Close Guantanamo Now

Close Guantanamo Now
by Mort Malkin

President Obama publicly ordered the closing of Guantanamo but privately said it would take a year or so to relocate all the “enemy combatants.” Various Republicans in Congress, when it was suggested the inmates be transferred to Leavenworth or Alcatraz or some Texas prison, said not in my backyard.

The President could start with a special group of 17 members of the Uighur culture, Muslims from Western China, who are completely innocent. Even the Bush administration has said they were sold by bounty hunters to the CIA and have never been accused of anything. They can’t be sent back to China, because the government there, Han Chinese by culture, would persecute them. Why not give them some compensation for the CIA’s mistake — cash and a Green Card — and let them locate in New York around Mott Street where many other Asians live.

Isn’t America famous for being a Melting Pot?

Welcome Spooks

Welcome Spooks
by Mort Malkin

So now, courtesy of MSNBC, we learn that the CIA and NSA have been spying on you and me, as well as other ordinary Americans. They monitored all our phone calls, e-mails, and maybe beauty parlor conversations. One group of Americans was deserving of special attention — journalists. As a journalist of sorts, myself, I am happy that more people are reading my writing. What more could any writer wish?

I’m notifying the White House that I wish to remain on the surveillance list, a most effective way to get my ideas through to the members of the Intelligence Committees in Congress and those who write up the President’s Daily Briefs. What a country!

Old King Coal

Gadfly
by Mort Malkin

Old King Coal

Coal has given us energy from the under-world since the Industrial Revolution. No wonder civilization didn’t use coal for the first 4,700 years since the invention of writing at 3,000 BCE. They wouldn’t even use graphite pencils for their cuneiform when they invented writing. Coal, as the Sumerians knew, was the stuff of the Devil. You want light, use olive oil. You need heat, burn wood.

Yes, coal can make heat and light, but it has far more disadvantages than redeeming features. First, the good news. Burning coal releases less methane than raising cattle. That’s it for the good news. The bad news, however, is world class in quality and quantity.

Coal fired plants make, in addition to electricity, SO2 and NOx which cause acid rain wherever the prevailing winds send the emissions. The coal plants of the Midwest send their acid smoke to the Adirondacks and New England, even to Republican Maine. While they are at it, coal plants offer mercury, arsenic, selenium, thorium, and uranium. You say acid rain kills all life in lakes and streams so we can’t catch any mercury tainted fish? Well, you know Murphy’s Law. It seems we humans have already been toxified from the mercury laden spewings of the coal plants.

More bad news. The process of mining, transporting, cooling, and ash disposal requires water in aquifer quantities, even more than Big Beef uses. In the Southwest at Black Mesa Arizona, Peabody Coal is mining on Hopi and Navajo lands. Billions of gallons of water are taken from the underlying aquifer to create a slurry pipeline, a new invention by Bechtel Inc, the devil’s apprentice. The coal, in fact may be less valuable than the water. Don’t accuse the coal companies of racism, they will even take the white man’s water. In Great Falls Montana, the proposed coal fired plant is well on its way with the permitting process. Recently, a ray of hope appeared. An environmentally sensitive official raised an eyebrow over the plan to take many millions of gallons of water from the Missouri River. Another eyebrow went up over the threat to the Lewis & Clark Historical Site that was so inconveniently located. Maybe history will win out.

Coal mining goes back in my memory to John L Lewis of the bushy eyebrows and outspokenness, and to the UMW in the first half of the 20th century. In those days mining was simply digging mine shafts & tunnels and bringing in men with pick axes and canaries. Black lung disease was endemic in Appalachia. But, some twenty years ago such memorable companies as Peabody, Arch Coal, and Alpha Natural Resources — do gooders all — figured out that they could eliminate black lung disease by the technique of mountain top removal. Just dynamite the mountain, and take out the coal with mondo bulldozers. It is rumored that a few mucky mucks in the companies, upon hearing that nuclear energy leaves no carbon footprint, proposed to use small nuclear bombs to detach the mountain tops. But, their atoms-for-peace plan was killed off by a pair of reporters who heard about it and went radioactive, reporting it on a blog site. Then, a question arose from the depths: what to do with the mountain tops after blasting them off. Somehow, the peaks didn’t vaporize. The answer was found in the valleys and streams between the mountains, just the right sized space. How convenient.

Of course, coal fired plants also produce lots of CO2, the prime greenhouse gas that creates global heating and climate chaos. The whoo-ha about “clean” coal was promoted by the President early in 2001 by offering $2 billion for R&D. The delusion increased over the years, and by 2007 “clean” coal made it into his State of the Union speech. In 2008, Barack Obama said “Me too.” Until then, many thought the now President Obama was smarter, or more honest, than that. In the hypothetical “clean” coal model, the CO2 produced is removed and buried and the other toxic pollutants are removed by scrubbers. The coal fired plants may not yet have developed the CO2 sequestration techniques, but they know how to install scrubbers. They are proceeding with them with all deliberate haste, having installed the technology in 134 of the more than 600 coal plants around the country since the 1990s. The accent in “with all deliberate haste” is on “deliberate.” In fact, many of the older plants, over 42 years old, have a “grandfather” exemption from modernizing with scrubbers. The designers of new coal fired plants are presently trying to figure out how to be grandfathered without Bush in the Oval Office.

Last, comes the question of what to do with what’s left after the coal is burned. When I was a kid in East Flatbush in Brooklyn, the apartment house on the block and a few other homes were heated by coal. The ashes were less ashes than clinkers. They were disposed of in ash cans separate from garbage cans. The same inconvenient ash must be produced by the coal fired plants. Coal ashes are useless as fertilizer or anything else. The power plants are as technologically advanced in doing away with coal ash as they are in converting coal from dirty to clean. What the coal plants have traditionally have done with the ash, and still do, is to grind it up, mix it with water (more water), and dig out a few acres of earth for sludge “ponds.” Last month, a dammed, 40 acre sludge pond in Tennessee gave way and flooded the town of Kingston City, near Knoxville. OK, at 40 acres, it was more of a lagoon, as potent as, if not better smelling than, a pig waste lagoon. The Tennessee sludge flood was picturesque enough to interest the media, followed quickly by a call to the Coast Guard as well as to the EPA. The local folks were in over their heads. Keep your eye on the 1300 other “containment” sites around the country.

If it’s not enough to leave the coal in the ground for all of the above reasons, why not leave it just because Nature intended it there? Maybe it is part of Nature’s grand design of turning coal into its purest form of carbon — diamonds.

Leave Iraq? Plan A1

Gadfly
by Mort Malkin

Leave Iraq? Plan A1.

Barack Obama came out against the war in Iraq early on. He promised that if elected he would get our troops out promptly, but also orderly and responsibly. So, he was selected against war hawk Hillary Clinton and then elected against John McCain the forever warrior. Everyone seems to forget that the administration’s Plan A was that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans with sweets and flowers, we would depose Saddam Hussein, Achmed Chalabi would be anointed President, and we would promptly depart secure in the knowledge that Iraq would privatize the oil industry for Exxon and the other multinationals based in Texas. There was no Plan B.

Even before January 16, when he moves into the White House, Obama was acting like he owned the keys to the front door and the Oval Office. Right after Thanksgiving he named key members of his Cabinet. First named were members of the war cabinet: Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, General James Jones as National Security Counselor, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and Robert Gates to continue as Secretary of War (er, Defense). No one was nominated to be Secretary of a Department of Peace.

Everyone from Bush to Obama view the Iraqi as small children who need US guidance until they grow up. That’s the same Iraq whose history goes back at least 8,000 years in the Fertile Crescent where civilization was born, city states grew, writing was invented, law codes were carved in stone, and all the rest. The Iraqis, poor children, would not be able to defend themselves against terrorists, or Saddam’s ghost, if we left precipitously.

Gadfly avers that no bloodbath would occur. The Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia, are first of all Iraqis. Before 2003 when the US came to take their once and future oil, intermarriage was commonplace and mixed neighborhoods were the norm. The Shia, though the majority religious group, are not monolithic. There is President Nouri al-Maliki and the religious leader, Moqtada al Sadr, backed by the Mahdi Army. In the South, the Marsh Arabs are an ancient people, Shia by history. The Oil Workers, a politically strong group centered in the South, may be mostly Shia, but they are more interested in keeping the oil for Iraq than in family values such as religion. Floating over all the Shia differences is the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani who lets all the faithful know what’s on his mind.

The Sunni, the original insurgents, settled in Anbar Province in the West of Iraq and needed no instruction from the Americans in how to mount military operations against foreign occupiers, especially Americans. To promote "The Surge" the US public was sold the idea that the Sunnis would clean out Al Qaeda for the good of Iraq. In Iraq, the Sunnis were sold the same idea by being placed on the State Department payroll along with Blackwater et al. When the money stopped for a few weeks, the “awakening” went back to sleep.

So much for basic background. A few events are offered to support the thesis of the title of this essay, “Leave Iraq? Plan A1.” The odds makers of the Gadfly Revelry & Research gang predict that we could safely leave right now. They say the Iraqis are competent to take care of themselves — there will be no blood. Back in April 2007, Moqtada al-Sadr, who has nothing good to say about the occupation, organized a giant rally of all Iraqis — Shia, Sunni, and secular persuasions. The rally, held in Najaf, attracted 600,000 from all parts of the country. They carried Iraq flags and signs saying “No, No to Occupation.” It was entirely peaceful. The US military wisely stayed far away.

Then in June 2008, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Baghdad for a meeting with Iraqi leaders. He drove from the airport — a usually dangerous route — quite safely. In Baghdad, he met with President Jalal Talibani in the Presidential Palace. It was a full state welcome, red carpet and all. They shared food and conversation while guarded by Iraqis. Not an American soldier was in sight. Afterward, Ahmadinejad met Nouri al-Maliki for further discussions. The two day visit was welcomed by almost all Iraqi leaders and went off without incident.

Most recently, in November 2008, Moqtada al-Sadr organized a demonstration of many thousands of Iraqis to oppose a pact with the US which would continue the US occupation, maintain “enduring” bases, and establish an oil law that would give multinational corporations the right to explore undeveloped oil fields. The huge rally was attended by all religious factions, who considered themselves, first and foremost, Iraqi. The Iraqi flag was much in evidence as were the signs condemning the “agreement of humiliation.” George Bush attended in effigy and was pelted by every convenient missile, from rocks to shoes, and set afire. The protest was peaceful, but the Iraqi subtlety was not mistaken for a “Have a nice day” message.

Most Americans oppose “precipitous” withdrawal. They say it will result in anarchy and civil war, and we must stay there till we train the Iraqi Army to provide security. But the “security” skills of the Iraqis have been on display since 2003. Without an air force, navy, or tank corps, they have been able to tie down the greatest military force in the world. All they had were pickup trucks, rifles, roadside bombs, and rocket propelled grenades. Moreover, each of the Iraqi factions wants to participate in ruling the entire nation. They know of their great natural wealth. They remember that even under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was counted as an advanced Arab nation. They were considered number one in many disciplines. Women occupied many professional positions. Especially, they are aware of the history of Mesopotamia from the first cities of Sumer to Babylon and Assyria, old as the civilizations of Egypt and China. The Iraqis are a proud people.

Free Enterprise

Free Enterprise, Unltd.
by Mort Malkin

We, of course, are exemplars of advanced industrialized society. Then, there are the primitive Third World countries. Between the First World and the Third World, there is a populous place, not the Second World, but Emerging Nations. The emerging nations such as China and India are primitive in the countryside and industrialized in the cities. But, whether rural and urban, the emerging nations have few environmental regulations and labor laws — ideal for outsorcing American jobs.

We of the First World know that bigger is better. Modern science and capitalism have told us so. In the 18th century we had the Industrial Revolution (jail the Luddites) and were already into the second Agricultural Revolution. Nature was slow and undisciplined. By the 20th century, modern man could use chemistry and electronics to gain speed and focus.

In agriculture, we made wondrous fertilizers, created herbicides & pesticides, and had the judgment to decide which variety of the genus and species was best for potatoes, tomatoes, corn, wheat, rice, oranges, berries, and very few other essential foods. We didn’t have to bother with broccoli or kale — few eat these strange tasting vegetables. Only the French insist on keeping different kinds of grapes so they can have: Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Zinfindel, and Syrah.

By the late 19th century biodiversity was considered old fashioned. A pioneer Celtic nation, Ireland, had decided that the the Lumper potato was the best kind to feed the poor people. It was the only variety planted in the Emerald Isle. Unfortunately, the phyto-pathogen phytophthera infestans, also thought the Lumper was the best potato. So, the potato blight came, and there were no resistant potato varieties around. So, all the starving Irish had to emigrate to the New World and get used to food in the Automat, New York’s prototype of a fast food joint.

In the early 20th century the corn borer moth came to New England and did in the cornfields of Massachusetts. Over the following decades the corn borer migrated across to the Great Plains where monocrop corn farming was the rule — perfect conditions for the corn borer moth. It presented a challenge to American Chemistry. Rather than diversify the varieties of corn and finding some that were resistant to the corn borer — that would be the primitive Mexican way — we invented new pesticides that would kill the moth and its larvae that deserved nothing less for daring to tangle with us. If the pesticide turned out to be toxic to humans as well, we would deal with that a few years later when the ecologists had proof positive that we could no longer deny.

As the 20th century was closing, the chemists of Monsanto had a new lucrative toy — genetic engineering — which enabled them to play God at elementary levels. What a feeling! For example, they could take the genes from cold water fish and inject them into tomatoes that would then be resistant to frost. The tomatoes were called “flavor savers" but didn’t taste any better. Nor did they have any more vitamins or nutrients. Nowadays we don’t hear much about the flavor saver tomato. They decided to move a couple of steps away from direct confrontation with the consumer. Genetically engineered corn and soy that was fed ro animals or put into prepared foods was a more peaceful way for Monsanto to make a living.

In Africa and Europe, consumers are insisting that genetically engineered (GE) foods be labeled so, or at least as “franken foods.” The farmers, too, refused to join the fourth agriculturl revolution and would not buy GE seeds or the pesticides for which they were engineered. In the US, GE labeling is not required even though the majority of corn and soy grown in our country is genetically engineered. Working on another track, we insist on free trade and open markets for US corporations. Thus, the industrial sized farms that are favored with tax cuts can out-compete small family farms in Third World countries and drive them out of business. When the Third World nations complain, they are accused of protectionism and isolationism, sovereign criminal behavior to be sure. The poets of the Gadfly Revelry & Research group have suggested that these nations call their policies localism and self sufficiency. Their farmers are willing to work hard. They are happy to farm small acreage without using artificial anything. They fertilize with compost, mulch, and manure. They pick off insect pests by hand. Twenty acres supports a family with food with plenty left over to sell to neighbors and markets.

We in the US can take a lesson from old fashioned family farmers and communities around the world. We can shop locally, join a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm, or shop at farmers’ markets supporting farmers who grow different varieties of different vegetables. We might even learn to identify wild edible plants and become wildcrafters. Then we’ll be back before the first Agricultural Revolution, back to our hunter-gatherer roots when our genetic heritage was established.

Quote of Note

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter."
-- Thomas Jefferson