From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

[giovonni]

Solar Doubling, Gas Glut Drive Down German Power Prices: Energy Markets


Rows of solar panels are seen at the Solarworld AG plant in Freiberg, Germany.


Germany is installing 10 times as much solar power capacity this year as the U.S.

By Lars Paulsson - Sep 22, 2010

Solar power may almost double in Germany this year just as a natural gas glut sends electricity prices to near five-month lows.

Capacity at plants converting sunlight to electricity in Europe’s biggest energy market will rise to 18,000 megawatts from 9,786 megawatts, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts. No other power source will grow as fast, increasing the glut that emerged after last year’s recession, UBS AG said.

“What’s new and special in Germany this year is the devilish growth in solar,” Sigurd Lie, a senior analyst at Imarex ASA’s Nena unit, an Oslo-based energy markets research company, said in a Sept. 16 phone interview. “This has kept a lid on prices even as you’ve seen an increase in demand.”

German prices probably won’t gain this year even with power consumption forecast to rise 4 percent, according to Lie, 44, who has tracked electricity markets for 12 years at Nena. Per Lekander, UBS’s head of global utilities research, said in a Sept. 16 e-mail that profits at coal-fired plants, such as those run by E.ON AG and RWE AG, the country’s two biggest utilities, may drop by more than 50 percent to as low as 2 euros ($2.66) a megawatt hour in the next 12 months.

German power for next year, the European benchmark contract, fell to its lowest since July 27 today, trading at 49.25 euros a megawatt hour, according to broker prices on Bloomberg, down 11 percent from this year’s peak of 55.10 euros on June 21. E.ON spokesman Georg Oppermann declined to comment on the UBS forecast while RWE spokeswoman Annett Urbaczka declined to comment on trading matters.

Gas Glut

The contract exceeded 90 euros in July 2008, as a six-year rally in energy prices was coming to an end. Now, natural gas, used to produce about 15 percent of Germany’s electricity, is also damping gains, said Sebastien Terryn, a risk manager at Summit Energy Inc. in Waregem, Belgium.

“German power won’t rise to anywhere near the record levels of 2008 for at least another two years because of the price link with natural gas, which remains a market with ample supplies,” Terryn said by e-mail on Sept. 17. Summit manages about $20 billion of energy purchases annually for clients including Healthcare Trust of America Inc.

U.K. natural gas for this winter is down 18 percent since July 5 to 47.50 pence a therm today. A therm is 100,000 British thermal units. The U.K. gas market, Europe’s biggest, influences prices elsewhere in the region.

Solar Surge

Producers will bring 7,000 to 9,000 megawatts of new solar capacity online in Germany this year, said Francesco d’Avack, a London-based analyst at New Energy Finance. That’s in addition to the 9,786 megawatts in use at the end of last year, which is equivalent to the capacity of about 11 new coal-fired plants.

Germany is installing 10 times as much solar power capacity this year as the U.S. Investors are racing to lock in above- market rates for 20 years while they can. Germany’s parliament decided July 8 on a 16 percent reduction in solar subsidies, and another reduction in the so-called feed-in tariffs is scheduled for January.

Mikio Katayama, president of Sharp Corp., Japan’s biggest solar-panel maker, said last week the Osaka-based company may boost sales by 50 percent this year, faster than it earlier forecast, on increased demand in Europe. Sharp today agreed to buy California’s Recurrent Energy for as much as $305 million. The all-cash deal will be completed by the end of the year, the companies said.

Solar Sales

Global 2010 sales for photovoltaic panels may more than double to as much as 18,000 megawatts and then flatten next year as countries including Germany, Italy and France cut solar energy subsidies, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated.

Germany meets as much as 10 percent of its power demand from the sun on some days, Andreas Haenel, chief executive officer of German solar-plant developer Phoenix Solar AG, said in an interview last month. In the southernmost state of Bavaria, solar power contributes as much as 25 percent of total electricity when the sun shines and demand is low, he said.

Solar power’s share may rise to as much as 7.5 percent of Germany’s total power generation by 2013, according to Deutsche Energy Agentur GmbH, from about 1 percent last year, as measured by industry group Bundesverband Solarwitschaft.

As solar capacity jumps, traders will increasingly depend on data for projecting availability and prices. The European Energy Exchange AG in Leipzig started publishing daily data on expected solar capacity on July 19, in addition to estimates on other German power sources. Solar output was expected to peak today at as much as 7,963 megawatts at 1 p.m. Berlin time, according to a forecast published yesterday.

Surplus Power

The German government also plans to extend the lifespan of aging nuclear power plants. On Sept. 28, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet is set to approve a plan to allow reactors to operate for an average of 12 years beyond a legally mandated closure of 2022, to help the nation of 82 million people transition to renewable power.

Germany’s surplus power is weighing on coal-fired generators. The so-called clean-dark spread, a calculation of forward prices for fuel, power and carbon allowances, was at 5.36 euros a megawatt hour yesterday, according to Bloomberg calculations. That’s down from 11.93 euros at the start of this year and almost 18 euros in December 2008.

Lekander at UBS expects as much as 10,000 megawatts of solar capacity and 2,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity plants to be added in Germany this year. Neither renewable power source is available 24 hours a day, unlike coal or nuclear. Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are collectively adding about 7,000 megawatts of gas-fired capacity a year.

“The spreads have collapsed and won’t recover in a long time because there will be even more overcapacity next year,” Lekander, 48, said.

Source;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-0...-markets.html#

[giovonni]

Out of the hysteria of 9/11 has grown a whole movement designed to compromise civil liberties. It had been my hope -- obviously a vain one -- that the Democrats would stop this erosion of privacy. Clearly both parties find fear too politically useful to honor the Constitution.

Feds: Privacy Does Not Exist in ‘Public Places’

by David Kravets



The Obama administration has urged a federal appeals court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.

The Justice Department is demanding a federal appeals court rehear a case in which it reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month, without a court warrant. The authorities then obtained warrants to search and find drugs in the locations where defendant Antoine Jones had travelled.

The administration, in urging the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reverse a three-judge panel’s August ruling from the same court, said Monday that Americans should expect no privacy while in public.

“The panel’s conclusion that Jones had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the public movements of his Jeep rested on the premise that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of his or her movements in public places, ” Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Smith wrote the court in a petition for rehearing.

The case is an important test of privacy rights as GPS devices have become a common tool in crime fighting, and can be affixed to moving vehicles by an officer shooting a dart. Three other circuit courts have already said the authorities do not need a warrant for GPS vehicle tracking, Smith pointed out.

The circuit’s ruling means that, in the District of Columbia area, the authorities need a warrant to install a GPS-tracking device on a vehicle. But in much of the United States, including the West, a warrant is not required. Unless the circuit changes it mind, only the Supreme Court can mandate a uniform rule.

The government said the appellate panel’s August decision is “vague and unworkable” and undermines a law enforcement practice used “with great frequency.”

The legal dispute centers on a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning a tracking beacon affixed to a container, without a court warrant, to follow a motorist to a secluded cabin. The appeals court said that decision did not apply to today’s GPS monitoring of a suspect, which lasted a month.

The beacon tracked a person, “from one place to another,” whereas the GPS device monitored Jones’ “movements 24 hours a day for 28 days.”

The government argued Monday that the appellate court’s decision “offers no guidance as to when monitoring becomes so efficient or ‘prolonged’ as to constitute a search triggering the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

The appeals court ruled the case “illustrates how the sequence of a person’s movements may reveal more than the individual movements of which it is composed.”

The court said that a person “who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

Source:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...#ixzz10GwocAiu

[giovonni]

There is a very significant trend taking place in the world: more and more women are entering politics and attaining real power (see the bottom of this report). As in the case of Dilma Rousseff, a number of them have experienced pain and persecution from earlier American backed authoritarian regimes, and we must anticipate reaping the bitter fruit arising from those experiences, as they formulate their policies. The same will be true in the Islamic nations where young politicians bear significant grudges against the U.S. for its ill-conceived wars and policies.


The former guerrilla set to be the world's most powerful woman

Brazil looks likely to elect an extraordinary leader next weekend



Dilma Rousseff in her 1970 police mugshot, when she led a revolutionary group

then and now





By Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Sunday, 26 September 2010

The world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend. Stocky and forceful at 63, this former leader of the resistance to a Western-backed military dictatorship (which tortured her) is preparing to take her place as President of Brazil.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton
, the US Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is revelling in its new oil wealth. Brazil's growth rate, rivalling China's, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy.

Her widely predicted victory in next Sunday's presidential poll will be greeted with delight by millions. It marks the final demolition of the "national security state", an arrangement that conservative governments in the US and Europe once regarded as their best artifice for limiting democracy and reform. It maintained a rotten status quo that kept a vast majority in poverty in Latin America while favouring their rich friends.

Ms Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother and grandmother will be her own woman. The polls say she has built up an unassailable lead – of more than 50 per cent compared with less than 30 per cent – over her nearest rival, an uninspiring man of the centre called Jose Serra. Few doubt that she will be installed in the Alvorada presidential palace in Brasilia in January.

Like President Jose Mujica of Uruguay, Brazil's neighbour, Ms Rousseff is unashamed of a past as an urban guerrilla which included battling the generals and spending time in jail as a political prisoner. As a little girl growing up in the provincial city of Belo Horizonte, she says she dreamed successively of becoming a ballerina, a firefighter and a trapeze artist. The nuns at her school took her class to the city's poor area to show them the vast gaps between the middle-class minority and the vast majority of the poor. She remembers that when a young beggar with sad eyes came to her family's door she tore a currency note in half to share with him, not knowing that half a banknote had no value.

Her father, Pedro, died when she was 14, but by then he had introduced her to the novels of Zola and Dostoevski. After that, she and her siblings had to work hard with their mother to make ends meet. By 16 she was in POLOP (Workers' Politics), a group outside the traditional Brazilian Communist Party that sought to bring socialism to those who knew little about it.

The generals seized power in 1964 and decreed a reign of terror to defend what they called "national security". She joined secretive radical groups that saw nothing wrong with taking up arms against an illegitimate military regime. Besides cosseting the rich and crushing trade unions and the underclass, the generals censored the press, forbidding editors from leaving gaps in newspapers to show where news had been suppressed.

Ms Rousseff ended up in the clandestine VAR-Palmares (Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard). In the 1960s and 1970s, members of such organisations seized foreign diplomats for ransom: a US ambassador was swapped for a dozen political prisoners; a German ambassador was exchanged for 40 militants; a Swiss envoy swapped for 70. They also shot foreign torture experts sent to train the generals' death squads. Though she says she never used weapons, she was eventually rounded up and tortured by the secret police in Brazil's equivalent to Abu Ghraib, the Tiradentes prison in Sao Paulo. She was given a 25-month sentence for "subversion" and freed after three years. Today she openly confesses to having "wanted to change the world".

In 1973 she moved to the prosperous southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where her second husband, Carlos Araujo, a lawyer, was finishing a four-year term as a political prisoner (her first marriage with a young left-winger, Claudio Galeno, had not survived the strains of two people being on the run in different cities). She went back to university, started working for the state government in 1975, and had a daughter, Paula.

In 1986, she was named finance chief of Porto Alegre, the state capital, where her political talents began to blossom. Yet the 1990s were bitter-sweet years for her. In 1993 she was named secretary of energy for the state, and pulled off the coup of vastly increasing power production, ensuring the state was spared the power cuts that plagued the rest of the country.

She had 1,000km of new electric power lines, new dams and thermal power stations built while persuading citizens to switch off the lights whenever they could. Her political star started shining brightly. But in 1994, after 24 years together, she separated from Mr Araujo, though apparently on good terms. At the same time she was torn between academic life and politics, but her attempt to gain a doctorate in social sciences failed in 1998.

In 2000 she threw her lot in with Lula and his Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers' Party which set its sights successfully on combining economic growth with an attack on poverty. The two immediately hit it off and she became his first energy minister in 2003. Two years later he made her his chief of staff and has since backed her as his successor. She has been by his side as Brazil has found vast new offshore oil deposits, aiding a leader whom many in the European and US media were denouncing a decade ago as a extreme left-wing wrecker to pull 24 million Brazilians out of poverty. Lula stood by her in April last year as she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, a condition that was declared under control a year ago. Recent reports of financial irregularities among her staff do not seem to have damaged her popularity.

Ms Rousseff is likely to invite President Mujica of Uruguay to her inauguration in the New Year. President Evo Morales of Bolivia, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay – other successful South American leaders who have, like her, weathered merciless campaigns of denigration in the Western media – are also sure to be there. It will be a celebration of political decency – and feminism.

Female representation: A woman's place... is in the government

In recent years, female political representation has undergone significant growth, with dramatic changes occurring in unexpected corners of the globe. In some countries women are dominating cabinets and even parliamentary chambers. By comparison, the UK falls far behind, with only 22 per cent of seats in the Commons currently held by women.

Bolivia In the Bolivian cabinet, 10 men are now matched by 10 women. In 2009, women won 25 per cent of seats in the lower chamber, and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Costa Rica In 2010, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Argentina In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 47 per cent in the upper chamber.

Cuba In 2009, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Rwanda In 2009, women won 56 per cent of seats in the lower chamber and 35 per cent in the upper chamber.

Mozambique In 2009, women won 39 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Angola In 2009, women won 38 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Switzerland Has a female-dominated cabinet for the first time. In 2007, women won 29 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Germany In 2009, the cabinet had six women and 10 men. That year, women won 33 per cent of lower chamber seats.

Spain Nine women compared with eight men in cabinet. In 2008, women won 37 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Norway Equal numbers of men and women in the cabinet. Women won 40 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Denmark Nine women and 10 men in cabinet. In 2007, women won 23 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Netherlands Three women and nine men in cabinet. In 2010, women won 41 per cent of seats in the lower chamber.

Source;
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...n-2089916.html

[giovonni]

Longtime SR readers know of my view that water is destiny (See the archives for two of my essays on this subject, or go to explorejournal.com/content/schwartz. Here is further evidence of this trend. It isn't hard to understand the implications of this story on life in Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Tucson.

Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning


The Southern Nevada Water Authority is tunneling under Lake Mead to install an intake valve that could continue operating until water levels dropped below 1,000 feet.



Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning
By FELICITY BARRINGER

LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Nev. — A once-unthinkable day is looming on the Colorado River.

Barring a sudden end to the Southwest’s 11-year drought, the distribution of the river’s dwindling bounty is likely to be reordered as early as next year because the flow of water cannot keep pace with the region’s demands.

For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system — irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet.

If it does, that will set in motion a temporary distribution plan approved in 2007 by the seven states with claims to the river and by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada would be reduced.

This could mean more dry lawns, shorter showers and fallow fields in those states, although conservation efforts might help them adjust to the cutbacks. California, which has first call on the Colorado River flows in the lower basin, would not be affected.

But the operating plan also lays out a proposal to prevent Lake Mead from dropping below the trigger point. It allows water managers to send 40 percent more water than usual downstream to Lake Mead from Lake Powell in Utah, the river’s other big reservoir, which now contains about 50 percent more water than Lake Mead.

In that case, the shortage declaration would be avoided and Lake Mead’s levels restored to 1,100 feet or so.

Lake Powell, fed by rain and snowmelt that create the Colorado and tributaries, has risen more than 60 feet from a 2004 low because the upper basin states, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah, do not use their full allocations. The upper basin provides a minimum annual flow of 8.23 million acre feet to Arizona, Nevada and California. (An acre-foot of water is generally considered the amount two families of four use annually.)

In its August report the Bureau of Reclamation said the extra replenishment from Lake Powell was the likeliest outcome. Nonetheless, said Terry Fulp, the bureau’s deputy regional director for the Lower Colorado Region, it is the first time ever that the bureau has judged a critical shortage to be remotely possible in the near future.

“We’re approaching the magical line that would trigger shortage,” Mr. Fulp said. “We have the lowest 11-year average in the 100-year-plus recorded history of flows on the basin.”

The reservoir is now less than 15 inches above the all-time low of 1,083.2 feet set in 1956.

But back then, while the demand from California farmland was similar, if not greater, the population was far smaller. Perhaps 9.5 million people in the three states in the lower Colorado River basin depended on the supply in the late 1950s; today more than 28 million people do.

The impact of the declining water level is visible in the alkaline bathtub rings on the reservoir’s walls and the warning lights for mariners high on its rocky outcroppings. National Park Service employees have repeatedly moved marinas, chasing the receding waterline.

Adding to water managers’ unease, scientists predict that prolonged droughts will be more frequent in decades to come as the Southwest’s climate warms. As Lake Mead’s level drops, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity, which, like the Colorado River water, is sent around the Southwest, diminishes with it. If Lake Mead levels fall to 1,050 feet, it may be impossible to use the dam’s turbines, and the flow of electricity could cease.

The fretting that dominates today’s discussions about the river contrasts with the old-style optimism about the Colorado’s plenitude that has usually prevailed since Hoover Dam — then called Boulder Dam — was completed 75 years ago, impounding the water from Lake Mead.

The worries have provoked action: cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have undertaken extensive conservation programs. Between 2000 and 2009, Phoenix’s average per-capita daily household use has dropped almost 20 percent; Las Vegas’s has dropped 21.3 percent.

Nonetheless, “if the river flow continues downward and we can’t build back up supply, Las Vegas is in big trouble,” Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said in an interview.

While Las Vegas is one of the Colorado River’s smaller clients — it consumes 2 percent of the river’s allocated deliveries— the city relies on Lake Mead for 90 percent of its water supply. From 2002 to 2009, the metropolitan area’s population mushroomed by nearly 40 percent, to 1.9 million from 1.37 million.

In response to the population boom and the drought, which began in 1999, the authority began an aggressive effort to encourage water conservation in 2002.

Now it is expanding its options: it is tunneling under the bottom of Lake Mead to install a third intake valve that could continue operating until lake levels dropped below 1,000 feet.

Saddle Island, the construction staging site on the reservoir, looks like an abstract painting, its dusty russet ground covered with interlacing segments of the 2,500 concrete rings that will make up the three-mile-long pipe.

Ms. Mulroy has also pushed aggressively for pipelines to carry distant groundwater to the Las Vegas area; most contentious is a planned 285-mile pipeline that would cross the state diagonally and take groundwater from the Snake Valley, on the Nevada-Utah border, to Las Vegas.

The authority has also spent about $147 million on a program to encourage homeowners and businesses to eliminate their lawns in favor of the rock, grass and cactus landscaping known as xeriscaping. More than 70 percent of household water usage is attributed to outdoor use, Ms. Mulroy said.

Residents can now water their yards only three days a week, before 11 a.m. and after 7 p.m., and the restrictions are to tighten this winter.

Dolores Cormier, 82, who lives on Monterrey Avenue on the southern side of Las Vegas, reconfigured her front and side lawns, installing a rocky cover and drip irrigation. Under a water authority program known as Water Smart Landscapes (colloquially, Cash for Grass), she has received $2,689 in utility subsidies that will offset the $5,600 or so she said the xeriscaping cost her.

She is pleased with the new look but said her average monthly water bill of $45 or so has yet to decline, perhaps because she still tends grass in her small backyard. “I need some lawn,” she confessed.

If the 1,075 level is broken at Lake Mead next year, more drastic conservation measures will be needed, officials warn.

“We have a very finite resource and demand which increases and enlarges every day,” said John A. Zebre, a Wyoming lawyer and the president of the Colorado River Water Users Association.

“The problem is always going to be there,” he said. “Everything is driven by that problem.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us...dNy2ILBdgbLlw#

[giovonni]

For over a decade I have been writing about the growth of the American Gulag, and its toxic effects on society (See SR archives). Here is the latest on this national self-mutilation trend. Certainly we need prisons, all societies do. But when matters rise to this level, where the warehousing of human beings is a major industry it is a sign of deep social dysfunction.

from
DANIEL TENCER - The Raw Story
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 -- 9:26 pm


One in 28 US kids has a parent in prison: study

The US's exceptionally high rate of incarceration is causing economic damage not only to the people behind bars but to their children and taxpayers as a whole, a new study finds.

The study (PDF) from the Pew Research Center's Economic Mobility Project, released Tuesday, reports that the US prison population has more than quadrupled since 1980, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, making the US's incarceration rate the highest in the world, beating former champions like Russia and South Africa.

This means more than one in 100 Americans is in prison, and the cost of prisons to states now exceeds $50 billion per year, or one in every 15 state dollars spent -- a figure the study describes as "staggering."

According to the authors, one in every 28 children in the US has a parent behind bars -- up from one in 125 just 25 years ago. This is significant, the study argues, because children of incarcerated parents are much likelier to struggle in life.

A family with an incarcerated parent on average earns 22 percent less the year after the incarceration than it did the year before, the study finds. And children with parents in prison are significantly likelier to be expelled from school than others; 23 percent of students with jailed parents are expelled, compared to 4 percent for the general population.

Both education and parental income are strong indicators of children’s future economic mobility," the survey notes. "With millions of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children."

In all, 2.7 million US children have parents behind bars, and "two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses," the study notes.

Not surprisingly, the statistics show large disparities when broken down by race. Among black children, fully one in nine, or 11.4 percent, have a parent in jail. For Hispanics, the number is one in 28, and for white children it's one in 57.

The study also finds that the US now has a prison population larger than the 35 largest European countries combined. The incarceration rate in the US is five times that of Great Britain -- 753 inmates per 100,000 people, compared to 151 inmates in the UK. Even the British incarceration rate is high compared to some countries: 96 in France and 88 in Germany, for example.

The cost of such a high incarceration rate hasn't been lost on lawmakers in this era of budget deficits. Over the past few years, numerous states have released prisoners early to reduce incarceration costs. California granted early release to some 1,500 inmates this year, and the state hopes to reduce its prison population by a total of 6,500.

But those early releases have proven controversial, both for political and public safety reasons. The New York Times reported earlier this year:

In February, lawmakers in Oregon temporarily suspended a program they had expanded last year to let prisoners, for good behavior, shorten their sentences (and to save $6 million) after an anticrime group aired radio advertisements portraying the outcomes in alarming tones. “A woman’s asleep in her own apartment,” a narrator said. “Suddenly, she’s attacked by a registered sex offender and convicted burglar.”

In Illinois, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, a Democrat, described as “a big mistake” an early release program that sent some convicts who had committed violent crimes home from prison in a matter of weeks. Of more than 1,700 prisoners released over three months, more than 50 were soon accused of new violations.

An early release program in Colorado meant to save $19 million has scaled back its ambitions by $14 million after officials found far fewer prisoners than anticipated to be wise release risks. In more than five months, only 264 prisoners were released, though the program was designed to shrink the prison population by 2,600 over two years.

With concern growing about the cost -- both economic and social -- of incarceration, lawmakers have turned an eye to sentencing reform. But prospects for wholesale changes to sentencing in the US are dim, primarily because of the difficulty of selling "weaker" criminal punishments to a skeptical public.

This year, the Obama administration backed sentencing reform for crack cocaine, reducing the disparity between crack sentences and powder cocaine sentences on the basis that they discriminated along racial lines. But, as law professor Andrea Lyon noted at the Huffington Post, even that reform allowed for large disparities in sentences. "What was a 100 to 1 disparity is now 'only' an 18 to 1 disparity," she writes.

In Missouri, an innovative new law gives judges access to information about incarceration costs before they decide on punishment, as well as access to information on recidivism rates for various crimes. Lawmakers hope it will result in a more consistent application of the law.

Marijuana law reform could also have an impact, by simply reducing the number of crimes for which people can be jailed. Last year alone, there were more than 858,000 arrests in the United States for marijuana. That's down from a peak of 872,000 in 2007, but still near record highs. More than half of all drug arrests involved marijuana.

Source:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/o...nt-jail-study/

[giovonni]

While we are squandering our wealth on self-crippling wars, the Chinese are using theirs to gain control over the raw materials that will define the century. The shortsightedness of American politicians of both parties is breathtaking.

*********************************




The Great Haul of China:
Fears of Chinese land grab as Beijing's billions buy up resources

By Sarah Arnott

Saturday, 2 October 2010

China is pouring another $7bn (£4.4bn) into Brazil's oil industry, reigniting fears of a global "land grab" of natural resources.

State-owned Sinopec clinched the deal with Spain's Repsol yesterday to buy 40 per cent of its Brazilian business, giving China's largest oil company access to Repsol Brasil's estimated reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil and gas. The whopping price tag for Repsol Brasil – which values the company at nearly twice previous estimates – is a sign of China's willingness to pay whatever it takes to lock in its future energy supplies and avoid social unrest. It will give the company enough cash to develop all its current oil projects, including two fields in the Santos Basin.

The Repsol deal is not China's first in Brazil. In February last year, Sinopec stumped up a $10bn loan to Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, in return for guaranteed supplies of 10,000 barrels of oil every day for the next 10 years.

It also follows a slew of similar deals across the world. While much of the developed world is baulking at its debts in the aftermath of the financial crisis, China has continued a global spending spree of unprecedented proportions, snapping up everything from oil and gas reserves to mining concessions to agricultural land, with vast reserves of US dollars.

This year alone, Chinese companies have laid out billions of dollars buying up stakes in Canada's oil sands, a Guinean iron ore mine, oil fields in Angola and Uganda, an Argentinian oil company and a major Australian coal-bed methane gas company.

"China is rich in people but short of resources, and it wants to have stable supplies of its own rather than having to buy on the open market," Jonathan Fenby, China expert and director of research group Trusted Resources, said.

But it is a strategy causing anxiety elsewhere in the world. Rumours in recent weeks that China's Sinochem may make a bid for Canada's Potash Corporation raised fears that the Middle Kingdom would corner the global market for fertiliser.

Similarly, when BP's share price plummeted after Barack Obama's criticisms in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, there was concern that the company would be driven into the hands of the Chinese.

More explicitly still, when the aluminium giant Chinalco was trying to buy Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto last year, television ads protesting against the scheme from no less than the Senate opposition leader bellowed "Keep Australia Australian".

"Chinese acquisitions are increasingly on the political radar," said Robin Geffen, the chief executive of Neptune Investment Management, which runs a leading China investment fund. "The pinch points come when people feel that supplies affecting national security could be threatened by China buying them all up."

Contrary to the conspiracy theories, China is not looking for world domination. It has seen economic growth averaging a massive 10 per cent for the best part of three decades, and although it is expected to drop into the high single-digits in the coming years – in response to a dip in export demand – the natural resources required to support even slightly moderated growth are an overwhelming priority.

China is already the second-largest oil consumer in the world and far outstrips its domestic supplies. Neptune estimates that it will need to buy two companies the size of BP each year for the next 12 years to meet its growing domestic energy demand. Demand for electricity alone is growing each year equivalent to Britain's entire output.

"These are massive, massive numbers," Mr Geffen said. "The deal with Repsol today, and all the others we have seen in recent years, are wholly strategic, to nail down what they estimate future demand will be."

But, despite the concerns that China is cornering the market and will push up prices, the developed world also has a vested interest in China pursuing a successful strategy.

Notwithstanding qualms about a change in the global balance of power, China's continued economic growth has been vital to hauling the world out of recession – and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The threat from political instability if Chinese growth stalls has similarly global implications. "The whole world needs China to have these resources to help pull us out of recession and avoid local unrest," said Ian Sperling-Tyler, a partner and oil and gas expert at the consultancy Deloitte.

But concerns remain about China's involvement in politically difficult countries, particularly in Africa. China is not squeamish about the politics of its business partners. It follows a simple formula, offering premium prices and massive infrastructure investments in return for long-term concessions for key resources. There are several well-documented deals on the continent – including a recent $2.5bn tie-up with Britain's Tullow Oil in Uganda and off-shore production in Angola and Nigeria. And the positive impact is evident in spanking new infrastructure including hospitals, ports, and road and rail links being built with the influx of Chinese money.

But China is also involved in some of Africa's more controversial countries. It came in for widespread criticism in 2008 for arms sales to war-torn Sudan, a major trade partner, and its alleged refusal to help resolve the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. It has also been accused of paying multimillion-dollar backhanders in return for African leaders repudiating Taiwan at the UN, although nothing has ever been proved. And because the majority of the deals are done on a government-to-government basis, there is no way to be clear on the extent of the relationships.

Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-2095451.html

Related ~ Bonus - Story Article- below



*********************************
China's Wen offers to buy Greek debt

China says has bought and will buy new Greek bonds

By Ingrid Melander and Harry Papachristou

ATHENS, Oct 2 (Reuters) - China offered on Saturday to buy Greek government bonds when Athens resumes issuing, in a show of support for the country whose debt burden pushed the euro zone into crisis and required an international bailout.

Premier Wen Jiabao made the offer at the start of a two-day visit to Greece, his first stop on a tour of Europe, and also said he wanted to boost shipping and trade ties with Athens, underscoring Beijing's use of economic strength to win friends.

"With its foreign exchange reserve, China has already bought and is holding Greek bonds and will keep a positive stance in participating and buying bonds that Greece will issue," Wen said, speaking through an interpreter.

"China will undertake a great effort to support euro zone countries and Greece to overcome the crisis."

Wen and his Greek counterpart George Papandreou said in a statement the world's nations need to coordinate their economic policies for global recovery to find a sure footing. [ID:nATH005710]

"The global economy shows signs of gradual recovery but many uncertainties remain," the two leaders said in the statement, issued on Saturday by Papandreou's office after the two men met in Athens.

In addition to seeing economic opportunities in Greece, China may calculate its support of a struggling European country will help deflect international criticism of its trade policies and its refusal to let its yuan currency appreciate sharply.

Wen did not specify how much Greek debt China would be willing to buy or which Chinese entities would buy the bonds.

Chinese state entities have been generally conservative about investing in foreign financial markets and the Chinese government faces domestic political criticism over losses incurred by these entities during the global financial crisis.

HIGH BORROWING COSTS

A senior Greek government official said Wen made clear his offer concerned buying bonds only when the country returned to markets. [ID:nATH005706]

Greece, which is currently funded through a 110 billion euro ($150 billion) EU/IMF bailout, is only issuing short-term T-bills for the time being.

Since the true scale of its debt burden emerged late last year, investors have shunned its bonds. The yield they demand to hold 10-year Greek debt has shot up to 10 percent, compared with just 2.3 percent for similar bonds from the euro zone's biggest economy Germany, making it too expensive for Greece to seek long-term funding in international markets. GR10YT=RR

It has said it wants to return to markets some time next year to sell longer-term debt.

China, at loggerheads with the United States over the yuan and likely to face similar complaints during this European tour, emphasised its willingness to cooperate with the 27-nation EU on financial issues.CNY=CFXS

"China is prepared, hand in hand with the EU, as passengers in the same boat, to strengthen cooperation ... to confront the financial crisis," Wen said. "I believe that we can undertake a genuine effort to promote the reform of the international financial system and strengthen its supervision," he said.

Neither Wen nor Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou mentioned the Chinese currency at the news conference.

SHIPPING FUND, TRADE, EXPORTS

Wen said China wanted to boost cooperation with Greece -- which faces its worst recession in decades as it struggles with its debt -- on all fronts, including by setting up a shipping fund and doubling bilateral trade to $8 billion by 2015.

"China will set up a special Greek-Chinese shipping development fund for Greek shipowners on which it will invest, in an initial phase, $5 billion," Wen told the news conference. "The aim is to offer Greek shipowners a basket of financial support to buy Chinese-made vessels."

Greece and China pledged to stimulate investment in a memorandum of understanding and private companies signed a dozen deals in areas like shipping, construction and tourism. [ID:nATH005705] [ID:nATH005704]

With the global economic crisis and competition with other Balkan countries increasing, foreign direct investment in Greece fell from 6.9 billion euros in 2006 to 4.5 billion in 2009, according to Investment Ministry figures.

Chinese investment represents a very minor proportion of this, excluding a 35-year concession deal China's Cosco signed in 2008 to turn the port of Piraeus into a regional hub for a guaranteed amount of 3.4 billion euros, according to port authority figures.

The investment memorandum does not target specific investment volumes, an official close to Investment Minister Harris Pamboukis said ahead of Wen's visit.

"We want to build this strategic partnership with China," the investment ministry official said. "The purpose is not a signature on something big."

Wen will address the Greek parliament on Sunday and leave early on Monday for Brussels, where he will attend an EU-China summit before going on to Germany, Italy and Turkey.

Clinching business deals with countries such as China and Qatar would help boost confidence among Greek consumers and businesses, economic analysts said.

(Additional reporting by Deborah Kyvrikosaios and George Georgiopoulos; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Charles Dick/Ruth Pitchford) ($1=.7322 Euro)

Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

Source;
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE69100N20101002

[giovonni]

Once again we see how the middle class is being destroyed. Endless dollars for war while 12.67 per cent of our people are on food assistance teetering on the brink of hunger.



Food Stamp Recipients at Record 41.8 Million Americans in July, U.S. Says


By Alan Bjerga - Oct 5, 2010

The number of Americans receiving food stamps rose to a record 41.8 million in July as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high, the government said.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 18 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.4 percent from June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 20 straight months.

Unemployment in September may have reached 9.7 percent, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts in advance of the release of last month’s rate on Oct. 8. Unemployment was 9.6 percent in July, near levels last seen in 1983.

An average of 43.3 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.

Source:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-1...-u-s-says.html

[giovonni]

Animals said to have spiritual experiences
Ever have an out-of-body experience? Your dog may have too

By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery Channel

Animals (not just people) likely have spiritual experiences, according to a prominent neurologist who has analyzed the processes of spiritual sensation for over three decades.

Research suggests that spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain — areas shared by other animals with brain structures like our own.

The trick, of course, lies in proving animals' experiences.

"Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences," Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, told Discovery News.

"Despite this limitation, it is still reasonable to conclude that since the most primitive areas of our brain happen to be the spiritual, then we can expect that animals are also capable of spiritual experiences," added Nelson, author of the book "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain," which will be published in January 2011.

The finding is an extension of his research on humans, which has been published in many peer-reviewed journals. A Neurology journal study, for example, determined that out-of-body experiences in humans are likely caused by the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness.

"In humans, we know that if we disrupt the (brain) region where vision, sense of motion, orientation in the Earth's gravitational field, and knowing the position of our body all come together, then out-of-body experiences can be caused literally by the flip of a switch," he said. "There is absolutely no reason to believe it is any different for a dog, cat, or primate’s brain."

Other mammals also probably have near-death experiences comparable to those reported by certain humans, he believes. Such people often say they saw a light and felt as though they were moving down a tunnel.

The tunnel phenomenon "is caused by the eye's susceptibility to the low blood flow that occurs with fainting or cardiac arrest," he said. "As blood flow diminishes, vision fails peripherally first. There is no reason to believe that other animals are any different from us."

Nelson added, "What they make of the tunnel is another matter."

The light aspect of near-death experiences can be explained by how the visual system defines REM (rapid eye movement) consciousness, he believes.

"In fact," he said, "the link between REM and the physiological crises causing near-death experience are most strongly linked in animals, like cats and rats, which we can study in the laboratory."

Mystical experiences — moments that inspire a sense of mystery and wonderment — arise within the limbic system, he said. When specific parts of this system are removed from animal brains, mind-altering drugs like LSD have no effect.

Since other animals, such as non-human primates, horses, cats and dogs, also possess similar brain structures, it is possible that they too experience mystical moments, and may even have a sense of spiritual oneness, according to Nelson.

Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, also believes animals have spiritual experiences, which he defines as experiences that are nonmaterial, intangible, introspective and comparable to what humans have.

Both he and primatologist Jane Goodall have observed chimpanzees dancing with total abandon at waterfalls that emerge after heavy rains. Some of the chimps even appear to dance themselves into a trance-like state, as some humans do during religious and cultural rituals.

Goodall wondered, "Is it not possible that these (chimpanzee) performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe? After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. What is it, this water?"

"Perhaps numerous animals engage in these rituals, but we haven't been lucky enough to see them," Bekoff wrote in a Psychology Today report.

"For now, let's keep the door open to the idea that animals can be spiritual beings and let's consider the evidence for such a claim," he added.

"Meager as it is, available evidence says, 'Yes, animals can have spiritual experiences,' and we need to conduct further research and engage in interdisciplinary discussions before we say that animals cannot and do not experience spirituality."

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39574733/from/toolbar#

[giovonni]

Poverty Grows in Suburbs, but Social Services Don’t Keep Up

Released: 10/4/2010 4:00 PM EDT
Embargo expired: 10/7/2010 12:15 AM EDT
Source: University of Chicago

Newswise — Poverty has grown in America’s suburbs during the recent economic downturn, but poor people in many suburban communities are finding it hard to get the help they need, a report by University of Chicago researchers shows.

“Many suburbs have seen significant expansion in the number of poor persons over the last several years, yet few of the suburban communities have a social services infrastructure in place to address the challenges this increased poverty poses,” said Scott Allard, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University.

Allard and Benjamin Roth, a graduate student at SSA, are the authors of a report, “Suburbs in Need: Rising Suburban Poverty and Challenges for Suburban Safety Nets,” prepared for the Brookings Institution, to be released Thursday, Oct. 7. For the study, the researchers examined census data, records from the Internal Revenue Service and interviewed representatives of social service agencies in suburban Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

The authors focused on these specific metropolitan areas because they provide a diverse set of suburban communities with different levels of poverty and social service support. Focusing on three metro areas also allowed the authors to follow a large set of nonprofit service providers over the course of a year. The experiences of low-income people in the suburbs of these three metro areas are quite similar to the experiences of low-income people in other suburban areas across the country, Allard said.

The study is one of the first comprehensive looks at suburban safety nets and poverty during the recession. The majority of poverty research focuses on concentrated urban poverty.

Poverty rates remain higher in urban areas than suburban areas (18.2 percent versus 9.5 percent), but the number of poor in the suburbs has grown considerably as the overall population of the suburbs grows. Poverty rates also grew quickly in the suburbs of the largest metropolitan areas during the 2000s, and by 2008, the number of suburban poor exceeded the number of city poor in the largest metro areas by 1.5 million. The report found that several suburban counties outside Chicago experienced more than 30 percent increases in the number of poor residents from 2000 to 2008, as did portions of counties in suburban Maryland and northern Virginia.

As in the city, poverty also is concentrated in certain areas of the suburbs, with some communities having high concentrations of poverty while nearby communities are more affluent. Suburbs also vary greatly in their number of immigrants and minority populations. For example, while several suburban Los Angeles municipalities are predominantly Hispanic and a handful of Chicago suburbs have sizeable Hispanic populations, many Washington, D.C. suburbs have substantial black and Asian populations as well.

Although the collapse of the housing market and high unemployment are driving demand for help, many of the people seeking assistance have jobs. They are among the working poor who have seen their hours and earnings cut in the last few years. “Forty-five percent of providers report substantial increases in the number of clients coming from households where one or both adults are working but cannot earn enough to make ends meet,” Allard said.

The researchers also found that a major impact of the ¬Great Recession has been an increase in the number of people coming, for the first time, to seek help from social service agencies. “Almost three-quarters of suburban nonprofits are seeing more clients with no previous connection to safety net programs,” Allard said.

The social service agencies, which provide emergency food and housing relief, job training, help with health care and other assistance to low-income populations, were often not well-positioned to respond to the increase in poverty, the report showed.

“Suburban safety nets rely on relatively few social service organizations, and those few organizations tend to stretch operations across much larger service delivery areas than their urban counterparts,” Allard said. The study found that 60 percent of the agencies administered programs in more than one community, which led to fragmentation in the services that agencies could provide because they had to deal with different sets of municipal leaders.

The study also found great variation in the number of social service agencies for given populations of poor people. In suburban Chicago, Evanston had one social service agency per 344 poor residents in the community, while nearby Skokie had one social service agency per 1,299 poor residents.

A major problem for social service providers has been low funding, and that will continue as the economy slowly recovers. Both California and Illinois have massive deficits that limit the prospect for state support of social service agencies. Additionally, philanthropic support has declined, Allard said.

“Almost half of suburban nonprofits surveyed reported a loss in a key revenue source last year, with more funding cuts anticipated in the year to come. Nearly 30 percent nonprofits have laid off full-time and part-time staff,” Allard said. As a result, the poor are put on waiting lists for the help they need.

Despite such challenges, the work of nonprofits serving the poor in the suburbs is needed now more than before, and deserves support, Allard said.

“As is true for cities and rural places, the nonprofit social service sector in suburbs can help these communities alleviate the worst economic and social impacts of the current downturn and future increases in poverty,” Allard said. “Promoting stronger region-wide providers and better engaging charitable foundations in metropolitan safety net planning represent important strategies for strengthening suburban social services infrastructure.”

Source;
http://www.newswise.com/articles/pov...&page=9&search

[giovonni]

Further evidence of the destruction of the middle class.


Debtors prisons have been outlawed in the U.S. for more than 100 years -- but that hasn't stopped collections agencies


The Return of Debtor’s Prison
Collection agencies use the criminal justice system to pocket credit card debts

Greg Beato from the November 2010 issue

According to Michael Klozotsky, managing editor of the trade publication insideARM.com, debt collectors contact consumers approximately four billion times a year. With so many contacts, there are bound to be complaints. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received 88,190 consumer complaints about third-party debt collectors. More than 2,500 of these involved collectors who used threats of violence, or actual violence, while plying their trade. Another 11,505 involved false threats of arrest or property seizure. Approximately zero involved one of the more egregious aspects of debt collection: the way the industry outsources collection efforts to the civil court system, using taxpayer money and government force to strong-arm nickels from low-level deadbeats.

“In 2007, third party collection agencies returned over $40 billion to original creditors via collection efforts,” Klozotsky tells me. He’s making a case for the virtues of debt collection, and this is his most persuasive talking point: Those recovered billions increase the availability of credit to all consumers and help keep interest rates in check.

But the persistent phone calls and dunning letters that collection agencies deploy on debtors only pack so much punch. More and more, creditors are retaining the services of attorneys to file lawsuits on their behalf in civil court. At an FTC roundtable in 2009, Ira Leibsker, a Chicago collection attorney, estimated that there were “probably tens of millions of lawsuits” underway at that time. That same year, a single company, Encore Capital Group, filed 375,000 suits in the United States. According to “Debt Deception,” a report published by the Legal Aid Society and several other advocacy organizations in May 2010, the 26 largest debt buyers in New York City filed 457,322 lawsuits from January 2006 through July 2008.

This huge infusion of cases exposes thousands of individuals to a process that overwhelmingly favors plaintiffs. Indeed, in debt collection cases, you’re basically guilty until proven innocent.

Part of the problem stems from the way the debt buying industry has evolved over the last 20 years. As recently as the early 1990s, many credit card issuers made little effort to collect on their past-due accounts. If a cardholder missed a payment or two, in-house collection efforts would generally follow. But when a cardholder hadn’t made a payment in 180 days, issuers tended to “charge off” the delinquent account against earnings, settle for the tax break, and pursue collection efforts no further.

Now there are companies that purchase portfolios of delinquent debt for pennies on the dollar, then attempt to collect. According to “Debt Machine,” a report produced by the National Consumer Law Center, debt buyers bought receivables worth $6 billion in face value in 1993. By 2005, that number had grown to $110 billion. Debts migrate from seller to buyer, often with very little information attached to them. “What they’re buying is a spreadsheet full of data: names, addresses, account numbers, and balances,” says Fred W. Schwinn, an attorney at Consumer Law Center, Inc. in San Jose, California. Applications, original contracts, transaction histories—plaintiffs don’t need any of these documents to file a lawsuit. “You don’t have to attach assignment documents of any kind,” says Schwinn. “You just say, ‘I bought an account [with a balance of] $10,000. This person owes me the money.’ You file the complaint, you get service on the defendant, and the courts will grant a judgement on that.”

In the bulk of these cases, defendants don’t show up and the judge simply issues default judgments against them. In many instances, they fail to show because they’re hoping haplessly to avoid paying debts they owe. In others, they simply don’t know they’re being sued. “I get people in our office every week who say, ‘My paycheck just got garnished and I’ve never been served for anything,’” says Schwinn. “Come to find out, they were substitute-served at an address they haven’t lived at in three or four years. The processor knocks on the door and asks for So-and-So, and the person says, ‘I never heard of that person.’ And the processor just drops the paperwork on the porch and walks away.”

In the early years of America, “debt was an inescapable fact of life,” the historian Bruce H. Mann writes in Republic of Debtors, his 2002 account of how the new nation reconciled its ideals of “republican independence” with the pervasive indebtedness that plagued its citizens. Over time, he shows, insolvency shifted in meaning “from sin to risk, from moral failure to economic failure,” and bankruptcy laws and the eventual abolition of debtor’s prisons offered the insolvent a chance to free themselves from past failures and misfortunes.

While this shift in meaning applied more to commercial debts than personal ones, we see its echo in today’s statutes of limitations on credit card debts. Simply put, America doesn’t want you to stay in debt forever. While statutes of limitations differ from state to state, more than half give creditors just three to five years to sue debtors for non-payment. If they miss that window, a debtor is under no legal obligation to repay
his debt.

If a creditor sues and obtains a judgment, however, any ideals of republican independence, fresh starts, and forgiveness quickly go out the window. In California, for example, judgments are enforceable for 10 years, then renewable for another 10 years, then renewable after that under certain conditions. Interest accrues at 10 percent per annum, wages can be garnished, bank accounts frozen, property seized. A debt originally incurred by someone whose name is similar to yours can become a lifelong commitment, simply because you ignored a few letters from a company whose name you didn’t recognize that said you owed it money. That’s a worst-case scenario, but as cases get rubber-stamped by judges and clerks auto-piloting their way through the daily deluge of lawsuits, it happens.

Then there’s an unfortunate fellow in Kenney, Illinois. In January, a judge sentenced him to “indefinite incarceration” until he paid $300 toward a debt he owed to a lumber yard. Originally reported in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the case is an extreme example of a practice that, while rare, is apparently happening more frequently—the Star Tribune reports that the “use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases [in Minnesota] in 2009.”

When a judge issues a judgment against a debtor, the debtor is supposed to complete a financial disclosure form that will provide the information a creditor needs to collect his debt. If the debtor fails to do this, the creditor can obtain a court order compelling the debtor to show up in court to explain why he hasn’t. If the debtor fails to show up for this hearing, a judge can issue a contempt of court order and a warrant for the person’s arrest.

It’s the same process the court system uses to imprison individuals who fall behind on child support. In the mid-1990s, a hospital in Illinois started employing the tactic as well. Over the last decade, at least four people around the country have actually been arrested and at least briefly detained for their failure to pay library fines. Debtors have also been arrested and jailed in Arkansas, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, and New Jersey.

While the official charge is contempt of court, judges sometimes set the bail to the exact amount the debtor owes. When he pays it, it can go straight to the creditor’s coffers. At a time when the federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out big business, it’s a travesty that state and local governments are using the full force of their power to shake down private citizens on behalf of debt collectors—especially when many of those debts have been acquired for less than it costs to incarcerate a small-time deadbeat for a long afternoon, much less indefinitely.

Source;
http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/0...debtors-prison
Reason Magazine

*********************************
Here's a very real example of this articles report

Robert Vee Discovers that Collections Agencies Have Created a New Debtors Prison -- with Government Help


By Cory Zurowski in Douchebags,
Tuesday, Jul. 13 2010




Robert Vee, a highway construction worker from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, got boned not once but twice. If it wasn't bad enough that late last winter he was tossed into a local county clink -- the result of missing a court hearing over an unpaid credit card...

The truly below-the-belt shot came when he found out his bail was the exact amount he owed the creditor: $1,875.06. It was not coincidence.

In various parts of the country, collections agencies -- fueled by a sideways economy and a growing industry that buys bad debt -- are hijacking law enforcement and the legal system to arrest and imprison people who have walked on unpaid bills, ranging from auto loans to credit cards to outstanding medical tolls.

In a multiplying number of cases, judges set the debtor's at exactly what they owe the creditors. And more often than not, if friends or family do come up with the bail money, they'll likely never see it again.

It will end up with the creditor who initiated the collection process and will ask the court for the bail amount.

Debt collectors having law enforcement officials haul people off to jail is a disagreeable if obnoxious way of doing business. But a private company using government employees as its own collections arm feels like the stuff of Lucifer.

Still, it is happening as more and more in an industry that believes any means available to collect is fair game.

Being in debt hasn't been illegal in the United States for more than 100 years when debtor's prisons were scrapped. However, in modern day America, missing a court hearing over an unpaid bill allows collections agencies to bring the hammer down.

Private firms such as Portfolio Recovery Associates and Encore Capital Group buy old debt from other companies that have thus far been stiffed: a mortgage firm, a cell phone provider, a credit card lender. They purchase them for pennies on the dollar.

If harassing phone calls don't work, these debt buyers enlist the help of the courts. Of course, fees and interest are usually tacked on as well. The profit goal for these agencies is to reap more than 200 percent of what they originally shelled out for the tardy debt.

When the debtor doesn't show up for a hearing called by the likes of Encore Capital, that's when law enforcement and the courts "unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors," says a Spokane lawyer who has represented people against private debt collectors.

Those who fail to appear in court can be held in contempt. An arrest warrant is issued if a collector so desires and the court goes along with it.

If a debtor who's bagged on or just blatantly ignored their hearing is unfortunate enough to live in a jurisdiction that has extra law enforcement resources, they soon might find themselves in cuffs.

"The debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people, " adds the Spokane attorney, "and law enforcement is going along with it."

Oddly enough, arrested debtors aren't officially charged with a crime.

Robert Vee eventually was released from the Hennepin County jail in downtown Minneapolis after he made a collect call to his landlord, who posted his bail for the amount he owed on his unpaid credit card.

Despite satisfying the old tab, he is not without fret. He still has unpaid junk debt. Vee also owes $40,000 on a second mortgage.

"The question always crosses my mind: 'Are the cops going to arrest me again?' So long as I've got unpaid bills, the threat is there."

Source;
http://www.truecrimereport.com/2010/...gged_on_he.php

[giovonni]

Here is a leverage point for change, speeding on the Green Transition.

New discovery paves way for pollution-free electricity production
2010-10-15 05:30:00

Scientists have identified new properties in a material that could result in efficient and inexpensive plastic solar cells for pollution-free electricity production.

The discovery by physicists at Rutgers University reveals that energy-carrying particles generated by packets of light can travel on the order of a thousand times farther in organic (carbon-based) semiconductors than scientists previously observed.

This boosts scientists' hopes that solar cells based on this budding technology may one day overtake silicon solar cells in cost and performance, thereby increasing the practicality of solar-generated electricity as an alternate energy source to fossil fuels.

"Organic semiconductors are promising for solar cells and other uses, such as video displays, because they can be fabricated in large plastic sheets," said Vitaly Podzorov, assistant professor of Physics at Rutgers.

Podzorov and his colleagues observed that excitons - particles that form when semiconducting materials absorb photons, or light particles - can travel a thousand times farther in an extremely pure crystal organic semiconductor called rubrene. Until now, excitons were typically observed to travel less than 20 nanometers - billionths of a meter - in organic semiconductors.

"This is the first time we observed excitons migrating a few microns," said Podzorov, noting that they measured diffusion lengths from two to eight microns, or millionths of a meter. This is similar to exciton diffusion in inorganic solar cell materials such as silicon and gallium arsenide.

"Once the exciton diffusion distance becomes comparable to the light absorption length, you can collect most of the sunlight for energy conversion," he said.

Excitons are particle-like entities consisting of an electron and an electron hole (a positive charge attributed to the absence of an electron). They can generate a photo-voltage when they hit a semiconductor boundary or junction, and the electrons move to one side and the holes move to the other side of the junction. If excitons diffuse only tens of nanometers, only those closest to the junctions or boundaries generate photo-voltage. This accounts for the low electrical conversion efficiencies in today's organic solar cells.

While the extremely pure rubrene crystals fabricated by the Rutgers physicists are suitable only for laboratory research at this time, the research shows that the exciton diffusion bottleneck is not an intrinsic limitation of organic semiconductors. Continuing development could result in more efficient and manufacturable materials.

The scientists discovered that excitons in their rubrene crystals behaved more like the excitons observed in inorganic crystals - a delocalized form known as Wannier-Mott, or WM, excitons. Scientists previously believed that only the more localized form of excitons, called Frenkel excitons, were present in organic semiconductors. WM excitons move more rapidly through crystal lattices, resulting in better opto-electronic properties.

Podzorov noted that the research also produced a new methodology of measuring excitons based on optical spectroscopy. Since excitons are not charged, they are hard to measure using conventional methods. The researchers developed a technique called polarization resolved photocurrent spectroscopy, which dissociates excitons at the crystal's surface and reveals a large photocurrent. The technique should be applicable to other materials, Podzorov claims.

The discovery has been posted online and slated for publication in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature Materials. (ANI)

Source;
http://sify.com/news/new-discovery-p...ln4ebeigj.html

[giovonni]

If depression is a problem for you, you might consider discussing this treatment with your physicians.



Magnets Used To Treat Patients With Severe Depression

Released: 10/14/2010 3:45 PM EDT
Source: Loyola University Health System

Newswise — John O’Sullivan had struggled with bipolar depression since he was a teen. He has tried numerous types of psychotherapy and medication but nothing seemed to help for long.

A salesman whose profession required the constant projection of a positive, upbeat image to be successful, O’Sullivan found that his condition frequently left him feeling listless and restless. He switched jobs often and had difficulties in his family life.

“When you’re in a maniacal state with bipolar, it’s not like you’re often happy. You’re irritable and hard to live with,” said O’Sullivan, a husband and father of five. “That’s been tough on the family.”

At age 50 and desperate, O’Sullivan was cautiously intrigued when his Loyola University Medical Center psychiatrist, Dr. Murali S. Rao, told him about a new high-tech, non-invasive therapy that uses magnetic waves to treat his condition.

“My first thought was, ‘What is this?’” said O’Sullivan, a resident of Downers Grove, Ill. “But, really, I was open-minded to it because I was desperate for anything that would work quicker and more effectively.”

Known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the treatment delivers a series of electrical pulses to the part of the brain associated with depression and other mood disorders. The pulses generate an electric current in the brain that stimulates neurons to increase the release of more mood-enhancing chemicals like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine.

“The electrical pulses target the nerve cells in the region of the brain called the left prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that regulates our moods,” said Rao, chairman of Loyola’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience Services.

A study involving 301 patients that was recently published in the journal Brain Stimulation found TMS to be “an effective, long-term treatment for major depression.”

O’Sullivan’s treatment took place over a span of about three weeks. It involved a series of sessions lasting about a half hour each, five days a week. He remained awake and alert throughout each session and no anesthesia or sedation was required.

“The results have been what I would call surprisingly good,” O’Sullivan said. “From my experience going back to my teenage years, I’ve never been as optimistic about life as I am now after TMS. I feel like a million bucks. I feel great. It’s a pretty big change.”

There is nothing new about the use of electricity to treat depression. For years, a treatment called electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – also known as “electric shock treatment” – has been used to induce seizures in anesthetized patients for therapeutic results.

“But since TMS uses an electrical field, not electricity like ECT, there is very little risk of a seizure from the procedure,” Rao said. “The pulses are mild and painless and patients are able to immediately return to normal activities.”

The short-term side effects of TMS are usually minor. Some patients experience tingling in the scalp or twitching of facial muscles. Others experience a headache, which can be relieved by any over-the-counter pain-relief medication.

“It’s not all unpleasant,” O’Sullivan said. “During treatment, I could feel a pulsing around my left eye but it wasn’t painful.”

TMS is FDA approved and is performed on an outpatient basis in a psychiatrist’s office. Patients sit in a device that resembles a comfortable dentist chair. The chair reclines and has a padded headrest. It also has a touch-screen control panel and an electrical magnetic coil that is positioned on a precise spot on the patient’s head.

“I’ve had tremendous results in the three weeks I was undergoing it,” O’Sullivan said. “Medication would take six to eight weeks before I knew it was working or not. The TMS results were pretty quick and pretty dramatic.”

Source;
http://www.newswise.com/articles/mag...&page=1&search[status]=3&search[sort]=date+desc&search[has_multimedia]=

[giovonni]

This is wonderful news. As readers know my view is water is destiny, and the lack of potable water constitutes an almost insurmountable obstacle stopping poor indigenous cultures from rising to a higher quality of life. Please click through and look at the MIT created video.

Researchers demonstrate portable, solar-powered water desalination system

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, October 16th, 2010

About one in eight humans do not have access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization. That's approximately 884 million people.

The repercussion of this reality are a daily reality in developing nations: an estimated 1.4 million children perish each year due to diarrhea brought on by waterborne bacteria. In spite of breathtaking advances in human technology, over 97 percent of the world's water is still undrinkable.



This full-scale rendering may represent the future of clean water for those who have none.

And while salty or impure water can be cleaned through existing water desalination technologies, the facilities needed are massive and consume vast amounts of energy. It's costly, too: purifying sea water can cost "over $1,000 per acre-foot," according to the US Geological Survey. Even worse, of the roughly 12,500 desalination plants operating as of 2002, their combined total output was equal to less than 1 percent of humanity's daily water consumption.

All of these factors combine to effectively place clean water out of reach for most of the world's poor.

Enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Field and Space Robotics Laboratory, which has developed and successfully tested a portable, solar-powered water desalination system that has the potential to save millions of lives the world over.

Under the guidance of Profs. Steven Dubowsky and Richard Wiesman, the group created a small, reverse-osmosis system that's capable of producing up to 80 gallons of clean water per day. A scaled-up version of the system could produce up to 1,000 gallons per day, according to David Gabriel, writing for the Environmental News Network.

One of the military's C-130 cargo planes could theoretically carry up to 24 of these systems, Gabriel noted. With 24,000 gallons of clean water per day, that's enough to sustain a population of approximately 10,000.

"The system is designed to be cost effective," he explained. "It is made from standard parts such as PVC pipe and basic electronic components. It can be assembled and operated by local people who do not need advanced technical training. The units can also operate efficiently in a wide range of weather conditions. They have built in computers with sensors that can change certain variables if it gets cloudy. For example, the computer can adjust power going to the pump or the position of the valves to ensure the system will always produce water."

This video of the portable water desalination prototype in action was released by the MIT News Office on Oct. 14, 2010.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=j2bVJxuFP4I

(Courtesy photo: MIT.)

Source;
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/r...nation-system/

[giovonni]

This is extraordinary news. It would provide replacement employment for miners, so that the general financial health of West Virginia would actually improve, and the devastation of coal, and coal mining, would end. It will be interesting to see whether old energy attempts to take this over, or blocks it.

EDITORIAL:
Bonanza: Geothermal Heat in West Virginia

By The Charleston Gazette, W.Va.


Oct. 17--Apparently, West Virginia sits atop a potential industrial gold mine, a source of boundless free energy even greater than the state's rich coal deposits.

It's geothermal heat -- 400-degree power seething 3 miles underground in semi-magma rock layers -- that might be tapped by deep wells for steam-turbine electricity generating plants.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory studied temperature readings from 1,400 West Virginia oil, gas and water wells. They found indications that the East Coast's strongest "hot spots" lie beneath Greenbrier, Pocahontas, Randolph and Tucker counties.

"It appears to be hotter than other areas on the East Coast," SMU researcher Zachary Frone said. SMU estimated West Virginia's geothermal power-generation potential at 18,890 megawatts -- exceeding the 16,350 megawatts currently derived from coal, river dams and other sources.

West Virginia University engineer Brian Anderson commented: "I actually do think it is something to be excited about. ... It's a reserve, or resource, of energy that West Virginia has that other places don't."

Geothermal heat is the molten "hell" inside the planet that can be seen when volcanoes spill rivers of fiery lava. Part of it stems from the original formation of Earth, and part comes from radioactive decay of minerals. If this power could be utilized more fully, it would meet all human needs worldwide forever.

"The amount of heat available from the Earth under the United States alone is enough to power the current U.S. energy demand for 10,000 years," WVU's Anderson said. "You can consider the geothermal energy source an infinite energy source."

Reaching this free power requires drilling extra-deep wells -- costing around $10 million each -- then pouring in water to make steam. Such operations already exist in Italy, New Zealand, California, Nevada, Germany and elsewhere. A recent attempt in Switzerland triggered local earthquakes and had to be canceled.

State Geologist Michael Hohn says the sedimentary rock of the Appalachians presumably wouldn't cause quakes of the sort suffered in Switzerland.

Geothermal wells release some polluting gases trapped deep underground -- but only about 4 percent of the pollution freed by burning fossil fuels. Thus geothermal is considered clean "green energy." It's more reliable than wind and solar, which generate electricity only when the wind blows or the sun shines during daylight hours.

The promise of an important new geothermal power industry in West Virginia is a bright prospect. State leaders and the Legislature should launch studies to evaluate this enticing possibility.

Source;
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article...icleid/4587892

[giovonni]

The Rule of Law

I urge each of you to go to the World Justice Project website and download and read this report:

http://www.worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/

STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Editor - Schwartzreport

It has always been my safe port that no matter what else happened in America I always saw the justice system as fair; perhaps you feel the same way. I mean America is the shining city on the hill, to use President Reagan's image, when it comes to Justice and the Rule of Law ... right? That's what I thought, and if you feel the same, you will be as appalled as I was when I read the just released World of Justice Project report: Rule of Law Index 2010.

When compared to our peer group of high affluence industrialized nations -- with 1 being best and 7 being worst -- the US ranks 7th in limited government powers; 7th in Absence of corruption; 6th in clear, publicized and stable laws; 6th in order and security; 7th in fundamental rights; 3rd open government; 5th in regulatory enforcement; 7th in access to civil justice; 5th in effective criminal justice.

To understand why I think this report is such a big deal, and not just another ideological think tank agitprop report perhaps it will help to say who funded it: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Neukom Family Foundation, the GE Foundation, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Lexis Nexis. I list them to make the point that this is the pinnacle of non-partisan philanthropy, not some political think tank with an agenda. We can trust the data.

The project, involving 900 researchers from 35 countries, who have polled 35,000 individuals, in addition to searching each nation's records, presents itself in this way:

'Establishing the rule of law is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity and equity-communities that offer sustainable economic development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights…. The rule of law is the cornerstone to improving public health, safeguarding participation, ensuring security, and fighting poverty.”

When the World Justice Project talks about the rule of law they spell out very carefully what they mean. They refer to 'a rules-based system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:

• The government and its officials and agents are accountable under the law;
• The laws are clear, publicized, stable, and fair, and protect fundamental rights,
including the security of persons and property;
• The process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient;
• Access to justice is provided by competent, independent, and ethical adjudicators, attorneys or representatives, and judicial officers who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

With this as the basis for its analysis the Rule of Law Index then lists what it calls the 10 'factors” which break down further into 49 'subfactors.” These descriptors are the basis upon which the Rule of Law Index evaluates a nation's justice under the rule of law. The outcome of this exercise is a quite extraordinary assessment 'of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law-- not in theory but in practice. (emphasis added).” Here are the 10 factors; they all sound very 'American.”

• Factor One - Limited government powers
• Factor Two - Absence of corruption
• Factor Three - Clear, publicized and stable laws
• Factor Four - Order and security
• Factor Five - Fundamental rights
• Factor Six " Open government
• Factor Seven - Regulatory enforcement
• Factor Eight - Access to civil justice
• Factor Nine - Effective criminal justice
• Factor Ten - Informal justice”

As I started reading the report I assumed that whatever other self inflicted wounds we have brought to ourselves as a nation, our justice system was still solid, and that the U.S. would rank at the top of the world's list. Surprise. The WJP groups countries by regions as well as such considerations as income level. Then evaluates them, dropping Factor 10 - Informal Justice - because it is does not involve law. Not surprisingly the U.S. is grouped with North America and Western Europe, and there are seven nations in our bloc: Austria, Canada, France, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and USA. These are the nations where the survey was carried out for the 2010 report, with other countries to follow in later reports.

It is a death's head portrait of the reality that lies beneath the smug rhetoric we use to hector others about justice and the rule of law. I am embarrassed. We all should be. This has haunted me since I read the report. If America is not a leader in justice, what are we? Who are we? What have we become?

[giovonni]

Water on the Moon: a Billion Gallons !

Scientists Say LCROSS Moon Mission Found Enough Ice in Crater to Fill 1,500 Olympic Pools

Water on the moon? Scientists used to think it was as dry as, well, lunar dust.

But after a year of analysis NASA today announced that its LCROSS lunar-impact probe mission found up to a billion gallons of water ice in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater near the moon's south pole.

That's enough, said researchers, to fill 1,500 Olympic-size swimming pools, all from one crater.

If there is ice there, it probably exists in other places on the moon as well. They also found silver, mercury, carbon monoxide and ammonia.

LCROSS was an empty rocket stage that was deliberately crashed into the moon last year, while a small satellite trailing it took chemical measurements of what it kicked up. Its target, a crater called Cabeus, was chosen because it is so deep that sunlight never reaches the bottom -- and any ice there, mixed in the soil, would never have a chance to vaporize. The ice might have remained frozen there for billions of years.

"To our surprise, some of the permanently shadowed regions had no water, but some of the areas that receive sunlight occasionally did have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team.

The LCROSS researchers had already announced preliminary findings last November -- about a third less water than they reported today -- and refined their numbers in the months since. Their conclusions appear today in the journal Science.

Finding large amounts of water on the moon could be important, not just for science, but for future exploration by astronauts. Water, essential for human survival, would be heavy and expensive for spacecraft to bring from earth. But if astronauts land near ice deposits, as NASA has long hoped, they could, in effect, live off the land.

The ice could be melted and purified for drinking and cooling of spacecraft systems -- and beyond that, it could also be broken down into its components, hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen could be used as rocket fuel; oxygen could be used for breathing.

"This place looks like it's a treasure chest of elements, of compounds that have been released all over the moon and they've been put in this bucket in the permanent shadows," said planetary geologist Peter Schultz of Brown University in Rhode Island in a statement.

How much water did they actually find? The researchers said the satellite measured about 41 gallons in the debris from the 60-foot crater gouged out by the crashing rocket. Since the ice was mixed in with rock and dust, its chemical signature -- H2O -- was mixed in with the myriad minerals to be found in lunar soil.

Some of those other minerals were less than welcome to the researchers. Mercury, in particular, is toxic, so the idea of astronauts simply melting the ice for personal use becomes more complicated. And the scientists said not to get excited about the silver they found; it's hardly enough to be worth mining.

There is no saying whether astronauts will get to use that ice any time soon. The Obama administration early this year canceled the Constellation project, which had been proposed by President George W. Bush, to return astronauts to the moon and eventually send them on to Mars. They will still go to Mars, someday, but the moon plans, when given another look, appeared unaffordable.

But scientists' image of the moon has changed since the Apollo astronauts came home. Anthony Colaprete, the chief mission scientist, said Cabeus crater was like an "oasis in a lunar desert."

video-clip
and
source page here;
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wat...1939079&page=1

[giovonni]

In very short order it will soon be accurate to say Americans are minority owners of America.



From the Rolling Stone Magazine's
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's 'Griftopia'





Our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters, finding eager buyers in the Middle East.

By Matt Taibbi
Oct 18, 2010 1:30 PM EDT

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that "great vampire squid", played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book,


Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America, due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that swims around the world in search of things to buy.

Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency, most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.

My buddy was a young guy who'd come up working on the derivatives desk of one of the more dastardly American investment banks. After a few years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend their oil billions.

Aside from the hot weather, it wasn't such a bad gig. But on one of his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work had gotten a little, well, weird.

"I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ."

I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?"

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you know about this?"

As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.

There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

note > to continue reading excerpt from page 2-5
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...S_show_page=1#


Source;
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...S_show_page=0#

[giovonni]

The richest country in the world, spending hundreds of billions on wars, and one out of eight Americans are on food assistance. Can the craziness of our priorities get any starker?


Food Stamp Usage Soars Among Working Families




MARK NIESSE | 10/22/10 04:45 PM | AP

HONOLULU — Lillie Gonzales does whatever it takes to provide for three ravenous sons who live under her roof. She grows her own vegetables at home on Kauai, runs her own small business and like a record 42 million other Americans, she relies on food stamps.

Gonzales and her husband consistently qualify for food stamps now that Hawaii and other states are quietly expanding eligibility and offering the benefit to more working, moderate income families.

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reviewed by The Associated Press shows that 30 states have adopted rules making it easier to qualify for food stamps since 2007. In all, 38 states have loosened eligibility standards.

Hawaii has gone farther than most, allowing a family like Gonzales' to earn up to $59,328 and still get food stamps.

Prior to an Oct. 1 increase, the income eligibility limit for a Hawaii family of five was $38,568 a year.

"If I didn't have food stamps, I would be buying white rice and Spam every day," said Gonzales, whose Island Angels business makes Hawaiian-style fabric angel ornaments, quilts, aprons and purses.

Eligibility for food stamps varies from state to state, with the 11 most generous states allowing families to apply if their gross income is less than double the federal poverty line of $22,050 for a family of four on the U.S. mainland. The threshold is higher in Alaska and Hawaii.

With more than 1 in 8 Americans now on food stamps, participation in the program has jumped about 70 percent from 26 million in May 2007, while the nation's unemployment rate rose from 4.3 percent to 9.2 percent through September of this year.

"We've seen a huge increase in participation due to the economic downturn," said Jean Daniel, a spokeswoman for the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service. "That's the way this program was designed."

In addition to helping alleviate economic pressures, many states embrace the popularity of food stamps because their cost – $50 billion last year – is paid entirely by the federal government. States are only responsible for paying half of their programs' administrative costs.

Food stamps have been blasted by some Republicans in this midterm election season as just another federal entitlement program, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich framing the vote as a choice between "the party of food stamps" and Republican policies that create jobs.

Participants in the food stamp program, technically called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, receive a per person average of $133 per month to buy staples including milk, bread and vegetables.

Shortly after Hawaii announced it was raising its eligibility limits starting this month, three carloads of 10 seniors drove to the Kauai Independent Food Bank to ask if they qualified. Nine of them did, said Judy Lenthall, executive director for the food bank, which helps people apply for food stamps.

"We saw an immediate and overwhelmingly wonderful response," Lenthall said. "It surprised us how fast it's spreading."

States that have relaxed food stamp eligibility did so by moving to a system where applicants could qualify based on their income, and their other assets such as real estate, vehicles and savings accounts could be ignored.

Basing food stamps on income alone allows the newly unemployed and the elderly to seek government food aid without having to first sell their property or exhaust every dollar they've earned, said Sue McGinn, director of the food stamp program in Colorado, which will expand eligibility beginning in March.

"They won't have to wipe out their savings to apply for benefits," McGinn said.

Many of these states also raised income limits, although applicants still have to show they're essentially living at the poverty line after accounting for allowable deductions, including elder medical expenses and child support.

"It helps moderate and low-income people who are struggling," said Stacy Dean of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "They're doing everything we want: they're working, paying all their bills, taking care of their kids, and they still don't have enough money at the end of the month to put food on the table."

Since 2000, the only states that haven't enacted the lower food stamp eligibility requirements are Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.

In Hawaii, where everything from milk to gasoline is typically the highest in the nation, the changes are welcomed by Gonzales and others.

"As long as my kids have good food, that's all I care about," Gonzales said. "It makes a tremendous difference."

Source;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/1..._n_772287.html


If you, or someone you know needs help with food: Food and Nutrition Service: http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/

[giovonni]

When I wrote my first book in 1976, I lived in Arizona in Flagstaff, where I co-directed a remote viewing archaeological site, and in Tucson. Through an encounter on a mountain I was given access into the Hopi culture, and through another connection, the Navajo. I learned many things but what particularly impacted me was the realization that when the Green Transition occurred Native Americans would become genuine nations within the United States, sanctioned by ancient treaties. And that this will happen because the resources within their territories, and the territories themselves make them affluent. It started with casinos, which have always seemed to me a voluntary reparations tax. But this will be dwarfed by the income from wind and sun and the rising value of their lands.

This story, I believe is the next step of this evolving process.



Navajos Hope to Shift From Coal to Wind and Sun

By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: October 25, 2010


Supporters of Earl Tulley and Lynda Lovejoy at a campaign rally last month in Blue Gap, Ariz.

BLUE GAP, Ariz. — For decades, coal has been an economic lifeline for the Navajos, even as mining and power plant emissions dulled the blue skies and sullied the waters of their sprawling reservation.

But today there are stirrings of rebellion. Seeking to reverse years of environmental degradation and return to their traditional values, many Navajos are calling for a future built instead on solar farms, ecotourism and microbusinesses.

“At some point we have to wean ourselves,” Earl Tulley, a Navajo housing official, said of coal as he sat on the dirt floor of his family’s hogan, a traditional circular dwelling.

Mr. Tulley, who is running for vice president of the Navajo Nation in the Nov. 2 election, represents a growing movement among Navajos that embraces environmental healing and greater reliance on the sun and wind, abundant resources on a 17 million-acre reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

“We need to look at the bigger picture of sustainable development,” said Mr. Tulley, the first environmentalist to run on a Navajo presidential ticket.

With nearly 300,000 members, the Navajo Nation is the country’s largest tribe, according to Census Bureau estimates, and it has the biggest reservation. Coal mines and coal-fired power plants on the reservation and on lands shared with the Hopi provide about 1,500 jobs and more than a third of the tribe’s annual operating budget, the largest source of revenue after government grants and taxes.

At the grass-roots level, the internal movement advocating a retreat from coal is both a reaction to the environmental damage and the health consequences of mining — water loss and contamination, smog and soot pollution — and a reconsideration of centuries-old tenets.

In Navajo culture, some spiritual guides say, digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium (which the reservation also produced until health issues led to a ban in 2005) is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.

“As medicine people, we don’t extract resources,” said Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about 100 healers known as medicine men and women.

But the shift is also prompted by economic realities. Tribal leaders say the Navajo Nation’s income from coal has dwindled 15 percent to 20 percent in recent years as federal and state pollution regulations have imposed costly restrictions and lessened the demand for mining.

Two coal mines on the reservation have shut down in the last five years. One of them, the Black Mesa mine, ceased operations because the owners of the power plant it fed in Laughlin, Nev., chose to close the plant in 2005 rather than spend $1.2 billion on retrofitting it to meet pollution controls required by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Early this month, the E.P.A. signaled that it would require an Arizona utility to install $717 million in emission controls at another site on the reservation, the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico, describing it as the highest emitter of nitrous oxide of any power plant in the nation. It is also weighing costly new rules for the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona.

And states that rely on Navajo coal, like California, are increasingly imposing greenhouse gas emissions standards and requiring renewable energy purchases, banning or restricting the use of coal for electricity.

So even as they seek higher royalties and new markets for their vast coal reserves, tribal officials say they are working to draft the tribe’s first comprehensive energy policy and are gradually turning to casinos, renewable energy projects and other sources for income.

This year the tribal government approved a wind farm to be built west of Flagstaff, Ariz., to power up to 20,000 homes in the region. Last year, the tribal legislative council also created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to promote environmentally friendly jobs and businesses.

“We need to create our own businesses and control our destiny,” said Ben Shelly, the Navajo Nation vice president, who is now running for president against Lynda Lovejoy, a state senator in New Mexico and Mr. Tulley’s running mate.

That message is gaining traction among Navajos who have reaped few benefits from coal or who feel that their health has suffered because of it.

Curtis Yazzie, 43, for example, lives in northeastern Arizona without running water or electricity in a log cabin just a stone’s throw from the Kayenta mine.

Tribal officials, who say some families live so remotely that it would cost too much to run power lines to their homes, have begun bringing hybrid solar and wind power to some of the estimated 18,000 homes on the reservation without electricity. But Mr. Yazzie says that air and water pollution, not electricity, are his first concerns.

“Quite a few of my relatives have made a good living working for the coal mine, but a lot of them are beginning to have health problems,” he said. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect me.”

One of those relatives is Daniel Benally, 73, who says he lives with shortness of breath after working for the Black Mesa mine in the same area for 35 years as a heavy equipment operator. Coal provided for his family, including 15 children from two marriages, but he said he now believed that the job was not worth the health and environmental problems.

“There’s no equity between benefit and damage,” he said in Navajo through a translator.

About 600 mine, pipeline and power plant jobs were affected when the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada and Peabody’s Black Mesa mine shut down.

But that also meant that Peabody stopped drawing water from the local aquifer for the coal slurry carried by an underground pipeline to the power plant — a victory for Navajo and national environmental groups active in the area, like the Sierra Club.

Studies have shown serious declines in the water levels of the Navajo aquifer after decades of massive pumping for coal slurry operations. And the E.P.A. has singled out the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Generating Station as two of the largest air polluters in the country, affecting visibility in 27 of the area’s “most pristine and precious natural areas,” including the Grand Canyon.

The regional E.P.A. director, Jared Blumenfeld, said the plants were the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 emitters of nitrogen oxides, which form fine particulates resulting in cases of asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart attacks and premature deaths.

Environmentalists are now advocating for a more diversified Navajo economy and trying to push power plants to invest in wind and solar projects.

“It’s a new day for the Navajo people,” said Lori Goodman, an official with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, a group founded 22 years ago by Mr. Tulley. “We can’t be trashing the land anymore.”

Both presidential candidates in the Navajo election have made the pursuit of cleaner energy a campaign theme, but significant hurdles remain, including that Indian tribes, as sovereign entities, are not eligible for tax credits that help finance renewable energy projects elsewhere.

And replacing coal revenue would not be easy. The mining jobs that remain, which pay union wages, are still precious on a reservation where unemployment is estimated at 50 percent to 60 percent.

“Mining on Black Mesa,” Peabody officials said in a statement, “has generated $12 billion in direct and implied economic benefits over the past 40 years, created thousands of jobs, sent thousands of students to college and restored lands to a condition that is as much as 20 times more productive than native range.”

They added, “Renewables won’t come close to matching the scale of these benefits.”

But many Navajos see the waning of coal as inevitable and are already looking ahead. Some residents and communities are joining together or pairing with outside companies to pursue small-scale renewable energy projects on their own.

Wahleah Johns, a member of the new Navajo Green Economy Commission, is studying the feasibility of a small solar project on reclaimed mining lands with two associates. In the meantime, she uses solar panels as a consciousness-raising tool.

“How can we utilize reclamation lands?” she said to Mr. Yazzie during a recent visit as they held their young daughters in his living room. “Maybe we can use them for solar panels to generate electricity for Los Angeles, to transform something that’s been devastating for our land and water into something that can generate revenue for your family, for your kids.”

Mr. Yazzie, who lives with his wife, three children and two brothers, said he liked the idea. “Once Peabody takes all the coal out, it’ll be gone,” he said. “Solar would be long-term. Solar and wind, we don’t have a problem with. It’s pretty windy out here.”

Source;
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/sc...pagewanted=all

[giovonni]

The obscenity of this makes me have to get up and walk around.
A small group of contractors are making so much money it seems like a novel. And they are doing so under conditions of drunken looseness. It is so over the top that they don't even know where it went. Or who ended up with it. Billions. Meanwhile one in eight Americans are on some kind of food assistance.

US not tracking spending on Afghan projects, audit says


Billions have been spent on contractors in Afghanistan, but US records are poor

The US government has spent about $55bn on rebuilding in Afghanistan since 2001 but cannot easily show how the money was spent, a government watchdog says.

The special inspector general's office for Afghanistan reconstruction talked of a "confusing labyrinth" of spending.

It said some 7,000 contractors received $17.7bn from 2007-09 but data prior to 2007 was too poor to be analysed.

It is the first comprehensive audit of US spending in Afghanistan since US-led troops ousted the Taliban in 2001.

According to the report, US government agencies are not tracking Afghan contracts in a shared database and cannot easily show where the money went.

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says record-keeping has been so poor that most of the money has not been properly recorded.

The Pentagon, state department and USAID "are unable to readily report on how much money they spend on contracting for reconstruction activities in Afghanistan", said the report from the special inspector general's office, which was set up by Congress.

It was also not clear who had received money disbursed by the three agencies, which are the biggest US spenders on Afghan reconstruction.

'Oversight impossible'

Pentagon contracts worth $11.5bn for construction, supplies and logistics in Afghanistan went to more than 6,615 contractors between 2007 and 2009, the audit found. Half of that money went to just 41 contractors.

USAID spent $3.8bn during that time and the state department $2.4bn.

"The audit shows that navigating the confusing labyrinth of government contracting is difficult, at best," according to the watchdog.

It said there had been little co-ordination within and between US government agencies. The three agencies mentioned above, for example, do not separate their spending in Afghanistan from other US-funded projects around the world.

"If we don't even know who we're giving money to, it is nearly impossible to conduct systemwide oversight," the inspector general, Arnold Fields, said.

US special envoy Richard Holbrooke has voiced similar concerns in the past, talking of an "ununified" effort by the US, the UN and hundreds of other countries and aid agencies in Afghanistan.

According to the inspector general's audit, the largest contract between 2007 and 2009 was with US company DynCorp. It received about $1.8bn for police training and counter-narcotics work in Afghanistan.

A Kabul construction company received nearly $700m to build offices and barracks.

In a separate report, the inspector general found that six buildings constructed for the Afghan national police - which cost the US taxpayer $5.5m - were unusable.

The quality of construction was so bad that the sites in Helmand and Kandahar could collapse in an earthquake, it reported.


Much of Afghanistan remains to be rebuilt after years of war

Source;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11641964