Feasting on Ecocide!

Over the past decade, countries across the world have been discussing the profound damage that has been occurring through deep-sea fishing. The Pew Environmental Group has been tracking the situation:

Since 2004, the international community, through the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly, has called on fishing countries and regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) to urgently act to protect deep-sea life. Beginning in 2006, U.N. resolutions that outlined a plan to safeguard this fragile biodiversity passed. Many governments supported an outright moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling, but countries operating deep-sea vessels instead promised to take action to make fisheries more sustainable and protect vulnerable marine ecosystems. Ultimately, they agreed to conduct a formal assessment after a few years to determine how well the resolutions had been implemented.

Preliminary findings released in June 2011 by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), "highlight serious failures by countries and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) in efforts to protect vulnerable deep-sea biodiversity and high seas fish species."

Research conducted by scientists and published in the journal Marine Policy are recommending a complete halt to all deep sea fishing.  Instead of permitting industrial fleets from disrupting these extremely delicate aquatic ecosystems, scientists are further recommending that fishing be confined to more productive coastal fisheries nearer to consumers.

The following summary from Eurekalert outlines the problem:

Life is mostly sparse in the oceans' cold depths, far from the sunlight that fuels photosynthesis. Food is scarce and life processes happen at a slower pace than near the sea surface. Some deep-sea fishes live more than a century; some deep-sea corals can live more than 4,000 years. When bottom trawlers rip life from the depths, animals adapted to life in deep-sea time can't repopulate on human time scales. Powerful fishing technologies are overwhelming them. 

"The deep sea is the world's worst place to catch fish" says marine ecologist Dr. Elliott Norse, the study's lead author and President of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Washington USA. "Deep-sea fishes are especially vulnerable because they can't repopulate quickly after being overfished." 

The deep sea provides less than 1% of the world's seafood. But fishing there, especially bottom trawling, causes profound, lasting damage to fishes and life on the seafloor, such as deep-sea corals, these experts say. 

Since the 1970s, when coastal fisheries were overexploited, commercial fishing fleets have moved further offshore and into deeper waters. Some now fish more than a mile deep. 

"Because these fish grow slowly and live a long time, they can only sustain a very low rate of fishing," says author Dr. Selina Heppell, a marine fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University. "On the high seas, it is impossible to control or even monitor the amount of fishing that is occurring. The effects on local populations can be devastating."

The Washington Post has a good article discussing the topic and revealing the moral cowardice of the Europeans in reigning in their colleagues in Portugal, Spain, France, and Denmark from destroying these ecosystems.

Third world America: Highland Park, Michigan

Is America the richest country in the world?

Ostensibly the claim is made that America is the greatest country in the world.  A continental nation with global commercial centers, successful manufacturing sectors, a productive workforce, and over 8.4 million households with assets greater than 1-Million dollars (excluding their primary residence). According to Bloomberg News, more than 600,000 persons became millionaires in America in 2010.

However, the rest of the country has not been so lucky and many areas remain mired in debt and socio-economic decline.  The state most exemplifying changes in America's fortunes has been Michigan.  Due to the state's dependence on the automotive industry, Michigan never recovered from the initial dot-com recession of 2001.  For the totality of the decade of the zeroes, the state shed jobs, businesses, and people.  Middle class union jobs that were the backbone of the economy were slashed.  The net result was depression level cut-backs in government spending at the municipal and state level.  With decreased taxes, municipalities cut services; including essential services like police, fire-fighters, and ambulances.

An example of this freefall into urban dystopia is the current city of Highland Park.  The small city of eleven thousand lies encapsulated by Detroit and has witnessed a population decline of 33% since 2000.  Until 1995 it was the former home of Chrysler Automotives, which contributed to nearly 50% of the city's tax base at the time. The decade of the zeroes was particularly harsh to metropolitan Detroit and cities like Highland Park.

In a recent Detroit News article, DTE energy was removing street lights, of which 1,400 have already been extracted, as part of "of a settlement that allowed the city to avoid paying $4 million in unpaid bills going back several years."

Residents of the city are unhappy that basic utilities and services, such as luminating city streets and the front of business locations will not be available.  The Detroit News elaborates:

"After they took the street light from in front of my business, someone climbed onto my roof and stole an air conditioning unit," said Bobby Hargrove, owner of Hargrove Machinery Sales on Oakland Avenue, who also claims a police officer asked him for money to beef up his protection. "I feel like I'm being punished — I've always paid my bills on time, but they took the street light anyway."

So this is where America stands.  Broken urban landscapes bereft of basic amenities and services that people had a century ago.  Welcome to third world America.

Quote of the Day: Chomsky on Resistance

Actually, during this entire crisis, I thought one of the most astute comments was a two-sentence comment by Marwan Muasher. He’s a former high Jordanian official who’s head of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. He said, "There’s an operative principle in the Middle East." He said, "The principle is, as long as people are quiet and passive, we’ll do whatever we like." That’s a general principle of statesmanship that applies here, too. As long as people are quiet and passive, we’ll do whatever we like. Now, of course, if they stop being quiet and passive, we’ll have to adjust somehow. Maybe they’ll even throw us out, but we’ll try to hang on as much as we can. And that’s what we see going on in the Middle East. That’s what we saw going on in Latin America. It’s what we see right here.

- Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking to Amy Goodman at DemocracyNow on the Middle East revolutions earlier in 2011.

Chart of the day: increased incidence of natural disasters

(h/t The Big Picture)

The chart is provided by Re Munich and it indicates the growth of natural disasters over a period covering 1980-2011.  Insurance companies have an inherent self-interest in understanding the dynamics of disruptive natural events and how those events will have an impact on their business.  The data presented in the above graph is unequivocal in showing that climate change related events are rapidly increasing.  The scientifically illiterate right wing, uneducated masses, and corporate naysayers affiliated with the petrochemical industry can all continue to spout rubbish, but the facts speak for themselves. Consider that earthquakes and other geophysical events have stayed constant during the 30 year period, while storms, floods, and extreme temperature events have all increased geometrically over the same period.  This isn't God flushing the toilet on humanity; this is humanity self-destructing.

It appears from this graph, that we are looking at a doubling time of 15 years.  Under this time scale, things will become extremely difficult for most of this planet shortly.

We have passed the point of no return. What people should learn to accept is that we as a civilization and species have collectively failed to organize ourself to rectify a problem that  twenty years ago we all understood, but lacked the courage to tackle.  By kicking the problem down the road and listening to the greedy or stupid, we have condemned ourselves to a world that will nominally have substantial levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will disrupt agricultural production; increase droughts, fires, mass population movements, cause mass extinctions of other species; encourage conflict and warfare over resource scarcity; and eliminate possibly billions of humans.

You go girl: Elizabeth Warren redux

The faux Elizabeth Warren in this satirical send-up is almost as awesome as the real deal!

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

It's obvious that those in the press and in the corridors of power will attempt to pressure her to pursue a milquetoast agenda, but given the way the economy is going and the profound disconnect between the ruling plutocrats and the citizens of the nation, it seems to me that any politician willing to challenge the status quo and expose the fraud mongering in congress will have the support of the majority of people across America.

The Democratic Party has learned that sending up another corporate stooge, like that of Massachusetts  AG Martha Coakley, to fight for the seat held by liberal lions such as Edward M.Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy is a losing proposal. The Hartford Informer described Coakley's loss to Scott Brown -in the most liberal state in the United States of America- as nothing less than "one of the biggest failures of a political party and a candidate in recent history."

Coakley's campaign was by all accounts pathetic.  Her arrogance in assuming that regardless of her opponents position and the national trends that the citizens of Massachusetts would elect her.  Weeks prior to the election she was slumming with corporate benefactors, instead of engaging citizens and letting them know that Kennedy's legacy and liberal vision would continue in her advocacy.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren has shown the country that she believes in what she preaches.  Her position at Harvard University in researching consumer bankruptcies and as the central figure most responsible for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, provides a firm example of what intelligent, dedicated, and responsible liberalism can accomplish.

***
Additional posts by this blog on Elizabeth Warren are below:

Elizabeth Warren: TARP Watchdog
Elizabeth Warren: The banks are jerking us ALL!
Elizabeth Warren takes the reigns of the CFPB
Warren on how to save the Middle Class

Roubini says double-dip too!

On the other hand, Paul Krugman isn't talking about double-dips, but a decade long depression.

I've got an expanded blog article titled "Recession Watch: one dip, two dips, ... we all fall down", which includes current macroeconomic data on America's descent into recession and opinions on what this all means by Krugman, Roubini, Joe Stiglitz, and Ken Rogoff.

None of this should be a surprise to those paying attention, but I suspect most people -as usual- aren't.

Quote of the day: Krugman on the coming storm

The austerians have brought us to the brink of a vast disaster. A recession in Europe looks more likely than not; and the question for the United States is not whether a lost decade is possible, but whether there is any plausible way to avoid one.

- Paul Krugman, "Defeatism"

Chomsky on the Wall St. protesters, Bin Laden, & Israel

In this interview with Russia Today (RT) television Noam Chomsky discusses three main topics:

1. The current protests occurring in New York across from Wall Street and spreading throughout the world
2. The legal framework and international norms associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder
3. The current international versus American-Israeli perspective on the emergence of a Palestinian state.

For the most part I think what Chomsky has to say is true.

Criticisms leveled by Chomsky regarding economic matters and the control of the legislative process by corporations has been shown by this recent depression to have been wholly correct. America's political system is so badly broken that not even the greedy politicians can claim that the system works for anyone other than Goldman Sachs.

***

What I found disappointing about this interview is Chomsky's rather weak argument that America is a lawless country because it assassinated Osama Bin Laden, invaded the sovereign nation of Pakistan, then dumped Bin Laden's body at sea. Unlike a great number of person on the left, Chomsky has never claimed that there were grand conspiracies at work during the 9-11 attack. What he does do is make the rather odd legalistic argument that everyone under American jurisprudence is entitled to the claim of being "innocence" until found guilty. That statement is true, but misleading. Bin Laden was never after 9-11 a conventional criminal. Rather, Bin Laden was the leader of an international organization whose purpose was to engage in terrorism that indiscriminately killed as many people as possible to draw America into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Bin Laden freely admitted and repeatedly boasted of his multiple attacks on American assets abroad and on 9-11. If we are talking about US law, under public law 107-40, the US Congress authorized the president of the United States “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Equally, under international law the UN charter provides nation states the right to use lethal force in individual and collective self-defense.

Second, Chomsky makes the error of claiming that the assassination has inflamed Pakistan's civilian population and enraged the quasi-military rulers of the state, thus exacerbating US-Muslim tensions and further destabilizing the Middle East. What Pakistan or its illiterate masses thinks about American killing of Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders on their territory is irrelevant. Pakistan exists because the United States for decades has been propping up this little Islamic wasteland run by kleptocrats and military dunces. The country is a failed state that exists as the central exporter of international terrorism across the world. What has become completely evident after the assassination is that individuals within Pakistan and its government have been hiding and protecting Bin Laden for years. Given the overall lawlessness and criminal actions of the Pakistani state, there is little reason anyone should consider anything that this country wants as legitimate.

Chomsky further states that Obama has become even more reckless than Bush in using drone attacks on targets. The problem with this statement is that is exactly what Obama didn't do when he sent military personnel to kill Bin Laden. Today Bin Laden's family members that were hiding with him in Pakistan are alive and not dead.  Something that Bin Laden's victims cannot claim.

I for one am in complete agreement with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who said

“The death of Osama bin Laden … is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism…Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done.”

For all his faults, President Obama did the right thing and all civilized people should applaud his actions, instead of trying to score cheap rhetorical points in defending the indefensible.

Harper's stooges in full jester mode

Every election politicians claim that only they can protect us the people from the vicissitudes of corruption inherent in their opponents.  Invariably these same turkeys turn out to be the exact charlatans that they castigate while shaking down votes on the campaign trail.  Two items last week highlighted this fact.

The first item involves Peter MacKay, Harper's current Minister of Defense.  According to the Globe and Mail,

MacKay outranks almost all his cabinet colleagues when it comes to using federal government executive jets, racking up more than $2.9-million in flights on the Challenger planes in the past four years.

Senior politicians are requested to use commercial aircraft whenever possible.

Despite protestations by the Prime Minster's Office and Conservatives that the millions of dollars used by MacKay were in services of his official duties, the record tells a different story.  National Defence records show that 35 flights arranged for Mr. MacKay over a period of four years ran nearly 250 hours in total. None of these trips involved Afghanistan and only ten of the trips involved international travel.

Perhaps believing that he was a senior executive of a multinational corporation that actually generated private sector jobs and wealth and thereby deserving of such benefits, civil servant MacKay was found to have also used the exclusive jets to ferry him around from his vacation destinations.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay took a Challenger jet at a cost of about $40,000 to fly out of Newfoundland two summers ago after getting a $16,000 helicopter ride from a fishing lodge to the airport.

The entitlements these politicians think they deserve for doing such a lousy job is appalling.  However, the financial profligacy of Mr. MacKay is countered by John Baird in the arrogance and pettiness department.

Baird, who is now Minister of Foreign Affairs in Harper's new cabinet, was found to have requested, in violation of official policies on branding, that his business cards be in English only, embossed with gold trim, listing only his name without reference to the Lester B. Pearson building, which houses the department of foreign affairs, and no reference to Canada!

What this incident indicates is how shallow these characters in the Conservative party are.  Baird didn't want his name eclipsed on his business card by the lettering of the word Canada; the same country these assholes claim to be patriots and defenders of.  The removal of Pearson's name is yet another example of their contempt of Canada's rich liberal history and an indication of how little they actually care about the country they claim to represent.

Portraits of a declining empire: Wall St. edition

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

- John F. Kennedy

***

Photographs of protesters during the recent occupy Wall Street movement September/October 2011 and in the last photo, a simple suggestion to the folks who created the financial crisis of 2008.  (source: C.S. Monitor)

As in the case of previous protests against the corporate state, the police were brought in to reign in any wider public criticism of the elite.  Police more interested in protecting the criminals who instigated the Great Recession than in supporting the constitutionally sanctioned free-speech of protesters, brought out their truncheons, pepper spray, and paddy wagons, to disrupt protests consisting of no more than a few hundred people.  I briefly discussed the nature of this struggle for democracy and incipient fascism in an earlier post.

The movement, if it can even be called that, is now expanding across America and the world.  News reports indicate that, "More than 100 cities have clocked in under the “Occupy” moniker."  MIT professor and lawyer Nicholas Ashford states the following:

It’s not just a matter of people being “mad as hell and not taking it anymore,” he says. “It’s more crucially the dawning realization that the US economy was always built on quicksand, and that our current dismal state is not the anomaly, but the reality.”

With the global depression unfolding across the northern hemisphere (i.e. Europe, Japan, and North America) the elite -who have suppressed earlier protestation from across the political spectrum- are realizing that they no longer have the ability to hide their incompetence and perfidy.  While the election of Barack Obama was meant to assuage popular discontent in 2008, his mediocre performance and constant willingness to capitulate to the interests of big business (i.e. financial industry versus main street bail-out, health care insurance, protection of the banks and oil companies, and expansion of the Afghan conflict) have alienated much of his liberal base and emboldened the unhinged statists on the right.

Violent and unsettling times await us all as the plutocrats pull up the drawbridge and attempt to prevent the restless masses from engaging in retribution to their greed and criminality.

What she just said...

Occupy Wall Street protestor using something other than a manila colored pizza box to denounce the corrupt state of affairs that is now America's corporate plutocracy.

***

The topics inveighed by the left are vast and given the MSM's collusion in disseminating propaganda and controlling the public narrative on subjects of interest to the corporate state, usually very little coherent messaging makes it into the public consciousness.  However, people across the world, not just in authoritarian countries, are protesting en mass to the reckless and destructive practices of our authoritarian and/or corporate overlords.  Unlike the bullshit machine during the Iraq invasion where the venal and pliant press stenographed the Bush imperium's falsehoods on Iraqi mushroom clouds and fantastical weapons of mass destruction, the fruits of our economic discord are apparent for all to see.  The nations of the world are sliding into a new period of stagnation and decline.  Unemployment, social mobility, declining wages, and reduced prosperity are evident for all to see.  While society crumbles, multinational corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars of liquid capital, financial houses are given nearly unlimited protection by the state for their incompetence, and the wealthiest beneficiaries of the past 30-years of deregulation and financialization of western economies bemoan any increase in their tax rates.

The elite are firmly aware that for them to stay in power demands that the masses are fully unaware of how dire a situation they are in.  Institutional propagandists denounce the protestors as "dangerous" and predicated on mob rule.  Many are asking what the objectives of the movement are about (psst... its about greedy stupid bankers and their congressional whores, motherfucker!).  Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic is already calling the protests a waste of time, given that they are unfocused, the financial industry owns congress, and of course the big lie, that America really, really needs behemoth "to big to fail" monstrosities like Bank of America, Citibank, or Goldman Sachs, because as he states, the rest of the economy is just useless unproductive crap. To enforce the objectives of the corporate state, NY city police department was more than happy in assaulting, brutalizing, and arresting innocent civilians who exercised their first amendment rights.  This is nothing new for the NYPD, which has a long record (i.e. the 2004 Republican presidential election convention) of crushing pubic dissidence and violating the civil rights of protestors.

Many people realize the system is fundamentally rigged against them and the composition of the protestors and their supporters reflects this fact:

The crowd—while represented widely in the media as white, liberal college kids—is surprisingly diverse, including raging grannies, street kids, union workers, professors, ex-bankers, longtime activists, human rights lawyers, Native American band members and ex-military. Political views span the spectrum, from anarchist to right-wing libertarian—complicating efforts toward any kind of unifying objective or mantra.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author, had this to say about the occupation:

The real people who are scared are the power elite. Of course, they’re trying to make you scared and us scared. But I can tell you, having been a reporter for the New York Times, that on the inside they’re very, very frightened. They do not want movements like this to grow, and they understand on some level — whether it’s subconscious or, in other cases, even overt — that the criminal class in this country has seized power.

I am not optimistic that any particular resistance to the corporate state can succeed in changing the current trends.   If history is a guide, it is more likely that the people will turn on those protesting and disclosing the rampant corruption, rather than on their own imbecile leaders.  As long as people remain confused, uneducated, and ignorant to the current situation, the crypto-fascists, corporate fraud-mongers, and militarists driving policy will remain in the driver's seat.