Peak Oil to Food to Steel : The Domino Effect

Posted on May 17, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

First of all, we likely have already peaked last year, or are now peaking in world oil production, as currently soaring oil prices should indicate. But see also the following link:

Revision of Depletion Model.

This being the case, it is important to dispel the notion that oil prices can be kept from influencing every other price that is linked to oil, which includes about everything. When cost-push inflation moves from oil to food to steel, you’re in real trouble. And that is what seems to be happening now.

Why? Because stuff made of steel that is powered by oil is what you depend on to provide alternative energy to fix the many problems caused by the lack of cheap oil.
The harder you work to fix the energy problem, the worse it gets. And if that were not enough, people get angry.

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

High Steel Prices: A Preview of Peak Oil
By Jim Kingsdale / May 16, 2008

I use the phrase “Crunch Time” to denote the period after Peak Oil during which oil prices are so high due to production shortfalls that the normal functioning of economic activity is curtailed. Not only are the poor – and eventually the middle class – kept from buying the oil products they need, but industry’s capacity to ameliorate the problem by making what is needed to free society from the grip of oil is also greatly slowed, thereby extending the Crunch Time.

Such necessary products fall in two categories. First are those consumers can use to free themselves of oil: cars, trucks, and trains that operate on electricity instead of gasoline or diesel. Second is the capital equipment needed to make both such consumer items and to obtain more oil and other energy sources. Steel is one of the inputs to those products.

A hint of Crunch Time is in this report from Brazil and a sample is also described in today’s Wall Street Journal. The headline is, “Fast-Rising Steel Prices Set Back Big Projects.” The article starts, “Relentless increases in the price of steel are halting or slowing major construction projects world-wide and investments in shipbuilding and oil-and-gas exploration.”

Stripped of the human dimension the essential formula is:

global demand growth -> high oil, food and steel prices -> high costs to build rigs and ships -> higher energy prices -> higher oil, food and steel prices

This mechanical process of higher prices cycling up the line and shortages of things needed to make other things compounding the dysfunction is only the start. Then, the human dimension supercharges the process.

As the Journal points out, higher steel prices are now causing strikes in Turkey, cancellation of infrastructure projects in India, and government interventions in the private sector via price controls, nationalizations, and export controls – all of which cause other economic dislocations. Not the least of today’s dysfunctional outcomes is a slowdown now occurring in the production of equipment needed to find and produce oil.

As production slows, companies lay off workers. While layoffs tend to reduce ultimate consumer demand for products, in the short term shortages of manufacturing inputs just increase demand for those inputs further. Thus society’s initial efforts to increase manufacturing capacity turns into an effort to simply maintain capacity – or stop it from freezing up.

As the process of rising costs and slowing production reinforces itself, it gains speed like an ocean storm. As the Journal reports, “Last year, it took six months for steel prices to rise $100 a ton. Now, prices are moving that much in a month.”

The vicious cycle we are seeing today was initially caused by rapid growth and improved living standards in China, India and other poor countries as brought on by globalization. The process was initially demand driven. It can – and eventually it will – be corrected by a significant economic slowdown.

But the real Crunch Time will be caused by Peak Oil, the inability of the world to produce any greater flow of oil. What makes the real Crunch Time so vicious is that a simple recession will not cure the problem. It is likely that human inputs like violence and hoarding will only make the problem of insufficient oil even more acute. That is why today’s mini-Crunch is so tame compared with the Crunch Time that will occur after Peak Oil.

The scenario of shortages reducing society’s ability to function is why the Hirsch Report concluded that in order to have a fairly painless transition from petroleum-based transport to electricity-based transport, the world would need to start to make the transition about 20 years before Peak Oil started. Today, when we no longer have 20 years before Peak Oil, we are getting a small preview of the conditions to which the Hirsch Report was anticipating.

Here is a summary of the conclusions of Hirsch Report:

A scenario analysis was performed, based on crash program implementation worldwide – the fastest humanly possible. Three starting dates were considered:
1. When peaking occurs;

2. Ten years before peaking occurs; and

3. Twenty years before peaking.

The timing of oil peaking was left open because of the considerable differences of opinion among experts. Consideration of a number of implementation scenarios provided some fundamental insights, as follows:

• Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.

• Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.

• Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking offers the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall.”

Here are some excerpts from the WSJ article:

We have not yet seen that prices have peaked, what we have seen is the costs increasing every month,” said ArcelorMittal Chief Executive Lakshmi Mittal on a conference call with reporters.

While still in a position of pricing power, steelmakers are concerned that over time, their high prices will affect sales. “There will be impact on demand, and that is not a good development for the steel industry,” said Aditya Mittal, chief financial officer of ArcelorMittal, on a separate conference call.

As a result, steelmakers are taking steps to cut their costs. To shield themselves from higher raw-material prices, more of them are acquiring their own iron-ore and coal mines or deposits, as well as producers of scrap steel. Nippon Steel Corp. and other Japanese steelmakers announced this month that they would accelerate cost-cutting efforts, which could include layoffs and developing cheaper steel substitutes.

The industry is also consolidating, which should allow producers to become more efficient and gain economies of scale that could ultimately result in more pricing stability and fewer, larger players. In recent months, India’s Tata Steel Ltd. and Essar Steel Holdings Ltd. have made major acquisitions, as have Russia’s Evraz Group SA and Sweden’s SSAB Svenskt Stl AB (SSABF.PK). Even so, the world’s top-five steelmakers still account for just 18% of the world’s steel supplies.

Source. / Seeking Alpha

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The Time Has Come for Americans to Blink

Posted on May 16, 2008 by RagBlog


Everybody Knows.
By Sheila Samples / May 16, 2008


Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.
That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.
– Leonard Cohen – (complete MP3 download)

The fate of millions was sealed the moment Dick Cheney selected himself as The Destroyer whose charge to keep for the next eight years would be — as Capitol Hill Blue’s Doug Thompson so succinctly described George W. Bush — a “criminally insane, pill-popping dry drunk.” I don’t know about that. I’ve seen some drunks in my time — even dry ones — and George Bush appears to be more than a little moist.

Bush was the perfect foil for Cheney. The Scalia-driven 2000 election coup catapulted Bush to the top of the political heap. For the first time in his worthless, impotent, cruelly indifferent life, Bush was suddenly important — the most powerful man on the face of the earth — and all because he had been told to scream, “Jezus! Jezus is my philosopher!” to the swooning masses. Makes one wonder at the rigid consent of those same “believers” for the ensuing slaughter of so many innocents — when murdering even one in the name of Jesus should have sent a collective shriek reverberating throughout the religious universe. (See Matthew 18:14; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2)

Everybody knows that Bush isn’t remotely qualified to be at the helm of the world’s superpower. He can neither think nor speak coherently, can recognize little other than Texas on a map, has completely torpedoed every business venture he attempted, and admittedly was a hard-partying sot until he was 40. Cheney was another matter. He was a household word. He had been a public servant throughout his career. He served as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, earned six terms in the House of Representatives where he ascended to the position of minority whip and, finally, was the elder Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

We trusted Cheney to keep Bush from making rash decisions. Was it not Cheney who, at the conclusion of the 1991 Desert Storm assault, made the assessment that to expand the exercise to include regime change in Iraq was not morally sustainable because of the chaotic bloodletting — the needless toll on our uniformed military?

We were wrong. Had we bothered to check the “other priorities” that allowed Cheney to dodge the draft five times on his rise to power, his chilling congressional voting record, his efforts to enrich the military industrial complex by privatizing defense duties and granting massive contracts to Halliburton, we would have known that Cheney was consumed with lust for power and money. We would have known Cheney had been champing at the bit for more than a decade to impose a new order wherein the American Empire controls the world and its resources.

Had we checked, we would have known Dick Cheney was the wrong babysitter for a kid who gets his jollies by blowing things up.

Cheney Unbound

In 1991, Cheney was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the upheaval of the following decade, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and the expanding manipulative power of the corporate media created the axis of corruption necessary for a Cheney reign of terror. Cheney was ready, as were the militant warmongers of the Project for the New American Century who had been demanding Saddam Hussein’s head for years. At least 12 of the 18 co-signers of the January 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, and another letter four months later to then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, demanding the overthrow of Saddam were given key positions on Cheney’s destructive team.

The fix was in. Four days before the 2001 inauguration, PNAC’s deputy director, Thomas Donnelly, wrote a memorandum to “Opinion Leaders,” reminding them that “the task of removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power still remains…Many in the incoming Bush Administration understand this challenge…”

Four months after the inauguration, the White House issued a press release warning that the threat of terrorist-nations using weapons of mass destruction against the American “homeland” was very real. To counter this danger, Cheney put himself in charge of the entire government — departments of Defense, Justice, Health and Human Services, Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, FEMA, and “other federal agencies,” which would naturally include both FAA and NORAD. A new department — the Office of National Preparedness — was created so Cheney could protect us from catastrophic harm and deal with “consequence” management.

The next four months were busy ones. With malicious indifference, Cheney set about screwing the American people; destroying 225-year Constitutional protections, passing secret laws to seize unlimited executive power, and locking both Congress and the public out of the legislative process. Bush provided cover by regaling us with hilarious “Benny Hill” bits of linguistic derring-do, strutting from one presidential photo op to another, falling off couches and bicycles, choking on pretzels, and attacking brush with a chainsaw at his Crawford ranch.

Cheney in Charge

Then it was 9-11. Suddenly Bush was no longer a spoiled, bumbling, schizophrenic little president. In an instant, he was transformed into a loaded codpiece — The Commander in Chief, The Decider of life and death — a modern-day Caligula towering above mankind with lighted depleted uranium firecrackers gripped in both fists. Cheney could not have picked a more willing accomplice to export death and violence to the four corners of the earth…

With smoke still rising from the ashes of Afghanistan, the drive to topple Saddam, who was demanding Euro for his oil, quickly turned into a crusade. It was Cheney-orchestrated and Cheney-driven. Under the deepening shadows of mushroom clouds, administration neoconservatives teamed up with ecstatic corporate media co-conspirators to terrify an already traumatized public. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith launched a separate intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to create the propaganda needed to invade Iraq.

Since Bush can’t be trusted to maintain a single train of thought in one-on-one interviews, he hit the campaign trail with a prepared speech he delivered over and over — is now delivering about Iran — frantically catapulting the propaganda that Saddam was ‘threatening America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.” Bush convinced a majority of Americans that the Iraqi dictator was allied with Al Qaeda and provided a “safe haven” for terrorists, and if we didn’t wipe him out, he would strike us again without leaving any fingerprints.”

Cheney’s fingerprints are all over every aspect of the drive for war. For a year and a half, Cheney bullied the entire intelligence apparatus, especially the CIA, into making a false case that Saddam was an immediate nuclear threat. He denigrated the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report that there was no evidence, sneering that the intelligence was faulty, and IAEA Director-General Mohammed El-Baradei had no credibility where Iraq was concerned.

But it was Secretary of State Colin Powell who rolled the loaded dice at the UN Security Council on February 8, 2003, in a presentation even he admitted was “bullshit.” Powell, who is adept at leaving no fingerprints, but whose shadow lingers over decades of slaughtered innocents, carried the water for his masters one last time. When Powell completed his somber charges that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq running “poison camps” full bore, that Saddam was obtaining magnets for uranium enrichment — charges backed up with photos and vials of poison — we were sold. Because we trusted him.

A Moral Fork in the Road

I don’t want to go off on an Aristotelian rant here, but thanks to Cheney and those around him obsessed with world government, this nation appears to be running on empty where morality, or ethos, is concerned. Values such as compassion, sympathy, prudence, virtue, decency, ethics — cannot thrive in a nation controlled by war criminals who force its citizens into submission through fear, violence and propaganda. How can a society be “just” when natural laws have fallen by the wayside and nobody is held accountable for crimes against God and humanity?

We are under the control of the criminally insane. Cheney has turned the greatest democratic republic ever conceived into a world corporation and anointed himself its Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He has supplanted two centuries of protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with executive orders and secret laws. In their lust for power and riches, Cheney and Bush have managed in just seven grueling, sadistic, morally corrupt years to destroy entire nations, including their own. And they accomplished this in the only way possible. Because we permitted it. Because we lost our moral compass.

So we stand here in the blood-sodden mess of two lost wars. Millions — millions — have been displaced, destroyed, dishonored in Cheney’s quest for oil. Tens of thousands of our own citizens are injured, maimed — 4,077 dead — an entire generation of Americans lost in a depleted uranium wasteland. “So?” Cheney says, “They were all volunteers.” He admitted that losing sons or daughters could “be a burden” on families, but reminded us sternly that “the biggest burden” is on the President, who has to send even more to their deaths.

We’re at the crossroads. We can no longer remain neutral nor mill around in confused acceptance of the genocidal madness into which we have been swept. Thomas Jefferson said, “When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.”

Everybody knows the folly of the treasonous “corrections” made to counter the Iran-Contra evil in the 1980’s and early ’90’s — the flurry of Presidential Christmas-Eve pardons allowing convicted criminals to recede into the shadows only to return and metastasize throughout the current Cheney/Bush administration.

Cheney, Bush and their co-conspirators throughout the three branches of government must be removed. Indicted. Convicted. Imprisoned. Voting records of the 435 members of Congress and 33 Senators up for re-election in 2008 must be vetted, and those who do not reflect the will of the people must go. No exceptions. The remaining 17 Senators must either stand or fall on their voting records. If those who are guilty of the same breach of trust as their cohorts refuse to budge, they must be impeached and removed from office.

They have left us with but one choice, and one last chance to make that choice. We have reached a point in the “course of human events” where it is not only our “right but our duty” to throw off this destructive government and institute one which remembers it “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The time has come for Americans to blink. Because the Abyss is staring back at us.

Sheila Samples sheilastuff.blogspot.com is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at rsamples@wichitaonline.net.

Source / Information Clearing House

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Moron-in-Chief on Obama and Appeasement (Bomb, Bomb Iran Dept.)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


Lies of Aggression
By Paul Craig Roberts / May 16, 2008

On May 15, the White House Moron, in a war-planning visit to Israel, justified the naked aggression he and Ehud Olmert are planning against Iran as the only alternative to “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

But the White House Moron has the roles reversed. It is not Iran that is threatening war. It is George W. Bush. It is not Bush who is appeasing. It is Iran.

Iran has not responded in kind to any of Bush’s warlike moves and provocations. Iran has not sunk a single one of our sitting duck ships and has not given the Iraqi insurgents any weapons that would easily turn the tide of war against the United States.

It is Bush, not Iran, who sounds like Adolf Hitler blustering and threatening. It is Bush’s American Brownshirts, the neocons, who express the view: “What’s the good of nuclear weapons if you can’t use them?”

It is the United States that is funding assassination teams inside Iran and using taxpayer dollars to fund dissident and violent organizations opposed to the Iranian government. Iran is doing no such thing here.

It is members of the Bush regime and U.S. generals who continue to lie through their teeth about Iranian support for insurgents, for which they can supply no evidence, and about Iranian nuclear weapons programs, for which the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors can find no sign.

It is the U.S. print and TV media that serves the Bush regime as propaganda ministry for its lies of aggression.

All the war crimes that are being planned are being planned by Bush and Olmert.

What would George Orwell make of the Bush regime’s position that anything less than a direct act of naked aggression is appeasement?

The Chicago City Council has passed a resolution “opposing any U.S.
attack on Iran and urging the Bush administration to pursue diplomatic engagement with that nation.” But the White House Moron says diplomacy is appeasement. He learned this false equivalence from the neocon Brownshirts whose control over his administration has made America despised throughout the world, with the exception of Israel.

After broadcasting false claims for weeks from U.S. generals and Bush regime spokespersons that the United States has “definite proof” in the form of captured Iranian weapons that Iranians were “responsible for killing American troops,” the great free American media went silent when Los Angeles Times correspondent Tina Susman reported from Baghdad, “A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was cancelled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran.”

A people devoid of a media are sitting ducks for tyrannical government, which is what the United States has.

What is the difference between Hitler’s concocted excuses for his acts of naked aggression and the Bush regime’s plan to use a briefing by Gen. Petraeus, with “captured Iranian weapons” as props, as proof of Iranian complicity in U.S. deaths in Iraq as a means to break down public and congressional resistance to an attack on Iran?

Why has the Bush regime suffered no consequences for this blatant attempt to orchestrate an excuse for another war?

Why have there been no consequences to the regime for the blatant lies it told in order to attack Iraq?

Why has the Bush regime suffered no consequences for its violation of U.S. statutory laws against spying without warrants and against torture?

In the U.S. criminal justice system, three strikes and you are out.

For the Bush regime, is there any limit on its lawless behavior?

How many strikes? A dozen? Thirty? Three hundred?

Is there a limit?

To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Source. / Creators Syndicate

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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McCain’s Magic Carpet Ride

Posted on May 16, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


John McCain Trades Straight Talk for Unadulterated Fantasy
By Arianna Huffington / May 15,2008

John McCain unveiled his new campaign strategy today: invite the American people to take a magic carpet ride with him to the land of Eternal Sunshine.

In a speech this morning in Ohio — backed up by a companion TV ad — McCain hopped into an imaginary time machine and took us all to the year 2013, offering a sneak peek of what the world will look like at the end of his first term as President.

And what a wonderful world it will be: “The Iraq War has been won”: “Iraq is a functioning democracy”; “al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated”; Osama bin Laden has been captured or killed; there’s been no major terrorist attack in the U.S.; Iran and North Korea have renounced nuclear weapons; “the size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased and are now better equipped”; there’s been “a substantial increase” in veterans’ benefits; the genocide in Darfur has been stopped; “the United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth, and Americans again have confidence in their economic future”; “the world food crisis has ended”; “test scores and graduation rates are rising everywhere in the country”; “health care has become more accessible”; Medicare and Social Security have been fixed “without reducing benefits” or “increasing taxes and raising premiums”; America is “well on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil”; “our southern border is now secure” and “illegal immigration has been finally brought under control.” And, oh yeah, there are a lot fewer fat kids trudging their way through PE class.

Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?

There’s only one problem: it’s pure, unadulterated fantasy. The political equivalent of the trippy tour the Beatles gave us in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds — only instead of rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies, we have “professional and competent” Iraq Security Forces and an Iraqi government “capable of imposing its authority in every province” and “defending the integrity of its borders.”

Despite starting his speech by saying how important it is for candidates to lay out “what they plan to achieve not with vague language but with clarity,” McCain then proceeded to spin his cotton candy daydream with nary a hint of how his lofty and admirable goals will be accomplished. He’s taking us on a trip to Fantasyland, but at no point does he show us how we’re going to get there.

Sure, he tossed out a few generalized, pie-in-the-sky allusions to “reforms of the [health] insurance market” and “reforms to the way we acquire weapons programs” and a handful of specifics, including “a reduction in the corporate tax rate” and the building of “20 new nuclear reactors.” But when it came to Iraq, he didn’t offer even the vaguest clue about how — after five long years of failure — victory, democracy, the defeat of al Qaeda, the prevention of civil war, the disbanding of militias, and the sudden competence of the Iraqi military will magically be achieved. Rather, one morning four and a half years from now, we’re going to wake up and pigs will be flying, and all will be right with the world.

I get the thinking behind the McCain camp’s strategy. With 82 percent of the public unhappy with the direction of the county, and with 68 percent unhappy with the war, and 75 percent anxious about the economy (which McCain admits he doesn’t understand all that well), there is no way McCain or his fellow Republicans can run on reality or their record over the last seven-plus years, so they have to run on fantasy.

But building castles in the sky — and painting rosy, reality-free scenarios — runs counter to McCain’s brand as a straight talker™ who tells it like it is, even when that means admitting that ending the war or fixing the economy or passing needed reforms won’t be easy.

You know things have gotten bad for the GOP when John McCain, the man who ran a TV ad claiming “One man does what’s best for America. Not what’s easy,” and who told us on the campaign trail “I’ve got to give you straight talk, my friends. This is a tough war we’re in. It’s not going to be over right away. There’s going to be other wars, I’m sorry to tell you… My friends, it’s going to be tough,” is now acting like Mr. Rogers. It’s going to be a beautiful day in the neighborhood. In 2013. I can’t tell you how, boys and girls, but it will be. You just have to trust me.

I’ll admit, I found McCain’s fantasy speech moving and effective, especially the part where he envisions a growth in national service, fueled by young Americans who “understand that true happiness is much greater than the pursuit of pleasure, and can only be found by serving causes greater than self-interest.” I also appreciated his promise to “set a new standard for transparency and accountability,” abstain from Bushian signing statements, and do away with “mindless, paralyzing” partisanship while making the coming campaign “an argument among friends, each of us struggling to hear our conscience and heed its demands.”

Then the pig that was flying overhead fell from the sky, showed me his McCain button, and reminded me that Hamas wants Obama to win.

Source. / The Huffington Post

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BushCo’s GWOT: Making You Less Secure

Posted on May 16, 2008 by RagBlog


The survivors’ stories leave no doubt: Guantánamo Makes Us All Less Safe
By George Monbiot / May 14, 2008

Official accounts reveal with chilling clarity that acts carried out in the name of the war on terror have backfired dreadfully

When we learned last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantánamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantánamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years”. The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials, or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantánamo not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats”. When the Americans released him from Guantánamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissible evidence required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantánamo, and in the CIA’s other detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques – devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington – have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantánamo and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end”. He was abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?

The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantánamo. “Twelve thousand kilometres away from Mecca, I realised the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Qur’an and threw it in dirty places.” Al-Ajmi’s lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.

The accounts of people released from Guantánamo describe treatment that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man – scarcely more than a boy – in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more.

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantánamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”

In reading the histories of Guantánamo, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process that generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

Source / Information Clearing House / The Guardian

To learn more, go to The Guantanamo Blog or to Andy Worthington.

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Dying Over the American Housing Crisis

Posted on May 16, 2008 by RagBlog

Let’s be clear about the facts here: it’s okay to bail out the lenders who are in trouble, but we will ignore the home-buyers who cannot meet their mortgage payments.

Just another example of BushCo’s “we-don’t-give-a-flying-fuck” approach to America. “If you aren’t in my circle of corporate buddies, we don’t care.”

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


Foreclosures take an emotional toll on homeowners
By Stephanie Armour / May 15, 2008

On a brisk day last fall in Prineville, Ore., Raymond and Deanna Donaca faced the unthinkable: They were losing their home to foreclosure and had days to move out.

For more than two decades, the couple had lived in their three-level house, where the elms outside blazed with yellow shades of fall and their four golden retrievers slept in the yard. The town had always been home, with a lazy river and rolling hills dotted by gnarled juniper trees.

Yet just before lunch on Oct. 23, the Donacas closed all their home’s doors except the one to the garage and left their 1981 Cadillac Eldorado running. Toxic fumes filled the home. When sheriff’s deputies arrived at about 1 p.m., they found the body of Raymond, 71, on the second floor along with three dead dogs. The body of Deanna, 69, was in an upstairs bedroom, close to another dead retriever.

“It is believed that the Donacas committed suicide after attempts to save their home following a foreclosure notice left them believing they had few options,” the Crook County Sheriff’s Office said in a report.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Florida Oregon Midwest South East Office Sarasota ATMs Raymond Psychological Association Apache Corp. Finance RealtyTrac Prineville Associated Press-AOL Money Cadillac Eldorado

Their suicides were a tragic extreme, but the Donacas’ case symbolizes how the housing crisis is wrenching the emotional lives of legions of homeowners. The escalating pace of foreclosures and rising fears among some homeowners about keeping up with their mortgages are creating a range of emotional problems, mental-health specialists say. Those include anxiety disorders, depression and addictive behaviors such as alcoholism and gambling. And, in a few cases, suicide.
Crisis hotlines are reporting a surge in calls from frantic homeowners. The American Psychological Association (APA) and other mental-health groups are publishing tips on how to handle the emotional stress triggered by the real estate meltdown. Psychologists say they’re seeing more drinking, domestic violence and marital problems linked to mortgage concerns — as well as children trying to cope with extreme anxiety when their families are forced to move.

“They’re depressed, anxious. It’s affected marriages, relationships,” says Richard Chaifetz, CEO of ComPsych, a Chicago-based employee-assistance firm that is counseling homeowners over mortgage fears. “People tend to catastrophize, and that leads to depression. Suicide rates go up. We see an increase in drinking, outbursts at work, violence toward kids. Before, their houses were like ATMs,” as they rose in value. “Now, they feel trapped like a rat in a corner.”

Foreclosure filings surged 65% in April compared with the same month last year, according to a report Wednesday by RealtyTrac. One in every 519 households received a foreclosure filing last month, and the number of homes with foreclosure activity in April was the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing the report in January 2005.

Don Donaca, Raymond’s brother, says it’s hard to understand the suicide, but he thinks the pending foreclosure led to their deaths.

“He got so deep in debt he couldn’t figure out what else to do,” says Don, 74, a retired sawmill worker in Prineville. “I guess a guy would have to walk a few miles in his shoes to understand.”

Financial concerns at the top

Many other homeowners are at risk of less-severe, but still significant, psychological distress: One in seven homeowners worry that they won’t be able to make their mortgage payments on time over the next six months, according to an April Associated Press-AOL Money & Finance poll, and more than one-quarter fear their home will decline in value during the next two years.

ComPsych says financial concerns are now the top issue the firm’s counselors are hearing in calls from clients. Calls about financial worries have surged 20% over last year; those related to mortgage problems have doubled.

“It’s escalated to the No. 1 issue because of the housing crisis,” Chaifetz says.

Read all of it here. / USA Today

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Protesters converge on Houston to say "No New Coal"

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Environmental activists from Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Texas, and Iowa converged on Houston May 14, 2008,to urge the Houston-based Dynegy corporation to halt construction on its six proposed coal plants.

The protest targeted Dynegy’s annual shareholders meeting. Activists gathered outside the meeting to protest and hand out information detailing the dangers of coal and then held a rally nearby featuring short remarks from community activists representing each state. Coal-fired power plants produce around 40% of the U.S.’s CO2 emissions which fuel global warming; and cause 24,000 deaths, 1,000 hospitalizations, and 38,000 heart attacks each year in the U.S. due to the harmful chemicals released.

Supporters of clean energy held a die-in during Dynegy’s annual shareholder meeting on May 14 to protest the company’s plans to construct six new coal-fired energy plants. Photo by HIMC/Southern Energy Network

Source. / Houston Indymedia
Photos from the event.

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Big Win for Gay Rights

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

John Lewis, right, hugs his partner, Stuart Gaffney, left, outside of the California State Supreme Court building in San Francisco, Thursday, May 15, 2008, after the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage in a ruling that allows same-sex couples in the nation’s biggest state to tie the knot. Gaffney and Lewis are one of the main plaintiffs in the case. Photo by Paul Sakuma / AP.

All of you were warned by the religious right it would come to this: if Queers got domestic partnership benefits or civil unions, demands for same sex marriage would be next. The amazing thing about this decision is that it is about equality, which is what the “gay agenda” has been about for the past 25 years. Mayor Gavin Newsom is salivating–he hopes this state referendum will be his ticket to victory in the 2010 Governors race.

Schwarzenegger is also hoping this issue will propel him into the US Senate when he runs against Barbara Boxer–that’s why he’s opposing the referendum. Meanwhile, here in Kook City we can’t help noticing that on the same day equality for Queers became law in CA, Nancy Pelosi blocked war funds in the House of Representatives. It was a good day for the Fox News Networks’ “extreme radical left.”

Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog / posted May 17, 2008

Gay Marriage Ban Overturned By California Supreme Court
By Lisa Leff / May 15, 2008

Today the California Supreme Court took a giant leap to ensure that everybody _ not just in the state of California, but throughout the country _ will have equal treatment under the law,” said City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who argued the case for San Francisco.

The challenge for gay rights advocates, however, is not over.

A coalition of religious and social conservative groups is attempting to put a measure on the November ballot that would enshrine laws banning gay marriage in the state constitution.

The Secretary of State is expected to rule by the end of June whether the sponsors gathered enough signatures to qualify the marriage amendment, similar to ones enacted in 26 other states.

If voters pass the measure in November, it would trump the court’s decision.

California already offers same-sex couples who register as domestic partners the same legal rights and responsibilities as married spouses, including the right to divorce and to sue for child support.

But, “Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation,” Chief Justice Ron George wrote for the court’s majority.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Marvin Baxter agreed with many arguments of the majority but said the court overstepped its authority. Changes to marriage laws should be decided by the voters, Baxter wrote.

Source. The Huffington Post

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US Arms Accusations Against Iran? …Never Mind

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The Iranian arms justification for bombing Iran is holding up no better than Bush’s justification for invading Iraq, based on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

US claims on Iranian arms proove bogus
By Gareth Porter / May 14, 2008

WASHINGTON — Early this month, the George W. Bush administration’s plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shiite militias in Iraq encountered not just one but two setbacks.

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to endorse U.S. charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to the Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms were of Iranian origin.

The news media’s failure to report that the arms captured from Shiite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian weapon shielded the U.S. military from a much bigger blow to its anti-Iran strategy.

The Bush administration and top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus had plotted a sequence of events that would build domestic U.S. political support for a possible strike against Iran over its “meddling” in Iraq and especially its alleged export of arms to Shiite militias.

The plan was keyed to a briefing document to be prepared by Petraeus on the alleged Iranian role in arming and training Shiite militias that would be surfaced publicly after the al-Maliki government had endorsed it and it used to accuse Iran publicly.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told reporters on Apr. 25 that Petraeus was preparing a briefing to be given “in the next couple of weeks” that would provide detailed evidence of “just how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment instability”. The centrepiece of the Petraeus document, completed in late April, was the claim that arms captured in Basra bore 2008 manufacture dates on them.

U.S. officials also planned to display Iranian weapons captured in both Basra and Karbala to reporters. That sequence of media events would fill the airwaves with spectacular news framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq for several days, aimed at breaking down Congressional and public resistance to the idea that Iranian bases supporting the meddling would have to be attacked.

But events in Iraq diverged from the plan. On May 4, after an Iraqi delegation had returned from meetings in Iran, al-Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a news conference that al-Maliki was forming his own Cabinet committee to investigate the U.S. claims. “We want to find tangible information and not information based on speculation,” he said.

Another adviser to al-Maliki, Haider Abadi, told the Los Angeles Times’ Alexandra Zavis that Iranian officials had given the delegation evidence disproving the charges. “For us to be impartial, we have to investigate,” Abadi said.

Al-Dabbagh made it clear that the government considered the U.S. evidence of Iranian government arms smuggling insufficient. “The proof we have is weapons which are shown to have been made in Iran,” al-Dabbagh said in a separate interview with Reuters. “We want to trace back how they reached [Iraq], who is using them, where are they getting it.”

Senior U.S. military officials were clearly furious with al-Maliki for backtracking on the issue. “We were blindsided by this,” one of them told Zavis.

Then the Bush administration’s campaign on Iranian arms encountered another serious problem. The Iraqi commander in Karbala had announced on May 3 that he had captured a large quantity of Iranian arms in and around that city.

Earlier the U.S. military had said that it was up to the Iraqi government to display captured Iranian weapons, but now an Iraqi commander was eager to show off such weapons. Petraeus’ staff alerted U.S. media to a major news event in which the captured Iranian arms in Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.

But when U.S. munitions experts went to Karbala to see the alleged cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing that they could credibly link to Iran.

The U.S. command had to inform reporters that the event had been cancelled, explaining that it had all been a “misunderstanding”. In his press briefing May 7, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner gave some details of the captured weapons in Karbala but refrained from charging any Iranian role.

The cancellation of the planned display was a significant story, in light of the well-known intention of the U.S. command to convict Iran on the arms smuggling charge. Nevertheless, it went completely unreported in the world’s news media.

A report on the Los Angeles Times’ Blog “Babylon & Beyond” by Baghdad correspondent Tina Susman was the only small crack in the media blackout. The story was not carried in the Times itself, however.

The real significance of the captured weapons collected in Karbala was not the obvious U.S. political embarrassment over an Iraqi claim of captured Iranian arms that turned out to be false. It was the deeper implication of the arms that were captured.

Karbala is one of Iraq’s eight largest cities, and it has long been the focus of major fighting between the Mahdi Army and its Shiite foes. Moqtada al-Sadr declared his ceasefire last August after a major battle there, and fighting had resumed there with the government operation in Basra in March. Thousands of Mahdi Army fighters have fought there over the past year.

The official list of weapons captured in Karbala includes nine mortars, four anti-aircraft missiles, 45, RPGs and 800 RPG missiles and 570 roadside explosive devices. The failure to find a single item of Iranian origin among these heavier weapons, despite the deeply entrenched Mahdi Army presence over many months, suggests that the dependence of the Mahdi Army on arms manufactured in Iran is actually quite insignificant.

The Karbala weapons cache also raises new questions about the official U.S. narrative about the Shiite militia’s use of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) as an Iranian phenomenon. Among the captured weapons mentioned by Gen. Jawdat were what he called “150 anti-tank bombs”, as distinguished from ordinary roadside explosive devices.

An “anti-tank bomb” is a device that is capable of penetrating armour, which has been introduced to the U.S. public as the EFP. The U.S. claim that Iran was behind their growing use in Iraq was the centrepiece of the Bush administration’s case for an Iranian “proxy war” against the U.S. in early 2007.

Soon after that, however, senior U.S. military officials conceded that EFPs were in fact being manufactured in Iraq itself, although they insisted that EFPs alleged exported by Iran were superior to the home-made version.

The large cache of EFPs in Karbala which are admitted to be non-Iranian in origin underlines the reality that the Mahdi Army procures its EFPs from a variety of sources.

But for the media blackout of the story, the large EFP discovery in Karbala would have further undermined the credibility of the U.S. military’s line on Iran’s export of the EFPs to Iraqi fighters.

Apparently understanding the potential political difficulties that the Karbala EFP find could present, Gen. Bergner omitted any reference to them in his otherwise accurate accounting of the Karbala weapons.

[Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.]

Source. / Inter Press Service

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Austin Vets for Peace Fete Folk Legend Utah Philips

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Utah Philips performs in Milwaukee on May Day, 2006.

Austin salutes ailing folk great and freedom fighter Utah Philips
By Doug Zachary / The Rag Blog

Austin Vets For Peace is raising money for our fellow Peace veteran and VFP member, the folk singer Utah Phillips. Utah has been grounded by congestive heart failure. There will be a benefit Sunday, May 18, at 5 pm, at Jovita’s in Austin.

He is very grateful that we are doing this; his family is in a pinch and needs the support. He is sending us some CDs to sell at the event

Utah was denied the opportunity for a heart transplant. It was determined that his body was too weak to survive the operation. He has congestive heart failure and will grow progressively weaker until he dies of it. In the meantime, he is fighting back. He stayed in the hospital for over a month, as they determined a good medical regimen for him. He now wears a shoulder bag filled with his medications and a computerized pump, from which runs a permanent IV directly into his heart. He has had to “give up the trade,” as he put it very sadly.

Utah told me about the first time he came to Austin, shivering in his boots because he had heard of the Texas habit of throwing beer, and beer bottles, at the performers. Imagine his pleasure when he showed up at the club, Emma and Joe’s, to find photos of Emma Goldman and Joe Hill on the wall.

He was especially pleased that Veterans for Peace is supporting this event. He is a Korean War veteran and a VFP member in good standing. He said, “If there is an organization in the US with the moral authority to turn things around, it would be Veterans For Peace.” Later in the conversation, he said that the most important movement on the planet is feminism and that only feminist men would be able to change the habit of old men ordering young men to take weapons and kill other people, and young men seeking thrills and gender identity through obedience.

The schedule for entertainers at the benefit is as follows:

5:50-6:00 Bill Johns VFP Chapter 66 Member
6-6:15, Bill Passalacqua
6:20-6:40, Jim Patton and Sherry Brokus
6:45-7:05, Steve Brooks
7:10-7:40, The Ginn Sisters
7:45-8:15, Michael Fracasso
8:20-9:00, Shelley King Band
Also appearing: Tim Henderson and Bob Cheevers

U. Utah Phillips — Funniest Story Ever!!

About Utah Phillips

Bruce “Utah” Phillips (born May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio) is a labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller, poet and self-described “Golden Voice of the Great Southwest”. He describes the struggles of labor unions and the power of direct action. He often promotes the Industrial Workers of the World in his music, actions, and words.

A fan of T. Texas Tyler, Phillips adopted the stage name U. Utah Phillips.

Phillips served the United States Army for three years beginning in 1956. Witnessing the devastation of post-war Korea greatly influenced his social and political thinking. Following service, he returned to Salt Lake City, Utah and joined Ammon Hennacy from the Catholic Worker Movement in establishing a mission house of hospitality named after the activist Joe Hill. [1] [2]Phillips worked at the Joe Hill House for the next eight years, then ran for the U.S. Senate as a candidate of Utah’s Peace and Freedom Party in 1968. He received 2,019 votes (0.5%) in an election won byRepublican Wallace F. Bennett.

Phillips met folk singer Rosalie Sorrels in the early 1950s, and has remained a close friend of hers ever since. It was Sorrels who started playing the songs that Phillipswrote, and through her his music began to spread. After leaving Utah in the late ’60s, he went to Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was befriended by the folk community at the Caffé Lena coffee house, where he became a staple performer throughout that decade.

An avid rail fan, Phillips has recorded several albums of music related to the railroads, especially the era of steam locomotives. His first recorded album, Good Though!, is an example, and contains such songs as ” Daddy, What’s a Train?” and “Queen of the Rails” as well as what may be his most famous composition, “Moose Turd Pie” [3]wherein he tells a tall tale of his work as a gandy dancer repairing track in the Southwestern United States desert.

In 1991 Phillips recorded an album of song, poetry and short stories entitled I’ve Got To Know in one take, inspired by his anger at the first Gulf War. The album includes “Enola Gay,” his first composition written about the United States’ atomic attack onHiroshima and Nagasaki.

Phillips was a mentor to Kate Wolf. He has recorded songs and stories with Rosalie Sorrels on a CD called The Long Memory (1996), originally a college project fromMontana. Ani DiFranco has recorded two CDs, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (1996) and Fellow Workers (1999), with him. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for his work with Ani DiFranco. His “Green Rolling Hills” was made into a country hit byEmmylou Harris, and ” The Goodnight-Loving Trail” has become a classic as well, being recorded by Ian Tyson, Tom Waits, and others.

Phillips has become an elder statesman for the folk music community, and a keeper of stories and songs that might otherwise have passed into obscurity. He is also a member of the great Traveling Nation, the community of hobos and railroad bums that populates the midwest United States along the rail lines, and is an important keeper of their history and culture.

When Kate Wolf grew ill and was forced to cancel concerts, she asked Phillips to fill in. Suffering from an ailment which makes it more difficult to play guitar, Phillips hesitated, citing his declining guitar ability. “Nobody ever came just to hear you play,” she said. Phillips tells this story as a way of explaining how his style over the years has become increasingly based on storytelling instead of just songs. He is a gifted storyteller and monologist, and his concerts generally have an even mix of spoken word and sung content. He attributes much of his success to his personality. “It is better to be likeable than talented,” he often says, self-deprecatingly.

Until it lost its funding, Phillips hosted his own weekly radio show, Loafer’s Glory: The Hobo Jungle of the Mind.

In August 2007, Phillips announced that he would undergo catheter ablation to address his heart problems. Later that autumn Phillips announced that due to health problems he could no longer tour.

Source. / Wikipedia,

Utah Philips website.

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Gulp!

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The Onion.

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A Really Low-Budget Horror Flick: Crazy Ants Hit Houston

Posted on May 15, 2008 by RagBlog

Exterminator Tom Rasberry lets the creatures named for him, “crazy rasberry ants,” crawl on his arm Tuesday.

‘Crazy’ Ants Swarm Over Houston Area
By Linda Stewart Ball / May 14, 2008

In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as “crazy rasberry ants” — crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and “rasberry” after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

“They’re itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they’re just running everywhere,” said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. “There’s just thousands and thousands of them. If you’ve seen a car racing, that’s how they are. They’re going fast, fast, fast. They’re crazy.”

The ants — formally known as “paratrenicha species near pubens” — have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.

“At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed,” said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.

But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven’t caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

“The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It’s not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

At the same time, the ants aren’t taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

“It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms,” said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents’ home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

“This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger,” said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Source / AP

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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