Michael Moore Interview for his New Film; Climate Change Worsens; Right Wing Demand for Bullets Increases; more (posted 09/25/09)

- Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore Moore says "In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making the film and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that's simmering beneath the surface... And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used to call fascism." 

- World Consumption Plunges Planet Into 'Ecological Debt' Rich consumers are still voraciously gobbling up the world's resources, despite the worst recession in a generation, with their appetite pushing the planet into "ecological debt" [from this day onward]... This "ecological debt day" marks the point in the year when consumption around the world exceeds the Earth's annual "biocapacity" - so for the remainder of the year, we will be eating into environmental resources that will not be replaced.

- Unions Criticize Obama's School Proposals as 'Bush III' To the surprise of many educators who campaigned last year for change in the White House, the Obama administration's first recipe for school reform relies heavily on Bush-era ingredients and adds others that make unions gag.... Labor leaders, parsing the Education Department's fine print, call the proposal little more than a dressed-up version of the No Child Left Behind law enacted seven years ago under Obama's Republican predecessor.

- Bullet Makers Can't Keep up With Demand Gun enthusiasts claim Obama's election is fueling demand for guns, ammo from crazy right wingers

- Same-Sex Unions Will Enhance the Traditions of Marriage Gay couples deserve the benefits of marriage as a matter of civil rights and social justice.


New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase
By Juliet Eilperin
Published in the Washington Post
Friday, September 25, 2009

Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

"We don't want to go there," said Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.

The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations' climate policies -- including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union's pledge to reduce its emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 --and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 degrees.

World leaders at the July Group of 20 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, pledged in a joint statement that they would adopt policies to prevent global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit: "We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed two degrees C."

Corell, who has shared these findings with the Obama administration as well as climate policy makers in China, noted that global carbon emissions are still rising. "It's accelerating," he said. "We're not going in the right direction."

Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director, told reporters at the National Press Club on Thursday that the report aims to update the IPCC's 2007 findings to reflect both new physical evidence and a more sophisticated understanding of how Earth systems work.
"With every day that passes, the underlying trends that science has provided is . . . of such a dramatic nature that shying away from a major agreement in Copenhagen will probably be unforgivable if you look back in history at this moment," Steiner said. He noted that since 2000 alone, the average rate of melting at 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges has doubled compared with the rate during the previous two decades.

"These are not things that are in dispute in terms of data," he said. "They are actually physically measurable."

Other findings include the fact that sea level might rise by as much as six feet by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet, as the IPCC had projected, and the Arctic may experience a sea-ice summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century.

While the administration is pressing this week for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies as part of the current G-20 summit in Pittsburgh -- and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told reporters Thursday that world leaders appear open to such a proposal -- activists such as 350.org director Bill McKibben said politicians worldwide are not taking aggressive enough steps to address climate change.

"Here's where we are: The political system is not producing at the moment a result which has anything to do with what the science is telling us," said McKibben, whose group aims to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, well below the 450 ppm target that leaders of the Group of 20 major nations have embraced.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-sponsor of the House-passed climate bill that researchers included as part of their new temperature analysis, said, "As sobering as this report is, it is not the worst-case scenario. That would be if the world does nothing and allows heat-trapping pollution to continue to spew unchecked into the atmosphere."

Michael MacCracken, one of the scientific reviewers for the IPCC and a contributor to the UNEP report, said that if developed nations cut their emissions by half and the developing countries continued on their current path, or vice versa, the world would still experience a temperature increase of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.

"We face a situation where basically everybody has to do everything they can," MacCracken said.

Sean

Obama being a wimp; Bad Climate Change news; US Threatens UK, and more (originally posted 02/06/09)

- Letters Prove US Threats to Halt Intelligence to UK "A flurry of letters between the British Foreign Office and the US State Department has revealed that Washington did threaten to withdraw intelligence-sharing with Britain if documents related to the alleged torture of a British terrorism detainee in Guantanamo Bay were made public....The High Court in London said on Wednesday the Foreign Office had refused to allow the torture documents to be revealed because of a "threat" from Washington to stop sharing intelligence with Britain."

- Naomi Klein: We've Got to Make Obama Do It!

- Obama's Energy Secretary Outlines Dire Climate Change Scenario

- Watchdogs: Government Overpaid for Wall Street Assets "The federal government (under control of Bush) overpaid by about $78 billion for stock and other troubled assets when it bailed out big banks last year, and it lacks sufficient internal controls to police and protect taxpayers' investment in the institutions, government watchdogs said Thursday."

- Advocacy Groups Fear New Wave of Homeless

All the Comforts of Home: Republicans Destroy, Democrats Serve Cookies

Published on Friday, February 6, 2009 by CommonDreams.org 
 by David Michael Green

I got a bad feeling that if we liked the Clinton years, we're gonna love the Obama ones.

Remember those fun 1990s? Actually, they really weren't, of course. If they look good at all in retrospect, it is purely because the intervening monster mash gave us a point of reference so that we might know what ugly really looks like.

Apart from that, however, the political story of that decade had a depressingly simple narrative arc to it. Republican bottom-feeders demonstrated at every opportunity how scummy politics can be, and Democrats responded over and over again with the political equivalent of "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" And wasn't that fun to watch?

What the last months seem to be screaming out for all to hear is the lesson that some people just can't change. Or won't.

Could the little project launched a few centuries back, and affectionately referred to as 'America', possibly be in a more precipitous free-fall than it is right now?

No. And yet...

...And yet, while Wall Street firms are desperately trying to out-30s the 1930s themselves with their 2008 exercise in earnings annihilation, management gladly rewarded itself with nearly $20 billion dollars in bonuses, many funded by the United States taxpayers. This caused the people's president to nearly raise his voice in remonstration, he was so upset.
...And yet, with the Republican Party tanking so badly that its best likely outcome in the years ahead (and you should see the second best) is to wind up as the undisputed vote-getting champ of Mississippi and large parts of Georgia, still they reiterate their most aggressive and abysmal of behavior.

...And yet, with the Democratic Party holding more or less all the political cards imaginable, still they go desperately looking for any and all possible ways to share their political power with the GOP. And when the latter folks reward such generosity with an immediate slap to the face, still the Dems come back begging for more.

We're two weeks into the Obama decade, and already I'd be bored if I wasn't so pissed. Even with every imaginable self-made predator circling the camp, still we go on with the same set of juvenile antics that substitute for meaningful politics in America. Even with every conceivable disaster hungrily lapping at our shores, some of us would rather get rich than live to retirement age, some of us would rather win elections than save the country, and some of us would rather hold hands than be the guy who walks away from the knife fight alive.

Yep, it's the Clinton years again. Minus the booming economy and probably the sexual shenanigans. But the politics sure look the same.

Wall Street greed that exists absolutely without bound, to start with. And a government that finds increasingly creative ways to liquidate the commonwealth of its common wealth and turn it instead into private playgrounds, corporate jets, MBA bacchanals, and really big rings on the fingers of really big trophy wives. What, you've got a problem with a $35,000 toilet for a company accepting taxpayer bailout money?

Don't worry. Barrack Obama called it shameful. Since that appears to be just about all he plans to do about it, and since I had already made that particular analytical leap on my own horsepower, I must confess to being seriously unimpressed. Yeah, limiting salaries of the execs running companies receiving bailout funds is not a bad idea, but mostly another terribly trembling tactic from timid town. Since I am now an owner of these firms, would it be too much to ask for new management? Call me strange if you must, but I don't want corporate chiefs who have proven their ability to wreck companies running mine. It's just this odd quirk I've always had.

But the finger-wagger-in-chief's little dressing down was actually the high point of the week. Somewhat less amusing was the GOP's reaction to the president's fiscal stimulus plan. Even though Obama went out of his way to include within it tax cuts that seem to be the only two words the lips of Republicans are able to form in discussions of economics or public policy - tax cuts that are widely understood not to have serious stimulus capacity at this point - still not a single member of the House - not one - voted for the bill. Instead, they went parading around the media complaining about how the legislation would favor illegal immigrants, or would spend a few bucks on family planning services. Can't have that. Brown women in America? Not barefoot and not pregnant? Not okay.

Did I mention that this looks a lot like the 1990s? Zero was precisely the number of Republicans who voted for Bill Clinton's economic rescue package in 1993. Taxes, sex, war, taxes. Taxes, sex, war, taxes. This guys are like a jazz singer who can only hit four notes, two of which are the same. And about as useful.

Of course, people gotta have principles. Texas Senator John Cornyn - who is absolutely everything you'd expect a Texas senator to be - said this week "I read the bill in vain for any real stimulus in the economy. What I do see mainly is an opportunity being exploited to spend a lot of money without much scrutiny." Now see, dang it, that's not okay. For example, let's just say you had this Treasury secretary - we'll just call him John Doe Paulson, to pick a name at random - and he spent $350 billion by giving banks rescue money that they used instead for bonuses and really cool toilets, literal and figurative. Now that there, my friends, is an example of money being spent without scrutiny. Or certain contractors (oh, you know, like Haliburton maybe) and their no-bid contracts in certain wars (let's say Iraq, for instance). Or a prescription drug bill that actually forbids the government from using its buying power to obtain volume discounts. Now those are some nasty cases of unscrutinized federal spending, and we can all be thankful that Cornyn and other Republicans have been on the job this last decade, making sure none of that transpired.

The party, meanwhile, was busy last week choosing for themselves a new chairman. And guess what? He's a real conservative fellow. Now there's a shocker. And he's a black man. And he argues that Republicans have gotten a totally bum rap when it comes to perceptions of their racist politics these last decades. You know, that whole Reagan states' rights campaign kick-off speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi - a town famous for only one thing, murdering civil rights workers - for example. Or that whole Nixonian Southern Strategy to appeal to racist white voters in the South. Or the Willie Horton ad. Or the small matter of mass black voter disenfranchisement campaign in Florida in 2000. Or Ohio in 2004. Yeah, man. You gotta feel bad for the GOP and this unfair reputation. They really need to hire some new marketing people!

Oh, and did I mention the guy who didn't get the chairmenship? He sent around a CD to party leaders that included the snappy little tune, "Barack, the Magic Negro"! Some people in the party thought that was pretty tacky. But others didn't, and so a serious and major debate ensued within the party leadership as to whether this was an appropriate thing to do, and whether it was a good idea to put such a person at the top of the party. Hmmm, tough question. No wonder they had such a struggle over it.

Of course, the good news for the GOP is that with a black man as their chairman now, they'll no doubt be drawing tons of black votes from this point forward. And the even better news is that the GOP thinks that with a black man as their chairman now, they'll no doubt be drawing tons of black votes from this point forward. You know, just like Sarah Palin knocked down those barriers preventing women from gaining equality (the same ones that Republicans had spent lifetimes erecting) and thus energized the female vote for the GOP ticket. Oh yeah.

Let's be honest. The chances that the GOP would change its ugly ways only rose to the high-water mark of about three out of a thousand because of the trouncing they took in two elections back-to-back. Anyone who thought these folks were about to give up either their abysmal politics or their disgusting tactics hasn't been paying attention since the 1950s. And, besides, what would be the point? We already have a party that stands for just about nothing, and does so with unsurpassed strategic blunder, and a passionate devotion to the avoidance of both passion and devotion. Who needs another?

Speaking of which, I'm starting to feel kinda dumb for having said lately that a certain fellow by the name of Obama is a real smart guy. The more I see him in operation, the more I get the sense that the prime directive of his operating system is to always seek the making of happy-happy with his adversaries. He actually had some nice Republican members of Congress over to his new house the other day and personally walked around the room carrying a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies to serve them. You think I'm making this up, don't you? You wish. I wish. If this keeps up, pretty soon he's gonna make Chamberlain at Munich look as tough as the siege of Stalingrad by comparison.

He gave the Republicans a couple of hundred million bucks worth of worthless tax cuts as a means of compromise, even though that substantially diminishes his chances for succeeding in bringing recovery, and therefore also in succeeding at playing president. He says nice things about Ronald Reagan and throws a big shindig for the guy who just got through spending half a year calling him a socialist terrorist. He's now put three Republicans in his cabinet, which by my count totals to a contingent therein approximately three hundred percent bigger than the liberal cohort (of, maybe, one person). Not only that, instead of trading the last Republican added for the 60th Democratic senator and thus a filibuster-proof majority that would guarantee getting his legislation through Congress, Obama agrees to a deal wherein the Democratic governor of New Hampshire backfills Judd Gregg's seat with a Republican appointee.

And what do they do, in return? Trash his bill in public, say that they hope he fails, and vote - with nary a single exception - against the signature legislative initiative of his presidency. During an economic crisis, no less, with a public already massively angry at them.

If anyone knows this guy's Blackberry address, pass it along, wouldya? I'd like to remind him that Republicans don't get that whole 'post-partisan' thing. Precambrian, yes. Post-partisan, no. They will thrash the country (again) if they think it will wreck this presidency and bring them back to power. I'm not sure how Rush Limbaugh could possibly have been quite any more explicit about that. Yo, Barry. They are going to resist you any and every way they can. If you succeed, they'll take credit for it, maybe saying that the Bush tax cuts finally kicked in. If you fail, I'm pretty sure they won't be acknowledging the role of their political sabotage during a national economic crisis.

Lose the hand-holding impulse, dude. You've got cred, you've got crises, you've got control of the government. If you throw them a bone and they slap your face in return, the thing not to do here is increase the size of the bone. No more oatmeal cookies, man. Pull their useless stuff out of the bill, redraft it exactly the way you want it, and ram it down their throats. If they use their 41-seat minority in the Senate to block a relief bill that the people desperately want, the House has passed, and the president is waiting to sign, make them pay for it politically by endlessly reminding the public just who's standing in the way of the Red Cross trucks, and just who's driving them.

I mean, is it really too much to ask for a Democratic Party actually does something? Without asking the GOP for permission first?
 
Once before, America had a crumbling economy, a bumbling foreign policy, an angry electorate, and a decisive election. Ronald Reagan won in 1980, and Democrats cowered for the next three decades. They're still cowering.

This time the conditions are almost identical, except for three things. First, people are hurting a lot worse now than in 1980. Second, it's the Democrats who have won this time. And, third, it wasn't an election. It was two (elections).

But, of course, one thing hasn't changed.

It's still the Democrats doing the cowering.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at HofstraUniversity in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Sean