Financial finagling in food and sustainability

Week three of the Comparative Farming and Sustainable Food Systems class proceeded on in fascinating detail. We've been talking about sustainability and the design of food and farm systems. Sustainability can be thought of as the interactions of cultural, economic, social, institutional, and energy components in a system that have positive effects on the present, without compromising the future. The design of such a system has an end of healthy ecosystems and healthy communities, creating wellbeing for people and their environment in both the short and long term. Cultural are distinguished from social components in that the former have to do with identity (traditions, value systems, language), while the latter have to do institutions and systems of organization (political structure, systems of control and distribution).

One of the topics that came up during the course of discussion was the food price spikes we're seeing lately and the resultant riots around the world. The professor handed out an article on this from the January 15 New Zealand Herald:

The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are going to spread. During the last global food shortage, in 2008, there was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt. We may expect to see that again, only more widespread.

The article talks about poverty, climate change, world population, global consumption patterns, floods, drought, imports, local crop failures. Interestingly, it does not talk about commodity speculation in grains and other foodstuffs. I recalled a story written for Harper's Magazine by Frederick Kaufman about the food riots of 2008 and what led up to them: he specifically focused on the role of companies like Goldman Sachs and the issue of commodities futures in wheat and corn in the food crisis. The title says it succinctly: "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it." (PDF)

Investors were delighted to see the value of their venture increase, but the rising price of breakfast, lunch, and dinner did not align with the interests of those of us who eat.

I did a little searching on the web and found the letter from Steve Strongin on behalf of Goldman Sachs in response to the article, Kaufman's reply to that, and an interview with Kaufman by Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now!

The economics of sustainability has to do with full costing: what's known as the triple bottom line or the related integrated bottom line. We talked about economy of scale (Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm is helping to teach the class, and he spoke about this): maximizing your inputs (money, equipment, time, labor, etc.) for the most efficient and best levels of use for what you have—a balancing of costs and benefits. Each size of operation has an economy of scale that best suits it. Craig Gerlach brought up "neighboring," a term I hadn't heard before. This is a practice where neighbor farmers will work in common to help each other. For example, community harvesting: farmers in a particular local showing up at one farm to help harvest that farmer's fields, then moving on to the next farm in a given area, and so on, until all of their fields are harvested. Bringing in the harvest is an old tradition, as is barn-raising. Farmers may also share equipment.

in a food system, how do the local, regional, and global food systems link and interact? How do the scales of agriculture affect diversity in ecology, society, culture? We talked about the size of a farm affecting its ecological diversity: monoculture tends to be the rule on the extremely large farm. Gerlach hastened to point out that the modern industrial standard of monoculture and resource exploitation could be replaced with a restorative system, using organic and rotational methods, on the very large as well as the small farm, and that diversification of crops can be done over time as well as land area.

"Nature is the model."

This led us to talking about the plains vs. the prairie, and the idea of place-based development of breeds and farming methods. Gerlach mentioned the work of Wes Jackson, who became concerned about erosion of topsoil in the US (famously in the Dust Bowl of the thirties, but still continuing), and ended up founding an organization called The Land Institute. Most grains we use are annuals; we till the land, sow the seed, harvest the crop, and then plow under the stubble. The institute describes the situation and their mission this way:

No method for perpetuating agricultural productivity exists. Our goal is to improve the security of our food and fiber source by reducing soil erosion, decreasing dependency upon petroleum and natural gas, and relieving the agriculture-related chemical contamination of our land and water. Our specific research is an innovation for agriculture, using "nature as the measure" to develop mixed perennial grain crops as food for humans where farmers use nature as a standard or measure in making their agronomic decisions. Over 75 percent of human calories worldwide come from grains such as wheat and corn, but the production of these grains erodes ecological capital. Our research is directed toward the goal of having conservation as a consequence of agricultural production.

The classic documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, brought the problem of tilling and erosion to public attention in 1936. The sound is pretty bad on this, but it's an interesting piece.



"A healthy, well-integrated community needs to be integrated with its food," said Gerlach, and I agree. That means the consequences of agricultural economics has to be connected to the consequences of agriculture. Food, economics, human happiness: you can't rip off one sector without hurting the others.

Previous posts in this series:

Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Food systems, policy, and foodsheds

The second week of my Comparative Food Systems class has readings in Anna Lappé's book, Diet for a Hot Planet, going over Hamm's seven principles for a healthy food system, reading an article by Jack Kloppenburg and others on the foodshed, an article on rural Alaska food systems by my professor, Craig Gerlach, and researching definitions of "food system." In the meantime, I've been working on the Alaska Food Policy Council's introductory paper on food policy and the Alaska food system, so these two projects dovetail quite nicely. It adds up to a lot of reading—interesting, definitely, but a lot of pages.

So, to start: Lappé makes the argument that not only is small-scale, diversified organic farming that caters to a local market sustainable and good for communities, this type of agriculture is climate-friendly because it: produces fewer comparative greenhouse gas emissions than industrial farming; requires less energy inputs from fossil fuels; improves the soil; and actually sequesters carbon in the soil rather than releasing it. Her description of the energy-intensiveness of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations is horrific—and never mind the inherent cruelty of them, she hasn't even gotten into that so far. She does talk about the unhealthiness of the modern diet in terms of the amount of processing food undergoes: highly processed foods, like Pringles or Pop-Tarts, use a huge amount of energy and resources—and they're just not that good for you.

Lappé describes seven principles of a climate-friendly diet:

1. Reach for real food (food that has fewer ingredients and isn't processed or transmogrified a lot is likelier to be less climate-destructive)
2. Put plants on your plate (eat less meat—most modern meat is grain-fed, which is energy-intensive; if you eat meat, eat meat that is raised humanely and sustainably, because these practices, like grass-fed beef, produce less greenhouse gas emissions—grain-fed cattle produce more methane than grass-fed cattle!)
3. Don't panic, go organic (industrial chemicals require large energy inputs; nitrogen fertilizer produced through the Haber-Bosch process, for example—and then there's all those petrochemicals used for pesticides)
4. Lean toward local (less shipping, for one)
5. Finish your peas…the ice caps are melting (food waste is a waste of energy resources; institutional composting makes use of food waste and reduces land-fill emissions)
6. Send packaging packing (the throwaway society wastes humongous amounts of resources; I think we should institute a law like that in Germany, where the producer or seller of packing must take it back from whoever they sell it to. For example, the customer buys a box of chocolate, but returns the box to the store—the store has to take the box, no charge. Then the store can return their collected boxes to the supplier of the chocolate—and the supplier can't charge them. The cost to the retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers has reduced extra packaging dramatically in Germany. Lappé has not mentioned this law so far in my reading.)
7. DIY food (grow and cook your own food: better for you and lots less processing—and therefore lots less energy intensive)

Hamm's article, assigned last week, was also interesting but a bit less easy reading than Lappé's book. (My editorial eye kept twitching—he'd have had red ink all over his paper had I gotten to it before publication.) His operating principles for a healthy food system are that it would:

1. insure community food security for all residents
2. be community based
3. be locally integrated
4. be reasonably seasonal in nature
5. present primarily opportunities rather than problems
6. connect health across the layers of the system
7. be diverse

This is, of course, not at all what our current food system looks like. Our current food system is highly energy-intensive, unseasonal, deters connectivity between the different layers of the food system, is almost completely disassociated with local communities, is rarely distributed or minimally distributed within a community, and is rife with pseudo-diversity and ultra-processed crud disguised as foodoid items.

You can tell where I'm coming from, can't you?

A concise definition of "food system" comes from the San Francisco Food Alliance's 2005 San Francisco Collaborative Food System Assessment (PDF), which says

A food system describes the cycle of growing, distributing, eating and recycling our food, and all the factors that affect it.

Short and sweet! It's "all the factors" that are the hairy part, however: natural resources and environmental systems, social and cultural systems, political systems, economic systems, technology, research, education, etc. That encompasses a lot of things: disease, hunger, political will, costs, food safety, commodities trading, water rights, the Green Revolution, agribusiness, organic certification, heirloom seeds, and so on. This in turn brings up ideas like food democracy and equity, food sovereignty, fair trade, self-reliance, guerilla gardening, etc.

Kloppenberg's article, "Coming in to the Foodshed," takes the metaphor of the watershed and applies it to food. How does food move through the landscape, the community? One quote from it struck me:

Provided with an apparent cornucopia of continuously available foods, few consumers have much knowledge of the biological, social, or technical parameters and implications of food production in the global village.

Of course, much of the power of agribusiness ultimately depends on farmers and consumers not knowing. If we do not know, we do not act. And even if we do know, the physical and social distancing characteristics of the global food system may constrain our willingness to act when the locus of the needed action is distant or when we have no real sense of connection to the land or those on whose behalf we ought to act. Ultimately, distancing disempowers. Control passes to those who can act and are accustomed to act at a distance: the Philip Morrises, Monsantos, and ConAgras of the world.

(My emphasis added.) In short, it pays the big guys for the public to be uniformed or misinformed.

The thing that I am discovering about an examination of food systems and sustainable farming: food is political, and food politics are radical—because the nexus of the issue is about self-determination, freedom.

Kloppenberg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson go on (and bear in mind that this article was published 15 years ago) to talk about "foodshed work." They describe it so (again, my emphasis):

• A foodshed will be embedded in a moral economy that envelopes [sic] and conditions market forces. The global food system now operates according to allegedly "natural" rules of efficiency, utility maximization, competitiveness, and calculated self-interest. The historical extension of market relations has deeply eroded the obligations of mutuality, reciprocity, and equity that ought to characterize all elements of human interaction. Food production today is organized largely with the objective of producing a profit rather than with the purpose of feeding people. But human society has been and should remain more than a marketplace.
• Community Supported Agriculture also serves as an illustration of our expectation that the moral economy of a foodshed will be shaped and expressed principally through communities.…We imagine foodsheds as commensal communities that encompass sustainable relationships both between people (those who eat together) and between people and the land (obtaining food without damage). …[B]uilding the commensal community means establishment or recovery of social linkages beyond atomistic market relationships through the production, exchange, processing, and consumption of food. …Finally, the standards of a commensal community require respect and affection for the land and for other species. It is through food that humanity's most intimate and essential connections to the earth and to other creatures are expressed and consummated.
• The dominant dynamics of the global food system actively erode both moral economy and community. We agree with those who believe that this destructiveness is an inherent property of the system, and that what is needed is fundamental transformation rather than simple reform.

All this makes having a garden at home look like a revolutionary act. And maybe it is.

More later on Gerlach's article, "Rural Alaskan Food Systems: Problems, Prospects, and Policy Considerations," written for the Alaska Food Policy Council in August 2010.

See my previous posts on this course:

• Food systems and shizen
• Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Raising a rumpus: Wells Fargo's preferred provider

Neil Davis writes the Dose of Reality column for The Ester Republic, and seems to have raked up a bit of muck this month. Wells Fargo is the state's new health care/insurance administrator, and recently sent out an announcement indicating that it had entered into a preferred provider agreement with Alaska Regional Hospital in replacement of the one the state formerly had with Providence Hospital, because it would be cheaper.

Well, this caught Neil's eye because he'd done some cost-comparison research on these hospitals for his book, Mired in the Health Care Morass. The crucial piece of information here is that Alaska Regional is a for-profit hospital, whereas Providence is, like Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit hospital—and markups at for-profit institutions can be significantly higher than nonprofit institutions. So he looked into it, and sure enough, it appears that's still the case for Alaska Regional. Generally speaking, procedures at this hospital tend to be more expensive or about the same as those at Providence.

So why would Wells Fargo claim that it's the other way around?

One possibility is that it IS cheaper—for Wells Fargo. The companies could have a steep discount for their payments. This does not mean, however, that it is any cheaper for the patients who are getting their care there, or for the state of Alaska.

Neil rightly raises these questions, and suggests that they be looked into. I agree.

Corporations have more rights than you

The Supreme Court's decision (PDF) in Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission is one of the biggest farces in American history, overturning 150 years of court precedent and rendering moot much of the campaign finance reform law in the United States, at both state and national level. (My February Ester Republic editorial was about this ruling—I strongly recommend reading Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion for some entertaining and commonsense treatment of the matter)

Fortunately, several states are fighting back, and Alaska is one of them. Unfortunately, the bills that would clarify in no uncertain terms that corporations are not to be treated as persons for the purposes of elections have been sat on in committee, and here we are, two days from the end of the session, and they still haven't been released for an up-or-down vote. This is OUTRAGEOUS!

The House bill is stuck in the State Affairs Committee, which is under the aegis of Rep. Bob Lynn. I urge everyone to e-mail and call his office at 465-4958.

Not only that, but a companion bill that makes sure that campaign donations by corporations must be reported, although the Senate bill passed (19-0), is also stuck in committee in the House. From Mudflats:

The State limits on private citizen campaign contributions are the same after the Supreme Court ruling. Those limits include the $500 annual limit on individual donations to candidates and a disclosure requirement. Unless legislative action is taken, corporations will have more rights than the citizens of Alaska.

But why should we be surprised? Large corporations already get massive subsidies and don't even have to pay income tax, even if they make tens of billions of dollars in profit. They're subsidized with our tax dollars, after all. Why should they have to deal with the limitations to their political activiities involving money like the rest of us?

Remember: we're the peons, they are the beneficent aristrocrats. We don't count, so we give up our money and our rights (through our elected representatives), so they can rob us blind. Don't believe it? Exxon not only didn't have to pay taxes for 2009, they got a $156 million tax refund. How much did you pay in taxes this year?

Yes Men muzzled by my old ISP

Hurricane Electric used to provide hosting for my website. I've since been on another host, and it's a good thing. Hurricane Electric doesn't know that parody is protected speech. From the Yes Men:

US Chamber Shuts off TheYesMen.org and Websites of Hundreds of Other Activist Groups

Free Speech, Free Commerce Threatened by "Free Trade" Champion

Hundreds of activist organizations had their internet service turned off last night after the US Chamber of Commerce strong-armed an upstream provider, Hurricane Electric, to pull the plug on The Yes Men and May First / People Link, a 400-member-strong organization with a strong commitment to protecting free speech.

"This is a blow against free speech, and it demostrates in gory detail the full hypocrisy of the Chamber," said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. "The only freedom they care about is the economic freedom of large corporations to operate free of the hassles of science, reality, and democracy."

After suffering embarrassment at the hands of the Yes Men on Monday, the Chamber immediately threatened legal action, then followed through Thursday by sending a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice to Hurricane Electric Internet Services. In the DMCA notice, the Chamber claimed that the parody Chamber website operated by The Yes Men constituted copyright infringement, and demanded that the site be shut down immediately and that the creator's service be canceled.

But the Yes Men are not served directly by Hurricane Electric, but by May First / People Link. And when Hurricane Electric shut down the fake Chamber of Commerce site (now relocated), they also took down the websites of 400 other organizations.

May First / People Link fought back. They immediately "mirrored" the site, and then quickly negotiated with Hurricane Electric to restore service to their other members.

"The DMCA attacks the critically important right we have to effectively comment and criticize institutions and companies," said May First/People Link Co-Director Alfredo Lopez. "It's an undemocratic, backwards law, a perfect example of how the government shouldn't intrude on our lives. But the Chamber was perfectly happy to use it to stomp on the Yes Men's rights to free spech, and the rights of hundreds of other organizations to operate on the web."

The 400 May First / People Link members weren't the only victims of the Chamber's action on Thursday. Today is the start of the national release of the Yes Men's new film, The Yes Men Fix the World. The film is being released in a number of independent theaters - who, not being part of a chain, are heavily dependent on the Yes Men website for selling tickets to the film. The Chamber's actions thus impinge on the ability of these small businesses to turn a profit.

"The Chamber claims to represent 3 million businesses of every size, yet their actions undermined a fair number of small businesses," said Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men. "The Chamber is clearly much less interested in actual freedom, economic or otherwise, than in the license of their largest members to operate free from the scientific consensus." (The Chamber has opposed or refused to endorse a climate bill, the absurdity of which the Yes Men's Monday action was designed to highlight.)

This isn't the first time a Yes Men site has found itself targeted by a DMCA complaint brought by a large corporation. The Yes Men have in the past received DMCA notices from Exxon, Dow Chemical, DeBeers, and the New York Times. In each case, the the Yes Men (represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation) refused to comply, and prevailed. Even the George W. Bush campaign sent a complaint to try to interrupt service to GWBush.com, in 2000, resulting in extensive ridicule that culminated in Bush's mind-boggling gaffe that "There ought to be limits to freedom."

Given that I regularly run parody, satire, and even the occasional press release by the Yes Men, I have to say that I'm glad I am not hosted by Hurricane anymore, and after this, I recommend that anyone looking for an ISP avoid them like the plague.

The Onion's got it right

Again.

Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care

"Both parties understand that the current system is broken," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. "But what we can't seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It's a very complicated issue."

"Ultimately, though, it's our responsibility as lawmakers to put these differences aside and focus on refusing Americans the health care they deserve," Pelosi added.

The legislative stalemate largely stems from competing ideologies deeply rooted along party lines. Democrats want to create a government-run system for not providing health care, while Republicans say coverage is best denied by allowing private insurers to make it unaffordable for as many citizens as possible.

"We have over 40 million people without insurance in this country today, and that is unacceptable," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said. "If we would just quit squabbling so much, we could get that number up to 50 or even 100 million. Why, there's no reason we can't work together to deny health care to everyone but the richest 1 percent of the population."

"That's what America is all about," he added.

Thank the gods for the Onion.

Senator Baucus: bought and paid for?

Well, this is one possible answer to my question on why, if Senator Baucus thinks we have such a terrible health care crisis in this country, he isn't (as chair of the hearings) allowing single-payer advocates a seat at the table:

One of the Baucus 13, Kevin Zeese, recently summarized Baucus’ career campaign contributions:

“From the insurance industry: $1,170,313;
health professionals: $1,016,276;
pharmaceuticals/health-products industry: $734,605;
hospitals/nursing homes: $541,891;
health services/HMOs: $439,700.”

In other words: his campaigns have been financed by the for-profit health industry.

Interesting, wouldn't you say?

Let's just take a look at WHY single-payer reduces expenses so dramatically. Here's the United States' system as it currently stands:



Rather messy, no? Convoluted, even.

And here's Canada's single-payer system:



Much simpler. It's the complexity of the US system that breeds an expensive wastefulness, and the profit motive that creates an incentive to whittle away people's coverage and endurance through (again wasteful) quantities of paperwork, etc.

These graphic representations of health care systems are from Neil Davis' book, Mired in the Health Care Morass, which I published last year. Reading that book made it very very clear just why Congress' and the White House's approach on this is so wrong-headed, and doomed to failure--from a health care standpoint. It will work beautifully from an investor's profit-making standpoint, so long as you don't care that people will be dying and sickly and going broke as a result.

Congress & Obama in cahoots with the insurance companies

I've been listening to the news about the latest blah-blah in Congress and from the White House about the supposed health care "reform" they plan to foist on the public. "We'll have a great new plan by July!" gushes Speaker Pelosi. "Coverage for everyone!" promises Obama.

Well, who gives a flying fuck, huh, really?

"Congressional leaders on health care have taken single payer off the table as politically impractical." Um, yeah, the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry might not fund their campaigns next time. "Coverage" and "insurance plans" just arent' going to cut it. The proposals seem to be headed straight to a private-profit, public-cost type of plan. Single-payer advocates have to disrupt the hearings to even get the phrase mentioned in Baucus' hearing rooms, although that isn't helping it get addressed, exactly.

Last time, says Catherine Arnt of Business Week, the Clinton adminstration botched health care reform because they didn't engage all the players:

The Administration apparently learned its lesson from the Clinton experience, which hammered out its bill behind closed doors, with little to no industry input. By bringing the insurance and hospital executives to the table, it makes it that much harder for them to derail the effort altogether. At a White House press conference, Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters: "Let's not minimize the impact of the difference between being at the table working constructively for comprehensive health-care reform that cuts costs for the American people, vs. campaign-style ads to derail it. I think today represents, in many ways, a big shift in the ground underneath people that have been working on health-care reform for decades."

So, apparently the Obama administration plans to botch this attempt too, by excluding the single-payer players, which represent better than 60% of the public. John Conyers bill, HR 676, is ALREADY prepared and ready to go.

So really, it's quite clear that they JUST DON'T CARE. Obama might possibly care, but he's not listening to the science, or the facts, or the people who could tell him the facts. Nope. It's 'politically inexpedient.'

This is really, really, foul. Senator Baucus knows there's a problem, but if it's the crisis he says it is, why isn't he willing to even consider a possible solution, one that is working in almost every other industrialized nation? Why is he supporting a model like Massachusetts' plan, which, as Neil Davis points out in his upcoming Dose of Reality, is failing miserably?

Nonsustainable industry practice: stupid wanton waste

This extremely pertinent question was posted on Fiery Blazing Handbasket, and picked up by Kodiak Konfidential, but it's just too barbed a point not to repeat once again:

Does anyone else find it odd that the Bering Sea pollock trawlers can catch and discard as bycatch over 100,000 king salmon per year while the small, community-based fishing effort has to shut down? That we haven't even managed to let enough kings by on the Yukon to meet our treaty obligation to the Canadians?

All so Americans can eat cheap fish sticks?

It's real stupidity, and corruption in action, that's what it is. Bycatch waste has got to be the stupidest shortsighted cut-off-your-nose practice in the fishing industry. It costs fisherfolk a lot of effort, time, money, and bad press--but it's the bottom trawlers and big industrial-size factory fishing boats and nets that do the real damage. "Bycatch" is dead dolphins in the tuna harvest (finally got some protections there, after a long, long fight), king salmon in the pollack harvest, dead sea turtles, dead sharks, dead birds, and so on and so on....and it's a HUGE problem. According to Global Chefs magazine, something like 25% of all fisheries catch is wasted.

Bycatch.org has a database of bycatch reduction methods, and NOAA has a whole Fisheries Feature devoted to the issue.

But, as Global Chefs and others point out, consumer action can have quite an effect. And it's the big fleets and megacorps, not the little Yukon River villages, that do the most damage.

Here's an interesting article from March 1999 from the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations on the management issues regarding sustainability, with a good bit of background on the present problems.

Two of the Big Three are full of crap

and we shouldn't fund them. At all.

I heard an interview the other day on NPR with the current Ford scion, who told Melissa Block that the Ford company will be bringing its European models to the United States. FINALLY! Y'see, in Europe, to be a) legal and b) competitive, cars and trucks have to have decent gas mileage. This doesn't mean a measley 26 mpg, like our Honda Element gets, this means 50, 60, 70, 80 mpg. Miles per gallon, not just liters. But those models haven't been available for sale in the US, even though Ford makes them. How stupid is that? So it's about freaking time that they start making and selling them here.

Chrysler and General Motors, on the other hand, are still suing states to attempt to prevent them from requiring cleaner car emissions and more efficient models, and Chrysler is shutting down one of the two plants it makes hybrid vehicles in. Of course, those hybrids aren't doing so well, partly due to the credit crunch, but I imagine that all that effort Chrysler has been putting into resisting improving their automobiles has something to do with it.

At least Ford has been thinking a bit more sensibly, gearing down to produce smaller vehicles.

I'm with Peregrine Wood: we shouldn't be bailing out the companies that have been digging in their heels for decades on environmental and efficiency standards, making bad business decisions, and spending lots of money on lawyers and lawsuits so they can continue to artificially restrict states to going along with those bad decisions. And we've given them a bailout already this year (and there was that bailout of Chrysler back in the 80s, don't forget). It certainly doesn't seem to have helped them see the error of their ways. Are we sure we want to do this again?

More room for the Internet

Save the Internet reports that the FCC decided it was more important to have the public airwaves saved for the public (gasp!) than for the cable companies. See the Democracy Now! interview with Timothy Karr below. The Seattle Times has a pretty cool opinion piece about the issue by him, too.

Bailing 'em out again

So, on the radio this morning, they were interviewing the former CEO of General Electric, who said, oh don't worry about it, this has happened before: the Japanese recession of '95, the recession of '90, and the recession of '87. The government introduced liquidity and our bacon was saved.

So, asks Hans, you mean the taxpayers have bailed out these boondoggles before? When are people going to notice that the system doesn't work very well if you have to bail out the big guys every so often?

No wonder people are mad. The little guys get to pay for the big guys' mistakes over and over, and the government keeps allowing the same sorts of stupid behavior on the part of large corporations and networks within different industries.

Halving emissions by 2050: big deal

The supposedly "strong resolve" to cut global CO2 emission by the participants in the G8 Summit is a farce. No base year has been determined, no short-term or medium-term targets have been agreed on, and even if that long-term goal was met, we'll still be in a world of hurt. Forty-two years to get halfway back to too high? give me a break. The oceans have already changed and will continue to change even if we cut all CO2 emissions out NOW: and that is going to kill the coral reefs, which will wipe out about a third of oceanic life. This is due to warming but also to acidification. We are SCREWED.

We were warned about these problems and others back in 1992. Sixteen years later the leaders of the world's nations are STILL failing to grasp that we are in dire danger from environmental collapse. Most people I know have no concept of just how far off the cliff we've already run, Wile E. Coyote-like.

We've got only a very short window to reverse the worst of the situation. The biggie is overpopulation: we're supposed to have 9 billion people on the planet in forty years. Organizations like the Worldwatch Institute and movements like Slow Food, Green politics, and environmentalism are helping change the attitudes of people everywhere, but our goose is still cooked if we don't get the people in power and the people down the street aware of the importance of these efforts. We can at least throw out our current crop of elected nincompoops and get some new ones in who maybe will Pay Attention to the writing on the wall.

UAA: a partially owned subsidiary of ConocoPhillips

UAA is actually proud of turning their science building into an advertisement for corporate giant ConocoPhillips:

ConocoPhillips Alaska, Inc. has pledged $15 million to support science and engineering programs at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). This gift is the largest the company has ever made in Alaska and is also the largest single corporate gift that the University system, including UAA has received.

In honor of this pledge, and in recognition of the $20 million dollars in unrestricted support that ConocoPhillips has contributed to the University of Alaska since 1999, UAA’s new Integrated Science Building will carry ConocoPhillips’ name. Four million dollars of this gift will fund equipment for the state-of-the-art ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building which is due to open its doors in fall of 2009; $11 million will establish the ConocoPhillips Arctic Science and Engineering Endowment.

Sort of an expensive ad and employee-training program, but what the hey, after those 89 percent quarterly profits in 2005 (post-Katrina), and the continued ridiculously good to really good profits in 2006, 2007, and the first quarter of 2008, they've got a little change to throw around.

'Course, it's hard to tell exactly how much money they're making, because oil companies are notoriously secretive and tricky about their accounting. At least, as secretive as they can get away with.

But aside from all that, it's just bothersome to me when individuals or companies donate money and then get their names on buildings or institutes or some such at a university. It just seems wrong, as though they are buying the university, converting it into a subsidiary of the company or subsuming the mission of the institution, converting it into cheery adverts and marketing for a money-making machine. Forget education and knowledge! Let's just use universities as the good PR outlets they are (and maybe brainwash a few students while we're at it)!

Ayn Rand sucks.

Writing from the Insurgent49 bunker in a new undisclosed location

Yep, I'm visiting with the old Insurgent49 rabblerousers, Aaron Selbig and Nova Stubbs, here in Anchorage. While spending my days as a mild-mannered publisher hawking cool aviation books, I am spending wild nights on the town with my volunteer marketer, Melinda, or eating red meat and playing Scrabble with my fellow insurgents here in their new digs in Anchortown's outpost by the sea. They just moved to this house from their loft on 5th, and they've got a wonderful big back yard--rare for Anchorage itself.

Aaron, of course, is still getting into loud and noisy trouble (or causing it), as any good insurgent does. He's been the programming director for KUDO and the host of their top-rated talk show (called, naturally, the Aaron Selbig Show), which has featured some movers and shakers not only in the Anchorage area, but statewide, too. But alas, he finally poked one too many oxen, and got gored: KUDO just fired him last week, ostensibly to "cut costs", but later they decided it was because ratings were low. No, wait, it was for both reasons. Aaron points out that the advertising budget for the station to promote itself was close to zilch, so that might have had something to do with the low ratings, too.

An interesting aspect of this is that KUDO is a union-owned station. Yet, their one full-time employee at the station had no health insurance. Tsk. A bit ironic, don't you think? So when he blew out his Achilles tendon and had to have surgery, and then got a staph infection at the hospital and had to have a second surgery and the infection taken care of, there was no health insurance to take care of it. So now he's facing what will probably end up being around $20,000 worth of medical bills.

Lovely. So I brought him a copy of Neil Davis' book, Mired in the Health Care Morass. I'm hoping it will help him trim the bills down to a reasonable size. He's been hobbling around the house here this weekend. He's got a gaping hole in the back of his leg, but it does appear to be healing. (He keeps it under wraps most of the time, but showed it off to Nova and me yesterday to demonstrate that yes, it finally was healing, look! Nova and I pretty much both went, "Ick.")

Aaron is now looking for a job. He's applied to several places, one of them Outside. I dread the thought of Alaska losing such a champion. Aaron won a Liberty Award from the ACLU last year, and well-deserved it was, too.

Genetically modified crops not so great after all

And not for the reason you'd normally expect to hear from my mouth. It turns out that GM crops just don't produce as well as normally bred strains, even ones that are almost identical to the modified ones.

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

This holds true for other crops, too, such as cotton.

But getting the news out can be a little difficult when a very rich corporation is involved. The phenomenon is still being studied, of course.

The mainstream media finally notices

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The Green Party has been jumping up and down about this for some time, but at long last, the New York Times has noticed that, far from being the "land of the free," we are the land of the imprisoned:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Adam Liptak is doing an invaluable public service by exposing our system's workings to the public. Let's hope he goes on to examine the for-profit prison.

Website delay

Although the paper has been out for several days, the Republic's website is still back in February. This is because I don't have internet access at my new office, so I can't upload the new pages and probably won't be able to for some time. So, for those of you who are curious, here's what is in the new issue:

• a cool cover photo of bubbles trapped in ice, by Doug Yates
• "Bobblehead Leadership at our Swell University," an opinion piece by Richard Seifert
• "An Alternative Thought," an editorial by yours truly, on media consolidation, alternative newspapers and 'zines, and the copyleft movement
• a cartoon by Jamie Smith on the Obama campaign
• miscellaneous letters to the editor from an emperor and a few of the rabble-rousers around here
• a cartoon by Dan Darrow on Tom DeLong and GVEA
• a cartoon by Jolene Schafer-Howell on walrus and ice
• a cartoon by Jeanne Mars Armstrong on teacher conferences
• a book review by David A. James on Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR
• library news update (lallapalooza coming up soon!)
• the Publisher's Picks
• an outsourced Thought Posse Report
• poems by Shanna Karella, Sarah Sarai, Gregory Shipman, and Frank Keim
• "How I See It," by jean lester
• part 2 in the self-reliance series by Phil Loring, "The Farmer-Pirate and Other Cautionary Tales"
• an error correction from the Yes Men
• "Iron Prices, Inflation, and Mining Consolidation," by Stephen Hannaford
• "Singletrack Trails Proposal for Ester Dome," by Geoff Orth and Joel Buth
• The Long View by Ross Coen, "Fire and Skiing at the Lodge"
• "The Emma Creek West Fiasco," an opinion by Hans Mölders on the borough/Ester meeting at the fire hall on March 12
• "The Missionary Position on Lyrics," by Neal Matson
• "Women's Day--Iraq: Surviving Somehow Behind a Concrete Purdah," by Dahr Jamail
• "Dose of Reality: Alaska Health Care Lobbying" by Neil Davis
• "A Conspiracy of Ravens," by Richard Seifert
• a cool photo of Dave Hyland on his mom's old Polaris snowmachine

Available for sale at a coffeeshop near you! or at least, one in College. I'm working on finding one nearer downtown.

Freedom of speech and squelching of whistleblowers

I've been here before, but I forgot about this wonderful website, which is now in danger of being permanently shut down: Wikileaks provides documents on line to blow the whistle on wrongdoing and corruption in government, business, and other sorts of organizations. The forces of transparency soldier on, and the forces of iron-fisted control freakage keep on trying to go for massive overkill. From the New York Times article:

In a statement on its site, Wikileaks compared Judge White’s orders to ones eventually overturned by the Unites States Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971. In that case, the federal government sought to enjoin publication of a secret history of the Vietnam War by The New York Times and The Washington Post.… Judge White’s order disabling the entire site “is clearly not constitutional,” said David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School. “There is no justification under the First Amendment for shutting down an entire Web site.”

Addendum: I should note that privacy and confidentiality issues are frequently shot to hell by the internet and by websites like these. It's a bit of a problem, from the extreme of identity theft at one problem and just plain old unwanted public exposure, to the other end of secrecy and obstacles to freedom of information on things we should all know about.

The Republic's done been polled

Again and again and again. I don't know what it is with these Republicans. At home, we got one recorded poll from some Republican pollster, and some woman calling up to ask my political opinions (but she wouldn't talk to Hans, who was the only one there at the time). But at the Republic, I've gotten probably one actual human pollster, maybe three hangups that I suspect must have been autocalls, and five or six (I kid you not) auto ads for Mitt Romney (railing against that evil liberal, John McCain) plus two or three autopolls--all for Republicans. In the last week. I've received one autocall recorded by John Davies on behalf of the Democrats, and one reminder about the Democratic caucuses ("you can register Democrat at the door!").

It renews my faith in the Republican Party: they appear to be assuming that because "Republic" appears in the business name, it must be a Republican/rightwing rag.

Or maybe they think Hannah the Radical Mayor (the other person listed on the phone number) is a likely candidate for brainwashing to the neoconservative cause.

Ridiculous.

But it tells you how much money the Republicans are backed by, that's for sure. Bears thinking about, doesn't it? Foller that moolah, folks…it'll lead you right to who owns Mitt and John and all those R candidates, and I'm betting it isn't the People.