Hi. I just got this key to understanding of the latest tsunami roiling the world. Back to basics, and beauty. I regularly get small notes, some of this quality. I'd like to continue posting such at the top. Let me know if they distract from the central themes. -Ed
--- From: Michael Schwartz Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 6:58 PM Subject: Fw: depictions of muhammed Dear all If you are curious about the controversy over the Danish political cartoons, here is a very good source. It has a pictorial history of art and satire related to Mohammed, with good quality visuals of some gorgeous art that contains his image, some later work with this face erased (in deference to what was a growing sense that his image was not acceptable), and a whole host of the political satire, including some really rugged, horrible stuff. Including all the Danish images. It's long, but engaging, particularly some of the gorgeous early art. Here's the site: http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/ *** http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/opinion/06krugman.html?th&emc=th The Effectiveness Thing By PAUL KRUGMAN NY Times Op-Ed: February 6, 2006 We are ruled by bunglers. Every major venture by the Bush administration, from the occupation of Iraq to the Medicare drug program, has turned into an epic saga of incompetence. In retrospect, the Clinton years look like a golden era of good government. Given the Bush administration's evident inability to govern, Democratic electoral victories should be a sure thing. But they aren't. Why? Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion - which is sure to generate a lot of angry mail - that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn't. All you have to do is consider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Under the elder George Bush, FEMA was used as a dumping ground for political cronies, with predictable results. Descriptions of FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 sound just like the response to Katrina: for three days FEMA was nowhere to be found, and when it finally arrived its relief efforts were utterly incompetent. Bill Clinton changed all that by choosing James Lee Witt, who knew a lot about disaster management, to run FEMA, and encouraging him to run the agency professionally. The result was a spectacular improvement in performance. FEMA, formerly considered one of the worst agencies in the federal government, won praise for its quick and effective responses to events like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. But George W. Bush restored the practice of stuffing FEMA with cronies; the ludicrous Michael Brown is gone, but others remain. And the agency has reverted to impotence and incompetence. As FEMA went, so went government as a whole. On one side, FEMA's rebirth under Mr. Clinton wasn't unique. For example, a similar tale of miraculous turnaround can be told about the Veterans Health Administration. And I'd argue that there was a broad improvement in the government's professionalism during the Clinton era. On the other side, what happened to FEMA starting in 2001 is typical: politicization and cronyism have become standard operating procedure throughout the federal government, even when the need for professionalism is obvious. (Recall how unqualified political loyalists were sent to run Iraq during the crucial first year.) That's one main reason President Bush has failed at everything he's tried except cutting taxes - and winning elections. Which brings me to the political puzzle. Our leaders' bungling hasn't escaped public notice: more than half of Americans say that the Bush administration has been a failure. Yet it's not at all clear that Democrats can translate this sentiment into large political gains - because despite the governing skill of the last Democratic administration, the public doesn't think of Democrats as being effective. A lot of this has to do with the way the news media cover politics: they focus mainly on Washington, and many news organizations - especially the broadcast media - prefer to do horse-race stories rather than discuss policy issues. And from that point of view, the Democrats present a sorry spectacle. Not only are they a minority in Congress, shut out of power; they're an undisciplined minority constantly facing defections from their own ranks on crucial issues. The issue of Iraq epitomizes the political paradox. The war has been a monstrous policy failure, but it remains a political asset to the Bush administration, because it divides the Democrats and makes them look ineffectual. Yet if the Democrats could present a united front on Iraq, they'd probably have a lot of public support. You'd never know it from the range of views represented on the Sunday talk shows, but a majority of Americans believes both that the administration deliberately misled the nation about W.M.D.'s and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal. And the public's views on other issues seem to favor the Democratic position - or, rather, what the Democratic position would probably be if the Democrats could agree on one - even more strongly. For example, the public believes by two to one that the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. The point is that Democrats are largely winning the battle of ideas: on the issues, public opinion is shifting in their direction. But to take advantage of that shift, they have to overcome an image of ineffectiveness that is partly the fault of the news media, but largely the result of their own disunion. *** http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1700409,00.html The Guardian February 2, 2006 It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both Our economic system is unsustainable by its very nature. The only response to climate chaos and peak oil is major social change By Robert Newman There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system. Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with. Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis. On these pages we have been called on to admire capital's ability to take robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20% reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets are over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not any more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable, what with the packaging, food miles and destruction of British farming. Small, independent suppliers, processors and retailers or community-owned shops selling locally produced food provide a social glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is true of food co-ops such as Manchester's bulk-distribution scheme serving former "food deserts". All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become non-profit eco-networks supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the Fortune 500 corporations that will save us all and ecologists are denounced as anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an anti-capitalist position is what's alienating the mainstream from their irresistible arguments. But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction by the bizarre discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how insipid the solutions proposed? Go on a march to the House of Commons. Write a letter to your MP. And what system does your MP hold with? Name one that isn't pro-capitalist. Oh, all right then, smartarse. But name five. We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced. Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our species is the discovery of huge new reserves of oil, or even the burning into the sky of all the oil that's already known about, because the climate chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of industrial society a sideshow bagatelle. Therefore, since we've got to make the switch from oil anyway, why not do it now? Solutions need to come from people themselves. But once set up, local autonomous groups need to be supported by technology transfers from state to community level. Otherwise it's too expensive to get solar panels on your roof, let alone set up a local energy grid. Far from utopian, this has a precedent: back in the 1920s the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Battersea had their own electricity-generating grid for their residents. So long as energy corporations exist, however, they will fight tooth and nail to stop whole postal districts seceding from the national grid. Nor will the banks and the CBI be neutral bystanders, happy to observe the inroads participatory democracy makes in reducing carbon emissions, or a trade union striking for carbon quotas. There are many organisational projects we can learn from. The Just Transition Alliance, for example, was set up by black and Latino groups in the US working with labour unions to negotiate alliances between "frontline workers and fenceline communities", that is to say between union members who work in polluting industries and stand to lose their jobs if the plant is shut down, and those who live next to the same plant and stand to lose their health if it's not. We have to start planning seriously not just a system of personal carbon rationing but at what limit to set our national carbon ration. Given a fixed UK carbon allowance, what do we spend it on? What kinds of infrastructure do we wish to build, retool or demolish? What kinds of organisational structures will work as climate change makes pretty much all communities more or less "fenceline" and almost all jobs more or less "frontline"? (Most of our carbon emissions come when we're at work). To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where the debate is at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow morning. If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it's wise to remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both. · Robert Newman's History of Oil will be broadcast on More4 next month · [EMAIL PROTECTED] Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 To subscribe: http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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