Gary Null's Blog, page 26

Could Prop. 37 Kill Monsanto's GM Seeds?

You'd be forgiven for not noticing—unless you live in California, where you've likely been bombarded by geotargeted web ads and TV spots—but this election could spur a revolution in the way our food is made. Proposition 37 [1], a popular Golden State ballot initiative, would require the labeling of food containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients. The food and agriculture industries are spending millions to defeat it, and with good reason: As we've seen with auto emissions standards and workplace smoking bans, as California goes, so goes the nation.

At least 70 percent of processed food [2] in the United States contains GM ingredients. Eighty-eight percent of corn and 93 percent of soybeans grown domestically [3] are genetically modified. Soda and sweets are almost guaranteed to contain GM ingredients, either in the form of corn syrup or beet sugar. Canola and cottonseed oils also commonly come from GM crops. But if those stats make you want to run and examine the labels on the boxes and cans in your pantry, you're out of luck. Unlike the European Union [4], the US government doesn't require food manufacturers to disclose their use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Californians appear ready to change that: An August poll [5] found voters in the state favoring Prop. 37 by a margin of 3-to-1. And if they do approve the measure, food companies might well start disclosing GMOs nationwide, since it would be expensive and cumbersome to produce one set of labels for California, home to 12 percent of the nation's population, and another for the remaining 49 states. California voters already have a record of being leaders in food reform: When they passed a ban on tight cages for egg-laying hens [6] in 2008, the egg industry initially fought it. But by 2011, it had begun working with animal welfare groups to take the California standards national [7].

Why the push to label GMOs? After all, these crops have been marketed as environmental panaceas, and some prominent greens have been convinced. By opposing GMOs, environmentalists have "starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool," Stewart Brand wrote in his 2009 book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. So far, biotech giants like Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta have commercialized two main GM "traits," engineering crops with the bug-killing gene from the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and crops that can withstand Monsanto's Roundup and other herbicides. Yet GM crops' herbicide resistance has caused a 7 percent net increase in pesticide use in the United States since 1996, according to a recent paper by Washington State University researcher Charles Benbrook.

The industry swears genetically engineered foods are safe even though their potential risks have not been fully studied. Back in 1992, the Food and Drug Administration declared GM foodsessentially equivalent [8] to foods derived from non-GM plants, and it has implemented no requirements for safety testing. GMOs have been in the food supply since 1996, which isn't long enough to tell whether they are having subtle negative effects on our health. Plus, as the advocacy group Food & Water Watch recently reported (PDF) [9], long-term safety studies have been limited because the biotech industry uses its patent power to prevent independent scientists from cultivating GM seeds [10] for research purposes.

In the EU, where labeling has been required since 1997, most consumers have rejected GMOs. No wonder the GM seed industry has been shoveling cash into fighting Prop. 37.

Some independent, peer-reviewed research has suggested trouble, however. GMOs are capable of creating novel proteins that can turn out to be allergenic, as Australian scientists found [11] when they tested a pea variety that had been engineered to express an otherwise harmless protein from the common bean. A 2009 study by French researchers [12] found that rats fed Bt and Roundup-tolerant corn for three months showed declines in kidney and liver function. While such findings don't establish that GMOs are unsafe, they do leave the question wide open—and validate demands for labeling. GMOs are a "massive experiment on the American people," says Stacy Malkan, media director for the pro-labeling group Yes on 37 for Your Right to Know If Your Food Has Been Genetically Engineered [13]. "We absolutely have a right to know and choose for ourselves if we eat genetically engineered foods."

If Prop. 37 wins and the food industry eventually takes labeling nationwide, will it present a serious challenge to GMOs? One possibility is that consumers will simply ignore the labels and continue shopping as usual. Or not: A 2010 Thomson Reuters poll (PDF) [14] found 93 percent of respondents in support of labeling; 40 percent indicated they wouldn't choose to eat genetically engineered vegetables, fruits, or grains. In the European Union, where labeling has been required since 1997, most consumers have rejected GMOs, essentially killing the market for them. Hostility toward the technology is so strong that the German chemical giant BASF recently announced [15] it would stop producing GM seeds for the European market.

No wonder the GM seed industry has been shoveling cash into the No on 37 Coalition Against the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme [16]. As of early fall, it had raised $32 million [17], eight times as much as the pro-labeling group. Its list of funders [18] reads like a Big Food and Ag trade group: Major donors include Monsanto ($7.1 million), DuPont ($4.9 million), Dow ($2 million), and PepsiCo ($1.7 million). The parent companies of major organic brands have also lined up against Prop. 37, including Coca-Cola (Honest Tea), General Mills (Cascadian Farm), Kellogg (Kashi), and Dean Foods (Horizon Organic). The No on 37 campaign's treasurer [19]is Thomas Hiltachk, a prominent Republican lawyer and former tobacco industry lobbyist who has served as outside counsel to Philip Morris and helped lead the failed 2010 ballot initiative[20] to repeal California's climate law.

The group's main strategy has been to portray the labeling measure as a needless burden and waste of money. An image on its website shows a farmer with his mouth taped shut and his body crisscrossed by red tape—never mind that the proposal imposes no requirements on farmers. The group has funded studies purporting to show that Prop. 37 would impose an additional $1.2 billion in annual production costs [21] on California food processors and wouldincrease household food prices [22] by as much as $400 a year.

The Yes on 37 side is playing hardball, too. By early September, it had raised $4 million [23], mostly from the pro-organic, anti-corporate Organic Consumers Fund, independently owned food companies like Clif Bar and Nature's Path, and a supplements distributor [24] run by the quackish natural-health guru Joseph Mercola. In late August, it released a 30-second TV ad[25] linking the GM seed industry to past chemical industry scandals, pointing out that Monsanto and Dow once staunchly defended infamous poisons such as DDT and Agent Orange.

If Prop. 37 passes, will it threaten the GMO giants' bottom line? So far, the market seems unfazed about the prospect of mandatory labeling. Two months from Election Day, Monsanto's share price was up more than 25 percent over last year's, significantly outperforming the broader market and showing no evidence of investors' fretting over the California ballot initiative. But Wall Street's hyperfocus on the short term sometimes blinds it to major shake-ups approaching on the horizon.

By cutting fat checks and hauling out an old tobacco hand to defeat California's labeling proposition, Monsanto and its peers are no doubt taking the long view. The US market for genetically engineered crops is by far the world's largest, accounting for two-thirds of global annual GM seed sales of about $13.3 billion [26]. This fight isn't just about keeping consumers in the dark in a single state; it's about keeping GMOs in farm fields and on supermarket shelves nationwide.

The Largest Economy In The World Is Imploding Right In Front Of Our Eyes

A devastating economic depression is rapidly spreading across the largest economy in the world.  Unemployment is skyrocketing, money is being pulled out of the banks at an astounding rate, bad debts are everywhere and economic activity is slowing down month after month.  So who am I talking about?  Not the United States - the economy that I am talking about has a GDP that is more than two trillion dollars larger.  It is not China either - the economy that I am talking about is more than twice the size of China.  You have probably guessed it by now - the largest economy in the world is the EU economy.  Things in Europe continue to get even worse.  Greece and Spain are already experiencing full-blown economic depressions that continue to deepen, and Italy and France are headed down the exact same path that Greece and Spain have gone.  Headlines about violent protests and economic despair dominate European newspapers day after day after day.  European leaders hold summit meeting after summit meeting, but all of the "solutions" that get announced never seem to fix anything.  In fact, the largest economy on the planet continues to implode right in front of our eyes, and the economic shockwave from this implosion is going to be felt to the four corners of the earth.

On Friday, newspapers all over Europe declared that Greece is about to run out of money(again).

The Greek government says that without more aid they will completely run out of cash by the end of November.

Of course the rest of Europe is going to continue to pour money into Greece because they know that if they don't the financial markets will panic.

But they are also demanding that Greece make even more painful budget cuts.  Previous rounds of budget cuts have been extremely damaging to the Greek economy.

The Greek economy contracted by 4.9 percent during 2010 and by 7.1 percent during 2011.

Overall, the Greek economy has contracted by about 20 percent since 2008.

This is what happens when you live way above your means for too long and a day of reckoning comes.

The adjustment can be immensely painful.

Greece continues to implement wave after wave of austerity measures, and these austerity measures have pushed the country into a very deep depression, but Greece still is not even close to a balanced budget.

Greece is still spending more money than it is bringing in, and Greek politicians are warning what even more budget cuts could mean for their society.

For example, what Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras had to say the other day was absolutely chilling....

"Greek democracy stands before what is perhaps its greatest challenge," Samaras told the German business daily Handelsblatt in an interview published hours before the announcement in Berlin that Angela Merkel will fly to Athens next week for the first time since the outbreak of the crisis.

Resorting to highly unusual language for a man who weighs his words carefully, the 61-year-old politician evoked the rise of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party to highlight the threat that Greece faces, explaining that society "is threatened by growing unemployment, as happened to Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic".

"Citizens know that this government is Greece's last chance," said Samaras, who has repeatedly appealed for international lenders at the EU and IMF to relax the onerous conditions of the bailout accords propping up the Greek economy.

But don't look down on Greece.  They are just ahead of the curve.  Eventually the U.S. and the rest of Europe will go down the exact same path.

Just look at Spain.  When Greece first started imploding, Spain insisted that the same thing would never happen to them.

But it did.

By itself, Spain is the 12th largest economy in the world, and right now it is a complete and total mess with no hope of recovery in sight.

The national government is broke, the regional governments are broke, the banking system is insolvent and Spain is in the midst of the worst housing crash that it has ever seen.

On top of everything else, the unemployment rate in Spain is now over 25 percent and the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 is now well above 50 percent.

An astounding 9.86 percent of all loans that Spanish banks are holding are considered to be bad loans which will probably never be collected.  Before it is all said and done, probably ever major Spanish bank will need to be bailed out at least once.

Manufacturing activity in Spain has contracted for 17 months in a row, and the number of corporate bankruptcies in Spain is rising at a stunning rate.

Five different Spanish regions have formally requested bailouts from the national government, and the national government is drowning in an ocean of red ink.

Meanwhile, panic has set in and there has been a run on the banks in Spain.  The following is from a recent Bloomberg article....

Banco Santander SA (SAN), Spain’s largest bank, lost 6.3 percent of its domestic deposits in July, according to data published by the nation’s banking association. Savings at Banco Popular Espanol SA, the sixth-biggest, fell 9.5 percent the same month.

Eurobank Ergasias SA, Greece’s second-largest lender, lost 22 percent of its customer deposits in the 12 months ended March 31, according to the latest data available from the firm. Alpha Bank SA (ALPHA), the country’s third-biggest, lost 26 percent of client savings during that period.

Overall, the equivalent of 7 percent of GDP was withdrawn from the Spanish banking system in the month of July alone.

Thousands of Spaniards have become so desperate that they have resorted to digging around in supermarket trash bins for food.  In response, locks are being put on supermarket trash bins in some areas.

But Greece and Spain are not alone in seeing their economies implode.

As I wrote about recently, the number of unemployed workers in Italy has risen by more than 37 percent over the past year.

The French economy is starting to implode as well.  Just check out this article.

The unemployment rate in France is now above 10 percent, and it has risen for 16 months in a row.

It is just a matter of time before things in Italy and France get as bad as they already are in Greece and Spain.

The chief economist at the IMF is now saying that it will take until at least 2018 for the global economy to recover, but unfortunately I believe that he is being overly optimistic.

As I have said so many times before, the next wave of the global economic crisis is rapidly approaching.  Depression is already sweeping much of southern Europe, and it is only a matter of time before it sweeps across northern Europe and North America as well.

Neither Obama or Romney is going to be able to stop what is coming.  The global economy isgetting weaker with each passing day.  The central banks of the world can print money until the cows come home, but that isn't going to fix our fundamental problems.

The largest economy in the world is imploding right in front of our eyes and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

If you believe that Barack Obama, Mitt Romney or Ben Bernanke can somehow magically shield us from the economic shockwave that is coming then you are being delusional.

Just because what is going on in Europe is a "slow-motion train wreck" does not mean that it will be any less devastating.

Yes, we can see what is coming and we can understand why it is happening, but that doesn't mean that we will be able to avoid the consequences.

Read more.. http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-largest-economy-in-the-world-is-imploding-right-in-front-of-our-eyes

Ryan’s Distortion of America’s Founding

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has been roundly criticized for being light on substance and long on fluff. But his running mate Paul Ryan is promoting a dangerous idea that refutes the historical foundations of democratic government. Practically ignored by the mainstream press, Ryan’s manifesto demands closer scrutiny.

When Rep. Ryan accepted Mitt Romney’s invitation as running mate, the Wisconsin Republican uttered a simple, but profound, statement:

“But America is more than just a place. It’s an idea. It’s the only country founded upon an idea: Our rights come from Nature and God, not government. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. This idea is founded upon the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination, and government by the consent of the governed. This idea is under assault.”

“Our rights come from Nature and God, not government?” Let us hope this idea is under assault, because it is powerful, and it is dangerous.

We know this idea is historically powerful because Americans once used it to overthrow the authority of the British Empire; we know it is imminently dangerous because contemporary American plutocrats are now using it to undermine our hard-won democracy.

Ryan’s opinion that human rights are conferred by “Nature and God” is breathtakingly unoriginal. Witchdoctors and warlords have been inventing and re-inventing the idea of atavistic and supernatural rights since the first virgin was sacrificed on the bloodstained altar of some prehistoric bogeyman. But more recently, and more civilly, the concept was resurrected by English philosopher John Locke in the 17th Century.

Locke, a philosophical shaman of the today’s Libertarian-Right set, hawked the idea that human rights were conferred by an imaginary “law of Nature,” which he said pre-existed and superseded any law made by actual lawmaking people. Think of Moses bringing the tablets down from the Mount – but without Moses, or the tablets, or a population that could read.

Please understand that Locke’s “law of Nature” existed in a prehistoric “state of Nature,” a sort of Garden of Eden where he said “men … by nature all free, equal, and independent” existed without either the cost or any benefit of government. But there was a snake in Locke’s garden: “For although the law of Nature be plain and intelligible to all rational creatures, yet men, being biased by their interest … are not apt to allow of it as a law binding to them in the application of it to their particular cases.”

The only solution to humanity’s selfish transgression of the “law of Nature,” Locke explains, was the establishment of government. “The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting.”

So, according to Locke, man-made law (government) was invented by man to protect rights that man never made in the first place. (This is but one version of the long-running theory of the “Social Contract.”)

But notice the shift from man in a “state of Nature” to man in a governed society: the “chief end” of this novel entity of government was not to protect mankind’s original condition “by nature allfree, equal and independent,” which was their apparent birthright, but “the preservation of their property.”

Does this reasoning sound at least vaguely familiar? It should. It was the same argument that was enthusiastically adopted by the well-to-do, property-owning, tax-evasive, English Colonial elite at the onset of the American Revolution. The current GOP’s political base, if you will – backdated a couple of centuries.

But in contemporary times, Locke’s “natural law” has languished as a hot cocktail party topic for many folks. An interesting exception is arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who, when queried about his judicial philosophy at his 1991 Senate confirmation hearing, said he thought “natural law” provided “philosophical background” to the Constitution.

Now Paul Ryan, who like Thomas is a self-professed Ayn Rand devotee, has weighed in with his grandiloquent echo that humans’ irrevocable rights do not originate from their fellow humans, but from somewhere out of the Blue.

The opinion that persons’ rights derive from Nature, or natural law, has been rejected for centuries by philosophical luminaries from Baruch Spinoza to Jeremy Bentham, who pointed out the obvious: rights derive from law; and law as we know it does not and cannot exist without government.

To imagine “law” existing prior to government, said Bentham, is not only a contradiction of terms, but is “nonsense upon stilts.” The world’s greatest scientists confirmed Bentham’s conclusion: Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Albert Einstein, for example, never discovered that “Nature” conferred “rights” to any animal, plant or thing in the known Universe.

Nature – infamous for its so-called Law of the Jungle – is a notorious transgressor of human rights. Any random rattlesnake, bubonic plague bacterium or tsunami stands ready to prove the point to humans foolish enough to fantasize otherwise. Anybody who has ever camped out for a summer weekend without bug repellent can tell tales of woe concerning the “natural rights” showered upon humanity by the natural world.

Whether God confers immutable rights upon humans seems to depend upon whom you ask. Contemporary radical Zionists would probably agree. So might a jihadist terrorist. Adam and Eve, interestingly, could not. Napoleon quipped that God assigned right according to who has the best artillery, but in the following century the Soviets, who in fact possessed the winning artillery at Stalingrad, claimed God did not exist. Go figure.

But even devout believers in the Western monotheistic deity – Christian, Jew and Muslim alike – must admit that, according to scripture, God-given rights apparently do not confer immunity from fatal inconveniences such as Death Angels, plagues, floods, eternal damnation, and, of course, crucifixion.

Declaration of Independence: First Edition

So it would be fair to say Ryan’s “foundational idea” that Americans’ rights come from “Nature and God” is not an established fact. Yet it does have a familiar ring to it, and for good reason. Ryan’s idea was scribbled in stone, as it were, in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which states explicitly that “certain unalienable rights” are endowed by man’s Creator:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

“Assault Thomas Jefferson if you dare,” was the obvious subtext of Ryan’s pronouncement.

But let’s set the historical record straight here: Thomas Jefferson did not conceive that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Others penned those words.

Let us recall that Jefferson was on a committee whose job it was to draft a statement of independence based upon a Congressional resolution authored on July 2, 1776 by Richard Henry Lee (ironically, or not, the great grand-uncle of rebel leader Robert E. Lee). The committee’s other members were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston.

Some revisions to Jefferson’s original document seem to have been made by Adams and Franklin, others by the Second Continental Congress as a whole – but it is not known who edited what, exactly. We do know Jefferson’s original words, however. Like any prudent writer, he retained his first draft. This is what he actually wrote:

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

So Jefferson evidently did not mean that human rights are “endowed by their Creator,” or by Nature, simply because that is not what he wrote. It is clear from his original draft that he personally conceived that inherent human rights derived from humans’ equality, not from Locke’s (or Ryan’s) concept that rights come down to man from some pre-extant forcesuperior to human creation.

This difference between the origins of rights – equality vs. superiority – is crucial. Equal rights have generally been repudiated by the economic elite who find it more profitable to claim that rights flow down from upon High. Those who champion equality have usually supported the obverse: that rights, if they flow at all, need to flow up from the people, “grassroots” style.

It takes no flash of genius to perceive that the elites’ preference for the “superiority model” of rights was not only the basis, but also a prerequisite, for the long-discredited “Trickle-Down” economic theory – which holds that the working class is best nurtured from the table scraps of the wealthy.

This pernicious idea has itself trickled down, like some generation-skipping genetic disease, from Jefferson’s editors, to the Gilded Age, then to Herbert Hoover, thus to Ronald Reagan, and now finally to some guy named Paul Ryan.

Of course, the oligarchs’ embrace of a trickle-down theory of human rights was hardly the only flaw in the self-serving reasoning of those who published the Declaration. That indentured servitude, debtors’ prisons, slavery and bonded child labor were acceptable institutions by those who signed off on the idea that “all men are created equal” seems stunningly hypocritical today. Yet it did not quite seem that way to propertied men empowered by votes unavailable to their servants.

To the mostly privileged soon-to-be Founders, social and economic equality – as well as their peculiar idea of liberty – applied only to the elite who already possessed it. Thus, the American Revolution was not led by an American Spartacus, but rather by the Colonial elite who risked treason against the British Empire in order to preserve for themselves the unequal social and economic prerogatives in their new, distinctly American, empire.

The elites’ Orwellian crusade for “government by those who do not consent to be governed” should sound familiar to those who are afflicted by today’s mainstream, corporate-owned media. This message was not intended to further the interests of a democratic society then, nor is it now, and those who value democracy should heed it at their peril.

The Declaration, Disestablishmentarianism and the Constitution

Its editors’ revisions notwithstanding, the Declaration of Independence still served its purpose. But its purpose was not to “found a country” upon the idea that our rights come from “Nature and God,” as Paul Ryan would have it.

Indeed, the Declaration’s specific intent was not to establish any sort of political entity at all, but rather to disestablish a government that already existed and which, by the late 18th Century, had begun to threaten the prerogatives of the Colonial American elite. The secondary purpose of the Declaration was a public relations play, as its very first sentence makes clear:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Despite Paul Ryan’s belief in his mythical “founding idea,” the Second Continental Congress, including Jefferson, weren’t founding anything with all their eloquent words. They were, however, executing a calculated but gutsy gamble – not unlike that of a disaffected wife serving divorce papers on an abusive spouse who was also the most powerful corporate CEO on the planet – and hoping for the best.

How the divorce was to be justified would be critical to its success. To this end, the “opinions of mankind” (especially those of potential allies) were of paramount importance. This public relations task fell to Thomas Jefferson, whose true genius was to turn the logic of monarchical rule on its head, not to beat it at its own game.

For how many millennia had a rogues’ gallery of pharaohs, emperors, kings, czars, sultans and khans decreed that their right to rule came, as Ryan insists, from “Nature and God, not from government?” The crucial challenge of Revolutionary self-government, Jefferson understood, would be to divorce itself not only from the raw power of the king and Parliament, but from the fundamental logic of despotism.

In effect, Jefferson justified the Colonial bride’s right to divorce her abusive spouse on the grounds of her undeniable equality. But his edited argument – based upon Locke and now parroted by Ryan – was that the bride’s right to divorce was justified by her claim to the sameassumed superiority of her abusive husband. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, in other words. The problem was that the sauce was not good for the goose in the first place.

Jefferson’s vision allowed the moral authority of egalitarianism to challenge – not assume – the king’s fictive mandate from heaven. But when Jefferson argued for inalienable rights based upon human equality, the elitist Paul Ryans in the Second Continental Congress struck his words and replaced them with rights based upon supernatural authority.

In so doing, neither they, nor Paul Ryan, repudiated the medieval principle of Divine Right of Kings. Their reasoning does deny the idea of rule consecrated by divine authority, but rather usurps it.

In any event, the United States of America was not founded, as Ryan announced, upon some extra-legal “idea” of divine authority, but upon the Constitution. Unfortunately for Ryan, who as a professional politician has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution on numerous occasions, our actual founding document contains no reference to the will of “Nature” or “God” at all.

Nowhere does the Constitution say, nor even imply, that persons’ rights are “natural” nor “endowed by their Creator,” nor does it even hint that “rights” are unalienable, inalienable, inherent, natural or somehow sacrosanct. The Constitution does not pass upon the origins of rights.

And it does not confer any rights. As a matter of fact, the word “right” only appears once in the original body of the un-amended Constitution, and only then in reference to patents, of all things. In more bad news for folks like Ryan, neither the Constitution nor any of its Amendments mentions “government by the consent of the governed,” or “self-determination,” or “free enterprise.”

Ryan, in point of fact, is just making this stuff up and hoping the rest of us have never actually read the Constitution, or can distinguish it from the Declaration of Independence, which carries no authority of law.

American Anarchy vs. Fake Patriots

The Declaration of Independence inspired other independence manifestos, including the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the American feminists’Declaration of Rights and Sentiments in 1848. With crushing irony, even the Vietnamese explicitly copied Jefferson’s masterpiece in their own declaration of independence from the French in 1945.

(Note: one year after the Vietnamese declaration, the United States of America – Ryan’s visionary champion of “self-determination” – re-imposed French colonial domination over the Vietnamese homeland.)

These revolutionary movements that copied our Declaration were the underdogs of their times. But they all eventually succeeded in overcoming the non-consensual rule imposed by the presumed “natural” or “God-given” prerogatives of state-sanctioned religion, male chauvinism, and Euro-American colonial overlord-ship.

They, like Paul Ryan, extolled the ideas of The Declaration. But what possible common ground do religious right-wingers and Ayn Rand cheerleaders such as Ryan & Company share with malcontent, progressive revolutionary movements whose anti-paternalist and anti-capitalist causes were so clearly at odds with Ryan’s neoconservative base? Perhaps the surprising word we are searching for is “anarchy.”

The word comes from the Greek anarchos, “having no ruler.” Anarchy is not a word that any respectable American is supposed to use nowadays to describe a credible political or social movement. This no-no word has associations with evil, alien, bomb-heaving zealots bent on the nihilistic destruction of the “American Way of Life,” apparently just for the hell of it.

Yet this is an odd taboo for a country whose national capital is named in honor of the most famous leader of the most celebrated bomb-heaving radicals of the 18th Century.

The long war these anarchists fought from 1775-1783 was… messy. American “Sons of Liberty” gangs nailed shut the doors of peaceable, but “politically incorrect” churches. The Crown set slaves free to fight their liberty-loving masters. Patriot forces unleashed preemptive genocidal military campaigns against unsuspecting Indians. British officers led loyalist Americans in atrocities against the own countrymen – and vice versa. Lord Howe’s invaders kidnapped and gang-raped New Jersey farm girls for days on end, while some unpaid Patriot volunteers were beheaded for desertion by Patriot freedom-fighters.

Atrocities, spies, mutinies, traitors, counterfeiters and war profiteering were commonplace. Though only a minority of Americans supported the revolution against aristocratic rule, the Revolution’s top leaders came from the colonial elite, and many of the best were foreign noblemen: Count Pulaski, Baron von Steuben, Lord Sterling, and Marquis de Lafayette. George Washington once personally threatened to shoot his own Patriot troops … and a few guys dumped some tea into Boston Harbor. Let’s not forget that.

If there were a war today that killed the same percentage of the American population, we would have over 3,000,000 graves to dig – ten times as many as we dug for combat deaths in World War II. If this level of disorganized carnage were visited upon America today, would we not be inclined to call it “anarchy?” And what should we think of the document that called us to arms?

The Declaration of Independence is nothing if not a profoundly “anti-ruler” screed. It declared the radical dissolution of the “political bands” which had bound the American colonies to the British Empire for more than 150 years, but it instituted no new government whatsoever to take its place. It is difficult to imagine a more anarchical statement.

But the government the Declaration despised was an astonishingly inequitable system based on aristocratic pretensions and class-based privilege. Even the English Parliament was held hostage to the hereditary wealth and membership of its Upper House of Lords.

The corrupt British government both chartered and owned stock in neo-global corporations such as the British East India Company, whose tea was dumped into Boston harbor, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, that once dominated the resources of an area of North America larger by far than the land mass of the Roman Empire at its height of power. But nowhere in the vast holdings of the British Empire could a man without property cast a vote.

When the truly radical American revolutionary Thomas Paine said, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one” this was the system he meant. Indeed, it was the only kind of government that then existed: an oppressive racket of “God-endowed” kings and hereditary dynasties.

Backed by a proto-military-industrial complex whose sole purpose was to protect the profits of the investor class, these privileged parasites cared little for the toiling masses that physically produced the wealth of the Empire. They cared nothing at all for the millions of indigenous peoples whose lands, lives and cultures were decimated by a pre-planned colonial holocaust that was but a half-step removed from a policy of outright extermination.

This may sound familiar to contemporary Americans whose military-industrial-financial imperium spans the globe under the twin banners of Free Trade and American Exceptionalism. But however problem-ridden our civilization may seem today, it is immensely superior to the system in place the day our Constitution was ratified. Tossing out a king and founding a government were just the first baby-steps in our long journey toward domestic social justice.

Through the power of the democratic process, the American people first unshackled themselves from aristocratic colonial landlords and later from Gilded Age industrial robber-barons; from chattel slavery and child labor; from the criminalization of organized workers; from the disenfranchisement of women, minorities, and the un-propertied; from the specter of old-age squalor and hopeless poverty; from the degeneracy of company-store peonage and sweatshop labor; and from the futility of private-only education.

Having accomplished this much for ourselves, we finally made some small provisions to preserve for our posterity what little was left of our remaining physical resources.

Despite a Constitution which tolerated these gross inequities, and despite the profits that accrued to the wealthy who promulgated them, the American people cast away this rule of cruelty. Eschewing the orchestrated violence of elitist, trickle-down, anti-egalitarian leaders, common Americans achieved their goals legally – not naturally or supernaturally.

With man-made law the American people upheld equal rights – which originated, and continue to be held in common, in the minds of our fellow human beings. Truly “anarchic” Americans thus chose to live “without rulers” excepting ourselves. To re-direct the famous Patrick Henry line: “If this be anarchy, we made the most of it.” And it worked.

But that was then. Now, a media-multitude of freedom-fetishists such as Paul Ryan would hijack the genuine anarchy of American Progressivism by cherry-picking self-serving phrases from the Declaration of Independence. They borrow the language of violent Revolutionary elitism in order to wage an economic campaign against an American government that was reconfigured by a century of legal, democratic revolution.

They, as ever, are corporate-men who envision America only as a place worth owning, while they vilify those who envisioned America as a place that should be worth living in. It is enough to make one wish for a law against criminal farce.

These Revolutionary imposters would have Americans believe that any American democratic-collective institution is synonymous with Soviet state-socialism; that the licentiousness of the privileged few is a necessary precondition for the economic prosperity of the multitude who work for them; that their business corporations are legal persons – and worse yet – that the constitutionally protected rights of such fictitious persons come from some mumbo-jumbo agency of “Nature and God,” quite beyond the authority of a citizen in possession of a ballot.

Then, almost as an afterthought, the Ryans and the other Randistas among us offer the fraudulent consolation that opportunity is somehow more valuable than outcome – as though an equal turn at rolling the dice gives all players the same stake in the game.

“We promise equal opportunity,” Ryan comforted his audience, “not equal outcomes.”

This is the logic of sperm. Perhaps the biologists among us may offer congratulations. Predictable outcomes make opportunities valuable, not the other way around, and if Ryan does not understand this concept perhaps he should find a stockbroker to explain it to him.

Most grievous, these faux Revolutionaries claim some hocus-pocus “natural law” as superior to human rationality, which admittedly is imperfect, but is arguably the sole attribute elevating the human condition above that of asparagus. In so doing, the worshipers of irrationality simultaneously deny Jefferson’s moral vision that human equality is the sine qua non of any civil society that deserves the consent of the governed.

“Our rights come from Nature and God.” Can this be true simply because some guy said so? More important, is this really the “idea” upon which the American nation was either founded, or ought to exist today?

No, it is not, and we know why it is not.

Ryan’s “idea” is the fantasy of a self-indulgent class who, like many of our elitist forebears, would arrogate to themselves the authority to say whose rights will bloom and whose will wither on the vine. His grand idea is merely the scheme of anti-democratic con-men, of fake Patriots, who would rescue self-government – not from any enemy, foreign or domestic – but only from itself. As ever, it is the idea of men who would be kings.

Read more.. http://consortiumnews.com/2012/10/06/...

8 Facts That Prove Our Govt. Is Not Going Broke

Pete Peterson, the billionaire former private equity mogul, is quietly funding a noisy bus tour [3]to whip up debt hysteria across the land. The “Ten Million a Minute Tour” headed by the Peterson Foundation’s former CEO, David M. Walker (and featuring such economic soothsayers as Alan Greenspan and Ross Perot) will end this week in Washington, DC after traveling coast to coast to alert America about the myriad of alleged dangers posed by government debt and deficits.

Really, it should be called the “Million an Hour” cavalcade because that’s about how much Peterson and company made, in part, through obscene tax loopholes designed for private equity firms and hedge funds. If there really is a debt problem, then Peterson and his fellow tax-evading financial moguls have contributed mightily to it.

But America does not face a debt crisis. Nor are we likely to face one in the next 100 years. In fact, we are the last country on Earth that needs to worry about its public debt.

What’s really behind the debt histrionics is a relentless effort by these Very Important People to use a trumped-up crisis to shred the social safety net and bring forth their bleak vision of a dog-eat-dog society where government provides for no one (except the super-rich). Unfortunately, many liberals are also buying into a “debt crisis” that doesn’t exist.

It’s time to inoculate ourselves from deficit hysteria. The first step is recognizing that virtually everything we read and hear about government debt and deficits is misleading, manipulative or just plain wrong. So, here’s your handy guide to the eight biggest lies.

But first, some basic definitions and facts:

·         Deficits are how much the government budget goes into the red in a given year. The red ink is covered by the sale of government bonds to investors here and abroad.
·         The national debt is the total amount of what the U.S. owes on those government bonds. If we have deficits year after year, then the debt gets larger year after year.
·         The projected deficit for this fiscal year is over $1 trillion.
·         Our total government debt is more than $16 trillion as of Oct. 1, 2012.

1. Isn’t it extremely dangerous to have such a large government debt?

Supposedly, the danger point comes when investors no longer will buy our debt at reasonable interest rates because they fear we won’t pay it back. Are we there yet? Are we getting close?

Let’s start with a look at debt as a percentage of our nation’s annual economic activity (gross domestic product or GDP). The chart below shows our national debt as a percentage of GDP hit an all-time high of 121 percent during the depths of World War II and recently began sharply rising again in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. In 2011 the debt/GDP percentage reached 102.9 percent. Most forecasts suggest it is now leveling off.

 

We can also compare ourselves to other large economies. Here’s a list from the International Monetary Fund [4].

 

Government Debt as a Percentage of GDP, 2011

 

 

China

25.8%

France

86.3%

Germany

81.5%

Japan

229.8%

United Kingdom

82.5%

United States

102.9%

What’s going on here? First off, China’s percentage is artificially low because it buries a good deal of public debt in opaque provincial and local government loans and land giveaways. And then you have Japan. Why isn’t everyone screaming about Japan’s debt? Because investors consider its economy to be strong, steady and safe. They’re happy to lend to Japan at very low interest rates. And where is the safest haven in the world? Here in the USA. Investors are willing to lend us money at almost no interest rate at all.

Here’s the rub. Debt is only too high if the underlying economy is shaky. Investors all over the world are betting that the U.S. is the strongest, most stable nation right now, and over the long haul. They expect our economy to grow which automatically will shrink the debt ratio. It’s simple math. Economy up, debt down as a percentage of the economy (all other things being equal).

Despite what you hear from nearly every media outlet and every politician, investors do not see our debt as dangerously high. They are more than willing to pour money into the most stable, dynamic economy in the world – one that is both safe now, and likely to grow in the future.

2. Aren’t we’re in danger of becoming the next Greece?

Greece is in a heap of trouble even though its debt-to-GDP ratio (169.8%) is far below Japan’s (229.8%). With an unemployment rate of over 25 percent, Greece’s economy is shrinking rapidly. The more it shrinks the more it has to borrow to pay back previous loans and to balance its budget. But it can’t borrow unless it cuts its budgets. To cut its budgets, it has to lay off public employees and cut its social safety net, which further increases unemployment and shrinks its economy. Unless you’re in love with retsina, this is not a great time to be living in Greece.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Greece’s recovery is that it doesn’t have its own currency. If Greece did, it could let the value of that currency fall, which would make its economy more competitive. Obviously, both the US and Japan have their own currencies. Also, the U.S. and Japanese economies are much, much richer, stronger and diverse than Greece’s. Therefore, there is no chance – none whatsoever --- that the U.S and Japan will face Greece’s debt problems. Anyone who makes that comparison is either a fool or a demagogue hoping to skewer popular social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

3. Won’t cutting the national debt make the economy grow?

When economic calamity strikes, we humans seem instinctively to hoard our remaining resources. (Once we had belts, we tightened them.) But complex modern economies are not like families. Economies mired in major recessions require spending, not austerity, to function properly. As John Maynard Keynes noted two generations ago, when an economy is in a depression, the worst thing you can do is pay down government debt, precisely because families and businesses already are belt-tightening so much. Instead you need to run up even more debt to make up for the demand we lose when households “tighten their belts.” If major governments move to austerity during hard times, the recession grows deeper.

You want proof? Look at Europe today, where a real-time austerity experiment is in progress. Led by Germany, each European nation is cutting back on social services and increasing taxes. The net result: The 17-nation Eurozone is falling back into another recession with unemployment now rising to 11.4%. As the New York Times [5] reports:

Greece had an unemployment rate of 24.4 percent in June, the latest month for which data were available. Spain still had the region’s highest jobless rate, at 25.1 percent, and an even bigger problem among young people. Nearly 53 percent of Spaniards younger than 25 were classified as unemployed in August.

There is no way in hell that cutting government debt will put America back to work. Instead it will send our economy into a nosedive. We’ve already unnecessarily unemployed more than 650,000 public employees due to self-destructive cuts in local, state and federal budgets. It would have been far, far, better for the government to borrow more to put America back to work.

4. But isn’t it ominous that the rating agencies took away our AAA rating?

Ludicrous, not ominous.

Rating agencies were first established to help investors judge the ability of corporations to repay their debts (corporate bonds). At first the rating agencies were paid by investors who wanted the information. But, a new business model emerged --- agencies were paid by the corporations and banks who were selling bonds in question. No one seemed to care much about the obvious conflict of interest until the recent Wall Street crash. Then we painfully discovered that these “independent” rating agencies made tens of millions of dollars doling out AAA ratings on every piece of toxic trash that investment banks paid them to rate. Then when the crash hit, the rating agencies had to reclassify thousands of mortgage-back bonds from AAA to junk. In short, the rating agencies are best viewed as pet poodles for the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks and investment houses.

Rating agencies also evaluate debt offerings by governments and government agencies so that investors can decide how much risk to take on. The lower the rating, the higher the risk, and therefore, the higher the interest rate for the government offering. Fair enough.

But when it comes to rating major economic powerhouses like the U.S., Japan or Germany, what the rating agencies say is meaningless. When the U.S. “lost” its AAA rating, it was supposed to signal a rise in risk and therefore a rise in the interest rates the U.S. would be forced to pay investors to hold its debt. Instead, U.S. government bond rates went down as investors poured more money, not less, into buying our debt.

So why did the rating agencies bother to offer what obviously was a meaningless downgrade? Because again, they were acting as Wall Street poodles, hoping to tip government policy toward debt reduction and away from making Wall Street pay for the unconscionable mess it created. It’s amazing to watch highly educated politicians genuflect before these bogus ratings. It’s theology, not economics.

In short, the cut in our AAA rating should be viewed for what it really is: a political act to help Wall Street support the Republicans, submarine new financial regulations, and redirect the debate away from increased taxes on Wall Street and the super-rich.

5. Isn’t China buying up most of our debt and doesn’t that put us at its mercy?

The U.S. imports more from China than it exports to China. This produces a trade deficit (not government debt). In the first six months of 2012 we imported $235 billion worth of goods from China but exported only $61 billion to China for a net trade deficit of $174 billion. (There are many reasons for this imbalance, but a big one is that China keeps its currency artificially undervalued, which in turn, keeps its products cheap and ours more expensive. That makes it very hard to compete.)

Since China wants to do something with all those extra dollars, it buys U.S. government bonds. How much of our debt does China now own? About 8 cents of every dollar of outstanding U.S. debt. Other U.S. agencies like the Social Security Trust Fund and the Federal Reserve own about 30 cents of every dollar of our debt, and individual investors, corporations and other countries own the rest – about 62 cents of every dollar of debt. (See U.S Treasury Department[6] and Businessinsider.com [7].)

Yes, China is the biggest foreign player, but it's not about to make trouble. It couldn’t even if it wanted to. China needs us to buy its goods or its economy will collapse. (Think for a minute about the trade. We get real goods and China gets paper…or rather little electronic signals in a currency account. It’s not clear who’s getting the better of that deal.)

In the end, large global economies are joined at the hip. China will buy our debt because it has no other choice. It has no interest at all in roiling the U.S. debt markets. If we go down, they go down.

6. Isn’t the debt caused by runaway entitlements?

Now we’re getting down to what this debt debate is really about. The austerity folks don’t want to tighten just any belt. They want to shred our social safety net. Debt is their excuse. Instead of making an open and honest case for a dog-eat-dog society, the social Darwinists (with Paul Ryan their new leader) make the utterly untruthful claim that so-called entitlements are driving up debt.

With a little addition, we can see how bogus this claim really is.

About a decade ago we were running a yearly surplus, meaning that each year we were paying down our national debt, not adding to it. Then stuff happened.

·         The Bush tax cuts (continued by Obama under severe Republican pressure) cost $250 billion a year in revenue.
·         The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan added another $300 billion a year in unfunded expenditures.
·         The Wall Street crash (which destroyed 8 million jobs in six months) led to a total of $350 billion a year in lost tax revenues and increased expenditures for the unemployed.
·         The bailout/stimulus rescue of the economy cost an additional $300 million a year for two years.

As the bottom black line on the graph below shows, instead of our current trillion dollar deficit, we’d be very close to a balanced budget were it not for Wall Street’s reckless greed, the unnecessary wars, and tax cuts for the rich. And we’d get there without shrinking social programs.

 

7. Isn’t this Obama’s fault?

As we just reviewed, Obama is not the cause of the rising debt. The tax cuts, the unfunded wars, the Wall Street crash and the bailouts started on Bush’s watch. Obama did indeed push the stimulus through, but that was a good move for our economy not a bad one. Furthermore, it was too small, not too big. (And Obamacare, over the long haul, is roughly neutral when it comes to the national debt.)

Obama, however, is not blameless. He should be faulted, not for running up the debt, but for not running it up more! Instead of kowtowing to deficit mania he should have visited unemployment line after unemployment line to make the case that Congress must allocate the funds needed to put America back to work.

With long-term interest rates at record lows (2.81% for 30 years) we could easily afford to borrow more to rebuild our infrastructure, weatherize all public buildings, provide free tuition for college students, and finance a host of other public programs that would move us to a full employment economy. And Obama could even make the case for funding much of it through a financial transaction tax on Wall Street’s casinos, as well as increased taxes on the super-rich. Of course, the Republicans wouldn’t go along with it. But the Communicator-in-Chief could have done more to educate the public that jobs, jobs and more jobs should come first. No talk of debt reduction, no “Grand Bargains” with the Republicans, until unemployment comes down to 5 percent! (And by then the debt/GDP ratio would be rapidly declining anyway because of economic growth.)

8. Won’t our kids be forced to shoulder the debt we leave behind?

Yes, this is a real tearjerker. Who among us wants to pawn off our debts onto our kids? A sad thought, if were true. But it’s not. Government debt, unlike our mortgages, is rarely repaid in full. Instead they roll over. The cost to taxpayers is the interest we pay on the outstanding debt and the refinancing of it. With the global economy at stall speed there is no danger in the foreseeable future of rising interest rates.

What about in 30 years when our darlings are at the helm? The answer depends on the economy, not on debt. If we borrow cheaply now to put our people back to work, if we invest fully in funding higher education, and if we build up our crumbling infrastructure and tend to the environment, then we’ll leave behind a prosperous economy. Debt will shrink over time as the economy grows. And more revenues will come in as our people go back to work.

However, if we become obsessed with debt and deficits, and slash to the bone the programs that develop future prosperity, we’ll leave behind a faltering economy and an even bigger environmental mess.

Debt hysteria is like a pandemic that quickly cripples logical thinking. Once infected, Very Important People with Very Impressive Degrees sound like fools.

Let’s hope there’s a cure…and soon.  

Read more.. http://www.alternet.org/economy/8-facts-prove-our-govt-not-going-broke

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril

Tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court’s agenda this fall is a little-known case that could upend your ability to resell everything from your grandmother’s antique furniture to your iPhone 4.

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products.

A Supreme Court case could limit the resale of goods made overseas but sold in America.

Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.

Put simply, though Apple Inc. /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL -0.11%  has the copyright on the iPhone and Mark Owen has it on the book “No Easy Day,” you can still sell your copies to whomever you please whenever you want without retribution.

That’s being challenged now for products that are made abroad, and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling, it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it.

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.”

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale.

It could be your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great-grandparents who immigrated from Spain. It could be a book that was written by an American writer but printed and bound overseas, or an Italian painter’s artwork.

There are implications for a variety of wide-ranging U.S. entities, including libraries, musicians, museums and even resale juggernauts eBay Inc./quotes/zigman/76117/quotes/nls/ebay EBAY -1.66%  and Craigslist. U.S. libraries, for example, carry some 200 million books from foreign publishers.

“It would be absurd to say anything manufactured abroad can’t be bought or sold here,” said Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer and Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation who specializes in technology issues.

The case stems from Supap Kirtsaeng’s college experience. A native of Thailand, Kirtsaeng came to America in 1997 to study at Cornell University. When he discovered that his textbooks, produced by Wiley, were substantially cheaper to buy in Thailand than they were in Ithaca, N.Y., he rallied his Thai relatives to buy the books and ship them to him in the United States.

Better made in the U.S.A.

While American men's brands once prized European craftsmanship or appreciated low-cost production from the Far East, some of the best fashion now is made right here in the U.S. Martin Marks talks menswear. (Photo: AP)

He then sold them on eBay, making upward of $1.2 million, according to court documents.

Wiley, which admitted that it charged less for books sold abroad than it did in the United States, sued him for copyright infringement. Kirtsaeng countered with the first-sale doctrine.

Read more.. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/your...

How the Gov’t Is Saddling Parents with College Loans They Can’t Possibly Afford

More than a decade after Aurora Almendral first set foot on her dream college campus, she and her mother still shoulder the cost of that choice.

Almendral had been accepted to New York University in 1998, but even after adding up scholarships, grants, and the max she could take out in federal student loans, the private university — among nation's costliest — still seemed out of reach. One program filled the gap: Aurora's mother, Gemma Nemenzo, was eligible for a different federal loan meant to help parents finance their children's college costs. Despite her mother's modest income at the time — about $25,000 a year as a freelance writer, she estimates — the government quickly approved her for the loan. There was a simple credit check, but no check of income or whether Nemenzo, a single mom, could afford to repay the loans.

Nemenzo took out $17,000 in federal parent loans for the first two years her daughter attended NYU. But the burden soon became too much. With financial strains mounting, Almendral — who had promised to repay the loans herself —withdrew after her sophomore year. She later finished her degree at the far less expensive Hunter College, part of the public City University of New York, and went on to earn a Fulbright scholarship.

Today, a dozen years on, Nemenzo's debt not only remains, it's also nearly doubled with fees and interest to $33,000. Though Almendral is paying on the loans herself, her mother continues to pay the price for loans she couldn't afford: Falling into delinquency on the loans had damaged her credit, making her ineligible to borrow more when it came time for Aurora's sister to go to college.

Total Disbursements in Millions of Plus Loans

While the number of parents taking out Plus loans has nearly doubled since 2000, loan volume has grown much faster. All values are adjusted for inflation.

 

Source: U.S. Department of Education

Nemenzo is not alone. As the cost of college has spiraled ever upward and median family income has fallen, the loan program, called Parent Plus, has become indispensable for increasing numbers of parents desperate to make their children's college plans work. Last year the government disbursed $10.6 billion in Parent Plus loans to just under a million families. Even adjusted for inflation, that's $6.3 billion more than it disbursed back in 2000, and to nearly twice as many borrowers.

A joint examination by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education has found that Plus loans can sometimes hurt the very families they are intended to help: The loans are both remarkably easy to get and nearly impossible to get out from under for families who've overreached. When a parent applies for a Plus loan, the government checks credit history, but it doesn't assess whether the borrower has the ability to repay the loan. It doesn't check income. It doesn't check employment status. It doesn't check how much other debt — like a mortgage, or other student-loan debt — the borrower is already on the hook for.

"Right now, the government runs the program by the seat of its pants," says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of two authoritative financial-aid websites. "You do have some parents who are borrowing $100,000 or more for their children's college education who are getting in completely over their heads. Those parents are going to default, and their lives are going to be ruined, because they were allowed to borrow far more than is rational."

Much attention has been focused on students burdened with loans throughout their lives. The recent growth in the Plus program highlights another way the societal burden of paying for college has shifted to families. It means some parents are now saddled with children's college debt even as they approach retirement.

Unlike other federal student loans, Plus loans don't have a set cap on borrowing. Parents can take out as much as they need to cover the gap between other financial aid and the full cost of attendance. Colleges, eager to boost enrollment and help families find financing, often steer parents toward the loans, recommending that they take out thousands of dollars with no consideration to whether they can afford it.

When it comes to paying the money back, the government takes a hard line. Plus loans, like all student loans, are all-but-impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. If a borrower is in default, the government can seize tax refunds and garnish wages or Social Security. What is more, repayment options are actually more limited for Parent Plus borrowers compared with other federal loans. Struggling borrowers can put their loans in deferment or forbearance, but except under certain conditions [6] Parent Plus loans aren't eligible [7] for either of the two main income-based repayment programs to help borrowers with federal loans get more affordable monthly payments.

The U.S. Department of Education doesn't know how many parents have defaulted on the loans. It doesn't analyze or publish default rates for the Plus program with the same detail that it does for other federal education loans. It doesn't calculate, for instance, what percentage of borrowers defaulted in the first few years of their repayment period [8]— a figure that the department analyzes for other federal student loans. (Schools with high default rates over time can be penalized and become ineligible for federal aid.) For parent loans, the department has projections only for budgetary — and not accountability — purposes: It estimates that of all Parent Plus loans originated in the 2011 fiscal year, about 9.4 percent will default over the next 20 years.

But according to an outside analysis of federal survey data, many low-income borrowers appear to be overburdening themselves.

Total Recipients of Plus Loans

The number of parents taking out Plus loans has nearly doubled since 2000.

 

Source: U.S. Department of Education

The analysis, by financial-aid expert Kantrowitz, uses survey data from 2007-08, the latest year for which information is available. Among Parent Plus borrowers in the bottom 10th of income, monthly payments made up 38 percent of their monthly income, on average. (By way of contrast, a federal program aimed at helping struggling graduates keeps monthly payments much lower, to a small share of discretionary income.) The survey data does not reflect the full Plus loan debt for parents who borrowed through the program for more than one child, as many do.

The data also show that one in five Parent Plus borrowers took out a loan for a student who received a federal Pell Grant — need-based aid that typically corresponds to a household income of $50,000 or less.

When Victoria Stillman's son got in to Berklee College of Music, she couldn't believe how simple the loan process was. Within minutes of completing an application online, she was approved. "The fact that the Plus loan program is willing to provide me with $50,000 a year is nuts," says Stillman, an accountant. "It was the least-involved loan paperwork I ever filled out and required no attachments or proof."

She decided against taking the loan, partly because of the 7.9-percent interest rate. Although it was a fixed rate, she found it too high.

Of course, Parent Plus can be an important financial lifeline — especially for those who can't qualify for loans in the private market. An iffy credit score, high debt-to-income ratio, or lack of a credit history won't necessarily disqualify anyone for a Plus loan. Applicants are approved so long as they don't have an "adverse credit history," such as a recent foreclosure, defaulted loan, or bankruptcy discharge. (As of last fall, the government also began disqualifying prospective borrowers with unpaid debts that were sent to collection agencies or charged off in the last five years.)

The Education Department says its priority is making sure college choice isn't just for the wealthy. Families have to make tough decisions about their own finances, says Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the department. We "want folks to have access to capital to allow them to make smart investments and improve their lives," Hamilton says. In the years after the credit crisis, department officials point out, other means of financing college — such as home-equity loans and private student loans — have become harder for families to get.

The department says it's trying to pressure colleges to contain costs, and working to inform students and families of their financing options. "Our focus is transparency," says Hamilton. "We want to make sure we're arming folks with all the information they need."

Colleges' Tricky Role

Colleges rarely advise families on how much is too much. After a student's own federal borrowing is maxed out, financial-aid offices often recommend large Plus loans for parents.

Using Education Department data, The Chronicle and ProPublica took a closer look at colleges where borrowers took out the highest average Plus loan amounts per year. (See a breakdown of the top schools. [9]) NYU ranked 11th, with an average annual loan of $27,305. The university generally gives students less financial aid [10] than many of its peers. Last year, parents of NYU students borrowed more than $116 million through the Plus program, the second-largest sum taken on for a single university, trailing only Penn State University's $160 million.

"Our first suggestion is the Plus loan," says Randall Deike, vice president for enrollment management at NYU. Yet he has misgivings about the program. "Getting a Plus loan shouldn't be so easy," he says.

Among the top 25 institutions with the largest average Plus loans, more than a third focus on the arts. Tenth on the list is New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, a for-profit acting school. The school's sticker price for the current year adds up to nearly $53,000 [11] for a year's worth of tuition, fees, room, board, and other expenses. Without an endowment, says David Palmer, the conservatory's chief executive, the school can't provide much financial aid — so families are often left to make difficult decisions about how borrowing is too much. Ideally, families would have saved for college, according to Palmer, but often tuition payments come in the form of Plus loans.

"It doesn't make me feel great, truthfully," Palmer says. "But then again, what can I do? We have to pay our bills."

Last year, 150 parents borrowed for their children to attend the institution of 330 undergraduate students. Palmer knows that sometimes families borrow too much, and students have to drop out. "It makes me sick to my stomach," he says. "Because they've got half an education and a mountain of debt."

Still, he says, "I don't know that it's the institution's responsibility to say we'll take a glimpse of what your individual situation is and say maybe this isn't a good idea."

To the dismay of consumer advocates, some universities lay out offers of tens of thousands of dollars in Parent Plus loans directly in the financial-aid packages of prospective students — often in the exact amount needed to cover the gap between other aid and the full cost of attendance. That can make it look like a family won't have to pay anything at all for college, at least until they read the fine print. The offers are often included in financial-aid packages even for families who clearly can't afford it.

"It is deceptive," says Greg Johnson, chief executive of Bottom Line, a college access program in Boston and New York. His organization's counselors have seen firsthand how students and families can get confused: When Agostinha Depina first got her financial aid award letter from New York's St. John's University, her first choice, she was excited. But upon taking a closer look at the package with her counselor at Bottom Line, she realized that a $32,000 gap was being covered by a Parent Plus loan that her parents would struggle to afford.

"It made it seem like they gave me a lot of money," says Depina. In reality, "it was more loans in the financial-aid package than scholarship money." Depina, 19, opted to go to Clark University, where she had a smaller gap that she covered with a one-year outside scholarship. A spokeswoman for St. John's did not respond to requests for comment.

There's considerable debate among financial-aid officials about whether and how to include Plus loans in students' financial-aid award letters. Some universities opt not to package in a loan that families might not qualify for or be able to afford. Instead, they simply provide families with information about the program.

"We inform them about the different options they have, but we wouldn't go in and package in a credit-based loan for any family," says Frank Mullen, director of financial aid at Berklee College of Music. "To put a loan as part of someone's package without knowing whether they'd be approved? I just wouldn't feel comfortable with it."

Others say it isn't so simple. "This is one of those knives that cuts both ways," says Craig Munier, director of scholarships and financial aid at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

"If we leave a huge gap in the financial-aid package, families could reach the wrong conclusion that they cannot afford to send their children to this institution," says Munier, who is also chair-elect of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. "The other side," he says, "is we package in a loan they can't afford, and they make a bad judgment and put themselves into debt they can't manage. You can second-guess either decision."

For parents in exceptional circumstances, colleges have some discretion to bypass the Plus application process and give a student the additional amount of federal student loans that would be available in the case of a Plus denial — up to $5,000. Those are judgment calls, says Justin Draeger, president of the aid administrators' group. Cases of a parent who is incarcerated or whose only income is public assistance are more straightforward, but the prospect of evaluating a parent's ability to pay is fraught. Deciding to tell them what they can afford "leaves the schools in sort of a moral dilemma," Draeger says.

But encouraging Plus loans for parents who would struggle to repay them lets colleges shirk their own responsibility to help families with limited means, says Simon Moore, executive director of College Visions, a college-access program based in Rhode Island. "Colleges can say, 'We want to enroll more low-income students,' but don't really need to step up and offer students good aid packages," he says. Plus loans "offer colleges an easy way to opt out."

The Middle Class Struggles to Repay

Some parents who have borrowed through Plus have found themselves working when they could be retired, and contemplating whether to pay off the debt by raiding their retirement nest eggs.

Galen Walter, a pharmacist, has put three sons through college. All told, the family racked up roughly $150,000 in loans, about $70,000, he estimates, in the Parent Plus program.

Average Plus Loan Amount

Even when inflation is taken into account, the average Plus loan has increased by roughly a third, to almost $12,000. All values are adjusted for inflation.

 

Source: U.S. Department of Education

Walter is 65. His wife is already collecting Social Security. "I could have retired a couple years ago," he says, "but with these loans, I can't afford to stop." His sons want to help with the Plus payments, but none are in the position to do so: One son is making only $24,000. Another is unemployed. The youngest is considering grad school.

Before the downturn, Walter says, he might have been able to sell his house and use the profit to pay off the loans. But given what his house is worth now, selling it wouldn't cover the loan. With his sons in a challenging job market, he thinks he may be repaying the loans for at least a decade.

Many parents are more than willing to take on the burden. Steve Lance, 58, is determined to pay for the education of his two sons, whose time at private universities has left him saddled with $133,000 in Parent Plus loans. (He also says he's committed to paying for his sons' federal and private student loans, which bring the total to $317,000 in debt.)

"The best thing I thought I can do as a parent is support them in having their dreams come true," says Lance, a creative director who writes and speaks on advertising and marketing. "There's no price tag on that." Out of necessity, he has put some loans in deferment.

Often, students and families set their hearts on a specific college and will do whatever it takes to make it work, betting that the rewards will outweigh the financial strain.

That's what happened with J.C., who asked that her name not be used. J.C. took out about $41,000 to help her daughter, an aspiring actress, attend NYU. A high-school valedictorian, her daughter could have gone to a public university in their home state of Texas debt-free, J.C. says. But the opportunities in theater wouldn't have been the same. It had to be NYU.

"The night she got there she said: Mom, this is the air I was meant to breathe," J.C. says of her daughter.

J.C., 58, is divorced and makes about $50,000 a year. She anticipates Plus loan payments between $400 and $500 a month, which she says she can handle. "I'll never retire. I'll work forever, that's OK," she says. Still, the hope is that her daughter makes it to the big time in her acting career: "If she's really, really successful I'll retire sooner rather than later," J.C. says.

Recent Changes to Parent Plus, and Uncertain Results

The Education Department's recent change in how it defines adverse credit history — adding unpaid collections accounts or charged-off debt as grounds for denial — is meant to "prevent people from taking on debt they may not be able to afford while protecting taxpayer dollars," Hamilton, the department spokesman, wrote in an email message.

The change may result in significantly more Parent Plus loan denials, according to Kantrowitz — and some financial-aid officers' recent observations seem to bear that out. But new denials may actually target the wrong people. After all, the tightened underwriting still examines aspects of credit history, not ability to repay.

"It's not going to make much of a difference for people who overborrow. It's not going to prevent people from overborrowing," Kantrowitz says. Instead, the new policy may preclude borrowers who once fell behind on a debt, he says, but now pose little credit risk.

Borrowers who are denied can appeal the decision and still get the loans if they convince the Education Department that they have extenuating circumstances. Or they can reapply with somebody cosigning on the loan.

It's not yet clear how much the change to the credit check will alter the scope of the Parent Plus program. Early tallies for the 2011-12 year show a modest dip in borrowing over the previous year, but the data is incomplete and won't be fully updated for months.

For now, the Parent Plus program is part of a stopgap solution to the complex problem of college affordability. And the factors that drive parents to borrow too much won't be changing anytime soon.

Kantrowitz believes that the student-loan system is in need of much broader solutions. The current federal loan limits for undergraduates are arbitrary, he says, and not based on the type of program or a student's estimated future earnings. More grant money could also help alleviate overborrowing, especially for low-income families.

"We need a complete overhaul of the student-loan system so there's a more rational set of limits" to curb the debt problem, says Kantrowitz. The government can't keep "magically sweeping it under the parent rug."

The Real Republican Agenda Exposed

There is no longer any ambiguity about the path that Romney would pursue as president, because it's the same trajectory charted by Paul Ryan, the architect of the House GOP's reactionary agenda since the party's takeover in 2010.   "Picking Ryan as vice president outlines the future of the next four or eight years of a Romney administration," GOP power broker Grover Norquist exulted in August.   "Ryan has outlined a plan that has support in the Republican House and Senate.   You have a real sense of where Romney's going."   As Norquist told party activists back in February, the true direction of the GOP is being mapped out by congressional hardliners.   All the Republicans need, to realize their vision, he said, is a president "with enough working digits to handle a pen."

But the GOP legislation awaiting Romney's signature isn't simply a return to the era of George W. Bush.   From abortion rights and gun laws to tax giveaways and energy policy, it's far worse.   Here's why:

Measures that have already sailed through the Republican House, and are simply waiting for Romney to take the presidency, would do the following:

 * roll back clean-air protections so as to help increase the profits of many large corporations,

 * gut both Medicare and Medicaid as a favor to big health insurance companies,

 * lavish trillions in tax cuts on billionaires while raising taxes on the poor, to help pay for those tax cuts,

 * slash everything from college aid to veteran benefits, to help pay for more tax cuts for the very rich.  

In fact, the tenets of Ryan Republicanism are so extreme that they even offend the pioneers of trickle-down economics.   "Ryan takes out the ax and goes after programs for the poor -- which is the last thing you ought to cut," says David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan's budget director.   "It's ideology run amok."

A look at the bills that Republicans have passed since they took control of the House in 2010 offers a clear blueprint of the agenda that a Romney administration would be primed to establish:

Republicans in Congress have repeatedly put ideology before creating jobs.   Example:   For more than a year, they've refused to put President Obama's jobs bill up for a vote, even though projections show it would create nearly 2 million jobs without adding a penny to the deficit.   The reason?   The $447 billion bill would have to be entirely paid for through a surtax on millionaires.

Second example:   the Republicans' signature initiative last year -- the debt-ceiling standoff -- was a known jobs-killer, clearly applying the brakes to the economic recovery.   From February through April 2011, the economy had been adding 200,000 jobs a month.   But during the uncertainty created by this congressional impasse, job creation was cut in half for every month the standoff continued.   And according to the Economic Policy Institute, the immediate spending cuts required by the debt-ceiling compromise are likely to shrink the economy by $43 billion this year, killing nearly 323,000 jobs.   This is putting ideology before job creation, the American people be damned.

What Ryan markets as his "Path to Prosperity" would make things even worse:   The draconian cuts in his latest budget, according to the Economics Policy Institute, would put an additional drag on the economy, destroying another 4.1 million jobs by 2014.

The Republican War Against Women

Last year, the House passed a bill that would prohibit women from purchasing insurance plans that cover abortion.   The so-called Protect Life Act would also allow hospitals to refuse a dying woman an abortion that would save her life.   Ryan himself co-sponsored legislation that would have made it impossible for impoverished victims of rape and incest to receive abortions unless their assault met a narrow definition of "forcible rape."   Under the bill's language, for instance, federal abortion coverage would be denied to a 12-year-old girl impregnated by a 40-year-old man -- unless she could prove she fought back.

And when they weren't trying to force women to birth babies for rapists, the GOP House was voting to make it easier for would-be criminals to carry concealed firearms.   In the first major gun legislation passed after their colleague Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by one Jared Loughner, the House sided with her attempted murderer, passing an NRA-backed measure that would have undercut state limits on concealed-carry permits.   The bill would "make it easier for crazies like Jared Loughner to pack heat on our streets and in our communities."

Drill and Pollute

In thrall to dirty-energy interests, House Republicans have held more than 300 votes to hamstring the EPA, roll back environmental protections and open up sensitive public land to drilling -- offering polluters a virtual license to kill.   "This is, without doubt, the most anti-environmental Congress in history," said Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy Committee.

Under the Republicans, the House has voted to:

 * ban the EPA from placing limits on climate-warming pollution,

 * reverse new fuel standards that were projected to slash dependence on foreign oil and thereby save Americans $1.7 trillion at the pump,

 * end standards signed into law by President Bush that would phase out wasteful, high-wattage incandescent light bulbs.  

Even more reckless, the House voted to block limits on deadly mercury emissions -- a move that federal scientists calculate would result in 20,000 premature deaths -- and drop safeguards on cement manufacturing that would kill another 12,500 Americans and lead to thousands of avoidable heart attacks.

Perhaps worst of all, in February the House passed a bill to block all new major regulations until the nation's unemployment rate falls to six% -- a measure that would choke off not only new environmental safeguards, but also the new limits on Wall Street recklessness required under Dodd-Frank.

Enrich Billionaires at the Expense of Everyone Else

House Republicans have voted three times to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts -- a move that would blow a $3.8 trillion hole in the budget over the next decade.   In fact, the Ryan budget -- twice approved by the House -- goes even further, doling out another $2.5 trillion to the wealthiest Americans by reducing the tax rate on top earners from 35 to just 25 percent, lowering the corporate rate to 25 percent, and ending the alternative minimum tax, a safeguard against tax cheats.

Romney, in fact, wants to give away even more to the rich than Republicans in the House by permanently eliminating the estate tax -- a proposal that alarms veterans of the first Bush administration:   "Given the vast amounts of wealth that have accumulated at the very, very, very top, it's an odd time to be eliminating this most progressive element of the tax system," says Michael Graetz, a former deputy assistant Treasury secretary under Bush.   Over a decade, Romney's gift to the nation's most fortunate families would allow their heirs to pocket at least $1 trillion (including up to $50 million for Mitt's own heirs), all at the expense of the rest of America -- which means that those without family fortunes would see their taxes soar.   Independent tax groups have concluded that the only way to replace the tax revenue lost by the proposed Ryan and Romney tax cuts would be to end tax breaks (like the one for home-mortgage interest) that directly benefit the middle class.   And the poor would get the shaft as well:  The Ryan budget slashes the Child Tax Credit, meaning that a single mother of two earning the minimum wage would watch her annual tax bill rise by more than $1,500.

Slash Government

If signed into law by President Romney, the Ryan budget would slash spending on college tuition grants by 42% next year and kick 1 million students out of the program.   It would also gut funding for public schools, food and drug safety, basic science research, law enforcement and low-income housing.   The cuts to food stamps alone would total $134 billion over the next decade.   Ripping Ryan for trying to cloak his budget in Catholic doctrine, priests and faculty from Georgetown University wrote, "Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the gospel of Jesus Christ."  

There is one place, however, where Republicans want to increase spending:   Under the most recent Ryan budget, the Pentagon would receive an extra $29 billion a year, thereby reversing Obama's modest efforts to slow the growth of defense spending.  

Where Would the Extra Cash Come From?  

In May, the House approved a Ryan bill to replace automatic cuts to the Pentagon under the debt-ceiling agreement with $261 billion in cuts to the federal safety net.   This measure would deny food stamps to 1.8 million low-wage Americans, leave 280,000 kids without school lunches and cut off health care to 300,000 children living beneath the poverty line.

Cripple Health Care So As to Provide Massive Givebacks to the Rich

Republicans in the House have voted more than 30 times to repeal Obamacare -- a move that would deplete the Medicare trust fund eight years early, kick 6.6 million young adults off their parents' health insurance, annually cost seniors $700 more on average for prescription drugs, and make it legal once again for insurance companies to charge women more than men, and to rescind policies when people get sick.   This would provide a massive giveback to the rich, handing over nearly $400 billion in tax revenues to those who earn above $250,000 a year.

To further boost profits for insurance companies, the House passed a Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare, thereby subjecting seniors to what you might call "profit extractions" by the private market.   In the first year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost to seniors would more than double, to $12,500 -- and taxpayers would not save a dime, since private insurers would be pocketing the extra money.   By 2050, as inflation took its toll, buying a policy as good as present-day Medicare would cost an 85-year-old more than $50,000.   (So what kind of "voucher' is going to pay that kind of cost?)   The Ryan plan would also eviscerate Medicaid by turning federal contributions to the program into lump-sum "block grants" that states can administer as they see fit.   The trouble is that these grants, like Medicare vouchers, simply can't and won't keep pace with soaring health care costs.   In the first decade alone, therefore, the plan would bilk states out of $810 billion and deny health care to 30 million disabled Americans, seniors, and children living beneath the poverty line,.

The last time a Republican presidential candidate touted an agenda to cut spending, lower taxes, boost defense and balance the budget was Ronald Reagan in 1980.   Like Romney and Ryan, Reagan didn't have an actual plan for his spending cuts -- they were merely an accounting fantasy, openly joked about.   In the end, as promised, Reagan's tax cuts went through, and the Pentagon's budget soared.   But the compensatory spending cuts never materialized -- so Reagan wound up tripling the nation's debt.

If it didn't work for Reagan, says his former budget director, it would be foolish to assume Romney and Ryan can do better.   "The Republican record on spending control is so abysmally bad," Stockman says, "that at this point they don't have a leg to stand on."   Indeed, the last GOP administration turned $5 trillion in projected surplus into $5 trillion of new debt.

No one doubts Ryan's determination to slash the social safety net:   Of the $5.3 trillion in cuts he has proposed, nearly two-thirds come from programs for the poor.   But when it comes time to eviscerate the rest of the federal budget -- i.e. funding for things like drug enforcement and public schools -- David Stockman says Congress will "never cut those programs that deeply."   In other words, the rich will get their tax cuts, the poor will be left destitute, and America will be driven ever deeper into debt.

That, at heart, is the twisted beauty of the plan being championed by Ryan and Romney:   The higher Republicans manage to drive up the debt, the more ammunition and excuses they have in their fight to slash federal spending for the needy.   And the more time they waste trumpeting the cause of "fiscal discipline," the more the nation's infrastructure will continue to crumble around them.  

What you have just read is a synopsis of Tim Dickenson's excellent article in a recent issue of Rolling Stone.

Read more.. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Fully-Exposing-the-Real-Re-by-Richard-Clark-121007-308.html

Disaster in the Making: Grave Warnings Issued That Keystone Pipeline Is Structurally Flawed

A pipeline materials engineer, who worked for TransCanada Pipeline for five years, says some of the nation's major pipeline companies are breaking the rules on pipeline safety and that National Energy Board is not adequately enforcing them.

Evan Vokes, a 46-year-old Calgary-based engineer and former TransCanada employee, has filed complaints with the National Energy Board, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA is a self-regulating professional group that represents engineers) and the Prime Minister's Office documenting repeated violations of standard safety regulations and codes.

The alleged offences include repeated violations of several sections of the nation's Onshore Pipeline Regulations (OPR-99) on issues as varied as welding inspections, the safety of materials and conflict of interest.

In addition Vokes also charges that engineers do not always make project and scheduling decisions during pipeline construction (a common lament) and that "unskilled practice by professional engineers in a hurry" is a routine problem throughout the multi-billion dollar industry.

National Energy Board investigating

In response to a Tyee inquiry the board replied that it is actively investigating the allegations. “Board Executives met with senior company representatives to describe the allegations and how seriously the board takes them." One company in particular has been asked to report on their internal investigation of allegations of non-compliance.

Added Erin Dotter, the NEB's communication officer: "The NEB investigation into this file is ongoing and we are thoroughly reviewing and assessing the information that has been submitted. It would not be appropriate to discuss this matter further while it is under investigation."

Vokes' concerns, shared to varying degrees by members of Canada's embattled pipeline industry, have already been partly corroborated by U.S. and Canadian regulatory bodies in a series of recent investigations and reports on pipeline spills.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), for example, categorized Enbridge as having a "culture of deviance" on safety matters after it investigated that company's 20,000-barrel bitumen spill on the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The NTSB accused the company of taking advantage of "weak regulations" and not learning from previous incidents.

Enbridge employees also admitted to NTSB investigators that the largest oil spill in U.S. history was "a wake-up call" that highlighted problems associated with rapid growth including staff shortages "and that type of thing."

As a consequence the US Pipeline Hazardous Material Standards Administration (PHMSA), fined [4] the company last summer a record $3.7-million for a total of 24 violations of pipeline regulations jointly enforced by the both National Energy Board (NEB) and PHMSA.

U.S. regulators also caught Kinder Morgan, another big pipeline player with extensive Canadian properties as well as controversial bitumen expansion plans, violating welding codes and nearly a dozen sections of the US Pipeline Safety Regulations while building the Rocky Express [5] natural gas pipeline between 2007 and 2008. It fined the company $400,000 in 2012.

U.S. regulators aren't alone in finding routine violations of code. A 2009 National Energy Board investigation on the death of an electrician at an Enbridge pump station found violations of construction codes and concluded [6] "the safety culture at Enbridge Kerrobert [pump station] was not adequately developed."

NEB made pipeline safety top priority for 2012

Unlike its U.S. counterparts, which have long records of public transparency, The National Energy Board did not begin posting its safety and environmental actions till the fall of 2011. Since 2008 the Board says it has issued 24 Safety Orders against on pipelines owned by Enbridge, TransCanada and Kinder Morgan. None are available on its website.

But the spotlight on pipeline safety has not just fallen on Enbridge, which is now under regulatory scrutiny for its proposed Northern Gateway project as well as another spill at a Wisconsin pipeline in 2012.

The Canadian Transportation Safety Board, the nation's version of the NTSB, is investigating Houston-based Spectra Energy, which operates 2,900 kilometres of pipeline in British Columbia for two separate 2012 incidents: a sour gas rupture as well as an explosion at a natural gas compressor station that injured two workers just north of Fort St. John, British Columbia.

TransCanada, another big pipeline player and Vokes' former employer, has also been in the headlines. The first phase of TransCanada's controversial Keystone XL pipeline leaked 14 times in just two years and the company has now been ordered by the National Energy Board to investigate Keystone's pumping stations in Canada.

Last year a 50-foot section of TransCanada's brand new Bison gas pipeline also blew up in Wyoming due to mechanical damage caused by the improper laying of pipe in the ground. That accident forced a month-long closure.

Although the National Energy Board officially declared [7] pipeline safety its top priority in 2012, Canada's federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has raised serious issues about the board's accountability and enforcement practices.

Tracing Enbridge's learning curve

The Commissioner reported [8] in 2011 that the NEB often identified problems on its 71,000 kilometres of interprovincial pipeline system, but rarely followed up: "there is little indication that the Board takes steps to ensure that the identified deficiencies are corrected."

In fact many of the problems that Enbridge experienced during the $800-million Michigan debacle, the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history, were flagged by an NEB inspection audit in 2008 that found multiple problems with the company's program for maintaining pipeline integrity. (Because Enbridge operates lines that are intercontinental, it is jointly regulated by the NEB and US PHMSA.)

Although the NTSB flagged the NEB 2008 inspection audit of Enbridge's Canadian operations as an example of the company's poor learning curve, the audit does not appear to be available on the NEB's website.

The audit found, among many other safety failings, that Enbridge's "assessment process and data for determining the crack and corrosion in-line inspection frequency required improvement to prevent failures from reoccurring."

Canada's Commissioner of the Environment also found that Canada's national pipeline regulator did not properly monitor emergency procedures manuals and failed to communicate deficiencies in a timely manner: "We have concluded that the Board's oversight of companies' emergency procedures manuals is deficient," went the report.

According to the Auditor General The NEB had but a budget of $7 million and a staff of 63 to check on regulatory compliance on some of the world’s longest pipelines in 2011.

Since then the NEB has tried frantically to catch up with rapid pipeline infrastructure growth and a doubling of pipeline incidents or what the board calls [9] "an increased trend in the number and the severity of incidents being reported by NEB-regulated companies."

Engineers have 'duty of care': whistleblower

The board reports that it now has a staff of 80 including 35 qualified engineers to enforce the law and will increase inspections from 100 to 150 a year thanks to additional federal funding of $13-million provided this year. Incredibly, it is only now developing a program to fine pipeline operators for non-compliance of regulations.

In 2009 the NEB took on the responsibility of looking after an additional 24,000 km of pipeline owned by Nova Gas and formerly monitored by Alberta's regulators. It did not increase staff at the time.

Meanwhile the office of pipeline safety of the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which has fined offenders for years, has issued alerts, held workshops and given presentations on what it calls new construction "challenges" facing pipeline builders across the continent.

PHMSA presentations [10] include graphic illustrations of cracked pipelines and clearly show a rising incidence of problems related to bad welding practices and improper coating of pipelines.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, which investigates accidents, also reports [11] worsening pipeline trends too.

Since 2002 this federal agency has recorded a near doubling of pipeline incidents from an average of 95 a year to 161 incidents in 2011. The federal investigator partly blames the combined effects of the rapid pipeline growth, the conversion of oil to gas pipelines, better reporting, and an aging infrastructure. It is also studying other factors.

All pipelines contain flaws as they are not ideal but the codes set a standard for accepatable risk tolerance. But the most recent issue of the magazine Pipeline International highlights [12] many of the issues raised by Vokes such as the importance of pipeline integrity management. Such a process should allow operators to routinely check that their pipeline networks operate in a safe, reliable, sustainable and optimal manner.

But if neglected and unused, even the most expensive and "high tech" systems or tools will fail warns the magazine article. And if these systems are not properly enforced, adds Vokes, low probability events on pipelines can become catastrophic problems and headline makers.

The Tyee took a copy of Voke's assorted documents to an experienced engineer who has worked in the oil patch for 40 years and here's what he said.

"This man knows what he is talking about and knows his codes and jargon and metallurgy. The industry is moving too fast and doesn't have the people and experience to manage its safety systems."

Added the reviewer: "The regulators haven’t caught up with the right standards and we don't have the senior expertise to oversee some of these issues. Vokes is raising significant issues for the industry."

The issues are significant enough that that Alberta, home to 400,000 kilometres of pipeline, has contracted [13] a Calgary engineering firm to do an independent analysis of pipeline safety and integrity after a series of high-profile oil spills this year.

"There is only story here," adds Vokes who is pleased that the NEB is taking his allegation seriously. "It's what the NTSB report called a 'culture of deviance' and a lack of accountability. And that’s the whole thing," says the engineer.

"When you sign onto engineering ethics you have a duty of care to the public before you do to your employer."

In response to recent pipeline incidents the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association (CEPA), a lobby group for the nation's powerful pipeline builders, launched an "Integrity First" campaign last August. An industry press release says that the industry needs "to do more to reduce the frequency and impact of pipeline events."

According to CEPA its members operate and monitor 110,000 kilometres of pipelines or what it calls "energy highways" that carry nearly $60-billion worth of hydrocarbons every year.

Canada's petroleum industry wants to double the nation's oil pipeline capacity from 3 million to 6 million barrels over the next two decades.

Read more.. http://www.alternet.org/environment/d...

If America Only Knew How Much Arsenic Ends Up on the Average Dinner Plate

The American right wing loves to hate Big Government, but does size matter? Perhaps the problem is not Big Government, but Dumb Government, Inefficient Government or even Corrupt, Sold-Out, or Inept Government. The recent bombshell Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, dropped – that rice contains dangerous levels of arsenic [3] – illustrates how good, effective government can save lives by keeping deadly toxins out of the food supply whereas our federal bureaucracy (aided, abetted and cajoled by industry) has instead let us down.

Arsenic [4] “is considered the number one environmental chemical of concern for human health effects both in the U.S. and worldwide,” according to information published by Darmouth Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program. It can be divided into two categories: organic and inorganic. While organic arsenic is itself a probable human carcinogen, inorganic arsenic is a definite human carcinogen that is linked to liver, lung, kidney, bladder, and skin cancer as well as “increased risk of vascular and heart disease, type 2 diabetes, reproductive and developmental disorders, low birth weights in babies, neurological and cognitive problems, immunodeficiencies, metabolic disorders, and a growing list of other serious outcomes.”

In short: you don’t want this in your food.

“When you're talking about a carcinogen [like arsenic], there is no safe level,” Consumers Union’s senior scientist Michael Hansen explains. Instead of eliminating all risk, one looks at carcinogens in terms of levels of risk. For example, Consumers Union provides a table explaining how much rice one can eat [5] to achieve a 1 in 1,000 lifetime risk of cancer. The federal government does not limit the amount of arsenic allowed in food, so Consumers Union based its standard on the EPA’s initial recommendation for arsenic limits in drinking water (five parts per billion).

In fact, the drinking water standard – which is now set at 10 parts per billion (ppb) – is a fine place to begin the story of how government, industry and arsenic fit together. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element, but the U.S. has increased the amount of arsenic in our environment and our farmland over the past century by using 1.6 million tons of it in agricultural and industrial uses. About half of that amount has been used since the mid-1960s.

Once in the environment, arsenic – a chemical element and a heavy metal – does not break down and go away as do some toxins. Once so much arsenic was sprayed on farms, it was in the environment for good – and it could find its way into our food and water. U.S. limits on arsenic in drinking water were set at 50 ppb [6] in 1942, before arsenic was classified as a carcinogen. But a 1999 report by the National Academy of Sciences showed that this level failed to protect Americans from an unacceptably high risk of cancer.

The EPA then proposed lowering the limit for arsenic from 50 ppb to just 5 ppb in 2000. Industry complained, and the Clinton-era EPA settled upon lowering the limit to just 10 ppb instead. Once George W. Bush took office, he initially attempted to block the change [7], thus keeping the World War II-era limit of 50 ppb. By November 2001, the Bush administration gave in to allowing the 10 ppb limit to go forward. Even still, Sen. Barbara Boxer noted that this 10 ppb limit would allow three times as much cancer risk as the EPA’s usual goal.

Arsenic in food deserves some special concern, and yet there are no regulations limiting it. In addition to arsenic used in industry that finds its way onto farms, there is arsenic used in agriculture that the farmers themselves bring to their farms, a practice almost dating back to the Civil War.

Long before the days of DDT, the first synthetic pesticides were arsenicals. An arsenical paint pigment called Paris green was first used against Colorado potato beetles in 1867. Even then, arsenic’s deadly toxicity was well known – Will Allen tells in his book, The War on Bugs, how farmers lost cattle after they ate potato plants treated with Paris green. Other arsenic pesticides, London purple and lead arsenic, soon followed Paris green onto the market. By the 1930s, “well over a hundred million people in the United States suffered from mild to severe arsenic and lead poisoning,” writes Allen.

Yet the end of arsenic as a favored pesticide did not come from government – it came from nature and from the chemical companies. As pests evolved resistance to arsenical pesticides and as chemical companies supplanted arsenicals with newer products, arsenicals fell out of favor. Only then did the government begin canceling some of the registrations of arsenical pesticides.

And yet, even after arsenicals were displaced by other pesticides for most uses, half of the arsenic used in the U.S. has been in the last half century. Recent uses of arsenic fall into two categories: livestock drugs and pesticides.

Until recently, the arsenical livestock drugs roxarsone, nitarsone, carbarsone and arsanilic acid were all used in chickens, turkeys and swine. Roxarsone [8] was widely used for disease prevention, weight gain, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation in chickens from 1944 until it was voluntarily removed from the market by Pfizer in 2011 following the revelation that chickens fed roxarsone had inorganic arsenic in their livers. The latter three are all still legal, regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Once used in chickens, the arsenic in roxarsone remained in the chickens’ litter, which consists of bedding, droppings, feathers, and dropped feed. Poultry litter, in turn, served as fertilizer on farms and – believe it or not – cattle feed. And, as it turns out, the top rice-producing state in the U.S., Arkansas [9], is in second place behind Georgia for broiler production. (Of the six rice-producing states, all rank among the nation’s top broiler producers, with Mississippi and Texas among the top five, and California and Missouri among the top 10.)

As pesticides, many arsenicals were phased out over the years, but some uses remain. In 2006, the EPA attempted to essentially ban the remaining uses of organic arsenicals [10], because "following application, these pesticides convert over time to a more toxic form in soil, inorganic arsenic, and potentially contaminate drinking water through soil runoff." Following outcry from industry, EPA backed away from its initial decision.

All organic arsenicals except one herbicide, monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA), were banned as of 2009. After that time, MSMA could still be used on sod farms, golf courses and highway rights of way until the end of 2013. After that, only one remaining us of any organic arsenical would be permitted: MSMA on cotton.

As luck would have it, the six rice-growing states are among the top cotton-growing states [11]: Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas top the list, with California, Louisiana and Missouri each growing significant cotton acreage as well. Rice is so susceptible to taking up arsenic because it is often grown in fields flooded with water. In fact, a 2008 study [12] found that growers can reduce the amount of total and inorganic arsenic in rice by growing it under “aerobic” (not flooded) conditions. And yet the same states that grow rice are also the cotton-growing states where MSMA is still used.

So why does the EPA still allow MSMA on cotton if arsenicals are so bad that they are banned on absolutely everything else? Two words: Palmer amaranth. Despite years of warnings, biotech and chemical companies and cotton growers have created the perfect weed. Palmer amaranth has evolved resistance to both ALS inhibitor herbicides and to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, and one plant can produce half a million seeds.

Weeds commonly evolve resistance to ALS inhibitors [13], much more so than for any other class of herbicides. But resistance to glyphosate was almost unheard of before Monsanto first introduced its Roundup Ready genetically engineered crops to the market in 1996. Glyphosate use shot up, giving weeds the evolutionary force needed to develop resistance. Nowhere was this truer than on fields that rotated between two Roundup Ready crops, soybeans and cotton.

Glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth first turned up in GE soybeans and cotton in Georgia in 2005 [14] and before long it was documented across the U.S. including in the rice-growing states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, and California. In some case, resistance to both types of herbicides was found in the same Palmer amaranth plant. The weed has caused growers to turn to more toxic herbicides, hand-weeding, and even entirely abandoning their fields.

One last direct outlet for arsenic into agricultural lands comes from sewage sludge. Under current EPA regulations, sewage sludge containing 41 parts per million – 41,000 parts per billion – total arsenic can be applied to agricultural land and even sold to consumers for home garden and lawn use. (Full disclosure: I recently worked on the Center for Media & Democracy’s sewage sludge campaign [15], which opposed the use of sewage sludge in agriculture.) Under existing law [16], farmers can apply sewage sludge containing up to 41 kilograms of arsenic per hectare of land.

As you can see, between them, the USDA, FDA and EPA have allowed pesticides, pharmaceuticals and practices that led to the toxic load of arsenic Consumers Union found in rice. The EPA regulated pesticides, the FDA regulated drugs, and the USDA worked with farmers in many aspects of agriculture and gave the green light to Roundup Ready crops. It was no secret that arsenic was going into farms and fields where our food is grown, and yet the question of where the arsenic went was mostly ignored. The FDA recently released its own tests [17], confirming Consumers’ Union’s findings. As their data shows, even organic rice contains arsenic. (Organic farmers cannot use arsenical pesticides, but they can use manure from chickens fed roxarsone and other arsenical drugs.)

So is the government to blame for this massive oversight and public health risk? Michael Hansen doesn’t think so. “The issue in the larger context isn't so much that it's bad government,” he says. “If you put it in the proper context, it's not only the gutting of the regulatory agency but also the control by industry and outside forces. I think there are definitely people within the agency who would like to take action on a number of things but they can't because of the reaction by industry… The power of industry is so strong, you can't expect the government to take action when they are trashed left and right.”

Consumers Union recently sent and published three letters, one to the EPA [18], one to the FDA [19] and one to the USDA [20], asking them to rectify all of the problems named in this article so that no more arsenic finds its way into U.S. farms and so that standards are set for how much arsenic is allowed into our food supply. They also commend Congress for introducing the R.I.C.E. Act (Reducing Food-Based Inorganic and Organic Compounds Exposure Act) and they advocate its speedy passage (which is not likely in the current politically charged environment).

When citizens reflect on the size of their government, surely most would agree that it ought to be “big” enough to keep arsenic out of the food supply. But the comedy of errors between three different agencies that allowed so much arsenic onto our farms and then our dinner tables is exactly the sort of disaster that causes voters to throw up their hands and wish the government would go away altogether. Yet, if Hansen is correct, the incompetence shown in this case was not a matter of bureaucratic ineptness but one of industry’s capture over the agencies charged with regulating it. Voters going to the polls need to recognize the problem. Instead of voting for candidates who vow to get government out of our lives we should be voting for leaders willing to take a stand against undue corporate influence.

Read more.. http://www.alternet.org/food/if-america-only-knew-how-much-arsenic-ends-average-dinner-plate

Truly Trifle - Gary Null Picture

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