People Before Profit blog

Venezuela Continued Progress in Human Rights Throughout 2010

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 09:17:00 +0000

Historic turnout in legislative elections, region-leading drops in poverty and inequality, steady progress towards achieving Millennium Development Goals. These are just a few examples of the progress Venezuela made in 2010 in the promotion and protection of human rights. This progress was seen in political, economic, social, and cultural rights, a demonstration of Venezuela’s government continuous commitment to the integral development of its people.

Historic Levels of Political Participation

Over 11 million Venezuelans – 66 percent of all voters – turned out to peacefully cast their ballots in the September 26 legislative elections, Venezuela’s sixteenth election since the first election of President Hugo Chávez in 1998. The turnout was the highest for any such electoral process in the country’s history.

This election was also significant because signaled the reincorporation of the opposition to the democratic game after having participated in the 2002 coup, the 2003 oil sabotage and the 2005 boycott of legislative elections. In the September elections, a coalition of 10 opposition parties won 65 out of 165 seats in the Venezuelan National Assembly.

The success of the legislative elections follow a decade worth of advances in promoting political and civil rights in Venezuela by increasing and deepening citizen participation at every level of government. It also reflect the consolidation of an Electoral Power transparent and trustworthy.

According to a 2010 region-wide survey conducted by polling firm Latinobarometro, support for democracy in Venezuela reached 84 percent in both 2009 and 2010, the highest in the region. Venezuela’s support for democracy has climbed steadily during President Hugo Chávez’s tenure. In 1996 and 1997, before he was elected, it stood at 62 and 64 percent, respectively.

Led Regional Drop in Inequality

Venezuela’s gains in human rights also extended to economic, social and cultural rights, which are vital to the full enjoyment of political and civil rights.

According to an October 2010 OAS/UNDP report, between 1998 and 2008 poverty in Venezuela fell by 44 percent, representing the single biggest decrease in the region. Additionally, and just as importantly, economic inequality fell 17.9 percent, a rate five times higher than Venezuela’s regional neighbors.

The decreases can be attributed to increased government spending on innovative social programs addressing health, education, and employment. Between 1988 and 1998, the year President Chávez took office, social spending stood at 9.5 percent of GDP. Since then, it has averaged 17.5 percent – amounting to more than $330 billion in social spending.

That spending has gone to programs like Barrio Adentro, an innovative health initiative that places doctors and medical clinics in low-income communities. It also funds programs like Misión Milagro – Miracle Mission – which in 2010 reached a significant milestone by having offered one million free eye surgeries to Venezuelans and citizens of other countries. It has also offered basic food at subsidized prices to over 14 million Venezuelans.

During the UN Millennium Development Summit in New York in September 2010, Venezuela announced that it had achieved a number of its development targets ahead of schedule and would meet the remaining ones by the 2015 deadline set by the organization.

According to the 2010 Latinobarometro report, 52 percent of Venezuelans stated that the government’s policies improved their lives, third in the region behind only Uruguay and Chile. They also ranked their country highest in the region in terms of distribution of wealth, with 38 percent saying it was “Very Just” or “Just.” The regional average was 21 percent. When asked whether or not they were satisfied with their lives, 84 percent of Venezuelans answered affirmatively, second only to Costa Rica in the region.

Consequences of Overusing Antibiotics

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:57:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: I understand that the use of antibiotics in raising farm animals is threatening to make bacteria overall more resistant to antibiotics, which has serious life and death implications for people. Can you enlighten and advise what is being done about this? -- Robert Gelb, Raleigh, NC

Most medical doctors would agree that antibiotic drugs—which stave off bacterial infections from staph to salmonella to bacterial pneumonia—are among the most important tools in modern medicine. But public health advocates, environmentalists and even many doctors worry that our society’s overuse and misuse of antibiotics is making bacteria more resistant and thus limiting the effectiveness of these lifesaving drugs.

Bacterial resistance to our antibiotics simply means longer, more serious and more costly illnesses. The Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, a nonprofit that conducts research around the world on antibiotic resistance, estimates that antibiotic resistance has been responsible for upwards of $16 billion annually in extra costs to the U.S. health care system in recent years. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers antibiotic resistance one of its top concerns.

While misuse of antibiotics for human health problems is definitely a concern—those with a valid need for antibiotics who don’t finish off their prescriptions, for example, could effectively help bacteria develop resistance and make it stronger for when it infects its next host—a larger issue is the misuse of antibiotics to treat the common cold and flu and other viral infections which do not involve bacteria. The more antibiotics we use willy-nilly, the faster bacteria will develop resistance, rendering many of the drugs modern medicine has come to rely on obsolete.

Of even greater concern is the preponderance of antibiotics used down on the farm. “Antibiotics often are used on industrial farms not only to treat sick animals but also to offset [the health effects of] crowding and poor sanitation, as well as to spur animal growth,” reports the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming. Indeed, researchers estimate that up to 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to healthy food animals to artificially expedite their growth and compensate for the effects of unsanitary farm conditions. “The routine use of antibiotics in food animals presents a serious and growing threat to human health because it creates new strains of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” says Pew.

So what can we do to curtail the overuse and misuse of antibiotics? For one, we should not prescribe or use antibiotics to (mis)treat viral infections. Beyond being conscientious with our own bodies, we should also urge farmers to reduce their use of these drugs. Pew and other groups are trying to muster public support for the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA, H.R. 1549/S. 619), which if enacted would withdraw from food animal production the routine use of seven classes of antibiotics vitally important to human health unless animals are diseased or drug companies can prove that their use does not harm human health. Hundreds of groups, including the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatricians, Infectious Diseases Society of America and World Health Organization support the legislation. Pew is urging concerned citizens to call their Representatives and Senators and advocate for pushing the legislation into committee hearings.

CONTACTS: Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, www.tufts.edu/med/apua; CDC, www.cdc.gov; Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, www.saveantibiotics.org.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk®, c/o E – The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. E is a nonprofit publication. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Request a Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Photo courtesy Farm Sanctuary/Flickr

Atlantans Protest in Solidarity with Egyptian People

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:41:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA -- About 300 people gathered at CNN Center to stand in solidarity with the Egyptian people. The crowd chanted "30 years is enough - Mubarak must go."

"The rally at CNN was extremely positive support, whether from the non-Egyptians who participated or the people supporting our cause in the streets, dozens of cars honking in support, some even slowing down to show support, hold flags and take photos," Sherif Abdelmohsen, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, told Atlanta Progressive News.

"This really raised our spirits and made us feel how important it is that the American people know more and more about the situation in Egypt and the region," Abdelmohsen said.

Sameh Abdelaziz, an Egyptian American, said he and a few friends organized the solidarity protest in only a few days using the Internet, Facebook, and by calling friends.

Protests occurred in dozens of other US states from California to New York in support of the Egyptian people, as well as in many other countries.

"Mubarak is a modern manifestation of a Pharaoh and hopefully he will be the last Pharaoh of Egypt," Nagi Gebraeel, one of the organizers, told APN.

"His 30 year regime has never had any vision for the future of the Egyptian people. The money for the budget does not go to programs that serve the people. It goes to the military and the security services like police," he said.

"Egypt has lots of resources but only the elite prosper. There is no middle class, the people are impoverished. 41 million people live below the poverty line, the price for basic food is very high, and the infrastructure is decaying," he said.

"Egypt was a timebomb and Tunisia was the spark that ignited the timebomb," Gebraeel said, referring to a Tunisian man who set himself on fire, igniting the movement among Tunisians to create an independent nation.

"The anger in Egypt is real and unprecedented. The courageous Christian, Muslim, and Secular Egyptians fighting side by side for their democratic right to end a totalitarian government will not impede until Mubarak and his government is out. Changing the government alone will not be enough," Abdelaziz said.

Although President Mubarak has dissolved the Egyptian cabinet by asking for the voluntary resignation of its members, he refuses to step down.

Mubarak has also appointed a new Vice President; however, according to US filmmaker Michael Moore, the new VP ran the US's secret rendition program in Egypt.

All of this has angered the people in the streets of Egypt. One man on national television yelled "Go to Hell Mubarak" and another held up a sign "We hate Mubarak," while others burn pictures of Mubarak.

Mubarak promises to press ahead with social, economic and political reforms but he has no creditability with the people. He has made promises before which he has not kept. It's too little too late. Protesters across Egypt are calling for regime change. Everyone knows that Mubarak must go, except Mubarak.

"I believe that a free, progressive, and democratic Egypt will become a better ally of US," Abdelaziz said. "A new permanent government in Egypt will be a secular one that respects the traditions but acts with an eye on the future to solve people’s problems and bring them to the twenty-first century."

"This revolt is not an ideological or religious one. It is a natural human reaction that rejects injustice and corruption. I want people to understand that people in Egypt and everywhere in the world have the same dreams, hopes, and aspirations to see their kids doing better than they did, to be able to support their families, find jobs, and live dignified life. In summary, geography has nothing to do with dreams," Abdelaziz said.

The US has been a major backer of the Egyptian military over the last three decades, supplying the country with around 2 billion dollars in annual aid, mostly for military purposes.

The US government has helped keep Mubarak in power for years.

However, the Daily Telegraph newspaper of the UK reported that Wikileaks documents show that US "was offering support to pro-democracy activists in Egypt while publicly praising Mr. Mubarak as an important ally in the Middle East. The [US] government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning 'regime change' for the past three years."

It appears the US may have been playing both sides.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told NBC news that the US has long supported free and fair elections in Egypt and a transition to a participatory democracy, including Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

Egyptians are fed up with rampant corruption, repression, joblessness, poverty, and rising prices – issues raised in chants and on homemade signs.

There's no single organizer of the Egyptian protests, which have been occurring for several days. "Activists, students, and ordinary people have coordinated over cellular telephones, the Internet, and social networking sites," Al Jazeera television has reported. Al Jazeera's US viewership has quadrupled in recent days.

"The protests started as peaceful. People were shouting 'peaceful, peaceful' while marching and insisted on ensuring and enforcing that themselves," Abdelmohsen said.

"Once they showed persistence, that this corrupt regime must fall, security forces got orders to disperse protesters. They started using rubber bullets, tear gas, and this escalated to using live ammunition later on and a lot of casualties and deaths," Abdelmohsen said.

"In addition, security forces used secret police and intentionally released thugs and criminals from prisons to gradually spread chaos as another way to trick the people and get them to think that a lot of violence is going on from the protesters' side," Abdelmohsen said.

"This led to the escalation of the latest looting as well, where the regime wanted to put the people under the impression that the vast majority of the vandalism is from the protesters, thus allowing more eradication or the possibly killing of the protesters," Abdelmohsen said.

More than 100 have been killed in protests across Egypt, Al Jazeera reports.

"Egypt is pivotal in Middle Eastern politics and what happens here will resonate with other countries like Algeria, Yemen and Syria," Gebraeel said.

Factors that triggered the Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" - hike in food price and costs of living, can also be seen in Ethiopia. A similar revolution could be replicated there.

Leaders in countries where unemployment, inflation, poverty, and economic inequality exist, may be ripe for their own "Jasmine Revolution" or "Days of Rage."

Thousands have already taken to the streets in Jordan, demanding the country's prime minister step down, and the government curb rising prices, inflation, and unemployment.

"In this connected world of ours every corner of the Earth is capable of reaching out to every other corner. This connectivity brings the potential of progress. Scientific advancements, better living conditions, or it can bring extremism, hatred, and destruction. This revolt has the potential to bring justice, freedom, an democracy to Egyptians, which would be the first real victory over extremism since we started that war," Abdelaziz states.

People of Watsonville 4 – Migrant Education at Ohlone School

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:34:00 +0000

Migrant Education is a product of the civil rights and farm worker movements of the 1960s. California's Migrant Education Program was established in 1967, two years into the five-year historic grape strike by the United Farm Workers. That strike, and the farm workers movement that it helped to ignite, gave migrant workers and their allies the political power necessary to get the state's educational system to respond to their needs. Today migrant education programs are one of the most important ways that farm worker families can win social equality and a future for their children beyond the fields.

The Pajaro Valley district includes thousands of students who travel with their families every year because their parents are migrant farm workers. The demographics of farm labor have changed radically over the last three decades. Today a large percentage of families come from Oaxaca and the states of southern Mexico. Many come from communities where people speak indigenous languages that were old when Columbus arrived in the Americas. The most common language among Watsonville students is Mixteco, although a few students speak Triqui or Zapoteco.

Families qualify as migrants because the parents work in farm labor, and have moved at least once in the last few years. In addition to education programs, children also get help with medical and dental care. The program has a very active parents group, with large meetings every month during the work season. Watsonville is close to the campus of the University of California in Santa Cruz, and university students help farm worker kids begin to think about the possibility of going to college.

Photographs:

Children of migrant farm workers, many of them from indigenous Mixtec families from Oaxaca, are part of the Migrant Education program at Ohlone Elementary School. Ofelia Lopez is a Mixteco-speaking student in Jenny Doud's class. Doud helps students learn the words to a song. In another classroom, students hold hands, jump and dance.

Natalia Gracida-Cruz is a tutor who speaks Mixteco with students for whom it is their primary language. Gabriela Diaz and Ruth Espinoza practice the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. Then Gracida-Cruz helps the two girls and Hector Cruz with recognizing letters and sounds. In another classroom she helps Victor Mendoza.
Outside, older students get ready to practice a Mixteco song, including Romualdo Ortiz, Elizabeth Espinoza, Ezequiel Espinoza and Luis Lopez. Then Gracida-Cruz and migrant education instructor Casimira Salazar lead the four students, plus Claudia Salvador, in a song honoring Mexico's first indigenous president, Benito Juarez.

(all photos by David Bacon)

Students Organize Protest at Bank of America Tower

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:06:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA - It was a cold, rainy, and dreary day, on Wednesday, January 26, 2011, as approximately 25 activists gathered in front of the Bank of American (BOA) headquarters building at 600 Peachtree Street.

They held signs stating, "BOA is a Criminal Organization" and "Smash Capitalism."

The young, cutting-edge, mostly-male, gathering of students are part of an organization called Atlanta Defends Dissent (ADD), which promotes democracy and the freedom of expression by citizens without persecution by the state.

Students from Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, and Georgia College and State University located in Milledgeville were present. Also present were local anarchists, communists, peace activists, 1960's radicals Steve Wise, Jim Skillman, and Stephanie Coffin, one of the co-founders of the former Great Speckled Bird newspaper.

"I'm here to support the students from Georgia State University," Coffin said.

"Foreclosures are through the roof in Atlanta. In this blood-red state it is no surprise that tenants have very few rights in the way of not having their livelihood stripped from them and their families. We are sick of this endemic greed," according to protest materials posted on Infoshop News.

"Additionally, Bank of America has been an anti-social institution for its entire existence - culminating in the four billion dollar bonus package for its higher-ups that was paid for as a part of a 25 billion dollar bailout package in 2008. This regular looting of society in the form of interest and foreclosure has gone on for far too long."

APN first reported on ADD when the group participated in a December 15, 2010, rally in front of CNN to defend dissent and support Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks.

Matt, who did not want to use his last name, told APN that, "ADD is protesting Bank of America because of out of control foreclosures and a criminal history of looting society. They are a terrible corporation and have played a decisive role in the neoliberal exploitation of the entire planet, including, but certainly not limited to, their role in the 1973 coup in Chile. We are also protesting in conjunction with a promised WikiLeaks release involving the bank."

One of the December 15 protesters who spoke with APN and had read Wikileaks cables aloud, also had not wanted his last name used.

When asked why some were wearing scarves around their faces, Matt gave these reasons: "The police are known to film and photograph radical protesters - even to the point of creating entire dossiers on certain active individuals. This type of action has really taken off since 9/11, especially involving the environmental movement. The facelessness of the mask is a gesture of solidarity with voiceless revolutionaries worldwide."

"Many apologists claim that capitalism's problems are either aleatory [dependent on chance and luck] or necessary evils. I think many in ADD believe the problems that have re-surfaced in the last decade, including our foreign wars, the market crash and the resulting recession, are systemic flaws that lie at the core of capitalism," C.A. Seidl, an ADD member, said.

In 2009, Julian Assange told Computer World that secret documents he obtained from the hard drive of a megabank executive were related to Bank of America.

Reports suggest Bank of America is very worried about the upcoming release of WikiLeak documents. They are going into damage control and buying up hundreds of derogatory internet domain names like BankofAmericaSucks.com.

According to an informational flyer by ADD:

-BOA has multiple lawsuits from private investors, as well as, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, demanding the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages-backed securities. The firm stopped issuing subprime mortgages in 2001, but it kept underwriting subprime mortgage-backed securities for many years.

-A BOA employee deposed in February 2010 said that she signed as many as 8,000 foreclosure documents a month without reviewing them, in violation of the law.

-In 2008, BOA acquired Countrywide, one of the most aggressive and fraudulent lenders during the housing bubble. The result has been a trainwreck of liability and lawsuits for the megabank that now has over 1.3 million customers in foreclosure. There is no end in sight for these suits.

-In January 2009, BOA acquired the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch for 50 billion dollars. The US government blessed the merger with a 20 billion dollar bailout loan to aid BOA. After the acquisition went through, it was revealed Merrill Lynch had lost 15.8 billion in the last quarter of 2008 and that 3.6 billion in bonuses were paid ahead of schedule to top executives at Merrill. About the deal New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said: "One disturbing question that must be answered is whether Merrill Lynch and Bank of America timed the bonuses in such a way as to force taxpayers to pay for them through the deal funding."

-In addition to the 25 billion dollars in TARP bailout money and the 20 billion for purchasing Merrill, BOA also received an estimated 931 billion dollars from the Federal Reserve in short-term loans and government subsidies. The Federal Reserve was forced to release this data about its emergency loan programs in December 2010.

-If the biggest bank in the US is only being kept alive by accounting tricks and ongoing government subsidies, the result could be another government bailout or potentially the orderly dissolution of a firm that is "too big to fail" and still poses a threat to our nation's economy.

Another participant at the BOA protest was G. Fabre. Mr. Fabre has been in the mortgage and real estate industry for nearly 17 years and currently has a case in US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia with BOA.

According to the federal court database, PACER, the case is Gaellen Fabre v. Bank of America, concerns the Fair Debt Collection Act, and is still pending. It was originally filed in the Superior Court of Fayette County Georgia.

Fabre told APN that about two years ago he found out some very disturbing news about how bank loans are done.

"First of all I was current with my mortgage payments. I mailed on three separate occasions what we call a nice offer and demand, which is my right since they claim I owe them money. Basically what that is, is a 26 page letter to the 'lender' telling them that I will pay the balance in full (102,000 dollars) if they can prove that they gave a legal loan, gave me full disclosures, and answer a few simple questions like, did I fund my own loan?" Fabre said.

"Later in August 2009 I filed a petition (Motion to Compel) with the county courts and my first hearing was in October of 2009. The superior court judge ordered Bank of America to give me the documents I requested within 10 days. They did not give me a thing and about 15-20 days later as we were preparing a contempt order, BOA removed my case to federal court. 24 months later they still haven't given me anything but a counterclaim. If I were to violate a judge's order like Bank of America did I will be in jail," he said.

"My case is still in federal court northern district and still I fight. The bank has told lie after lie in their filings. This case could have all been done if they were to just answer a few simple questions or just say that I am right. I try to stay informed about BOA and the banking industry so when I heard about today's protest I showed my support, despite the cold and rain."

ADD will probably be back at BOA with the much anticipated January 2011 release of BOA documents from Wikileaks. In 2010, Assange told Forbes magazine the information was significant enough to "take down a bank or two."

Venezuelan Home-heating Program Helps Vulnerable Americans

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:04:00 +0000

6th Annual CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program Helps the Most Vulnerable

BOSTON, Jan. 27, 2011 – CITGO Petroleum Corporation has announced the start of the sixth consecutive year of the CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program, which helps approximately 500,000 individuals every winter, including those in more than 250 tribal communities and 234 homeless shelters across 25 states and the District of Columbia. CITGO President and CEO Alejandro Granado and the chairman of Citizens Energy Corporation, Joseph P. Kennedy II, were joined by a CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program recipient to officially launch this year’s program with a home heating oil delivery to a family in the Boston area.

“CITGO is very proud to mark the sixth anniversary of our Heating Oil Program, our flagship social development initiative, which is in alignment with the humanitarian and solidarity principles endorsed by the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela through its national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A (PDVSA),” said CITGO President and CEO Alejandro Granado. “Since its beginning in 2005, this program has been fully supported by President Hugo Chávez and it has been maintained over time thanks to the solidarity that exists between the people of Venezuela and the United States. It is without doubt one of the most important and long-lasting social development initiatives implemented by any large energy corporation in the U.S. and around the world.”

Mr. Granado pointed out that according to official figures, eight million U.S. households are forced to choose between heating their homes and covering other vital necessities. “What would each one of us choose if we could only afford one or the other? Would you warm your home or feed your family? Those are decisions no one should have to make,” he said. “Although at CITGO we cannot help eight million households in need, we believe that every home that we do get to warm alleviates the need, and makes a difference, one home at a time,” he added.

CITGO has partnered with Citizens Energy Corporation, a non-profit organization created by Joseph P. Kennedy II, a Boston native, to help implement the program. Citizens Energy Corporation works across the country to support families in need of home heating oil assistance and ensure that the CITGO-Venezuela heating oil donations reach the people that need help the most. Since 2005, 170 million gallons of home heating oil have been donated to needy families across the United States to help them stay warm through the winter months.

“Every year, we hear from families who struggle each and every day to put food on the table and heat their homes,” said Joseph P. Kennedy II, President of Citizens Energy Corporation. “We are deeply grateful to CITGO and the people of Venezuela for their generosity to those who need help keeping their families warm. Every year, we ask major oil companies and oil-producing nations to help our senior citizens and the poor make it through winter, and only one company, CITGO, and one country, Venezuela, has responded to our appeals.”

The CITGO and Citizens Energy presidents delivered heating oil to the South Boston home of Diane Clark, who is raising her three adopted grandchildren, ages 2, 4, and 8, while caring for her 63-year-old brother, who has cerebral palsy. "I really appreciate the help from CITGO and Citizens Energy," said Clark, who works part-time at the U.S. Post Office. "I work, but it's a real struggle taking care of the kids and my brother."

The CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program began in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Thousands of low-income people in the United States called for assistance as they struggled with the high price of heating oil that resulted from the hurricanes’ destruction. This plea triggered an open letter on Oct. 27, 2005 from 12 U.S. Senators, including Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid. They requested that oil companies step forward to help low-income families affected by the high prices of heating oil. As the senators stated in their letter, “American families need economic relief from high energy prices.”

Families struggling to pay for home heating oil can call Citizens Energy Corporation at 1-877-JOE-4-OIL (1-877-563-4645) or apply online at www.citizensenergy.com to see if they are eligible for heating oil assistance. If approved, the household will receive an authorization letter from Citizens Energy Corporation and details on how to arrange delivery with an approved heating oil dealer.

CITGO, based in Houston, is a refiner, transporter and marketer of transportation fuels, lubricants, petrochemicals and other industrial products. The company is owned by PDV America, Inc., an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

For more information visit www.citgo.com

Beginning in 1979 with oil-trading ventures in Latin America and Africa, Citizens Energy has used revenues from commercial enterprises to channel millions of dollars into charitable programs in the U.S. and abroad. Whether heating the homes of the elderly and the poor, lowering the cost of prescription drugs for millions of Americans, or starting solar heating projects in Jamaica and Venezuela, Citizens creates social ventures as innovative as the businesses that finance them.

For more information, visit www.citizensenergy.com.

State of the Union: Unnamable Politics and Useful Idiots

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:38:00 +0000

“For decades, Egypt’s authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, played a clever game with his political opponents. He tolerated a tiny and toothless opposition of liberal intellectuals whose vain electoral campaigns created the façade of a democratic process.” -- David D. Kirkpatrick and Michael Slackman, “Youths Upend Cairo’s Taming of Opposition,” NYTimes January 27, 2011

“The pragmatist will compromise when he has to, as Obama did with tax cuts, angering liberal Democrats but helping him with the much bigger slice of the electorate who call themselves independents.” -- Timothy Egan, “The Six-Year Blueprint,” NYTimes January 26, 2011

What needs to be expanded in an e-mail is expanded in a blog and what needs to be updated in a blog is updated on Facebook and what needs ... in a tweet. In the Broadband Age nothing therefore should be left unnamed, unless it might be the politics that opposes the rule everywhere of “market forces.”

Perhaps the fault here lies in the inadequacy of emoticons and tweets to rise to the necessary level of profundity. Doubtlessly, the tweet serves Sarah Palin well whereas a Montaigne-like essay might over tax both her and her audience, who find the tweet a satisfactory “basic conveyance” of political views. So we cannot name the politics that opposes market forces rule because we’ve descended to a discourse level that such an unnamed politics overspills.

Whatever the Unnamable might be, it doesn’t sound bite and tweet the way “Tax and Spend Liberals!” “Trickle Down!” “Free Market Solutions!” “Personal Choice Not Government Mandates!” and “Don’t Retreat, Reload!” do. Against this Conservative Catechism which both rich and poor can recite, Liberals assume a defensive posture. And that posture against market rule suits market rule because it makes us all feel that our hearts do bleed for all causes and all losers, that we recognize “collateral damage” and do what we can; but the war, of competition as it were, must be pursued. The strong don’t retreat for the sake of the weak. Liberals serve like sobbing mothers and wives when men go off to war. Liberals are like a Greek chorus to the actions of the real protagonists, the bold and intrepid entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers.

Similar to a Greek chorus, Liberals won’t let Americans forget that our capitalism is tempered by democratic principles, human rights values, and our compassion for every species, including foreigners, whales, wolves and the poor. At the same time of course, any recitation of poverty and the poor translates as Losers who are best not nurtured by Winners, for the sake of the Losers themselves. Think of a Liberal like a boxer who can cover up but can’t throw a punch. Market rule and free market solutions have been soundly knocking Liberals around the ring since Reagan, with some brief flurries of offense now and then. Liberals indeed create the façade of a democratic process. You need the help of our Unnamable politics to break through that façade and see what the state of our union is.

Liberals may have birthed themselves but for a very long time now, Conservatives have nourished and nurtured Liberalism out of necessity. Straw dogs, scapegoats, comedic straight men, and useful idiots are in big demand when a country which assumes it rests on the lofty aspirations of lofty Founding Fathers, a country that touts itself as “Exceptional” in its freedom from the vile history of Europe, is in actuality a country ruled by a casino-type economics which, as in a game of Monopoly, has put most of the wealth in a few hands. The most useful, of course, are the professional meritocracy which serves the top one percent wealthiest in the same way that the Roman Senate was made to serve under the Roman emperors.

The politics of money is a protective policy, not by nature democratic, but it is designed, like the shark, to destroy what might jeopardize “the bottom line.” It’s the “bottom line” as well as “possessed wealth” which must be protected against the claims of the poor, the unemployed, the foreclosed, the medically uninsured, the downsized, the sick and dying, the old, Mother Nature, African misery, all of the Latin American poor, thieves, youth gangs, unions, terrorists, socialists, anarchists, naïve idealists, an education in critical thinking, history, good memories, and crazed disciples of socialist leanings who would resurrect past legislation that grew the middle class, enabled the mobility of the working class, and thusly prevented oligarchy replacing democracy. This Unnamable Politics introduced a now defunct attitude in which profit would not drive war, education, health care, or any domain in which the common good was affected. Those domains now include pharmaceuticals, energy, air, and water. “Free market solutions” are solutions that grow the wealth of a few and leave the many in a “pay as you go” stasis.

The common thread that joins those who represent an Unnamable Politics in the U.S. is a socialist critique of capitalism. Because any variety of socialism must not be named, rather like the villainous character in the Harry Potter novels, Liberals are left floating in a groundless ether, or, something tossed like unmoored ships in a Perfect Storm. Or, in our boxing ring image, Liberals have devolved from a now Unnamable politics which knew how to throw a punch, knew how to effectively counterpunch, to useful punching bags. Smash mouth commentators like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin are punching away to the delight of their fans.

Republicans can freely point to their free market/free to choose/personal liberty foundations while Liberals can only make weak protestations on behalf of “small business owners.” It is this group that now represents another “unnamable” – the working class. In President Obama’s second State of the Union address he replaced any mention of a diminished middle class with “small business owners,” a grouping palatable to conservatives whose class demarcations begin and end with “Winners” and “Losers.” Any mention of the “working class” and their unemployment would lead to a litany of “unnamables’: an uncontrolled outsourcing, “shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors and risky bets on securities backed by the loans,” and the deregulating policies which left the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

Small business owners who did not loot the country in 2008, who do not represent a detached transnationalism, and who do not engage in bamboozlement and distraction are not a threat to our democracy. If we were detectives working on the Great Recession of 2008 as a crime committed, we wouldn’t be on the trail of small business owners. A good detective discerns a red herring.

Obama made no mention of the problems we face with a capitalism that has globalized and therefore has disconnected corporations from national concerns, including a high rate of unemployment, environmental degradation, infrastructure collapse, failed educational systems, and an anxious and fearful – and possibly dangerous for all that – populace. Cybertech has enabled capitalism to monitor closely products and workers globally, thus joining an already boundary free movement of capital to form a globalized network of wealth and power. Obama represses all this, preferring to speak of “competition,” “challenge,” “productivity,” “free enterprise,” “education,” and “government reform.” If we consider each from the perspective of our Unnamable politics we may be able to see through the façade that market rule needs, Liberals help maintain, and Obama will not violate because his pragmatic politics must bend to what is possible. We can, however, imagine beyond the confines of what is possible, what works now, and create the conditions of new possibilities. This country begins in this way, by rejecting the realm of possibility imposed by King George. There is a built-in timidity to pragmatism – South Africa, for instance, would still be apartheid. There is a self-imposed weakness to a Liberalism that fears to speak and act on behalf of the common good but instead bows to a ludicrous notion that an oligarchy will drop enough crumbs to serve that common good as defined fitfully but continuously in our own American past.

Are the ignorant and deceived then also useful idiots, as useful to market rule as Liberals presently are? They are certainly useful at the polls. George W. Bush, after all, was re-elected in 2004 instead of being impeached for weaving a façade of deceit which took us into a pre-emptive war that destroyed and continues to destroy the lives of so many. Confessions of ignorance or false intel should serve Bush and company as well as the same served Eichmann and company. The deceived are not however useful in the way that Lenin thought of American Communist sympathizers. They are not useful in discourse or debate. They are not intellectually useful. They do not present weak counters to conservative precepts as the Liberals do.

Just as Liberals prefer not to call themselves Useful Idiots, the dazed, confused, and bamboozled prefer to call themselves Independents. And it is probably true that these Independents outnumber the radical advocates of our Unnamable Politics and that it’s savvy politics for Obama to play to them rather than these Unnamable advocates. However, it’s foolhardy to adopt a child’s understanding if one wishes to achieve adult solutions. American Independents? Think of them historically, or on various historical stages. French Revolution? War Between the States: what’s an Independent then? World War II: what’s an Independent then? Vietnam? Civil Rights? Apartheid? Women’s Vote? I think anyone who found themselves on any of those historical stages and who asserted an independence from the issues at hand is perhaps not paying attention or is a solipsist or can’t work their head around the issues or suffers from ADD or OCD or is having too much or no fun to care, or likes the word “independent,” or hates politics and thinks being an “Independent” is an “unfriending” gesture,” or … .

The point here is that there is no honor in such an appellation at this moment on the U.S. stage and therefore it’s particularly upsetting to see a State of the Union address addressed to the corporate party of Republicans and Independents while the politics of the Unnamable remains unnamed. Obama does not need to cater to Independents out of fear. What he needs to do is make them aware of the politics that clearly contests the power of “free market solutions” to the problems of a democracy. He needs to give them the sort of red meat that the Tea Party throws at them and not the back pedaling, defensive mewling of Liberalism.

When a TV pundit from a conservative or libertarian think tank is asked what the role of government is that pundit doesn’t punt but launches an offense. The Liberal, however, gets no further than suggesting government does indeed have a role to play although the smaller government is the better off we all are. That role then seems small for it were a large role it seems we would need a large government. It’s an assisting role: to make sure government doesn’t place any unnecessary burden on business. So in this Liberal view we need a government to protect us from a government that would place any unnecessary burden on business. We need to ask business what those burdens might be. Government can also assist business in the realms of competition and innovation and education and infrastructure. Because globalized technocapitalism has already settled these matters to its liking, the Liberal government is, to repeat, no more than a useful front and its pundits useful idiots.

Competition is at Wild, Wild West levels. See Great Recession 2008 and afterward. That same capitalism already consumes any tax payer innovation, either from public supported university labs or government research itself. Cybertech has extended the labor force globally so that the only domestic workers needed are in the service sector. Such globalized capitalism has little interest in the successes or failures of American education when their hi-tech labor force can come from elsewhere. And in regard to infrastructure General Electric is as concerned about roads and bridges in Germany as they are about the same in the U.S. Transnational enterprise has no national patriotism. It’s not a bottom line concern.

Perhaps we can keep the world from regressing to an oligarchic rule in which globalized security forces created to “keep us safe from terrorism” now protect the oligarchy from the mounting unrest of the Losers. But we can’t look to transnationalized corporations as our heroic rescuers when their growth, power and influence are what we must counter. Our Unnamable politics points to the savagery resulting from unbridled globalized technocapitalism, a savagery that can’t be regentrified so that it appears as if we have “justice for all” and “equal opportunity.” The cosmetic applications of a Liberal government cannot conceal the ugliness that has resulted from applying “free market solutions” to health care, war, education, energy, welfare, and the regulation of private enterprise.

The state of our union remains unnamed and the politics that might deter our movement to what Gore Vidal termed “The United Corporation of America” remains an Unnamable Politics.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

China: 57 Million Jobs Created Between 2006 and 2010

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:34:00 +0000

Original source: China Wire

A total of 57 million jobs will have been created in China’s urban areas over the 2006-2010 period, the Minister of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) Yin Weimin said Thursday.

Annual employment for the period will be 11.4 million, or 2.1 million more than China’s 10th Five-year Program (2001-2005) period, said Yin while addressing a national human resources and social security work conference.

Yin said the unemployment rate had remained under 4.3 percent throughout the period, while nearly 45 million underemployed rural workers had taken up new jobs in the non-agricultural sectors, 5 million more than the 2001-2005 period.

The Employment Promotion Law of 2007 as well as measures introduced after several natural disasters and the global financial crisis had boosted employment, Yin said.

Also, a system providing vocational training and employment services was taking shape, he said.

About 86 million people received special vocational training and 330 million people used government employment services during the period, he added.

Climate Change: Developed Countries Put World at Risk

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:27:00 +0000

Original source: The Guardian

Huge rainfalls causing floods narrowly missed the climate change negotiators who met for another round of talks in Tianjin last October with disappointing results. Tianjin, a historical coastal town which is also China’s industrial centre, just a half-hour rapid train ride from Beijing, was the host of that session in the United Nations’ climate talks.

The 3,000 participants were impressed by the warm hospitality, courteous volunteers and the giant convention centre with super facilities. The Chinese put 2,000 people on the job to handle the logistics, and the meetings went on without a hitch.

But as the Chinese chief negotiator, Su Wei, reminded everyone in the closing session, it could have been very different. The first site that China chose for the meeting was not Tianjin, but Hainan, the picturesque island province in the South. The island was lashed with the heaviest rainfall since 1961, causing 1,200 villages to be submerged by floodwaters, with 1.6 million people affected and 210,000 evacuated.

“If our meeting had been held in Hainan, we would have had a deeper understanding of the effects of climate change,” remarked Su Wei.

Climate change may indeed have contributed to the Hainan rains and floods. A United Nations scientist has linked the recent huge rainfalls, such as the big floods in Pakistan and landslides in China, to increased cloud formation arising from the rise in ocean temperature, which is a part of the global warming phenomenon. (We now have the unprecedented floods in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Colombia and a number of countries in Europe.)

Indeed, throughout that week’s meeting in China, many developing countries’ delegates referred to the many extreme weather events that have caused devastating damage in many countries, a clear sign that the climate crisis is not a science-fiction scenario but a reality that is now upon us and will get much worse.

Consider that today the world is 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer on average than in pre-industrial times, and at current emissions rates the temperature will rise by 4 degrees or more, with devastating effects like the melting of ice caps and sea-level rise causing extensive flooding, and glacier melting causing water shortages in many countries.

Even restricting warming to 2 degrees, which is the target the political leaders agreed to, would result in a lot of damage. Some prominent scientists and many countries are asking for a goal of 1.5 degrees.

At the Tianjin talks, the results were disappointing. The delegates now have a new negotiating text containing different options in language and positions, which they were supposed to focus on to narrow differences.

The buzz-word at that meeting was the need to attain “balance” among the issues being negotiated, but there were different views on what that means. To the developing countries, the main stumbling block is the reluctance of many developed countries to commit themselves to deep cuts in emission reductions. Worse, it seems that many of the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol (only the United States is not a member) do not want to continue being in it.

Under the Kyoto Protocol (KP), the developed countries agreed to cut their combined emissions by 5 percent by 2012 compared to 1990 levels, and then to negotiate new emission reduction rates in a second period starting 2013.

The KP group meeting in Tianjin, was mandated to come up with an aggregate reduction rate for developed countries, based on what science says is needed to avoid global warming. Developing countries are calling for a 40-50 percent cut (by 2020 compared to 1990) while the most quoted scientific estimate is 25-40 percent. Within this combined target, each developed country would then make a commitment which is adequate. All these national commitments must add up to the aggregate.

The problem is that many of the developed countries want to “jump ship” from the KP to a new agreement that would also include the US and the developing countries. However this new protocol, following the US approach, is of the nature of a voluntary national pledge system, with no top-down science-based aggregate figure, and there is no certainty that the national pledges will be adequate or comparable with one another.

According to the pledges already made, the developed countries altogether (including the US) will cut their emissions (1990-2020) by only 13-18 percent. If “loopholes” are included, that allow more emissions, the result may be only 4 percent reduction or even a 4 percent increase in emissions. This is on track to global warming of 3-4 degrees, a disastrous situation.

The biggest battle in the negotiations is over the model of the developed countries’ emission-reduction commitments – whether the KP model of legally binding aggregate figure with adequate national reductions, or the voluntary pledge system with no aggregate number and no system of ensuring adequate numbers for each country.

In Tianjin, only Norway clearly indicated it wanted to continue with the KP, with the European Union also giving a lukewarm nod, provided conditions are met. Japan explicitly announced in Tianjin that it would not support a second commitment period in the KP. Other countries including Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada have also signalled they want to do away with the KP.

This has caused the developing countries to accuse them of intending to kill the KP, the only legally-binding climate change agreement for emission reduction. With this development, the developing countries find it outrageous that the developed countries are insisting that they agree to an intrusive system of international “monitoring and verification” of their mitigation actions.

The good news coming from Tianjin is that some progress was made towards creating a new Climate Fund inside the UN climate convention. The United States indicated it would not allow a decision on the fund unless developing countries agreed on a “robust” system for internationally monitoring their mitigation actions.

“It is disconcerting that the setting up of a fund is held hostage to other things,” said Desima Williams on behalf of small island states. “It’s unethical.”

Tunisia: How We Got Here and the Task Ahead

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:17:00 +0000

Hunger strikes. These were the last resort for Tunisian activists as they fought against a brutal and highly oppressive regime. Prior to the ousting of Zineal-Abidine Ben Ali by an unprecedented people’s uprising on January 14, there seemed to be no end in sight to the regime’s wide-ranging human rights violations. Over time, these became a relegated segment of evening news across the Arab world. Even hunger strikes, shocking at first, became a routing event.

For Tunisians, unemployment, poverty and lack of civil liberties have long made life intolerable. Many were forced to flee the country, or dare challenge the authoritarian rule of Ben Ali and his security apparatus, which grew in numbers to double – or even triple - the nation’s army.

While Tunisia may not have appeared the most likely location for a successful popular rebellion, the country always had the potential of hosting one of the most active civil societies in the Arab Maghreb countries. This was what prompted Ben Ali and his regime to dedicate much time and energy into weakening and largely dismantling a once thriving, diverse and highly educated civil society. The society expressed itself through three main pillars: labor unions, the Islamic movement, and a strong student body throughout the country.

When Tunisia gained independence from France in 1957, the country was rife with hope and expectation. The anti-colonial fervor that gripped the country produced an active civil society who wished to move from a French sphere of influence into a nationalistic one. The national leader at the time, Habib Bourguiba dared not upset the growing mobilization of the country, and in fact succeeded in using – and later co-opting and manipulating - the mass movement to maintain his control over the country. This lasted for decades, until Ben Ali carried out his “tranquil revolution” and ousted Bourguiba in 1987.

But even authoritarianism has its own compelling logic. Ben Ali could do little to mobilize Tunisian society, and his early promises of greater political participation, equality and openness were never translated into real action. Over time, he grew wary of everyone, including the elites, who are usually the bread and better of any authoritarian regime. He quickly began dismantling every component that gave civil society its import and vigor, destroying or restricting unions, enacting draconian measures against political activities that opposed his ruling party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD), and bending the law and even the constitution to serve his own interests.

Ben Ali’s success in maintaining his regime for 23 years hinged on several major strategies. He ensured that the presidential palace was the ultimate center of power, thus denying anyone else the chance to gain popularity outside a closely-knit circle. A system of patronage existed, whereby those who played by the rules were granted tiny spaces to operate and benefit. For example, during the elections of 2004, the Movement of Socialist Democrats (MDS), an ‘opposition party’ actually endorsed Ben Ali’s re-election bid because it helped “complete the process of democratic pluralism". Other parties, including the Popular Unity Party (PUP), whose former leader Mohamed Bouchiha once competed for the post of the president, also seconded Bin Ali’s bid to "drive the democratic process".

And what about those who refused to play by the rules? The Islamic al-Nahdha party and the Tunisian Community Workers’ Party (POCT) are two such examples. Ben Ali utilized the second set of measurements to contain ‘unruly’ opposition- brutality, crackdowns and torture. The attempt to silence both parties was equally and decidedly brutal, but in 1991 an-Nahdha protest and call for change seemed to spread quickly in universities and working-class neighborhoods. The event signaled a repeat of the rise of the Islamic resurgence in Algeria, and Ben Ali was determined to stifle any rise of Islamic opposition before the phenomenon became too popular.

Ben Ali’s violations of human rights – which grew rapidly since the early 1990s – received little chastising from other governments. Various western powers that hailed Ben Ali’s model of political moderation were, of course, fully aware of the bizarre ‘democracy’ underway in Tunisia. However, Ben Ali’s ability to crush dissidents earned him high regard and constant accolades by these very powers, particularly Tunisia’s former colonizer France.

With major hurdles out of the way, the various branches of Tunisia’s security apparatus had little to do, save silencing the people. The mafia-like police used many means of control, leaving activists with no option but hunger strikes. In a report issued weeks before the ‘Jasmine Revolution,” Amnesty International stated: “Worn down by years of harassment and with no remedy in sight, hunger strikes seem to have become the final recourse for journalists, political activists, government critics and human rights defenders, in order to draw attention to their legitimate demands to have their fundamental human rights respected. Both inside and outside Tunisian prisons, the hunger strikers’ demands range from the release of prisoners of conscience to obtaining passports and medical care for former political prisoners.”

Human Rights Watch published a report on October 21, 2010, when the situation in Tunisia seemed to be reaching intolerable levels. It decried the government’s relentless campaign against two of the main pillars in any civil society: labor and student unions. “No realm of civil society in Tunisia is safe from government interference, not even trade unions, if they are considered critical of the government. Using methods ranging from bureaucratic machinations to physical aggression, the Tunisian government is keeping Tunisia's unions under its thumb.”

Less than a week after Ben Ali was forced to leave the country, Arab League's Secretary General Amr Moussa warned Arab countries of the possibility of more Tunisia-style revolutions should their policies remained unchanged."The Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession...The political problems, the majority of which have not been fixed...have driven the Arab citizen to a state of unprecedented anger and frustration," he said.

In Tunisia that ‘unprecedented anger” has reaped unprecedented results, leaving Tunisia with the great task of rebuilding a civil society that was weakened, demoralized and purposely disjointed by a calculating and oppressive regime. The prospects for freedom are now greater than ever in Tunisia. Despite the many challenges ahead, this is a serious cause for celebration.

Shouldering Our Burdens

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:56:00 +0000

In “Living in an Era of Change,” C. J. Atkins makes a disarmingly gentle, yet muddled case for name change. After an opening congratulatory appraisal of the Party’s past 20 years (of successfully avoiding name change while remaining politically dynamic), he proposes that the Party not only drop its “Communist” label, but its self-definition as a party. He makes this recommendation while failing to convince that the Party does not act like a party, based on his assumptions that a party, by definition, must independently present its own candidates in the electoral process. In other words, the CPUSA does not act like a “party,” as other parties (the Green Party, SPUSA, and other “third” parties), since it does not encourage its members to reject the Democratic Party, in favor of their own alternative candidates. Therefore, like the DSA, the CPUSA is for the moment largely a think-tank organization that helps its members become part of the broader coalition movement for progressive change. However, the CPUSA has since its inception been in favor of both putting candidates forward when this was practical and supporting the Democratic Party when not, in addition to organizational work for broad social movements outside the electoral process. In this way, it has stayed close to Lenin’s justification of participating in the electoral process while simultaneously working to undermine the class domination that doggedly polices the current process. Why tie the Party’s hands by narrowing its range of activities, when it can sometimes be an organizing social force and, at other times, a party that is prepared for an electoral breakthrough should any such opportunity arise in the future?

Of course, it is this last condition that Atkins completely denies as possible, largely because the label “communist” is not acceptable, and never will be, to the vast majority of Americans. It is a brand name “sullied beyond reprieve.” Thus, the two conditions arguing against the Party remaining a “party” are: (1) its current retention of the label “Communist” and (2) the fact that America has a two-party system that makes it historically unlikely a successful third party will ever arise. As for the second point, we can agree that the restrictions of the two-party system (plus the failed attempts at campaign finance reform) have shifted the odds against change coming anytime soon, especially given the failed attempts of Ralph Nader and the Green Party on the Left and Ross Perot’s Independent Reform Party on the Right. However, one cannot see that far into the future to know for certain. Besides that, the fact that America once had more than two parties and that the debate is still taking place nationally bodes well for the possibility of future reform in this respect. So I return to my original question: why tie our hands to the potential range of activities open to us given this uncertainty and the possibility of the situation changing (even possibly in the near future)?

The thorny issue of the label “communist” may take longer to clear up. As Atkins rightly states, we have to admit that communism still remains unpopular in American politics, despite twenty years after the collapse of the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, and a good-faith effort by Gorbachev (and other reformers) to recast both its political and economic processes to meet the demands of the post-industrial age. The associations with Stalinist crimes persist, but this is analogous to the histories of other parties and institutions (like the tradition of the Democratic Party in the Southern U.S., and the Catholic Church) that survived precisely because they could, and did, change. We have to make the case for our changes not by running from the past, a maneuver that, as some have commented, none will accept as legitimate, but by looking forward and making change-in-perception contingent on our future actions, successes (and, yes, failures). We should courageously address the past, continuously analyze it in historical context, and keep taking concrete steps in future actions that render the past not invisible, but irrelevant to present conditions. Also, if we jettison our name (and necessarily the historical tradition that comes with it), others will seize it, and we will lose the right to defend the positive changes that were also part of that experience. We cannot have it both ways.

Of course, one could argue that communism is to socialism what Cromwell’s republic was to later, Western-style democracy, and go for the simple adoption of “socialist” as part of the new name. However, there are so many groups (and media pundits) already bandying that label about that it would also demand much preliminary discussion, in order to newly differentiate our Party. In the comment section of Atkins’ article, Charles Kyger relates how someone was more horrified by the designation “socialist” than “communist” in a discussion about his political views. This can only be explained by the recent extensive tarnishing of “socialism” by Tea-Party critics of Obama’s policies that has been kept in constant “feed-loop” by the corporate media.

These exact points about the shared problems with socialism, Marxism, and labor politics serve as the jumping-off point for Joe Sims’ rebuttal to Atkins’ arguments, in “Extreme Makeover Goes Too Far.” Sims points out that there are three main cases against Atkins’ proposals: (1) the organizational tasks of an avowedly Marxist party, (2) the need to underscore and champion the independence of politically conscious working-class elements, and (3) the “historical precedents” that played such a huge role in our current stage of development. With regard to the role of a Marxist party, Sims concedes that it must work in concert with other working-class and people’s coalitions under the umbrella of the Democratic Party, to do otherwise would be self-defeating. However, as Sims also stresses, electoral work cannot be the sole task of a Marxist party, whose responsibilities include developing working-class solidarity and strengthening its socialist consciousness. This latter part includes the primary role of contact with working-class groups and telling them something about who we are, both past and present. Here, as others have pointed out in the reply section, we must re-emphasize reading and discussion of classic works of Marxist-Leninist thought, as well as current party literature (Political Affairs, People’s World, etc.). But more fundamental than that, we have to understand that the Party works in contact with the broad currents of the Democratic Party machine in both a spirit of tactical cooperation and ideological, political disagreement and (ultimately) antagonism. In other words, we must maintain a dialectical spirit of struggle in our thinking and scope of action in working within the main party system.

This insistence leads to the other point made by Sims, which is that the Party must always safeguard and struggle against any encroachment by the Democratic Party machinery on the political independence of the working-class and its specific class interests in participating within broader coalitions. As examples of groups that lost their organizational integrity in past coalitions, he cites the experiences of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the New America Movement, and the New Democratic Movement. As a positive example of a party successfully working within Democratic coalitions, Sims points to the experience of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ promotion as a successful candidate of the Vermont Progressive Party. Thus, for Sims, maintaining an independent party structure, rather than deflating that structure into an incoherent and impressionable “organization,” makes tactical sense especially when working with other progressive groups alongside the Democratic Party.

As for understanding the Party’s historical precedents, Sims takes issue with Atkins’ negative assessment of past “dogmatic” Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Pointing out that there is a significant body of critical, non-dogmatic work under the rubric of Marxism-Leninism, Sims calls Atkins’ dismissive characterization of this body of thought “unfortunate.” I am inclined to agree. We have to be careful not to generalize about the Marxist-Leninist tradition, and do the hard critical legwork of distinguishing the worthy bodies of literature and thought from the chaff. In closing, Sims insists that the forces that have contributed most to the tarnishing of communism have to do with the specific anti-communist tradition sustained by the Ultra-Right within the U.S. However, I agree with others who have also pointed out that this tarnishing of communism cannot be solely, or even mainly, attributed to the forces of anti-communism, since other groups favorably disposed within the American Left often hesitate in openly associating with the Communist brand. This has to be accepted and understood as part of the ongoing legacy of mistakes and political failures inextricably bound up with the Soviet past.

This last point is one of the two main points that Dan Margolis presents to take issue with Sims’ presentation and to endorse Atkins’ position, in his responding article “What’s in a Name?” He opens his article congratulating both authors for maintaining a cordial exchange, by attacking ideas, not people, but oddly dispenses with the affectionate and brotherly address “comrade” (with which this author shares a particular fondness). That aside, the two mistakes that Margolis sees with Sims’ presentation are: (1) confusing the problems with the negative connotations of communism with anti-communism and (2) that the changes that Atkins proposes do not go as far as Sims suggests. With the first point, I agree, but with the second point, as is clear from the foregoing, I disagree. Margolis sees nothing wrong with Atkins’ position, which he completely endorses, namely that the CPUSA should drop its “Communist” label and no longer call itself a “party.”

In presenting his case against retaining the communist label, Margolis is far more unsparing than Atkins by going into more sustained enumeration of the crimes of former and present “Communist” regimes, and the need to affirm unreservedly the inalienable nature of human rights. Then, he goes on a long excursus of how unnecessary a defense of the communist past (and present) should be for anyone seeking to fully participate in the current political situation. He claims that Sims fails to demonstrate that group integrity dissolved in the examples of groups, like the Rainbow Coalition, the New America Movement, and the New Democratic Movement, that worked in contact with the Democratic Party machinery. I agree that more discussion needs to be presented by Sims on this point, especially since no background is provided for these experiences. However, it does not take any stretch of the imagination to understand why working with a powerful party machinery, like that of the Democratic Party, might pose fatal problems for loosely-defined and inarticulate organizations, whose members often get lost in its iron maw.

However, back to Margolis’ point about the communist past. I don’t think that we can discard that past so easily through name change as he suggests. It is not enough to anticipate only Glenn Beck and other right-wing media pundits in addressing this issue. The Party has plenty of rivals on the Left who would also seize upon the surrendering of the term “communist,” as an opportunity to demand of former-CP members why remain part of an ex-party that merely reproduces their strategies and tactical formation, one that they have carried out longer. Wouldn’t we risk becoming redundant with say the DSA, by being only an organization working within the Democratic Party and going by the designation “democratic socialist”? How would we be setting ourselves apart from them? Furthermore, other parties, such as the SPUSA, would pick off those members convinced of “going it alone,” by consistently pushing independent candidates in the electoral process. Surrendering “communism” would hand the other left groups an unearned moral victory, a “told you so” moment that would severely weaken, not strengthen the newly designated organization. Margolis fails to even address these concerns.

In closing, the only route that seems defensible is to accept the long and difficult path of rebuilding the Party’s reputation, especially when everyone left of center shares a broad deficit of popular support in America. But we all recognize that this situation is fluid and that the current economic recession and two failed, unpaid-for wars should also keep the Right no less broken and on the defensive, if we continue to hammer these points home. However, we can do that most effectively by sustaining our name and organizational structure within the current hysterical climate of irrational taunts raining down from the Ultra-Right, on everyone left unconvinced of Reagan’s “revolution.” That’s why the Memphis Club of the CPUSA remains committed to being part of a Communist Party, in a long, ongoing, and internationally recognized effort to recast human relations, first envisioned by Marx and Engels and shaped by the best laborers of that tradition.

Bird, Fish Kills Quite Common - and That's the Problem

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:30:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

ATLANTA, Georgia, Jan 24, 2011 (IPS) - The New Year brought a spate of incidents across the United States and around the world in which large numbers of birds appeared to have fallen out of the sky, and thousands of fish were found floating dead in rivers.

As media reports multiplied of mysterious mass wildlife deaths, and blogs and social media picked up on the story, the inevitable theories began circulating, ranging from the outlandish (a sign of the apocalypse) to the more plausible (a consequence of environmental damage, such as the U.S. Gulf Coast oil spill of 2010).

In the end, while the reasons appear to have varied, scientists say such deaths are a normally occurring phenomenon – and that is precisely why people should be concerned.

"We somehow think we can put up power lines, cell towers and high-rises and wildlife will just fly around it," Karen Rowe, bird conservation programme coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, told IPS.

On Jan. 1, residents of Beebe, Arkansas, awoke to find about 5,000 dead blackbirds lying on the ground. Then, on the state's Arkansas River, 80,000 drum fish were found dead.

On Jan. 3, residents of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay area began reporting tens of thousands of small fish, including menhaden, spots, and croakers, washing up on shore. Officials believed it was due to cold weather. The following day, dozens of dead birds were spotted by a Gilbertsville, Kentucky woman in her backyard. More were found at nearby Murray State University.

Also on Jan. 4, about 500 dead blackbirds and starlings were found in Labarre, Louisiana, and thousands of dead mullet, ladyfish, and catfish were found in Spruce Creek, Florida. Several dozen birds, including American coots, were found on Jan. 5 on a Texas highway. About a hundred starlings were found dead on Jan. 10 near a highway in northern California.

Then on Jan. 11, thousands of gizzard shad fish were found in Chicago, Illinois, followed by 300 dead starlings in South Dakota on Jan. 18.

Bird deaths were also reported in Falkoeping, Sweden, on Jan. 4; Peterborough, England, on Jan. 4; and Faenza, Italy, on Jan. 7. Fish deaths were reported in Parana, Brazil, throughout late December and early January; in Sarnia, Canada, in early January; and Little Bay and Waikawau Bay, New Zealand, on Jan. 4.

Rowe and Tom Sherry, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane University in Louisiana, both told IPS these types of incidents are actually quite common.

Indeed, according to the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center, in the last decade, 175 mass deaths exceeding 1,000 birds have occurred in the United States alone.

Bird die-offs would happen without human activities like industry, Sherry said, but human activities are making it much worse, and we are starting to see what he refers to as the "cumulative impact" of numerous problems.

Rowe studied the Beebe incident and concluded that the birds died from being scared from their roost at night by fireworks.

"You have to understand what fireworks do," Rowe said. "They don't see very well. When the birds heard these noises, we strongly believe they flew up into the air. A portion of them came down, [and] they collided into buildings, houses, trees."

"It was the noise of the fireworks that caused them to leave the roost, but the cause of death was trauma from flying into objects," she said. "All three labs found trauma injuries, hemorrhages to the chest, head, and the wings, consistent with flying into something rather than falling."

Prof. Sherry looked into the reports of dead birds in Labarre, Louisiana, and noted in almost all the cases, the dead birds were found within a few yards of power lines. Sherry believes the birds were flying low due to a storm event, and again, blackbirds cannot see well in the dark, so they collided with the power lines.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture admitted guilt in the South Dakota incident; it had deliberately poisoned the birds after a local farmer complained.

"In any month of the year, there are several ongoing mortality events that go on across the nation. Wintertime is a stressful time for wildlife," Rowe explained.

"Birds are colliding with power lines, communication towers, high-rise buildings. Those are species suffering declines," Rowe said. "How many birds are we willing to see die because we're going to place a new cell phone tower?"

Sherry noted that some scientists have lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to change the lighting on communications towers, to prevent birds from flying into them.

"If they would just change the light from a red light to a white strobe light, bird mortality could be reduced by 75 percent," Sherry said.

"There's a variety of lighting techniques that can help the birds avoid towers, miss buildings. We have to focus on how to mitigate the impacts on the migrating birds," Rowe said.

According to a report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of Migratory Bird Management, there are ways bird mortality could be mitigated. While the law gives them the power to pursue prosecution for threats to migratory birds, the agency has instead chosen a softer approach.

"We support initiatives such as the Cats Indoors Program and the Fatal Light Awareness Program, which encourages building owners to turn off skyscraper lights during spring and fall night-time songbird migrations," the Service wrote.

As for the fish kills, Sherry said freezing cold temperatures was a plausible explanation for some incidents, adding that some of this winter's extreme cold and blizzard conditions across the United States could be due to climate change.

Comcast Behind Olbermann Firing?

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:39:00 +0000

Media Advisory
Olbermann Is Out
MSNBC host's departure shows the limits of corporate media liberalism
1/24/11

Whether the abrupt termination of MSNBC host Keith Olbermann's contract on January 21 was connected to Olbermann's left-of-center politics or the recent purchase of NBC by Comcast from General Electric, the host's departure provides an opportunity to reflect on the bigger picture.

MSNBC's current liberal identity is generally attributed to Olbermann, whose success offered compelling evidence that a left-of-center TV host could find a sizable audience. Olbermann's willingness to criticize prominent Republican leaders and right-wing commentators like Fox's Bill O'Reilly was virtually unknown in corporate television. And the show did more than that for progressive causes; for instance, as the Nation's Jeremy Scahill noted on Twitter (1/21/11), Olbermann's program regularly reported on the scandals associated with the Blackwater mercenary company.

Olbermann was not, however, the first avowedly liberal cable host. He was preceded at MSNBC by Phil Donahue, whose program was canceled in the run-up to the Iraq War for explicitly political reasons: His firing followed an internal NBC report that called him "a tired, left-wing liberal" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" (FAIR Action Alert, 3/7/03).

It's reasonable to wonder whether politics were involved in Olbermann's departure as well. Olbermann had several clashes with NBC management, most recently over donations he made to Democratic political candidates (FAIR Action Alert, 11/5/10).

Olbermann revealed in 2005 that MSNBC management had two years earlier pushed back against the leftward direction of his show, calling him onto the carpet when he had Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo on as guests in close succession (FAIR Media Advisory, 10/27/05):

I got called into a vice president‘s office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on on consecutive nights?"

Last week's formal approval of the Comcast/NBC merger raised questions about whether the new company had any role in the termination of Olbermann's contract. Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast, citing a "knowledgeable official," reported that it didn't (1/21/11), while the Washington Post's Paul Farhi (1/23/11) reported that one source "intimate with MSNBC's management" believed that the removal of Olbermann was related to the Comcast takeover.

Comcast's record in this regard suggests concern is warranted. In 2008, Comcast fired one of its own reporters, CN8 TV host Barry Nolan, for speaking out against a local Emmy being awarded to Fox's O'Reilly. Nolan had distributed materials critical of O'Reilly to other reporters--or, as Nolan explained it (Think Progress, 5/27/08), “I got fired from my job on a news and information network for reporting demonstrably true things in a room full of newspeople.”

There's some truth to the notion that Comcast is a conservative company; Stephen Burke, Comcast COO and the man picked to head up NBC after the merger, raised at least $200,000 for George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign. But GE, a major military contractor, has also long had a Republican orientation--going back to its launching of Ronald Reagan's political career (Extra!, 11-12/94). And no media conglomerate is likely to be comfortable owning an outlet with an explicitly progressive slant, given the critique of corporate power that's at the heart of the progressive philosophy.

In discussions of cable news channels, there is often a tendency to treat Fox and MSNBC as mirror images--Fox providing one thing on the right, MSNBC doing the same on the left. This is wildly misleading, though (FAIR Blog, 10/4/10). Fox, from its inception, has sought to deliver a right-wing product. MSNBC, by contrast, tried and failed to succeed as a competitor to Fox on the right (FAIR Action Alert, 2/5/99, 3/7/03; Extra! Update, 2/05): "We have to be more conservative then they are," NBC CEO Robert Wright reportedly told NBC News chief Neal Shapiro after September 11 (New York, 10/3/10).

NBC only reluctantly accepted a progressive tilt for its cable channel after Olbermann, moving to the left after being hired, proved that counter-programming against Fox with left-leaning programs was the only way MSNBC could win an audience. Even then, NBC executives (and even on-air reporters) were clearly uncomfortable with the political leanings of its most prominent host (Daily Beast, 1/21/11).

There is little reason to believe that Comcast's takeover of MSNBC will make things any better. As fired Comcast reporter Nolan put it (CJR.org, 8/16/10), Comcast "aspires to run a major network news operation. What happens when Keith Olbermann goes after O’Reilly? I think that’s scary." With Olbermann gone, the future of MSNBC under Comcast is very much up in the air.

Photo: News commentator Keith Olbermann (Freedom to Marry, cc by 2.0)

Coal Operators Organize Rally for Mountain Top Removal in Charleston, WV

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:07:00 +0000

The Environmental Protection Agency has vetoed the permit for the Logan County, WV Spruce Number One mine – a symbol of the debate over mountain top removal mining that has been embroiled in litigation since 1998.

In the wake of the defeat of significant carbon reduction by Republican filibusters of the energy bill last session, the Environmental Protection Agency has become more aggressive on doing something about climate change dangers posed by, among other culprits, carbon polluting coal. When combined with additional significant pollution and land degradation associated with mountaintop removal mining. the EPA finally shrugged off intense pressure coming from the oil AND coal industry to continue doing nothing, and took a stand.

Well now, you can hear the coal companies holler cross every holler in the State of West Virginia. Not just them, but their friends in the legislature, state government and communities where the economy – and public services – are heavily dependent on revenues from the coal industry. Coal industry employment has shrunk from over 120,000 direct workers in 1960, to just 20,000 today – out of a workforce of 820,000 people. Nonetheless, while coal employs less than a half a percent of the workforce, it contributes nearly 15 percent of state revenues, mostly through the legacy “severance” tax. This no doubt helps explain the mass turnout of state officeholders, plus the Congressional delegation, to the “Rally for Coal” held in the capital, Charleston, a week ago Thursday to protest the EPA sanction against mountaintop removal.

About 400 defenders of coal cheered the importance of coal in energy policy, some claiming it was “God’s will” that coal be both mined and burned. Others denying climate change, or just pointing out the absence of alternative jobs, or political hacks whose paychecks are directly or indirectly signed by the coal companies joined the crowd.

Acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin chaired the “Rally" inside the state Capitol. He called upon the Rev. Mitchell Bias, from the Delbarton Regional Church of God, to deliver God's Word on the subject. "Coal is your will. You placed it here on earth. It is part of your master plan," Bias said. He prayed to God that 2011 "will be safe and secure for mining and the most prosperous year for mining." Some of the Reverend's people attending the rally wore black "Friends of Coal" T-shirts reading, "Pro-Christ, Pro-Life, Pro-American, Pro-Guns, Pro-Coal ... Republican."

Back on earth, Marie Gunnoe, an organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, said “Mountaintop removal is no longer a jobs issue. It is a health issue. They are killing us by destroying our mountains and destroying our water. Six generations of my family have lived there. We have every right to stay there. Don't we have the right to protect our water?"

There were a couple of hundred opponents of mountaintop mining as well, including both coal miners and longtime residents from coal districts of West Virginia. The theme of the opponents was: “the mountains in West Virginia are now worth a lot more standing, than they are being torn down.” So agreed state delegate John Doyle, a delegate from Jefferson county (in the panhandle – not in coal country), who added, “Tourism and knowledge based industries must be our future.” The coal lobby is not pushing in that direction, clearly.

The United Mine Workers in WV has taken an agnostic position – not challenging climate change science, or the need for “clean coal”, but clearly concerned about any threat to jobs. The Spruce Mine – vetoed by the EPA – would have been a $250 million dollar investment promising 250 jobs.

Of course these particular jobs would be non-Union. Only a tiny amount of mountaintop removal mining jobs are unionized (less than five percent).

Meanwhile, West Virginia ranks 49 in personal income. For all the wealth that mining coal creates, it has not had much spillover in terms of overall economic development for the state.

Moderate political forces at the rally, fearful of overly offending coal, but still not entirely numb about the science – and dangers – of carbon pollution and environmental degradation from mountaintop removal mining – called for more focus on “clean coal.” In the past this has turned out to be just a code word for the slogan’s nickname, which is just “coal!!.” The EPA decision compels the coal industry, and their supporters – to put some skin in the game when they say “clean.”

Rocked by nine percent unemployment and increasing pressure to adjust its economic development philosophy – West Virginia must begin looking to the future, not the past, for answers. But we are not quite there yet! But WE WILL MAKE IT!

Vermont Single-payer Proposals a ‘major step in right direction’

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

MONTPELIER, Vt. – Longtime reform advocate and Vermont family physician Dr. Deborah Richter hailed Wednesday’s report of health system expert William Hsiao to the Vermont Legislature, particularly Hsiao’s findings that a single-payer system would be the best remedy for what he called the state’s “broken” and “unsustainable” way of paying for care.

“Dr. Hsiao’s team of researchers found that a streamlined, single-payer system for financing health care would save money by reducing excess paperwork and bureaucracy, cover everyone in Vermont with no increase in health spending, reduce or eliminate patient co-pays, promote job growth and economic development, and control costs,” Richter said.

“Although the devil is in the details, the broad outlines of his single-payer proposals are very promising,” she said. “They represent a major step in the right direction.

“This thoughtful, evidence-based approach to solving our state’s health care problems – an approach that involves our new governor, our congressional delegation and state lawmakers poised to take swift, positive action to translate reform proposals into law – stands in stark contrast to the noisy goings-on in Washington this week,” Richter said, alluding to the Republican party’s symbolic vote in the House to repeal the federal health law.

While her overall attitude toward Hsiao’s draft report was very positive, Richter said that her group, the Vermont chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, would be making recommendations to improve the single-payer models to maximize administrative savings and strengthen cost control even further. After a period of public comment, a final report from Hsiao is due Feb. 17.

“Only a one-payer system can maximize the efficiencies and cost savings,” Richter said. “So it will be important to fully incorporate Medicare and Medicaid into the system as soon as possible. We will also be recommending the use of single-payer tools like separate operating and capital budgets for hospitals.”

“Optimally, a single-payer program would also prohibit the participation of investor-owned, for-profit delivery systems, which studies show drive up costs and produce worse medical outcomes,” she said.

Hsiao is a professor of economics at the Harvard School of Public Health and an internationally recognized authority on health care systems. Last year he and his team were commissioned by the Legislature to analyze three models for state health reform, including a single-payer model, where private insurers are excluded from the system and all medical bills are paid by a single public or quasi-public authority.

In his presentation to Vermont lawmakers, Hsiao outlined the three models: a public single-payer plan, a plan that builds on the new federal health law but adds a so-called public option, and his team’s recommended plan.

Hsiao’s team found that the “public option” plan would yield the poorest results, having only a very modest impact on reducing costs and having almost no impact on reducing the number of the uninsured.

While citing the merits of a publicly administered single-payer plan, Hsiao’s team ended up by recommending a “public-private hybrid single-payer” model that would be managed by an independent board and that would contract-out the job of claims processing to private and public bidders. A private company like Vermont Blue Cross Blue Shield, for example, could be hired to process the claims, as is done currently by Medicare.

Richter likes the idea of the independent board and says physicians in Vermont favor single payer because it’s the only approach that gives them a voice and negotiating power – something they lack with insurers today. Single payer will also benefit the state’s physicians by simplifying billing and giving them a choice of practice options. “It will make primary care very attractive in Vermont,” she said. “We’ll be able to choose where we want to practice and patients will be able to freely choose their doctors.”

She also would like to see the enactment of a plan that provides for comprehensive care.

Richter practices family medicine in Montpelier, and has pushed for single payer in Vermont for more than two decades. She is a past president of Physicians for a National Health Program, a nationwide organization of 18,000 doctors who favor single-payer national health insurance, commonly referred to as an improved Medicare for all.

“Dr. Hsiao has performed an extraordinary service,” Richter said. “Vermont has an historic opportunity to lead the nation on fundamental health reform.”

Georgia PSC Releases Emergency Low-Income Energy Assistance for Seniors

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:56:00 +0000

Original source: The Atlanta Progressive News

(APN) ATLANTA -- The Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) released five million dollars from the Universal Service Fund fund on January 18, 2011, to help low-income seniors pay their energy bills this winter.

Georgia Watch had made a formal request to the PSC to release the funds. Commissioner Doug Everett then made a formal motion, and the PSC unanimously voted to release the funds.

Four million dollars will be credited to eligible senior customers of Atlanta Gas Light Company and other gas marketers. The money will show up as a line item credit, "Georgia PSC Credit," on gas bills.

The Salvation Army will receive the remaining funds to disburse to people in need across the state.

“We applaud the PSC for acting quickly to address a situation that has reached emergency levels,” Georgia Watch executive director Angela Speir Phelps, said. “The recession has hit consumers hard and record-low temperatures are exacerbating an already dire situation.”

The PSC’s Universal Service Fund (USF), one of the purposes of which is to assist low-income residential consumers in times of emergency, had a balance of around 30 million dollars as of December 2010.

These funds will supplement the dwindling LIHEAP funds, which as previously reported by APN, are almost depleted in Fulton County.

FACAA CEO Joyce Dorsey told APN two days ago that the agency had not received the remaining LIHEAP funds yet from the state, but that they had been appropriated. However, they have started taking applications again because they anticipate the funds will arrive soon.

According to the Secretary of State's website, the USF is funded by a variety of profit sources accumulated by utility companies in Georgia, including unclaimed deposits paid by consumers to establish utility service. Apparently, customers have a two year period in which to reclaim their deposit, so beware.

The purposes of the USF include low-income energy assistance and construction by utility companies to expand their service.

According to the PSC, "The Georgia General Assembly originally established the USF in the Natural Gas Deregulation Act of 1997 to fund natural gas pipeline extensions in the Atlanta Gas Light Company service area and charged the Commission with administering and managing the fund."

The PSC establishes the amount of the fund every year, with a maximum of 25 million dollars per year.

"In 2002 the Legislature passed amendments that allow the USF to be used to provide assistance to low-income natural gas customers in the AGLC delivery area. Since the inception of the USF, the Commission has allocated close to $100 million for customer refunds and low-income assistance," the PSC said.

The last time the PSC allocated USF funds for the purpose of low-income gas bill assistance was in 2008 when it disbursed 6.6 million dollars.

“We are pleased that we are able to assist these natural gas customers during this extremely cold 2011 winter heating season,” Commissioner Everett said.

Meanwhile, Dorsey noted that FACAA has a second pot of money available for a variety of emergency assistance, totaling only 100,000 dollars, which comes from federal grants. This is separate from LIHEAP or USF money.

Hold Yourself Personally Accountable

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:39:00 +0000

“It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” -- Sarah Palin, video message, Jaunary 12th, 2011

“So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy.” -- Pres. Obama, Tucson, Arizona Memorial Speech, January 12, 2011

“Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them.” -- William Hazlitt, 1816

If we are pragmatists, we ask whether Sarah Palin’s assertion is useful given the present context. And indeed it is. Nothing suits a deep wealth divide in which a miniscule few have enormous wealth and a great multitude have dwindling or vanished resources than a “hold yourself personally accountable” view. Call it the “Frank Sinatra I Did It My Way” view.

An individual, say, like John Paulson, a hedge-fund manager, who earned $2.3 billion in 2009 by betting against sub-prime mortgages, would surely find “the precept that each individual is accountable for his actions” a practical precept to support. The average John Doe who made somewhat less in 2009 might also consider the precept a practical one to adopt because next year he may be the one earning $2.3 billion and he wants to be held totally personally accountable at that time. You can’t write an online essay that will counter that optimism because it’s something of a Twilight Zone deal, comparable to America’s love affair with the automobile, guns and football.

Palin’s assertion of personal responsibility and the “free to choose” that it is logically tied to are both foundational tenets of our religious faith or our sense of patriotism – that is, if we’re not free and responsible then how can there be a Heaven or a Hell? Or, how can we be exceptional if it’s not our free choice that has made us so? Any view that siphons off an iota of responsibility onto Nature, Fate, Chance, Society, History, War, Poverty, or the Stars comes out of the “politics of the impossible.” Such politics is fighting The Lord and the Founding Fathers who seem clearly in the minds of many to have established individual freedom and personal accountability.

If politics is the art of the possible, there’s no politics on this issue. Then again political power and crazed fantasies have historically mostly defined “regimes of the possible” and thankfully the countering forces of the impossible, say, from Christianity to anti-apartheid, managed to break through. And maybe now, after one crazed individual, Jared Loughner, kills six people and wounds 13 others in Tucson, we need not to take our focus from the surround, from the stage upon which this happened and give all our attention to the individual psyche of the shooter. But to put American culture – the bifurcated political and economic order after 2008 – under examination when we are disposed to accepting the precept that Palin cites – that Loughner and Loughner alone should bear responsibility – seems futile, but nonetheless, needed.

President Obama has responded to this incident by urging an immediate need to defuse heated attacks and accusations. This president would rather see the heat of any issue die down. Think of Lincoln’s essentially pragmatic approach to slavery, a “violation of human rights” issue that perhaps President Hu Jintao had in mind when President Obama brought up the issue of Chinese violation of those rights. Lincoln’s pragmatic goal was the preservation of the Union. Everything else had to be quieted. It is not clear what in President Obama’s mind is comparable to Lincoln’s goal. What is clear is that there is no partisan dispute regarding any of our choice and responsibility illusions, illusions that are accepted as the light of truth. We need to deal with those issues and Tucson is a good place to start.

Treating Jared Loughner as an autonomous but crazed free agent and asking him to assume total responsibility for his thoughts and actions releases a deeply flawed society and culture from all responsibility. Those who have triumphed, as the conservatives have, in the competitive arena of illusion, spectacle and enchantment, in detouring a population that conservatism has brought to its knees from riot and rebellion want to be exempted from any scrutiny of the Tucson killing rampage. They want to leave the stage they have set upon which Loughner, along with the rest of us, think and act, and leave him and us to make a personal review of conscience.

A society which leaves its young men and women stranded in a wasteland made by the rapacious greed and looting that led to the Great Recession of 2008 and which had already brought middle class well-being to a state of indenture to banks and credit card companies nurtures bewilderment, uncertainty, fear, frustration, and anger. The young are not experienced in this sort of warfare, and like real combat, they suffer and sometimes die before they are tempered.

Liberals have chosen not to take on the various illusions of American individualism and personal freedom and personal responsibility because there’s only what we call the “extreme Left” on that side. Everyone else, from Conservative, Libertarian, Independent, Soccer Mom, Millennial, Militia, Tea Partiers, the Positive Illusionists, and Oprah Winfrey don’t want the power of personal choice and accountability to be messed with. Precisely because these illusions are so widely held and precisely because they keep us from any recuperation, any hope of improving the societal surround of our young, they must be faced directly. Obama’s style of sidling by a direct clash will not work here. We cannot buy into the alchemy of attitude overpowering reality, of choices severed from the world within which they are made.

Our persons are influenced in various ways and to various degrees by the world we are in. We are “free to choose” within the constraints of time and place, of genetic inheritance, of power, of unconscious desire, and the play of chance. If you winnow through all those, you will find an ever-changing amalgam of the autonomous self and the manufactured self. The more powerful the empire of illusions within which we live, from those inspired by “market values” to the intended “harmonies” of our new “social networking,” the more powerfully are our choices manufactured, our minds “leased.” Maybe Milton Friedman neglected to mention such qualifiers because we would be led to examine closely the “self-correcting” presumptions of totally unregulated free markets and the power of globalized technocapitalism in shaping our “free choices.” There is a monumental defensive Great Wall built to keep out any consideration of constraints upon our “free to choose.”

We live in a world of unbelievably powerful influences that does not hesitate to demand that we each hold ourselves personally accountable for actions already inhibited by “prior constraint” or indulged by resident ruling priorities. In other words, there’s a worldly “disposition” within which we make our “free choices.” In the matter of planetary degradation we can see “power” and its shaping force in play. We humans have the power here by our choices to decide the fate of every living creature on the planet. Within our own humankind it is not difficult to see the same sort of power at work, say, in post-industrialized societies “opening markets” and exploiting labor in undeveloped regions of the world. Power constrains choice indirectly by offering a hyperreal that over-stimulates, distracts and suppresses. Power will ultimately resort to a direct suppression of choice by imprisoning the chooser within an inescapable world. The rapid flight of millions to cyberspace may represent an attempt at escape. Consider the “personal freedom” enjoyed by Iraqis under Saddam and then subsequent to Bush’s “pre-emptive” war. Consider the “personal freedom” of Afghans as the result of choices made by the U.S.. We do not blush in demanding that both countries at some point “assume personal responsibility” for choices that our use of power have made.

In regard to the play of Chance and its effect on “personal free choice” and “assuming personal responsibility” I need only point out that the wealthy and super-wealthy never recognize chance as anything but a challenge to be seized and turned to profit. The wealthy hold that those without wealth are crushed by such challenges. Chance in the Winner’s view is not a force that may limit or extend one’s fortune but an opportunity to establish your superiority. Winners never see themselves as victims of chance nor do they owe their winnings to chance. The Losers are also not allowed to claim victimization by chance or by anything for that matter. There is no possibility that those in need of welfare are laid low by unfortunate accidents or a mounting series of such accidents. They chose to become victimized by their own failures. They failed to make lemonade out of a lemon.

We can assume that the poor and struggling and all those of the middle class whose circumstances have diminished in the last quarter of a century have chosen their Fate and should assume personal responsibility. The actor is always at fault, not the stage upon which he acts. Lunacy is always personal, like sin. Does no one go nuts because he or she is overwhelmed by the gross inequities foisted upon them by a “free choosing” Wall Street who will not be asked to “assume personal responsibility”? Is there no mind ever too weak, no intelligence God-given too scant to maintain a “functional ego”? And can we also assume that the rising number of suicides among our soldiers is no more than a number of unique mental instabilities detached from the combat surround? Do we ask that each soldier who takes his own life assume total responsibility for that act, for the “dark sun” that shadowed his soul? And when “time and chance” happens in such a crushing way that no light enters, that only a lunatic’s reasoning remains, do we only think of involuntary commitment and precepts of assuming personal responsibility? We should expect that if the stage remains set in the same way, the same actors and actions will reappear.

What we should assume is that Jared Loughner will not be the first monster and casualty that such a society will produce as long as we remain under our enchantments of unconstrained autonomy.

Photo: Sarah Palin's Twitter site celebrates website with rifle crosshairs that many have linked to the Tucson shootings. (Posted to Flickr by Monado)

Japan: 2011 Spring Union Struggles Begin

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:23:00 +0000

Original source: Japan Press Weekly

Union workers on January 14 declared the start of a series of annual wage hike actions, the 2011 Spring Struggle, in front of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) building in Tokyo. Their slogan, “Use excessive corporate internal reserves for wage increases and job creation!” resounded through Tokyo’s business district.

Union workers on January 14 declared the start of a series of annual wage hike actions, the 2011 Spring Struggle, in front of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) building in Tokyo. Their slogan, “Use excessive corporate internal reserves for wage increases and job creation!” resounded through Tokyo’s business district.

The People’s Spring Struggle Joint Committee, consisting of independent unions and Japan Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren)-affiliated unions, is demanding an increase in hourly wages by more than 100 yen and in monthly pay by more than 10,000 yen.

On behalf of the organizers, Zenroren President Daikoku Sakuji spoke in front of the Keidanren building and reported that a growing proportion of the general public has now become aware of the need to utilize a part of the corporate internal reserves of 244 trillion yen to raise wages.

Daikoku called on union workers to demand a wage increase and defend job security as a means to expand domestic demand and shouted, “Let us recover our economy! Let us boost the Spring Struggle to defend our livlihoods!”

Chair of the Japan Federation of Aviation Workers Unions Chikamura Kazuya criticized Japan Airlines for having unreasonably dismissed targeted JAL crewmembers. He expressed his determination to do his best to achieve a withdrawal of their dismissals and to create a society in which everyone can continue to work without anxiety.

President of the Japanese Federation of Co-op Labor Unions Kuwata Tomio called for an increase in the present minimum hourly wages at least to 1,000 yen.

Secretary General of the Japan Federation of Prefectural and Municipal Workers’ Unions (Jichiroren) Saruhashi Hitoshi stated, “Japan’s entry into the TPP free-trade pact will not only destroy the nation’s agriculture, forestry, and fisheries but also adversely affect the nation’s employment system as a whole.”

Tsuchiya Satomi, who was a contingent worker at Nissan Motors and is now fighting in court against the carmaker to demand that her dismissal be retracted, said “Large corporations should be held responsible for providing job security and protecting local economies.”

Renew Tax Credit for Energy Efficiency

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:12:00 +0000

EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: A number of federal energy efficiency related tax incentives expired at the end of 2010. Will any such programs remain in force and if not, are there other ways to save money on green upgrades? -- Jen Franklin, Chicago, IL

It is true that some federal tax credits for energy efficiency upgrades expired at the end of 2010, but there is legislative effort afoot to extend some of those credits—and there are plenty of other ways to defray the costs of turning over a new green leaf or two this year and beyond.

One of the best known green federal tax incentives, the Residential Energy Efficiency Tax Credit—which kicked in 30 percent of the cost of household efficiency upgrades up to $1,500 on items including water heaters, furnaces, heat pumps, central air conditioning systems, insulation, windows, doors and roofs—is no longer available as of January 1, 2011. However, some lawmakers are looking to extend the credit. U.S. Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico) have drafted legislation calling for keeping the program going, in a slightly revised form, for another two years.

“Residential energy efficiency has been identified as the most effective strategy to enhance our energy security and save money on energy bills,” says Snowe. “The residential energy efficiency tax credits…have been key catalysts in improving the energy efficiency of homes throughout the country [and] have driven companies to produce the most advanced products current technology allows…”

And if you were thinking you would save thousands of dollars on the price of a Toyota Prius thanks to federal incentives, think again. Federal tax credits also expired at the end of 2010 on the purchase of hybrid gas-electric cars and trucks. However, if you want to roll away in one of the sporty new all-electric cars, such as the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt, you can now qualify for up to a $7,500 (depending on battery capacity) federal tax credit. The federal government now also offers a tax credit for 10 percent (up to $4,000) of the cost of a kit to convert an existing hybrid vehicle into a plug-in hybrid.

All of these programs expire themselves at the end of 2011. Whether or not new federal alternative fuel vehicle incentives crop up for 2012—when many new ultra-efficient plug-in hybrids from the likes of Toyota, Honda, Volvo and others are slated for release—remains to be seen.

Regardless, many states have their own programs to encourage energy efficiency. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) regularly updates its free online State Energy Efficiency Policy Database, which makes accessing information on your state’s energy efficiency programs, standards and “reward structures” as easy as clicking on a map. Likewise, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE) is another free online resource that lists state and federal incentives for buying an alternative fuel car, greening up your home or otherwise embracing energy efficiency. And the Energy Star website details special offers and rebates from cities, towns, counties and utilities on the purchase of appliances and equipment that meet federal standards for energy efficiency.

CONTACTS: Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE), www.dsireusa.org; ACEEE’s State Energy Efficiency Policy Database, www.aceee.org/sector/state-policy; Energy Star Special Offers and Rebates, www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=rebate.rebate_locator.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk®, c/o E – The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. E is a nonprofit publication. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Request a Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

Photo: Both the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf (pictured here), qualify for up to a $7,500 federal tax credit (courtesy Nissan).

Generalizing Tunisia: Context Overrides Story

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:41:00 +0000

When faced with problems, most authoritarian regimes maintain a policy of rigidity when the appropriate response would be flexibility, political wisdom and concessions. This policy gives authoritarian leaders their ability to control their populations to serve the interests of a few individuals and political and military elites. It can also, however, usher their downfall, for populations can only be oppressed, controlled and punished to a point.

President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, who controlled his population with an iron fist since his arrival to the presidential palace in 1987, must have crossed that point. He was forced to flee the country amid the angry chants of thousands of Tunisians, fed up with growing unemployment, soaring inflation, government corruption, violent crackdowns and lack of political freedom. These mounting frustrations led to relentless protests throughout the country. The government’s subsequent crackdowns only stirred emotions beyond any crowd control strategy, and eventually Ben Ali’s plane left to seek refuge outside his own country.

The upheaval in Tunisia is certainly worthy of all the headlines, media commentary and official statements it has generated. But many of these reactions contain generalizations that hype expectations, worsen an already terrible situation and provoke misguided policies. Indeed, the current political storm, dubbed both the “Youth Intifada” and the “Jasmine Revolution”, has inspired many interpretations. Some commentators wished to see the popular uprising as a prelude to an essentially anti-Arab regimes phenomenon that will strike elsewhere as well, while others placed it within a non-Arab context, noting that popular uprisings are growing in countries that struggle with rising food prices. Even al-Qaeda had a take on the situation, trying to score points to find a place in the looming political void.

Many commentators have focused on the Arab identity of Tunisia to find correlations elsewhere. Hadeel al-Shalchi’s Associated Press article “Arab activists hope Tunisia uprising brings change,” presented the uprising within an Arab context. Reporting from Cairo, she wrote of the growing optimism among those whom she dubbed “Arab activists” that other Arab leaders will share the fate of Ben Ali if they don’t ease their grip on power. Hossam Bahgat is one such activist. He told AP, “I feel like we are a giant step closer to our own liberation… What’s significant about Tunisia is that literally days ago the regime seemed unshakeable, and then eventually democracy prevailed without a single Western state lifting a finger.”

True, both Tunisia and Egypt are Arab countries with many similarities, but expecting a repeat of a scenario that was uniquely Tunisian and implicitly suggesting that Western states serve as harbingers of democracy is illusory, to stay the least.

Now that Ben Ali is out of the picture, Western governments are cautiously lining up behind the Tunisian uprising, but hardly with the same enthusiasm of their support of the Iranian riots of June 2009. British Foreign Secretary William Hague merely denounced the unrest, calling for “restraint from all sides.” He stated, “I condemn the violence and call on the Tunisian authorities to do all they can to resolve the situation peacefully.” US President Barack Obama added, “I urge all parties to maintain calm and avoid violence, and call on the Tunisian government to respect human rights, and to hold free and fair elections in the near future.”

Clichéd statements aside, both the US and the UK must fear the repercussions of a popular uprising in an area so close to the heart of American-British interests in the Middle East. Both countries are careful not to appear to oppose democratic reforms, even if they are forced to disown their friends in the region. Their response is largely representative of official responses from many Western capitals – the very capitals that lauded Tunisia as a model for how Arab countries can help win the war on terror.

One must not let confusing media headlines sideline the fact that neither the US nor the UK had Tunisia on their radar for circumventing democracy or violating human rights. Ben Ali was celebrated as an icon of moderation, notwithstanding his atypical Arab stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime was not the type that required much chastising. It was the benign kind that allowed a tiny space for secular opposition while cracking down on any Islamic opposition group. For 23 years, such practice was barely problematic, for it served the interests of both Ben Ali and various Western powers. The countless calls for respect of human rights from international and local organizations were mostly unheeded. Washington and London rarely found that irksome.

Now that the Tunisian people’s fight for rights has taken a sharp turn, many of us find it difficult to examine the specific context of this case without delving into dangerous generalizations. Western governments now speak of democracy in the region – as if there were ever a genuine concern; commentators speak of the next regime to fall – as if every Arab country is a duplication of another; and technology bloggers are celebrating another ‘twitter revolution.’

Perhaps generalizations make things more interesting. Tunisia, after all, is a small country, and most people know little about it aside from the fact that it’s a cheap tourist destination - thus the need to place it within a more gripping context. Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is using the opportunity to read the Tunisian uprising in a unique way. The AQIM leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, has called for the overthrowing of the “corrupt, criminal and tyrannical” regimes in both Tunisia and Algeria and the instatement of al-Sharia law. This call has promoted American commentators to warn of the future Islamization of Tunisia and will likely result in Western intervention to ensure that another “moderate” regime succeeds the one that just fled.

There is no harm in expanding a popular experience to understand the world at large and its conflicts. But in the case of Tunisia, it seems that the country is largely understood within a multilayer of contexts, thus becoming devoid of any political, cultural or socio-economic uniqueness. Understanding Tunisia as just another “Arab regime”, another possible podium for al-Qaeda’s violence, is convenient but also unhelpful to any cohesive understanding of the situation there and the events that are likely to follow.