January 13, 2012

How Much Is an Earth, and Do You Have One in Extra Large?

A new book suggests that "It's the economy, stupid," may be more than political strategy; it may also be the key to environmental sustainability. The book is "Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet," by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The argument developed is not just that the consumer choices of an individual won't save the planet without collective action, but also that the only collective action that will save us is abandoning the whole idea of consumer choices.

Pierre-Louis lays the groundwork for her argument by walking us through the hazards of supposedly environmental approaches to numerous fields. First is clothing, in which a big trend is toward organic cotton. While reducing pesticides is all to the good, Pierre-Louis writes, growing cotton -- any cotton -- is a rapid way to exhaust the earth's stores of fresh water. Among the preferable proposals the author suggests is creating or altering your own clothing so that it means more to you and you throw it away less rapidly. The low-hanging fruit in improving our clothing practices is in quantity, not quality: buy less clothing!

Next comes diet. Our poisonous farming practices are killing the Mississippi River, exhausting our underground water supplies, drying up the Colorado (on this I recommend the 3-D movie "Grand Canyon Adventure&quot , eradicating biodiversity, eliminating soil, and consuming fossil fuels. Genetically modified crops are outrageous failures on their own terms, resulting in increased, rather than diminished, use of pesticides and herbicides. Last week, I would add, the Obama administration approved new Monsanto corn despite 45,000 negative public comments and 23 positive, corn that will mean the widespread use of a major ingredient in Agent Orange as herbicide. According to Pierre-Louis, we cannot ethically shop our way out of this, not even by buying local, and we couldn't even if products were meaningfully labeled and the accuracy of the labeling was verified. Instead the easiest solution lies in the fact that, in the United States, we throw away 40 percent of the food we buy. Stop doing that! Start buying and using only what you need.

What about toiletries? Did you know there's antifreeze in makeup and deodorant? Were you aware there are irritants, poisons, and carcinogens in lots of toothpastes, shampoos, and soaps. You'll be proud to learn that hair-care products banned in many countries are quite popular and profitable in ours. Makeup tends to be such nasty stuff that it becomes hard not to find it unattractive. And shopping right won't fix this. "Natural" on a label means absolutely nothing. "Organic" might mean something when there's a USDA Certified logo and when there's an indication of how much of the product is organic. But nobody's actually checking to make sure labels are honest. It is helpful to buy products with the fewest and clearest ingredients, but -- as in other areas -- the obvious solution here is to stop slopping quite so much goop on ourselves.

Then there are cars. In an absolute sense, despite the small U.S. population, as well as on a per capita basis, the United States has more cars than anywhere else. Our 3 percent of the species produces 45 percent of automotive greenhouse gas emissions. I'm less scornful than Pierre-Louis of people who buy a Toyota Prius in order to appear environmentally correct. What in the world is wrong with that? It's certainly better than waving a "Drill, Baby, Drill!" flag. The trouble is that, as Pierre-Louis points out, even if all of our cars ran on air, the manufacturing of the cars, and the construction of the roads and highways, would still destroy life as we have known it. We need to create ways to live without all the driving, ways to lie without moving as much, or to live with walking, or with mass transit.

An electric car doesn't make things worse; it just doesn't solve the problem. A metal water bottle may make things worse. Plastic water bottles are a disaster, of course. The plastic ends up in the ocean, or in shower washes and toothpastes, or in the stomachs of fish eaten by larger fish eaten by us. But the manufacture of metal water bottles does all kinds of environmental and cultural damage. The solution -- by this point you may see it coming -- is to use public water fountains, drink at home out of a cup or a glass, and not settle on something else to buy to solve your hydration needs. Stop buying stuff!

Environmental labeling on house construction is as misleading as on food and shampoo, and Al Gore's "green" 10,000-square-foot home is, even though a retrofit rather than new, just too darn big to be green. We need to build smaller houses, and longer-lasting houses. In fact, we need to build longer-lasting furniture and everything else that goes into the houses. Furniture is for life, or for several lives, not to keep just until a new catalog comes in the mail. We need to retrofit old buildings and build up density, not create starter castles with high-tech enviro-innovations. Rammed earth houses make sense, as do straw-bale houses, cob building, and underground or earth-sheltered homes. Small ones, meaning ones like our parents and grandparents found plenty big enough.

Pierre Louis turns next to energy and, somewhat discordantly points out the problems with coal. Are there people who really believe the "clean coal" nonsense? If so, there's a chapter here just for them.

Ethanol comes in for as serious criticism as coal. It can be as bad for the air as gasoline, and it takes almost as much energy to produce it as is produced in it. The author might have made a similar but even stronger case against nuclear energy, but for some reason skipped it. Instead, she focuses on the limitations of solar and hydro power. Pierre Louis's recommendation, as you may have guessed by now, is to seek the easy and massive gains to be had through increasing efficiency and reducing consumption. These are two separate approaches, and the second one may be the larger. We can use energy more efficiently, but -- even more so -- we can just use less of it.

In fact, we can use less of lots of things. We have more and more televisions in our homes, even as useful content available through those televisions shrivels away like a shallow lake. Why?

A quarter of U.S. leisure time is spent doing something I consider a chore and Pierre Louis comes close to considering ecocide, namely shopping. Why? Seriously: what in the world for?

Now, one way in which we could do less of everything and stop trying solutions that cause new problems of their own would, of course, be to slow, halt, or reverse the growth of the human population. For some reason this idea is not developed in the book. Perhaps the author thinks it's unnecessary. More likely, she thinks there is something easier and more effective and, therefore, more urgent. Regardless of whether the population is growing, we need to break free from the idea that something else must be constantly growing: the economy.

What if shopping were not a patriotic duty? What if buying lots of cheap plastic disposable crap wasn't the way to make sure our neighbors have careers or incomes? The most significant reductions in U.S. carbon emissions have come as a result of economic recession. We need a different economic system, one that does not depend on infinite economic growth in a finite world. But might there not then be great unemployment and suffering as a result of insufficient shopping?

I'd like to suggest part of the answer, as I think Pierre-Louis frames the problem a little more clearly than the solution, and I think there's at least one piece of the puzzle that can easily be provided. Right now over half of our public treasury, our federal discretionary spending, goes into something not mentioned in "Green Washed" or just about any other environmentalist book, despite the fact that it is our greatest consumer of petroleum and most wide-ranging destroyer of our environment. I mean the war machine.

If instead of military spending, we invested our public riches in human needs, we might -- through some trial and error -- see our way clear to a world not based on growing our economies. We could invest in green energy jobs, in research, and in experiments in local sustainable lifestyles. We could invest in education, mass-transit, and healthcare. We could invest in retirement security and unemployment security, and reduce the number of hours people needed to work, commute, and shop. We could rally people around a national and global campaign of nothing less than saving the world by becoming citizens rather than consumers.

There's not much that you couldn't do with a trillion dollars a year and the will to put it to good use instead of continuing to pour it into waste and destruction.

January 12, 2012

What We Owe to Bertha von Suttner

Just saying her name sounds like a joke: Baroness Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner, Gräfin, née Countess Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau. And when she began talking about ending war in mid-nineteenth century Austria it wasn't her name that was treated as a joke. Yet by the turn of the century, her idea seemed to be one whose time had come.

Bertha von Suttner's novel "Ground Arms," or "Lay Down Your Arms," was widely described as the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of war abolition. It was doing and would accomplish for war what Harriet Beecher Stowe's book had for slavery. I can't encourage you strongly enough to take a quick break from the inanities of presidential debates and football announcers and buy the book, borrow the book, or read it free online.

It was principally this book, along with years of activism, journalism, and organizational leadership in the peace movement (and not a single Iranian scientist's murder) that won von Suttner the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel website reads: "The effect of Die Waffen nieder [Lay Down Your Arms], published late in 1889, was … so real and the implied indictment of militarism so telling that the impact made on the reading public was tremendous."

The impact was not so much the love of the novel's characters. Nor was it a new understanding of how hellish war can be. The power of the impact, I think, came from the way the book framed war abolition within a story of advancing civilization. Humanity was developing, according to this story, after endless eons of fighting off ferocious beasts and fighting off ferocious humans. Violence was on the wane. The beasts were gone, and the humans were learning to speak and negotiate. City states were united as nations. Blood feuds were left behind. Dueling among individuals was being replaced by discussions, arbitrations, courts of law, and -- more importantly -- by a new conception of honor. No longer would disgrace fall on the man who tolerated an affront so much as on the buffoon who delivered it.

War itself was being civilized. The Red Cross was seeking to tend the wounded. Atrocities were being banned. Disputes among royals were being mocked by republicans as proper grounds for wars. Arbitration was proving itself as an alternative to slaughter. With slavery and pillage being left behind, with religion beginning to fade, with the technology of weaponry rapidly advancing, war was losing its economic motive, it's theocratic justification, and its suitability as a test of individual skill or courage. The ending of war was an idea that went from fringe craziness to mainstream popularity during Bertha von Suttner's lifetime, and in great measure because of her. The Nobel website reports:

"In August of 1913, already affected by beginning illness, the Baroness spoke at the International Peace Congress at The Hague where she was greatly honored as the «generalissimo» of the peace movement. In May of 1914 she was still able to take an interest in preparations being made for the twenty-first Peace Congress, planned for Vienna in September. But her illness - suspected cancer - developed rapidly thereafter, and she died on June 21, 1914, two months before the erupting of the world war she had warned and struggled against."

When the idea of ending slavery came and developed and took hold and spread, it could not be stopped by the occurrence of a sudden catastrophic outbreak of slavery. Slavery is not like a hurricane. It was a practice that went on and could be ended. It might be brought back, but only slowly, not in a mad rush of passion before anyone had time to think it through. War was different. The ending of war was an idea whose time had come. And then time halted. Time froze. The evolution of civilization was instantly thrown into reverse.

In von Suttner's novel, a crowd begins to sing pro-war songs in excitement over a new and exciting war, and her two main characters, husband and wife, converse:

"'See, Martha," exclaimed Frederick, 'this spark which spreads from one to another, uniting this whole mass and making every heart beat higher, is love --'

'Do you believe so? It is a song inspiring hate.'

'That makes no difference; a common hatred is but another form of love. When two or three or more are bound together by the same feeling, they love one another. When the time arrives for a nobler, broader aspiration than the interests of nationality, namely, the cause of humanity, then our ideal will be attained.'

'Ah, when will that time come?' I sighed.

'When? One can speak but relatively. As a length of time compared with our personal existence -- never; when compared with the existence of our race -- tomorrow.'"

Peace activists, like suffragettes, and like reformers of all kinds in this period, accepted that they might not succeed during their lifetimes, that like Dr. Martin Luther King they might not make it to the mountain top, but they were completely and absolutely confident that in the coming decades or centuries victory would be won. No doubt, that confidence contributed to their willingness to work for their good causes despite the slow or invisible pace of progress.

Now, of course, we are up against environmental destruction and the potential for complete elimination of our species through war. We feel we do not have the time to toil slowly for our descendants' inevitable advancement. But here's the important point: we don't need long. We as a culture reached the point of outgrowing war a century ago, and the course of progress was thrown off track. War makes absolutely no more sense today than male nipples or fathers giving away brides or the prohibition on ending a sentence with a preposition. War is an anachronism. It's a freak meme traveled forward in time purely because of the power it has to disrupt cultural advancement.

World War I, once it had ended, only strengthened the drive to end war, but it also strengthened the opposing forces. World War II did the same, and the strength it gave to the pro-war forces was much greater. The idea of ending war was set aside as a dream because its time had come and it had not been fulfilled. Nothing looks weaker than an idea whose time has come and gone. But ending slavery remained a sensible cultural advance that had once appeared fantastic and naïve. So did ending feuds and duels and corporal punishment and infanticide and witch burning. Living in an environmentally sustainable manner is another idea whose time has come and is rapidly going. This idea cannot be fulfilled without ending war, but ending war missed its chance; and so environmentalism steers clear of pacifism, to its own serious -- possibly fatal -- detriment.

An idea whose time has come and gone is an idea that can be rapidly revived. Renaissance is a common concept because we have had cultural renaissances before. They require humility, and they require work, but they are far easier and more fruitful than trying to reinvent the wheel.

January 9, 2012

Corporate Personhood Worse, Ending It Easier, Than You Think

Don't take it from me. Take it from the book being published today that will mainstream the movement to end corporate personhood: "Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do, And What You Can Do About It," by Jeff Clements with foreword by Bill Moyers.

Clements traces the development of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood back long before the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision two years ago this month, in particular to President Richard Nixon's appointment of Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court in 1972. Led by Powell's radical new conception of corporate rights, Clements shows, the court began striking down laws that protected living breathing persons' rights in areas including the environment, tobacco, public health, food, drugs, financial regulation, and elections.

In 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had speech rights that prevented banning their money from an election, a conclusion that might have been nearly incomprehensible a decade earlier before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and various corporate foundations began filling our public discourse with phrases like "corporate speech." In 1980 Congress forbade the Federal Trade Commission from protecting children or students from junk food advertising and sales. In 1982 corporate speech rights in the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a state law that had attempted to block energy companies from promoting greater energy consumption. In the 1990s, the Monsanto corporation, whose genetically engineered drug was banned in many countries, won the right to include it in milk in the United States and the "right not to speak," thereby overturning a law requiring that milk be labeled to indicate the drug's presence.

Decision after decision has extended corporate rights to a position of priority over actual human rights on everything from food and water and air to education and healthcare and wars. The ground has shifted. In 1971 Lewis Powell argued on behalf of the cigarette companies that they had a corporate person's right to use cartoons and misleading claims to get young people hooked on nicotine, and he was laughed out of court. In 2001, the Supreme Court struck down a state law banning cigarette ads within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds. The reason? The sacred right of the corporate person, which carries more weight now than the rights of the people of a community to protect their children ... er, excuse me, their "replacement smokers."

And why do corporate rights carry so much weight? One reason is that, as Clements documents and explains, "transnational corporations now dominate our government" through election spending. This is why a civilized single-payer health coverage system like those found in the rest of the wealthy nations of the world is not "practical." This is why cutting military spending back to 2007 levels would mean "amageddon" even though in 2007 it didn't. This is why our government hands oil corporations not only wars and highways but also massive amounts of good old money. This is why we cannot protect our mountains or streams but can go to extraordinary lengths to protect our investment bankers.

"Since the Citizens United decision in 2010," Clements writes, "hundreds of business leaders have condemned the decision and have joined the work for a constitutional amendment to overturn expanded corporate rights." You might not learn this from the corporate media, but there is a widespread and growing mainstream understanding that abuse by oversized mega-corporations has been disastrous for ordinary businesses as well as communities, families, and individuals. Clements' turns out to be a pro-business, albeit anti-U.S. Chamber of Commerce, book.

And what can be done? We can build an independent, principled, and relentless Occupy movement and include as a central demand the amending of the U.S. Constitution to end corporate personhood. Clements' book offers a draft amendment, a sample resolution, a collection of frequently asked questions (and answers), a list of organizations, websites, resources, books, and campaigns.

This is doable, and it is what we should do this election year so that in future election years we might actually have elections.

January 1, 2012

Obama Crowned Himself on New Year's Eve

These were among the complaints registered the last time this nation had a king:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
"He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
"He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
"He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
"He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
"He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
"For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
"For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
"For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

To prevent the U.S. government from behaving like a king, the drafters of the U.S. Constitution empowered an elected legislature to write every law, to declare every war, and to remove its executive from office. To further prevent the abuse of individuals' rights, those authors wrote into the Constitution, even prior to the Bill of Rights, the right to habeas corpus and the right never to be punished for treason unless convicted in an open court on the testimony of at least two witnesses to an overt act of war or assistance of an enemy.

President Barack Obama waited until New Year's Eve to take an action that I suspect he wanted his willfully deluded followers to have a good excuse not to notice. On that day, Obama issued an unconstitutional signing statement rewriting a law as he signed it into law, a practice that candidate Obama had rightly condemned. The law that Obama was signing was the most direct assault yet seen on the basic structure of self-governance and human rights that once made all the endless U.S. shouting of "We're number one!" significantly less ludicrous. The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police-and-war state.

President Obama has claimed the power to imprison people without a trial since his earliest months in office. He spoke in front of the Constitution in the National Archives while gutting our founding document in 2009. President Obama has claimed the power to torture "if needed," issued an executive order claiming the power of imprisonment without trial, exercised that power on a massive scale at Bagram, and claimed and exercised the power to assassinate U.S. citizens. Obama routinely kills people with unmanned drones.

The bill just signed into law, as sent to the President, said this:

"Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force."

In other words, Congress was giving its stamp of approval to the unconstitutional outrages already claimed by the President. But then, why create a new law at all? Well, because some outrages are more equal than others, and Congress had chosen to specify some of those and in fact to expand some of them. For example:

"Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war."

And this:

"The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following: (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force."

Jon Stewart explained when those detained without trial under the law might be released: "So when the war on terror ends, and terror surrenders and is no longer available as a human emotion, you are free to go."

An exception for U.S. legal residents and citizens was kept out of the bill at President Obama's request.

So why did Obama threaten to veto the bill initially and again after it passed the Senate? Well, one change made by the conference committee was this (note the crossed-through text):



"The Secretary of Defense President may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary President submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States."

The reference here is to military tribunals. The President — that is, the current one and future ones — need not hand someone over even to a military tribunal if . . . well, if he (or she) chooses not to.

That was the most power Obama could have transferred to the White House in this bill. But it was not absolute power, and was therefore not good enough. Hence the signing statement, the relevant portion of which begins:

"Moving forward, my Administration will interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our safety depends and upholds the values on which this country was founded."

This is Bush-Cheneyspeak for "I will not comply with the following sections of this law despite signing it into law."

After having persuaded the Congress to remove an exception for U.S. legal residents, Obama has the nerve in the signing statement to assert, not that the law makes any such exception, but that he personally will choose to do so, at least for U.S. citizens. Future presidents may lock U.S. citizens up without trials, but Obama won't do so. He promises:

"I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law."

The first two sentences above are highly unusual if not unprecedented. Most, if not all, of Bush and Obama's law-altering signing statements up to this point have not sought to clarify what a particular administration would choose to do. Rather, they have focused on declaring parts of the laws invalid. Usually this is done in a manner misleadingly similar to the third sentence above. By claiming the power to interpret a law in line with the Constitution, Bush and Obama have each on numerous occasions asserted the view that the Constitution grants presidents far-reaching powers that cannot be restricted by legislation. If Obama had wanted to deny that this law could be applied to U.S. citizens (or legal residents), the above paragraph would look very different, although equally unusual in that it would then be rejecting power rather than claiming it.

Also note, as Marcy Wheeler has already pointed out, Section 1021 applies to any detention, and Obama promises only not to subject U.S. citizens to indefinite military detention. While locked away forever without a trial you'll be able to take comfort that yours is a non-military imprisonment.

Also, remember that Obama claims and exercises the power to kill U.S. citizens or anyone else (arguably at least as serious a violation of rights as imprisonment!), and for that he will use the military if he sees fit, or even allow the military to operate freely.

Also notice that legal residents are not included in the category of citizens.

Next, Obama declares Section 1022 on military custody "ill-conceived." His personal right to a waiver, won through the conference committee, was not enough. Obama insists on also erasing this section of law: "I reject," he writes,

"any approach that would mandate military custody where law enforcement provides the best method of incapacitating a terrorist threat. While section 1022 is unnecessary and has the potential to create uncertainty, I have signed the bill because I believe that this section can be interpreted and applied in a manner that avoids undue harm to our current operations. I have concluded that section 1022 provides the minimally acceptable amount of flexibility to protect national security. Specifically, I have signed this bill on the understanding that section 1022 provides the executive branch with broad authority to determine how best to implement it, and with the full and unencumbered ability to waive any military custody requirement, including the option of waiving appropriate categories of cases when doing so is in the national security interests of the United States. … I will therefore interpret and implement section 1022 in the manner that best preserves the same flexible approach that has served us so well for the past 3 years and that protects the ability of law enforcement professionals to obtain the evidence and cooperation they need to protect the Nation."

Obama goes on to reject several other sections of the law, including restrictions on his unlimited power to rendition prisoners to other countries. Among the notable rejections is this:

"Sections 1023-1025 needlessly interfere with the executive branch's processes for reviewing the status of detainees. Going forward, consistent with congressional intent as detailed in the Conference Report, my Administration will interpret section 1024 as granting the Secretary of Defense broad discretion to determine what detainee status determinations in Afghanistan are subject to the requirements of this section."

In other words, U.S. prisoners held in Afghanistan will not be given even any formal pretense of a legalistic review of their status unless Obama and his Secretary of "Defense" see fit.

I've just been editing a forthcoming book in which one of the contributors writes:

"In 1971, Congress passed the Anti-Detention Act, 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a), which states that "no person shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress." Fred Koramatsu, who had brought the unsuccessful case before the Supreme Court, was eventually awarded the Medal of Honor. Congress apologized and provided for limited reparations for this heinous act."

The author is referring to the unconstitutional indefinite detention of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. This type of criminal abuse for which Congress had to apologize and pay reparations, and for which there is a misleadingly pro-war-looking memorial hidden between the U.S. Capitol and Union Station, has now been effectively sanctioned by our Constitutional Scholar in Chief.

My chief regret is that we have not seen the major resistance we could have, and without any doubt would have, seen to this if only Obama were a Republican.

December 27, 2011

24 Items Not to Hoard

1. Toilet Paper. Instead of hoarding toilet paper for the coming disaster and anarchy that should never be out of your mind if you want to remain easily manipulable by cynical demagogues, invest in providing clean and accessible bathrooms for the homeless. This will radically improve the lives of millions of Americans and, as a happy side effect, make it much easier for us to engage in long-term demonstrations and nonviolent resistance actions in public places.

2. Paper Towels. Rather than quietly stocking up on paper towels before the riff raff figure out your secrets and buy out the entire endangered national supply of this critical survival tool, bring all of your paper towels and all of your friends to a community clean-up of every scrubable surface surrounding a nearby fossil fuel burning facility. As a bonus, you'll get to meet some people and together you'll feel less terrified.

3. Coffee Filters. You could stock up on this truly stupid item, along with everything else needed to put it to use, including coffee, a coffee maker, and electricity, or you could just get a coffee maker that doesn't use filters, or — preferably — drop the unnecessary habit of drinking coffee, along with all of your other bad habits, like fear, obedience, subservience, scapegoating, wishful thinking, revenge, racism, sadism, demonization, and the shelling out of hard-earned money for moronic lists of the critical items you'll need to survive the coming catastrophe.

4. Trash Bags. Instead of hoarding this bass-ackward non-solution, try composting the compostable, recycling the recyclable, and reusing the reusable, as well as burning the burnable to generate the heat you'll need when the hot air production from right wing pundits has been silenced by a communist conspiracy catastrophe.

5. Zip type Freezer Bags. This will always be a really dumb thing to hoard, and all of this crap you're hoarding depends on a huge supply of completely uninterrupted electricity. If you want that, you should focus first on a few things you cannot pick up at the grocery store, such as a wind mill, solar hot water, photovoltaics, tight windows, and good insulation. If you want to get off the grid, don't do it by building your plan around a completely reliable grid while buying useless crap at the supermarket. Do it by getting off the grid. Or create small grids with your immediate neighbors. Or get together to demand sustainable solutions as a society that don't destroy the earth's climate, motivate wars, or radically concentrate wealth, all of which factors contribute the possibility of the catastrophe you fear.

6. Coolers, various sizes. I hate to point this out to you, but coolers are for picnics, not long-term survival and food-hoarding.

7. Shovels. Unless you're going to grow extra arms, you can really only use one shovel at a time. And if you're going to enlist your neighbors' arms in a joint community effort, it would probably be a good idea not to be such an ass and hoard all the shovels.

8. Soaps and Cleansers, Sponges and other scratchy pads. Oh, come on! Your freezers are going to work but not your dishwasher? Let's admit that there's a bit of fantasizing here. If you want a disaster, I've got great news for you. There is one. Go help! Go cook and wash dishes in a homeless shelter or soup kitchen right now. Plan a trip to a part of the world suffering from war or hurricane or corporate trade agreement. Join in the relief effort. Maybe the disaster won't spread to your dishwasher after all.

9. Cotton Rounds. Now, if I get cut, I'd rather have a bandaid than a ball of cotton. And if I need to start a fire, I'd rather have matches than anything else. Rather than hoard your cotton balls, I recommend throwing them at your senators and misrepresentatives who are refusing to create a civilized single-payer health system in this country. If they ask you why, tell them you're helping them prepare for the coming communist takeover.

10. Paper. Do not hoard paper. Take a bit of it and go teach somebody something. Teach yourself. Teach your neighbors. Teach children. And educate those who fail to understand the need for a well-educated populace. Hoarding education and education supplies is something only the severely uneducated would do.

11. Pens and Pencils, especially the click pencil type that don’t [sic] need a sharpener. Because you're not going to want a knife. It's more important to have plastic bags and cotton balls. After all, this is not the list of weapons. We're trying to stoke and profit from paranoia without bearing any responsibility for the increased weapons sales, gun accidents, suicides, or murders that result.

12. Rubber bands. OK, we just put this one in here as a paid advertisement for rubber bands, but can you prove they will not be essential? Wouldn't it be smarter to stock up on them before they sell out, in case they turn out to be essential after they're all gone and your neighbors are refusing to share them with you because you hoarded all the shovels and toilet paper?

13. Tape. This can be valuable for capturing terrorists, advertising a debilitating fear of anthrax by pretending to seal your house shut, or building artwork out of your coffee filters. But how much of it do you need? What if you just bought what you needed and everyone else did the same. Then why would you need to hoard it? Are you planning to sell this hoarded stuff at a profit? And if so, wouldn't you rather be the guy who hoarded alcohol than the guy who hoarded scotch tape?

14. Sewing Kits. How are you going to attach the necessary tea bags to your hats? Tape?!

15. Matches. These will be critical for cooking frozen food over cotton balls.

16. Salt. Remember that Gandhi marched for the right to hoard entire four-car garages full of salt rather than expose his family to the mercies of a Socialist government that was telling him salt was bad for his health.

17. Aluminum Foil Wrap. This may be needed for coating your hats after sewing on the tea bags.

18. Candles. These can be used for cooking your hamburgers if you run out of cotton balls.

19. Can Opener. Because planting a garden is a liberal plot to infect you by producing your food in a giant pile of dirt.

20. Basic Tools. You never know what you might have to build: a coffee maker, a waterboarding table, a social contract.

21. Handyman’s Hardware Assortment: screws, nuts and bolts, wire, nails, etc. Because if your neighbors cannot find any nails or screws, they will be more content, more self-sufficient, and less likely to crucify you as punishment for your superior entrepreneurship.

22. 5-Gallon Gas Can Containers. These will be critical for maintaining supplies of our essential bodily fluids.

23. Round Magnifying Glass. Now, let's think about this. Will a magnifying glass, even a round one, provide you with what could have been provided by a group of friends and neighbors working together? Maybe we're trying to focus on the tiny details so much that we're missing the bigger picture. Look at the nations that have nonviolently overthrown tyrants, rejected rigged elections, ended foreign occupations, and abolished systemic abuses of rights? What if those people had hidden away in their houses with large supplies of magnifying glasses and gas containers? And how many magnifying glasses can you actually use anyway? Is the point to provide yourself with something supposedly essential or to deny it to others? Because you are already denying others the essential provision of your cooperative collaboration in building a better world. And by denying it to others, you are depriving yourself as well.

24. Envelopes. Neither rain nor sleet nor plague of anarchy . . . . Oh for godsake, do you really think the mailman is going to bring you mail after you've sat by while the post office was dismantled and then focused your energy on hoarding plastic bags and salt? Let's grow up before it's too late. Let's write some letters and send them while we still can. Let's put something kind and constructive in them whenever possible.

25. If you've already hoarded anything, take it to an occupy encampment now!

December 27, 2011

Stop Picking on the Poor Plutocrats

I stopped by a corporate chain bookstore this week and checked out the "Current Affairs" section. I was a little surprised to discover that according to a dozen or more books dominating the display we are all under a vicious life-and-death assault from a raving, drooling mob of communist devils led by that well-known pinko guerrilla Barack Obama.

Of course, further investigation tends to reveal that the crimes of this mythical nouveau-Soviet assault by Democrats in D.C. are a combination of tasks performed for their masters on Wall Street and tasks they would never perform even under enhanced interrogation technique. The Obama-gang of rabid leftists stands accused of bailing out banksters and mega corporations, as of course they have eagerly done, just as have their Republican partners in crime. And they stand accused of taxing the rich and cutting the military while providing healthcare, education, retirement security, renewable energy, and affordable housing to the least well-off among us, as of course they will do the day Newt Gingrich turns monogamous.

I've just read a forthcoming book whose publisher I doubt will pay to place it in prominent display among the breathless coverage of the coming commie apocalypse. It's called "Pity the Billionaire" by Thomas Frank. On its surface, the book is a rather blatant argument for self-publishing, since the delay that traditional publishers create has rendered the book out-of-date before it's publication. Frank's book treats the Tea Party as the latest thing and has never heard of Occupy.

In the dated world of "Pity the Billionaire" an explanation is sought precisely for the absence of something like Occupy, as well as for the bizarre presence of the Tea Party:

"Now, There is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom. What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when freemarket theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero."

Frank compares the response to the crash of 1929 with the response to our latest Great Recession and suggests that, "should you happen to hear an homage to the spirit of the Boston Tea Party nowadays, the demands that follow will be the opposite of those striking farmers of 1932. What makes the rebel's blood boil today is not the plight of the debtor but the possibility that such 'losers' might escape their predicament — that the government might step in and do the things those Iowa farmers wanted it to do eighty years ago."

Frank dissects the incredible inversions of fact and logic that constitute the victimology of the meritocratic victors of the Ayn Randian, Glenn Beckian Tea Party mythology. But he concludes the book with this sentiment:

"It is preposterous. It is contemptible. But you know what it's better than? It's better than nothing. . . . The real tragedy of the Great Recession is that moneyed interests no longer have anything to fear from us, and they know it."

Arguably that has changed in the past few months, and there is potential for greater change to come in this regard. If the Occupy movement did not exist, we would have to invent it. Frank, writing when it did not yet exist, was pointing out the need for its invention. Talking to the media in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., some weeks back, the most interesting interviews for me were those with Northern European journalists who would ask me with sheer bewilderment to explain the phenomenon of people demonstrating to demand that they not be provided with healthcare. These reporters did not ask why our country lacked any popular movement for peace, justice, and the social good. It was too late to ask that long-standing and most vexing of questions.

But what the next several months will bring is anyone's guess. The analysis Frank provides of the Fox News fantasy of noble entrepreneurs victimized by the Socialist State will remain valuable regardless. But it may continue to require contextualizing in a country with a healthy and active resistance movement from the left. Or, on the other hand, it may appear perfectly up-to-date and immediately applicable to everything around us. After all, this is an election year. After 10 months of election obsession and lesser-evilism, this place could look more or less the way it would have had Occupy never arisen.

That situation would leave us with no option but to confront this question, which we ought to come to an understanding of regardless, the question of why people would expend energy to urge each other to pity billionaires.

December 26, 2011

DU Holiday Greetings: Goodwill and Death Threats

This person
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=profile&uid=279274

sent me on Thursday a lovely DU Mail Message with the subject:
fuckwit

and the text:
Can you please remove yourself from the gene pool? Preferably in the most painful and agonizing way possible? Retard

Die painfully okay? Prefearbly by getting crushed to death in a
garbage compactor, by getting your face cut to ribbons with a
pocketknife, your head cracked open with a baseball bat, your stomach
sliced open and your entrails spilled out, and your eyeballs ripped
out of their sockets. Fucking bitch

I really hope that you get curb-stomped. It'd be hilarious to see you
begging for help, and then someone stomps on the back of your head,
leaving you to die in horrible, agonizing pain. Faggot

Shut the fuck up f aggot, before you get your face bashed in and cut
to ribbons, and your throat slit.

December 22, 2011

Prospects for Peace on Earth

http://warisacrime.org/content/prospects-peace-earth

December 22, 2011

Obama less popular on DU than war-making

Did you ever notice the vicious contempt for war opposition on DU?

I'm very encouraged to see the rapidly growing willingness to get honest about Obama.

War deserves no less.

December 16, 2011

Set Your Doomsday Clock to 11:51

[p]The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit further still.

[p]I'm not referring to the “doomsday” [a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/panetta-doomsday-scenario-may-exaggerate-cuts.html"]predicted[/a] by Leon Panetta should military spending be scaled back to the obscenely inflated levels of 2007. I'm talking about the complete failure to [em]keep[/em] the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we might not. Practices that were avoided, outsourced, or kept secret when Bill Clinton was president were directly engaged in on such a scale under president George W. Bush that they became common knowledge. Under President Obama they are becoming formal law and acceptable policy.[p]Obama has [a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/22/vince_warren"]claimed the power[/a] to imprison people without a trial since his earliest months in office. He [a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/21/obama-national-archives-s_n_206189.html"]spoke[/a] in front of the Constitution in the National Archives while gutting our founding document in 2009. So why not pick the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights to further codify its elimination? President Obama [a href="http://warisacrime.org/ongoingtorture"]has claimed[/a] the power to torture "if needed," issued an [a href="http://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama-issues-executive-order-institutionalizing-indefinite-detention"]executive order[/a] claiming the power of imprisonment without trial, exercised that power on a massive scale at Bagram, and claimed [a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/04/07/assassinations_2/"]and exercised[/a] the power to assassinate U.S. citizens. Obama routinely kills people with unmanned drones.[p]As Obama's Justice Department has broken new ground in the construction of state secrecy and immunity, the Bush era advancers of imperial presidential power have gone on book tours bragging about their misdeeds. One can expect the next step to involve serious abuse of those who question and resist the current bipartisan trajectory.[p]So what does the latest bill do, other than dumping another $660 billion into wars and war preparation? Well, [a href="http://warisacrime.org/content/changes-made-won-obamas-approval"]it says this[/a]:

"Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force."

[p]In other words, Congress is giving its stamp of approval to the unconstitutional outrages already claimed by the president. But then, why create a new law at all? Well, because some outrages are more equal than others, and Congress has chosen to specify some of those and in fact to expand some of them. For example:

"Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war."

[p]And this:

"The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following: (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force."

[p]Jon Stewart explained when those detained without trial under the law might be released: “So when the war on terror ends, and terror surrenders and is no longer available as a human emotion, you are free to go.”[p]An exception for U.S. citizens was kept out of the bill [a href="http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/"]at President Obama's request[/a].[p]So why did Obama threaten to veto the bill initially and again after it passed the Senate? Well, one change made by the conference committee was this:

"The Secretary of Defense President may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary President submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security interests of the United States."

[p]The reference here is to military tribunals. The President – that is, the current one and future ones – need not hand someone over even to a military tribunal if . . . well, if he (or she) chooses not to.[p]President Obama wanted a bill that limited him in no way, and he is likely to issue a law-altering signing-statement that further removes any offensive limits on absolute tyrannical power. This type of signing statement is another example of something done secretly by Bush, exposed, turned into a temporary scandal, denounced by candidate Obama, then utilized by President Obama, formally established by executive order, and now more or less accepted by everyone as the norm.[p]That is what will happen with trial-free imprisonment and assassination as well. And the presidents who engage in these practices will be from both major political parties. So readers should weigh the acceptable crimes and abuses of the good tyrants on their team against the risk of presidents from the other team doing the same. Of course, this team loyalty is the main reason the streets of Washington are not filled with protesters. The corporate media believes that outrages agreed to by both parties are not news. Many Democrats believe any power a Democratic president wants he should have, even though all of his successors will have it too. And many Republicans back whatever comes out of a Republican House of Representatives.[p]A large majority of Republicans in the House voted to eviscerate our Bill of Rights, and the Democrats split 93 to 93. In the Senate both parties overwhelmingly voted "Aye."[p]If ever there was a time to build an independent, principled movement based in activism rather than elections and to put a few more minutes back on the doomsday clock, this is it. While Obama's decision not to veto this bill has discouraged many, at RootsAction we've continued [a href="http://rootsaction.org/featured-actions/316-veto-imprisonment-without-charge-or-trial"]demanding a veto[/a] because we think the Constitution should be upheld and improved, not dismantled. If signed into law, we will demand that this elimination of our rights be repealed by Congress or overturned in court, and we will use that campaign to educate the public about what just happened.[p]##[p]David Swanson is a campaigner for http://rootsaction.org and the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union."
PS sorry all the hyperlinks are gone -- what's up with that?