Let's Get Moving....

Transforming the Rust-Belt into a Green Belt

By , Blog for Our Future
Posted on December 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144489/


President Obama announced a new series of jobs initiatives Tuesday while at the Brookings Institute. (“Recovery Act Lite”?) His announcement came a few days after visiting Allentown, Pa., as the first stop on a listening tour on the economy. And the listening tour came a few days after the “White House Summit on Jobs and Economic Growth,” which brought together business, labor and policy leaders to wrestle down some solutions to the nation’s economic crisis and unemployment rate spike to double-digit territory.

The President committed to new jobs-creation programs, business tax cuts and ramped-up business loan programs, along with new infrastructure funding and help for communities. He pledged to recycle some of the repaid TARP funds to jump-start the banking credit system, which has been seriously stalled.

It’s good to see the renewed efforts, and some of these ideas may work well. We desperately need all the help we can get. But let’s return for a moment to Allentown.

Remember Allentown? It was memorialized by the Billy Joel song about the shutdown of nearby Bethlehem Steel. During the Town Hall meeting and company visits, we heard some inspirational stories of local entrepreneurs, about the increase in federal Small Business Administration funding, and how Allentown should be able to cash in on the green-jobs boom.

In researching this story, I remembered that the Bethlehem Steel Plant had been razed to make way for a casino. I wasn’t surprised. We also have a new casino in Pittsburgh (my home town), built on an old industrial waterfront site (and despite the hype of the recent G-20 event, the City of Pittsburgh is still bankrupt). When I read that the Las Vegas casino owners in Bethlehem had problems finding enough steel to build the new gambling site—well, that’s just another day in Allentown. Or Homestead…Youngstown …Flint…and hundreds of auto-belt rust-towns and now Florida, Arizona and California boom towns gone bust.

The real economic pain of Allentown and Bethlehem cannot be solved by heartwarming vignettes. The Lehigh Valley’s unemployment rate hovers near 10 percent, almost double a year ago, the fourth highest in Pennsylvania. Like innumerable hometowns in the commonwealth and beyond to Midwest-Great Lakes towns, we need significant, long-term federal investments to recover. We need banks to begin lending money again to local businesses, especially manufacturing firms. We need advanced manufacturing jobs if we are ever going to realize the green boom.

Casinos might be fun to visit (hey, I love the comps), but the jobs don’t replace hard industries that have been lost. Service, financial, retail and hospitality jobs just camouflage the sorry reality that vast waves of our money have actually disappeared into a dark hole called financialization. Financialization led to the herding of our savings and assets into short-term, risky bets that redlined entire regions, crowded out critical industry investments, and, ultimately, contributed to the market crash.

If we can’t find enough steel to build casinos today, how in the world will we build the green jobs industries of the future? Beth Steel was originally built to forge the steel for the nation’s rail systems. Where will we get the steel to build the Obama Administration’s proposed new high-speed rail system, the new wind farms, the new green buildings?

I’m all over the President’s Main Street Tour; I hope it continues for the next seven years. We should remember that we have not had a serious effort to rebuild our industrial communities since the roof began caving in around the time of the Joel song, circa the Reagan decade. So, we should support the new administration and Congress in many of these new initiatives. But it’s going to take more money still, and then all the cavalry we can muster.

Fortunately, there’s one source of money that we, the people, actually have a say over. We own the institutional investments markets, vast pools of around $24 trillion before the crash. While it’s our money— in pension and savings plans, insurance companies, endowments, foundations and deposits—we don’t control how it’s invested. For years, it’s been churning away, hollowing our hometowns. But we—steelworkers and teachers, insurance holders and foundation chiefs—could change that, with help from the president and Congress (and that includes re-regulating the financial markets).

For the past three years, I’ve been meeting innovative, successful investment managers across the U.S. and Canada who’ve done well by creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying, mostly union jobs and similar numbers of affordable housing units—and investing in the green economy. They have capitalized $30 billion-$35 billion in ready-to-invest assets, primarily through union and public pension fund investments. With some federal funding guarantees and partnerships, we could see these investors and dozens more bring a much larger, at-scale cavalry for economic recovery.

These responsible investment funds have invested in U.S. portfolio companies to build them up, not tear them down. They’ve restructured companies in trouble, stabilizing them and saving jobs, not stripping and flipping. They’ve increasingly invested in green buildings and sustainable housing, not subprime mortgage scams. They’ve expanded renewable energy and efficient transportation firms, including builders of windmills and hybrid buses, leading to green-collar jobs (often with union wages and benefits). They’ve invested large sums, prudently and profitably, for the long term. They’ve aligned their investments with the long-term interests of their beneficiaries.

Yes, we need a lot of new federal dollars, but we also need to marshal workers’ resources—our own money—for the long run. We can’t revive our hometowns via the “small is beautiful” mantra, nor the 1990’s Clinton free-trade delusion. It’s time real money was put to work to rebuild our communities, industry by industry, block by block, brick by brick.

We have the capacity to reconstruct our infrastructure, reinvigorate our cities and create that hoped-for green-jobs future. But first, together, we have to reclaim control of our money.

© 2009 Blog for Our Future All rights reserved.

Beware of the Green Police.....It's Not all Black and White / Good and Bad

GM's Money Trees



By Mark Schapiro Tue November 3, 2009 4:00 AM PST

I am standing in the shadow of General Motors' $1 tree. It's a native guaricica, with pale white bark and a spreading crown that looms about 40 feet above my head. Hanging from its trunk is a small plaque that identifies it as tree No. 129. I've come here, to the verdant chaos of Brazil's Atlantic forest, to understand the far-reaching and politically explosive controversies taking shape in diplomatic corridors thousands of miles away over the fate of trees like this one.

No. 129 stands in the heart of the Cachoeira reserve in the state of Paraná—one of the last slivers of a forest that once blanketed much of the country's southeastern coast. Just 7 percent of the Atlantic forest remains, but it is still one of the Earth's richest centers of biodiversity, home to a wealth of plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon's. On the way here, our group—led by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS)—walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin, and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects native to the area.

But our journey is not focused on the rare creatures in the forest. It's about the forest itself—the trees that are our partners in respiration, inhaling carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and storing the carbon in their trunks and leaves. That simple process makes them one of Earth's most potent bulwarks against climate change (a.k.a. a "carbon sink"); but when they are cut and burned, all that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Already, some 32 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed each year, an amount of land equivalent to the state of Mississippi's; deforestation, according to the United Nations, is responsible for roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

What will it cost to keep those trees standing? And who's going to pay for it? The challenge of assigning precise values to an increasingly rare commodity—wild trees—and indeed the question of whether they are a commodity at all, is one of the most hotly contested in the climate world.



IT WAS AN unusual deal that landed tree No. 129 at the center of the debate. Between 2000 and 2002, the US-based Nature Conservancy struck an alliance with three of the planet's leading carbon emitters: General Motors, Chevron, and American Electric Power. Together the corporations gave the environmental group $18 million to purchase 50,000 acres of Brazilian Atlantic forest, much of which had been degraded by grazing. Three reserves were created: Serra do Itaqui, financed with $5 million from AEP; Morro da Mina, paid for with $3 million from Chevron; and Cachoeira, underwritten by $10 million from GM. (GM's role in the project survived the company's bankruptcy, which means that No. 129 is now partially owned by you and me.) SVPS was brought in to manage the reserves, which together form one contiguous forest known as the Guaraqueçaba Environmental Protection Area. You'll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the Nature Conservancy's website as an example of corporate partnerships that make "an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet's biodiversity." What you won't see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.

At tree No. 129, de Britez takes out a tape measure and unspools it around the trunk. We're at one of the 190 carbon dioxide measuring stations—each a group of trees with numbered plaques—scattered around the Guaraqueçaba forest. Documenting the bulk of the reserve's trees is an ongoing enterprise, like tracking tagged whales.

"We measure the biomass of these trees and their carbon sequestration," de Britez says as a ranger picks up the other end of the tape measure and writes down No. 129's stats. It's 3 feet in diameter and about 45 feet tall. He estimates the carbon it contains at 95 kilograms—just under one-tenth of a ton. At $10 a ton, the upper end of the range at which carbon offsets trade in the US, No. 129 is worth about $1. Scale up to the two to three tons of carbon per acre that de Britez estimates across the 50,000-acre reserve, and the potential payoff, in addition to the public relations value, comes into focus.

The trees in the Cachoeira reserve could never offset even a fraction of GM's total carbon footprint—a single Hummer H2 (which the company started producing the same year it signed on to the Guaraqueçaba project) would require about 50 trees to offset. But the Nature Conservancy and its partners aimed to use the Brazilian reserves as a test case for preserving forests via corporate carbon credits. "The investors wanted to be pioneers in the carbon-sink field," de Britez explains. "They had in mind to start working on this before other companies."

All three companies, as it happens, had aggressively lobbied the Clinton administration against signing the 1997 Kyoto climate accord and stayed mum when President Bush withdrew from it. But they hedged their bets, figuring that the Brazilian forests could be turned into offsets to sell in places (like Europe) where Kyoto's emission limits did apply, or could be held in reserve in case the US ever established its own limits.

By the time the companies were ready to begin preparing their credits for sale, however, the UN had refused to allow "avoided deforestation" projects—those that buy forestland and then promise not to cut the trees—as an offset for industries seeking to buy their way out of emission limits. Credits generated from projects like Guaraqueçaba were excluded from the international carbon market launched by Kyoto, a market that now accounts for more than $126 billion in offset transactions. The offsets could be sold, however, in the United States, where the $700 million domestic carbon offset market is unregulated (and where prices are generally half those of Kyoto-regulated offsets).

Manyu Chang, a forest scientist who is the coordinator for climate policy for the state of Paraná, explained the problem with avoided-deforestation credits to me at her office in the state capital of Curitiba. For starters, she said, trees—living beings, after all—are far less predictable than, say, windmills. They are subject to the vagaries of fires and disease, both of which are increasing due to climate change. Each species absorbs carbon at different rates depending on factors like the altitude, soil, and weather. Then there's the problem of "leakage"—when deforestation simply shifts from protected zones to unprotected ones, creating no overall emissions reduction. And finally, the UN did not want to open the door to a perverse sort of extortion: A country could threaten to open its lands to logging unless it was paid to not do so.

More fundamentally, Chang notes, when companies create reserves on already forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is limited: "Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?" José Miguez, one of Brazil's top climate officials, told me that during the Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern industries to pollute more. "The forest is there," he said. "You can't guarantee it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate change."



THERE IS ANOTHER vexing question inherent in preserving forests: What happens to the people who use the land? Efforts to protect biodiversity in the dwindling wildlands of the world have increasingly run into a discomfiting tension between the impulse toward absolute preservation and the needs of people—many of them indigenous—who have lived sustainably in forestlands for decades or centuries. Such tensions are playing out in the new economics of carbon offsets.

With a preserve designed in large part to safeguard stored carbon, a new set of imperatives comes into play. Turning trees into carbon credits requires knowing how to extrapolate from carbon measurements, like the ones of tree No. 129, to determine a forest's potential as a carbon sink. It requires knowing as precisely as possible how many trees there are and of what size—which means minimizing the unpredictable activities of human beings, as small scale as they might be.


Villagers like Jonas de Souza can no longer hunt in the forest they've used for generations.
For many generations, the Guaraqueçaba forest was home to the Guarani Indians, but their dominion waned as the Brazilian government encouraged subsistence farmers to settle and clear the land. Today the two populations coexist, living alongside the reserves or in communities nearby and relying on what remains of the forest for everything from food to building materials. There are more than a dozen villages around the three reserves, linked by dirt roads and river tributaries traveled by canoe. Most are home to just a few dozen people living in structures of wood and reeds. Jonas de Souza is a 33-year-old farmer who grew up a quarter of a mile from the forest that is now part of the GM-funded Cachoeira reserve. His family grows bananas, cocoa, and coffee on a small plot. He remembers hunting for small prey—roast paca, a large rodent, is a local delicacy—and collecting seeds and hearts of palm. But now, signs have gone up at the edge of the forest: No hunting, fishing, or removal of vegetation. A state police force, the Força Verde, or Green Police, patrols the three reserves, as well as a larger state-sanctioned preservation area, to enforce the restrictions.

"Now," says de Souza, "I don't have the right to go out and do what I used to do when I was 12, 14, 15 years old. I'd grab my fishing rod and get a fish to bring to my family or to feed myself. You don't have the right to walk into the forest to go and cut a heart of palm to eat. I'll get arrested and I'll be called a thief."

De Souza says he's found numerous relics of the Guarani—pipes, an axe, pottery, and burial items. The forest is valuable today, he notes, because his community and those who were here before them have taken good care of it. "We have been here, and still the forests haven't disappeared. Still the rivers aren't contaminated. Still the biodiversity isn't extinct."


Guarani children on their way home from school.
One of the goals of the Green Police is to prevent large-scale poaching, particularly of the endangered and highly valuable hearts of palm, as well as exotic primates and birds. Yet officers cited few arrests of individuals linked to major logging, palmito, or wildlife-smuggling enterprises when I joined them on patrol. Many of their enforcement efforts have focused on local people cutting a single palm for its succulent heart—or collecting wood to build their homes. "They're afraid of us," said Captain Lestechen, a patrol leader, as a group of young boys sitting on a bench eating a heart of palm quickly scattered at the approach of the Força Verde jeep.

Visiting the villages without the Força in tow, I heard numerous stories of people being harassed, arrested, and shot at while looking for food, wood, or reeds. Antonio Alves, a 35-year-old farmer and carpenter—we spoke as he carved a 15-foot log canoe—said he was arrested this year for chopping down a tree to fix his mother's home in Quara Quara.


Antonio Alves (above; his father-in-law, Valderica Dutra, is at left) had to leave his village near GM's preserve because he can no longer hunt and gather plants in the forest.
It's a stretch to call Quara Quara a village: It's a cluster of five cabins perched at the end of a small, silted waterway. The only way in is by canoe. Three of the homes have been abandoned—the residents left, Alves said, because they could no longer hunt and gather food in the forest. After his arrest, Alves spent 11 days in jail in Antonina, a one-hour canoe ride away. The lawyer defending him at trial, pro bono, was the town's mayor, Carlos Machado. Sitting in his expansive office in the town's colonial-era city hall, Machado told me that he's represented a string of people like Alves, villagers hauled into court on charges of violating the strict prohibitions in the reserves.

"I know he didn't go cut that tree down to speculate on the wood," Machado said. "It's one thing, the wood seller who is destroying [the forest]—this is very different from a caboclo [farmer] who cuts down a tree to build a fence." These distinctions, he said, have been missing from the policies created by the reserves and enforced by the Força Verde (whose officers have received training from SPVS, the Nature Conservancy's Brazilian partner). Machado has noticed a stream of migrants from the backwoods to his town, which is buckling under the strain. "Antonina is a small town that has few resources for generating income, few possibilities for people who come from the rural zone without skills and without the defenses to live in the urban environment. They stay in the outskirts of town, in the mangrove swamps, in irregular, inhospitable situations. It creates a lot of social problems for us...Through those conservation projects, they created a poverty belt around our town." The migrants also move west to Curitiba, said Machado, where they're often steered into prostitution or the drug trade.

By excluding villagers from the forests, says Jutta Kill, a researcher with the Forests and the European Union Resource Network who has spent months interviewing locals about the project, the reserves are pulling out the communities' lifeline. "In this area," she says, "everyone is cash poor but no one goes hungry. If you take the forest away, you take away everything. The preservation projects here are designed to generate offsets for the largest polluters, and they're doing it by cutting off people from the land." Few of the people here have motors on their boats, she notes; even fewer own cars. People with some of the smallest carbon footprints on Earth are being displaced by companies with some of the biggest.

Back in Curitiba, Chang, the state forestry expert, told me that the conservation groups were trying to create a "zero disturbance" environment in their forests. "Maybe that's a little obsolete," she said. "Maybe you [should] have 90 percent conservation, not 100 percent. That way you could include the community of people who live there." But that could undermine a system based on assigning a stable, reliable, and tradable value to a living ecosystem.

"The carbon idea is not really tangible to people in the community," Miguel Calmon, the Nature Conservancy's director of forests and climate in Latin America, acknowledges. Calmon says the conservation groups initially sponsored training programs for local community members in alternate sources of income—cultivating honeybees, organic bananas, local crafts—but the money ran out. Now, he says, the rules are clear: "You can't go into these private reserves. That land is not their land anyway. If you used to go [into the forest] from your house across the road, now you can't. That land is already owned."

The supply of forests for offsetting pollution in developed countries is, potentially, almost infinite. There are an estimated 90 billion tons of carbon in Brazil's forests alone, and billions of tons more are sequestered in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and other nations with substantial tropical forests, which are considered the most vulnerable to deforestation. The world has a major stake in keeping all that carbon where it is. The question now being debated in Washington and Copenhagen is whether the fate of the forests—and their people—will rest on the ability of industries to pay for preserving distant trees rather than reducing emissions closer to home.

Comparing Obama to Nixon??? What Planet are They Living On???

Remembering Nixon
October 23, 2009 2:25 pm ET - by Jamison Foser

The first year of Barack Obama's presidency has seen some absurd media memes, from nonexistent "death panels" to crazy birtherism. But for overall ahistorical (not to mention hysterical) audacity, it's tough to beat the past week's overheated comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon.

The Obama administration's purportedly "Nixonian" sin is its public criticism of Fox News, a cable channel that has repeatedly tied Obama to terrorists and compared him to Adolf Hitler. Having had enough, White House communications director Anita Dunn, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and others have said that Fox is less a news organization than a partisan political operation.*

Even if we stipulate for the sake of discussion that Fox is a news organization, that's tame stuff by the standards of previous White Houses. You'd be hard-pressed to find an administration that hasn't at times taken a more aggressive approach toward journalists. If you're thinking "Lincoln," think again. Faced with complaints about his administration's censorship of the press in 1863, Lincoln responded, "I think when an office in any department finds that a newspaper is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress it, but in no other case."

And yet the Obama administration's criticism of Fox News -- criticism, not censorship or suppression of Fox's "reporting" -- was greeted with immediate howls of protest and allegations of Nixonian behavior.

Fox foot soldiers like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers like Instapundit led the way, of course, but that's to be expected. People who don't hesitate to compare Obama to Hitler and Mao Zedong cannot be expected to hesitate before comparing him to Nixon -- unless it is to consider whether such a comparison will be seen as a compliment, considering the source.

But Beck and O'Reilly were quickly joined by people who should know better. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wrote that the criticism of Fox "has a distinct Nixonian -- Agnewesque? -- aroma." NPR's Ken Rudin said the criticism is "almost Nixonesque" -- and this was no throwaway comment; Rudin drew out the comparison for a full paragraph. (To his credit, Rudin apologized for the comments the next day, calling them "boneheaded.") CNN's Anderson Cooper asked, "[D]oes the Obama White House have an enemies list?" and, "[D]o you see shades of Nixon here?" (Even Cooper's Republican guest, Kevin Madden, was unwilling to sign on to that premise.) Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik wrote, "I have compared the current administration to the White House of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and believe me, I did not do that lightly."

The comparison is preposterous, as Salon's Joe Conason, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, and others have explained.

In short: The Nixon administration wiretapped journalists' phones and audited their taxes. G. Gordon Liddy and another Nixon henchman even plotted to murder Jack Anderson.** That's "murder" as in "kill." And "kill" as in "dead."

Meanwhile, Obama aides have publicly criticized Fox News for lying about their boss.

It is rather obvious that these are not the same things.

You know who would really be outraged by the comparison? Richard Nixon. If a Nixon aide had proposed dealing with a hostile entity like Fox News with a sternly worded public statement rather than a (literal) firebombing, he'd likely have been axed (with luck, figuratively) on the spot.

What makes the comparison of Obama and Nixon really astounding, however, is that the comparison wasn't made with President George W. Bush, whose administration engaged in warrantless domestic spying and other tactics that actually were reminiscent of Nixonian tactics.

In addition to spying on domestic environmental and poverty-relief organizations, Bush's FBI dug into reporters' phone records. Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice revealed that the NSA monitored the communications of "U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists." James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, has said, "What I know for a fact is that the Bush administration got my phone records." The statements from Tice and Risen went all but ignored by the media, as Eric Alterman explained earlier this year.

As far as I can tell, The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has never compared the Bush administration's surveillance of journalists to the Nixon administration's surveillance of journalists -- she has never described anything Bush did as "Nixonian." Neither has the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik, who has repeatedly compared Obama to Nixon. Or NPR's Ken Rudin.

The Bush administration spied on journalists and who knows who else, and Marcus, Zurawik, and Rudin never once thought to note the similarities to Richard Nixon's surveillance of journalists and who knows who else. But Anita Dunn criticizes Fox News for lying, and all of a sudden, they think they're seeing the second coming of Chuck Colson and Gordon Liddy. The double standard and the lack of perspective are simply staggering.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

*A brief response to the question some have raised about whether it is appropriate for the White House to decide what is or is not a news organization: Of course it is. The only question is whether it has drawn the line in the right place. Nobody would expect the White House to grant the Weekly World News or the Halliburton corporate newsletter or the author of the Republican National Committee's mass emails the same access they grant ABC and The New York Times. The question isn't whether the White House should make a determination about which news outlets to treat as a legitimate, it's whether it makes the right determinations.

**During last year's presidential campaign, the news media, which were so obsessed with Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, were unconcerned by John McCain's palling-around with Liddy. Then again, Liddy had merely plotted to murder a journalist; he didn't appear on CNN to criticize Fox News.

Copyright © 2009 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.

If I Was President.....

Let's Repower America - Environment California

Hello Friends,



I've been gone for awhile but I'm back. I have been working on Environment California's campaign to get strong global warming legislation passed. It is coming down to the wire. Please, click on this link and watch the video at this link. The main argument against limits on global warming pollution is the cost. Try to imagine the cost if we do nothing. It is unimaginable.



Let's Repower America - Environment California

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Peace,

Alan

"He Outlasted The Bastards"...Happy Birthday Pete...

Legendary Folk Singer & Activist Pete Seeger Turns 90, Thousands Turn Out for All-Star Tribute Featuring Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Dozens More

From Democracy Now

Legendary folk singer, banjo player, storyteller, and political and environmental activist Pete Seeger turned ninety on Sunday. More than 18,000 people packed New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday celebrate the man, the music and the movement. The all-star lineup included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Billy Bragg, Ruby Dee, Steve Earle, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Dar Williams, Michael Franti, Bela Fleck, Tim Robbins, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp, Ben Harper, and Ritchie Havens. We speak with some of the musicians, play Seeger’s music and play excerpts from our hour-long interview with Seeger in 2004.

Highlights from Pete Seeger 90th birthday tribute:

AMY GOODMAN: Legendary folk singer, banjo player, storyteller, and political and environmental activist Pete Seeger turned ninety on Sunday. More than 18,000 people packed New York’s Madison Square Garden for a night of music in his honor on Sunday night. The concert was also a benefit for an environmental group Seeger founded to preserve the Hudson River, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

The all-star lineup included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Billy Bragg, Ruby Dee, Steve Earle, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Dar Williams, Michael Franti, Bela Fleck, Tim Robbins, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp, Ben Harper, and Ritchie Havens.

Pete Seeger has been an icon of American dissent and creative energy for almost seventy years. He performed with Woody Guthrie and the Weavers in the ’40s. In the ’50s, he opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt and was almost jailed for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He helped popularize the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He was also a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and inspired a generation of protest singers. Later he became an important voice within the environmental and anti-nuclear movements.

Pete Seeger is now ninety years old and continues to perform and be politically active.

Bruce Springsteen, who sang Woody Guthrie’s original version of “This Land Is Your Land” with Pete Seeger at President Obama’s inauguration this year, headlined Sunday night’s concert and began with a moving tribute to Seeger.


BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: As Pete and I traveled to Washington for President Obama’s inaugural celebration, he told me the—he told me the entire story of “We Shall Overcome,” how it moved from a labor movement song and, with Pete’s inspiration, had been adopted by the civil rights movement.

And that day, as we sang “This Land Is Your Land,” I looked at Pete. The first black president of the United States was seated to his right. And I thought of—I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. You know, my own growing up in the ’60s, a town scarred by race rioting, made that moment nearly unbelievable. And Pete had thirty extra years of struggle and real activism on his belt. He was so happy that day. It was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man. You just outlasted them. It was so nice. It was so nice.

At rehearsals the day before, it was freezing. It was like fifteen degrees. And Pete was there, he had his flannel shirt on. I said, “Man, you better wear something besides that flannel shirt!” He says, “Yeah, I’ve got my long johns on under this thing.” I said—and I asked him, I said, “How do you want to approach ‘This Land Is Your Land’?” as it’d be near the end of the show. And all he said was, “Well, I know I want to sing all the verses. You know, I want to sing all the ones that Woody wrote, especially the two that get left out, you know, about private property and the relief office.” And I thought, of course, you know, that’s what Pete’s done his whole life: he sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people, you know?

At some point—at some point, Pete Seeger decided he’d be a walking, singing reminder of all of America’s history. He’d be living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people.

Now, despite Pete’s somewhat benign grandfatherly appearance, you know, he is a creature of a stubborn, defiant and nasty optimism. He carries—inside him, he carries a steely toughness that belies that grandfatherly facade, and it won’t let him take a step back from the things he believes in.

At ninety, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures, as well as shining a light towards our better angels in the horizon, where the country we’ve imagined and hold dear, we hope, awaits us. And on top of it, he never wears it on his sleeve. He’s become comfortable and casual in this immense role. He’s funny and very eccentric.

The song that—I’m going to bring Tommy out. And the song Tommy Morello and I are about to sing, I wrote it in the mid-’90s, and it started as a conversation I was having with myself. It was an attempt to regain my own moorings. And its last verse is the beautiful speech that Tom Joad whispers to his mother at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. It says, “Wherever there’s a cop beating a guy, wherever a hungry newborn baby cries, wherever there’s a fight against the blood and the hatred in the air, look for me, Mom. I’ll be there.” Well, Pete has always been there.


AMY GOODMAN: Bruce Springsteen honoring Pete Seeger on his ninetieth birthday Sunday night at Madison Square Garden. Back at the inauguration, Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Pete’s granson, sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial “This Land Is Your Land.”


PETE SEEGER: [singing with Bruce Springsteen and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger] I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, under shadow of the steeple
At the relief office, I saw my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling
This land was made for you and me.

A great high wall there tried to stop me
A great big sign there said private property
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island…


AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger at the inauguration, singing those often forgotten words of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. As we continue with the tribute to Pete Seeger on his ninetieth birthday and the celebration of his environmental group Clearwater. I’m Amy Goodman, very happy to be back in New York.

During the concert on Sunday night, Pete Seeger came backstage and took a few questions from us reporters.


REPORTER: When you were writing “My Dirty Stream,” did you wonder, “Would it work?” Did you ever have doubts that things would get better on the river?


PETE SEEGER: No, I think I figured that sooner or later—I didn’t know it would happen so soon, frankly. But if the human race can keep the scientists from inventing two more foolish weapons, I think we’ve got time to solve our problems. The only question is science—scientists have a religion. They think that an infinite increase in empirical information is a good thing. Can they prove it? Of course not. It’s a religious belief. That’s science for you.


REPORTER: Hey, Pete. Down in the front here. Happy birthday, first off. What are your plans and goals for your hundredth birthday?


PETE SEEGER: I don’t expect to be around.


AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Pete. What are you proudest of accomplishing in these first ninety years? And can you start by saying your name?


PETE SEEGER: My name, I think, is Pete Seeger, but I’m losing my memory. I think the best thing I’ve ever done is stay married to an extraordinary person, who had three wonderful young people that we’ve raised and six wonderful grandchildren.


REPORTER: Hi, Pete. Back here.


PETE SEEGER: Who?


REPORTER: Hi, Pete. Back here. How are you doing? Happy birthday. Describe, if you will, what this night is like for you, to have all these great artists here honoring you.


PETE SEEGER: Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big. Look at the scalpers that got into the act with this particular evening, doubling the price of tickets. But it, needless to say, was a great honor, and these absolutely fantastic musicians.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s Pete Seeger behind the stage. Well, singer-songwriter Joan Baez was also there last night. I caught up with her just before she went on stage.


JOAN BAEZ: I am Joan Baez, and my first experience with Pete Seeger was weaning me from rhythm and blues, which—as my parents badly wanted to do. They were horrified. They thought all rhythm and blues singers were dope addicts, even though they didn’t know what dope addicts were. So my auntie—they spirited me away with my auntie to a Pete Seeger show. And it was like a vaccine. Either it was going to take or not. And it took.

And I loved the music, and I discovered that this man did what my family, in a sense, had done for many years, which was, having become Quakers when I was eight years old, fused everything with their politics. And this was music and politics in a way that I had never known. But it was so natural to me, his music and what he did with his life. And I understood that very quickly.

And when I found out at an early age—I don’t know if this is myth or not, but when the press went to his house for an interview at one point, that he was on the roof tacking a few of the last shingles on, and he wouldn’t come down, and he was ready. I knew this was a man I wanted to follow for his political and musical events that he did. And so, I did. There was Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Pete. And I listened to Pete’s music endlessly and heard the stories about him and learned his songs and followed him.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s Joan Baez. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the all-female African American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock and one of the original members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, also talked to reporters behind stage.


DR. BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: I’m Bernice Johnson Reagon. I was born in Southwest Georgia in the country. And the first time I heard Pete Seeger was on TV with the Weavers doing the Hootenanny. But I didn’t know him as Pete Seeger.

I met him as a human being because of the Albany, Georgia civil rights movement in the 1960s. And he actually thought the singing in Southwest Georgia was so powerful that they should organize a singing group. And he talked about the Almanac Singers and the Weavers and said to Jim Forman of SNCC, “If you organized a group, you would have a group that could travel all over the country singing songs about the movement, and they might also bring financial support to the movement.” And so, Cordell Reagon, who was a SNCC field secretary, organized the first group of Freedom Singers. I was an alto, Rutha Harris was soprano, and Charles Neblett was bass. And Pete was really the person who actually identified that body of work. And in ’63, we traveled all over the country, and it—sometimes they called us the singing newspaper.

But he was really transformative in my life. And one of the important things about Pete is that he was married to a woman named Toshi. And the first time I did not go home for Christmas, I spent Christmas at the Seegers’. And Toshi booked the Freedom Singers, and I was the contact, so my foundation for the business part of music comes from Toshi Seeger. So, of course, when I had my first baby, and my baby was a girl, that girl’s name is Toshi Reagon. And so, the Seegers are powerful forces in my life and in my work.

The other thing that Seeger taught me was the idea of a working singer, that you did not have to be a star. You had to know you were a singer. You had to know what your music was. And you had to be willing to do it for the rest of your life, as long as you had voice. And people would keep up with you. They would catch up with you if you did not go away. And it was a very important model for a young singer. And as a Freedom Singer, we made $10 a week. It was the perfect way to start my career as a musician, but it was looking at Pete Seeger and his years and years of doing music as a part of struggle that really inspired me. He was a very important model.

And what’s incredible is that he has not—he has not broken stride in any way. So, now he is a ninety-year-old. If you live to be ninety, you could just take the whole thing to your grave, you know?


MIKE BURKE: Can you talk about Pete Seeger’s connection to the song “We Shall Overcome”?


DR. BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie went to Highlander Folk School during the 1940s. Zilphia Horton, the wife of Myles Horton, who was one of the founders of Highlander, was the music director. She taught Pete a song that had come to Highlander from people who went on strike from Charleston to the American Tobacco Company. And so, Pete took this song, and he said that he took it back home, and he was doing a lot of concerts for union organizing. And he said the song really didn’t do much.

But he made some changes. He changed “I” to “we.” And instead of “I’ll” or “I will,” which is the way we sing it as a church song, he said he changed it to “I shall,” because it sounded better. And he also added the verse, “We’ll walk hand-in-hand.”

And this song was taught at Highlander to the students who came there on Easter weekend 1960 after their sit-in work in Nashville, Tennessee. They took the song back home. And at an organizing meeting, the students who were sit-in leaders actually started to sing the freedom songs they had been doing. And Guy Carawan led this particular song, and they stood, and they joined hands. And from that point, this became the theme song of a movement.

And it is Pete Seeger who is the link. If you start with black people striking in Charleston, go into the one place in the South during the ’30s and ’40s where black and white people could organize together, Pete learning the song there, taking it north, including teaching it to Guy, who ended up back at Highlander. Myles Horton said that Highlander sort of incubated the song until it could be returned to black people organizing against racism. So Pete is a crucial and very important link, having things pass through him no matter where he was.


AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the SNCC Singers and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock.

This is Democracy Now!, as we turn now to an excerpt of an interview I did with Pete Seeger five years ago, right here in the firehouse in New York. I asked him about “We Shall Overcome.”


PETE SEEGER: In 1957, I went down to Highlander. Zilphia was dead, and Myles Horton, her husband, said, “We can’t have a celebration of twenty-five years with this school without music. Won’t you come down and help lead some songs?” So I went down, and Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy came up from Alabama to say a few words, and I sang a few songs, and that was one of them. Ann Braden drove King to a speaking engagement in Kentucky the next day, and she remembers him sitting in the back seat, saying, “‘We Shall Overcome.’ That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?” But he wasn’t the song leader. It wasn’t until another three years that Guy Carawan made it famous.


AMY GOODMAN: We’ll go back to that interview. But first, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello took a few questions from reporters last night, as well.


TOM MORELLO: Pete Seeger is a tremendous inspiration, not just for activist musicians, but I believe for all Americans, and a shining example of someone who combines uncompromising activism with heart and soul and a generous spirit. And his enormous catalog of fantastic songs, mixed with his bravery throughout his ninety years of life in standing up for social justice, is unparalleled in American history. And it’s a real honor to be with him here today to celebrate his birthday.

I think that Pete is one of the first links in a chain of musicians—before him, maybe Joe Hill, and after him, not just folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, you know, Bruce Springsteen and, you know, those of us who—many on the bill today, including my own Nightwatchman, who try to follow—put our small feet in his big footsteps, but I also think he’s a link in the chain of groups like Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down and the Clash and Public Enemy, music that serves the purpose of social justice, but also music the stands on its own.

My first memory is not actually hearing Pete Seeger. It’s seeing his banjo and seeing the words written on it, because I was a fan of Woody Guthrie and his “This machine kills fascists.” And Pete had, you know, sort of a subtle twist on it, with “This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to remember,” and then I—“surrender.” And then I knew that there was a thoughtful man behind that banjo.

His antiwar stance, I think—you know, if one four-minute performance of a song could be credited with ending the Vietnam War, it was Pete Seeger on The Smothers Brothers Show, when he sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” in defiance of the censors and in defiance of the blacklist. And I think that was a really heroic moment in the antiwar crusade.


AMY GOODMAN: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, as we turn again back to my 2004 interview with Pete Seeger. I asked him about “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” and how he made his anti-Vietnam War stance clear back in ’67, when he was on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.


PETE SEEGER: Well, the Smothers Brothers were a big, big success on the CBS television. And way back the year before, I think in the spring of ’67, they said—CBS says, “Anything we can do for you? You’re right at the top. What can we do to make you happier?” And they said, “Let us have Seeger on.” And CBS said, “Well, we’ll think about it.” Finally, in October they said, “OK, you can have him on.” And I sang this song “Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.”

The tape was made in California, flown to New York. And in New York they scissored the song out. And now, the Smothers Brothers took to the print media and said, “CBS is censoring our best jokes. They censored Seeger’s best song.” And they got some publicity. And during November, December and January, the arguments went on. Finally, in February—no, pardon me, late January, late January of ’68, CBS said, “OK, OK, he can sing the song.” Six hours’ notice, I flew out to California.

I remember singing a batch of songs from American history, songs from the Revolution, like “Come ye hither, redcoats, you mind what madness fills. In our forest there is danger, there’s danger in our hills. Fall the rifles, the rifles in our hands shall prove no trifle.” I think I mentioned the hit song of 1814. It was the hit song: “Oh, say can you see.” And the song of the Mexican War, “Green grow the lilacs all sparkling with dew.” A love song. That’s why Yankees are called “gringos” in Mexico, from that song. And, of course, the Civil War, several good songs, not just “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but a batch of them. The Spanish-American War, Oscar Brown taught me this song. American soldiers in the Philippines, they were singing, “Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos. Cross-eyed kakiack ladrones. And beneath the starry flag, civilize them with a crag, and go back to our own beloved home.” I didn’t sing that.

But along come modern times. I sang “Waste Deep in the Big Muddy,” and this time only a station in Detroit cut it out. But the rest of the country heard it, so seven million people heard it. Who knows? Later that month, in late February, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election. The song would be probably just one more thing.

I honestly believe that the future is going to be millions of little things saving us. I imagine a big seesaw, and at one end of this seesaw is on the ground with a basket half-full of big rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air. It’s got a basket one-quarter full of sand. And some of us got teaspoons, and we’re trying to fill up sand. A lot of people are laughing at us, and they say, “Ah, people like you have been trying to do that for thousands of years, and it’s leaking out as fast as you’re putting it in.” But we’re saying, “We’re getting more people with teaspoons all the time.” And we think, “One of these years, you’ll see that whole seesaw go zooop in the other direction.” And people will say, “Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?” Us and all our little teaspoons. Now granted, we’ve got to keep putting it in, because if we don’t keep putting teaspoons in, it will leak out, and the rocks will go back again. Who knows?


AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. But we’re continuing with this tribute to Pete Seeger, who turned ninety years old on May 3rd, on Sunday. This is Pete Seeger singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968.


PETE SEEGER: [singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”]

It was back in 1942,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in Louisiana,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That’s how it all begun.
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool said to push on.

Well, the Sergeant said, “Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?”
“Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
‘Bout a mile above this place.
It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging.
We’ll soon be on dry ground.”
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool said to push on.

The Sergeant said, “Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim.”
“Sergeant, don’t be a Nervous Nellie,”
The Captain said to him.
“All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.”
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
The big fool said to push on.

All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain’s helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, “Turn around men!
I’m in charge from now on.”
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.

We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand…


AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger, singing the song he was forbidden to sing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” Yes, that was him singing on The Smothers Brothers Show.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn back to the ninetieth birthday tribute of Pete Seeger—for Pete Seeger at Madison Square Garden. Among those who were there was singer-songwriter Steve Earle. He performed at the tribute. Before the concert, he spoke about the importance of Pete Seeger in his life.


STEVE EARLE: I don’t remember, you know, ever not being aware of Pete Seeger. It’s like, my age—the year I was born, 1955, is the year that Pete testified before HUAC, downtown New York City. And if you’ve ever seen those transcripts, he took the First Amendment like the Hollywood Ten did. He basically said that, you know, “You have no right to”—you know, basically, “You don’t have a right to ask me this. It’s the same thing as telling somebody who you voted for when you go into the booth, to tell somebody what political party that you belong to,” which is what the first question that everybody that went before HUAC was asked.

Nineteen sixty-six, when the blacklist effectively ended for Pete, you know, I saw Pete on the Smothers Brothers, and I became—you know, it’s like, by that time, I’m playing guitar, and the war is going on. And I was fourteen years old when I started really, you know, going out and playing, and I couldn’t get into places that served liquor, and that meant coffee houses. And I lived in a military town, and the Vietnam War was going on. So I heard about Pete Seeger almost immediately. And it’s kind of—it’s kind of huge.

I mean, I literally wrote a song about it, about the fact that, you know, people—we went through a period over the last few years when there was a lot of talk about what artists should be commenting on and what they shouldn’t be commenting on. And I was raised, partly because I knew who Pete Seeger was all my life, to believe that that was my job, that that’s what artists do, is you comment on the society that you live in. That’s my gig. That’s the way I was taught to do it.


AMY GOODMAN: That’s Steve Earle. Ani DiFranco was also one of the headliners. I caught up with her a few nights before in Madison, Wisconsin, when she was there for the hundredth anniversary of The Progressive magazine, before she flew to Pete Seeger’s ninetieth birthday in New York.


ANI DiFRANCO: My name is Ani DiFranco.


AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts about Pete on his ninetieth birthday?


ANI DiFRANCO: So glad I’m going to go to his ninetieth party, so happy that I was invited. It’s going to be an awesome group of people, fitting of an awesome fellow. I mean, I just—I feel grateful just to know the man, to have been in the room with him on more than one occasion and felt the power of his energy. You know, I’m so impressed by the fact that at his age he’s still engaged and informed and inspiring and inspired.

And, you know, I’ve been with him at, you know, big benefits and hootenannies, where it’s all disorganized and chaotic, and everybody starts griping at everybody else and forgets why we’re there. And then Pete walks in, and everybody remembers again, you know? So, you know, I just—I’m really glad that we get to gather together while he’s still with us and pour some of that love back into him that he’s been pouring into the world all this time.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you remember when you first heard Pete Seeger or a Pete Seeger song?


ANI DiFRANCO: Well, yeah. I’m not sure when I first heard a Pete Seeger song. I was probably really little, the folk canon was very much a part of my upbringing. So, almost before memory, I’m sure I heard his music. And then I met him at the Clearwater Festival that he and Toshi have been running for forever and contributing to the cleaning up of our Hudson River, and I shared the stage with him first there and on his home turf.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you have a favorite song of his?


ANI DiFRANCO: I don’t think so. You know, I think that, like any folksinger, it’s not about one song or one moment, you know, in a more of a pop model of music. It’s about a lifetime of—you know, it’s almost like every song that he’s offered is another verse, you know, in the great song of his life and of our society.


AMY GOODMAN: Both Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams performed at Sunday night’s tribute to Pete Seeger. But Dar Williams was also in Madison, Wisconsin, last week, where I spoke to her about Pete.


AMY GOODMAN: It’s Pete’s ninetieth birthday. What do you think? What are your thoughts about Pete?


DAR WILLIAMS: Well, first of all, Pete has set the standard for all of us musicians, ‘cause every time I do something that’s like a little vain or a little selfish, a little, you know, highlights in the hair, I think, “Pete would not do this.” You know, he’s just been—he’s been a person-to-person musician. And he actually said to me, like he was talking about somebody writing an article where they said that he was concerned about his career, and he said, “I never gave a ‘s’ about my career.” And I thought, that is exactly true, and it’s a real model to the rest of us artists.

And then there’s the—all of this straight-ahead, “unspotlighty,” you know, movement-to-movement contributions he’s made about stuff that—you know, I live close to him, so he just shows up at places that need a little boost. And it’s not glittery, and it doesn’t bring attention to him, but it helps every cause that he, you now, joins.


AMY GOODMAN: When do you remember first hearing Pete?


DAR WILLIAMS: Let’s see. Well, you know, as Peter said, you know, there are certain things that are just in your DNA. So, who knows when any of us first heard Pete? But I do remember a friend of mine working at a camp for disabled kids. And I was just out of college, and I was, you know, trying to figure out what my contribution to society would be. And he showed up and was—he sang “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.”

And nobody really knew he was coming. It was a camp for disabled kids. You know, there was nothing—it was just he was there to sing music that would include people. And kids in wheelchairs were singing; kids were singing in sign language; kids with disabilities, with very limited abilities to, you know, participate, were participating.

All the counselors were in tears. I was in tears, because he was just—and I just thought, you know, that spirit of inclusiveness, that spirit of unity. Of all these different abilities, these kids who have this, you know, desire to express and be a part of it, he’s completely succeeded. You know? And everyone was going, “Whoo-hoo!”

That’s when I realized what his power was and that the power is—what Spalding Gray called like “horizontal.” You know, it wasn’t vertical, from on top of a mountain speaking down. It was radiating outwards. And that’s when I realized that that’s the kind of power, that if I ever had it, that’s the way I would do it. So, my cognizance of his power was around then.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you have any favorite songs that you think of when you think of Pete Seeger?


DAR WILLIAMS: You know, I think that “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” is a really—you know, some of these songs like that and “Turn, Turn, Turn” that really just sit us down in the eternal reality of what we have to work on, you know, what we have to break it down to, its simple elements, is—those are still really—hit me really strongly.

The other thing is, my favorite band growing up were The Byrds. Like, they were just so sexy and so, like, groovy, and their harmonies were beautiful. And they would sing “The Bells of Rhymney.” And I kind of feel like there’s something very deep and existential about that song. And it just shows the poetry that he did, as well as, you know, the simplicity in the messages. There was also deep poetry in what he was doing. So, that’s actually one of my favorite songs, “The Bells of Rhymney.”


AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to you to be at the celebration, to be singing in Madison Square Garden with Pete and all of the people who love him?


DAR WILLIAMS: I think it’s a moment that many people are taking right now to acknowledge the people. And actually, after having seen the documentary about him, about how many years he spent going and singing to kids when he was blacklisted, you know, just finding a way to communicate. Aside from commerce, aside from his career, aside from what he knew what the future would bring, here he was just going from place to place. And I’ve met a lot of people who work that way, you know, go community to community, child to child, human to human. And here we are filling Madison Square Garden with a person who’s had that kind of—you know, who spoke in person to person. It’s not like he got a lot of advertising spots to advertise himself.

So, it’s a people’s victory that we all circle around a person and a person’s singing like that, you know. And the way that he actually—he’s probably mortified, because he’s probably like, “I was here to show you that you could sing, that you could participate. I’m not at the center. My job was to put you closer to the center of power and music and your voice.” Anyway, I think it’s—you know, not to lionize him, but I think that coming to Madison Square Garden is a part of us acknowledging that he had that power on us and that we feel completely united in what he, you know, sought out to achieve.


AMY GOODMAN: At Madison Square Garden, Dar Williams performed with the British folk musician Billy Bragg. He came to the back of the stage to speak with reporters last night about the influence of Pete Seeger’s music on his own politically conscious music.


BILLY BRAGG: Pete has been a constant since the days of Woody Guthrie, you know, and to meet with him and talk with him, with someone who, you know, rode the rails with Woody, who sang with Paul Robeson, who stood up against McCarthy, who marched with Dr. King—you know, I mean, he’s like a history of our tradition.

And, you know, I’m part of that sort of like political song tradition. And Pete is—he’s right through it. He runs through it like a—you know, like a constant stream. He reminds me of a redwood. He’s like a redwood, really. And we, you know, we see him standing tall in the forest.

And so, to be here today and be part of this—and particularly, as I was saying on stage, you know, he encouraged me to rewrite the words to “The Internationale,” which is like, you know, the national anthem of the left. I would never have even tried such a thing, had Pete not, you know, encouraged me to do it. And his belief in me and my ability to do that, that’s the influence he’s had on me.


AMY GOODMAN: Billy Bragg, what about Pete’s antiwar stance and combining that with his art and his music? How has that influenced you?


BILLY BRAGG: Very crucial, really crucial, because obviously, you know, the imperial wars that my country has been involved in, first in Northern Ireland and then moving on through the ‘80s in the Falklands and elsewhere around the world, you know, the antiwar songs that Pete wrote have a strong connection.

And he’s kind of influenced also with the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement in America was very strong politicizer around the world. You know, the Northern Ireland troubles began with a Catholic civil rights movement. That was the start of it, and that was influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States of America. So the culture of that battle kind of transferred to our culture. We sing the songs that Pete wrote or took part in popularizing, and we sing those, as well.

And we’re still, today, at antiwar, anti-capitalist demos, I sang “The Internationale”—last time I sang “The Internationale” was on the steps of the Bank of England at the G20 demonstration on April the 1st. So, you know, that connection of people coming around again to that tradition, I think, tonight is very, very timely.


AMY GOODMAN: British folk musician Billy Bragg. Hip-hop artist Michael Franti also spoke to reporters about the importance of Pete Seeger in his life.


MICHAEL FRANTI: My name’s Michael Franti. I have a group called Spearhead. And Pete is somebody who made it possible for—or made it OK, I should say, for artists to give a s-h-i-[deleted]. He made it possible for an artist to stand on the stage and speak from their heart about what they feel about going—that is going on in the world and not have any shame about it, you know.

And over the last eight or nine years, especially since the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been a lot artists who have closed down and a lot of media sources who have refused to open their doors and ears to those artists. And Pete is somebody who gave me, personally, the strength to continue, because as I look back in history, he was always on the side of peace and justice. And if you’re on that side, then history is always going to show that you were on the right side of things.

And so, that’s why I’m here. I’m grateful for Pete for shining that light and also being such a brilliant inspiration to, you know, not only the folk music world, but also his rhyming. He was a predecessor to rap music in a lot of his songs, so I appreciate it.


AMY GOODMAN: Hip-hop artist Michael Franti. As you can see, it was an all-star cast. As the Academy Award-winning actor Tim Robbins stepped off the stage, I had a chance to ask him about Pete Seeger.


TIM ROBBINS: I’m Tim Robbins. Pete Seeger is someone that I’ve been aware of pretty much all of my life. My dad was a folksinger. We were—we listened to his albums when we were kids. My dad’s group sung a few of Pete’s songs that he either wrote or unearthed. As a folklorist, he’s invaluable to the country as someone that has extended the life of so many different songs, be they sea shanties or Negro spirituals or workers’ songs or civil rights songs. He’s in all of our blood. You know, he’s part of who we are.


AMY GOODMAN: What did his antiwar stance mean to you as a performer, an artist, a musician and a political activist?


TIM ROBBINS: Well, you know, he had courage, you know? He did things that, you know, after being blacklisted for how many years? Fifteen, twenty years? The first thing he does on television is “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on CBS. You know, this is a man with courage, you know. One would hope that, you know, one could achieve that kind of conviction and courage in their life.


AMY GOODMAN: You just celebrated your fiftieth birthday. What do you want to be doing when you’re ninety?


TIM ROBBINS: I think I’ll be folk singing.


AMY GOODMAN: Tim Robbins. Well, today we’ll end this tribute to Pete Seeger in his own words. Back in our interview in 2004, the last question I asked Pete.


AMY GOODMAN: And for someone who isn’t so hopeful, who is listening to this right now, trying to find their way, what would you say?


PETE SEEGER: Realize that little things lead to bigger things. That’s what Seeds is all about. And this wonderful parable in the New Testament: the sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousand fold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?


AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger. Yes, he has turned ninety years old, May 3rd, 2009. Madison Square Garden was packed last night for the celebration of Pete Seeger and the Clearwater, the environmental group he founded, for which it was a fundraiser. You can check out their website at clearwater.org. If you want to check out our entire interview with Pete Seeger, more than an hour, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

How Much Money Would You Save By Giving Up Your Constitutional Rights?

U.S. Cities Increasing Use of Armed Mercenaries to Replace Police
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports
Posted on April 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/138180/

The United States is in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. We see this in schools, health care, prisons, and certainly with the US military/national security/intelligence apparatus.

There are almost 200,000 "private contractors" in Iraq (more than U.S. soldiers) and President Barack Obama is continuing to use mercenaries there and in Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine. At present, 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is going to private companies.

This privatization trend is hardly new, but it is accelerating. While events such as the Nisour Square massacre committed in September 2007 by Blackwater operatives in Baghdad show the lethal danger of unleashing mercenary forces on foreign soil, one area with the potential for extreme abuses resulting from this privatization is in domestic law enforcement in the U.S.

Many people may not be aware of this, but since the 1980s, private security guards have outnumbered police officers.

"The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States," according to the Washington Post. Some estimate that private security operate inside the U.S. at a 5-to-1 ratio with police.

In New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of the city, private security poured in. Armed operatives from companies like Blackwater, Wackenhut, Intercon and DynCorp spread out in the city. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235.

In New Orleans at the time, I interviewed Israeli commandos from a company called Instinctive Shooting International as they operated an armed checkpoint on Charles Street after having been hired by a wealthy businessman. I also interviewed private guards who bragged of shooting "black gangbangers."

The abuses by private security guards in New Orleans and elsewhere has not to this day been thoroughly investigated. Moreover, the legality and constitutionality of the deployment of these modern-day Pinkertons needs to be seriously explained to the U.S. public.

Now it seems that some cities think it is a great idea to expand the use of these private forces using taxpayer funds.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported, "Facing pressure to crack down on crime amid a record budget deficit, Oakland is joining other U.S. cities that are turning over more law-enforcement duties to private armed guards. The City Council recently voted to hire International Services Inc., a private security agency, to patrol crime-plagued districts. While a few Oakland retail districts previously have pooled cash to pay for unarmed security services, using public funds to pay for private armed guards would mark a first for the city."

In a stunning development revealed late Wednesday night, Oakland dropped its plan to hire International Services Inc. after the firm's founder and two other executives were arrested on charges of defrauding the state of California out of more than $9 million in workers compensation.

Although this particular company may be going down in flames, that doesn't seem to deter Oakland's advocates for using private forces. According to the WSJ:

Ignacio De La Fuente, a city council member who led the drive to hire armed guards, said he will push to retain another security service. "There is still a very serious need for security in some of our more crime-plagued areas," he said. Before selecting [International Services Inc.], Mr. De La Fuente said, he and representatives of Oakland's police department interviewed security candidates and found nothing out of the ordinary.

Regardless of the specific company, this trend toward hiring private security companies is an ominous development. As it is, Oakland (and many other cities) have severe problems holding accountable police (and other law enforcement) for brutality and extrajudicial killings.

"Oakland, unfortunately, has had a history of treating the African American community unfairly," said George Holland Sr., an attorney who heads the Oakland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "The community has a great distrust for police officers because they feel they can't be punished."

Most recently, the January execution-style killing of Oscar Grant, a 22-year old unarmed African-American man, on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train platform by a BART police officer, has sparked outrage. A decision is still pending on whether the officer in that case will be tried for murder. With activist groups already decrying the state of police/law enforcement oversight in the city, some powerful officials in Oakland want to use private armed operatives with fewer mechanisms for accountability than the police.

Why do some Oakland officials want this? On the one hand, the belief that it will bring security, but also to save money:

Hiring private guards is less expensive than hiring new officers. Oakland -- facing a record $80 million budget shortfall -- spends about 65 percent of its budget for police and fire services, including about $250,000 annually, including benefits and salary, on each police officer.

In contrast, for about $200,000 a year, the city can contract to hire four private guards to patrol the troubled East Oakland district where four on-duty police officers were killed in March. And the company, not the city, is responsible for insurance for the guards.

As in many cities, this is a contentious issue in Oakland, which has struggled to deal with substantial violence on the one hand and police brutality on the other. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The areas where the armed guards were supposed to have been deployed have a disproportionate share of homicides, assaults with deadly weapons and robberies. … The crime rate in the area, according to a 2003 blight study, is between 225 and 150 percent higher than the city as a whole.

Shortly after the Grant killing, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums tabled the hiring of the private guards, putting him in opposition to local city council members who faced pressure from businesses to hire private security guards to patrol the streets.

"The same way you had problems with a BART cop killing somebody, what happens if a guard who doesn't have the same training as a police officer shoots somebody?" said City Administrator Dan Lindheim. "It's not worth the risk."

Predictably, the Oakland police opposed the deployment of private security for union and overtime reasons.

John Macdonald, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who did a study on private security for the Rand Corp. told the WSJ he opposes turning to a private security service to take the place of police officers: "If an unfortunate event were to happen," he says, "it could cost the public more in the long term than what the city believes it could save."

That's very true. But money is just one issue. More pressing is, who will be responsible if these guards kill an unarmed kid? What happens if they unlawfully detain people? The most urgent question now is what can the public can do to pre-emptively protect itself from unaccountable private forces?

Here are some questions (obviously there are many more) that should be publicly answered by Oakland and any other city that wants to use these private forces in a "law enforcement" capacity before these forces deploy on the streets:

* What training do these forces have in protection and respect for constitutional rights?
* What will the oversight system for these private forces consist of?
* Will these forces be required to produce documents and other information under state, local and federal Freedom of Information Act requests (and state and local equivalents)?
* Will these forces have arrest powers? If so, what about Miranda rights?
* Will these forces have authority to use lethal force? If so, what are the rules governing when they are "authorized" to pull the trigger?
* What happens if these private guards are accused of violating civil rights? Who gets sued?

Oakland is certainly not alone in looking to private security. This is an issue that is going to be increasingly popping up in cities across the US.

It is also becoming a major issue on the U.S.-Mexico border, as mercenary companies offer privatized border agents to the U.S. government.

If the public isn't vigilant, this will metastasize rapidly.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.
© 2009 Rebel Reports All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/138180/

Who's Been Investing My Life???

The Earth Is a Ponzi Scheme on the Verge of Collapse
By Matthew Stein, Huffington Post Posted on April 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135525/



Bernie Madoff sure made a name for himself, didn't he? First he made a name for himself as a "Wall Street Genius" whose coveted firm not only promised, but consistently delivered, extraordinarily high annual returns on investment, even when the economy was down. More recently he made a name for himself as the architect of the largest and most notorious "Ponzi Scheme" in history, bilking investors out of as much as 50 billion dollars!

So what is a Ponzi scheme, anyways? A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that promises, and delivers (at least for a while) exceptionally high and consistent financial returns to investors. These returns are paid to its investors from their own money, and the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by bona fide income generating investments (such as manufacturing, mining, or rental income). In ways similar to "pyramid schemes" or "chain letters", in order for a Ponzi scheme to work, it must continuously attract an ever increasing pool of investment from unsuspecting customers, in order to provide an ever increasing supply of money to draw upon to maintain payments to its ever increasing pool of investors. The trick is to promise such glorious results that the greed factor overcomes its victim's common sense as they turn a blind eye to the fact that the scheme lacks a solid foundation and can't go on forever. It is absolutely critical to the success of all Ponzi schemes that an aura of respectability and impeccability be maintained for as long as possible, for as soon as suspicions spread concerning the fraudulent nature of the business, new investments dry up and the Ponzi scheme collapses, since it has no source of true earned income with which to maintain payments to investors.

So, is it true that we are running our planet like a Ponzi scheme? And if this is true, does it mean that we must inevitably face collapse, as all Ponzi schemes must eventually end in catastrophe?

The illusion that the "Free Market" is the logical savior of our world has been maintained by the promise of riches and an ever increasing standard of living and lifespan that has been demonstrated by the industrialized world for the past several hundred years. On the surface, who can look at the apparent success of America, and not come to that quick conclusion? However, when you look deeper, you will find that this success is built on a business model based upon exponential growth, and that this growth must be fed by a similar exponential growth in consumption of energy, natural resources, raw materials, and in the continuous expansion to new markets. All of this is well and good when the world has an abundant supply of undeveloped lands and unused resources, but it starts coming apart as that same world approaches its natural limits to growth and consumption.

Our world-wide Ponzi scheme got its start with the industrial revolution in Western Europe, and it was colonialism that provided ever increasing sources for the raw materials and markets that kept this giant Ponzi scheme rolling. It spread to America with the colonial takeover of vast untapped resources and huge tracts of lands previously occupied by Native American hunter-gatherers. As America industrialized, its population grew and its resources were drawn down, the giant Ponzi scheme continued to grow through globalization and it continued to feed its ever growing appetite by drawing down the natural resources in the world's oceans, forests, and more remote areas, and by expanding it markets into the farthest reaches of the globe. We are witness to a five hundred year run on this giant ever-expanding global Ponzi scheme, and unless we change the way we are playing this game, that run is now drawing dangerously close to a natural and catastrophic conclusion.

Here is a brief summary of a few current trends that illustrate my point:

1. Trees: About 1/2 of the world's forests are already gone (most were cut in the last 50 years), and a significant percentage of the rest are in trouble. At the current rate of destruction, it has been estimated that the world's rainforests will be completely eliminated within forty years. Trees play a necessary role in stabilizing our planet's weather, atmosphere and soils. A single large mature tree has the evaporative surface area on its needles or leaves equivalent to a 40 acre lake. A process called "desertification" occurs near areas that have been deforested once the trees stop recycling moisture back into the atmosphere to fall as rain somewhere down wind. A recent study shows that deforestation contributes roughly 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions every year.

2. Atmosphere: Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by a factor of four since 1950. We have been burning fossil fuels for over 500 years, but half of all of those burned fuels have been consumed in the past thirty years! There is a scientific consensus to 90% certainty that these atmospheric changes will result in catastrophic, potentially civilization busting, climate changes within the next 50 years. Even if you do not believe in global warming, data indicates that the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere (the primary greenhouse gas) caused by our rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels, is increasing the acidity of the oceans, and that if this trend continues much longer, it has the potential to kill most of the planktons, diatoms, and coral reefs of the ocean, knocking out the bottom of the food chain, killing most of the life in the oceans of the world, and destroying one of the legs of our world's oxygen cycle.

3. Oceans: 11 out of 15 of the world's major ocean fisheries are either already in collapse, or are in serious decline and danger of collapse. All large open ocean predatory fish, such as marlin and tuna, are already 90% depleted. By 2004, an estimated 20% of the world's coral reefs had been destroyed (up from just 11% in 2000), an additional 24% were close to collapsing, and another 26% were under long-term threat of collapse. A recent British government report showed a drop in the world's oceanic zooplankton of an astounding 73% since 1960. Zooplankton are a critical element in the bottom of the world's food chain as well as its oxygen cycle.

4. Oil and other fossil fuels: Our modern industrial global machine essentially eats, sleeps, and shits oil. Nearly all of the world's giant oil fields (they produce over half the world's oil) are mature and exhibit declining rates of oil production. In 2008, the International Energy Agency (IEA) shocked the world when it released an authoritative public study revealing that the world's oil fields are declining at an average rate of 9.1%, which is much faster than previously thought. Even with huge capital investments to implement Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods, this rate of decline would only improve to 6.4%. What does this mean? It means that if our world is to maintain its current rate of oil consumption (our world's recent globalization has been fueled by an annual oil production growth rate of something like 10%), then we would need to find and develop a Saudi Arabia's worth of oil every year for the next year or two from now to eternity--an impossible fantasy!

5. Soil: A third of the original top soil in the United States is now gone. It has been estimated that the world has from 50 to 100 years of farmable soil, using current farming practices. The US has cut soil losses to 18 times the rate of nature's replacement, the developing world averages a soil depletion rate of 36 times natural replacement, and China averages 54 times the rate of replacement.

6. Fresh water: Irrigated land comprises only 16% of the world's croplands, but produces 40% of the world's crop production. Many of the world's major rivers (China's Yellow River, America's Colorado River, the Nile, the Rio Grande, the Ganges, the Indus, the Amu Darya, the Syr Darya, and Africa's Chao Phraya) now run dry, or nearly dry, for significant parts of the year due to expanding irrigation and population demands. Unsustainable over pumping from aquifers is causing increasing salinity, lowering aquifer levels, and failed wells in many of the world's irrigated bread baskets, such as California's Central Valley, the US' giant south central Ogallala aquifer, China's grainbelt middle plains, India's principle breadbasket, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula.

If the previous list is not enough to convince yourself that we are operating a giant Ponzi scheme, and that we are running out of new sources of energy, untapped markets, and raw materials to keep it running, then the following two figures should open your eyes.



Figure 2. Ecological footprint by region.
(Illustration courtesy of Global Footprint Network)

Figure 2 depicts a scientifically calculated global footprint by region. What this show us is that if our current planetary population of nearly 7 billion people were to live like we do here in North America, we would need an Earth with 9 1/2 hectares worth of productive land per person to sustainably supply us with the necessary raw materials, and to absorb our wastes. Yet we now have only roughly 1.7 global hectares of usable land per person. This means that we would need roughly 5 1/2 earths to support our planet if everyone in the world averaged the consumption levels of North America!



Figure 3. Ecological footprint of humankind from 1961 to 2003.
(Illustration courtesy of Global Footprint Network)

Figure 3 shows us that back in the mid 1980's, when our world had just over half its current population, we first exceeded the capacity of our planet to continuously supply us with the food and raw materials that we consume, and to process our wastes. What this means, is that we have been consuming our planet's resources faster than they regenerate, and polluting its natural systems faster than they can recover. This "drawing down" of our resources, is essentially spending the money from investors (all of us) in this Ponzi scheme, and when the remaining "money" (the natural resources and ecosystems of our world) can't support the payments anymore, it will most certainly collapse!

Unfortunately, it's going to take more than minor changes in the way we do business to get off this giant Ponzi scheme. It will not be easy, but I do believe it is doable. For a good idea of what it is going to take to make the shift to sustainability and get off this Ponzi scheme, see my prior Huff Post blog, 12 Tips for the Sustainability Shift.

The question to ask ourselves, is do we wish to adopt the attitude of Mr. Madoff, saying essentially, "Fuck it! The world will do what the world will do, so I might as well enjoy one hell of a ride while it lasts!" Or do we decide to transform the way we do business, halt and reverse population growth and over-consumption, and collectively work together to nurture and rebuild the natural systems and biodiversity of our planet that are absolutely critical for supporting and maintaining a viable world for generation upon generation?


Matthew Stein is the author of When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency, from Chelsea Green.

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135525/