MySpace


MySpace.com | rss | sign in
Badger



Last Updated: 5/31/2009

Send Message
Instant Message
Email to a Friend
Subscribe

Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 42
Sign: Aquarius

State: Wisconsin
Country: US
Signup Date: 9/11/2006

Blog Archive
[Older      Newer]
 /  / 
Thursday, May 07, 2009 

May 5, 2009


Today is a day to celebrate. The European Union has slammed shut the door on trade in the products of the commercial seal slaughter.

The Canadian government used every trick in the book to try to derail the ban: massive lobbying, misinformation, and even threats of trade reprisals. But the EU stood its ground and honored its citizens’ opposition to this trade in cruelty. By doing so, the EU has saved millions of seals from a horrible fate.

Every year, the ProtectSeals team has endured hazardous conditions to document the seal hunt. We are committed to showing the world that the Canadian government is lying when it claims that the hunt is humane.

On our trips to the ice, the ProtectSeals team has brought key opinion shapers such as Paul McCartney and Swedish Member of the European Parliament Carl Schlyter. After their trips, neither has wavered in speaking out against the hunt. Shortly after his trip to the ice, Schlyter drafted the first version of today’s EU ban. Our hunt footage was directly responsible for convincing the rest of the EU to agree to the ban. It gives me enormous satisfaction to know that we haven’t just documented the hunt, we have made history.

What Does It Mean?

This is the beginning of the end for the Canadian seal hunt. The Canadian government estimates that losing this primary market will cost Canada’s sealing industry $6.6 million (CAD) each year. The hunt brought in less than $7 million last year. It's not hard to do the math.

Just the promise of an EU ban was enough to drive the prices for seal fur down to $15 (CAD) per skin -- a decline of 86 percent since 2006. As a result, many sealers stayed home. Out of this year's quota of 280,000 harp seals, fewer than 60,000 have been killed so far.

Now that the EU has banned its trade in seal products, countless more seals will live their lives in peace from this year forward.

What’s Next?

Canadian seal hunt supporters won’t give up just yet. With government subsidies still in hand, the sealing industry will be chasing down new markets. The ProtectSeals campaign is working to convince all targeted nations to follow the EU’s example.

We’re keeping the pressure on the Canadian fishing industry and government with the global boycott of Canadian seafood products. Since the boycott began, the Canadian fishing industry has suffered a $750 million (CAD) drop in the value of snow crab exports alone to the United States.

Canadian Senator Mac Harb has introduced his nation’s first bill to end the hunt. The ProtectSeals campaign is striving to convince other members of Canada's Parliament to support the bill.

Yes, there is still much to do -- and if you'd like to help, please visit humanesociety.org/protectseals to learn how. But for the moment, please join me in celebrating this historic victory. Thank you for fighting alongside me to make this day possible. The seals could not ask for stronger allies.



Rebecca Aldworth
Director of Canadian Wildlife Issues
The Humane Society of the United States

9:56 PM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Saturday, April 25, 2009 


3:59 PM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Sunday, April 05, 2009 
By Rebecca Aldworth
April 4, 2009


Live From the Ice

So often the suffering of the seals during this slaughter is viewed at a distance.

From the air, from thousands of feet, somehow the pain of the animals does not transmit properly.

You see them wriggling across the ice, blood trailing behind them. You see their mouths open in a silent scream through the camera lens.

But from the ice it is different. You hear their cries, you see them try to escape, you smell the blood and you feel their terror.

Yesterday, the ProtectSeals team travelled to the seal killing area by zodiac (a small, inflatable boat), documenting the slaughter from 30 meters away. We witnessed so many seals dying a horrible death, as sealers shot at the terrified babies, and then descended on the wounded, struggling animals with wooden bats.

I will never be able to forget the agonizing assault on one seal. The pup was in front of our zodiac, and a nearby sealing vessel approached. The pup sniffed the air as if sensing danger.

He looked around, and then the first bullet slammed into him. His scream could be heard all across the water. He tried to crawl away but another bullet ripped through his flesh.

His outraged cries echoed as a third and fourth and fifth bullet hit him. Finally, he dove into the water. He did not come back up. The sealers shrugged nonchalantly and moved on.

We looked around frantically for him but he did not surface. Likely, this baby seal would have bled to death slowly and painfully under the water, like tens of thousands of other seals that are "struck and lost" each year in this cruel slaughter.

I want the world to remember this brave seal. His cries of protest are echoing in my mind and I want them to sound across the world. I want everyone to hear as I did the mortal cries of a wounded baby seal who doesn't understand why he is being hurt.

And hearing those cries, know as I do that this slaughter simply has to stop.

Despite Canada's assurances that this year the seal hunt will be humane, we filmed so much cruelty it is unbearable. Sealers were shooting at seals in open water, not bothering to retrieve the wounded animals.

So many pups were shot multiple times before the sealer approached and, realizing the seal was still conscious, beat the animals to death with wooden bats. Wounded seals were repeatedly allowed to slip beneath the water's surface, left to die slowly.

I have filmed this carnage for eleven years now, and this year is exactly the same as every other—filled with unspeakable suffering and unconscionable cruelty.

Not surprisingly, some sealers don't want us to film them. They were more aggressive toward our observers than ever before. Yesterday they made veiled threats about "ricocheting bullets" hitting us, and they pointed a rifle at us. Four sealing boats repeatedly tried to ram our zodiac, yelling threats all the while.

It takes a special kind of person to club and shoot helpless baby seals and threaten unarmed, peaceful observers. The sealers' cowardice speaks volumes. We won't be intimidated, and we won't go anywhere.

We are here to document the cruelty, and it is crucial work. For we know, as the sealers do, that our evidence will put this industry into the history books where it belongs.


Rebecca Aldworth is director of Humane Society International Canada (HSI Canada). For more than a decade, she has observed firsthand Canada's commercial seal hunt—escorting more than 100 scientists, parliamentarians and journalists to the ice floes to bear witness to the largest marine mammal slaughter on Earth.


3:37 PM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Sunday, March 29, 2009 

By Will Potter
Bite Back Magazine
Mar 25th, 2009

Shortly after midnight on November 11th, 1988, Fran Trutt exited the passenger side of a rented Chevy pickup and approached the headquarters of U.S. Surgical with a package. She still had doubts about the evening. The day before, as she prepared for the trip to Norwalk, Connecticut, from her home in Queens, New York, she called a friend three times. She had cold feet. Could she go through with this? Was it taking things too far? What if someone got hurt? No, no, the voice on the phone reassured her. Remember the dogs.

U.S. Surgical had become the nation’s largest supplier of surgical staplers, a speedier alternative to stitches. The company used about 1,000 dogs each year in training doctors to use the product, stapling dogs and then killing them. Behind the invention of the surgical stapler, the rise of U.S. Surgical to a $1 billion company, and the deaths of tens of thousands of dogs was the CEO, Leon Hirsch.

To Trutt, Hirsch murdered the only creatures who seemed to understand her. She was a loner and uncomfortable around
people, neighbors said. But dogs were different, especially the four she called her “babies.” She felt a special kinship with them. To Trutt, the dogs were unconditionally loving and affectionate. To Trutt, Hirsch was unconditionally evil.

She placed the package in some bushes about ten feet from where Hirsch would park his car the next morning. Inside the package, a foot-long radio controlled pipe bomb had been wrapped in roofing nails. Maybe Trutt still had doubts as she hid the package and then turned back to her waiting driver. By the time she reached the truck, though, it was too late for second thoughts.

Fran Trutt had been set up. U.S. Surgical, the press and most animal rights groups, would soon condemn her as a violent extremist. But over the coming months it would be revealed that the plot—the only act of attempted murder in the history of the U.S. animal rights movement—had not been an organic occurrence.

The money for the bomb, the truck, the logistics, the encouragement—U.S. Surgical and a “counter-terrorism” firm had been orchestrating it all.

Hired Guns

When Trutt returned to the truck, police moved in. They arrested her and found a radio-controlled detonator. They also arrested her driver, 30-year-old Marc Mead.

That afternoon, New York City police and bomb squad searched Trutt’s basement apartment in Queens and found a sawed-off shotgun, another weapon they described as a hybrid of a bazooka and a shotgun, and two more homemade bombs. The bombs were made of M-80s—large firecrackers—wrapped with nails and BB pellets, and stuffed into 3-by-6 inch pieces of standard plumbing pipes. One had a fuse, and one had a radio. Trutt had few other possessions, not even a telephone, but police also found pictures of tortured animals.

Trutt faced two sets of charges. In New York: federal charges of possessing two bombs. In Connecticut: attempted murder, possession of explosives and manufacturing a bomb. The press called the case a thwarted “terrorist” plot. The FBI announced a “terrorism” investigation. News stories said Trutt “may have been supplied with the explosive device by a terrorist group.”

All this talk of terrorism and murder didn’t sit well with Mead, Trutt’s driver. He had been released without charge, but worried that news reports implicated him. Mead, the owner of a window washing company, felt he had to do something to distance himself from this animal rights terrorist. He walked into the newsroom of the The Westport News with a press release he wrote—headlined “WINDOW WIZARD THWARTS ASSASINATION [sic] ATTEMPT”— hoping to clear his name.

The local newspaper’s expose, and the national headlines that followed, revealed a long-term plan by U.S. Surgical to infiltrate and disrupt the animal rights movement. To do his dirty work, Hirsch had
hired a counter-terrorism firm called Perceptions International. The firm was the brainchild of Jan Reber, a self-styled “terrorism” expert who had experience demonizing animal rights groups: he also published
a newsletter called the Animal Rights Reporter, a dossier on the activities of animal activists crafted for the vivisection industry.

Perceptions International had hired a woman named Mary Lou Sapone to infiltrate the movement. Sapone met Trutt at a U.S. Surgical demonstration in 1988, and reported back to Perceptions International and U.S. Surgical that Trutt had made threatening comments against Hirsch. Keep tabs on Trutt, they said. Talk to her. Befriend her. She did, and Trutt opened up about her anger at Hirsch, her sex life, and, of course, her dogs.

Sapone urged Trutt to take action. The spy had already approached other animal activists, saying someone should bomb U.S. Surgical, but they had written her off as a drunk or a lunatic. With Trutt, she found a more receptive audience.

Two months before the night of the bombing, Perceptions International brought Mead into the operation. The firm paid Mead $500 a week to befriend Trutt. Following Sapone’s lead, he used dogs to do so. He approached her in a pizza parlor, and asked for advice on finding homes for puppies.

They became friends, talking about animal rights and U.S. Surgical. Mead soon gave Trutt about $300, which she said was explicitly to be used for hiring two non-activists in New York to make the bomb. Although Mead denies this, and says the money was to help her pay her rent, he admitted that the president of Perceptions International went so far as to tell him when to bring Trutt and the bomb to the U.S. Surgical office.

When Trutt began to lose her nerve en route, she called her friend Mary Lou Sapone.

No Way Out

With evidence of his covert plans mounting, Hirsch finally acknowledged using paid informants. He told the Associated
Press that animal rights “terrorists” had left him no choice. “Many of them are very dangerous organizations,” he said. “They don’t believe in right and wrong as most people in society do. They believe that human beings are on the same par as rats and dogs and they are prepared to take violent actions to enforce their beliefs.”

Trutt maintained the she never intended to kill Hirsch; she intended to explode the bomb as he walked into the building. “It would have been purposeless to kill him,” she told The Advocate of Stamford. “But to scare him at this time might have affected some change.”

Yet the media circus and aggressive prosecution wore her down. On the New York bomb possession charges, she pled guilty and received time served in prison. On the Connecticut murder charges, she agreed to a plea agreement, and then rescinded upon learning she would not be allowed to visit her dogs. Abruptly, in April 1990, she agreed to plead no contest in exchange for one year in prison followed by three years of probation.

“The sex tapes—I think that’s what did it. It was just disgusting,” said John Williams, her attorney. “I have been fearing this from the first day: How long will Fran be able to stand up to this?”

Prosecutors had threatened to introduce tape recordings between Trutt and Sapone, he said. On the tapes, Trutt rails against Hirsch, and also discusses a sexual relationship with a woman.

Even the federal prosecutor in the New York case opposed using the tapes in court. Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Caldwell had written a letter to a U.S. District Judge questioning the handling of the case by Connecticut police.

“Like a sports ‘highlight film’ made for the benefit of home team fans, the tape contains many of Trutt’s most menacing and outrageous remarks,” she wrote. “However, it omits the operatives’ goading, encouragement and offers of money.”

Lessons Unlearned

By giving national exposure to so-called “animal rights terrorism,” the foiled plot marked a turning point in the history of the animal rights movement and in the sustained corporate campaign to surveil, disrupt and demonize activists. Trutt’s case should be a reminder of the dangers of jumping to conclusions. It should also be a reminder of the importance of focusing on true enemies, not placing blame. But for some of the activists involved in this
scandal, these lessons of terrorist scare mongering have gone unlearned.

Wayne Pacelle, for example, was executive director of the Fund for Animals, which filed a government complaint against U.S. Surgical’s experiments. He is now the head of the Humane Society of the United States, the largest animal protection organization in the country.

“[Sapone] was at every meeting of at least three people, always milking people for information,’’ he told the New York Times in 1989. “She served not only as an informant, but as a provocateur, often suggesting illegal activities.’’

Despite Pacelle’s firsthand experience with provocateurs, and firsthand knowledge of the dangers of jumping to conclusions, he has done exactly that in recent months. When a bomb exploded in California at the home of UC researchers, animal activists issued no communiqué or claim of responsibility. Nevertheless, Pacelle and HSUS not only issued media statements condemning underground activists, but also donated $2,500 to law enforcement for their “ecoterrorism” witch hunt.

Similarly, Friends of Animals led the demonstrations against U.S. Surgical beginning in 1981. Members recalled that Trutt attended at least one of their protests.

“It’s a classic frame case,’’ Priscilla Feral, president of the group, told the New York Times. “This is a concerted effort to discredit a movement that is having an effect.’’

Despite Feral’s firsthand experience with corporate smear campaigns, Friends of Animals has repeatedly focused its efforts on discrediting other animal activists. Instead of placing blame for this “Green Scare” on corporations and government agents, Friends of Animals says underground activists have brought these tactics upon themselves.

As Lee Hall of Friends of Animals has written, “government seizes opportunities provided to them by apparently dangerous activists to begin treating all kinds of dissenters as terrorists.”

History Repeats Itself

Time and again, these “dangerous activists” are in fact government and corporate creations, the product of cloak and dagger maneuvers to frame individual activists and discredit entire movements. In a contemporary case eerily reminiscent of Trutt’s entrapment, an environmental activist named Eric McDavid was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for “conspiring” to blow up the Nimbus Dam in California.

His Mary Lou Sapone was a young FBI operative named “Anna.” McDavid fell in love with Anna. Anna provided McDavid and friends with bomb-making recipes; at times financed their transportation, food and housing; strung along McDavid, who had hopes of a romantic relationship; and poked and prodded the group into action.

While Trutt was sentenced to about one year in prison for attempted murder and possessing bombs, McDavid, who wasn’t accused of either—only “conspiracy”—was sentenced to 20. Post-9/11, the tactics of government and corporations haven’t changed, but the stakes for activists have clearly risen.

From Bombs to Boards of Directors

The media coverage of Trutt’s case, and the role of Perceptions International, seemingly should have ruined Sapone’s career as a mole. Instead, she just switched social movements. A 2008 investigation by Mother Jones magazine revealed that Sapone—going by Mary Lou McFate, her maiden name—had been spying for years on gun control groups. She wasn’t orchestrating bomb schemes or murder plots. This time, on the payroll of the National Rifle Association, she was hired to spy on the upper echelons of the mainstream movement.

She posed as a gun-control activist for more than a decade, even landing positions on two boards of directors. As both a local and national activist, she gained access to the internal deliberations, lobbying strategies, media plans, and internal gossip of the entire movement.

Bryan Miller, the executive director of Ceasefire New Jersey, told Mother Jones that Sapone’s story “would confirm for me the way that the gun lobby works, which is no rules no question of fairness or honesty. Anything that they can do they would do to protect the profits of the gun industry.”

If one substitutes “animal research” for “gun,” the story remains the same.

What is the True Threat

The FBI has labeled the animal rights and environmental movements the “number one domestic terrorism threat.” But
the true threat posed by these movements is not violence. As we saw in the Trutt case, and recently in the McDavid case, the most serious acts of “violence” in the movement have been the work of provocateurs.

These corporations and politicians are not after the Fran Trutts of the movement. They’re not after the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, Revolutionary Cells, or any other underground group. The true target of these terrorist witch hunts is not “violent extremists,” but the movements themselves.

It’s telling that Mary Lou Sapone’s career took a drastic turn, from coercing activists into bombings to infiltrating boards of directors. Sapone and the “terrorism” firms she worked for evolved in their understanding of how to squash and repress social movements. Activists must evolve, too. These corporations and government agents might single out an individual like Fran Trutt in order to make headlines and demonize the movement. But that’s merely a single step, a stop along the way to their bigger goal. Infiltrating and sabotaging the activities of grassroots activists and direct action supporters is simply the low hanging fruit. When grasped, these corporations and government agents become bolder and start trying to hack down the entire tree.

Sapone realized this. U.S. Surgical, Perceptions International and the NRA realized this. And until mainstream animal protection and environmental groups realize this, there will be many more Fran Trutts.
6:21 AM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Sunday, March 29, 2009 

By PATRICK MADDEN
counterpunch.org
March 26, 2009

This week the Obama administration released the details of its plan to stimulate the flow of credit and reduce the cost of borrowing by subsidizing the purchase of mortgage and other debt-backed securities, the market for which has completely dried up since the onset of the crisis. The plan is designed to encourage so-called public-private-partnerships (PPPs) between private investors and the US government, in an arrangement in which the US Treasury will put up billions in low-interest, nearly risk free loans to private investors willing to purchase the toxic assets- now politely dubbed ‘legacy assets’ by the administration- that have been straining the balance sheets of the banks that hold them. The idea is that if investors can be enticed into buying these debt instruments, then the banks will be able to move them off of their balance sheets and thus be able to begin issuing new loans to consumers, in turn helping to stimulate the debt-fueled demand that has fallen off sharply since the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of the ‘originate-and-distribute’ model of debt creation.

After Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner divulged the details of the plan on the morning of 23 March, the markets responded by surging upwards, with banks leading the way: the S&P Financial index gained an impressive 19%, driving overall gains of 7% in the broader S&P 500. Optimists began suggesting that the ‘bottom’ is in sight, perhaps marking a turning point in a global recession in which 50 trillion in global wealth has faded into oblivion , stock markets have plumbed lows not seen in a decade, and global unemployment has skyrocketed.

Yet the terms of the arrangements are suggestive of the enormity of the problem. In order to entice private investors to buy these securities, the government is taking on almost all of the risk of the venture and loaning up to 97% of the purchase price of the securities to investors. In order to provide such an incentive the US Treasury will put up nearly $100 billion of its own funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and use its leverage from the Fed and the FDIC to borrow up to $900 billion which it will loan out to potential investors. The New York Times described the arrangement:

[The] crucial incentive for investors — traditional fund managers, hedge funds, private equity funds, pension funds and possibly even banks — is that the government would lend as much as 85 percent of the purchase price for each portfolio of mortgages….On top of that, the Treasury would invest one dollar of taxpayer money for every dollar of private equity capital to cover the remaining 15 percent of the portfolio’s purchase price….The biggest inducement in all the programs is the government’s willingness to provide “nonrecourse” loans to institutions that buy up the unwanted assets. A nonrecourse loan is secured only by the underlying home or building….If the borrower defaults, the government would only be able to seize the real estate. If the mortgages or the securities generate bigger losses than expected, the government and not the private investors would have to absorb the brunt of those losses.

The money generated from the TARP-backed plan could result in up to $1 trillion being handed over to investors- yet this is not all. The Troubled Asset-backed Loan Facility (TALF), will also create close to $1 trillion in loans for roughly the same purpose as the TARP fund.

How are we to explain the administration’s willingness to have the US taxpayer shoulder the risk of the TALF and TARP plans while at the same time exposing the dollar to immense inflationary pressures and potential devaluation? Amidst the recent AIG bonus scandal public outrage has been directed at the crony-capitalism of the Fed-Treasury-Wall Street nexus exemplified by figures like Geithner, whose conflicts of interest and ties to big Wall Street firms compromise their ability to make good policy decisions. Indeed, as David Harvey recently wrote on this site, the class-warfare dimension of the current crisis should not go un-noticed. The current plan will no doubt continue the trend in the redistribution of wealth toward the wealthy. We should supplement this analysis of the class-warfare dimension of the crisis with one that explains why the plan will fail, even on its own terms.

Geithner’s wager is based on three erroneous assumptions. First, that hidden in that titanic morass of debt backed securities is value. Second, that the fundamentals of the US economy are essentially sound. And third, that the foreign governments that buy up our debt will continue to do so regardless of the fiscal and monetary profligacy of the Obama administration and the huge global imbalances that have been growing for half a generation. There are significant problems with each of these assumptions, and I will deal with them in turn.
The Geithner plan assumes that the debt-securities and credit-derivatives bogging down the banks’ balance sheets are not being purchased because their values are unknown; thus, for obvious reasons, investors are loth to take on the risk these assets conceal. Nobody knows if the low prices of these securities simply reflect an unduly large risk premium, or, alternatively, if the low prices are an indication of the underlying toxicity of the asset. A recent Financial Times article describes the problem:

The scheme should clarify the degree to which current depressed prices of traded securities reflect a liquidity risk premium - absence of financing - as opposed to expected credit losses, and may lead to a new, higher price level being established…."We are trying to tease out the liquidity premium," said Sheila Bair, chairman of the FDIC. The plan could reveal that the liquidity risk premium was large - as Ms Bair expects. Or it could show that the premium was not that big and expected losses are very large.

Currently, the banks are caught between a rock and a hard place, as selling off their debt-securities at current prices would entail even more losses, while not selling them off will inevitably lead to future write-downs and the prolonging of the credit crisis. Geithner’s hope is that the huge incentives and cheap financing provided by the government will restart the market for these troubled assets, raising their prices and lowering their risk premiums.

Yet it is far from clear that the Geithner plan will be able to square this circle, as the market forces driving down prices and pushing up risk premiums may be too strong to overcome. Again, the New York Times:

Risk-taking institutional investors, like hedge funds and private equity funds, have refused to pay more than about 30 cents on the dollar for many bundles of mortgages, even if most of the borrowers are still current. But banks holding those mortgages, not wanting to book huge losses on their holdings, have often refused to sell for less than 60 cents on the dollar.…The result has been a paralyzing impasse. Banks, unwilling to sell their loans at fire-sale prices, have had less capital available to make new loans. Mortgage investors, unable to leverage their investments with borrowed money, have been unwilling to pay more than fire-sale prices.

Even if the Geithner plan is able to attract investors, a further very serious problem remains: the size and scope of the plan. According to the Financial Times, even a $1 trillion plan will remove only a portion of the debt-backed securities from the banks’ books. The IMF has estimated that US bank losses on bad assets will reach $2.2 trillion, while Nouriel Rubini has revised his estimate upward to $3.6 trillion.

The upshot is that the current plan may be able to cover only a fraction of the assets that the banks stand to lose. The hope is that once the government plan jump-starts the market for these securities the engine of debt-creation and speculation on debt-derivatives will start turning over, in turn stimulating credit-driven demand thus pulling the US and the rest of the globe out of the recession. This will probably prove to be wishful thinking, as the problem facing the global economy runs deeper than the ‘financial sector.’

In order for the Geithner plan to work it would have to be the case that the current crisis is confined to the banking and financial sector and that the rest of the economy is fundamentally sound. Assuming this, the only problem is to revive the credit markets so that banks can start lending, investors start buying banks’ debt-securities, and American consumers get back to the old routine of buying cheap foreign goods with the credit that they need to supplement their stagnating incomes. But this assumption makes the error of completely overlooking the very deep-rooted problems that lie at the heart of the global capitalist system. In a recent interview with the Asia Pacific Journal, economic historian Robert Brenner spelled out the problem, stressing that the system wide overcapacity in the global manufacturing sector has led to a declining rate of profit, slow growth in investment in plant and equipment, stagnating wage growth, and finally the expansion of huge bubbles in equities and housing. As Brenner puts it:

It’s understandable that analysts of the crisis have made the meltdown in banking and the securities markets their point of departure….From Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chair Bernanke on down, they argue that the crisis can be explained simply in terms of problems in the financial sector….[They] assert that the underlying real economy is strong, the so-called fundamentals in good shape. This could not be more misleading. The basic source of today’s crisis is the declining vitality of the advanced economies since 1973, and, especially, since 2000. Economic performance in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan has steadily deteriorated, business cycle by business cycle, in terms of every standard macroeconomic indicator -- GDP, investment, real wages, and so forth. Most telling, the business cycle that just ended, from 2001 through 2007, was -- by far -- the weakest of the postwar period, and this despite the greatest government-sponsored economic stimulus in U.S. peacetime history.

Under the Clinton administration the US turned to a policy of low interest rates and easy money policies that allowed consumers to take on unprecedented debts, driving up asset prices and increasing the ‘paper-wealth’ of holders of securities and owners of homes. The bubbles of the last ten years must be seen as a direct result of the overproduction that has plagued the manufacturing sector since the beginning of the ‘long downturn’ in 1973. By 1995, with the Reverse Plaza Accord agreements, the US effectively ceded the field in manufacturing to Japan, Germany, smaller Asian countries, and eventually China.

The US agreed to maintain a high-dollar policy and an ever-growing current account balance, which it financed by issuing credit instruments to its creditor countries: this is why China now holds close to $2 trillion in dollar denominated reserves.

As long as the US’s creditor nations continued to accept credit instruments (government and corporate bonds, etc.), and hold these in dollar denominated reserves, it is conceivable that the colossal imbalances of the global capitalist system could be maintained. This, however, is looking increasingly less likely. Recently, China has begun questioning the stability of the dollar. Here is Chinese premier Wen Jaibo, from a recent Financial Times article. ‘"We have lent a huge amount of money to the United States"…."Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am a little bit worried. I request the US to maintain its good credit, to honour its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets."’ And in a recent essay Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, expressed his concern over ‘the potential inflationary risk of the US Federal Reserve printing money,’ going so far as to call for a new reserve currency. Clearly the Chinese state is not interested in financing the US current account gap indefinitely.

Geithner’s plan to pump trillions into the markets will only exacerbate the problem of international faith in the stability of the dollar. In order to finance the purchase of the debt-backed securities, the Fed has to finance these purchases. How does it do this? A recent article by Stanford economist John Taylor explains:

The Fed can borrow the funds, or it can ask the Treasury to borrow the funds, or it can do it the old-fashioned way: create money. The Fed creates money in part by printing it but mostly by crediting banks with deposits at the Fed. Those deposits are called reserve balances and are the key component - along with currency - of base money or central bank money which ultimately brings about changes in broader money supply measures….These deposits or reserves have been exploding as the Fed has made loans and purchased securities. Six months ago reserves were $8bn, in a range appropriate for its interest rate target at the time. As of last week, reserves were nearly 100 times larger at $778bn, the result of creating money to finance loans to banks, investment banks, AIG, central banks and purchases of private securities….With last week's dramatic announcement, the Fed will have to increase reserves…to $3,365bn by the end of the year if the securities purchases are financed by money creation.



The coming year will witness three interrelated pressures put on the dollar. The first will be the current account gap, the second the enormous expansion of the money supply that will result from the bailout plan, and the third are the gargantuan budget deficits projected by the Obama administration- already estimated at $1.75 trillion for 2009.

The Geithner plan assumes that the toxic assets that the banks hold can be detoxified to re-start lending; it assumes that there is no problem with the fundamentals of the global economy; and it assumes that China and the rest of the world will have the patience and the political will to allow the US to print money at astonishing rates in order to keep the system afloat. Maybe this is not impossible, but it is extremely unlikely.
5:54 AM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Friday, March 27, 2009 




Only Silence Remains
Posted March 24, 2009, 9 PM AST

This afternoon, we reached the scene of the commercial harp seal slaughter in the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Our helicopter flew through gale force winds—slowed by massive gusts—to reach the carnage.


By the time we arrived, we had little fuel and almost no time to spend there before sundown. But it didn't take long for us to fully comprehend the atrocity happening on the ice below.


It's hard to write this, because it's hard to think about what I have just seen.


The blood was visible from the air, from 2,000 feet away. The carcasses were dumped—as they always are—left to rot in the blood of the slaughtered seals. These seals are killed for their fur in a pointless slaughter, all for vanity and fashion.


From the air, we could see the babies try to crawl away, to escape as the sealers bore down on them.


But they were no match for men armed with hakapiks and knives. In seconds, the sealers reached the defenseless pups, and beat the terrified animals to death.


We landed on the ice to observe the killing from there. We ran across the floe toward the area where the sealers were killing seals.


Seeing us, they stopped their grisly work, got back on their vessel and left the area.


The sealers know that the images of the slaughter are their undoing. They will do anything to prevent us from obtaining our evidence—including occasionally leaving a few survivors behind.


Two pups remained on the floe—alone and terrified, they were left to crawl through the blood and carcasses.


These animals were born in the beginning of March. Now, just three weeks later, they have been subjected to violence more obscene than most adult humans can fathom.


I take some small comfort in the knowledge that those two seals are still alive on that pan of ice because we were there today.


What remains of the harp seal nursery is the carnage, the devastation, and the complete absence of the sounds of the seals. What was once the best place on Earth is now one of the worst.


Rebecca Aldworth is director of Humane Society International Canada (HSI Canada). For more than a decade, she has observed firsthand Canada's commercial seal hunt—escorting more than 100 scientists, parliamentarians and journalists to the ice floes to bear witness to the largest marine mammal slaughter on Earth.
12:24 AM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Monday, March 23, 2009 


2:14 AM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Sunday, March 22, 2009 

The murder of Dutch movie director Theo van Gogh in November 2004 came just two months after his highly controversial film, Submission - about the abuse of Muslim women - was shown on national TV in Holland.




12:14 AM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Saturday, March 21, 2009 
11:35 PM 
1 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate
Saturday, March 21, 2009 


In a few short days, hundreds of seal hunters will move into the pristine harp seal nursery of Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence and club and shoot to death every defenseless seal pup in their path. This year's quota is 338,200 seals.






Help protect the seals.



4:28 PM 
0 Comments
(Add Comment) |
Translate