Warning to those who will heed

 By a Brit, but this could just as well be about America and the 1% vs. the rest of us:

Wracked from end to end by riots and looting, the country is now starting to admit the existence of the hidden faultlines that lie quivering beneath the humdrum everyday blandishments of society as we live it.

Underneath the surface chatter about police brutality and parental responsibility is a deeper fear, and a not unfounded one: that a social contract's been torn up. If you accept the possibility that there are many kinds of violence — not merely physical, but emotional, economic, financial, and social, to name just a few, then perhaps the social contract being offered by today's polities goes something like this:  "Some kinds of violence are more punishable than others. Blow up the financial system? Here's a state-subsidized bonus. Steal a video game? You're toast." (To be painfully clear, I don't think any form of violence is justifiable, excusable, or acceptable.)

There are many kinds of looting. There's looting your local superstore — and then there's, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there's looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation...or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one.")  The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse.  Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.

An enlightened social contract is not built on subsidies or "handouts" — whether to the impoverished, or to the pitiable welfare junkies formerly known as "the markets."  It's built on a calculus of harm and benefit not just accepted by a plurality of its citizens (versus a tiny Chalet-owning, caviar-gobbling minority at the top) — and also a calculus that can be said to meaningful in the sense that it results in real human prosperity.  Without such a bargain to set incentives and coordinate economic activity, even the mightiest, proudest societies will find themselves as bent old men on an endless plateau, searching for a lick of shelter as the typhoon bears down.

Meanwhile, as the Lords of Finance and Infinite Growth Gamble with the Planet

Image by Cebete via FlickrThey are rewarded for their "value creation" efforts in gold beyond even Midas's dreams:

Robin Hood in Reverse in US: Seven Examples

by Bill Quigley

The rich have been getting richer and the poor and middle have been getting poorer in the US recently. Here are seven examples that show how the US is going through Robin Hood in Reverse.

Between 1948 and 1979, the richest 10 percent of families in the US claimed 33 percent of average income growth. Between 2000 and 2007, the richest 10 percent claimed a full 100 percent of average income growth in the US, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Business taxes were cut from 46 to 34 percent 25 years ago, according to Pro Publica. But today 115 of the big 500 companies listed on Standard and Poor’s Stock Index paid federal and other taxes of less than 20 percent over the last 5 years according to David Leonhardt of the New York Times.

General Electric’s tax rate for last year was 7 percent according to Pro Publica.

The top 5 percent US households claim 63 percent of the entire country’s wealth. The bottom 80 percent hold just 13% of the growth, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Last year, John Paulson, a hedge fund manager “earned” $4.9 billion, according to the New York Times. Ten years ago it took 25 such managers to collectively earn that much. Last year the top 25 hedge fund managers pocketed (a much better word) a total of $22 billion. It would take over 440,000 people each earning $50,000 a year to match that amount.

A federal development program intended to help poor communities, the New Market Tax Credit, instead funnels up to ten billion taxpayer dollars to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs and Prudential to build luxury hotels, office buildings and a car museum. Bloomberg Markets Magazine pointed to the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago which was renovated for $116 million. Prudential got $15.6 million in tax credit from the US Treasury for helping fund the project because the hotel was in a census zone that included two colleges which housed a lot of lower income students.

According to the Financial Times, there are now more people living in poverty in the US than at any time in the last 50 years. Foreclosure filings were nearly 4 million in 2010, up 23 percent since 2008 according to RealtyTrac.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com

ODOT hammers Salem and its own greenhouse gas reduction goals

Image by Jason McHuff via Flickr

What is up with the State of Oregon trying to kill Salem's downtown?

At the north end of town the state has been busily filling up the Capital City Business "Center" -- the center of nowhere, actually, -- with hundreds of office workers, in a "center" that has no direct bus service from downtown Salem.* And now ODOT is planning to permanently move hundreds of high-paid white collar technical jobs out of downtown and into an area suited for manufacturing!

So even as the state makes a big show out of its greenhouse gas reduction goals, it keeps moving workers out of the bike-able and walkable core area that has the best service by bus. Instead, it's going to fill prime industrial space in a transit-inaccessible area with office workers, which means expensive interior refits and more driving by all those workers, plus starving downtown businesses of vitally needed customers.

But hey, who cares if Oregon's capital starts to look like Michigan's (Lansing's downtown is a scary, depressing vision -- something that Salem does NOT want to emulate). Something about these deals stinks.

-At the former Tyco building at 4040 Fairview Industrial Drive SE, ODOT wants to take 75,000 square feet of space on a 10-year lease, Miles said. The 4040 Fairview site will become the permanent home for ODOT's Technical Services and a section of Information Services. In all, about 300 workers will be based at the former Tyco building.

The building was built as a sister manufacturing site for Tyco's now defunct circuit board plant in the Polk County town of Dallas. Tyco broke ground on the project in autumn 2000, but Tyco never used the building for manufacturing and it became a symbol of the downturn in Oregon's high-tech industry. The vacant building is now owned by State Investment LLC, a local investment group.

-ODOT's plans call for about 220 employees to go to the former SUMCO building at 3930 Fairview Industrial Drive SE. The agency wants a two-year lease for about 65,000 square feet of space.

Employees at the old SUMCO building will return to the Capitol Mall building when the renovations are complete.

In 2004, SUMCO phased out its local manufacturing operations. The shutdown marked the end of an era that started in the 1980s when Siltec, a predecessor to SUMCO, began making silicon wafers in Salem.

Cascadia Canyon LLC, a group with ties to Sunwest Management Inc., controlled the SUMCO property for several years. Past attempts to bring new businesses to the property came to a standstill when Salem-based Sunwest's financial problems spun out of control in fall of 2008. New owners, who are affiliated with Salem developer Jack Fox, have recently acquired most of the former SUMCO campuses.

There's something that Oregon seems to struggle with that world-class organizations figured out a long time ago: you can't let divisions optimize their own corner of the world at the expense of the whole organization. You have to optimize as a whole. Meaning that, even if we think the move of 300 prime workers is strictly on the up-and-up and has no hidden ulterior motive behind it, it still allows one division (ODOT) to make it's own numbers look better by making Salem's and the State of Oregon's look worse. Only by ignoring the impact of the move on Salem and on the state's own goals for reducing vehicle trips can you are argue that this pencils out, and it would only pencil out for ODOT management. It's going to hurt Salem as a whole, hurt those 300 workers who are losing their options for biking or walking or taking the bus to work, and it's going to hammer downtown businesses.

Funny, there's some prime spaces in the very heart of downtown that could be refitted to serve office workers much easier than refitting manufacturing space ... but apparently no one is keeping an eye on how the state as a whole treats Salem -- especially sad given how much property tax revenue the state doesn't pay. The Legislature loves to badger the feds for timber payments in lieu of taxes for federally owned land, but apparently sees no connection with Salem's starved budgets and all the state-owned property in Salem.

(* Amusingly, Cherriots uses a photo of CCBC in some of its promotional materials with a caption along the lines of "Cherriots, We Take You There" -- irony at its finest. CCBC sits at the far end of the little northeast-pointing appendix grafted onto the otherwise circular Route 14 -- a route almost fiendishly well calculated to be useless.)

Serious threat: Spotted Wing Fruit Flies

Yikes.

Recent news reports have indicated that this foreign (previously locally unknown) pest has the potential for turning both commercial and residential fruits (trees and berries) to mush in a very short time.

Early control is important. There have been local reports of entire
orchards (peaches in one case) becoming infested and all the fruit being ruined completely.

If you have fruit trees (apples, peaches, pears for certain -- probably others) and/or berries (raspberries, blackberries) in your yard and want to have them around to harvest this season, these sessions are at no charge and come highly recommended.

The OSU Extension Service will host two workshops on Spotted Wing Drosophila fruit fly to assist homeowners and growers of fruit crops with identification and management of this new insect pest. The dates, times and locations for the workshops are:

April 26th, 7-8:30pm. Salem Electric meeting room, 633 7th Street NW, Salem, OR

May 12th, 7-8:30pm, Academy Building Room 212, 182 SW Academy Street, Dallas, OR.

The workshops are free and open to the public. For more information, call the OSU Polk County Extension office at 503-623-8395.

Graffiti isn't cool. Call 371-GANG to report tags

Image via Wikipedia

Salem has a real problem with graffiti. Whole books can be written about the social pathology that graffiti represents and the futility of trying to leave it to the police to resolve. Salem seems headed down that track, which is a perfect setup for a vicious cycle of graffiti crackdowns and flareups as testosterone-poisoned young males on both sides of the equation get into a classical primate dominance contest with everybody the worse off and lots of collateral damage all around.

Incidents of graffiti have significantly increased over the past three months throughout Salem, with the past week being particularly busy. Thankfully, in most cases property owners have been compliant with rapid removal. In some cases the Graffiti Abatement Team has responded to the area and removed graffiti, only to have it get tagged again within a matter of days. While this high volume of calls has created some delay in the response time of the Graffiti Abatement Team, we ask for patience from the public as we work very hard to catch up on calls, and we also ask for your vigilance in reporting and removing graffiti in a timely manner. If you do remove graffiti, please remember to take a photo first and send it to knelson@cityofsalem.net Also, remember that graffiti is a crime. Please report in-progress crimes immediately by calling 911 and report suspicious activity.

Our community has been very aggressive at keeping graffiti in check, and we want to thank you for being our partner in fighting crime and not allowing the vandals to win!

Graffiti Hotline: 503-371-4264

Sgt. Doug Carpenter
Salem Police Department
Crime Prevention Unit
555 Liberty St SE #130
Salem, Oregon 97301
503-588-6050 ext 7030
dcarpenter@cityofsalem.net

Salem police officer shoots, kills pit bull running amok

Reading this story we can be thankful that Salem has its priorities straight and freely allows dogs that terrify and sometimes maim or even kill people while protecting us from the terror of urban hens!

Police responded to a report of the dog running loose and charging passers-by near Liberty Elementary School at 7 p.m., Salem Police Lt. Keith Blair said.

Officer Jacob Pratt found the pit bull at its owner's home in the 4900 block of Liberty Road S and called for backup and an animal-control stick to contain the dog, Blair said. While he waited, the dog charged Pratt, who fatally shot it, Blair said.

Investigation led police to determine that the dog had lunged at several people and that one woman had to dodge out of the dog's way to avoid being bitten, Blair said.

Why is it called "The Land of the Free" again? (click to expand view)

Think health care costs a lot now?

Image via Wikipedia

(h/t to Hank for forwarding this.)

Think health costs are hot now? Factor in global warming

A report by University College London and The Lancet, a leading public health journal, recently called global warming the greatest threat to public health this century. As I described in a June 21 column, the report said climate change will produce worsening patterns of vector and waterborne disease; heat and respiratory illnesses; malnutrition; and harm from extreme weather events, flooding and sea level rise. Billions of people in both developed and developing nations will be affected.

In Oregon, for instance, asthma is already a major problem, and it will expand as temperatures increase. Heat-related illnesses will grow as we experience more frequent periods of 100-degree days. West Nile Virus, which is caused by infected mosquitoes that migrate northward as temperatures warm, has appeared here and eventually could spread as it has in other states.

The costs of health care are certain to skyrocket under these conditions. A study produced in February by my program at the University of Oregon, for example, found that global warming would generate a minimum of $764 million in additional health-related costs for Oregonians by 2020.

These costs are likely to increase to at least $1.3 billion by 2040. Other states will experience even higher costs. Employers and the self-insured will find it exceedingly difficult to pay the additional costs of climate-induced health impacts. Further, unless every American is automatically covered, those most affected by the health impacts of climate change — including the infirm, children, elderly and low-income individuals — will be left to fend for themselves. . . .

The media has done a good job of documenting the disinformation and consequent hysteria generated by opponents to health care reform. Less well-documented are the remarkably similar strategies being used to stop climate policies. A good example is a two-inch-thick document I recently received from a journalist friend, published by a right-wing group. It claimed to refute the science of today's global warming.

If it weren't so frightening, it would be laughable. Millions of dollars undoubtedly were spent on the publication. It has a glossy cover, is made to look like a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and almost certainly was mailed to hundreds of reporters — and probably others — nationwide.

But rather than being filled with peer reviewed science, it is laced with anti- government and environmental rhetoric. Most of the claims it makes to refute the fact that the Earth is warming primarily due to human activity are irrelevant. It cherry picks data to make its case and omits other important data. Many of the key points are nonsensical. The credibility of the document, however, does not matter. The goal is to create doubt among the unsuspecting about the veracity of global warming and thus stifle support for climate protection policies.

There is too much at stake now to let this type of cynical behavior rule the day. . . .

Bob Doppelt is director of Resource Innovations and the Climate Leadership Initiative at the University of Oregon.

(And here's a link to another sobering piece very much worth reading.)

A contender for "Worst Op-Ed Ever Committed"

How's the view, Michael Lynch? Image by Spartacus007 via Flickr

Thank God that online newspapers are interactive -- the scores of comments to this execrable POS are far more well-informed and insightful than the subject op-ed.

The funny thing is, it's hard to know how to improve Lynch's piece. Trying to argue that oil is in practical terms infinite is so unhinged from reality that ad hominem attacks and misdirection ploys are just about all he's got. He reminds me of the guy with the pistol in the Russian Roulette game after five other players: "Well, there's been no explosion for those guys, so I'm going to be fine."

Nice open-source rebuttal being built here.

UPDATE: hysterically funny and on-target dismemberment of Lynch's "work" here.

As Salem prepares to forever ban agriculture from 200 acres of rich farmland

Salem's commitment to ending hunger --- one sticker deep at most. Image by ginnerobot via Flickr

Before leaping into the fantasy solutions proposed below (skyscraper soilless gardens anyone?), shouldn't we try at least preserving some of the land we have been farming successfully for 150 years?

Funny how many people in Salem seem to think that hunger elsewhere won't mean problems here. Apparently for these people, Salem exists in a perfect bubble, untethered to a world where more than a billion people go hungry regularly -- with billions more expected soon, including millions of Americans and thousands of Oregonians.

Just as we're recognizing how difficult feeding a world of 7 billion is, Salem is proposing to knock out 200 acres of prime, well-situated close-in farmland. Because, to some of the well-fed, "natural re$toration" dollars count more than other peoples' hunger, even when those hungry people are right here in Salem.

If climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. . . .

The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India's agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.

What's more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.

Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world's hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans. . . .

Bad Precedent Rising: Still time to speak out

This is an old Oregon plat map. One of the very first and most important acts of government in North America has been platting land and defending those boundaries. Image by Beaverton Historical Society via Flickr

Sometimes it seems that there's simply no idea so bad that some body of elected officials won't embrace it heartily, despite its gross defects.

Take rewarding people who poach public park land, for instance. One of the first and oldest principles in law is that you cannot obtain title to government land by adverse possession. This reflects a deep and historically unbroken recognition that public land is a special form of public trust. That is, it's not just that the land is valuable, the way cash is valuable. It's more that public lands are irreplaceable, and public officials are simply trustees for that land for the rest of us, caretakers in other words; it is not theirs to give away to their friends, campaign contributors, or even sympathetic but careless homeowners who encroach on it.

The Marion County Commissioners appear determined to make the worst caricatures of politicians come to life as they, against all reason and advice, try to create a terrible precedent by giving away something that is not theirs to give, stealing it from the rest of us and violating their oaths of office to do so:

Problems arise when squatters claim public land. Squatting is like stealing because it is taking possession of something that doesn’t belong to you.

In spite of that basic truth, Marion County Commissioners are considering giving public land to property owners who have no claim to it.

The hearing on this case is called: PLA/FP/Greenway Case No. 09-017

And it is taking place Wednesday, August 19 (tomorrow), at 4PM, at the County Building; 555 Court Street, Main Floor.

Here’s the background:

Property owners bought property next to Spong’s Landing (a county park) and fenced off some of the park land.

In May 2008, Marion County Public Works wrote to the property owners ordering them to remove the sections of their fence that enclosed a part the park. The property owners appealed and asked the County to give them title to the enclosed park land.

This required a hearing where NO ONE testified in favor of yielding the park land. In spite of the public outcry, the commissioners voted to sell the land to the property owners for $5000.

Concerned citizens put up the money and filed an appeal with the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA). LUBA agreed with the citizens and told the commissioners to find another solution.

Now the commissioners are simply redrawing the Spong’s Landing property line and giving the park land to the property owners.

Giving park land away like this is extremely unusual. There are no provisions for it in the Comprehensive Plan and the Marion County Parks Commission objects to it. It doesn’t serve the public interest, and it ignores the unanimous will of the people.

The Commissioners could have followed the rules and supported staff’s legal notice ordering the property owners to vacate the park land. Instead they have let the matter drag on for several months and consume thousands of dollars of public funds.

The Commissioners should stick to the rules.

Please attend or testify that the property line adjustment be DENIED.

Testifying is one way you can claim standing if there needs to be another appeal.

For more information contact: Aileen Kaye, 503-743-4567

Intl. Energy Assn. chief economist: Oil peaks within 10 years

The zeppelin is our economy. The photo is of our economy reacting once the implications of ever-scarcer oil supplies at ever-higher prices sink in and make the recent credit collapse look like a Sunday picnic. Image by e-strategyblog.com via Flickr

Given the incendiary nature of the warning -- essentially an announcement that all global economic growth ends when its key ingredient starts becoming more and more scarce -- you can't fault him too much for trying to get in via sleight of hand of saying that it was still a future event foretold (rather than a recent event becoming more evident every day). We can expect all similarly situated experts to continuously sound the warning about the "impending" problem right up to the instant that they start saying that, "Wups, it appears we peaked a few years ago." At which point our economic bubble doesn't just burst -- it acts as if it was a Hindenberg-sized bubble of hydrogen all along.

This is going to have an effect on Salem (and everyplace else in the developed -- read, oil-addicted -- world) that is impossible to overstate. For starts, since all human activity starts with food, it means that distant food is going to quickly become an unaffordable luxury for most of us . . . a distant memory as it were. It also means that we have only a few years to invest real money and, even more important, a lot of time in learning to do agriculture without abundant fossil fuels, and to build soil health as much as possible wherever we are, because that is the true foundation of our economy.

It's time for us to act with dispatch and purpose, because it will be much harder to act when the economy is collapsing around our ears. Dmitry Orlov's prescient book "Reinventing Collapse" has much to offer here, based on the example of the collapse Soviet Union. We need to start preparing ourselves for having the props drop out from under what we think of as "the way things are." That phrase needs to be excised from our minds -- because "the way things are" is going to be undergoing a tremendous upheaval in the next decade.

One thing we very much need is to start reducing the resources that we're squandering on the military and start redirecting them towards enhancing our capability to feed ourselves using minimal or no fossil fuel inputs.

I propose that Oregon start by establishing an OATC (Oregon Agricultural Transition Corps) program along the lines of the Pentagon's ROTC programs: full ride scholarships + books + monthly stipend + summer internships to students who would major in low-input agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry and commit to serving some time (one year for each year in the program, for example) working in county extension offices supporting local farmers and gardeners throughout Oregon. Think of this as Master Gardeners on steroids, or "education as if eating mattered." Because we need a whole lot more people to be a lot more intimately involved with their food once we can no longer make up for our ignorance and disconnection from our land with fossil fuels.

Be afraid. Be very afraid: The tundra is outgassing CO2/methane

Turns out, a witty license plate for a gasoline powered car isn't enough. We needed to act before nature's balance tipped. We didn't. Image by 37 °C via Flickr

Sub-Arctic timebomb: warming speeds CO2 release from soil

PARIS (AFP) – Climate change is speeding up the release of carbon dioxide from frigid peatlands in the sub-Arctic, fuelling a vicious circle of global warming, according to a study to be published Thursday.

An increase of just 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over current average temperatures would more than double the CO2 escaping from the peatlands.

Northern peatlands contain one-third of the planet's soil-bound organic carbon, the equivalent of half of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation found in wetlands or peatlands, which cover between two and three percent of the global land mass. While present in all climate zones, the vast majority of peatlands are found in sub-Arctic regions.

A team of European researchers led by Ellen Dorrepaal of the University of Amsterdam artificially warmed natural peatlands in Abisko, in northern Sweden, by 1.0 C over a period of eight years.

The experimental plots exhaled and extra 60 percent of CO2 in Spring and 52 percent in Summer over the entire period, reported the study, published in the British journal Nature.

"Climate warming therefore accelerates respiration of the extensive, subsurface carbon reservoir in peatlands to a much larger extent than previously thought," the authors conclude.

The findings highlight the extreme sensitivity of northern peatland carbon reservoirs to climate change, and the danger of a self-reinforcing "positive feedback" in which the CO2 released adds to global warming.

And unlike the boreal forests in Canada, Russia and Northern Europe, very little of the extra carbon was absorbed by additional vegetation spurred by the warmer temperatures.

The researchers warn that annual surplus CO2 released by peatlands with a 1.0 C increase -- between 38 and 100 million tonnes -- could cancel out the European Union objective of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 92 million tonnes per year.

In another study released last month, the Global Carbon Project based in Australia found that the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic and boreal regions of the world is some 1.5 trillion tonnes, more than double previous estimates.

This is it, folks -- the moment when the long, long, ricketyricketycreak ascent up one side of the roller coaster just eases and you stand poised--just for a moment--and see that first tremendous drop ahead of you and you realize that there's no getting off the ride now.

We've pumped enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to destabilize the climate to the point where now, we don't have to do anything at all --- we're just along for the ride, and it doesn't stop until a new equilibrium is reached, probably in a much, much hotter and less benign climate.

Congratulations to all the climate change deniers, you succeeded in your mission of preventing any meaningful action until it was too late.

Dangerous curves

In August 2003, we were living in the Midwest, and we sweltered through a terrible heatwave -- which led to the most recent great blackout in the US, which sent us back to pre-electric days.

This made me even more attuned to the stress that climate change is placing on our electrical grid (a failure of which was the proximate cause of that blackout, the real cause of which is our blockheaded habit of thinking that we don't have to live within any natural limits and that we can use as much energy as we want to bail us out of our poor decisions, such as to build millions of houses and commercial office buildings so that they must draw immense amounts of energy at all times).

So I've been following this curve quite closely this week.

Maybe the best quick read ever on the industrial phood nightmare

A phactory pharm -- funny, it doesn't look like the image on the packages. They NEVER show the gigantic manure lagoons. Image by SkyTruth via Flickr

A sample:

It is in the 1970s that Smithfield Foods revolutionizes hog production. "What we did in the pork industry is what Perdue and Tyson did in the poultry business," Joseph W. Luter III, chairman and chief executive of Smithfield, told the New York Times in 2000.

According to a Rolling Stone exposé, Smithfield "controls every stage of production, from the moment a hog is born until the day it passes through the slaughterhouse. [It] imposed a new kind of contract on farmers: The company would own the living hogs; the contractors would raise the pigs and be responsible for managing the hog shit and disposing of dead hogs. The system made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive -- those who could not handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of business."

In the 1950s, there were 2.1 million hog farmers, with an average of 31 hogs each. As of 2007, there were 79,000 hog farmers left, averaging over 1,000 hogs each. A single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah holds a half-million hogs and produces more shit every day than all the residents of Manhattan.

Rolling Stone's stunning report describes the lakes of shit that surround pig factories as the color of Pepto Bismol because of the "interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs."

Vegetarians who think they are unaffected by this toxic fecal frappe should think again: The sludge is often used to "fertilize" crops that end up on your table.

Beef, poultry and hog CAFOs could not exist without large-scale environmental devastation. Governments at every level exempt these operations from the laws and regulations covering air pollution, water pollution and solid-waste disposal. They are also largely free from proper bio-surveillance, that is, public monitoring to detect, observe and report on the outbreak of diseases.

Mike Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door, writes that scrutiny of the interface between human and animal diseases is "primitive, often nonexistent" because Smithfield, IBP and Tyson would have to spend money on surveillance and upgrade conditions at their hellish animal factories.

Read it all here. Then start growing some food, even just a single tomato or zucchini -- and help get hens legalized here in Salem.

Yet another recall showing why we need to encourage MORE local food production

Plum tree laden with fruit. With some creative thinking, Salem could create a vast supply of healthy & inexpensive food for the Food Bank and for the Saturday Market just by putting fruit trees in parking strips and starting an "adopt-a-tree" program to ensure the fruit is tended and harvested. Image via Wikipedia

Another industrial phood nightmare, another reminder that what people in Salem need is more encouragement and support for growing or buying locally grown food that has never joined the industrial phood system.

That means encouraging backyard and frontyard gardening, replacing street trees with fruit trees, community gardens, support for small market gardeners just starting out, and, yes, allowing residents to keep some hens.

Don't know how to get started? Call Your Home Harvests.

UPDATE: Great article on how the industrial phood system has mastered the arts of using our evolved tastes against us.

The Issue that Surrounds Everything

One of the things we're going to need in the future is a lot more entrepreneurial activity. The old economy, based on gigantic and ever-increasing flows of energy and materials (and wastes) is grinding to a halt, and won't be coming back. In the future, there will be a lot fewer massive institutions employing hundreds of thousands of people in big bureaucratic kingdoms, with benefits. People will have to make a lot more of their own livelihood, and they will have to do so much more locally.

One of the big barriers to the kind of innovation and entrepreneurial behavior we need is our weird system of health insurance that's tied to employment rather than citizenship. By tying access to health insurance to working for someone else -- and typically, that means a very big someone else -- we discourage people from creating precisely the kind of ventures that we will need the most of in the future: small, local services that are aimed at meeting each others' basic needs.

People in the health insurance industry are, no doubt, occasionally wonderful people -- just like some of the people who sell guns and drugs in the black market are sometimes wonderful people. But their industry is a parasite, consuming 30% of our sky-high health care costs and producing exactly no health benefit. In fact, our insurance system is one of the root causes of our insanely poor overall rankings on national health indices: we are far and away #1 in spending but about 35th in health results. A good deal of that is due to the fact that we treat health care like a non-essential, and we allow other people do without access to it (so long as we ourselves have access). Thus, people don't follow good health maintenance and illness-prevention strategies and the giant money-sucking leeches in the health insurance biz don't want to pay for prevention because there's no guarantee that the eventual savings will accrue to them instead of their competitor.

Truly an insane system, but one that is so fantastically profitable for a few that it will not die easily, despite the huge amount of suffering and needless waste that it inflicts on us.

Socialist Health Plan? In Norway, Obama's Plan Not Even Close

If Michael Steele and the Republicans really believe that President Obama is proposing a socialist health plan, they need to get out more.

I've just returned from a research trip to Norway, where their universal health system really is socialist. It's also much less expensive than the current U.S. system, so maybe the Republicans would like it if they checked it out. The non-socialists in Norway support it because it works so well, especially compared with "the bad old days" of private medicine, when even the doctors' association advocated for socialized medicine as the only affordable way to make quality care available to all Norwegians.

One reason Norwegians like their system is that it's pro- economic innovation because it's not tied to the employer. Norwegians are free to change jobs for more challenging opportunities, or try their wings as entrepreneurs, because they don't have to worry about insurance - it's with them wherever they go. Economist Jonathan Gruber of MIT is one of many economists who believe that U.S. employer-tied health insurance is a drag on progress. But Obama's plan accepts the status quo even though it might not be affordable.

Norwegians like their system because it cuts red tape. The patient-doctor relationship isn't complicated by multiple insurances; if you need care, you get it as a matter of right. No bills to pay, no plans to juggle, no worry about your dependents, and no worry about your becoming a burden to your children.

Because Norwegians are practical, they enjoy saving money for quality health care. On a per capita basis, Norwegians spend $4,763 per year, and cover everyone, while U.S.'ers spend $7,290. By various standards of health quality, like life expectancy or rate of preventable deaths, Norway does better than the U.S. One key measure is physicians per capita: the U.S. has 2.43 physicians compared with Norway's 4 doctors per 1,000 population, even though Norway spends a third less of its Gross Domestic Product on health care than the U.S. does. (These numbers are from Bruce Bartlett, Forbes magazine columnist who was a former U.S. Treasury Department economist.)

While in Norway I did hear complaints - Norwegians famously believe everything can work better than it does - but I didn't interview anyone, from left wing to right wing, who would change the basic system. Maybe it's time for U.S. politicians to learn from what other countries are doing right.

Serious D & G

For thermal, read "fossil fuels" -- coal and natural gas, the very things that are melting the poles. Image via Wikipedia

900,000 GW Hours

Jeff is using nice round numbers, and siding optimistically more often than not, but his goal is to see what it will take to simply offset the energy lost from the declining availability of oil as we slide down the far side of Hubbert's Peak by converting to renewables. Jeff puts that figure at about 5% attrition as a round number which has historical precedent, and then converts the current Oil use in the world into BTU's for lack of a better unit, and then finally converts that into electricity as that is what renewables are good at. The result of offsetting 5% of our current annual oil use with elecricity? 900,000 GW hours.

Lets put that into a measurement that we are used to seeing on our monthly bills: KWH. 900,000,000,000 KWH. Frankly that is a number too big to even comprehend. So I tried to convert it into how many gasifiers we would need to build to make that much electricity since we can make 40,000 KWH each. Yep LOTS better – we only need to build 2.25 billion gasifiers and cut down 3.5 milllion square miles of willow coppice annually to power them. And that is only to replace what we are losing each year, i.e. we have to build that many EACH YEAR just to maintain our energy status quo. That also means we will need to build 1000% more PV and Wind generators than we did in 2008 (the current record holder) and then do it EVERY year, for the next 40-50 years. Considering the best PV is only getting 15 watts per sq ft that is an amazing amount of area to cover.

Conservation and efficiency gains you ask? We can only pray that it offset the dual demographic pressures of rising population and the desire of the Third World to drive an F-150 to eat a Big Mac for lunch every day, and I didn't even get into EROEI, front loading the carbon emissions to retool our society, or the fact that there simply may not be enough copper left to wire the generators that we will need. Something to think about next time you see that cheery bumper sticker about "The Answer is blowing in the wind…" or "The Answer Comes up Every Morning". PV and especially wind generation will certainly have a huge role to play in our future, likely the same critical role as they did to electrify the farms of great grandparents; I am rapidly becoming convinced that Energy DESCENT is the reality – and that the Status Quo is already living History.

A question for those who think man isn't causing climate chaos

Why, in the six-thousand years since God created the Earth, did he wait until man started driving up CO2 levels up, up, up to start erasing the poles and all the species therein? (Click on image to view fully.)

Best editorial in a long while: Paul VanDeVelder

Image via Wikipedia

Saving the Columbia and Snake river salmon

If ever there were a story that foreshadowed the political and legal Waterloos that loom in seeking solutions to climate change, surely that cautionary tale is the one about the Columbia and Snake rivers' salmon and their imminent extinction. And like most stories about endangered species or environmental threats, this one is not only about fish and rivers -- it's about us.

The policy deadlock that has resulted from the debate among stakeholders along the Columbia and the Snake -- aluminum smelters, the Bonneville Power Administration, politicians, Indian tribes, states, conservation groups, fishermen, barge operators, agribusiness and wheat farmers -- has flushed billions of taxpayer dollars out to sea over the last 15 years while doing very little to prevent 13 endangered salmon stocks from going extinct. . . .

Throughout this stalemate, fish counts have continued to fall, and the underlying science is clear: In river after river where dams have been removed, native fish populations have rebounded and thrived. As the government's former chief aquatic biologist, Don Chapman, concluded, dam removal is the most effective strategy for saving endangered native fish stocks from extinction.

This was the conclusion reached by the Idaho Statesman newspaper back in 1997 after it conducted a yearlong study of the Snake River dams. The paper reported that the economic benefits of a healthy fishery -- and the resultant tens of thousands of jobs -- would swamp the benefits of leaving the dams in place. . . .

If the law and science are unable to trump politics to save this fishery -- a fishery that was the most productive in the world just two generations ago -- how will we ever meet the towering challenges posed by global climate change?