April 2008 archive

1. The Los Angeles Times reports Bush opens summit with leaders of Canada and Mexico. George W. Bush, Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and Stephen Harper of Canada are meeting for the fourth annual summit between the three nations. New Orleans was chosen as a venue by the Bush administration for propaganda value. Bush said he was celebrating “the comeback of a great American city” that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

   The summit will focus on trade, immigration, and cross-border drug and weapons smuggling, just as free-trade agreements and NAFTA in particular are under political attack more than at any time since the U.S.-Canada-Mexico agreement began eliminating tariffs and other barriers to North American trade 14 years ago.

   Three-way trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico has grown since 1994 from about $290 billion to $930 billion, according to U.S. government statistics.

   But Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, long an opponent of the pact, said the increase was largely the result of a “massive surge in imports” into the United States, bringing with it what the group calculated was a 691% increase in the trade deficit attributed to NAFTA.

   According to the AP, Bush refuses to admit the U.S. is in a recession. “Bush, replying to criticism from Democratic presidential candidates, said Tuesday that ‘now is not the time to renegotiate … or walk away from’ the North American Free Trade Agreement… Asked about the state of the U.S. economy, Bush said: ‘We’re not in a recession. We are in a slowdown.‘”

Four at Four continues below the fold with stories of big oil supporting state-sponsored terrorism, a plea to “eliminate capitalism” to save the planet and humanity, and an update on the Chinese arms ship en route to Zimbabwe.

The Rant, a fine human tradition. And one I occasionally trade on shamelessly. Humans have odd social rules, especially those of us humans descended from the Puritan/Protestant tradition of hiding our emotions. But it seems to be somewhat socially/politically acceptable to, every once in a while, but not too often, let our emotions out in one big burst. Our fellow humans seem to, for the most part, understand that this is a necessary, or at least inevitable, part of living in an emotionally repressed society.

Iow, we are ‘allowed’ to let our true feelings, such as frustration and anger out once in a while, as long as we ‘act normal’ the rest of the time. And I agree. And so I do my best, lol, to act normal. Ranting makes people uncomfortable, rants are usually mostly raw emotion. Raw emotion is in itself uncomfortable, because it triggers an emotional response in us, and we don’t like to be emotional. We are not good at it, we haven’t been trained to deal with it, we don’t know how to respond to it. It makes us uncomfortable, in a society built around the idea that comfort is the highest goal.



Abandon Comfort, All Ye Who Enter Here

Here’s a short little ditty for your consideration…

My youngest sister once asked my mom what the difference between a republican and a democrat was.

she answered with this story…

Up yours, America!

Remember when the Chicken Hawks thought this image was SO cool?

That was because they understood the idea of hiding from anything more dangerous than a Cheeto was really important, and they needed someone else to do what they would not, could not and never would.

Happy Earth Day.

Maybe we should start with a disclosure that I am Gaylord Nelson’s biographer, which may give me a somewhat different perspective on Earth Day, founded by Senator Nelson (pictured), than some others.

That said, do take time to read Meteor Blade’s commentary and Q-A with Denis Hayes, who has been associated with Earth Day since Gaylord Nelson hired him to coordinate the first one in 1970.

Earth Day, it is true, has not solved all of the world’s environmental problems.  But it has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on how people think about and relate to the environment.

Gaylord Nelson’s primary goal in launching Earth Day was to get environmental issues a prominent place on this country’s political agenda, and it certainly accomplished that long ago.  On the first Earth Day, seven months after Nelson announced plans for what he envisioned as a campus environmental teach-in, 20 million people — 10 per cent of the US population at the time — participated in some way.

Earth Day introduced the Environmental Decade, an unparalleled period of legislative and grassroots activity to protect the nation’s environment. More significant environmental legislation was signed into law during the eleven-year “decade” (1970-1980) than during the 170-year period prior to Earth Day.  Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental laws, and hundreds of other public lands bills to protect and conserve natural resources.

Philip Shabecoff, a noted environmental writer, described it this way:

After Earth Day, nothing was the same. Earth Day brought revolutionary change and touched off a great burst of activism that profoundly affected the nation’s laws, its economy, its corporations, its farms, its politics, science, education, religion, and journalism… Most important, the social forces unleashed after Earth Day changed, probably forever, the way Americans think about the environment.

It’s not like there’s nothing happening on the Olympic torch front. There are already protests in Australia as the torch heads toward that country: http://www.news.com.au/heralds…

Lin Hatfield Dobbs, a social justice campaigner, has pulled out of the Olympic torch relay in Australia, saying of the torch, “For a lot of people it still carries the meaning of harmony but for an increasing number of the global community watching it’s carrying a lot of meaning around human rights.” link: http://afp.google.com/article/…

And the International Herald-Tribune reports that in Japan, instead of the torch relay starting at the enigmatic Zenkoji Temple, it will begin in a parking lot: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap…

But all of that really pales in comparison to an event happening right now, involving multiple countries, including the United States and China. It includes an act of non-cooperation by trade union workers. A political party has spoken out, expressing fears that its members would become the victims of violence.

And yet we are treated to the same response by the Chinese government, that this event shouldn’t be “politicized”.  

According to this Yahoo!News story…

…for those living in the Northern Hemisphere, a great “window of opportunity” for viewing Mercury in the evening sky is about to open up.

(Since the progress-o-sphere is about to go primary-day-crazy, here’s something to possibly counter all the primary talk from the state of Maine! Ohio? Mississi– Um, which state is it again?)