Boulevard

I urge all of you who, like me, believe this next election will be the most important election of our lifetime to check-out the following Rapid Response connection with The Democratic Party.

It's not quite July 4, but let's remember the principles our forefathers founded and take back America from those who are un-doing our democracy and trying to replace it with an oligarchy.

-Boulevard



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posted by J. Boulevard @ 7:57 PM 0 comments

The Sickly State of Health Insurance

The Sickly State of Health Insurance
By Nomi Prins, AlterNetPosted on September 12, 2006, Printed on September 12, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/41416/
The following is an excerpt from Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (Whether you voted for them or not) by Nomi Prins, PoliPointPress, 2006.
What do a successful ABC television producer, an ex-Los Angeles Laker turned actor, and a former meth addict turned PR god all have in common? First, they all spend way too much time in LA traffic. Second, they all think America's current health-care system sucks.
Poncho Hodges is a 34-year-old former LA Laker. He's the tallest person I've ever stood next to. I walk with him (Poncho used to live in New York, so is down with the whole walking thing) to a nearby Starbucks, on Magnolia and Lankershim Boulevard. My all-black outfit (yes, it is a New York thing) looked a little grim next to his red and white Yankee cap and red and white sneakers. His face was framed by bling studs and a thick gold chain necklace.
Poncho attended the University of Colorado on a basket-ball scholarship. He did a stint as power forward for the Lakers. He's perfectly healthy now, but having witnessed tons of sports injuries in his career, he knows the importance of coverage. "Health insurance?" he says with a voice as deep as James Earl Jones. "Been winging it."
Like other members in the Screen Actors Guild and vari-ous professional groups or unions, he gets insurance through group policies that are imbedded with obstacles. "I got the SAG one, but you need to gross like $15,000 a year to keep it. You have to gross about $25,000 to get dental."
For seven years, he played basketball all over Europe, and learned from his time there: "America needs to take lessons from other countries where if you're a citizen, you get health care, no matter who you are." Ideas like this separate Poncho from the thinking of our gov-ernment, even though he considers himself a Republican. "I like the things they stand for -- like on religion -- and I'm down with keeping American traditions. On the economic thing, it's different -- they don't care about the poor, they're too privileged." He is further proof that the need for decent health care cuts across political beliefs, and he is one more example of how out of touch conservatives are even with their own constituents.
After Poncho takes off in his size 15 Nikes, I have another latte. For this one, I'm joined by Jed Wallace, a super-lively PR person. Jed has an expensive individual health insurance plan, which also covers his two young daughters. He got it on-line. "It's Blue Cross/Blue Shield -- over $800 a month, a $10 deductible on office visits, $30 on prescription drugs, $500 on ER work, and an annual deductible of $750." Part of the reason the plan is so expensive is Jed's former ultra-Hollywood lifestyle. He craved the dream: "I wasn't exactly sure how, but my ego said I wanted to be rich and famous -- then you get pummeled by reality."
Reality for Jed started with smoking pot, then doing hallucinogens. It soon became a full-blown meth addiction. During the mid-'90s, he co-hosted a web radio spot and "Popcorn," a movie review show on MTV. He made, as he put it, "shitloads of money, burned through it, and started doing coke." MTV was short-lived, so he got into the bar business in Santa Monica. "It was 'on' from there -- partying, drugs, everything."
By April 2000, he was cruising high. The manager of one of the beer companies he bought along the way happened to be his drug dealer. "I was working 20- to 22-hour days -- I had to get into meth, the delusion that with a little, you could do anything."
He rationalized that he provided his two-year-old and wife with a home, money, and cars. He paid employees in drugs. Finally, his wife left him. Eventually she returned and created an inter-vention that led him to Life's Journey Center in Palm Springs. It was, as he put it, "a humbling experience. There, we also discovered I was bipolar -- that's why my insurance is so high."
Now, he speaks to kids in recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. "Lots of people in treatment wind up dead, back on drugs, or in jail. I'm lucky. People helped me. 'Cause it's not covered by insurance." He's been clean for two years, having been to hell and back, and has met tons of lost people along the way. Many of them, he believes, were souls that could have been helped by wider reaching health care. "This government is totally detached from the real American psyche and spirit," he says, driving me back to my car. "You parked all the way over here?! Why?"
The next day, I hit ABC Studios, where it was definitely turning Christmas. A young intern was passing out ginger-bread cookies while I waited for Harry Phillips, a producer of Primetime. After a few minutes he arrived, a friendly man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and mustache, and offered me herbal tea from their kitchen.
Behind his desk are several bags of Christmas presents, mostly for his youngest daughter, Abigail. "She's 12 going on 20," he says. On his walls are several Emmy awards, a map of the United States, and a Norman Rockwell print of a young black girl in Mississippi.
He's been at ABC for 16 years. His health plan is through Disney/ABC, and is CIGNA/PPO, for which he pays $250 a month with a $350 annual deductible. Born in Canada on Memorial Day in 1952, he has been in the United States for 15 years but maintains dual citizenship. The biggest reason why? Yep: "Health care--socialized medicine." As far as he's concerned, Canada just flat out gives its citizens better care than we do. And it's hard to argue with him. Canada has the equivalent of an interlocking system of Medicare and Medicaid. Everyone's in the same risk pool and there are fewer administrative costs.
His ABC health-care plan is a good one, and Harry knows it. He also realizes how lucky he is compared to many of us: "I'd be willing to give up some of that privilege in return for others to have more access to health care in the U.S." Meanwhile, Harry is holding onto his Canadian national health care (CARE) card and his home in Canada because "retiring there makes a lot more financial sense." Sadly, most of us don't have this option. And after all, should we really have to feel "lucky" to have decent health care?
Rising Health Care Costs and Your Wallet
The private health-care system is filled with waste. In 2003, health-care bureaucracy cost the Americans who use it $400 billion. And health insurance companies don't even actually provide health care. It's not like GM, which provides cars (or tries to anyway).
Let's make no mistake about this: insurance companies are middlemen. Their sole job is to connect the dots that stand between you and your medical treatment. More often than not, it seems like their job is actually to create red tape between you and your wallet. Why do we put up with them? Because these companies are so entrenched in our daily lives that we can't imagine an alternative. But there are other options, whether or not the Bush conservatives want to acknowledge them. A recent study found that national health insurance, financed by the federal government instead of private insurance companies would save Americans about $286 billion annually in paperwork alone. This would be enough to give all uninsured Americans full prescription drug coverage.
President Bush goes out of his way to ignore these obvious statistics. He goes out of his way to bolster our current system, which is only getting worse. Medical expenses rose faster than inflation in the 1990s as insurance companies created plans to limit our treatment options through something they like to call "managed care." To me this translates as: we manage our (enormous) profits, you wing your (shoddy) coverage.
On top of that, the costs of plans have increased. Between 2000 and 2005, average monthly premiums for individual cov-erage shot from $342 to $603, and annual deductibles (the amount you put out before your insurance kicks in) almost doubled, to $323 from $175.
To make sure drugs companies weren't left behind as health insurance companies grabbed their enormous profits, the Bush Republicans introduced the prescription drug bill -- or "Medicare Part D"-- for Medicare beneficiaries, the 42 million Americans who are disabled or 65 or older.11 In far from conservative wisdom, the bill doesn't include the ability to bargain with drug companies for lower cost drugs. Since its inception, drug companies have substantially raised prices on nearly all drugs covered by the program. Plus, the cost of this drug-company orgy to our federal budget is projected to be a staggering $8.7 trillion between now and 2080.
The Medicare prescription drug bill was part of the 2003 Medicare law and took effect in January 2006. Your first $250 of drugs is free. Then comes the cloud, looming behind that slim silver lining: you pay a quarter of costs from $251 to $2,250, and all of the next $2,850. That "doughnut hole" lasts until you hit $5,100 in drug costs per year. After that, Medicare picks up most of the tab. All in all, the gap in coverage has only increased with the new plan, and with it, out-of-pocket expenses for the average participant. By January 2006, less than half of the elderly able to sign up for the prescription drug plan did. Why? The sign-up process was nearly impossible to figure out.
"The Bush administration knew that going in," Diane Archer, founder of the Medicare Rights Center, told me. "They banked on it. They didn't even keep the right to negotiate prices with the drug companies. Others who did sign up didn't get their plastic ID cards that confirmed they had, so they couldn't get the drugs they needed." And the problems aren't limited to the people who need those drugs. Before the bill, Medicare's overhead was only 4 percent of its total cost to the federal budget. After the prescription plan was adopted, overhead tripled. Nevertheless, Bush has decided the program is a raging success.
Unfortunately, Bush is not alone. Drug and health insurance companies felt the love that average citizens didn't feel, as they were second only to oil companies in 2005 stock market performance. Once again, those companies book the profits, and we Americans foot the ever-growing bill.
Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and is the author of Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (Whether you voted for them or not) PoliPointPress, 2006.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/41416/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:33 PM 0 comments

How Bushs Metaphoric

How Bush's Metaphorical War Became Real
By George Lakoff and Evan Frisch, AlterNetPosted on September 11, 2006, Printed on September 12, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/41471/
Language matters, because it can determine how we think and act.
For a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11, administration spokesmen referred to the event as a "crime." Indeed, Colin Powell argued within the administration that it be treated as a crime. This would have involved international crime-fighting techniques: checking banks accounts, wire-tapping, recruiting spies and informants, engaging in diplomacy, cooperating with intelligence agencies in other governments, and if necessary, engaging in limited "police actions" with military force. Indeed, such methods have been the most successful so far in dealing with terrorism.
But the crime frame did not prevail in the Bush administration. Instead, a war metaphor was chosen: the "War on Terror." Literal -- not metaphorical -- wars are conducted against armies of other nations. They end when the armies are defeated militarily and a peace treaty is signed. Terror is an emotional state. It is in us. It is not an army. And you can't defeat it militarily and you can't sign a peace treaty with it.
The war metaphor was chosen for political reasons. First and foremost, it was chosen for the domestic political reasons. The war metaphor defined war as the only way to defend the nation. From within the war metaphor, being against war as a response was to be unpatriotic, to be against defending the nation. The war metaphor put progressives on the defensive. Once the war metaphor took hold, any refusal to grant the president full authority to conduct the war would open progressives in Congress to the charge of being unpatriotic, unwilling to defend America, defeatist. And once the military went into battle, the war metaphor created a new reality that reinforced the metaphor.
Once adopted, the war metaphor allowed the president to assume war powers, which made him politically immune from serious criticism and gave him extraordinary domestic power to carry the agenda of the radical right: Power to shift money and resources away from social needs and to the military and related industries. Power to override environmental safeguards on the grounds of military need. Power to set up a domestic surveillance system to spy on our citizens and to intimidate political enemies. Power over political discussion, since war trumps all other topics. In short, power to reshape America to the vision of the radical right -- with no end date.
In addition, the war metaphor was used as justification for the invasion of Iraq, which Bush had planned for since his first week in office. Frank Luntz, the right-wing language expert, recommended referring to the Iraq war as part of the "War on Terror" -- even when it was known that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and indeed saw Osama bin Laden as an enemy. Fox News used "War on Terror" as a headline when showing film clips from Iraq. Remember "Weapons of Mass Destruction?" They were invented by the Bush administration to strike terror into the hearts of Americans and to justify the invasion. Remember that the Iraq War was advocated before 9/11 and promoted as early as 1997 by the members of the Project for the New American Century, who later came to dominate in the Bush administration. Why?
The right-wing strategy was to use the American military to achieve economic and strategic goals in the Middle East: to gain control of the second largest oil reserve in the world; to place military bases right in the heart of the Middle East for the sake of economic and political intimidation; to open up Middle East markets and economic opportunities for American corporations; and to place American culture and a controllable government in the heart of the Middle East. The justification was 9/11 -- to identify the Iraq invasion as part of the "War on Terror" and claim that it is necessary in order to protect America and spread democracy.
What has been the result?
Domestically, the "War on Terror" has been a major success for the radical right. Bush has been returned to office and the radical right controls all branches of our government. They are realizing their goals. Social programs are being gutted. Deregulation and privatization are thriving. Even highways are being privatized. Taxpayers' money is being transferred to the ultra-rich making them richer. Two right-wing justices have been appointed to the Supreme Court and right-wing judges are taking over courts all over America. The environment continues to be plundered. Domestic surveillance is in place. Corporate profits have doubled while wage levels have declined. Oil profits are astronomical. And the radical rights social agenda is taking hold. The "culture war" is being won on many fronts. And it is still widely accepted that we are fighting a "War on Terror." The metaphor is still in place. We are still taking off our shoes at the airports, and now we cannot take bottled water on the planes. Terror is being propped up.
But while the radical right has done well on the domestic front, America and Americans have fared less well both at home and abroad.
What was the moral of 9/11?
To Osama bin Laden, the moral was simple: American power can be used against America itself. This moral has defined the post 9/11 world: the more America uses military force in the Middle East, the more damage is done to America and Americans.
The more Americans kill and terrorize Muslims, the more we recruit Muslims to become terrorists and fight against us.
The war in Iraq was over in 2003 when the US forces defeated Saddam's army. Then the American occupation began -- an occupation by insufficient troops ill-suited to be occupiers, especially in a country on the brink of a civil war, where neither side wants us there.
The number of lives lost on 9/11 is currently listed as 2973. As of this writing 2662 Americans have been sent to their deaths in Iraq, a Muslim country that did not attack us. At the current rate, within months more Americans will have been sent to their deaths by Bush than were murdered at the hands of bin Laden.
9/11 was a crime -- a crime against humanity -- and terrorism is best dealt with as crime on an international level.
It is time to toss the war metaphor into the garbage can.
The war metaphor is still intimidating progressives. To come out against "staying the course" is to be called unpatriotic, weak, and defeatist. To say, "no, we're just as strong, but we're smarter" is to keep and reinforce the war metaphor, which the conservatives have a patent on.
It is time for progressives to jettison the war metaphor itself. It is time to tell some truths that progressives have been holding back on. What has worked in stopping terrorism is just what has worked in stopping international crime -- like the recent police work in England. What has failed is the war approach, which just recruits more terrorists. In Iraq, the war was over when we defeated Saddam's army. Then the occupation began. Our troops are dying because they are not trained be occupiers in hostile territory on the cusp of a civil war.
Bush is an occupation president, not a war president, and his war powers should be immediately rescinded. Rep. Lynn Woolsey's resolution to do just that (H.R. 5875) should be taken seriously and made the subject of national debate.
I am suggesting a conscious discussion of the war metaphor as a metaphor. The very discussion would require the nation to think of it as a metaphor, and allow the nation to take seriously the truth of our presence in Iraq as an occupation that must be ended. You don't win or lose an occupation; you just exit as gracefully as possible.
Openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would allow the case to be made that terrorism is most effectively treated as a crime -- like wiping out a crime syndicate -- not as an occasion for sending over a hundred thousand troops and doing massive bombing that only recruits more terrorists.
Finally, openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would raise the question of the domestic effect of giving the president war powers, and the fact that the Bush administration has shamelessly exploited 9/11 to achieve the political goals of the radical right -- with all the disasters that has brought to our country. It would allow us to name right-wing ideology, to spell it out, look at its effects, and to see what awful things it has done, is doing, and threatens to keep on doing. The blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq, in New Orleans, in our economy, and throughout the country at large should be placed squarely where it belongs -- on right-wing ideology that calls itself "conservative" but mocks real American values.
Metaphors cannot be seen or touched, but they create massive effects, and political intimidation is one such effect. It is time for political courage and political realism. It is time to end the political intimidation of the war metaphor and the terror it has loosed on America.
George Lakoff is the author of 'Whose Freedom? The Batle Over America's Most Important Idea' (Farrar Straus Giroux). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute.
Evan Frisch is a technology strategist at the Rockridge Institute.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/41471/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 5:08 PM 0 comments

In Search of Accurate Vote Totals

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September 5, 2006
Editorial, The New York Times
In Search of Accurate Vote Totals
It’s hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven’t mastered the art of counting votes accurately. Yet there are growing signs that the country is moving into another presidential election cycle in disarray.
The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio, a key swing state, whose electoral votes decided the 2004 presidential election. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio’s biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election.
Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, hired a consulting firm to review its election system. The county recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. The investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year’s primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.
This is seriously bad news even if, as Diebold insists, the report overstates the problem. Under Ohio law, the voter-verified paper record, not the voting machine total, is the official ballot for purposes of a recount. The error rates the report identified are an invitation to a meltdown in a close election.
The report also found an array of other problems. The county does not have a standardized method for conducting a manual recount. That is an invitation, as Florida 2000 showed, to chaos and litigation. And there is a serious need for better training of poll workers, and for more uniform voter ID policies. Disturbingly, the report found that 31 percent of blacks were asked for ID, while just 18 percent of others were.
Some of these problems may be explored further in a federal lawsuit challenging Ohio’s administration of its 2004 election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who has been criticized for many decisions he made on election matters that year, recently agreed to help preserve the 2004 paper ballots for review in the lawsuit.
Ohio is not the only state that may be headed for trouble in 2008. New York’s Legislature was shamefully slow in passing the law needed to start adopting new voting machines statewide. Now localities are just starting to evaluate voting machine companies as they scramble to put machines in place in time for the 2007 election. (Because of a federal lawsuit, New York has to make the switch a year early.) Much can go wrong when new voting machines are used. There has to be extensive testing, and education of poll workers and voters. New York’s timetable needlessly risks an Election Day disaster.
Cuyahoga County deserves credit for commissioning an investigation that raised uncomfortable but important questions. Its report should be a wake-up call to states and counties nationwide. Every jurisdiction in the country that runs elections should question itself just as rigorously, and start fixing any problems without delay.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 7:22 PM 0 comments

The Real Thing Is Getting So Hard to Find

The Real Thing Is Getting So Hard to Find
By Jay Walljasper, OdePosted on August 21, 2006, Printed on August 22, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/40501/
Victoria Beckham, also known to the world as Posh of the Spice Girls, was giving a performance for fans in Birmingham, England, and accidentally dropped the microphone. Her voice, however, continued ringing out of the speakers as if by magic. But it wasn't magic; Posh was lip-synching to a pre-recorded track. As if that weren't insincere enough, the lip ring she wore also turned out to be fake. Posh hadn't really pierced herself like so many of her young fans... she just wanted them to think so.
It's difficult to know what's real anymore. Politicians deceive us. Corporations cover up misdeeds with frothy PR. Photoshop makes it simple to fake photographs. Breast implants and facelifts are as common as Band-Aids.
This is nothing new. The pages of history are filled with stories of fraud going back at least as far as the Trojan Horse. The difference today is that high-powered technology can manipulate reality and disseminate falsehoods on a scale never before seen.
In response to this onslaught, it's easy to become cynical about almost everything. Yet rather than throwing up our hands and accepting a world that feels faux, many of us are rolling up our sleeves to maintain what's honest in our lives. American social scientist Paul Ray calls this as a historic social development. "Authenticity is so much in demand today," he declares.
Ray became fascinated by the subject through his research on "cultural creatives"--a sizable segment of the population he has identified who share common values about the environment, social justice, creative expression and personal growth. After extensive interviews with numbers of them, Ray uncovered another trait cultural creatives hold in common: a drive for authenticity. This means living in a way that "your inner self matches your outer self," he says.
Veteran British journalist and trend spotter David Boyle also sees the emergence of a new social sensibility based upon "a determined rejection of the fake, the virtual, the spun and the mass-produced.
"There is an obsession on all levels about what is real and what is fake," he notes in a recent interview. "At its core it is a search for what's still human in business, in politics, in culture and in our own lives."
Boyle sees our growing yearning for authenticity as a factor in the recent boom of organic and local food, holistic medicine and socially responsible business. He also points to the worldwide success of the raw Detroit blues-rock duo The White Stripes, the resurgence of public poetry in the UK and the popularity of vintage fabrics from fashion designer Stella McCartney as precursors of a coming "authenticity revolution."
In his book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, Boyle describes nine kinds of values that inspire us to seek out what's genuine in the world: ethical, natural, honest, simple, unspun, sustainable, beautiful, rooted and human.
You see people everywhere making choices that once would have seemed surprising. Forgoing a fancy holiday to embark on an eco-travel adventure or a volunteer vacation helping out in a poor community. Skipping the mall in favor of funky furnishings and fashions from thrift stores or handicraft shops. Deciding against a new house on the edge of town to take part in revitalizing an older neighbourhood. Tuning out powerful entertainment conglomerates in order to discover avant-garde, locally made or exotic artistic alternatives. Steering clear of the high-flying corporate track for a lower-paying career with more satisfaction.
"People feel contradictions more sharply than a generation ago," Boyle explains. "They are less willing to work for a company they dislike, or invest their pensions there, or buy their products. Businesses know this, but it's hard for a company to actually be authentic when it is big, globalized and virtual."
As hard as it may be, embracing authenticity represents the wisest, brightest future for business, according to Neil Crofts--a former British publishing executive, race-car driver and corporate-strategy specialist who founded the Authentic Business website.
The key to authentic business, and an authentic life, in Crofts' view, is knowing that some things matter more than money. "If you are doing something you believe in passionately and it fits with your talents, you will always do it better and you will attract the support of others," he asserts. "You will not only make more money, you'll be happier."
Crofts sees Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company, as a prime example. "Their customers are hardly customers; they're more like fans." He also singles out two rising British firms that graphically illustrate the rewards of authentic business -- Yeo Valley Organic yogurt and Cafédirect coffee.
Yeo Valley ranks fourth among UK yogurt producers with six percent of the market and spends 700,000 pounds ($1.3 million U.S. or a million euros) a year on marketing, according to Crofts. Muller, the top-selling British brand, meanwhile controls 36 percent of the market and spends 40 million pounds ($79 million U.S. or 59 million euros) on marketing. "That's almost 60 times as much money to sell six times as much yogurt," Crofts calculates, noting that Yeo Valley's good reputation and organic ingredients sell themselves.
Cafédirect -- which sells fair-trade coffee -- was seeking new investment recently and raised 5 million pounds ($8.8 million U.S. or 7.3 million euros) in just five weeks, all of it from their customers. Every one of these new shareholders, Crofts notes, signed a statement endorsing the company's social principles and half of them agreed to forgo any dividends in the short run. Imagine what great opportunities that kind of financial arrangement offers a growing business.
"Who said business has to be ruthless and competitive and corrupt?" Crofts asks. "Business exists to serve the needs of society. And this is not some kind of new message. It is part of the perennial philosophy of humanity. Look at Buddha. Look at Christ."
While the principles of authenticity are enduring, the concept itself is rather new. In researching a coming book on the subject, Paul Ray could trace the idea back no further than the 17th century. He credits Enlightenment mathematician and philosopher René Descartes with coining the term. Much later it was taken up by existentialist philosophers in France and Beat generation poets in the U.S., eventually being introduced into mainstream culture thanks to the social movements of the 1960s. "It first went public with the women's movement, which emphasized the need for authenticity in relationships and with the slogan 'the personal is political.' But it's easily traced back to the civil-rights movement, where they called it, 'walking your talk.'"
Some of the big debates of our era look different when viewed through the lens of authenticity. The controversy over gay rights and same-sex marriage, for instance, is not simply a moral debate but a question about whether a person should acknowledge or repress authentic feelings from within. The resurgent movements for human rights, global justice and ecological restoration are all inspired by people no longer willing to hide their feelings about what's going on in the world.
"After making its mark on psychology and the social movements, authenticity is now hitting business. The one place it hasn't hit yet is mainstream politics," Ray notes. "In fact, one reason why Al Gore and John Kerry lost [in U.S. presidential elections] is that people didn't perceive them as authentic." Ray, Crofts, and Boyle, in fact, all mention Al Gore's recent transformation. Now that he's speaking out boldly on global warming and other issues, Ray observes, "he comes across as convincingly authentic after seeming so inauthentic in his campaign."
"Humanity's continuing evolution," is how Ray explains the rising interest in authenticity throughout the modern world. "You have people now who want to keep developing through their whole lives. For most people through history the idea that you keep growing emotionally through your whole life was not known, except for maybe the upper classes. Authenticity is showing up now because we are ready for it."
Neil Crofts sees this growing quest for authenticity as a new form of spiritual expression. "There is a huge spiritual vacuum going on in our society, a crisis of meaning." This leads some people to throw themselves headfirst into consumerism. Others seek clarity and comfort in fundamentalism -- which gropes for a sense of authenticity by holding up the Bible, Koran or other all-encompassing philosophy as the supreme truth.
"But true authenticity is not based on dogma," Crofts says, " it's based on what's meaningful to you. It's based on our intuition. We know when we are doing the wrong thing. That's what guides us on our authentic journey."
Jay Walljasper is the executive editor of Ode Magazine.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 1:24 PM 0 comments

Blog Menace

Blog Menace
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNetPosted on August 7, 2006, Printed on August 9, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/40006/
Last week at the infamous computer security conference Black Hat in Las Vegas, Bob Auger announced what should have already been obvious: reading blogs isn't safe.
A security engineer with SPI Labs, Auger quietly revealed that the mere act of checking out somebody's RSS feed could allow bad guys to steal money from your bank account, post Web spam from your computer, and snoop on everything you've written anonymously in that online porn community you secretly visit. This is the new dark side of all that nice free speech that's been enabled by bloggish technologies.
Generally, free expression advocates worry about how businesses and governments censor the confessional, unedited style of bloggers. And they're right to be concerned. People posting personal rants have gotten fired for writing mean things about their bosses and been sued for criticizing litigious maniacs. These bloggers are receiving traditional retributions for speaking openly: They say bad things about someone or some corporate entity, and that person or entity smacks them down.
But as Auger and other researchers demonstrated at Black Hat, we're about to see a new threat to free expression. Massive groups of people will be punished not for what they say online but for using particular tools to say it. Auger investigated several popular RSS readers -- programs used to pull blog content onto your computer -- including Bloglines, RSS Reader, Feed Demon, and Sharp Reader, and discovered that many of them could be turned into delivery systems for malicious code designed to force computers to, for example, post spam on other people's blogs.
Known generally as "cross-site scripting" and "cross-site request forgery," these attacks work by covertly moving data from one location to another. And it could get worse than spamming. As Auger pointed out, everything you type into your banking Web site could get reposted elsewhere, thus allowing the bad guys to read your passwords and have fun with your money.
And blogs can spread their malicious code as quickly as they spread news. If I were a bad guy and wanted to steal a bunch of passwords, I would hide some malicious code inside a comment on a popular blog. As soon as your reader downloaded that comment, you'd be infected. Or I would start a blog that sounded particularly interesting (or pornographic), tempt a bunch of people into subscribing to my feed, and inject naughty code into their computers that way. When you consider how many people automatically repost other people's feeds onto their own blogs in a "what I'm reading" section or something like that, it's clear how bad things could get.
But even worse, in the process of using the Web's fastest free-speech engine to wreak havoc, the people injecting nasty code into blog feeds could undermine free speech itself.
Feed injection poses a whole new set of problems for people who want to promote free expression. We're dealing with a mechanism of censorship that isn't even aware of itself as such. People who do these hacks may not have our best interests in mind -- they're trying to lie, cheat, and steal -- but as an unintended consequence, they may also choke off a powerful avenue of open communication. If people begin to associate using blogs and feeds with being ripped off and spied on, many may stop reading them. Government and business couldn't have asked for a better self-censorship catalyst. Speaking out, no matter what you say, will turn you into a victim.
Luckily, there are fixes for the speech-stopping problems that Auger found -- just as there are legal and social remedies for traditional forms of censorship. After talking with Auger, developers at Bloglines fixed many of the bugs he pointed out. Other vendors are working on fixing them too. And fixes for a lot of cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery attacks can be borrowed from more protected programs. So people making feed readers simply need to start thinking about security issues and using these fixes when they release the next version of their software.
As ever, what the geeks at Black Hat remind us is that free speech isn't just a matter of political freedom -- it's also about technical freedom. Getting your message out means being prepared to defend yourself ideologically -- and digitally too.
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has tragically been forced to stop using different silly e-mail addresses each week to defend herself against insane volumes of spam.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 1:37 PM 0 comments

Ocean Power Can Be a Global Warming Cure

Ocean Power Can Be a Global Warming Cure
By Neil Peirce, Stateline.orgPosted on August 9, 2006, Printed on August 9, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/39755/
How shall we ever slake our ever-growing demand for electricity? Even as concerns about global warming escalate, are we doomed to create more of the same old polluting, coal- and oil-dependent power plants? Or can common sense -- and some radically new technologies -- serve us better?
There’s much talk of wind and solar power. But how about the oceans and their massive tidal and current patterns? Driven by the gravitational force of the sun and the moon, tides and currents represent a source that’s as infinite and everlasting as any force on earth.
A major pilot demonstration seems ready to launch in San Francisco Bay, where an immense tidal flow enters and exits every day at a narrow point of the Golden Gate. A gigantic energy-collection device vaguely reminiscent of a Ferris wheel, with a number of fins (or “wings”) to capture the power of the rapidly passing tides, will be lowered from a barge anchored in the narrows. Using maglev technology, it will produce electrical energy that can then be transmitted to shore by cable.
If the San Francisco experiment works, the way could be opened to vast “farms” of underwater energy generators, operating below the ocean surface off Florida’s Atlantic Coast and along such shorelines as New England and the Pacific Northwest. A major early target could be in the Gulf Stream as it flows between Florida and Bermuda, where the 6.1-mile-per-hour current is 23,000 times the magnitude of the river flow at Niagara Falls.
Dan Power, the former Air Force engineering officer who is president of Oceana Energy, a firm recently organized to develop tidal current power systems, says it’s too early to project the percentage of power needs the new technology could deliver. But along America’s heavily populated coasts, tidal currents could, he believes, become “a major future power source.”
First comes the next year focused on the San Francisco experiment, as Oceana works with engineers of the U.S. Navy’s Hydromechanics Directorate, local utilities and governments to model, test and install the pioneering generator at the Golden Gate.
Contrast that with last week’s estimate that over 150 coal-powered power plants, most powered by dirty, last-generation technologies, are now being planned by U.S. energy companies. The estimate, by U.S. PIRG, the national association of state Public Interest Research Groups, is based chiefly on information from the U.S. Energy Department. Already, quantities of the coal-fired plants are being announced, including 11 by TXU Corp. in Texas alone.
What will be the impact of all the new plants? A stunning 10 percent increase in U.S. global warming emissions, U.S. PIRG estimates -- at the very moment the United States, now responsible for over 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, should be reversing course, leading rather than hindering worldwide efforts to avert potentially catastrophic global climate change in this century.
Yet applying the same $137 billion the energy companies plan for coal-fired plants to energy conservation, U.S. PIRG calculates, would reduce our energy demand by 19 percent in 2025 -- obviating the need for all the new plants. Comparable investment in wind farms or solar power could also go far to obviate the need for the new coal plants (only 16 percent of which are projected to use new coal gasification technology).
But now comes ocean tidal power recovery -- a technology that Power claims is so benign it wouldn’t even impact fish life.
In one sense the idea of tapping tidal energy isn't new; even Ben Franklin, on his trans-Atlantic voyages, noticed the current and speculated on converting its power for human purpose. But not until recent advances in magnets as well as plastics that can protect underwater metal devices from corrosion has the technology become feasible.
Enter the 20-year-old Climate Institute, an early truth-teller on the perils of global warming. Several of its leaders -- Dan Power, President John Topping, environmentalist and businessman William Nitze, and former steel company executive Joe Cannon -- decided the institute’s powerful research and advocacy weren’t enough, that there was no substitute for real-world, economically feasible alternatives to fossil fuels. And that ocean tidal power, the hydraulic energy in the globe's waters, constituted a massive untapped potential.
So in 2005, they formed the for-profit Oceana Energy to do the hard work -- gathering new scientific data, pushing the engineering, recruiting capital and enlisting allies -- to harvest the freely flowing hydraulic energy in the globe’s waters.
One is tempted to liken energy competition to a David and Goliath story -- new upstarts, struggling for capital and market acceptance, against the entrenched fossil-fuel industries whose political clout delivers them more than $25 billion in federal subsidies each year.
With the new truths of global warming transforming the human environment and economics, the Davids will eventually triumph. But soon enough?
Neil Peirce is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group and is the founder of the Citistates Reports.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 1:37 PM 0 comments

Republican Senator Faults Bid to Classify Report on Iraq

August 4, 2006, Intelligence, The New York Times
Senator Faults Bid to Classify Report on Iraq
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee lashed out at the White House on Thursday, criticizing attempts by the Bush administration to keep secret parts of a report on the role Iraqi exiles played in building the case for war against Iraq.
The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, said his committee had completed the first two parts of its investigation of prewar intelligence. But he chastised the White House for efforts to classify most of the part that examines intelligence provided to the Bush administration by the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group.
“I have been disappointed by this administration’s unwillingness to declassify material contained in these reports, material which I believe better informs the public, but that does not — I repeat, does not — jeopardize intelligence operations, sources and methods,” Mr. Roberts said in a statement issued Thursday.
One completed section of the Senate report is said to be a harsh critique of how information from the Iraqi exile group made its way into intelligence community reports, said people who have read the report but spoke on condition of anonymity because it is still classified.
The second section compares prewar assessments of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs and its links to terrorism with what American troops and intelligence operatives have found since the war began in March 2003.
The two parts of the report will not be made public for weeks, and neither is likely to present conclusions very different from past investigations into faulty prewar intelligence. Yet the current dispute is a sign that more than three years into the conflict, emotions remain raw over the role that the Iraqi group and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi — who was close to Pentagon officials and Vice President Dick Cheney — played in the administration’s decision to wage war against Saddam Hussein.
The group’s role in building the case against Mr. Hussein has been the source of fierce ideological arguments in Washington for years. The report also concludes that the group did provide useful information regarding the disposition of Iraq’s military. In the end, four Republicans on the committee and all seven Democratic members approved of the section of the report about the group. Four Republicans voted against it.
Congressional officials said Thursday that they were puzzled by White House efforts to keep large portions of that section classified. Mr. Roberts pledged in his statement to maintain the pressure to declassify all of the Senate’s conclusions.
“This Committee will not settle for anything less,” he said. “Neither will the American people.” A spokesman for the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, whose office is in charge of the declassification, declined to comment.
The committee approved the other section of the report 14 to 1.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:19 AM 0 comments

Au Revoir, Freedom Fries

August 4, 2006, Editorial, The New York Times
Au Revoir, Freedom Fries
When Congress renamed the French fries sold in its cafeterias “freedom fries” before the Iraq war, Bob Ney, whose position as House Administration Committee chairman put him in charge of the cafeterias, said the change registered “the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France.” In the real world, it mainly allowed people to register their strong displeasure at how juvenile Congress was being.
In the last few weeks, as The Washington Times reported, Congress has quietly changed the name back. We could think of many good reasons for the move. “Freedom fries,” like the “mission accomplished” banner that President Bush stood in front of a few months later, is now a stale relic of a naïve time, when the war’s supporters were convinced that Iraqis would be free right after they finished greeting their liberators with rose petals.
The renaming also was the embodiment of President Bush’s my-way-or-the-highway diplomacy. A French Embassy spokeswoman gamely told The Associated Press at the time that “we are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues, and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes.” But “freedom fries” was intended to be, and was, a poke in France’s eye. Harassing the French is probably not the wisest course now that America may need their help negotiating a ceasefire in Lebanon.
We would like to think that such sound policy reasons — or just that “freedom fries” was so incredibly stupid — account for the change. But the real reason appears to be that Mr. Ney was forced to give up his chairmanship of the committee because of his extensive ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The current chairman, Vernon Ehlers of Michigan, seems more sensible about both intergovernmental affairs and cafeteria management.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 6:05 AM 0 comments

The Sound of One Domino Falling

August 4, 2006, Editorial, The New York Times
The Sound of One Domino Falling
It’s been obvious for years that Donald Rumsfeld is in denial of reality, but the defense secretary now also seems stuck in a time warp. You could practically hear the dominoes falling as he told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday that it was dangerous for Americans to even talk about how to end the war in Iraq.
“If we left Iraq prematurely,” he said, “the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines.” And finally, he intoned, America will be forced “to make a stand nearer home.”
No one in charge of American foreign affairs has talked like that in decades. After Vietnam, of course, the communist empire did not swarm all over Asia as predicted; it tottered and collapsed. And the new “enemy” that Mr. Rumsfeld is worried about is not a worldwide conspiracy but a collection of disparate political and religious groups, now united mainly by American action in Iraq.
Americans are frightened by the growing chaos in the Mideast, and the last thing they needed to hear this week was Mr. Rumsfeld laying blame for sectarian violence on a few Al Qaeda schemers. What they want is some assurance that the administration has a firm grasp on reality and has sensible, achievable goals that could lead to an end to the American involvement in Iraq with as little long-term damage as possible. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the same old exhortation to stay the course, without the slightest hint of what the course is, other than the rather obvious point that the Iraqis have to learn to run their own country.
By contrast, the generals flanking him were pillars of candor and practicality. Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander in the Middle East, said “Iraq could move toward civil war” if the sectarian violence — which he said “is probably as bad as I’ve seen it” — is not contained. The generals tried to be optimistic about the state of the Iraqi security forces, but it was hard. They had to acknowledge that a militia controls Basra, that powerful Iraqi government officials run armed bands that the Pentagon considers terrorist organizations financed by Iran, and that about a third of the Iraqi police force can’t be trusted to fight on the right side.
As for Mr. Rumsfeld, he suggested that lawmakers just leave everything up to him and the military command and stop talking about leaving Iraq. “We should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy,” he said.
Americans who once expected the Pentagon to win the war in Iraq have now been reduced to waiting for an indication that at least someone is minding the store. They won’t be comforted to hear Mr. Rumsfeld fretting about protecting Spain from Muslim occupation.

posted by J. Boulevard @ 5:50 AM 0 comments

Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the Press

Aug 04, 1735. Freedom of the press was established with an acquittal of John Peter Zenger. The writer of the New York Weekly Journal had been charged with seditious libel by the royal governor of New York. That jury said, "The truth is not libelous."

Wouldn’t it be appropriate if this date were declared a national holiday? This principle offers us protection from tyrants, would-be dictators (“deciders”), and elite cabals who steal our financial security as well as our dignity, privacy, and right to know what’s going on in our nation.

However, it seems that the corporate media has conveniently forgotten freedom of the press whenever the set-a-new-standard for secrecy Bush administration cows them. As my late friend, Boogie, used to say of his former paramours, “selective memory.” Like Boogie, the media barons who once upon a time enforced this principle are now dead. "Long live the talking points and the party line," says the new corporate media. Some television stations have gone so far as to run the administration's video press releases as news. How's that for lazy, and cowed, reporting?

We’re now informed by a national press corps of scribes, note-takers, talking-pointers, and public relations flacks. The free press, as we once knew it, has abandoned its post and gone to work for the other side. Afraid of losing “access,” the press has now lost a lot of its credibility. But, they've got their 401-k's.

Perhaps, instead, this date should become a national day of mourning for the former free press. The truth is now not only libelous, but also treasonous, or "unpatriotic" in the newspeak. It’s classified by our government and ignored by a lapdog press who say they're protecting us. But, aren't they really protecting themselves? From what? Us? Don't we have the right to know the truth?

posted by J. Boulevard @ 5:12 AM 0 comments

GOP Green for the Green in PA

GOP Green for the Greens in PA
By Lindsay BeyersteinPosted on August 3, 2006, Printed on August 3, 2006http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/39840/
Paul Kiel of TPM Muckracker is exultant:
OK, we've done it. We've nailed it down: Every single contributor to the Pennsylvania Green Party Senate candidate is actually a conservative -- except for the candidate himself.The Luzerne County Green Party raised $66,000 in the month of June in order to fund a voter signature drive. The Philly Inquirer reported yesterday that $40,000 came from supporters of Rick Santorum's campaign (or their housemates). Also yesterday, we confirmed that another $15,000 came from GOP donors and conservatives. Only three contributions, totaling $11,000, remained as possible legit donations.Today, I confirmed that those came from GOP sources.
Bravo to Kiel for rolling up some AstroTurf in Pennsylvania.
[TPM Muckracker]
Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/39840/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 3:08 PM 0 comments

Who Blows Joe

Who Blows Joe?
By Lindsay BeyersteinPosted on August 3, 2006, Printed on August 3, 2006http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/39843/
A contested primary is God's way of reminding you who your real friends are. So, who's in Joe Lieberman's corner as he faces down Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate Primary?
True friends of Joe Lieberman include:

1. George W. Bush


2. College Republicans


3. Right-wing slimelord David Horowitz


4. Indicted former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

Not so keen on Joe: Real Democrats including scary hippies.
[My Left Nutmeg, DailyKos, Max Blumenthal, Crooks and Liars, Wis[s]e Words, Hullabaloo]
Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/39843/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 3:07 PM 0 comments

Bye bye Freedom Fries

Bye bye, Freedom Fries
By Lindsay BeyersteinPosted on August 3, 2006, Printed on August 3, 2006http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/39845/
At the Congressional cafeteria, the taste treats formerly known as "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" have been discreetly reassigned their more familiar names:
Three years after House Republicans trumpeted the new names to get back at the French for snubbing the coalition of the willing in Iraq, congressmen don't even want to talk about french fries, which are actually native to Belgium, and toast.Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House's basement cafeterias. [Washington Times]
So, will the condoms in the Congressional vending machines be known once again as "French ticklers"?
Hat tip to Think Progress.
[Think Progress]
Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lindsay/39845/

posted by J. Boulevard @ 3:06 PM 0 comments