The environmental crisis, racism, the growing gulf between rich and poor… where to begin this Woeful Wednesday? Cultural disintegration? The collapse of community and family, the destruction of public education, the tear-down of knowledge and the ruination of the scientific edifice that once promised increasing abundance for all… humanity really must solve some structural problems if we hope to share a decent quality of life on planet earth.

Fortunately, there are people working hard to do just that.

The Climate Mobilization is organized to urge global governments to mount a World War 2 scale campaign against environmental degradation. American leadership seeks solutions in time-frames that no longer will work to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to halt warming and to reverse the acidification of the oceans. Hillary Clinton has stepped up to the issue and published a plan for shifting from carbon based electricity generation to solar power and other renewables. Sadly, Clinton’s plan offers too little in the way of structural change. The proposed implementation time-frame will be too late. The Pope has spoken up too. On May 24th this year he published Laudato Si — On Care for Our Common Home, an encyclical letter encouraging all earthlings to come together around the problems we face. Franklin Roosevelt, he ain’t, but it’s encouraging to hear him talk in terms of taking on our common enemy. We really are at war and we really must get mobilized if we don’t want to suffer the miserable consequences of defeat. It’s an existential thing.

What blocks our ability to tackle the biggest crisis civilized humanity has ever faced is our lack of civility and common concern for each other. The rich are divided from the poor, and white people in general are wandering about in a fog of entitlement and privilege ignoring the challenges faced by people of color. Is there anybody reading this who doesn’t understand the context and the reason why #BlackLivesMatter trumps the sentiment that “All lives matter?” If so, leave a comment and we can have quiet conversation here on this blog, away from all the Facebook friends and twitterers who have moved on from social justice issues to profound veganism and what-not.

I read yesterday that a group of hedge funds are calling for Puerto Rico to close schools, reduce university subsidies and fire teachers so it can pay back its debt (to those same hedge funds). “Austerity” is one way we keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Another way, of course, is with the gun. Contrary to the slogan on the picture above, banks and guns enjoy more complementarity than clash. Disparities in law enforcement are intensified by weapons in the hands of the police. It has always been so. The poor and the marginalized are suppressed by an armed force chartered by the rich. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That simple-minded bullshit, the second amendment of the constitution of the United States of America comes to us with some baggage. The security they’re talking about there is founded in the fear of slave revolts. While the second amendment bolsters the right of gun nuts, fetishists, and hunting afficionados to own firearms, the real “well regulated militia” we all live with is the heavily armed network of state and local police forces. And while the arguments for gun control go back and forth around the tragedies and the atrocities that civilians endure and mutually inflict on each other, the real danger–the gun owner most feared by people in the black community–is the cop.

As an older fellow, it has long been my observation that younger generations feel the need to re-invent, to re-state knowledge and understanding, to re-learn (sometimes painfully) the lessons of history. In politics there is constant back-pressure from conservatives to re-write laws that they find offensive. Some of this back-pressure comes from cynical ploys to drive the poorer classes apart with wedge issues. Whether the scapegoat of the season is ACORN or Planned Parenthood, the only “good” that comes from the scapegoating is the divisive influence brought by the rich against the poor so they will vote against their own interests. Other reasons for the back-pressure are more direct, more obvious. Rich people want to protect their wealth, and one way to do that is to eliminate progressive income taxes. Many of those rich people want to increase their wealth and one way to do that is to take money from the government. “Corporate welfare,” subsidies to agriculture and industry are among the obvious ways to redistribute wealth. Another way is to tear down the support infrastructure. When laws protecting the environment, or providing a social safety net, or supporting reproductive justice are overturned, who benefits? Maybe we can take a closer look at that question in the next Woeful Wednesday blog post.

Homework assignment: Learn about the Ludlow Massacre and perform a citizen’s arrest on at least one oligarch.

Ten thousand years ago the Pleistocene epoch ended after a good long run, long even for geologic time. Two and a half million years is nothing to sneeze at. (I’m tempted to turn that into some kind of mastodon joke, the sneezes of proboscideans being, well… nothing to sneeze at. Sorry.) So, the Pleistocene ended and across the western hemisphere the elephant ancestors and saber toothed tigers, and giant beavers and short faced skunks… a plethora of Pleistocene critters all vanished from the earth. We understand this tragedy to be the result of a fateful combination of human hunting pressure, and massive rapid climate change, aggravated perhaps by the rapid spread of highly infectious diseases.

Today we’ve all been exposed to another vector, a reminder that we live in times more parlous than those at the dawn of our current era when so many big animals died. Cecil the Lion is dead, a sentient creature, a thirteen year old sentient creature protected in a natural park in Africa for his entire life brutally slaughtered by a dentist from Minnesota, a man who says he kills large animals because he “doesn’t have a golf game.” Cecil is the victim of a man whose sense of entitlement and privilege threatens us all, a man who needs to be brought up short by society. The government of Zimbabwe has indicated that they want this chicken-shit bwana back for prosecution. If the US Justice Department fails to cooperate with the extradition, if Zimbabwe fails to prosecute the poacher to the maximum extent possible, then there is no justice.

There are seven billion people on the planet and we need to follow the rules if we intend to get through the next twenty years without being trampled by the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

There’s a petition to visit the wrath of all sentient life on the self absorbed asshole who caused Cecil to suffer for forty hours with a poorly placed arrow before killing him and attempting to hide the evidence of the crime by scattering Cecil’s remains and destroying his radio collar. Sign here for justice.

Current law requires the Governor to deliver the biennial budget message to the Legislature on or before the last Tuesday in January this year (extensions are permitted). The Governor must also provide the Legislature with a biennial state budget report, the executive budget bill, and suggestions for the best methods for raising any additional needed revenues.

The governor requested and received a one month extension of the deadline for presenting his biennial budget. The presentation was scheduled for tomorrow at 1:30pm. Whether because he has become persona non grata at the Capitol, or because he wanted to curry even more favor with business, Governor Walker scheduled his address to the legislature for an off-site location at a local livestock feed manufacturing concern. The presentation has since been cancelled and the Republican members of the Senate were okay with his excuse (“the dog ate his homework”) so he’s been granted another delay. The speech is now scheduled for March 1.

Now many of my friends are calling the governor a manipulative SOB, but the situation is more nuanced than that. The governor is not the brightest bulb in the string, and he has a little schedule that requires him to pass the “Budget Repair Bill” before he will share his plans for the next biennium. He needs to pass that bill because it gives him carte blanche to destroy Medicaid funded services and the civil service. It is also a union busting bill and deserves to be killed for that fact alone, and the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups points out that “…passage of the bill will give Governor Walker’s administration unprecedented authority to make sweeping changes to Medicaid programs such as SeniorCare Rx, Family Care, BadgerCare, ADRC’s, the Benefit Specialists program and services provided by OCI and the Board on Aging and Long-Term Care, without public input or approval from the state legislature.” It’s these sweeping changes that he requires to shape a budget that will most benefit his supporters and incidentally slash holes in the public program safety net that supports some of our most vulnerable neighbors.

So, we have our fingers crossed that the 14 Democrats in the Senate will stay away, the Budget Repair Bill will not be passed in anything like its current form, and the governor will be faced with doing some hard work to address our state’s fiscal issues over the next few years without a blank check in his pocket drawn on the account of the middle class and the working poor.

Here in the country we’ve experienced almost 48 hours of non-stop sleet and snow and freezing rain. The ground is covered with ice and it’s the end of a three day weekend. We needed this down time, but tomorrow morning we’ll be up and scraping the ice off the wind shield and heading into town. Beth will go to work. I’ll go back to lending a body in support of the organized protest against the Koch brothers fueled hubris of Governor Walker. Here’s what I think is happening. Drop a comment in with other information if you have it. (First time commenters are moderated, but the process is easy).

• Tuesday at 8am… Jesse Jackson addressing the students at East High School, the very kids who walked out early last week and helped spark the protests. Deke Rivers writes:
  

  The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spoke at the Capitol on Friday, will be back in Madison to speak at 8 a.m. Tuesday outside Madison East High School, district spokesman Ken Syke said.

  Just before classes start at East High School, Jackson plans to march from First Street and East Mifflin Street to the East parking lot for a rally.

  Then Jackson will speak to East students over the loudspeaker after the school bell rings. The idea is to both inspire and welcome students back, principal Mary Kelley said.

• The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign promises a citizen vigil resuming tomorrow and continuing through at least the middle of March.
• The Wisconsin Wave has scheduled picketing of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce convention at Monona Terrace on Wednesday at noon followed by a rally at 4:30pm.
• PR Watch at the Center for Media and Democracy is reporting live as the protests and demonstrations continue. Their latest update covers the Tom Morello concert ongoing now at Monona Terrace.
• The revolution is being tweeted using hashtag #wiunion
• Since teachers return to work on Tuesday, parents and “Friends of Wisconsin Teachers and Public Workers” will gather at the State Street entrance of the Capitol at noon to continue the vigil.

Wisconsin “Budget Repair Bill” Protest Pt 2 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

You can’t be friends with a squirrel. A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit.
— Sarah Jessica Parker

Corporate white-hat hackers and the Mossad have set back Persian plans for nuclear bomb production by at least three years according to an article in today’s New York Times. Fact checking the Times puff piece on Stuxnet, a worm crafted for cyberwar on the Iranian nuclear establishment that targets Siemens equipment used to control centrifuges, led me to blogger Dawn Lim, so the time spent reading the fatuous nonsense from the Times wasn’t completely wasted.

Microsoft and other commercial antivirus vendors brought public attention to Stuxnet last July. The time required to develop the malware before it was dropped into the wild isn’t publicly known, but the US and Israel couldn’t have whipped it up overnight. In 2024 the flaws in Microsoft Windows exploited by the worm’s designers were brought to public attention. According to ABC, in July 2024 the worm first appeared in the wild in Belarus, a year after the Microsoft flaws were made public. The time lag between discovery of the Windows problem and the remedy suggests that the company was cooperating with the US and Israel while the worm was being developed.

Last September, Eric Byres reported that “…the Stuxnet malware attacks on Siemens Simatic WinCC SCADA and PCS7 DCS systems that came to light this past July were not the first time industrial control systems have been targeted by hackers.” Byres cites attacks going back to the early days of the Bush administration, including sabotage of Venezuela oil tanker loading control systems in the winter of 2024-2003. That sabotage coincided with efforts to destabilize the country and oust left wing leader Hugo Chavez.

More information on Stuxnet and its effect on the Iranian nuclear program is of course available on Wikipedia.

The U.S. is far better off with this treaty than without it. It strengthens the security of the U.S. and our allies and promotes strategic stability between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
— Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense

The US Senate is considering ratification of the new START treaty with Russia. The deliberations, broadcast on C-Span, provide an opportunity to see Senators at their best and worst. A two-thirds majority will be needed to ratify the treaty, and the obstructionists are out in force attempting to deny the Obama administration any progress on any program, regardless of how much sense it makes. Ratification of START makes sense simply because the old treaty lapsed last December and without a treaty in effect, there is no mechanism to monitor the two countries’ progress toward the modest disarmament they’ve agreed upon. Sadly, ratification would be a concrete accomplishment of the administration. The take-no-prisoners competitive posture of the right-wing in America seeks to deny Obama any progress toward any goal. So, although a bi-partisan roll call of defense experts, military leadership, past and present Secretaries of State and Defense and countless others favor ratification, all it takes is thirty-four obstructionist Senators to draw down the curtain on any disarmament progress for the next four or five years.

Jeff Sessions of Alabama is a piece of work. C-Span, dry and formalistic though much of the content may be, provides an opportunity to see Sessions and his ilk at work ripping apart the fabric of the United States of America.

Coretta Scott King, Albert Schweitzer, and Benjamin Spock famously brought public attention to the horror of nuclear war when they founded The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. At that time, the US and the Soviet Union had entered an arms race with the common strategic goal of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). They were building bombs and bombers and missiles as fast as possible in order to make sure that no one on the planet would survive a nuclear war. The MADness continues to this day, albeit somewhat less dramatically. As of mid-2009 fewer than 5000 strategic atomic warheads are deployed by the combined forces of the United States and the Russian Federation (Russian MADness, US MADness). There are oodles of tactical nukes deployed of course, but these weapons are small potatoes, their yields about the same as the modest devices that ended World War II with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tactical nukes don’t count in the Strategic Arms book keeping biz.

Besides the US and Russia, at least seven other countries have nuclear arsenals, but none have tied their defense strategies to the craziness of mutually assured destruction. Here’s a link to an article in support of the START treaty by Robert Gates, former Bush and now Obama Secretary of Defense.

It’s not exactly a fresh concern. Since Ben wrote about his gustatory experience with cloned milk and meat for Wired magazine three years ago, the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved meat and dairy products from cloned critters. The US Department of Agriculture, bureaucratic servant of the big ag biz, has called for farmers to voluntarily keep cloned food products out of the supply chain “so it can manage a smooth and orderly transition to market.” In other words, until the “greed is good” crowd can control cloning operations under the umbrella of amoral corporate agribusiness, the USDA wants to keep the market closed.

In the Eurozone, government approval hasn’t been this easily won. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), sensitive to citizens’ concerns regarding animal welfare, genetic diversity of farm animals, and market conditions in the face of pressure from the global agribusiness giants, maintain a cautious attitude about clone products and other “novel foods.” In July clone products were removed from the “novel foods” category and the European Parliament called for more specific regulation (see Amendment 14). A press release accompanying this action said:

“A clear majority in the European Parliament supports ethical objections to the industrial production of cloned meat for food. Cloned animals suffer disproportionately highly from illnesses, malformations and premature death. MEPs have been calling for proper regulation for years: it’s high time the Commission listened to the European Parliament and citizens on this issue.”

There are now over 6 billion people to feed on the planet earth, and the way things are going there will be nine billion by 2024. Agricultural production on an industrial scale results in a degraded environment and ethical shortcuts that end up poisoning people. I’m thinking of mad cow disease, BSE prions spread through the mixture of brains, bones, and meat in cattle feed. USDA regulation is a sick and twisted example of government bureaucracy cross bred with corporate interests to the detriment of us all. In the case of mad cow disease, US beef producers have been restricted by the USDA from testing their own cattle. Whatever regulations emerge in the USA to control the market for clone sourced food, they will doubtless be as noisome and as ineffective as the regs surrounding animal feeding.

Cross posted at Class War.

Fries, by Karin Hearn

Earlier this year, in a typical exercise in editorial bloviation, the pompous Thomas Friedman, a high priest in the cult of the entrepreneur, belittled the bail-outs and by inference any proto-Keynesian impulses from the left. Bail-out money would have been better spent on start-ups, Friedman suggests. Grove destroys the nonsensical position that the government should back start-ups while commodity manufacturing should be allowed to die. No matter what Mr. Friedman says, our faith in start-ups as little job creation engines is misplaced. Long experience in Silicon Valley informs Grove’s argument that shipping jobs overseas to avoid rising costs stateside is a chump’s game.

As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S., and China opened up. American companies discovered they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done cheaper overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.

Back in the day, Intel converted its intellectual capital to manufacturing muscle by scaling up for production and creating jobs. These jobs cost Intel about $650 each–$3,600 in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation. Today, while the money invested in companies has grown enormously, far fewer jobs are produced. Grove estimates Silicon valley job creation costs now at about $100,000 per job. The reason is that over ninety percent of the jobs are farmed out to offshore manufacturing plants. Apple, for example, has 25,000 US employees (including, I assume, the nimrods behind the “Genius Bar” at your local Apple retail outlet). Meanwhile, in southern China, 250,000 Foxconn employees are busy manufacturing Apple products.

The US undervalues manufacturing. Ideologues like Friedman have been touting the “service (would you like fries with that?) economy” for years, placing a premium on “knowledge work” and ignoring the fate of factory workers and their jobs. The social costs of deteriorating infrastructure are ignored. The decisions to build new plants are based on financial statements.

Photo by Lawrence Sinclair

The profit motive has forced jobs offshore for a lot of reasons. Grove is less than forthcoming about Silicon Valley’s open secret, the environmental costs associated with making chips and circuit boards. The point isn’t central to his concern; but, by the eighties it was clear that the San Jose area would soon be awash in a sea of heavy metals and carcinogenic compounds if something wasn’t done. One of the quick and dirty solutions was to send our pollution offshore with our jobs.

Grove dares to question the conventional wisdom that the free market is “the best economic system.” He says, “Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory–and job-centric political leadership–to guide our plans and actions.” He’s lobbying for the country to “rebuild our industrial commons.” How can we get that done?

* * *

cross posted at Classwar

• Google stuff. So much of this is great. Why is Feedburner so difficult for me?
• Can the US Punish BP’s Shareholders? The editors of the New York Times asked that question. Is there any doubt that the US could freeze their assets and confiscate every dime? And would that be “punishment?” The NYT takes a swing and misses, bigtime. FAIL.
• Obama summons BP chiefs to White House.
• RSA Boss Slams Barack Obama In BP Row. Brass balls, that’s what the insurance guy who wrote this tract must have. To imply equivalence between the the President of the United States and the Chairman of BP is a bit of a stretch. To offer the President advice from that side of the Atlantic is more than a stretch, it’s presumptuous as hell.
• RSA Ordinary Shares. A chart showing that the presumptuous know-it-all in the previous link has led his company to lose about a third of its value since Obama was elected.
• Gulf spill insurance exposure tops $1.6B: Moody’s. A story showing why the English insurance guy who wrote the “open letter” linked above may be a less than disinterested party.
• Meet the US States that will default on their debt first. We can only hope that English banks and insurance companies are holding these notes.
• Want To Get Faster, Smarter? Sleep 10 Hours. Advice I can live with.
• friendfeed
• Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn do twitter.
• BBDO in the Wikipedia.
• BBDO Turkey. Flotillas are us.