All in the Head

The Plot to Rig the 2008 US Election

Published on Thursday, November 29, 2007 by The Independent/UK

by Johann Hari

In the long, hot autumn of 2000, the world was shocked by the contempt for democracy shown by the Republican Party. They knew their man had lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. They knew the majority of voters in Florida itself had pulled a lever for Gore. But they fought - amid the confetti of hanging chads - to stop the state’s votes being counted, and to ensure that the Supreme Court imposed George W Bush.

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election - and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we have to roam back to the 18th century, and learn about the odd anachronistic leftover they are trying to use now to thwart democracy. Back then, America’s founding fathers decided not to introduce a system where US presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington, DC, and the winner being the man with the most. Instead, they chose a complex system called the electoral college. This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a president. Instead, they technically vote for 539 state-wide “electors”, who then gather six weeks after the election to pick the President.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of electoral college votes. They also believed that, in a country that was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn’t know much about out-of-state figures, and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It is the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions there has been such a big gap between the national popular vote and the state-by-state electoral college votes that the guy with fewer real supporters in the country got to be President. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and - most tragically for the world - in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the electoral college among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favour. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its electoral college votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 per cent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 per cent of California’s electoral votes; if 51 per cent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 per cent of Texas’ electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this - but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California’s electoral college votes - and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a state-wide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California’s electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big state-wide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state’s 54 electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this was being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California’s forgotten Republicans would be represented in the electoral college, and so would Texas’s forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

You can see this partisan agenda if you look at who is behind the campaign. It was set up by Charles “Chep” Hurth III - a Republican donor to Rudy Giuliani. It was drafted by Tom Hiltachk - a Republican attorney. Its signature drive was co-ordinated by Kevin Eckery - a Republican consultant. Its funds were provided by Paul Singer - a Republican billionaire and one of Rudy Giuliani’s biggest donors. Its chief fundraiser is Anne Dunsmore - who went there straight from her post as national deputy campaign manager for Giuliani. Seeing a pattern yet?

Indeed, this bias is so blatant that the state Republican Party itself has now chipped in $80,000 (£39,000) to the campaign. Of course, the campaign is not marketing itself as a Republican rigging escapade. They insist: “This initiative is not about helping any one party or candidate. It simply ensures that every vote cast in our state counts in the electoral college.” But the best they can do to provide “balance” is to point to the fact that one of the men who has given them $20,000, Edward Allred, once also gave $2,300 to the campaign of Democratic contender Bill Richardson. Wow.

There is a real risk they could succeed. They are close to getting the number of signatures they need to secure a referendum in June. (The Los Angeles Downtown News claims to have witnessed signature-gatherers offering homeless people food in return for signing.) The turnout for the referendum is expected to be extremely low, because the state-wide primaries usually held on that date have been moved forward to February. So the Republicans only have to activate a small part of their base to push it through - and they have the cash to do it. California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day.

The Democrats in response shouldn’t be trapped in the conservative position of defending the indefensible electoral college. There is an alternative way to reform it - one that would be fair to all parties. It used to be thought it was all but impossible to ditch the system because it would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three-quarters of state legislatures.

But then constitutional scholars realised there was another way. The Constitution only requires that each state must “appoint” its presidential electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct”. That leaves a glimmer of hope. The Campaign for a National Popular Vote is campaigning for every state simply to commit its delegates to the electoral college to vote 100 per cent for the candidate who wins the popular vote. This would render the electoral college a forgotten technicality. It’s very revealing that when the California state senate voted to introduce this genuinely democratic system last year, the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it, with the support of his party.

It shows that the Republicans’ rhetoric of wanting “fairness” and “equal representation” in California is a honeyed lie. They want a system that retains their power, even if it subverts the will of the people. It risks becoming Florida Part II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the polling booth… Fasten your seatbelts - it’s going to be a bumpy election.

–j.hari@ independent.co.uk

For 2 in New York

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead...

Michelangelo, Study for an Annunciation, 1547

William Blake's Birthday 11-28-07

The Crusades

It was on this day in 1095 that Pope Urban II, while on a speaking tour in France, called for the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. There was no imminent threat. Muslims had occupied Jerusalem for hundreds of years. But Urban II had noticed that Europe was becoming an increasingly violent place, with low-level knights killing each other over their land rights, and he thought that he could bring peace to the Christian world by directing all that violence against an outside enemy. So he made up stories of how Turks in Jerusalem were torturing and killing Christians, and anyone who was willing to join the fight against them would go to heaven.

About 100,000 men from France, Germany, and Italy answered the call, formed into several large groups, and marched across Asia Minor to the Middle East. Nearly half of them died from exhaustion and sickness before they ever reached their destination. They began sacking cities along the way, and they fought among each other for the spoils of each battle. When they reached the trading city of Antioch, they killed almost everyone, including the Christians who lived there. By the time they got to Jerusalem, it had recently fallen into the hands of Egyptians, who were friendly with the Vatican. But the crusaders attacked anyway, killing every Muslim they could find. The Jews in the city gathered in the temple, and the crusaders set it on fire.

Pope Urban II died two weeks later, never hearing the news. But the crusading would go on for the next 200 years. In the fourth and last Crusade, in 1202, the crusaders never even made it to Jerusalem, but got sidetracked and wound up destroying Constantinople, which was at the time the last great city left over from the Roman Empire.

-The Writer's Almanac, 11-27-07

Charles Schulz

It's the birthday of cartoonist Charles Schulz, (books by this author) born in St. Paul (1922), who created "Peanuts" and Charlie Brown, who never gets to kick the football, always gets his kite stuck in the tree, and never wins the love of The Little Red-Haired Girl. Schulz loved comics from an early age. His father bought six different newspapers every weekend and they would sit and read all the comics together. Schultz started drawing his own cartoons, but he got a C-plus in a correspondence art course, and his sketches were rejected by the staff of his high school yearbook. He couldn't sell any cartoons to the major magazines, and he was turned down as an animator for Disney because he had no experience. And then, he got drafted to fight in World War II when his mother was dying of cervical cancer. One of the last things she said to him was that if the family ever bought another dog, they should name it Snoopy.

When Schulz got back from the war, he began drawing a comic strip about children called "Li'l Folks," and when he sold it to a national syndicate they changed the name to "Peanuts." The first Peanuts strip appeared on October 2, 1950, and it showed a boy and a girl sitting on a curb, with Charlie Brown approaching from a distance. The boy says, "Here comes ol' Charlie Brown! Good ol' Charlie Brown. ... Yes, Sir." And then once Charlie Brown has passed by, the boy says, "How I hate him!"

In addition to Charlie Brown, "Peanuts" introduced the world to Linus, Schroeder, Lucy, Violet, and Snoopy, the dog. It became the most popular comic strip of all time, appearing in 2,600 newspapers and 75 countries, read by more than 335 million people everyday. Charles Schulz did all the drawing, inking, and lettering of his cartoons by himself, with no staff assistants. And he took almost no breaks in 50 years, even when his hand began to shake after he had heart surgery. He only decided to retire after he developed Parkinson's disease and was diagnosed with cancer. He died on February 12, 2000, the day before his last strip was set to run.

Charles Schulz said, "Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning. Winning is great, but it isn't funny."

-The Writer's Almanac, 11-26-07

Published on Monday, November 26, 2007 by Truthdig.com

America in the Time of Empire

by Chris Hedges

All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades, as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible.

Dying empires cling until the very end to the outward trappings of power. They mask their weakness behind a costly and technologically advanced military. They pursue increasingly unrealistic imperial ambitions. They stifle dissent with efficient and often ruthless mechanisms of control. They lose the capacity for empathy, which allows them to see themselves through the eyes of others, to create a world of accommodation rather than strife. The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.

The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.

Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.

An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.

“There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers’ rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country’s managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.

Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has seen a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its workforce employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the zenith of the American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20 percent. Today it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer benefits, health care and most important enough money to provide hope for the future, no longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from Flint, Mich., to Youngstown, Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a growing internal collapse.

The United States has gone from being the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country was, for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received in investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation’s infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in Minnesota, collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the world combined, while Social Security and Medicare entitlements are jeopardized because of huge deficits. Money is available for war, but not for the simple necessities of daily life.

Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.

The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.

It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.

It signals the twilight of our empire.

Michelangelo, Satyr's Head, date unknown

Basquiat: Early Moses

Acrylic & Oil stick on canvas: 1983

Voltaire's Birthday: 11-21-07

It's the birthday of the man who helped spark the Enlightenment in France, writing under the name Voltaire, born Francois-Marie Arouet in Paris (1694). He was already a well-known playwright and poet when, in 1725, he got into an argument with a nobleman. A few days later, that nobleman hired a group of men to surround Voltaire in the street and beat him with cudgels. The nobleman stood by and watched. Voltaire was outraged when none of his political friends came to his defense after the incident. He had thought that his stature as a poet made him the equal of the aristocrats he spent all his time with, but apparently he was still a second-class citizen. He began publicizing the incident and calling for justice, and he was thrown into the prison at the Bastille. He was released only on the condition that he leave France, and so he went to England. He spent most of the rest of his life in exile, and his writings built up support in Europe for what we now think of as basic human rights.

Voltaire said, "Let us read and let us dance — two amusements that will never do any harm to the world."

-The Writer's Almanac

From the Writer's Almanac, 11-20-07

Nadine Gordimer said, "The ideal way to write is as if oneself and one's readers were already dead."

It's the birthday of the novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, South Africa (1923), who grew up in a middle-class white community near a gold mine where all the black workers were forced to live in a windowless barracks, guarded by police. She never thought about who those miners were or what their lives were like until the day she read Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, and she began to see the similarities between the meat packers in the book and the miners in her town.

Gordimer eventually moved to the racially mixed bohemian community in Johannesburg and began writing short stories, published in collections such as Face to Face (1949) and The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952). She watched as many of her black friends were put under surveillance and arrested for treason. She was one of the few white novelists of her generation who did not go into exile. Instead, she began to write about the South African political resistance in a series of novels, including The Late Bourgeois World (1966), The Guest of Honor (1970), and The Conservationist (1974), which won the Booker Prize. She was attacked by South Africa's government, and her books were banned for years at time. And then in 1991, a year after Nelson Mandela was released from his 28 years of imprisonment, Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Birthday also of Don DeLillo, who said, "My own personal preference is for fiction that is steeped in history, that takes account of ways in which our perceptions are being changed by events around us. Global events that may alter how we live in the smallest ways." His most recent novel is Falling Man (2007), about the September 11th attacks.

Don DeLillo worked at an advertising agency for three years after college, and then one day decided to quit. He later said, "I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore... what I wanted was... [to] look at the world.... I became a writer by living in New York and seeing and hearing and feeling all the great, amazing and dangerous things the city endlessly assembles."

The Supper at Emmaus: Caravaggio

Drought

Published on Friday, November 16, 2007 by TomDispatch.com

How Dry We Are
A Question No One Wants to Raise About Drought

by Tom Engelhardt

Georgia’s on my mind. Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a city in trouble in a state in trouble in a region in trouble. Water trouble. Trouble big enough that the state government’s moving fast. Just this week, backed up by a choir singing “Amazing Grace,” accompanied by three protestant ministers, and 20 demonstrators from the Atlanta Freethought Society, Georgia’s Baptist Governor Sonny Perdue led a crowd of hundreds in prayers for rain. “We’ve come together here,” he said, “simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm.” It seems, however, that the Almighty — He “who can and will make a difference” — was otherwise occupied and the regional drought continued to threaten Atlanta, a metropolis of 5 million people (and growing fast), with the possibility that it might run out of water in as little as 80 days or as much as a year, if the rains don’t come.

Here’s a little summary of the situation today:

Water rationing has hit the capital. Car washing and lawn watering are prohibited within city limits. Harvests in the region have dropped by 15-30%. By the end of summer, local reservoirs and dams were holding 5% of their capacity.

Oops, that’s not Atlanta, or even the southeastern U.S. That’s Ankara, Turkey, hit by a fierce drought and high temperatures that also have had southern and southwestern Europe in their grip.

Sorry, let’s try that again. Imagine this scenario:

Over the last decade, 15-20% decreases in precipitation have been recorded. These water losses have been accompanied by record temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have been growing rapidly. A fierce drought has settled in — of the hundred-year variety. Lawns can be watered but just for a few hours a day (and only by bucket); four-minute showers are the max allowed. Car washes are gone, though you can clean absolutely essential car windows and mirrors by hand.

Sound familiar? As it happens, that’s not the American southeast either; that’s a description of what’s come to be called “The Big Dry” — the unprecedented drought that has swept huge parts of Australia, the worst in at least a century on an already notoriously dry continent, but also part of the world’s breadbasket, where crops are now failing regularly and farms closing down.

In fact, on my way along the parched path toward Atlanta, Georgia, I found myself taking any number of drought-stricken detours. There’s Moldova. (If you’re like me, odds are you don’t even know where that small, former Soviet republic falls on a map.) Like much of southern Europe, it experienced baking temperatures this summer, exceptionally low precipitation, sometimes far less than 50% of expected rainfall, failing crops and farms, and spreading wildfires. (The same was true, to one degree or another, of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, and — with its 100-year record scorching of Biblical proportions — Greece which lost 10% of its forest cover in a month-long fiery apocalypse, leaving “large tracts of countryside…. at risk of depopulation.”)

Or how about Morocco, across the Mediterranean, which experienced 50% less rainfall than normal? Or the Canary Islands, those Spanish vacation spots in the Atlantic Ocean known to millions of visitors for their year-around mild climate which, this summer, morphed into 104 degree days, strong winds, and fierce wildfires. Eighty-six thousand acres were burnt to a crisp, engulfing some of the islands in flames and smoke that drove out thousands of tourists?

Or what about Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley, where, thousands of years ago, corn was first domesticated as an agricultural crop. Even today, asking for “un Tehuacán” in a restaurant in Mexico still means getting the best bottled mineral water in the country. Unfortunately, the area hasn’t had a good rain since 2003, and the ensuing drought conditions have made subsistence farming next to impossible, sending desperate locals northwards and across the border as illegal immigrants — some into southern California, itself just swept by monstrous Santa Ana-driven wildfires, fanned by prolonged drought conditions and fed tinder by new communities built deep into the wild lands where the fires gestate. And Tehuacán is but one disaster zone in a growing Mexican catastrophe. As Mike Davis has written, “Abandoned ranchitos and near-ghost towns throughout Coahuila, Chihuahua and Sonora testify to the relentless succession of dry years — beginning in the 1980s but assuming truly catastrophic intensity in the late 1990s — that has pushed hundreds of thousands of poor rural people toward the sweatshops of Ciudad Juárez and the barrios of Los Angeles.”

According to the How Dry I Am Chart of “livability expert” Bert Sperling, four cities in Southern California, not parched Atlanta, top the national drought ratings: Los Angeles, San Diego, Oxnard, and Riverside. In addition, Pasadena has had the dubious honor, through September, of experiencing its driest year in history.

Resource Wars in the Homeland

“Resource wars” are things that happen elsewhere. We don’t usually think of our country as water poor or imagine that “resource wars” might be applied as a description to various state and local governments in the southwest, southeast, or upper Midwest now fighting tooth and nail for previously shared water. And yet, “war” may not be a bad metaphor for what’s on the horizon. According to the National Climate Data Center, federal officials have declared 43% of the contiguous U.S. to be in “moderate to extreme drought.” Already, Sonny Perdue of Georgia is embroiled in an ever more bitter conflict — a “water war,” as the headlines say — with the governors of Florida and Alabama, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, over the flow of water into and out of the Atlanta area.

He’s hardly alone. After all, the Southwest is in the grips of what, according to Davis, some climatologists are terming a “‘mega-drought,’ even the ‘worst in 500 years.’” More shockingly, he writes, such conditions may actually represent the region’s new “normal weather.” The upper Midwest is also in rainfall-shortage mode, with water levels at all the Great Lakes dropping unnervingly. The water level of Lake Superior, for instance, has fallen to the “lowest point on record for this time of year.” (Notice, by the way, how many “records” are being set nationally and globally in these drought years; how many places are already beginning to push beyond history, which means beyond any reference point we have.)

And then there’s the southeast, 26% of which, according to the National Weather Service, is in a state of “exceptional” drought, its most extreme category, and 78% of which is “drought-affected.” We’re talking here about a region normally considered rich in water resources setting a bevy of records for dryness. It has been the driest year on record for North Carolina and Tennessee, for instance, while 18 months of blue skies have led Georgia to break every historical record, whether measured by “the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, [or] inches of rain.”

Atlanta is hardly the only city or town in the region with a dwindling water supply. According to David Bracken of Raleigh’s News & Observer, “17 North Carolina water systems, including Raleigh and Durham, have 100 or fewer days of water supply remaining before they reach the dregs.” Rock Spring, South Carolina, “has been without water for a month. Farmers are hauling water by pickup truck to keep their cattle alive.” The same is true for the tiny town of Orme, Tennessee, where the mayor turns on the water for only three hours a day.

And then, there’s Atlanta, its metropolitan area “watered” mainly by a 1950s man-made reservoir, Lake Lanier, which, in dramatic photos, is turning into baked mud. Already with a population of five million and known for its uncontrolled growth (as well as lack of water planning), the city is expected to house another two million inhabitants by 2030. And yet, depending on which article you read, Atlanta will essentially run out of water by New Year’s eve, in 80 days, in 120 days, or, according to the Army Corps of Engineers — which seems to find this reassuring — in 375 days, if the drought continues (as it may well do).

Okay, so let’s try again:

Across the region, fountains sit “bone dry”; in small towns, “full-soak” baptisms have been stopped; car washes and laundromats are cutting hours or shutting down. Golf courses have resorted to watering only tees and greens. Campfires, stoves, and grills are banned in some national parks. The boats have left Lake Lanier and the metal detectors have arrived.

This is the verdant southeastern United States, which, thanks in part to a developing La Nina effect in the Pacific Ocean, now faces the likelihood of a drier than ever winter. And, to put this in context, keep in mind that 2007 “to date has been the warmest on record for land [and]… the seventh warmest year so far over the oceans, working out to the fourth warmest overall worldwide.” Oh, and up in the Arctic sea, the ice pack reached its lowest level this September since satellite measurements were begun in 1979.

And Then?

And then, there’s that question which has been nagging at me ever since this story first caught my attention in early October as it headed out of the regional press and slowly made its way toward the top of the nightly TV news and the front-pages of national newspapers; it’s the question I’ve been waiting patiently for some environmental reporter(s) somewhere in the mainstream media to address; the question that seems to me so obvious I find it hard to believe everyone isn’t thinking about it; the one you would automatically want to have answered — or at least gnawed on by thoughtful, expert reporters and knowledgeable pundits. Every day for the last month or more I’ve waited, as each piece on Atlanta ends at more or less the same point — with the dire possibility that the city’s water will soon be gone — as though hitting a brick wall.

Not that there hasn’t been some fine reportage — on the extremity of the situation, the overbuilding and overpopulating of the metropolitan region, the utter heedlessness that went with it, and the resource wars that have since engulfed it. Still, I’ve Googled around, read scores of pieces on the subject, and they all — even the one whose first paragraph asked, “What if Atlanta’s faucets really do go dry?” — seem to end just where my question begins. It’s as if, in each piece, the reporter had reached the edge of some precipice down which no one cares to look, lest we all go over.

Based on the record of the last seven years, we can take it for granted that the Bush administration hasn’t the slightest desire to glance down; that no one in FEMA who matters has given the situation the thought it deserves; and that, on this subject, as on so many others, top administration officials are just hoping to make it to January 2009 without too many more scar marks. But, if not the federal government, shouldn’t somebody be asking? Shouldn’t somebody check out what’s actually down there?

So let me ask it this way: And then?

And then what exactly can we expect? If the southeastern drought is already off the charts in Georgia, then, whether it’s 80 days or 800 days, isn’t there a possibility that Atlanta may one day in the not-so-distant future be without water? And what then?

Okay, they’re trucking water into waterless Orme, Tennessee, but the town’s mayor, Tony Reames, put the matter well, worrying about Atlanta. “We can survive. We’re 145 people but you’ve got 4.5 million there. What are they going to do?”

What indeed? Has water ever been trucked in to so many people before? And what about industry including, in the case of Atlanta, Coca Cola, which is, after all, a business based on water? What about restaurants that need to wash their plates or doctors in hospitals who need to wash their hands?

Let’s face it, with water, you’re down to the basics. And if, as some say, we’ve passed the point not of “peak oil,” but of “peak water” (and cheap water) on significant parts of the planet… well, what then?

I mean, I’m hardly an expert on this, but what exactly are we talking about here? Someday in the reasonably near future could Atlanta, or Phoenix, which in winter 2005-2006, went 143 days without a bit of rain, or Las Vegas become a Katrina minus the storm? Are we talking here about a new trail of tears? What exactly would happen to the poor of Atlanta? To Atlanta itself?

Certainly, you’ve seen the articles about what global warming might do in the future to fragile or low-lying areas of the world. Such pieces usually mention the possibility of enormous migrations of the poor and desperate. But we don’t usually think about that in the “homeland.” Maybe we should.

Or maybe, for all I know, if the drought continues, parts of the region will burn to a frizzle first, à la parts of southern California, before they can even experience the complete loss of water? Will we have hundred-year fire records in the South, without a Santa Ana wind in sight? And what then?
Mass Migrations?

Okay, excuse a terrible, even tasteless, sports analogy, but think of this as a major bowl game, and they’ve sent one of the water boys — me — to man the press booth. I mean, please. Why am I the one asking this? Where’s the media’s first team?

In my own admittedly limited search of the mainstream, I found only one vivid, thoughtful recent piece on this subject: “The Future Is Drying Up,” by Jon Gertner, written for the New York Times Magazine. It focused on the southwestern drought and began to explore some of the “and thens,” as in this brief passage on Colorado in which Gertner quotes Roger Pulwarty, a “highly regarded climatologist” at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

“The worst outcome…. would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime.”

Mass migrations, exfiltrations…. Stop a sec and take in that possibility and what exactly it might mean. After all, we do have some small idea, having, in recent years, lost one American city, New Orleans, at least temporarily.

Or consider another “and then” prediction: What if the prolonged drought in the southwest turns out, as Mike Davis wrote in the Nation magazine, to be “on the scale of the medieval catastrophes that contributed to the notorious collapse of the complex Anasazi societies at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde during the twelfth century”?

What if, indeed.

I’m not simply being apocalyptic here. I’m just asking. It’s not even that I expect answers. I’d just like to see a crew of folks with the necessary skills explore the “and then” question for the rest of us. Try to connect a few dots, or tell us if they don’t connect, or just explain where the dots really are.

As the World Burns

Okay, since I’m griping on the subject, let me toss in another complaint. As this piece has indicated, the southeastern drought, unlike the famed cheese of childhood song, does not exactly stand alone. Such conditions, often involving record or near record temperatures, and record or near record wildfires, can be observed at numerous places across the planet. So why is it that, except at relatively obscure websites, you can hardly find a mainstream piece that mentions more than one drought at a time?

An honorable exception would be a recent Seattle Times column by Neal Peirce that brought together the southwestern and southeastern droughts, as well as the Western “flame zone,” where “mega-fires” are increasingly the norm, in the context of global warming, in order to consider our seemingly willful “myopia about the future.”

But you’d be hard-pressed to find many pieces in our major newspapers (or on the TV news) that put all (or even a number) of the extreme drought spots on the global map together in order to ask a simple question (even if its answer may prove complex indeed): Do they have anything in common? And if so, what? And if so, what then?

To find even tentative answers to such questions you have to leave the mainstream. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, for example, interviewed paleontologist and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery recently on the topic of a “world on fire.” Flannery offered the following observation:

“It’s not just the Southeast of the United States. Europe has had its great droughts and water shortages. Australia is in the grip of a drought that’s almost unbelievable in its ferocity. Again, this is a global picture. We’re just getting much less usable water than we did a decade or two or three decades ago. It’s a sort of thing again that the climate models are predicting. In terms of the floods, again we see the same thing. You know, a warmer atmosphere is just a more energetic atmosphere. So if you ask me about a single flood event or a single fire event, it’s really hard to make the connection, but take the bigger picture and you can see very clearly what’s happening.”

I know answers to the “and then” question are not easy or necessarily simple. But if drought — or call it “desertification” — becomes more widespread, more common in heavily populated parts of the globe already bursting at the seams (and with more people arriving daily), if whole regions no longer have the necessary water, how many trails of tears, how many of those mass migrations or civilizational collapses are possible? How much burning and suffering and misery are we likely to experience? And what then?

These are questions I can’t answer; that the Bush administration is guaranteed to be desperately unwilling and unprepared to face; and that, as yet, the media has largely refused to consider in a serious way. And if the media can’t face this and begin to connect some dots, why shouldn’t Americans be in denial, too?

It’s not that no one is thinking about, or doing work on, drought. I know that scientists have been asking the “and then” questions (or perhaps far more relevant ones that I can’t even formulate); that somewhere people have been exploring, studying, writing about them. But how am I to find out?

Of course, all of us can wander the Internet; we can visit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has just set up a new website to help encourage drought coverage; we can drop in at blogs like RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress.org, which make a habit of keeping up with, or ahead of, such stories; or even, for instance, the Georgia Drought website of the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; or we can keep an eye on a new organization of journalists (well covered recently on the NPR show “On the Media”), Circle of Blue, who are planning to concentrate on water issues. But, believe me, even when you get to some of these sites, you may find yourself in an unknown landscape with no obvious water holes in view and no guides to lead you there.

In the meantime, there may be no trail of tears out of Atlanta; there may even be rain in the city’s near future for all any of us know; but it’s clear enough that, globally and possibly nationally, tragedy awaits. It’s time to call in the first team to ask some questions.

Honestly, I don’t demand answers. Just a little investigation, some thought, and a glimpse or two over that precipice as the world turns…. and bakes and burns.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

Oceans Go Acidic

Published on Sunday, November 18, 2007 by The Independent/UK

A World Dying, but Can We Unite to Save It?
Pollution in the seas is now speeding global warming, says a devastating new climate report.

by Geoffrey Lean in Valencia

Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process — thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years — is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.

The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.

Drawn up by more than 2,500 of the world’s top scientists and their governments, and agreed last week by representatives of all its national governments, the report also predicts that nearly a third of the world’s species could be driven to extinction as the world warms up, and that harvests will be cut dramatically across the world.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who attended the launch of the report in this ancient Spanish city, told The Independent on Sunday that he found the “quickening pace” of global warming “very frightening”.

And, with unusual outspokenness for a UN leader, he said he “looked forward” to both the United States and China — the world’s two biggest polluters — “playing a more constructive role” in vital new negotiations on tackling climate change that open in Indonesia next month.

The new IPCC report, which is designed to give impetus to the negotiations, highlights the little-known acidification of the oceans, first reported in this newspaper more than three years ago. It concludes that emissions of carbon dioxide — the main cause of global warming — have already increased the acidity of ocean surface water by 30 per cent, and threaten to treble it by the end of the century.

Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), said yesterday: “The report has put a spotlight on a threat to the marine environment that the world has hardly yet realized. The threat is immense as it can fundamentally alter the life of the seas, reducing the productivity of the oceans, while reinforcing global warming.”

Scientists have found that the seas have already absorbed about half of all the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity since the start of the industrial revolution, a staggering 500 billion tons of it. This has so far helped slow global warming — which would have accelerated even faster if all this pollution had stayed in the atmosphere, already causing catastrophe — but at an increasingly severe cost.

The gas dissolves in the oceans to make dilute carbonic acid, which is increasingly souring the naturally alkali seawater. This, in turn, mops up calcium carbonate, a substance normally plentiful in the seas, which corals use to build their reefs, and marine creatures use to make the protective shells they need to survive. These include many of the plankton that form the base of the food chain on which all fish and other marine animals depend.

As the waters are growing more acid this process is decreasing, with incalculable consequences for the life of the seas, and for the fisheries on which a billion of the world’s people depend for protein. Every single species that uses calcium in this way, that has so far been studied, has been found to be affected. And the seas are most acid near the surface, where most of their life is concentrated.

A report by the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific body, concludes that, as a result, of the pollution, the world’s oceans are probably now more acidic that they have ever been in “hundreds of millennia”, and that even if emissions stopped now, the waters would take “tens of thousands of years to return to normal”.

Professor Ulf Reibesell of the Leibnitz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany’s leading expert on the process, concludes in an issue of UNEP’s magazine Our Planet, to be published next month, that, if it continues to the levels predicted by yesterday’s report for the end of the century, the seas will reach a condition unprecedented in the last 20 million years.

He recalls how something similar happened when a comet hit Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, blasting massive amounts of calcium sulphate into the atmosphere to form sulphuric acid, which in turn caused the extinction of corals and virtually all shell-building species.

“Two million years went by before corals reappeared in the fossil record,” he says, adding that it took “a further 20 million years” before the diversity of species that use calcium returned to its former levels.

Scientists add that, as the seas become more acidic, they will be less able to absorb carbon dioxide, causing more of it to stay in the atmosphere to speed up global warming. Research is already uncovering some signs that the oceans’ ability to mop up the gas is diminishing. Environmentalists point out that the increasing acidification of the oceans would in itself provide ample reason to curb emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and felling forests even if the dwindling band of skeptics were right and the gas was not warming up the planet.

But yesterday’s cautiously worded report, which was agreed by the US government, also provides ample evidence that climate change is well under way, and is accelerating. It concludes that the warming is now “unequivocal” and “evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level”.

It adds: “Eleven of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature”. It goes on: “Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.”

If humanity were not affecting the climate, it concludes, declines in the sun’s activity and increased eruptions from volcanoes - which throw huge amounts of dust in the air that screen out sunlight - would have been likely to “have produced cooling” of the planet.

But emissions of all the “greenhouse gas” pollutants that cause global warming increased 70 per cent between 1970 and 2004 alone, it reports, adding that levels of carbon dioxide, the most important one, in the atmosphere now “exceed by far” anything that the Earth has experienced in the past 650,000 years. And it goes on to conclude that “continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century.”

It makes a host of specific predictions for every continent and warns that “impacts” could be “abrupt” or “irreversible”. One example of an irreversible impact is an expected extinction of between 20 and 30 per cent of all the world’s species of animals and plants even at relatively moderate levels of warming. If the climate heats further, it adds, extinctions could rise to 40 to 70 per cent of species.

The IPCC scientists and governments say that they are also more concerned about “increases in droughts, heatwaves and floods” as the climate warms. They believe that the damage to the world’s economy would be even greater than they had previously predicted, and were even more certain that the poor and elderly in both rich and poor countries would suffer most.

Yet the report also concludes that, while some climate change is now inevitable, its worst effects could be avoided with straightforward measures at little cost if only governments would take action. It says that the job can be done by using “technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialized in coming decades”. It could be done at a cost of slowing global growth by only a tenth of a percentage point a year, and might even increase it.

The missing element, virtually everyone agrees, is political will from governments. Next month they meet in Bali to start negotiations on a new treaty to replace the current provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, which run out in 2012.

The timetable is desperately tight; time lags in the process of getting a new treaty ratified by the world’s governments means that it will have to be agreed by the end of 2009 — and there is no sign of anything on the horizon.

Yet the treaty will have to go far beyond the protocol in order to put the whole world on track rapidly to reduce emissions if the world is to achieve the pollution cuts that the scientists say will be needed to avoid catastrophe. And it will have to ensure rapid action. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman, yesterday repeated a consensus among experts that the world as a whole will have to start radical reductions within eight years if there is to be any hope of preventing dangerous climate change.

Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace International said: “It is clear from this report that we are gambling with the future of the planet — and the stakes are high. This document sets out a compelling case for early action on climate change.”

The UN Secretary-General, agreed. The effects of climate change have become “so severe and so sweeping” he said “that only urgent, global action will do. There is no time to waste.”

Mr Steiner called the report “the most essential reading for every person on the planet who cares about the future”. He added: “The hard science has been distilled along with evidence of the social and economic consequences of global warming, but also the economic rationale and opportunities for action now. While the science will continue to evolve and be refined, we now have the compelling blueprint for action and, in many ways, the price tag for failure — from increasing acidification of the oceans to the likely extinction of economically important biodiversity.”

And Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — the parent treaty to the Kyoto Protocol — told the IoS that reaching agreement was “incredibly urgent”.

He pointed out that the world would replace 40 per cent of its power generation capacity in the next five to 10 years and that China is already building one or two coal- fired power stations a week. Those installations would last for decades - and the nations that built them would be reluctant to demolish them any earlier - so that unless the world rapidly changed direction it would be all the more difficult to avoid climate change running out of control.

Sticking point: It is crucial to get the US and China on board

Getting agreement on a new treaty to tackle climate change hangs on resolving an “after you, Claude” impasse between the United States and China, the two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming.

China insists - with other key developing countries like India and South Africa — that the United States must move first to clean up. It points out that, because of the disparity in populations, every American is responsible for emitting much more of the gas than each Chinese. But the US refuses to join any new treaty unless China also accepts restrictions.

There is hope of breaking the logjam. Chinese leaders know their country would be severely affected by global warming, and have done more than is generally realized to tackle it, not least by rapidly expanding renewable energy. The US will have a new leader by the time negotiations are completed, and even President Bush is backtracking, at least rhetorically.

Yesterday UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said he was optimistic. “I look forward,” he said, with a hint of steel, “to seeing the United States and China playing a more constructive role in the coming negotiations.”

Arctic

Greenland ice sheet will virtually completely disappear, raising sea levels by over 30 feet, submerging coastal cities, entire island nations and vast areas of low-lying countries like Bangladesh

Latin America

The Amazon rainforest will become dry savannah as rising temperatures and falling water levels kill the trees, stoke forest fires and kill off wildlife

North America

California and the grain-producing Midwest will dry out as snows in the Rockies decrease, depriving these areas of summer water

Australia

The Great Barrier Reef will die. Species loss will occur by 2020 as corals fail to adapt to warmer waters. On land, drought will reduce harvests

Europe

Winter sports suffer as less snow falls in the Alps and other mountains; up to three-fifths of wildlife dies out. Drought in Mediterranean area hits tourism

Africa

Harvests could be cut by up to half in some countries by 2020, greatly increasing the threat of famine. Between 75 million and 250 million people are expected to be short of water within the next 30 years

Here Come the Thought Police

Published on Monday, November 19, 2007 by The Baltimore Sun

Here Come the Thought Police

by Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson

With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman’s “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain.

Not since the “Patriot Act” of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The historian Henry Steele Commager, denouncing President John Adams’ suppression of free speech in the 1790s, argued that the Bill of Rights was not written to protect government from dissenters but to provide a legal means for citizens to oppose a government they didn’t trust. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence not only proclaimed the right to dissent but declared it a people’s duty, under certain conditions, to alter or abolish their government.

In that vein, diverse groups vigorously oppose Ms. Harman’s effort to stifle dissent. Unfortunately, the mainstream press and leading presidential candidates remain silent.

Ms. Harman, a California Democrat, thinks it likely that the United States will face a native brand of terrorism in the immediate future and offers a plan to deal with ideologically based violence.

But her plan is a greater danger to us than the threats she fears. Her bill tramples constitutional rights by creating a commission with sweeping investigative power and a mandate to propose laws prohibiting whatever the commission labels “homegrown terrorism.”

The proposed commission is a menace through its power to hold hearings, take testimony and administer oaths, an authority granted to even individual members of the commission - little Joe McCarthys - who will tour the country to hold their own private hearings. An aura of authority will automatically accompany this congressionally authorized mandate to expose native terrorism.

Ms. Harman’s proposal includes an absurd attack on the Internet, criticizing it for providing Americans with “access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda,” and legalizes an insidious infiltration of targeted organizations. The misnamed “Center of Excellence,” which would function after the commission is disbanded in 18 months, gives the semblance of intellectual research to what is otherwise the suppression of dissent.

While its purpose is to prevent terrorism, the bill doesn’t criminalize any specific conduct or contain penalties. But the commission’s findings will be cited by those who see a terrorist under every bed and who will demand enactment of criminal penalties that further restrict free speech and other civil liberties. Action contrary to the commission’s findings will be interpreted as a sign of treason at worst or a lack of patriotism at the least.

While Ms. Harman denies that her proposal creates “thought police,” it defines “homegrown terrorism” as “planned” or “threatened” use of force to coerce the government or the people in the promotion of “political or social objectives.” That means that no force need actually have occurred as long as the government charges that the individual or group thought about doing it.

Any social or economic reform is fair game. Have a march of 100 or 100,000 people to demand a reform - amnesty for illegal immigrants or overturning Roe v. Wade - and someone can perceive that to be a use of force to intimidate the people, courts or government.

The bill defines “violent radicalization” as promoting an “extremist belief system.” But American governments, state and national, have a long history of interpreting radical “belief systems” as inevitably leading to violence to facilitate change.

Examples of the resulting crackdowns on such protests include the conviction and execution of anarchists tied to Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Riot. Hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee for several decades during the Cold War and the solo hearings by a member of that committee’s Senate counterpart, Joseph McCarthy, demonstrate the dangers inherent in Ms. Harman’s legislation.

Ms. Harman denies that her bill is a threat to the First Amendment. It clearly states that no measure to prevent homegrown terrorism should violate “constitutional rights, civil rights or civil liberties.”

But the present administration has demonstrated, in its response to criticism regarding torture, that it can’t be trusted to honor those rights.

Ralph E. Shaffer, professor emeritus of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and R. William Robinson, an elected director of a Southern California water district, wrote this article for the History News Service.