byte&chew

We did it!

 

I write this post as the news that the New Hampshire State Senate has passed the Bragdon Forrester (HB648) Eminent Domain Bill in Concord. I believe that our own Sen. Gallus was influenced by the fact that several readers and participants on byte&chew wrote letters and sent emails to his office. I come to this conclusion because I saw the interview he gave a day or so before the vote and at that time he certainly was wishy washy about his position and how he was going to vote. I can’t help but believe that if “we the people” would make an effort to become more active in the political process, the complexion of our issues would change and we would see a positive impact in our communities and in our lives. Democracy only works if the citizens are engaged in the process. Without citizen participation “other” forces move in to fill that vacuum and influence decisions in their own self interest. I would hope that we can feel a sense of pride in the fact that we got off our duffs and took the time to let Sen. Gallus know how we felt about the Eminent Domain issue. Just think how different the Mayor and Council would consider issues if they knew that they would be facing their constituents every Monday night! What if their phones would ring off the walls when a critical issue was at hand or they made a wrong decision? I happen to believe that all of us do a better job at work knowing that we will be made accountable by our bosses. Our elected officials are our responsibility and when we fail in our role as their supervisors we create that “vacuum” that gets filled by political ambitions, self interest and special interests. I hope we’ve all learned a valuable lesson on how easy it can be to exercise our duty as citizens of our democracy by just giving a call or sending an email. Thanks to all of you who exercised that obligation.

Thanks toonist

History lesson with TomDispatch

January 17, 2012
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, Sinking the Petrodollar in the Persian Gulf

These days, with a crisis atmosphere growing in the Persian Gulf, a little history lesson about the U.S. and Iran might be just what the doctor ordered.  Here, then, are a few high- (or low-) lights from their relationship over the last half-century-plus:

Summer 1953: The CIA and British intelligence hatch a plot for a coup that overthrows a democratically elected government in Iran intent on nationalizing that country’s oil industry.  In its place, they put an autocrat, the young Shah of Iran, and his soon-to-be feared secret police.  He runs the country as his repressive fiefdom for a quarter-century, becoming Washington’s “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf -- until overthrown in 1979 by a home-grown revolutionary movement, which ushers in the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs.  While Khomeini & Co. were hardly Washington’s men, thanks to that 1953 coup they were, in a sense, its own political offspring.  In other words, the fatal decision to overthrow a popular democratic government shaped the Iranian world Washington now loathes, and even then oil was at the bottom of things.

1967: Under the U.S. “Atoms for Peace” program, started in the 1950s by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Shah is allowed to buy a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor for Tehran (which -- call it irony -- is still playing a role in the dispute over the Iranian nuclear program).  Defense Department officials did worry at the time that the Shah might use the “peaceful atom” as a basis for a future weapons program or that nuclear materials might fall into the wrong hands.  “An aggressive successor to the Shah,” went a 1974 Pentagon memo, “might consider nuclear weapons the final item needed to establish Iran’s complete military dominance of the region.”  But that didn’t stop them from aiding and abetting the creation of an Iranian nuclear program.

The Shah, like his Islamic successors, argued that such a program was Iran's national “right” and dreamed of a country that would get significant portions of its electricity from a string of nuclear plants.  As a 1970s ad by a group of American power companies put the matter: “The Shah of Iran is sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world.  Yet he’s building two nuclear plants and planning two more to provide electricity for his country.  He knows the oil is running out -- and time with it.”  In other words, the U.S. nuclear program was the genesis for the Iranian one that Washington now so despises.

September 1980: Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein launches a war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran.  In the early 1980s, he becomes Washington’s man, our “bulwark” in the Persian Gulf, and we offer him our hand -- and also "detailed information" on Iranian deployments and tactical planning that help him use his chemical weapons more effectively against the Iranian military.  Oh, and just to make sure things turn out really, really well, the Reagan administration also decides to sell missiles and other arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran on the sly, part of what became known as the “ Iran-Contra Affair” and which almost brings down the president and his men.  Success!

March 2003: Saddam Hussein is, by now, no longer our man in Baghdad but a new “Hitler” who, top Washington officials claim, undoubtedly has a nuclear weapons program that could someday leave mushroom clouds rising over U.S. cities.  So the Bush administration launches a war of aggression against Iraq, which like Iran just happens to -- in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- “float on a sea of oil.”  (Bush officials hope, in the wake of a “cakewalk” of a war to revive that country’s oil industry, to privatize it, and use it to destroy OPEC, driving down the price of oil on world markets.)  Nine years later, a Shiite government is in power in Baghdad closely allied with Tehran, which has gained regional strength and influence thanks to the disastrous U.S. occupation.

So call it an unblemished record of a kind not easy to find.  In more than 50 years, America’s leaders have never made a move in Iran (or near it) that didn’t lead to unexpected and unpleasant blowback.  Now, another administration in Washington, after years of what can only be called a covert war against Iran, is preparing yet another set of clever maneuvers -- this time sanctions against Iran’s central bank meant to cripple the country’s oil industry and crack open the economy followed by no one knows what.

And honestly, I mean, really, given past history, what could possibly go wrong?  Regime change in Iran?  It’s bound to be a slam dunk and if you don’t believe it, check out Pepe Escobar, that fabulous peripatetic reporter for Asia Times and TomDispatch regular. Tom

But why?

The Dynamics Of The Desperate

Looking at the election results today, one has to wonder why the Berlin area bucked the Romney trend and went for Ron Paul. I believe that Ron Paul is probably the most radical of all the candidates and in those numbers I include Barack Obama. So why did North Country voters pick the most radical candidate? I’ll take a wild guess at that question by suggesting that our North Country conditions are more desperate than in the rest of the state maybe in the country and that the hard economic times have been with us for a longer period of time. If I’m right in concluding that Ron Paul has the most radical position on issues, it makes sense to me that the people of Berlin are prepared to take the “medicine” and ignore that it might leave a bad taste in the mouth. I believe that it demonstrates that desperate people are more than willing to consider desperate actions if they believe that in the long run it will be in their best interest. If my theory is correct and if Washington continues to be occupied by those who support the best interest of the 1% and not the majority of Americans, then we better brace ourselves for some dramatic shifts in our politics and those who may become our leaders in the future. I don’t believe that this is a condition reflecting the usual Republican or Democratic political debate; this is a socioeconomic backlash that is triggered as a response by people who are becoming desperate and frightened. History is riddled with examples of what happens when a society becomes unstable by socioeconomic conditions that most people find unacceptable. The fact that most of us alive today have never been “without” almost anything we wanted or needed makes us even more vulnerable to what I call “the dynamics of the desperate”. We’ve been the privileged generation with our bellies always full and our garages and living rooms full of the latest toys. We raised the bar to our standard of living to what may be an unsustainable level and I fear that we may not have the discipline or the wisdom to make the right decisions when it comes to our leaders and our collective priorities. I see Ron Paul’s strength as a sign that the fabric of the country is unraveling and he may just be the canary in the coal mine. Those in power better take notice of the mood of the average citizen and the clear message that Ron Paul is preaching. Again let me say that history is full of examples of societies who become disillusioned by their lot and turn to political leaders that make Ron Paul look like a naïve adolescent.

Another worthy Tomgram

Tomgram: Thomas Frank, Why the Tea Party Needs Mitt

Posted by Thomas Frank at 8:07am, January 8, 2012.

Ode on American Earnings
A Poem for Campaign 2012

Goldman Sachs ($367,200)
Credit Suisse Group ($203,750)
Morgan Stanley ($199,800)
HIG Capital ($186,500)
Barclays ($157,750)
Kirkland & Ellis ($132,100)
Bank of America ($126,500)
PriceWaterhouseCoopers ($118,250)
EMC Corp ($117,300)
JPMorgan Chase & Co ($112,250)
The Villages ($97,500)
Vivint Inc ($80,750)
Marriott International ($79,837)
Sullivan & Cromwell ($79,250)
Bain Capital ($74,500)
UBS AG ($73,750)
Wells Fargo ($61,500)
Blackstone Group ($59,800)
Citigroup Inc ($57,050)
Bain & Co ($52,500).

Now, if that isn’t a poem that sings the (corporate) body electric, I don’t know what is.  According to the invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, it’s also the list of the top 20 contributors to presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign.  It’s his “people,” so to speak.  And if he weren’t to get the nomination, those involved (or their PACs, employees, owners, and top execs) would be someone else’s people because places like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase -- four of whose officials recently held a $2,500-a-person fundraiser for Romney in New York City -- just love presidential candidates.  They are simply so much more civic-minded than the rest of us.

As it happens, another must-read ode to our screwy moment has entered our world.  Just out from Thomas Frank (author of the bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas?) is a riveting new book on the Tea Party and the country.  It’s focus: how for almost two post-economic meltdown years -- until, that is, Occupy Wall Street came along -- we were left in a land of activists (and Republican operatives and billionaires) promoting a set of positions so wild that, under normal conditions, they might send you to an asylum, not the White House.  It is a movement, Frank writes, “in favor of the very conditions that had allowed Wall Street to loot the world.”

It’s as if, having had your city ravaged by Attila the Hun, you formed a movement in total outrage that essentially begged Attila to take another whistle-stop hop through your wrecked community.  The book, with a title to die for, is Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, and Frank has a little advice for the Tea Party whose life he’s chronicled and whose rank-and-file activists could still help put a quarter-billionaire in the White House to defend his financial betters. Tom

From Tom Dispatch

Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Buying Congress in 2012

Posted by Bill McKibben at 9:47am, January 5, 2012.

Startling numbers of Americans are “underwater” -- homeowners and students alike -- and so, for that matter, is Congress, even if in quite a different way.  In these last years, it’s been flooded with money.  Millionaires, including at least 10 centimillionaires, now make up nearly half of our representatives there, and as a group, they have been growing ever richer as Americans grow ever poorer.  Bad times?  Never heard of them.  Congress’s median net worth rose by 15% between 2004 and 2010 -- and this news, in a recent front-page New York Times piece, hardly caused a stir.

Of course, everything is relative.  Compared to the giant energy companies, ours is a Congress of paupers.  After all, the Big Five oil outfits (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell) announced a combined $36 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2011.  Exxon alone pulled in $10.7 billion (and spent more than half of those profits simply to buy back its own stock).  In the third quarter, the same five companies returned for an encore.  They made another $32.6 billion in profits, with Exxon at $10.3 billion (about half of which it again spent on stock buybacks).

Out of a deep sense of civic-mindedness, they and other oil and gas companies have, in turn, showered Congress with their pocket change.  From 1989 through 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, oil and gas companies gave Republicans in Congress $126 million and Democrats $42 million.  Throw in a few hundred thousand dollars for the odd “independent,” and you’ve got $169 million dollars of pure oil and gas generosity over that period, which for them, as Jackie Gleason might once have said, is a “mere bag of shells.”

In case you’re interested, you, the American taxpayer, through Congressional subsidies for the oil and gas industry, reach deep into your own pockets and pony up billions every year to support those poor dears.  And they turn around and pour what is, in essence, your money into the American electoral process to achieve the usual noble oil-and-gas ends.  And just how well does all of that work?  Here’s a little surprise: oil company political action committees (PACs) handed out $1.2 million to members of the House of Representatives in the first six months of 2011 and let’s not say “in return,” but -- consider it an unrelated fact -- 94% of the House members who received such funds voted to keep those industry subsidies flowing.

Then, of course, there’s the presidential race where, thus far, Rick Perry has raised $1.2 million from the energy sector, Mitt Romney $532,000, and Barack Obama $395,000.  (If you’re talking just oil and gas, the figures are: Perry $648,000, Romney $274,000, and Obama $83,000.)  And that’s just the beginning.  After all, we’re officially only five days into presidential campaign 2012!  And here’s the thing: you can’t always tell just where oil and gas money is likely to pop up.  It might even, for instance, turn out to be behind the energy questions people have been asking in Iowa recently. 

This is political (and corporate) life as we now know it, and most Americans are remarkably resigned to it.  Not Bill McKibben, TomDispatch regular and author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.  As he showed with the ongoing dispute over the Keystone XL pipeline, when he sets his mind to it, he has a way of making us take another look at the previously accepted and acceptable.  (To listen to Timothy MacBain’s first Tomcast audio interview of the new year in which McKibben discusses how the rest of us can compete with a system in which money talks, click here, or download it to your iPod here.)  Tom

Welcome to 2012

Let me begin this first post of 2012 with what I’ve personally grown to understand as the most precious gift and best wish of all. “May you have good health throughout 2012”.

I was just reading about the fact that Kestle is seriously thinking about establishing its airplane facility in Wisconsin. Let’s face it, companies move their operations to a particular location for several reasons and most of those reasons have to do with their bottom line. In our Live Free or Die State where we pride ourselves with the fact that we don’t have any broad base taxes, our State Economic Development Office can barely meet its payroll never mind offer generous incentives. (That’s why PSNH funds so many of their efforts) We might be proud of our tax situation here in New Hampshire but we have to keep in mind that although we don’t pay broad base taxes, we also don’t attract people like Kestle. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to pay taxes any more than the next guy, what I’m saying is that “there’s nothing for nothing” and when we pay nothing we usually end up with nothing. So when I read that Mayor Grenier is confident that Berlin is in the running, I have to ask myself why in hell would they be serious about Berlin? Sorry Paul, every community and State claims to have people with the “greatest work ethic”, so you better come up with something better than that. Now co-locating with the biomass plant has merit, but I don’t know if there’s enough to be gained by that co-location to make it worthwhile. Sure Kestle will get electricity at a discount, but that discounted electric rate is probably on par with the base rate in Wisconsin. I must confess that I have no idea how much thermal energy Kestle needs and it could be that it’s a tremendous amount and that it may make economic sense, but as I said earlier, the decision will be about the impact on the bottom line, not any special “deal” Mr. Grenier claims he can pull off. Berlin and our Mayor are back in that “mode” of wishing for a “knight in shining armor” that will ride into town and save our faltering economy. It’s that way of looking at our future that has seen us shrink to half our once prosperous selves and sets us up for promoters like Michael Bartoszek, the Granite Mining King we citizens supported for months and the TEPCO promoter John Harrison who promised us an aluminum plant and a nuclear plant. When will the leadership of Berlin come up with its own goal and a strategy to reverse our downward spiral? It’s a question that the citizens of Berlin should be asking Mr. Grenier and his hand picked “Team”.

HAPPY 2012

Going the way of dinosaurs

With Christmas behind us and the new year a few days away, I would hope that we’ll be spending some time both reminiscing about the year just past and reflecting on what our future may hold for us. I believe 2012 will be a very important year for our country and for each and every one of us. As the middle class has been watching their standard of living fall over the past several years, with wages stagnant for the past 30 years, we all have to wonder at what point this will bottom out and, what will our standard of living look like by that time this decline is reversed. Unfortunately some would like to reduce this topic to no more than political rhetoric blaming George Bush or Barack Obama or their respective political parties. In fact the issues go way beyond Bush and Obama and will continue into the future beyond whoever may be elected in November. We have a worldwide economic crisis on our hands the likes of which none of us have ever seen and yet the political chatter we hear on this blog and most media is in most part nothing more than platitudes. The so called presidential debates on TV have been a shameful spectacle and a waste of time since the candidates are not prepared to be honest with the American people and discuss the issues and solutions since they fear losing their popularity. First, the average person is unforgivably ignorant of the issues, second, most candidates don’t have a clue as to what to do and third, if they did, the proposed solutions would not be acceptable to the average voter. The reason people would not support the appropriate steps is that most of those steps would require personal sacrifices and a change in their lifestyle. Telling people what they don’t want to hear is not a winning strategy for winning a popularity contest. So what are these issues and what are the steps most people would not support? In my opinion there are many, but the two that jumps at me are the issues of energy (oil) and its cost. Related to energy is our sacred cow the Pentagon and, our unchallenged and unrivaled military spending. For the past 30 to 40 years we’ve seen the cost of energy skyrocket in price while at the same time, developing countries such as China are evolving into energy consuming societies. As more and more of our disposable  income is directed at purchasing energy to drive our vehicles and heating our homes, less and less money is available to buy those “finer things in life” thus our standard of living goes down. (So are the jobs) It’s estimated that we waste from 25% to 50% of all energy resources and, where at one time due to its low price it was tolerable, it’s now breaking the bank. Some 40 years ago President Jimmy Carter proposed an energy policy that would make us energy independent within 10 years and the voters terminated his political career quickly. As I claimed earlier our military spending is directly related to our energy issue since for the past several years we’ve had an ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan that no politician dare call an “OIL WAR”. I also don’t need to remind you that “military anything” carries an inflated price tag.(Remember the $600 toilet seat) President Eisenhower warned us of the financial and political power of the Military Industrial Complex, but several of our large corporations deleted that message from our history and our memory. I believe that until we address these two issues in a serious manner our standard of living will continue to fall and the middle class will shrink to the point where it will no longer influence political decisions and direction. At that point we will have a two class society where the disparities between classes will determine if you receive healthcare or not or if your children receive an education. The whole notion of the “American Dream” will be just a memory, owning luxuries such as camps, boats or snow machines will be nothing more than quaint stories told by grandparents and recorded in family photo albums. I believe that there are enough remnants of the government of the people, by the people and for the people to re-ignite the flames of our democracy, but only if the people wake up soon and become involved. It’s almost time for New Years Resolutions and I urge all of you to become informed and, involved in saving the middle class from extinction.