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100,00 ANTI-war protesters, 400 PRO-war protesters: Where's the media?

So how do the editors of the "new" Oregonian gauge the significance of 100,000 people demonstrating AGAINST the war in Iraq versus 400 who SUPPORTED the war the following day? 

Based on the coverage, the smaller protest was the more newsworthy.  The anti-war protest ended up on page A10 in Sunday's edition.  Today's story on the miniscule pro-war demonstration got page A2 treatment.  And it was longer by seven or eight paragraphs. 

But hey, the Oregonian was in good company.  According to Stewart Nussbaumer in Intervention Magazine,

"Indeed, the throngs that came to Washington will often convey more in their email exchanges than you are likely to glean from the mainstream media."

And Joan Vennochi writes in the Boston Globe that our Democratic "leadership" is equally remiss:

"Merely speaking up against the war in Iraq continues to terrify Democrats."

For those of you that saw nothing but hurricane coverage on the cable news channels this weekend, here are some pictures of the largest anti-war demonstration in the nation's capital since the beginning of the Iraq War.

The war on nature

The asault on Iraq is clearly misguided policy. So too is our continued assault on the environment.  It's long past time to rethink our vain and foolish attempts to bend the will of Mother Nature to  our  economic needs. 

Why?  Because we can no longer afford it.  Messing with natural systems and ignoring basic science not only threatens our very survival, it's also costing us lots of money.  Hurricane Katrina has shown us that.

You can call a hurricane a natural disaster, but the $100 billion dollar cost for recovery from Katrina is entirely of man's doing.  Consider:

• New Orleans is a city built below sea level.  It is protected (or was) by levees, "...  a misguided urban project, a fool's errand, a disaster waiting to happen."
• Lax land use regulations allow us to "tempt fate" by building structures in disaster prone areas, thereby increasing the cost of recovery.   Roger A. Pielke, Jr. writes in the Los Angeles Times "... the continuing development and urbanization of coastal regions around the world accounts for all of the increases in economic and human losses... ."
• The channelization of the Mississippi River for economic development has contributed to massive loss of wetlands south of New Orleans that serve as a buffer against hurricanes:  "But the delta  --  and its wetlands and islands  --  have been steadily shrinking since 1930, thanks to river diversion projects that have prevented the river from depositing silt and sand at its mouth."

Our environmental hubris extends far beyond New Orleans.  Species extinction has accelerated dramatically as a result of human activity in the past century.  As a result, says a BBC report on the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, "... we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished." 

But even the rich should take heed.  According to this report from the NewYork Times, caviar-producing sturgeon are also at risk. 

Maybe that wiil get the attention of those who argue that the economy matters more than the environment.

UPDATE:  Sid over at New Frames offers this on the cost of global warming:

"I wonder if the insurance companies are going to start advocating for an energy policy that addresses global warming since the cost of warming far outstrips the cost of fixing it."

 

UPDATE: Out of Iraq now!

Robert Dreyfuss'  incisive analysis of the surge of Shiite militia violence in the heretofore "peaceful" Basra region of Southern Iraq does not bode well for the success of the American military misison in Iraq.  As Dreyfuss writes,

"Since 2003, the Bush administration’s one hope has been that it can contain the Sunni-led resistance by betting on the Kurdish-Shiite alliance. But if the Shiites shatter, it’s curtains for the Anglo-American occupation."

Nor does the op-ed piece of the normally stalwart and centrist Georgie Anne Geyer.  She cites Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal's warnine that "... Iraq is hurtling toward disintegration, a development that could engulf the entire region in civil wars."

American public opinion has turned decisively against the American presence in Iraq.  And more than half want a "speedy withdrawal."   Those CNN poll numbers are supported by a Gallup poll, which reveals that a mere "... 21% said the US would definitely win the war."

In the meantime, Democratic Party "leaders" are fleeing Washington as a massive peace rally descends on the city.  The  clamor against the war, just as in the Vietnam protests nearly forty years ago, is coming from the people, which is as it should be in a true Democracy. 

The most influential of those democratic voices is that of Cindy Sheehan who will deliver the keynote speech.  It ends with these words:

"It is time. Bring our troops home, NOW!"

 

Blood for oil?

With the military death toll now at 1907, it's time --once again-- to consider an immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, and say, once and for all, misison accomplished.

It's also time for a full and open inquiry into the motives of the pro-war party, meaning the Bush Administration, for the invasion of Iraq.  We know now that it was more than about toppling a dictator who supposedly posed a threat to America.  We know it wasn't about weapons of mass destruction.  It certainly wasn't about fighting terrorism. 

And it was not about spreading democracy.  It's disingenuous to claim that invading a sovereign country, in a region with little experience in self-rule and no democratic institutions, is an effective way to "spread democracy."  Bush may have believed that, but you can be sure his advisors, especially the neocons, were too sophisticated and too cunning to swallow that hokum.

Everyone should now know that the Bush Administration has been entirely dishonest with the American public about the reasons we went to war in Iraq.  So much so that William Pfaff says that the war in Iraq makes Vietnam look like an "honest war":

"President Lyndon Johnson, the Bundy brothers, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk really did believe that the Chinese Communists ran the Vietnam war, and would exploit victory there to motivate Communist uprisings throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.

"They didn't appreciate that the world isn't so simple. The Communists won and nothing happened.

"The people who invaded Iraq didn't care whether the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to control Iraq for economic and strategic reasons (and possibly for personal ones, in the case of both the Bush family and Donald Rumsfeld, who had dealt with Saddam Hussein when the United States backed Iraq's war against Iran)."

One of those "economic and strategic reasons" is oil.  When I went to peace ralllies before the war, I thought those signs that read NO BLOOD FOR OIL were silly.  Now I don't.  Nor does Michael T. Klare, who writes that now it's apparent that we're gettting much less oil for much more blood than the war planners anticipated:

"Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish -- rather than enhance -- America's access to foreign oil."

Klare makes it clear that American military force has often been used to "protect" American oil interests in foreign countries:

"American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003."

Tom Engelhardt adds another motive:  using Iraq as a means to enrich the crony capitalists that have long propped up the vaunted Bush dynasty:

"Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush's nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi 'reconstruction' that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country."

Now, with even the "safe" southern part of Iraq experiencing violence at the hands of Shiite militias, it can be said with some certainty that the country is in the throes of the sectarian civil war that was predicted by anti-war voices prior to the invasion.

It's time to get out now.

Sprawl*Mart

An OSU study has determined that the burbs attract people who are overweight to begin with.  Healthier and thinner people tend to congregate in pedestrian friendly and more densely populated cities.  That finding, of course, raises several intriguing questions.

First, if large people with little interest in exercise are actually attracted to areas with no sidewalks or bike lanes, why bother to plan for smart and compact growth?   In fact, the authors of the study pose that very question.

Second, what comes first-- the chicken or the egg?  How do we know for sure that fat lazy people are drawn to sprawling suburbs?  Maybe it's the other way around.  Maybe it's the sprawling auto-dependent suburbs that create fat lazy people. 

And finally, my earlier post about the research that says driving makes people fat may be entirely wrong.  Maybe obesity causes people to drive.

That brings me, somewhat circuitously, to an anonymous comment on a recent Wal-Mart post of mine that makes the preposterous claim that the mega-retail development proposed for McLouglin Blvd. at the foot of Tacoma Street would be "pedestrian friendly."  And that it would "cut down on auto trips" for neighborhood residents who now  have no access to a large retailer. 

If those two claims are true, why do I have a bumper sticker right here that says --
SPRAWL*MART?  That doesn't conjure up an image of shoppers happily hiking to and from a Wal-Mart store across a busy highway.  Nor does it suggest less automobile traffic.  Has anyone ever actually seen a Wal-Mart shopper walk-- not drive-- away from one of its mega-stores?

Traffic sprawl is a major issue with big box retailers like Wal-Mart, especially in an urban area like Portland which has staked its claim to livability on reduced traffic congestion.  But it's in small town America that Wal-Mart has had it's greatest and most deleterious impact, as the PBS documentary "Store Wars" so deftly illustrates.

Ashland, Virginia, the subject of the documentary, is a quintessential small American town, or at least was before "Wal-Mart comes to town":

"It is the only town in America where Amtrak trains pull into town and let passengers off right on Main Street. School bus drivers and morticians serve on the town council and the residents are fiercely protective of their small-town character. But this gentle way of life is jolted when Wal-Mart announces it wants to build a supercenter on the edge of town."

And sprawl becomes the enemy:

"But facing considerable growth pressure from Richmond as a result of the approximately 100,000 people a day that pass by on the highway, what remains to be seen is whether Ashland will be able to fight sprawl in the future and retain the intimacy and character of a small town."

As Joel Hirschhorn points out in his book, Sprawl Kills, the notion that Americans have opted for sprawl and deliberately chosen to live in what he calls the "blandburbs" is bunk:

"The first thing to get straight is that the sprawl industry's claim that suburban sprawl has dominated the housing market for 50 years because that's what Americans want is pure hokum.  Automobile-dependent sprawl living is dominant because Americans     have had virtually no other choice."

That's why, in a nutshell, I'm fighting Wal-Mart.  I choose to patronize locally owned, small businesses.  Ones I can walk to.

 

Duin versus the O's editorial board

It should come as no surprise that the Oregonian would lambaste efforts by two city council members to lower PGE's sky-high electrical rates.  After all, the Oregonian's editorial board was the loudest cheerleader for Texas Pacific's attempted takeover of the utility.  And the most vocal critic of public ownership of PGE.

It is rather odd, though, that while today's lead editorial dismisses the actions of Erik Sten and Randy Leonard as an obsessive "measure of revenge" for Enron's rejection of the city's offer to buy PGE, over in the Metro section, the Oregonian's star columnist virtually canonizes Sten, Leonard, and Dan Meek, head of the Utlility Reform Project, for their dogged pursuit of rate reductions.  As Steve Duin points out, "...PGE electric rates are 31 percent higher than those charged by PacifiCorp."

As a proponent of public power, maybe I'm biased, but Duin seems to have the better take on the city's response to the PGE/Enron problem. The Oregonian editorial argues wrongly that -

• "Oregon is better off with a stand-alone PGE headquartered in Portland... ."  That's simply a restatement of the paper's bias against public ownership of utilities.
• "It was clear from the beginning that Enron was unlikely to sell PGE to the city."  It was far from clear to most observers that Enron would reject Portland's puchase bid.
• "The city and surrounding communities also are best off if the state, not the Portland City Council, controls utility rates."   That's a reference to the state Public Utility Commission, the politically appointed group that delivered PGE to Enron and has falied repeatedly to protect ratepayers from PGE's ever-escalating electrical bills. 

The Oregonian even invokes the Citizen's Utility Board as an ally in its beef with the city council.  But unlike the O's editorial writers, CUB has been, and still is, a staunch proponent of city ownership of PGE:

"While we would have preferred that PGE be sold to the City of Portland, that deal was rejected by Enron's bankruptcy management team."  ....  "... CUB continues to believe that ownership of PGE by the City of Portland would provide customer benefits, ...  ."

Finally, CUB issues this caveat about the stock distribution plan:

"CUB wishes we could guarantee that PGE's spin-off into an independent, Portland-headquartered company was an end-state. Unfortunately, we cannot."

The "new" Oregonian and Wal-Mart

What do I think of the O's new look? Well, it "looks" more like the New York Times.  Unfortunately, its first Sunday edition is even more devoid of content than usual, if that's possible.

Laura Gunderson's biz blog feature did catch my attention with its promise of a discussion about Wal-Mart and its new Supercenter in Wood Village.  But that too was disappointing.  The post was brief and I couldn't find any hint of a discussion, or the possibility of initiating one. 

That said, Gunderson does ask the question that gets to the heart of the controversy over Wal-Mart:  Does the way Wal-Mart treats its employees and dominates the market trump any economic benefit it may bring? 

Let me ask an even more fundamental question taken from the title of the Frontline documentary that will be shown as a fundraiser for Neighbors Against Sellwood Ardenwald Wal-Mart this Thursday evening at the Moreland Theater at 7:15 p.m:

"Is Wal-Mart Good for America?"

The answer to that, on purely economic grounds, is no.  Let me quote some excerpts from the documentary to back up that contention:

• "Wal-Mart is one of the key forces that propelled global outsourcing -- off-shoring of U.S. jobs -- precisely because it controls so much of the purchasing power of the U.S. economy," says Gary Gereffi, a Duke University professor who studies global supply chains.

  "Wal-Mart," Gereffi continues, "has life-or-death decision over [almost] all the consumer goods industries that exist in the United States, because it is the number one supplier-retailer of most of our consumer goods -- not just clothes, shoes, toys, but home appliances, electronic products, sporting goods, bicycles, groceries, food."

• Years of extensive interviews with Asian and American manufacturers, as well as study of trade flows, have persuaded Professor Gary Hamilton of the University of Washington, that the big box retailers, epitomized by Wal-Mart, have been "driving a massive restructuring of production worldwide; moving jobs from the U.S. and Europe to Asia. They do it by setting price points and forcing suppliers to meet their targets. Only lowest-cost labor can meet their targets, and that means producing in Asia."

• "But clearly Wal-Mart, the largest and, according to Fortune, the most emulated and respected firm in the nation today, is setting a new standard that other firms have to follow if they hope to compete. And more than just other firms, it's setting standards for the nation as a whole. It's almost legislating social policy, not in terms of votes and lobbying, but when it does something, it's so large, it's so influential, others follow it. ....

  "We can see that right now in terms of Wal-Mart's employment policy, which is the de facto employment policy of vast ranges of people in America ... who don't work for the firm, but their employer sets their wage standards, their benefits standards according to the standard that Wal-Mart has put in place. ..."  --Nelson Lichtenstein

I could go on, but the bottom line is that Wal-Mart is too big and too powerful.  If it is allowed to continue its unchecked expansion, it will ultimately become America's (and the world's) company store. 

In historical parlance, as we all know, company store has a well-deserved negative connotation.

 

What's it going to be? Government or charity?

I love this piece from Ted Rall.  It reminds me of why I don't give money to organizations like the Portland Schools Foundation which operates under the assumption that the more money it collects from willing donors, the better off our local public schools will be.  Actually, the reverse is true.  It takes local elected leaders off the hook for failing to fund schools adequately.

Rall's concern is about the massive charitable giving drive to aid victims of the Gulf Coast disaster, which allows the federal government to ignore its responsibilities:

"Government has been shirking its basic responsibilities since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan sold us his belief that the sick, poor and unlucky should no longer count on 'big government' to help them, but should rather live and die at the whim of contributors to private charities. The Katrina disaster, whose total damage estimate has risen from $100 to $125 billion, marks the culmination of Reagan's privatization of despair."

Rall is especially critical of the Red Cross, with its 9% administrative overhead:

"There's only one reason flood victims aren't getting help from the government: because the government refuses to help them. The Red Cross and its cohorts are letting lazy, incompetent and corrupt politicians off the hook, and so are their donors."

The same might be said of the Portland Schools Foundation.  Its board of directors is laden with employees of tax-dodging corporations like PGE, Nike, Pacificorp, Northwest Natural, and Columbia Sportswear.  One of its founding members is Ron Saxton, a moderately anti-tax Republican.  No wonder they want my donation.  Anything to keep the tax burden low, especially on corporations and the wealthy. 

That brings us back to Katrina and the Gulf Coast.  If you deconstruct the speech Bush gave last night, what he's really offering those poor Southern states is the opportunity to cut taxes.  And those pesky government regulations, primarily as an incentive to get businesses to move back to the stricken areas in order to create jobs by revving  up the economy. 

That's no surprise.  Tax cuts, and privatization, are at the heart of the Bush agenda.  It's an agenda that's positively Reaganesque.

Howard Dietrich and the Sellwood Wal-Mart

Howard Dietrich claims in today's Tribune that the Wal-Mart he wants to plunk down on the edge of Sellwood is nothing more than a "mini-Wal-Mart."  Let me set the record straight.

A Wal-Mart Supercenter, which typically sells everything under the sun, has 200,000 square feet of retail space.  The retail development that Dietrich wants to lease to Wal-Mart has 150,000 square feet of retail space, plus parking for 500- 600 cars.  How that can be described as a "mini-Wal-Mart", something like a 7- 11 store, is beyond comprehension.

By any definition, the Dietrich proposed Wal-Mart on McLoughlin at the Tacoma Street overpass is a mega-retail operation that will overwhelm the locally owned small businesses in neighboring Sellwood and the city of Milwaukie.  And the impact of 500 cars coming and going several times each day will surely tax the capacity of not only McLoughlin Blvd., but also the two lane Johnson Creek Blvd. and Tacoma Street which leads directly to the two lane Sellwood Bridge. 

Beyond that, Wal-Mart is a lousy corporation.  If you don't believe that, or need more convincing, I invite you to attend this fundraising event for Neighbors Against Sellwood/Ardenwald Wal-Mart:

"Is Wal-Mart Good for America"
A PBS Frontline documentary
Moreland Theater  6712 S.E. Milwaukie
Thursday, September 22
7:15 p.m.
($5 suggested donation)

George W. and Poppy on vacation in New Orleans

                      

                     

Bush's long vacation may have distracted him from his duty as Protector-in-Chief of the American people.  But he apparently hasn't forgotten about his responsibilities to America's schoolchildren under No Child Left Behind.

According to this article from the New York Times, all students displaced by Hurricane Katrina will still be held accountable for learning.  Of course, it's the schools that take them in that stand to lose under NCLB:

"Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived."

The last I heard, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings wasn't considering waiving any of NCLB's stringent requirements.