Rove to Testify Before Congress … Hah, Hah, Hah

Posted on May 23, 2008 by RagBlog

Man, just read what this piece says: “… Conyers had negotiated with Rove’s attorneys for more than a year …” This says everything I need to know about the meaning of Congress.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

House Committee Subpoenas Karl Rove
By Lara Lakes Jordan / May 22, 2008

WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday subpoenaed President Bush’s former chief political adviser, Karl Rove, to testify about whether the White House improperly meddled with the Justice Department.

Accusations of politics influencing decisions at the department led to the resignation last year of Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.

It’s unclear whether Rove will ever be forced to testify. The White House refuses to let him or other top aides testify about private conversations with Bush, citing executive privilege to block Congress’ demands.

The subpoena orders Rove to appear before the House panel on July 10. Lawmakers want to ask him about the White House’s role in firing nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 and the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, a Democrat.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers had negotiated with Rove’s attorneys for more than a year over whether he would testify voluntarily.

“It is unfortunate that Mr. Rove has failed to cooperate with our requests,” Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement. “Although he does not seem the least bit hesitant to discuss these very issues weekly on cable television and in the print news media, Mr. Rove and his attorney have apparently concluded that a public hearing room would not be appropriate.”

Conyers added: “Unfortunately, I have no choice today but to compel his testimony on these very important matters.”

Both Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, declined to comment.

Read it here. / AOL News

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Fox News : A Rogue’s Gallery

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Fox News’ Criminal Pundits
By James Thindwa

Conservatives have created a two-tier system of accountability: one for progressives, the other for themselves and their claimed moral rectitude. Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine The sensationalist media inquest into Sen. Barack Obama’s associations has cheapened the national debate. It has also exposed the hypocrisy and double standard of the conservative media.

Fox News, which has championed this “guilt by association,” questions Obama’s fitness for office because of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

But if Fox News truly believed in guilt-by-association, the network would have severed ties with some of its pundits and consultants.

Mark Fuhrman — of O.J. Simpson infamy — is now one of its talking heads. Fuhrman, if you remember, was convicted of lying under oath during Simpson’s murder trial when he denied having used the word “nigger.” For right-wingers unburdened with racial sensitivity, Fuhrman’s easy use of the “n” word was probably not a big deal. And for Fox News, flouting the law is OK as long as the cause is right. O.J. Simpson was guilty, legalities be damned.

G. Gordon Liddy, sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate break-in (he served almost five), enjoys a post-prison celebrity status among conservatives. Liddy turns up on Fox News as a respected commentator, and has cultivated a fan base as a right-wing talk-radio jock. While Fox’s pundits froth at the mouth condemning Ayers for his membership in the Weather Underground 40 years ago, Liddy, whose crimes created a constitutional crisis, is embraced and celebrated as a conservative hero.

Conservatives have created a two-tier system of accountability: one for progressives, the other for themselves and their claimed moral rectitude.

How about Oliver North? His claim to fame was the Iran-Contra affair in the ’80s, when he illegally sold weapons to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and transferred the money to Nicaraguan Contras, in violation of U.S. law. He was charged with 16 felonies and convicted of three, which were later overturned because the prosecution had used testimony given under a grant of immunity. For his mockery of the Constitution, North became a right-wing folk hero, eventually landing a job at Fox News as an Iraq War correspondent. He was subsequently given his own television show, “War Stories.”

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is now a paid commentator on Fox News. Though Rove has not been convicted of any crimes, he has had an uneasy relationship with ethics and the law: reportedly the mastermind of the political firing of nine U.S. attorneys; allegedly outing CIA operative Valerie Plame; spreading rumors in 2000 about Sen. John McCain having fathered a daughter with a black woman; and selling the Iraq War for political advantage. But to Fox News and its conservative base, Rove is a hero.

William Kristol is not a former convict, but as salesman-in-chief for the Iraq War he has committed crimes of conscience. Kristol has a permanent seat on Fox News Sunday. Despite his discredited claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programs and his many attempts to link Hussein with al Qaeda, Kristol continues to be featured as an expert on the war.

Bill O’Reilly, the big daddy of Fox News, reached a settlement in November 2004 with a colleague who had reportedly recorded him attempting to have phone sex with her as he masturbated with a vibrator. This history contradicts the self-righteous protestations in his book Cultural Warriors and his screeds against “liberal” wrongdoers.

Newt Gingrich, Fox News’ most erudite and self-righteous pundit, has a checkered past that includes reportedly serving divorce papers to his cancer-stricken wife while she lay in her hospital bed. The former House Speaker also admitted to an affair with an aide while he was still married, even as he championed President Clinton’s impeachment. Most liberals believe these private matters should not disqualify people from public office. However, the pedantic moralists at Fox News cannot exempt themselves from the standards they apply to others. Their hypocrisy needs exposing.

Conservatives have created a two-tier system of accountability: one for progressives, the other for themselves. But their claimed moral rectitude belies an indulgent attitude toward questionable legal and ethical conduct. Mark Fuhrman, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North betrayed the rule of law that conservatives like to crow about.

Fox News and its right-wing functionaries threaten the fabric of our electoral system. The push back should start with denying them legitimacy. That means exposing their hypocritical invocation of the “rule of law,” challenging their simplistic “anything goes” standard of patriotism and denouncing their use of guilt-by-association.

Source. / In These Times

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Psycho Christians, McCain, and the Media

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Robert Mitchum as crazed preacher in “Night of the Hunter.”

UNION CITY, Calif. — Republican John McCain rejected the months-old endorsement of an influential Texas televangelist after an audio recording surfaced in which the preacher said God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.

“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee’s endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well,” the presidential candidate said in a statement issued Thursday.

The Huffington Post / May 22, 2008

Why the press gives McCain a pass for consorting with batshit holy men, but condemns Obama to talk-show hell for the same sin.
By Gary Kamiya / May 20, 2008

John McCain has some seriously screwed-up holy men surrounding him. First, there’s the Rev. John Hagee, a hate-monger and certifiable loon who believes that Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment on New Orleans for planning a gay parade, calls Catholicism a “false cult system” that conspired with Hitler to exterminate the Jews, and believes that America’s divine duty is to destroy Iran. Then there’s the Rev. Rod Parsley, who garnishes his bigoted theology by calling Islam “the greatest religious enemy of our civilization and the world” and saying that Muhammad was “a mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.”

These psycho Christians make Robert Mitchum’s sociopathic traveling preacher in “The Night of the Hunter” (the guy with “love” tattooed on one hand and “hate” on the other) look like St. Francis of Assisi. They are undiluted bigots who espouse beliefs just as twisted as those promulgated by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan — and far more toxic and extreme than those held by Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Yet, as many media critics have noted, no major-network interviewer is demanding that McCain denounce Hagee or Parsley, as Tim Russert infamously demanded again and again that Obama do of Farrakhan during a prime-time debate. No cable channel is ranting 24/7 about McCain’s failure to disavow these extremist bigots, and speculating that his ties to Hagee and Parsley could cost him the election. Considering that McCain desperately needs Hagee and Parsley to deliver votes in key states like Ohio, this is no small matter.

It’s true that neither Hagee nor Parsley was McCain’s pastor and personal spiritual advisor, as Wright was for Obama. Obama’s personal relationship with Wright raised more legitimate questions than were raised by McCain’s actively seeking Hagee’s endorsement. But especially during the second, more serious outburst of Wright-hysteria, after Wright went off the reservation at the National Press Club, it was obvious that the story had really shifted to Wright, not Obama. The brouhaha was a media ritual, in which Obama was required to sacrifice an unseemly political ally as a kind of campaign station of the cross. Obama had already given his now-famous speech about race in Philadelphia, and no one seriously believed that he shared Wright’s views. In any case, even if Hagee and Parsley had been McCain’s pastors, it’s hard to imagine that the media would have attacked him as relentlessly as it has attacked Obama over Wright and Farrakhan.

The media’s double standard is all about deference to perceived mainstream norms, and tiptoeing around the Christian right. Despite their cartoonish views, the media treats Hagee and Parsley as quasi-mainstream figures, which makes McCain’s relationship with them non-newsworthy. The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus. The issue isn’t that journalists share Hagee and Parsley’s views so much as that they know that they are widely held, which makes them reluctant to acknowledge how truly outrageous they are. After years of nodding at the whacked-out likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the media has, to borrow Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase, defined right-wing religious deviancy down. More or less “orthodox” Christian-right insanity, of the sort espoused by Hagee and Parsley, is familiar and normal, whereas black-church radicalism, with its ties to left-wing liberation theology, is not. In 2000, 45 percent of the population told Gallup they were either born-again or evangelical Christians.

The question of “newsworthiness” is one of the blind spots of conventional journalism. Since right-wing religious leaders have been endorsing conservative Republican candidates for decades (Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell endorsed Ronald Reagan; Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani; a small church in North Carolina kicked out members who voted for John Kerry), when another one does it, it’s a dog-bites-man story. Mainstream editors and reporters pose as hard-bitten realists, but they are in fact reluctant to deviate from pack thinking. For the media to suddenly go after McCain on Hagee as hard as it has gone after Obama on Farrakhan and Wright would represent, in their eyes, a “controversial” rejection of the way things have always been done.

This echo-chamber effect, in which a story is a story because it has been a story before, highlights the critical importance of precedent. From the beginning, the media didn’t go hard after extreme figures on the religious right because those extreme figures have major constituencies. The taboo against criticizing Christianity also plays a crucial role: Extreme, even demented beliefs are seen as untouchable so long as they are part of what is seen as mainstream evangelical Christianity. Of course this taboo does not extend to criticizing left-wing Christianity, à la Wright. If some public figure said that the earthquake in China was caused by the wrath of Zeus, who was offended because women’s rights had reduced the number of compliant virgins available for him to deflower, any politician who consorted with him would be forced to repudiate him. But Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Hagee and other such figures have said essentially the same thing and gotten a pass. Afraid of coming across as arrogant elitists who don’t understand or respect the faith of “real” Americans, the media has pulled its punches on the Christian right for years.

Patriotism and Islamophobia also contribute to the blank check handed to the religious right. Hagee and Parsley may be barking mad, but they wave the flag and denounce Islam. In the age of George W. Bush, that qualifies them as solidly in the American mainstream.

In fact, the media’s failure to subject Hagee and Parsley to the same scrutiny that they have given to Wright and Farrakhan is closely related to its colossal failures in covering Bush’s “war on terror.” The media failed in the run-up to the war in Iraq in large part because, under the patriotic pressure of 9/11, it followed the wartime norm of swallowing the administration line. Its shortcomings with Hagee and Parsley reflect the same internalized self-censorship.

One could argue that neither McCain nor Obama should be subjected to this “gotcha” game in which the media demands that a candidate prove his character and values by publicly excommunicating a problematic political ally. But the fact is that political news coverage today is driven by sensationalism, and candidates are subjected to simplistic tests, and that’s not going to change. So if Obama is forced to answer for Wright’s off-the-wall black nationalist Christianity, it’s only fair that McCain should be forced to answer for Hagee’s even more off-the-wall Christian right looniness as well.

Yet the coverage has been anything but fair — not just because of the media’s fear of going after nutty Christians, but because everything about Obama is unprecedented and therefore “sensational.” He’s not only the first-ever black presidential front-runner, but the first to confront a loose-cannon black pastor who said, “God damn America.” It bleeds! It leads! Tear up the front page! Call in the pundits to opine! By contrast, McCain’s mealy-mouthed half-criticisms of Hagee’s outrageous statements, and Hagee’s transparently disingenuous apology for attacking Catholics, are so familiar as to be sleep-inducing. There’s practically nothing that McCain can say or do that can make news the way that Obama does just by walking down the street.

By incessantly attacking Obama as strange and scary, which is certain to be his strategy, McCain will be tapping into this already existing media bias toward sensationalism. His and Bush’s outrageous charges that Obama is an “appeaser” are intended to play into this, and much worse is sure to be coming (get ready for a revival of “he’s a Muslim” smears from proxies who can be disavowed). Whether the press will be able to find the backbone to reveal the cynical emptiness of those charges, and bring aggressive scrutiny even to the old, familiar, patriotic, war-supporting, flag-waving ethos represented by McCain, may go a long way toward determining who our next president is.

Source. / Salon.com

Mother Jones magazine broke the story about Rev. Parsley and Islam. Please see McCain’s Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam .

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Reflections on the Question of Appeasement

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Financier Prescott Bush and son George H.W. Bush.

The Bushes and Hitler’s Appeasement
By Robert Parry

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naïve saying “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided,” then what should be said about Bush’s grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the “Trading with the Enemy Act.”

So, perhaps instead of holding up Sen. Borah to ridicule, Bush might have acknowledged in his May 15 speech that his forebears also were blind to the dangers of Hitler.

Bush might have noted that his family’s wealth, which fueled his own political rise, was partly derived from Nazi collaboration and possibly from slave labor provided by Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

A more honest speech before the Knesset – on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding – might have contained an apology to the Jewish people from a leading son of the Bush family for letting its greed contribute to Nazi power and to the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, there was just the jab at Sen. Borah, who died in 1940.

President Bush apparently saw no reason to remind the world of a dark chapter from the family history. After all, those ugly facts mostly disappeared from public consciousness soon after World War II.

Protected by layers of well-connected friends, Prescott Bush brushed aside the Nazi scandal and won a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut, which enabled him to start laying the foundation for the family’s political dynasty.

In recent years, however, the archival records from the pre-war era have been assembled, drawing from the Harriman family papers at the Library of Congress, documents at the National Archives, and records from war-crimes trials after Germany’s surrender.

Managers for the Powerful

One can trace the origins of this story back more than a century to the emergence of Samuel Bush, George W. Bush’s great-grandfather, as a key manager for a set of powerful American business families, including the Rockefellers and the Harrimans. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush Family Chronicles: The Patriarchs.”]

That chapter took an important turn in 1919 when investment banker George Herbert Walker teamed up with Averell Harriman, scion to a railroad fortune, to found a new investment banking firm, W.A. Harriman Company.

The Harriman firm was backed by the Rockefellers’ National City Bank and the Morgan family’s Guaranty Trust. The English-educated Walker assisted in assembling the Harriman family’s overseas business investments.

In 1921, Walker’s favorite daughter, Dorothy, married Samuel Bush’s son Prescott, a Yale graduate and a member of the school’s exclusive Skull and Bones society. Handsome and athletic, admired for his golf and tennis skills, Prescott Bush was a young man with the easy grace of someone born into the comfortable yet competitive world of upper-crust contacts.

Three years later, Dorothy gave birth to George Herbert Walker Bush in Milton, Massachusetts.
Lifted by the financial boom of the 1920s, Prescott and Dorothy Bush were on the rise. By 1926, George Herbert Walker had brought his son-in-law in on a piece of the Harriman action, hiring him as a vice president in the Harriman banking firm.

By the mid-Thirties, Prescott Bush had become a managing partner at the merged firm of Brown Brothers Harriman. The archival records also show that Brown Brothers Harriman served as the U.S. financial service arm for German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early funder of the Nazi Party.

Thyssen, an admirer of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s, joined the Nazi Party in 1931 when it was still a fringe organization. He helped bail the struggling party out with financial help, even providing its headquarters building in Munich.

Meanwhile, Averell Harriman had launched the Hamburg-Amerika line of steamships to facilitate the bank’s dealings with Germany, and made Prescott Bush a director. The ships delivered fuel, steel, coal, gold and money to Germany as Hitler was consolidating his power and building his war machine.

Other evidence shows that Prescott Bush served as the director of the Union Banking Corp. of New York, which represented Thyssen’s interests in the United States and was owned by a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands.

As a steel magnate, Thyssen was amassing a fortune as Hitler rearmed Germany. Documents also linked Bush to Thyssen’s Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, which was based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border and exploited slave labor from Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. But records at the National Archives do not spell out exactly when Bush’s connection ended or what he knew about the business details.

In 1941, Thyssen had a falling out with Hitler and fled to France where he was captured. Much of Thyssen’s empire went under the direct control of the Nazis, but even that did not shatter the business ties that existed with Prescott Bush and Harriman’s bank.

It wasn’t until August 1942 that newspaper stories disclosed the secretive ties between Union Banking Corp. and Nazi Germany.

After an investigation, the U.S. government seized the property of the Hamburg-Amerika line and moved against affiliates of the Union Banking Corp. In November 1942, the government seized the assets of the Silesian-American Corp. [For more details, see an investigative report by the U.K. Guardian, Sept. 25, 2004.]

No Kiss of Death

For most public figures, allegations of trading with the enemy would have been a political kiss of death, but the disclosures barely left a lipstick smudge on Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush and other business associates implicated in the Nazi business dealings.

“Politically, the significance of these dealings – the great surprise – is that none of it seemed to matter much over the next decade or so,” wrote Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty.

“A few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not be stopped from becoming federal mutual security administrator in 1951 or winning election as governor of New York in 1954. … Nor would Republican Prescott Bush (who was elected senator from Connecticut in 1952) and his presidential descendants be hurt in any of their future elections.”

Indeed, the quick dissipation of the Nazi financial scandal was only a portent of the Bush family’s future. Unlike politicians of lower classes, the Bushes seemed to travel in a bubble impervious to accusations of impropriety, since the Eastern Establishment doesn’t like to think badly of its own. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

To this day – as President Bush showed by mocking the long-forgotten Sen. Borah and then wielding the Nazi “appeasement” club against Barack Obama and other Democrats – the assumption remains that the bubble will continue to protect the Bush family name.

However, the evidence from dusty archives suggests that the Bush family went way beyond appeasement of Adolf Hitler to aiding and abetting the Nazis.

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.]

Source. / Consortiumnews / Posted May 18, 2008

Also see How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power. / Guardian, U.K.

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D. Zachary Cares About Vets, Other Victims of War

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

For GI’s, best cure is prevention
By Doug Zachary / The Rag Blog

[Rag Blogger Doug Zachary of Veterans for Peace originally posted the followinig as a comment to Vets Getting Shaft from Veterans Affairs by Maya Schenwar and Matt Renner, posted earlier today on The Rag Blog.]

Working class youth across the country have been conned into participating in this war, and they are being systematically cast aside upon their return home. There is nothing new about this behavior on the part of the government. From the so-called Revolutionary War on, veterans have been consistently denied their “rights”.

Veterans For Peace has been receiving a barrage of information of this sort for a couple of weeks now. Just in the past two days, Ms. Perez at Waco has been nailed as responsible for issuing “orders” to under-diagnose PTSD. Before she came to light, and throughout this war and occupation, we have seen several ways in which the Pentagon and the VA were working separately and together to deny soldiers their deserved care.

Sadly, even when a “proper” diagnosis is made, the quality of the care rendered at most VA facilities is lacking. The solutions used are usually drugs, drugs, and more drugs; nothing in the way of discernment or consciousness-building regarding the experiences of the soldiers. Just drug them and shut them the fuck up! This helps to ensure that future generations of young people can be fooled into acting against the interests of their own social class and persuaded to give up body, mind, and spirit to serve the Ultra-rich.

Some people in VFP make this their primary issue; Bill Perry in Philly comes to mind as the best among us in getting the Iraq vet through the maze at the VA. MY efforts are aimed at awakening the veterans and guiding them to the Iraq Veterans Against the War and to other peace groups. From my 39 years among Peace Veterans, I have learned that the best, and perhaps only, cure for PTSD, is a life dedicated to righting the wrongs by working for peace and justice. We are talking about a wound of the Mind and heart; it is about consciousness.

Frankly, my concern is for all the victims of the war and occupation, especially the Iraqi citizens who are suffering at the hands of these soldiers. The absolutely best “cure” is prevention. That is why Austin VFP is at the gates of Fort Hood and in the cafes and bars in Killeen, “armed” with information (including the likelihood that, if wounded, they will be under-treated) trying to open the minds and hearts of these vets before they deploy, or re-deploy, or re-re-deploy. Other members of Austin VFP are deployed in the schools in our city, along with non-veteran members of Nonmilitary options for Youth, working, preventitively, to reduce the incidence of PTSD.

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Texas Rebuked Over Seizure of Mormon Children

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints leave the Tom Green County Courthouse in San Angelo, Texas, on Friday, April 18, 2008. Photo by Tony Gutierrez / AP.

Appeals court: state had no right to seize sect kids
By Lisa Sandberg and Terri Langford / May 22, 2008

SAN ANGELO — A Texas appeals court ruled today that a San Angelo judge exceeded her discretion when she ordered the state to take custody of children from a polygamist sect.

The order by a panel of the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin gave State District Judge Barbara Walther 10 days to vacate her order, which applied to more than 460 children.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the decision means the children will be returned right away to the custody of their parents, followers of a breakaway Mormon sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

A spokesman for Texas’ Child Protective Services said attorneys were reviewing the order. “Any decision regarding an appeal will be made later,” Patrick Crimmins said.

Two FLDS mothers whose children were placed in foster care learned of the decision from reporters on their way to the courthouse in San Angelo, unaware of the 3rd Court ruling or that child custody status hearings that started here this week had been canceled in its wake.

“Hurray. Praise the Lord,” said Sarah Barlow, 45, who has two children in foster care. “We’re grateful for this.”

Ilene Jeffs, 45, who has three children in foster care, said, “We’re grateful for anything that’s positive.”

FLDS spokesman Rod Parker said families not involved in the lawsuit ruled on today will be filing paperwork to ensure they “get the benefits of this ruling.”

Cynthia Martinez, a spokeswoman for Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, which represented 48 mothers in the custody suit against the state, said, “We’re extremely happy with the ruling.”

Martinez said she wasn’t certain how soon the children might be returned to the 1,700-acre Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado

“The way that the courts have ignored the legal rights of these mothers is ridiculous,” said Texas Rural Legal Aid attorney Julie Balovich, who also represents FLDS mothers. “It was about time a court stood up and said that was has been happening to these families is wrong.”

“It is a great day for families in the state of Texas,” Balovich added later. “It’s a great day for justice in Texas. It was the right decision.”

In the decision, the 3rd Court ruled that CPS failed to provide any evidence that the children were in imminent danger and acted hastily in removing them from their families.

The agency had argued that the children on the ranch near Eldorado were either abused or at risk of abuse. The Texas Family Code allows a judge to consider whether the “household” to which a child would be returned includes a person who has sexually abused another child. Child welfare officials alleged that the polygamist sect’s practice of marrying underage girls to older men places all its children at risk of sexual abuse.

According to the court, “The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the Department’s witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger.”

It stated, “Removing children from their homes on an emergency basis before fully litigating the issue of whether the parents should continue to have custody of the children is an extreme measure.”

“The danger must be to the physical health or safety to the child,” the appeals court wrote. “The Department (CPS) did not present any evidence of danger to the physical health or safety of any male children or any female children who had not reached puberty.”

The state can either ask the Texas Supreme Court to stay the order or comply by returning the children to their parents, said Scott McCown, a former judge and executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

McCown said the appeals court is not saying the children could not be removed from their families, only that Walther had overstepped her authority by issuing an emergency order. He said protective services could still remove the children after a full trial.

But McCown said there is a very real risk that if the children are returned to their parents they will be moved to another state, Canada or Mexico and be outside the jurisdiction of Texas’ protective custody.

“One of the real dangers is flight, and the court doesn’t address that at all,” McCown said.

Dallas attorney Susan Hays, an ad litem attorney representing a 3-year-old girl, said also said the state’s options were to ask for a stay or comply. She said the stay could be sought either from the 3rd Court or the Texas Supreme Court.

In today’s order, she said, “What they’ve been told to do is start over, and do it right.”

Parker said, “All of the families want to express their thanks to Texas Rural Legal Aid for achieving this wonderful result. They’re ecstatic. They’re looking forward to being reunited with their children.”

Source. / Houston Chronicle

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Contempt for the Plight of the Common Man

Posted on May 22, 2008 by RagBlog

Let’s be clear about the contempt that corporate Amerikkka holds for you, me, and all those trying to make their way. This example is one of thousands a day that shows that we are beneath them, they have no time for our petty concerns, and we would be better served by staying silent. It is time to bring an end to capitalism in all its criminality and contempt for us. Up the revolution !!

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Countrywide CEO’s E-Mail Draws Fire
May 22, 2008

CALABASAS, Calif. – The chairman of beleaguered Countrywide Financial Corp. raised eyebrows and tempers with his snippy reply to an e-mail plea from a man who said he was in danger of losing his home.

“Disgusting,” Angelo Mozilo wrote in his inadvertent reply to an e-mail from Daniel Bailey Jr. who had asked the company to modify terms of his adjustable-rate mortgage.

Bailey said he didn’t fully understand the terms, was wrongly told he could refinance after a year and was on the verge of losing his home of 16 years because of unaffordable payments.

Bailey’s e-mail went to 20 Countrywide addresses. He used language from a form letter on the Web site LoanSafe.org, which offers advice to borrowers in trouble.

Countrywide said mass e-mails have flooded its inboxes and disrupted operations.

“This is unbelievable,” Mozilo wrote Tuesday. “Most of these letters now have the same wording. Obviously they are being counseled by some other person or by the Internet. Disgusting.”

Mozilo apparently clicked “reply” instead of “forward,” sending his comments back to Bailey.

Bailey posted the response on a LoanSafe forum, touching off a furor on housing Web sites.

A comment posted on loanworkout.org said Mozilo’s e-mail was “a perfect example of the ‘help’ they can expect to receive when contacting their lenders.”

Another comment on the Web site read: “If borrowers want the freedom to take out credit for hundreds of thousands of dollars, they are equally responsible to not sign something they don’t understand.”

Late Tuesday, Countrywide issued a statement saying the company and Mozilo “regret any misunderstanding caused by his inadvertent response to an e-mail by Mr. Bailey. Countrywide is actively working to help borrowers like Mr. Bailey keep their homes.”

Last week, a federal judge ruled that a shareholder lawsuit against Mozilo and other Countrywide executives and directors should go to trial. The plaintiffs claim the top officials failed to provide enough oversight of the lender and misled shareholders about the company’s true financial state.

According to congressional figures, Countrywide lost $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2007 and another $422 million in the fourth quarter as the subprime mortgage crisis hit. The company’s stock fell 80 percent between February and the end of the year.

During the same period, Mozilo received a $1.9 million salary. He also received $20 million in performance-based stock awards and sold $121 million in stock.

Source. / AOL News / AP

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Vets Getting Shaft from Veterans Affairs

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

GI with PTSD. Photo by Nine Berman/Redux

Post-traumatic Stress under-diagnosed, documents reveal
By Maya Schenwar and Matt Renner / May 21, 2008

Recently released documents from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) are further proof the VA has failed to adequately address the crisis in veterans’ mental health care, according to a former VA employee turned veterans’ advocate.

In March, Norma J. Perez, the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) coordinator at a VA facility in Temple, Texas, wrote an email (PDF) to her subordinates stating: “Given that we have more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, R/O [ruling out] PTSD … we really don’t … have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”

In response, VA secretary James Peake said that the VA is “committed to absolute accuracy in a diagnosis and unwavering in providing any and all earned benefits. PTSD and the mental health arena is no exception.” Peake placed the blame on Perez, saying that the memo revealed the mistake of a single employee, not VA policy.

However, the VA has been under fire from Congress and veterans’ rights groups for more than a year for allegedly covering up and underreporting the mental health care crisis among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. A lawsuit that is currently awaiting a final ruling seeks to force the VA to move quickly in addressing the mental and physical health needs of veterans.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), the veterans’ rights organization which brought the lawsuit, said the Perez email exemplifies a larger trend. “The bottom line is that VA under the Bush administration has dropped the ball. The email sent by Perez proves our lawsuit was correct – VA is short staffed for mental health care and VA intentionally misdiagnoses veterans in order to save money. VA was illegally and unconscionably turning away suicidal veterans in need of emergency mental health care. We are asking the court to order VA to stop this outrageous practice,” Sullivan said.

New VA documents obtained exclusively by VCS using the Freedom of Information Act indicate the VA is only paying disability benefits for PTSD to 33,247 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, although 67,717 have been diagnosed with PTSD. According to Sullivan, VCS is calling for an investigation into this apparent discrepancy.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in September 2007 stated that the VA’s “lack of early identification techniques” led to “inconsistent diagnosis and treatment” of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. According to the GAO, early diagnosis is essential in preventing PTSD’s consequences – which could be deadly.

Firsthand Accounts of PTSD Crisis

Kristofer Goldsmith, a former Army sergeant who was forced to stay in the military beyond his contract because of the “stop loss” order given by the president, testified about his experience with mental health care at Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We were told that if we were to seek mental health, we would be locked away and our careers would not advance. If I admitted that I had severe chronic depression, if I thought I had PTSD … my career could have been ruined,” Goldsmith said.

He received an adjustment disorder diagnosis after experiencing a panic attack in March 2007. Because he was not granted the PTSD label – despite displaying many symptoms of the disorder – he was ordered to deploy to Iraq for a second tour.

What Goldsmith described as a “sharp downward spiral” came to a head the day before he was scheduled to ship back to Iraq with his unit.

“The day before I was supposed to deploy, Memorial Day, I went out onto a field in Fort Stewart and tried to take my own life … I took pills and drank vodka until I couldn’t drink anymore. The next thing I knew I was handcuffed to a gurney in the hospital. The cops had found me and literally dragged my body into an ambulance,” Goldsmith said in his testimony.

Finally, in October 2007, months after his suicide attempt, Goldsmith received a PTSD diagnosis from the VA.

According to Goldsmith, his experience was far from unique.

“While undergoing psychiatric treatment, I heard of many people being diagnosed with personality disorder and adjustment disorder instead of PTSD,” Goldsmith told Truthout. “I believe this is a way for the Army to hide the levels of PTSD among its ranks, through the usage of misdiagnoses.”

Suspicions about the VA’s motives for misdiagnoses flared up over a year ago, when a series of news reports revealed many of the 22,500 soldiers diagnosed with “personality disorder” since 2001 were actually suffering from PTSD. Taken in conjunction with a rising suicide rate among veterans, the reports sparked a flurry of investigations and Congressional hearings.

“My concern is that this country is regressing and again ignoring legitimate claims of PTSD in favor of the time and money saving diagnosis of personality disorder,” said Congressman Bob Filner, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, at a July 27 hearing. “I want to know how the VA deals with veterans who have been labeled with a personality disorder. Does the burden fall on the veteran to prove that he or she doesn’t have a personality disorder? Will such a diagnosis prevent the veteran from receiving health care once initial VA coverage ends? What extra barriers does this veteran face?”

Misdiagnosed vets are not only often deprived of proper treatment, Filner noted; they also miss out on condition-related benefits and subsidies. PTSD has attracted a lot of legislative attention over the past year, and new funding may soon become available for veterans with that diagnosis. Moreover, special programs geared toward PTSD are already in motion at many VA facilities, and vets without an official diagnosis are not eligible for those treatments.

For Iraq veteran Joe Wheeler, a delayed VA diagnosis meant two years of paying for his psychotropic medications out of pocket, at a time when his tenuous mental health made it tough to hold a job. Wheeler’s doctors immediately diagnosed him with PTSD, but without an official VA acknowledgment of his condition, he was left without benefits.

“I was never told why my diagnosis was delayed,” Wheeler said. “It’s a faceless bureaucracy; most people within the VA don’t understand the system themselves. And it’s designed to be adversarial. They make it hard so that it costs them less money.”

Wheeler no longer seeks treatment at the VA, preferring the financial strain of private treatment to the psychological strain he endured under VA care. With a different doctor – and along with the switch, a new medication – every few months, his experience at the VA was a saga of fits and starts; not exactly a recipe for recovery.

Recent studies back up Goldsmith’s and Wheeler’s charges of VA negligence in PTSD diagnosis. According to Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka, the committee has uncovered “widespread inadequate evaluation of veterans claiming service-connection for PTSD due to combat exposure and military sexual trauma.”

“Veterans often report to the Committee that during exams they were not asked about their military experience and received superficial evaluations,” Akaka wrote in a letter to VA Secretary Peak last week. “Veterans’ advocates report the reluctance of some VA examiners to provide a diagnosis of PTSD, even for veterans previously diagnosed with PTSD.”

Akaka added that while the VA’s own “Best Practice Manual for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Compensation and Pension Examinations” recommends a three-hour evaluation session for every potential PTSD sufferer, average exams clock in at 30 to 35 minutes.

Following the release of the Temple VA memo last week, Akaka requested the Office of the Inspector General begin an investigation into the PTSD diagnosis methods at Temple.

“This incident is both disturbing and disappointing, and provides further evidence that VA’s mental health program requires significant attention,” Akaka said in a statement on Friday. “Psychological war wounds are difficult to diagnose and harder still to heal, but they are no less real than any other service-connected injury. I continue to be concerned that VA’s mental health system is unprepared for the rising demands placed on the system.”

Source. / truthout

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Wanted : Vegan Republican Moles…

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

In preparation for the Republican National Convention, the FBI is soliciting informants to keep tabs on local protest groups
By Matt Snyders / May 21, 2008

They were looking for an informant to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors. Paul Carroll was riding his bike when his cell phone vibrated.

Once he arrived home from the Hennepin County Courthouse, where he’d been served a gross misdemeanor for spray-painting the interior of a campus elevator, the lanky, wavy-haired University of Minnesota sophomore flipped open his phone and checked his messages. He was greeted by a voice he recognized immediately. It belonged to U of M Police Sgt. Erik Swanson, the officer to whom Carroll had turned himself in just three weeks earlier. When Carroll called back, Swanson asked him to meet at a coffee shop later that day, going on to assure a wary Carroll that he wasn’t in trouble.

Carroll, who requested that his real name not be used, showed up early and waited anxiously for Swanson’s arrival. Ten minutes later, he says, a casually dressed Swanson showed up, flanked by a woman whom he introduced as FBI Special Agent Maureen E. Mazzola. For the next 20 minutes, Mazzola would do most of the talking.

“She told me that I had the perfect ‘look,’” recalls Carroll. “And that I had the perfect personality—they kept saying I was friendly and personable—for what they were looking for.”

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

Carroll would be compensated for his efforts, but only if his involvement yielded an arrest. No exact dollar figure was offered.

“I’ll pass,” said Carroll.

For 10 more minutes, Mazzola and Swanson tried to sway him. He remained obstinate.

“Well, if you change your mind, call this number,” said Mazzola, handing him her card with her cell phone number scribbled on the back.

(Mazzola, Swanson, and the FBI did not return numerous calls seeking comment.)

Carroll’s story echoes a familiar theme. During the lead-up the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division infiltrated and spied on protest groups across the country, as well as in Canada and Europe. The program’s scope extended to explicitly nonviolent groups, including street theater troupes and church organizations.

There were also two reported instances of police officers, dressed as protestors, purposefully instigating clashes. At the 2004 Republican National Convention, the NYPD orchestrated a fake arrest to incite protestors. When a blond man was “arrested,” nearby protestors began shouting, “Let him go!” The helmeted police proceeded to push back against the crowd with batons and arrested at least two. In a similar instance, during an April 29, 2005, Critical Mass bike ride in New York, video footage captured a “protestor”—in reality an undercover cop—telling his captor, “I’m on the job,” and being subsequently let go.

Minneapolis’s own recent Critical Mass skirmish was allegedly initiated by two unidentified stragglers in hoods—one wearing a handkerchief over his or her face—who “began to make aggressive moves” near the back of the pack. During that humid August 31 evening, officers went on to arrest 19 cyclists while unleashing pepper spray into the faces of bystanders. The hooded duo was never apprehended.

In the scuffle’s wake, conspiracy theories swirled that the unprecedented surveillance—squad cars from multiple agencies and a helicopter hovering overhead—was due to the presence of RNC protesters in the ride. The MPD publicly denied this. But during the trial of cyclist Gus Ganley, MPD Sgt. David Stichter testified that a task force had been created to monitor the August 31 ride and that the department knew that members of an RNC protest group would be along for the ride.

“This is all part of a larger government effort to quell political dissent,” says Jordan Kushner, an attorney who represented Ganley and other Critical Mass arrestees. “The Joint Terrorism Task Force is another example of using the buzzword ‘terrorism’ as a basis to clamp down on people’s freedoms and push forward a more authoritarian government.”

Source. / City Pages / Minneapolis/St. Paul

Attorney General’s Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations.

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

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The Financial Three-Card Monte Falls Down

Posted on May 22, 2008 by RagBlog


“Far From Normal”
By Jim Kunstler

Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There’s a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual — raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America’s productive capacity — but apparently events are still out of hand.

The Federal Reserve itself has been instrumental in promoting abnormality by doing everything possible to prevent the work-out of bad debts in the system. Since money is loaned into existence, and loans are debts, the work-out of bad debt suggests the discovery that a lot of money has disappeared — which is exactly the case. The Fed has postponed the work-out by sucking up truckloads of impaired, untradable securities in exchange for loans to giant banks who don’t have enough cash on hand to pay their janitors.

Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the service of industrial productivity).

We’ve tried just about everything else. There was the so-called service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization — which allowed a few-hundred-or-so thirty-year-old smoothies to retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley, while hundreds of thousands of retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban sprawl under the theory that houses (or “homes” in the jargon of the realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned into existence — along with massive fees for structuring the loans into bundles of bond-like thingies.

This has all failed now because the racket went too far. Every possible candidate for a snookering got snookered. Too much collateral for which there were no takers went into the ground. The insane run-up in house values made a downward price movement inevitable, and as soon as the turnaround happened, it fell into the remorseless algebra of a deflationary death spiral. More importantly, however, this society ran out of tricks for loaning money into existence and instead began to experience the pain of money thought-to-be-in-existence being defaulted into a vapor — and worse, these defaults led to logarithmic chains of money destruction in its places of origin, the investment banks that had created the racket.

The important part of this is that the money is gone. What makes matters truly eerie is that the “bubble” in suburban houses has occurred at exactly the moment in history when the chief enabling resource for suburban life — oil — has entered its scarcity stage.

The logical conclusion of all this is not what the American public wants to hear: we have become a much poorer society and are now faced with the unavoidable task of making major changes in how we live. All the three-card-monte moves at the highest level of finance lately amount to an effort to avoid the unavoidable, acknowledging our losses. Certainly the political fallout of all this will be awesome. But it’s not about politics, really. It’s about the entire society’s inability to form a workable new consensus of reality.

It’s hard to predict how long these institutions at the heart of our economic system can linger in the “far from normal” limbo of pretending that money has not been defaulted out of existence. Since the same process is underway in Great Britain and Spain, places beyond the control of Bernanke, Secretary Paulson, and the Boyz on Wall Street, and since actions and reactions there will affect the destiny of money here, its hard to escape the conclusion that we’re at most months away from the brutal recognition that Wall Street has managed to bankrupt itself (and, by extension, the United States). This is dark heart of the matter of which no one dares speak.

Meantime, on the ground, every mook and minion in the land sees the gas pumps levitate beyond the $4 hash mark, and notes with bugged-out eyes the double-digit price stickers on common supermarket items, and feels the rush of blood from the extremities when some check-out clerk at the WalMart declares that a certain proffered credit card is maxed out, and some strangers in overalls — the neighbors say — managed to hot-wire the GMC Sierra in the driveway, and took it away….

The candidates for president will have a lot to talk about. I wonder if they’ll dare to.

Source / Clusterfuck Nation

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Wedding Vows

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Resisting Monsanto’s Seed Imperialism

Posted on May 22, 2008 by RagBlog


Focus On The Corporation: The Genetically Modified Food Gamble
by Robert Weissman

There have been few experiments as reckless, over-hyped, and with as little potential upside as the rapid rollout of genetically modified crops. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a pro-biotech nonprofit, released a report [in February 2008] highlighting the proliferation of genetically modified crops. According to ISAAA, biotech crop area grew 12 percent, or 12.3 million hectares, to reach 114.3 million hectares in 2007, the second highest area increase in the past five years.

For the biotech backers, this is cause to celebrate. They claim that biotech helps farmers. They say it promises to reduce hunger and poverty in developing countries. “If we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of cutting hunger and poverty in half by 2015,” says Clive James, ISAAA founder and the author of the just-released report, “biotech crops must play an even bigger role in the next decade.”

In fact, existing genetically modified crops are hurting small farmers and failing to deliver increased food supply–and posing enormous, largely unknown risks to people and the planet.

For all of the industry hype around biotech products, virtually all planted genetically modified seed is for only four products–soy, corn, cotton, and canola–with just two engineered traits. Most of the crops are engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide sold by Monsanto under the brand-name RoundUp (these biotech seeds are known as RoundUp-Ready). Others are engineered to include a naturally occurring pesticide, Bt.

Most of the genetically modified crops in developing countries are soy, says Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety and co-author of “Who Benefits from GM Crops?,” a report issued at the same time as ISAAA’s release. These crops are exported to rich countries, primarily as animal feed. They do absolutely nothing to supply food to the hungry.

As used in developing countries, biotech crops are shifting power away from small, poor farmers desperately trying to eke out livelihoods and maintain their land tenure. Glyphosate-resistance is supposed to enable earlier and less frequent spraying, but, concludes “Who Benefits from GM Crops?,” these biotech seeds “allow farmers to spray a particular herbicide more frequently and indiscriminately without fear of damaging the crop.” This requires expenditures beyond the means of small farmers–but reduces labor costs, a major benefit for industrial farms.

ISAAA contends that Bt planting in India and China has substantially reduced insecticide spraying, which it advances as the primary benefit of biotech crops.

Bt crops may offer initial reductions in required spraying, says Freese, but Bt is only effective against some pests, meaning farmers may have to use pesticides to prevent other insects from eating their crops. Focusing on a district in Punjab, “Who Benefits from GM Crops?” shows how secondary pest problems have offset whatever gains Bt crops might offer. Freese also notes that evidence is starting to come in to support longstanding fears that genetically engineering the Bt trait into crops would give rise to Bt-resistant pests.

The biotech seeds are themselves expensive, and must be purchased anew every year. Industry leader Monsanto is infamous for suing farmers for the age-old practice of saving seeds, and holds that it is illegal for farmers even to save genetically engineered seeds that have blown onto their fields from neighboring farms. “That has nothing to do with feeding the hungry,” or helping the poorest of the poor, says Hope Shand, research director for the ETC Group, an ardent biotech opponent. It is, to say the least, not exactly a farmer-friendly approach.

Although the industry and its allies tout the benefits that biotech may yield someday for the poor, “We have yet to see genetically modified food that is cheaper, more nutritious, or tastes better,” says Shand. “Biotech seeds have not been shown to be scientifically or socially useful,” although they have been useful for the profit-driven interests of Monsanto, she says. Freese notes that the industry has been promising gains for the poor for a decade and a half–but hasn’t delivered. Products in the pipeline won’t change that, he says, with the industry focused on introducing new herbicide resistant seeds.

The evidence on yields for the biotech crops is ambiguous, but there is good reason to believe yields have actually dropped. ISAAA’s Clive James says that Bt crops in India and China have improved yields somewhat. “Who Benefits from GM Crops” carefully reviews this claim, and offers a convincing rebuttal. The report emphasizes the multiple factors that affect yield, and notes that Bt and RoundUp-Ready seeds alike are not engineered to improve yield per se, just to protect against certain predators or for resistance to herbicide spraying.

Beyond the social disaster of contributing to land concentration and displacement of small farmers, a range of serious ecological and sustainability problems with biotech crops is already emerging–even though the biotech crop experiment remains quite new. Strong evidence of pesticide resistance is rapidly accumulating, meaning that farmers will have to spray more chemicals to less effect. Pesticide use is rising rapidly in biotech-heavy countries. In the heaviest user of biotech seeds–the United States, which has half of all biotech seed planting– glyphosate-resistant weeds are proliferating. Glyphosate use in the United States rose by 15 times from 1994 to 2005, according to “Who Benefits from GM Crops,” and use of other and more toxic herbicides is rapidly rising. The US experience likely foreshadows what is to come for other countries more recently adopting biotech crops.

Seed diversity is dropping, as Monsanto and its allies aim to eliminate seed saving, and development of new crop varieties is slowing. Contamination from neighboring fields using genetically modified seeds can destroy farmers’ ability to maintain biotech-free crops. Reliance on a narrow range of seed varieties makes the food system very vulnerable, especially because of the visible problems with the biotech seeds now in such widespread use.

For all the uncertainties about the long-term effects of biotech crops and food, one might imagine that there were huge, identifiable short-term benefits. But one would be wrong. Instead, a narrowly based industry has managed to impose a risky technology with short-term negatives and potentially dramatic downsides.

But while it is true, as ISAAA happily reports, that biotech planting is rapidly growing, it remains heavily concentrated in just a few countries: the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India, and China. Europe and most of the developing world continue to resist Monsanto’s seed imperialism. The industry and its allies decry this stand as a senseless response to fear-mongering. It actually reflects a rational assessment of demonstrated costs and benefits — and an appreciation for real but incalculable risks of toying with the very nature of nature.

Source / Eat the State

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