humans seem inclined to engage in Robin Hood-like thinking, which they often call "egalitarian motives," "inequity aversion," or "variance reduction." In fact, there's a growing body of evidence that, despite appearances, we're Robin Hoods at heart.

To measure our attitudes toward inequality, researchers conduct "ultimatum games," a form of experimental economics frequently cited by journalists and pop psychologists to debunk the idea that we always act rationally. In an ultimatum game, the first test subject is given money that he must divide between himself and a second subject. The second subject then gets the opportunity to take the deal or to reject it—leaving both subjects with nothing. It turns out that people are inclined to reject the deal when the split is very unequal, even though they'd be better off taking what they can. The conclusion: People are willing to sacrifice their own income to punish those who don't distribute incomes equally.

Other studies have gone one step further, examining our willingness to redistribute wealth actively. In a 2007 study, for example, James Fowler of the University of California-San Diego, and a team of researchers gave 120 college students different, randomly generated amounts of money. After dividing the students into small groups, they gave them the opportunity to do nothing or to alter their fellow group-members' incomes by paying one monetary unit to either increase or decrease another player's wealth by three units. The subjects were then shuffled around into new groups and allowed to alter incomes again. (The process was repeated several times.) Overall, 71 percent of the reductions were targeted toward wealthier people, and 62 percent of the increases were given to poorer people. "Not only are people willing to punish the rich they're willing to reward the poor," Fowler told me in a recent interview. He has replicated the study several times and always finds similar results.

The Robin Hood impulse isn't just a modern quirk: Anthropologists have found that it dates back to early humans. The expert in this area is Christopher Boehm, whose 1999 book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior explains how, as far back as 6 million years ago, rank and file members of society protected egalitarianism by ganging up on alpha males whenever they emerged. In two more recent papers, Boehm—who uses observations of contemporary primitive societies as models for how our ancestors lived—writes that humans became even more egalitarian about 250,000 years ago, when they began hunting in groups. "You cannot have a single alpha male eating up all the meat," Boehm explains, "because they have to hunt as a team, and when the rest of the team isn't nourished, everyone loses out."

Primatologists have even found egalitarian impulses in nonhuman primates. In 2003, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal published a study entitled "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay," which found that brown capuchins refuse a lesser reward (a cucumber slice) when another capuchin gets a better one (a grape). This year, a paper Brosnan co-authored with four other researchers in Animal Behaviour found that the rich chimps also noticed the inequality—they were more likely to refuse the better reward (a grape) when their partner got a lesser one (a carrot this time). It's possible, Brosnan argues, that the chimps behaved in this apparently self-abnegating manner for a self-serving reason—they were afraid of getting beaten up when they went back to their social group. But the chimps still reacted to the inequality. According to Brosnan, monitoring inequality may help primates maintain cooperation. If two chimps are working together, and one is getting more out of it than another, they want to erase the gap so that the cheated partner doesn't walk off the project.

Our Robin Hood impulses aren't just vestigial—spurred by laboratory experiments but otherwise dormant—they still show up in the real world. Take Internet piracy, for instance. According to a 2001 New York Times report on a piracy ring, the people who stole software from their firms and handed it to pirates to post for free on the Internet viewed themselves as "Robin Hood" figures, stealing from the rich (the company) to give to the poor (themselves and other consumers like them). Other evidence abounds. Recently, three researchers—Anat Keinan (at Harvard), Donald R. Lehmann (Columbia) and Hannah Chang (now at Singapore Management University) studied this issue by conducting surveys and experiments with college students and observing online discussions of piracy. Their working paper, "Robin Hood Is Alive: The Perceived Morality and Social Acceptance of Pirated Products and Counterfeits Usage," found that consumers' feelings on the subject depended on the size of the company being stolen from—people who take from large companies often use an "anti-corporate" justification and feel less guilty, whereas pirating from a small company induces a lot more guilt.

Given these impulses toward Robin Hood-like behavior, you might think redistribution wouldn't have such a bad reputation in America. But, of course, it's not that simple. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has studied our political beliefs via surveys conducted at YourMorals.org. "Everybody wants fairness," he explains, "but fairness is such a tricky concept because there are many versions." Liberals prefer equality, when everyone has the same number of dollars. Conservatives prefer equity, when the ratio of what a person puts in to what he gets is the same for everyone—basically, that everyone gets what he or she deserves.

Fowler, on the other hand, believes that on the subject of redistribution, liberals and conservatives are more similar than we think. In one version of the public goods games mentioned earlier, he and his colleagues found that people who are in a political party of any kind—Democrat or Republican—are more likely to redistribute incomes than people who are not party members. "Everyone agrees that there should be some redistribution, but we disagree on how it should be done," Fowler says. "Republicans trust the market more. Democrats trust the government a little bit more."

[Successfully-propagated meme of Republicans and the corporatocracy: that the government's role in redistributing wealth is accurately and adequately characterized as transferring from the rich to the poor.  Invisiblized: the much greater transfer of wealth from working people to the corporate and investor sectors. -MBC]

This distinction may reveal why Robin Hood's appeal cuts across party lines: He has liberal goals but accomplishes them with conservative methods. Instead of operating within the government, he's against it, creating clever plots to foil a villainous bureaucrat, the Sheriff of Nottingham. He is a vigilante, operating outside of the system, going against the law to enforce his own moral code. Now that sounds like a summer movie hero.

Truthdig - Euro’s Crisis Has American Fingerprints

Truthdig - Euro’s Crisis Has American Fingerprints

Euro’s Crisis Has American Fingerprints
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/euro_crisis_has_american_fingerprints_20100511/
Posted on May 11, 2010

By William Pfaff

The obituaries written of the European currency, the euro, have demonstrated divergences in national and cultural temperaments, the European funereal and laden with gloom about the future, but unyielding, and the American and British cheerfully and self-satisfiedly shoveling earth onto a casket of euros already six feet into the ground. Defy the markets, will they, these Europeans! Suddenly, the lid of the casket flew open early Monday morning, and the euro burst forth, bigger, better and brighter than before!

Sunday night, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was prudently off in Moscow to watch a V-E Day parade in Red Square, rather than witness electoral humiliation in North Rhine-Westphalia (where her party lost because of voter resentment of pleasure-loving Greeks squandering German wealth amidst permanent sunshine!). Britain was politically decapitated, without a functioning government.

Before Merkel was back, the German government had run up the white flag. The euro crisis was over. If any individual was a winner, it was temperamental and widely derided French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has insisted since his election in 2007 that Europe (or the euro’s users) requires a politically sophisticated decision-making authority.

Europe now has Sarkozy and the French government, which put this deal together while the Germans gnashed their teeth. He insisted that a self-governing currency was as dangerous as a market left totally free to regulate itself, expected to do so in the interests of all because it infallibly pursued the interest of each—otherwise known as the Reagan-Greenspan-Ayn Rand-School-of-Chicago fantasy. Now the world has Dominique Strauss-Kahn running the IMF, Jean-Claude Trichet running the European Central Bank, and Sarkozy performing a miracle in Brussels.

What was decided in the pre-dawn hours of Monday was that some 750 billion to possibly a trillion euros would be committed to back the worth of the euro. This was not—as was constantly and erroneously reported—“bailing out” anyone. It was EU and IMF money to stand behind the repayment of bank loans to sovereign debtors—meaning governments. This automatically reduced the interest rates demanded by those offering the loans. The agreement staggered world markets.

Among the recent and anxious holders of Greek debt, suffering for their imprudence, have been many German banks, their own financial stability supposedly guaranteed by the loads of U.S. derivative and “securitized” toxic paper that they themselves eagerly bought in recent years, like rubes at a carnival sideshow. (Foreign readers should consult an American slang dictionary.) One must keep in mind that there would have been no Greek crisis if international traders had not deliberately set out to panic markets, drive Greek rates sky-high, and go home laden with ill-gotten gold.

The markets now are calmed, for the present. The Europeans, for their part, have come to believe that the project of European union does advance by way of crises. Whether this will be proved true this time has to be seen. Certainly President Sarkozy has been proved right.

By Tuesday, there already was widespread concern in the press, including the serious press, that the amount of austerity now demanded of all of the euro-zone economies may prove too severe for electorates to accept. For some economists, the agreement is one that will manufacture a long recession, if not a depression.

Austerity will destroy consumption. To apply the pledged measures of austerity will require billions of euros in savings on government expenditures. The rich will have to be taxed more.

Pensions will be cut, and begin later. Corporate business must be forced to pay taxes. In the current situation, corporations—particularly in the U.S.—pass billions in earnings through overseas tax havens, where their corporate “headquarters” are located (consisting of a token office with a brass plate), and then report huge earnings to their stockholders and next to nothing to their national tax authorities.

A Feb. 2 Washington Post analysis of the 2009 U.S. federal budget showed corporate taxation in the U.S. now amounts to only about one-third of the return from personal income taxation. This is in contrast with the situation in Europe. In the French 2009 budget, corporate taxation is higher than the total contribution from personal income taxation. It has been observed—by a European—that all great fortunes originate in crime.

There is a remedy to this, which has no chance of being passed through the American Congress. This would require a company to pay tax to the government of the country where its principal activities and management are located, on the entire income declared to the stockholders of that company.

A feature of modern capitalism, in which the United States seems currently the leader, is that the countries where corporations are effectively headquartered have impoverished schools, rusting infrastructure, and Third World social and health facilities, while billions are paid to corporate and banking executives. This is a moral scandal even though economic elites promoting the dominant economic theory prevailing until now in the leading free-market countries have identified morality as a source of market distortion and economic inefficiencies.

Self-admittedly profligate Greece did not invent the world crisis, nor did Portugal, Spain or Italy. The guilt lies with the United States, source of modern intellectual global leadership and exemplar of democracy. It did not even have a serious reason. Americans did it to make money gambling with other people’s money.

Visit William Pfaff’s website at www.williampfaff.com.

Chomsky: Rustbelt Rage

Rustbelt Rage -- In These Times

Rustbelt Rage
By Noam Chomsky May 4, 2010

On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.

Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.

His neighbor, in her '80s and surviving on cat food, was the "widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.

"Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on."

He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to try to take away Social Security, too.

Stack decided that he couldn't trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he also couldn't trust a government that cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and privileged; or a legal system in which "there are two `interpretations' for every law, one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us."

The government leaves us with "the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering tens of thousands of people a year," with care rationed largely by wealth, not need.

Stack traces these ills to a social order in which "a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities--and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours."

Stack's manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: "The communist creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."

Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close plants and destroy families and communities.

An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power.

Striking similarities exist in China, the world's second largest economy, investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.

Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China's rustbelt--the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.

In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their U.S. counterparts--in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now bitter fraud.

Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units "are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity," arousing "rage and desperation," Lee writes.

Lee's work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious, often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.

In the U.S., the Tea Party movement--and even more so the broader circles it reaches--reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party's anti-tax extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack's protest, but it is suicidal nonetheless.

California today is a dramatic illustration. The world's greatest public system of higher education is being dismantled.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he'll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. Other governors are joining in.

Meanwhile a newly powerful states' rights movement is demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs--a nice illustration of what Orwell called "doublethink": the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.

California's plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It's much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.

Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the one that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can constrain the depredations of private power.

However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial institutions--and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.

But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear the deficit. That way, business's cohorts in Washington may agree to cut benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).

At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the deficit--the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system.

It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, but it's far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.

Katrina vanden Heuvel - How to turn Congress Inc. back to just Congress

Katrina vanden Heuvel - How to turn Congress Inc. back to just Congress

How to turn Congress Inc. back to just Congress

By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Wednesday, May 12, 2010;

What is the biggest scandal of 2010 so far?

Allegations of fraudulent misrepresentation from Goldman Sachs? An oil spill that poses a threat to our environment and economy for generations? Mining operators freely ignoring safety violations and treating workers as disposable?

Each of these is bad. But perhaps the biggest political scandal is the one that aids and abets these others -- the pay-to-play system that buys up Congress, pollutes our political system with special-interest cash and deep-sixes the kind of bold reform agenda that we voted for and need.

The health-care industry has contributed more than $200 million to congressional candidates in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Is it any wonder that there was no public option in the final bill, or that Medicare isn't able to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors the same way the Veterans Administration does for veterans?

Big banks and Wall Street financial firms spent more than $500 million since the beginning of 2009 on lobbying and campaign contributions, the center reports. In just the first quarter of 2010, the finance, insurance and real estate sectors spent more than $123 million on 2,057 lobbyists. Any bets on whether the final financial reform bill will create the kind of robust, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would serve as a watchdog with teeth?

Big oil and gas spent nearly $170 million lobbying in 2009 -- nearly $1 billion in the past 12 years -- and has given more than $140 million to members of Congress in the past 20 years. Is it any surprise that we've seen so many exemptions from environmental studies for oil-exploration plans? Or that the climate bill is stalled and insufficient to confront the global warming crisis?

It is clear that the kind of strong reforms we urgently need won't be achieved simply by electing a new president or new members of Congress. Despite the voters' mandate for change, the underlying problem of Washington -- what author and Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser calls "so damn much money" -- remains unaltered and is in many ways more powerful than even before. In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision -- which awarded corporations the rights of citizens when it comes to electioneering, allowing them to use their coffers to manipulate political discourse -- the prospect of a Congress "brought to you by (insert corporate sponsor here)" has only grown.

Americans must fight back with legislation that will help organized people defeat organized money. I'm not speaking of the Disclose Act -- a good response to Citizens United that would make corporate campaign funding more transparent. Democratic leaders must recognize that such efforts are mere triage and fail to get to the heart of the money problem in Washington. Congress should also pass the Fair Elections Now Act.

This legislation would sever ties between big-money campaign contributors and members of Congress, who, in the Senate, must raise an average of $27,000 every week they are in office in order to run competitive races. The bill would bar participating congressional candidates from accepting contributions larger than $100 and allow them to run honest campaigns with a blend of small donations and public matching funds.

Sponsored by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin and Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill has 18 Senate co-sponsors (12 of whom signed on since the Citizens United decision) and 149 bipartisan cosponsors in the House. Activists are hopeful there will be a House vote as soon as this summer, and Durbin reportedly will push for the Senate to take it up after the House does.

Fighting for this bill is good policy and good politics. A recent Greenberg/Mark McKinnon poll found that voters support the Fair Elections Now Act by a 2-1 margin, 62 percent to 31 percent. Independents support it 67 percent to 30 percent. Is there a candidate in the country who wouldn't gain votes by saying, "I want a political system in which someone who doesn't take more than $100 from anybody can run a competitive race for Congress. I want a political process that makes Congress listen to their constituents and allows them to ignore the lobbyists with fat checks in hand"?

It was a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, who had it right when he told Congress, "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law." He was so worried about the power of the trusts that he called for public financing of elections. More than 100 years later we can take a desperately needed step to protect the public interest and clean up our politics by passing this legislation.

Back to Petroleum - NewsTrust.net

Back to Petroleum

Thanks to the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the public is finally seeing through BP's decade-long greenwashing campaign.

BY KATE SHEPPARD | MAY 3, 2010

A decade ago, the company then known as British Petroleum launched a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to rebrand itself as the greenest of oil giants. Since then, it has gone only by the initials "BP" and has popularized a new slogan: "Beyond Petroleum." The campaign launched with a $200 million public relations and advertising budget and a new logo featuring the now-ubiquitous green-and-yellow sunburst. Ten years later, the company still spends big on advertising, dropping $76 million on radio and TV ads touting its image in the United States just last year.

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