Undernews for May 8 2011

World population may grow over 40% by end of century

Bloomberg - The world’s population is likely to grow to 10.1 billion by the end of this century, from the current total of about 7 billion, according to the first United Nations forecast for the year 2100.

The UN presented three scenarios, including a less likely “high projection variant” that foresees an increase in the world population to 10.6 billion in 2050 and 15.8 billion in 2100. The lowest projection, also considered unlikely, is based on a reduction in the global birth rate and foresees a decline in the world population to 6.2 billion in 2100.

“We are raising the alarm that even though the population of the world has reduced its growth rate enormously, current growth rates are too high,” Zlotnick said. “And you could have even more billions than our most likely scenario. That is where we see a danger.”

America's libraries are under attack

David Morris, On the Commons - The public library is a singularly American invention. Europeans had subscription libraries for 100 years before the United States was born. But on a chilly day in April 1833 the good citizens of Peterborough, New Hampshire created a radical new concept - a truly public library. All town residents, regardless of income, had the right to freely share the community's stored knowledge. Their only obligation was to return the information on time and in good condition, allowing others to exercise that same right.

By the 1870s 11 states boasted 188 public libraries. By 1910 all states had them. Today 9,000 central buildings plus about 7500 branches have made public libraries one of the most ubiquitous of all American institutions, exceeding Starbucks and McDonalds.

Almost two thirds of us carry library cards. At least once a year, about half of us visit a public library, many more than once. Library use varies by class and race and by age and educational level. But the majority of blacks and Latinos as well as whites, old as well as young, poor as well as rich, high school dropouts as well as university graduates, use the public library.

. . About 30 percent of the people who visit libraries do not borrow books or DVDs. For a greater number of people than we might care to believe, the library serves as a warm and dry sanctuary, a place they can sit without fear of being bothered. For others, it is a refuge from loneliness, a place full of hustle and bustle, where they can attend a concert, or hear a lecture or read a magazine free of charge.

. . By 1935 public libraries were serving 60 percent of the population. They had so proven their value that not a single library closed its doors during the Great Depression! To keep their doors open, the Cleveland public library sponsored "overdue weeks", encouraging patrons who could afford it to keep their library books until they were overdue, allowing the library to collect the 12 cents per week fine. In a time of soup lines and economic destitution, the library was known as the "bread line of the spirit".

In 1953 at the height of McCarthism, when magazine like the Nation were banned in many places and William Faulkner's novels were seized as pornographic literature, the American Library Association (ALA) adopted a Library Bill of Rights. "The freedom to read is of little consequence when expended on the trivia," it insisted, "Ideas can be dangerous...Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours."

. . Despite the enormous popularity and widespread use of public libraries have rarely been well funded. . . . And the lights are beginning to go out. U.S. mayors report that library budgets are one of the first items on the chopping block now. Some 19 states cut funding for public libraries last year. More than half of the reductions were greater than 10 percent. Those cuts compound an often overlooked fact of life for public libraries. Operating costs are going up - electricity, maintenance, materials. The result is that even when operating budgets remain constant something has to give - fewer books or computers or fewer hours.

. . An increasing number of library systems have gone beyond name changing to actual privatization of ever-larger parts of their library operations. . . . Privatization can undermine the public library's mission: protecting the public's access to information. The public library is a non-profit organization controlled by representatives of the users of the library. The mission of private companies is to maximize profits. They are controlled by representatives of their investors. LSSI, for example, is owned by a private equity fund, Islington Capital Partners whose investors expect a handsome profit on their capital. (The company does not disclose its earnings.)

. . We need a grassroots effort to defend our public libraries, an effort that can and should be part of a growing nationwide and international effort to defend the public sphere itself. Such efforts have begun.

In Bedford, Texas, after a community-wide petition campaign to oppose library outsourcing gathered 1,700 signatures in four days, city council members voted 4-3 to reject privatization.

In Philadelphia grassroots organizations such as Coalition to Save the Libraries sprang up in 2008 after the city, without a formal vote of the City Council, announced it was going to close 11 library branches. Residents of 9 of the affected neighborhoods plus several city councilors filed suit, citing a 1988 ordinance that no city-owned facility may close, be abandoned, or go into disuse without City Council approval. After two days of hearings packed with library supporters and just hours before the mandated closure, Judge Idee Fox granted an injunction against the closures.

In her ruling Judge Fox made clear the city's decision was about more than money, "The decision to close these eleven library branches is more than a response to a financial crisis; it changes the very foundation of our City." Much more

How did Bill Gates get to decide what's good for our children?

Diane Ravich, Ed Week - [Concerning] the agreement between the Gates Foundation and the Pearson Foundation to write the nation's curriculum. When did we vote to hand over American education to them? Why would we outsource the nation's curriculum to a for-profit publishing and test-making corporation based in London? Does Bill Gates get to write the national curriculum because he is the richest man in America? We know that his foundation is investing heavily in promoting the Common Core standards. Now his foundation will write a K-12 curriculum that will promote online learning and video gaming. That's good for the tech sector, but is it good for our nation's schools?

Oh, and one more outrage: The Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation, both of which maintain the pretense of being Democrats and/or liberals, have given millions to former Florida governor Jeb Bush's foundation, which is promoting vouchers, charters, online learning, test-based accountability, and the whole panoply of corporate reform strategies intended to weaken public education and remove teachers' job protections.

The scariest thought is that the Obama administration welcomes the corporatization of public education. Not only welcomes the rise of educational entrepreneurialism, but encourages it. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's chief of staff Joanne Weiss, who has experience as an education entrepreneur, wrote the following in a blog for the Harvard Business Review:

"The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale."

Yes, indeed, lots of opportunities for new businesses, smart investors, and a national marketplace for entrepreneurs. I would expect to read this sort of thing from the public relations department of Pearson or McGraw-Hill or one of the other industry leaders. But the chief of staff to the U.S. secretary of education?

Entropy update

Fortunately, the NY Times is behind a paywall, so it will be easier to keep your children from seeing this headline:

BIN LADEN RAID REVIVES DEBATE ON VALUE OF TORTURE

It got us thinking, however: what if the current NT Times crowd had been around at the end of World War II. Would we have seen a headline like

HITLER DEFEAT REVIVES DEBATE ON VALUE OF GENOCIDE

The treatment of torture as a mere tactical issue is a pretty good sign of how low our leaders and the media have fallen.

Furthermore. . .

A note from Rick Harkin in Ottawa: I notice that you have referenced Elizabeth May of the Green Party and her win in the latest Canadian Federal election. Other than her Green “positions” and some of them are dubious for a true Green, I would be careful because her other policies are not that progressive. At their latest annual convention in 2010 they hired Don Drummond (formerly very high official in Finance Dept. (Canada federal) and now a employee of the biggest banks in Canada to give them feedback on their economic plan etc., and he did not find it wanting. He was supportive. Our banks and Federal government officials working for the various depts are no different than yours and are to be viewed with doubt and scepticism. Elizabeth was formerly the head of the Sierra Club Canada. Another problem too.

Zero Hedge - McDonalds reports that as part of its employment event to hire 50,000 minimum wage, part-time (mostly) workers, subsequently raised to 62,000 it received a whopping 1 million applications. Over 938,000 applicants were turned away

How to reform our money system

Stephen Zarlenga & Greg Coleridge, Huffington Post - Be it for ignorance or by intention, few federal elected officials have examined how a change in the way money in our nation is created and issued could reduce our nation's deficit and debt and, in doing so, increase millions of vital jobs to transform our economy.

One of the few exceptions is Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who during the last Congressional session introduced the National Employment Emergency Defense Act.

The basis of the bill are three essential monetary measures proposed by the American Monetary Institute in their American Monetary Act (AMA). The AMA's recommendations are based on decades of research and centuries of experience; are designed to end the current fiscal crisis in a just and sustainable way, and are aimed to place the U.S. money system under our constitutional system of checks and balances system.

The three essential measures include:

Moving the mostly private Federal Reserve System under the US Treasury Department. The Fed would no longer be a virtual fourth branch of government, unaccountable to the public. Their important financial research functions would continue. But the Fed would no longer make unilateral monetary policy decisions beyond the reach of we the people.

Making the power to issue money a public function -- bypassing the current system which invited the careless and risky lending that led to the global economic crisis. The U.S. government would be authorized to issue dollars debt free. This power would replace the current undemocratic and unstable "fractional reserve" system in which money is created as debt through loans by financial corporations who lend many more times what they possess. Banks would no longer have this privilege to create our money supply.

Enabling the U.S. government to use its money power -- creating and spending money into circulation -- to address pressing infrastructure needs such as repairing our crumbling roads, bridges, rails and highways. The government also would be enabled to invest in health care and education. These projects would provide a huge numbers of jobs without going into debt and having to repay interest on debt to financial institutions. Economist Kaoru Yamaguchi's computer model has shown that a public-based money system and spending government money on jobs fixing our infrastructure is the best form of economic growth.

The irony is that these three provisions would institutionalize what most Americans falsely believe already exists: That the Federal Reserve is public. That banks only loan money that they possess. That the government creates our money. Wrong on all counts.

Top corporate tax avoiders gave $8 million to candidates in 2010

No reason for Obama to cede on debt ceiling

George Kenney, Huffington Post - Having already extracted far more concessions from the President on the budget than expected (or than the public truly understands), the Republicans think that by holding the debt ceiling hostage they can leverage those previous cuts exponentially. . . Because Mr. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated a strong aversion to political conflict, the Republicans think his psychological predispositions work to their advantage. Moreover, because the U.S. Constitution explicitly vests with Congress the power to manage federal debt the Republicans think that Mr. Obama has no choice but to negotiate on their terms that, in other words, just as with negotiations over the budget, he has no other option. They think they have the proverbial offer that can't be refused. But they are wrong.

While it's possible that Mr. Obama may yet give in to a fundamentally anti-democratic form of political hostage taking, (and if he does the Democrats should replace him) it's also possible that Mr. Obama could just tell the Republican House of Representatives "Nuts!" He can order more money printed and keep paying bills as if nothing had happened.

As President, he can argue, he not only has the power, but the responsibility, to ensure that the full faith and credit of the U.S. government is secure. The Constitution, he can point out, says that "Congress shall ... pay the debts. . . " not that it might decide it doesn't want to pay them after those debts have already been assumed by law. Since the members of Congress are not doing their job, he must do it for them. No doubt lawyers at the Justice Department can find dozens of constitutional and statutory justifications for the President's action.

Besides, who could stop him? In their rage the House Republicans might well impeach him but it's extremely unlikely that the Senate would find him guilty. The Supreme Court wouldn't want to touch the dispute with a ten foot pole. Public opinion would be entirely on his side.

Flotsam & Jetsam: The reality of myths

Sam Smith

The same media that promotes “the free market,” “American exceptionalism,” and “the war on terror,” gets upset when it finds myths spreading among ordinary people. Apparently, it’s another privilege of power to decide which myths are acceptable.

As a case in point, the Atlantic Monthly has been treating a misquotation of Martin Luther King as a major discovery in investigative journalism. Missing from the discussion is the fact that in the end it’s the quote and not the source that matters.

Also missing is the fact that there are lots of similar misquotations that even the educated class uses regularly including “Beam me up, Scotty,” “Blood, sweat and tears,” Elementary, my dear Watson,” “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” and “Play it again, Sam.”

Here’s something I wrote on topic sometime back:

Having been an anthropology major, I don't get as riled up about mythology in public life as many in the media and politics. Myths can be helpful, benign, sad, or deadly but mostly they're there to fill the empty places in reality.

Sometimes myths are carried on the backs of famous people because the reality isn't powerful enough to do the job. A classic case involves the death of Dr Charles Drew, the famous black surgeon.

It is widely told that Drew, then 46, died in North Carolina in 1950 following a car accident for which he was unable to get treatment at a white hospital and had to be transported to a much more distant black hospital, wasting critical treatment time.

But the Annals of American Survey notes:

"The authoritative work by historian Spencie Love entitled, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles Drew, described how the myth has been cultivated because of the time and place of Dr. Drew's death and serves as an unfortunate filler between living memory and written history. True enough, a 23-year-old black World War II veteran by the name Maltheus Avery was critically injured in an auto crash on December 1, 1950, exactly 8 months after Dr. Drew's death. He was a student at North Carolina A&T, a husband, and a father of a small child. Like Dr. Drew, he was treated initially at Alamance General Hospital. He was transferred to Duke University Hospital and subsequently turned away because they had exhausted their supply of beds for black patients. Mr. Avery would die shortly after arrival at Lincoln Hospital, Durham, North Carolina's black facility. Spencie Love's book discusses how the story of the lesser-known Maltheus Avery confronted the circumstances of the death of the more prominent Dr. Drew, and thus a myth was born."

Something similar was at work in the black response to the OJ Simpson case. To many blacks, Simpson was carrying the mythic weight of decades of ethnic abuse under the justice system. In a column at the time for Pacific News Service, a black journalist, Dennis Schatzman, outlined some of the black context for the Simpson trial:

|||| Just last year, Olympic long jumper and track coach Al Joyner was handcuffed and harassed in a LAPD traffic incident. He has settled out of court for $250,000.

A few years earlier, former baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan was "handcuffed and arrested at the Los Angeles airport because police believed that Morgan 'fit the profile of a drug dealer.'" He also got a settlement of $250,000.

Before that, former LA Laker forward Jamal Wilkes was stopped by the police, handcuffed and thrown to the pavement.

A black man was recently given a 25-year to life sentence for stealing a slice of pizza from a young white boy.

In 1992, a mentally troubled black man was shot and killed by LA sheriff's deputies while causing a disturbance in front of his mother's house. Neighbors say they saw a deputy plant a weapon by the body.

Simpson case detective Mark Fuhrman was accused of planting a weapon at the side of a robbery suspect back in 1988. The LAPD recently settled for an undisclosed amount.

In North Carolina, Daryl Hunt still languishes in jail for the 1984 rape and murder of a white newspaper reporter, even though DNA tests say it was not possible. ||||

These examples would be rejected as irrelevant by the average lawyer or journalist but in fact OJ Simpson's case served as the mythic translation of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should have been on CNN but weren't. Everything was true except the names, times and places. In Washington, they do something similar when stories can't be told; they write a novel.

In the case that got the Atlantic so worked up, the phrase assigned to Martin Luther King Jr was “I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” Faultily assigned to be sure, but a perfectly good epigram and one King probably wouldn’t have objected to.

We live in a world filled with myths and if every one was as benign as this example, the world would be a much happier place.

Great moments in research

Marc Abrahams, Guardian, UK - Scientists know a bit more about contagious yawning – one of science's utter mysteries – than they did a year ago, thanks to a study called No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, Geochelone carbonaria. The study's authors say their experiments, conducted with seven tortoises, might help eliminate some of the many competing theories as to why humans yawn when they see other humans yawn.

Writing in the journal Current Zoology, Anna Wilkinson, Isabella Mand and Ludwig Huber of the University of Vienna, Austria, and Natalie Sebanz of Radboud University in the Netherlands, explain: "This study aimed to discriminate between the possible mechanisms controlling contagious yawning by asking whether contagious yawning is present in a species that is unlikely to show empathy or nonconscious mimicry: the redfooted tortoise, G carbonaria.

Killing Bin Laden improves Democrats' sex life

Nick Gillespie, Reason - The killing of Osama Bin Laden is wildly popular with the American public. Rasumussen reports that 86 percent of Americans support the president's mission to kill Bin Laden. And yet, it's headlines like this one - "Bin Laden Killing Erases Democrats' Wimp Factor" - that tell us more about what it's like to be alive in the 21st century. It's for a piece by Peter Beinart over at The Daily Beast. Said piece lays out the glorious partisan reasons beyond the obvious to celebrate the death of an evil killer, including such insights as:

"The bin Laden operation...was pure testosterone. Once U.S. intelligence tracked bin Laden to his compound, Obama chose the most aggressive option - a commando attack -rather than missile strikes, even though it risked U.S. deaths or hostages....:"

We can cheer on the death of the worst terrorist we hopefully will ever know, we can even get behind various efforts to flex American muscles and might, we can rally around the flag, we can get jingoistic even about chess matches and piano recitals and the Olympics, but trying to lock down how every freaking thing in the world will erase one party's "wimp factor" (anyone else remember the equally pathetic ramblings about George H.W. Bush around the time of the first Gulf War?) isn't going to inspire confidence in the two-party system. Or the testeroney goodness of Bush the Elder, Barack Obama, or anyone else.

Yesterday, we released results of the first Reason Foundation-Rupe Poll. One of the findings was that a plurality of Americans (35 percent) answered neither when asked whether they thought the Democrats or Republicans would govern more responsibly. Which suggests that we aren't just smart, we're actually paying attention to the way partisans yammer on about things.
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Obama threatening state employees over marijuana reform laws

Raw Story - A recent letter from the Department of Justice, threatening state employees in charge of implmenting medical marijuana laws with prosecution, has forced some governors to re-evaluate and even veto popular legislation -- all seemingly in violation of what the medical marijauana community thought was a cease-fire with the federal government.

Facing the threat of seeing otherwise innocent state employees thrown in jail, lawmakers are responding in an entirely human fashion: what Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, called "the old need to CYA -- cover your ass."

Ultimately, the administration's confusing legal position has led to a stagnation of medical marijuana reform efforts, with some states simply deciding it's not worth the risk.

It also represents a significant change in momentum for the prohibition reform movement as a whole, and one that's taken them almost entirely by surprise.

Earlier this month, however, the Justice Department sent a letter to the governor of Washington, warning that state employees may be prosecuted if they are in any way involved in the licensing of production or distribution of marijuana.

"The prosecution of individuals and organizations involved in the trade of any illegal drugs and the disruption of drug trafficking organizations is a core priority of the Department," department attorneys wrote. "This core priority includes prosecution of business enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana."

Pocket paradigms

Why is it safer to say "fuck" than to say "fascism?" One of the curiosities of post-cold-war rhetoric is that we no longer have a term for those who practice ideologies antithetical to democracy. One American politician once put it this way: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." Would such a radical be allowed on Sunday morning talk shows today? Probably not, even though his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. -Sam Smith

Word

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired - Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer

How the mighty have fallen

If you thought texting during dinner or church was bad. . .

Finger nose stylus

Spring is here. . .

And Senator Chuck Grassley is out mowing his lawn with his exclusive three-mower system. And bragging about it

Bin Laden: The monster America built

Robert Scheer, Truth Dig - He was our kind of guy until he wasn’t, an ally during the Cold War until he no longer served our purposes. The problem with Osama bin Laden was not that he was a fanatical holy warrior; we liked his kind just fine as long as the infidels he targeted were not us but Russians and the secular Afghans in power in Kabul whom the Soviets backed.
But when bin Laden turned against us, he morphed into a figure of evil incarnate, and now three decades after we first decided to use him and other imported Muslim zealots for our Cold War purposes, we feel cleansed by his death of any responsibility for his carnage.

Kind of like when the CIA assigned the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and the Mafiosi turned out to have their own agenda, or when Pentagon experts anointed the Catholic nutcase Ngo Dinh Diem as the George Washington of predominately Buddhist South Vietnam before they felt the need to execute him. A similar fate was suffered by Saddam Hussein, whose infamous Baghdad handshake with Donald Rumsfeld stamped him as our agent in the war to defeat the ayatollahs of Iran.

Department of Good Stuff

Kurt Vonnegut charts three classic stories

What Bin Laden was really up to

Ezra Klein, Washington Post - Bin Laden, according to [intelligence expert Davecd] Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do ¬ and, more to the point, what he thought he could do ¬ was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

“He has compared the United States to the Soviet Union on numerous occasions ¬ and these comparisons have been explicitly economic,” Gartenstein-Ross argues in a Foreign Policy article. “For example, in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, ‘continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’ ”

For bin Laden, in other words, success was not to be measured in body counts. It was to be measured in deficits, in borrowing costs, in investments we weren’t able to make in our country’s continued economic strength. And by those measures, bin Laden landed a lot of blows.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at yet another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

Study: Oceans could rise five feet by 2100

Reuters - Quickening climate change in the Arctic including a thaw of Greenland's ice could raise world sea levels by up to 1.6 meters [five feet] by 2100, an international report showed. Such a rise -- above most past scientific estimates -- would add to threats to coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, low-lying Pacific islands and cities from London to Shanghai.

"The past six years (until 2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic," according to the Oslo-based Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, which is backed by the eight-nation Arctic Council."Arctic glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet contributed over 40 percent of the global sea level rise of around 3 mm per year observed between 2003 and 2008," it said.

Question

What do Barack Obama, Osama Bin Laden and Prince William have in common? They are each icons used to substitute for real issues as the world, as described by the media, turns into one giant American Idol show.

ENDS

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