Andrew Breitbart – the scum of the earth – a blogger bent on destroying America’s true achievements in order to promote the worst of the Tea Party.

Critics Say White House Intimidated on Race – Leading black commentators suggest the administration was cowed by the right in its handling of the Shirley Sherrod affair.

The fountain of venom flows at http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2010… THE www.BigGovernment.com blog of that master operator Andrew Breitbart – Scum of the Earth – and Badge of Dishonor of the USA 2010 media. The way he falsified the clear statements of lily-white pure black woman Shirley Sherrod caused some weak minded Democrats to falter and take steps they should not have taken – this because of the power of shadows that “The worst of The Tea Party” is having over them. Could they not learn that going down fighting the revival of American fascism is much less dishonorable then giving in to them?

See, the intent of the America Extreme Right is to derail the Obama Administration like they did to the Clinton Administration, in hope that the weak-minded will vote for return to prehistory. We think that what the country needs is a President that concentrates on issues of the EPA, the Sustainable Economy of the Future, Displacement of dependence on oil and coal. and pure patriotism that is based on pursuing the real interests of the US in the world rather then the contrived chase for oil.

To be able to do those things Washington must make sure that the civil war and the fight for civil rights are behind us, and that the US has a unified country that stands behind an acceptable honest difference in Congress between economic interests – not the contrived deviations engineered by the Fox and individuals like Breitbart. If the media does not go after the real dishonest opinion mongers, the whole media system is lacking. These days it is the whole US conventional media that is lacking because of the attention they lobe only on Vilsack and forget to point out that he was simply a weakling manipulated by Breitbart. If someone should be put on the cross that is Breitbart, if someone should be fired – that is Vilsack.

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Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times.

There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’

By FRANK RICH

Published: July 24, 2010
www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html

This is just one arresting moment — no others will be mentioned here — in the first episode of the new “Mad Men” season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don’t say and can’t say. “Mad Men” is about placid postwar America before it went smash. We know from the young woman’s reference to Goodman — one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 — that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can’t imagine the full brunt of what’s to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod’s 43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from immediately condemning Sherrod for “shameful” actions. As the world knows now, her talk (flogged by Fox as “what racism looks like”) was an uplifting parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural development.

The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn’t look like a Norman Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture who fired Sherrod without questioning the video’s patently spurious provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the Sherrod smear — including some in the news business who reported on the video without vetting it — have watched her entire speech. What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story.

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th anniversary of her father’s funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17, leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth. Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed “Gator” for a reason. Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father’s murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

Sherrod had long thought she’d flee the South, but had an epiphany on the night of her father’s death. “I couldn’t just let his death go without doing something in answer to what happened,” she said. So she made the commitment to stay and devote her life to “working for change.” She later married Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation, including his imprisonment, PBS.org.” href=”http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/witnesses/charles_sherrod.html”>can be found in any standard history of the civil rights movement.

None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to expel “racist elements” in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a “parody” on the Web — a letter from “colored people” to Abraham Lincoln berating him as “the greatest racist ever” and complaining about “that whole emancipation thing” because “freedom means having to work for real.”

Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P. had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party’s racist elements, he was belatedly excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth, it’s not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.

The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under their tent. “I am not interested in getting into that debate,” said Mitch McConnell last week.

Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus Sherrod video as revenge under the headline “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism.” To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.”

Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes. Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod’s father was murdered 200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis with lying — never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses — and Salon.com about Breitbart’s video challenge of Lewis’s story.” href=”http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/04/13/andrew_breitbart_misleading_video”>tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn’t push it. But he wasn’t deterred then, and he and others like him won’t be deterred by the Sherrod saga’s “happy ending” as long as the McConnells of the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage into the media bloodstream 24/7.

“You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.

We don’t know what history will bring next. But we might at least address the chilling question prompted in “Mad Men” by the horrific events of 46 summers ago — “Is that what it takes to change things?” — before our own summer comes to a boil again.

————————————-

Open letter from Dr. James Hansen, published in Aftenposten, May 19, 2010

Dear Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

As you know, I am fond of Norway, and have great respect for your country and its citizens, as well as for your personal ambitions to protect global climate. Your recent rainforest initiative is a splendid example of leadership the world desperately needs. And your commitment at the Copenhagen climate talks to reduce Norway’s emissions 40 per cent by 2020 was exemplary.

However, and especially in light of that, I am disappointed to learn that Statoil, Norway’s state-owned oil company, has taken such backward strides through its strategic decision to invest in Canada’s destructive tar sands industry. As the most energy-intensive source of oil, this project represents the worst of what humans are doing to the planet in a quest to prolong our global addiction to fossil fuels.

It is still feasible to stabilize the climate, but only if we leave the tar sands in the ground. The massive greenhouse gas amounts from the tar sands surely would cause the climate system to pass tipping points, while also trampling on the human rights of Canada’s First Nation communities and greatly damaging the Canadian boreal forest.

Prime Minister Stoltenberg, the world has reached a critical juncture in the climate debate. We can either move into the production of the most damaging fossil fuel, or we can begin to address our destructive addiction. We desperately need leadership at this time. I am confident that you could provide that leadership. Please do not prove me wrong.

In your capacity as owner or more than two-thirds of the shares in Statoil, I urge you to end Norway’s involvement in this dangerous, dirty and destructive project. I ask that you support the resolution at Statoil’s upcoming AGM on May 19th, that Statoil show environmental leadership and pull out of the Canadian tar sands. Statoil may pride itself on being a more responsible company than others, but that will not be enough in the tar sands. If we extract and use the tar sands, there can be no sustainable future for young people.

I look forward to my visit to Norway in June. I hope that it can be a time to celebrate Norwegian leadership in responsible environmental policies

Dr. James Hansen
James E. Hansen is member of the National Academy of Sciences, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, grandfather and winner of the Sophie Prize 2010.
James E. Hansen will visit Norway June 22 and 23 2010 to receive the Sophie Prize.

—————-

The answer from the Government:

Dear Mr. Hansen,

Thank you very much for your e-mail to the Prime Minister, which was forwarded to the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy as the governmental body responsible for Statoil ownership issues. Let me first take this opportunity to congratulate you on being awarded the Sophie-prize for 2010. I know a lot of people are looking forward to your visit to Norway, and I hope you will enjoy your stay here.

On behalf of the Government, I am pleased to say that we hold your work on climate change in high esteem, and further, that we appreciate your engagement and your views on Norway’s efforts to find good sustainable solutions to the global climate challenges.

As you now know from the results of the Statoil Annual General Meeting, we see Statoil’s oils sands investment as a commercial decision which is within the Statoil board’s area of responsibility. We are of the opinion that such decisions should not be overturned by the AGM. It is our opinion that this is in line with good corporate governance, a view that is also shared by a vast majority in the Norwegian Parliament. I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad, and we look forward to your continued engagement.

Yours faithfully
Robin Martin Kåss
Statssekretær, Olje- og Energidepartementet
Deputy Minister, Ministry of Petroleum and Energy
Postboks 8148 Dep, 0033 Oslo, Norway

Fra: Jim Hansen
Sendt: 24. mai 2010 14:08
Til: Postmottak SMK
Kopi: Jim Hansen
Emne: Climate Change and the Tar Sands Development Vedlegg: Hansen text for ad and letter in both languages.doc

Dear Prime Minister Stoltenberg,

I understand that you may have missed my open letter to you published in Aftenposten, so for your convenience I have attached it here.

My wife Anniek and I are looking forward to visiting your beautiful country in June.
With kind regards,
James E. Hansen

————–

AND THE – Message from Sophie Prize Winner.

I am grateful to Jostein Gaarder and the Sophie Foundation for the opportunity to discuss the state of Earth’s climate, the implications for people and nature, and action that is needed.

Our planet today is close to climate tipping points. Ice is melting in the Arctic, on Greenland and Antarctica, and on mountain glaciers worldwide. Many species are stressed by environmental destruction and climate change. Continuing fossil fuel emissions, if unabated, will cause sea level rise and species extinction accelerating out of humanity’s control. Increasing atmospheric water vapor is already magnifying climate extremes, increasing overall precipitation, causing greater floods and stronger storms.

Stabilizing climate requires restoring our planet’s energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth’s energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.

Actions needed so that the world can move on to the clean energies of the future are possible and practical. The actions would restore clean air and water globally, assuring intergenerational equity by preserving creation – the natural world — thus also helping achieve north-south justice. But the needed actions will happen only if the public becomes forcefully involved.
Citizens can help by blocking coal plants, tar sands, and mining the last drops of fossil fuels from public and pristine lands and the deep ocean. However, fossil fuel addiction can be solved only when we recognize an economic law as certain as the law of gravity: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy they will be used.

Solution therefore requires a rising fee on oil, gas and coal – a carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies at the domestic mine or port of entry. All funds collected should be distributed to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations. As the fee rises, fossil fuels will be phased out, replaced by carbon-free energy and efficiency.
Governments today, instead, talk of “cap-and-trade-with-offsets”, a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.

We need a simple honest flat rising carbon fee across the board. It should be revenue neutral – all funds distributed to the public – “100 percent or fight”. It is the only realistic path to global action. China and India will not accept caps, but they need a carbon fee to spur clean energy and avoid fossil fuel addiction.

But our governments have no intention of solving the fossil fuel and climate problem, as is easy to prove: the United States, Canadian and Norwegian governments are going right ahead developing the tar sands, which, if it is not halted, will make it impossible to stabilize climate.

Our governments knowingly abdicate responsibility for young people and future generations. I have been disappointed in interactions with more than half a dozen nations. In the end, they offer only soothing words, “goals” for emission reductions at far off dates, while their actual deeds prevent stabilization of climate.

The Sophie Prize provides a new opportunity to draw attention to the actions that are needed to stabilize climate. Norway may be the best place, with its history of environmentalism. I can imagine Norway standing tall among nations, taking real action to address climate change, drawing attention to the hypocrisy in the words and pseudo-actions of other nations.

So I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister suggesting that the government, as the majority owner of Statoil, should intervene in planned tar sands development. I appreciate the polite response, by letter, from the Deputy Minister of Petroleum and Energy. The government position is that the tar sands investment is “a commercial decision”, that the government should not interfere, and that a “vast majority in the Norwegian parliament” agree that this constitutes “good corporate governance”. The Deputy Minister concluded his letter “I can however assure you that we will continue our offensive stance on climate change issues both at home and abroad”.

A Norwegian grandfather, upon reading the Deputy Minister’s letter, quoted Saint Augustine: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

The Norwegian government’s position is a staggering reaffirmation of the global situation: even the greenest governments find it too inconvenient to address the implication of scientific facts. Perhaps our governments are in the hip pocket of the fossil fuel industry – but that is not for science to say.

What I can say from the science is this: the plans that governments, including Norway, are adopting spell disaster for young people and future generations. And we are running out of time.

Stabilizing climate is a moral issue, a matter of intergenerational justice. Young people, and older people who support the young and the other species on the planet, must unite in demanding an effective approach that preserves our planet.

Because the executive and legislative branches of our governments are turning a deaf ear to the science, the judicial branch may provide the best opportunity for redressing the situation. Our governments have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the rights of young people and future generations. I look forward to working with young people and their supporters in developing the legal case for young people and the planet.

To the young people I say: Stand up for your rights, for your future. Demand that the government be honest, admit and face the consequences for you from their policies.

To the old people I say: we are not too old to fight. Let us gird up our loins and prepare to fight on the side of young people for protection of the world they will inherit.

I look forward to standing with the youth of the world as they demand their proper due and fight for nature and their future.

————————

Other Recent Publications by Dr. James Hansen:

2010. Obama’s Second Chance on the Predominant Moral Issue of this Century. Op-ed on Huffington Post, Apr. 5.

2010. Only a carbon tax and nuclear power can save us. Op-ed in The Australian, Mar. 11.

|

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.

WORLD NEWS – JULY 29, 2010
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424…

Climate report shows Earth has heated up over 50 years.

Which in the printed Wall Street version was rechristened – “CLIMATE STUDY CITES 2000 as WARMEST DECADE.” This appropriate to the US inward look of New York, while the above title is clear better positioned for the world at large -

By GAUTAM NAIK

A new assessment concludes that the Earth has been getting warmer over the past 50 years and the past decade was the warmest on record.

The State of the Climate 2009 report, published Wednesday as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, was compiled by 300 scientists from 48 countries and drew on measures of 10 crucial climate indicators.

Seven of the indicators were rising, including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, sea level, ocean heat and humidity. Three indicators were declining, including Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Each indicator is changing as we’d expect in a warming world,” said Peter Thorne, senior researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, a research consortium based in College Park, Md., who was involved in compiling the report.

The report’s conclusions broadly match those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, which published its last set of findings in 2007. The IPCC report contained some errors, which further stoked the debate about the existence, causes and effects of global warming.

The new report incorporates data from the past few years that weren’t included in the last IPCC assessment. While the IPCC report concluded that evidence for human-caused global warming was “unequivocal” and was linked to emissions of greenhouse gases, the latest report didn’t seek to address the issue.

The report “doesn’t try to make the link” between climate change and what might be causing it, said Tom Karl, an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration involved in the new assessment.

The report said, “Global average surface and lower-troposphere temperatures during the last three decades have been progressively warmer than all earlier decades, and the 2000s (2000-09) was the warmest decade in the instrumental record.” The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere.

The scientists reported that they were surprised to find Greenland’s glaciers were losing ice at an accelerating rate. They also concluded that 90% of planetary warming over the past 50 years has gone into the oceans. Most of it had accumulated in near-surface layers, home to phytoplankton, tiny plants crucial to virtually all life in the sea.

A new study has found that rising sea temperature may have had a harmful effect on global concentrations of phytoplankton over the past century.

—————————–

BUT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL IS VERY ANEMIC ON CONTENT OF ABOVE NEWS – IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, AS MOSTLY ALMOST – GO TO THE FINANCIAL TIMES. HERE YOU FIND FIONA HARVEY’S FULL ARTICLE – SHE  CONTRIBUTES TO THE EDITORIAL SECTION AS WELL. YOU WILL BE IN THE CLEAR ABOUT THE MACHINATIONS IN WASHINGTON AS WELL.

You will also see there the Washington rot as in the following: “Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in the US, formerly in charge of energy with the powerful CSIS, said the new report would not change people’s minds. “It’s clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is.”

You will find that there was no doubt about the implication that it is humans who did it except in the words of that outspoken minority of industry lobbyists that hold power over Washington.

————————–
 http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/author…

NOAA finds “human fingerprints” on climate

July 28th, 2010  by Fiona Harvey

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6d1fd25c-9a69-…

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 http://planetark.org/wen/58965

Developing Nations See Cancun Climate Deal Tough.

 http://www.truth-out.org/red-sea-the-oth…

Red Sea: The Other Oil Spill.

Friday 16 July 2010

by: Jon Jensen  |  GlobalPost | Report

Hurghada, Egypt – When Hamdy Shahat and his four-man crew first set sail from this resort town last month, he expected to return with a boatload full of red snapper to sell at the market later that night.

Instead, the 33-year-old skipper came back empty-handed, except for several streaks of thick, brown oil gummed along the hull of his wooden boat.

Thousands of miles from the Gulf of Mexico, the site of BP’s massive oil leak, Shahat had inadvertently discovered Egypt’s own oil spill. Now, just like most Americans, Egyptians are asking what went wrong in the Red Sea.

For fishermen like Shahat, navigating around small patches of oil floating in the otherwise turquoise-colored Rea Sea is not all that new. Egypt’s portion of the waterway is, after all, home to about 180 oil platforms and heavily trafficked by massive tankers heading north from the Middle East to Europe through the Suez Canal. In an environment like this one, small-scale oil leaks are almost the norm.

But this time, the oil was nearly impossible to avoid.

“I remember the slick looking like a lot more oil than usual,” said Shahat. “The way the sunlight hit the surface of the water the patch looked so big that we thought it was actually underwater coral.”

Last month, Shahat was among the first in Hurghada to discover, like other fishermen who inadvertently sailed through it, what some experts are already calling one of Egypt’s worst oil spills in recent years.

Many details regarding the source of Egypt’s latest spill, which washed up on the shores of an area rich in biodiversity and popular with foreign tourists, are still unknown.

The leak, initially reported to have blanketed a 12-mile stretch of sea, was first reported on June 18, though many here believe the oil started seeping into the water days earlier.

Scientists and conservationists admit that serious environmental damage was limited to only a few offshore islands because of strong currents and winds that quickly pushed the slick to Hurghada’s shoreline, rather than underwater to the coral reefs.

And by most accounts, the total amount of oil spilled in Egypt was small when compared to other international incidents, like the BP spill that was finally capped on Thursday.

But for many residents in Hurghada, there is little comfort knowing they won’t have to face the huge levels of crude oil that is now washing up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

The uncertainty over exactly what happened in the Red Sea in June, coupled with the possibility of larger spills in the future, is enough to keep everyone here on edge.

Nearly one month after the spill’s discovery, very few details have emerged regarding the source of the leak and the actual amount of oil released, prompting accusations of government mismanagement from a host of activists, independent scientists and local businessmen.

Amr Ali, director of the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Agency, an organization started by a group of divers, is leading the charge against the government’s handling of what Ali calls a “catastrophic” spill. The parties responsible for the leak, Ali said, did not notify anyone of the spill until Hurghada’s fishermen literally sailed into it — a full three days after it started.

“This is not just about the spill — it’s about how crises like this are handled with zero transparency,” he said. “Whoever caused this spill should not get away without a penalty.”

Ali said he was surprised to hear Egypt’s government eventually announce that they had sealed the leak, while simultaneously pleading ignorance on the exact location of the source.

Video footage shot by Ali’s organization, which was later posted to the group’s YouTube channel days after the start of the spill, shows an oil-like substance floating in the water outside an offshore drilling platform. In the video, a small boat dumps what appear to be chemical dispersants into the water near the rig.

The platform is identifiable in the footage as a similar rig run by PetroGulf Misr, a government-controlled oil company based near Geisum Island, just north of Hurghada.

For its part, the company has denied any involvement in the spill.

Khaled Boraie, a spokesman for PetroGulf Misr, provided GlobalPost only the following statement: “We have no relation with the oil spill in Hurghada.”

A sign displayed in the lobby of the company’s Cairo’s office proudly announced that they had gone 107 days without incident or accident.

Egypt’s petroleum ministry finally weighed in one week after the incident, issuing a lengthy press release denying that the company’s platform could have caused any spillage and offering several possible alternative sources.

“The spill was due to passing oil tankers that discharged their ballasts or spilled oil from their loads and then the wind likely spread it to the beaches,” said Khaled Ismail, a chemist with the government-run Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation, echoing the press release.

Another possible source of oil, which only amounted to between 30 and 50 barrels, according to Ismail, was older sludge spilled years ago on nearby islands that had melted under higher-than-average heat and slid back into the Red Sea.

Several independent scientists, however, refute those claims.

“I cannot accept [the ministry’s account] because the amount of oil found was much more than would come from a passing ship. And it was all crude oil,” said Salah el-Haggar, a professor of energy and environmental studies at the American University in Cairo. “They are aware of the problem but we are not. So we still don’t know how this happened and who is responsible.”

Though Egypt’s petroleum and environmental ministries were generally praised for the rapid cleanup of Hurghada’s beaches — thoroughly swept within just three days — many believe it was a cosmetic attempt to rescue only the areas tourists frequent.

Mahmoud Hanafy, professor of marine sciences at the Suez Canal University, worries that although the spill was limited in size, lingering pollution may have already disrupted the ecology on the islands off Hurghada’s coast.

The uninhabited Northern Islands are home to a variety of species of fish and turtles and also serve as nesting grounds for the white-eyed gull, a “near threatened” species endemic to the Red Sea. The oil washing up during the initially unreported first few days of the spill hit these beaches hard, according to Dr. Hanafy.

“The problem is that the spill happened in an area with a sensitive ecosystem. This is a very valuable piece of land for diving, as an ecological site and for oil production,” Hanafy said. “The challenge for Egypt is to figure out how to reach a balance between oil production and conservation of the Red Sea.”

Egypt produced an average of 685,000 barrels of oil per day in 2009. About 70 percent of that oil, according to Hanafy, comes from the fragile Red Sea ecosystem.

Many conservationists and tour operators saw a minor victory when, in the wake of the spill last month, Egypt’s petroleum minister said he would consider reducing the number of oil concessions granted in the Red Sea area.

Egypt’s tourism sector, by comparison, especially around the Red Sea beaches and coral reefs, is one of the largest sources of national revenue. In 2007, over 11 million foreign tourists visited Egypt, earning the country more than $7.6 billion.

Several beaches in Hurghada temporarily closed for a few days during the cleanup period last month. Sameh Hwaidak, chairman of the Red Sea Hotel Association, admits that tourism in Hurghada was not significantly affected by the spill.

But like many hoteliers here, Hwaidak watches the events transpiring in the Gulf of Mexico with grave concern, worrying that the possibility of an equally devastating oil spill in Egypt — with a similar response from the government here — would cripple the local tourism.

“We only found out about this the minute oil hit the beach. We put down booms and cleaned the sand, but that’s not the solution,” he said. “The solution is to stop the oil platforms from operating so close to our beaches.”

from: solutions@thesolutionsjournal.com date: Sun, Jul 25, 2010 subject: [Solutions Update] Special Issue: The Future of Appalachia.

Solutions is a nonprofit print and online publication devoted to showcasing
bold and innovative ideas for solving the world’s integrated ecological,
social, and economic problems.

With the help of a dynamic group of academics, business leaders, and
activists, Solutions has recently released a special issue dedicated to
creating a brighter future for Appalachia. A new conversation is emerging
in Central Appalachian coal country. Many groups are exploring how the
region can grow a more diverse and more sustainable economy by reforesting
barren mine lands, reclaiming rivers and streams, developing renewable
energy industries, and supporting the region’s many entrepreneurs. This
discussion goes beyond the important goal of creating a restorative
enterprise economy; it also includes investing in the region’s social
capital. Including a diverse range of perspectives, rich historical
accounts, and detailed descriptions of solutions already in place on the
ground, this Solutions special issue is Appalachia’s playbook for an
economic and environmental transition.

Appalachia issue articles include:

– What Else? by Wendell Berry
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/669)

– Can a Wind Farm Transform Appalachia’s Energy Future? by Vernon Haltom
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/664)

– A Cooperative Approach to Renewing East Kentucky by Sara Pennington and
Randy Wilson (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/683)

– Regulating History: A Conversation with Joe Childers
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/676)

– A Cure for Appalachia by Adam Lewis
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/674)

– The Return of the American Chestnut by Christopher Barton, Michael
French, Songlin Fei, Kathryn Ward, Robert Paris, Patrick Angel
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/688)

– Tennessee Territory: A Knoxville Church Group Battles Mountaintop
Removal by Stephen George (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/668

– A Step toward Fixing a County’s Economy by Herb Smith
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/682)

– The Challenge and Promise of Carbon Capture and Storage by Sarah Forbes
(http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/689)

Additional articles from the Appalachia Special Issue will be up on the Solutions
in the next couple weeks.  These will include but not be limited to:

– Beyond Coal: A Resilient New Economy for Appalachia by John Todd, Samir
Doshi, and Anthony McInnis

– The Transition of Appalachia by Anthony Flaccavento

– Orange Water, Green Jobs by Evan Hansen, Anne Hereford, and Rory
McIlmoil

– Cinderella County Blues: Cleanup Achievements and Hidden Costs in
Germany’s Ruhr by Frank Uekoetter

– Kentucky’s Community Farm Alliance: From Growing Tobacco to Building the
Good L.I.F.E in Kentucky by Dwight B. Billings, Jenrose Fitzgerald, and
Lisa Markowitz

– Two Kentucky Towns Envision a Future Beyond Coal by Penn Loh, Phoebe
Eng, Leigh Graham, and Amy Hogg

– A Step toward Fixing a County’s Economy by Herb E. Smith

Excerpts from “At UN, Of Africa Days and Al Qaeda Evenings, Burundi and Bacardi Gold.”
By Matthew Russell Lee.

UNITED NATIONS, July 15 — With small countries in Africa dominating the Security Council’s July 15 schedule … one of the four countries already on the “Peace Building Commission” (PBC) agenda, Burundi, recently had a one party election marred by tossed grenades and now the threat of attack by Al Shabab.

Burundi has soldiers in Somalia {and this is the reason why it has become fair game to Al Shabab}. Inner City Press spoke this week with the UN’s envoy to Burundi Charles Petrie. He put a positive spin on the one party election, saying it was not as violent as it might have been.

Petrie said the opposition is weak, and the UN must play the counter-balance that civil society and opposition parties would in other countries. He should know: he was thrown out of Myanmar by the government, then served for a time in a humanitarian role on, but not in, Somalia. He was in the French military …. The Council should have heard from him but didn’t.

The same might be said of the UN’s new envoy to Somalia, Augustine Mahiga. He went into the Council’s quiet room on July 14, but was not heard from by the Council as a whole. He met with the Permanent Five, one by one. He stopped to speak to Inner City Press, about including Al Shabab on the Al Qaeda sanctions list under Council Resolution 1267 in the wake of the Kampala bombings {This again, because Uganda has military forces for peace Keeping in Somalia.}.

Later on July 14, at an ill-attended UK reception on climate change in the General Assembly lobby, Inner City Press asked UK Permanent Representative Mark Lyall Grant about 1267 and the Shabab. He pointed out that they are already on the Somalia sanctions list, and who knew who is or is not truly affiliated with Al Qaeda. An Ethiopian diplomat added, not surprisingly, they are “definitely” with Al Qaeda.

But the Council sticks to its schedule. Guinea Bissau was the topic for July 15. The coup leader now heads the military; the UN “took note” of it. A Presidential Statement is to be drafted in the coming days.

Still and all, the Permanent Representatives of France, Japan and Mexico strode into the Council just after 10 a.m..

{Liberia is now becoming the fifth small African Country on the PBC operating table.}
* * *
{And further at the UN} - In Wake of Uganda Bombing, UNSC Statement Does Not Assign Blame, Even After Al Shabab Takes Credit.

UNITED NATIONS, July 12, updated — A day after the Kampala double bombing which killed more than 60 people, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had yet to issue any kind of statement. In front of the Security Council on Monday morning, one non-permanent member’s spokesperson wondered under what agenda item the Council might issue a statement: Somalia?

Another spokesperson said moves were afoot for the issuance of a press statement, later in the day. Would it say who is responsible? After the bombing of trains in Madrid, the Council issued a statement blaming it on ETA. When Al Qaeda later took responsibility, the Council’s statement was never retracted.

Here, nearly all speakers including Uganda authorities are pointing the finger at Islamist Somali insurgents. They had vowed retaliation for the Ugandan and Burundian AMISOM peacekeepers’ shelling of a market in Mogadishu. Others pointed out the targeting of “Ethiopian Village,” given antagonism between irridentist Somalia and Ethiopia. Motive is certainly there– and, the media pointed out, opportunity.

As the draft text of the press statement was distributed to members, a Council diplomat told Inner City Press it did not assign blame, only the Council’s “standard terrorist attack language.” Might that change?

Update of 3:20 p.m. — Nigeria’s Ambassador, the Council’s president for July, read out a four paragraph statement. As Inner City Press predicted this morning, it did not assign blame. But in the interim, the spokesman for Al Shabab has taken credit for the bombings, saying they were months in the planning.

Inner City Press asked Nigeria’s Ambassador on camera why blame was not ascribed, and if this might not discourage countries from sending peacekeepers to Somalia. She declined the first, and to the second question said “there is a peace to keep in Somalia.”

Afterward, Inner City Press was told that Al Shabab’s confession came after the statement was circulated and concurrence obtained. They didn’t want to delay it. But wouldn’t it have been stronger if more specific? An Ethiopian diplomat spoke about Eritrea. If ten Taliban are coming off the 1267 Al Qaeda sanctions list, does that mean there’s room for Al-Shabab?

In Kampala, the Ethiopian Village?

Incoming UN envoy on Somalia, Tanzania’s former Ambassador Mahiga, spoke to Inner City Press at the UN in New York last week, including about the peacekeepers’ use of “long range artillery” and the civilian casualties caused. Will Mahiga take this so-called “collateral damage” more seriously than Ould Abdallah did?

———————————–

From the above we see clearly that when it come to the need to blame an Islamic insurgency, the UN is very slow at pointing a finger. There clearly must internal UN be reasons for that.

Now let us see what Fared Zakaria and his high-brow participants in his circle of policy reviewers think about the situation:

His program included Jeffrey Gettleman, the New York Times Bureau Chief in East Africa Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya) who saw the situation on location in Somalia, and Ken Menkhaus of Davison College in New Jersey, who served as UN Political Advisor in Somalia 1993-94.
 http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.z…

 http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/podcast…

—————-

Chaos and lawlessness rule in Mogadishu, Somalia. And Al Shabab, a Somali affiliate of Al Qaeda, is exploiting that power vacuum and exporting terror.

Al Shabab claimed responsibility for the bombing of World Cup viewers in Uganda and is practicing an extreme form of Islamic justice.

What exactly is Al Shabab doing in Somalia and what can we expect next? Is there anything the U.S. or its allies can do to help the country that is called “the world’s worst failed state?”

—————

Somalia is a country of 6-8 million people and at the end of the cold war they were the most militarized country in the world. Now there are 1-1.5 million people living outside Somalia and the country was destroyed – not by bombings but by small caliber guns. There is no central authority in the country and it has become ideal terrain for an Al Qaeda base.

In 1992 the First President Bush had there 20,000 troops and left to avoid worst disaster leaving behind total vacuum.

The locals are incapable of establishing a functioning government. Foreign funds that go to an interim government are dissipated but nevertheless there is a will on the outside to view this government as a transition – the question transition to what?

The Al Shabab is widely unpopular but viewed as an alternative to useless government. This Al Shabab practices the most tuthless of Islam justice – like the cutting off of arms for suspected thieves.

In this second level of vacuum move in the foreigners – be these the Al Qaeda people from Pakistan who want to see if they can move here as a new home base, and some more benevolent home comers from among the Somali diaspora that actually are ready to provide their skills in building government at locality levels like cities. These are very welcome by the elders who are ready to back their efforts with the elder prestige.

This latter is the hope – but this is a bottom up government – and who will say that this will lead to a National government in its present borders? Would it not make sense to let them rule according to the ethnic divisions of the country and resulting in two or three smaller States that can then go their own ways? Jeffret Gettleman has seen this function on the ground in several locations where the situation is thus much better then in the country at large.

The importance of this goes well beyond Somalia and the case that came to mind in this CNN/GPS program was Iraq.

With the Iraqi elections held 133 days ago and a Parliament that todate has met only for the grandiose time of 18 minutes, and with the upcoming holidays, the evidence that nothing else can be expected before September and the US troops starting by then to leave the country, is Iraq going to be next Somalia?

So – the conclusion is that government can be built only bottom up if the idea is to reach up to democracy – and then why insist on having a non-unified country when the only evidence at hand is that the people actually hate each other and belong to various groups with the only semblance of unity is the unity of cleptocrats?

This disaster of Somalia may turn out to speak not only of Africa, but also of Iraq and why not of Afghanistan?

These problem go well beyond the limited scope we started out with.

—————————
 http://ipsterraviva.net/UN/currentNew.as…

Somalia Centre Stage Ahead of AU Summit.
Joshua Kyalimpa -   ipsterraviva.netKAMPALA, Jul 18 (IPS) – The African Union summit opens in Kampala on July 19 amid heightened security following twin bomb attacks a week earlier. The official theme of child and maternal mortality will likely be overshadowed by discussion of the AU’s mission in Somalia.

The blasts, which killed at least 74 people and wounded 82 others watching the World Cup finals on big screens at the Ethiopian Village Restaurant in Kampala’s Kabalagala neighbourhood, and at the Kyaddondo rugby grounds. The attacks came just two days after a spokesperson for Somalia’s al-Shabaab group, which is fighting against the weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG) for control of the country, said Uganda would be targeted for its role in the conflict.

Questioning military solutions Some analysts argue that a troop surge will achieve little, pointing to the difficulties faced by Ethiopia. Ethiopian soldiers entered Somalia in December 2006 to push back the Union of Islamic Courts, an Islamist group with ambitions to establish sharia law in Somalia, from which al-Shabaab subsequently emerged. But while the UIC’s bid for control was halted, this larger force was unable to fully capture the capital or impose itself in the countryside; the Ethiopians pulled out and were replaced by the Ugandan-dominated AMISOM. Makerere University political scientist Yassin Olum believes it is time for Uganda to review its position in Somalia, with a view to withdrawing. “We have to ask ourselves why other African countries are not sending troops to Somalia. Maybe they have realised it’s a hot potato or they view it as an internal matter,” says Olum.

Targeting the AU mission in Somalia

Uganda contributes the majority of the 5,000 troops in the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), which has helped the TFG maintain a tenuous hold over parts of the capital, Mogadishu, but little more.

“We are sending a message to every country who is willing to send troops to Somalia that they will face attacks on their territory,” said al-Shabaab spokesman Ali Mohamoud Rage following the attacks. He added that Burundi, the second-largest troop contributor to AMISOM after Uganda, “will face similar attacks if they don’t withdraw.”

Bahoku Barigye, spokesperson for AMISOM, told IPS that the mission’s mandate should be expanded from peace-keeping – its terms of reference originate in a U.N. resolution authorising a “training and protection” mission – to one of peace enforcement, for which more soldiers would be needed.

“We have troops guarding the airport, the presidential palace, the port and other key installations this leaves us with few men to defend the civilians,” says Barigye.

Security personnel in Uganda have so far made 20 arrests; two men have also been detained in neighbouring Kenya in connection with the bombings.

Despite previous commitments by members of the African Union to contribute to a force of 20,000 peacekeepers, there are only about 5,000 troops in the Somali capital in support of the weak transitional federal government. Over 3,000 of these are from Uganda, the rest are from Burundi.

Uganda undeterred

At a Jul. 14 meeting called after the Kampala bombings, the Inter Government Authority on Development, a regional bloc of countries in the Horn of Africa, agreed to send an additional 2,000 soldiers.

Uganda has indicated it will send in more of its own troops if other countries are not willing.

Addressing a news conference at his private home in Ntugamo, western Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni said, “It was a very big mistake on their side; we shall

Development goals overshadowed by conflict? African civil society has voiced concerns that the AU summit to be held in Kampala from Jul. 17-19 could be dominated by the Somalia question. The official theme of the summit is “Maternal, Infant and Child Health and Development in Africa,” but consideration of this development goal seems likely to suffer the same fate as previous themes on water and sanitation and promotion of agriculture: a formal declaration will be made, but the summit will be dominated by al-Shabaab’s bombing of Uganda, the leading contributor of troops to the AU’s mission in Somalia. Civil society organisations organised a forum in Kampala ahead of the summit to enable civil society, ordinary citizens and key stake holders deliberate on the key issues and demand action, but now doubt they will get a platform to present their case to African leaders.

l deal with the authors of this crime.” He is also reported to have assured the U.S., which takes an active interest in Somali Islamist activity, that Uganda would not try to disentangle itself from the conflict in Somalia.

The U.S. ambassador to Uganda, Jerry Lanier, said, “We believe the Uganda mission is more important than ever now.”

The ambassador said the U.S. planned to increase assistance to Uganda and AMISOM.

Political scientist Yassin Olum says the Ugandan president needed more time to reflect on the matter before making statements.

“What this means is that we are no longer neutral in the conflict and we are fighting on the side of the Transitional Federal Government which is dangerous. This is not conventional warfare where you need more troops to defeat the enemy.”

Fred Bwire, a Kampala city resident, voices the attitude of many ordinary Ugandans towards the Somali mission. “What are we doing there? Our people are being killed for nothing. Why aren’t Kenyans – who are neighbors with Somalia – bothered?”

Hussein Kyanjo, an opposition member of parliament, believes the main beneficiary of Uganda’s continued involvement in Somalia is President Museveni himself. “He knows that the United States of America opposes the al-Shabaab and so he fights U.S. enemies to blind them to his dictatorial tendencies.”

Amama Mbabazi, Uganda’s minister for security, responds that Kyanjo forgets that Uganda was suffered terrorist attacks long before it sent troops to Somalia.

“The Allied Democratic Forces – another rebel outfit with links to Al-Qaeda – killed many people in the past and my friend Kyanjo seems to have forgotten this.”

In their struggle against the government, the Islamist ADF rebels attacked police posts, schools and trade centres in the west of the country beginning in 1996; in 1998, it carried out several bombings in Kampala, killing five and wounding six others. Military action by the Ugandan army largely destroyed the group the following year.

————————————————

July 21, 2010 as per official UN NEWS we are not convinced the UN has the faintest idea of what to do about Somalia beyond calling for wasting some more money on it:

UN DAILY NEWS from the
UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
21 July, 2010 =========================================================================

UN SOUNDS THE ALARM AS DIRE HUMANITARIAN SITUATION CONTINUES TO GRIP SOMALIA .

As Somalia remains in the grip of a humanitarian crisis, it is vital to ensure adequate funding to assist the 3.2 million people – or more than 40 per cent of the population – who rely on international aid, a senior United Nations aid official stressed today.

UN agencies and their partners have so far received only 56 per cent of the $600 million needed to fund critical areas such as health, water and sanitation, nutrition and livelihood support in Somalia, which is recovering from drought and years of chaos and is also in the throes of ongoing violence.

“My major concern at this time of the year is that there is a renewed emphasis on ensuring that we do address the funding gaps in Somalia to help us to sustain the achievements that can continue to be made in one of the world’s most difficult and acute humanitarian crises,” said Mark Bowden, the UN Humanitarian and Resident Coordinator for Somalia.

He told a news conference in New York that the situation in the Horn of Africa nation is characterized by severe child malnutrition, loss of livestock and livelihoods, as well as ongoing displacement owing to continued clashes between Government forces and Islamist militant groups.

The conflict has led to Somalia being one of the countries with the highest number of uprooted people in the world – an estimated 1.4 million displaced within the country and almost 595,000 living as refugees in neighbouring countries.

“Conflict is the driving cause behind displacement and most of it comes from Mogadishu,” he said, noting that 20,000 people were displaced in the capital in June, and an estimated 200,000 people have been displaced from the city this year.

In addition, fighting in Mogadishu since March this year has led to more than 3,000 conflict-related casualties.

“What I genuinely hope is that we try to find some way of reducing the impact of this conflict on the civilian population and all parties need to find more peaceful means of settling their disputes,” he said, adding that where that is not possible, to at least avoid the considerable collateral damage on civilians.

Despite the ongoing crisis, Mr. Bowden noted that the situation in Somalia “isn’t all bad news,” although it is one of the most complicated humanitarian situations the UN is facing.

Some major achievements include keeping the country free of polio amid a resurgence of the disease in a number of other African countries. This is thanks to the provision of clean water to 1.3 million people, as well as vaccination campaigns that were carried out, even in volatile areas.

“We are able to make progress in terms of managing humanitarian operations in extremely difficult circumstances, which include control of large parts of the country by rebel groups and active conflict in other parts,” he noted.

————————————

And Inner City Press from the UN continues its bleak reporting from the UN that really shows again and again that the UN will not lead the Somalis out of their misery.

See - http://www.innercitypress.com/un1soa0721…

Killing of Civilians by UN Supported Troops in Somalia Admitted But Not Acted On.

By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, July 21 — In the wake of the World Cup finals bombing in Uganda, there has been even less discussion of the civilians being killed in Mogadishu by the peacekeeping mission which the UN is supporting. But a memo leaked from within that AMISOM mission notes continued firing into civilian neighborhoods.
Inner City Press asked UN Humanitarian coordinator Mark Bowden whether there is a special responsibility on the UN to ensure that the troops to which it provides logistical support through its UNSOA office are not killing civilians. “Yes there is,” Bowden said, adding that he’s “had discussions” with Ambassador Diarra of the African Union about “reducing civilian casualties.” ………..  it continues

–

On Child Soldiers Supported by UN in Somalia, UNSC Will Respond After 3 Years.

By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, June 16, updated — Days after the UN-supported Somali Transitional Federal Government’s use of child soldiers was widely exposed, the UN Security Council’s lack of seriousness on the issue was on display on Wednesday. Mexican foreign minister Patricia Espinosa presided over a day-long series of speeches about children and armed conflict. At noon, Inner City Press asked her what she and the Council would do about their support of the TFG, which uses children as young as nine and 12 to wield AK-47s in Mogadishu.

This has not been raised to the Security Council, Secretary Espinosa replied, not even to the Working Group. …… more

——————–

Eli Kintisch is reporter for Science Magazine and author of “Hack the Planet” released by Wiley April 19, 2010.

Bill McKibben, author of “EARTH: MAKING A LIFE ON A TOUGH NEW PLANET” and co-founder of 350.org, an organization that our readers know that we hold in very high esteem,  wrote about “HACK THE PLANET:”

“Anyone who considers themselves scientifically literate had better get versed in the new discipline of geo-engineering — or planethacking, as Eli Kintisch calls it in his nuanced and useful new account. This discussion is not going to go away anytime soon!”

Once the stuff of science fiction, geoengineering has come into the mainstream, with top scientists, the National Academy of Science and Congress investigating this radical concept.

please look at www.hacktheplanetbook.com

and if you need a contact – the book’s publicity is with Erin Beam of  ebeam at wiley.com

———————–

I got a few minutes late to the library’s lower level and so a nice size roomful of very mixed crowd – from the young shoeless intellectual in the front row to the spectacled white hair retiree in the back row. They all listened very intent and at the end asked good questions.

As my usual way, I went directly to the table loaded with the books for sale, took one and stood next to the wall – leafing from cover to cover. That is how I learned that the book starts with old-time friend Academician Yuriy Izrael from Moscow with whom I shared before the Rio Summit of 1992 two weeks in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, where local Professor Jose Oswaldo Carioca was preparing for a Brazilian submission to the upcoming UN Conference on Environment and Development. Since then I visited with Academician Izrael a couple of times in Moscow – the last time in Moscow during the September 29 – October 3, 2003 World Climate Change Conference where he was the head of the local organizing scientific committee and co-chair of the Conference, with Mr. A. N. Illarionov (Andrey Nikolayevich), the Adviser of then Russia President Vladimir Putin. Bert Bolin of Sweden, a pioneering climatologist and the first chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was the foreign co-chair of the event.

That was a very important meeting, with participants from over 100 countries, because it dealt with the crucial question – Will Russia Ratify the Kyoto Protocol? At the time Putin was relying on Yu. Izrael and Andrey Nikolayevich, and the world still thought that the KP is imperative for a Multilateral approach to Climate Change. With the US clearly out – Russia became all important in order to reach the magic number of ratifications so the KP gets into effect. Eventually it became Putins decision to say – DA – YES – while his two advisers still said NO!
That was real drama.

Somehow I still have my stash of papers from that meeting and I was looking now at hints at geoengineering in Russia’s position. But I did find a list of 10 questions Illarionov did put before the conference in his presentation that had the title: “Antropogenic Factors in Global Warming: Some Questions.” It was Bert Bolin, chair emeritus of IPCC, who gave the two answers with the last one answering to “How much will it cost.” This is fascinating history from the days we thought we had a plan – but the Russians seemingly were already convinced then that we really had no plan.

Strangely, when I looked up Google I found there on first page for Illarionov -

Answers to the questions raised by A.N. Illarionov during his talk …

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat – Quick View
Answers to Questions by A. Illarionov (Adviser of the President of Russian Federation). Moscow – World Climate Change Conference 2003 …
www.sysecol.ethz.ch/Articles_Reports/Illarionov_QandA_WCCC_2003.pdf

further: As a senior advisor to Russian President Putin, Illarionov was outspoken against Russia’s ratification of Kyoto. Despite Illarionov’s vocal opposition, Putin ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2004. In October 2006, Illarionov was appointed senior researcher of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity of the US libertarian think tank Cato Institute in Washington, DC.

————

The above was just an aside and I will get back to it after doing full justice by reading “Hack the Planet” as I am convinced that some form of geoengineering will eventually become part of humanity’s effort to put a lid – cap in BP’s language – in order to control the runaway increase of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Yuriy Izrael was talking of placing sulfur compounds in the upper atmosphere – others may have various sun deflectors in mind,
I for one may think that the Peter Glazer idea of concentrating sun light in outer space and beaming it back to earth might be a way to provide clean solar energy for our needs. I have no trust in the Carbon Capture and Sequestration concept – this because I do not think that we know how to do it and I mistrust those that promote the idea as it feels rather like an attempt to keep us away from research in positive directions that can wean us from our dependence on oil and coal. Further, it is clear that just companies like Haliburton and large oil companies will be the only ones to be able to implement these programs if there is ever some success with these ideas. This is also a geoengineering concept. Changing fish population in a pond is a case of forced change of nature and we have many examples that led to negative results because of unintended consequences.

Anyway – this is a large topic that serves our attention, so after talking to the great family of presenter Eli Kintisch – he was there with both his parents and kid brother – all knowledgeable in the subject – and to one of the people that asked questions, I continued to Piermont.

There it was all fun, but my connection to the book presentation is clear to me. It will eventually take a revolution to break down the Bastille walls of the anti-progress interests when dealing with climate change.

I saw in Piermont a friend from the UN, bought two interesting T-shirts and went home.

I still visited a great cooperative gallery – The Piermont Flywheel Gallery – that was about half works of Howard Berelson – a colorist with many scenes from East Africa.

He has a great painting from the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania – “Death in the Garden of Eden.” Was that bull failed also because of the high heat? Are the colors of the Hudson River Odyssey – another painting – so that we are reminded of the turning of our area into another hot Africa?

————————————

and if someone is interested in contacting Academician Izrael:

Yuri IZRAEL
Institute of Global Climate and Ecology
Glebovskaya str., 20B
107258 Moscow
RUSSIA
Tel: +(7 095) 1692430
Fax: +(7 095) 1600831
E-mail:  Yu.Izrael at g23.relcom.ru

and as an appetizer see the following:

The journal Russian Meteorology and Hydrology recently published a new kind of geoengineering study whose lead author is the journal’s editor, the prominent Russian scientist Yuri A. Izrael.

Izrael and his team of scientists mounted aerosol generators on a helicopter and a car chassis, and proceeded to blast out particles at ground level and at heights of up to 200 meters. Then they attempted to measure just how much sunlight reaching Earth was reduced due to the aerosol plume.

This small-scale intervention was effective, the Russian scientists say. And in an accompanying article on geoengineering alternatives, Izrael and colleagues note that “Already in the near future, the technological possibilities of a full scale use of [aerosol-based geoengineering] will be studied.”

——————

Above leads to brain storming:

Billionaire airline tycoon Richard Branson baldly told the press last year, ‘If we could come up with a geoengineering answer to this problem, then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necesary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars.’

And what do you know – there is already a clear reaction to the geoengineering ideas:

But on the eve of this year’s UN-designated International Mother Earth Day, over 60 national and international organizations launched Hands Off Mother Earth (H.O.M.E.). The global campaign, now supported by the Ecologist, includes a website  handsoffmotherearth.org) where signatories upload photos of themselves with their hands up in a ‘stop’ gesture.

The campaign insists that a halt be placed on geoengineering experiments and that the ‘rights’ of Planet Earth be respected. ‘Not just human beings have rights, but the planet has rights,’ asserts Evo Morales, Bolivian president and host of the recently concluded Cochabamba Climate Change Conference in Bolivia. The first right, he says, is ‘the right for no ecosystem to be eliminated’. The second, ‘for Mother Earth to live without contamination’. The final statement by the 35,000 people attending Cochabamba called out geoengineering as a false solution to the climate problem.

19 July 2010

by Jan Lundberg

19 July 2010 Our Posting is in effect an amalgam of Jan Lundberg’s article at Culture Change http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/666/68/ and an older version that reached us earlier. We all want to really make it right in the Gulf. Will BP and the government handle it well enough? That’s in doubt. It’s actually up to us all. We need urgent environmental action especially involving energy consumption: let us cut oil use. – The grassroots coalition World Oil Reduction for the Gulf (WORG) has as its initial objective the promulgation and propagation of a powerful Resolution for immediate global remediation of the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. –

We all want to really make it right in the Gulf. Will BP and the government handle it well enough? That’s in doubt. It’s actually up to us all. We need urgent environmental action especially involving energy consumption: let us cut oil use.The grassroots coalition World Oil Reduction for the Gulf (WORG) has as its initial objective the promulgation and propagation of a powerful Resolution for immediate global remediation of the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. A sensible approach is to go after the low-hanging fruit, which WORG and many other advocates have identified. World Oil Reduction for the Gulf’s first purpose is to ecologically and numerically counteract the unprcedented millions of barrels of toxic oil and methane spewing into the Gulf waters and the atmosphere. The crisis may seem to abate, but it may not be possible to fully describe the long-term ecological and economic consequences with words, numbers and images. To act you need not go further than to read and distribute the WORG Resolution. See the document on our new webpage at www.WorldOilReduction.org. As specified, relatively simple measures can begin to bring U.S. oil consumption under control, if we move toward achieving a reduction commensurate with the near hundreds of millions of gallons of oil and unknown number of cubic feet of methane released by the Deepwater Horizon (Macondo) gusher. We cannot stop there. The Gulf disaster has opened the eyes of millions of people to the threat that oil poses to all aspects of life on our small planet. The crisis in the Gulf cannot “go away” any time soon, but some citizens may want to believe it — will they miss the opportunity to do something about the overall problem? Will ecological degradation reach the killing point world-wide, to finally wake people up when it is too late? If enough people begin to push their city councils to act — ordinances to follow the Resolution — we can achieve action also on the State level, finally causing the federal government to act in confirmation of a national movement. It seems obvious that for first states, Louisiana and Florida should be logical candidates, despite any anti-oil green tinge from cutting oil consumption: the “pain” of reducing oil use across the board would be distributed mainly beyond the Gulf. For a progressive proposal such as WORG to fly, it may have to be that a state like Vermont takes the plunge first. We invite you to join us in our attempt to have the U.S. finally address its oil and energy gluttony. This can affect positively other nations and the global economy. The standing of the U.S. today as most wasteful consumer can improve by offsetting the Gulf disaster on a barrel-to-barrel basis, by cutting petroleum use. The U.S. uses twice the energy of affluent West European countries per capita, largely due to massive pro-oil subsidies in the U.S. It is high time that the profligate U.S. cuts back now, when the planet is taking a big hit from greedy BP and from those tied to its fortunes (you and me?). WORG offers a choice of various kinds of cutbacks in oil use for communities to undertake. These cutbacks, requiring “sacrifice,” would in the aggregate potentially make up for the entire Gulf oil gusher — past, present and future — in a short time if they were even modestly implemented. They will be clearly set out: a Washington, D.C. think tank is preparing for WORG a special graph of U.S. oil consumption that shows some of the many ways to reduce oil consumption. They won’t all be on the pie chart, but these ways include: lessening car dependence through enhancing mass transit, bicycling, and car-pooling; purchasing less food shipped from thousands of miles away; banning some disposable plastics; adjusting thermostats; banning leaf blowers and discouraging power mowers; shutting BP’s unsafe refineries, and — last but not least — ending the wars for oil. Plugging the damaged well and cleanup are only the first step. President Obama has offered no leadership towards slashing oil use – except for calling for a clean energy future. We need action now, rather than waiting for results from long-term investment and faith in the free market and government. As an independent oil industry analyst I have been trying to do everything possible to bring culture change to the forefront. We stand a good chance now to do that through WORG. I hope you share our goals and will get involved. We have the WORG coalition counts as its members: Center for Biological Diversity RealitySandwich.com Population Press Hope Dance Culture Change and Dr. Brent Blackwelder, president emeritus of Friends of the Earth – U.S. ——————————————– To join WORG (no membership fee), consider the Resolution that we hope your city council and state will adopt. It is at www.WorldOilReduction.org. Let us know if you and your organization can be listed as a member or endorser of WORG. Your involvement in this cause as a WORG coalition member is most welcome. Very soon the website will be further developed for maximum participation and speedy actions for WORG participants. Besides signing up more groups and individuals, the task at hand requires networking, research, travel, and publicity. The present WORG coalition members will do their part. Meanwhile, prior to rapid deployment for our first city-council Resolution for world oil reduction for the Gulf, Culture Change is now the organization making the big initial push. So your generous donation to Culture Change today will support the early, rapid development of WORG. Please go to our donation page at culturechange.org/donate.html Thank you, Jan Lundberg independent oil industry analyst Publisher, Editor and Founder, Culture Change P.O. Box 4347, Arcata, CA 95518  http://www.culturechange.org Committee Against Oil Exploration (CAOE, pronounced K-O). www.WorldOilReduction.org jan “at” culturechange.org Further reading: On oil subsidies and more: “New thinking on BP spill: Declare a holiday!” by Brent Blackwelder,The Daly News: Energy Bulletin

We extricated these lines from a review article in The New York Times of July 15, 2010 and reworked them as follows:

The basis for direct talks is likely to be Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s carefully shaped formula of last November. She said she believed that:

the two sides, through negotiations, could reconcile “the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.”

Mrs. Clinton’s statement came soon after Mr. Netanyahu announced a partial, 10-month moratorium in new Israeli residential building in the West Bank. Mr. Netanyahu has been generally cagey about whether he will ask his government to extend the moratorium beyond its Sept. 26 deadline. Officials said that Mr. Netanyahu discussed other confidence-building measures with Mr. Obama, to be carried out either in the prelude to, or during, direct talks.

Mr. Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, made a far-reaching proposal in late 2008 to the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas whose government rules over the West Bank only.  It included an Israeli withdrawal from 93.5 percent of the West Bank, with land swaps and a safe route for Palestinian travel between Gaza and the West Bank making up the other 6.5 percent of the land area that Israel won in 1967.

Those talks ended with Israel’s military campaign against the militant Hamas dominated Gaza strip.

Mr. Olmert says he never heard back from Mr. Abbas. Mr. Erekat, honored spokesman for the West Bank, disputes that version, insisting that Mr. Abbas made a counteroffer. Addressing an Israeli audience at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University in May 2010, Mr. Erekat produced a map that he said Mr. Olmert received, allowing for Israeli annexation of 1.9 percent of the West Bank in return for an equitable land exchange.

Seemingly, the real issue now is that after 16 years of an intermittent peace process, the sides do not yet agree on which settlement blocs Israel would retain. We think that the novel approach by Secretary Clinton is in the words “reflect subsequent development” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which could be a formula for achieving a full agreement now with the Palestinian Authority in the name of Palestine, that freezes the situation of Gaza to the point that it is allowed to subscribe, according to its present outline, to the agreement later – as part of Palestine. That is what our website was calling the Three State Solution that is really a Two States Solution in two stages – the only way to move the cart from its dead point.

Where will limits of G20 policy leave debt-strewn Japan?

THIS was FOR US A FIRST – WE ADVERTISEd HERE A FAREED ZAKARIA PROGRAM BEFORE IT HAPPENS – PLEASE WATCH IT ON JULY 11, 10 am or 13 pm – on CNN. The latter time is just prior to the World Cup Final. Usually we just try to write up what we learn by watching his program. This time we realize that the issue he brings up has high anticipatory value for US policy as well.

Britain’s brave, bold and risky experiment.

CNN Editor’s note: Fareed Zakaria is an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN U.S. on Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET and CNN International at 2 and 10 p.m. Central European Time / 5 p.m. Abu Dhabi / 9 p.m. Hong Kong.

London, England (CNN) — Britain’s new coalition government has embarked on a budget-deficit cutting strategy that is bold, brave and potentially very risky, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.

It could turn out to be a model for the United States to follow — or a prime example of what not to do in the wake of a severe recession.

After forming a government in the wake of the May election, the ruling coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats announced plans last month to cut spending and raise taxes in an effort to reduce the budget deficit.

Zakaria, the author and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” spoke to CNN on Wednesday from London. Here is an edited transcript:

Video: IMF forecast for global economy

Video: The global economy’s future

CNN: The new coalition government in Britain has announced major steps to cut the budget deficit. What has the impact been?

Fareed Zakaria: In general, I’d say the government is benefiting from having announced these cuts. There’s a sense that they’re being bold, they’re being brave, they’re taking on a big challenge. It particularly helps them that you have this coalition government, so the fact that the Liberal Democrats, who are really quite a left-wing party, are supporting the budget has given Conservatives more cover. …

It’s important to remember that it’s not just budget cuts, it’s also tax raises. You have to give them credit for being serious about this. It is not pure ideology as with the right in the United States. They understand that if you’re going to do something serious about the budget deficit, you’ve got to do both spending cuts and tax increases .There’s simply no way for the math to work without doing that.

Now, on the political side though, these changes have not come into effect yet. So there are two big questions, what happens economically when these budget cuts start going into effect and what happens politically — how popular does the government remain at that point? But the biggest question is what happens economically.

CNN: Is it too soon to take these steps as the world is coming out of a big recession, and government spending is seen as a way to speed the recovery from a recession?

Zakaria: The crucial question here is about timing, and very few people would disagree that Britain had to get its public finances in order. There’s a universal sense that the last Labour government spent too much money and borrowed too much money. But in the midst of a very weak economic recovery, does it make sense to slash spending, raise taxes, all of which will have the effect of putting some people out of work and reducing people’s spending power.

Here’s the debate — one side says that will reassure markets, that will bring interest rates on things like mortgages even lower, and that will give businesses confidence to invest, and the other side says once you inflict that much pain on the economy, people are going to spend less as people lose jobs or are taxed more heavily, which will cause an even more severe downturn.

CNN: What does this mean for the rest of the world?

Zakaria: Britain is the guinea pig here. We’re all going to watch the outcome very closely because President Obama has taken a position in this debate.

He told the G-20 countries, which includes Britain of course, that it is too soon to start withdrawing the stimulus measures. Britain is going further than withdrawing the stimulus measures, it’s actually cutting spending.

The big debate is over what will restore business confidence and what will make businesses start spending again. Because everyone agrees that government spending is only a bridge to business spending. At some point business has to start spending again.

I’m pretty persuaded that the timing on this is bad. I think it would have made more sense to wait at least six months, if not nine to 12 months before beginning these measures.

CNN: If you’re going to have to do it eventually, why wait?

Zakaria: It’s really quite brave of the Conservatives to take on the fiscal problem but there is definitely a danger that they are doing it too soon and will put the economy into a lower growth mode. This is something that you have to remember for the United States as well. If you have lower growth, you also have a worse deficit because the biggest contributor to deficits is a decline in tax revenue. So the slower the economy grows, the fewer people who are employed, the lower the taxes going to the government treasury, the bigger and bigger the deficit becomes.

So, in a strange sense, even to help the deficit in the short term, you need a little bit of government spending to get the economy going, to get people spending, to get them paying taxes.

CNN: Does David Cameron’s victory in the U.K. election tell us something about the future of conservatives in America?

Zakaria: Outside Britain, people are struck by David Cameron, the fact that he’s become prime minister, that he’s fairly popular and he seems to be taking big, bold measures. But here people are still struck by how limited was the Tory victory, if you could call it a victory.

After 13 years of Labour rule, when it would be only natural for the Conservatives to be given power for just cyclical reasons, after a very unpopular Labour prime minister and the worst economic crisis since the great depression, the conservatives still were not able to muster a majority and had to go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

CNN: Why couldn’t the Conservatives put together a majority in the election?

Zakaria: What thoughtful observers say was that the Conservatives still made no inroads in Scotland, did not make many inroads with working women — which is a growing part of the population — and they did not make many inroads with nonwhite minorities, people from India, and Pakistan and the Caribbean. As somebody put it to me, the Conservative brand is still a tarnished brand.

To me, that was a very interesting lesson for the right in America. You can have the small government argument David Cameron was making. It did have a lot of appeal — but to England, not Scotland and not to the nonwhites in England either.

It made me wonder about the Republican Party in the United States, which of course has broader appeal, but still faces some of these same challenges.

The midterm election looks like it’s going to go very well for the Republicans because there is a lot of anti-incumbency sentiment and some anger at the Democratic Party. But to seal the deal, Republicans need to close the gap with nonwhites and working women, and there, the Republican Party, like the Conservatives, still faces some challenges.

CNN: What other lessons are there for conservatives in the United States?

Zakaria: The Republicans should really watch the British Conservatives. What David Cameron is trying to do is to modernize the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party was seen in Britain as too right wing, too extreme and too intolerant in many ways and what he’s been trying to do is to broaden its appeal.

David Cameron is more green, more environmentally active, than Gordon Brown. He’s come out very strongly in favor of gay rights, he’s come out in favor of the National Health Service.

All of this is a signal that he’s not a Conservative who’s going to completely destroy England’s welfare state. In a sense, working with the Liberal Democrats has been a godsend for David Cameron. The fact that he’s in coalition with them means that when the far right of his party asks him to do something, he can say, I’m sorry guys, I just can’t do it because we’re in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and to keep the coalition together I have to moderate my stance.

Now there’s an interesting debate in Britain about whether he’s modernizing the Conservative Party because he is himself a great moderate or because he just wants to win and he knows the center is where the electability is.

In a sense it doesn’t matter for Republicans watching it. You still need to be attractive to the center, to the younger generation, to working women and to ethnic minorities.

Of course it will all depend on how this economic experiment goes. If these cuts put Britain in a double-dip, you’ll see great strains on the coalition itself, and the Liberal Democrats will find it difficult to stay in this coalition. Then this whole thing spins out of control.

Brian Stelter knows something about TWITTER – he is running his own, but he also had a Thursday article in the New York Times in which he analyzed the transgressions of another Journalist – a CNN senior editor – that went beyond what is allowed in journalism and ended up being fired by CNN. Her obvious transgression was on Twitter.

Brian Stelter (brianstelter) on Twitter

– 2:04pm Get short, timely messages from Brian Stelter. Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information. It’s easy to stay updated on an incredibly wide …
twitter.com/brianstelter

His article on-line was

CNN Fires Middle East Affairs Editor.

By BRIAN STELTER, Published: July 7, 2010

The title as in NYT print July 8, 2010 was: “A TWITTER POST THAT ENDED A 2-YEAR CAREER AT CNN.”

Octavia Nasr

Parisa Khosravi, the senior vice president of international newsgathering for CNN Worldwide, said in an internal memorandum that she “had a conversation” with Ms. Nasr on Wednesday morning and that “we have decided that she will be leaving the company.”

For her coverage of events like last year’s protests in Iran, CNN had previously called Ms. Nasr a “leader” in integrating social media Web sites like Twitter within its newsgathering process.

Ms. Nasr, a 20-year veteran of the network, wrote on Twitter after the cleric died on Sunday, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”
The ayatollah routinely denounced the United States and supported suicide bombings against Israel.

Some supporters of Israel seized on the Twitter message as an indication of bias. A CNN spokesman said Tuesday that Ms. Nasr had made an “error of judgment” that “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards.”

In an explanatory blog post on CNN.com Tuesday evening, Ms. Nasr said she was sorry about the message “because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah’s life’s work. That’s not the case at all.”

She said she used the words “respect” and “sad” because “to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. She continued, “This does not mean I respected him for what else he did or said. Far from it.”

Despite her senior editor title, Ms. Nasr did not run CNN’s Middle East coverage, a spokesman said. She reported and provided analysis about the region for CNN’s networks.

Her explanation of the Twitter message was apparently not enough for her CNN bosses. Ms. Khosravi wrote in the memo, “at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

——————-

The problem with this is not Ms. Nasr – she would be clearly entitled to say what she wants to her tweeter – that is guaranteed by the First Amendment, but CNN has more at stake here. It is the credibility of CNN that she undermined and provided clear proof to the Israelis that when CNN covered the Lebanon war it might not have been impartial. With people like Octavia Nasr, partisans to a cause, the credibility of the media is being destroyed.

We post this because we think CNN is the best there is on US TV. We watch religiously the Fareed Zakaria weekly program – the only consistently intelligent program we know on US TV – so we do not want to see CNN downgraded to the level of a FOX. Granted, Ms. Nasr was not a columnist anchor of the network, but she was in charge of media gathering – and if the news are faked by partisanship – the whole system is “kaput.”

——————-

FRIDAY, JULY 09, 2010
CNN’s Objectivity Questioned in Sacking of Mideast Reporter.
Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON, Jul 8 (IPS) – CNN’s firing of Octavia Nasr, the editor responsible for the network’s Middle East coverage, over a Twitter post in which she expressed her sadness over the death of a Lebanese cleric has set off a firestorm of debate about what the decision says about CNN’s fairness in reporting on the region. On Sunday, Nasr wrote, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot,” on her Twitter account, which is followed by over 7,000 readers.

Fadlallah was an inspirational figure for Lebanese Shiites and an early supporter of Hezbollah. Fadlallah, who initially supported the use of suicide bombings as a means of resistance against the occupation of Lebanon and Palestine, later criticised Hezbollah for its close ties to Iran, as well as Ayatollah Khomeini’s velayet- e faqih “rule of the clerics”, which Khomeini imposed in Iran in 1979.

Critics of Fadlallah have charged that he was staunchly anti-U.S., and had been linked to bombings that killed more than 260 U.S. citizens, but others have pointed to the cleric’s support for women’s rights and fatwas against female circumcision and honour killings as evidence of his comparatively progressive position. After the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a number of right-wing news outlets and blogs took issue with her expression of regret over Fadlallah’s death, on Tuesday, Nasr wrote another Twitter post in which she attempted to clarify her earlier comment and emphasised her admiration of Fadlallah’s defence of women’s rights.

“Fadlallah, designated by the U.S. Department of Treasury as a specially designated terrorist, disseminated numerous fatawa’ supporting terrorist operations and was a vocal supporter of terrorism against Israeli targets,” read a statement from the ADL on Tuesday.

“It is clearly an impropriety for a CNN journalist/editor to express such a partisan viewpoint as Ms. Nasr did in her tweet,” the statement continued.

“How did CNN senior editor of Middle East affairs Octavia Nasr celebrate July 4? By mourning the passing of Hezbollah’s Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah,” blogged Daniel Halper at the neoconservative Weekly Standard.

But other journalists and watchdog groups expressed concern over the speed with which CNN fired Nasr and the emergence of a double-standard when reporting on Middle Eastern affairs.

“The network – which has employed a former AIPAC official, Wolf Blitzer, as its primary news anchor for the last 15 years – justified its actions by claiming that Nasr’s ‘credibility’ had been ‘compromised,’” wrote Salon’s Glenn Greenwald in an article in which he went on to argue that Nasr was fired for offending the “neocon Right” by expressing regret over the death of a “profoundly complex figure, with some legitimate grievances, some entrenched hatreds and ugly viewpoints, and a substantial capacity for good.”

Peter Hart, activism director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group, told IPS that, “If there was some suggestion that she had been producing questionable journalism over all these years you’d think this would have been an issue before this, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. So it’s a decision which is disconnected from any sensible policy. The real problem is that she said something which offended very powerful people and that was her mistake.”

Nasr had worked for the Atlanta-based CNN for 20 years and rarely appeared on-air except for occasional appearances as an analyst in discussions on Middle East news. She had no history of an anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian bias and, according to Greenwald, “blended perfectly into the American corporate media woodwork”.

“Octavia Nasr got fired for the one smart thing she ever said,” quipped journalist Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, in a Twitter post.

“[P]lenty of American journalists and politicians have shown ‘respect’ (and in some cases, fawning admiration) for various world figures with hands far bloodier than Ayatollah Fadlallah – including Mao Zedong, Ariel Sharon, the Shah of Iran, or even Kim il Sung – but it didn’t cost them their jobs,” wrote Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University.

Questions have been raised over why Nasr, known as an uncontroversial reporter of Middle East affairs, was fired so quickly for an off-the-cuff Twitter post.

According to some observers, her unwillingness to conform to the narrative depicted by a number of right-wing news outlets and U.S. Jewish groups that Fadlallah was a terrorist, anti-US and anti-Semitic resulted in CNN receiving pressure to fire her.

“Nasr’s comment was enough to spark fierce outrage from the various precincts of the neocon blog/twittersphere, who went after Nasr for her egregious failure to reduce Fadlallah to an anti-Israel, anti-American terrorist bogeyman,” blogged Matt Duss, a National Security Researcher at the liberal Center For American Progress.

While right-wing news outlets, such as the Weekly Standard and the conservative WorldNetDaily gleefully reported on Nasr’s departure from CNN, others expressed concern for the double standard which has emerged when discussing Middle East affairs in the US mainstream media.

“The standard here is based on nothing that Nasr reported for CNN. [Her Twitter post] was barely a one sentence expression of sympathy. Firing her was a decision that was completely disconnected from her work so it’s a decision that’s very troubling. Lou Dobbs’s thoughts about immigrants were on CNN every night and CNN stood by him as the criticism mounted and the factual inaccuracies piled up,” said Hart.

“In this case, a stray comment is enough to terminate someone’s role at CNN almost overnight,” he said. “The discrepancy is rather revealing and CNN would have a very hard time revealing precisely what their policy is on this. It’s hard to find precedent for this. She has a history of covering the region and that is not easily replaced.”

———————-

We do not approve of the Lou Dobbs diatribe on CNN on US immigration, and we think he should have been chastised by the network, but this is the only point the above article makes that we can agree with.

Otherwise, the article is in itself proof of how split and detrimental to the surfacing of the truth on matters of the Middle East the whole public policy arena is for years. There are plenty of Jewish groups that think Wolf Blitzer is biased against the Israeli government. We have met the man at the time he worked at the UN and are convinced he is a true journalist. Most others mentioned belong either to the left or to the right and as we know well both sides have other goals then a two State solution for the Middle East morass. Our website neither accepts the demise of Israel, nor the lack of a Palestinian State, so we clearly can say that someone who believes that Allah calls for suicide bombers to achieve his goal of eradicating Israel, is no better then Ahmedi-Nejad – the true follower of Hitler.

Yes, Ms. Nasr had to go not because ADL wanted her to go. It is because CNN needed her to go- and yes, CNN might look also at who else has to go in order to build back its own credibility.

————————

The continuing problem Ayatollah with Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah’s followers is in today’s news – so a credible press coverage is imperative – niceties and partisanship aside – just see in -

UN DAILY NEWS DIGEST – 9 July, 2010:

LEBANON: SECURITY COUNCIL CALLS FOR FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT OF UN PEACEKEEPERS .

Strongly deploring recent incidents directed at United Nations blue helmets in Lebanon, the Security Council today called for ensuring the safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers serving there.

Members of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have recently been the target of protests and attacks by villagers in the south of the country in response to routine military exercises carried out by the mission.

“The members of the Security Council strongly deplore the recent incidents involving UNIFIL peacekeepers which took place in southern Lebanon on June 29th, July 3rd and July 4th in the UNIFIL area of operation,” Ambassador U. Joy Ogwu of Nigeria, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency for July, said in a statement read out to the press following closed-door talks.

They also emphasized the importance of not impairing UNIFIL’s ability to fulfil its mandate under Security Council resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah.

The resolution also calls for respect of the so-called Blue Line separating the Israeli and Lebanese sides, the disarming of all militias operating in Lebanon and an end to arms smuggling in the area.

“They call on all parties to ensure that the freedom of movement of UNIFIL remains respected in conformity with its mandate and its rules of engagement,” the statement added.

In addition to monitoring the 2006 ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, UNIFIL is also tasked with accompanying and supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as they deploy throughout the south, and extending its assistance to help ensure humanitarian access to civilian populations and the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons.

Also today, Michael Williams, the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, discussed the recent incidents involving UNIFIL with Lebanese Foreign Minister Ali Shami.

“We all hope that the situation has now calmed down and that there will be no recurrence of such incidents,” he in a statement following the meeting in Beirut.

Mr. Williams asserted that UNIFIL’s freedom of movement is a critical element for it to discharge its mandate and it must be fully respected.

“I think that we all agree that the excellent cooperation between UNIFIL and LAF has been the backbone of the stability that has prevailed in the south, and we must do all we can to maintain and to enhance it,” he added.

It happened last night, June 29, 2010, and the venue was the delightful Museum of American Finance – right there at 48 Wall Street, and our host was the delightful 1988 Founder, and Chairman Emeritus, John E. Herzog.

The Spring Issue of Financial History, the Museum’s Magazine is very up-to-date. It has on the cover Charles Ponzi and articles like “why We Love Scandals,” “Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,” “James Bowie’s Louisiana Purchase Fraud,” and Monclova Speculations,” “How to Make a Dead Ma” on the life insurance business.

The first thing I learned at the Museum was that Warren Buffet, now billionaire investor of the  was the only student at the Columbia University School of Business, who ever got an A+ from his Professor Benjamin Graham who in the early 1930s, taught his students Value Investing. Today’s Ben Graham Center for Value Investment at the Richard Ivey School of Business, in London, Western Ontario, Canada,  teaches: “First, we think of stocks in the same way that a business person would think of a business. Second, we do not follow but instead try to take advantage of the manic depressive Mr. Market. Third, we always look for a margin of safety.” Did you note – A MARGIN OF SAFETY!” Do you need to study the Manic Depressive side of Washington?

Anyway, Warren Buffet went on to sell pinball machines in bars, and with his first $1,000 he earned he bought land which he rented to farmers. The rest is history, and ask Berkshire Hathaway investors about safe investing.

I learned much more in this excellent museum and recommend it to our readers. I even learned that in the Napoleon – Thomas Jefferson Louisiana deal – the Louisiana purchase that doubled the size of the US for $15 million in US Treasuries subscribed by two European banks, the US acquired the land at 3 cents/acre.

But, it was not the museum and the catered treats we got at the end that brought me there: it was a Sierra Club e-mail about a panel: “EVERYBODY WINS: INVESTING IN ENERGY EFFICIENCY.”

The  moderator was Michael Richter – partner with Environmental Capital Partners (ECP), a private equity firm affiliated with New York Private Bank & Trust that provides long-term capital and management support to leading middle-market companies in the environmental industry. (Before doing that, and before business school,  he was three time National Hockey League All-Star.)

His panel included:

Rebecca Craft, Director of Energy Efficiency Programs at Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. A regulated utility that whatever happens – must make a profit.

Christopher J. Lord, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Hannon Armstrong Capital. They specialized in the last 30 years in investment in new technologies.

Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club, America’s largest grassroots environmental organization and as the paper proudly states - “The Aspen Institute, after surveying every member of Congress and key federal officials, named the Sierra Club as the most influential organization in Washington DC.” I was appalled reading this self description which in my eyes looked rather like the reason of disqualification from claiming representation on environmentalism’s board.

————–

After the statements by the panelists, with major participation of Con Edison that turned it all into a rather energy for the home sort of an event, there were many intelligent questions from the audience, and I am sorry to say that again I found it quite disquieting as I realized that with this sort of discussion we will really not get out of the hole we find that we dug ourselves with the  help of exactly this sort of thinking – how to make a buck by skirting the real issues and trying somehow to improve at the margin.

I did not raise any question – rather slumbered through it all – then went over to a chat with Carl Pope.

Now this is a work in progress and I will get back to it – but want to post mow because of another event I picked up and want our readers that can make it – go over if they can.

Today, Wednesday, June 30, 2010,  12:30 – 01:30, at the Museum – 48 Wall Street, New York NY, 10005
tel: 1-212-908-4110

There will be a  discussion on past, present, and future of energy trading.

Participants are: Howard Hopkins, Director Energy Products CME Group.

and Paul Huges. Senior Analyst within Business Development for CME Group.

They will provide an overview of pre-electronic energy trading, speak about the current status of the markets, and discuss the globalization of futures markets and CME Group.

—————

We just received our electricity bill and it had an attachment for the sake of “ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE FOR CON ED”
It gave “The Fuel Souces and Air Emissions to Generate Your Electricity for the year 2006.” Is it not amazing? July 2010 we get information for 2006 – and they are partners of a panel with Sierra Club Chief?

So how did they produce our electricity in 2006?

Gas          – 50%

Nuclear   – 35%

Coal         -    8%

Hydro     -     3%

Oil           -     2%

Biomass, Solar, Solid Waste, Wind – each one of them says Less then 1% – and if we total them all up – we find that their total is 2% at best.

Now, do not think that the Con Edison list was according to resources used as I did it. It was rather by alphabet – so it is less obvious to the eye.

A blog about all things green, from conservation to Capitol Hill.

Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/07/06/report-card-on-renewables-europes-getting-as/#ixzz0t4OJ8DiL

Don’t Let Goldman Sachs Off The Hook.

When the nation’s most prestigious investment banks found themselves on the verge of total annihilation in the fall of 2008, the most radical and effective government response was not the infamous $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The wildest salvation scheme for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the securities system at large was a plan from the Federal Reserve to give these speculative institutions access to cheap loans from the central bank. It worked.

With access to unlimited cheap funding from the Fed, the Wall Street titans survived. Hurrah.

Here’s the catch. Cheap Fed funding is a subsidy during good times, and a bailout during bad times.

These subsidies are supposed to spur productive activity.

We want Fed money to be fueling business and consumer lending—we don’t want it to be encouraging gambling in the securities and derivatives casinos.

Those businesses are risky, they create big horrible asset bubbles and then put taxpayers on the hook for losses when the Fed backs them.

That’s why securities houses like Goldman and Morgan were never, ever granted Fed funding until the fall of 2008.

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And Goldman has leveraged that Fed funding for all it’s worth. Goldman had to create a commercial bank unit in order to borrow from the Fed, and Goldman chose to house its riskiest businesses in that unit in order to make sure that they would benefit from both cheap Fed funding and the better credit ratings that funding creates.

Goldman has about $40 trillion in derivatives operations functioning under its commercial bank unit, which does nothing else but accept money from the Fed.

The Fed is funding Goldman’s casino, and the economy is getting nothing of value in return.

So what should we do now that Goldman and Morgan are getting access to all of the perks of being a commercial bank without any of the regulatory hurdles?

According to William Cohan’s latest, disastrous column for The New York Times, Goldman should cut its ties with the Fed and just be a securities firm again.

When it inevitably gets into trouble at some point in the future, nobody should bail it out.

That all sounds very nice. Who could oppose ending bailouts?

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The trouble is, it has absolutely no teeth.

Once the Fed steps in to bail you out, everybody in the market knows it will step in again, regardless of how your business is structured.

Every aspect of Goldman’s business currently benefits from taxpayer perks, and the greatest perk of all is the fact that Goldman still has businesses. They would be totally and completely gone without massive government aid, and their destruction would be of their own making— they ran a business that operated with massive and unnecessary counterparty risks which was completely dependent on capital markets confidence for its functionality.

There can be no un-ringing of the bailout bell.

Goldman absolutely must be aggressively regulated as a commercial bank to make sure that its subsidies are not destructive. That’s the minimum reform.

Still better would be to cut off the subsidies, claw-back the bonuses earned over the past two years, and break the bank up into smaller institutions that the Fed would not feel compelled to step in and save.

But to pretend the bailout never happened and promise not to do it again is simply not credible.

Even if we could make the entire world forget that the bailouts happened, do we really want companies like Goldman to go back to the same business that got them into big trouble? If Goldman can put the entire financial system in jeopardy—or at least convince policymakers that its failure would do so—why do we want them to return to business as usual?

We’d want them to be more rigorously regulated and structurally reformatted to prevent future disasters.

Cohan’s argument is actually a bit worse than what I’ve presented above says Zach Carter.

There’s always a tension in Cohan’s writings between the broad public interest and the narrow interests of whatever firm he’s writing about. He can never quite sort out whether he thinks a bunch of rapacious bastards are praiseworthy for enriching their shareholders by juicing the public, or whether the public has a right to be upset with the rapacious bastards who juiced them.

But it appears that Cohan doesn’t want to see Goldman to cut its ties with the Fed because those ties create problems for the broader economy.

Instead, he wants them to spurn Fed money because he’s worried that new regulations will make Goldman less profitable.

As it happens, I think Cohan has this profitability issue completely wrong. The two serious rules cracking down on banks with access to Fed funding were basically gutted at the final stage of the reform negotiations.

Banks that deal derivatives will have to put up more capital for a small fraction of their derivatives businesses, and banks will only be able to gamble 3 percent of their capital in proprietary hedge funds.

There’s quite a bit of controversy as to how much of Goldman’s business is straight prop trading disguised as client business, but the new rules do not seem likely to seriously curb those operations. But that cheap funding will always be there, and they’d be fools to give it up for such a paltry set of restrictions.

The important question about the Wall Street reform legislation is not whether the new rules will be good for Goldman profits and bonuses.

The important question is whether Wall Street profits and bonuses are derived from activities that benefit the public good.

Very little in the legislation that Congress is likely to soon approve will actually address that latter issue.

And as a result, there’s very little reason to believe that companies like Goldman Sachs will change their ways and stop screwing over the public for money.

That doesn’t mean the reform bill is a failure. It means it’s a first step, and we need another, better bill after this one is approved.

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Please don’t forget – in the US economy at large all high positions are taken by Goldman Sachs graduates, and this might indeed help explain profitability in the blow-out and bail-out seesaws.

 http://stuartjeffery.blogspot.com/2010/0…

Tuesday, 6 July 2010

UN report on climate change was ‘one sided’ says right wing press

UN report on climate change was ‘one sided’ was the front page headline in today’s The Times (no longer available online without subscription) which struck me as strange as the equivalent Guardian headline reported: “Review of questioned IPCC report says conclusions ‘well-founded’”.

As the Guardian talks about the serious consequences of climate change that the review has suggested,The Times focused on positive benefits that were ignored.

The Guardian talks about these too :”ignored positive impacts such as the ability to grow new crops in some parts of the world, or opening of shorter Arctic sea routes” but I have to question whether a reduction in arctic sea ice is really a benefit or whether it is a tipping point and feedback loop!

The difference in spin and emphasis between left and right wing press never fails to amaze me.

Sadly the majority of our press is right wing.

Sadly the public never get a balanced view of the world around us.

News from post-Independence (July 5th) on what to expect July 6th.

Consider these recent environmental news events:

The US Attorney General’s office is still looking into “possible” criminal activity at Massey’s Energy Upper Big Branch coal mine, despite hundreds of serious regulatory violations and 29 deaths. And despite a preliminary Congressional investigation that concluded BP oil intentionally sought to subvert industry guidelines and regulations, the Justice Department is still in the early stages of maybe pursuing a criminal investigation of the oil giant’s criminal activity.

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Two weeks before the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the huge, trouble-plagued BP refinery, in the coastal town of Texas City, spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies.

The release from the BP facility here began April 6 and lasted 40 days. It stemmed from the company’s decision to keep producing and selling gasoline while it attempted repairs on a key piece of equipment, according to BP officials and Texas regulators.

BP says it failed to detect the extent of the emissions for several weeks. It discovered the scope of the problem only after analyzing data from a monitor that measures emissions from a flare 300 feet above the ground that was supposed to incinerate the toxic chemicals.

The company now estimates that 538,000 pounds of chemicals escaped from the refinery while it was replacing the equipment. These included 17,000 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen; 37,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, which contribute to respiratory problems; and 186,000 pounds of carbon monoxide.

It is unclear whether the pollutants harmed the health of Texas City residents, but the amount of chemicals far exceeds the limits set by Texas and other states.

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Look on – All publications dated July 5, 2010 plus

Green Jobs Advocate Faces Prison for Banner, While BP and Massey Go Free.

The climate change and clean energy debates might have reached a new low–just ask the US Attorney General’s office.

Ted Glick, a legendary nonviolent advocate, who dropped a “Green Jobs Now” banner down the hallway of the Hart Senate Office Building last fall, goes to trial on Tuesday, July 6th, at the Superior Court in Washington, DC. He faces up to three years in prison.

Three years for dropping a banner that reminds Congress to pursue green jobs and clean energy?

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Yes, even a local Fox News station is flummoxed by the ridiculous news:

Let’s put this bizarre situation in its proper context. Consider these recent environmental news events: The US Attorney General’s office is still looking into “possible” criminal activity at Massey’s Energy Upper Big Branch coal mine, despite hundreds of serious regulatory violations and 29 deaths. And despite a preliminary Congressional investigation that concluded BP oil intentionally sought to subvert industry guidelines and regulations, the Justice Department is still in the early stages of maybe pursuing a criminal investigation of the oil giant’s criminal activity.

And then there’s Glick, who simply wants Congress to move along in a time of crisis.

He’s facing prison?

————

You find these in the two following “Speakeasies:”

(1) Texas BP Refinery Released 538,000 Pounds of Chemicals Into Atmosphere
Tana Ganeva
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/05/texas-bp-refinery-released-538000-pounds-of-chemicals-into-atmosphere/

(2) Green Jobs Advocate Faces Prison for Banner, While BP and Massey Go Free
jeffbiggers
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/05/green-jobs-advocate-faces-prison-for-banner-while-bp-and-massey-go-free/

Fareed mentioned that on this day, nine years ago, he took the Oath of Naturalization and became a US citizen – clearly a tremendous gain for the US.

He mentioned this while showing 57 military personnel serving with the US forces in Afghanistan who took today their oath of Naturalization right there in Afghanistan swearing that they will be ready to take up arms in the defense of the United States – this please note while they are already fighting on behalf of US Government even though they were not yet US citizens.

This might have been an expressive thing that caught my eye on the CNN/GPS  program – sort of corollary to the main meat of the program that dealt with the G-20 meeting on the World Economy and the US position on the conclusions of the meeting.

Our clear decision watching the program is that the US is far from being united and one. In effect it is divided in two, and it was Fareed Zakaria – the newest American – who tried to bind the two parts into one. But what is even worse, the two opposing parts – both of them – are not purely American – but rather still beholden to the British outreach – this after all of these 234 years.

So, as Fareed would say – “let us see:”

The G-20 decided (that is except for Japan) that we must start decreasing debt because otherwise the cost of borrowing money increases prohibitively. Today is Greece – tomorrow it’s us.

The stakes are the future of US and Global Prosperity and the two opposing points of view are:

(A) As presented by Paul Krugman – an American steeped in Keynesian (English) economics – said that our reaction today is like it was in the 30s and we will face similar consequences – a similar large depression which he calls The Coming Third Depression.

We need increased stimulus now – a la Keynes – and he told us so earlier that the $800 Billion were just not enough. He does not want to see unemployment keeping  workers out of a job for 3-4 years as it becomes harder for them to return ever to a job. They will be lost into a structured unemployment reality.

Also, people will be afraid to spend enough to keep the economy going. In uncertainty they will hold on to their money as this will seem the right thing to do, but it will cause drop in prices and deflation.

So, if we do not increase spending now – in the next 1-2 years – in the short term – we drift into The Third Depression.

A trillion dollars spending now will cause $26 Billion in interest per year but this is not so much.

(B) On the other side was Niall Ferguson, himself British of Glasgow, and we do not know if he ever started steps to become American.

He points a finger at the US debt and says the US must start to decrease spending and have also some increase in taxes if it wants to get back some credibility in the world. He said the financial crisis is already happening – right now – and we will not have a Keynesian answer of stimulus in the future.

The US Treasuries are safe heaven like Pearl Harbor was until something happened. Imagine something happening – then what?

Ferguson talks of a rationalized new tax structure that is a serious option. He was reminded by Fareed that this is the Republican approach that was presented by Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin, and was told that in the Meeting with him, there were two more Congressmen present. So, what we are talking here is a Policy Change but Fareed is skeptical. If we cannot even raise the retiremment age by one year, how will we achieve radical change?

The answer was that when an international Bond market crisis hits – there wil be a radical restructure of policy. It seems that the Republican answer to Keynes is to create first a total collapse that will radicalize the wealth divide before readiness to do anything at all. That smells of the 30s all-right.

Fareed added that American companies have a lot of cash at hand from earnings that they do not spend – to which Ferguson reacted that confidence is low. if you look at China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, growing very fast and you sit on money at a US company, so what are you to do?

The Chinese had it very well when keeping out of a Western Crisis, but they over-heated and have wage unrest as a consequence. If we do the right thing – they will do the right thing – he said.

(C) The Fareed Zakaria Unifier Proposal:
That seems easy – Go for a second stimulus coupled with an announced 10 year program or what we say all the time – do now what should have been done then – Give money to companies only so that they work with you on betterment and problem solving – not as giveaway and bailouts.

Clearly he says – the US never had a problem borrowing money – this until we will!

Further – the issue is not Small Government or Big Government – But Smart Government.

———————–

Back to Afghanistan, Fareed Zakaria noted that having been told that the number of Al Qaeda men in Afghanistan is 100, and the yearly expenditure on the war by the US is $100 Billion – this comes to $1 Billion/Al Qaeda man/year. At the same time -  legally, at Afghan airports, $2.7 Million declared money leaves daily, and this is by far much more then all the taxes that the Afghan Government collects. The illegal exit of money is obviously much much higher – so what is the US doing there?

———————-

Also, today, July 4, 2010 is DAY 76 of the BP oil-spill and the TV showed a huge ship called “A WHALE” that was refitted specifically for the purpose of collecting water and oil mixtures in order to retrieve the oil from the water. This does not yet make the US independent of its oil industry strongmen.

VENICE, La., July 4 (UPI) — The world’s largest skimming vessel, A Whale, could play a crucial role in oil cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico if tests succeed, maritime experts say.

The tanker, which can skim about 21 million gallons of oil a day by taking in water with oil and separating it, was conducting tests in a 5-square-mile area north of the underwater spill Sunday, CNN reported.

The ship is capable of skimming at least 250 times the amount of oil that modified fishing vessels now in the gulf are able to contain, said Taiwanese shipping company TMT, the ship’s owner.

Initial test results could be available Monday, TMT spokesman Bob Grantham said. A Whale arrived in the gulf Wednesday and was waiting approval to join in cleanup operations.

A Whale is a Liberian flagged oil tanker built in 2010 by Hyundai Heavy Industries, Ulsan, South Korea. She was refitted and converted in Portugal into a so-called “super skimmer” to assist in the clean up of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A Whale arrived in the Gulf of Mexico on 30 June 2010, while financial agreements were yet pending.

The “WHALE” is thus capable to retrieve some of the oil – clearly a financial gain for BP.