Would the world be better off without religion? That was the topic of a recent debate in the NYU Intelligence Squared series. One of the audience questions concerned the enormous wealth hoarded by churches, which Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza defended as follows:

I think in the case of the Vatican, the wealth of the Vatican is in priceless treasures, tapestries, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, art. Now, let’s remember… it was popes, the Medici popes and so on, who commissioned those paintings. If it wasn’t for Catholicism, we wouldn’t have the Sistine Chapel.

This was the only line of the night that got boos from the audience. It’s easy to see why, since D’Souza was clearly trying hard to overlook the obvious reply: The reason it was the church that commissioned those artworks, and not some other buyer, is because the church had all the money! The great composers, painters and sculptors of the Renaissance worked for whomever could afford to pay them, which is why they often ended up working for the church even when they were notorious freethinkers, as in the case of Giuseppe Verdi. If it wasn’t for Catholicism, we might not have the Sistine Chapel, but it’s a near-certainty that we’d have different artworks, equally majestic and famous, by the same artists. As Richard Dawkins has suggested, wouldn’t you love to hear Beethoven’s “Evolution Symphony”?

I bring this up because, thanks to the Occupy protests, inequality has come to dominate the American political conversation. Poverty and inequality are at their highest levels since the Great Depression, and there’s a growing clamor to raise taxes on the wealthy to provide more opportunity for the rest of us. I think this is an excellent idea, and I’d like to suggest that beside Wall Street bankers and stock traders, there’s another group of the mega-wealthy that’s often overlooked.

Why don’t we consider taxing the churches?

Not all churches or all ministers are rich, but some of them are very rich indeed. And that’s no surprise, because society subsidizes them through a constellation of generous tax breaks that aren’t available to any other institution, even non-profits. For example, religious organizations can opt out of Social Security and Medicare withholding. Religious employers are exempt from unemployment taxes, and in some states, from sales tax. Religious ministers — and no other profession; the law specifies that only “ministers of the gospel” are eligible for this benefit — can receive part of their salary as a “housing allowance” on which they pay no taxes. (Compounding the absurdity, they can then turn around and double-dip, deducting their mortgage interest from their taxes, even when their mortgage is being paid with tax-free money in the first place.) And, of course, churches are exempt from property tax and from federal income tax.

We’re all paying for the special privileges afforded to religion. Your taxes and mine have to be higher to make up the revenue shortfall that the government isn’t taking in because these huge, wealthy churches don’t pay their own way. By some estimates, the property tax exemption alone removes $100 billion in property from U.S. tax rolls. (And it’s not just the big churches where that exemption bites: According to authors like Sikivu Hutchinson, the proliferation of small storefront churches is a major contributor to poverty and societal dysfunction in poor communities, since these churches remove valuable commercial property from the tax base and ensure that local governments remain cash-strapped and unable to provide basic services.) Just about the only restriction that churches have to abide by in return is that they can’t endorse political candidates — and even this trivial, easily evaded prohibition is routinely and flagrantly violated by the religious right.

Combined with a near-total lack of government scrutiny, the privileges granted to religion have enabled megachurch ministers to live fantastically luxurious lifestyles. An investigation by Sen. Chuck Grassley in 2009 gave a rare public glimpse of how powerful preachers spend the cash they rake in from their flocks: jewelry, luxury clothing, cosmetic surgery, offshore bank accounts, multimillion-dollar lakefront mansions, a fleet of private jets, flights to Hawaii and Fiji, and most famously in the case of Joyce Meyer, a $23,000 marble-topped commode. Meyer’s ministry alone is estimated to have an annual take of around $124 million.

Most of these Elmer Gantry-types preach a theology called the “prosperity gospel.” The basic idea of this is that God wants to shower you with riches, but only if you first “plant a seed of faith” by giving your church as much money as you possibly can, trusting that God will repay you tenfold. (The typical ask is for 10 percent of your annual income — gross, not net; people who tithe based on their net income hate the baby Jesus.) Naturally, this idea has made some churches very, very rich, while making a large number of poor, desperate people even poorer.

One might think this scam would only work for so long before people start to realize that giving all their money away isn’t making them rich. But the pastors who preach it have a very convenient and clever rationalization: when supernatural wealth fails to materialize, they tell their followers that it must be their own fault, that they’re harboring some secret sin that’s preventing God from fulfilling his promises.

But beyond the prosperity gospel, we’re now witnessing a new and even more brazen idea spreading among the American religious right: that the poor should accept their lot without complaint, and that calling for a stronger social safety net or advocating higher taxes on the rich is committing the sin of envy. For example, here’s Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who’s found a profitable after-prison career as a born-again right-wing pundit, denouncing the poor for wanting a better life for themselves:

Despite this, many people insist on soaking the well-off because… what they want is to see their better-off neighbors knocked down a peg. That’s how envy works.

Thomas Aquinas defined envy as “sorrow for another’s good.” It is the opposite of pity. And it is one of the defining sins of our times.

(I would guess that by Colson’s standard, some of the authors of the Bible would also be committing the sin of envy with their denunciations of the rich.)

The right-wing Family Research Council has also joined in, calling for its followers to pray that God stifles the Occupy Wall Street protests; its president, Tony Perkins, has said that Jesus “endorses the principles of business and the free market”. And then there’s this billboard, which asserts that protesters’ demands for health insurance and higher corporate tax rates violate the biblical commandment against coveting. I would’ve thought this was a bizarre joke if not for the fact that so many powerful right-wing Christians are openly saying the same thing.

On its surface, Christianity seems like the least likely religion for this theology of the rich and powerful to take root. The Bible, after all, denounces wealth and praises poverty in no uncertain terms. In fact, Jesus unequivocally commands that Christians should sell all their possessions, give the money to the poor, and live as wandering mendicant evangelists. The famous analogy about a camel going through the eye of a needle was a parable intended to forcefully make the point that it’s almost impossible for a rich person to get into Heaven — and by the Bible’s standard, millions of modern Christians are very rich indeed:

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

…Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

–Matthew 19:16-24

In another verse, Jesus tells his followers not to save money or store up possessions, but to travel constantly with no thought for the future, having faith that God will somehow feed and clothe them each day:

“And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is today in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?

And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind… But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

–Luke 12:22-31

The Bible goes so far as to say that the first community of Christians weren’t just socialists, but communists:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”

–Acts 2:44-45

By some accounts, this verse is what inspired Karl Marx’s dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Irony of ironies: Communism was espoused in the pages of the Bible!

Of course, these commands are nearly impossible to follow, and that’s precisely the point. In the beginning, Christianity was a small, radical sect whose followers expected the world to end within their own lifetimes. It’s no wonder that they saw no use for earthly possessions. But when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire and began to convert the powerful and the comfortable, this would no longer do. No large, organized religion could possibly thrive on precepts like this, and so they were left by the wayside in the pursuit of worldly riches and imperial grandeur.

This pattern happens over and over: Even when it begins among the poor and disenfranchised, religion almost always ends up being co-opted by the wealthy and powerful and used as a convenient excuse to justify inequality. Nothing is more effective at persuading the poor not to rebel or protest than the belief that, if they stay quiet and compliant, they’ll be rewarded after death. As the columnist Ed Weathers wrote, “If you would have your slaves remain docile, teach them hymns.” And this idea isn’t just prominent in Christianity — we also see it in other religions, like Hinduism, which teaches that people’s social caste is the deserved result of the karma they accumulated in past lives. Obey the rich people in this life, and maybe you’ll be reborn as one of them next time!

The repeated exploitation of religion throughout history to further beat down the downtrodden isn’t just a coincidence. Any belief system which teaches people to fix their gazes on another life can by its nature be leveraged to excuse poverty, oppression, and injustice in this one. When we see wealthy preachers joining hands with wealthy bankers to urge the masses to stop protesting and quietly accept their lot, it shouldn’t be surprising — it’s a reminder of the natural order of things. Both groups are privileged elites whose highest concern, with a few rare and honorable exceptions, is hanging on to that privilege.

There’s a lesson here for the 99 percent of us: If we seek social justice, the only way we’ll ever truly attain it is to overthrow every ideology that promises pie in the sky by and by. As long as our effort is focused, even partially, on another world, it will always be divided and therefore less effective than it could be. (It’s not for nothing that John Lennon put “Imagine no religion” together with “No need for greed or hunger.”) We’ll have real equality and real opportunity when we learn to set aside fantasies of another existence and turn our attention fully to this life and the things of this world, which are the only real or important things.

This article was reposted from AlterNet.

Ben Wizner, the litigation director for the ACLU’s national security project, cheerfully admits that its April 2011 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for 23 of the very same US State Department diplomatic cables we all read this time last year, when WikiLeaks released them to five newspapers including the Guardian, was “cheeky” – a way to foreground the “absurdity of the US secrecy regime”.

And so it has. Nearly eight months after the original FOIA request, the State Department has finally released … 11 cables. Federal censors have helpfully redacted them, making it easy to see, by a simple act of comparison (which the ACLU performs for us, here), precisely which sections the State Department wants hidden. Missing are a dirty dozen cables the government refused to release – despite those cables having already been leaked, published and analysed in virtually every major national and international media venue – again, because they were classified as secret or deemed to contain sensitive information.

Administration officials unleashed plenty of hyperbole and hysteria when the cables were first published. But it turned out that none of the information in them actually endangered American citizens, allies or informants. They did, however, prove embarrassing for the US and many foreign leaders. Because it turned out that claims about national security were often an excuse to prevent us from seeing our government engaged in unethical, unconstitutional and, sometimes, illegal practices. These ran the gamut from extraordinary renditions, detentions and torture to shaking down other governments in an attempt to influence their political processes and tamper with their criminal justice systems.

We learned that the same Obama administration that had refused to pursue the perpetrators of the Bush torture regime at home had also tried to put its thumbs on the scales of justice in Spain – aggressively attempting to prevent a counter-terrorism judge from trying the senior legal minds of the Bush administration for their part in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

We learned about the US attempt to scuttle the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, the greengrocer mistaken for a senior al-Qaida official. He was kidnapped, tortured, drugged, beaten and thrown into Afghanistan’s CIA-run Salt Pit prison, until – oops – they realised they had the wrong guy and dumped him in the Albanian outback. In public, Munich prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA operatives involved in his abduction and torture, and Angela Merkel’s office called for an investigation. In private, the German justice ministry and foreign ministry both made it clear to the US that they were not interested in pursuing the case, emboldening the US to refuse to arrest or hand over the agents.

If the first part of the ACLU’s agenda in asking for the 23 already-leaked cables is to highlight what it calls a “penchant for excessive secrecy in defiance of all reason”, the second is to spotlight the way in which the Bush and Obama administrations abuse the state secrets privilege to keep illegal programs from being judicially reviewed.

When the ACLU challenged the CIA on behalf of el-Masri in 2005, a judge dismissed the case. The US government did not deny that he was wrongfully kidnapped. Instead, it successfully argued that his case be dismissed because litigation of his claims would expose state secrets and jeopardise American security. This despite the fact that, as el-Masri pointed out, “President Bush has told the world about the CIA’s detention program, and even though my allegations have been corroborated by eyewitnesses and other evidence.”

First the Bush administration and then the Obama administration successfully evoked the state secrets privilege to prevent the ACLU from filing a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc, the folks who helped the CIA fly extraordinary rendition victims to secret sites where they were detained, tortured and interrogated. Again, the government claimed that further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public. And again, it appears to have won.

In the hall of mirrors that the US security regime has become, information that is not officially acknowledged cannot be used to hold government officials responsible in the courts. And an administration that can evade charges of misconduct, including torture, by hiding behind state secrets claims, even when all the details are publicly known, becomes the guardian of its own liability. That’s bad news.

Transparency and accountability are the oxygen of democracy. But don’t hold your breath waiting for this administration to respond to requests for either one.

Nancy Goldstein’s work has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, NPR, Politico, Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, and the Washington Post, where she was an Editor’s Pick and the winner of the blogging round during their Next Great Pundit Contest.

This article was reposted from AlterNet.

17 December, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Sorman, Libya: It was a warm early Monday morning along the Libyan coast on June 20, 2011.

At approximately 0200 GMT the next day in NATO Headquarters in Brussels and 30 minutes later in its media center in Naples, staffers finished tabulating NATO’s 92nd day of aerial attacks on Libya and began to post the data on its website (www.nato.int).

Twenty four hours earlier an Atlantic Alliance command unit, located approximately 30 miles off the Libyan coast, in a direct line with Malta, and NATO’s targeting unit had signed off on 49 bombing missions for June 20th, the last day of spring and the last day of NATO’s original UN bombing mandate.

The authority for NATO’s bombing, which far exceeded earlier estimates ,killing or wounding of between 90,000-120,000 Libyans and foreigners, and the displacement of more than two million Libyans and foreign workers was claimed from the hastily adopted UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and UNSCR 1973. UN resolutions 1970 & 1973 gave NATO UN Chapter 7 authority to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, initially for 90 days which ironically ended the day before its bombing at Sorman.

The two UN Security Council Resolutions were insisted upon by their main sponsors, France, the UK, Italy and the US who claimed that ”a limited no-fly zone would protect Libya’s civilian population from the wrath of the government of Libya’s leader, Muammar Kaddafi.” NATO requested and was granted two additional 90 days extensions to continue its Libyan mission which gave its air force until the end of 2011 to continue Operation Unified Protector.

It was early Monday morning, June 20, 2011.

Sorman Libya. A quiet and peaceful Libyan town, Sorman is located 45 miles west of Tripoli, near the Mediterranean coast, in the Zawiya District of the Tripolitania region in northwestern Libya. Many of the town’s children grew up exploring the 3rd Century truly magnificent Roman Ruins at nearby Sabratha. Some archaeologists consider Sabratha, located almost in direct line with Rome across the Mediterranean, and built on a high cliff above the sea, as the most complete extant Roman architecture with only a small part of this large Roman city having been excavated. This observer has visited Sabratha a few times since the mid-1980’s and each visit presents more awe. Families from Sorman and nearby villages regularly visit and picnic there.

In the early hours of June 20, 2011 it was dark in Sorman except for some muted half-moon light. A few dim street lights and some partially illumined homes provided some light as residents began to rise and prepare for the Al Fajr (“Dawn”) prayers.

At the homestead of Khaled K. El-Hamedi, the 37 year old President of the International Organization for Peace, Care & Relief (IOPCR), one of Libya’s most active social service organizations everyone was asleep following a rambunctious birthday party for his three year old son. The Hamedi family members included Khaled’s three year old son Khweldi, five year old daughter Khaleda, his beautiful pregnant wife Safa, his aunt Najia, and his six year old niece Salam, among others.

At NATO’s Control and Command Center, the 49 bombing missions planned for early morning of June 20, included a target at Sorman, which would push the number of NATO reconnaissance sorties over Libya to 11,930. This number would become 26,500 by midnight on October 31, when NATO would end its air campaign. The days bombing sorties would also bring the tally of rocket and bombing targets to 4,521. This figure would increase to more than 11,781 by late fall, when NATO was instructed to end OUP (Operation Unified Protector).

NATO’s prepares to bomb Dorman’s “command and control center”

Before the bombs were fired at Khaled K. al-Hamedi compound, NATO staff conducted a six step process the first of which was surveillance using the MQ-9 Reaper UAV, which sometimes is also used to fire missiles. Also above Sorman was the Predator drone with full-motion video. During June 19 and the early hours of June 20, the drones locked on the Hamedi homestead target and relayed updated information to NATO’s command center.

The Hamedi home was not what NATO labels a “time-critical target” so there was plenty of time for its staff to transmit information about the site from unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to intelligence analysts. Almost certainly, according to a source at Jane’s Weekly, NATO UAV’s watched the Hamedi compound over a period of days and presumably observed part of the birthday party being held for three old Huweldi, the day before the order to bomb was issued.

NATO Rules of Engagement for Operation United Protector, constitute a set of classified documents which present specific and detailed instructions about what is a legitimate target and who can approve the target, whether pre-planned or “on the fly” when a pilot happens upon a target of opportunity.

The Sorman attack on the Hamedi home was planned as part of what NATO calls its “Joint Air Tasking Cycle (JATC). A target development team put the Hamedi home on the June 20th daily list of targets. The team used a report from NATO intelligence analysts who determined that retired officer Khaled al Huweldi, Hamedi, one of the original members of the Gadhafi led 1969 coup against King Idris in 1969, and a former member of the Al Fatah Revolution’s Revolutionary Command Council was living on the property. His assassination had been ordered by NATO because they hoped to weaken the regime in some way even though the senior Hamedi was retired and had no decision making role in Libya.

On June 19, the day before the bombing attack on the Hamedi family at Sorman, NATO was obliged by its own regulations and by the international law of armed conflict to conduct a “potential for collateral damage review” of this mission.

There is no evidence that this was ever done.

A requested US Congressional NATO Liaison Office review of the Sorman bombing, initially requested from Libya on August 2, was completed in early September 2011 and found no documentary evidence or other indication that Bouchard or anyone in NATO’s Target Selection Unit, evaluated, discussed, or even considered the subject of potential civilian casualties at the Hamedi home in Sorman.

Following Bouchard’s green light to bomb the Hamedi home, the coordinates were fixed at 32°45′24″N 12°34′18″E . Specific aim points on the Hamedi property were chosen and eight bombs and missiles were readied and attached to the strike aircraft.

At Sorman, NATO used a variety of bombs and missiles including the “bunker busting” BLU-109 (Bomb Live Unit) which is designed to penetrate 18 feet of concrete. NATO also used the American MK series of 500 lb, (MK 81) 1000 lb, (MK-82) and the 2000 lb (MK-84) that Israel used so widely during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. The MK series and the BLU-109 are reportedly being stockpiled in Israel in preparation for both countries anticipated next war in this region.

Following the infernal at Sorman, NATO denied responsibility but the next day NATO admitted carrying out an air strike somewhere in Sorman but denied that there were civilian deaths even as its drones filmed the scene close up. NATO’s media office in Naples issued a statement claiming “A precision air strike was launched against a high-level command and control node in the Sorman area without collateral damage.” NATO spokespersons also told Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that “the facility was a legitimate military target and that all necessary precautions were taken before conducting the strike which minimized any potential risk of causing unnecessary casualties”.

The official NATO record of its bombing of Libya for June 20, 2011 reads as follows and remains unchanged:

“Allied Joint Force Command NAPLES, SHAPE, NATO HQ.

Over the past 24 hours, NATO has conducted the following activities associated with Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR:

Air Operations Sorties conducted 20 JUNE: 149

Strike sorties conducted 20 JUNE: 52

Key Hits

20 JUNE: In the vicinity of Tripoli: 1 Command & Control Node, 8 Surface-To-Air Missile Launchers, 1 Surface-To-Air Missile Transport Vehicle. In the vicinity of Misratah: 3 Truck-Mounted Guns, 2 Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns, 1 Tank. In the vicinity of Tarhunah: 1 Military Equipment Storage Facility. In the vicinity of Al-Khums: 1 Military Vehicle Storage Facility. In the vicinity of Zintan: 1 Rocket Launcher.”

Oddly, NATO records for June 20th as well as subsequent reports of bombing attacks listed for June 20th and June 21st in its daily logs have never included the bombing attack on Sorman or the attack on the Al-Hamedi residence which indisputably killed 15 civilians.

Just before the bombs hit, eye witnesses, reported seeing red specks in the sky and then flashes of intense light, immediately followed by thunderous ear splitting blasts as eight American bombs and rockets pulverized their neighbors homestead.

In an instant Khaled El-Hamedi’s family was dead. The children were crushed, blown apart or shredded into pieces, along with friends and extended family members who had slept overnight.

Khaled was working late, attending meetings with displaced Libyans driven from their homes and urgently in need of IOPCR help. As he returned home, Khaled saw from his car window the sky light up and heard exploding bombs. He was frozen in horror as entered his property and observed rescue workers frantically digging and futilely trying to move the thick concrete slabs of his home hoping against hope that they would miraculously find survivors.

Libyan government spokesman Mousa Ibrahim announced the death of 15 people, including three children, were killed at Sorman. He slammed the NATO bombing as a “cowardly terrorist act which cannot be justified.” Investigators, who visited Sabratha hospital 10 kilometers from Sorman, saw nine bodies, including three young children. They also saw body parts including a child’s head.

For those who visited the Al-Hamidi family compound back in June following the NATO bombings, as this observer did less than a week after the crime as part of an international delegation, the scene was one of total devastation.

Collapsed and blown apart concrete and tiled homes, small body parts, and bits of family belongings and memorabilia, trees, some blown over, others bending and nearly denuded of their foliage, dead, terrified and dying petting zoo animals, including exotic birds, Ostrich, Deer, small animals and large moose killed or left near death and most in a blind stupor staring blankly from what remained of their shelters while dying of wounds and from trauma.

Outside one of the bombed houses I noticed crushed cartons of spaghetti pasta and cans of tomato sauce, stockpiled for distribution to the needy as part of the work of IOPCR during the summer and in preparation for the coming Holy month of Ramadan observances which included doing and performing charitable works and individual humanitarian acts.

Under growing pressure from the international community including NATO member states, NATO HQ claimed equipment malfunction, missed target, poor intelligence and pilot errors. Finally US Defense secretaries Gates and his replacement, Leon Panetta admitted that NATO lacked effective intelligence on the ground to identify military targets with certainty. Former Defense Secretary Gates, in criticizing NATO’s operation in Libya implied that NATO used a bomb first ask questions later paradigm in Libya. And this appears to have been the case. These excuses in no way absolve NATO and its 28 NATO member states of responsibility.

Canadian Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard insists to this day that only Libya’s military was targeted: “This important strike will greatly degrade Gadhafi regime forces’ ability to carry on their barbaric assault against the Libyan people,” he told the media from his office in Brussels. The civilian deaths at Sorman came just hours after NATO acknowledged that one of its missiles had gone astray early on Sunday, hitting a residential neighborhood of Tripoli.

At the request of Khaled al-Hamedi, himself being sought by Libya’s new government, and aware that I was going to return to Sorman, I felt honored as I made my way to his loved ones gravesites on the family homestead where he and I first met, in order to deliver a message from him to his loved ones.

Picking my way through debris in the dark, under the cold and suspicious eyes of a couple of local militiamen, I stood at the same spot, where on June 27th his family’s freshly dug graves bore witness to what Khaled was describing to our shocked delegation concerning the details of the horror and hellfire that NATO unleashed upon his family.

Back in June I had moved to the rear of our group as Khaled spoke to us about the loss of his babies, his beauties and his precious pregnant wife. I was embarrassed because for some reason, uncontrollable tears would not stop streaming down my face and, despite averting my eyes, I saw that Khaled noticed. I was touched when this young man, to whom I was a total stranger, came to me and put his arm around my shoulder in comfort. Clearly he understood that each of us can feel the pain of others, even of strangers, as well as connect them with our own losses of loved ones in life.

Later, as I learned more about Khaled’s family and saw their most expressive and revealing photos, I came to believe that with respect to the wanton criminal aggression that caused thousands of needless deaths of innocents over the period of nearly nine months against this simple, gentle society, that Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi, and the others slaughtered at Sorman, are forever iconic representatives of all the innocent civilians who were slaughtered in Libya since March 2011.

During my recent visit to Sorman, I stood at the same location as last June. I surveyed the area and then approached the graves of Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi. In the cold darkness, and the piles of rubble still in place,it was eerie

I knelt close, felt a strange source of warmth and looked over my shoulder.

I whispered in the silent night that I had a message from your loving Husband, Father, Uncle and Nephew that he asked me to deliver to you.

I read to them the message entrusted to me. And I left a copy in Arabic, pinned to a bouquet of flowers:

The message read:

“Please say a very big hello to them and tell them I am coming.

Please tell them “I won’t leave you alone

And I miss each of you so very much.”

And please write them each a note.

Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi.

Franklin, Tell them, “You are my life.

You are my love.

I miss you very, very much.

Life without you is so painful, so hard and completely empty.

I won’t stay and live away from you. I promise.

I’ll return and be close to you. Baba will be back.

I love you.

As I made my way back to the main road in search of a taxi, a militiaman stopped me and interrogated me about why I was there, confiscated my camera and ordered me to leave the area at once.

I paused for a moment and looked back toward what had been a loving family home, a petting zoo and bird sanctuary that had delighted the children in this neighborhood.

A little boy and girl, perhaps siblings, maybe six or seven years old, approached me with their Ethiopian nanny and asked: “Wien, (where is) Khaleda? Wien Khweldi? metta yargeoun ila Al Bayt (when will they come home?)

“When will they come home?”

Unable to speak, I kissed and patted their sweet heads and continued on my way.

Khaled K. Al-Hamedi is strong, deeply religious, and fatalistic. He has pledged to family and friends around the world that he will continue his work with the International Organization for Peace, Care & Relief in spite of the life shattering loss of his loved ones.

An honorable family, a peaceful and welcoming town, a devastated country, and a shocked and angry international community demand justice from those who sent ‘Unified Protector’ and NATO’s no-fly zone to destroy Libya in order to “protect the civilian population.”

Franklin Lamb is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

This article was reposted from CounterCurrents.org.

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society….To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective,” Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan wrote in a personal letter, “Am an admirer of Ayn Rand.” Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) credits Rand for inspiring him to go into politics, and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) calls Atlas Shrugged his “foundation book.” Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) says Ayn Rand had a major influence on him, and his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an even bigger fan. A short list of other Rand fans includes Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission in George W. Bush’s second administration; and former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.

But Rand’s impact on U.S. society and culture goes even deeper.

The Seduction of Nathan Blumenthal

Ayn Rand’s books such as The Virtue of Selfishness and her philosophy that celebrates self-interest and disdains altruism may well be, as Vidal assessed, “nearly perfect in its immorality.” But is Vidal right about evil? Charles Manson, who himself did not kill anyone, is the personification of evil for many of us because of his psychological success at exploiting the vulnerabilities of young people and seducing them to murder. What should we call Ayn Rand’s psychological ability to exploit the vulnerabilities of millions of young people so as to influence them not to care about anyone besides themselves?

While Greenspan (tagged “A.G.” by Rand) was the most famous name that would emerge from Rand’s Collective, the second most well-known name to emerge from the Collective was Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist, author and “self-esteem” advocate. Before he was Nathaniel Branden, he was Nathan Blumenthal, a 14-year-old who read Rand’s The Fountainhead again and again. He later would say, “I felt hypnotized.” He describes how Rand gave him a sense that he could be powerful, that he could be a hero. He wrote one letter to his idol Rand, then a second. To his amazement, she telephoned him, and at age 20, Nathan received an invitation to Ayn Rand’s home. Shortly after, Nathan Blumenthal announced to the world that he was incorporating Rand in his new name: Nathaniel Branden. And in 1955, with Rand approaching her 50th birthday and Branden his 25th, and both in dissatisfying marriages, Ayn bedded Nathaniel.

What followed sounds straight out of Hollywood, but Rand was straight out of Hollywood, having worked for Cecil B. DeMille. Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden’s astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol.

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!”

Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Branden’s extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Branden with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

After being banished by Rand, Nathaniel Branden was worried that he might be assassinated by other members of the Collective, so he moved from New York to Los Angeles, where Rand fans were less fanatical. Branden established a lucrative psychotherapy practice and authored approximately 20 books, 10 of them with either “Self” or “Self-Esteem” in the title. Rand and Branden never reconciled, but he remains an admirer of her philosophy of self-interest.

Ayn Rand’s personal life was consistent with her philosophy of not giving a shit about anybody but herself. Rand was an ardent two-pack-a-day smoker, and when questioned about the dangers of smoking, she loved to light up with a defiant flourish and then scold her young questioners on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence.” After an x-ray showed that she had lung cancer, Rand quit smoking and had surgery for her cancer. Collective members explained to her that many people still smoked because they respected her and her assessment of the evidence; and that since she no longer smoked, she ought to tell them. They told her that she needn’t mention her lung cancer, that she could simply say she had reconsidered the evidence. Rand refused.

How Rand’s Philosophy Seduced Young Minds

When I was a kid, my reading included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others weakness.

Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible….The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself can be intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life.

I have known several people, professionally and socially, whose lives have been changed by those close to them who became infatuated with Ayn Rand. A common theme is something like this: “My ex-husband wasn’t a bad guy until he started reading Ayn Rand. Then he became a completely selfish jerk who destroyed our family, and our children no longer even talk to him.”

To wow her young admirers, Rand would often tell a story of how a smart-aleck book salesman had once challenged her to explain her philosophy while standing on one leg. She replied: “Metaphysics—objective reality. Epistemology—reason. Ethics—self-interest. Politics—capitalism.” How did that philosophy capture young minds?

Metaphysics—objective reality. Rand offered a narcotic for confused young people: complete certainty and a relief from their anxiety. Rand believed that an “objective reality” existed, and she knew exactly what that objective reality was. It included skyscrapers, industries, railroads, and ideas—at least her ideas. Rand’s objective reality did not include anxiety or sadness. Nor did it include much humor, at least the kind where one pokes fun at oneself. Rand assured her Collective that objective reality did not include Beethoven’s, Rembrandt’s, and Shakespeare’s realities—they were too gloomy and too tragic, basically buzzkillers. Rand preferred Mickey Spillane and, towards the end of her life, “Charlie’s Angels.”

Epistemology—reason. Rand’s kind of reason was a “cool-tool” to control the universe. Rand demonized Plato, and her youthful Collective members were taught to despise him. If Rand really believed that the Socratic Method described by Plato of discovering accurate definitions and clear thinking did not qualify as “reason,” why then did she regularly attempt it with her Collective? Also oddly, while Rand mocked dark moods and despair, her “reasoning” directed that Collective members should admire Dostoyevsky, whose novels are filled with dark moods and despair. A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Ethics—self-interest. For Rand, all altruists were manipulators. What could be more seductive to kids who discerned the motives of martyr parents, Christian missionaries and U.S. foreign aiders? Her champions, Nathaniel Branden still among them, feel that Rand’s view of “self-interest” has been horribly misrepresented. For them, self-interest is her hero architect Howard Roark turning down a commission because he couldn’t do it exactly his way. Some of Rand’s novel heroes did have integrity, however, for Rand there is no struggle to discover the distinction between true integrity and childish vanity. Rand’s integrity was her vanity, and it consisted of getting as much money and control as possible, copulating with whomever she wanted regardless of who would get hurt, and her always being right. To equate one’s selfishness, vanity, and egotism with one’s integrity liberates young people from the struggle to distinguish integrity from selfishness, vanity, and egotism.

Politics—capitalism. While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage. Rand was clever and hypocritical enough to know that you don’t get rich in the United States talking about compliance and conformity within corporate America. Rather, Rand gave lectures titled: “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business.” So, young careerist corporatists could embrace Rand’s self-styled “radical capitalism” and feel radical — radical without risk.

Rand’s Legacy

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

Actually, again inconsistent, Rand did have a God. It was herself. She said:

I am done with the monster of “we,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I.”

While Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed Americans about the United State’s dehumanization of African Americans and slavery, Ayn Rand removed Americans’ guilt for being selfish and uncaring about anyone except themselves. Not only did Rand make it “moral” for the wealthy not to pay their fair share of taxes, she “liberated” millions of other Americans from caring about the suffering of others, even the suffering of their own children.

The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

>Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.

This article was reposted from AlterNet.

Overwhelming evidence has engendered a consensus among global scientists that the human population level and trend are unsustainable. Although we are part of nature, we may have some choice in the ongoing process of which our numbers are but one variable. Individual, social, and institutional factors are examined, and policy options are considered. Evidence is given debunking the claim that the rich attempt to coerce poor nations to reduce fertility. Carrying capacity and optimum population concepts are discussed, particularly as to equilibrium potential. Prospects for pro-active success are entertained.

INTRODUCTION

“A suitable total for the number of citizens cannot be fixed without
considering the land…” Plato, Laws, V

During the New Millennium, many unexpected events and conditions will undoubtedly surprise our progeny and us. Perhaps the decline of fossil energy sources will be rendered benign due to scientific discoveries. Perhaps “factor ten” improvements in technological efficiency will aid in the rehabilitation of the environment. Perhaps our species will self-select for survival tolerances in polluted or otherwise altered conditions. These possibilities are little more than speculations.

We can have a bit more confidence that our numbers will not continue the growth pattern of the last century, during which they quadrupled. This paper will briefly explore why it is that a consensus of the world’s experts believe the rate of growth will continue to slow, whether or not a reduction or crash is likely, and if it is plausible that stabilization might occur at some level other than extinction.

Some people claim that humans are somehow exempt from the sorts of systemic constraints, which limit the populations of other life forms. We indeed have managed to extend our range into vastly diverse habitats due to our adaptive fitness. Language, abstract thought, and reflective consciousness are traits, which aided this expansion. However, in a largely closed system, physical expansion cannot be infinite.

We will explore possible scenarios, which might lead to stabilization or equilibrium.

Projections vary somewhat, but the next half-century is conservatively expected to result in a 50% increase to approximately nine billion of us. We will explore the extent to which it is conceivable that human planning could affect the actual outcome.

The first section will provide brief evidence that overpopulation is a problem. The fascination with “virtual realities” and the myth of the “de-materialization” of economies are examples of impediments to the grasping of this issue. The vast majority of humans who are unwired know they cannot live on bits and bytes even if some of us believe otherwise; their needs include food, water, and energy.

The second section will outline some variables affecting human reproductive behavior as positive and negative feedback. These include our genetic make-up (hard wiring), environmental conditions, socio-economic values, institutional pressures, and what is called “free will”.

Next will be the question of what could constitute equilibrium. Carrying capacity connotes a maximum number of a species, which can endure in a habitat. Tolerances in a complex ecosystem are variable to inputs and internal changes, and are most sensitive when near maximum thresholds. Freedom has been described as the key human value, and it is reflected in maximal options for future decisions and actions. (Buchanan, 1997) Equilibrium seems inconsistent with carrying capacity, since the proximity of potential constraints would reduce future options and maximize the destabilizing risks of changing conditions. If attainable, equilibrium at some variable optimum level should maximize freedom and well-being, and minimize destabilizing occurrences.

Finally, I will venture into the realm of speculation to consider the prospects for success in the self-determination of equilibrium. Peace and the minimization of future suffering seem to be related to the ultimate outcome.

WHAT PROBLEM?

“Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a till greater increase in population.” (Peter Farb, 1978)

Albert Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of Physics at The University of Colorado, has demonstrated that with a 1% annual growth rate, human population would in 17,000 years equal all the atoms in the universe.(Bartlett, 1996) As a reference, the last ice age was about 17,000 years ago. We currently are growing at a rate around 50% faster than that. Bartlett was responding to the claim of the possibility of 1% annual growth of the human population for seven billion (then corrected to seven million!) years by Management professor Julian Simon. If space were the only requirement for a healthy, enduring habitat, the issue would be relatively easy to address. In short, sustainable (non-stop) growth of physical systems is an oxymoron.

Following are some opinions from diverse sources. In a letter to me dated October 3, 1996, U.S. Vice-President Al Gore stated: “I consider the dramatic growth in the world’s population to be the greatest challenge currently facing the environment…The effects of this rapid increase are felt around the globe. Starvation, deforestation, and lack of clean water are just some of the problems…”

Stuart L. Udall, former US Secretary of the Interior, wrote in a recent essay:

“…current consumption of the two cornerstone resources of modern life – water and oil – foreshadow shortages that will cripple the economies of many nations if present [population] trends continue.”(Udall, 2000)

There is a solid scientific consensus evidenced by a 1992 joint statement by The British Royal Society and the (US) National Academy of Sciences urging world leaders to address human overpopulation, as well as by the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” written in 1993 and signed by over 1600 senior scientists from 70 countries which includes the following:

“The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits.”

“Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth.”

“No more than …a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.”

” We must stabilize population.”

” We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.”

Many people besides world leaders and scientists understand the seriousness of our predicament. John H. Adams, Executive Director of The Natural Resources Defense Council, an organization not active in population affairs, began an essay entitled “What Matters Most” in The Amicus Journal:

“There is no single thing more significant for the future of the world than the fact of human population growth.”(Adams, 1997)

Author of Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond wrote in The Third Chimpanzee:

“A nuclear holocaust is certain to prove disastrous, but it isn’t happening now. An environmental holocaust is equally certain to prove disastrous, but it differs in that it is already well underway.”(Diamond, 1992)

Diamond may unfortunately underestimate the risk of a quick, violent demise.

The University of Toronto’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program has done extensive research on factors influencing violent conflict. One area of the program is the Project on Environment, Population, and Security. Scarcities, depletion, and degradation of resources such as potable water are part of the feedback loops of human activity-habitat systems which impact violent conflict.(Homer-Dixon, et al. 1993)

“Don’t worry, be happy” is sadly no longer applicable to our predicament. There are some, though, who dismiss these concerns as fiction. They point to past analyses (Ehrlich1968) which contained some incorrect judgments as to the timing of approaching limits. Evidence is strong, though, that the trends are proceeding as he envisioned if we believe the scientific consensus. The nay -sayers include those like the late Julian Simon and Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey who conveniently ignores issues like declining stocks of fish which are to be shared by a quarter of a million net additional people daily.(Bailey, 2000) The UN has been at the forefront in seeking solutions for overpopulation. The poorest nations are struggling to address the issue, but aid promised by wealthy nations has been slow in coming. India recently announced a national population policy and China is still struggling with the issue. Denial that overpopulation exists and is a serious problem led biologist Garrett Hardin to write a new book last year called The Ostrich Factor. Suffice it to say that I view the evidence as overwhelming.

FEEDBACK

“The more we examine the relationships between population, resources, and the environment the stronger the connections appear.” (Dr. Nafis Sadik in an address to The UN Conference on Environment and Development, Geneva, 991)

INDIVIDUAL/SOCIAL/ENVIRONMENTAL

The widely accepted theory called the demographic transition holds that upon reaching a secure and materially comfortable lifestyle, birthrates tend to decline. The case histories of North America and Western Europe are used as evidence for the theory’s validity. In some cases, correlations have occurred, and causal links may seem obvious. However, many physical and social scientists are more rigorous when seeking causal evidence. Virginia Abernethy a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical School, argues convincingly that the perception of the commencement of better economic times (material well-being) leads to higher fertility rates. She gives several good examples:

“In times of privation in France, prior to the revolution, a sense of limits promoted reproductive caution, and small families were the norm…Prosperity induced high fertility rates in Ireland after the introduction of the potato, and in Turkey, when families received land.” (Abernethy, 1994)

Even when a “demographic transition” is claimed to have occurred, there could be several generations between supposed cause and effect, making the number of variables too numerous and complex to yield analytic certainty. Several generations of high fertility, like those in the US during the first half of the twentieth century, could result in a rapid population increase, after which a slowdown in births occurs. Abernethy claims that the rise of the US as an economic power, with concomitant optimism for well-being by it’s citizens, was key to the high birthrates. She sees uncertainty about real wages and job security, combined with the high costs of education and health care as factors in the slowdown in US fertility in the latter part of the century.

Humans do not easily embrace this sort of evidence, but we must continue to examine the possible causes of our actions if we are to pursue effective solutions. Many animals exhibit reduced fertility and/or lower survival rates of young offspring well in advance of serious food shortages. This is an adaptation for survival. Humans exhibit similar patterns when stressed by overcrowding and environmental scarcities. D.H. Stott discussed this at length, and I continue by quoting:

“…the predicted catastrophe of a world population increasing by geometrical progression to the point of starvation is unlikely to occur. It will be forestalled, if not by conscious human design, by physiological mechanisms, which have evolved to obviate such a calamity. This is not to minimize the fact that these mechanisms themselves are highly unpleasant. Nature prescribes happiness when it has survival value. To man nevertheless is given an answer. We need not wait for the physiological killers and maimers to come upon us…It should not, however, be beyond the capacity of man to develop cultural methods of regulating population-numbers which do not involve distress and unhappiness.” (Stott, 962)

Bill Rees, well known for developing the ecological footprint concept, noted ten years ago the relevance of work by Prigogine and Stengers, Crutchfield et al., and Palmer regarding thresholds of unpredictability. The systemic feedback that will affect human numbers with or without our intent may be unexpected in timing and intensity. Worth noting here is the principle of the weak link as expressed by Rees:

“It should be understood that while human society depends on many ecological resources and functions for survival, carrying capacity is ultimately determined by the single vital resource or function in least supply.” (Rees, 1990)

There are well-entrenched historically based values, which provide disincentives to reducing fertility. Only children were thought to be deprived by the lack of siblings. This “folk wisdom” is still widely believed despite the lack of conclusive supporting evidence. Large families are accepted by many societies as a joy or a blessing. When farm labor was important for economic viability, this might have reflected rational criteria. In modern industrialized nations, agriculture depends more on energy, chemicals, and technology than on farm hands, and a very small percentage of families is engaged in farming. In many countries the family farm has been subdivided among offspring for generations, resulting in small, unviable plots. Feedback of this nature can be mythical, but nonetheless is still effective.

In societies with high mortality rates for infants and youth, and lack of institutional old age security, poor families need to produce children as their only realistic means of attempting to secure their future. Here the biological constraint of the prospect of inadequate food is challenged by the human need for future security. This seems a most basic example of the human predicament, called by The Club of Rome, the “global problématique.”

POLICY OPTIONS

What types of actions might prove useful in a humane attempt to influence fertility? The acceptance that we have some sphere of free will seems necessary to continue this exploration; just how much is not easy to say.

“Sociobiology’s premise is that individuals of all species including humans are genetically predisposed to act in ways that maximize their ‘inclusive fitness’…Axiomatically, every living individual had ancestors that succeeded…so most of us carry genes impelling us…” (Abernethy, 1993)

It is not my intention to attempt to classify or divide human behavior into determined movements or free actions – or any percentage combination of the two. Tendencies or predispositions can be accepted as indicators of probabilities or expectations. We plan and make choices about our role in sexual reproduction to greater or lesser degrees. Ansley Cole has delineated three categories for successful intentional implementation of reduced fertility. First is the actualization and realization that both parties indeed have a choice in the matter. Second is that they perceive benefit(s) from the resulting smaller family. Third is the availability and knowledge of various means of implementing their choice.(Coale, 1989)

Dr. John R. Weeks is the Director of the International Population Center at San Diego State University. He develops Coale’s concepts into policies with direct and indirect impacts on reproductive behavior. From a systems perspective, these constitute feedback. Direct policies include full legal rights for women, payments for having fewer children, higher (rather than lower) taxes per child, legalization of contraceptive technologies, abortion and sterilization, and availability of family planning services in local outlets. Examples of indirect policies are improved secular education, increased economic opportunities for women, lower infant and child mortality rates, community birth quotas, and public campaigns promoting knowledge and use of birth control.(Weeks, 1990)

Further discussion of possible planned intervention will be undertaken in the final section of this paper: Prospects.

INSTITUTIONAL OBSTACLES

Government

Most governments, even when well-meaning, have discovered deficit financing and become addicted to revenue growth. The addition of interest results in larger total future payments than the amount of the original loan. This inevitably results in a race to keep up, as new borrowings are added on a regular basis. With the onset of declining fertility and demographically aging populations in many developed nations, immigration increases are sought to keep the economy growing and to expand payments into the pension system. There have been attempts in Germany and France, among others, to stimulate higher fertility by native born women. This may reflect fear of cultural dilution by societies, and is evidenced by recent political victories by advocates of restricted immigration. If there were a national wealth surplus rather than a debt, growth would not only be unnecessary, it might be undesirable. Old age security would be covered, and remaining wealth could be shared by fewer people.

Business

Globalization has been accompanied by the dominance of multi-national corporations. It is the mandate of corporations to deliver maximum profits to shareholders, and managers seek to maximize their own income and security by achieving that goal. It is not rational for corporations (or any business) to seek shrinking markets for goods or services. So the system has a built in growth imperative. At the same time, labor shortages would give bargaining power to workers, and would likely increase costs to business. For decades businesses have been relocating facilities to areas where labor is abundant and therefore cheaper. A lack of necessary skills may be a short term constraint, but a declining population is generally not appealing to businesses.

Now let’s have a look at how a Chinese expert perceives this. Zhang Zhirong is Deputy Director of China Population Welfare Foundation in Beijing. He wrote a report to the Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security from which I quote:

“China is caught in a vicious cycle of swelling population and diminishing resources…Economic growth is the goal of China’s industrial policy. However rapid population growth allays the economic growth that occurs.” (Zhirong, 1994)

It appears that it is possible for business leaders to catch on that there is a point of diminishing return to population linked economic growth. I expect this feedback to spread globally, like a viral meme, as systemic instability increases.

Religion

There are many religious (and ethnic) beliefs which can influence human reproductive behavior. Some examples include Muslim sects, Orthodox Jewish, and Catholic doctrine. The most extreme example that I’m aware of is the Morman belief that twelve offspring by a man places him closest to God. Groups at war have overtly used competitive breeding as an alternate method of conquest, and rape has been used as part of ethnic cleansing. Other than obscure suicide sects, I know of no religions, which advocate a reduction in the number of their adherents. Some might recognize that overpopulation is a problem. This could present a dilemma to them as they seek to spread their version of the truth and the good. The Dalai Lama gave a speech in New Zealand a few years ago where it was reported that he said the world’s population problem would benefit from more priests, nuns, gays, and lesbians. I interpret this as a touch of humor applied to a serious problem by a wise leader.

EQUILIBRIUM

“All optima must lie between the minimum viable population size, MVP, and the biophysical carrying capacity of the planet.” (Gretchen C. Daily, A. Ehrlich and P. Ehrlich)

The above range is wide enough to drive all the vehicles in the world through. How might we narrow it? The authors state in the same paper:

“…social preferences are critical because achieving any target size requires establishing social policies to influence fertility rates. Human population sizes have never, and will never, automatically equilibrate at some level. There is no feedback mechanism that will lead to perfectly maintained, identical crude birth and death rates.” (Daily, et al. 1994)

Although I agree with the need for planning, it seems like a conceptual error to place it somehow outside the feedback system. Again ignoring the free will issue, it is not reasonable in my opinion to somehow excise our planning from the ecosystem of which we are a part. Recall Stott’s point about natural governors of fertility. Our planning could be part of our adaptive fitness.

The paper goes on to state criteria for choosing optimum population size. First is a desired minimum quality of life balanced by the impacts to the ecosystem for sustaining it. Second is an acceptance that material wealth will always be unequally divided among humans, and the resulting need for a cushion (or excess) of continuously available per capita resources. They include a consideration of waste reprocessing without toxification of the system.

Next is the value of cultural diversity. They believe geographic dispersion requires a certain minimum amount of population. I think this is a prehistoric era consideration, and not meaningful now. Rather it seems that an excess of people combined with globalization, results in cultural extinctions. I find this categorically different than the prior criteria, believing that adaptation in evolution will result in ongoing cultural changes in any event.

A “critical mass” distributional criteria similarly perplexes me, although I understand the cultural value of urbanization. These two criteria seem more like value judgments based on the cultural biases of the authors, who live in the developed world.

Next is the need to protect biodiversity. Obviously each human displaces (or alters habitat potentially useful for) other life forms, with the partial exception of human parasites. Biodiversity, they explain, is anthropocentrically valuable as part of our habitat and is necessary for our health. It also provides aesthetic pleasure. They then add the ethical responsibility of humans to minimize species loss. Cultural bias seems involved in the latter two elements, but it is arguable that they reflect universal human values.

The authors then add the key value of human freedom that was mentioned in the introduction:

“In general, we would choose a population size that maximizes very broad environmental and social options for individuals.” (Daily, et al., 1994)

For a different perspective, let’s turn again to Zhang Zhirong on China’s population: “According to The China Academy of Sciences, and based on estimated land resources, the optimum population in China is 950 million now, and 1.16 billion by 2000.” (Zhirong, 1994). Zhirong then states that China’s carrying capacity, also based on “land resources” is no more than 1.6 billion. He believes that serious environmental and social problems exist and will worsen as China’s population first exceeds the optimum level, and then the carrying capacity level. Maybe China expected to add some land resources between 1994 and 2000. What other variables could cause it’s optimum population to go up by 7% in six years? No answer is given in the report.

Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel winner in Physics and Harvard professor, said in a presentation to colleagues: “Would a total world population of about one billion as existed two hundred years ago represent a reasonable compromise between quantity and quality of human life? The answer…clearly involves value judgments.” (Bloembergen, 1996)

J. Kenneth Smail, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Kenyon College in Ohio, has an argument for “…a sustainable optimum of approximately 2 billion by the beginning of the 23rd century.” He presents much evidence that mere stabilization during the 21st century will result in a “future demographic catastrophe.” (Smail, 1995)

I see no clear way, given the current cultural, economic, and geophysical variables of societies on earth, to expect a consensus for approximating an optimum human population. Stabilization, or equilibrium, if it is to be realized anytime soon, would seem to be based on fragmented actions, or unintentional outcomes. What is obvious from my investigations is that most concerned with the issue believe that the desired direction for human population is downward.

PROSPECTS

“Nobody knows if a steady state population could be reached by the year 2050. Perhaps a period of negative population growth could be envisioned…hopefully not be caused by …war, famine, and pestilence.” (Bloembergen)

We have discussed a variety of influences on human reproduction. Included were inherent predispositions and individual responses to environmental and social conditions. We also explored possible policy options, which many believe have the potential to influence our demographic future. Besides the institutional obstacles mentioned, there are some common misconceptions by many well-meaning people. I will mention only one, which, if sufficiently countered, might abet a more humane resolution.

The environment and social justice are issues, which have growing support among those able to think about more than their immediate material needs. Advocates seem certain that their own issue is the most important one, but many fail to question its sufficiency. A typical response to the introduction of the overpopulation factor is that the rich should reduce their consumption and waste production instead of chiding the poor people of the planet. This demonstrates a lack of knowledge that the poor have been clamoring for our aid in population matters, and that they have banded together to help themselves. Provision of such aid is not a substitute for encouraging conservation and cleaner economies at home. There is no either/or involved. Both are desirable.

In 1989, as verified by The UN Population Fund, the following countries signed a statement urging early stabilization of human population. Austria, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bhutan, Botswana, Cape Verde, China, Columbia, Cyprus, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Fiji, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Jordon, Kenya, Rep. of Korea, Liberia, Malta, Mauritius, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Panama, Philippines, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe. Note the absence of most wealthy nations. It is ridiculous to claim that the rich are trying to coerce the poor nations to reduce population. In fact, they are not responding to the affirmed needs of the poor.

The following countries are part of either the South Commission or Partners in Population and Development: Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mexico, Colombia, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, China, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Ivory Ciast, Jamaica, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yugoslavia (former), and Western Samoa. The “Partners” share expertise with each other in reproductive health, appropriate technologies, and population policy. The Challenge to the South: Report of the South Commission, included this unequivocal statement:

” In the long run the problem of overpopulation of the countries of the South can be fully resolved only through their development. But action to contain the rise of population cannot be postponed.” (Nyerere, 1990)

Easier said than done. Nature will provide, as they say, but what percentages of any “cure” will be higher mortality versus lower fertility? What percentages of lower fertility could be due to wilful constraint versus physiological changes? We may have some choice in the answers to these questions, but acts of omission (purposeful inaction) decrease that possibility. Smail says he is “cautiously optimistic” that humans will take global action based on “an individual and collective concern for posterity.”

Bloembergen summarizes six measures proposed by Joel Cohen, which have been widely supported. “Educate and empower women; educate men; promote the distribution of contraceptives; save the children, improve the economics in developing countries; all of the above.” Abernethy strongly supports the empowerment and education of women. The economic element may need refinement to address the “opportunity model” (Abernethy and Smail) in which population expands in synch with perceived future well-being. This is the most difficult element of feedback to address in my opinion, since the poor naturally and expectedly strive for better material conditions. Perhaps sustainable development combined with other comprehensive measures is the right approach. Traditional development with minimal population policy action is a recipe for continued suffering by humans and the rest of the planet, only greater in scope and severity.

Udall’s essay calls for the establishment of “a direct-to-the-people non-profit organization financed by a consortium of billionaires.” It would be primarily locally staffed, and deliver women to women reproductive health services to the poorest nations of the world. The Ted Turner, Bill Gates, George Soros, Rockefeller, Packard, and many other foundations have recognized the importance of this issue. It may well be that those enmeshed in fierce economic competition are blinkered by their focus to succeed, while those who are very rich have the opportunity to step back and look farther into the future. A trillion dollars in assets passed to progeny can’t by itself guarantee them a peaceful planet, clean air and water, delicious healthy food, and the joys of a diverse natural environment.

A primary need is for human action to accelerate systemic feedback to augment womens’ empowerment, health, and education. The technical means already exist to control fertility. A second, and not previously mentioned challenge is the need for system science methodology to grow worldwide and to ultimately replace irrational, power based approaches to social organization. Overpopulation is but one of the global issues we must address; and the principle of the weak link applies to the whole system.

REFERENCES

Abernethy, Virginia D., 1993, Population Politics, The Choices That Shape Our Future, New York, Plenum

Abernethy, Virginia D., 1994, The Democratic Transition Revisited, Report of

The Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security

Adams, John H., 1997, What Matters Most, The Amicus Journal, 19(1)

Bailey, Ronald, 2000, Earth Day Then and Now, Reason, May 2000

Bartlett, Albert A., 1996, The Exponential Function, The Physics Teacher, 34

Bloembergen, Nicolaas, 1996, Focus, 7(1)

Buchanan, Bruce, 1997, Human Freedom and Cybernetic Principles, Proceedings of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, Spring 1997

Coale, Ansley, 1989, The Demographic Transition, Proceedings of the International Population Conference, Liege, Vol 1

Daily, G., Ehrlich, A., and Ehrlich, P., 1994, Optimum Human Population Size, Population and Environment, 15(6)

Diamond, Jared, 1993, The Third Chimpanzee, Harperperennial Library

Ehrlich, Paul, 1976, The Population Bomb, Amereon Ltd.

Farb, Peter, 1978, Humankind, Houghton Mifflin Company

Homer-Dixon, T., Boutwell, J., and Rathjens, G. 1993, Environmental Change and Violent Conflict, Scientific American, 268(2)

Nyerere, Julius, 1990, The Challenge to the South, Oxford University Press

Rees, William E., 1990, Sustainable Development and the Biosphere, Teilhard Studies 23(Spring)

Smail, J.K., 1995, Confronting the 21st Century’s Hidden Crisis, NPG Forum, Aug.

Stott, D.H., 1962, Five Cultural and Natural Checks on Population Growth, Culture and the Evolution of Man, Oxford University Press

Udall, Stewart L., 2000, Population Control: A New Paradigm, The Seattle Times, February 11

Weeks, J.R., 1990, How to Influence Fertility: The Experience So Far, NPG Forum

Zhirong, Zhang, 1994, Identifying Population Security Links and Optimum Population Considerations, Report of the Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security

Steven B. Kurtz, a philosophy graduate of New York University, is a member of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome. He was an Assistant Director of Merrill Lynch International Bank during a twenty-five year career in financial derivatives. After nine years organic gardening in New Hampshire, he now does research and volunteer work in ecological economics and sustainable futures with several organizations.

Reposted from Countercurrents.

by: Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch [3] | News Analysis

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury would have recognized Morris Davis’s problem.

Here’s the First Amendment, in full [4]: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face. If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself [5] from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on. In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

Now, it also seems to be chipping away at the most basic American right of all, the right of free speech, starting with that of its own employees. As is often said, the easiest book to stop is the one that is never written; the easiest voice to staunch is the one that is never raised.

It’s true that, over the years, government in its many forms has tried to claim that you lose your free speech rights when you, for example, work for a public school [6], or join the military [7]. In dealing with school administrators who sought to silence a teacher for complaining publicly that not enough money was being spent on academics versus athletics, or generals who wanted to stop enlisted men and women from blogging, the courts have found that any loss of rights must be limited and specific. As Jim Webb wrote [8] when still Secretary of the Navy, “A citizen does not give up his First Amendment right to free speech when he puts on a military uniform, with small exceptions.”

Free speech is considered so basic that the courts have been wary of imposing any limits at all. The famous warning [9] by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes about not falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater shows just how extreme a situation must be for the Supreme Court to limit speech. As Holmes put it in his definition: “The question in every case is whether the words used… are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” That’s a high bar indeed.

The Government v. Morris Davis

Does a newspaper article from November 2009, a few hundred well-reasoned words that appeared [10] in the conservative Wall Street Journal, concluding with these mild sentences, meet Justice Holmes’s high mark?

“Double standards don’t play well in Peoria. They won’t play well in Peshawar or Palembang either. We need to work to change the negative perceptions that exist about Guantanamo and our commitment to the law. Formally establishing a legal double standard will only reinforce them.”

Morris Davis got fired from his research job at the Library of Congress for writing that article and a similar letter to the editor [11] of the Washington Post. (The irony of being fired for exercising free speech while employed at Thomas Jefferson’s library evidently escaped his bosses.) With the help of the ACLU, Davis demanded his job back. On January 8, 2010, the ACLU filed [12] a lawsuit against the Library of Congress on his behalf. In March 2011 a federal court ruled [13] that the suit could go forward.

The case is being heard this month [14]. Someday, it will likely define the free speech rights of federal employees and so determine the quality of people who will make up our government. We citizens vote for the big names, but it’s the millions of lower-ranked, unelected federal employees who decide by their actions how the laws are carried out (or ignored) and the Constitution upheld (or disregarded).

Morris Davis is not some dour civil servant. Prior to joining the Library of Congress, he spent more than 25 years as an Air Force colonel. He was, in fact, the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo and showed enormous courage in October 2007 when he resigned [15] from that position and left the Air Force. Davis had stated he would not use evidence obtained through torture back in 2005. When a torture advocate was named his boss in 2007, Davis quit rather than face the inevitable order to reverse his position.

In December 2008, Davis went to work as a researcher at the Library of Congress in the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division.  None of his work was related to Guantanamo. He was not a spokesperson for, or a public face of, the library. He was respected at work. Even the people who fired him do not contest that he did his “day job” as a researcher well.

On November 12, 2009, the day after his op-ed and letter appeared, Davis was told by his boss [16] that the pieces had caused the library concern over his “poor judgment and suitability to serve… not consistent with ‘acceptable service’” — as the letter of admonishment he received put the matter.  It referred only to his op-ed and Washington Post letter, and said nothing about his work performance as a researcher. One week later, Davis was fired.

But Shouldn’t He Have Known Better Than to Write Something Political?

The courts have consistently supported the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to use extreme and hateful words, of the burners of books, and of those who desecrate the American flag. All of that is considered “protected speech.” A commitment to real free speech means accepting the toughest cases, the most offensive things people can conceive of, as the price of a free society.

The Library of Congress does not restrict its employees from writing or speaking, so Davis broke no rules. Nor, theoretically at least, do other government agencies like the CIA and the State Department restrict employees from writing or speaking, even on matters of official concern, although they do demand prior review [17] for such things as the possible misuse of classified material.

Clearly, such agency review processes have sometimes been used as a de facto method of prior restraint.  The CIA, for example, has been accused of using indefinite security reviews to effectively prevent a book from being published. The Department of Defense has also wielded exaggerated claims [18] of classified material to block books.

Since at least 1968, there has, however, been no broad prohibition against government employees writing about political matters or matters of public concern.  In 1968, the Supreme Court decided a seminal public employee First Amendment case, Pickering v. Board of Education [19].  It ruled that school officials had violated the First Amendment rights of teacher Marvin Pickering when they fired him for writing a letter to his local paper criticizing the allocation of money between academics and athletics.

A Thought Crime

Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote that Wall Street Journal op-ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen, never mentioning his (unrelated) federal job. The government just did not like what he wrote.  Perhaps his bosses were embarrassed by his words, or felt offended by them. Certainly, in the present atmosphere in Washington, they felt they had an open path to stopping their own employee from saying what he did, or at least for punishing him for doing so.

It’s not, of course, that federal employees don’t write and speak publicly. As long as they don’t step on toes, they do, in startling numbers, on matters of official concern, on hobbies, on subjects of all sorts, through what must be an untold number of blogs, Facebook pages, Tweets, op-eds, and letters to the editor. The government picked Davis out for selective, vindictive prosecution.

More significantly, Davis was fired prospectively — not for poor attendance, or too much time idling at the water cooler, but because his boss believed Davis’s writing showed that the quality of his judgment might make him an unsuitable employee at some future moment. The simple act of speaking out on a subject at odds with an official government position was the real grounds for his firing. That, and that alone, was enough for termination.

As any devoted fan of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Philip K. Dick would know, Davis committed a thought crime.

As some readers may also know, I evidently did the same thing. Because of my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People [20], about my experiences as a State Department official in Iraq, and the articles, op-eds, and blog posts [21] I have written, I first had my security clearance suspended [22] by the Department of State and then was suspended [23] from my job there. That job had nothing to do with Iraq or any of the subjects I have written about. My performance reviews were good, and no one at State criticized me for my day-job work. Because we have been working under different human resources systems, Davis, as a civil servant on new-hire probation, could be fired directly. As a tenured Foreign Service Officer, I can’t, and so State has placed me on indefinite administrative leave status; that is, I’m without a job, pending action to terminate me formally through a more laborious process.

However, in removing me from my position, the document the State Department delivered to me darkly echoed what Davis’ boss at the Library of Congress said to him:

“The manner in which you have expressed yourself in some of your published material is inconsistent with the standards of behavior expected of the Foreign Service.  Some of your actions also raise questions about your overall judgment. Both good judgment and the ability to represent the Foreign Service in a way that will make the Foreign Service attractive to candidates are key requirements.”

There follows a pattern of punishing federal employees for speaking out or whistle-blowing: look at Davis, or me, or Franz Gayl [24], or Thomas Drake [25]. In this way, a precedent is being set for an even deeper cloud of secrecy to surround the workings of government. From Washington, in other words, no news, other than good or officially approved news, is to emerge.

The government’s statements at Davis’s trial, now underway in Washington D.C., do indeed indicate that he was fired for the act of speaking out itself, as much as the content of what he said. The Justice Department lawyer representing the government said [26] that Davis’s writings cast doubt on his discretion, judgment and ability to serve as a high-level official. (She also added that Davis’s language in the op-ed was “intemperate.” One judge on the three-member bench seemed to support the point, saying, “It’s one thing to speak at a law school or association, but it’s quite a different thing to be in The Washington Post.” The case will likely end up at the Supreme Court.

Free Speech is for Iranians, not Government Employees

If Morris Davis loses his case, then a federal employee’s judgment and suitability may be termed insufficient for employment if he or she writes publicly in a way that offends or embarrasses the government. In other words, the very definition of good judgment, when it comes to freedom of speech, will then rest with the individual employer — that is, the U.S. government.

Simply put, even if you as a federal employee follow your agency’s rules on publication, you can still be fired for what you write if your bosses don’t like it. If your speech offends them, then that’s bad judgment on your part and the First Amendment goes down the drain. Free speech is increasingly coming at a price in Washington: for federal employees, conscience could cost them their jobs.

In this sense, Morris Davis represents a chilling precedent. He raised his voice. If we’re not careful, the next Morris Davis may not. Federal employees are, at best, a skittish bunch, not known for their innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. Actions like those in the Davis case will only further deter any thoughts of speaking out, and will likely deter some good people from seeking federal employment.

More broadly, the Davis case threatens to give the government free rein in selecting speech by its employees it does not like and punishing it. It’s okay to blog about your fascination with knitting or to support official positions. If you happen to be Iranian or Chinese or Syrian, and not terribly fond of your government, and express yourself on the subject, the U.S. government will support your right to do it 110% of the way. However, as a federal employee, blog about your negative opinions on U.S. policies and you’ve got a problem. In fact, we have a problem as a country if freedom of speech only holds as long as it does not offend the U.S. government.

Morris Davis’s problem is neither unique nor isolated.  Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director of Reporters without Borders [27], told me earlier this month, “Secrecy is taking over from free speech in the United States. While we naively thought the Obama administration would be more transparent than the previous one, it is actually the first to sue five people for being sources and speaking publicly.”  Scary, especially since this is no longer an issue of one rogue administration.

Government is different than private business. If you don’t like McDonald’s because of its policies, go to Burger King, or a soup kitchen, or eat at home. You don’t get the choice of federal governments, and so the critical need for its employees to be able to speak informs the republic. We are the only ones who can tell you what is happening inside your government. It really is that important. Ask Morris Davis.

Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well [21]. His book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People [20] (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), has recently been published. To read about the grilling he’s gotten from the State Department for his truth-telling, click here [28].

[Note on further readings: You can check out the ACLU’s full-filing text on behalf of Davis by clicking here [29].]

[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this post.]

Reposted from Truth-out.

Perhaps there were truly free markets before the industrial revolution, where townspeople and farmers gathered in a square to exchange livestock, produce and handmade tools. In our modern world, such a market does not exist. Governments set up the rules of the game, and those rules have an enormous impact on our economic outcomes.

In 2007, the year of the crash, the top 1 percent of American households took in almost two-and-a-half times the share of our nation’s pre-tax income that they had grabbed in the 40 years folliwing World War Two. This was no accident – the rules of the market underwent profound changes that led to the upward redistribution of trillions in income over the past 30 years. The rules are set by Congress – under a mountain of lobbying dollars – but they are adjudicated by the courts.

The Supreme Court, with a right-wing majority under Chief Justice John Roberts, has become a body that leans too far toward the “1 percent” to be considered a neutral arbiter. So whether they know all the ins and outs of the court’s profound rightward shift or not, those protesting across the country as part of the Occupy movement are motivated by its corruption as well.

While conservatives constantly rail against judges “legislating from the bench,” it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That’s what a 2005 study by Yale University legal scholar Paul Gewirtz and Chad Golder found. According to the scholars, those justices most frequently labeled “conservative” were among the most likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress, while those most frequently labeled “liberal” were the least likely to do so.

A 2007 study by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein looked at the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies, and found a similar trend. The Supreme Court’s “conservative” justices were again the most likely to engage in this form of “activism,” while the “liberal” justices were most likely to exercise judicial restraint.

The most notorious case of activism by the Roberts court was its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, which overturned key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, rules that kept corporations — and their lobbyists and front groups (as well as labor unions) — from spending unlimited amounts of cash on campaign advertising within 60 days of a general election for federal office (or 30 days before a primary).

At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

To arrive at their ruling, the court’s conservative majority stretched the Orwellian legal concept known as “corporate personhood” to the limit, and gave faceless multinationals expansive rights to influence our elections under the auspices of the First Amendment.

“They wanted to hear the possibility that that’s the way the constitution would read to them,” said Grayson. “So they picked an issue out of the air that nobody had conceived of [as a First Amendment case] because 100 years of settled law meant that corporations cannot buy elections in America, and they not only allowed corporations to buy those elections, but they made it a constitutional right.”

Early on, the plaintiffs themselves had decided not to base their case on the First Amendment. It was the conservative justices themselves who ordered the case re-argued fully a month after a ruling had been expected, asking the lawyers to present the free speech argument they’d earlier abandoned.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens noted that it was a highly unusual move, and that the court had further ruled on a Constitutional issue that it didn’t need to consider in order to decide the case before it — the diametric opposite of the principle of “judicial restraint.” He charged that the conservative majority had “changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

That’s nothing new. The Citizens United decision simply advanced a bizarre legal doctrine, developed during the last 150 years, that effectively codifies the power of corporate interests.

Corporate personhood’s origin in English law was reasonable enough; it was only by considering companies “persons” that they could be taken to court and sued. You can’t sue an inanimate object.

During the 19th century, however, the robber barons, aided by a few corrupt jurists deep in their pockets, took the concept to a whole new level in the United States. According to legal textbooks, the idea that corporations enjoy the same constitutional rights as you or I was codified in the 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. But historian Thom Hartmann dug into the original case documents and found that this crucially important legal doctrine actually originated with what may be the most significant act of corruption in history.

It occurred during a seemingly routine tax case: Santa Clara sued the Southern Pacific Railroad to pay property taxes on the land it held in the county, and the railroad claimed that because states had different rates, allowing them to tax its holdings would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th  Amendment. The railroads had made the claim in previous cases, but the courts had never bought the argument.

In a 2005 interview, Hartmann described his surprise when he went to a Vermont courthouse to read an original copy of the verdict and found that the judges had made no mention of corporate personhood. “In fact,” he told the interviewer, “the decision says, at its end, that because they could find a California state law that covered the case ‘it is not necessary to consider any other questions’ such as the constitutionality of the railroad’s claim to personhood.”

Hartmann then explained how it was that corporations actually became “people”:

In the headnote to the case—a commentary written by the clerk, which is not legally binding, it’s just a commentary to help out law students and whatnot, summarizing the case—the Court’s clerk wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The discovery “that we’d been operating for over 100 years on an incorrect headnote” led Hartmann to look into the past of the clerk who’d written it, J. C. Bancroft Davis. He discovered that Davis had been a corrupt official who had himself previously served as the president of a railroad. Digging deeper, Hartmann then discovered that Davis had been working “in collusion with another corrupt Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field.” The railroad companies, according to Hartmann, had promised Field that they’d sponsor his run for the White House if he assisted them in their effort to gain constitutional rights.

Hartmann noted that even after the ruling, the idea of corporate personhood remained relatively obscure until corporate lawyers dusted off the doctrine during the Reagan era and used it to help reshape the U.S. political economy.

Nike asserted before the Supreme Court . . . as Sinclair Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from discrimination—the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the slaves after the Civil War—and that communities that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products. With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively helpless and fragile human beings.

Such is the power of a corrupt judiciary.

Returning to the present, while Citizens United is arguably the Roberts court’s most widely criticized ruling, it was not the only time the majority has bent over backward to protect the interests of corporate America and the 1 percent. Legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick, writing on Slate, condemned the court’s “systematic dismantling of existing legal protections for women, workers, the environment, minorities and the disenfranchised.” Those who care about spiraling inequality, she wrote, “need look no further than last term at the high court to see what happens when—just for instance—one’s right to sue AT&T, one’s ability to being a class action against Wal-Mart, and one’s ability to hold an investment management fund responsible for its lies, are all eroded by a sweep of the court’s pen.”

The takeaway is that those camping out in town squares across the country must direct their energy not only at Wall Street, but also at its enablers, in Congress, and ultimately, at the high court.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Reposted from AlterNet.

“How could this happen in America?”

“Is this still my country?”

In the past few days, those and similarly poignant Twitter posts have appealed to fundamental American values in objecting to the notorious U.C. Davis event, where police pepper-sprayed seated protesters, and to cities generally cracking down on the Occupy movement. The crackdowns have brought a military level of combativeness to what many Americans — even those not in sympathy with the protesters — would normally see as a police, not a military matter.

Police, not military. The distinction may seem academic, even absurd, when police are bringing rifles, helmets, armor, and helicopters to evict unarmed protesters. But it’s an old and critical distinction in American law and ideology and in republican thought as a whole. The 17th-century English liberty writers, on whose ideas much of America’s founding ethos was based, believed that turning the armed might of the state, (necessary in waging war against foreign enemies), to domestic policing of local communities tends to concentrate power in top-down executive action and vitiate treasured things like judiciary process, individual liberty, representative government, and free speech.

Constabulary and judiciary matters, high Whigs came to think, should never be handled by what they condemned as “standing armies.” It’s true, on the other hand, that keeping public order, not just aiding in prosecutions, is a duty of local police. When concerted crowd violence occurs against people and property, policing may be expected to be pretty violent too, and distinctions between combat and policing sometimes naturally blur.

But where protest is peaceful — maybe loud, maybe deliberately annoying, combative in its rhetoric, even possibly illegal, yet not actually violent or dangerous — treating it the way a state normally treats an outside military threat will give many Americans, across a broad political spectrum, a gut problem.

We’ve seen military hardware and tactics used in the Occupy crackdowns. We’ve seen them in post-9/11 federal funding in the states and municipalities for homeland security. We’ve seen them in the aptly named “war on drugs.” And anyone who has watched shows like “Cops” has seen — and may by now take for granted — techniques and technologies of military-style police raids on homes, raids that in more upscale neighborhoods might amount to nothing more than knocking on a door and serving a warrant. A Twitter post from Joy Reid, of the blog the Reid Report, put it this way last week: “Disconnect: liberals see a suddenly ‘militarized,’ possibly federalized police force. Black people see ‘the usual.’”

The police behavior at U.C. Davis — manifestly not “rogue-cop,” a trained, planned exercise — reveals the cool military thinking behind the operation. Pepper-spraying looked surgical, preemptive, even robotic. The strategic directive must have been to conserve police effort and maintain police maneuverability at virtually any cost. Such efficiencies and capabilities would be important in a riot; they’re not important when hoping to evict unarmed, seated protesters. It’s not as if officers have been resorting to battle gear under otherwise unmanageable pressure or initiating violence only as a last resort. They’ve been arriving in battle gear. They’ve been construing noncompliance as potential attack. They’ve moved preemptively to disable attack where none existed, not just trying to evict but seemingly hoping to inspire fear, to punish and defeat.

The mood these operations convey is that failure to achieve police objectives must result in something awful for the body politic. In reality, leaving citizens sitting around a park or campus a few more days, even possibly illegally, might be frustrating for police and others; it’s hardly the end of the world. Sometimes taking a few deep breaths is the only thing to do. But military training, tactics, and weaponry seem to inspire the idea in civic strategists that failure to achieve an objective is tantamount to fatal defeat by a hostile enemy. Intolerable. Not an option.

That mentality tends to place American governments at enmity with their dissident citizens — and vice versa. The fact that much militarizing of police, over the past twenty years, has federal sources raises endlessly complicated questions that reflect strangely on the histories of American federalism and government suppression. A horrific theme of the Civil Rights Movement was police violence, and many Americans have branded on their brains the watercannons, clubs, dogs, fists, and boots used against nonviolent protesters in the 1950s; police involved were generally state and local. Then in 1957 federal troops — the 101st Airborne Paratroopers — entered Little Rock, Arkansas, with fixed bayonets, to enforce federal law by ensuring the entry of African American students to state school there; states-rights advocates talked about federal overreaching and police state, the end of liberty. Then again, in the 1960s and ’70s the federal government, via its law-enforcement arm the FBI, carried out a covert war — involving assassination, it’s fairly uncontroversial to say — on the militant activist group the Black Panthers, who it’s fairly uncontroversial to say were not always peaceful protesters.

Responding now to police efforts against demonstrators, liberals and leftists have begun raising anew the issue of inappropriate police militarization and violence. Yet it’s the libertarian right that has done much of the reporting and research on the issue in recent decades (Democracy Now! is among left-liberal institutions that have also covered the issue for many years). The current state of heightened awareness means there’s a possibly interesting opportunity for people of varying backgrounds and politics to begin a new conversation. That conversation would involve some very strange bedfellows — and might spark new enmities. The Salon columnist Joan Walsh’s suggestion last weekend on Twitter that if police violence has federal sources, then President Obama bears some responsibility set off a torrent of invective violent even by Twitter standards.

James Madison may offer some long-range perspective. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, arguing for forming a nation instead of retaining the confederation of states, he said that force applied to citizens collectively rather than individually ceases to be law enforcement and becomes war; groups so treated will seize the opportunity to dissolve all compacts by which they might otherwise have been bound. Madison’s argued against militarism in favor not of anarchy but of a higher kind of law and order.

And in 1794, Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, advising President Washington (to no avail) to eschew military adventure against the so-called Whiskey Rebels, and to use prosecutions instead, argued passionately that the real strength of government always lies not in coercion but in the affection of the people. Randolph was facing an actual insurrection, with threat of secession, not a peaceful protest; there were federal crimes involved. Still he advised against a military operation. The loathing of military suppression as a substitute for due process of law, going back to our first administration, runs deep in the American psyche.

But it’s worth remembering that equally strong feelings have always run the other way. Long before events known as the Whiskey Rebellion had risen to any kind of crisis, Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, was urging Washington to bring military force against citizens somewhere in the country; otherwise, Hamilton believed, authority would always be in question. When Washington did so, he ignored habeas corpus and nearly every individual right set out in the new Bill of Rights, federalizing militias to bring overwhelming force to shock and awe innocent citizens of an entire region of the country. In his book Crisis and Command, John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” has defended the George W. Bush administration’s tactics in dealing with suspected terrorists by citing precedent — not wrongly — in Washington’s behavior in the 1790s.

“Is this still my country?” That’s been a question from day one, asked by Americans of widely diverging views in response to government crackdowns on protest. Objecting to military violence against protesting citizens may be inherently American. The urge to crack down can look inherently American too.

William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories ‘Declaration’ and ‘The Whiskey Rebellion’ and a collection of essays, ‘Inventing American History.’

Reposted from AlterNet.

This post first appeared at Earth Policy Institute.

People do not normally leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount, we can expect to see a growing number of environmental refugees. Rising seas and increasingly devastating storms grab headlines, but expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation are also forcing people from their homes.

Advancing deserts are now on the move almost everywhere. The Sahara desert, for example, is expanding in every direction. As it advances northward, it is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast. The Sahelian region of Africa—the vast swath of savannah that separates the southern Sahara desert from the tropical rainforests of central Africa—is shrinking as the desert moves southward. As the desert invades Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, from the north, farmers and herders are forced southward, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water number in the thousands. In Brazil, some 250,000 square miles of land are affected by desertification, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, many of the migrants who leave rural communities in arid and semiarid regions of the country each year are doing so because of desertification. Some of these environmental refugees end up in Mexican cities, others cross the northern border into the United States. U.S. analysts estimate that Mexico is forced to abandon 400 square miles of farmland to desertification each year.

In China, desert expansion has accelerated in each successive decade since 1950. Desert scholar Wang Tao reports that over the last half-century or so some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been abandoned either entirely or partly because of desert expansion.

China is heading for a Dust Bowl like the one that forced more than 2 million “Okies” to leave their land in the United States in the 1930s. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger and so is the population: China’s migration may measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolianoted, “unfortunately, China’s twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to—at least not in China.”

With the vast majority of the 2.3 billion people projected to be added to the world by 2050 being born in countries where water tables are falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty. Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in northern Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Thus far the evacuations resulting from water shortages have been confined to villages, but eventually whole cities might have to be relocated, such as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Sana’a, a fast-growing city of more than 2 million people, is literally running out of water. Quetta, originally designed for 50,000 people, now has a population exceeding 1 million, all of whom depend on 2,000 wells pumping water from what is believed to be a fossil aquifer. In the words of one study assessing its water prospect, Quetta will soon be “a dead city.”

Two other semiarid Middle Eastern countries that are suffering from water shortages are Syria and Iraq. Both are beginning to reap the consequences of overpumping their aquifers, namely irrigation wells going dry. In Syria, these trends have forced the abandonment of 160 villages. And a U.N. report estimates that more than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have been uprooted because of water shortages.

A final category of environmental refugee has appeared only in the last 50 years or so: people who are trying to escape toxic waste or dangerous radiation levels. During the late 1970s, Love Canal—a small town in upstate New York, part of which was built on top of a toxic waste disposal site—made national and international headlines. Beginning in August 1978, families were relocated at government expense and reimbursed for their homes at market prices. By October 1980, a total of 950 families had been permanently relocated. A few years later, the federal government arranged for the permanent evacuation and relocation of all 2,000 residents of Times Beach, Missouri, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered dioxin levels well above the public health standards.

While the United States has relocated two communities because of health-damaging pollutants, the identification of more than 450 “cancer villages” in China suggests the need to evacuate hundreds of communities. China’s Ministry of Health statistics show that cancer is now the country’s leading cause of death, and with little pollution control, whole communities near chemical factories are suffering from unprecedented rates of cancer. Young people are leaving for the city in droves, for jobs and possibly for better health. Yet many others are too sick or too poor to leave.

Another infamous source of environmental refugees is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Kiev, which exploded in April 1986. This started a powerful fire that lasted for 10 days. Massive amounts of radioactive material were spewed into the atmosphere, showering communities in the region with heavy doses of radiation. As a result, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat and several other communities in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were evacuated, requiring the resettlement of 350,400 people. In 1992, six years after the accident, Belarus was devoting 20 percent of its national budget to resettlement and the many other costs associated with the accident.

When a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, the ensuing nuclear crisis at the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Whether they will be able to return or will become permanently displaced is a question that remains unanswered.

Separating out the geneses of today’s refugees is not always easy. Often the environmental and economic stresses that drive migration are closely intertwined. But whatever the reason for leaving home, people are taking increasingly desperate measures. Some of their stories are heartrending beyond belief.

As a general matter, environmental refugees are migrating from poor countries to rich ones, from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to North America and Europe. Some of the largest flows will be across national borders and they are likely to be illegal. The potentially massive movement of people across national boundaries is already affecting some countries. The United States is erecting a fence along the border with Mexico. The Mediterranean Sea is now routinely patrolled by naval vessels trying to intercept the small boats of African migrants bound for Europe. India, with a steady stream of migrants from Bangladesh and the prospect of millions more to come, is building a 10-foot-high fence along their shared border.

Maybe it is time for governments to consider whether it might not be cheaper and far less painful in human terms to treat the causes of migration rather than merely respond to it. This means working with developing countries to restore their economy’s natural support systems—the soils, the water tables, the grasslands, the forests—and it means accelerating the shift to smaller families to help people break out of poverty. Treating symptoms instead of causes is not good medicine. Nor is it good public policy.

Adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. Full book available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wot.

Lester R. Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to building a sustainable future. He has authored or co-authored over 50 books, the most recent of which is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, and has received 24 honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the 1987 United Nations Environment Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C.

This article was reposted from: http://www.alternet.org/story/152253/

What does desire truly look like? Science hasn’t come up with an answer, because most of us won’t let curious researchers watch us tumbling between the sheets, and surveys aren’t necessarily reliable. Are you willing to jot down answers to questions like “Have you ever felt attracted to your pet schnauzer?”—even if the unshaven young grad student quizzing you insists, “Trust me—your answers are completely anonymous”?

Only one scientist managed to survey a large number of people on a broad range of sexual interests: Alfred Kinsey. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kinsey and his team interviewed thousands of subjects, asking questions about a tremendous variety of turn-ons, including bondage, bestiality, and silk stockings. But the Kinsey reports are now more than a half century old, and the findings were limited: The subjects were primarily educated, middle-class Caucasians; they were not selected randomly or systematically; and the data consisted of only recollections the subjects chose to share.

Today, a wide variety of scientists—neuroscientists, psych­ologists, anthropologists, biologists, pharmacologists—study desire, and one of their most basic questions remains: Why do we like the things we like? To answer that, we must first determine what people like, and stealing a look at men and women’s true interests has been far from easy.

Until the arrival of the Internet.

In 1991, the year the World Wide Web went online, there were fewer than 90 different adult magazines published in America. Just six years later, there were about 900 pornography sites on the web. Today, there are 2.5 million adult websites. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary development in the history of human sexuality. With a visit to an adult video site like PornHub, you can see more naked bodies in a single minute than the most promiscuous Victorian would have seen in an entire lifetime.

By examining raw search data, we can finally view an unfiltered snapshot of human desire. Take a look at the following list. Each phrase is an actual search entered into Dogpile (a popular “meta-engine” combining results from sources like Google and Bing) in May 2010: shemales in prom dresses, Twilight slash Edward and Jacob, black meat on white street, wives caught cheating on cam, best romance novels with alpha heroes, kendra wilkinson sex tape, spanking stories, free gay video tube, Jake Gyllenhaal without shirt, girls gone wild orgies. What immediately jumps out is the remarkable diversity of people’s sexual interests.

In 2010 we conducted the world’s largest experiment: We sifted through a billion different web searches, including a half million personal histories. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories and thousands of romance e-novels. We looked at the 40,000 most trafficked adult websites. We examined more than 5 million sexual solicitations posted on online classifieds. We listened to thousands of people discussing their desires on message boards.

The goal? To understand the specific cues that trigger human desire.

Wolfgang likes to look at images of female derrieres. He prefers certain poses: bent over, legs splayed, leaning on her knuckles. He likes these images so much that he is willing to pay for them—sometimes several times a day. This might seem excessive, though not exactly remarkable, except for one fact: Wolfgang is a monkey.

Rhesus macaques studied at Duke University are able to trade fruit juice for peeks at photos of female perinea. Researchers have consistently found that males are willing to trade juice to view these images and will trade more juice to look at monkey erotica than any other image.

Men aren’t the only primates willing to spend money just to look at females, but they’re the only ones to develop it into an industry. The most popular paysites featuring adult videos typically attract an audience that is around 75 percent men, and when it comes to actually paying for porn, the gender gap widens into an abyss. On the web, women prefer stories and men prefer images. So what exactly are all these men so driven to look at?

The most influential male cue is age, which dominates sexual searches, adult website content, and pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms describing age—such as teen, young, and mature—are the most frequent type of adjective in sexual searches, appearing in one out of every six.

While the data show that youth dominates male desire, and there is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, there is significant interest in older women as well. More than a quarter of all men report that their first sexual fantasy was triggered by a sexy older person. And what is the single most popular word users enter into the PornHub search engine? Mom. MILFs (Mothers I’d Like to Fuck) are one of the most profitable genres of male-targeted pornography.

Men’s interest in women’s bodies is well known, but the next visual cue may come as a surprise. Men are more interested in penises than women are. An eye-tracking study found that, when viewing nonerotic images, men consistently direct their gaze to the male crotch, through women rarely do. In porn, the penis is always under the spotlight. On the adult website Fantasti.cc, the predominantly male users rate more than
1 million images and videos. Out of the 100 top-rated images, 21 feature close-up shots of a penis. And on all of the major adult video sites, “Big Dick” is a popular porn category.

But men aren’t satisfied by checking out other men’s penises. They also like to flaunt their own. Chat Roulette is a website that allows users to randomly connect to other people around the world. Once you enter Chat Roulette, you see whatever other people have chosen to place in front of their webcams—a party, a cute kitten, an old man with a beard. One blogger recorded what he saw on 1,276 consecutive sessions: 298 webcams (about one in four) were aimed at a penis. Perhaps men are tapping into an ancient display mechanism we share with other primates.

While straight men have a deep-rooted fascination with penises, gay men are positively obsessed with them. Feet, butts, and chests are also highly popular in both gay and straight porn, as are domination, submission, group sex, amateurs, and numerous other interests. With so many parallels, Internet porn suggests that gay men share the same visual cues as straight men.

Forbidden acts have a very special power to arouse. Unlike anatomical cues, transgression is a psychological stimulus. Both sexes can get wildly turned on by situations that are immoral or dangerous, because of their immorality or dangerousness.

Consider the enormous popularity of cuckold porn—in which a man’s wife has sex with another man. Cuckold porn is the second most popular heterosexual interest on English-language search engines. Only youth is more popular. On PornHub, men who search for “cheating wife” view the greatest number of videos.

In cuckold porn, the boyfriend or husband almost always watches from the sidelines, usually with a look of frustration and dismay. Frequently, the wife calls out to her husband as she’s being serviced, touting the superior skills or better equipment of the bull—a common term for the cuckolder. Why would a straight man get turned on by watching a dominant, masculine man have sex with his wife? What makes a man’s sexual desire overcome his sexual jealousy? The science of biology offers one intriguing answer to these questions. Sperm competition.

Sperm competition refers to a variety of physiological and behavioral adaptations that enable a male’s sperm to compete with other males’ sperm to impregnate a female’s egg. If a man believes that his sexual partner may have been with a rival, he is driven to have sex with her as quickly and as vigorously as possible. In many species, the more dominant the potential rival, the stronger the sperm competition cue and the more intense the arousal.

Female pleasure is also one of the most potent psychological cues for male arousal. On Fantasti.cc, we analyzed 10,000 comments on 100 top-rated videos. The third most common type of comment is acknowledgment of the woman’s pleasure. For example, “She loves it!” and “Look at how excited she is!” Why are men so interested in a woman’s sexual pleasure? Perhaps for the same reason that the male brain is designed for sexual jealousy: to ensure a woman’s fidelity. The more pleasure a man provides a woman, the more likely she’ll want to have sex with him again.

Cravability is the food industry’s term for dishes that dupe the mind in order to make diners want more and more. The manufactured cravability of Chili’s Texas Cheese Fries brings together combinations of tastes that never existed before. When they hit our tongue, our brain swoons with a pleasure more intense and thrilling than when we bite into a mere fried potato.

Certain kinds of sexual stimuli combine cues in a similar way—a kind of trickery we call erotical illusions. With modern technology and human creativity, ancient sexual cues are spliced together in ways that can hyperstimulate our sexual perception, giving rise to curious new erotic cravings.

When men search for porn on the Internet, they seek out the perfect combination of cues. They hope to find a body that maximizes their desire by activating as many cues as possible. Many thumbnail sites make it easy, displaying rows of photographs featuring a wide variety of female bodies. But once in a while, a different kind of body pops out.

“I call it the ‘trannie peek,’” explains one industry veteran. “Adult webmasters figured out that straight guys will click on shemales out of curiosity and take a look. It grabs about 5 percent of the clicks on straight thumbnail galleries.”

The terms trannie, shemale, and T-girl are frequently used as slang within the adult industry for a transsexual woman who has been treated with hormones so that she possesses breasts and a female figure but still has a penis. The main audience for T-girl porn, which has exploded in popularity over the past decade, is heterosexual men.

What drives straight men’s interest in T-girls? The T-girl is an erotical illusion that juxtaposes two kinds of male visual cues. First is a set of cues for femininity: breasts, butts, curvy figures, and feminine facial features and mannerisms. But there is another vivid cue: the penis. As we’ve learned, the penis has a special power to activate the male sexual brain. When you superimpose these two cues, the result is powerful.

In Japanese anime, transsexual characters are known as futanari. Futanari porn reveals exactly what appeals to straight men about T-girls. Typical futanari features schoolgirls with giant protrusions beneath their plaid skirts, teenage girls with pink hair and a bulge in their jeans, ballerinas in tutus sporting erections as long as their slender legs.

If Japanese anime offers the greatest creative freedom for erotical illusions that titillate the male brain, then the paranormal romance is its match for the female brain.

Women respond to a truly astonishing range of cues across many domains. The physical appearance of a man, his social status, personality, commitment level, confidence, authenticity of emotions, family, attitude toward children, kindness, height, and smell are all important. Unlike men, women need to experience enough simultaneous emotional and psychological cues to cross an ever-varying threshold.

Over the past decade, sexy vampires and lusty werewolves have replaced mortals as the most popular romance heroes for women. Stephenie Meyer leads the pack of paranormal authors with her Twilight series of novels.

The rapid rise of the paranormal romance is largely due to an extraordinary variety of erotical illusions. The paranormal takes the psychological cues inherent to the genre and twists them into variations that satisfy women in deliciously new ways.

Supernatural males are alphas among alphas, turbocharging cues of masculinity. They know how to fight and are willing to annihilate the competition. They are fully capable of protecting the ones they love from a range of mundane and otherworldly dangers. But the erotical illusions are complete only when these invincible heroes are brought to their knees by the irresistibility of an ordinary woman.

Erotical illusions—including T-girl porn and paranormal romance—reveal a hidden fact about all erotic experiences: What ultimately binds sexual cues together into a single experience is our imagination.

Many believe that by reducing our desires into a set of narrow biological cues, we eliminate the magic of sex. Instead, by identifying those cues, we can see the magic more clearly. A penis and a female body combine within the sorcery of the male sexual imagination to produce an entirely new creation. Dominant men and irresistible women are magnified by the erotic artistry of the female sexual imagination to produce thrilling tales of vampires and demons.

By investigating the software of our sexual brain, we can finally appreciate the true nature of human desire. There is no such thing as an absolute “male sexuality” or “female sexuality,” but instead a number of gender-specific components, subject to the vagaries of biology and experience. Cues can flip, change, or transform, resulting in endless variations of sexual identity that defy easy labeling. But it is our sexual cues—our finite, identifiable, biological cues—that grant us all the pleasures of sex.

Our cues release us, even as they bind us.

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam hold PhDs from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. Excerpted from A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam (Dutton/Penguin Group, 2011). www.us.penguingroup.com

This article was reposted from UTNE READER.

August hasn’t been a happy month the for the Monsanto public-relations team. No, I’m not referring to my posts on how Gaza and Mexico don’t need the company’s high-tech seeds—the ones it will supposedly be “feeding the world” with in the not-so-distant future.

Monsanto’s real PR headache involves one of its flagship products very much in the here and now: the herbicide Roundup (chemical name: glyphosate), upon which Monsanto has built a highly profitable empire of “Roundup Ready” genetically modified seeds.

The problem goes beyond the “superweed” phenomenon that I’ve written about recently: the fact that farmers are using so much Roundup, on so much acreage, that weeds are developing resistance to it, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic “pesticide cocktails.”

What Roundup is doing aboveground may be a stroll through the meadow compared to its effect below. According to USDA scientist Robert Kremer, who spoke at a conference last week, Roundup may also be damaging soil—a sobering thought, given that it’s applied to hundreds of millions of acres of prime farmland in the United States and South America. Here’s a Reuters account of Kremer’s presentation:

The heavy use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide appears to be causing harmful changes in soil and potentially hindering yields of the genetically modified crops that farmers are cultivating, a US government scientist said on Friday. Repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, impacts the root structure of plants, and 15 years of research indicates that the chemical could be causing fungal root disease, said Bob Kremer, a microbiologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

Now, Kremer has been raising these concerns for a couple of years now—and as Tom Laskaway showed in this 2010 Grist article, the USDA has been downplaying them for just as long. Laskaway asked Kremer’s boss at the Agricultural Research Service, Michael Shannon, to comment on Kremer’s research. According to Laskaway, Shannon “admitted that Kremer’s results are valid, but said that the danger they represent pales in comparison to the superweed threat.”

So let’s get this straight: The head of the USDA’s crop-research service agrees that Roundup damages soil and thinks the superweed problem is even more troublesome. In the face of these two menaces, you might expect the USDA to intervene to curtail Roundup use. But Shannon meant his statement as a rationale for ignoring Kremer’s work. Meanwhile, the USDA keeps approving new Roundup Ready crops—ensuring that the herbicide’s domain over US farmland will expand dramatically.

Kremer commented on his employer’s reception of his work in a Reuters article last year:

“This could be something quite big. We might be setting up a huge problem,” said Kremer, who expressed alarm that regulators were not paying enough attention to the potential risks from biotechnology on the farm, including his own research…”Science is not being considered in policy setting and deregulation,” said Kremer. “This research is important. We need to be vigilant.”

Meanwhile, at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in early August, another mainstream ag expert raised serious concerns about the poison, according to an account in Boulder Weekly. Iowa-based consultant Michael McNeill, who has a Ph.D. in quantitative genetics and plant pathology from Iowa State University, advises large-scale corn and soy farmers on weed control and soil fertility. He’s observing trends in the field that are consistent with Kremer’s research. Here’s Boulder Weekly:

McNeill explains that glyphosate is a chelating agent, which means it clamps onto molecules that are valuable to a plant, like iron, calcium, manganese, and zinc.…The farmers’ increased use of Roundup is actually harming their crops, according to McNeill, because it is killing micronutrients in the soil that they need, a development that has been documented in several scientific papers by the nation’s leading experts in the field. For example, he says, harmful fungi and parasites like fusarium, phytopthora and pythium are on the rise as a result of the poison, while beneficial fungi and other organisms that help plants reduce minerals to a usable state are on the decline. He explains that the overuse of glyphosate means that oxidizing agents are on the rise, creating oxides that plants can’t use, leading to lower yields and higher susceptibility to disease.

According to McNeill, problems with Roundup aren’t limited to the soil—they also extend to Roundup Ready crops and the animals that eat them.

McNeill says he and his colleagues are seeing a higher incidence of infertility and early-term abortion in cattle and hogs that are fed on GMO crops. He adds that poultry fed on the suspect crops have been exhibiting reduced fertility rates.

McNeill made an interesting comparison to the Boulder Weekly reporter: “Just as DDT was initially hailed as a miracle pesticide and later banned, researchers are beginning to discover serious problems with glyphosate.”

Well, the EPA has been in the process of reviewing glyphosate’s registration since July 2009, but I’ve seen no evidence that the agency has the fortitude to challenge Monsanto and its multibillion-dollar empire. Just last week, Kremer told Reuters that neither the EPA nor the USDA has shown interest in further exploring his research. Maybe Monsanto’s PR team doesn’t have much to worry about, after all.

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Tom Philpott’s RSS feed.

Reposted from Mother Jones.

The most common stereotype about atheists, the most common reason why religious people fear and distrust us, is the belief that people who don’t believe in God have no reason to behave morally. In the view of the planet’s major religions, the way we know what’s right and what’s wrong is that God tells us so, and the reason we follow the rules is because we fear divine retribution if we break them. This worldview is simple and emotionally satisfying and to those who believe it, it’s a natural implication that a person who no longer believes in God has no reason not to indulge their every selfish desire.

Now, I’ve never claimed to speak for every atheist. Because nonbelievers are a diverse and quarrelsome lot, there may in fact be a few who think this way. But if there are, they’re staying well hidden. The vast majority of atheists, like the majority of human beings in general, are perfectly good and decent people. This should be no surprise, as the evidence shows that human beings all tend to have similar moral intuitions, regardless of whether we profess a religion. But that doesn’t address how an atheist justifies acting morally. When we’re wrestling with an ethical dilemma, how do we make up our minds? What can nonbelievers appeal to as a reason for their action?

Again, atheists are a diverse bunch. There are some who would argue that morality is just an opinion, a mere matter of taste, like preferring vanilla ice cream to chocolate. But I reject this view, just as I reject the view that morality can only come from obeying what people believe to be God’s will. I believe that morality is real, that it’s objective, and that it’s a thoroughly natural phenomenon that’s perfectly compatible with a worldview that includes nothing spooky, mystical, or supernatural.

To see how this can be, consider the question from another angle: What’s the point of morality? What quality are we trying to bring more of into the world?

The problem with most common answers to this question is that they’re arbitrary. If your answer is something like freedom or justice or familial duty or piety, you can always ask why we should care about that quality and not a different one. Why should we care about freedom more than stability? Why should we care about free speech more than harmony? There obviously can’t be an infinite regress of justifications, but we should keep asking the question as long as it can be meaningfully answered. And if you do keep asking, there’s only one answer you’ll find at the bottom.

The only quality that’s immune to this question is happiness. You can ask someone, “Why do you want (good friends/a loving family/a fulfilling job/etc.)?” and the answer is, “Because it will make me happy,” but it’s meaningless to ask, “Why do you want to be happy?” Happiness is its own justification, the only quality in human experience that we value purely for its own sake. Even theists who say that morality is based on following God’s commands, whether they realize it or not, are really basing their morality on happiness. After all, if you should do what God says because you’ll go to heaven if you do and to hell if you don’t, what is this if not a claim about which actions will or won’t lead to happiness?

This is my answer to moral anti-realists who say that facts are out there in the world, waiting to be discovered, but morality isn’t. They rightly point out that there’s no elementary particle of good or evil, that it would be bizarre to have a moral commandment — an “ought” — just hovering there, hanging over us with no prior explanation for its existence. This is a spooky, mystical, weird notion, and they’re right to reject it. But as I’ve said, this only applies to arbitrary qualities chosen as the basis of morality with no real justification. Happiness is not an arbitrary choice; by definition, it’s what we all wish for. This, then, is where that “ought” comes from. It comes from us: from our essential nature as human beings and from the fact that we all have this basic desire in common.

My definition of happiness isn’t just physical well-being or pleasure of the senses. Nor is it limited to economic stability, or meaningful human relationships, or productive achievement. Rather, it’s a balanced approach that includes all of these and more besides. Some might charge that this is too vague, but I’d answer that any moral theory which reflects the almost limitless variety of human experience is bound to be multivariate, sprawling and diverse, and not reducible to a single number on a measuring stick. As the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris notes, “health” is a similarly broad concept — the inability to leap three feet straight up could be perfectly normal for me, while for an NBA player, it could be a sign of crippling injury — but no one would argue that therefore the concept of health is too poorly defined to base the entire field of medicine on.

The next question is I should care about other people’s happiness, rather than just my own. In theory, you could use happiness as the basis of morality and construct an Ayn Rand-type moral system where everyone is perfectly selfish and cares only about themselves. But the problem with this is that human beings are intrinsically social creatures, designed by evolution to live in groups, which is why people who are deprived of contact with others, like prisoners in solitary confinement, tend to go insane in short order. Our social nature gives rise to the phenomenon of emotional contagion: for better or for worse, we’re affected by the moods of those around us.

This means that, if you value your own happiness, it’s not in your interest to live in a society where it can only be achieved by the downfall of others. Friendly competition has its place, but there’s greater potential for happiness in a society structured to encourage cooperation and reciprocal altruism, one where we can achieve more by working together rather than fighting against each other. If your success is others’ success as well, they’ll have every reason to work with you and assist you, rather than opposing you and impeding you from achieving your goals. Regardless of what you personally desire, the best thing for you is to live in a society that values honesty, generosity, fairness and the like. A rational being will always come to this conclusion, regardless of their own desires.

One more key piece of this moral synthesis is that we should choose our actions so as to create not just the least actual suffering and the most actual happiness for those immediately involved, but the least potential suffering and greatest potential happiness. In short, this moral system asks us to care not just about the immediate impact of our actions, but the precedent they set down the line, which establishes a basis for principles like human rights. Even if you can come up with contrived and unlikely scenarios where a temporary gain in happiness could be realized by violating a fundamental right like free speech, in the long run, it’s far better for all of us to live in a society that respects those principles.

Now, I acknowledge that this argument won’t win everyone over. If there’s someone who believes that happiness can’t be proven to be the highest good, there’s little I can say to them. But then again, no rational system can derive its starting principles out of thin air. Every field of human inquiry, from science to history to mathematics, is based on assumptions that a stubborn person could reject. Just as a morality denier could say, “Why should I care about happiness?”, a science denier could say, “Why should I care about the scientific method?” The only answer you could give that person is that science works — it discovers truths about the world, and thereby makes it possible for us to achieve our desires.

And the same is true of morality. The only real, practical reason for believing in it and adopting it is because it works — because it makes the world more free, more fair, more peaceful, and makes it possible for more people to lead happy and fulfilling lives. In this respect, morality could even be seen as another field of science, like a subdomain of anthropology or sociology: the study of how best to promote human flourishing.

With these basic ingredients, we can build a moral system that’s completely secular and religion-neutral, one that’s in no way dependent on following the decrees of a holy book or a religious authority. By always seeking to bring about the greatest happiness, we have a guide for what we should do in any situation, one that’s rooted in human nature and based on something real and measurable.

That said, I want to emphasize that I don’t claim to possess the definitive answer to every ethical problem. The theory of morality I’ve sketched here is more like the scientific method: not a list of claims to be taken as dogma, but a way of thinking about certain kinds of problems. It still requires people to evaluate evidence, offer reasoned arguments and use their own judgment, and I consider this a point in its favor.

But even in its broadest strokes, a world where everyone agreed on the goal of advancing human happiness would be dramatically different from the world we live in now. In this society, other, more selfish goals — increasing the wealth of the wealthy and the power of the powerful, maintaining the privilege of the few at the expense of the many — often interfere and cause suffering and inequality to persist. But a world where happiness was the primary goal, and where every human being’s happiness was judged to be of equal value, would necessarily entail some major changes.

It would be a world of democracy, where all people have a say in how their society is governed, and where human rights are fixed and inviolable. It would be a world of free enterprise, where people succeed on the basis of effort and merit; but it would also be a progressive world with a strong safety net and a more equal distribution of wealth and resources, rather than the law-of-the-jungle capitalism championed by libertarians or the Dickensian dystopia sought by Tea Party conservatives. It would be a world that valued sustainability and environmental conservation for the sake of future generations that have yet to come into existence, but whose happiness matters no less than our own despite that.

It would be a world in which all people have access to education and the other public goods needed to develop their talents to their fullest extent; since, after all, a society where everyone is educated, productive and prosperous offers far more potential for happiness than a world with a vast gap between rich and poor, where people succeed or fail based on accidents of birth. For the same reason, it would be a world of free choice, where no woman would ever become pregnant against her will, where population is sustainable and every child is wanted and cared for.

And, most of all, this would be a secular world. Whether religion still existed or not, it would be a private and individual matter, not the loud, overbearing presence in public affairs that it currently has, and moral rules based purely on religious belief would fade away. As I said earlier, most religious moralities are also based on happiness; but their error is that they arrive at moral decisions through unverifiable private faith, rather than facts and evidence that can be demonstrated to anyone’s satisfaction. The fact that the world’s longest-running, most destructive and most intractable conflicts all stem from religion only highlights this problem… and in a world built on secular reason and compassion rather than faith, it’s entirely possible that these would finally cease.

Imagine a world where the sun rises on olive trees and vineyards growing where once there was barbed wire and checkpoints; a world where religious terrorism is unknown and the holy books that preach war and vengeance on the infidels peacefully gather dust on shelves. In this world, the churches, mosques and temples, institutions which teach doctrines that divide people from each other, will have become libraries and museums, institutions that teach wisdom and advance the common good; and human beings care about each other’s happiness in the present, rather than looking wistfully to an afterlife where evil will be eradicated.

I freely admit this is a utopian vision. But even if it’s unattainable, it still has value as a guide, a best-possible outcome that we should try to approach as closely as we can. If every person was willing to work together, it wouldn’t take much effort at all to create a better world. All I’m suggesting is that we each do the small part that would be required of us in that ideal scenario. As the great orator and freethinker Robert Ingersoll said, we can all help “toward covering this world with the mantle of joy.” What higher purpose, what deeper meaning, could you ask for in a human lifetime, regardless of what you do or don’t believe?

This article was reposted from Alternet.

15 July, 2011
Post Carbon Institute

World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy — the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in ‘clean-coal’ technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources. It is an important enough assumption about our energy future that it demands closer examination.

There are two reasons to believe that coal prices are likely to soar in the years ahead.

First, a spate of recent studies [1–5] suggests that available, useful coal may be less abundant than has been assumed — indeed that the peak of world coal production may be only years away. One pessimistic study [1] published in 2010 concluded that global energy derived from coal could peak as early as 2011.

Second, global demand is growing rapidly, largely driven by China. Demand rose modestly in the 1990s (0.45% per year), but since 2000 it has been surging at 3.8% per year. China is both the world’s biggest producer of coal (40% of global production) and its biggest consumer. Its influence on future coal prices should not be underestimated.

Economic shocks from rising coal prices will be felt by every sector of society. Better data on global coal supplies is long overdue and energy policies that assume a bottomless coal pit need rethinking urgently.

Forecasting future supplies of coal is a murky business, largely because of the unreliability of national estimates. China claims that it has enough coal to fuel its growing economy at current rates. According to data collected in the 2000–10 national resource survey by the China’s Ministry of Land and Resources, the country’s proven reserves of coal total 187 billion tonnes, the second-largest reserves after the United States. For China, that is about 62 years’ worth of coal — at 2009 rates of consumption (roughly 3 billion tonnes a year). This simple ‘lifetime’ calculation is popular with industry and politicians but it can generate a false sense of security over the actual state of reserves.

‘Proven recoverable reserves’ are estimates of the national coal resources that geologists believe are technically and economically feasible to mine. New mining technology and higher coal prices could, in principle, increase the size of those reserves. But the overwhelming global trend, as revealed by national coal surveys over the past few decades, is for the size of countries’ estimated reserves to shrink as geologists uncover restrictions — such as location, depth, seam thickness and quality — on the coal that can be practically extracted.

For example, both German and South African reserves have fallen by more than one-third between 2003 and 2008. The first British coal survey, in the nineteenth century, suggested that the nation had enough coal to last 900 years. The current reserves lifetime is only 12 years [6], and the British coal industry is a tiny fraction of its former size. Similarly, the first official US coal survey, in the early twentieth century, suggested that the country had enough coal for 5,000 years. That estimate shrank to about 400 years in 1974 and stands at 240 years today. There are exceptions to this trend: estimates of reserves in Indonesia and India have grown. However, in aggregate, estimates of global coal reserves have dropped at a faster rate in recent years than can be accounted for by mining alone.

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OPTIMISTIC FORECASTS

China’s reserves were last surveyed in the early 2000s, and the US reserves in the 1970s. China does not possess, as the United States does, vast deposits of surface-minable coal. More than 90% of China’s coal comes from underground mines that can be as much as 1,000 metres deep, presenting increasing engineering challenges. We strongly suspect that the current reserves figures are too optimistic. The coal is certainly there, but — like the majority of coal elsewhere in the world — most of it is probably destined to stay put. One way to estimate future production is to look at past production trends. This method was pioneered by geophysicist King Hubbert, who used 1950s data from the US oil industry to predict that US oil production would peak in the early 1970s. It did. Hubbert production profiles plotted over time assume the shape of a distorted bell curve, with a short peak and gradual decline (see graphic). Applying Hubbert analysis to coal, Chinese academics Tao and Li [7] forecast in 2007 that China’s production will peak and begin to decline long before the simple 62-years estimate, perhaps as early as 2025. During and after the period when production peaks, resource quality will dwindle and mining costs will rise, pushing up coal prices, as is already beginning to happen with Asia-Pacific coal.

Tao and Li used the Chinese government’s latest official reserves figure of 187 billion tonnes to arrive at their peaking date between 2025 and 2032. Other forecasts are more pessimistic. A 2007 forecast3 by the Energy Watch Group, based in Berlin, used a reserves figure of 114.5 billion tonnes (reported by China to World Energy Council in 1992) to forecast a peak of production in 2015, with a rapid production decline commencing in 2020. Analogous concerns raised in 1998 about the end of cheap oil [8] proved prescient. The price of oil has grown substantially since then, as have the costs of finding and extracting new supplies. The current price of more than US$80 per barrel is about three times higher than the upper range in official forecasts for 2010 that were being issued in the late 1990s [9]. New technologies have made marginal oil reserves accessible, but deepwater drilling and oil-sands production entail high costs and risks.

Similarly, new technology — underground coal gasification — may eventually make marginal coal reserves accessible, but it will take time and substantial investment to commercialize on a large scale. Meanwhile, the world’s highest-quality and most-accessible coal reserves are disappearing as demand for the fuel grows.

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Coal consumption is accelerating fast, notably in China (see graphic). This renders meaningless reserves-lifetime figures calculated on the basis of flat demand. A 2009 report from China’s Energy Research Institute forecast that coal demand would rise by 700 million to 1 billion tonnes by 2020, reducing the reserves lifetime to about 33 years. If coal demand grows in step with projected Chinese economic growth, the reserves lifetime would drop to just 19 years [10].

COAL RELIANT

China has few options for reducing its reliance on coal. It uses coal in many more industries than the United States, where coal mostly fuels power generation. About half of China’s coal provides 80% of the country’s electricity supply; another 16% supplies the coke for its iron and steel industry, the largest in the world. Hundreds of millions of people in northern China consume another 6% for their winter heat supply. The remaining 28% is primarily used in industries such as cement, non-ferrous metals, and chemicals. Although China is rapidly expanding its supply of natural gas, to replace just the coal used for heating would double its total gas consumption.

Urbanization is also driving demand for coal. Less than half of China’s population now lives in cities (compared with 80% for the United States and the European Union). To improve living conditions and opportunities for its citizens, the government wants the urban population to grow by 350 million people over the next 15 years, all of whom will require infrastructure such as housing, energy, transport, water supply and waste treatment. This will necessitate a steady supply of building materials such as cement, steel, aluminium and copper, all of which depend on coal for their production. Over the next decade, economic growth and urbanization are expected to use at the very least 700 million tonnes of coal — assuming that aggressive energy-efficiency and alternative-energy targets are also met [7].

Can China go elsewhere for its coal? The United States has the world’s biggest reported reserves, but almost all its current production — 1 billion tonnes — is used domestically. The biggest exporters of coal, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa, have much smaller reserves and production rates — some 250 million to 400 million tonnes a year. In 2008 the entire seaborne trade in steam coal (mainly used by power plants) amounted to about 630 million tonnes. Although this could grow (Australia, Russia and Indonesia are expanding capacity), growth will be limited, and prices pushed up, by the need to construct mines, railways and ports.

Russia has large but mostly undeveloped coal resources in Siberia. They are not located near demand centres, and rail transport of coal is expensive (which is why the largest exporters are coastal and trade is waterborne). Nevertheless, Russia could export Siberian coal to China more easily than to Europe, especially if China helped to build the railways.

China alone could absorb all current Asia-Pacific exports with just three years of import growth at current rates. Because other countries in the region also depend on coal imports, China clearly cannot take all, but competition for imports drives up prices. And then there’s India, where imports are expected to nearly double to 100 million tonnes by 2012. India is one of the few countries to revise its reserves estimates upwards in recent years, but its higher-quality reserves are limited and it is importing increasing quantities.

The inevitable result of soaring demand and dwindling supply will be rising coal prices globally, even in nations that are currently self-sufficient in the resource.

The poor quality of coal data globally means that uncertainty clouds every forecast. Even in the technologically advanced United States — the ‘Saudi Arabia of coal’ — most experts rely on decades-old coal surveys. These are commonly interpreted as indicating that the nation has a coal supply with a 250-year lifetime. This figure is not reliable enough for strategic energy planning.

In terms of energy output, US coal production peaked in the late 1990s (volume continued to increase, but the coal was of lower energy content). In 1995 the US Geological Survey (USGS) promised a new national coal survey, but it has not been seen as a high priority by that organization or by Congress. The most recent surveys [11],[12] of two key mining regions show rapid depletion of high quality reserves. There is still an enormous amount of US coal, but whether future energy production can be increased is doubtful, even taking into account new mining areas in Montana, Alaska and the Illinois basin.

LIMIT CONSUMPTION

At the very least, the USGS should urgently complete a new national coal survey. And it is essential for the security of energy supplies globally that Chinese domestic coal production and the timing of its likely decline is better understood.

We believe that it is unlikely that world energy supplies can continue to meet projected demand beyond 2020. Therefore, new limits on energy consumption will be essential in all sectors of society — including agriculture, transportation and manufacturing — and will be imposed by energy prices and shortages if they are not achieved through planning and policy.

Supply limits also have implications for the development of clean-coal technology. Also known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), clean coal is one proposal for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions while growing energy supplies. Because maintaining economic growth while cutting coal out of the energy equation globally will be difficult, and because nearly everyone assumes that coal will remain cheap far into the foreseeable future, the idea is to keep the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal from going into the atmosphere.

There are two hitches: the difficulty of scaling up such an enterprise, and its effect on electricity prices. As many analysts have noted, the scale and cost of clean-coal infrastructure will be vast [13]. Energy analysts agree that this will boost the price of electricity, but the scheme could work if coal prices remain low. If they don’t, building new coal plants — conventional or clean — makes little economic sense, except to replace ageing inefficient infrastructure.

Nations should immediately begin to plan for higher fossil-fuel prices and to make maximum possible investments in energy efficiency and renewable-energy infrastructure. Even then the world will have to accept a slowdown in economic growth.

Richard Heinberg and David Fridley are at the Post-Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, California 95404, USA. \

Heinberg is the author of nine books, including Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis, The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and the soon-to-be-released The End of Growth. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.

David Fridley: Since 1995, David Fridley has been a staff scientist at the Energy Analysis Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He is also deputy group leader of Lawrence Berkeley’s China Energy Group, which collaborates with China on end-user energy efficiency, government energy management programs, and energy policy research. Mr. Fridley has nearly 30 years of experience working and living in China in the energy sector, and is a fluent Mandarin speaker. He spent 12 years working in the petroleum industry both as a consultant on downstream oil markets in the Asia-Pacific region and as business development manager for Caltex China. He has written and spoken extensively on the energy and ecological limits of biofuels.

This article was Originally published November 18, 2010 in Nature Vol 468. Republished with permission.

1. Patzek, T. W. & Croft, G. D. Energy 35, 3109–3122(2010).

2. Mohr, S. H. & Evans, G. M. Fuel 88, 2059–2067(2009).

3. Zittel, W. & Schindler, J. Energy Watch Group, Paper No. 1/07 (2007); available at http://go.nature.com/jngfsa

4. Rutledge, D. Hubbert’s Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change (2007): available at http://rutledge.caltech.edu

5. Höök, M., Zittel, W., Schindler, J. & Aleklett, K. Fuel 89, 3546–3558 (2010).

6. 2010 Survey of Energy Resources (World Energy Council, 2010); available at http://go.nature.com/hde5r7

7. Tao, Z. & Li, M. Energy Pol. 35, 3145–3154 (2007).

8. Campbell, C. J. & Laherrère, J. H. The End of Cheap Oil. Sci. Am. (March 1998).

9. Energy Information Administration. Annual Energy Outlook 1998 (DOE/EIA, 1997).

10. 2050 China Energy and CO2 Emissions Report (in Chinese) Science Press, 2009).

11. Luppens, J. A. et al. Assessment of Coal Geology, Resources, and Reserves in the Gillette Coalfield, Powder River Basin, Wyoming. Open-File Report 2008-1202 (USGS, 2008).

12. Coal Reserves of the Matewan Quadrangle, Kentucky — A Coal Recoverability Study. US Bureau of Mines Circular 9355 (USGS, 2003).

13. Strategic Analysis of the Global Status of Carbon Capture and Storage. (Global CCS institute, 2009).

15 July, 2011
Al Jazeera

In Ecuador, protesting for the rights of the Earth and trying to preserve natural resources may make you a “terrorist”.

If you thought there was anything romantic about environmental activism or indigenous rights, think twice. Socialist ideas about nature – such as keeping water a public good – can get you facing charges of sabotage by a leftist government. In the land of the Incas, if you protect the pachamama ["Mother World"], you might just be a “terrorist”.

It’s becoming tricky to identify “terrorists”, at least in Ecuador. They are not members of criminal organisations, they don’t spread fear or target civilians, nor have a politically motivated agenda. According to President Correa, “terrorists” are those opposing Ecuador’s development. So today’s “terrorism” might just look like indigenous peoples peacefully taking over the streets, with their ancestral knowledge and values, to demand environmental and social rights.

In Ecuador, “terrorists” are indigenous peoples from the Amazon and the Andean highlands fighting to preserve access to water in their communities. Old penal codes written in times of dictatorship are being revived by leftist presidents to repress indigenous activists. As “terrorists”, they are labelled as enemies of the state, and arrested – by the very president that claimed leftist credentials and staged his inauguration in overtly ethnic style.

When the Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala gathered delegations from the entire hemisphere in Ecuador last month, the focus was on the criminalisation of environmental protest.

Abya Yala, which means “continent of life” in the language of the Panamanian Kuna peoples, refers to the Americas. The summit has consolidated ethnic organising capacity across borders since it first organised in 1990, maintaining a diversity of indigenous voices from Canada and the US all the way to Honduras, Guatemala, Argentina and Chile.

This fifth meeting was symbolically held in Cuenca, where the last Inca died of smallpox – brought from Europe – years before the Spaniards themselves made it to the Andes. This year’s topic was water – yakumama in Quechua, and the earth – pachamama, echoing the growing environmental pressures on rural communities.

But the week’s true highlight was the establishment of an independent, transnational Ethics Tribunal.

Modelled on a “truth commission”, the Ethics Tribunal was designed as a public court to bring visibility to injustices and foster government accountability towards international human and indigenous rights. It was specifically established to address cases of criminalisation of indigenous protest for environmental justice.

On June 22, a four-judge tribunal heard multiple expert reports – as well as 17 personal testimonies – taking more than four hours on the issue.

According to Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, there are currently 189 cases of people accused of sabotage and terrorism by the Ecuadorian government, for protesting the privatisation of natural resources. The situation is so critical that Amnesty International issued a statement denouncing it as an attempt to silence opposition to government policies.

Cases vary in context, but not in substance. In Cochapata, community members were condemned to eight years in jail on charges of terrorism for opposing mining – the government has so far ignored the amnesty granted by the constitutional assembly. A radio station in the Amazon province of Morona Santiago, Radio Canela, was shut down in April for fueling opposition.

Silencing the opposition

The most prominent cases relate to the accusation and illegal arrest of some of the most visible indigenous leaders in Ecuador – Pepe Acacho, Marlon Santi, Delfin Tenesaca and Marco Guatemal. The four heads of national indigenous organisations were accused of sabotage for participating in marches against laws to privatise water during a 2010 summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in the indigenous town of Otavalo, where leftist presidents discussed continental multiculturalism without inviting indigenous organisations.

All cases reveal a state-led effort to silence indigenous protest to protect access to clean water.

Using so-called “anti-terror” laws to silence indigenous struggles over natural resources is not a new strategy. Chile, for instance, has extensively used anti-terror laws created under the Pinochet regime to criminalise Mapuche protests over lumber. Canada has also responded to opposition against resource extraction on native land in Ontario by incarcerating the protesters.

What is news is that a leftist president – who has repeatedly fallen back on ethno-politics to increase his legitimacy – is using forms of martial law inherited from past military regimes to destroy indigenous calls for environmental justice.

The irony is that President Correa, a political ally of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez against North American hegemony, maintains a strong discourse of environmental justice for the Global South. Not only has his administration pioneered international norms by granting new rights to nature in the 2008 Constitution, but it strongly supported the World’s People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Bolivia in 2010.

Yet President Correa started using laws codified in the 1920s and 1970s, including the Doctrine of National Security designed by the military dictatorship, to persecute indigenous opposition. He created a state of emergency, calling upon the armed forces to intervene when internal security might be threatened, and he has already shown a willingness to use them.

Proposed legislation to increase jail time for stopping traffic is a direct attempt to disrupt traditional forms of indigenous protest, which often rely on marches and road-blocks.

Correa’s government, which was elected under a mantle of social justice, has also silenced his opposition through legal and military violence and manipulating judicial mechanisms to repress dissidents. The most recent referendum expanded the executive grasp on the judicial apparatus, making it even more dangerous to oppose his neoliberal stance on natural resources.

Ecuador’s indigenous movement, often described as the strongest in Latin America, has been strongly targeted as the main opposition to Correa’s neoliberal agenda with regards to water.

Last year’s proposed Water and Mining Laws to further privatise access to water and expand mining concessions was stopped only by indigenous mobilisation. Extractive policies are at a peak, with close to two thousand mining concessions, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Despite Correa’s best efforts to silence indigenous claims, one cannot but recall Bolivia’s water wars a decade ago. Multinational participation in the privatisation of water led to widespread street protests, and the more the government repressed protest the more tensions escalated until Cochabamba exploded in conflict.

Indigenous peoples have been struggling for survival on their lands for centuries – they are not about to let water go. Instead, the confrontation seems to be worsening.

As things intensify, the indigenous peoples of Ecuador will continue to take their protest to the streets. They will also focus on organising international pressure on their government. The Ethics Tribunal will not run out of work anytime soon.

Manuela Picq has just completed her time as a visiting professor and research fellow at Amherst College. She is returning to the Amazon this autumn to continue her research on indigenous peoples’ rights.