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June 16, 2006

Exploitation of the oceans "rapidly passing the point of no return."

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Okay, enough already with the good news. Via the Guardian, here's some of the other kind:

Damage to the once pristine habitats of the deep oceans by pollution, litter and overfishing is running out of control, the United Nations warned yesterday. In a report that indicates that time is running out to save them, the U.N. said humankind's exploitation of the the deep seas and oceans was "rapidly passing the point of no return."
Last year some 85 million tonnes of wild fish were pulled from the global oceans, 100 million sharks and related species were butchered for their fins, some 250,000 turtles became tangled in fishing gear, and 300,000 seabirds, including 100,000 albatrosses, were killed by illegal longline fishing.
Into the water in their place went three billion individual pieces of litter - about eight million a day - joining the 46,000 pieces of discarded plastic that currently float on every square mile of ocean and kill another million seabirds each year. The water temperature rose and its alkalinity fell - both the result of climate change. Coral barriers off Australia and Belize are dying and newly discovered reefs in the Atlantic have already been destroyed by bottom trawling.

The piece has a U.N. official saying, "Humankind's ability to exploit the deep oceans and high seas has accelerated rapidly over recent years. It is a pace of change that has outstripped our institutions and conservation efforts," and notes by way of example that mining could soon spread to the sea floor for the first time, with a Canadian company planning to dig for deposits of gold and copper off Papua New Guinea.

For a full inventory of the woes afflicting the oceans see Julia Whitty's excellent piece from the March/April Mother Jones. And if you want to do something about this mess--and you can--click here.

"It's a big vote for small cetaceans."

Welcome news for dolphins, porpoises, and all who wish them well: Japan today lost a vote to have the so-called "small cetaceans" (mini-whales) removed from the protective purview of the International Whaling Commission, which just began a five-day meeting in St. Kitts in the Caribbean.

If you haven't been following this closely, Japan is pushing hard to persuade members of the 70-country IWC--whose remit is essentially to conserve whale populations--to agree to ending a 20-year old moratorium on commercial whaling. The 2/3 majority the Japanese need to overturn the ban outright seems beyond their reach for now, but there are plenty of proposals coming up for a vote short of full repeal that will loosen restrictions on whale hunting. The small-cetacean measure was one of these--another would ban groups like Greenpeace from snooping around whaling vessels--and the fact that Japan's push failed suggests it lacks the strength to win on the others. (This despite Japan's allegedly having bought the support of other countries with foreign aid.)

Three countries have kept on hunting whales despite the 1986 moratorium: Norway, which has ignored the ban entirely; Japan and Iceland, which have exploited a loophole that permits whaling for purposes of "scientific research." (See photo below.)

Why is Japan so hot to overturn the ban? Not clear. Whale meat from the "scientific" hunts is sold commercially and, thanks to the Japanese government, is a staple in school lunches; fact is, though, Japanese people don't much care for whale meat, and the industry subsists in large part on government subsidies. Puzzled outsiders apparently put Japan's whaling jihad down to "a small caucus of politicians who have turned the issue into one of 'culinary imperialism,' in which Japan is defiantly asserting that it will not be told what to eat, any more than Australians should be told not to eat kangaroo." (LAT)

For more on whale-, dolphin-, and ocean-related developments, see Mother Jones' recent special report on the state of our oceans, which includes this article on Japanese scientific whaling and this interview with filmmaker Hardy Jones, aka the "Dolphin Defender." For up-to-the-minute coverage of the IWC meeting, see Greenpeace's "Ocean Defender" blog. And to find out what you can do to protect our oceans and the critters and plants that live in them check out "Ocean Voyager", Mother Jones' interactive online journey (video! photos! ocean sounds!) to defend our seas.

Polls Aren't Always Trustworthy

I don't know many people who take opinion polling on policy issues as definitive in any way, but James Fishkin's piece in the Boston Review on polling had two interesting anecdotes on just how unreliable polling can really be:

Sometimes the "opinions" reported in polls do not exist. Because respondents do not like to say "I don't know," they often pick an answer more or less at random. When George Bishop of the University of Cincinnati asked in surveys about the "Public Affairs Act of 1975," the public offered opinions even though the act was fictional…

The second problem with conventional polling is that sometimes the responses to questions do not express real opinions but simply the first thing that comes to a respondent's mind. This phenomenon was first described by the eminent political scientist Philip Converse. A National Election Studies panel was asked the same set of questions each year from 1956 to 1960. The questions included some low-salience items about such subjects as the government’s role in providing electric power.

Converse noticed that some of the respondents offered answers that seemed to vary almost randomly over the course of the panel. They cared so little about the issue that they could not even remember what they had said the previous year in order to try to be consistent. Converse concluded that significant numbers of people were simply answering randomly.

The Fishkin piece, by the way, advocates "deliberative polling," a process which would gather a representative group of people together on some weekend retreat or other, poll them on an issue, let them talk it out, and then poll them again to see what they think after some thought, discussion, and, well, deliberation. It's an interesting idea, but either way, the piece is a good reminder that people can say all sorts of things about various intricate policy programs, but that's no indication as to what they really might think about something if they gave it some actual thought.

Hyping the China Threat

Well, this is disturbing. As we all know, the Pentagon has a rather alarmist view of China. But where does this view come from? Careful analysis? Maybe not. Gregory Kulacki reports in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the United States' appraisal of China's intentions and military capabilities is often based on dubious sources—an essay from tabloid newspaper in one case, the writings of an amateur weapons enthusiast in another—that are then wrongly attributed to the Chinese government and deemed cause for concern.

In 2001, for instance, a U.S. commission warned that China was preparing for, quote, a "space Pearl Harbor" and probing for weaknesses in our high-tech infrastructure that could be exploited in a possible war over Taiwan. But much of this assessment was based on an essay written in China by a junior military officer freelancing for an "outlook" magazine, who wrote a piece on U.S. vulnerabilities that exclusively cited U.S. sources, including various Pentagon reports. In no way did the essay reflect China's official intentions, much less its ability to probe for weaknesses. It was just misinterpreted by whatever analyst read it. As Kulacki says, it's "a game of telephone gone horribly wrong."

Now China might in fact be planning some colossal space war against the United States. Or planning to dominate all of Asia. Or whatever nightmare scenario we're supposed to worry about. It's possible. But there's no reason to take the U.S. intelligence community's word on this as final—not least because, according to Kulacki, most of people gathering intelligence on China don't even speak Chinese very well, and so are quite prone to misunderstandings and mistranslations.

Even worse, though, is that a needlessly hawkish view on China can create a dangerous feedback loop. Chinese analysts read U.S. government reports, and in turn write their own analyses for Chinese military journals, which are in turn read by U.S. analysts, and so on. A bit of excess alarmism in those initial reports can be amplified over time, as both sides get increasingly alarmist, and hawkishness can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Already we have a military-industrial complex that has every incentive to hype the Chinese threat in order to justify expensive new weapons systems; we hardly need Chicken Little intelligence based on shoddy translation on top of that.

Minnesota company never charged with theft of 45 tons of Ground Zero disaster relief supplies

Following the tragedy of September 11, 2001, Kieger Enterprises of Minnesota sent trucks to a warehouse in Long Island and proceeded to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donated bottled water, clothes, tools, and generators, which were then moved to Minnesota, where the company planned to sell the items for profit. Dan L'Allier, a Kieger employee, witnessed the trucks being loaded. He and disaster specialist Chris Christopherson told a Kieger executive, who told them to keep quiet about the theft. They then told the FBI.

As a result, the two whistleblowers lost their jobs, received death threats, and were blackballed in the disaster relief industry. They each received $30,000 (after expenses) from the government, their share in a civil suit against Kieger. Some of the company's executives were charged with fraud by the federal government, but the September 11 theft of 45 tons of needed goods was not included in the government's case.

The former U.S. Attorney in Minnesota said it was never his intention to charge Kieger for the theft--that he had referred the September 11 part of the case to New York prosecutors. The government's explanation for excluding the theft was that fraud was at the core of the case and "we didn't need the theft." The whistleblowers say they were never even contacted by New York prosecutors.

However, there is evidence that suggests the government was preparing to bring theft charges against Kieger. That evidence is in the form of a March, 2002 memo from the U.S. Attorney's ofice in Minnesota. However, according to an investigator for the FBI and FEMA, plans to go ahead with the theft charges were curtailed when it was discovered that an FBI agent in Minnesota had stolen a crystal globe from Ground Zero. An investigation then revealed that sixteen government employees, including a top FBI executive and and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, possessed Ground Zero or September 11 Pentagon artifacts.

Jane Turner, the lead FBI agent, says that the FBI attempted to fire her because she brought the stolen artifacts to light. She retired in 2003.

An attorney representing Kieger called the accusation of theft "much ado about nothing," claiming that Kieger employees tooks some water and T-shirts, and that they had permission from FEMA to do so. The FEMA official in charge says that no such permission was given.

Fraud charges against Kieger have not been limited to the September 11 event, but also involve the June, 2000 flood in Eagan, Minnesota and the June 2001 tornado in Siren, Wisconsin.

June 15, 2006

Where's the Food Aid?

Let's rattle off some numbers here: The Pentagon is currently spending $300 million on a propaganda program to sneak stories favorable to the United States into foreign newspapers. In May, meanwhile, the United Nation's emergency food agency had collected only $14 million of the $37.3 million needed to continue its feeding programs. Across Africa, 16 million people are "facing starvation of debilitating malnutrition. And so on.

You can see where this is going. Those figures come from this Salon piece by Samuel Lowenberg on the dire need for food aid to stave off world hunger. It's become fashionable to say that "aid doesn't work," but food aid works perfectly well—it's just underfunded. And what aid there is usually pours in long after a famine has struck, when it's too late. (Famine insurance might help alleviate this problem, however.) Most food aid from the United States, meanwhile, must be used to purchase U.S. crops, a subsidy to agribusiness that causes delays in aid delivery and usually undercuts local markets. No doubt "local corruption" makes some food aid ineffective, but there are more immediate problems that can be addressed first.

There's also the argument that emergency food aid is just a stopgap measure. Give a man a fish and all that. True, but Africa has never received the sort of long-term agricultural development assistance that Latin America and Asia received during the Cold War—currently, only a small fraction of U.S. food aid to Africa is set aside for this purpose. This is stuff that's extremely doable. It's just not done. And people really are dying unnecessarily.

Wal-Mart Can Afford a Pay Raise

You often hear that Wal-Mart simply can't afford to pay its workers more than it does, because then it would have to raise those "always low prices" for which it's so famous. Now I have a problem with the whole concept of "always low prices", but a new study by the Economic Policy Institute points out that the argument's wrong in any case.

According to EPI, Wal-Mart could have raised the wages and benefits of each of its non-supervisory employees in 2005 by more than $2,000 without raising prices a penny and still maintaining a profit margin almost 50 percent greater than Costco (although lower than it is now). So really, there's no excuse.

Crisis in America's ERs

Whenever people talk about instituting a national health care system to the United States, opponents cry foul and fret about "waiting lists" and the like. Well, as it turns out, the health care system in France—which allows people to purchase private health care on top of a universal public insurance system—has no waiting lists. Neither does Germany, another national health care system. On the other hand, we certainly have waiting lists here in the United States:

Emergency medical care in the United States is on the verge of collapse, with the nation's declining number of emergency rooms dangerously overcrowded and often unable to provide the expertise needed to treat seriously ill people in a safe and efficient manner.

That's the grim conclusion of three reports released yesterday by the Institute of Medicine, the product of an extensive two-year look at emergency care.

Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital bed.

This despite the fact that the United States pays more for health care than any other country in the world. (In fact, per capita the U.S. government alone spends more on public health care than countries with supposedly "socialized" systems—and that's before all the private spending is included.) And yet the U.S. still endures waiting lists and rationing—not to mention the 46 million people who don't have insurance at all.

In fact, the large number of uninsured people in this country contributes heavily to the hospital crisis—since the uninsured often can't afford preventive care, they tend to wait until problems get really bad and require hospitalization, which then puts a burden on the emergency medical care system. (By law, emergency rooms must at the very least evaluate and stabilize everyone who comes in.) But for some reason we're told we shouldn't change anything. Right.

George W. Bush: Environmentalist?

Here's a headline to make brows furrow: "Bush Plans Vast Protected Sea Area in Hawaii." Bush plans what now? The man with the worst environmental record in history wants to protect what? No, apparently it's true: he'll designate as a national monument a 1,200 chain of small Hawaiian islands, along with the surrounding waters and reefs, creating the world's largest protected marine area. But here's the backstory:

Some environmentalists noted yesterday that the extra protection was an easy call for the administration, in part because there was little significant opposition in Hawaii or Washington. The move could also help the re-election prospects of Linda Lingle, Hawaii's first Republican governor, who last fall banned commercial activities in state waters in the area and endorsed the federal sanctuary plan.

Now we're getting somewhere. I was worried there was a totally non-cynical explanation for all of this. But surely bailing out a Republican governor isn't enough to spur Bush into helping the environment, right? I mean, wasn't there some sort of business or commercial interest opposed to protecting the reefs that he needed to kowtow before? Apparently not:

[Environmentalists] noted that there were only eight commercial fishing boats licensed to fish in the remote islands, and that rising fuel costs had made such trips less and less profitable.

Gotcha. Fishermen don't really care about this sanctuary, not much harm was being done to the reefs anyway, so Bush may as well go ahead and protect the damn thing, especially since he can now claim that he has "accomplished the single largest act of environmental conservation in history." Our hero. Well, it's good news regardless, although there are countless other reefs and coastal regions that still need actual protection. What are the odds of Bush acting on those? No, let's not answer that. By the way, it's come to my attention that I get paid by the shameless plug, so do check out Mother Jones' new Ocean Voyager site, which takes an in-depth look at all the ocean stuff being neglected these days. It's really quite amazing.

Remember, the US could have taken Zarqawi out years ago.

In the oceans of ink produced following Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s death, there’s been little more than a trickle on one of the most memorable elements of the Zarqawi saga: the fact that, as the Wall Street Journal and NBC News reported years ago, the Pentagon had plenty of chances to take Zarqawi out before the war even began, but didn’t, in part to assuage the Europeans and in part because his presence in Iraq served the administration’s purposes as proof of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link. The irony, of course, is that while Zarqawi was already training terrorists back then, he had not yet formalized his ties to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That would occur after the war, when the insurgency began to grow. From the WSJ piece:

The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House staffers…. Gen. Keane characterized the camp "as one of the best targets we ever had.”

Also worth a look is a report from Australian news program Four Corners, from May of this year, in which former CIA agent Mike Scheuer says this:

"Mr Bush had Zarqawi in his sights almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn't shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq."

In the post-bombing stories, very few have so much as mentioned the prewar opportunities; Newsweek’s cover story is an exception, with two short paragraphs that hit all the right notes.

Some American intelligence determined that Zarqawi and his cohorts were manufacturing crude chemical weapons [at Ansar Al-Islam]. The Pentagon developed plans to bomb the Ansar camp in 2002, but the White House withheld its approval. “He was up there, we knew where he was, and we couldn’t get anybody to move on it,” said a former US intelligence official who had worked on the plans to take out Zarqawi, but who refused to be identified discussing military secrets. “We were told they didn’t want to disrupt the war planning. It was a real opportunity lost.

The Bush administration wanted to exploit Zarqawi in a different way. When Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations to make the case for going to war against Saddam in February 2003, he charged that Saddam “harbors” a “deadly terrorist network” headed by Zarqawi, whom he described as a “collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.”

June 14, 2006

Obama offers vision, while Dems offer laundry list

On the final day of a largely inspiring Take Back America progressive conference, Sen. Barack Obama offered, in a powerful, well-received speech, a searing critique of Bush administration policies, borrowing from Newt Gingrich's recommended attack phrase, "Had enough?" Yet at the same time he provided reassurance and hope for progressives. He told us that we know who we are and we stand for goals that appeal to the best in Americans: "The time for our identity crisis as progressives is over. Don't let anybody tell you that we don't know what we stand for."

He won applause, though, without providing a specific plan for withdrawal from Iraq. Divisions over Iraq among Democratic leaders became the focus of much of the mainstream coverage of the event, missing the broader "Common Good" agenda for change offered by some Democratic leaders and activists at the conference.

Obama captured that uplifting theme well and showed in a smart way how to put forward a positive program for Democrats. Here's some excerpts from a transcript, picking up after his critique of the Administration's failures on health care, Iraq and Katrina, and its underlying Social Darwinism:

Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on self-reliance and individual initiative and a belief in the free market.

But it's also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, our sense that we have a stake in each other's success.

(APPLAUSE)

You know, that everybody should have a shot at opportunity.

Americans understand this. They know the government can't solve all their problems, but they expect the government can help because they know it's an expression of what they're learning in Sunday school, what they learn in their church, in their synagogue, in their mosque, a basic moral precept that says that I have to look out for you and I have responsibility for you and you have responsibility for me; that I am your keeper and your are mine.

That's what America is.

And so I am eager to have this argument with the Republican Party about the core philosophy of America, about what our story is. We shouldn't shy away from that debate.

The time for our identity crisis as progressives is over. Don't let anybody tell you that we don't know what we stand for.

(APPLAUSE)

On the same day that Obama was giving his speech, the Democratic leadership offered a litany of ideas, billed as a "New Direction" for America, such as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, raising the minimum wage, etc.

What was missing from this Democratic list was the broader big idea , "The Common Good," best articluated by Michael Tomasky in a recent, highly influential American Prospect article about Democrats moving beyond single-issue ideas and interest groups into a broader civic republicanism. (Full disclosure: he has edited some free-lance pieces of mine.)

It was that idea that animated the Take Back America Conference, and was liberally borrowed in John Kerry's speech. In fact, an entire luncheon was devoted to Tomasky debating with Barbara Ehrenreich over this idea, with Tomasky seeking to put at ease her concerns that such a broader vision would undermine the fight against the attack on the poor and the working class. In his talk, he cited as an example LBJ promoting the Civil Rights Act for the way it would help all Americans, not just blacks, and cited polling that straight-ahead class war populist apeals are unlikely to win a majority of the public. You can read their speeches at this link (scroll down to luncheon talk on Tuesday).

At the end of the conference, Robert Borsage, the co-director of the sponsoring organization, the Campaign for America's Future, pointed out, "The right has not failed because it's corrupt or because it's
incompetent. It failed because conservatism is wrong for America. "The Common Good Agenda charts a new direction of politics guided by the sense that we're all in this together."

Obama spoke about what this could mean to America, without invoking the phrase "common good" but capturing its spirit for progressives:

Don't doubt yourselves. We know who we are.
And in the end, we know that it's not enough just to say that we've had enough. We've got a story to tell that isn't just against something but is for something.

We know that we're the party of opportunity. We know that, in a global economy that's more connected and more competitive, that we're the party that will guarantee every American an affordable, world- class, lifelong, top-notch education, from early childhood to high school, from college to on-the-job training.

(APPLAUSE)

We know that that's what we're about. We know we're the party -- we know that as progressives we believe in affordable health care for all Americans and that we're going to make sure that Americans don't have to choose between a health care plan that bankrupts the government and one that bankrupts families; the party that won't just throw a few tax breaks at families who can't afford their insurance but will modernize our health care system and get every family a chance to buy insurance at a price they can afford.

Progressives are the folks who believe in energy independence for America...

(APPLAUSE)

... that we're not bought and paid for by the oil companies in this country.

(APPLAUSE)

We believe that we can harness home-grown alternative fuels and spur the production of fuel-efficient hybrid cars and break our dependence on the world's most dangerous regions.

OBAMA: We understand that we get a three-for: We can save our economy, our environment and stop funding both sides of the war on terror if we actually get serious about doing something about energy. We understand that.

(APPLAUSE)

We understand as progressives that we need a tough foreign policy. But we know the other side has a monopoly on the tough and dumb strategy. We're looking for the tough and smart strategy...

(APPLAUSE)

... one that battles the forces of terrorism and fundamentalism, but understands that it's not just a matter of military might alone, but we've got to match it with the power of our diplomacy and the strength of alliances and the power of our ideals; and that when we do go to war, we should be honest with the American people about why we're there and how we expect to win.

(APPLAUSE)

We understand as progressives that we believe in open and honest government that doesn't peddle the agenda of which ever lobbyist or special interest can write the biggest check.

(APPLAUSE)

And if we believe on all these things and if we act on it, then I guarantee you America is looking for us to lead. And if we do it, it's not going to be a Democratic agenda or a liberal agenda or a progressive agenda, it's going to be an American agenda.

Reporters invited to Guantanamo, then sent home by Rumsfeld

The admiral in charge of the prison at Guantanamo Bay invited the news media to come to the base on Saturday to cover the suicides of three of the prisoners. Reporters responded, but on Tuesday night, the Pentagon sent an email citing a directive from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

Media currently on the island will depart on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 10:00 a.m. Please be prepared to depart the CBQ [quarters] at 8:00 a.m.

A flight had already been arranged to expedite the reporters' exit from the base, and though they protested the change of plans, they had to leave.

Editors of the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer said called the reversal "bad public policy" and "a panicked move."

A Pentagon spokesman, J.D. Gordon, said that the reporters were sent home because other media outlets were threatening to sue to get equal access.

In the meantime, George W. Bush as stated that he would like to close the Guantanamo Bay facility as soon as he has a plan to deal with the "darn dangerous" prisoners there.

Making Iraq Boring

John Dickerson thinks Bush's new Iraq strategy is to try to make it appear as "boring" as possible, so that the media stops paying attention. That means no more dramatic photo-ops aboard aircraft carriers or sweeping statements about freedom and the like. Instead it's all talk of reconciliation committees and public finance systems from here on out.

I'm not sure this is really the "strategy" here, but if Dickerson were right, it's be nice to say with confidence that the media would never fall for this. Who knows, though? Already the so-very-well-trained Washington press corps is swooning over the fact that yet another top Bush advisor wasn't indicted this week. Our hero. Meanwhile, I missed it when it came out earlier this week—too "boring," perhaps—but Anthony Shadid reported that foreign veterans of the Iraqi insurgency are now returning to places like Lebanon, waiting to start up what "Abu Haritha" calls "a more expansive war beyond Iraq, a struggle he casts in the most cataclysmic of terms." But we'd hate to rain on this week's magical "Bush bounce," so never mind.

UPDATE: Well, I was curious about this, and here's evidence that newspapers really are slowly pushing Iraq off the front page: "In the first five months of this year, the [Chicago] Tribune placed Iraq on the front page 41 times in 151 days. But in the same period last year, there were 74 Iraq articles on Page 1, and 138 stories in 2004." The same holds true for the New York Times, USA Today (which runs astonishingly few front page stories on Iraq in any case) , the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Private Internet Spies

Creepy. Via Feministe, apparently there's a group called Netvocates out on the internet that offers its services to businesses. And what sort of services might those be? Well, if a blog sullies the honor of the business in question, Netvocates will send out a swarm of right-wingers to troll the offending post with propaganda in the comments section. Meanwhile, the Rendon Group—about which more here—may be doing monitoring lefty blogs, for what purpose who knows. It all sounds conspiratorial, but seriously, check out the links.

Why Proxy Season Matters

Kevin Kelleher of CorpWatch has a great article about how activists are increasingly submitting shareholder resolutions during proxy season in order to demand accountability from large corporations. Coca-Cola alone was the target of three such resolutions this past fall: one to demand an investigation into the company's complicity with paramilitaries in Colombia; one to force the company to develop a plan for recycling; and one to clarify the environmental impact of Coke's water-extraction plants in India. All three resolutions failed, but that's not the point:

For shareholder activists, bringing a proxy to other shareholders is less about winning the vote: Most institutional investors don't vote or blindly go with the management's recommendation. And even if a resolution passes, it's not legally binding. What's more encouraging is when a proxy wins the attention and the approval of a large number of investors.

"More and more, shareholders are voting in favor of resolutions," says Schueth. "Five to seven years ago, we'd win 3 percent or 4 percent of the vote and we'd be thrilled. "But we're seeing an uptick every year, so that now they win maybe 15 percent to 20 percent of the vote. That's a lot of investors, and it's often enough to lead the management to change."

Indeed, many corporations worry enough about the optics of these resolutions to try to reform themselves before the issue gets brought to the attention of investors. (Apple promised to offer free recycling to users discarding their old Macs in response to a threatened shareholder resolution by activists complaining about the company's ever-growing e-waste.)

This looks like a trend to follow closely, especially as public pension funds start getting into the game. The New York City Employees Retirement System, for instance, sponsored the paramilitary resolution submitted to Coca-Cola shareholders. It's possible that with conservatives controlling the majority of statehouses across the country and likely to hold onto at least one branch of Congress this fall, the main impetus for progressive reform in this country could increasingly come from the treasurers, comptrollers, and pension-fund trustees that help manage large blue-state public funds such as CalPERS in California. (The potential for state pension funds to throw their weight around is staggering—nationwide, public funds hold $2.7 trillion in stocks and union-managed funds another $400 billion.)

California Treasurer Phil Angelides, the current Democratic candidate for governor, was big on a variation of this strategy while sitting on the boards of both CalPERS and CalSTRS (the teachers' pension fund). As William Greider reported last year, he helped initiate a host of activist moves: "dumping tobacco stocks, blacklisting ten 'emerging markets' that ignore international labor standards, redeploying capital to neglected sectors like inner-city redevelopment and innovative environmental technologies, and, above all, peppering scores of corporations, banks, brokerages, financial markets and federal regulators with critiques and demands for change." The strategy was slowed somewhat when Schwarzenegger helped force out Andrew Harrigan, the labor-backed CalPERS board president, in 2004, but it was quite effective.

The "Fair and Balanced" Obsession

Pam Spaulding spots a great example of one of journalism's most annoying tics: the need to put fake "balance" into stories. The other day the Houston Chronicle ran a profile of Sgt. Jack Oliver, the first officer in the Houston Police Department to undergo a sex change while on active duty. Interesting stuff. But the reporter then feels compelled to gin up controversy where none exists and quotes some pastor or other who gets all squirmy at the thought of transsexuals: "That would raise issues of competency in the line of duty in my mind."

"Issues of competency?" Who cares what "David Welch, executive director of the Houston Area Pastors Council" thinks about police competency? There might be "competency" issues involved in this story, but a pastor has neither the authority nor the expertise to discuss them. Unless, of course, the reporter's purpose here is to give voice to bible-thumpers who think transsexuals are "icky" without appearing like she's wantonly turning the microphone over to bigots just for the fun of it. Which, of course, is exactly what's going on. But creating fake controversies just for the sake of seeming "balanced" doesn't count as objective reporting in any sense I'm familiar with.

Congress Gets a Raise

The House quickly voted to give itself a $3,300 pay raise yesterday, so that congressional salaries could keep up with the rising cost of living. No word on whether a new minimum wage bill—which would slowly raise the wage floor from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour (which is still far, far below living wage levels) by 2009—will also pass. No sense in rushing that, after all.

June 13, 2006

Hillary meets the anti-war left: booing at progressive conference

Hillary Clinton is supposed to have some of the most dedicated factions of the Democratic Party in her corner, but there's a new interest group competing for power in addition to minorities, the teachers' unions and feminist activists: the anti-war left.

And by the often tepid and sometimes hostile response she received at the "Take Back America" conference Tuesday -- including booing -- she has a long ways to go to win over liberals outraged over the war. ( Some lefties even speculated that she welcomed the outrage as her "Sister Souljah" moment to build up her credibility with the general public.) The line that drew that strongest negative response was this effort to create the appearance of centrism in her position on Iraq: "I do not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain. I do not agree that that is in the best interesets of our troops or our country."

That spurred either mostly silence or booing, some of it led by members of the direct action group Code Pink.

In contrast, Senator John Kerry, offering yet another apology for supporting the war and offering a fiery attack on Bush's failed war policies, won strong applause and some favorable online commentary.

But no new politician-hero of the left has emerged at the conference, even as some progressives hungered for the return of the supposedly new and improved Al Gore, riding a crest of (perhaps deluded) hope in his candidacy from a left that is, as Neil Young sings, "Looking for a Leader." On the final day of the conference, Senators Barack Obama and Russ Feingold, one of the left's favorite candidates, address the crowd.

See and hear for yourself what some of the politicians and activists had to offer by going to this complete list of speakers (scroll down to Tuesday for Clinton, Kerry, Pelosi and others), with some videos and transcripts provided.

Faster, Pussycat! Drill! Drill!

A while back, Mother Jones' Osha Gray Davidson exposed the environmental m.o. of the Bush administration in a piece focusing on the under-the-radar nature of policymaking in the age of Rove:

"What makes this administration different is the fact that it is filled with anti-regulatory zealots deep into its rank and file...The result is an administration uniquely effective at implementing its ambitious pro-industry agenda-with a minimum of public notice."

Now comes the LA Times with a terrific story illustrating just how this works. In a nutshell, way back when, the Clinton administration came up with a rule that would have forced oil drillers to do more to keep gunk out of the groundwater. The drillers were not happy, and in 2002--when the EPA was still working on implementing the restrictions--a Texas oilman who happens to have been the mayor of Midland and also happened to have once run Reagan's Texas campaign, wrote to his friend Karl Rove to "openly express doubt as to the merit of electing Republicans when we wind up with this type of stupidity."

You know the rest; the rule is history, thanks in part to the folks over at the Office of Management and Budget, who made sure those EPA bureaucrats toed the line. Write the LAT's Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten,

Environmentalists pointed to the Rove correspondence as evidence that the Bush White House, more than others, has mixed politics with policy decisions that are traditionally left to scientists and career regulators.

Ya think?

No to Murtha

What? Kos wants John Murtha to knock Nancy Pelosi from the Speaker spot should the Democrats retake the House this fall (or, at the very least, Steny Hoyer from the whip position). Now I think all this certainty about the Democrats winning sounds terribly premature, and I'm no fan of either Pelosi or Hoyer, but come on.

A quick glance at Murtha's history reveals that he has the most conservative voting record of any Democrat representing a district won by John Kerry in 2004. So he can't cite his constituents as an excuse for his pro-life and anti-environment positions. Murtha's outspoken against the war in Iraq, to be sure, but I can't imagine it's tough to find other, actually liberal Democrats with similar views that could be put up on a pedestal, if that's what the "netroots" wants. Nor, I think, is the longstanding Democratic fetishization of military vets a terribly good thing on the merits, and getting behind a Murtha insurgent campaign would only further that trend. The netroots: our great "progressive" hope? Really, now.

Next villain, please

Riverbend, the girl blogger on the Tigris, has a bitter (how would you not be bitter in Baghdad?) take on Zarqawi:

"To hell with Zarqawi (or Zayrkawi as Bush calls him). He was an American creation -- he came along with them -- they don't need him anymore, apparently. His influence was greatly exaggerated but he was the justification for every single family they killed through military strikes and troops. It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now?"

Indeed, whom, or what, will we blame now? Killing Zarqawi was probably the only thing the administration could have done in Iraq that was guaranteed to generate positive spin--and the spin won't last. Someone, somewhere, must be thinking about how to follow this act between now and November.