What if We Elected a Peace President and Nobody Came....

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The U.S. War Addiction: Funding Enemies to Maintain Trillion Dollar Racket

By David DeGraw, DavidDeGraw.org
Posted on June 16, 2010


Editor's Note: With so many problems in the USA, it's no easy job to single out a handful of the most important, priority issues. But the enormous pile of wasted money spent on wars and the military-industrial complex has to be right at the top. Not only is the money spent an enormous destructive waste, but there's also the question of opportunity cost; just a fraction of war money could make major improvements to health care, schools and universities, and our decaying public infrastructure. The release of the Pentagon's Quadrennal Defense Review indicates that Obama intends to spend even more on war. David DeGraw's article below sheds some light on the madness of war spending and the serious attempts made by the racketeers to make our wars self-perpetuating to keep the cash rolling in; infuriating as it is sickening.

***

A few recent news items help expose the true drivers of current wars around the world.

#1) Wherever there is a war, look for CIA/IMF/private military war profiteers covertly funding and supporting BOTH sides in order to keep the wars raging and the profits rolling in. As former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell explained: “Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.”

Here’s an important glimpse of truth to seep through last week in the NY Times, via Raw Story:

US-backed ‘bribes’ in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban

On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said.

“The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops,” [Kucinich] said…. The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who “believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.” [read more]

#2) On top of that report, Sunday’s headlines read, “Pakistani spy agency supports Taliban:”

Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.

The findings could heighten tension between the two countries and raise further questions about U.S. success in Afghanistan since Pakistani cooperation is seen as key to defeating the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul in the 1990s with Islamabad’s support.

U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, have maintained links to the Taliban despite the government’s decision to denounce the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure. [read more]

First off, these two reports are really not news at all. Reports of American tax dollars ending up in the hands of the Taliban have been coming out since the start of the war and the ISI, as the CIA has been well aware of for years now, has been playing both sides of this war and is pivotal in keeping the war going. Secondly, I have long wondered when the CIA / US military would start exposing all of this in the mainstream propaganda press as a pretext to further expand the war into Pakistan.

#3) As a result of all this, and not surprising at all to people who were paying close attention to Obama’s surge strategy, costs and death counts are quickly rising. Jim Lobe reports from Afghanistan that the “News is Bad.”

While U.S. officials insist they are making progress in reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over the last several years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth.

Even senior military officials are conceding privately that their much-touted new counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold and build” in contested areas of the Pashtun southern and eastern parts of the country are not working out as planned despite the “surge” of some 20,000 additional U.S. troops over the past six months.

Casualties among the nearly 130,000 U.S. and other NATO troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting quickly. [read more]

#4) In a propaganda effort to spin away from all the latest bad news, the desperate US military has pulled this dusty old news report out of their back-pocket and launched a psychological operation in the NY Times to give a positive spin in hopes of further manipulating US public opinion:

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves…. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. [read more]

In the process of this latest propaganda campaign, the Pentagon has unwittingly exposed two things that I will now jump on. A) The real reason why we are in this war to begin with: it’s all about natural resources. And B) All the BS statements about these “previously unknown deposits” clearly prove, yet again, that the NY Times is only too happy to play the role of a straight-up propaganda paper. For those of us paying attention, we’ve been reading reports about these minerals for the past decade! Roland Sheppard just sent this along:

“The New York Times, when it was beating the drums of war in 2002, failed to mention that the USGS published a report, at that time, Mines and Mineral Occurrences of Afghanistan Compiled by G.J. Orris and J.D. Bliss. Open-File Report 02-110. On page 16, they list as ‘Significant Minerals or Materials’ magnetite, hematite, chalcopyrite, covellite, chalcocite, cuprite, malachite, azurite, molybdenite, and native gold – lithium is mentioned on page 10 under ‘References.’”

So, from the very beginning, as I went into further detail in the past, the war in Afghanistan is all about resources. I’ll get back to the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” in a minute, here’s a brief excerpt from my prior report on another key resource in the region:

ORIGINS OF THE AFGHANISTAN OCCUPATION: “STRATEGY OF THE SILK ROUTE”

Up until 9/11, oil companies, with the help of the Bush administration, were desperately trying to work out a deal with the Taliban to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. One of the world’s richest oil fields is on the eastern shore of the Caspian sea just north of Afghanistan. The Caspian oil reserves are of top strategic importance in the quest to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. The US government developed a policy called “The Strategy of the Silk Route.”

The policy was designed to lock out Russia, China and Iran from the oil in this region. This called for U.S. corporations to construct an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan. Since the mid 1990s, a consortium of U.S. companies led by Unocal have been pursing this goal. A feasibility study of the Central Asian pipeline project was performed by Enron. Their study concluded that as long as the country was split among fighting warlords the pipeline could not be built. Stability was necessary for the $4.5 billion project and the U.S. believed that the Taliban would impose the necessary order. The U.S. State Department and Pakistan’s ISI, impressed by the Taliban movement to cut a pipeline deal, agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan. [read more]

Then of course we have the war in Iraq, again from my previous report:

ORIGINS OF THE IRAQ OCCUPATION: CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE

As an AlterNet report put it: “In January 2000, 10 days into President George W. Bush’s first term, representatives of the largest oil and energy companies joined the new administration to form the Cheney Energy Task Force.”

Secret Task Force documents that were dated March 2001, which were obtained by Judical Watch in 2003 after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, contained “a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects…” They also had: “… a series of lists titled ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts‘ naming more than 60 companies from some 30 countries with contracts in various stages of negotiation.

None of contracts were with American nor major British companies, and none could take effect while the U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iraq remained in place. Three countries held the largest contracts: China, Russia and France — all members of the Security Council and all in a position to advocate for the end of sanctions.

Were Saddam to remain in power and the sanctions to be removed, these contracts would take effect, and the U.S. and its closest ally would be shut out of Iraq’s great oil bonanza.”

Project Censored highlighted a Judicial Watch report that stated: “Documented plans of occupation and exploitation predating September 11 confirm heightened suspicion that U.S. policy is driven by the dictates of the energy industry. According to Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, ‘These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public.’”

So that’s the oil angle of this resource war, now back to the lithium angle. This longest war in US history is very similar to the even longer wars raging in Northern Africa, another resource rich paradise of death and destruction. In the late 1990s, CIA-connected corporations like Bechtel worked with NASA to conduct infrared satellite studies to discover mineral rich regions throughout the world. Other than the discoveries in South-Central Asia (Af-Pak region), Northern Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo region), emerged as a key source for future resources. In particular, the mineral coltan, which like lithium, is vital to powering most computer technology. Since Bechtel and NASA made these discoveries, a report from The International Rescue Committee revealed that an astonishing 5.4 MILLION Africans have been killed in the region. For some background, here’s an excellent report from July 2001, in Dollars and Sense magazine:

The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan

“This is all money,” says a Western mining executive, his hand sweeping over a geological map toward the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is explaining why, in 1997, he and planeloads of other businessmen were flocking to the impoverished country and vying for the attention of then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila. The executive could just as accurately have said, ‘This is all war.’

The interplay among a seemingly endless supply of mineral resources, the greed of multinational corporations desperate to cash in on that wealth, and the provision of arms and military training to political tyrants has helped to produce the spiral of conflicts that have engulfed the continent – what many regard as “Africa’s First World War.” These minerals are vital to maintaining U.S. military dominance…” [read more]

For further detail, here’s Project Censored’s 2003 report:

American Companies Exploit the Congo:

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been labeled “the richest patch of earth on the planet.” The valuable abundance of minerals and resources in the DRC has made it the target of attacks from U.S.-supported neighboring African countries Uganda and Rwanda.

The DRC is mineral rich with millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium, niobium, and tantalum also known as coltan. Coltan has become an increasingly valuable resource to American corporations. Coltan is used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and capacitators used to maintain the electrical charge in computer chips….

The DRC holds 80% of the world’s coltan reserves, more than 60% of the world’s cobalt and is the world’s largest supplier of high-grade copper. With these minerals playing a major part in maintaining US military dominance and economic growth, minerals in the Congo are deemed vital US interests.

Historically, the U.S. government identified sources of materials in Third World countries, and then encouraged U.S. corporations to invest in and facilitate their production. Dating back to the mid-1960s, the U.S. government literally installed the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, which gave U.S. corporations access to the Congo’s minerals for more than 30 years. However, over the years Mobutu began to limit access by Western corporations, and to control the distribution of resources. In 1998, U.S. military-trained leaders of Rwanda and Uganda invaded the mineral-rich areas of the Congo. The invaders installed illegal colonial-style governments which continue to receive millions of dollars in arms and military training from the United States. Our government and a $5 million Citibank loan maintains the rebel presence in the Congo. Their control of mineral rich areas allows western corporations, such as American Mineral Fields, to illegally mine. Rwandan and Ugandan control over this area is beneficial for both governments and for the corporations that continue to exploit the Congo’s natural wealth….

San Francisco based engineering firm Bechtel Inc. established strong ties in the rebel zones as well. Bechtel drew up an inventory of the Congo’s mineral resources free of charge, and also paid for NASA satellite studies of the country for infared maps of its minerals. Bechtel estimates that the DRC’s mineral ores alone are worth $157 billion dollars. Through coltan production, the Rwandans and their allies are bringing in $20 million revenue a month. Rwanda’s diamond exports went from 166 carats in 1998 to 30,500 in 2000. Uganda’s diamond exports jumped from approximately 1,500 carats to about 11,300. The final destination for many of these minerals is the U.S.” [read more]

And to close this out, let me return to “The Business of War” report by Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan. As you will see, you always have to follow the money, the bankers and our friends at the IMF are always at the root of global death and destruction, and are the true Masters of War:

“Today, the United States claims that it has no interest in the DRC other than a peaceful resolution to the current war. Yet U.S. businessmen and politicians are still going to extreme lengths to gain and preserve sole access to the DRC’s mineral resources. And to protect these economic interests, the U.S. government continues to provide millions of dollars in arms and military training to known human-rights abusers and undemocratic regimes. Thus, the DRC’s mineral wealth is both an impetus for war and an impediment to stopping it….

During his historic visit to Africa in 1998, President Clinton praised Presidents Kagame and Musevini as leaders of the ‘African Renaissance,’ just a few months before they launched their deadly invasion of the DRC with U.S. weapons and training….

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have knowingly contributed to the war effort. The international lending institutions praised both Rwanda and Uganda for increasing their gross domestic product (GDP), which resulted from the illegal mining of DRC resources. Although the IMF and World Bank were aware that the rise in GDP coincided with the DRC war, and that it was derived from exports of natural resources that neither country normally produced, they nonetheless touted both nations as economic success stories….

In January 2000, Chevron – the corporation that named an oil tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – announced a three-year, $75 million spending program in the DRC, thus challenging the notion that war discourages foreign investment…. As one investor put it, “It is a good moment to come: it is in difficult times that you can get the most advantage.”….

In April 2001, a scathing UN report argued that Presidents Kagame and Museveni are “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The two leaders, the report alleged, have turned their armies into armies for business….

According to East African media reports, U.S. diplomats continue to view Rwanda and Uganda as “strategic allies in the Great Lakes region” and “would not want to upset relations with them at this time.” …. The IMF and World Bank have also indicated that their policies toward Rwanda and Uganda will remain unchanged….”

Famed two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient US Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler accurately summed up the situation when he said: “I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism…. The general public shoulders the bill. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones, Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

Sing it with me: (Lyrics substituted by SpringWind for actual recording in original article)

Masters Of War
------Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.


Read more of David DeGraw's work at DavidDeGraw.org.
© 2010 DavidDeGraw.org All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147217/

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.

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If I Was President.....