Can’t imagine they’re just saying this to scare people.

No Comments »

Email to supporters from Hillary Clinton

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party’s nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.

“I’m not a member of an organized party, I’m a Democrat,” Will Rogers once said.   Ok, the street fight is over. Join hands everyone and sing “Cumbaya.” The Democratic Party will now unify as never before and  clobber the Republicans in November.

(BTW, I’m not a Democrat. Now that we’re back in California, I’ll register as Peace & Freedom, the only socialist party in California with ballot status. Obama may well raise expectations so high that he will open the door for the possibility of real change - whether he wants to or not.  Will he end the wars? Dunno. But I doubt he’ll support torture and the erosion of constitutional rights, and that’ll be major steps in the right direction. And he gets it about global warming.)

1 Comment »

Simply, Mexico is in a guerrilla war and the majority (54%, in a recent Reforma poll) of the population thinks the narco-guerrillas are winning.

The only existential threat the US faces in the near term, is from global guerrillas in Mexico and not the Middle East. A breakdown there could result in massive population movements, refugee centers, and the spread of guerrilla warfare into US border states.

Emphasis added. Odd how we’re hearing little about this in the States. Mexico is also a major exporter of oil to the US. This could get seriously crazy.

No Comments »

Let me give my perspective on this. I am a Palestinian, born in the Galilee in “Israel,” forced with my family to leave the farm we had owned for five centuries (since we came to Palestine as refugees from the loss of Al-Andaus to Castilian Spain), and declared absentees who had no right to live there (this happened in 1965, when I was eight).

I totally support Obama for president, even though I also believe he means what he says and will be as blindly pro-Zionist as he sounds. That is because it is an iron law of American politics that to be elected, your position on Palestine has to be awful. There is no one that can be taken seriously in American politics who is not awful on Palestine. Even the post-presidential, well-meaning Jimmy Carter, who does not need to worry about elections anymore, is only tolerable.

I want an American president who does well on all the other topics he or she must deal with– and I pray only that he or she will shut up and get out of the way and let the rest of the world work out Palestine, since it is political suicide for an American politician to do the right thing. We don’t need “honest broker” America. That is not possible. Ideally, the American government would develop amnesia about the Middle East and just do nothing at all there– for or against anyone. Just shut up and get out of the way.

Presumably Obama will not be as overtly bellicose (and incompetent) as Bush. That would be a first step in the right direction.

8 Comments »

National Wind’s Community Wind Model: We form an actual legal business partnership with property owners. We create a joint ownership structure for each wind project with the landowners and community as a partner. Landowners have an opportunity to influence the project and have their voices heard. The community ultimately receives a large portion of the profits.

This is quite different from standard agreements where the utility owns everything, keeps most the profits, and pays the landowner at flat rate or small royalty. This is community-based wind power with joint ownership. Everyone wins.

EcoGeek has more.

No Comments »

Heard John Perkins speak Tuesday night at The Commonwealth Club in SF. He’s the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and the recent The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World.

He say, first they sent the economic hit men like me to corrupt foreign leaders into doing our bidding and if that didn’t work, then they sent in the jackals to depose or kill them. That’s the world Perkins used to live in.

His epiphany came when he realized the US government really does sometimes murder uncooperative heads of state. He decided he had to get out. At first he was threatened then essentially bribed to not write the book, then some years later, wrote it anyway. He says it’s his best insurance policy as it has sold millions of copies and if he should die violently, would sell many millions more.

Nine heads of state in Latin America now directly oppose such imperialism, a welcome trend he says. While he finds Chavez’s personality a bit much and wishes he’d tone down the rhetoric, it was Chavez and his ability to avoid being deposed in the CIA-led coup that inspired other Latin American leaders to run for office too and win. Given that the US could easily now lose easy access to Middle East oil, it can’t come down hard on Chavez or any of them simply because it needs the oil and no longer has the military resources to invade.

Oddly, he is often asked to speak at conventions of CEOs. Many of them, he says, are starting to get it. Exploiting third world resources simply creates unacceptable blowback. Cooperation is a better way. Since he wants solutions in his lifetime, he says capitalism will have to do, but not a greedhead capitalism that puts profits before everything else. Many CEOs now agree, they don’t want to see Florida underwater or the icecaps melting or terrorist bombs exploding either.

So, he says, we need to convince corporations to do the right thing. Rainforest Action Network is a real model here. Working quietly and effectively they have convinced many large corporations to stop exploiting the rainforests. This can be a model for the future. A corporation that makes armaments could also switch over and make equipment to remediate carbon and clean up pollution.

Indeed, a bunch of Greens or Lefties don’t have the economic power or technical chops to create such equipment. But large corporations do. So, as Rainforest Action Network does, the task is to convince them to do the right thing. We no longer have small problems in different parts of the world, but global problems that everyone knows about, like global warming, terrorism, and greedhead capitalism. Yes, he goes way back in the Amazon and they know all about global warming too.

So, Perkins says, the solutions can and will be global, with everyone involved.

No Comments »

Does the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act contain a loophole that would allow financial speculators to manipulate the price of carbon allowances, escalate the cost of U.S. emissions reduction efforts, and hinder the development of clean energy?

It’s a given that speculators will trade carbon allowance credits and try to make money doing so. Will the system be able to be gamed? Well, just look at the oil market now. Speculators certainly are driving those prices up.

if the bill has a loophole, traders will find it.

No Comments »