A new CNN/ORC International poll shows that President Barack Obama remains popular and a majority of Americans continue to think he is honest and has managed the government effectively, while the tea party movement got a boost after being targeted by the IRS.

The survey was taken last week after the IRS, Benghazi and Associated Press controversies marked one of the worst weeks for the White House. It asked if Obama is a strong leader, with 58% saying he is, a level he last reached just after the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

The tea party movement’s overall favorable rating is up nine points to 37% since March; 45% hold an unfavorable view of the tea party, the poll shows.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination if she runs in 2016, continues to hold a favorable rating over 60%.

The survey, conducted May 17-18, has a sampling error of +/- 3 percentage points.

=======================

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

President, Waterkeeper Alliance;
Senior Attorney, NRDC

For once with good reason, the GOP is exorcised with the scandals involving the IRS targeting political groups and the FBI’s spying on A.P. reporters. The broader public is legitimately concerned. However, in its classic overblown breathlessness at all things Obama, the gleeful Republican leadership is already calling for impeachment and dragging out desperate comparisons to Nixon’s Watergate. This, despite caveats from its own sages not to overplay Republican good fortune. “We overreached in 1998,” Newt Gingrich admitted recently. He counseled restraint to the Tea Party jihadists he helped spawn. Gingrich recalled how the GOP’s scandal mongering against Clinton had only amplified Clinton’s popularity and cost Republicans the 1998 mid-terms and Gingrich his speakership. But this new generation of hysterical House members immune to that wisdom, are headed straight for the feinting couch in fits of anti-Obama hysteria.

In a characteristic spasm of partisan apoplexy, Iowa Congressman Steve King offered a shrill algorithm: “add Watergate and Iran Contra together and multiply by ten” to calculate the tyrannical evil of the Obama scandals.

As usual, the Fox-fueled GOP narrative swayed the mainstream press. On May 16, Reuters’ Jeff Mason interrupted Obama’s press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to ask the President, “How do you feel about the comparisons by some of your critics with the scandals of the Nixon Administration?” Obama responded with calm contempt; he would leave those comparisons to the journalists. But he urged Mason to “read some history.” If Mason takes that advice, here are some of the historical tidbits he might consider.

President Richard Nixon was aware that the IRS had audited him in 1961 and 1962 and presumed those audits were politically motivated by the Kennedy White House. When, early in his Administration, Nixon learned that his friends and political allies John Wayne and Rev. Billy Graham had endured recent audits by his own IRS, Nixon boiled over. He ordered White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, “Get the word out, down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits on those who are our opponents.” Perhaps recalling the Kennedy era audits, Nixon ordered that its investigator begin with my Uncle’s, John F. Kennedy’s, former campaign manager and White House aide, then Democratic Committee Chairman, Lawrence O’Brien.

Nixon’s minions had the IRS set up a special internal arm “the Activist Organization Committee” in July of 1969 to audit an “enemies list” provided by Nixon. My uncle Senator Ted Kennedy was at the top of that list along with a small army of well-known journalists. The IRS later renamed its political audit squad “Special Services” or “SS” to keep its mission secret. The SS targeted over 1,000 liberal groups for audits and 4,000 individuals. The SS staff managed their files in a soundproof cell in the IRS basement.

On September 27, 1970, Nixon ordered Haldeman to get the IRS to investigate my Uncle Ted who was then the presumed frontrunner in the 1972 presidential contest, sharing the field with Edmond Muskie and Hubert Humphrey who Nixon also ordered audited.

Nixon personally put White House dirty trickster Tom Charles Huston, former president of the Young Americans for Freedom, in charge of setting up the new IRS “anti-radical squad” to make sure that the laggards in IRS’s bureaucracy didn’t drop the ball. Huston prepared a 43-page blueprint for Nixon outlining a government agency campaign targeting Nixon’s enemies. Uncle Teddy was still at the top. The scheme included tapping phones without warrants, infiltrating organizations that had been critical of the President and, purging IRS agents who refused to tow the Republican line. Huston told the President, “we won’t be in control of the government and in a position of effective leverage until such time or we have complete and total control of the top three slots” at the IRS. Nixon also enthusiastically authorized a series of “black bag jobs” including breaking into offices, homes and liberal think tanks like the Ford Foundation and the Brookings Institute which Nixon believed was home to many former Kennedy Administration officials.

As a disclaimer, Huston cautioned that the “use of this technique is clearly illegal; it amounts to burglary. It is also highly risky and could result in great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also the most fruitful tool and can produce the kind of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion.”

According to historian and Nixon biographer, Rick Perlstein, Nixon “found the document splendid.” Haldeman ordered Huston to draft a formal decision memo outlining the illegal plan as a mandate to the heads of the intelligence and tax collecting agencies. Nixon ordered Haldeman and Huston to order the IRS, the FBI and the CIA to proceed with the plan.

In May 1971, Nixon used an IRS investigation of Alabama Governor George Wallace’s brother, Gerald Wallace, to pressure Gov. Wallace to run for President on the Democratic ticket as a spoiler rather than on a third party ticket as he planned. The blackmail scheme succeeded and most of Wallace’s white male supporters fled to the Republicans after the Democrats nominated civil rights activist George McGovern. Nixon’s tactic of having Wallace run as a Democrat was an indispensable element of the White House’s “southern strategy”.

Four months later, on September 8, 1971, Nixon raged at his counsel and Chief Domestic Policy Advisor, John Ehrlichman, about the IRS’s lack of progress on finding dirt on his enemies. “We have the power but are we using it to investigate contributors to Hubert Humphrey, to Muskie, and the Jews? You know they are stealing everybody…. you know they really tried to crucify Ho Lewis [Reader's Digest editor, Hobart Lewis, a Nixon supporter who had been audited]! Are we looking into Muskie’s return? Hubert’s? Hubert’s been in a lot of funny deals. Teddy? Who knows about the Kennedys? Shouldn’t they be investigated?”

The following week he pleaded with Haldeman to light a fire under the IRS. “Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know the Big Jewish contributors of the Democrats…. Could we please investigate those cocksuckers?”

The following day he replayed that tune for Ehrlichman. “You see the IRS is full of Jews that’s the reason they went after Graham.” Haldeman recounted in his diary, “There was a considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media. Graham has the strong feeling that the Bible says there are Satanic Jews and that’s where our problem arises.”

The “Jewish-controlled media” and the “liberal media” were never far from Nixon’s limbic system. Nixon also bugged reporters and used bribery, blackmail attempts, forgery, spying, burglary, and extensive bugging by national police agencies and by his own “plumbers squad” to monitor and manipulate the press for political purposes. Many of the top twenty names on Nixon’s political enemies list (which eventually included 47,000 Americans) were reporters. They included Daniel Schorr, Mary McGrory, Edwin Guthman and Walter Cronkite. Nixon’s staff and agencies bugged their phones, investigated their sex lives, rifled their trash, and had them watched and followed. Nixon directly ordered the investigation of imagined homosexuality by columnist Jack Anderson, a devout, teetotaling Mormon with a happy marriage and nine children.

On March 24, 1972, a group of Nixon’s trusted operatives including former CIA spy E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, a murderous former Dutchess county, New York prosecutor and Adolf Hitler admirer, huddled in the basement of Washington’s plush Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House with Dr. Edward Gund, a CIA physician, poison and assassinations expert. Nixon had complained darkly to top staffers including Special Counsel Chuck Colson that Anderson was “a thorn in his side” and that “we have to do something about this son of a bitch.” According to Hunt and Liddy, Colson deployed them that day saying that Nixon had ordered Colson to “Stop Anderson at all costs.”

The three spooks plotted out the best way to murder Anderson including running him off the road, spiking his drink with venom, breaking into his home and lacing Anderson’s aspirin bottle (“aspirin roulette”) with a special toxicant undetectable by autopsy or simply shooting him with Liddy’s untraceable 9mm pistol. The plot is detailed by Mark Felstein in his 2005 book, Poisoning the Press, and elsewhere. Liddy suggested painting Anderson’s steering wheel with a massive dose of LSD which would cause Anderson to crash in a hallucinogenic craze. Dr. Gund warned them that the LSD would be traceable in an autopsy. They finally elected to stab Anderson outside his house. Liddy volunteered to do the bloody work and make the crime look like a bungled robbery. Luckily for Anderson, the plot fizzled and was forgotten when both conspirators were arrested shortly thereafter in the Watergate scandal while endeavoring to reset a bug in Larry O’Brien’s office.

On October 6, 1971, Nixon ordered Haldeman to have the IRS audit Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler who had transformed the Times from a right wing rag into a universally respected paper by recruiting top journalists from across the nation. Chandler and his very large family were close friends of my family and had spent the summer prior to my father’s death running the Colorado River with us. “I want Otis Chandler’s income tax,” Nixon told Haldeman. Nixon then called his Attorney General and former law partner, John Mitchel, and ordered Mitchel to fire the Los Angeles Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “The fellow out there in the Immigration Services is a kike by the name of Rosenberg.” The President explained to Mitchel, “He is to be out.” Fulminating on, Nixon told Mitchel, “I want you to direct the most trusted person you have in the Immigration Service to look at all the activities of the Los Angeles Times… let me explain as a Californian, I know everybody in California hires them… Otis Chandler… I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he is a wetback. Is that clear?” When the Attorney General replied, “Yes, sir.” Nixon crowed triumphantly, “We’re going after the Chandlers! Every one, individually and collectively, their income taxes… every one of those sons of bitches.”

In August of 1972, Edmund Muskie withdrew as George McGovern’s Vice Presidential running mate. After my Uncle Ted demurred at McGovern’s request that he join the ticket, McGovern recruited another of my uncles, Sargent Shriver. On August 9, Nixon had a meeting with his staff to discuss how to destroy the Democrats. Turning to Haldeman, he asked, “What in the name in of God are we doing on this one? What are we doing about the financial contributors? Now those lists there… are we looking over the financial contributions to the Democratic Committee? Are we running their income tax returns? Is the Justice Department checking to see if there are any anti-trust suits? We have all this power and were not using it. Now what the Christ is the matter? In other words I’m just thinking for example if there is information on Larry O’Brien. What is being done? Who is doing this full-time? What in the name of God are we doing?” Nixon abruptly narrowed his sights on McGovern’s top contributor, Henry Kimmelman, and said emphatically, “Scare the shit out of him,” He repeated the order to Ehrlichman, “Scare the shit out of him. Now there are some Jews with the mafia and they are involved with this too!”

George Schultz was now Treasury Secretary. Nixon directed Haldeman to order Schultz to audit Kimmelman. “Everybody thinks George is an honest, decent man,” Nixon observed contemptuously. “George has got a fantasy… what’s he trying to do say? That you can’t play politics with the IRS? Just tell George he should do it.” Three days later Nixon had Kimmelman’s tax returns as well Larry O’Brien’s who had by then agreed to manage McGovern’s faltering campaign and whose office would be the target of the Watergate break-in.

On March 12, 1973, even with the erupting Watergate scandal and its related Congressional investigations incinerating his presidency, Nixon was still intent on using the IRS to disable his enemies. That day he asked Haldeman, “What happened to the suggestion that the IRS run audits on all the members of Congress?”

Those who bother to read these historical snippets will find many important departures and only tenuous parallels between the Obama Administration’s IRS affair and Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era IRS scandal. A principal distinction is the ingredient of direct presidential involvement. President Nixon was the fulcrum, the visionary and the principal conspirator in his various capers to use the IRS as a political weapon. Nixon personally directed and persistently harangued his staff to audit, investigate and gather dirt on his enemies for personal purposes. Nixon went to reckless extremes even punishing IRS agents who refused to participate in his vendetta. A mean-spirited viciousness and his contagious enthusiasm for law breaking were also distinctive Nixon bailiwicks. In contrast, there is no evidence that Obama even knew of the IRS investigations which were presided over by Donald Shulman, a Bush appointee.

The most recent evidence indicate that the Tea Party audits resulted not from intentional political targeting of conservatives from the sheer preponderous of Tea Party applications among the hundreds of 501(c)(4) tax exemption requests that deluged a tiny understaffed IRS field office. The 200 demoralized officials, already drowning in tax exemption petitions, also audited several liberal groups including Progress Texas and Sea Shepard. Detailed reporting in Sunday’s New York Times indicates that the problem arose because the Cincinnati branch is already debilitated and overwhelmed by years of personnel and budget cuts, now aggravated by the sequestration — and confused by new rules applying to the cascade of political “charities” unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The GOP’s comparisons of today’s IRS blunders to the Watergate era scandals broadcast a willful blindness toward history.

As to the A.P. eavesdropping scandal, any spying directed at journalists should set off fire alarms in a democracy. The Associated Press is justified in its outrage at the Justice Department caper. Fear that a reporter’s phone may be bugged will inhibit disclosures and discussions with the many secret sources and whistleblowers upon whom journalists rely to keep our democracy transparent and our public informed.

Obama’s Justice Department’s eavesdropping on the Associated Press, however, is in no way analogous to Nixon era bugging. The Obama eavesdropping was an, unfortunately, legal investigation of national security leaks involving a Nigerian terrorist bomber planning to blow up an American airliner en route from Amsterdam to New York. Nixon’s bugging in contrast was illegal and his purposes were political and personal having little or nothing to do with national security.

Many states have “journalist shield” laws that make eavesdropping on reporters illegal and give a limited, but critical privilege to the relationship between journalists and their sources. Obama has long promised to support federal shield legislation. This week, apparently motivated by damage control, he finally asked Senate leaders to produce a federal shield law, a reform that could transform this scandal into a national plus for American democracy. That legislation will require GOP support. Republicans could also work with the White House to find adequate funding and training for the IRS and remedy the morale and governance problems in Cincinnati. The big question now, is whether Republicans will sideline genuine reform in their efforts to exploit the “scandal.” Republican legislators have apparently been ordered by their leadership to hold scandal-mongering hearings but to stall any legislation for genuine reform. The real scandal is the Republican party’s devotion to grandstanding over governance and its preference for slime over substance.

=============———————-==============———————–

To the above, nevertheless, we feel obligated to note as well that The Establishing of The Environmental Protection Agency, and The Clean Air Act are the Strongest and most influential Environment Legislation so far in American History. These came about under President Nixon.

We wait to see how the Obama Administration moves on to strengthen further that streak that was also part of the Nixon legacy but was later weakened, thanks to the stranglehold by the oil industry lobby, during the rule of more recent  Republican Presidents.

———————==================———————–==============

The New York Times OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

Stop the Leaks.

By WILLIAM P. BARR, JAMIE S. GORELICK and KENNETH L. WAINSTEIN

Published: May 20, 20

Otto Dettmer

 

Related: Head of The A.P. Criticizes Seizure of Phone Records (May 20, 2013)
Phone Records of Journalists Seized by U.S. (May 14, 2013)

Related in Opinion:  Editorial: Spying on The Associated Press (May 15, 2013)

As former Justice Department officials who served in the three administrations preceding President Obama’s, we are worried that the criticism of the decision to subpoena telephone toll records of A.P. journalists in an important leak investigation sends the wrong message to the government officials who are responsible for our national security.(*)

While neither we nor the critics know the circumstances behind the prosecutors’ decision to issue this subpoena, we do know from the government’s public disclosures that the prosecutors were right to investigate this leak vigorously. The leak — which resulted in a May 2012 article by The A.P. about the disruption of a Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner — significantly damaged our national security.

The United States and its allies were trying to locate a master bomb builder affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group that was extremely difficult to penetrate. After considerable effort and danger, an agent was inserted inside the group. Although that agent succeeded in foiling one serious bombing plot against the United States, he was rendered ineffective once his existence was disclosed.

The leak of such sensitive source information not only denies us an invaluable insight into our adversaries’ plans and operations. It is also devastating to our overall ability to thwart terrorist threats, because it discourages our allies from working and sharing intelligence with us and deters would-be sources from providing intelligence about our adversaries. Unless we can demonstrate the willingness and ability to stop this kind of leak, those critical intelligence resources may be lost to us.

At the time the article was published, there were strong bipartisan calls for the Justice Department to find the leaker. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. gave that assignment to Ronald C. Machen Jr., the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, who is known for his meticulous and dedicated work. Importantly, his assignment was to identify and prosecute the government official who leaked the sensitive information; it was not to conduct an inquiry into the news organization that published it.

His office, which has an experienced national security team, undertook a methodical and measured investigation. Did prosecutors immediately seek the reporters’ toll records? No. Did they subpoena the reporters to testify or compel them to turn over their notes? No. Rather, according to the Justice Department’s May 14 letter to The A.P., they first interviewed 550 people, presumably those who knew or might have known about the agent, and scoured the documentary record. But after eight months of intensive effort, it appears that they still could not identify the leaker.

It was only then — after pursuing “all reasonable alternative investigative steps,” as required by the department’s regulations — that investigators proposed obtaining telephone toll records (logs of calls made and received) for about 20 phone lines that the leaker might have used in conversations with A.P. journalists. They limited the request to the two months when the leak most likely occurred, and did not propose more intrusive investigative steps.

The decision was made at the highest levels of the Justice Department, under longstanding regulations that are well within the boundaries of the Constitution. Having participated in similar decisions, we know that they are made after careful deliberation, because the government does not lightly seek information about a reporter’s work. Along with the obligation to investigate and prosecute government employees who violate their duty to protect operational secrets, Justice Department officials recognize the need to minimize any intrusion into the operations of the free press.

While we cannot know all of the facts and considerations that went into the department’s decision, we do know that prosecutors were right to try to find out who gave this damaging information to The A.P. They were right to pursue the investigation with “alternative investigative steps” for eight months first. And ultimately, they were right to take it to the next stage when they still needed more to make a case against the leaker. If the Justice Department had not done so, it would have defaulted on its obligation to protect the American people.

—————————————

The 1 Percent Are Only Half the Problem.

The Great Divide is a series about inequality – the haves, the have-nots and everyone in between — in the United States and around the world, and its implications for economics, politics, society and culture. The series moderator is Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a Columbia professor and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank.

Most recent discussion about economic inequality in the United States has focused on the top 1 percent of the nation’s income distribution, a group whose incomes average $1 million (with a bottom threshold of about $367,000). “We are the 99 percent,” declared the Occupy protesters, unexpectedly popularizing research findings by two economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, that had previously drawn attention mainly from academics. But the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is only half the story.

Granted, it’s an important half. Since 1979, the one-percenters have doubled their share of the nation’s collective income from about 10 percent to about 20 percent. And between 2009, when the Great Recession ended, and 2011, the one-percenters saw their average income rise by 11 percent even as the 99-percenters saw theirs fall slightly. Some recovery!

This dismal litany invites the conclusion that if we would just put a tight enough choke chain on the 1 percent, then we’d solve the problem of income inequality. But alas, that isn’t true, because it wouldn’t address the other half of the story: the rise of the educated class.

Since 1979 the income gap between people with college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has grown. Broadly speaking, this is a gap between working-class families in the middle 20 percent (with incomes roughly between $39,000 and $62,000) and affluent-to-rich families (say, the top 10 percent, with incomes exceeding $111,000). This skills-based gap is the inequality most Americans see in their everyday lives.

Conservatives don’t typically like to talk about income inequality. It stirs up uncomfortable questions about economic fairness. (That’s why as a candidate Mitt Romney told a TV interviewer that inequality was best discussed in “quiet rooms.”) On those rare occasions when conservatives do bring it up, it’s the skills-based gap that usually draws their attention, because it offers an opportunity to criticize our government-run system of public education and especially teachers’ unions.

Liberals resist talking about the skills-based gap because they don’t want to tell the working classes that they’re losing ground because they didn’t study hard enough. Liberals prefer to focus on the 1 percent-based gap. Conceiving of inequality as something caused by the very richest people has obvious political appeal, especially since (by definition) nearly all of us belong to the 99 percent. There’s also a pleasing simplicity to the causes of the growing gap between the 1 and the 99. There are only two, and both are familiar liberal targets: the rise of a deregulated financial sector and the erosion of accountability in compensating top executives outside finance. (The cohort most reflective of these trends is actually the top 0.1 percent, who make $1.6 million or more, but let’s not quibble.)

Both halves of the inequality story should command our attention, because both represent a dramatic reversal of economic trends that prevailed in the United States for most of the 20th century. From the 1930s through the 1970s the 1 percent saw its share of national income decline, while the “college premium” either fell or followed no clear up-or-down pattern over time.

At least some of the tools to restore these more egalitarian trends shouldn’t be divisive ideologically. Liberals and conservatives both recognize the benefits of preschool education, which President Obama has proposed making universally available. I’ve never met an affluent 4-year-old who wasn’t enrolled in preschool, but nationwide about one-third of kids that age aren’t.

Another reform both conservatives and liberals have supported — though at different times — is withholding federal aid from colleges and universities that can’t control tuition increases. Mr. Obama proposed it in his last two State of the Union addresses; House Speaker John A. Boehner was a sponsor of a bill to do the same in 2003.

THERE is also more bipartisan support than you might suppose for restricting some of the Wall Street excesses that enrich the 1 percent. The impetus to do so isn’t inequality so much as fear that an out-of-control banking sector will once again create economic crisis and compel Congress to bail out the big banks. Congressional Republicans have been blocking proper implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, but a growing chorus of conservative voices, including the columnist George F. Will, the former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, favor breaking up the big banks. Senators David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, and Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, have sponsored a bill to require the largest banks to hold more capital reserves, or become smaller.

One reason the left plays down the growing skills-based gap is that it accepts at face value the conservative claim that educational failure is its root cause. But the decline of labor unions is just as important. At one time union membership was highly effective at reducing or eliminating the wage gap between college and high school graduates. That’s much less true today. Only about 7 percent of the private-sector labor force is covered by union contracts, about the same proportion as before the New Deal. Six decades ago it was nearly 40 percent.

The decline of labor unions is what connects the skills-based gap to the 1 percent-based gap. Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing. Since 1979, except for a brief period during the tech boom of the late 1990s, labor’s share of corporate income has fallen. Pension funds have blurred somewhat the venerable distinction between capital and labor. But that’s easy to exaggerate, since only about one-sixth of all households own stocks whose value exceeds $7,000. According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income. It couldn’t have happened if private-sector unionism had remained strong.

Reviving labor unions is, sadly, anathema to the right; even many mainstream liberals resist the idea. But if economic growth depends on rewarding effort, we should all worry that the middle classes aren’t getting pay increases commensurate with the wealth they create for their bosses. Bosses aren’t going to fix this problem. That’s the job of unions, and finding ways to rebuild them is liberalism’s most challenging task. A bipartisan effort to revive the labor movement is hardly likely, but halting inequality’s growth will depend, at the very least, on liberals and conservatives better understanding each other’s definition of where the problem lies.

---

Timothy Noah wrote – “The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis And What We Can Do About It.”

Ecologic Institute: An International Think Tank for Environment and Development.

At the end we have the UPDATE Of May 19, 2013!

Reader Supported News | 11 May 201

Jonathan Chait | Obama Might Actually Be the Environmental President.

President Obama spoke during a tour of a solar energy firm in Acadia, Fla., last fall. He has focused on renewable power and energy security. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, May 11, 2013.

Chait writes: “All the myths of the presidency we cling to are perfectly useless here. The heavy lifting will be, by conventional political terms, invisible. There is no need for Johnsonian arm-twisting or Sorkin-esque rhetorical uplift. The fight of Obama’s second presidential term – the much-mocked fight to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet – requires only the simple exercise of power.”
READ MORE

Dr. James Hansen | Norway, Canada, the United States and the Tar Sands
Dr. James Hansen, Reader Supported News
Dr. Hansen writes: “The common presumption that President Obama is going to approve the Keystone XL pipeline is wrong, in my opinion. The State Department must provide an assessment to President Obama. Secretary of State John Kerry is expert on the climate issue and has long been one of the most thoughtful members of our government. I cannot believe that Secretary Kerry would let his and President Obama’s legacies go down the tar sands drain.”
READ MORE

Obamacare Is Already Forcing Private Insurers to Lower Their Premiums
Sy Mukherjee, ThinkProgress
Mukherjee writes: “As Thursday’s development shows, that public information empowers consumers by forcing insurers to compete with one another to attract customers. Or to put it another way – and contrary to conservative fear-mongering about the law – Obamacare is working exactly as it was intended to.”
READ MORE

————————————————————————————

tate of the Union addresses are wearying rituals, in which stitched-together lists of never-gonna-happen goals are woven into idealistic catchphrases, analyzed as rhetoric by an unqualified panel of poetry-critic-for-a-night political reporters, quickly followed by a hapless opposition-party response, and then, in almost every case, forgotten. This year, plunked into the midst of the tedium was a gigantic revelation, almost surely the most momentous news of President Obama’s second term. “I will direct my Cabinet,” he announced, “to come up with executive actions we can take now and in the future to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

Here was a genuine bombshell. It sounded a little vague, and the president did not explain precisely what he intended to do or how he would pull it off. But a handful of environmental wonks had a fairly strong grasp of the project he had committed himself to, and they understood that it was very, very real and very, very doable. If they were to have summarized the news, the headline would have been OBAMA TO SAVE PLANET.

Few outside the green community grasped the meaning of the revelation, and it sank beneath the surface with barely a ripple as bored reporters quickly turned to other matters. Several elements of the Obama agenda – immigration reform, gun control, the budget wars – have since churned busily away in plain view, while his climate pledge has generated no visible action. (Which, as we’ll see, may be just how the administration wants it.)

More than anything, though, Obama’s announcement was shrouded in the pervasive miasma of failure, the stench of too little, too late, that has surrounded his climate agenda. Obama’s election “was accompanied by intense hope that many things in need of change would change,” lamented Al Gore in a 2011 Rolling Stone essay. “Some things have, but others have not. Climate policy, unfortunately, is in the second category.” Matters appear only to have gotten worse since then, especially as climate activists chain themselves to the White House gate to protest the president’s likely approval of the Keystone pipeline. Obama himself has taken an apologetic tone, telling green-minded donors that the politics “are tough,” as people “struggling to get by” care more about providing for their immediate needs than forestalling long-term environmental degradation and climate change.

The New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann recently wrote a eulogy for the environmental movement, using the 2010 disintegration of cap-and-trade legislation in Congress as the culmination of failure. “The movement had poured years of effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant environmental legislation since,” he wrote. “Indeed, one could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990 … What went wrong?”

The pervasive “what went wrong?” narrative contains a series of assumptions: that Obama can prevail only by winning over public opinion and Congress, that the fate of his climate policy hinged on the cap-and-trade bill, and that the primary question hanging over his environmental record is how to apportion blame. None of these assumptions is correct.

The assumption that Obama’s climate-­change record is essentially one of failure is mainly an artifact of environmentalists’ understandably frantic urgency. The sort of steady progress that would leave activists on other issues giddy does not satisfy the sort of person whose waking hours are spent watching the glaciers melt irreversibly. But there is a difference between failing to do anything and failing to do enough, and even those who criticize the president’s efforts as inadequate ought to be clear-eyed about what has been accomplished. By the normal standards of progress, Obama has amassed an impressive record so far on climate change.

There are two basic ways to measure this, which must be taken together. The first, and simplest, is to ask: How much carbon are we emitting into the atmosphere? In the first year of Obama’s presidency, the United State pledged that by 2020 it would reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 17 percent (starting from the level set in 2005). That 17 percent reduction is the brass ring of the environmental movement. It is the target the cap-and-trade legislation was designed to hit. It is also the target that Obama must be able to claim he is on track to reach by the time of the next international climate summit in 2015. That occasion, most observers agree, will probably be the world’s last chance to sign an accord that averts catastrophically and permanently higher temperatures.

As it happens, after decades of rising, carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States started falling in 2008. They have kept falling. By the end of last year, emissions had fallen almost 12 percent below the 2005 level. That is to say, with 12 percent of the 17 percent drop having already occurred, and seven more years to go until the target date, the U.S. is two-thirds of the way to its environmental goal after just one-third of the time has passed. If you follow this measure, climate policy looks like a runaway success.

This metric isn’t entirely fair, of course, because most, though not all, of this drop occurred for reasons having nothing to do with Obama. About half of the emissions drop can probably be attributed to the recession. (When people cut back on their spending, they do less driving, don’t run the air conditioner as high, and so on.) Another portion of the decline occurred because the fracking boom flooded the market with cheap natural gas, which replaced much dirtier coal. These trends will probably level off, as the price of natural gas has plunged so quickly drillers have already scaled back their production. Still, even if the progress was temporary and mainly a result of luck, it has provided Obama with breathing room that most observers haven’t been willing to grant him.

The second way to measure Obama’s climate-change record is: What has he done? He has done quite a bit, probably far more than you think, and not all of it advertised as climate legislation, or advertised as much of anything at all. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was many things – primarily, a desperate bid to shove money into enough Americans’ pockets to prevent another Great Depression – but one of them was a major piece of environmental reform. The law contained upwards of $90 billion in subsidies for green energy, which had a catalyzing effect on burgeoning industries. American wind-power generation has doubled, and solar power has increased more than six times over. As Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald detailed in his book The New New Deal, the new law suddenly transformed the Department of Energy, previously a sclerotic backwater charged mainly with overseeing the nuclear-weapons cache, into a massive new engine of cutting-edge environmental science.

The stimulus had the misfortune of absorbing the brunt of the public’s dismay with the economic crisis, and Republicans successfully turned Solyndra, an anomalous case of a green-energy subsidy that went bust, into a symbol that rendered the whole law so unpopular Democrats quickly grew afraid to tout it. Even a close observer like Lemann has forgotten that it was indeed “major environmental legislation.” And yet, the wave of innovation – new fuels, plus turbines, energy meters, and other futuristic devices – will reverberate for years. Envia Systems, a stimulus-financed clean-energy firm in Silicon Valley, has developed technology for electric-car batteries three times as efficient as the technology in the Volt, capable of shaving $5,000 off the sticker price of an electric car when it comes to market in 2015. Just a few weeks ago, the Times reported on a new stimulus-financed research project to increase the energy content (and thus reduce the emissions) of natural gas.

The administration has also carried out an ambitious program of regulation, having imposed or announced higher standards for gas mileage in cars, fuel cleanliness, energy efficiency in appliances, and emissions from new power plants. In aggregate, they amount to a major assault on climate change. Some environmentalists judge them to be insufficient – a fair critique – but many more Obama supporters aren’t even aware that they exist. This is likely because none of these regulations produced any political theater. There was no legislation, no ponderous Sunday-morning talk-show chin-scratching, no dramatic wrangling of votes on the House floor. Just the issuing of a new regulation, a smallish one-day story.

Last August, for instance, the administration announced it was ratcheting up vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, from 29.7 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon. The news barely got a day of coverage, coming as it did during the first day of the Republican National Convention. About six weeks ago, the administration announced new standards for cleaner gasoline. “There is not another air-pollution-control strategy that we know of that will produce as substantial, cost-effective, and expeditious emissions reductions,” cooed the executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. Remember that?

The political theater has instead played itself out in two episodes in which Obama has appeared impotent, or even indifferent, in the face of climate change. Currently, we are in the midst of the drama over the proposed Keystone pipeline, which Obama has hinted he will approve. NASA scientist James Hansen has proclaimed the pipeline, which would carry oil from the Canadian tar sands, “game over” for the climate. Most analysts, though, don’t support Hansen’s apocalyptic view. A survey of studies conducted by the Congressional Research Service found that the pipeline would increase carbon emissions by anywhere from 0.06 percent to 0.3 percent per year. (Note that emissions dropped 3.7 percent – twelve times the high-end estimate – last year.) Wonkblog reporter Brad Plumer called the pipeline “a slight step in the opposite direction” of meeting Obama’s climate goals. The pipeline’s outsize role in the presidential campaign, and the noisy protests it inspires, have elevated it far beyond the scale of more consequential environmental decisions.

The central environmental drama of the Obama years was the failure of the cap-and-trade bill in 2010. Both Obama and the environmentalists had invested all their soaring hopes in that bill. Its failure, a months-long slow bleed of wavering coal-state Democrats and hardening Republican intransigence, amounted to a kind of psychological torture for environmentalists. Cap-and-trade’s demise came to emblematize environmental policy in the Obama era. Ryan Lizza, in a lengthy 2010 New Yorker reportorial narrative, tabbed it “perhaps the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era.”

It was not the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era. There is one more.

On December 31, 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. The dispatches from that era feel unfathomably remote. The law passed Congress with Pearl Harbor war-resolution levels of support: In the House, 374 members favored it, with just one Nebraska Republican opposed. The Senate passed it 73-0. “Anti-pollution laws,” explained the Times, “did not excite political rivalry.” The law embodied a sweeping brand of environmental absolutism that would make Al Gore blush. It mandated that power plants use the best available technology, with no apparent thought given to the cost.

Obviously, nothing remotely like such a law could pass either chamber today. (Even Democrats favor more-cautious approaches to limiting pollution.) But the four-decade-old law has gained a new relevance to the climate crisis through a cascading, often dramatic series of recent events. The law requires the EPA to regulate “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Scientists at the time did not recognize that carbon dioxide contributed to global warming; they were more concerned with the human health effects of carbon monoxide and other chemicals. But as the scientific case for climate change hardened, environmentalists filed suit to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions like other pollutants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in the environmentalists’ favor. In 2008, the agency officially deemed carbon dioxide a pollutant, and sent its finding to the White House. The Bush administration refused to open the e-mail, thus, incredibly, running out the clock on any legal obligation.

The coming of the Obama administration, with its greater affinity for opening e-mails and lower affinity for fossil-fuel industries, resolved the question of whether Washington had an obligation to regulate carbon emissions. After Obama’s original cap-and-trade plan failed, he started using the agency regulatory powers directly. (This is how Obama has been able to issue new regulations on cars, fuel, appliances, and future power plants.)

So far, there is one hole in his regulatory agenda: power plants that currently exist. This is, unfortunately, a very large hole, as these plants, mostly coal, emit 40 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions. Coal is so inherently dirty that no available technology can prevent a plant from emitting unacceptable levels of greenhouse gases. You can require more-efficient cars or more-efficient refrigerators, and the industry will respond. You can’t really require coal plants to be anything more than slightly cleaner; it’s just physically impossible. The only meaningful standard one could impose for a coal plant would result in all of America’s coal plants shutting down – which, even if phased in slowly, would carry large costs and likely provoke a revolt from people suddenly staring at huge electric bills. The EPA’s choice, as environmental writer David Roberts has put it, appears to be “either a firecracker or a nuke.”

During Obama’s first term, the nuke was useful, as nukes tend to be, only as a threat. The idea was so abhorrent to power companies and some Republicans that it brought them to the bargaining table during the cap-and-trade negotiations. When negotiations collapsed, the prevailing assumption was that the ability to regulate existing plants had become a useless tool, paradoxically too powerful to actually deploy.

Then, a few weeks after last year’s election, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a plan for the EPA to regulate existing power plants in a way that was neither ineffectual nor draconian. The proposal would set state-by-state limits on emissions. It sounds simple, but this was a conceptual breakthrough. Much like a cap-and-trade bill, it would allow market signals to indicate the most efficient ways for states to hit their targets – instead of shutting coal plants down, some utilities might pay consumers to weatherize their homes, while others might switch some of their generators over to cleaner fuels. The flexibility of the scheme would, in turn, reduce the costs passed on to consumers. Here is a way for Obama to use his powers – his own powers, unencumbered by the morass of a dysfunctional Congress – in such a way that is neither as ineffectual as a firecracker nor as devastating as a nuke: The NRDC calculates its plan would reduce our reliance on coal by about a quarter and national carbon emissions by 10 percent.

This is the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era. The prospect, for environmentalists, is exhilarating but also harrowing. The struggle will be lengthy, waged largely behind closed doors, and its outcome won’t be known until the Obama presidency is nearly over.

In the second week of April, the acting administrator of the EPA told reporters that a state-based plan to regulate existing power plants – that is, something like the Natural Resources Defense Council plan – is “certainly something that will be on the table in this next fiscal year.” That was a gaffe. Officially, the Obama administration has no such plan, and the agency issued a quick official correction, a masterpiece of the passive voice: “To assert that any decision on any additional action has been made would be incorrect.”

The official administration line holds that Congress should pass a cap-and-trade law. In his State of the Union address, Obama prefaced his threat of executive action with a conditional “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.” The if is obviously preordained – no possible scenario, not even if John Boehner were ordered to pass a cap-and-trade bill by a returning Jesus Christ, bearing legislative text, could result in Congress’s passing a cap-and-trade law.

And within the environmental world, it is essentially a given that Obama will enact some version of the NRDC plan. Dan Lashof, its lead author, told me, “We are hearing that they’re looking quite seriously at our proposal.” A “person familiar with the matter” told the Wall Street Journal, “You will ultimately see a proposal from EPA to regulate existing power plants.” A group of electric utilities has already circulated a paper predicting that the EPA will do just that.

New regulations would have to withstand a certain legal challenge from the energy industry – though, crucially, implementation would not have to wait as cases wind their way through the courts. The EPA’s authority has withstood several high-profile challenges before, because the law is so broadly written; on the other hand, the challenges to Obamacare remind us that precedent cannot fully predict the behavior of agitated conservative judges. Also like the Obamacare challenge, the legal fight will play out against the backdrop of political war. Republicans in Congress have proposed barring the EPA from using its powers – in Senator James Inhofe’s formulation, “Put Congress, not unaccountable bureaucrats, in charge of deciding the nation’s energy policy.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page has described Obama’s threat to regulate carbon emissions as something akin to the action of a “dictator.”

So the administration and its allies have been mobilizing for combat. It’s not insignificant that Obama chose Denis McDonough, who has a deep background in climate change, to be his second-term chief of staff, or that he promoted Gina McCarthy, who oversaw the rewriting of EPA regulations in his first term, to run the department. Democratic Senators are vowing to block any House Republican attempt to handcuff the EPA. Working in Obama’s favor is the fact that Americans, while disturbingly blasé about climate change, favor federal regulation of greenhouse gases by huge majorities.

Lashof predicted the following sequence of events. The agency will finish drafting its regulation scheme by the end of the year. It will then take about a year of public comments and revisions, at which point it will finalize its rule. That will be the end of 2014, just after the midterm elections. Another nine months to a year will be required to carry out the rule, which will get us to the end of 2015 – and the international climate summit.

The administration’s refusal to publicly commit itself to this strategy, just as it risks losing supporters over the Keystone decision, is in some ways an odd political choice. But it makes sense as a strategy to win the inevitable conflict. The charade of asking Congress to pass new climate legislation demonstrates to the public – and to the courts, inevitably – that the administration is not trying to usurp Congress’s role and will take action on its own only as a final resort.

The timing of a drawn-out regulatory process also dovetails with the progression of Obama’s second-term agenda. The administration needs to cooperate with Republicans to pass immigration reform and harbors at least faint hopes for a budget accord. A muscular exercise of administrative power over environmental policy may reignite the raging anti-government paranoia that made any bipartisan cooperation impossible during Obama’s first term. Far more sensible to pass whatever laws can be passed first.

One also gets the sense, though, that even if Obama shouted his regulatory plans from the rafters, it wouldn’t do much to change the narrative. Outside the narrow energy-and-environment community, few major national reporters or pundits have keyed in to Obama’s strategy. They habitually equate progress with the passage of laws, and the absence of a legislative agenda means the lack of any agenda at all. “Many took note of Mr. Obama’s promise to tackle global warming in his inaugural address,” Edward Luce wrote mournfully in the Financial Times last week. “That was the last anyone heard of it.” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza is typical: “[G]iven the fraught politics around doing anything major on the issue … it seems likely that Obama will go small-bore rather than major overhaul if he wants to get something through Congress.” Note the assumption that doing anything major requires getting it through Congress.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, chided reporters earlier this year: “A lot of you press me … on: ‘Where is the bill on climate change? Where is the bill?’ There doesn’t have to be a bill.”

She’s right. We don’t need a law, because Richard Nixon and his Congress, filled with what we today would call wenvironmental wackos, already passed it 40 years ago.

All the myths of the presidency we cling to are perfectly useless here. The heavy lifting will be, by conventional political terms, invisible. There is no need for Johnsonian arm-twisting or Sorkin-esque rhetorical uplift. The fight of Obama’s second presidential term – the much-mocked fight to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet – requires only the simple exercise of power.

—————————————

and a few of the comments:

Small Family Farmer 2013-05-11 11:52

The Vienna Solarstammtisch that meets at the “Zum Hagenthaler” Restaurant at Wallgasse 32, 1060 Wien, every third Thursday of the month, is a creation of Eurosolar Austria.  www.eurosolar.at

It is led by Professor Franz Niessler, and the information is usually conveyed by Eng. Herbert Eberhardt   herbert.ebergardt at eurosolar.at

Many of the the Solar Table participants own electric vehicles and live in energy-saving homes equiped for use of solar energy.

At the May 2013 meeting, the First presenter was Rosemarie Dietz, a Green visionary from Perchtoldsdorf NO, who related her experiences when crossing on foot the length of Lower Austria (Niederoesterreich) looking for the implementation of renewable energy on her path. She was looking for location of wind-mills and for the use of photovoltaic use of solar energy, but she also found that there were no-more small local restaurants on her way where one could have stopped for a meal and a drink. The villages are shrinking and the young people move to the large cities. The small scale agriculture that was the base of the rural sector has vanished and everything is bought at the large supper markets like in the city – much of it imported from long distance.

The moderator was Gerhard Kohlmaier and the main speaker Professor Hannes Bauer who is now with the Union of Retirees of Lower Austria, Head of the Political and Economic Futures Forum and building an effort for change. His target is the economic security of the individual in a growing strength of the European Union. He clearly sees in providing safeguards for the communities in villages – people living on and from the land – the best way of providing this security – and it clearly grabs our attention because this is also our belief.

Dr. Bauer looked at the ethics of high social, ecological and democratic values as strength for Austria in the EU context – Quality of Life and the Social Security of the citizens are the goals of his sort of politics.

Dr. Hannes Bauer is not a newcomer to Austrian Politics. During the years 1989-1991 and 2000-2008 he was a Socialist Party member of the Austrian Parliament and 1986-1987 State Secretary in the Ministry of Trades, Industry, and Labor. His background is economics – business development. Having started out from the State Government of Lower Austria and entering in 1991 the Leadership of at the the Federal level of the Austrian Socialist Party. He belongs to the Chancellor Bruno Kreisky School of active policy-oriented Socialism.

The meeting of the Solar-Table May meeting was amazing. Besides the Austrian political Reds and Greens, present were also the Blacks, Blues, and the new Stronach Yellow – and all got involved in the conversation. Needless to say that all were for solar energy but had difficulty accepting each-others honesty in pursuing the goal of a decentralized, community-based, small-town or village based economy – though all adhered to such a goal.

Energy was a main topic. How do we build back an agriculture that will provide biofuels, and how do we do so that the villages rely on photovoltaic solar energy and windmills – being independent of big corporation electricity grids, and even able to supply energy to the National grid? How do we convince the governing powers that there is no need of shale-fracking – this beyond the obvious that fracking is dangerous to the environment? How does one handle American intervention in EU economy planning?

I will now do something unusual – I am going to put forward the ideas I voiced at the meeting and which I felt summarized the different points of view in an event that sounded like a political competition, but that could easily be turned into a united National front for independence from outside economic forces. All what is needed now is a single party to come up with such ideas in its platform and invite the others to join in.

Let us start now:

The thesis is that what grows on the land is sustainable and positive, what comes from the inside of the earth will not endure, is unsustainable, and negative.

Planting for food and fuel, for animal feed and industrial feed-stocks, for human and animal life, is all based on the continuous energy that reaches the earth from the sun – thus non depleting. This is done by people living in small communities on the land – this activity if cared for, with the help of appropriate National policies, will keep people on the land and avoid their migration to magnet-cities something the topic of the evening was aimed to achieve.

Planting wind mills and solar collectors, like the photovoltaic collectors, on the land or roof-tops, is just another act of reaping results with the help of solar energy – exactly like growing vegetation or animals. We see no difference here.

Looking under the land for riches deposited in the past, the likes of fossil fuels of all sorts – coal, shale, oil, gas, and figuring out technologies to extract them from underground, amounts to using up in a short time of natures bank-deposits. On top of this it gave us the CO2 problem and clear climate-change – both avoidable if we refrain from using fossil fuels.

ERGO: Working the land revives the villages and provides us with what we need. Searching ways to obtain products out of fossil deposits, destroys the land, the population living on the land, and eventually the whole economy, because of the way it effects the environment, the social and economic development of the State, and the security of the people who lose their direct relationship to the land.

What political party will have the courage to put a return to a land policy of growth on its election banner?

————————

Further:

Mr. Eberhardt brought to show the new Renaud “Twizy” small two-seater electric vehicle.

———–

Next Solar Table meeting will be Thursday, June 20, 2013, same location, 18:00 pm (6PM)

THE TOPIC:  RENEWABLE PRIMARY MATERIALS – “NAWAROS” – (“Nachwachsende Rohstoffe”).

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. “If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades,” scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! “We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.”

 

 

 

May 17, 2013  | from Tara Lohan on AlterNet

If you didn’t know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports:

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a “vanishingly small proportion” defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn’t specifically address humanity’s involvement — likely because it’s considered a given in scientific circles, the survey’s authors point out — but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration’s been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz’s first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas.

Of course, we’ve already been sold the story that we’re suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked — although what Americans will get out of the deal
will be higher gas prices and less energy security.

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management’s newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club’s Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won’t be required to disclose what chemicals they’re using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we’re serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not “taking any meetings on the pipeline.”

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

“I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans’ dinner tables every year,” said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.”

In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.”

Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he’s completely out of touch with reality. You can’t hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think “all of the above” is a rationale energy strategy.

 ————————————-

Iran will assume the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament on May 27 and hold it over four weeks, until June 23, 2013.

The conference chair helps organize the work of the conference and assists in setting the agenda.

The conference was established in 1979 after a special U.N. General Assembly session, and is made up of 65 countries. In the past, the conference and its predecessors negotiated major multilateral arms limitation and disarmament agreements. In recent years it has become paralyzed, with member states often divided even on setting the agenda.

The Conference of Disarmament reports to the UN General Assembly and is billed by the UN as “the single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community.”

Iran is astate that illegally supplies rockets to Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, potentially aiding and abetting mass murder and terrorism. To make this rogue regime head of world arms control is an outrage. Abusers of international norms should not be the public face of the UN.

“This is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of a women’s shelter,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the Geneva based non-governmental organization, which announced it will hold protest events outside the UN hall, featuring Iranian dissidents.

The UN is not shocked, its officials say Iran’s post is merely the result of an automatic rotation.

=====================================

The US and others speak up:

=======================================================================================

another e-mail we got:

This isn’t the first time that the Conference on Disarmament has faced similar controversy. In July 2011it was North Korea’s turn to take the helm. Not surprisingly, North Korea took the appointment as a sign of approval. Its representative announced that the country was “very much committed to the Conference” and that “he would do everything in his capacity to move the Conference on Disarmament forward.”

So fast forward. We find an ever more aggressive North Korea sharing nuclear know-how with like-minded belligerents, such as Iran and Syria.

When North Korea took the helm, Iran’s representative told the Conference: “I would like to congratulate the distinguished ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the assumption of the presidency and assuring him of my delegation’s full support and cooperation.” You can be sure that the North Korean rep will deliver an equally flowery welcome when Iran dons the crown.

This also isn’t the first time that the UN has appointed Iran to a position of authority wildly at odds with its reprehensible record. In 2010 Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women – the UN’s top women’s rights body. Iranian laws that permit women to be stoned for alleged adultery? Irrelevant.

The saddest part of this charade is that these countries and their despotic leaders take sustenance from acquiring such formal trappings and basking in the accompanying diplomatic niceties. The United States is a member of the Conference on Disarmament. We don’t need another administration speech that the “door is still open” but “the window is closing.” With an Iranian poised to preside, we need to leave.

===============================================================================

UN rights chief finally thinks Egypt’s human rights trajectory a problem

UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay is getting worried somebody might figure out she was on the wrong side of history in Egypt. Her latest press statement is entitled: “Egypt risks drifting away from human rights ideals.” D’ya think? So Pillay now has this to say about the legal moves currently unfolding under the human rights tutelage of the Muslim Brotherhood: “I am very concerned that the new law, if adopted in its current form, may leave them in a worse situation than they were prior to the fall of the Mubarak Government in 2011.”

==============================================================================

Then see also:

Saudi Arabia heads UN counter-terror efforts

350NYC

United Against Pipelines, Forward on Climate!  Tomorrow, Monday May 13th,  New Yorkers will march and rally to greet President Obama when he attends a fundraiser in NYC––his first visit since his post-Sandy inspection. In his Inaugural Address just a few months ago, Obama promised “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”
Yet he continues to promote an “All of the above” energy policy that includes coal, tar sands, and fracked shale gas.

Join us if you stand against fossil fuel pipelines, against fracking, against tar sands, and FOR a country powered by wind, water and solar.

Gather in Bryant Park starting at 5 (meet near the fountain off 6th avenue at 41st Street). Reverend Billy and his choir will lead us off with a rousing blessing and song. We’ll begin to march at 5:30, then rally in front of the Waldorf Astoria at 6:30.

If you can, please wear yellow and orange (the colors of Occupy Sandy) to demonstrate your support for a clean energy future.
act.350.org/signup/NYC_Unites_Against_Pipelines/.

Event Partners: 350 NYC, 350 NJ, 350.org, Brooklyn For Peace, Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP), CREDO, CUNY Divest, Food & Water Watch, Global Kids Inc., Green Party of NY, Human Impacts Institute, NYC Friends of Clearwater, NYU Divest, Occupy the Pipeline, Occupy Sandy, Restore the Rock, Sane Energy Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Sierra Club National, United for Action, World Can’t Wait, WESPAC, YANA (You Are Never Alone).

Opinions – published by The Washington Post.

The invasion of the bollards.

Our website has proposed that geopolitics are headed to a new structure were it is needed to have a billion people in order to be considered a World Power. As such we proposed that besides China and India, the other World powers will be -

- an Anglo-American Block led by the US and that will include also the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and as well Mexico and Japan;
- a European Block led out of Brussels by a more united and reorganized EU and that will include Russia but not the UK;

- an Islamic Block led by Turkey or Indonesia that will stretch from Mauritania to Indonesia;

- and a block “Of the Rest” that will be led by Brazil and include, with a few exceptions based on the US led Trans-Pacific Partnership (the TPP) , Latin America, Africa, the SIDS, parts of Asia.
It is this last Block that will become the new Third World – that is the Sixth World of those outside the China, India, US, EU, and Islamic Blocks.

We see the recent news of Brazil defeating Mexico for the leadership of the WTO as an important step in above direction.

=======================

Brazil Wins Leadership of the World Trade Organization

Brazilian Roberto Azevêdo has been chosen over Mexican candidate Herminio Blanco as the newest director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on May 7. El Palenque, AnimalPolitico’s debate forum for experts, discusses the effects this win will have on Mexican diplomacy, Brazil’s role in trade liberalization, and the prominence of the BRICS on the world stage. Azevêdo will be the first Latin American to head the WTO.

—————–

The Financial Times wrote May 7, 2013:

So, Roberto Azevêdo, Brazil’s candidate for director general of the WTO, has pipped his rival Herminio Blanco of Mexico for the job.

But there is still a question to be answered: Who won? The man or the country?

Between Azevêdo and Blanco, there may not be much to choose. Both have impressive credentials. Azevêdo, a career diplomat in one of the world’s most polished diplomatic services, has been Brazil’s ambassador to the WTO since 2008. He knows the organisation inside out. Blanco is a businessman steeped in trade, a trade consultant who was formerly Mexico’s trade minister and its chief negotiator during preparation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

If the race was between two technocrats, it must have been a photo finish.

But what if the WTO members voted for the country, not the man? Then, it was a matter of chalk and cheese. Disgruntled Mexicans – whose pride will have taken a severe knock – will call this a victory of protectionism over free trade.

It will also be a victory of the developing world over the developed one.

Mexico, which has free trade agreements with 44 different countries, is the new poster child of developed world policies at work in the developing world. Brazil has free trade agreements with nobody, and has shown a tendency to renegotiate what agreements it does have as soon as they become inconvenient – not least its auto agreement with Mexico. Many developing countries – in Africa and Asia as well as in Latin America – will have felt the Brazilian was much more likely to protect their fledgling manufacturers and farmers than was the Mexican. Many of those countries, especially in Africa, already have closer ties with Brazil than they do with Mexico.

In an interview with Reuters, Azevêdo played down the issue of nationality:

“I, as candidate and as director of the WTO will not be representing Brazil,” Azevedo told Reuters in a phone interview on Tuesday.

“I made it to the final round in the election with those complaints on the table, and that doesn’t change things. It means there is an understanding between WTO members that the candidate must be independent from his country and be evaluated according to his skills.”

Asked if he considered Brazil was protectionist, he declined to comment.

To those who say that, under Azevêdo, the WTO will lose sight of its mission to promote free trade, others will reply that it never had one in the first place.

But Tuesday’s decision will make a big difference. No matter how pure a technocrat he is, Azevêdo will find it hard to fend off the influence of Brasília. It was the Brazilian that won, and not the Mexican.

Related FT reading:
Brazil wins battle for WTO leadership, FT
WTO chief must show relevance by making progress on global pact, FT
WTO candidates adopt varying stances on trade, FT
Questions for the world’s next trade chief, FT
Herminio Blanco: status quo is not an option for the WTO, beyondbrics

SO, WE WILL SAY – THE FT AGREE WITH OUR POINT OF VIEW THAT THE US CANDIDATE – MEXICO – LOST TO THE CANDIDATE OF THE THIRD WORLD – THAT IS OUR TRUE SIXTH WORLD – WHO WILL STAND UP TO THE BIGGER BOYS OF THE OTHER FIVE WORLDS – SPECIFICALLY THE US – WHO BLATANTLY USE THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR THEIR OWN GOOD – EXCLUSIVELY!!!

=====================

FURTHER NEWS OF RELEVANCE TO THE NEW WORLD IN THE MAKING:

Clinton Global Initiative to Launch Latin America Program in Rio

Former President Bill Clinton announced on May 6 that the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) would be expanding to Latin America in December 2013, with its first meeting set to launch in Rio de Janeiro. He was joined by Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes in making the announcement at the mid-year meeting for his annual conference.

Brazil Starts Small Business Ministry

President Dilma Rousseff announced the start of a small business ministry on May 6, saying that government banks will provide up to $7,500 to small businesses in 2013 and will reduce the public loan interest rate from 8 percent to 5 percent beginning on May 31. “The question of small business is indispensable for the country’s future and present,” said Rousseff. Brazil’s estimated 6 million micro and small businesses accounted for 40 percent of the country’s 15 million new jobs from 2001 to 2011.

Cuba to Send 6,000 Doctors to Brazil

Brazil plans to hire approximately 6,000 Cuban doctors to work in the country’s rural areas, said Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota on May 6. The Federal Medical Council­–a Brazilian doctor’s organization–questioned the island nation’s medical qualifications, but Patriota called Cuba “very proficient in the areas of medicine, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology.” President Dilma Rousseff began the talks in January 2012, and both countries are currently consulting with the Pan American Health Organization to move forward.

A Bright Outlook for Latin American Economies?

The International Monetary Fund’s May 2013 Regional Economic Outlook predicts Latin America’s growth to increase approximately 3.5 percent by the end of the year. But, in an article for The Huffington Post, Director for the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department Alejandro Werner questions whether countries in the region will be able to “adjust policies to preserve macroeconomic and financial stability” after the near-future external benefits, such as easy external financing and high commodity prices, begin to decline.

Volcanoes and Geysers Could Fuel Chilean Energy

Chile will partner with New Zealand to develop its deep exploration drilling and to develop its geothermal energy production. Chile is home to 20 percent of the world’s active volcanoes, which can be harnessed for geothermal energy. However, only 5 percent of the country’s electrical power is attributed to renewable energy resources, reports IPS News.

The Pacific Alliance Creates a Legislative Committee

Heads of Congress from Pacific Alliance members Chile, Colombia, México, and Perú signed an accord to form a Pacific Alliance Inter-Parliamentary Committee on May 6, reports La República. The committee would serve as the legislative arm of the Alliance by developing a framework to approve free trade agreements and distribution of goods, services, and capital under the Alliance. The committee will be officially presented to the Alliance at a legislative session in Chile in June.

Washington to Host Chilean and Peruvian Presidents

Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera and Peru’s President Ollanta Humala will visit Washington D.C. in June to discuss economic relations with President Obama. Piñera’s visit will take place on June 4, and Humala will visit one week later on June 11. The agenda will likely touch on negotiations with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as all three countries hope to develop closer economic ties to Asian markets.

from NYU School of Continuing & Professinal Studies – Global Affairs Division: scps.global.affairs@nyu.edu
that years ago made it possible for us to introduce Sustainable Development to the Achademe.

LEARN FROM THE EXPERTS

Our faculty are practitioners and experts in their field.
They bring their real-world experience to life for their students.
Join them this summer!

World Politics: Confrontation or Cooperatiion? (GLOB1-CE9284)
Multiple sections, 8 weeks, begins May 14

Ralph Buultjens is a historian, author, and the former Nehru Professor and Professorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded the Toynbee Prize for Social Sciences in 1984. He is a well known media commentator featured on major networks such as the BBC, CNN, and ABC. He has also served as a consultant to the United Nations and major international organizations. At the Carnegie Council, Professor Buultjens served as trustee from 1978 to1984 and was Senior Fellow for several years. His numerous publications include: Conceptualizing Global History (with Bruce Mazlish, 2004) The Destiny of freedom: Political Legacies of the Twentieth Century (Louis Nizer lecture on public policy, 1999) Politics and History: Lessons for Today (1986), and The Secret Life of Karl Marx (1985).

Superstorm Sandy, NYC, and Climate Change (GLOB1-CE9023)
Saturday, June 15, 9am-5pm

Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus is a former climate change advisor to Palau Mission to the UN. While at the Mission, he worked closely with Ambassador Stewart Beck to draft, advocate for, and pass the first United Nations General Assembly Resolution to recognize climate change as an issue of international peace and security. He is currently pursuing his J.D. at NYU School of Law where he served as the Staff Editor for the Environmental Law Journal in 2012-13 and currently serves as the Journal’s Submissions Editor. He received the Guarini Center on Environmental and Land Use Law Summer Internship for 2013. As a legal intern for the Environmental Defense Fund, Cameron-Glickenhaus researched and drafted memos and an amicus brief related to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proceedings.

The United Nations‘ Role in the War on Terror (GLOB1-CE9998)
Mondays, 6:45-8:50pm, 8 weeks, 6/3-7/22

Howard Wachtel is a Franklin Fellow in the Political Section (Sanctions Unit) of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, where he focuses on the al Qaeda/Taliban, Cote d‘Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Iraq sanctions regimes. During the course of the year, Howard will be monitoring each of these regimes, attending Security Council sanctions committee meetings, and contributing to the negotiation and drafting of Security Council resolutions related to each regime. He comes to the U.S. Department of State from Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP, where he is a litigation associate. Mr. Wachtel is primarily responsible for USUN’s interaction with the Security Council on issues related to al-Qaeda/Taliban sanctions (the “1267 regime“). He is responsible for providing guidance and recommendations regarding the strategic direction of the 1267 regime, including new measures to address recent litigation challenging the regime and to ensure that the regime adapts to the evolving nature of the terrorist threat.

Creating a Nonprofit in a Global Landscape:
A Comprehensive and Practical Approach (GLOB1-CE9943)
Monday-Friday – June 17-21, 2013 (one week intensive)

Brad Heckman is the founding Chief Executive Officer of New York Peace Institute, one of the nation’s largest community dispute resolution and mediator credentialing agencies. Previously, he served as Vice President of Safe Horizon, New York’s leading victims services and violence prevention agency. In that capacity, he oversaw the agency‘s Mediation, Families of Homicide Victims, Legal Services, Anti-Trafficking, Batterers Intervention, and Anti-Stalking Programs. Mr. Heckman served as International Director of Partners for Democratic Change, for which he developed community peacebuilding centers throughout Eastern Europe, the Balkans, South Caucasus, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. He received NYU-SCPS’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012, and serves on the boards of the National Association for Community Mediation, the New York City Peace Museum, and the New York State Dispute Resolution Association.

==================================

 TODAY – LAST EVENT OF THE SEMESTER!

In Print with James F. Hoge, Jr.

Featuring Michael Levi, David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future

TONIGHT!
Thursday, May 9
6.30-7.45pm
RSVP here

Gov. Hickenlooper admits his absolutist positions in support of fracking are not rooted in science. (photo: Getty Images)

How a Big Fracking Setback Got Overlooked

By David Sirota, Salon

07 May 13

potential 2016 contender softens his pro-fracking stance, citing unsettled science. So why is it being ignored?

As an oft-rumored 2016 presidential candidate, a regular subject of obsequious profiles in the local and national press (including in this week’s New Yorker), and the chief executive of one of the biggest fossil fuel states in America, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s declarations about environmental issues carry weight. And so his stunning admission late last week is, indeed, big news in how it so definitively proves that political money buys hostility toward environmental science.

With his election campaigns bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, Hickenlooper has long ignored troubling drilling-related data from (among others) the Environmental Protection Agency, Duke University, the University of Colorado and the fossil fuel industry itself. Instead, as he rakes in massive amounts of fossil fuel campaign cash Hickenlooper has paid back his donors by publicly declaring that “there is literally no risk” associated with hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and by claiming to Congress that fracking fluid is safe to drink (it isn’t).

 That’s where Hickenlooper’s admission comes in.

At a forum on energy issues last week, Hickenlooper simultaneously defended his assertion that fracking is perfectly safe and yet according to the Associated Press, he also “said the science on the impact of fracking is far from settled.”

In other words, the chief executive of a major fossil fuel state is now on record at once claiming fracking is totally safe but admitting he believes we don’t have enough science to know that his reassuring assertions are true.

Worse, he is admitting the need for more scientific research into fracking while actively working to kill legislation to scientifically study the effects of fracking.

When a governor admits his absolutist positions in support of fracking are not rooted in science, it should generate headlines – especially when that same governor has amassed a record like Hickenlooper. He is, after all, one of the fossil fuel industry’s chief political spokespeople; indeed, he actually moonlights as one of the industry’s official spokesmen in its paid political advertisements. Additionally, Hickenlooper is one of the industry’s best political friends: He is not only right now fighting his own party’s legislation to punish polluters, he has also publicly denied that global climate change is even happening; appointed one of his fossil fuel industry donors to a key regulatory position; fought state legislative initiatives that would have empowered municipalities to better regulate oil and gas operations in their midst; threatened to sue cities that regulate drilling; and reduced regulatory enforcement in the face of drilling-related spills.

Yet, despite this industry loyalist admitting his public policy positions are not supported by science, and despite the media’s obsession with the Colorado governor, Hickenlooper’s statements have garnered little attention. Why?

First and foremost, the Hickenlooper fans in the national press corps typically drop into Denver for a few days and produce long essays about the governor’s charisma and charm – that is, about everything other than his actual record.

The resulting hagiography subsequently credits him for much of the state’s high-profile progressive successes despite the fact that most of those successes have come from the Legislature and ballot initiatives in spite, rather than because of, the governor. The one thing you don’t hear much about in this kind of puffery is arguably the single most important responsibility of any Colorado governor: the responsibility to regulate our state’s most financially powerful and environmentally rapacious industry. The result is that you hear more about how goofy and fun-loving and swell ol’ Hick is than you do about the fact the Hickenlooper Era has coincided with a frightening rise in drilling-related spills, a precipitous decline in environmental enforcement and parts of Colorado becoming toxic hazard zones.

But obsequiousness is only part of the explanation for the media blackout. The other part is about an undying devotion to The Narrative – that is, the meme that projects all political stories through a red-versus-blue prism, and that therefore casts hostility to science as only a Republican phenomenon rather than what it really is: a transpartisan side effect of political money.

Yes, it’s true; whether pretending climate change is a hoax or casting aspersions at the notion of independent peer-reviewed research, Republican politicians tend to reject scientific data more often than Democratic politicians. Because of that, a press corps that seems only able to portray issues as partisan showdowns tends to portray the so-called War on Science as an exclusively Republican onslaught. That same press corps, though, simply cannot process or comprehend the notion of a Democrat helping his donors wage a war on science (especially one like Hickenlooper who touts his geology degree) because that kind of politician contradicts the preconceived story line.

This Narrative, of course, is only further exacerbated by what I’ve previously called the “No Money” rule. Simply put, reporters don’t like to acknowledge the role that campaign cash plays in politicians’ positions because in elite political circles, acknowledging rank corruption is considered impolite and uncouth.

Thanks to these dynamics, a revealing and incredibly newsworthy admission by a bankrolled Democratic governor is, thus, wholly ignored – as is the science that should be driving our energy policy.

The following was e-mailed to us and I thought to post it because at the bottom-line it says – forget religion – that will not bring Muslims and Christians together (actually Muslims and non-Muslims) – but rather approach the issue from a common humanity direction. So, Muslim teaching will make it impossible for the Muslims to accept a different way of life as the one ordered in the Quran, but the Human side of Muslims that loosen up allows for hope.

—————-

The Boston Bombings and Understanding the Islamic Worldview
Interview with Mark Durie

Christian Worldview Radio
April 27, 2013

www.meforum.org/3497/boston-bombings-islamic-worldview

Print

Send

RSS

Share:

Be the first of your friends to like this.

David Wheaton: Perhaps you watched the Boston Marathon bombings that killed four people and injured more than 200 others and wondered, “Why would two young Muslim men, who were granted political asylum in America years ago, educated in our schools, and received financial aid from U.S. taxpayers, set off two bombs in order to murder and maim as many Americans as possible?”

It’s a very good question. It has been said that, “All Muslims are not terrorists … but almost all terrorist attacks against America are committed by Muslims.”

Why is this? What is it about Islam — or perhaps about America? — that leads two young Muslims to murder the people that have actually taken them in?

Mark Durie, an Australian pastor and author of three books on Islam joins us from Australia The Christian Worldview all the way from Australia.

Many pastors are trying to find common ground between the Christian faith and Islam, for instance the document that came out a few years ago in America, A Common Word Between Us and You signed by many evangelical leaders and the leaders of Islam. Why have you focused on the critical differences and pointed out some of the negative aspects of Islam?

Mark Durie: I think we do have precious common ground with Muslims, but it’s in our humanity, not in faith.

I think it’s really important to hold love together with truth, and not to abandon one for the other, or to pit them against each other. Truth means acknowledging the differences, which are great and significant, and not glossing over them or pretending they don’t exist. When you’re dealing with a very different faith it takes an effort and care to really understand those differences. That’s been part of my work, to help people understand what seems incomprehensible, what those differences really are.

DW: The Free Republic reported on April 15, saying this, “Shortly after terror bombs exploded and murdered over 12 people at the Boston marathon – I guess that’s an incorrect number – members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah were reported to be dancing in the streets of Gaza, handing out candies to passers by. The head of an Islamic organization in Jordan, the Muslim Salafi group, said he’s ‘happy to see the horror in America’ after the bombing attacks in Boston. ‘American blood isn’t more precious than Muslim blood,’ said Mohammad al-Chalabi, who was convicted in an Al-Qa’ida-linked plot to attack US and other Western diplomatic missions in Jordan. ‘Let the Americans feel the pain we endured by their armies occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and killing our people there.’”

Reportedly some people in the Muslim world celebrated the Boston bombings. The vast majority of the Muslim world not condemn it – I know there were some select Muslims who did.

MD: I think there are certainly Muslims who regard the West and America as the enemy and rejoice in what they regard as inflicting pain and harm on their enemy. So there are some like that. I think some Muslims in American also really prefer to emphasize that Muslims are the real victims – that’s a theological theme in Islam, that Muslims are the victims – so they don’t want the attention to be taken away from that. Also some Muslims don’t want to apologize for Islam. It causes them distress to have to engage with this [incidents of Islamic terrorism] and they resent being held to account for their faith. So there’s a deeper denial sometimes, at least among Western Muslims about Islamic radicalism. All these factors sometimes make it difficult for Muslims to engage.

DW: Now the response of the parents of bombers – the mother and the father – they had this to say in the immediate aftermath of the bombing: …

[Mother here:] “What happened is a terrible thing, but I know that my kids had nothing to do this.”
[Father here:] “Somebody clearly framed them. I don’t know exactly who framed them but they did. They framed them and then they were so cowardly that they shot them dead. There are policemen like that.”
[Mother:] “They were being killed just because they were Muslims. Nothing else.”
[Interviewer:] “Do you think they’ll get a fair trial?”
[Mother:] “Only Allah knows it. I don’t know.”

DW: So that was the mother and the father of the two bombers. You could understand how parents are in denial sometimes. But it seems that there is an unbridgeable truth gap between the West and the Muslim world. For instance, whether it is just denying the patently obvious of what took place in Boston, but even on a broader scale, denial of the holocaust; or saying that 9/11 was not done by Muslims, it was an inside job; or the ‘fact’ that America is out to take over the world – that sort of thing. In your studies is there an unbridgeable truth gap between the West and the Muslim world?

MD: I think there’s an emotional world-view gap that drives the truth gap. Shame and honour are very powerful forces in Islamic culture, and there’s a desire to claim the moral high ground of being a victim. They did this to them “just because they are Muslims,” the mother of the bombers said.

“We are the victims!” one Muslim scholar was screaming on al-Jazeera, in a debate with Wafa Sultan, who is a doctor who left Islam. She had challenged him, saying, look Muslims had done some bad things, but he just began to scream at her: “We are the victims!”

This sense that “We are the victims: there’s nothing wrong with us, it is someone else’s fault”: that is what drives these wild conspiracy theories and denial of obvious and plain truth. I think underlying it is something like shame or just some sort of fear, and this creates the sense of unreality. The Muslim world is awash with bizarre conspiracy theories. There is a truth gap, but it is because of an emotional world-view gap.

DW: Chris Matthews, a politially liberal host here in America, had this to say as they were trying to find a possible reason or motivation behind these bombings.

[Clint Van Zandt, FBI Profiler:] “The pieces we don’t have Chris is “Where was their inspiration? Where did they get their guidance? Who taught them how to build the bombs? Where did they build them? These are a lot of questions.”

[Chris Matthews, interrupting and shouting over Van Zandt:] “Why is that important? Why is that important to prosecuting? Is that important to prosecuting? I mean, what difference does it make why they did if they did it? I’m being tough here but I don’t know whether, when you look at all this evidence…”

Frankly Mark, I do want to know why they did this. How much credence is there to [the claim that] Muslims conducting terrorist attacks in America is because of America’s “meddling” in the Islamic world, like that previous quote, of being involving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others will say they hate our freedom and lifestyle and they try to kill us because of that.

Contrary to what Chris Matthews just said, I really do want to know what motivates these Islamic terrorists, these two young men specifically, to do this kind of thing.

MD: Well the first thing is that it is not just Americans that are being attacked by radical Muslims. Just recently the Coptic cathedral in Cairo was attacked and someone was shot. Actually Christian minorities in Muslim countries are attacked and hated as well, so it is not just America.

The root of the problem is in the Qur’an. The Qur’an says “Fighting is obligatory for you, though you dislike it.” [Sura 2:126]. The word in Arabic for fighting means “to kill.” And it says also “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the disbelievers. Cut off their heads, and cut off their limbs.” [Sura 8:12]

There’s a stream that’s at the core of Islam that generates hatred against non-believers. Christians are being killed and attacked in Nigeria and in the Sudan, and that’s not because they are a world power or a dominant force.

There is an old Islamic doctrine that the blood of infidels is halal: it can be taken. It’s not a crime to attack a non-Muslim, and the radicals, like the Tsarnaev brothers, they are taught this sort of worldview. It’s the devaluation of the lives of non-Muslims in these radical versions of Islam that’s the real problem.

The blame-the-victim response – “it’s our fault that we’re being killed” – that’s a terrible mistake to fall into. That’s just what the terrorists want you to think – that it’s your fault.

DW: So if America weren’t involved in the Middle East, let’s say not involved in Afganistan and Iraq – let’s say still supporting Israel as an ally – these kind of things would still happen?

MD: Oh absolutely. The hostility would only increase. America stands for the freedom and the power and might of the non-Muslim world, and that’s enough to justify the jihad. You won’t get peace by withdrawing from those places. It’s not going to happen.

DW: I watched these Boston bombings and the aftermath in the media, and I thought “What are they really trying to accomplish, these two Muslim men, by just setting off two bombs and randomly killing some civilians on a street in Boston. One would think that would turn world opinion against them, but it doesn’t seem to. What do you think is trying to be accomplished? Are they trying to take over America? Obviously that’s not going to work. They can’t do it with a couple of bombs on a sidewalk in Boston.

MD: Well, there’s two reasons. One is, as the Qur’an says, to strike terror in the hearts of the enemy [Sura 8:60, see also 3:150, 8:], to condition fear in who they [the terrorists] regard as the enemy, which is non-Muslims.

And the other is, as a leading scholar in Syria [Al-Bouti see here] said in a ruling made about suicide bombings, it is permissible to do it to spite the enemy, that is to hurt them. So there’s the desire to hurt someone who is thought to be an enemy. That’s the pleasure of inflicting harm on your enemy.

DW: Mark, let’s come back to America, from the standpoint of Americans to this. Why don’t you think President Obama ever mentions the words Muslim or Islam in connection with terrorist attacks like this in Boston, when clearly the Islamic religion is the motivating force behind these Muslims doing this?

MD: For one thing he has a secular liberal view that all religions are much the same. So he denies that Islam is the reason or makes any contribution to these acts.

Furthermore he identifies with Islam – as he has explained to the Muslim world – because his father was a Muslim and he was exposed to Islamic worldview and background when he was a kid. So he is very deliberate about deflecting attention away from Islam. He has forbidden his spokespeople to make any links between Islam and terrorism. It is his deliberate policy to do that.

DW: The political left here in America were openly hoping that the bombers would be an American terrorist, like a Timothy McVeigh, the guy who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma, sort of a home grown right-wing extremist type person. They were hoping the bombers would not be Muslim. Why do you think the political Left want to protect Islam, especially when Islam is so against what the Left holds dear, things like sexual “freedom”, homosexuality, multiculturalism… None of these things are tenets of Islam. They stand against those things, but the political left sides with the Muslims, they go soft on calling this what it is, Islamic terrorist.

MD: It’s true, David, that those on the left wouldn’t last long in an Islamic state, but they support the Islam project. That’s a really fascinating thing and there’s a number of reasons that all come together. One is that the left hasn’t really come to terms with the failure of communism, and they don’t actually have an ideal to hold out as a result, except that they hate capitalism, and thus they hate America as well, and they share that hatred with radical Islam. So on the basis that “Whoever is my enemy’s enemy must be my friend,” there’s a natural partnering there.

Another is the victimhood thing. The left loves a victim, and Islam promotes itself – Muslims promote themselves – as victims, so there’s a partnering there.

And another is that both ideologies are totalitarian, so there’s somehow an affinity where the two work together. But as you say, radical sharia law would just destroy many of the projects that the left holds dear.

DW: I’ve often thought that the Islamic world – those who are intent on world domination – think that the bigger force to deal with first are those who hold the conservative or Christian worldview in the west, and once they are dealt with there’s going to be no problem to take out the political left.

Mark, these young men, the Boston bombers, had been in America – they were actually given politcal asylum here in America, escaping their homeland over in the former Soviet Republic of Chechenya. They had been in America for many years – I think at least one of them had been here for about ten years -– and were supported financially to a large extent by Americans taxpayers. From your understanding, your research, how does one get radicalized to the point that they would actually attack the country that had helped them?

MD: I think there’s two reasons. One was explained by their uncle, Uncle Ruslan, [here] who had absolute contempt for them. He said they did not ‘settle’ – that is, they couldn’t find a meaningful way of making a path for themselves. Tamerlan had wanted to be an engineer, but he did not do well enough; then he wanted to do boxing, but he wasn’t quite good enough at that; he felt superior but he wasn’t getting on.

But the [second] key factor then was that they were exposed to radical teachers who told them about their superiority as conservative Muslims, and offered them this sense of significance, the hope of achieving paradise if they gave their lives in jihad. It’s that radicalisation, the teaching, the doctrine, which was the key issue.

DW: The wife of the older bomber. She was just a regular American girl. I think she was just in college. She met the older bomber and then was married to him, and she actually converted to Islam, which is to me very unusual, to grow up in America, to know the lifestyle here in America of personal freedom versus voluntarily taking on the constrictions of Islam with the headcovering and the different kinds of lifestyle restrictions. What is allure of Islam for a American girl who decides all of a sudden to convert to that religion?

MD: It’s interesting David that quite a lot of women are converting to Islam in the West, more perhaps than men. One woman explained to me that sometimes Muslim men are good looking and attractive, so there’s that factor.

And for some young women, the modern secular west seems rootless, and morally and spiritually lost and Islam seems to offer safe-haven, a place where you know what you are supposed to do, where you’ve got a clear place, and where you don’t have to put yourself on show.

Sometimes women are ignorant and deceived.

There’s also the issue of dominance. It seems that Katharine Russell partnered with a young man who was abusive and dominating and he put a lot of pressure on her. All those factors can come together.

DW: A strain of Islam, both preached by some Imams and practiced by certain followers, actually encourages death – either death by martyrdom for the cause of Islam, as the only sure path to Allah, or also death to non-Muslims, as you have been talking about, and that’s where we see these terrorist attacks as something that pleases Allah. Now it’s just the opposite in the Christian faith. Jesus said “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Jesus also said in John 8:44 “He, Satan, was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and a father of lies.” I don’t want to be too extreme on this, because Satan is the father of all false religions, because he’s very happy that people are religious but not following the one and only true way through Jesus Christ. How do you categorise Islam compared to other false ways?

MD: I think it’s true that Islam does emphasize death, and the Qur’an criticizes the Jews for loving life [Sura 2:96]. And it’s also true that Islam is in many respects very antagonistic to core values of the gospel. Muhammad, for example, hated crosses and would destroy anything that had a cross on it. Also Islam has been the most devastating ideology in terms of its impact on the Christian world. Most of the ancient Christian world was overwhelmed. His track record is really incredibly devastating. I believe Muhammad was a false prophet. His message was not true. He did not lead people to God but away from God.

Is it the ultimate? Is it the worst expression of the Satanic delusion, that all of us can be affected by? I’m reluctant to say that, but certainly militant Islam has had a hugely devastating effect.

This is one reason why I find it very distressing when people in the West speak of “the prophet Muhammad”. He’s not a prophet. He’s a false prophet. And we need to find ways that really distance ourselves from the claims of Islam, so that we don’t just accept them or speak about it with reverence and respect. Because it is not a true religion.

DW: What would you say to those professing Christians that think that Islam and Christianity can work together because of our shared values of “loving God and loving neighbor”? A lot of Christians think that Allah and God – and Muslims used those words interchangeably — are the same thing. How would you respond to that Mark?

MD: I think it’s tempting to think that people of a different faith just believe more or less the same things that we do. We look at another faith and think “Oh it must be the same.” But that’s just too easy. You need to pay attention to what people actually teach and believe. And even some leading Christian thinkers and writers like Miroslav Volf from Yale University have said “Islam teaches love of the neighbor.” It’s not true. Islam teaches love of the Muslim neighbor, but not of the non-Muslim neighbor.

The Qur’an actually teaches Muslims to show harshness to non-Muslim neighbors and to fight against them [Sura 9:123, Sura 48:29] so you shouldn’t look to religion to be the basis of working together. You should look to common humanity.

I think Christians and Muslims can work together, but not based on a shared religious belief, but rather on their shared humanity, their conscience, their awareness of right and wrong that’s not necessarily based on religion at all, but is just part of the human condition.

DW: What have you found that helps Christians and people in general understand and deal with Islam in the best way?

MD: I think it’s really important to study Islam for yourself. Look at the original sources. There are some very good books that make those sources available. Take the Life of Muhammad: to understand how different it actually is, you really need to be confronted with teachings that say do not love non-Muslims. You need to read those things thoroughly. My book The Third Choice explains Islam clearly, and that’s a resource.

Another thing is you need to set aside the need to be comforted, such as thinking that all religions are the same, or everyone is basically decent: that’s not a good basis for examining these differences. You have to pay attention and look at the issues for what they are.

Another is don’t try to find solutions too quickly. Solutions come later. First you have to understand the problem and live with that and understand that first. The solutions will come as you allow those facts to come to your mind.

DW: Tell us what the situation is like in Australia with regards to Australia? Are you experiencing a lot of the same things, maybe more, because you are closer to the Islamic world? What’s it like down there Mark?

MD: About 2.4% of the Australian population is Muslim. They come from many, many different countries, so their stories are very diverse, because they come from different places. Some Muslims have had difficulties settling here, and we have certainly have the radicals here too – as in the US, where I think there have been hundreds of potential Boston bombings that have been thwarted by the FBI – we’ve had issues here too: people have been arrested and imprisoned for plotting here. In general most Muslims are doing pretty well and adapting well to Australia, but it’s not all roses by any means.

One really good thing that’s happened here is that both sides of politics have repeatedly said very clearly we’re not going to have sharia law here. There’s one law for all. All people are going to be equal before the law. That’s our common law tradition. And if you want to live in Australia that’s what have to put up with, and that’s the way it works. That’s been good: our government has made very clear statements about our values and our legal system to the Muslims that have come into the country. And I wish government leaders around the world would say that very clearly to their Muslim immigrants.

DW: Now Mark one final question. You’ve written three books on Islam. You’re a pastor. You speak very graciously and yet the truth that you speak might be offensive to some Muslims in Australia and Muslims who are listening today. What has been the response to a pastor saying the kinds of things you say? It doesn’t seem to be inflammatory. You point out the differences, which I think is completely fair game. What has been the response that you get from the Muslim world.

MD: I’ve had a range of responses. Sometimes Muslims have been intrigued by what I’ve had to say and I’ve had some very interesting interactions with them. Understanding the religion enables that to happen. Occasionally people have just been offended and they dismiss you, but I find that if you love people and you express your views graciously, and you don’t assume that the person who you’re speaking to has certain beliefs, and you ask them what they believe, and inquire about what they believe, you can have a very good relationship with them. I have friends who debate with Muslims in Hyde Park in London, and often if you can engage in a very frank and open way you can connect very powerfully, much better than if you have a wishy-washy fearful “Oh we’ll all the same” approach. You are much less likely to have a significant engagement with Muslims if you have that view.

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

Canada’s Israel Support Draws Ire From Arab Nations at UN.

World headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, Canada. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Some Arab nations are making an effort to isolate Canada at the United Nations in retaliation for the Canadian government’s pro-Israel stance.

Qatar is working to gather votes from 115 countries to relocate the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which determines global rules for airplane transportation, from Montreal to the Middle East by 2016. In addition, Arab UN ambassadors met in New York on April 23 to discuss Palestinian issues, and discussed ways to rally support against the Canadian government among international organizations.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is known for his staunch support of Israel and maintains a close relationship with the Israeli government. In April, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird stoked Arab anger by meeting Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni in eastern Jerusalem, an area where the Palestinians dispute Israeli jurisdiction.

Joseph Lavoie, a spokesman for Baird, said Canada will “fight tooth and nail” to keep the ICAO in Montreal. “Canada will not apologize for promoting a principled foreign policy,” Lavoie said, according to the Daily Globe and Mail.

——————————-

Comment from Mel

The United Nations headquarters and its overfed diplomats have earned deportation to the Middle East.

The enemies of Western Civilization have not earned the right to enjoy its benefits.

New York and Montreal are too good for them.

Let’s find out how they like eating and swimming in sand!