JPBlog

Ellsberg is a true patriot.

Part V 1/28/2006

Part VI 1/29/06 (final)

We received our water bill Saturday, exactly ten days after the due date printed on the bill. The envelope bears no evidence of when it was sent. Has anyone else had this problem?

The fourth installment on the Daily Kos.

Favorite quote: "But a lot of the folks back home, if it were really put to them: It's either a lot of other people's sons and daughters have to die or you're going to have long gas lines."

Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memo and TPM Cafe has started a Drug Bill Debacle Blog on the TPM web site. Like many of the other blogs on TPM Cafe, this look like it will be a useful source of information and debate on the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Society is best served by adhering to principles that bestow long-term benefits. A society can be said to be healthy to the extent that its citizens believe in and act upon such principles. Social justice is one of those principles. Unjust societies are brittle because they require oppression to maintain the unjust conditions; the few are afraid of the many who seethe in anger at their oppressors.

Today, most people believe that they will lose dearly if real social justice is established. That the middle class still believes this falsehood after having endured twenty-five years of conservative economic policy is a tribute to the power of the media to shape the public mind. The middle class has been taught to believe that they deserve what they have solely because of their own hard work and that the poor are lazy and shiftless and therefore deserve their poverty.

To preserve this illusion we restrict the poor to the inner cities where we cannot see how hard they work and how little they are rewarded for their hard work. We cannot be allowed to realize their humanity, lest our eyes be opened to injustice. Making them foreign allows us to project our shadow side onto them, much like we have been recently encouraged to project it onto Arabs and Moslems.

The result: walled communities surrounded by poverty and decay. The well-off and even the moderately well-off are afraid. They are rightly afraid of the underprivileged because they are a threat to peace and security. But they are equally afraid that real social justice, which is the only solution to our deepening slide into lawlessness and anarchy, would threaten their precarious debt-ridden standard of living. Being in fear of both disease and cure and blinded to more attractive options by their conservative or neo-conservative philosophy, the middle class continues to support the very policies that if not reversed will ultimately destroy it.

Nature regulates itself by negative feedback loops. The checks and balances written into the U. S. Constitution can be thought of as a structure of negative feedback loops, designed to keep the system from running too far off the road. Positive feedback loops are inherently unstable and threaten systems, like cancer and nuclear fission. In the social realm, fear almost always creates a positive feedback loop, because it feeds on itself. Dictators are afraid of their people and consequently do the very things that cause them to be even more afraid of their people.

The Daily Kos is beginning a series of interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. Well worth reading and following.

Part I 1/20/2006

Part II 1/21/2006

Part III 1/22/206

Part IV 1/27/2006

Part V 1/28/2006

Part VI 1/29/06 (final)

Of the 580,000 soldiers that served in Gulf War I, 325,000 were on permanent disability in 2000. It's nearly certain that the principal cause was the extensive use of depleted uranium in military ordinance. Uranium is a heavy metal like lead, so although environmental uranium may pose very little danger from radioactivity, it is at least as chemically lethal as lead.

http://www.sfbayview.com/012605/headsroll012605.shtml

The National Environmental Trust has released a report on a recent Environmental Protection Agency proposal to weaken reporting of toxic chemical hazards in communities. Under the proposals approximately ten percent of communities that are included in the Toxic Release Inventory would no longer have the benefit of information on potentially lethal sources of industrial chemicals in their area. The Toxic Release Inventory was created by Congress when it enacted the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, signed into law by President Reagan. It was designed to prevent accidents such as the one at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands of people.

Weakening these protections will, of course, benefit industries that deal with large amounts of toxic chemicals. It's a short-term benefit, though, as any relaxation of regulation toxic waste increases the likelihood of a disaster. Time and time again, large corporations have shown that they will leave no corner uncut in their drive to reduce the costs of doing business, regardless of danger to the public. Even a small disaster will create tremendous political pressure for far tighter regulation than they now experience.

But corporate finance and governance are structured towards short-term gain. CEOs and others at the top have every incentive to increase profits and the share value of corporate stock, secure in the knowledge that the bad times will almost surely come after they have left the corporation and cashed out their stock and stock options.

A sensible public policy would give fewer rewards for short-term gains and greater rewards for long-term gains. A change in the taxation of executive compensation, stock options and capital gains would be a good start, but only a systemic restructuring of the entire financial (and monetary) system can eliminate the manic suicidal drive for immediate return on investment that characterizes our present day practices. I will shortly be publishing an essay/review for the JP based on Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money that explores some of the alternatives, many of which are already being tried on a small scale around the world. Until we tame this monstrous system that destroys families, communities and even nations in the name of profit, most of us are destined to witness the progressive loss of what makes our lives on this planet tolerable, even possible.


The deadline for comments is today. Sorry I didn't find out about it sooner. Make a Comment which will be sent to the EPA administrator.

The National Environmental Trust

Analysis: Nearly 1,000 Communities Across U.S. Would Lose All Toxics Information

Text of proposed rule and supplementary information. (Note: this is a large .pdf file and the actual text of the amendments begins on Page 74 of the document)

Right to Know Network (Part of OMB Watch. Features databases copied from EPA TWI database you can use to investigate toxic release in your area)

The Guardian recently published a sober assessment of the neocon debacle and how we got to where we are. It rings true, but not novel. Republics are undermined and eventually destroyed by their very successes. The empires that emerge from failed republics gradually decay until they are unable to resist aggression from without. For an example, read Pericles's funeral oration given at the height of Athens's power and prestige. Print it out and then read it again.

Keep in mind that Athens was defeated a few years later, having alienated its allies by mistreatment and its subjects by harsh and brutal oppression.