Redeye 11/17/10

Arctic oil, gas can spark big wars

LAT, 10/8 — If we didn’t already have the phrase Cold War, we’d have to invent it to describe the power struggle taking place for Arctic Ocean resources.

Companies such as BP and OAO Gazprom are readying themselves for the last great energy frontier. Russia, the United States, Canada, and Iceland are vying for control of the wealth and power that exploitation of the Arctic will create.

…Trying to bring the frozen wastelands around the North Pole into the global economy involves two huge risks: catastrophic climate change, and a major war.

….There is already geopolitical conflict brewing in the region…The Russians are planning to grab control of as much of the arctic as they can. But so are Canada, the U.S., Iceland, Denmark, and Norway. If the Chinese can think of some plausible reason for saying it is theirs, no doubt they will be there soon as well.

Rich see poor as ‘genetic mud’

GW, 10/22 — ….We now know that genes play little part in why one sibling, social class or ethnic group is more likely to suffer problems than another.

….Politicians may be the reason why the media has so far failed to report the small role of genes. The political right believes that genes largely explain why the poor are poor, as well as twice as likely as the rich to be mentally ill. To them, the poor are genetic mud, sinking to the bottom of the genetic pool….

Instead, the Human Genome Project is rapidly providing a scientific basis for the political left. Childhood maltreatment, economic inequality and excessive materialism seem the main determinants.

Few volunteers, so U.S. buys thugs

NYT, 10/24 — Contractors were necessary at the start of the Iraq war because there simply were not enough soldiers….Even now — with many contractors discredited for unjustified shootings and a lack of accountability amply described in documents — the military cannot do without them. There are more contractors than actual members of the military serving in the Afghanistan war….A failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians [so] contractors often shot with little discrimination….

The Iraqis who were shot at…were nearly always civilians…and for all the debates about their necessity, it is clear from the documents that the contractors appeared notably ineffective at keeping themselves and the people they were paid to protect from being killed.

No jail for biggest drug dealers

NYT, 10/15 — CVS Caremark has agreed to pay $77.6 million to settle an investigation that its drugstores allowed widespread sales of cough medicines used to manufacture the stimulant methamphetamine.

CVS…acknowledged that it has sold pseudoephedrine to criminals who used it to make meth….The government said it would not pursue criminal charges against CVS. The company will start a compliance and ethics program. 

Cop racism wherever bosses rule

GW, 10/22 — Black people are 26 times more likely them white people to be stopped and searched by police in England and Wales, the most glaring examples of “Racial profiling” researchers have seen, according to an international report.

….Asians were 6.3 times more likely to be stopped than whites.

Iraq oil means U.S. won’t leave

GW, 10/22 — A senior Obama administration official said: “…there are no plans to keep troops after December 2011. We are drawing down and all will be out of Iraq.”

However, unofficially Washington expected to retain a force in Iraq after December 2011, as well as bases to protect oil interests.

Rulers blame “culture” for poverty

NYT 10/25 — to the editor: The concept of culture as a cause of poverty and the related academic debate are primarily politically driven….The use of culture as a cause of poverty provides an academic hook to explain away real major causes of poverty like race, class, and disability, these are problematic to conservative political forces who want society to be blameless for poverty.

Profits  = trashing older workers

Harvard Mag. Nov. — The high costs of keeping our aging population healthy and out of poverty has caused the United States and other rich democracies to lose their economic and political footing. Countries on the rise of amass wealth and geopolitical clout by refusing to bear those costs. Older countries lose work to younger countries.

…Here in the United States, for example, health career costs for workers who are between 50 and 65 are, on average, almost two times what they are for their peers in their 30s and 40s….

Companies that move production to China or buy goods from Chinese suppliers gain the leverage they need to rewrite the terms of employment and their older workers at home or the ability to push those workers off the payrolls altogether...

China is not the only country in which a young labor force attracts global businesses and investors. Much of the developing worlds, particularly in Asia and Latin America, operates the same way….

…[In]…the American workplace…older employees in manufacturing jobs who are low-skilled have been among the most vulnerable workers of all…

…These results predate the recent recession…U.S. unemployment levels for workers over 50 are now at their all-time highs, nearly double what they were three years ago.

…Fiscal woes driven by age-related expenses plague every level of government in the United States. Europeans take to the streets, strike and close down governments struggling to cover unsupportable pensions. The most advanced countries owe trillions in age-related public expenses. They can pa for income support and services for their elderly and drastically reduce financing for schools, [armies,] infrastructure and everything else, or they decide older people will have to make do with far less.

Faith in vote traps many blacks

LAK 10/9 — …There’s one thing I can say with confidence about midterm election: African-Americans will vote overwhelmingly for Democratic Party candidates at every level…

Democrats, at least, are much better at talking the talk. But is the Democratic Party offering any new ideas — or even the promise of meaningful resources — to eliminate the stubborn, multigenerational poverty and dysfunction in which far too many African-Americans are trapped?

You can’t vote anti-imperialist!

LAT 10/10 — The Woodward book depicts Afghanistan as a quagmire-to-be with no clear and coherent strategy….In senate and House races all across the country, the venue for debating important issues, the candidates are largely silent about the war, irrespective of the contest, region or party.

Staffers burn out, children suffer

NYT 10/16 — to the editor:

Re “New York Missed or Ignored Signs on Girl Who Died” (front page, Oct. G):

The series of failures and missed opportunities by child welfare workers to prevent the tragic death of Marchella Pierce, a 4-year-old girl who was found beaten and starved, is a structural problem. There is a serious work force crisis in child welfare, with chronic staff turn-over and vacancies.

The average length of employment in a child welfare agency is less than two years because of factor like low pay, unsafe working conditions, high case-loads and lack of adequate supervisions and training.

Research on the child welfare work force suggests that workers are emotionally exhausted and burnt out from work-related stress.

Tea-partiers doubt leaders’ rants

GW 10/29 — I signed up as a [Tea Party] member and delegate….The Tea Partiers I met weren’t racist bigots….What led them to join the movement was less their anger than their perplexity — and one has to grant that they have much to be perplexed about.

…At mealtimes and one the smokers balcony, I grew increasingly less guarded about voicing my own exasperation with…the demonization of immigrants, the idea that Barack Obama was part of a Marxists conspiracy to reshape the U.S. into a communist tyranny, and the other hobbyhorses ridden by our plenary speakers; and nearly always I met with private agreement. People had come to Nashville spurred by rising unemployment figures in their towns, their underwater mortgages, the dwindling value of their retirement nest eggs, the shuttered storefronts on their local strip malls, excited by the Tea Party slogan, “Take Our Country Back.” They wanted to do something to help, had hoped to learn how best to do it, and were impatient with the paranoid ideologues who harangued them in the ballroom…

When, at long last, Sarah Palin took to the podium…her $100,000 speech fell a little flat. It had one good quip (“ho’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out fo ya?”) but her tour d’horizon of foreign and domestic policy was so diffuse, its remarks so banal, that I began to suspect her of having written it herself. The applause at the end was noticeably feebler than the rapture that had greeted her.

…When Palin rails against “so-called experts” and the “east coast elites” and pitches her brand of “commonsense conservatism”, she speaks for a vast congregation of the mystified and fearful. Palin and her kind have put heart into people who previously imagined themselves merely confused or ill-informed….But the greater fault has been that of Obama’s White House.

Fight greed, don’t sneak behind it!

GW 10/22 — Advertisers…“should see themselves as trying  to manipulate…cultural forces, not brand impressions”. The more they foster selfish values, the easier it is to sell products….Every year, through mechanisms that are rarely visible and seldom discussed, the space in which progressive ideas can flourish shrink a little more. The progressive response has been disastrous.

Instead of confronting the shit in values, we have sought to adapt it…Many…social justice campaigners have tried to reach people by appealing to self-interest: explaining how, for example, relieving poverty in the developing world will build a market for products. This tactic also strengthens [home selfish] values…a simple remedy: we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Progressive campaigners…should come together to challenge forces — [such as] the advertising industries that make us insecure and selfish.

People with intrinsic values must stop being embarrassed by them. In asserting our values we become the change we want to see.