Mark Engler - The Politics of TED

Is the topic of income inequality “Too Hot for TED“? Controversy has erupted in the past week over this question after a talk planned for the organization’s popular website was pulled at the last minute. The incident has offered an interesting window into the politics of the group.

Here’s what happened: recently, wealthy Seattle-based venture capitalist Nick Hanauer gave a talk challenging the idea that the rich are “job creators.” Countering this concept, he made the demand-side argument that consumer spending is what generates employment, and that more equitable distribution of income, in turn, produces more robust consumer demand.

Having made much the same point in an op-ed last November, Hanauer dressed up his views with some slides and presented it in a short, TED-style talk. (For those unfamiliar with it, TED was initially launched as pricey conference presenting cutting-edge ideas in “Technology, Entertainment, and Design”; over the past decade, it has spawned its own genre of internet-friendly, pop-intellectual presentations.)

Hanauer expected that his speech would be featured on the popular TED site last week. Indeed, it was prepared for release. But the weekend before it was set to go up, TED director Chris Anderson personally intervened to pull the video. This pissed off Hanauer, who released emails from Anderson which showed that the video was being yanked because it was too “political.”

Read More:

http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=765

Robert Parry - The Enduring Secrets of Watergate

Three times in May 1972, burglars working for President Richard Nixon's reelection committee tried to enter the Watergate complex, an elegant new building situated along the Potomac River. Their target was the Democratic National Committee.

For the Watergate burglars, the third try was the charm. Armed with an array of burglary tools, two of the Cuban-Americans on the team -- Virgilio Gonzalez and Frank Sturgis -- entered the building through the B-2 garage level. They climbed the stairs and taped open the doors behind them. Reaching the sixth floor where the DNC offices were located, Gonzalez made quick work of the door lock and the burglars were finally inside.

"The horse is in the house," they reported over a walkie-talkie back to team leaders across Virginia Avenue at a Howard Johnson's hotel. The leaders included G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who had devised the spying plan called Gemstone, and E. Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA officer and part-time spy novel writer.

At word that the break-in had finally succeeded, Liddy and Hunt embraced. From a balcony at the Howard Johnson's, James McCord, another former CIA officer and the security chief for the Committee to Re-elect the President known as CREEP, could see the burglars' pencil flashlights darting around the darkened offices.[1]

Read More:

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/05/22/the-enduring-secrets-of-watergate/

Robert Naiman - Would It Make a Difference to Progressives if Norman Solomon Goes to Congress?

A key paradox for progressives of our national political life goes something like this: everybody complains about Congress, but nobody does anything about it.

Of course, it is far from true that nobody is doing anything about Congress. Lots of people are doing something about it. But if you hold the complaints of progressives about Congress in one hand, and the level of progressive activity to change who is in Congress and what they do when they get there in the other, there is a big mismatch. The level of complaint should provoke a much higher level of activity to do something about it.

Every four years it is revealed that at the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people in the U.S. are pragmatic idealists. They are people who have one eye on the horizon, and the other eye on the next practical step that can help get us closer to the horizon - or stop us from being pushed further away, which amounts to the same thing. The overwhelming majority of progressive-minded people will vote in the fall Presidential election, and they will vote for Obama; not because they think that doing so is the beginning and end of political engagement, but because they think - correctly - that it is the political choice in the context that best serves the interests of pragmatic idealists.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/22-7

Ellen Brown - Cooperative Banking, the Exciting Wave of the Future

As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In 'New Economic Visions', a special five-part AlterNet series edited by Economics Editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

According to both the Mayan and Hindu calendars, 2012 (or something very close) marks the transition from an age of darkness, violence and greed to one of enlightenment, justice and peace. It’s hard to see that change just yet in the events relayed in the major media, but a shift does seem to be happening behind the scenes; and this is particularly true in the once-boring world of banking.

In the dark age of Kali Yuga, money rules; and it is through banks that the moneyed interests have gotten their power. Banking in an age of greed is fraught with usury, fraud and gaming the system for private ends. But there is another way to do banking; the neighborly approach of George Bailey in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Rather than feeding off the community, banking can feed the community and the local economy. 

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155454/cooperative_banking%2C_the_exciting_wave_of_the_future

EU Food Agency Rejects France Ban on Monsanto's YieldGuard GM Maize

Europe's food safety agency EFSA on Monday rejected the grounds for a temporary French ban on a genetically modified strain of maize made by U.S. company Monsanto (IW 500/94).

"Based on the documentation submitted by France, there is no specific scientific evidence, in terms of risk to human and animal health or the environment," EFSA said in a scientific opinion issued on its website.

A spokesman for Europe's health commissioner John Dalli said the EU executive "will consider how to follow up on this ruling, though technically we could ask France to raise its ban" on MON 810.

"The commission will wait for the conclusions of the next environment ministers' meeting June 11 in Luxembourg and hopes for a positive outcome to its proposals for cultivation, which have been blocked for almost two years by France and others," spokesman Frederic Vincent told AFP.

Paris had asked Brussels in February to suspend the cultivation of MON 810 on the basis of new scientific evidence after France's top administrative court in November overturned a government order banning the planting of genetically modified crops from Monsanto.

The court said that in a November 2008 ban, the government had failed to prove that Monsanto crops "present a particularly elevated level of risk to either human health or the environment."

Read More:

http://www.industryweek.com/articles/eu_food_agency_rejects_france_ban_on_monsantos_yieldguard_gm_maize_27415.aspx?Page=1&SectionID=2

Raffi Cavoukian - The Environment Is Dead: Long Live Mother Nature

“Environmentalism has failed” is a statement that deserves attention. It comes from famed environmentalist David Suzuki marking 50 years since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, helped spark the modern environmental movement.

Suzuki’s recent essay, Environmentalism Has Failed: On Adopting a Biocentric Viewpoint, on the fundamental failure of environmentalism is ominous. The world faces not only environmental calamities such as deforestation, coral reef depletion, and freshwater shortages, it is also mired in economic crises and harsh political realities. Despite the promise of “Arab Springs” and the global Occupy movement, we are increasingly in planetary peril. Throughout his life, David Suzuki has been a leading educator on planetary health; his conclusion about the environmental movement’s failure must be agonizing. Perhaps that’s why his blog offered no new way forward.

What now?

If decades of environmental campaigns produced significant gains but have lost the overall struggle to protect planetary life, that raises key questions:

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/23-1

Severe Nuclear Reactor Accidents Likely Every 10 to 20 Years, European Study Suggests

Western Europe has the worldwide highest risk of radioactive contamination caused by major reactor accidents.

Catastrophic nuclear accidents such as the core meltdowns in Chernobyl and Fukushima are more likely to happen than previously assumed. Based on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have calculated that such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) -- some 200 times more often than estimated in the past. The researchers also determined that, in the event of such a major accident, half of the radioactive caesium-137 would be spread over an area of more than 1,000 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor. Their results show that Western Europe is likely to be contaminated about once in 50 years by more than 40 kilobecquerel of caesium-137 per square meter. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an area is defined as being contaminated with radiation from this amount onwards. In view of their findings, the researchers call for an in-depth analysis and reassessment of the risks associated with nuclear power plants.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm

Tom Philpott - What Do the World's Most Powerful Pesticide Honchos Eat For Dinner?

I've made a career of sorts writing about the "big six" agrochemical companies—Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, DuPont, Syngenta, and BASF—that produce the great bulk of the world's pesticides and, increasingly, seeds. [1] But last week, I did something different. Rather than investigate and critique these companies in print, I broke bread with some of their executives. And then, in a public forum live-cast on the internet from DC's Newsuem, I told them bluntly what I thought of their industry.

They seemed a bit stunned by the spectacle, rapt in attention but increasingly silent as my critique went on. From my perspective, I was looking into a sea of dark suits, red ties, and wide eyes, with only the stray vigorous shake of the head to register open dissent from my critique.

The event was the annual policy summit held in Washington, DC, by CropLife America [2], the trade group representing Big Agrochem/Biotech and the suppliers and retailers that sell their goods throughout farm country. The group had invited me to speak at the behest of my friend, green-business journalist Marc Gunther [3], who has an annual gig moderating the event.

My foray into agrochem-exec shoulder-rubbing began the night before the conference, when I attended the pre-event speakers' dinner in a private dining hall of a DC hotel.

Read More:

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/05/dinner-pesticides-monsanto-bayer-syngenta-dow-croplife

Graham Harvey - The New Day Age

One of Britain's leading agricultural scientists fears we may be entering a new dark age. Professor Maurice Moloney – director of Rothamsted Research – is worried by green activist threats to trash a trial plot of GM wheat at the Hertfordshire research site. "We face the destruction of a technology that could not just help wheat production in Britain," he says, "but could boost crop yields elsewhere in the world."

Down here in Candleford we take a rather different view. We think that if there’s a new dark age being ushered in, it's because of the decisions made by Prof Moloney and the BBSRC – the funding body that appointed him. Rothamsted's chief responsibility is to conduct research aimed at improving our food security. Britain already has a secure food production system – it’s called the mixed farm. It's capable of producing large amounts of healthy food through biological processes. And it has an inbuilt resilience to climate change by virtue of its biological diversity.

A World Bank-funded study by more than 400 scientists around the world concluded that diverse farming systems like UK mixed farming were the most secure and effective way to feed the world, now and in the future (IAASTD, 2008). You might think –as we do – that a leading research station concerned with food security would concentrate its energies on understanding and refining this established model. But under Professor Moloney, the scientists seem content to gamble our food security on an unproven and potentially unstable technology.

Read More:

http://grahamsquest.co.uk/the-new-dark-age/

Richard Norton-Taylor - Bush and Blair's pre-Iraq conversation must be disclosed, tribunal rules

Extracts of a phone conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush a few days before the invasion of Iraq must be disclosed, a tribunal has ruled.

The Foreign Office lost an appeal against an order by the information commissioner, Christopher Graham, to disclose records of the conversation between the two leaders on 12 March 2003. Graham's order was made in response to a freedom of informationrequest by Stephen Plowden, a private individual who demanded disclosure of the entire record of the conversation.

"Accountability for the decision to take military action against another country is paramount," Graham had said in his original order.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/21/bush-blair-pre-iraq-conversation