Category Archives: Activism

Bee-Positive Action

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A young German here in Buenos Aires alerted me to an unfolding story I’d not heard of – the decline in the bee population in the US and UK, attributed by some to the genetic modification of crops, by others to the use of pesticides. Other experts blame cell-phones. Or stress from migration.

At Natural Choices, one writer, Ladd Smith, describes the crisis:

“A topic of real concern to gardeners across the country is the recent major decline in the honeybee population. Referred to as “colony collapse disorder (CCD),” it was first reported in the U.S. in October 2006 and spread rapidly, with beekeepers reporting losses of between 50 percent to 90 percent of bees. While the exact causes are not known, there are a variety of theories, including pesticide use, migratory stress and the bees’ immune system failure.”

The article offers the following suggestions:

1. Plant a bee garden (this takes a wide variety of plants and shade)
2. Create an insectary (don’t use chemicals pesticides that kill insects)
3. Add Orchard Mason bees (non-aggressive)

Monsanto’s Toxic Path in South America

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Agribusiness titan Monsanto is the goliath every activist would like to slay:

Its patented Round Up brand of herbicide is ubiquitous in farmland world over, but new research suggests the product poses a danger to human health. [Note: an earlier version of this post dropped the word herbicide by accident so it read as though soy contained the chemical. I corrected it but the google cache still shows the old version in the header. Apologies. I often think I’ve corrected something and saved it and find that the save didn’t actually take place…]

From Marie Trigona at America’s Program

“A study released by an Argentine scientist earlier this year reports that glyphosate, patented by Monsanto under the name “Round Up,” causes birth defects when applied in doses much lower than what is commonly used in soy fields.

The study was directed by a leading embryologist, Dr. Andres Carrasco, a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. In his office in the nation’s top medical school, Dr. Carrasco shows me the results of the study, pulling out photos of birth defects in the embryos of frog amphibians exposed to glyphosate. The frog embryos grown in petri dishes in the photos looked like something from a futuristic horror film, creatures with visible defects—one eye the size of the head, spinal cord deformations, and kidneys that are not fully developed.

“We injected the amphibian embryo cells with glyphosate diluted to a concentration 1,500 times than what is used commercially and we allowed the amphibians to grow in strictly controlled conditions.” Dr. Carrasco reports that the embryos survived from a fertilized egg state until the tadpole stage, but developed obvious defects which would compromise their ability to live in their normal habitats.

Pointing to the color photos spread on his desk, Dr. Carrasco says, “On the side where the contaminated cell was injected you can see defects in the eye and defects in the cartilage.”

For the past 15 months, Dr. Carrasco’s research team documented embryos’ reactions to glyphosate. Embryological study is based on the premise that all vertebrate animals share a common design during the development stages. This accepted scientific premise means that the study indicates human embryonic cells exposed to glyphosate, even in low doses, would also suffer from defects.

“When a field is fumigated by an airplane, it’s difficult to measure how much glysophate remains in the body,” says Dr. Carrasco. “When you inject the embryonic cell with glysophate, you know exactly how much glysophate you are putting into the cell and you have a strict control.”

Glyphosate is the top selling herbicide in the world and is widely used on soy crops in Argentina.

Monoculture soy is grown on more than 42 million acres of fields across Argentina and sprayed with more than 44 million gallons of glyphosate annually. It is part of a technological package sold by Monsanto that includes Round Up Ready seeds GM to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate. This allows growers to fumigate directly onto the GM soy seed, killing nearby weeds without killing the crop. In the winter, crops are sprayed to kill off weeds and seeds are then planted without having to plow the soil, a process commonly referred to as “no-till farming.” Nearly, 95% of the 47 million tons of soy grown in Argentina in 2007 was genetically modified, adopting the Round Up ready technology marketed by Monsanto.

The study on the top-selling agrochemical has alarmed policymakers, so much so that Dr. Carrasco has received anonymous threats and industry leaders demanded access to his laboratory immediately following the study’s release. Industry leader Monsanto wouldn’t talk to the Americas Program for this story, but in a press release on its website, the company says that “glyphosate is safe.”

My Comment:

There – the cat’s out of the bag. Now you know why I’m down here. South America has the last remaining land masses suitable for agriculture, the greatest biodiversity, the richest vegetation, the richest fauna….

No wonder one of the most predatory and rapacious corporations in the world is also here…


More Web Abuse

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OK.  A new one. Shortly after my blog posts on antisemitism, the gunman, and racist language, I get an email in my inbox saying I’m subscribed to Pak Alert.

I didn’t pay any mind and didn’t click on it, thinking it was spam. Then I googled Pak Alert, which seems to be a news group. Glancing through it, I see it has the Protocols of the Elders of Zion listed….and some antisemitic language that I didn’t bother to read through since it was clear what it was.

I deleted the mail, thinking it was spam.

But then I got to thinking about how I got the mail. So I went and and checked and sure enough, someone had subscribed me to the group. That’s abuse, and I reported it twice to Google.

Wondering if someone wanted to create an embarrassing record to “prove” I was anti-Semitic, since I’d subscribed to the group.

Now, how did that happen? Did they get my password or can you just add an email without permission? No idea. I don’t frequent chat groups.

Tomorrow, I’m going through and making note of some of the things that have happened since I started writing for the web. It runs the gamut from name-calling to hacking, spamming, stalking, provocation, libel, threats, delinking articles, plagiarism, copyright infringement, personal harassment, forgery, invasion of privacy, sending out private email to public groups…….

Not complaining, merely observing the follies of my fellow men.

And wondering if they’re worth it.

What’s the Point of Dollar Devaluation?

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“If all a country needed to do to achieve manufacturing supremacy and economic dominance was devalue their currency then Georgia and Bosnia would be considered paragons of economic prosperity.”

—   Michael Pento, via 321 gold.

Aha. The folly of naivete. Mr. Pento’s mistake is to think that manufacturing supremacy is what our oligarchs have in mind for the US.  He must be kidding.

The goal is to destroy US economic independence (let alone dominance) and subjugate it to an international cabal centering around….guess who…the oligarchs.

Over a Million Refugees in Somalia

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In the news on Friday, May 22:

“Martin Bell, former BBC war correspondent and current UNICEF UK Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies, recently concluded a three-day trip to the north-east zone of Somali to report on the situation of children and women affected by conflict, drought, displacement and other hardships – and to shed light on UNICEF’s efforts to provide them with crucial services.
In Bossaso, one of the country’s busiest ports, Mr. Bell visited settlements for displaced people and saw firsthand the dire conditions in which they live. Displaced populations form a group of chronically vulnerable people here, lacking even the most basic social services and livelihood opportunities.
Bossaso hosts 27 camps where 40,000 people have sought refuge from other parts of the country. Over 1 million people in Somalia are internally displaced, mainly due to the conflict and insecurities in the central and southern regions..”

More at Relief Web.

Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres reports that more than 270,000 have fled to Northern Kenya, to camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, where rations have been cut by 30% and malnutrition runs at over 22%, well above the emergency threshold. That’s driving many of the refugees back to the war-zone.

My Comment

This was sent to me by a young Somali friend, who urges everyone to help in any way they can.
Now, my focus in this blog is on mass thinking, but the organization of crowds (through state propaganda, coercion, and surveillance) has as its other face, the dis-organization of crowds in times of crisis, often state-produced crisis, such as at New Orleans during Katrina, or here. Among people on the move in large groups, refugees are probably the largest group.
What is amazing to me about crowds of refugees is that they move peacefully, giving the lie to fear-mongering imagery of masses of people overwhelming civilization. That’s the sort of imagery usually conjured up by authoritarians when discussing mass migration or mass movement of any kind.

Financial Follies: Condo Builders Under Water

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In the news today, AP reports:

“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”

My Comment

Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.

Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that  “raised hopes.”

Hopes should not be raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised  – black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.

I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to  Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.

If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.

And don’t tell me they added any real value.

In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene.  I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through.  Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline,  polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.

Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.

Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.

It just doesn’t get better than that….

Beat Up a White Kid Day [Added links]

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A posting on facebook tells me that there is such a thing as “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” apparently a kind of May-day ritual.

I was astounded and first thought it must be some kind of prank, but there it is on wiki:

“However he [Judge Russo] concluded that “based on the evidence I’ve heard, May Day is reality and the evidence was overwhelming that this was an attack based on May Day and that the victim was chosen because she was white.” In drawing such a conclusion, Judge Russo suggested that white students in Cleveland’s integrated public schools have reason to fear assaults by minorities in so-called May Day attacks every May 1.”

Lila:

The judge in question was Cuyahoga juvenile court judge Russo, who was ruling on the beating up of Melissa King, a 13 year old student at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 2003, by a group of black and hispanic children. Although the immediate cause in this case was a personal vendetta, almost everyone in the case, seems to have acknowledged the reality of “Beat Up a White Kid Day.”

Since there’s been so much talk about white supremacists and their links to tax protesters and militia groups, I thought it was only right to show that such ideologies don’t rise in a vacuum. There’s plenty of hate anger to go around. [Lila: hate is misused as a word so I changed it to anger] And here’s one instance.

What was the reaction?

In Cleveland, the original story brought a flood of more than 100 letters to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in which readers wrote that in fact this had been a May-day ritual for many years in desegregated communities and that many of them had been afraid of going to school on that day.

I’ll be retuning to this blog post  to add any links to interesting aspects of the media coverage of this (or lack of it).

(And yes, I know I have two other posts I have to return to to update…bear with me).

OK.  Remember Jena in Louisiana ? In 2006 a white student, Justin Barker, was attacked by six black students, setting off a case that had the whole country in a ruckus.

In this Alternet piece, a black commentator looks at Jena and sees excessive fear of young black males that leads to their being sentenced much more stiffly than whites for comp[arable crimes.

On one site. black readers’ comments show that the central fact of the Jena case for them was the hanging of nooses.

That was seen by many of the whites in Jena as a prank.

For the whites the physical beating far outweighed the symbolic threat of the nooses (equivalent to cross-burning).

Here’s a Counterpunch article on it that plays up that angle. But there are some interesting slants in the piece which grate on me a bit. Picking apart the language of Jena residents (who refer to “coloreds” and “our blacks”) is a bit silly. Small town people without requirements to be PC in their language are going to express themselves in ways that are not as ‘sensitive’ as less insular society demands. This probably means nothing.  And what was the need to emphasize that there was only one black person on the 9 member school board and only one black man in the 10 member parish government?  Jena had a little less than 3000 people at the time. The African-American population is around 3500. That means the Af-Am percentage was at the time a bit over 10%. That means the racial make-up of the board seems quite fair, even if you subscribe to such numerical tests. [Correction: I have to go back and look at the hispanic population and find out how much of a difference to my calculations adding it would make].

But I digress. While I can find any number of articles on the Jena 6, most of them focusing on southern racism and noose hanging, I can find hardly any on Beat Up a White Kid Day. And on forums I’ve seen, the attitude is that there can be no race hatred among minorities because racism is related to power structure.

With Barack Obama now president, that leaves us with several possible positions.

One. Blacks now are part of the power-structure and can be as racist as whites.

Two. Blacks really aren’t part of the power-structure, and Obama is just a figure-head.

[In that case we need to ask who really is in power].

Three.  There are many kinds of power. Opinion-making is also power.

Media Coverage:

On the Jena story, digging through links, I got an American Journalism Review piece which covers the media coverage (always the most interesting part of an American news story). The piece shows that the national media actually didn’t touch the story until 5 months later, when black bloggers and activists like Alan Sharpton had made a furor over it, and then they almost uncritically accepted the version put out by an activist called Alan Bean. The AJR piece questions Bean’s portrayal of the story, raising several points that also struck me.

Here’s a quote from AJR:

“Out of 57 stories:

Only eight stories allude to Mychal Bell’s prior criminal record….

Ten stories use the phrase “all white” to describe the jury that found Mychal Bell guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. None explains why the jury was all white…..

Multiple stories describe the tree the nooses were found on as a “white tree”…… No stories question if the description is correct, and none asks students about the tree. Only the L.A. Times does not describe the tree as “white.”

Descriptions of white student Justin Barker’s medical condition vary from paper to paper and from story to story.…….. [Lila: here’s a link to what is seems to be an injured Justin Barker. From the looks of it, the beating doesn’t seem too bad. ]

The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune never, in months of coverage, mention Barker’s medical bills. [Lila: the medical bills seem to be equivalent to the cost of an ambulance, ER, stitches and a bit more – roughly $12,000; again, more like injuries in a school brawl)……….

All four papers link the events in Jena multiple times, without ever explaining why they’re linked…………

Thirty stories quote civil rights activists, organizations or advocates. Eight stories quote Jesse Jackson; twelve quote Al Sharpton; others quote the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. Six quote Alan Bean of Friends of Justice five of them in the Chicago Tribune………

….. In a piece titled “How One Man Fired Up Jena 6 Case,” [Jason] Whitlock wrote that the media blindly accepted Bean’s story, to the detriment of the truth. Why? Because it was easy, he says.”

Lila: To put this in perspective, consider another race-hate crime in the last two years:

The Megan Williams torture case: in which a twenty-year old black woman was held captive for several days, sexually abused, forced to eat faeces, and stabbed by six whites, according to this AP report.

One of the defendants in this case got 10-25 years for second-degree sexual assault and another got three consecutive sentences, one for 10 years for violation of civil rights and the others for 2-10 years for assault.

Put this against what Mychal Bell, the 16 year old defendant at Jena, was initially charged with. He was charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder (Lila: surely excessive). Later, this was reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.

At his initial conviction Bell faced up to 22 years in prison. On retrial, this was reduced to simple battery and finally he served 18 months altogether.

Lila (May 6):

Well, I don’t agree with the comment that “blacks are not part of the power structure” unless you want to say the president of the USA , the AG and a number of other positions are completely devoid of power. In which case, whites haven’t been all that powerful either. I think the third position is the correct one. There are many kinds of power: there’s money power, there’s political power, there’s public opinion, there’s academic opinion, there’s moral force, there’s biological power….

We tend to focus on money power/political power to make claims about the power or lack thereof of minorities. And largely, I think that’s correct – when you’re talking about structures of law, administration and institutions where those kinds of power hold sway. But there are other realms, as I’ve indicated.

My point is our discussion of race is abysmally simple-minded. We think in slogans and in memes. And that gets echoed in real life.  Ultimately, this kind of mass thinking drives real life victimization, especially in troubled times. Exactly how it does this needs to be explored.

But this post is long enough now, and I’ll leave it at that.

PS (May 6): The context that is ignored in all this is inter-racial crime, crime that is not characterized as hate-crime officially, but is felt among whites as racially motivated. But since a post on this would be lengthy and involved I’ll address it separately.

Credible Tax Protesting

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For a tax-protest to be credible, the protester has to show evidence of good-faith.

Here are some points to consider:

  • It’s futile to argue the constitutionality of laws that the courts themselves have repeatedly ruled are constitutional. The enforceable law is whatever the courts say it is. The law of God, natural law, morality, your personal opinions, your rabid convictions won’t count when it comes to enforcement. Sorry.
  • There is a legitimate part of government – admittedly a small one – which goes toward services the citizenry receive.  A good-faith tax protest would pay up that amount.
  • A good-faith tax protest would not involve teaching tax-evasion methods (there’s a big difference between evading and avoiding taxes) to uninformed people that lands them in jail.
  • A good-faith tax protester would not receive any services from the government, or would pay for those he’s obliged to receive from need. He might even overpay to show good faith. He might put the some of the money he owed (say, money that would have gone to war or to the bail-out) to some civic use – not because he is obliged to, but to show that his unwillingness to pay taxes doesn’t stem from venality.  He might place it in a family foundation that would benefit his own family but at the same time be of use to the community. The purpose of his act is to change enough minds to change the law. Establishing his credibility is part of that.
  • A good-faith tax protest would be conducted from start to finish publicly because its purpose is public – to protest the tax. A protest is a public act.

If you want to engage in counter-economics, then you should know its activities are criminal and will be so regarded. Don’t expect sympathy from the rest of the public which does pay its taxes.

Notice that the media has made a distinction between the tax-resistance of the Vietnam war era and contemporary tax resisters – emphasizing the “white supremecist” elements and scams in the latter (and doubtless there are many).

Expect most people to believe (and, unfortunately, in some cases they will be right about it) that you are just another free-loader on the system.

Check out this factsheet to see how the government views tax protesters like Irwin Schiff.

And here’s a sympathetic view of Irwin Schiff from Libertarian Republican.

My view? I don’t know Schiff’s case in detail but I’m not persuaded by his methods, though sympathetic to his aims.

My suggestion, if you really don’t want to be subject to Uncle Sam, leave the country. Drop citizenship.

A large mass of people renouncing US citizenship is the smartest, least problematic way to defund the US government.