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A Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

To The Beginning Of The End Of Life

By Jason M. Satterfield

Description
Individuals with serious and incurable illnesses often require care that goes beyond the body. As they face the challenges of living with and eventually dying from their conditions, they may need to acquire new skills to cope and increase their quality of life. Even those at the beginning of the end of life can take an active role in their treatment. This skill-based program emphasizes flexibility and should be tailored to individual clients. The first module introduces stress management techniques, including cognitive restructuring, relaxation, and problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. The second module targets mood management, with sessions on depression, anxiety, and anger. Social support is addressed in the third module where clients learn communication and conflict resolution skills. Special attention is paid to supporting caregivers and working with medical providers. The fourth module focuses on quality of life and covers symptom management, goal setting, positive psychology, and spiritual issues. An adaptation chapter details how to run the program as a group and discusses other possible formats. Incorporating a wide variety of CBT techniques, this program can benefit patients suffering from a range of chronic and terminal diseases. The corresponding workbook helps clients personalize the content of sessions and practice new skills. The facilitator guide is invaluable to any mental health professional working in a medical or other palliative care setting.
Minding the Body Workbook: Workbook
A Cognitive-Behavioral Approach to the Beginning of the End of ...

Viviane Forrester : The Economic Horror

by Viviane Forrester

• I think that each of us, whatever our walk of life, should feel concerned about the present state of the world, which is entirely governed by economics. If Shakespeare were to come back to life today, I think he would be fascinated by the tragic interplay of powerful economic forces which are stealthily transforming the lives and destinies of the citizens or rather the populations of all countries.
• To my mind we are witnessing a profound change, a transformation of society and civilization, and we are finding it very hard to accept. How can we say good-bye to a society that was based on stable jobs that provided a safety net and the basics of a decent existence? Job security is on the way out.
  For the first time in history, the vast majority of human beings are no longer indispensable to the small number of those who run the world economy. The economy is increasingly wrapped up in pure speculation. The working masses and their cost are becoming superfluous. In other words, there is something worse than actually being exploited and that is no longer to be even worth exploiting!
• The managers of the economic machine exploit this situation. Full employment is a thing of the past, but we still use criteria that were current in the nineteenth century, or twenty or thirty years ago, when it still existed. Among other things, this encourages many unemployed people to feel ashamed of themselves. This shame has always been absurd but it is even more so today.
  It goes hand in hand with the fear felt by the privileged who still have a paid job and are afraid of losing it. I maintain that this shame and this fear ought to be quoted on the stock exchange, because they are major inputs in profit. Once upon a time people pilloried the alienation caused by work. Today falling labour costs contribute to the profits of big companies, whose favourite management tool is sacking workers; when they do this, their stock market value soars.
• Today we hear a lot about "wealth creation". In the past it was simply known as profit. Today people talk about this wealth as if it will automatically go straight to the community and create jobs, yet at the same time we see highly profitable businesses cutting down heavily on their workforce.
  Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to "deserve" the right to live? — Viviane Forrester
  When people talk about society's "movers and shakers", they aren't talking about the bulk of their country's population but about business leaders who relocate at the drop of a hat. Politicians make jobs their priority, but the Stock Exchange is delighted whenever a big industrial complex fires workers and gets worried whenever there's the slightest improvement in the unemployment figures. I wanted to draw people's attention to this paradox. A company's stock market quotation depends largely on labour costs, and profit is generated in the last analysis by reducing the numbers of those who have a job.
• The present situation raises a vital question for the future of the people of our planet, above all for young people and their future. Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to "deserve" the right to live? The commonsense answer is that it is a good thing to be useful to society. But we are preventing people from being useful, we are squandering the energies of young people by regarding profitability as the be-all and end-all.
• Most countries have lost their sense of priorities. There is a greater and greater need for teachers and medical staff, but governments are increasingly aggressive towards them. These are the professions where posts are abolished and funding is cut. Yet they are indispensable to the welfare and future of humanity. This confusion between "usefulness" and "profitability" is disastrous for the future of the planet.
  Young people live in a society which still regards salaried employment as the only acceptable, honest and lawful way of life, but most of them are deprived of the opportunity to achieve this. In deprived inner city areas this is a major problem.
  At the same time I often meet young people with armfuls of degrees who are out of work. What inexcusable waste! For generations study was young people's initiation into social life. I admire young people today because they go on with their studies fully aware that they are running the risk of rejection by society.
• Only twenty or thirty years ago, there was still reason to hope that the relative prosperity of the North would spread all over the world. Today we are seeing the globalization of poverty. Businesses based in the North that set up in the so-called "developing" countries, do not create jobs for the people of those countries but generally make them work without any kind of social security protection, in medieval conditions. The reason is that the workforce underpaid women and children, as well as prisoners costs less than automation would cost in the country of origin. This is colonization in another, equally heinous, form.
  I am not pessimistic, far from it. The pessimists are those who say there is no alternative to the present situation, that we have no choice. My book is an attempt to describe what is going on. It's true that the situation is dramatic. All the same I am, like many other people, the citizen of a country whose democratic regime makes it possible to reflect and freely resist the growing pressure that the economic factor is exerting on our lives.
• I would like there to be checks and balances, alternative thinking, conflicts of ideas and interests. Not violent conflict, of course, but we should wake up and stop being petrified, prisoners of hackneyed thinking. Already in countries where my book is being translated-especially in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Lithuania, Poland and in others such as the Republic of Korea it is causing something of a stir even before publication.

Beyond the World Bank Agenda : An Institutional Approach to Development

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5781388.html

By Howard Stein, professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for Afro-American and African Studies.

Synopsis
Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, developing countries have experienced lower growth and rising inequality compared to previous periods. In Beyond the World Bank Agenda, Howard Stein argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development.
Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this revolutionary volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations. Beyond the World Bank Agenda will be essential reading for anyone concerned with forging a new strategy for sustainable development.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT YOU DON'T KNOW WITHOUT KNOWING THAT YOU DON'T KNOW?

The Dirty Secret of the Financial Crisis:

Our Banking System's Broken

By William Greider, The Nation.
Posted November 22, 2008

No more free money from Washington. No more masters of the universe. No more business as usual. Time for a banking holiday.

Henry Paulson's $700 billion plan to save the world is dead or dying, but the bailout was not killed by his arrogance or his grossly misleading claims about what the public's money would buy. The plan collapsed because it didn't work. The Treasury secretary has launched a PR offensive to revive his falling influence. Too late. The Democrats should be equally embarrassed. In September their leaders in Congress rushed to embrace the Paulson solution, no hard questions asked. They now claim they were duped.

Paulson's squad at Treasury pumped $250 billion into the largest banks, buying their stock at inflated prices on the assumption it would persuade investors to step forward with their capital too. Instead, savvy financial players realized Paulson was spitting into a high wind, trying to save a system with stout talk.

Here is the ugly, unofficial truth that neither Wall Street nor the government will acknowledge: the pinnacle of the US financial system is broke -- with perhaps $2 trillion in rotten financial assets on the books. Nobody knows, exactly. The bankers won't say, and regulators won't ask, or at least don't dare tell the public. Official silence naturally feeds the conviction that banking's problems are far worse than we've been told. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College puts it plainly: "It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today -- with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson's entire $700 billion in one gulp."

The scale of this disaster explains why the Treasury secretary had to abandon his original plan to buy up failed mortgages and other bad assets from the banks. If government paid the true value for these nearly worthless assets, the banks would have to write down huge losses or, as Levy economists put it, "announce to the world that they are insolvent." On the other hand, if Paulson pumps the purchase price high enough to protect the banks from losses, $700 billion "will buy only a tiny fraction of the 'troubled' assets."

Paulson was trapped by these circumstances (and his own mendacity). Each time he tried to change the script, market insiders became even more alarmed. Congress is trapped too. So is President-elect Obama. From the outset of the crisis, the essential fallacy shared by governing influentials has been a wishful assumption that quick interventions with tons of public money would somehow restore the system to "normal" without disturbing free-market principles. Replenished banks would start lending again and lead us to recovery. "Normal" is not going to happen. If the new president does not break free of the denial and act decisively, his administration will be dangerously compromised from the start.

Obama can begin by declaring a "bank holiday" like FDR's in 1933 -- an opportunity to put the hard facts on the table and assume temporary control of the entire financial system. Nationalizing the banks sounds more radical than it is, since banking law already empowers regulators to impose extraordinary controls and close supervision over troubled institutions. Facing facts will be painful, but it's better than continuing a costly charade. Paulson's approach, endorsed by many Democrats, was designed to preserve oversized Wall Street titans. In fact, Paulson and the Federal Reserve are making things worse by creating new members of the privileged club of "too big to fail." Public money is being used to finance bank takeovers that will become new behemoths.
Read more

William Greider is the author of, most recently, "The Soul of Capitalism" (Simon & Schuster).
AlterNet.Org

How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth

by Herve´ Kempf

Chelsea Green Publishing

A best seller in France, and already translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Korean, Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth now appears in its first English edition. Bringing to bear more than twenty years of experience as an environmental journalist, Kempf describes the invincibility that many of the world’s wealthy feel in the face of global warming, and how their unchecked privilege is thwarting action on the single most vexing problem facing our world.

In this important primer on the link between global ecology and the global economy, Kempf makes the following observations: First, that the planet’s ecological situation is growing ever worse, despite the efforts of millions of engaged citizens around the world. And second, despite environmentalists’ emphasis that "we’re all in the same boat," the world’s economic elites—who continue to benefit by plundering the environment—have access to "lifeboats" that insulate them from the resulting catastrophes.

Societies have not been able to effectively combat the expanding ecological crisis because it is intimately linked to the social crisis in which the ruling form of capitalism has been organized to impede democratic initiatives. This link explains the failure to make progress against the greatest emergency of our time, because in this relationship the oligarchy plays an essential and destructive role. For this reason, solving the ecological crisis depends on disrupting the power of the world’s elite.

We cannot understand the entwined ecological and social crises, Kempf argues, if we don’t see them as the two sides of the same disaster—a disaster that comes from a system piloted by a dominant social strata that has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology. But Kempf also calls for measured optimism: "Despite the scale of the challenges that await us, solutions are emerging and—faced with the sinister prospects the oligarchs promote—the desire to remake the world is being reborn."


About the Author
Hervé Kempf was born in 1957 in Amiens, north of Paris, in France. After studies in economics, history, and political science, he became a journalist. Since 1988 he has specialized in environmental and ecological reporting. He created the environmental magazine Reporterre, and has written for scientific and economic newspapers. He has worked with Le Monde, the most influential French newspaper, since 1998, where he is the Environmental Editor and covers ecological topics, notably climate change and biodiversity. Le Monde now has an entire section devoted to environment and science. Traveling worldwide for his reporting, Kempf makes his home in Paris.

PBS frontline: diet wars

interview: marion nestle

Food Politics - The Homesite of Marion Nestle

"Today the great thing is to be "profitable", not "useful". This raises a very serious question: Should people be profitable in order to "deserve" the right to live?"
By Viviane Forrester

How trade, the WTO and the financial crisis

reinforce each other
November 14th, 2008

Myriam Vander Stichele, SOMO, in a detailed and excellent brief, argues that the call made by the World Trade Organisation and some European leaders to finalise the Doha round at the same time of financial reform talks (so-called Bretton Woods II) completely ignores that this would impose on the South exactly the same recipe of deregulation and liberalisation of financial services that caused the crisis in the first place. In fact, Free Trade Agreements already signed by both nations in both the North and the South are already likely to make increasing regulation of the financial sector difficult, if not impossible.

WTO meeting on financial crisis only about more financing of trade

On 12th November 2008, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) held a selective conference about the impact of the financial crisis on trade. The main issues discussed were the lack of credit and finance for traders, and the slow down of the economy resulting in slowing down international trade. The main responses advocated, which are already widely used, were to increase co-sharing of risks by the international financial institutions and export credit agencies (ECAs).

What the WTO calls risk-sharing, however, turns out in practice to increase risk for developing countries and minimise risk for transnational corporations. Export credits ultimately have to be paid by developing countries, thus increasing the debt burden of developing countries. They also mean less risk is to be taken by the private sector, some of whom were attending the meeting –including some of the banks that have already received government support such as ING and Royal bank of Scotland despite their poor social and environmental record.

The wrong arguments used for pushing to finalise the Doha Round of WTO negotiations

Of course, the WTO Director General Mr Lamy, has in his many speeches during the last weeks argued that the WTO is a solution to the crisis, that WTO rules prevent “protectionist measures” and beggar-thy-neighbour policies which led to the economic depression in the 1930s and the consequent wars, and that conclusion of the Doha Round means strengthening regulation. Mr Lamy has admitted that some losses of jobs and income over the last years are to be attributed to trade liberalisation [speech of 29 October 2008] but that therefore “restoring citizens’ confidence in trade requires governments to ensure that sound domestic policies are in place.” However, since those sound and distributive domestic policies are not in place, and the WTO rules are even undermining such policies, there is little argument to liberalise further.

There are many arguments why the WTO’s rule based system is not sufficient and why finalising the Doha Round as currently negotiated would be disastrous to deal with the economic, social and environmental problems facing the world today:

• In the Doha Round, developing countries are asked to open up their markets much more than developed countries, so that they will have to bear more of the burden to cope with liberalisation. This is contrary to the Doha Round principles and inegates the responsibility of the developed countries for the financial crisis: the latter should indeed show solidarity and take the responsibility of unilaterally providing financial support to allow developing countries to trade without undermining social and environmental needs worldwide.
• Opening up more markets would give even less chances to smaller producers and traders to be able to survive. In many countries employment and income losses cannot easily be replaced. The current world economic system has so many unequal players that liberalisation does not provide the claimed benefits of open trade as argued in the comparison with the 1930s. The multinationals would be the winners of the increased competition game and not the workers, poor and jobless. The Doha Round negotiation draft text show a protectionism of the rich and multinationals who lobbied for their interests, and would result in a inequitable and unsustainable ‘rule-based system’.
• The Doha Round is about deregulation and minimising governments’ space to make policies, and is not about strengthening of regulation. The Doha Round would reinforce a failed model of laissez-faire, based on the belief that markets can be left on their own and that the common good will come out of leaving everybody to pursue their own interest. The financial crisis has shown how the free market is based on a failed ideology and why the gap between rich and poor is increasing. Free markets are unable to take environmental and social concerns into account.
• Lamy’s argument that “one’s protection is another one’s lost opportunity” should be turned around by “each market opening is one’s lost opportunity”: the importance is that there should be no lost opportunity for “raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income” and “the optimal use of the world’s resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development,” “in a manner consistent with [countries’] respective needs and concerns at different levels of economic development,” – as the preamble of the WTO says! However, the trade rules would need to change as well !

The WTO has so far not talked about how General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and Free Trade Agreement (FTA) commitments to liberalise financial services and to undermine the ability of governments to prevent, or deal with, the financial crisis as explained below.

Read more

Read also: The facilitating framework for free investment and capital

Casino Crash

Transnational Institute

Ending Poverty: Moving Beyond

More Aid And Fair Trade
By Davinder Kaur
18 November, 2008 STWR
CounterCurrents.Org

As the United Nations seeks increased financial assistance from donor countries to help meet the flagging Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the inadequacy of international aid and fairer trade agreements has never been so clear. In 2007 alone, aid to developing countries fell by 8.4%, leaving huge challenges ahead to meet the Gleneagles G-8 target of doubling aid to Africa by 2010. In July, the Doha round of trade talks collapsed again for the third time as developing countries refused to bow down to US pressure allowing increased access to their markets. These factors, alongside the rise in hunger as a result of the food crisis and the worsening global financial crisis, underline the low global priority given by rich nations to the world’s poor.

Pledges and promises of aid to eradicate poverty made by rich nations over the past four decades have resulted in few changes for the Global South. If genuinely concerned with poverty reduction, all OECD member states would have long ago reached the 0.7% target for aid, pledged via the United Nations in 1970. Thirty-eight years later, not a single G8 country has met this target. Any reasons or excuses are rendered largely irrelevant when considering that it took a matter of days for Western governments to find an estimated three trillion dollars to bailout banks caught in the financial crisis. The Jubilee Debt Campaign estimates that less than a quarter of this amount is needed to wipe the debts of the poorest 100 countries - simply to allow them to meet their people’s most basic needs.

At a time when the rise in food prices has caused an additional 105 million people to join the ranks of the hungry, the impact of the economic crisis is likely to see the needs of the developing countries further sidelined as Western governments rush to divert money to contain the problem.

Systemic Failures

As these crises worsen, the global trading system continues to do more harm than good. Import surges of heavily subsidised goods flood the markets of poor countries, wreaking havoc on domestic producers and driving many out of business and into poverty. Additionally, rich nations consistently force developing countries to lower their tariffs while refusing to do so themselves, thereby denying poor farmers the right to protect their livelihoods. The situation is further exacerbated when considering that two-thirds of developing countries are now net food importers. The WTO and the international trading system that it promotes has served to strengthen the status quo, keeping those at the top of the ladder in place while kicking away the ladder from those at the bottom.

Even if the targets for aid and trade were met in the near future, the underlying problems of how trade and aid are administered would continue. Aid would still leave developing countries in a state of dependence upon rich nations and continue to come with conditions attached forcing them to open up their markets to foreign goods and services. Furthermore, aid used by poor countries to pay their external debts would detract them from providing the most basic needs for their citizens. On a broader level, the unaccountable and undemocratic ways in which the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO function would not be addressed, much less resolved, while the enormous influence of corporate lobbying groups would persist.

Calling for better trade rules and more aid to reduce poverty and growing inequality is not enough to achieve real change. The neoliberal ideologies of economic growth are enshrined in the very institutions that are designed to help developing countries prosper. A belief in the free market, deregulation, privatisation and corporate globalisation is the basis upon which these institutions operate. We have seen in recent weeks how unsustainable the current economic system is and how liable it is of causing a financial tsunami upon the lives of people everywhere.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930s is not taking place in a vacuum - its roots are based in the neoliberal ideologies stemming from the Washington Consensus dating back to the 1980s. Only a few weeks ago, it seemed we had reached a stage where the conceptual apparatus of neoliberalism had become “so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question.” Since then, the world’s most profitable banks have been part-nationalised, a worldwide recession is looming and a global crisis in confidence in the current economic model has become the norm.

Recent events have demonstrated that to continue working within the confines of the global economic framework may result in slight changes for a small proportion of the world’s poor, but will not be significant enough to achieve targets such as the UN’s Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015. This goal, which is already insufficient, was made further unattainable since the World Bank revised the international poverty line from $1.08 to $1.25 per day, effectively plunging a further 430 million people into extreme poverty overnight.

Securing Basic Human Needs

The current economic system, based on ever-increasing economic growth as the overarching solution to fighting poverty, is both ineffective and unsustainable. The key to tackling poverty and inequality must come from a change in principles and priorities from which practical steps can be taken to put long-term structures in place. One such solution would be to define and redistribute essential resources in order to immediately secure basic human needs. The universal right to a life of dignity and survival has long been enshrined in article 25 of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights which states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services.”

There is no reason why 967 million people should go to bed hungry every day. The problem is not defined by a scarcity of food, but by the insufficient access to resources for millions of the world’s poor who lack the necessary purchasing power to survive. The ‘trickle-down theory’ of economic growth, or the political promise that wealth accumulated by the rich would eventually permeate down through society, has proven to be grossly insufficient in dealing with the urgent demand for basic and essential needs.

To immediately reduce inequality and end extreme poverty, a new international mechanism is required which can facilitate a greater economic sharing of essential resources. The most critical of these are land, basic agricultural produce, water, energy and essential medicines, which together need to be defined, withdrawn and protected from international markets and no longer traded by multinational corporations. A similar initiative was supported by over 100 civil society organisations at the recent WTO talks. Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua presented a proposal to remove healthcare, education, water, telecommunications and energy from the WTO “on the basis that these essential public services are human rights which governments have an obligation to provide, and should not be treated as tradable commodities.”

Although the UN is in need of considerable reform, it should play a lead role in redistributing essential resources. It is the only international body with the experience, expertise and financial resources to initiate and coordinate such a crucial program. A new body within the UN needs to be responsible for a short-term emergency relief program to address the urgent needs of the 50,000 people who die each day from poverty, of which 30,000 are children. Simultaneously, a long-term program could begin to coordinate securing the wider basic needs of the global public.

A genuine change in principles and a renewed sense of commitment is urgently needed to tackle extreme poverty and inequality. A global undertaking of this scale would not come without further challenges and complexities, but it would lead to rapid and progressive change as low-income countries lift themselves out of poverty without permanently relying on financial hand-outs. Campaigning for the redistribution of essential resources, rather than just more aid or fairer trade, is the first vital step to securing the basic needs of the world community.

Davinder Kaur is the Communications Officer for Share The World’s Resources, an NGO advocating for essential resources such as food, water and energy to be shared internationally. She can be reached at davinder@stwr.org

Public Lecture: The Global Financial Crisis

with Michel Chossudovsky

Montreal, November 27

Le Mouvement montréalais pour la vérité sur le 11 septembre en association avec le Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation présente:

GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

The Great Depression of the 21st Century

What are the policy alternatives?

Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse?

The Great Depression of the 21st Century: Collapse of the Real Economy

The Crisis Has Hardly Begun

CounterCurrents.Org

By Paul Craig Roberts
17 November, 2008Vdare

"The prospects of a government rescue for the foundering American automakers dwindled Thursday as Democratic Congressional leaders conceded that they would face potentially insurmountable Republican opposition," reported the NY Times last Friday. [Chances Dwindle On Bailout Plan For Automakers, By David M. Herszenhorn, November 13, 2008]

Wow! The entire country is steamed up over the Republicans bailing out a bunch of financial crooks who have paid themselves fortunes in bonuses for destroying America’s pensions. Why do Democrats want to protect Republicans from further ignominy by not giving them the opportunity to vote down a bailout for workers? Quick, someone enroll the Democratic Party in Politics 101.

GM’s divisions in Canada and Germany are asking those governments for help. It will be something if Canada and Germany come through for the American automaker and the American government doesn’t.

Conservative talking heads are saying GM is a "failed business model" unworthy of a $25 billion bailout. These are the same talking heads who favored pouring $700 billion into a failed financial model.

The head of the FDIC is trying to get $25 billion--a measly 3.5 percent of the $700 billion for the banksters--with which to refinance the mortgages of 2 million of the banksters’ victims, and Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury Paulson says no. Why aren’t the Democrats all over this, too?
Apparently, the Democrats still think they are the minority party—or else their aim is to supplant the Republicans as the party of the rich.

Any bailout has its downsides. But if America loses its auto industry, it will lose the suppliers as well and will cease to have a manufacturing sector. For years no-think economists have been writing off America’s manufacturing jobs, while deluding themselves and the public with propaganda about a New Economy based on finance.

A country that doesn’t make anything doesn’t need a financial sector as there is nothing to finance.

The financial crisis has had one good effect. It has cured Democratic economists like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman of their fear of budget deficits. During the Reagan years these two economists saw doom in the "Reagan deficits" despite the fact that OECD data showed that the US at that time had one of the lowest ratios of general government debt to GDP in the industrialized world.

Today Reich and Krugman are unfazed by their recommendations of budget deficits that are many multiples of Reagan’s. Moreover, neither economist has given the slightest thought as to how the massive budget deficit that they recommend can be financed.

Both recommend large public spending programs. Krugman puts a price tag of $600 billion on his program. If it takes $700 billion to save the banks and only $600 billion to save the economy, it sounds like a good deal. But this $600 billion is on top of the $700 billion for the banks, the $200 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the $85 billion for AIG. These figures add to one trillion five hundred eighty-five billion dollars, a sum that must be added to the budget deficit due to war and recession (or worse).

What we are talking about here is a minimum budget deficit of $2 trillion. The US has never had to finance a deficit of this magnitude. Where is the money coming from?

The US Treasury doesn’t have any money, and neither do Americans, who have lost up to half of their savings and retirement funds and are up to their eyeballs in mortgage and consumer debt. And unemployment is rising.

There are only two sources of financing: foreign creditors and the printing press.

I doubt that foreigners have $2 trillion to lend to the US. Thanks to the toxic US financial instruments, they have their own bailouts to finance and economies to stimulate. Moreover, I doubt that foreigners think the US can service a public debt that suddenly jumps by $2 trillion. At 5 percent interest, the additional debt would add $100 billion to the annual budget deficit. In order to pay interest to creditors, the US would have to borrow more money from them.

Economists and policy-makers are not thinking. This enormous financing need comes not to a well-managed economy that can take the additional debt in its stride. Instead, it comes to an economy so badly managed that there are no reserves.

Massive US trade deficits have been financed by giving up US assets to foreigners, who now own the income flows as well. Budget deficits from 6 years of pointless wars and from unsustainable levels of military spending have helped to flood the world with dollars and to drive down the dollar’s exchange value. Consumers themselves are drowning in debt and can provide no lift to the economy. Millions of the best jobs have been moved offshore, and research, design, and innovation have followed them. Considering America’s dependency on imports, part of any stimulus package that reaches the consumer will bleed off to foreign countries.

Generally, when countries acquire more debt than they can service, they inflate away the debt. If foreign creditors do not save the Obama administration, the Treasury will print bonds and give them to the Federal Reserve, which will issue money.

The inflation will be severe, particularly as Americans will not be able to pay for the imports of manufactured goods from abroad on which they have become dependent. The exchange value of the dollar will decline with the domestic inflation. Once inflation is off and running, the printing press dollars will only have goods made in America to chase after. The real crisis has not yet begun.

Paulson should rethink the automakers’ and FDIC’s proposals. A bank produces nothing but paper. Automakers produce real things that can be sold. Occupied homes are worth more than empty ones.

Paulson’s inability to see this is the logical outcome of Wall Street thinking that highly values deals made over pieces of paper at the expense of the real economy.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Disposable People

New Slavery in the Global Economy

By Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, Washington, DC, (www.freetheslaves.net) and Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey Roehampton, England. He is the world's leading expert on contemporary slavery.

All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund antislavery projects around the world.

In 2002, The Carpet Slaves: Stolen Children of India, an HBO documentary based on Disposable People, won a Peabody and two Emmy Awards, one for Outstanding Investigative Journalism–Long Form and another for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research.

Description
Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of contemporary slavery reaches from Pakistan's brick kilns and Thailand's brothels to various multinational corporations. His investigations reveal how the tragic emergence of a "new slavery" is inextricably linked to the global economy. This completely revised edition includes a new preface.

Explore full text using Google Book

Roehampton University: Kevin Bales

Free the Slaves - Home

Slavery: A Global Investigation

Evolutionary Dynamics:

Exploring the Equations of Life

Martin Nowak is Professor of Biology and of Mathematics at Harvard University. He is Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences, evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. Any observation of a living system must ultimately be interpreted in the context of its evolution. Evolutionary change is the consequence of mutation and natural selection, which are two concepts that can be described by mathematical equations.Evolutionary Dynamics is concerned with these equations of life. In this book, Martin Nowak draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves. His work introduces readers to the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems, no matter how complicated they might seem.

Evolution has become a mathematical theory, Nowak suggests, and any idea of an evolutionary process or mechanism should be studied in the context of the mathematical equations of evolutionary dynamics. His book presents a range of analytical tools that can be used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the Prisoner's Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations, evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos. Nowak then shows how evolutionary dynamics applies to critical real-world problems, including the progression of viral diseases such as AIDS, the virulence of infectious agents, the unpredictable mutations that lead to cancer, the evolution of altruism, and even the evolution of human language. His book makes a clear and compelling case for understanding every living system--and everything that arises as a consequence of living systems--in terms of evolutionary dynamics.

The Fundamentals of Brain Development

Integrating Nature and Nurture

By Joan Stiles, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego.

In a remarkable synthesis of the research of the last two decades, a leading developmental neuroscientist provides psychologists with a sophisticated introduction to the brain--the system that underpins the functions that they study.

In clear terms, with ample illustrations, Joan Stiles explains the complexities of genetic variation and transcription, and the variable paths of neural development, from embryology through early childhood. She describes early developmental processes from gene expression to physiology to behavior. Sections on clinical correlations show the consequences for later physiological, neurological, or psychological disturbances in neural development.

As Stiles shows, brain development is far more complex and dynamic than is often assumed in debates about nature vs. nurture, nativism vs. cultural learning. Inherited and experienced factors interact constantly in an ever-changing organism. The key question is, what developmental processes give rise to particular structures or mechanisms?

A landmark of synthesis and interdisciplinary illumination, The Fundamentals of Brain Development will enrich discussion of developmental processes and more rigorously define the terms that are central to psychological debates.

Forget Red vs. Blue

It's the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.
Posted November 12, 2008
AlterNet.Org

Millions of Americans live in a non-reality-based belief system informed by childish clichés - they can barely differentiate between lies and truth.

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.

Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichs, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both.

The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.
Read more

East Bound And Down:

A Homeless March On Washington Part 2
By David Kendall

Countercurrents.org
11 November, 2008

Read Part I

The first installment of this series might have appeared to dismiss David Swanson's suggested march on Washington with regard to a "stolen election". [1] Far from it, Swanson's call for justice seemed well founded, and he is probably best qualified to organize and lead that movement or any other. But in view of the recent victory for Barack Obama, this article series seeks to extend the purpose and application of Swanson's original proposal beyond the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election. [2]

First, most Americans cannot leave their jobs, homes and families indefinitely as Swanson suggests, whereas growing numbers of American homeless already have. As outlined in the first installment of this series, "American Homeless Ambassadors" are an army of disenfranchised citizens ready and waiting to be mobilized through regional and community coordination for a "Homeless March on Washington".

Second, much bigger problems still remain for all Americans to protest in Washington. As Susan Rosenthal suggests, "No matter who is elected, the war will continue to take American and Iraqi lives. The economy will be continue to be floated at the expense of working people. The environment will continue to be destroyed for profit. And more Americans will lose access to health care." [3] Owned by corporate America, both Obama and McCain are on the same team, and it doesn't happen to be ours. Both presidential candidates supported the recent "Wall Street Bailout", and neither have proposed any sort of emergency plan to bailout "Main Street".

Meanwhile, Richard C. Cook, former policy analyst for the U.S. Treasury Department, has proposed a feasible plan designed to extend beyond the immediate crisis. To stabilize the U.S. economy, the "Cook Plan" simply injects it with purchasing power at a monthly rate of $1,000 per adult and $500 per child -- regardless of employment status. [4]

Essentially, that's all there is to it -- a simple plan that is easy for everyone to understand, but not so easy for politicians to manipulate and distort for their own interests. Cook estimates the annual gap between production and purchasing power in the United States is about $3.77-trillion. The current U.S. population is just under 306-million. If monthly vouchers were distributed according to the "Cook Plan", the government would still have several hundred billion dollars left over at the end of each year. Sweet deal. So why hasn't the government implemented it yet? This is an excellent question that will be discussed in the next installment of this series.

Meanwhile, the "Cook Plan" is something all other Americans can literally get their teeth into. It's a positive proposal we can all get behind and promote in a "Homeless March on Washington", rather than merely protesting a "stolen election" or any number of other social injustices.

Right now, most Americans probably aren't too excited about a "Homeless March on Washington". It seems like a painful and expensive job -- probably even "silly" and "extreme" -- and nobody really wants to do it. Likewise, our leaders in Washington don't seem too excited about a "Basic Income Guarantee" or any other means of pulling us out of this noose that they've cinched around our necks.

Meanwhile, the economic and ecological crises continue to escalate, and they're not going to magically disappear this time. So while a "Homeless March on Washington" might seem like a dirty job, somebody will eventually need to do it. Moreover, the effort will be far more successful with regional and community support than without it. Ann Friedman provides some interesting commentary in this regard:

"Today's social-justice activists start with very different conditions than those that existed in the 1960s. Yes, the student protests against the Vietnam War shook the country to its core. But it's not hard to connect the dots between the absence of a draft for the Iraq War and the lack of ongoing protest today." [5]

Michael Moore follows with an entertaining thought: "America needs to bring back the draft, but only draft the children of the rich". [6] But how many millions of American homeless have already been "drafted" and "shafted" in a very real sense -- by their own government? How many more of us need to be drafted before communities start coordinating a response to this madness? As the current economic crisis continues to escalate, perhaps increased numbers of Americans will become ready to mobilize a "Homeless March on Washington" for "Basic Income Guarantee".

In his many articles, Richard C. Cook very effectively fields all sorts of technical arguments regarding his proposal. [7] But some important general observations can be made here:

1) At least one real world American example of Basic Income Guarantee already exists. Established in 1976, the "Alaska Permanent Fund" provides every citizen in the State of Alaska with an annual dividend of approximately $1,200 from productive surplus. So not only is guaranteed income entirely doable, it's already being done -- in the United States. [8]

2) If the U.S. government can bail out wealthy bankers on Wall Street, then it can also bail out workers on Main Street. To coin an old cliché', "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Any questions about inflation, welfare, funding, or feasibility should be applied at least as critically to the Wall Street Bailout and the war in Iraq as they are to a Basic Income Guarantee for every American citizen.

3) If our government can afford to maintain endless wars against unnamed terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, then it can afford to satisfy the fundamental needs of every American citizen right here at home. In 1966, John Kenneth Galbraith suggested that a guaranteed income wouldn't cost "much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam". [9] [10]

4) "The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however minuscule, through welfare benefits." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. considered it a symptom of "confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest". But these two extremes in American society have already enjoyed a "guaranteed income" for at least the past eighty years. [11]

5) According to Dr. King, "The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity." [12] And Richard C. Cook concurs: "Our problems stem not from a failure to manage fairly the limited resources found in a world of scarcity but from our inability to manage a world of almost unlimited abundance and prosperity."[13]

"Phase 1" of Dr. King's dream was to abolish Black segregation in the United States, and great strides resulted from his leadership in this regard. But "Phase 2" of Dr. King's dream was to eradicate poverty for people of all races worldwide. While he recognized that "people must be made consumers" through either employment or incomes or both, the centerpiece for King's proposal was "Basic Income Guarantee". [14]

But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was by no means the first or last to propose guaranteed purchasing power as a means toward economic stability. It was proposed in 1795 by American revolutionary, Thomas Paine, [15] and again in 1849 by American businessman Edward Kellogg . [16] In 1918 Scottish engineer, C.H. Douglas, proposed a "national dividend" based on a system he called "Social Credit". [17]

But according to Richard C. Cook, "...while the financiers were well aware of Douglas 's system, they hated it. Word went out in the 1920s that his name was never to be mentioned in the British press. John Maynard Keyes was said to have developed his own deficit-spending theories as a means to counter Douglas 's influence. And when Douglas visited the U.S. in the late 1930s, he was told to his face that he would never be allowed to introduce his ideas in this country." [18]

More recently, Nobel Prize winning Economist, Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax to support a Basic Income Guarantee. But he originally intended this program to replace all other welfare and assistance programs. So when the bill was revised to merely supplement the existing system rather than replace it, Friedman ended up opposing the distorted version of his original proposal, and it was never implemented. [19]

Now Peter Barnes, founder of Working Assets and author of "Capitalism 3.0", steps forward to join Richard C. Cook and many other economists to propose a "national dividend" or "basic income guarantee" to save the U.S. economy. While Barnes suggests funding should come from the formation of a "Commons Sector" to regulate the environmental damage caused by industry, his conclusions concur with many others regarding a guaranteed income -- in other words a "birthright" or "heritage" for every American citizen; a permanent "leisure dividend" instead of temporary "unemployment compensation" or "welfare"; a daily opportunity for self-improvement and personal growth; and purchasing power for social security and economic stability, overall. [20]

So, with such a long history and so much contemporary support, why does such a simple idea receive so much opposition from those in power? Why are the power structures on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. so reluctant -- nay afraid -- to even discuss such an obviously viable plan for economic stability? Why must "We The People " march on Washington to gets this proposal discussed? If we're "all in this together" as Barack Obama suggests, then why must we force a reasonable decision upon him?

In the next and final version of this series, these questions will be discussed along with a few others. Meanwhile, the economic forecast is not at all promising, regardless of recent election results. Things will most likely get much worse before they start getting any better. Moreover, windy campaign rhetoric rarely translates very well into real-world practice.So it might be wise for communities nationwide to begin right now in organizing a Homeless March on Washington -- "East Bound and Down" -- to bring our leaders back to their senses.

"East bound and down, loaded up and truckin', We're gonna do what they say can't be done. We got a long way to go, and a short time to get there. Well, I'm eastbound, jus' watch ol' Bandit run!!" [21]

David Kendall lives in WA and is concerned about the future of our world.

The Bridge at the Edge of the World

Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

"My point of departure in this book is the momentous environmental challenge we face. But today’s environmental reality is linked powerfully with other realities, including growing social inequality and neglect and the erosion of democratic governance and popular control… As citizens we must now mobilize our spiritual and political resources for transformative change on all three fronts.”

—Gus Speth

How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are no holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically, and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline. Something is badly wrong, and a deeper critique is needed.

Speth contends that this critique leads to a severe indictment of today’s economic and political system — capitalism as it now actually operates. Our vital task is to change the operating instructions for the modern economy before it is too late.

The book is about how to do that.

James Gustave Speth, a distinguished leader and founder of environmental institutions over the past four decades, is Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He was awarded Japan’s Blue Planet Prize for “a lifetime of creative and visionary leadership in the search for science-based solutions to global environmental problems.

“When a figure as eminent and mainstream as Gus Speth issues a warning this strong and profound, the world should take real notice. This is an eloquent, accurate, and no-holds-barred brief for change large enough to matter.”

─Bill McKibben

“Honest, insightful, and courageous. Dean Speth draws on his formidable experience and wisdom to ask why we are failing to preserve a habitable Earth. His conclusions are cogent, revolutionary, and essential.”

—David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, Oberlin College, and author of Design on the Edge and Earth in Mind

Sixty Days and Counting

Written by Kim Stanley Robinson

ABOUT THIS BOOK
By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next.

But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR–and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it.

For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue “black ops” agency not even the president can control–a task for which neither Frank’s work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him.

In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last–and most terrible–of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock . . . the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about.

An Open Letter To The Candidates

On Single Payer Health Reform

America's health care system is failing. It denies care to many in need and is expensive, error-prone, and increasingly bureaucratic. The misfortune of illness is often amplified by financial ruin. Despite abundant medical resources, care is often inadequate because of the irrationality of our insurance system. Yet our political leaders seem intent on reprising failed schemes from the past, rejecting the single payer national health insurance model that is the sole hope for affordable, comprehensive coverage.

Leading Republicans propose tax incentives to encourage the uninsured to buy coverage, but these subsidies fall far short of the cost of adequate insurance. For cost control, they suggest high co-payments and deductibles. Yet these selectively burden the sick and poor, discourage preventive and primary care, and have little effect on costs, since seriously ill patients - who account for most health spending - quickly exceed their deductibles and are in no position to forego expensive care.

Most leading Democrats offer a mandate model for reform. Under this model, the government would require people (or their employers) to buy private coverage, while offering an expanded Medicaid-like program for the poor and near-poor.

Variants of the mandate model, first proposed by Richard Nixon, were passed with great fanfare in Massachusetts (1988), Oregon (1989) and Washington State (1993). All died quiet deaths. As costs soared, legislators backed off from enforcing the mandates or funding new coverage for the poor. Massachusetts' recent reform, which largely excuses employers from the mandate but imposes steep fines on the uninsured, appears poised to follow a similar path. Of the middle-income uninsured who are required to pay the full premium for coverage, few have signed up. Meanwhile, the state has already announced a $147 million shortfall in funding for subsidies for the poor.

Mandates and tax incentives can add coverage only by increasing costs. They augment the role (and profits) of private insurers, whose overhead is four times Medicare's, and whose efforts to avoid payment impose a costly paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals. The cost cutting measures often appended to such reforms - computerization, care management and medical prevention - have repeatedly failed to yield savings.

In contrast, single payer reform could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually - enough to cover the uninsured, and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans. It would also slow cost increases by fostering coordination and planning.

Political calculus favors mandates or tax incentives, which accommodate insurers, drug firms and other medical entrepreneurs. But such reforms are economically wasteful and medically dangerous. The incremental changes suggested by most Democrats cannot solve our problems; further pursuit of market-based strategies, as advocated by Republicans, will exacerbate them. What needs to be changed is the system itself.

We urge our political leaders to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a non-profit, single payer national health insurance system.
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP)
PNHP RESOURCES
CommonDreamsOrg.

Obama Administration, New Congress Should Mean

Aggressive Approach to Global Warming, Science Group Says

WASHINGTON (November 5, 2008)

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is looking forward to quick and decisive action to combat climate change by the new Obama administration and Congress after eight long years of obstruction by the outgoing administration.

"President-elect Obama has argued that our economic, energy and environmental problems share the same solution," said UCS President Kevin Knobloch. "We are looking to the new president and Congress to work together to build a clean energy economy that will create millions of new jobs here at home, expand capital investment, make our nation less dependent on oil, and prevent the worst consequences of global warming.

"The past eight years of denial and delay are over. Voters largely embraced candidates who support clean energy, green jobs, and a safer climate for our children and grandchildren."

Next year the new administration and Congress can do much to jumpstart a "Green Deal" that would help pull the country out of our economic downturn by investing in clean energy and modernizing the national electricity grid, Knobloch said.

"A critical step for Congress is to pass a strong federal climate bill with a declining cap on global warming emissions," Knobloch said. "Such a cap-and-trade system would generate needed revenues to finance new energy sources and help Americans manage and reduce their energy costs."

Federal lawmakers would be following the example set just last month by six of the 10 Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative states in the Northeast. They raised nearly $39 million in the first U.S. auction of permits to emit carbon dioxide under a regional cap-and-trade regime. If the price of the first auction holds, the auctions would yield more than $500 million each year for investment in energy efficiency initiatives and renewable energy development. That number is modest in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars that a national economywide cap-and-trade program could raise.

President-elect Obama's Web site states that his cap-and-trade policy would require all permits to be auctioned, and the proceeds to go to "investments in a clean energy future, habitat protections, and rebates and other transition relief for families." The new president has called for global warming emissions to be reduced by 80 percent by 2050, a target that is consistent with what leading climate scientists say will be needed to stabilize our climate.

President-elect Obama also has pledged to ensure that 10 percent of the nation's electricity comes from renewable energy sources by 2012 and 25 percent by 2025. Such a national renewable electricity standard would cut global warming emissions, create jobs, save ratepayers money, and encourage private investment in clean technology.

According to a UCS analysis, if Congress required 20 percent of the nation's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020, for example, it would generate 185,000 new jobs; spur $66.7 billion in private capital investment; provide $25.6 billion to farmers, ranchers and rural landowners for leasing their land for biomass and wind energy production; and generate $2 billion in new local tax revenues by 2020. It would cut consumer electric and natural gas bills $10.5 billion in 2020, and by $31.8 billion in 2030. And it would cut 223 million metric tons of global warming emissions a year in 2020—the equivalent of taking some 36 million cars off the road.

The Bush administration spent eight years trying to sabotage international progress on climate change. In stark contrast, "President-elect Obama has pledged that United States will lead and inspire other countries to take action," Knobloch said, "and he clearly recognizes that the essential step to restoring our international leadership on global warming is to take bold action here at home." Obama has indicated he will send representatives to the next UN climate meeting, which will take place in Poland next month.

Homepage Union of Concerned Scientists
Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air [PDF]

Thoreau, Walden and the Environment

CommonDreams.Org

WHAT ORWELL DIDN'T KNOW : Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=9781586485603

A passionate, thought-provoking, sometimes incendiary look at the role of propaganda in American today-- by leading political pundits, intellectuals, and writers

Propaganda. Manipulation. Spin. Control. It has ever been thus—or has it? On the eve of the 60th anniversary of George Orwell's classic essay on propaganda (Politics and the English Language), writers have been invited to explore what Orwell didn't—or couldn't—know. Their responses, framed in pithy, focused essays, range far and wide: from the effect of television and computing, to the vast expansion of knowledge about how our brains respond to symbolic messages, to the merger of journalism and entertainment, to lessons learned during and after a half-century of totalitarianism. Together, they paint a portrait of a political culture in which propaganda and mind control are alive and well (albeit in forms and places that would have surprised Orwell). The pieces in this anthology sound alarm bells about the manipulation and misinformation in today's politics, and offer guideposts for a journalism attuned to Orwellian tendencies in the 21st century.

Philosophy in the Flesh:

The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions—that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal—that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that: Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body—not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosopy as it has never been seen before.