Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Back in 1980 Paul Ehrlich made a famous bet with Julian L. Simon. They bet $1,000 that five resources (of Ehrlich’s choosing) would be more expensive in 10 years. Ehrlich lost: 10 years later every one of the resources had declined in price by an average of 40 percent.

The wager reached legendary proportions among conservative economists and pundits. Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute gloated that “Julian Simon’s views on population and natural resources are so triumphant that they are almost mainstream. No one can rationally look at the evidence today and still claim, for example, that we are running out of food or energy.”

But now it appears that Ehrlich was not wrong, only two decades too early. Since 2000, the price of energy and metal resources have been soaring. Prices for copper, iron ore, lead, crude oil, and uranium have more than doubled in five years. Others have shown significant gains as well. The markets are signalling that we are reaching the limits of growth.

As Stephen Moore notes,

Among the many prominent converts to the Julian Simon world view on population and environmental issues were Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Despite howls of protest from the international population control lobby, in 1984 the Reagan administration adopted Simon’s position—that the world is not overpopulated and that people are resource creators, not resource destroyers—at the United Nations Population Conference in Mexico City. The Reaganites called it “supply-side demographics.” Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, Simon traveled by invitation to the Vatican to explain his theories on population growth. A year later Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter urged nations to treat their people “as productive assets.”

While I would contend that it is not so much population growth that is driving the problem as it is consumption, and therefore very much a western problem, the almost unbelievable naivety of the “supply side demographics model is going to come back to haunt us soon.

Here’s the Bush economy for you…

In the District, the richest families had incomes 12 times higher than the poorest ones early this decade, compared with seven times higher in the troubled economy of the early 1980s. The major reason for the widening gap: The highest incomes are growing more sharply than the lowest ones. Incomes at the top fifth rose 81 percent during those two decades, to an average of $157,700. Those at the bottom went up 3 percent, to an average of $12,700.

Click here for link.

The current discovery, reported in today’s issue of the journal Nature in a paper signed by 73 researchers, took advantage of a relatively new technique called gravitational microlensing, based on Einstein’s precept that light from a distant star is bent by the gravitational pull of intervening stars, or other large bodies, on its way toward Earth.

The “lensing incident” distorts the incoming starlight, causing it to brighten for about a month. If the intervening star has an orbiting planet — even a small one — it will cause a supplemental “blip” in brightness. To analyze these planets, astronomers must observe the microlensing event continuously for as long as it lasts.

Click here for link.

PFOA — a key processing agent in making nonstick and stain-resistant materials — has been linked to cancer and birth defects in animals and is in the blood of 95 percent of Americans, including pregnant women. It has also been found in the blood of marine organisms and Arctic polar bears.
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“This is one of those days when the Environmental Protection Agency is at its best. With its announcement today, the EPA is challenging an entire industry to err on the side of precaution and public safety, and invent new ways of doing business,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization. “As harshly as we have singled out DuPont for criticism for its past handling of PFOA pollution, today we want to single out and commend the company and acknowledge its leadership going forward.”

Click here for link.

‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Documents His Efforts To Raise Alarm on Effects of Global Warming

Among the film’s lessons: Earth’s glaciers are melting, the polar bears are screwed, each year sets new heat records. Al Gore sometimes flies coach. He also schleps his own bags.

Click here for link.

There’s a line I love (Granted, from a Clint Eastwood flick that I’ve never seen) that goes:

“There comes a time in a man’s life when he has to ask himself this question: Do I feel lucky? [long pause] Well, do you feel lucky, punk?”

If you like or — as in my case — love it, then click here and read the Jack Bauer speech. I love it (even though I’ve never seen the show).

http://counterpunch.org/roberts01242006.html

January 24, 2006

Unfathomed Dangers in Patriot Act Reauthorization
Patriot Police
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

A provision in the “Patriot Act” creates a new federal police force with power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.

Go to House Report 109-333 -USA PATRIOT IMPROVEMENT AND REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005 and check it out for yourself. Sec. 605 reads:

“There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the ‘United States Secret Service Uniformed Division’.”

This new federal police force is “subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

The new police are empowered to “make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.”

The new police are assigned a variety of jurisdictions, including “an event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance” (SENS).

“A special event of national significance” is neither defined nor does it require the presence of a “protected person” such as the president in order to trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the police themselves, can place the SENS designation on any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an event, the new federal police are empowered to keep out and to arrest people at their discretion.

The language conveys enormous discretionary and arbitrary powers. What is “an offense against the United States”? What are “reasonable grounds”?

You can bet that the Alito/Roberts court will rule that it is whatever the executive branch says.

The obvious purpose of the act is to prevent demonstrations at Bush/Cheney events. However, nothing in the language limits the police powers from being used only in this way. Like every law in the US, this law also will be expansively interpreted and abused. It has dire implications for freedom of association and First Amendment rights. We can take for granted that the new federal police will be used to suppress dissent and to break up opposition. The Brownshirts are now arming themselves with a Gestapo.

Many naive Americans will write to me to explain that this new provision in the reauthorization of the “Patriot Act” is necessary to protect the president and other high officials from terrorists or from harm at the hands of angry demonstrators: “No one else will have anything to fear.” Some will accuse me of being an alarmist, and others will say that it is unpatriotic to doubt the law’s good intentions.

Americans will write such nonsense despite the fact that the president and foreign dignitaries are already provided superb protection by the Secret Service. The naive will not comprehend that the president cannot be endangered by demonstrators at SENS at which the president is not present. For many Americans, the light refuses to turn on.

In Nazi Germany did no one but Jews have anything to fear from the Gestapo?

By Stalin’s time Lenin and Trotsky had eliminated all members of the “oppressor class,” but that did not stop Stalin from sending millions of “enemies of the people” to the Gulag.

It is extremely difficult to hold even local police forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a federal police protected by Homeland Security and the president?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: pcroberts@postmark.net

Yet IN SPITE OF THIS, the Ehrlich Administration WILL NOT issue any health warnings!

The agency hopes to pinpoint the carcinogen by next year if it finds money for additional work. [my emphasis] The initial study was partly paid for by the South River Federation, a nonprofit group that monitors the 12-mile river, which flows through Anne Arundel County into the bay just south of Annapolis.
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Despite the alarming findings, Richard McIntire, a Maryland Department of the Environment spokesman, said the state is not likely to issue a catfish consumption advisory for the South River. “This has been a known problem for quite some time,” McIntire said.

“If you catch any fish that looks strange,” he added, “throw it back.”

The state also has no plans for advisories on swimming and other recreational use, based on cancer findings, he said.

Click here for link.

What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must challenge the terms under which Rove and Bush would conduct it. Imagine, for example, directly taking on that line about Sept. 11. Does having a “post-9/11 worldview” mean allowing Bush to do absolutely anything he wants, any time he wants, without having to answer to the courts, Congress or the public? Most Americans — including a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans — reject such an anti-constitutional view of presidential power. If Democrats aren’t willing to take on this issue, what’s the point of being an opposition party?[my emphasis]

Click here for link.

It sounds like it must be some sort of joke, but on the same day that Ford Motor Company announced they had cut 10,000 jobs last year and were going to cut 30,000 more, they also announced that “repatriation of foreign earning pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 resulted in a permanent tax savings of about $250 million.”

The “Jobs Creation Act,” sidgned despite objections from the Treasury Department and Council of Economic Advisors, gave U.S. companies a one time opportunity in 2005 to repatriate profits made overseas and pay only 5.25 percent tax rather than the usual 35 percent.

The only problem was that the act creates no jobs.

American Enterprise Institute fellow Phillip L. Swagel, formerly chief of staff of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors said that “you might as well have taken a helicopter over 90210 and pushed money out the door.”

Not funny?

Well, I guess the joke’s on us.