i-eclectica.org

Empty shelves at the Alameda County Community Food Bank
in Oakland signal a hard winter ahead for those in need.

Another sign for an economic model in deep trouble: US food banks are struggling to supply the poor. The New York Times reports that critical shortages have forced them to ration supplies, distribute staples usually reserved for disaster relief and in some instances close. The situation is the worst some organisations have seen for 26 years.

Experts attributed the shortages to an unusual combination of factors, including

• rising demand, partly driven by rising prices of oil, gas, rents and the results of foreclosures
• a sharp drop in federal supplies of excess farm products because farmers are doing well, which leaves the federal Agriculture Department’s Bonus Commodity Program with too little surplus crops to buy (supplies from the surplus program dropped to $67 million worth last year, from $154.3 million in 2005 and $233 million in 2004)
• tighter inventory controls that are leaving supermarkets and other retailers with less food to donate
• retailers selling to discount stores items they can’t sell or that are part of seasonal inventory that is no longer needed because people are shopping in those places
• a farm bill currently stalled in the Senate that would raise emergency aid for food banks to $250 million a year, from $140 million, a figure has remained steady since 2002

The Vermont Food Bank said its supply of food was down 50 percent from last year, and for two weeks this month, the New Hampshire Food Bank distributed supplies reserved for emergency relief. Demand for food here is up 40 percent over last year and supply is down 30 percent, which is striking in the state with the lowest reliance on food banks. Household budget squeezes have led to a drop in donations and greater demand, leaving not only the homeless hungry but also working people. Household incomes are kind of stuck. There’s very little way to increase income, and most people have a very heavy debt load. Any event that increases your costs is really, really troublesome, because they already are stretched thin.

The problem though is not just a result of social injustice (e.g. some struggling food bank are in the heart of one of the most productive agriculture areas in the world) or corporate greed - it is a systemic one, and it is no surprise that American food banks are hit hard. The US is the champion of a totally unsustainable, ruthless capitalism that deifies the market, exalts those who successfully profit from it and worships consumerism over anything else in life. This has resulted in a nation living totally beyond its means through racking up staggering amounts of debt (that it can’t repay) for the acquisition of goods (it didn’t really need), resulting in an economy that slowly but surely is sliding into recession. And given the US being the biggest consumer society in the world, the global repercussions will be enormous, with the only unpredictable aspect right now being the scale of the negative effects. Foreclosures, food bank shortages, the falling US dollar, peak oil, falling consumer confidence and the various effects of global warming are all signs for an economic model at breaking point and maybe even at the beginning of collapse. The free market economy, certainly in its excessive neo-conservative manifestation is dieing, with the pain accompanying its demise just beginning for all of us.

Climate change is paving a “highway to extinction” which could see billions of people perish from hunger, malnutrition, disease, extreme weather events, heat-induced stress and lack of drinkable water by the year 2050, according to the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due to be released in Belgium next Friday.

Climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia told the Associated Press that the report maps out the consequences of climate change degree by degree, as temperatures rise. He said this presents a clear “highway to extinction, but on this highway there are many turnoffs. This is showing you where the road is heading. The road is heading toward extinction.”

Dr Weaver is one of the lead authors of the first IPCC report, issued in February. That report confirmed the strong scientific consensus that climate change is real and is caused by human activity related to greenhouse gas emissions.

If the global temperature rose by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) up to 1.7 billion people would not have enough water. Infectious diseases and allergenic pollens would also substantially increase, and amphibians would begin to go extinct.

A further increase of 1 degree Celsius would see one-third of the world’s species approach extinction and at least 2 billion people facing death as a result of hunger, malnutrition, disease, extreme weather events, heat-induced stress and lack of drinkable water. Life on the planet would reach this threshold by the year 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions were not reduced substantially.

A further doubling of temperatures would see one-fifth of the world’s population affected by catastrophic flooding, up to 3.2 billion people facing extreme water shortages, and major extinctions around the globe.

Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Program, told Reuters that “We are talking about a potentially catastrophic set of developments.” He believes the public, governments and businesses now realize that the substantive debate is over and that there is overwhelming consensus on climate change in the scientific community.

“We’ve passed the tipping point,” he said. “It’s no longer about whether climate change is happening – but about how we deal with it.” The next report of the IPCC, due out in October 2007, will assess the range of options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise mitigating climate change.

Reports of the IPCC draw on the research of 2,500 climate scientists and reviewers. Only conclusions and projections beyond dispute make it into the final drafts of the reports, which are then signed off by more than 120 governments.

A draft of the current IPCC report has been circulated to major media organizations and lists a range of potential climate change related consequences including:

• vast tracts of low-lying nations, island-states and coastlines around the world being swallowed by rising sea levels;
• Himalayan glaciers melting by the 2030s;
• powerful heat waves recurring across the United States;
• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef being destroyed; and
• agricultural production plummeting world-wide (after a brief boost in Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Scandinavia).

Despite the dire warnings contained in this second report of the IPCC, scientists remain optimistic that humanity will act on climate change.

Oceanographer James McCarthy of Harvard University, one of the key authors of the current report, is one such optimist. “The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can’t be that stupid,” he told Reuters. “Not that I think the projections aren’t that good, but because we can’t be that stupid.”

[via Gaia Foundation WA]

An enormous island of trash twice the size of Texas is floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. The California Coastal Commission in San Francisco said the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has been growing a brisk rate since the 1950s.

Island of trash larger than Texas floats in the Pacific Ocean

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii. Marcus Eriksen, director of research and education at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, said his group has been monitoring the Garbage Patch for 10 years. “With the winds blowing in and the currents in the gyre going circular, it’s the perfect environment for trapping,” Eriksen said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, except do no more harm.”

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco. Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans.” The report found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash. That’s what makes a potentially toxic swamp like the Garbage Patch entirely preventable, Parry said.

“At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option,” Parry said. “It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues. … The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits.” Parry said using canvas bags to cart groceries instead of using plastic bags is a good first step; buying foods that aren’t wrapped in plastics is another.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group. Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean’s surface, they can appear as feeding grounds. “These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs,” Chabot said. “It doesn’t pass, and they literally starve to death.” The Greenpeace report found that at least 267 marine species had suffered from some kind of ingestion or entanglement with marine debris.

[via Gaia Foundation WA; Original Source: The San Francisco Chronicle]

[Sydney Morning Herald] [The New York Times]

Mark Landler
November 8, 2007

AS the price of oil surges above the symbolic milestone of $US100 ($106) a barrel - with Malaysia’s TAPIS crude hitting $US100.54 yesterday - it is creating new winners and losers across the globe. In southern China, high oil prices forced Wang Pui, a truck driver, to wait in line 90 minutes the other day to fill up, just to be told he could pump only 98 litres, as China faced spot shortages of petrol and diesel. When Vladimir Putin was making Russia’s bid to be host of the 2014 Winter Olympics last July, he reached into the country’s deep pockets, bulging with oil profits, and pledged $US12 billion to turn a Black Sea summer resort into a winter-sports paradise. Russia, which was nearly bankrupt a decade ago, won the Games.

The prospect of triple-digit oil prices has redrawn the economic and political map of the world, challenging some old notions of power. Oil-rich nations are enjoying historic gains and opportunities, while major importers - including China and India, home to a third of the world’s population - confront rising economic and social costs. Managing this new order is fast becoming a central problem of global politics. Countries that need oil are clawing at each other to lock up scarce supplies and are willing to deal with any government, no matter how unsavoury, to do it.

In many poor nations with oil, the proceeds are being lost to corruption, depriving these countries of their best hope for development. And oil is fuelling gargantuan investment funds run by foreign governments, which some in the West see as a new threat. “Five months ago, readers would not have recognised SWF as meaning sovereign wealth fund,” said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, referring to the funds set up by Russia, Norway and others to invest their oil profits. “And yet now,” he said, “they’re recognised as one of the fundamental forces of the global economy.”

The basic calculus of expensive oil still holds: exporters enjoy a windfall and importers bear a heavier burden. But some unexpected countries are reaping benefits, as well as costs, from higher prices. Consider Germany. Although it imports virtually all its oil, it has prospered from extensive trade with a booming Russia and the Middle East. German exports to Russia grew 128 per cent from 2001 to 2006; exports to the US grew just 15 per cent.

Throughout Europe, the rise of the euro has acted as a hedge against fluctuations in the dollar-denominated oil market, while the heavy taxation of fuel has made rising oil prices less jarring to motorists. “For Europeans,” said David Fyfe, a senior oil market analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris, “$US100 oil is mostly symbolic.”

Elsewhere, it is much more. For developing countries, oil can be a tool of national transformation, whether the goal is a middle-class standard of living or a utopian society. In Venezuela the President, Hugo Chavez, is pouring oil proceeds into a socialist revolution, creating free health care, free education and cheap food; enabling heavy public spending that has helped fuel four years of economic growth.

The trouble, says Theresa Paiz, a Latin American director for the Fitch ratings agency, is that it’s not really clear how the money is invested. Mr Chavez’s government is steering large chunks of money to development funds and state-owned companies not subject to audits. Transparency International, an organisation that tracks corruption, ranks countries from least to most corrupt, and in its 2007 index Venezuela was at 162 out of 179 countries.

Concerns about corruption are even more pronounced in Nigeria and Angola. Oil-rich Angola is taking in 2½ times the cash it did three years ago. Hotels in the capital, Luanda, are booked months in advance, largely by foreign oil companies. Sales of luxury cars are booming and the International Monetary Fund projects the economy will grow 24 per cent this year, one of the world’s fastest rates. Yet analysts for the Catholic University of Angola’s research centre say two in three Angolans live on $US2 or less a day, the same ratio as in 2002, when the country’s decades-long civil war ended. The Government of Angola is eager to show that oil wealth is benefiting ordinary citizens. It has rebuilt 3800 kilometres of roads, refurbished four airports, and laid 690 kilometres of railroad tracks. But many Angolans take it as a given that oil has enriched public officials most of all. In 2003 a newspaper in Luanda identified the 20 richest people in Angola: 12 were government officials and five were former officials.

Angola’s growing muscle means it is now the biggest oil supplier to China and the sixth biggest to the United States. This is leading it to rethink its global position. It recently joined the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and is limiting its cooperation with the IMF. China has become Angola’s financier, lending Luanda as much as $US12 billion for the country’s reconstruction, in return for guaranteed oil supplies.

The contest among importers to secure access to oil supplies has become fierce. China, a one-time oil exporter that now must import half its oil, is facing politically troublesome shortages of fuel from Shenzhen to Beijing, as Chinese refining companies refuse to supply diesel at unprofitable state-regulated prices. To head off a crisis, China raised retail prices for fuel nearly 10 per cent on November 1.

India is potentially even more vulnerable than China. Although it consumes a third as much oil as China, it imports 70 per cent of its oil. It also has no strategic reserves and demand is growing faster than in any other economy except China’s. Like China, India subsidises fuel, particularly the kerosene used by lower and middle-class families for cooking, a policy that costs it some $US12 billion a year. If oil reaches $US100 a barrel and stays there, analysts say, India will be forced to roll back those subsidies. Sooner or later, prices are going to bite, said Subir Gokarn, Standard & Poors chief economist in Asia. Without an increase in retail prices, officials at the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas warned recently, they might no longer be able to buy adequate supplies of crude for India’s refineries. Unless consumers are paying for what they consume, said M. S. Srinivasan, the petroleum secretary, the ministry is going to be left with a big hole in its pocket. But raising fuel prices could ignite even greater civil unrest in India than in China, where a man was killed recently after jumping a line to buy petrol in the city of Xinyang, in Henan province.

Even in developed countries like Canada, rising oil prices can cause dislocation. The region around the oil sands in northern Alberta is the closest thing the developed world has to a 19th-century boom town. The influx of workers has created a shortage of skilled labour in neighbouring British Columbia, where construction is under way for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

In comparison, the problems faced by other oil producers seem almost benign. For them, the most burning question is what to do with all the money. Norway, the world’s 10th-largest oil producer, wants to guarantee every child a subsidised kindergarten spot by the end of 2008. It has increased spending on kindergarten to $US3.3 billion this year, from $US2.75 billion, partly using money transferred from its $US350 billion State Pension Fund, once known as the Petroleum Fund. Most of the fund is earmarked to pay the future pensions of Norway’s 4.6 million people. The discipline is structural, said Johan Nic Vold, a consultant and former executive at Royal Dutch Shell. Without it, the demands on politicians to use the oil revenue would be almost insatiable.

Dubai has taken a similarly long view. Treating its oil reserves as temporary, it used the proceeds to expand pell-mell into tourism, trade, real estate and construction. The oil sector now accounts for only 5 per cent of Dubai’s gross domestic product.

But perhaps no country has revelled in its oil wealth like Russia. NetJets Europe, the private-jet company, plans to open an office in Russia because the traffic between Moscow and London has become so dense. “Russians have kept London’s high-end real estate market buzzing. There are a lot of Russian buyers around who are prepared to pay a vast amount of money,” said Michael Chetwode of the Home Search Bureau. Back home, Russia’s oil wealth is trickling down. Mr Putin is using it to finance priority national projects, like improved health care and education, and access to affordable housing. Oil may also help Mr Putin cling to power. As he noted recently: “We all remember what state the country was in seven, eight years ago.” (When oil was $US16 a barrel.)

[What this article isn’t talking about are other aspects of oil and wealth: the unsustainability of our dependence on oil, the profit-driven resistance of oil companies and other oil dependent industries to switch to sustainable forms of energy and raw materials, the wars being fought over oil and the suffering they cause to people like those in Iraq, or possible future scenarios arising from a possible more fierce fight over access to oil. It is quite interesting to see how power relationships are redefined or to become aware of which countries care for their citizens, but the real questions are systemic ones -asking them might help guarantee the planet’s survival].

The following post is a slightly edited version of an article published by Between The Lines - on the shift of power from the US Congress to the Executive, intentionally invoked and enforced by the Cheney/Bush administration. It demonstrates how the strengthening of presidential power was a strategy planned from the outset of their reign. The article not only includes some facts on how the pair successfully takes unilateral decisions without parliamentary checks and balances, it also managed to get Supreme Court backing for keeping crucial decision making processes hidden from public scrutiny. Both, the naked grab for power and secrecy around government decision making aren’t limited to the imperial US, we have the same thing happen here in Australia (eg anti-terrorism legislation or growing restrictions to accessing information under the Freedom of Information Act) and it happens most likely elsewhere in so-called Western democracies; the US of course always sets the example that others then all too willingly follow. And like in the case of human rights abuses, the unscrupulous power seizure also lays bare the hypocrisy of western politicians when they point their fingers at guys like Putin; it’s not the degree that counts - it’s the quality of democracy that’s in question.

Interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning,
Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage,
conducted by Scott Harris

Listen in RealAudio
http://www.btlonline.org/savage110907.ram

the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney came to Washington determined to restore the power of the executive branch restrained by Congress in the aftermath of the Nixon era Watergate scandals. After 9/11, the Bush administration used the justifiable concerns of the American people over security, and transformed their fear into a power grab.

Over the course of the last seven years, President Bush has unilaterally renounced international treaties, ordered the detention of suspected terrorists without charge or trial, authorized the abuse and torture of prisoners, approved warrantless wiretapping of American’s phone and email communications, and imprisoned U.S. citizens as enemy combatants. Taken together, these actions make clear President Bush’s intention, and success, in setting precedents for strengthening the power of the Oval Office while undermining constitutionally mandated checks and balances.

In 2007, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of national legal affairs focusing on the Bush administration’s attack on the separation of powers. He has written extensively on President Bush’s more than 750 signing statements on congressionally passed-laws that he claims the unilateral right to re-interpret or disregard. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Savage about his new book titled, “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

CHARLIE SAVAGE: The central agenda of this administration — something that Cheney was using his extraordinary influence over the administration to promote, long before 9/11 -– we think about this I think, superficially as though it’s a war and wartime presidential power always goes up. This goes well beyond National Security issues and it was something that was a consciously articulated agenda from their first day in office.

Part of the thing in my book, “Takeover” is, based on on-the-record interviews with people who were in the room, describe the first meeting of the White House legal team the day after the inauguration in January 2001, at which White House counsel Alberto Gonzales conveys from Bush and Cheney the instructions that they are going to use this time in office to expand the power of the presidency, not just to achieve some particular policy end, but as an end to itself.

Cheney has talked about this a lot. He’d seen this erosion of the authority of the president starting from his baseline, which was the absolute maximum power that a president had ever wielded, which was the Nixon administration. He wanted to put it back; he thought those reforms were a bad idea.

The very first fight we saw on this before 9/11 was the fight over Dick Cheney’s energy task force. There were laws on the books that said that those kinds of task forces had to operate subject to the scrutiny of the public and the Congress. The same laws that had been used to force Hillary Clinton 10 years earlier to reveal what her health care task force was up to. But unlike the Clinton White House, the Bush White House, fought because this was their agenda, all the way to the way to the Supreme Court and they won precedents that gutted those open government laws. And so not only did Cheney succeed in keeping secret whom his task force had met with, but all future presidents will now have the power to have policymaking bodies like that operate totally outside of the public view. Maybe Hillary Clinton will have that power, too, if she gets elected president.

That’s just one of the many ways in which they very successfully, very ably, expanded the fortress of secrecy that surrounds the upper levels of the executive branch. Their secrecy push in turn, is just one of the many different tactics that they very successfully employed to expand executive power generally –- not just for themselves, but for all future presidents.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There has been a lot of discussion since the Sept. 11 attacks that we have to balance our liberty with our security and therefore, these presidential powers are seen by some –- not all of the population — as a necessary evil to protect the country. I wonder how you respond to this large-scale power grab on the part of President Bush and what, if anything, it has to do with keeping this nation more secure?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Bush could have gone to the Congress in October of 2001 after 9/11 and said, “give me all these powers, put them in the Patriot Act, I need them,” and they would have fallen all over themselves to rubberstamp everything he asked for. But the very act of doing that would have conceded that what Congress says matters, and that means that down the road, if Congress decides things have gone too far, Congress could change the law, and the president wouldn’t be able to do that any more. That’s one of the reasons they were very interested in doing it unilaterally, just to show that, to establish as an historical fact that presidents set their own rules, especially when it comes to matters of national security, and that no statute passed by Congress and signed by some previous president — or this president for that matter, when you think about the McCain torture ban (Senate legislation) –- or no treaty negotiated by some previous president, signed by some previous president, and ratified by the Senate –- like the Convention Against Torture, which was a Reagan administration product –- can bind the hands of commander-in-chief if he doesn’t want to obey it.

And so, this is coming up in the context of “oh, the president needs power to protect us from terrorists.” It almost doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not, in any of these specific powers because it’s sort of above the policy question, it’s above the politics. It’s a question of who decides? If these powers are necessary, shouldn’t the Congress, won’t the Congress just sign off on them if they truly are? Congress is made up of the elected representatives of the people – that’s what democracy is all about.

And if Congress is un-persuaded, then, maybe those aren’t such a good idea. Or maybe the people will vote Congress out next time, and put in people that will vote the right way. But, the point is American-style democracy is separation of powers. It’s the president not being able to set his own rules or her own rules, whoever that president happens to be at any given moment. It’s the president having to operate within the rules that Congress sets. It’s the checks and balances that prevents the concentration of government power in any one officials’ hands.

This goes back to the founders’ insight that human beings are flawed, that it’s inevitable because people are flawed, that from time to time, we’ll have misguided leaders, bad leaders, foolish leaders, incompetent leaders. You know, you want to have a system where in between elections you still have some constraint and some limit on what the government can do. That is American-style democracy and that is what has been eroding so much over the last seven years so dramatically.

For more information on the book or to read articles by Charlie Savage, visit his website at: www.charliesavage.com

==========================
Scott Harris is executive producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 40 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending Nov. 9, 2007. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Anna Manzo and Scott Harris.

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