DRIVING THE SAUDIS Writer: Jayne Amelia Larson Director: Charlie Stratton Where does your GAS money really go? Larson’s grueling adventures as a chauffeur for Saudi Royals on a mega shopping/plastic surgery vacation in Beverly Hills explores cultural divides and common hypocrisies plus everything you wanted to know about ass implants. 1h 30m   National   Los Angeles, CA Solo Show   Multi-Media Staycation: Through Heaven & Hell In Someone Else’s Shoes www.drivingthesaudis.info VENUE #16: The SoHo Playhouse Sun 15 @ 9:30 Thu 19 @ 3 Sat 21 @ NOON Sun 22 @ 9:15 Fri 27 @ 3:45 VENUE #16: The SoHo Playhouse 15 Vandam Street (6th Avenue & Varick / 7th Avenue) SUBWAY: 1 to Houston Street A, C, E to Spring Street

written and performed by Jayne Amelia Larson
directed by Charlie Stratton

DRIVING THE SAUDIS asks where our gas money really goes — and provides some answers by following the grueling adventures of a chauffeur who whisks Saudi Royals through a Beverly Hills shopping/plastic surgery vacation. Visit www.drivingthesaudis.info.

DRIVING THE SAUDIS is a one-woman show based on Larson’s real life experience as a chauffeur for a family of Saudi Royals visiting Beverly Hills—for 7 weeks of shopping and plastic surgery. As the only woman in a detail of almost 50 drivers assigned to the family and its extensive entourage, Ms. Larson details her invitation inside one of the most closely guarded private monarchies in the world. DRIVING THE SAUDIS explores and challenges American perceptions of beauty, culture, religion, and the subjugation of women, through the curious eyes of the actress-turned-chauffeur.

This multi-media piece includes original film footage and found stills which illuminate the story and content.

JAYNE AMELIA LARSON
Miss Larson received an undergraduate degree from the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and a graduate degree from Harvard University’s Institute of Advanced Theater Training under the tutelage of Robert Brustein. She has also studied with Patsy Rodenburg from the RSC, Larry Moss, Rod Menzies, The Groundlings, and Boris Imas of the Moscow Art Theater. As a working actress, she has performed extensively in regional and New York theaters, and has made numerous television and film appearances including a series regular on Judging Amy, The Gilmore Girls, The Huntress, Club 7, and The Illusion, in which she plays opposite Kirk Douglas, released this past year. Her solo show, More Than Naked, premiered in Los Angeles as part of the acclaimed 2006 Edge Of The World Theatre Festival. She is now developing a new solo show, Driving The Saudis, and recently workshopped it at the Off Broadway Theater in Boston, at Hollins University, at the Naked Angels In Progress Series, and at Cornell University.

She has served as literary manager and part of the acting company of the award-winning theater group, The Wilton Project. Upon request, she has coached privately in Los Angeles for several years and has also taught workshops at Cornell University, University of Redlands, and the University of California State Northridge.

In addition, Ms. Larson was the VP of Development at entitled entertainment, an independent film company producing many award winning films including Thirteen Conversations About One Thing with Matthew McConnaughy, Amy Irving, and Alan Arkin; LA Riot Spectacular with Charles Dutton and Snoop Dogg; Levity with Billy Bob Thornton and Kirsten Dunst; The Illusion with Kirk Douglas and Michael Goorjian; and Aurora Borealis starring Donald Sutherland, Josh Jackson, and Juliette Lewis.

CHARLIE STRATTON (director)
Mr. Stratton has directed theater in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He was the Co-Artistic Director of the Los Angeles based Wilton Project, an award-winning theatre company which focused exclusively on the development and production of new material. He has worked extensively with the New York based theater companies Naked Angels and New York Stage and Film where he recently directed a production of FINKS by Joe Gilford starring Josh Radnor and Jennifer Westfeldt. Additionally, he frequently directs, produces and writes for television and feature films. He is a graduate of The Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University.

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This is a re-posting as I saw the play today and found that there is much more to it then I wrote above. As such I will have several postings on Driving the Saudis – starting with a second posting today. (The editor – Pincas Jawetz)

We originally posted this on August 24, 2010.

Originally posted August 1, 2010 and updated August 17, 2010.

As we intend to be next week in New Hampshire to visit with some Green efforts there, we are now more attentive to that State and I just found the following:

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We found among our REFERRERS a terrific blog and in turn we recommend it to you – our readers:

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/

Thursday, August 12, 2010

This IS America

The blogger seems to be:

About Me

Gail

New Jersey, United States

The summation of my motivation for starting this blog can be found at my WWF Witness Profile here:  http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/abo…. Beyond that, I post random thoughts and musings from Wit’s End, a little farm I share with a dog, 2 indoor cats and 2 barn cats, a flying squirrel (Whippersnapper), Sun Conure (Bird), African Grey (Simon), a dozen chickens, a pair of peafowl, sundry koi in the pond, and various wildlife visitors, most notoriously among them, a voracious fox.

View my complete profile

googletracker – It’s Over -

First I got worried about trees. They all looked sickly, or even dead – and that’s what led me, much to my detriment, to learn more about climate change than I had dreamed in my worst nightmares could possibly be happening, in my backyard, in the lifetime of myself and my children…and extreme weather, and peak oil, and collapse of the ocean food chain from acidification, and mass extinction, and everything happening much faster than predicted, and, and…See please and think -

“Technological Progress is Like an Axe in the Hands of a Pathological Criminal”

- So said Albert Einstein.

- – - – - = – - – - – - – - – - -

and quoting

“The Fallacy of Climate Activism” by Adam Sacks

“Telling the Truth

If we climate activists don’t tell the truth as well as we know it—which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words—the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless “focus groups,” contrary to the endless speculation on “correct framing,” the only way to tell the truth is to tell it. All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be.

It is offensive and condescending for activists to assume that people can’t handle the truth without environmentalists finding a way to make it more palatable. The public is concerned, we vaguely know that something is desperately wrong, and we want to know more so we can try to figure out what to do. The response to An Inconvenient Truth, as tame as that film was in retrospect, should have made it clear that we want to know the truth.

And finally, denial requires a great deal of energy, is emotionally exhausting, fraught with conflict and confusion. Pretending we can save our current way of life derails us and sends us in directions that lead us astray. The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Let’s just tell it.”

|

from Eban Goodstein <nti.eban@gmail.com> date Fri, Jul 30, 2010 subject C2C Launch Conference! Building a Climate Network, Williams College 9/24

C2C/The National Climate Seminar

Amidst the wreckage of climate legislation in DC, one thing is clear. This is not the fight of a day, of a year or of a decade. Even had the Senate acted, changing the future would still have required a vibrant, engaged global citizenry, pushing every day of every year, for the next 40 years, to decarbonize the planet.

www.bard.edu/cep

**************

C2C is the e-bulletin of the public policy initiatives of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy.

Fareed Zakaria’s Dream-Team of Sunday, June 27, 2010 looks at the Obama Administration on issues ranging from the BP oil-spill back to the bailouts of conventional business that was done without providing for change and roads to progress.

Latest results for Fareed Zakaria are coming in – our readers can pick them up on the great internet:
BrandonF?- Tom Friedman to Fareed Zakaria: “Why do the Afghans need military training? They fought the U.S. to a draw, right?”
Twitter – 3 minutes ago
josieO?: Thomas Friedman you are no expert period. Listening to Fareed Zakaria.
Twitter – 4 minutes ago
dolphingroup?: Arianna Discusses Sarah Palin And The Tea Party On ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’: Arianna appeared as a guest on CNN’s “Fa…
HuffPost TV: Arianna Discusses Sarah Palin And The Tea Party On …? - huffingtonpost.com
Twitter – 5 minutes ago
a4ashu?: Fareed zakaria Huff spitzer tom friedman woow star cast on fareed’s GPS 2day
Twitter – 7 minutes ago

No, we are not negative on Obama yet – we know he has moved US policy and has created a new feeling towards the US in the world.

Yes, we appreciated tremendously the new team Fareed had on his CNN/GPS today – and we join in when it comes to much of their criticism.

—————-

The members of team were:

Eliot Spitzer, 54th Governor of New York from January 2007 until his resignation on March 17, 2008 in the wake of the exposure of his involvement as a client in a high-priced prostitution ring. Prior to being elected governor, Spitzer served as New York State Attorney General.former Governor of New York State. He has had many achievements in his life until that act of personal indiscretion, and is trying a public come-back. He is needed in today’s attempt to go after the Wall Street much more serious indiscretions, and we appreciate Fareed not shying away from putting him on his program. As Governor, sandwiched in between Pataki and Paterson, he was the only light in Albany in recent years.

Arianna Huffington, creator, owner, publisher. etc. of http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ – probably one of the best on-line media today.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor, publisher, and part-owner of the magazine The Nation. She has been the magazine’s editor since 1995. She is a frequent guest on numerous television programs. Vanden Heuvel is a self-described liberal and a progressive.

Ross Douthat, with The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist since April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for www.theatlantic.com. On this panel he was the person most to the right.

Others pulled into the discussion were Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Martin Wolff of The Financial Times and

—————-

This discussion was in the second half of the program. The first half was dedicated to the burning issue of the change in leadership of the US in Afghanistan from General Stanley McChrystal, to General David Petraeus – with Thomas Friedman, David Kilcullen and Fareed Zakaria pretty much concurring that this was an act of leadership on the part of the President, and this was not merely an issue of insubordination, but rather that the man in place was the wrong man for the job. David Kilcullen the author of a book “Counterinsurgency” said that the US can be the anvil in Afghanistan if Pakistan agrees to be the hummer – but this “if” is very large. The problem that the afghans know the Americans will leave in 9 months – so they are not cooperating – and what can you do in 9 months? Perfect is not on the menu in Afghanistan, he said. Half of the population in Afghanistan are Pashtuns and 100% of the insurgency is Pashtun, with 80% of the Pashtun involved in the insurgency. He also stressed that an insurgency ends when insurgents trade weapons for power. Is Karzai trying to go this way? Yes, Petraeus wrote the US manual on the insurgency in Iraq, but Afghanistan is very different from Iraq. Will he adjust to the new grounds?

We like to add here a comment describing the Walt Handelsman cartoon in Newsday that shows President Obama sitting at his table reading an article “McChrystal Finished” and saying – “Well …! I plugged One Leak.”

Then, Fareed Zakaria had a lengthy discussion on with Thomas Friedman on the Middle East Israel-Palestinians issue. Again, the agreement was that the situation is complicated and that the Netanyahu government does not act in the best interest of the Israeli people. US pressure is needed to bring about change right now – as there is an opportunity that should not be missed. finally the Yasser Arafat kleptocracy has been removed and the Salam Fayyad government on the West Bank behaves as if he learned government from the Israelis. The fact that wars with Hezbollah and Hamas in the past gave the Israelis time-out in which they made progress for the Israeli economy. Now things have changed because the fight against Hamas calls for more civilian casualties then in the past and the world gets rather reluctant to back the Israelis under these conditions. The Israelis thus need the help to start real negotiations with the Fayyad government which is ready to do serious negotiations with them.

————

Now we arrived to the main meat of the hour – “the new dream team.”

Spitzer made it clear that Obama was handed a very bad set of cards and he trusted people too much – this goes for Wall Street – an area Spitzer knows very well, and the BP corporation. Obama believed he can bring people to work with him at what was against their interests.

Huffigton added to this – “Obama has always reverence for authority.” He did this on the bail-out stimulus, on health-care, and now with BP – the liberal model is flawed – she said – and The Wall Street.

Vanden Heufel just put it as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the Supreme Court gives Supreme Power to Corporate Money.

Spitzer volunteered at this point that “the President has to embrace genuine reform – instead we said that we saw continuity.”

Douthat, was somewhat more forgiving – he said that the House is Democrat and the Senate more balanced, but the Administration was able to push through conservative programs – he said.

The discussion changed to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Huffington mentioned the Stimulus packages that did not create jobs and they agreed that the loss to Scott Brown in Massachusetts is good news to the Democrats as Douthat put it. Alll agreed that too much is establishment in both parties.

Huffington: Mayor Bloomberg gets together with Fox News on immigration. All over we have the right getting organized.

Fareed’s question to Huffington: Sarah Palin – is that the right answer to Obama? She answered by pointing out the sense of unfairness felt by the American people. NO MATTER WHAT THEIR FIRST ISSUE IS – THE SECOND ISSUE FOR ALL OF THEM IS THE BAIL-OUT – THE RECAPITALIZATION OF THE BANKS.

Spitzer: Something had to be done. The problem that nothing was asked from the banks to be done in return.
AGREED – PALIN WAS THE ONLY BENEFICIARY OF THE BAILOUT.

Vanden Heuvel: The issue is the role of Government.

Douthat: There is a real shift to the right since last elections.

Conclusion – The Tea Party has an Inner Core doctrinaire Republican, but the second ring is the sympathizers. There you have the cost of clunckers, the GM bailout – the use of funds for people that made the bad bets. We got the jobs to China, Vietnam. Brazil …

———————

Our own conclusion from this panel is that what is needed is a show of government power – like in the removal of McChrystal. The failure of Obama was that he did not clean house from the bureaucracy staff he inherited from the Cheney/Bush Administration – the likes of the non-professional lady that was running the MMS and made thus possible the high level of risk in deep-water drilling. Obama removed McChrystal who was his own appointee, just think how much more he would have been in his right to send off all those Cheney/Bush appointees they made in their full two terms – some even in the last days of the second term. There are many more of these around then the few mistakes Obama managed to do in his own first-half of his first-term.

Then obviously – Obama throwing money at the establishment – to save Wall Street in its past form, aging corporations like General Motors or money-making machines of the financial institutions kind like AIG, or the labor unions that have no interest in the quality of jobs, but only in retaining their old jobs, all of these have undermined his performance so that his natural allies are sneering at him now.

Does that mean that he has to be punished and turned into a one-term President? NO and NO! He has only to be admonished and told frankly by bright people – like the above Fareed Zakaria “dream team,” that he has to shape up and stand straight against the push of the Washington interests – from the industry, from the military, from labor ,etc. and by doing the right things, following an honest policy line that creates green jobs and lets go off the jobs that the global economy will be phasing out anyway, that is when he will get back the attention of the “PALIN SYMPATHIZERS” that joined Sarah Palin not out of volition, but out of conviction that Washington does not listen to their concerns.

Mr. President – these ideas were cooked up, not by any sworn right wingers or enemies of yours, but by the brightest that consider themselves of the progressive left.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created under President Richard Nixon. Since then it was all downhill. BP has now started to reeducate President Obama.

Our Deepwater wake-up call: Let’s rethink the trade-off between economic development and environmental protection.

- – - – - -

In the wake of Deepwater, let’s put the environment first

An oil-soaked bird struggles against the side of a ship near the oil-spill site. (Gerald Herbert/associated Press)

In June 1969, the stretch of the Cuyahoga River that runs through Cleveland was so polluted that it caught fire. Time magazine described the Cuyahoga this way: “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows.”

The spectacle of a river in flames helped galvanize the environmental movement, and the following year, with Richard Nixon as president, the Environmental Protection Agency was established. In 1972, Congress passed the landmark Clean Water Act. Today, the Cuyahoga is clean enough to support more than 40 species of fish.

We still don’t know the full extent of the environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico — the impact on avian and aquatic life, on fisheries, on tourism, on the delicate ecology of coastal marshes and barrier islands. We do know, though, that it is the worst oil spill in our nation’s history, far surpassing the Exxon Valdez incident. And maybe the shocking images from the gulf of dead fish, oiled pelicans and shores lapped by viscous “brown mousse” will refocus attention on the need to preserve the environment, not just exploit it.

“Drill, baby, drill” isn’t just the bizarrely inappropriate chant that we remember from the Republican National Convention two years ago. It’s a pretty good indication of where the national ethos has drifted. Environmental regulation is seen as a bureaucratic imposition — not as an insurance policy against potential catastrophe, and certainly not as a moral imperative.

Yes, many Americans feel good about going through the motions of environmentalism. We’ve made a religion of recycling, which is an important change. We turn off the lights when we leave the room — and we’re even beginning to use fluorescent bulbs. Some of us, though not enough, understand the long-term threat posed by climate change; a subset of those who see the danger are even willing to make lifestyle changes to try to avert a worst-case outcome.

But where the rubber hits the road — in public policy — we’ve reverted to our pre-enlightenment ways. When there’s a perceived conflict between environmental stewardship and economic growth, the bottom line wins.

Barack Obama is, in many admirable ways, our most progressive president in decades. But as an environmentalist, let’s face it, he’s no Richard Nixon. Before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded — allowing, by some estimates, as many as a million gallons of crude oil to gush into the Gulf of Mexico each day for more than a month — Obama had announced plans to permit new offshore drilling. “I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything,” Obama said at the time. “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”

Obama has wisely backed away from that decision. The technology involved in deep-sea oil drilling turned out to be far more advanced than the technology needed to halt a spill if something goes wrong — essentially, like engineering a car to double its top speed without thinking to upgrade the brakes. This oversight apparently wasn’t noticed by anyone who had the power to correct it.

Calls for Obama to somehow “take over” the emergency response ring hollow. Take it over with what? Hands-on intervention has never been government’s role in this kind of situation. BP and the other oil companies had the undersea robots and the deep-water experience. Other private companies owned and operated the skimmers that remove the oil from the surface. There is no huge government reserve of the booms that are needed to protect Louisiana’s beaches and marshlands; those are made by private firms and are being deployed by unemployed fishermen.

Obama has rethought his enthusiasm for offshore drilling. Now he, and the rest of us, should rethink the larger issue — the trade-off between economic development and environmental protection. In the long run, our natural resources are all we’ve got. Defending them must be a higher priority than our recent presidents, including Obama, have made it.

Energy policy is one of Obama’s priorities. He talks about “clean coal,” which I believe to be an oxymoron, and favors technologies — such as carbon capture and sequestration — that are new and untested. The environmental risks must be a central and paramount concern, not a mere afterthought. Let’s preclude the next Deepwater Horizon right now.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

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

But the Washington Post, afraid of looking too progressive in a Sarah Palin dominated US political backwaters town, has balanced above excellent article with a second one that caters to the political sharks. Please read the two articles not just as a sandwich were our future is the filling. Read it rather as an effort to blunt the call for non-fossil future. In effect, this second article is nothing less then the Hofmeister defense of BP which we posted as our original article after we listened to this former CEO of Schell Oil Company on his launch at the US Foreign Policy Association on his start of a book-release campaign in defense of Big Oil.

- – - – -

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So we go deep, ultra deep — to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That’s a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they’ve escaped any mention at all.

The other culprits are pretty obvious. It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastrophic system failure.

Op-Ed Columnist

A Beer for Palestine

By ROGER COHEN

The New York Times, May 17, 2010

I was there last month visiting David Khoury, who, in 1995, mortgaged a house and sold property in Brookline, Massachusetts, in order to found the first microbrewery in nascent Palestine. That was a time of Oslo-induced optimism. But of course Palestine, to the world’s frustration and cost, is still waiting, 15 years later, to be born.

The Khoury family had done all right in Brookline running a liquor store called Foley’s in what was an Irish-American neighborhood. The store had been there for decades. They saw no reason to change its name. Who in the United States cares if a store with an Irish name is in fact run by Palestinian Christians from a state-in-waiting somewhere in the Middle East?

It’s not easy to trade that sort of buck-is-a-buck agnosticism for the ferocious identity politics of the Holy Land, where blood trumps money. But that’s what David and his master-brewer brother Nadim Khoury did to help a Palestinian state get on its feet. When brains and cash move in rather than out, they figured, good things start happening.

That was theory. Practice proved near disastrous. After a strong start — with their Taybeh beer selling well in Israel, ingredients coming in smoothly from Israel, sales growing in Gaza and a franchise established in Germany — their company almost fell victim to yet another sterile spasm of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The second intifada of 2000 cut Taybeh staff from 15 to zero by 2002. Hops, yeast and barley no longer reached them from the port of Ashdod. Sales in Israel collapsed. Jordan, to the east, became inaccessible. Soon the Israeli wall-fence started going up, cutting off Jerusalem to the west. Hamas in Gaza meant an end to sales of alcohol there.

Not the sort of stuff that happens in Brookline.

“Fortunately, we didn’t owe much to banks because they never thought investing in a beer company in a mainly Muslim environment made sense,” David Khoury told me. “We would not have survived.”

Now the Taybeh beer company is coming back. There are things to celebrate again — weddings, homecomings, nonviolence. Some 70 percent of sales are made in the West Bank — nearly that much used to be in Israel — and profit has returned.

The company is not a bad barometer of the fast-growing West Bank economy and how, quietly, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is building the elements and institutions of statehood. Khoury knows that, as he put it, “We could wake up one day and all this will be under siege again,” but he’s placing his faith in Fayyad’s “wise leadership.”

I asked Khoury what he would say to an Israeli general if he had the chance. “I would tell him that Israel is a reality and the Palestinian people are ready to live in peace,” he said. “We are not terrorists but we have the right to resist occupation. I would say that you are greedy. You have to give up the West Bank and go back to the 1967 borders, for the sake of Israeli women and children and Palestinian women and children. Enough is enough.”

There are Israeli settlements on either side of his village. Khoury sees one from his window. Gesturing toward it, he said of the 22 percent of British Mandate Palestine that are the West Bank and Gaza, “You see, we want this land, not half of it.”

That is also Fayyad’s position. Development is his means to get there. “A road, a health care facility, a school — people are beginning to buy into it,” Fayyad said. “There is a sense of self-empowerment.”

But for now, Palestinian development has to happen in whatever small space is accorded by Israel. If 6 percent economic growth is to continue, the West Bank must wean itself off massive international aid and become self-sustaining. But logistics remain a nightmare.

Because of checkpoints, it takes Khoury a day to get his beer into Israel, when Jerusalem is 20 minutes away. All the beer in kegs has to transit a single checkpoint near Hebron, nearly three hours away. Bottled beer takes a more direct route, but closures are frequent. “The other day it was raining and the Israelis said their dogs couldn’t sniff and everything shut down,” Khoury said.

“If you complain,” he continued, “there’s just one word — security.”

Peace is risk, no way around that. But Israel won’t do better than Fayyad. He’s a man worth taking risks for. And if you think the Holy Land could ever be a place where a Jew from Odessa drinks Arab beer in Tel Aviv made by Palestinian entrepreneurs with a joint called Foley’s in Brookline and a factory in a West Bank village with a church — and thinks nothing of it — then you should get behind Taybeh by paying it a visit.

It’s the right thing to do.

The CNN ireport – LIVING IN A TOXIC TOWN. CNN and Dr. Sanjay Gupta invite you to put on video what you know.
 http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories….

Living in a toxic town

Many residents of Mossville, Louisiana, suspect their proximity to more than a dozen chemical plants may be responsible for what they say are high rates of cancer and other diseases in the area.

Is there a place near you where pollution is making people sick? CNN is investigating the environment’s effects on health as part of Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s Toxic Towns USA special. We want you to join us in the newsgathering process.

“Put yourself on video and document conditions in your area, or take photos of what’s around you. Tell us what industrial or chemical pollution may be contributing to health problems for you and those you love, and be sure not to put yourself in a dangerous situation,” CNN writes.

“Tell us about toxic towns near you and Dr. Gupta may report on your community.”

This is a good piece on the engineering challenges presented in capping a spewing oil well 5,000 feet underwater.

‘Dome’ is a temporary method of containing gulf oil spill.

By Fred Tasker | The Miami Herald, Friday, May 7, 2010.

The 78-ton steel containment dome that crews lowered over the Deepwater Horizon site on Thursday night represents the best immediate chance to slow the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the blown-out well.

But even if it works — a big “if” that may not play out for days — it’s still a temporary measure subject to weather and other conditions.

“A dome might slow the leak, but it can’t stop it,” said Dr. Philip Johnson, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Alabama.

The only permanent solution is to drill relief wells to shut off the flow, Johnson and other experts say. And BP says that will take three months. Because of that, a half-dozen other methods — from burning the oil to dispersing it with chemicals, continue at full speed.

Workers lowered the four-story dome onto the seabed surface late Thursday night, but said it will be Sunday or Monday before they will know if it’s working.

Oil has been leaking in three places since the April 20 explosion. One small leak was capped Wednesday. The containment box will be lowered over a much bigger leak in a pipe that’s responsible for about 85 percent of the oil that’s coming out.

“This kind of system worked very effectively after Hurricane Katrina,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas. “But it was in much shallower waters, mostly less than 200 feet deep.”

At 5,000 feet it will be much harder.

“It’s pitch black down there. There are no divers. And there are all kinds of currents,” McCormack said.

If the box being lowered Thursday can contain the bigger leak, a second box being built may be used to stop the smaller leak at the blowout preventer.

Even with two domes in place, the method depends on piping the oil up to a ship, which will siphon it into smaller ships to be carried away. But, Johnson notes, “if a hurricane comes, you’re in trouble.” Hurricane season starts in June.

Relief wells are the best solution, the experts say.

“It’s the standard method when you’ve lost control of high-pressure wells,” said Greg Pollock, head of the oil spill division of the Texas General Land Office.

BP began drilling the first of two planned relief wells near the broken well on Sunday. Tony Hayward, BP’s group chief executive, estimates it will take three months to complete.

One other alternative BP engineers are considering is to try to plug the leaking well from the top instead of drilling a relief well to cap it from the bottom. That would take two to three weeks.

Three months to drill a relief well is “an optimistic estimate,” says Dr. Don Van Nieuwenhuise, geology professor at University of Houston who helped drill two relief wells for an earlier Gulf oil well blowout. The oil in the area beneath the BP well is trapped in shale under great pressure.

Drilling into it could create new leaks if not done carefully, he said.

Ever since the oil rig exploded, dozens of BP and Coast Guard ships have been cruising through the oil slick on the surface of the Gulf spraying dispersants into it. Dispersants are mixtures of solvents, surfactants and other compounds that break up the surface tension of the slick, making the oil more soluble in water.

Wave action pulls the oil apart into even smaller droplets, which remain suspended beneath the water or fall to the ocean floor. It helps protect onshore birds and animals, but wildlife experts fear its effects on fish and other animals living beneath the sea, according to the National Academics of Science.

In another novel attempt to reduce oil damage, BP workers on Wednesday injected about 3,000 gallons of dispersant directly into the leaking well on the seabed.

So far, Coast Guard and BP vessels have used 190,285 gallons of dispersant and have another 55,611 gallons available, according to the Deepwater Horizon Response Operation.

The use of dispersants has won only grudging approval from environmentalists and even petroleum engineers.

“Dispersants are chemicals. Chemicals aren’t good in the environment. It’s a trade-off,” McCormack said.

Meanwhile, BP, the U.S. Coast Guard and an army of volunteers are using several other strategies to stop damage from the gushing oil.

• Controlled burning: On Thursday, favorable weather conditions finally allowed cleanup crews to conduct a controlled burn of oil on the surface. An earlier successful burn took place April 28, destroying thousands of gallons of oil, but rough weather had frustrated several attempts since.

In a controlled burn, boats maneuver through the oil slick towing buoyant, fire-resistant booms to gather the oil into a thick, flammable pool. When a “boomful” of oil is gathered, it is towed away and ignited. When an oil slick burns, residue hardens and drops to the ocean floor. • Oil-skimming boats: BP and the Coast Guard have at least 35 ships in the Gulf skimming the oil from the surface and pumping it into barges.

“Rough seas can limit its effectiveness, but you have to use every method available,” Pollock said.

• Floating booms: These are miles-long, 20-inch-tall devices of vinyl fabric with a foam float stitched inside for buoyancy that can be stretched along the water. They can help contain oil slicks at sea, redirect them into planned areas for recovery or disposal and hold them back from environmentally sensitive areas.

The Deepwater Horizon Response Operation reports that 535,870 feet of booms had been deployed, with another 664,9891 feet available. They are being used offshore in the Gulf to redirect the oil slick, and near shore to protect shorelines at six locations including Pensacola. For days, rough seas have disrupted many of the booms, hurting their effectiveness.

Despite all the efforts, there are no guarantees.

Said Pollock: “I just hope things can happen quick.”

We posted the following advance announcement and on Wednesday April 28, 2010 we had the rewarding presentation by Professor Simon Johnson in the UN General Assembly Hall.

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 Posted in Book reviews, Future Events, Massachusetts, New York, Policy Lessons from Mad Cow Disease, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Reporting from Washington DC

Professor Johnson looks back at times that a US President was ready to act when he saw internal financial powers in the US become to large for our common good.We saw the following article:

“To battle Wall Street, Obama should channel Teddy Roosevelt.“
Teddy showed the banks who’s boss. Will Obama?
by Simon Johnson and James Kwak
in the Sunday, April 4, 2010 Washington Post.
In late February 1902, J.P. Morgan, the leading financier of his day, went to the White House to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt and Attorney General Philander Knox. The government had just announced an antitrust suit — the first of its kind — against Morgan’s recently formed railroad monopoly, Northern Securities, and this was a tense moment for the stock market. Morgan argued strongly that his industrial trusts were essential to American prosperity and competitiveness.

The banker wanted a deal. “If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up,” he offered. But the president was blunt: “That can’t be done.” And Knox succinctly summarized Roosevelt’s philosophy. “We don’t want to fix it up,” he told Morgan, “we want to stop it.”

Just over a century later, on March 27, 2009, 13 bankers were summoned to the White House. The global financial system was verging on collapse, in no small measure because of the bankers’ concentrated power and their manifest inability to manage the risks of their “financial innovation.” Banking had to be rescued — no modern economy can function without credit, of course — and only the Obama administration had the power to save the day.

But instead of specific new regulations or changes in the way they operate — or even any constraints on their power — what did these 13 bankers find waiting for them? On this day and in the months that followed, the administration provided generous expressions of unconditional financial and moral support, both explicit and implicit, along with gentle and nonbinding admonitions.

The headline quote from President Obama sounded tough: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” he told the meeting. But the reality was as mild as it could be: All 13 bankers, no matter how discredited, kept their jobs, their salaries, their bonuses, their pensions, their staff and, most remarkable given the near-complete breakdown of governance, even their boards of directors. Our leading bankers were saved by the generosity and magnanimity of our president.

Since that meeting, the country has seen no discernible changes in the financial management and incentive systems that for 30 years have given Wall Street the benefits of the upside and Main Street the costs of the downside. And politically, our financial titans have bitterly opposed the mild reforms that the Obama administration eventually proposed. Even Citi and Bank of America, which essentially spent 2009 as wards of the state, have engaged in egregious lobbying.

There is no way that Teddy Roosevelt would have stood for this. He saw finance and economics through the lens of political power. In his book, it did not matter how important you were, or claimed to be, to the economy. If you were too powerful, and if your actions were hurting other people in the economy, Roosevelt wanted to take you on — and he instructed his lawyers accordingly.

Roosevelt did not launch the antitrust movement by gently tugging on some low-hanging fruit. He took on J.P. Morgan, the central figure in the burgeoning American financial system, and he won (though just barely, with the Supreme Court voting 5 to 4 to dissolve Northern Securities). And after many twists and turns, the new consensus regarding acceptable business practices led to the breakup of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil — arguably the most powerful company in U.S. history to that date.

Of course, Roosevelt did have the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act on his side. But before 1902, that law had never been used against an industrial trust, and precedent suggested that there was no legal basis for reining in Morgan’s ventures. Roosevelt’s audacious move seemed against the odds, and it was very much against the advice of top figures in his Republican Party.

In the spring of 2009, Obama and his senior advisers did not seem terribly troubled by the dangerous concentration of power, wealth and hubris on Wall Street. The president thought it reasonable to find a way forward through amicable accommodation, assuming that Big Finance really could change. Yet, in memoirs and public statements, the bankers repeatedly submit their defense: The system — the mechanics and incentives of Wall Street — made them do it. Unfortunately, Wall Street and its intimate connections to Washington have not become any safer for the American economy since this crisis began.

In fact, the latest boom-bust-bailout cycle probably worsened matters. We can argue whether, before September 2008, the people running huge financial firms really thought they were “too big to fail.” Lehman, after all, did go bankrupt; Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were rescued at the eleventh hour. But today, who thinks Goldman could fail?

In the moment of most intense crisis, Goldman became a bank holding company, subject to the supervision of the Federal Reserve and able to borrow from the Fed’s official “discount window” — effectively gaining government support. Yet today the firm is also allowed to carry out essentially the same activities (including securities and foreign-exchange trading, as well as real-estate-related transactions) as it did prior to the meltdown of 2008, when there was supposedly no government backing.

If you were exempt from paying speeding tickets, no matter how fast you drove, what would you do? Perhaps, immediately after observing a horrific crash or having a near-death experience, you would be more careful. But soon you would feel the need to get somewhere quickly. And you might even think that your special legal status merely reflected your advanced skills. How long until the next big accident?

Since Democrats lost the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January, the president has shown some new fire. In a major potential course correction, he proposed the “Volcker Rule,” named after former Fed chairman and current Obama adviser Paul Volcker, which would constrain the risk-taking and the size of the largest U.S. banks. The move blind-sided Wall Street. In the sound bite of Jan. 21, Obama sounded just like Teddy: “If these folks want a fight,” he said, “it’s a fight I’m ready to have.”

It is now time for that fight. Senate Democrats have proposed a financial overhaul that includes the Volcker Rule, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that passing regulatory reform by late May is realistic. But to make progress in this legislative cycle, the president needs to go all in, as he did with health-care reform. The potential political message here is powerful: If opponents of reform think they are “too big to fail,” then we will prove them wrong.

It doesn’t help that Wall Street has vast amounts of cash to spend on lobbying and political ads. Yet, if framed correctly, the reform message cuts across the political spectrum. If there is one thing that the left and the right agree upon, it is that a “get out of jail free” card distorts the free market. Massive banks have access to cheaper financing because the credit markets understand that the government stands behind them. This is unfair competition, pure and simple.

Will the administration stand up and fight now, before we have another crisis? Surely this is what Theodore Roosevelt would have done. He liked to act preemptively; when he saw excessive power, he took it on, creating his own moments of political opportunity.

Of course, there is always the other Roosevelt. When FDR took power in March 1933, he took aim at the banks. As historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in “The Coming of the New Deal” — “No business was more proud and powerful than the bankers; none was more persuaded of its own rectitude; none more accustomed to respectful consultation by government officials. To be attacked as antisocial was bewildering; to be excluded from the formation of public policy was beyond endurance.”

By the mid-1930s, Franklin Roosevelt had become skeptical of powerful financiers, but he was only able to translate those feelings into policy after a major global depression. Obama shouldn’t wait for another one before pushing for the changes that matter.

 baselinescenario at gmail.com

The bottom line of a Johnson argument is that a handful of American banks (six of them) gained unprecedented wealth and threatened the well-being of the nation. He advocates that big financial institutions should be allowed to fail. To enable this we must make sure that no bank is bigger in assets then $100 billion. If they are bigger – force them to split into smaller units in the hope they will compete and some will then be allowed to fail.

——————–

The problem is not Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, or Ireland.

The problem are greedy banks, who are doing multi-billion-dollar deals on Greece failing, causing the interest rates for Greece to grow too high, thus causing the very debt crisis in the first place.

These people are making huge profits out of the problems of others, causing whole nations to go bankrupt, including all the malevolent effects for social security systems etc. People will actually die because of the greed of others.

And these are the very same people who asked for taxpayer’s bailout money just a few months ago.

– — –

UNU Current Affairs Series

Bankers and the Next Financial Meltdown – with Simon Johnson.

Date: Wednesday, April 28^th, 2010, 3:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Venue: General Assembly Hall, UN Headquarters, New York

Speaker: Simon Johnson, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management and former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

In this timely event, renowned economist Simon Johnson will talk about his new book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.

13 Bankers charts the meteoric rise of the banking sector over the last three decades. It argues that power and prestige became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, and locates the cause of the financial crisis in the excessive risk-taking which became standard practice on Wall Street in the last decade. The book also directs blame at the Bush and Obama administrations for rescuing the megabanks without securing meaningful financial reform. However, Johnson and Kwak are convinced there is still time to restructure the banking sector and introduce the necessary regulations before the next financial meltdown.

———–

Praise for the book

‘A beautifully written and powerful story…Required reading for the President, and anyone else who cares for this Republic.’

- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law and Director of the
Edmond J. Safra Foundation for Ethics at Harvard University

‘Simon Johnson was the first to point out that this was and is a crisis of political economy. His and James Kwak’s analysis…is essential reading.’

- Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University,
Professor at Harvard Business School, and Author of The Ascent of Money
Visit www.ony.unu.edu for more information

———-

ENRON hails to New York from London – the Headlong Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre and Royal Court Theatre Production by Lucy Prebble. The Director is Rupert Goold. The play is about real life events that took part from 1992 to the present days.

The Green Content of Obama’s Potential Supreme Court Pick Front-runners for replacing Justice Stevens.

From GRIST: How green are Obama’s potential Supreme Court picks?

Rumors about President Obama’s replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens have quickly settled on just three people. Jonathan Hiskes takes a look at their environmental records and explores what the John Paul Stevens retirement means for energy progress.

We posted earlier: http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2010/04…

Now please see:

President Barack Obama is reportedly considering about 10 people to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, although popular consensus has quickly settled on just three: Elena Kagan, Diane Wood, and Merrick Garland. A National Journal poll of court-watchers picked Kagan as the most likely, with Wood and Garland as the only close contenders.

Obama’s choice will have a direct bearing on climate policy, as the court is likely to hear a number of consequential cases in the coming years. It already affirmed the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but the agency is facing new legal challenges to that authority from the state of Texas, among others. If Congress passes a climate bill, it would face similar challenges. And towns such as Kivalina, Alaska, threatened by the effects of carbon pollution, are pursuing public nuisance lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, which could be appealed up to the Supreme Court.

So here’s a look at the environmental records of these leading contenders:

Courtesy Doc Searls via Wikimedia Commons

Elena Kagan

As Obama’s solicitor general, Kagan represents the U.S. government before the Supreme Court. But because it’s her job to represent the government’s view, the work doesn’t reveal much about her judicial philosophy or environmental priorities. And she’s never served as a federal appeals judge (unlike the other nominees and all current justices), or any kind of judge, so she has no judicial record to assess.

One indicator of her philosophy is her six years as dean of Harvard Law School, from 2003 to 2009, where she helped found the Environmental Law Program. Kagan lured the highly regarded environmental policy and regulation scholar Jody Freeman from UCLA to lead the program, one of the most prominent hires of her Harvard tenure. Kagan also launched an Environmental Law and Policy Clinic that puts students to work on current cases.

“For many years, Harvard was not known for a primary expertise in the environmental jurisprudence, and that changed under Dean Kagan’s watch,” environmental law professor Jim Rossi told Greenwire last year.

Merrick Garland

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals judge is considered the insider’s choice–widely known and liked in Washington legal circles, able to draw support from both Democrats and Republicans. Former Bush Justice Department official Ed Whelan called Garland “the best that conservatives could reasonably hope for from a Democratic President.”

That won’t excite progressives, but they might appreciate the role he played on the D.C. Appeals Court in repeatedly smacking down environmental shenanigans from the Bush administration EPA. In 2004, he wrote the court’s opinion [PDF] that found the Bush EPA had deliberately dragged its feet on smog standards, ruling in favor of Earthjustice and the Sierra Club.

Courtesy Linda Rux via Wikimedia Commons

Diane Wood

Wood sits on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, where she’s considered a liberal counterweight to conservative heavyweight Richard A. Posner. Her signature environmental mark was defending the scope of the Clean Water Act in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The case questioned whether seasonal and non-navigable waterways should be considered protected, a dilemma stemming from ambiguous language in the Act. Wood’s majority opinion held that regulations should apply to such waterways. The Supreme Court reversed that decision, however, limiting the reach of clean-water regulation. It’s an issue the court could well examine again.

Wood’s position on that case might give encouragement to fans of clean water, air, and soil because it rests on a broad interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the foundation of much federal environmental regulation. Given Chief Justice John Roberts’ ambiguous position on the commerce clause, Wood’s support could be an asset.

———————————————————–

• What the green movement needs from the next Supreme Court justice
• 
  
• Justice Stevens’ pro-environmental legacy embodies a simple approach:  follow the law

Gil Friend
Strategic Sustainability, and other worthy themes of our time
(Sometimes long and thoughtful, sometimes just blogging off the top of my head.)
 http://blogs.natlogic.com/friend/

Making the Business Case for Sustainability

One data point in particular stands out for me in The Business of Sustainability report (produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group) that we reported on in January. It’s not that 92% of the more than 1500 executives surveyed said their company was “addressing sustainability in some way.” It’s not that nearly 75% say they have not reduced sustainability investment due to the recession.

It’s this: “More than 70 percent of respondents said their company had not developed a business case for sustainability.”

In fact, “the majority of sustainability actions undertaken to date appear to be those limited to those necessary for meeting regulatory requirements.” – which is far from a business case, and about as exciting – or as strategic – as flossing your teeth. It’s a good thing to do, a good defensive move, but hardly a path to adding value and enriching your life. Or your business.

Most companies won’t move without understanding the business case. And sadly, most people – whether in business, government, or NGOs – still assume that sustainability, environmental performance and social responsibility will inevitably cost money. The more optimistic assume it will at least cost money “in the short term”, while potentially adding value in the “long term”.

There are several problems with this perspective:
- It’s mired in the short term thinking that plagues modern business.
- It sees “sustainability” only as a cost, not an investment.
- It demands higher hurdle rates from sustainability investments than other investments.
- Like many assumptions, it blinds people to the facts. (I’ve had countless interactions where people literally couldn’t see the attractive ROIs on the page because they were so convinced that environmental improvement had to cost money.)

Also: it’s fundamentally wrong.

In our experience – based on Natural Logic’s strategic work with dozens of leading companies, efficiency assessments of hundreds of facilities, and tracking the work of many other companies and practitioners – there simply is no necessary conflict between sustainability performance and economic performance. In fact they often go hand in hand. As we say on the cover of The Truth About Green Business, “You don’t have to choose between making money and making sense.”

Why else would Henry Kravis, co-founder of private equity giant KKR (Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co.), say, “The business case for environmental management has never been stronger”? (In fact, KKR just announced that it’s expanding its Green Portfolio Program to cover 20 percent of the companies in its portfolio.)

If you believe sustainability is a cost, a rational CFO will delay this investment as long as possible, and do only what is required by regulators. If you believe sustainability can add value, a rational CFO will accelerate this investment, and accelerate the harvest of value.

As I wrote in 2004 in “Risk, CFOs, and the Sustainability Business Case”, Dupont CFO Gary Pfeiffer understood this well, and thought that Wall Street did too:

Wall Street’s legendary focus on the short term… is more precisely a focus on discounted future cash flows. Wall Street is happy if a company will (a) make more money in the future; (b) make money sooner rather than later; and (c) face less risk that could reduce or delay the money they might make….A and B argue for using sustainability perspectives to guide the invention of better products and services — ones that can profitably meet present and anticipated market needs, meet them sooner than the competition, and turn them profitable faster than the competition…

The third element, C, demands reducing the risks that could weaken that cash flow – barriers to market entry from future regulatory hurdles, missing shifting market expectations or competitor innovations, facing unanticipated calamities like Bhopal or fully anticipated ones like rising sea levels — is equally subject to management’s ability to see into that landscape.

Making the business case has to include three elements, in three dimensions. It has to: provide a good return on investment of money, time and brand; generate more value than other potential uses of that time and money; and do this in financial, operational and strategic dimensions.

“Indirect” returns, though not always easy to measure, can be worth more than tangible ones like energy savings. These include impacts on productivity and quality; on intangibles like brand (which can itself be worth much more than the book value of a company), employee perceptions (which impact recruitment and retention), customer and analyst perceptions, and a host of other factors typically left out of financials. They may hard to monetize, but smart companies rarely make decisions only on the numbers, so at least list the intangibles, and include them in strategic discussions.

It’s critical to consider risk as well as benefit. Volatile times demand that companies “factor the future” into these assessments, with explicit consideration of risk in the sustainability business case. For example, the prospect of rising energy prices should be an explicit factor in considering the risk and determining the net present value (NPV) on any investment. Do you expect oil prices to hover around $70/barrel, drop significantly, or settle above $100 — or even $200/barrel? What could be the impacts on your cost structure – or supply chain – of dramatic changes in energy prices, or even availability? How can you design a portfolio of strategies that “future-proof the company” by diversifying your risk going forward?

What other “inevitable surprises” await? Changing regulations – or customer expectations – at home or aboard? Financial crises? Rising sea levels? Competitive innovation eating your lunch? You can’t predict “the” future, but you had better be prepared for possible futures.

Adequate consideration of these risks is part the fiduciary duty of business leadership, and directors and executives at many companies (as we argued in the Wall Street Journal in 2005) are needlessly exposed – especially since these avoidable risk often hold significant business opportunities, not just cost avoidance.

But here’s a deeper question about the “business case”: How do you use it? To determine what you should do? Or how to do it?

The numbers can’t tell you what you should do. They can only tell you how well you’re doing it – and perhaps help you make and defend the case, and sometimes help you recognize and evaluate opportunities.

As to what you should do, you already know the answer: You should look to your core purpose, your reason for being, and do what you – and your business – are really here to do. (But that’s a matter for a future article.)

A “business case” is not substitute for insight, leadership and courage. “If you try to anticipate every possible use for new business models,” says Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito, “it won’t work. You have to allow for applications that are hard to predict, locally driven, and full of weirdness.” And you have to make decisions, commit capital and sometimes bet the farm on worlds that are still coming into being, and futures that no-one can predict.

The question is not “Can you find a viable business case for the carbon-constrained world that is rapidly heading your way?” The question is “How can you create one?” Because you will find one, create one or die.

Challenging enough for you? If not, let me remind you of Bill Gates’ astute observation: “If you can show me the business case, you’re too late.”

# # #

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Natural Logic’s Full Cycle Sustainability™ program can help you cut thru this “lack of business case” problem, starting with a one day strategic briefing with your senior team — a frank dialog in which your leadership and ours:

• share our respective views of your business landscape and the sustainability trends you face;
• examine the business case for embedding sustainability into your core business goals; and
• lay the foundation for sound, profitable business strategy that will deliver those results.

This is about GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker has a reputation as a smart guy, but he said last week he wasn’t smart enough to form an opinion on the hottest environmental topic of the day – Climate change.

Baker’s bio says he graduated Harvard College, later “served as Corporate Communications Director for the Massachusetts High Technology Council,” and then “decided to return to school in 1984 and earned an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in 1986.

Blue Mass Group (“Mass” in the name of this website  stands for Massachusetts) has more detail on the Suffolk incident:

Speaking at the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service at Suffolk University Law School on Thursday February 5th, Charlie was snowing the crowd under with his intellectual firepower.

An admiring Globe scribe remarked on Baker’s “somewhat apologetic tutorial on energy pricing” and told how he “talked at length about regulatory overhaul, duplicative bureaucracy, and the esprit de corps he experienced at a once-foundering health plan.”  He practically sounded professorial!  But then Charlie faced a question about global warming: “I don’t think whether I believe that or not matters in this conversation,” Baker said.  He added, “I can get eight professors from MIT on both sides of this issue and no one in this room will walk away understanding what they said about climate change.”

That global warming stuff is way too complicated for anyone to understand, especially Charlie Baker. It’s a good thing he’s willing to settle for something easy like being Governor of Massachusetts.

Actually, there is precisely one MIT professor trying to obfuscate the issue and he has been utterly debunked again and again (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”).

The other seven MIT professors would share with you their analysis — and it ain’t pretty:

M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F

Has Baker simply decided that it’s good politics to pretend to be stupid?  (If Baker took truth serum before he answered the Globe does anyone honestly believe that he would maintain this pretense that he does not believe in global warming?  Yes-it’s sad but true that some, though not all Republicans (witness the exceptions like Lindsay Graham) have decided it’s good fun to reject science, but Baker headed an organization vitally dependent on the scientific progress.

————

For the full posting please go to:

GOP candidate response when asked about climate change “wail shucks, ah jus aint’ smart nuff!”: http://bit.ly/cZHQQM via @addthis
12:18 PM Feb 10th from web

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 26th, 2010
by Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.com)

Opinion: Lead Health Care Reform With Conviction.

Howard Dean
Special to Sphere, aol, January 25, 2010.
The conventional wisdom inside the beltway is that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate signals that the electorate at large in the U.S. has taken a sharp turn to the right as a reaction to over-reaching by the majority. This, of course, is total nonsense, as is much of what passes for spin, political calculation and punditry in Washington.

A poll of Obama voters conducted by Research 2000 on election night in Massachusetts paints a very different picture. The poll found that 18 percent of people who voted for Brown also voted for Obama in the 2008 general election. Of these voters, 82 percent said they wanted a public option, and 57 percent said they thought the health care reform bill in Congress did not go far enough. The poll also found that among the Obama voters who stayed home, 86 percent said they wanted a public option, and by 6-to1 they said the bill in Congress did not go far enough.

The Massachusetts vote was a populist rebellion by voters on the left, in the middle and on the right, mobilizing against a Washington that they see as both unresponsive to and ignoring their needs.

The American electorate was promised change. So far they have not seen it. The Republicans have skillfully opposed everything, and then blamed the Democrats and the president for failing to deliver. The Republicans can’t govern, but they sure are good at opposition. And we play the role of collaborative punching bags all too well. George W. Bush, with an assist from the Supreme Court, gained power because we simply weren’t tough enough, and we are seeing it happen again.

Our country cannot afford another Republican government. The last one brought us to near economic collapse.

Rules for winning

1) Lead with conviction. Prescribe a course for the country and then do it. The American people respect strength and decisiveness in leadership. They desperately want change in the way business is done in Washington, where they see everyone except themselves represented at the table. Remember that there’s a difference between making a compromise and compromising principles.

2) In the long run, how you get there matters less than how good the results are. A majority of Americans care less about using reconciliation than they do about stopping insurance company abuses. Allowing health care companies to charge two or three times as much to older people or women (as is in the current House and Senate bills) is not insurance reform and shouldn’t be sold that way. Ultimately you can’t fool the voters.

3) Timing matters. What political adviser would suggest to a client that they pass a bill that the client would have to defend for two election cycles with only modest changes seen by the vast majority of voters? Yet that is what both the current House and Senate bills do.

4) Use what people know and like. Expanding Medicare and Medicaid works, and people like these programs. Remember last August. People really did say, “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare.” I asked 2,700 people at a town hall meeting in Virginia how many of them would give up their Medicare. Only five raised their hands.

5) Explain what we are doing often. Health care reform is complex, but it can be distilled to a few simple principles based on our values. One example is, “If you like what you have, you can keep it.” We needed to stay with that. Another, “Put an end to insurance company rip-offs.” Everyone gets that. Or, “You can choose between private insurance and a public insurance like Medicare.” Americans like choices, and they hate to be told what to do, especially by the government.

We need to refocus our agenda, but we can’t forget our promises on health care.

It may be too late for a public option or an individual mandate. If there is still the stomach for using reconciliation, use it to: 1) Expand Medicare to help those over 55 who are unable to get insurance because of disability or unemployment, or because it is a barrier to being employed. 2) Do the expansions to Medicaid, which were in both the House and Senate bills, and which would insure countless working people, especially young people just graduated into lower-wage jobs. 3) Pass a separate bill and dare the Republicans to filibuster insurance reforms such as extension of parental insurance policies to children under 28, eliminating pre-existing conditions as a barrier to insurance, and clamping down on insurance company abuse of claims denials.

The populist winds are strong, but they can shift direction quickly. The Republicans have that wind temporarily because Democrats have demoralized our own base, which gave President Barack Obama and our Congress their seats. But the Republicans cannot lead. So far they have only been able to say no, and to obstruct. That cannot make them winners, but it can make us losers. Unfortunately their pathetic strategy works when we fail to stand up to it and stand firmly on our values.

Be bold. That is what we promised. Bold leadership with less attention to politics in Washington and more attention to the desperation of ordinary Americans for real change is what will put Democrats back in the driver’s seat where we belong, and which we earned in 2008.
______________________
Howard Dean, MD, is former governor of Vermont and former Democratic Party chairman.

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– http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

The Great Recession Continues: Americans haven’t been fooled by the Dow’s rise. What they see ahead are more taxes.

By MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN, an Opinion piece, Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2010

The December jobs report has doused the hope that we were at the beginning of a sustained economic recovery.

The unemployment rate managed to hold at 10% in December only because of an extraordinary shrinkage in the labor force: Some 661,000 gave up looking for a job.

Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) nonfarm payroll data indicate that December job losses totaled 85,000. But the bureau’s household survey, a better and more comprehensive measure of both the unemployed and underemployed, indicated a loss of 589,000 jobs. Since the Great Recession began in 2007, some 8.6 million jobs have been lost, according to the bureau; and small businesses, the normal source for new jobs, are still shedding workers. Fewer than 10% added employees, while more than 20% cut back—and the cuts averaged nearly twice as many per firm as the hires at the expanding companies.

Unemployment, in short, has graduated from being a difficulty, a worry. It is now a catastrophe, with some 15.3 million Americans out of work, according to the BLS.

What about the future? The problem in the job market going forward is not so much layoffs in the private sector, which are abating, but a lack of hiring. The federal stimulus program is offset by a 2010 budget shortfall for state, city, county and school districts, which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently estimated will be in the range of an astonishing $200 billion nationally. Since virtually all states and cities have to run balanced budgets, the result will be reduced services, layoffs and tax hikes.

The consequence is that the U.S. economy—for decades the greatest job creation machine in the world—is taking longer and longer to replace the jobs already lost. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jane Sasseen noted in a recent report in BusinessWeek, it took as little as one year from the end of a recession to add back the lost jobs. After the eight-month downturn ending in March of 1991, for example, jobs came back in 23 months. After the downturn from the dot-com bust in 2001, it took 31 months. This time it could take as many as five years or even more to recover all of the eight-plus million jobs lost since March 2007. That’s because we would have to create an additional 1.7 million jobs annually beyond those for the 1.3 million new people who enter the work force every year.

Economists may see the recession as being over, but the man on the street does not. Roughly 60% of the public believes the recession still has a way to go, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported last October. Even those who have not suffered know someone—a friend, a neighbor, a family member—who is being hurt. Two in three say the rally in the stock market has not changed their views.

There are sound reasons for this gloom. Consumers have learned a bitter lesson. They understand that increased consumption—private and public—will have to come from income and not borrowing, and income will have to come from employment.

Today, mainstream Americans are going on a financial diet amid deteriorating family finances. They know now that they cannot spend what they don’t have, as the painful consequences of spending levels that were artificially pumped up by too much debt have hit home. The top 20% of the nation’s households account for 40% of all spending, according to government data reported by Ylan Q. Mui in the Washington Post last September. But these households no longer trust their home equity or rising stock portfolios (up by almost $5 trillion this past year) as a basis for spending in lieu of saving. All they see ahead are taxes, taxes, taxes. So the dollars have not yet started to flow. This is the new normal.

What this means is that larger-than-typical head winds face two of the three normal engines of recovery: consumption and residential investment. Rather than pumping more cash into a fragile economy to make up this difference, the government will have to focus on its next big task: drawing up credible plans for bringing bloated budget deficits under control without triggering another downturn.

The prospect, therefore, is sluggish GDP growth; employment gains that are too slow to prevent further increases in the unemployment rate; and firms still very reluctant to hire vigorously.

How can we accelerate a substantial recovery in job growth that will generate additional labor income? There is no snap answer. But this is no argument for inertia.

We must have programs that create some degree of confidence that America can be rebuilt, and jobs can be created, especially since consumer spending will likely decline as a part of GDP for many years. The unemployed have to be supported. But it would be better if the financial support employed labor in rational, long-term, major infrastructure projects, processed by a newly created National Infrastructure Bank.

These wouldn’t be entitlement programs, but regeneration programs. Government spending on infrastructure projects—broadband Internet access across the nation, restoring decaying bridges and canals, building high-speed railways, modern airports, sewage plants, ports—has a high multiplier effect for adding jobs to the economy. And we will be fulfilling a desperate national need.

A second avenue for increasing employment would be to enhance technology, the area of our greatest strength. We are depriving ourselves of productive talent by a fearful attitude toward immigration. We make it hard for bright people to come and we make it hard for them to stay, so once they have graduated from our universities they go home to work for our competitors. This is not the way to run a railroad.

Foreign students are a significant proportion of those with graduate degrees in the hard sciences in American universities. We should restore the quotas for H-1B visas to 195,000 annually (where it was in the early 2000s) from 65,000, where it is now.

This increase has been blocked by shortsighted special-interest groups that fear jobs will be taken from Americans. On the contrary. The kind of people we should be striving to keep are those whose work in technology and engineering provides more than their share of new jobs.

Technology and innovation have long given us our greatest job growth. Just think: In 1800, about three-quarters of the U.S. labor force was devoted to agriculture. Today, it is less than 3%. Manufacturing employed one-third of the work force at the end of World War II. Today, it is down to about one-tenth. Americans are accustomed to economic transformation.

We must follow rational economic policies in the interest of the nation and not in the interest of narrow parochial groups who lobby legislators. Otherwise, as illustrated by the sorry journey of health-care legislation, we will see more of the politics of corruption.

Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

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In the news oday, Russia is buying Canadian Dollars and financial papers, in order to diversify its foreign currency holdings away from the US Dollar.

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Obama v. Wall Street: The President gets serious about moral hazard.

A Wall Street Editorial, January 22, 2010
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

President Obama and Democrats have settled on demonizing Wall Street as a campaign theme for November’s elections. If history is any guide, Mr. Obama and New York Senator Chuck Schumer will now persuade Wall Street to underwrite this campaign. Ah, the politics of hope and change. How refreshing.

Phony populism aside, yesterday Mr. Obama introduced his first serious idea into the debate on reforming the financial system. In calling for an end to proprietary trading at firms with a federal safety net, the President showed that he now understands an important principle: Risk-taking in the capital markets is incompatible with a taxpayer guarantee.

Under the President’s still-sketchy plan, firms that hold government-insured deposits or are eligible to receive cheap loans in an emergency from the Federal Reserve would not be able to trade for their own accounts. The firms could facilitate customer orders as brokers have always done and continue to underwrite new issues of stocks and bonds, but they could not make bets with their own capital or own or invest in hedge funds.

Yesterday’s announcement is a critical departure from the reform plan Mr. Obama introduced last year—largely incorporated in the House and Senate bills written by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Those plans all sought to expand the universe of too-big-to-fail companies eligible for taxpayer rescue. Mr. Obama has at last joined the most important policy discussion: How to eliminate the moral hazard now embedded in the U.S. financial system. Political assaults on banker compensation have done nothing to address this core problem that enables gargantuan bonuses.

The days ahead will demonstrate whether Mr. Obama is serious, or if this is merely a political tactic to encourage Republicans to defend big banks. If he’s serious, he will add to his plan a taxpayer exit strategy from the most expensive bailouts—at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

He’ll also soon realize that while his plan raises the right questions, its details will be crucial. Since there’s a counterparty on the other end of every trade made by Goldman Sachs, it won’t always be easy to discern trades made for customers versus those made for Goldman.

More fundamentally, even if the logistics can be mastered, the President’s plan would not have prevented the credit chaos of 2008. Bear Stearns was not a bank, could not borrow from the Fed’s discount window and wasn’t even all that big, yet the government still wouldn’t let it fail. Under Mr. Obama’s new rules, Goldman might simply decide to sell its bank—yet investors and its own traders would still assume it is too big to fail. That problem still needs to be addressed.

Mr. Obama also keeps peddling the illusion that the entire crisis was caused by the bankers. But the root cause was a credit mania, courtesy of the Federal Reserve. The mania was concentrated in the housing market, courtesy of Congress and several Presidential Administrations.

If we are going to have a Fed and a political class as reckless as we have, then we need a more comprehensive answer to financial risk. Bankruptcy for risk-takers who bet wrong is the best option. Barring that, strict limits on margin and leverage, especially for holders of insured deposits, can be helpful. Mr. Obama’s suggestion yesterday of limits on the size of financial firms—with the limits still to be determined—deserves a hearing but would seem more problematic.

Still, we’re encouraged by yesterday’s announcement. The Democrats appear to finally realize that too-big-to-fail is a problem to be solved, not the foundation of a modern banking system.

The Lost Senate Seat Of Senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts on Barack Obama’s First Anniversary as President of the United States. Why? Is this some sort of a 21st Century Tea Party?

Having listened to the many lamentations, we decided to suggest our own way of looking at the events.

We start by saying that although for decades that seat belonged to the Democrats, it is nevertheless true that the State of Massachusetts, in its totality, is rather an Independent State, not a State in perpetuity belonging to the Democrats. What I learned was that today the strongest registration by affiliation figures in Massachusetts is “INDEPENDENT” – it is a little over 50%, more then Democrat and much more then Republican. So, lets start with the assumption that the folks in Massachusetts are in no-body’s pocket and then let’s remember that this is actually the State of the First “Tea  Rebellion” in 1773 – the so called “Boston Tea Party” that started rolling the American Revolution against the British.

“The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and reference is often made to it in other political protests.
The Tea Party was the culmination of a resistance movement throughout British America against the Tea Act, which had been passed by the British Parliament in 1773. Colonists objected to the Tea Act for a variety of reasons, especially because they believed that it violated their right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. Protesters had successfully prevented the unloading of taxed tea in three other colonies, but in Boston, embattled Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the tea to be returned to Britain. He apparently did not expect that the protesters would choose to destroy the tea rather than concede the authority of a legislature in which they were not directly represented.
The Boston Tea Party was a key event in the growth of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, closed Boston’s commerce until the British East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. Colonists in turn responded to the Coercive Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress, which petitioned the British monarch for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them. The crisis escalated, and the American Revolutionary War began near Boston in 1775.”

OK – so the folks here were for “No taxation without representation” – this was back in 1773, and just the same in 2008 – the year Barack Obama was elected President of the USA. The taxation this time was the sum-total of the transfer of the US treasury from the US Government to the Dick Cheney loyalists – those folks that built for years the bubbles of the economy and saw them burst, while we saw the funds under the Bush Administration continue to flow to their pockets that remained wide open because their institutions were “too big to fail.”

The Massachusetts Independents loved Ted Kennedy and listened to him, they voted for Barack Obama because they really had enough of the Republican shenanigans in Washington. They hoped for change and did not see it coming during this first Obama year. With Ted Kennedy gone they said – let’s tell Washington that we did not like it because we saw no change and we watch all that bickering of the Democrats that does not promise us a way out of stagnation. Let us send them this new unknown boy who happens to run under the Republican flag – this simply to wake them up and tell the Democrats – we want to see action and we want our wish to be noted.

So, let us repeat – this was a victory for the Independents who want to feel change in areas of the economy when measured directly with figures they relate to themselves – employment, value of their houses, earning by the lower middle class, their own health care bills, their children’s school, safe airports without the need to have your underwear checked, etc. Obama’s Washington claimed change and claimed they avoided much greater runs on the economy that they avoided by stabilizing the institutions that were handed down to them – but all of this meant nothing to the Independent person who looks at his own position in the world.

Let us call this vote – the 21st Century Tea Party and let us immediately say that this is not the church going women’s tea-drinking party to host Sarah Palin. This was the real thing – the dump into the sea of one tea-bale for the folks to notice what YES WE CAN means.

Very fast forward with our eyes looking backwards!

Barack Obama is a very intelligent man and we are completely in his corner. We also like the Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern team that works in his White House. They understand that the Democrats in Congress – the House and Senate – look at reelection rather then at reformation. To our great shame – reelection means money, and money comes from greasy hands – right – most of these hands one should be able to chop off but how do you do this when they are your source of political life? Does that mean that America is doomed and that we get the best Congress this money can buy, while we get the best President the people think might be ready to bring about change?

Now the greatness of the Massachusetts Independents’ affair. They told Congress – not really that they are ready to switch from Democrat to Republican – rather what they said was that they are ready to throw out all incumbents – AND THEIR STAND-INS TOO. That will create panic on both sides of the ail, but it will not create a more harmonious environment.

So what shall Obama do?

We think he knows and he showed that when the White House explained that they will have the EPA REGULATE on environmental needs.

The answer is thus RULE – BY REGULATION – that is government by a YES WE CAN man.

It is clear, this does not work if you need international agreements that have to be ratified by the Senate – but it is good for everything that is of real importance to the Tea Party Rebels of Massachusetts. You could even put up wind-mills where Senator Ted Kennedy did not want them.

The situation is simple – Congress will go with the winner so they can win also. The winner is the leader and in his results is his compensation.

So, starting immediately, the White House can pick items they can get going via regulation and expect his own party to back what he is doing in order to survive November 2010 – specially if he dos not ask for their vote. If they do not back him they will go down themselves. Those that do not run for reelection have it even easier. There is nothing to keep them from doing the right thing – that is their hand does not have to hold onto the greasy hand. Yes, we have noted that the US Supreme Court just voted to enlarge the greasy hand – and we hope this was noted also by the Independent voters that will realize that one more Republican appointment on that court – and the whole democracy fiction will be gone. (In his scathing dissent, 89 year young Justice Stevens said the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation” and is “a rejection of the common sense of the American people.”) But, to get there – show you can – regulate the banks, bring in Paul Volker to your kitchen, so Joe Stiglitz, find someone like them for every topic you want to tackle in the next 6 months, release some from the teams you inherited – and go for it.

KEEP THANKING MASSACHUSETTS FOR HAVING SOUNDED THE ALARM BELL – JUST IN TIME.

If you do not believe me – read The Washington Post of today - “Breaking News: Frustration drove Brown’s Mass. victory, poll finds.” Whatever – the specifics vary but the Independence is rock solid.