This just goes to show yet again that you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell the full story if it conflicts or undermines the U.S. elite’s policy goals.

I received the following from Steven L. Robinson via Green Alliance’s Green All Views Listserve.

by Joshua Holland & Raed Jarrar

AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/52135/

May 21, 2007.

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because [the resistance groups are] opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

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An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition.

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But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

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As early as 2005, the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole reported that the Sadrist movement — named after the father of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — had gathered a million signatures on a petition demanding a timetable for occupation forces to withdraw. More recently, the Arabic press reported that as many as a million Iraqis — a million Shia and Sunni working together — had protested the continuing occupation in Najaf on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad last month.

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One of the few laws left on the books from the Saddam Hussein era is one that severely limits the rights of Iraqi workers to organize. As journalist
David Bacon reported in the winter of 2003, coalition forces “escalated their efforts to paralyze Iraq’s new labor unions with a series of arrests”
that left one of the few surviving segments of Iraq’s once-vibrant secular civil society toothless.

Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up

Democrats Have Big Edge on Web

Besides TechRepublican, the group blog started two weeks ago by All, who worked as communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), there is QubeTV, founded in March as an alternative to what one of its founders, Charlie Gerow, a former Reagan campaign aide, calls “the liberal bias” of YouTube.  [my emphasis]

YouTube has a liberal Bias???!!!  YouTube???!!!  (Click here for the entire article.)   ANYBODY can post to the site!  ANYBODY!!!  By definition, it is impossible for the site to have any kind of bias!  (with the exception of “objectionable” and copyrighted material)

“But look at the short history of online politics,” Glover said. “For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment. . . . You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.“  [my emphasis]

“WHERE THE MOB RULES”???!!!  Somebody tell me that that is not an elitist and condescending remark! How typical of the Repugnicans!  (not that the Democratic leadership is much better…)

Forests Destroyed in China’s Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry

The Chinese logging boss set his sights on a thickly forested mountain just inside Burma, aiming to harvest one of the last natural stands of teak on Earth.He handed a rice sack stuffed with $8,000 worth of Chinese currency to two agents with connections in the Burmese borderlands, the men said in interviews. They used that stash to bribe everyone standing between the teak and China. In came Chinese logging crews. Out went huge logs, over Chinese-built roads.

About 2,500 miles to the northeast, Chinese and Russian crews hacked into the virgin forests of the Russian Far East and Siberia, hauling away 250-year-old Korean pines in often-illegal deals, according to trading companies and environmentalists. In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Africa and in the forests of the Amazon, loggers working beyond the bounds of the law have sent a ceaseless flow of timber to China.

Some of the largest swaths of natural forest left on the planet are being dismantled at an alarming pace to feed a global wood-processing industry centered in coastal China.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/31/AR2007033101287.html?nav=rss_email/components

Workers at Meatpacking Plant Must First Overcome Distrust

When she finished eating dinner at the party, Lenora Bruce Bailey sat for a spell on a little wood porch facing Main Street. Two years ago, she had one of the best jobs around: boxing scraps of hog meat at the nearby packing plant. Then she got sick. “They terminated me,” she said. “Took away my health insurance.”

In a nearby room, Raphael Abrego held up his purple and swollen right hand and wondered whether the same might happen to him. He was one of the better cutters on the fast-moving butcher line, but he slipped one day and injured his hand. “I can’t close it,” he said in Spanish, trying to clench bloated fingers.

Bailey is a black, native-born American. Abrego is a Latino immigrant. At Smithfield Packing Co., the largest meat-processing facility in the world, the two think of themselves as being in the same boat.

Recently, they attended a potluck to try to do something that is rare for African Americans and Latino immigrants: come together to fight for workers’ rights.
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The union’s difficulties are part of a larger story of distrust between black and Latino workers, a vast cultural divide between immigrants who illegally enter the country seeking work and African Americans who worry that immigrants will take over their jobs, communities and local political power.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300698.html?nav=trm

The ICC Plans Are Overrunning Derwood

Most of us in Derwood have done our homework on the planned intercounty connector because our town is slated to be the ICC entry point. This summer we’ve watched Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan ram through the approvals before the November elections. We’ve seen surveyors’ plastic ribbons fluttering in our woods. We’ve blanched as the state pushes forward on eminent-domain seizure of homes in nearby Cashell Estates.

But no one told us that a midnight confiscation of our private property was in the plan.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101413.html

Energy initiatives unveiled by Scottish ministers would require virtually all new property owners to produce at least 10 percent of their own electricity through a micro-renewable generating plant.

The plan is aimed at big developments such as schools, hospitals, council buildings and factories, but it will also affect large housing developments.

Solar panels, wind turbines, biofuels, photovoltaic cells, hydro-electric, ground-source heat pumps or some combination of these could would be required to fitted to any new development.  The ministers believe these additions will add to the building’s value and save electric costs in the long run.

Scotland’s plan is the most ambitious of any government so far, but it is not the first.  The English community of Woking Borough established their own local electric service beginning in 1990, using co-generation systems, photovoltaics and fuel cells. The system cut CO2 emmissions by 70% and cut energy consumption by over 40%

These are models all greens should be studying.  They are locally controlled, environmentally sound and drastically reduce reliance on hydrocarbon fuels.

The Republican House has passed a sweeping food safety act that could roll back as many as 150 state consumer and environmental regulations across the country. The industry sponsored legislation is being driven by the philosophy that 50 different sets of regulations on goods marketed nationally drains budgets and drives up costs that the consumer eventually pays. The Senate is expected to take up the bill in the coming weeks.

Already federal agencies have either overturned, stalled or weakened California’s initiatives to clean the air, block unwanted faxes, control e-mail spam, protect personal financial data from being sold and warn consumers of mercury in tuna.

The proposed food safety act would overturn Proposition 65 which requires a warning if consumers could be exposed to toxic chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects.

Governor Schwarzenegger, normally a pro-business Republican, condemns Congresses actions sayng that the Republicans have abandoned the shared power federalism promoted by Ronald Reagan. This December he blasted Congress;

Incredibly, under Republican control of Congress, states’ rights are beginning to erode again. They are telling us how to run state education, state health care, state elections and even where we can locate a liquefied natural gas plant.

Businesses seeking to limitstate regulations by turning to the federal government for watered down versions is nothing new.  Some of the landmark regulations of the progressive era were pushed by businesses because states were passing more radical versions.

The Republican mantra of states rights only comes to the fore when the federal government starts passing regulations that businesses don’t like.

Bills Vary Just Steps Apart in Md., D.C.

Is this stupidity or is this malice?

On the District side, Pepco’s rates will rise 12 percent to $1,280 for a typical annual bill. In Maryland, where the utility’s customers are in most of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, rates will increase 39 percent to $1,577.

Allegheny Power customers in northern Montgomery, meanwhile, won’t have any increase this year and will pay $908 for the same amount of electricity.

Click here here for link.

Hey folks,

The wonderful people over at WordPress have a new version of the blog software that I installed and upgraded to. It has nice new editing features that some of you will notice if you add an article to the blog. It should all be mostly self explanatory, and I don’t see any issues with the stunningly easy upgrade.  If you don’t like the new editing features, you can turn them off and go back to the old one’s in your user profile.
A big additional feature is that this version supports some software that should filter out the spam advertising that we’ve been getting lately.

If you see spam, let me know, and I can mark it as spam. The whole system is a collaborative automated filtering system. This means that all comments are compared to spam from a whole bunch of blogs on the web (I think it is anyone running the new version of the Wordpress software.) Once one member of this club has marked something as spam, all the other members automatically benefit from the identification and any spam that matches the pattern is automatically rejected.
The whole open source (WordPress is free, open source software) thing is tremendously Green in its approach. Grass roots thinking locally (ie creating something for one’s own use) is shared with others, and the community as a whole benefits. The price is right, and the software actually evolves. Each user is empowered because he can dive into the guts of the software code and fix or fiddle to his/her heart’s content, the only stipulation is that his/her change is made available back to the community as a whole, completing the evolutionary cycle.

Wonderful model.

Oh, and let me know, by commenting here or emailing me, if you see anything about the blog that doesn’t look right to you. Maybe the upgrade didn’t work as flawlessly as I think.

Government Is a Family and Neighborly Matter for Port Tobacco’s 18 Residents
This reminds me so much of my experiences with the Green Party (although the analogy can only be taken so far, since the town is obviously — as a whole — more conservative than the Greens are). But even so, the similarities are interesting. Specifically, just how informally things are run. Here in Montgomery, the only hard and fast rules that seem to be in place are that “officers” are elected every year and that decisions are reached at by consensus (I put officers in quotes because being an officer only entitles you to make decisions if no one shows up for a meeting and allows one to sound more authoritative when speaking with the media. Although, come to think of it, I don’t think that the media have ever contacted the Montgomery Greens…)

“Folks in the town tell us, ‘This is what we have to do.’ And I say, ‘Okay,’ ” said Mayor John T.E. Hyde, technically the president of the Village Commission. “I just do what I’m told.”

Hyde, a mortician, said he is perhaps the only Democrat in Maryland’s smallest municipality (population 18), but that will not prevent him from staying in office this election spring.
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Besides, no one else wants the job. “If someone campaigned for it, I’d say, go right ahead and take it — be my guest,” Hyde said.

Village Commissioner Dorothy Barbour put it this way: “We don’t work like your larger places.”

But in the verdant 60 acres of Port Tobacco, with its eight homes and one-room schoolhouse, one question always arises: Can a small town be too small?
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As the mayor of a place where nothing much happens, Hyde has developed a certain single-mindedness for what he wants to accomplish. This philosophy, he admitted, conflicts with his occasional absent-mindedness.

“Before I became mayor, I wasn’t paying attention” to the town, he said. “I’m hardly paying attention now.”

Click here for link.