[Don't] Mourn on the 4th of July [Organize]

John Pilger, New Statesman, July 9, 2009 (click title of this post for original):

... Meanwhile, the “city on the hill” remained a beacon of rapaciousness as US capital set about realising Luce’s dream and recolonising the European empires in the postwar years. This was “the march of free enterprise”. In truth, it was driven by a subsidised production boom in a country unravaged by war: a sort of socialism for the great corporations, or state capitalism, which left half the world’s wealth in American hands. The cornerstone of this new imperialism was laid in 1944 at a conference of the western allies at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Described as “negotiations about economic stability”, the conference marked America’s conquest of most of the world.

What the American elite demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism, “was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve-up of world markets.” The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these “international” institutions, and an “invisible government” of media would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays.

Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations.” Bernays used Freud’s theories about control of the subconscious to promote a “mass culture” designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”; and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala’s democracy in 1954.

Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. “Free enterprise” became a divinity. “By the early 1950s,” wrote Noam Chomsky, “20 million people a week were watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider disrupting the ‘harmony’ of the ‘American way of life’ . . . Every aspect of social life was targeted and permeated schools and universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on textbooks.”

The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology. ...

Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars. ...

As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British “influence”, albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says America under Obama is a land “where miracles happen”. Justin Webb, until recently the BBC’s man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather like the colonel in Vietnam, to the “city on the hill”.

Behind this façade of “intensification of feeling and degradation of significance” (Walter Lippmann), ordinary Americans are stirring perhaps as never before, as if abandoning the deity of the “American Dream” that prosperity is a guarantee with hard work and thrift. Millions of angry emails from ordinary people have flooded Washington, expressing an outrage that the novelty of Obama has not calmed. On the contrary, those whose jobs have vanished and whose homes are repossessed see the new president rewarding crooked banks and an obese military, essentially protecting George W Bush’s turf.

My guess is that a populism will emerge in the next few years, igniting a powerful force that lies beneath America’s surface and which has a proud past. It cannot be predicted which way it will go. However, from such an authentic grass-roots Americanism came women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership. In the late 19th century, the populists were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. In the Obama era, the familiarity of this resonates.

What is most extraordinary about the United States today is the rejection and defiance, in so many attitudes, of the all-pervasive historical and contemporary propaganda of the “invisible government”. Credible polls have long confirmed that more than two-thirds of Americans hold progressive views. A majority want the government to care for those who cannot care for themselves. They would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone. They want complete nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US to end its colonial wars; and so on. They are informed, subversive, even “anti-American”.

I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interests call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity.

“There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the South with the civil rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”

"The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity"

Excellent essay by Chris Hedges (click on title of post):

The saturation coverage of Jackson’s death is an example of our collective flight into illusion. The obsession with the trivia of his life conceals the despair, meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status, wealth and fame has destroyed our souls, as it destroyed Jackson, and it has destroyed our economy.

The fame of celebrities masks the identities of those who possess true power—corporations and the oligarchic elite. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, as we barrel toward a crisis that will create more misery than the Great Depression, we are controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness and keep us from fighting back. And in the end, that is all the Jackson coverage was really about, another tawdry and tasteless spectacle to divert a dying culture from the howling wolf at the gate.

The knight's dog

"At a certain Village in La Mancha, which I shall not name, there liv'd not long ago one of those old-fashion'd Gentlemen who are never without a Lance upon a Rack, an old Target, a lean Horse, and a Greyhound." --Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote


[photo by Barbara Karant]
Click here to find out about adopting greyhounds, the "40-mile-an-hour couch potatoes".

Sham citizen wind energy activism in Washington state

"Wind Farms Trump Local Land-Use Laws, Washington Governor, Court Decide", by Penny Rodriguez, Heartland Institute, February 1, 2009:

Todd Myers, director of the Washington Policy Center, is skeptical of the promised benefits of wind power but nevertheless applauded the Washington Supreme Court’s decision.

“In many ways this decision can be seen as the opposite of the facts presented in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London,” Myers said. “Here we have state government preserving property rights when local governments are trying to restrict them.

“If farmers want to earn money by putting windmills on their property,” Myers continued, “we should honor their right to do so when reasonable. Local decisions are certainly preferable to those imposed from the state or federal level, but individual property rights should be given the highest priority.

“There are problems with our energy policy, including renewable portfolio standards and preferential renewable subsidies. But denying property rights is not the proper way to deal with those problems. I hope the supreme court will apply the same logic when it comes to other permits and not just wind farms,” Myers said.

"Launched in 2003, ["think tank"] Washington Policy Center’s Center for the Environment focuses on free-market solutions to environmental issues."

Todd Myers is also the executive director of Windworks Northwest, which has just produced a 15-minute video about how crucial it is to get more giant wind turbines into Kittitas County.

As one Fennelle Miller states in the film, wind turbines are a community good that require unfettered property rights to impose them on the community.

This cynical exploitation of climate change fears for such a blatant pro-development agenda, this twisting of environmentalism to mean the very opposite, this opportunistic milking of federal and state subsidies in the name of free enterprise ... well, there's nothing new here. It is just a tiresomely predictable part of human history that nobody should think we are ever free of. And it is not surprising, but saddening nonetheless, that so many otherwise perhaps sane and decent people still fall for it.

The Windworks Northwest film also includes "Dr." James Walker, who is described as "president, american wind energy association". Since last year, though, Walker has been the past president of the AWEA board of directors. What the film also does not note is that he is the vice chairman of the board of Enxco, the company on behalf of whose project the film was made.

And the chairman of Windworks is Robert Kahn, whose company managed the permitting process of the Stateline Wind Project for Florida Power & Light in 2000-2002.

Deceit infuses the film, which is little more than a disjointed intercutting of non sequitur sound bites.

Windworks' "Who Are We": "We believe that the number of wind power plants in the Northwest needs to expand because more wind power means less CO2 emissions and greater U.S. energy security." And anyone who questions those reasons, unless he's executive director Todd Myers himself ("skeptical of the promised benefits of wind power"), is a Nimby aesthete. And anyone who supports industrial expansion heedless of neighbors human and wild is an environmentalist voice for freedom.

If anyone doubted that almost everything about big wind is a sham, Windworks Northwest has helpfully made it extra clear.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Study to determine health effects of wind turbines?

From the The Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario), July 8:

Researchers at nearby [to Wolfe Island] Queen's University have embarked on the first study to probe whether wind turbines built over communities can cause adverse health effects. The study measures residents' health and well-being before the turbines arrived on the island, again when the turbines were built but not yet operational and again after they'd been operating for a few months.

People living close to turbines in other regions have reported nausea, headaches, dizziness, anxiety, sleep deprivation and tinnitus - an incessant ringing in a person's ears.

However, there has yet to be any substantive research linking those ailments to the presence of windmills, says lead study author Neal Michelutti, a research scientist in the Queen's University biology department.

Dr. Michelutti, as he is later referred to in the article, is not a medical doctor. He is, according the university web site, a PhD specialized in paleolimnology (the study of ancient lakes) of Arctic regions.

This is a strange choice to lead an epidemiologic (the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations) field study.

Anti-wind arguments still standing

According to Friends of the Earth UK, a new report that they commissioned from energy consultant David Milborrow "scuppers anti-wind arguments". Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Foundation, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds also helped pay for it. Click here to download the "Managing Variability" report.

They must be chagrined that the report actually underscores anti-wind arguments.

For example, the summary states, regarding the intermittency, variability, and unpredictability of wind: "This extra uncertainty means that additional short-term reserves are needed to guarantee the security of the system" (p.3). As every utility and grid manager admits, every potential new megawatt of wind requires a new megawatt of backup dispatchable power.

The heart of the report examines ways to reduce that requirement somewhat (by requiring other additions to the grid). Following are brief comments on this section.

Section 5: Mitigating the effects of variability [i.e., the many other expensive developments necessary to "integrate" wind]

5.1 Wind forecasting. At best, this improves hour-ahead forecasting of average output, but cannot predict, let alone improve, the minute-to-minute variability of wind.

5.2 Higher productivity from offshore wind. Offset by higher costs and failure rates.

5.3 Demand management. A small potential effect, particularly as wind is effectively negative demand as far as the grid is concerned.

5.4 Energy storage. As yet nonexistent on a large scale, it would likely double the cost of wind energy while adding a significant layer of inefficiency (i.e., much less energy is extracted than is put in).

5.5 Additional international connections. "effectively increasing the size of the system" (p. 20) (and increasing costs). In other words, effectively reducing the percentage of wind energy -- this is how Denmark claims 20% wind, because their wind production accounts for less than 1% of the international grids they are part of.

5.6 Electric cars. Theoretical only, and if a significant number of people are dependent on electric cars, it would actually augment, not mitigate, the problem of wind's intermittency and nonpredictability.

5.7 ‘Smart grids’ and the growth of de-centralised generation. That is, hope that whole pieces of the grid operate more on their own.

5.8 Electric space and water heating. Idiotic. Solar and geothermal power are the obvious choices for heat production (and cooling).

5.9 The hydrogen economy. Only here does the report recognize the theoretical status and uncertain costs. Hydrogen, in the present context, however, is only a storage medium, and thus would serve to substantially reduce the energy available from wind.

5.10 Overall effects. "It is quite possible ..." There is not even a pretense of method in estimating costs. Purely made-up numbers.

Section 6: Experience elsewhere

6.1 Germany. "Some problems have been reported, leading some observers to assume that difficulties there reflect universal problems, but this is not the case." Whew. Note that Germany's typical capacity factor for wind of 14% -- the basis for this report's dismissal of their experience -- is not substantially lower than Denmark's 18%.

6.2 Denmark. The report acknowledges that "Denmark has transmission links with Germany, Sweden and Norway and the power exported over these links often mirrors the wind energy production" but then ignores this by simply adding the size of those links to the capacity of domestic thermal plants to claim that Denmark still gets 13% of its electricity from wind. The fact remains that exports coincide with wind production. Denmark's efficient combined heat and power plants actually make it impossible to accommodate large amounts of wind. It is notable that Denmark has not added any new wind capacity since 2003.

In conclusion, wind is a diffuse inefficient resource whose integration requires a Rube Goldberg–like collection of measures (most of which don't even exist) which only add to its inefficiency and industrial impact -- underscoring the madness of big wind.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, animal rights, human rights

Peaceable Kingdom -- documentary film

animal rights, human rights, vegetarianism