Destruction of civil service

Something that's bothered me for some time is what the Bush administration has done to the civil service. Paul Krugman has written about that in a piece called "The Green-Zoning of America". Here's part of what it says:

The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January 2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel.” The manifesto’s message, in brief, was that the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of the new administration’s conservative agenda. And there’s no question that Heritage’s thinking reflected that of many people on the Bush team.

How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost, Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the new administration “must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing — “contracting out as a management strategy.” This would supposedly reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of reducing the total number of civil servants.

The Bush administration energetically put these recommendations into effect. Political loyalists were installed throughout the government, regardless of qualifications. And the administration outsourced many government functions previously considered too sensitive to privatize: yesterday’s Times article begins with the case of CACI International, a private contractor hired, in spite of the obvious conflict of interest, to process cases of incompetence and fraud by private contractors. A few years earlier, CACI provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib.
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Those political appointees chosen for their loyalty, not their expertise, aren’t very good at doing their proper jobs — as all the world learned after Hurricane Katrina struck. But they have been very good at rewarding campaign contributors, from energy companies that benefit from lax regulation of pollution to pharmaceutical companies that got a Medicare program systematically designed to protect their profits.

I don't know what to say about all this except that it is really depressing. Bush has destroyed so much. He seems to like seeing how much destruction he can accomplish. Truly incomprehensible.

Chavez is going green

Hugo Chavez

Common Dreams has picked up an article from the Toronto Star entitled "Chavez Sets 'Green' Agenda" . Here's how it gets started:

His ambitious social programs are built on Venezuela's petroleum wealth, but President Hugo Chavez is increasingly talking up environmental causes and urging the world to cut back on oil use to fight global warming.

He wants to use some oil revenues in a venture to manufacture solar panels and has begun doling out millions of energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs to homes nationwide.

Some critics say Chavez's campaign is mostly rhetoric, noting this is a country where government subsidies have gasoline prices at 12 cents (U.S.) a gallon, car sales are booming and vehicle exhaust chokes litter-strewn streets.

But Chavez says Venezuela can be an example, and he has begun exhorting his followers to drive less and take public transport. His government plans a windmill farm to generate electricity on the Caribbean coast and is exploring more uses for cleaner-burning natural gas.

"Venezuela is one of the countries that least contaminates the environment, but nevertheless we want to give an example and be at the vanguard," Chavez said at a news conference Thursday.

He called U.S. oil consumption – which handsomely funds his government – a leading cause of the world's environmental troubles.

"They're destroying the world," Chavez said, citing melting glaciers in the Andes and predictions of rising sea levels. "The human race will be finished if we don't change the world capitalist system.''

Later the article reports that he will soon raise gas prices to discourage driving.

He is right that we are destroying the world. And it is unregulated capitalism that's doing it.

Irony

I came across an article today on AlterNet entitled "9/11: The Case Isn't Closed". The irony of the following information is enormous:

In fact, according to a Special Report in The Economist, the whole notion of "jihad" died out in Islam in the 10th century until "it was revived, with American encouragement, to fire an international pan-Islamic movement after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979."

Throughout the '80s, the Reaganites were superficially opposed to the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. But in reality, the Islamic fundamentalists were happy customers for U.S. arms sales. Care of the Reagan/Bush team, a triangular trade kept a clandestine flow of weapons, money and narcotics moving in and out of Central America, all to benefit the right-wing Contra militia. Meanwhile, the capital was flowing into the Mujahedeen through Pakistan. Oh, yeah, we were selling weapons to Iraq, too, so they could fight the Iranians.

The financial engine that helped run these operations was a well-oiled and bloody front bank called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was the funding vehicle that American and Pakistani intelligence used to arm the Afghani Mujahedeen against the Soviets. In the Pakistan/Afghanistan theatre, it moved guns and bombs in, and shipped heroin out. In Central America, it moved in guns and advisors, and took the payoff in cocaine.

When BCCI got busted in 1991, $10 million in State Department accounts was discovered. The CIA and the Pakistani ISI, learning to love each other in their first of many sick trysts, built BCCI into an international network still very much alive. Sen. John Kerry's investigation into BCCI started out strong, but eventually caved to political pressure. Under pressure from Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), Kerry fired his top investigator, Jack Blum. No major players were ever apprehended, censured, prosecuted or sentenced for the genocidal, narcotics-trafficking, lucrative top crimes of our time. Instead, many of them returned to power in 2001.

Ah, the law of unintended consequences!

Observation

Ha!

In the 60s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

-- Anonymous

Liberals and conservatives

A good summary:

Most liberals never lost sight of the potential for evil in big government. They have consistently opposed government power in matters of personal and political belief. Liberals are not unconcerned with economic liberty, but they have come to believe that the common good requires that social justice be given a higher priority than absolute economic freedom. Conservatives are—and always have been—on the other side of both questions. They are much more prone than liberals to limiting personal and political liberties, but they place the freedom of an individual to do as he pleases in the economic realm at the top of their concerns. Social justice has held a lower priority for conservatives, from the days of Alexander Hamilton when they favored strong government as a means of protecting their economic privileges to the days of Ronald Reagan when they see government as an instrument of social justice and therefore a threat to their economic position.

-- Robert S. McElvaine

The horror of hunting

I don't understand how people do it:

To kill for recreation living creatures who bond and mate, who give birth and nurture their young, who experience happiness, pain, fear and grief is quite simply barbaric. In some measure, I feel that killing animals for sport can desensitize the individual to the value of life in general, not only for other creatures but also for humans.

-- Paul M. Howey

Just read it

Please read the article from The Independent entitled "Global Warming: The Final Warning". It's very short. Read it all the way down to see what happens when average temperatures rise 6.4° C. Just go read it.

For America's sake

Frank Ford sent me this clip from a Bill Moyers speech:

What it will be like

You know what bothers me? The extraordinary lack of imagination exhibited by most people with regard to global warming. I want to call your attention to an article entitled "The Hellish Vision of Life on a Hotter Planet". Here's part of what it says:

Buried within the newly released IPCC report is an apocalyptic warning: if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at current rates, global warming by the end of the century could total 6.4C. The scientists don't say so explicitly, but a rise in temperatures of this magnitude would catapult the planet into an extreme greenhouse state not seen for nearly 100 million years, when dinosaurs grazed on polar rainforests and deserts reached into the heart of Europe. It would cause a mass extinction of almost all life and probably reduce humanity to a few struggling groups of embattled survivors clinging to life near the poles.

An eco-alarmist fantasy? Unfortunately not - having spent the past three years combing the scientific literature for clues to how life will change as the planet heats up, I know that life on a 6C-warmer globe would be almost unimaginably hellish. A clue to just how unpleasant things can get is contained within a narrow layer of strata recently exposed at a rock quarry in China, dating from the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago. For reasons that are still not properly understood, temperatures rose by 6C over just a few thousand years, dramatically changing the climate and wiping out up to 95 per cent of species alive at the time. The end-Permian mass extinction was the worst ever: the closest that this planet has ever come to becoming just another lifeless rock orbiting the sun. Only one large land animal survived the bottleneck: the pig-like Lystrosaurus, which for millions of years after the disaster had the globe pretty much to itself.
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The Met Office's Hadley Centre has predicted that the Amazonian rainforest could start to burn as early as 2050, gradually transforming towards desert as temperatures soar in the interior of South America. Ash and smoke would blanket much of the southern hemisphere, and nearly half of the world's terrestrial biodiversity would be wiped out at a stroke.

How people might fare is anyone's guess. With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean. As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges.

Does George Bush get it? Does he have even a clue as to what humanity is facing? If he got behind a serious effort to curb global warming, the whole world would listen. It would change everything.

Expectations

This really made me think:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.

~ Simone Weil

I suppose this is why it is such a betrayal when a government turns on its own people.

Bribing scientists

This is simply despicable. The article I want you to see is called "Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study" and it's from the Guardian. Here's a sample:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.
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The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

What do these people think is going to happen? Do they think they can put their finger in their ears and sing "La, la, la, la, la. I can't hear you!" and global warming will go away?

The Neo-Con philosophy

I really want you to go read an article called "The Great Experiment in (Neo-con) Freedom". It's hard to do it justice in an excerpt, but I'll tell you how it gets started and also share one important point made toward the end of the article:

God bless our Neo-cons. They believe in Freedom. With a capital F. They believe that government is the enemy of Freedom.

Iraq - partly consciously, and partly unconsciously - was their great experiment.

The United States, driven by neo-con theology, and frequently run by neo-cons, went into Iraq. They removed the government. They removed the police.They removed the army. They removed the top administrators of all those horrid government bureaucracies. Then they stood back and watched what happened.

Then the looting started. The US, with the only government and only armed forces and only police powers around, stood back and watched.
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But like domestic law, international law has grown out of experience. Certain conflicts and disasters have come up over and over again. So nations got together and said, let's make laws, so we don't have to guess each time what to do, we know how the games is played, and, in fact, we'll establish rules that we think generally lead to the best outcome and avoid disaster.

One of those laws - inscribed variously in the Hague Conventions of 1907, the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter - is that if a country conquers another country and becomes the occupying power, they are responsible to establish law and order, to protect the civilian population and property, supply food and medical care.

The failures to do those things, are crimes.

Any way you slice it, we're criminals. I do recommend that you click through and read the whole article. It's about the importance of the rule of law and the neo-con contempt for law. Very illuminating.

Friday cat blogging!

From 1000 Pictures

(used with permission)

Listen up, Senator Inhofe

For my UK readers, Senator Inhofe (of Oklahoma, I'm embarrassed to say) asserts that global warming is a "hoax". Take a look at what CNN says about the climate change report that came out today:

(CNN) -- The debate is over: Global warming is here and humans are "very likely" the blame, an international group of scientists meeting in Paris, France, announced Friday.

"The evidence for warming having happened on the planet is unequivocal," said U.S. government scientist Susan Solomon, who also is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"We can see that in rising air temperatures, we can see it in changes in snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere. We can see it in global sea rise. It's unequivocal," she said.

In a 21-page report for policymakers, the group of climate experts unanimously linked -- with "90 percent" certainty -- the increase of average global temperatures since the mid-20th century to the increase of manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Look, folks. There's no ambiguity there. It's real. We caused it. Now what are we going to do about it?

How to cope

MadPriest sent me an email today with the following message:

BBC breaking news alert:
Global temperatures will rise by 3C by 2100 and sea levels will increase by 18cm to 59cm, UN climate report predicts.

Are we going to act in time to save the planet? Sometimes I really suffer over that question. But I am consoled by something Gilda Radner said while fighting cancer:

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.

We don't know what's going to happen next. But we need to try as hard as we can to save our beautiful, damaged world.

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

Molly Ivins in her own words:

I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have a program. I’m not a communist or a socialist. I guess I’m a left-libertarian and a populist, and I believe in the Bill of Rights the way some folks believe in the Bible.
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Sunday-morning chatter announced in horror: "People may think the rich can buy their way out of the justice system." No shit. Been going to Texas prisons for a long time. Seen nobody rich on Death Row yet. . . . Wake me when impending egalitarianism is a problem. In the meantime, oligarchy is eating our ass, our dreams, our country, our heritage, our democracy, our justice, and our tax code.
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It’s hard to convince people you are bombing that you’re doing it for their own good.
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Robert Novak and Charles Krauthammer both claim to have “never seen anything like the detestation of Bush. . . ." Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to—our last President. Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice they haven’t let up yet. . . . "The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from," mused the ineffable Krauthammer. Gosh, what a puzzle that is. How could anyone not be just crazy about George W. Bush?
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The self-important chattering class of Washington insists that you only have credibility as a critic of the war if you were for it in the first place. I’m missing a logical link there.
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Listen, a populist is someone who is for the people and against the powerful, and so a populist is generally the same as a liberal—except we tend to have more fun.

And from her final column:

Every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them, and that’s why we’re trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets. Bang pots and pans. Demand, "Stop it, now!”

May she rest in peace.

UPDATE: Go read this article by Randolph T. Holhut entitled "Molly Ivins: A Mighty Voice Is Stilled".

Molly Ivins and breast cancer

I got an email from NewsMax today by Susan Estrich that was both a tribute to Molly Ivins and a plea that we do better with regard to breast cancer research. Here's how it concludes:

The war in Iraq has cost us $350 billion so far. The total budget for all National Cancer Institute research for this year is under 2 percent of that. The NCI's annual budget for breast cancer research is barely $600 million.

We talk about a war on cancer, but the truth is we're not really fighting one. The war we're fighting is a losing one in Iraq, not a winning one against cancer. How wrong can we be? The loss of 3,000 Americans over the course of the war in Iraq is unacceptable, but losing 41,000 every year to breast cancer is beyond intolerable.

President Bush, whom Molly memorably called "Shrub," was gracious about her death. But I can't help but believe he could have prevented it, that we could have, if only we got our priorities straight. How long will it take, how many more will we lose before we do? Enough is enough.

Just a few weeks ago, writing in the face of death, Molly urged every American to do their part to stop the war in Iraq. "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

We also need to start a new war, against the cancers that take our best from us. And this one, we need to win.

Our budget for cancer research is a disgrace. What will it take to get our priorities straight?