Sung a Lot of Songs

SMS Holdings: The "Faith-Based," Anti-Labor Company Behind Oakland's Private Cops

2012-01-16T22:04:00.001-05:00

Even as Oakland prepares to lay off 200 workers due to its shrinking budget and loss of Redevelopment Agency funds, the city will continue to pay $197,000 in property assessments to the Downtown Oakland Association, and Lake Merritt Uptown District Association, the two non-profits that manage the downtown business improvement districts. In turn, much of this money will be paid to Block By Block, a Louisville, Kentucky company that specializes in providing security for business improvement districts. Block By Block is a subsidiary of the Nashville, Tennessee headquartered SMS Holdings, a powerful, politically connected private corporation with a shady record of attacking unions and relentlessly hollowing out the pay and benefits of its employees.

SMS Holdings describes itself in company literature as a "God-centered, faith based" business. Its seven subsidiaries (Valor Security, Service Management Systems, PrimeFlight, FirstLine, Brantley Security, ServiceWear, and Block By Block) have attacked unions attempting to organize workers in airports, shopping malls, and business districts across the country. On the web sites of various anti-union consulting firms, SMS Holdings is listed as a satisfied customer, employing these modern-day Pinkertons to derail unionization drives and negotiations. Executives of SMS Holdings, however, are by no means critics of big government. Over the last decade they have cultivated strong —some might even say corrupting— ties to members of Congress in order to win lucrative, multi-million dollar security contracts at airports and other federal facilities where its holds lucrative contracts.

SMS Holdings' presence in Oakland, and the money it receives from the city's share of business improvement district assessments, raises important questions about the continuing privatization of city services, and subsidies Oakland is paying to security firms and real estate corporations, even while schools are closed and city services are axed.

Oakland's Costly BID Assessments

Oakland's contributions of public revenues to the DOA and LMUDA districts are significant commitments for the cash strapped city. This year Oakland taxpayers must provide the DOA with $109,904 because of assessments on five city-owned properties in the district's boundaries, including City Hall. Unlike most other taxes, public properties are not exempt from BID assessments.

According to the DOA's own assessment records the City of Oakland is by far the largest single contributor to the district's budget, a fact that somewhat undermines claims made by business leaders who say the advantage of the BIDs is that they provide special benefits through the assessment of private property owners.

The city is paying the Lake Merritt Uptown District Association another $52,068 this year. According to the LMUDA's records, the City of Oakland is the sixth largest funder of the district. What's more is that these assessments will increase five percent next year, and each year after.

When the City Council approved of creating the DOA and LMUDA in 2008, staff members of the Community Economic Development Agency noted that fiscal commitments over the 10-year lifespan of each district would be $1.58 million and $566,000 respectively. CEDA staff characterized these obligations of public dollars as "strategic and productive investment of public funds." Alternatively, one could just as easily frame the city's payments as a multi-million dollar subsidy for the large real estate companies who reap the benefits from these special assessments in the form of extra security, cleaning, landscaping services, public relations, lobbying, and special events that they pay far less for because of the city's contributions.

Adding further costs to Oakland's financing of these special districts is the elimination of the Redevelopment Agency. Losing these state-provided funds, the City of Oakland must now pay out of the General Pool Fund for the assessments of the four former Redevelopment Agency owned properties in the DOA. These properties were assessed at $30,438 in 2008. That means that this year the City will likely have to pay about $35,235, and this sum will increase 5% each year after.

Block By Block's contract with the business districts is one of the largest single expenses. According to the DOA and LMUDA's joint 2009-2010 Annual Report to the City Council, "Block By Block receives approximately $60,000 per month from both organizations...." That's roughly $720,000 per year of Oakland tax dollars being paid to SMS Holdings. This includes both assessments on private property that fund the DOA and LMUDA, and the city's $197,000 or so in funding for the district's.

The SMS Holdings Way

SMS Holdings was founded in 1988 as a janitorial services company in Nashville, Tennessee. It quickly grew into a multi-million dollar corporation through large service contracts cleaning office buildings. In the late 2000s SMS Holdings went on a growth spurt, buying up security companies. Among these was Block By Block, the Louisville, Kentucky firm that controls a large share of the market for "security ambassadors" and cleaning services provided to business improvement districts. Block By Block contracts with forty-two BIDs across the United States, including Oakland and Berkeley. By 2008 SMS Holdings posted revenues upwards of $300 million. The company's vice president predicted then that it would surpass a half-billion by 2011.

Image from "The SMS Holdings Way," company pamphlet.

A document entitled "The SMS Holdings Way," available on the company's web site, reveals the religious beliefs of its owners and executives: "from our company’s beginning, our business philosophy has been God-centered and faith-based. While we will always show tolerance and acceptance of the personal beliefs of others, we recognize that there is a higher order that provides a basis for all of our core values."

It's unclear just how deeply the Christian faith and beliefs of SMS Holdings' owners and executives shapes company policy, but in another area the results are much clearer. Block By Block and other SMS subsidiaries maintain low-wage, anti-union workplaces, and have been very aggressive over the past decade in lobbying federal legislators to privatize thousands of government jobs. Block By Block in particular has been criticized in several cities for privatizing services and opposing unionization drives among its employees. SMS Holdings' other subsidiaries have worse records. Paying minimum wages-levels (and in some workplaces even less), SMS Holdings has been able to skim enormous profit margins off of government outsourced jobs.

Block by Block employees are paid much less than municipal employees, especially unionized city workers. In Minneapolis the company's "Clean and Safety Ambassadors" were initially paid $11.50 an hour. Guards Valor Security Services are paid about $10.25 an hour, according to job listings in different states, while workers with PrimeFlight Services rarely make more than state minimum wages (including tips), and in some cases less. When Block By Block's workers successfully unionized with SEIU Local 26 in Minneapolis their wages were boosted to $13.22, levels still far below the living wages municipal public works employees are paid there and elsewhere.

In Pittsburgh Block By Block's security ambassador employees faced a different situation. When they attempted to unionize through the SEIULocal 32BJ, Block By Block managers opposed the simpler card check process, pressing instead for a secret ballot election, a union formation method that gives employers more tools to scuttle pro-union outcomes. Block By Block management barred employees from wearing union buttons or talking to the media, and according to reports in the Pittsburgh Gazette even conducted surveillance and called the police when some of their ambassadors passed out pro-union literature in front of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership's offices.

In a Nashville Business Journal article last year the chief development officer of SMS Holdings, Jim Burnett, told a reporter that for cities, "there’s a need to conserve, and so the private sector is an option that’s available to them." The article continued: "Burnett believes business opportunities through privatization are 'imminent.' SMS and other local companies — including Nashville prison operator Corrections Corp. of America and inmate health care provider America Service Group of Brentwood — acknowledge the heightened opportunities while saying they find interest in their services regardless of which party is in power." (More about Burnett below.)

In Oakland, where Democrats and "progressives" have a virtual monopoly on government, the city's chronic budget crunch has created favorable conditions for the formation of the publicly subsidized, privately managed business improvement districts that have hired Block By Block to patrol the downtown. Burnett's company is doing quite well here.

A Tangled Web of Political Connections

Block By Block appears to be a relatively small, but growing, segment of SMS Holdings. The company's most profitable ventures in recent years instead have been private security and aviation service workers whose ranks were greatly expanded with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and then privatized en masse by the Bush administration. These SMS Holdings companies reveal not only the extensive political connections the company has cultivated to obtain contracts and shape federal policies, they also provide a window into its extremely anti-union practices.

SMS Holdings owns two private security corporations, Valor and Brantley. Brantley specializes in guarding corporate and government campuses, schools, and residential communities. Valor's business is mostly with large shopping malls and hotels.

Valor's own employees have attempted to unionize before in several locations, but the company's managers have strongly opposed these efforts. A search of job listing posted by Valor on different web sites reveals universally low pay, rarely greater than $11 an hour. Anti-union shopping mall owners such as General Growth Properties —which has been embroiled in a battle with the SEIU for years over unionization attempts among its janitorial staff— is a major employer of Valor guards. Valor Security guards have been criticized for harassing other mall workers who have attempted to organize. One alleged incident in Heyward, California Valor guards were said to have assaulted janitors during a union drive in 2007.

Michael Rosado, an anti-union consultant, mentions SMS Holdings on his web site as a customer. Under the heading "Union Avoidance Campaign Victories/Withdrawals," Rosado includes SMS Holdings, explaining that his firm helped SMS avoid unionization attempts by employees seeking to join the UFCW at two Kentucky shopping malls. Rosado's web site doesn't explain anything further about this episode, but strangely his company uses the same image of the interior of a shopping mall that appears on Valor Security's website describing its "shopping center marketplace" services. In an October, 2011 blog post on his company web site, Rosado warns corporate managers "don't be fooled." He claims, "unions are out in full force, taking advantage of and positioning themselves at the OWS [Occupy Wall Street] rallies."

PTI Labor Research's web site, including testimonial from SMS Holdings.

Another anti-union consulting company's web site mentions SMS Holdings as a customer. PTI Labor Research features Bill Stejskal, vice president of human relations for SMS, among its client testimonials. “To defeat your opposition," Stejskal is quoted as saying, "it is best to know your opposition. PTI has assisted us by providing hard facts about our opponent labor unions that the unions would have preferred to have kept hidden from our employees. The great difficulty the unions had trying to explain away their unflattering pasts and their questionable current practices made a great impact on our employees."

SMS Holdings' aviation services companies by far have the worst labor records. Primeflight specializes in providing service workers to airports and airlines. At the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston where Primeflight workers drive passengers through terminals, company managers have pressured less-than-minimum-wage employees to over-report tips in order to qualify SMS Holdings for lucrative state subsidies, and to justify extremely low wages. The Houston Chronicle reported on November 1, 2011 that Primeflight's participation in the state subsidization program have been suspended, and that the company is being investigated.

The most profitable anti-union activities of SMS Holdings have been directed at workers employed by its FirstLine Transportation Security subsidiary. Firstline contracts with the Department of Homeland Security to provide airport security screeners at eight locations including Roswell, New Mexico and Kansas City, Missouri.

In 2003 the federal Department of Transportation determined that TSA screeners in airports could not legally form unions, ostensibly because of national security concerns. The ruling was highly profitable for FirstLine which was already contracting in several US airports, and working to vastly expand its ranks of screeners.

That ruling did not hold for long. Firstline employees at the Kansas City International Airport began to organize, seeking representation through the International Union, Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America. SHS Holdings attacked the union and its employees by appealing an election through the National Labor Relations Board. The company was backed by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, among other conservative, anti-labor organizations.

SMS Holdings' power to combat the unionization of its workforce was greatly enhanced by the political ties the company's executives had cultivated since the early 2000s. According to Federal Elections Commission data, executives of SMS Holdings contributed over $100,000 to the campaigns of congressional representatives since 2003. Much of this money was funneled through the FirstLine Transportation Security PAC.

This flow of campaign cash was focused largely on a few legislators whose powerful appointments on several congressional committees gave them oversight powers over TSA contracts sought by SMS Holdings. Among those who benefited from SMS Holdings contributions were House members John Mica (R-FL) and Dan Lungren (R-CA).

Rep. Mica is the current Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Rep. Lungren holds a seat on the House Subcommittee on Transportation Security. Both positions allow them to shape legislation impacting contracts held by SMS Holdings.

In the Senate John Thune, Jim DeMint, members of the Aviation Operations, Safety, and Security Subcommittee have been recipients of Firstline PAC money as well as contributions directly from SMS Holdings' executives.

Tight political connections that have allowed SMS Holdings to fight unions and obtain lucrative government contracts don't stop there. In 2003 the company hired Jim Burnett (quoted above on privatization as a business opportunity) to be its vice president of business development. Burnett previously was chief of staff to Van Hilleary, a US House member representing suburbs of Nashville.

When Rep. Hilleary quit his seat in 2004 he moved to Washington, D.C., working as a consultant at the powerful SNR Denton lobbying firm. Among his clients was SMS Holdings. In 2006 Van Hilleary ran for Senate. Financial disclosures filed then revealed he had lobbied extensively for SMS Holdings with his former congressional colleagues. Among the largest funders of his senatorial campaign were SMS Holdings executives.

These political connections continue to work for FirstLine and SMS Holdings. As recently as November of 2011 Rep. John Mica was arguing still for privatizing all TSA screening jobs.

...And Oakland is paying these people for private security guards.

Whose Streets?

2012-01-14T16:34:00.001-05:00

Part 2., Big Business' Occupation of Downtown Oakland

In our first installment in this series we gave an overview of the emergence and role of business improvement districts in Oakland, CA and beyond. We described how they allow real estate corporations to circumvent tax-revolt era laws that have starved many de-industrialized, majority-minority cities, in order to fund projects that are aimed at gentrifying neighborhoods to increase rents. We introduced two of Oakland's BIDs, the Downtown Oakland Association, and the Lake Merritt/Uptown District Association (DOA and LMUDA), and revealed their efforts to eliminate Occupy Oakland's encampment. In this piece we extend that analysis with more background on the political agendas of the DOA and LMUDA.

Since early 2009 a different kind of "occupation" in downtown Oakland has been reshaping public space and transforming the underlying relationship between government and the people. It's not a protest. There are no tents, banners, rallies or marches. Instead this occupation has taken hold through subtle but profound changes in state and local laws. The leaders of this occupation are a small group of major real estate companies. Their ultimate goals stand in stark contrast to the economic reforms and greater democracy the Occupy Oakland protesters say they are seeking.

Oakland's two largest business improvement districts, the Downtown Oakland Association (DOA), and Lake Merritt Uptown DistrictAssociation (LMUDA) have been praised over the last three years by politicians and the media for spurring a "renaissance" in one of California's most economically depressed cities. Both organizations have mostly avoided criticism, until very recently when they pressured Mayor Jean Quan and the Oakland Police Department to wipe out the Occupy Oakland encampment in Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. Their stance against Occupy Oakland led many observers to question why both special districts were so adamant about removing the encampment, even if it required violent police raids.

What the DOA and LMUDA's own records show, however, is that the forceful crackdown against Occupy Oakland they encouraged wasn't a one time position. In lock-step (both districts are governed by virtually the same board members, and managed by the same San-Diego-based consulting company) the DOA and LMUDA have waged a concerted campaign since their creation in 2009 to radically transform downtown Oakland. This transformation, according to the groups' own records, is explicitly intended to remove youth of color, the homeless, political activists, and virtually anyone else who does not conform to a desired upper-income consumer demographic. Policing, both private and public, has been central to this campaign.

Militarizing Public Space

The DOA and LMUDA's attempts to eradicate targeted populations from downtown Oakland are most evident in proposals to redesign or eliminate particular spaces where youth of color, the homeless, and even taxi cab drivers congregate. Spaces that the BIDs have been particularly focused on transforming or eradicating include the sidewalk surrounding Burger King on 13th and Broadway, the taxi stands on 13th, ledges around the BART station entrances, Snow Park, and Franklin and Latham Squares, and Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza.

In "Uptown" —the favored name used by corporate developers to identify the blocks bounded by Harrison Street, Grand Avenue, San Pablo Avenue, and 17th Street— the LMUDA is attempting to erase public spaces where "undesirable" persons congregate. Part of this strategy involves placing planters on the sides and backs of the 17th and 19th Street BART station entrances in order to eliminate places to sit. The LMUDA also claims that the homeless are "targeting Uptown," and minutes from the district's April 21, 2009 board meeting reveal that "homeless encampments in district will require coordinated effort with maintenance team," to remove them. Occupy Oakland wasn't the first encampment to be targeted for removal by Oakland's BIDs.

From OPD pamphlet.

In order to drive poor people out of the LMUDA district boundaries the organization has distributed OPD anti-panhandling flyers to building owners and apartment managers. They in turn have distributed these among the new upper-income residents of the luxury apartments and condos concentrated Uptown. Furthermore the head of LMUDA's private security, Ted Tarver of Block By Block, has pressured the Oakland City Attorney, OPD, and the City Council to prioritize the enforcement of laws against sidewalk sales in an effort to eliminate street vendors and panhandlers, according minutes of the district's "Sidewalk Order and Beautification Ordinance" committee from April 20, 2011.

Before taking over Block By Block's security operations for the DOA and LMUDA, Tarver was a 16-year veteran of the San Francisco Police Department. Block By Block specializes in contracting with business improvement districts for security and other services. It is a subsidiary of SMS Holdings, a Nashville headquartered firm that owns six similar companies. SMS Holdings describes itself as a "God-centered and faith-based" business in company literature, and is known for the anti-union policies of its management.

At Burger King on 13th and Broadway, the Downtown Oakland Association has proposed several measures to drive away persons characterized by the DOA as "pan handlers" and "loiterers." Seeking to eliminate poor people from this corner, the DOA, working through Ted Tarver, has convened meetings with the owner of the Burger King franchise, and the owners of the buildings immediately adjacent to the corner, in efforts to coordinate increased security patrols. The DOA's board meeting notes from March, 2009 boast that "[Block By Block] Ambassadors have greatly reduced the pan handling, loitering."

Taking further steps the DOA has researched the costs and jurisdictional logistics of installing planters on the ledges that wrap around the BART station entrance in front of the Burger King because "people use it as a bench," and it "encourages hanging out." The DOA defines "hanging out," and "using benches" as bad behaviors that must be eradicated. In one of their "District Identity and Streetscape Improvements" committee meetings, the DOA's board and staff discussed installing bulky landscaped planters as a means to "take up space and move people away from the corner."

Furthermore the DOA has allocated thousands of dollars toward eventual installation of a Muzak system —piped music and sound effects— to drive away "undesirable people from the area," as minutes from an April, 2009 board meeting reveal. Toward this effort the DOA has pressured business owners on the block, including the owner of the Burger King franchise, T-Mobil, Fred Karren (the owner of the building), and Mo Mashoon, owner of the building across 13th Street, to each contribute $2,000 yearly toward this audio deterrent.

Across 13th Street from the Burger King the DOA has advocated for the removal of taxi cab spots in the diagonal street parking because the corner "already has a loitering issue," and they want to remove the cabbies from the sidewalks where they take breaks and wait on fares. Oakland's cabbies, it should be noted, are primarily working class men of color. The DOA claims they are hanging out too much, and that their presence deters shoppers and corporate employees from frequenting the area.

Claiming Space

The 13th and Broadway site has become a zone of racial and class surveillance and policing of "undesirables" because it is the very core of the Downtown Oakland Association district. The DOA has chosen this intersection to install light pole banners with its logo, much like any occupier plants a flag claiming space.


SKS Investments' planned office tower.

Immediately across Broadway is the Clorox Company's office tower. Clorox is one of the district's largest corporate property owners with a controlling interest in the DOA's assessments and votes. Besides having its headquarters and own employees there, Clorox is now renting out much of its own building —seven floors, or 136,000 square feet to be exact— making the company one of Oakland's biggest landlords. Just around the corner on 12th and Broadway SKS Investments, a San Francisco headquartered real estate developer that was a major player in the gentrification of SOMA in decades past, is planning to build a 20-story office building. SKS Investments has a representative on the DOA board alongside Clorox and other major real estate owners in downtown Oakland like CIM Group, CAC, CBRE, Metrovation, California Capital Investment Group and a handful of others.

These concentrated corporate real estate owners are able to dominate the boards of the DOA and LMUDA and determine the policies of both districts because the law governing formation and management of business improvement districts (the Property and Business Improvement District Law of1994, CA Streets and Highways Code 36600 et seq.) apportions votes based on the percentage of the assessments each owner provides to the district's total budget. He who has the gold, makes the rules. Only property owners may vote on nominees for the district's board. Furthermore, it only takes a simple majority of votes held by the owners of assessed property to form and steer a district.

Phil "Shotgun" Tagami in his Rotunda Building.

According to data compiled from the DOA's initial assessment survey, a mere nine property owners together control more than 50% of the assessed property values in the district. Key among these are CBRE, the global real estate firm owned by Senator Diane Feinstein's husband Richard Blum; Phil Tagami, the owner of several downtown Oakland properties including the Rotunda Building which he infamously patrolled with a shotgun during Occupy Oakland's general strike; the CIM Group, a major LA-based real estate investor; and the previously mentioned SKS Investments and Clorox.

The LMUDA district, located north and east of the DOA's boundaries, is also controlled by an elite group of corporate real estate owners. According to assessment records obtained from the district, a mere twelve property owners numerically account for more than 50% of assessed property. The inner circle of the LMUDA overlaps very much with the DOA. The CIM Group and CBRE have representatives on the board. Other controlling interests include the Swig Company, a San Francisco real estate developer that owns the Kaiser Center and has holdings across California, in Texas, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.; Kaiser Permanente; Brandywine Realty Trust, one of the nation's largest REITs, based in Pennsylvania; Metrovation, another San Francisco real estate developer with national holdings; and Signature Properties, an Oakland-based developer.

Coordinating, Transforming, and Intensifying Police Force

Just prior to forming the DOA and LMUDA in 2008, the soon to be executive director of both organizations, Marco Li Mandri, wrote to the above set of corporate real estate owners in Oakland explaining how the district would allow them to obtain not only special assessment funded services, including security, but also how it would allow them to lobby for greater general city resources, including policing; "Experience has shown that once the assessment district management corporation is formed, the private property owners in the district can normally leverage a greater amount of general benefit City services than before the establishment of the district.This is due to the fact that those property owners are now organized...."

Since their formation Oakland's two downtown BIDs have attempted to coordinate and focus city police force on the downtown, in addition to beefing up security with their own private guards, called "ambassadors."

From very early on both BIDs have organized meetings with OPD leadership and officers in an attempt to seamlessly integrate the district's security guards with OPD. OPD officers, however, have been resistant to cooperating with Block By Block's ambassadors. This resistance is partly born of OPD's internal culture which disparages private security guards, and partly from the fact that OPD leaders and the police union leadership are intent on setting their own priorities.

Even so, OPD commanders have shown much deference to the BIDs and their agenda for the downtown. OPD Captain Anthony Toribio told the DOA board in December 2009 that the department supports joint patrols of OPD officers and Block By Block security, and that these private cops could act as a "force multiplier." In another meeting Captain Toribio told the LMUDA board he wanted the district's private security to "share intelligence" with OPD.

Captain Toribio suggested to the DOA that its board and staff should lobby the Alameda County District Attorney's office to press for stricter enforcement and sentencing of those targeted by Block By Block, and cited by OPD for various misdemeanors in the downtown, so as to drive these persons away permanently. The DOA board has also strategized with Captain Toribio as to how the district could most effectively pressure the City Council to increase the number of cops patrolling downtown Oakland. Similarly in a March, 2009 board meeting LMUDA members discussed petitioning the city to pay for more police to patrol "Uptown" so as to create a greater sense of security during events like the Art Murmur.

Upon hiring Block By Block as its security contractor, both the LMUDA and DOA have sought ways to fully integrate their private police force into the OPD. Early on Block By Block ambassadors were allowed to attend OPD daily lineups. According to notes from a December, 2009 LMUDA board meeting, OPD officers receive "weekly security updates" drafted by Block By Block security chief Ted Tarver.

At the same meeting Tarver, Captain Toribio, and the LMUDA board discussed ways to discipline OPD officers who continued to resist pressures to work with the LMUDA's hired security force: "Officers that do not like them and are resistant to work with them will be held accountable," read the minutes from the board meeting. Captain Toribio recommended that BBB security staff "record the car or badge number" of cops who refuse to cooperate with them, and "he will follow up with [the officers]."

Another means by which the DOA and LMUDA are "force multiplying" police and private security downtown is via technology. Block By Block initially sought permission for its security ambassadors to carry OPD radios. Due to police resistance, and because this could be a violation of the law, it was decided instead that OPD officers would carry Nextel phone/radios used by Block By Block staff. The next stage of this kind of "intelligence sharing" will involve hand-held devices that allow Block By Block ambassadors to track individuals and activity in the downtown, in real time, sharing it with OPD, and storing data for later analysis.

This system is being developed by Eponic, a Portland, Oregon-based company. Eponic's web site explains that they "develop mobile software and management solutions specifically for Business Improvement Districts, Urban Developers, Cleaning and Security Providers." Block By Block is exploring this technology for use in Oakland's downtown BIDs, according to board meeting minutes.

Former Oakland Police Cheif Anthony Batts is listed on Eponic's web site as a supporter. While heading up the Long Beach Police Department, Batts even endorsed the company's tracking software and devices. In a letter to the International Downtown Association, an industry lobby for BIDs, Batt's explained how this technology facilitates policing of the homeless, youth of color and other populations universally targeted for removal by BIDs.

"Guides are able to track on their PDAs trends in graffiti, illegal dumping, abandoned shopping carts, and quality of life issues such as panhandling and outreach to the homeless community. For instance, the Long Beach Police Department is responsible for enforcing curfew in a Downtown park where many homeless individuals tend to congregate," explained Batts. "The Guides are able to note the number of individuals in the park after curfew in their PDAs and send the data to us," whereupon the LBPD would cite, arrest, and otherwise remove these homeless persons.

As a result of Chief Batts' endorsement, Eponic and the Downtown Long Beach Association (a BID just like Oakland's DOA and LMUDA) won the International Downtown Association's 2007 Merit Award, beating out similar police-state/private security technologies developed in Cape Town, South Africa, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

While Chief of the Oakland Police, Batts was very supportive of the downtown BIDs.

The Oscar Grant Rebellion

Few specific examples better illustrate the political agenda of the DOA and LMUDA than their reactions to the protests following Oscar Grant's slaying by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Years Day 2009.

Swig Co.'s Kaiser Center.

Less than two weeks after frustrated Oaklanders marched on the downtown and faced off against the police, the LMUDA held a board meeting in the Swig Company's lakeside Kaiser Center tower. LMUDA directors, including representatives of Swig Co., Portfolio Property, Kaiser Permanente, CAC Beacon, Signature Properties, and CIM Group held a lengthy strategy session about how to defuse the nascent movement against police brutality, specifically because the situation was inconveniencing property owners and undermining the district's public relations campaign to re-brand downtown Oakland.

According to minutes from the LMUDA's January 20th board meeting, the district's staff were tasked with looking into why 14th and Broadway was a site of protest, what the city's process for issuing march permits was, and how the LMUDA and DOA could perhaps block issuance of these permits. Both BIDs tasked their staff with lobbying City Hall to move any future protests outside of the district, but especially away from 14th and Broadway and Frank Ogawa Plaza, which the DOA considers its domain.

Furthermore, the BIDs discussed ways to support removal of the impending trial of Mehserle from Alameda County, also in an effort to diffuse future protests. Mehserle's lawyer eventually would ask for a move which would be granted.

The BIDs also discussed creating a media strategy to undermine the protesters. LMUDA and DOA board members talked of the "need to counteract this negative press by putting forward the story of the CBDs," another name for the districts. Among some of its own corporate members the LMUDA and DOA were able to raise a $100,000 fund to compensate property owners whose buildings were damaged during the January 7, 2009 rebellion.

The LMUDA and DOA board meetings notes communicate nothing to the effect that these groups contemplated assisting Oscar Grant's family and the community, or that the LMUDA and DOA considered playing a positive role in addressing police-community relations during this tense period.

Instead the BIDs intensified their securitization of the downtown. For the DOA and LMUDA Block By Block set up a series of meetings in which Ted Tarver coordinated with the OPD, BART Police, the Alameda County Sheriff, and other police forces, in preparation to crack down against the protests.

In the aftermath of the trial's verdict, in July of 2010, an Oakland City employee who represented the city on both BID boards asked staff of the LMUDA and DOA and its contractor Block By Block for help "tracking down surveillance footage in an effort to apprehend and prosecute individuals involved in vandalism," according to meeting notes.

In the run up to the November, 2010 sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, Block By Block advocated for the creation of "arrest teams" among police forces, and the strategic placement of officers on each block to deter property damage. Block By Block chief Ted Tarver worked to create a "operation's [sic] manual to address any potential fallout from the upcoming Mehserle sentencing." According to DOA board meeting minutes from October 6, 2010, Tarver and the BIDs convened meetings of "all security managers in the districts, local law enforcement (OPD, BART Police, Alameda County Sherriff's Dept. [sic], the District Attorney's Office, the City Attorney's Office and CEDA to develop a game plan."

When the LMUDA and DOA learned that the sentencing date fell on Friday, November 5, the organizations went so far as to attempt to lobby the California Attorney General and District Attorney of Los Angeles, who they hoped would in turn put pressure the presiding judge to move the sentencing date, because it would conflict with a "First Friday" event, one of the art and culture productions put on by the districts to whip up tourism in Oakland.

According to DOA board meeting minutes from August 18, 2010 "Ted [Tarver of BBB] emphasized that a lot of the damage [from the protest after the July verdict] was cause by so-called Anarchists and not Oscar Grant protestors. Marco [Li Mandri of New City America] expressed concern over the scheduled date for the Mehserle sentencing. The date is a Friday and coincides with First Friday. Efforts are being made to reach out to the District Attorney and Attorney General to try to talk to the judge and request a new date."

After the sentencing DOA and LMUDA staff congratulated themselves on not receiving any reports of damaged properties, and diffusing negative impacts on the districts due to the protests which had by then become subject to enormous police repression.

Fill 'Er Up

2011-12-30T15:54:00.000-05:00

Northern California is a strange land when it comes to real estate development and agriculture. Here's two pieces on a massive terra-forming project in Sonoma County.

The short version:
Fill 'Er Up: A massive South County project has environmental watchdogs guessing

The backstory included:
Berg's Vineyard from Scratch

And in other news, CA seems closer to ditching nuclear energy after the CPUC rejects PG&E's application to pay for Diablo Canyon's re-licensing with ratepayer funds.

The Corporate Media's Counter-Counter Attack Against Occupy's Port Blockade

2011-12-15T16:31:00.001-05:00

Hearst Corporation's NY headquarters.

In spite of a negative propaganda campaign led by the San Francisco Chronicle and parroted in much of the Bay Area's corporate media, thousands turned out on Monday, December 12 to blockade the Port of Oakland.

Organizers for the Occupy movement explained that the blockade was a coordinated counter-strike against WallStreet and its political servants. It was a nonviolent response to the vicious police assaults against most of the nation's Occupy encampments. That violent wave of evictions, carried out through the month of November, was reportedlycoordinated by city officials and local police forces working through the USConference of Mayors. Many suspect the crackdown was also facilitated with assistance from high levels of the federal government's now sprawling internal security force known as the Department of Homeland Security.

Fittingly then, just as the government's nation-wide attack against the Occupy movement began with a "shock-and-awe" style police raid in the early morning hours of Tuesday, October 25 in Oakland, the movement's coordinated West Coast counter-strike began in the pre-dawn stillness of the same city. Hundreds gathered at the West Oakland BART station at 5am. Massing to over one thousand by 5:30, they marched in the cold and the dark of the city's industrial wastelands to the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest shipping facility in the United States, and a crucial choke point in the global logistics system relied upon by multinational corporations like WalMart, Nike, and Starbucks.

They shut it down.

By 9am word had spread across the city, across the West Coast, and eastward —into landlocked states where on any other day the BNSF and Union Pacific rail roads normally speed containerized cargoes from the Port on massive snaking intermodal trains— that that morning's crew of longshoremen had been notified by their union's arbitrators, the International Longshore Workers Union, not to cross the blockade's lines, ostensibly because of "unsafe" working conditions.

Word spread in spite of reports by the Chronicle and other corporate media, falsely claiming the morning blockade had garnered only only a few "hundred" picketers. Many of the ILWU rank and file gladly took the day off, even if some would have preferred to earn that day's wages.

The Chronicle had deceivingly reported the union's position and the sentiments of longshore workers with respect to the blockade in the week leading up to the action. The paper portrayed the ILWU's rank and file as opposed to the Occupy Movement's plans.

The biggest lie of the day of the shutdown though was the Chronicle's narrative of how the action impacted port truck drivers. The sentiments of a handful of frustrated truckers idling intheir cabs outside the terminals, losing a workday because their rigs would notbe loaded on time, were accurately quoted. But the paper failed to tell the bigger truth about the struggle of these workers across the US to better their working conditions and win dignified wages and benefits.

These few truck drivers became a wedge issue in the days leading up to the Port shutdown, seized upon and enormously exaggerated by editors at the San Francisco Chronicle who sought to magnify their lost workday as an ironic example of the Occupy Movement's supposed naivete. This story also served as yet another justification for the crackdowns against Occupy Oakland, and the dismantling of Occupy San Francisco's encampment at the foot of Market Street less than a week before.

The Chronicle has betrayed a strong editorial bias against the Occupy encampments and protests from the very beginning. The newspaper stepped up its campaign to foment popular misunderstanding in the weeks following the violent police raid against Occupy Oakland back in October. Its reporters were repeatedly tasked to write stories that would emphasize property damage as "violence" perpetrated by the protestors, and to fixate on reports of crime, vandalism, and unsanitary conditions around the camp. When Oakland's business lobby, organized throughthe Chamber of Commerce, several business improvement districts, and a fewpowerful downtown real estate owners developed the narrative that OccupyOakland's encampment was harming local and small businesses in Oakland, theChronicle gladly prioritized this story.

The Chronicle itself has never been a friend of labor or working families, or of anything movements in local and state politics resembling democracy. Historian Gray Brechin's account of the newspaper's rise in the late 19th Century under control of the de Young brothers, told eloquently in Imperial San Francisco, is about as damning an account you can imagine of a media company abusing its position to amass political power, largely by scapegoating Chinese and Japanese immigrants to gain support of San Francisco's xenophobic white working class voters.

The newspaper was held by the de Young family until 2000 when it was sold to the Hearst Corporation. Hearst Corp. is of course the corporate offspring of William Randoph Hearst's barony, which began with another San Francisco Newspaper, the Examiner. While the de Young's used racism to roil popular opinion in their favor, Hearst was more openly an enemy of all workers and their unions.

When the Chronicle passed into the hands of the privately owned Hearst Corporation in 2000, San Francisco's flagship newspaper became a small part of an titanic media, real estate, and business services empire. Still largely controlled by members of the Hearst family, Hearst Corp. owns newspapers in fifteen major US cities, but these alone have mostly proven to be stagnating holdings. The Chronicle was drainedof millions over the last decade, suffering from the rise of the Internet anddeclining subscriptions and ad rates. Hearst Corp.'s real moneymakers are in different areas, in broadcast television, network media, magazines, and digital media. The company also owns vast tracts of real estate in California, including multi-thousand acre timber and cattle ranches, and rental properties in San Francisco.

A diversified corporate titan,Hearst is a quintessential defender of corporate capitalism. Its newspapers are perhaps best understood as revenue neutral tools of pro-corporate propaganda, spilling most of their hi-def., color-ink, and center-fold layouts on real estate, food, and entertainment forms of "journalism" that serve the interests of powerful business constituencies in regional markets.

Real journalism still takes place in many of the Hearst Corp. newsrooms. Some of the remaining editors and reporters there still strive to tell the truth, investigate power, and foster democratic debate. There are deeper interests, however, guiding the Hearst Corporation's generation and dissemination of information. The company's newspapers like the Chronicle may occasionally take powerful businesses or politicians to task, but it's important to keep in mind that Hearst Corp.'s earnings are more dependent on media products requiring less than objective reporting, in fact requiring incredibly partisan boosterism of local and global real estate and capital markets. For example, a good deal of Hearst Corp.'sincome derives from San Francisco's commercial real estate market where thecompany plays the role of landlord, as well as chief promoter. Another example, among many that could be used to illustrate this point, is the HearstCorporation's large ownership stake in Fitch Ratings, one of the three most powerful global credit rating agencies. Fitch is partly responsible for inflating stocks values and bonds yields, and promoting many of the bizarre financial instruments responsible for causing the financial crisis and economic depression that began in 2008.

Given these hyper-interested business activities at the core of Hearst Corporation's operations, is it any surprise to see articles touting the unquestionable goodness of corporate profits, or the beneficent impact of rising real estate prices in the Bay Area in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle?

Then it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the Chronicle's publisher and executive editors, like its owners, have frowned upon a social movement that is deeply questioning the very foundations of capitalism, and the particular powers and benefits that the wealthy elite derive from this system at the expense of the majority.

The Chronicle's editors have unrelentingly ran with the narrative that the Occupy Movement's port shutdownhas primarily harmed the ILWU workers and the city of Oakland and is thereforemisguided.

The Chronicle has wasted virtually no ink exploring questions such as who primarily profits from the Port's activities? What corporate and financial interests operate out of the Port of Oakland? What longstanding conflicts between workers and these companies at the Port might contextualize the blockade that just occurred?

Even after the ILWU's rank and file and some of its leadership made themselves available to the media, explaining that many of the union's workers supported the blockade, the Chronicle chose to run headlines proclaiming "Port shutdownpledged despite union rejection," and "Union not keen on new Occupy Oakland port blockade."

The day of the blockade the Chronicle had largely moved on to the new narrative that the blockade wasspecifically harming the independent truck drivers, obviously members of the 99%. Headlines again hammered away with a message that actually had very little resonance among the nation's port truckers because it crassly over-simplified their concerns, and glossed over the struggles they have been engaged in for years now against the corporate masters who own the major shipping companies and dominate port operations across America. Human interest-styled articles with accompanying photographs of truckers sitting, worry-faced in their rigs, ran in the Chronicle and other papers, replete with quotes about how a lost workday would sting them.

This Tuesday, the day after the blockade, the Chronicle reported "protestors 'ecstatic' after portdisruption," (although this headline no longer seems to appear on the web) recounting the previous day's blockade in terms designed to make the movement's participants sound arrogant and un-caring for the plight of longshore workers and truckers. Accompanying this account was another article amazingly claiming that the "occupy movement fails to connect withblacks." Closing out the Chronicle's triple assault on the Occupy Movement was a column by Chip Johnson claiming that, "march organizers didn't helptheir cause by ignoring labor leaders who did not support this action. Thatmakes Occupiers about as arrogant as business owners who refuse to negotiatecontracts in good faith with their workers."

Johnson's claim is nothing short of idiotic, coming a day after the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, a national coalition that includes the ILWU, the Alameda Labor Council, AFL-CIO, the Teamsters Union, and 147 other major labor and environmental groups released an open letter signed by some of the very workers Johnson claims to be so concerned about giving voice to.

Entitled "AnOpen Letter from America's Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports," five veteran truck drivers from America's ports completely refute the kinds of blatant divide and conquer politics Chip Johnson and his employer, the Hearst Corporation's San Francisco Chronicle have pursued with respect to the Occupy Movement's port blockade and other actions.

Their letter is so clear in explaining what the majority of these port workers feel with respect to the Occupy Movement, and what they seek to accomplish in partnership with the movement, that it is worth quoting at length. So rather than wasting any more words myself, I'll let these workers have the last word:

"We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day. We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.

Today’s demonstrations [the December 12 ports blockade] will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?

We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families. There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago. We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.

You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us. Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?

The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice. Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.” But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12.

We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

A Pigovian Foreclosure Tax?

2011-12-10T11:18:00.001-05:00

Some types of taxes are levied on things that are considered socially harmful. For example, there are alcohol and cigarette taxes, the intended purposes of which are to dissuade people from consuming these drugs in excess, and to raise funds to deal with the legal and health consequences of alcohol and tobacco abuse.

Negative externality price-demand curve

These types of levies are known as Pigovian taxes. Named after the economist Arthur Pigou, a Pigovian tax attempts to correct for negative externalities in the market. Negative externalities are costs not reflected in prices, but still born in human suffering, environmental harm, or price increases in other goods and services.

Foreclosures generate numerous and significant negative externalities that are not reflected in the cost of carrying out a foreclosure. So why not institute a tax on foreclosures to dissuade banks from taking people's homes, and to compensate communities hit hard by the housing crisis?

Foreclosure of residential homes has undeniably harmed millions of families and individuals who have lost their residences in the last three years. The dislocation, stress, and loss of equity affects more than just the family losing their home, however. Harm is spread throughout communities where foreclosures are concentrated. School districts and cities lose property tax revenues and population. Local businesses lose workers and customers. Empty homes drag down local economies and become blighted.

Solution: tax the banks when they cause harm. Prevent foreclosures by modifying the incentives and disincentives for creditors dealing with customers who fall behind in payment. Create a source of funds to compensate communities harmed by foreclosures that do proceed.

Here's how it could work. Suppose a family, we'll call them the "Morgans," bought a house for $300,000 at the height of the real estate bubble in 2006. Since the financial crash in 2008, the Morgan's house has plummeted in value to $150,000, but they're still paying a mortgage on the sale price of 300k. They're underwater and struggling.

Now let's say the Morgan family has recently been missing payments. It could be because of an adjustable rate mortgage that kicked into high gear. Or maybe a Grandpa Morgan is sick, and the medical bills have exhausted the family's savings. Or maybe Mrs. Morgan lost her job, and there simply aren't opportunities to make nearly as much income again.

Whatever the problem, this family will soon be foreclosed upon. The bank, let's call it "JP-America-Fargo," will take their home, and they'll have to move.

But now suppose there's a Pigovian foreclosure tax. We could design the tax in innumerable ways, but here's a very simple one just to illustrate the point:

When JP-America-Fargo Bank forecloses on the Morgan family, it must pay 10% of the home's last sale price, or $25,000 — whichever is greater. (Or maybe we should peg it at 27%?)

This tax payment, or "bailout" if you will, could be split two ways. 25% of the foreclosure tax could go to the Morgan family, to help them recover from foreclosure, and 75% could go to the local school district where the house is located.

So if the Morgan's lost their home, JP-America-Fargo Bank would have to pay 10% of $300k - $30k. The Morgan's get $7,500 of this, and local public schools get $22,500.

There are conceivable cases where a home's sale price is incredibly small because it was purchased decades ago, thus a 10% tax on that price would be a bargain for a bank to pay in order to foreclose on property worth much more. This is why we have the alternative minimum of $25,000.

The tax is high enough to create a massive disincentive for banks to foreclose on homeowners, pressuring banks instead to help homeowners who are underwater or who are otherwise having trouble making payments refinance their mortgages and stay put.

10%, or $25,000 might seem like an enormous tax, but keep in mind that the federal government bailed out most of the biggest banks that are carrying out the bulk of foreclosures. Trillions of dollars were spent making the JP-America-Fargo Banks of the world solvent. Little to nothing has been done to help homeowners (and what was tried earlier was geared too much to the needs of banks, not homeowners).

A Pigovian foreclosure tax could help reverse this injustice and prevent socially harmful corporate behavior such as mass foreclosures from continuing to damage America.

Who Rules Oakland?

2011-11-30T18:11:00.000-05:00

Part 1., Corporate Directors and the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce

By Darwin BondGraham and Adrian Drummond-Cole

[Download a pdf of this article for end notes, higher resolution images and print layout.]

The Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce is a non-profit "business league" organization, chartered under Section 501 (c) 6 of the IRS Code. According to the IRS, business leagues are not organized for profit, and no earnings may directly benefit their members. However, business leagues can lobby government leaders for laws and policies in the interest of their members, and they can also engage in political campaigning for and against candidates and specific ballot initiatives. These are, in fact, the main reasons business leagues are chartered, and in this sense, chambers of commerce and similar groups are entirely about profit.

The goal of a business league is to promote political conditions in which their members can obtain lucrative government contracts, avoid local and state taxes, pass off operating expenses onto the public, and privatize public goods. Chambers of Commerce are essentially political committees of regional business leadership organized to secure favorable laws and regulations. They further serve as public relations fronts for big business, publishing propaganda, organizing promotional events, and serving as advocates for the “business community” to the media.

The membership of most chambers of commerce is split between two kinds of businesses. The first group is comprised of smaller companies, usually based in the same city as the chamber, and usually dealing in some kind of product that depends on the local business climate — think tourism, entertainment, conventions, food, sports, and real estate, among other things. The second category is comprised of larger corporations with national and transnational operations. Often though, these larger corporations have significant enough investments in a particular place to make participation in a local chamber strategically useful.

Large banks are a good example of this latter category of members in that they frequently participate in local chambers to promote local branches and ensure access to local housing, consumer, and business lending markets. Mining and manufacturing corporations are also frequent participants in local chambers of commerce. The business practices of these corporations often have negative environmental and social impacts on communities, so they utilize the public relations functions of local chambers to influence public opinion.

Another key reason why large corporations and smaller companies form business leagues is to build business networks. The concept of "networking" is so ubiquitous today that it's almost unnecessary to explain. But in the business world, networking specifically refers to the establishment of professional and social ties that advance mutual power aspirations. Business executives participate in chambers of commerce to network with their peers, building the relationships and creating the cultural cohesion that sustains and enriches their rule.

In the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, these two groups —local smaller business owners and representatives of larger corporations— overlap to some extent. It is the larger corporations, however, which hold the most power in the Chamber. Large corporations find membership in the Oakland Chamber of Commerce to their advantage because Oakland is a major consumer market, a major port of entry for goods into the United States, and headquarters to both regional government offices and peer corporations with multi-million, and in some cases, billion dollar revenues.

The following analysis is concerned with these major corporations and their membership in the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. In this report we focus on the networks created by directors of the Clorox Company and PG&E to illustrate linkages that are applicable to large corporate members of the Chamber more broadly.

Most of these companies have large dollar stakes in the Bay Area and California markets. Their membership and control of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce is just one small part of multifarious political operations intended to influence lawmakers and regulators across numerous local and state governments. This, in turn, is part of a larger national network of business lobbies and think tanks focused on the federal government and international institutions.

Finally, although space limitations here prohibit it, at the end of this report we are including a brief analysis of the other sixteen major corporations currently represented by board members on the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. Investigation into the power wielded by their directors and owners awaits further study.

Corporate Networks

How do these different corporations come to agree on a shared political program to pursue through the Oakland Chamber of Commerce? At first this would seem very difficult, as some of these companies have drastically different legal and regulatory concerns, and some are in fact competitors.

If we look at the directors and major shareholders of these companies, however, a picture of cohesive networked governance emerges. Yes, some of these companies compete with one another, and many have differing legal and regulatory concerns, but there is much overlap in both ownership and management of these companies. The following information pertains to their mutual direction and ownership by powerful board members and the private equity groups some of them represent.

Figure 1 illustrates the core network of corporate power embodied in the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. Five board members of the Chamber in this network, identified as large circular red nodes, represent the interests of five major corporations that fund the Chamber. These five corporations have the most reciprocal ties to other companies in the entire network represented in our data set.

Figure 1., Core Corporate Network Represented Through the Oakland Chamber of Commerce: Red square node positioned at center represents OMCC board. Five large red circular nodes represent select OMCC board members. Black square nodes represent corporate entities. Small red nodes represent directors or senior executives of select corporations with OMCC membership. Selections determined by deleting pendants, leaving only directors with more than one link to the network’s core corporate entities.

1. Micky Randhawa - Wells Fargo
2. Victoria Jones - Clorox
3. Nathan Nayman - VISA
4. Alicia Bert - PG&E
5. George Granger - AT&T

If we explore the network of governance and ownership through persons linked to each of these companies, we find that often, through only one or two degrees of separation, these corporations are linked back to each other in a web of mutual governance. They share some of the same directors on their boards, and some of their directors are linked to each other by third-party corporations which they also control. This is often, but not always, due to concentrated ownership of voting shares across many corporations by powerful private equity funds (i.e. hedge funds, private equity groups, investment banks, etc.). Owning large shares of each company, a powerful investment firm uses its shares to appoint its own directors to each corporate board. When this structure of ownership is viewed from a distance, we can see how powerful corporations in seemingly divergent industries are often owned by, and ultimately governed by, the same wealthy elites.

Let’s zoom closer in. Micky Randhawa represents the regional interests of Wells Fargo Bank on the Oakland Chamber of Commerce's board of directors, but Wells Fargo's board members are interested in more than just their company's fortunes. Among Wells Fargo's directors is John Chen, chairman and CEO of Sybase, Inc., a computer software company. Chen was a director of Pyramid Technology Corporation, a manufacturer of server hardware, and later worked for Siemens after the German company bought Pyramid in 1995. Incidentally, Chen is also a director of the Walt Disney Company and a former board member of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Chen is not just a director. He is a significant owner of both Disney and Wells Fargo stock. His ownership of shares in these companies is a result of his compensation as a board member. He and his peers, who together own a large share of these companies, ultimately determine the strategic goals of both.

Chen's income in 2010 as a shareholder and director of Wells Fargo and Diseny totals $505,438. Although this is by no means his sole source of income, and only a small fraction of his total net worth, this sum alone puts him in the top 1% of America's income distribution. (At the end we have attached a detailed breakdown of income distribution in the US between 1979 and 2009 in order to demystify the so-called 1%, and provide benchmarks for understanding inequality in relation to the fortunes of those discussed here.)

Alongside Chen on the board of Walt Disney Co. is Robert Matschullat. Matschullat is a board member of Clorox and VISA, both companies with direct representation on the Oakland Chamber of Commerce board.

The Clorox company is linked back to Wells Fargo by route of other directors who also sit on the board of the San Francisco headquartered McKesson Corporation, the world's largest distributor of health care systems, medical supplies, and pharmaceuticals. These links can be confusing, but by referring back to Figure 1, we can visualize them and see how this creates a cohesive network of corporate governance and ownership.

McKesson, Disney, and Sybase (a subsidiary of the giant German software company SAP AG) are all governed by directors who in turn sit on dozens of other corporate boards, but this data has been omitted from Figure 1 to keep the diagram as simple and intelligible as possible, and also to only illustrate directors who create a cohesive network of governance among the five corporations which partly control the Oakland Chamber of Commerce.

If, however, we were to map these extended linkages, we would discern an ever expanding and relatively cohesive network of corporate ownership and governance, and we would find that these other corporations cooperate with one another to operate business leagues in other cities in the United States and beyond. For example, Kim Delevett, Corporate Community Affairs Manager for Southwest Airlines, sits on the board of both the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce. Similarly, Ken Maxey, Regional Government Affairs Manager for Comcast, sits on the boards of the Oakland Chamber and the Livermore Chamber.

Although Figure 1 does not show these extended linkages to other corporations and business leagues, here are a few more examples we could map if we were to plug in the data: McKesson's Chief Financial Officer is a board member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Disney has placed executives on the boards of many business leagues including the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. SAP AG's current CEO is a past member of the US Chamber of Commerce.

Other corporate links in Figure 1 are worth exploring in detail, so let's take a look at the networks of two companies which fund and steer the Oakland Chamber of Commerce: the Clorox Company and Pacific Gas & Electric.

The Clorox Company

The Clorox Company, headquartered in Oakland, is a multi-billion dollar business with manufacturing facilities in nineteen countries worldwide. While Clorox is most commonly associated with liquid bleach, they also own twenty brands including Brita, Glad, Hidden Valley, Scoop Away, K C Masterpiece, Pine-Sol, and Burt's Bees. Figure 2 is a network diagram emphasizing the Clorox Company's links to other corporations through its board of directors.

Figure 2., Clorox’s Core Corporate Network in Relation to the OMCC: Blue square dots represent corporate entities. Red circular dots represent directors or senior executive officers. Egonets for all corporations besides Clorox have been deleted to reduce clutter and emphasize only ties connecting Clorox directors and OMCC directors. OMCC board appears as dense cluster in upper right of Figure.

The first thing you will probably notice is that two of Clorox's directors also sit on the boards of VISA and AT&T, corporations that also fund and steer the Oakland Chamber of Commerce through their representatives on that board.

Robert Matschullat, mentioned above, is a director of VISA. Besides Disney, Matschullat is also a director of the Transamerica Corp., USA Networks, and Joseph Seagram & Sons.

Transamerica is an insurance corporation owned by AEGON, a Dutch company. It's office tower in San Francisco is internationally famous for its pyramid shape.

USA Networks is a television company owned by NBCUniversal.

Joseph Seagram & Sons was originally an alcohol distiller based in Canada, but it became a conglomerate in the 1980s by acquiring large ownership stakes in other companies, including DuPont. When it sold its DuPont shares in the mid-1990s Seagram's, under Matschullat's leadership, bought into media and entertainment companies like Universal Studios (now part of NBCUniversal — see the links and how they develop across time as companies are bought, merged, and sold?).

That Matschullat is a board member of USA Networks, now owned by NBCUniversal, and Seagrams, which used to own Universal, is obviously no coincidence. Matschulatt was a key figure in shuffling the organization of ownership and direction of these companies. Not coincidentally, Matschullat also used to be a director of the McKesson Corporation.

Clorox board members Carolyn Ticknor and George Harad are linked to one another through their past positions as a director and as CEO (respectively) of Boise Cascade, which briefly owned OfficeMax until the latter was spun off in 2004 in a highly complex corporate restructuring driven by Chicago financiers. Ticknor is also a member of AT&T, which is a corporate member of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce.

All in all, the board members of Clorox are shareholder in, or independent directors of, many additional powerful corporations and private equity groups.

Clorox director, Edward Miller, is a board member of the seemingly ubiquitous McKesson Corp.

Clorox director Donald Knauss is a director of the global construction and engineering giant URS which has innumerable major military contracts and co-manages the two US nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Livermore, California in limited liability partnerships that include Bechtel and the University of California.

Clorox director Tully Friedman was a board member of APL Limited, a shipping corporation that uses the port of Oakland's facilities. We'll return to APL in a moment, but first let's look more closely at Friedman.

Tully Friedman is a current and past board member of numerous other corporations that his San Francisco investment firm, Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, LLC, has bought equity stakes in. The multi-billion dollar pots of money that Friedman oversees include contributions from very wealthy individuals, many of whom sit on the boards of companies already discussed above, or who had past executive positions at these very companies.

For example, Robert Matschullat, the presiding director of the Clorox Company mentioned above, has invested part of his personal fortune in Friedman's firm. The retired chairman and CEO of Clorox, G. Craig Sullivan, is also an investor in Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, LLC. A retired CEO of McKesson, a retired chairman of Wells Fargo, and a current director of AEGON (parent company of Transamerica) are all investors in Friedman's capital fund.

Like many finance capitalists, Friedman is involved in steering national non-profit corporate advocacy groups. He is a director of the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute; a think tank that promotes political reforms that would further empower corporations and the wealthy.

Now quickly back to APL. Beginning as a state-owned US shipping company, APL was privatized after World War II. In 1997 it was sold to Singapore-based NOL Lines for $825 million, or $33.50 per share. Alongside Tully Friedman on the board of APL Limited were Frederick Hellman and Barry Williams.

In 1984, Frederick Hellman and Tully Friedman co-founded Hellman & Friedman LLC, another private equity firm. Although Friedman left the firm in 1998 to start his own equity group, he reportedly maintains a collegial relationship with Hellman, perhaps best symbolized by the fact that Hellman didn't drop Friedman's name from the company's moniker. Today both firms are headquartered in the same building, One Maritime Plaza in San Francisco. When APL was sold to NOL Lines Friedman and Hellman each owned more than 2 million shares.

Hellman is as blue-blooded as Californians come. He is the great grandson of financier Isaias Hellman who, among other things, created Wells Fargo Bank and occupied a seat on the UC Board of Regents for the better part of four decades. Isaias Hellman's son and grandson served as presidents of Wells Fargo, among other roles. The Hellman family's history is deeply intertwined with Wells Fargo and the UC, which are further linked together in a web of financial and political connections that deserves its own detailed analysis.

Former APL director Barry Williams is not depicted in Figure 2, but he is strongly connected to the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. Moving on to Figure 3, we will further investigate the corporate networks of power that steer the Chamber, starting with Williams.

PG&E

The network of Pacific Gas and Electric, an Oakland Chamber of Commerce corporate member, is depicted in Figure 3. Barry Williams sits on PG&E’s board of directors. In addition to his seat on APL's board, Williams is a director of numerous other companies, including the Colorado-headquartered environmental engineering giant CH2M Hill, which has a major regional office in Oakland. Refer back to Figure 1 to visualize how Williams occupies power within the corporate network that steers the Oakland Chamber.

Figure 3., PG&E’s Core Corporate Network in Relation to the OMCC: Blue square dots represent corporate entities. Red circular dots represent directors or senior executive officers. Egonets for all corporations besides PG&E have been deleted to reduce clutter and emphasize only ties connecting PG&E directors and OMCC directors. OMCC board appears as dense cluster in upper right of Figure.

Blue square dots represent corporate entities. Red circular dots represent directors or senior executive officers. Egonets for all corporations besides PG&E have been deleted to reduce clutter and emphasize only ties connecting PG&E directors and OMCC directors. OMCC board appears as dense cluster in upper right of Figure.

Like Clorox, many of PG&E's board members are the owners and directors of a vast array of other major corporations. Of particular interest in terms of the cohesive network of corporate governance underlying the Oakland Chamber of Commerce is Forrest Miller. Mr. Miller is a director of PG&E, having been elected in 2008. He is also a senior executive of AT&T.

At AT&T, Miller is responsible for "corporate strategy and development." This title refers to a school of business management thinking developed over the last several decades which emphasizes the ways that companies can systematically analyze their strengths and weaknesses in their "operating environment." The "environment" here is conceived of largely as the laws and regulations affecting a corporation's behavior, but can also mean industrial competitors and external forces like broader changes in consumer preferences or the availability of resources, labor, and other inputs.

In practice, only half of “corporate strategy and development” is about making “internal” changes to a company in response to "external" factors. The other half involves changing the “external environment.” In this respect, Mr. Miller's job entails strategizing ways that AT&T can increase its power and profits by altering existing laws and regulations, eliminating potential competitors through mergers and acquisitions, preventing competition by maintaining current telecommunications laws and policies, and gaining entry to new markets controlled by foreign states. This is why Miller is a past director of the US Telecom Association, a 501 (c) 6 business league that is organized to promote the interests of its membership, large telecommunications companies (AT&T, Verizon, etc.). US Telecom is one of the largest lobbyists in Washington D.C., spending millions each year to influence lawmakers and regulators in Congress, the White House, Federal Communications Commission, and Federal Trade Commission.

To be fair to Forrest Miller, his job, notwithstanding its elaborate title, is not particularly different from that of nearly every other corporate director or executive at PG&E, or any of the other corporate directors discussed so far. They are all intensely focused on influencing lawmakers, packing bills with beneficial provisions for their firms, shaping regulations to strengthen their control of markets, and undermining environmental and labor policies.

Who Rules?

In subsequent parts to this series, we will present more network data illustrating the Oakland Chamber of Commerce's member companies. We will also give more detailed information about the directors and executives of these companies, and provide an analysis of their social cohesion, profit-driven collusion, and political influence. More broadly, we will explore networks and institutions of economic and political power in the Bay Area. Below, however, is a brief explanatory list of the current corporations with representatives on the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce:

1. Clear Channel Outdoor, an advertising company owning and operating billboards and other outdoor display faces, currently valued at $3.7 billion. Clear Channel owns and operates numerous billboards, bus shelter ads, and other display faces on both private and publicly owned properties in the Bay Area.

2. Swinerton, a private construction company based in San Francisco, builds for developers, government, and corporate clients. Swinerton projects in Oakland include the Ice Center, the twenty-story Essex tower on Lake Merritt, the twelve story Ellington Condominiums, and the famous "comic book" retrofit of the Oakland Police Headquarters. Outside of Oakland Swinerton has built casinos, military installations, and headquarters for companies like The Gap, Inc.

3. Pankow Builders, similar to Swinerton in scope, is a major construction company headquartered in Pasadena with a regional office in Oakland. Pankow built the Whole Foods in Oakland.

4. The global communications giant AT&T is valued at $162 billion. It has numerous operations in the Bay Area. AT&T's economic reach and political influence are too expansive to detail here.

5. PG&E, the region's behemoth investor owned utility, operates gas and nuclear fired power plants in California, and owns much of the state's electricity and gas distribution grid and pipeline infrastructure. Headquartered in San Francisco, PG&E is valued at $15 billion. Its profit margin is highly dependent on California state laws and regulations. Thus PG&E fields an army of lobbyists across all levels of government.

6. Securitas is a Swedish private policing company that hires out security personnel, including guards and investigators, to secure corporate property, wealthy residential associations, and high net worth individuals, among other glittery things. Securitas has a regional office in East Oakland, and is valued at $21 billion.

7. Southwest Airlines operates in the United States and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is valued at $5.8 billion. The Oakland Airport is a major hub.

8. Grubb & Ellis buys, owns, and sells real estate. The company leases out several hundred thousand square feet of office space in downtown Oakland, much of this right along Broadway between 20th and 15th Streets. The company's business model is predicated on increasing land values in Oakland and other cities. Grubb & Ellis is headquartered in Orange County and valued at $21 billion.

9. CIM Group is another real estate corporation, specializing in ownership and management. It's headquarters are in Los Angeles. It's regional Bay Area office is at 1333 Broadway in the 1 Kaiser Plaza building, a 28-story office tower the company owns and manages. CIM Group owns over 1 million square feet of office and hotel real estate in downtown Oakland. The company's business model is predicated on increasing land values in Oakland and other cities.

10. Colliers International is yet another real estate company that brokers much square footage in Oakland, especially downtown on Broadway, Harrison, and Franklin Streets. Colliers leases out office space in the Wells Fargo Bank Center building on Harrison, among other corporate properties. The company's business model is predicated on increasing land values in Oakland and other cities.

11. Sunwest Bank is a business bank headquartered in Tustin, a city in Orange County, California. It's Oakland office is at 1999 Harrison in the Lake Merritt Plaza.

12. Summit Bank is an Oakland-based, privately owned bank with assets between $100 million and $3 billion.

13. Waste Management transports and disposes of residential, industrial, healthcare, and construction wastes. The company has an Alameda regional office and contracts with the city of Oakland and other regional governments to haul trash. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Waste Management is valued at $14 billion.

14. Clorox, a consumer products company, is the largest corporation headquartered in Oakland with a market value of $8.4 billion. Located one block from Oscar Grant Plaza, the corporation's executives have long been involved in Oakland and the East Bay's politics, even though the legislative and regulatory issues the company is most focused on are federal.

15. Comcast, another telecommunications giant valued at $57 billion, specializes in cable. It counts the Bay Area among its largest markets. It's economic reach and political influence are too expansive to detail here.

16. VISA is headquartered in San Francisco on Market Street. The credit card company's entire business model is predicated on helping banks and other lenders intensify consumer debt. Visa is worth $61 billion. It's main corporate campus is in Foster City in San Mateo County.

17. Bank of America was headquartered in San Francisco until 1998 when it merged with NationsBank. The company, valued at $52.4 billion, counts California and the Bay Area among its biggest consumer and home loan markets. Bank of America absorbed Merrill Lynch during the financial crisis in 2009 and now operates Merrill as its investment bank subsidiary.

18. Wells Fargo is still headquartered in San Francisco. Valued at $123 billion, it counts California and the Bay Area among it biggest consumer and home loan markets. Wells Fargo absorbed Wachovia during the financial crisis in 2009, and retired the Wachovia brand in October, 2011.

Source: Congressional Budget Office. “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.” October, 2011. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/.../10-25-HouseholdIncome.pdf

"Dr." Taser/Mr. Clorox

2011-11-28T11:22:00.001-05:00

On November 16 about two-hundred and fifty Oaklanders convened a general assembly in the city's central square, Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. It was yet another experiment in direct democracy, one of many public meetings held since the city's encampment was established a month earlier. Buoyed by a massive march to UC Berkeley's campus the day before, Oakland's occupiers floated proposals to guide the movement's next steps.

A national day of action against the coordinated police crackdown on various occupy encampments around the nation received 90% of votes. An occupation of a park on 19th and Telegraph got another 90% of votes cast. Before adjourning, the assembly opened the floor to general announcements. Protesters from San Francisco spoke last. They were worried the police were coming for them again, armed with batons and pepper spray. "Please come help us defend ourselves," they asked. Taking this into consideration, the Occupiers adjourned.

Just a block away on the same day another kind of "assembly" was taking place, the CloroxCompany's annual shareholders meeting held in the corporation's office tower at 1221 Broadway. While a contractor tallied proxy votes, Clorox's executives, directors, and representatives of its major shareholders huddled to chart their future.

Clorox's board of directors was re-elected. It's directors in turn recommended a package of executive compensation for the year ahead. Chair and CEO Don Knauss was paid $9.1 million. VP Lawrence Peiros was approved for $2.9 million in pay and stock. Most of the other executives received similar seven figure packages.

It's likely that Clorox's leadership also talked about the Occupy encampment, rallies, and assemblies occurring just steps outside their building. It's quite likely they had been worrying if the protests would disrupt their annual meeting. Clorox, like other major corporations with offices in Oakland, is a member of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, one of several business organizations that had pressured the Mayor to send in the cops on amission to violently evict the movement.

On the Clorox committee making recommendations regarding compensation is one "Dr." RichardH. Carmona. Carmona has been a board member of the Oakland-based Clorox since 2007. In that time he has been paid several hundred thousand in fees, and has obtained an option on upwards of 7,000 shares in the company. Carmona is a wealthy man.

Guiding aspects of Clorox's corporate decision making is only one of Carmona's jobs, however. He's much more involved in a different company headquartered in his home state of Arizona.

Dr. Carmona joined the board of TaserInternational in the same year he joined Clorox. Not coincidentally, that was just after he left office as the 17th Surgeon General of the United States under the administration of George W. Bush. Taser International is what you think it is; the company that makes and sells the electronic guns popularly known by their most famous brand name. Taser's biggest customers are police departments. Carmona joined Taser because of his top-shelf political connections, and his longtime police connections.

According to various accounts, Carmona joined the Army in 1967, just as the Vietnam War was getting hot. He quickly became a member of the Army Special Forces known as the Green Berets, and learned medicine by treating fellow soldiers in the battlefield. After the war —in which he became a highly decorated combat veteran— he attended medical school, earning a bachelors degree from UCSF in 1979. Carmona's early medical career was spent mostly as a nurse and paramedic.

In 1986 Carmona joined the Pima CountySheriff's Office where he would become a leader of the SWAT team, and also worked as a police medic. Carmona killed in the line of duty in 1999, shooting a mentally ill man who fired at him. The deceased had reportedly killed his father earlier that day with a knife.

In Pima County, Carmona served in different management roles in the healthcare system while working as a cop. Lacking the advanced research and education that such jobs require, he obtained a Masters in Public Health from the University of Arizona in 1998. He is a professor in the University ofArizona College of Public Health, and a prior chair of the ArizonaSouthern Regional Emergency Medical System.

It was out of this context, somewhatout of the blue, that George W. Bush nominated Carmona for the postof Surgeon General in 2002. Physicians from the University of ArizonaMedical School, where Carmona lectured, even criticized thenomination. Against Carmona's confirmation, Dr. Charles Putnam wroteto Senator Ted Kennedy saying the nominee's work as a sheriff'sdeputy was in direct conflict with his oath as a doctor to do noharm. Putnam noted that Carmona was a poormanager and that, "he was removed from his two previousadministrative appointments [in Tucson]…. because he could not workin an effective or even a civil manner with health professionals andother constituencies of those positions." Putnam concluded that Carmona's "panache in the face ofobjective danger has on occasion overwhelmed his identity as aphysician."

Even so, Carmona was eventually confirmed, and bysome reports was competent in office, even emerging as a critic ofthe Bush administration after his departure.

As a board member of TaserInternational Carmona sits at that table with other retired military officers and representatives of major investors, some who specializein investing in weapons manufacturing companies. In 2010 Carmona waspaid $30,000 in fees and given another $58,000 in stock options ascompensation by the company. All told he owns about 25,000 shares ofTaser International stock.

In the world of corporate governanceCarmona is considered an "independent" director of Taserbecause he is not an official employee, and because his equity stakeis less than 1% of outstanding shares. Nevertheless, Carmona has astake in the company's fortunes. His compensation there is ultimatelylinked to how many Tasers the company sells.

It should come as no surprise toreaders that the Oakland Police Department is a major customer ofTaser International. According to the OPD's 2010 Training SectionReport, the department currently owns and fields 530 model X-26Tasers. The City Council authorized purchasing most of these weaponsin 2008 with $645,000, and tacked on an appropriation of another$55,000 every subsequent year for training and other costs associatedwith fielding them. The Oakland City Council even chose to waive thenormal competitive bid process, apparently because Carmona's company,Taser International is the only authorized distributor of the weaponsin California.

In Taser International's 2010 annualreport the company notes that one of its primary problems is thepossibility that local governments will not buy their X-26 weapons,which account for the bulk of sales revenues. The company states:

"Most of ourend-user customers are government agencies. These agencies often donot set their own budgets and therefore, have limited control overthe amount of money they can spend. In addition, these agenciesexperience political pressure that may dictate the manner in whichthey spend money. As a result, even if an agency wants to acquire ourproducts, it may be unable to purchase them due to budgetary orpolitical constraints."

In the case of Oakland, neither thecity's dire fiscal situation, nor widespread opposition within thecommunity scuttled the 2008 Taser deal. Officers wielded Tasersduring the several evictions of Occupy Oakland.

In March of 2010 San Francisco's PoliceCommission again rejected spending upwards of $1 million to outfitofficers with Taser weapons.

The Pima County Sheriff's Department,Carmona's old stomping grounds, is a Taser International customer.

Oakland Chamber of Commerce Executive Board Member Charged with Committing $19.75 Million Corporate Fraud

2011-11-18T15:47:00.002-05:00

In a case that is emblematic of thecorporate chicanery and greed the Occupy movement proclaims to standagainst, Todd Hansen, a former president of Posterscope, a globaladvertising firm, has been arrested by the FBI and charged withorchestrating a financial fraud to inflate company earnings, therebyenriching himself.

Hansen is a current member of theexecutive committee of the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce'sboard of directors, and the President of Clear Channel Outdoor's SanFrancisco Division, headquartered in downtown Oakland.

According to the FBI, Hansen and aformer colleague at Posterscope, "are accused of engaging in afive-year, $19.75 million accounting fraud scheme to make it appearthat the Company was meeting certain performance targets when it wasnot, so that they could receive higher salary increases, bonuses, andstock options."

By inflating the company's earningswith fictitious revenues the FBI says Hansen was able to boost hisannual bonuses by $1.1 million during his five years at the company.

Hansen is also accused of misusingthousands of dollars of the company's funds to rent apartments, payfor country club memberships, and purchase airplane tickets forhimself, his family, and friends. (Read the FBI's press release.)

Hansen was arrested on November 3 andawaits trial in the United States DistrictCourt, Central District of California. According to Hansen's lawyer,William Portanova, "this whole mess arises out of thebookkeeping practices of other people several years ago. We areworking to straighten the entire situation out."

The Oakland Chamber of Commercerecently put pressure on Oakland's City Council and Mayor to evictthe Occupy encampment from Frank Ogawa Plaza, claiming the protestersare harming businesses in downtown Oakland. The regional office ofClear Channel Outdoor run by Hansen is at 555 12th Street in Oakland.

Hansen was elected to the OaklandChamber of Commerce Board in February of 2010, and according to theChamber's web site still serves as the organization's Chair ofCommunications.

Over the past decade Clear ChannelOutdoor has inked numerous advertising contracts with variousgovernments and public agencies in the Bay Area, includingadvertising contracts with the city of Oakland, San Francisco, andvarious transit authorities.

First Steps: Occupation as Self Realization

2011-10-08T12:26:00.001-04:00

Since the first days of Wall Street's occupation the question of the protesters' demands has dominated discussion. However, fixating on the lack of specific demands completely misses the significance of the moment. Nevertheless observers, and even some participants in the rapidly growing occupy moment have incessantly wondered about demands. Based on this obsession that the occupiers should have demands, many are now suggesting how to channel this nonviolent uprising into electoral or organizational muscle. Others have dismissed the growing wave of occupations because of their "spontaneous" and "structureless" nature exemplified by the absence of pre-existing demands.

Social movements capable of transforming society in fundamental ways do not begin with demands or organizational drives, however. They start with encounters. They grow from meetings. They flourish when relationships are cultivated. And they succeed when people exercise power in broad and strategic ways, across lines of difference that are only possible after you learn who you are together, and what you are capable of as a collective.

If the occupy moment is anything, its an encounter among the self-proclaimed 99% who have finally left their "personal problems" behind to find one another in a social and political setting. And they could not have picked a better setting, Zuccotti Park, which as Peter Marcuse points out "is a privately–owned space, coincidentally named after an aggressive real estate development lawyer who has been active both in governmental affairs and in private development [...] owned by Brookfield Properties, in conjunction with its ownership of One Liberty Plaza, the adjacent high-rise commercial tower, which, in Brookfield’s terms, 'is home to many leading financial and professional services firms[....]'"

The 99% is seizing space in the rotten core of capital to learn about the struggles of each and all. To discover their commonalities they have created a space of differences. Consider the words of one occupier, Yotam Marom:

"we have taken steps to define ourselves, to write documents to that affect, and to move toward a collective consciousness that is bold and uncompromising. Those documents that define us take forever to write, because we all participate in their writing (yes, it's a bit of a drag, but revolutions aren't so easy when we are fighting for the type of liberation that demands self-management). Now, to be clear, I have always been a strong proponent of clear demands. They help define our struggle, point the way to actions we want to take, give us tools for measurement, communicate with people outside of the occupation, and represent those busy struggling elsewhere. However, I do want to point out that we have been able to continue to grow and bring new communities in despite a lack of demands, and that those people and groups will bring their own. I also think our demands really aren't as mysterious as some people are letting on; I think our critics are playing dumb."

Note the fact that new communities have joined the occupation because it is sufficiently open in terms of what it will demand. It's the encounter that is the most significant aspect of the occupation moment, and everything else that has happened is a profoundly radical break full of immense potential. What matters is not what we think we want to demand prior to our gathering, but rather what we might come to demand once we collect ourselves and realize who we are together as the 99%.

Even the naysayers represent a revolutionary shift in our political trajectory. Simply consider the very obvious fact that the mass media and prominent politicians and pundits have been wondering about demands. "What are their demands?!" Just three weeks ago no one was asking such a question. The 99% was shuffling along, head down, disorganized and alone, bewildered and exhausted by the contracting economy, outraged by a very gruesome and publicized legal lynching, weary of a decade of war, and so much other hell. That powerful commentators, sympathetic and otherwise, are even asking about the possible "demands" the dispossessed might now make on the ruling class is amazing. It recognizes the radical potential that is fermenting there in the streets of America's cities. But what is the essence of this potential?

It's important that seasoned activists, organizers, and intellectuals don't jump the gun right now. We think we know what needs to happen, what the demands should be. We think we know how the occupy moment should focus the energy and outrage it has gathered up in order to become some kind of "progressive" or "revolutionary" movement that will wage specific campaigns. Wrong. We don't have the answers. How could we? You can only make demands if you have the power to fight for them.

All the tactics of movement struggle —electoral campaigns, strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts, fasts, education, mutual aid, exodus, etc.— are only possible when you know what you are capable of, when you know what forms of power you can manifest. As the collectivity grows day by day, as we meet one another, again or for the first time, as we learn about each other's struggles, as we listen to each other, only then will our demands take shape, because only then will we know who we are, what we want, and what we are capable of. The occupation is the attempt of the 99% to define itself as a political subject capable of fighting back and making history.

Consider perhaps the most important encounter had so far at Occupy Wall Street: the arrival of labor unions to meet and support the youth who sparked the whole thing. Union support was recognized by the corporate media as a sign that the occupation had become a force, but the occupy moment has drawn in a true multitude of movements. Wall Street is now teeming with thousands daily who represent the 99%, and they are joined in solidarity by dozens of other cities. Our identities and our struggles are as diverse as the quantum we have chosen to represent all of us implies. Our anger at the inequities of capital are equal, even if the means by which our exploitation occurs are different. What will we demand? Who will we make demands upon? How will we enforce these demands? We don't know yet, but in meeting one another we might find out.

Back to School, Back to Budget Cuts

2011-09-06T17:12:00.002-04:00

School started for most this week in California. The state has been withdrawing support for higher education for over a decade now. This year the cuts are as big as ever. Meanwhile student fees are increasing to make up for budget cuts, as well as the costs of increasingly larger, higher paid administrations. Students and others have protested in recent years, mostly to no avail.

In California’s Battered Education System, More Cuts & Privatization

Costly Units: Painful cuts continue to chip away at the SRJC

Cowboys and Aliens: The Stories Hollywood Won't Tell

2011-08-18T12:22:00.001-04:00

As far as film genres go it's hard to find another that exceeds the racism, chauvinism and brutality displayed in westerns. The very material upon which westerns are based is an historical era characterized by one of the world's most massive genocides, the colonization of a half continent, and the theft of even more lands from a "mongrelized" nation, Mexico. Virtually every western flick produced before the 1970s is seething with anti-Mexican and anti-Indian racism, reflecting the reality of the day, and by the day I mean both the 19th Century frontier, and 20th Century US mediascape. Plots are built around the irrational "depravities" of the sub-races as they rampage across the "wilderness" attacking peaceful and industrious settlers. Virtually every early western is about the white man's attempts to defend his women and community against the "savage" red-skinned humanoids who heed no laws or honor.

Later westerns turned the mirror on the white man to some extent, showing that evil also lurked in the master race of colonizers. He was the black-hat villain, and as if to certify his criminal insanity he often consorted with dark Indians and especially mixed-race Mexicans. The heroes remained the same, the tall white-hat gunslinger. Sure there's a lot of variations and even quite a few exceptions to the rule. More than a few westerns were built around the anti-hero persona of men like Clint Eastwood. But the genre's overall narrative from its earliest days, with films like The Big Trail, has been about white civilization's survival in a savage wilderness, and the justness of manifest destiny in American history.

That archetype cowboy John Wayne explained the naturalness of this narrative best in his infamous 1971 Playboy interview: "I don'tfeel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that's whatyou're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just amatter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, andthe Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves." Wayne would know. He starred in dozens upon dozens of westerns, more than any actor before or since. In 1974 Wayne was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

While the vast majority of westerns have been built around this kind of conscious and proud white supremacism —let's call it John Waynism— there have been a few westerns produced across the years that depict an alternative narrative. Many show black cowboys riding alongside whites, transcending racial hatred and allowing whites to show that they're "not prejudiced." However, it's usually a cross racial solidarity reached to better kill redskins or pursue outlaws, all to more effectively protect the American imperial project. So the agenda of imperialism remains uncontested.

Other westerns go so far as to depict "good" Indians, but then isn't the very notion of a good Indian predicated on the notion that they're supposed to be bad? And even when Indians and blacks are depicted as human beings, and even when the plot goes so far as to show them as victims of grave injustice, a major problem for Hollywood has remained. Most westerns continue to fixate on the white man, on his desires, tribulations, and quest for honor. Dances With Wolves was the high point of this tendency. Then came the Sci-Fi that was still in many important respects a western, Avatar. Avatar had all the trappings, from a colonization mission, to a mining venture, to the Marine Corps, to the nobel savage indigenous race and their deep spiritual connections to the earth. To top it off the white man got to go native, screw an Indian girl, and redeem himself and his race in the process. It was such an over-the-top western narrative that even David Brooks demolished it as a "White Messiah Fable," in which "natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration."

This gets right at the biggest problem with these revisions of the western. Try as they might to give Indians, Blacks, Asians and other races positive roles in stories of the West, Hollywood has spun tales of pure fiction, so much so that the truth of the past is lost to the sensitivities of liberal guilt. We've ended up, therefore, with the older Westerns that depict the reality of white racism and brutality in all its disturbing psychopathy, through a false tale of bravery in the face of attack, and the newer revisionist Westerns that in trying to give non-whites positive roles have completely drained reality from the pictures by not dealing with the white man's overwhelming thirst for blood and empire.

The first category of westerns, the early canon, is based on racist lies. It depicts Indians and others as savage animals that must be put down by white defenders. But at least the racism of the narrative is apparent. This obvious white racism can't fly anymore among a mass audience, and so as the racial attitudes of whites have morphed, so has their ultimately racist narrative about themselves and the Other.

The second narrative, the new racialism, may be worse because it masks the deeply racist reality of what happened with a fictive storyline that is about whites overcoming racism to ally themselves with Indians, Blacks, Mexicans, whoever, to fight for some greater good. This is not what happened in the West. In the process the story that really needs to be told and retold, the story of what went down as the US Army, state militias, and posses of settlers systematically destroyed a thousand nations during the stampede to California, the story of what the West really is, how it deformed white men's souls and led to genocide and the extension of slavery, has been left untold.

Is this because Hollywood simply can't produce a film that isn't led by white people, a film in which the main character and the narrative aren't based in white experiences? And why can't Hollywood? Why wouldn't a film shot from the perspective of an Indian do well at the box office? Why must a white person always find their way into native skin to create mass appeal? What does this say about the American people today? What racial desires and fears lie in the white heart and mind?

Whatever the cause, the fact is that mainstream film has leap frogged over reality to tell tales of racial cooperation in the old west. This is what Cowboys and Aliens seems to be about on some level.

Here's the basic plot. Aliens come to earth to and attack a white settler gold mining town in Arizona. (The town happens to be named Absolution, the theological word for the forgiveness experienced after sacrament and reconciliation, which under Catholicism all results in the washing away of sins -- I'll let you read whatever you like into this.) The aliens call themselves "the Caste," and like many evil extraterrestrials are bent on conquering other planets in the same imperialistic fashion that Euro-Americans actually did set out with in the Fifteenth Century. It's a funny name for the aliens given the racial undertones of the film. The sociologist Gunnar Myrdal once used the word caste to describe Blacks in America, eschewing "race" because of its biologistic connotations which as a scientist he was eager to refute. Like many things woven into the plots of Hollywood's blockbusters there probably wasn't much of any deep thought put to this, however.

Anyway, feuding as they are amongst themselves the humans have trouble fighting back against the Caste. Eventually however the whites band together with none other than the Chiricahua Apache Indians to defend planet earth. The main character, Jake Lonergan, a white man played by Daniel Craig, drinks a magic Indian potion and recalls where the aliens are hidden in their grounded mother-ship - thanks magical Indian medicine man! It's assured that in any film in which the white man allies himself with Indians (or Asians, Africans, etc.) there will be a grave illness or some seemingly insurmountable impasse that can only be solved through the use of the red man's magical herbs and access to the spirit world, forces often summoned up from a dipped gourd or a hit off the old peace pipe.

After getting high and seeing things, Lonergan and company saddle up. A great battle ensues in which all the trite and cliche reversals of fortune, bravery, sacrifices, and final triumphs occur. If you've seen a Hollywood action flick you know the basic formula -- lots of explosions, shouting, jumping, flying horses and alien weaponry grafted onto bows and arrows, etc.

The humans eventually win. And in a plot twist proving they're not only not racist, but in fact they're not even speciesist or terrestrialist, producer Steven Spielberg, director Jon Favreau, and the eight other producers/screenwriters (all of whom are white men, surprise?) include this plot twist: Ella Swensen, a beautiful woman inexplicably traveling alone through Arizona's shit-lands and drafted in the battle to fight the aliens turns out to be an alien herself, although of a different alien race (or is it caste?) also battling against the intruders. She dies to save them all. Sorry if I spoiled things for you.

The end, happy end. But what after? Well if it's science fiction then we're supposed to suspend our disbelief and follow the what-ifs as far as they go. But after the aliens are vanquished there's still the question of the Chiricahua Apache, the Indian nation that up until very recently in Hollywood was naturally given the role of the alien force that could not be reasoned with, that could only be dealt with through violence. In Cowboys and Aliens the Apache just helped the white man save planet earth, so maybe in this fantasy realm everyone signs a big peace treaty and it's all good.

Back to reality. From their first encounters with the pale-faced, bearded military men and miners "exploring" their homelands, the Apache were subjected to murderous intentions. The Apaches resisted colonization and ruination of their homelands by the Mexican and later American militaries and were more successful in fending of invasion than most other tribes. It wasn't until the US realized the vast wealth of minerals, gold, silver and other precious metals under the Southwest that the intention to exterminate the Apache nation was firmed. This campaign of genocide began in the mining camps where the empire's most depraved petit capitalists, criminals, and get-rich-quickers turned their pistols and ropes on the Apache they encountered. Kidnapping and torture were commonplace, as was rape. The Apache bravely resisted.

The US military waged its official war against the Chiricahua during much of the latter 1800s, a war of attrition in which many Apaches were slaughtered resisting the invasion that had no legal or moral basis. It all more or less ended with Geronimo's surrender in 1886 and the imprisonment of the remaining Apaches in a number of military prisons from Florida to Oklahoma. The final days of the US Army's war to exterminate the Apaches was glorified in the classic John Wayne western Fort Apache.

After their removal the homelands of the Apache were subsequently turned into vast strip mines for copper and other materials when the US Army noted recoverable deposits. Corporations like Phelps Dodge eventually pulled billions of dollars worth of copper ore from the Apache nation's homeland, mostly from open pits that have left scars in the earth visible from space.

Perhaps the real aliens see these tears in the earth, and wonder what they are? No Hollywood narrative yet exist to explain it.

The Elephant in the Room

2011-07-27T12:23:00.000-04:00

California's fiscal mess continues to worsen thanks to the anti-tax, anti-government policies of the GOP. Read all about it: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/the-elephant-in-the-room/Content?oid=2938473&showFullText=true

A National Park for Nukes?

2011-07-26T12:31:00.000-04:00

Two pieces about Los Alamos National Lab and nuclearism. The more important one is published below.

"A National Park for Nukes?"

"Nuclear Fiddling While Los Alamos Burns"

There's a lot more to be said about the nuclear establishment's propagandizing of history in service of their current missions. I recommend Marc Lafleur (and see this link too) and Joseph Masco's excellent works on this and other subjects pertaining to culture and nuclear weapons for a deeper understanding.

----

A National Park for Nukes?

When the Truman administration dropped the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, they not only initiated a Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, they also began a struggle over the meaning of the atom bomb inside the United States.

It began slowly. Criticism of the bomb was at first strongly repressed by McCarthyism and other militaristic histrionics, but by the late 1950s hard questions about nuclear weapons were publicly being raised. By the late 1960s doubts and criticisms went mainstream. Disillusioned Americans wondered, had it been necessary to reduce two Japanese cities to dust, killing hundreds of thousands in mere seconds? Was it necessary to sacrifice vast zones of the American West to uranium mining, nuclear dumps, testing grounds, and weapons silos? Had the government acted in hasty ignorance, or in knowing neglect when it allowed miners and downwinders and soldiers to be poisoned with radioactive dust? Was there really a "missile gap"? Did atomic scientists actually purposefully expose their own children to radiation? Would it be possible to survive nuclear war, as the experts told us? What did the creators of the atom bomb really think about their "achievement"? What opportunity costs was our multi-trillion dollar investment in nukes imposing upon us as a country?

These and other questions about the nation's commitment to nuclear weapons were intensely debated as the Vietnam war rose to a fever pitch. New evidence continually surfaced revealing that the federal government had often acted with malice and intentional deception throughout the Manhattan Project, through the 1950s, and beyond. Historians began to document the realities of the nuclear age, including willful poisonings, and experimental defilements of the people and ecosystems of North America, especially Nevada's Great Basin, and also the South Pacific's Marshall Islands, and other testing and nuclear dumping grounds where generations would suffer on lands poisoned for thousands of years.

Quickly much of the logic that had justified the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came apart, and newer, more informed histories were drafted, showing cynical US leaders bent on punishing Japan and thwarting Soviet occupation of that island, not quickly ending the war and saving US and Japanese life. Gar Alperovitz's "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb" presented the bones of this argument. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's "Racing the Enemy" concluded the argument in extensively researched detail.

In other exposés of journalism and archival research the nuclear labs and testing grounds of America were exposed not as monuments to great achievements of science and national will, but rather as institutions of hubris and death, occupying stolen Indian lands, and dreaming up ever more deadly doomsday machines in the forms of thermonuclear weapons, MIRVed missiles, neutron bombs, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. The willingness of US leaders to threaten the use of nuclear weapons again and again against non-nuclear states was revealed, particularly after Vietnam.

The nation's nuclear weapons program lost its early luster then as many Americans came to fully grasp the toxic legacy, and understand the antidemocratic tendencies inexorably tied to the bomb and the institutions that created it. The 1980s brought this awareness to a peak as public perceptions of the bomb and its creators congealed around condemnation and a desire to abolish nuclear weapons.

When the Cold War ended the toxic legacy of the Manhattan Project and the continuing US nuclear weapons program was subjected to its greatest scrutiny of all. Losing their mythical rival in the Soviet "evil empire," the weapons labs entered a long decade of scandalous revelation; declining morale, accidents, corruption, theft, espionage, greed, incompetence. The 1990s and early 2000s brought repeated crises for the US nuclear establishment. 'If only it were possible to bring back the good old days,' thought the bewildered senior weaponeers. However, these good old days too were tarnished by the truth.

All the while, all through these eras of revelation and crisis, the weaponeers who dedicated their lives to the nuclear enterprise waged a battle of ideas to hide the ugly truths of the Manhattan Project's historical legacy. These acolytes of nuclearism —old Cold Warriors retired from the weapons labs, the Department of Energy, the military, and the private sector corporations that have made billions from building the bomb and spoiling the land and water and DNA of large swaths of the earth— they organized their own effort to re-write history all over again, to recast nuclearism in the benevolent form it had lost. They sought to recapture former glories that had withered through decades of sobering reality. As public perceptions of the bomb and the nuclear labs further soured they stepped up their game, especially in the 1990s.

Their revisions began modestly enough, but quickly turned into a national institutionalized effort. Historical foundations were incorporated by DOE retirees and nuclear boosters around various Cold War nuclear weapons sites. Soon large sums of money were raised, and with the eager cooperation of the nuclear labs and military-industrial corporations still designing and building nuclear arms, museums were opened to the public. These museums grew into absurdly large and well financed propaganda pieces.

The Bradbury Museum in downtown Los Alamos, named after Norris Bradbury, the second Los Alamos Laboratory director, became a museum of "science," not just of the lab, or simply the weapons it built, or merely the Cold War. No, it is "science." This aspiration to educate the public about "general science" was reflected LANL's intense effort in the 1990s and early 2000s to obscure its own core mission of nuclear weapons, constantly draping itself in the prestige of being a "national laboratory," or as the lab still describes itself, "a premier national security research institution, delivering scientific and engineering solutions for the nation's most crucial and complex problems." The lab also launched its own history web site in the 2000s showing its preferred arc of development, from the Manhattan Project to "computing," and "basic science," even though the lab remained thoroughly a nuclear weapons facility, and today is in fact becoming more and more dedicated to weapons manufacturing.

Inside the Bradbury Museum is an entire history of LANL, the Manhattan Project, nuclear science, and a few exhibits extolling the lab's supposedly non-nuclear contributions. Full scale nuclear missiles and bombs float on wires above and sit in displays within arms reach. You're encouraged to touch the bomb. You're told not to fear radiation. The Bradbury Museum, funded with federal dollars, became a key site of struggle over history in the 1990s as community groups battled the lab and DOE to include a different interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, a narrative that didn't claim it was a "necessity" to end the war and save lives, one that showed in images, and described through first hand accounts what the victims experienced. Parties without an agenda to promote nuclear weapons were, in other words, simply asking the Bradbury to present the history that most historians now acknowledge as most complete. In the end the lab and museum's staff, composed of pro-nuclear managers, allowed an alternative display in a dark corner of the museum, completely marginalized from the rest of the lavish exhibits.

For about a decade the Bradbury Museum stood as the premier pro-nuclear weapons propaganda tool. Other sites within the weapons complex were busy building their own museums though. The Nevada Test Site opened the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas in 2005 after a pro-nuclear weapons lobby, the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, raised enough money and convinced the Smithsonian Institute to join up.

It should be noted that the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, like the foundations that run or help support the Bradbury and other nuclear museums, is run by a roster of retired Test Site employees and contractors, all strong believers in nuclear weapons as forces of unquestionable good in the nation's past and present. The NTSHF's president Nick Aquilina, for example, was described in a tribute published in the Congressional Record in 1994 as a man who "characterizes the spirit and dedication of a generation of Americans who dedicated their lives to maintaining our nuclear deterrent". Aquilina was a thirty-two year career DOE manager. The foundation's chairman, Troy Wade, is head of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, a lobby for the state's military-industral complex, and also a retired DOE manager. With or without the Smithsonian's involvement it's obvious what sort of historical narrative about nuclear weapons testing attendees will be exposed to.

In the Atomic Testing Museum one is subjected to an entire historical narrative emphasizing the race for the bomb between the USA and Germany, culminating in the "necessary" dropping of the bomb on Japan, and then describing decades of testing in the desert northwest of Vegas, emphasizing the greatness of nuclear weapons and the men who built and blew them up. It's all packaged in a feel good, almost kitschy nostalgia. There's even a theater where you can sit through a simulated nuclear blast in which air is blown into your face and the bench beneath you rumbles and shakes. The kids must love that.

The biggest museum contribution to the pro-nuclear weapons historical narrative to date, however, is the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Located in a hanger-sized building along a major boulevard in Albuquerque, New Mexico, just blocks from Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base (where thousands of nuclear weapons are currently stockpiled) the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is nothing less than a flattering shrine to nuclear weapons, replete with a seventy foot tall Redstone missile in the front parking lot. Like the Atomic Testing Museum, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is also a Smithsonian affiliate, but it casts its own role in much grander terms: according to the Museum's web site, its "mission is to serve as America's resource for nuclear history and science." That's "America's resource" singular - a one stop oracle of truth.

Like Bradbury or the Atomic Testing Museum, the National Museum's exhibits extoll the history of nuclear science, recounting a narrative filled with bravery and wonder regarding the Manhattan Project's personalities. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan is predictably explained as a benevolent, if unfortunate necessity to save the lives of not only American GIs, but also Japanese women and children. The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History also has a backyard in which it displays decommissioned nuclear-capable aircraft, disassembled nuclear missiles, nuclear rocket launchers, and even a submarine. Like the other pro-nuclear museums everything is kid friendly. You can walk right up and rub your hand on the nose of a nuclear missile.

Apparently not satisfied with this now national network of pro-nuclear weapons museums, each with multi-million dollar budgets and tens of thousands of visitors (there's another in TOak Ridge, Tennessee called the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the B Reactor Museum Association in Richland, Washington) the nuclear weaponeers have for years sought a more powerful medium through which to communicate their hagiography of nuclear weapons.

In 2004 they found it in a bill sponsored by New Mexicos' Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman (it was probably dreamed up and written by the same pro-nuclear weapons boosters who organized and built the atomic propaganda museums in Los Alamos and Albuquerque). Senator Bingaman, in partnership with his then senior colleague Senator Pete Dominici, and also the two Senators from Washington State, and Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, introduced the "Manhattan Project National Historical Park Study Act," the first step in establishing a national park dedicated to nuclear weapons. Money for the study was initially hard to find, but eventually allocated. Completed recently, the Obama administration announced on the 13th of July its intention to embrace this project and create a national historic park in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

It would be a very strange national park. Los Alamos Laboratory was built on sacred lands filled with Native American ruins, existing and extensively used ceremonial sites, burial grounds, and other places of profound cultural significance to the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande Valley. Were it not a nuclear weapons lab, it is likely it would have long ago been deemed reservation land because of its true ownership, or a National Park because of its sublime beauty, or given some other dedication of preservation and reverence.

Pressing against LANL's boundaries on three sides already is the Bandelier National Monument, created in 1916 by Congress, and containing tens of thousands of archaeological sites and 23,000 acres of wilderness. As a National Park Service property should be, Bandelier is dedicated to the high desert, to the western pine, juniper, and fir forests of the Southwest, and to a history of human habitation that is thousands of years old. When Los Alamos was built, it was on top of this one-of-a-kind landscape that Congress had previously recognized as nationally unique and worthy of preservation. The lab colonized this landscape and occupied it with gigantic industrial-nuclear manufacturing and testing facilities. The spotted owls, coyotes, and spirits of the land, one imagines, fled the fumes and noise.

The entire notion of creating a national park dedicated to the history of nuclear weapons seems completely out of sync with the purpose of parks. The National Parks Service, for example, explains in its own criteria for establishing national parks that, "hunting, mining, and other consumptive uses such as grazing are generally prohibited in National Parks". Well what about nuclear weapons designing, nuclear waste dumping, high explosives testing, and biological warfare experimentation? What about planning for and manufacturing the weapons for the annihilation of entire ecosystems? Is that allowed in National Parks? It will be if this plan moves forward.

The National Parks Service has already had to defend this proposal from criticism leveled by myself and my colleague Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group. According to a spokesperson for the NPS, the Manhattan Project's sites "are significant parts of our national cultural history. And before they get bulldozed over, we are in favor of preserving these places so future generations can study these events, for good or bad." This description all sounds very neutral and useful, but it's not at all what's happening.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that it completely ignores how the proposal to create a Manhattan Project National Historic Park came about, that it was the idea of pro-nuclear lobbyists who have already succeeded in creating a national network of taxpayer-funded, Smithsonian-affiliated museums dedicated to glorifying nuclear weapons. These parties are not interested in preserving places for unbiased reflection on the bomb's creation. They are set on valorizing nuclear weapons, and they understand that a National Historic Park for the Manhattan Project would be the pinnacle.

And more than anything, they understand that reclaiming the past and re-polishing the bomb's image by dedicating a National Park to it will serve their aims today, aims that include pushing ahead with highly controversial and historically unprecedented investments in new nuclear weapons.

Los Alamos is, after all, currently undertaking a construction program that is larger in dollar terms than the entire Manhattan Project in New Mexico, all to build a new plutonium bomb pit factory.

Writing about politics, energy, budgets, and justice

2011-05-31T00:19:00.000-04:00

I'll be writing about energy policy, taxes, the budget, and other political issues with a focus on California for the foreseeable future, publishing links to them as they come online. Here are the first two.

California's Nuclear Future Is in Doubt, East Bay Express, April 27, 2011.

Voltage & Violets: How a public power agency in Sonoma County could revolutionize the grid, North Bay Bohemian, May 25, 2011.

Disaster Tax Policy

2011-04-06T01:10:00.000-04:00

The finer points of capital's affinity with catastrophe

Piles of words have been written about disaster capitalism. Most people's knowledge of it draws on Naomi Klein's expansive thesis laid out in "The Shock Doctrine." This brand of capitalism involves two kinds of assaults on communities: severe budget cuts and extensive privatization, both imposed during periods of psycho-social shock resulting from an economic crash, war, or a "natural disaster." In 2005 Hurricane Katrina became a case study to trace these twin prongs of disaster capitalism as one of the world's great cities and a stretch of the Gulf Coast were decimated by a post-hurricane flurry of budget cuts and privatization.

However, there's a third leg of the violent imposition of neoliberalism in the wake of disaster that has been subject to much less scrutiny. This aspect has been as effective as privatization in opportunistically transferring huge sums of wealth into the hands of a few corporations and the rich. It has also laid much of the groundwork for further budget cutting in the wake of catastrophe. What is it?

Two words: tax policy. Disaster tax policy.

In December of 2005 Congress responded to Hurricane Katrina by passing an unprecedented economic recovery package in the form of a tellingly named bill, the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005 (or "GO-Zone"). For those familiar with corporate globalization-speak, an "opportunity zone" is a synonym for "enterprise zone," and also closely related to the various other "zones" of special exploitation carved out by states for the benefit of capital. In these sorts of zones the normal rules of state regulation (to protect the environment, workers, etc.) are suspended, creating a laissez faire atmosphere. The GO-Zone essentially amended sections of the Internal Revenue Code, sections that normally apply to corporations and financial entities operating in a region of opportunity that included the southern counties of Mississippi and Alabama, and southern parishes of Louisiana.

The GO-Zone, the central economic policy response to Hurricane Katrina, was quite simply a massive tax break for corporations and the wealthy. It has resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars from the federal government and public sector to mostly large transnational corporations and investment banks, but also to the top 5% of wealth holders in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Because this raid on the federal budget was designed to occur through somewhat arcane tax expenditures its effect of upwardly redistributing wealth and reducing federal revenues have been subtle and difficult to discern. It's absence of positive economic impacts for the hardest hit communities are conspicuous, however.

As a policy the GO-Zone has its origins in another recent disaster, 9-11. A virtually identical package of tax breaks for corporate wealth was written into a section of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 shortly after blocks of New York City were reduced to rubble on September 11, 2001. Buried not too deeply in this bill was the provision for creating a "New York Liberty Zone."

This uber-patriotic idea (conveniently designed to aid already fabulously wealthy real estate and financial companies owning real estate and operating in lower Manhattan) was thought up right in between the two most important Bush-era tax laws, the Economic Growth and Tax ReliefReconciliation Act of 2001, and Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Actof 2003. All three of these bills reduced corporate taxes and taxes on personal wealth to nearly record levels, and set the federal government on its path to where it is today - massive deficit spending and a budget crisis due to shrinking revenues.

One of the Republican Party's key players in drafting all of this pro-corporate tax legislation was a relatively unassuming and little known House member from Louisiana's 4th District, Jim McCrery.

McCrery's Congressional career began in 1988 and lasted just over two decades. In that time he became one of the Congress's most knowledgeable members with respect to tax issues, and therefore a key contributor to the Bush administration's rollback of progressive taxes. McCrery co-sponsored the Bush tax cut bills and helped work out some of their finer points as a powerful member of the Ways and Means Committee.

In December of 2005 McCrery introduced the GO-Zone act to Congress and shepherded it through the House, Senate, and to the President's desk in a swift sixteen days with strong bi-partisan support. On the floor of the House McCrery implored, "I cannot overemphasize the importance of putting into law as quickly as possible incentives to give businesses, individuals, people with capital to invest, the urge to go to these devastated areas and invest that capital." His colleagues on both sides of the isle concurred that government's role should be to lavish the wealthy and powerful with lucrative tax incentives. During the perfunctory floor debate no Democrat or Republican asked why similarly targeted economic assistance was not being proposed for workers, small businesses, and others who lacked "capital to invest."

At the center of the GO-Zone are two key provisions that require a corporation or individual already be wealthy and powerful to take advantage of. The first is a $14.9 billion in bonding authority given to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. These "GO-Zone bonds" allow private financial institutions to lend billions to private companies to build all manner of private, for-profit industrial and commercial projects, with profits on these bonds subject to zero federal tax. The Government Accountability Office notes that this provision alone will reduce federal revenues by at least $1 billion over the eleven year span of the program.

The second key provision was establishment of a bonus depreciation allowance which let businesses drastically reduce their tax burdens by claiming a deduction related to the expected wear-and-tear and therefore decline in the value of property and capital invested in after the storm. Depreciation is a standard tax deduction used by businesses, but the "bonus" aspect allowed for larger immediate deductions. The GO-Zone included billions more in other tax credits, tax exemptions, tax write offs, and tax loopholes to be claimed by corporations and other owners of large real estate and capital holdings, all predicated on the notion that the best disaster recovery policy is aimed at helping those who already have the most.

After more than five years the GO-Zone has proven a resounding failure with respect to economic recovery along the Gulf Coast. Although local chamber of commerce boosters have pointed to a lower unemployment rate than the national average, the reality is that the region's economy has shrunk, especially in locales like New Orleans and coastal parishes where the GO-Zone's promised benefits never materialized and never will. New Orleans and many of the hardest hit Louisiana parishes and counties in Mississippi and Alabama have seen little to no benefit from the promised infusions of cash via corporate investments in their backyards. This has meant relatively poor levels of job creation, few if any local construction contracts or subcontracts, few new sources of local tax revenues, actual reductions in housing stocks, and closures of unfunded public schools, public housing, public libraries, and other public goods. Because disaster tax policies are expressly written to benefit large wealth holders, these policies have no positive impact for working families. The majority who possess no vast real estate holdings and who own none of the corporate capital are at the mercy of the wealthy few to make decisions about the future. Democratic control over economic development is made impossible.

The hard truth is that most communities inside the GO-Zone's boundaries were never meant to reap benefits from these tax incentives. The intended benefactors from the very beginning were large corporations, the big financial companies that loan to them, and the elite law firms that serve both.

The Gulf Opportunity Zone Act was written by and for corporate capital. Representative McCrery sponsored the bill to respond to his most important constituents: major corporations and financial institutions with stakes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. These parties were not interested in rebuilding the region's economy to benefit disaster stricken communities. They were keen on obtaining huge tax breaks and cheap bond money to expand the already harmful economy of extraction: refineries, pipelines, and chemical plants.

This opportunistic imposition of disaster tax policy was a fitting capstone to McCrery's Congressional career which was characterized by a nearly perfect record of supporting regressive taxation and budget cutting. McCrery began his professional life as a lawyer in the small city of Leesville, Louisiana. After a stint as an assistant attorney for the city of Shreveport, in 1981 he joined the staff of Rep. Charles Roemer, III. McCrery's boss would eventually become a tax-hating, budget slashing Governor of Louisiana, one who also ushered in gambling via floating casinos and the now ubiquitous video poker machines placed in seemingly every bayou bar and truck stop. McCrery inherited Roemer's Congressional seat in 1988.

In the interim, however, McCrery spent four years working as a lawyer for the Georgia Pacific Corporation, one of the largest timber, pulp, and chemicals companies in the world with operations in Louisiana and nearby Arkansas. Perhaps it was during his four years at Georgia Pacific that McCrery's pro-corporate ideology was finally and fully cemented, or maybe it was earlier. Whenever it was, freshman McCrery entered the Congress ready to rewrite the tax code in favor of further concentrating wealth to the benefit of companies like G-P.

Candidate McCrery's elections were bankrolled by the usual powerhouse corporations that spend heavily on Republicans and Democrats alike, many of them big insurance, healthcare, and financial concerns. Oil and chemical companies with operations in Louisiana were also among the Congressman's biggest sources of campaign cash. He received virtually nothing from unions, environmental funds, women's organizations, and African American owned businesses.

McCrery's former employer Georgia Pacific was one of his top donors throughout his career. Between 1998 and 2004 Georgia Pacific gave McCrery more than $21,000. After Georgia Pacific was bought out by Koch Industries in 2005 (just around the same time Hurricane Katrina struck) Koch continued to donate to McCrery, giving him $10,000 in 2006. Another major funder of McCrery was Harrah's Entertainment. The Casino giant with two hotels, two casinos, and a horse-racing track in his district, gave McCrery $17,500 between 2002 and 2006. These corporations were largely investing in McCrery for his deft knowledge of tax policy, and his effectiveness in crafting tax legislation redistribute wealth from the public sector to private. These were shrewd investments.

To build support for this neoliberal economic agenda, Rep. McCrery created a very successful political action committee in 1996, the Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism (CPC). In addition to spending tens of thousands of dollars on ritzy fund raising events at various California wine country attractions like the Lodge at Sonoma, and Benziger Winery, McCrery's CPC doled out $5000 and $10,000 contributions to Republican candidates who would help pass extremely corporate friendly laws. A list of the CPC's biggest cash cows correlates almost perfectly with high scorers on the Americans for Tax Reform scorecard (Grover Norquist's austerity-obsessed organization). McCrery himself routinely scored above the 95th percentile. Some of the CPC's favored candidates have become stars of the Tea Party.

Having helped stack the House with Republican allies, when Hurricane Katrina hit it was almost a foregone conclusion that the economic policy response would center on tax cuts. Democrats voted with equal enthusiasm for the GO-Zone Act though, their own party's leadership having been been infected by the same neoliberal policy doctrines during the Clinton years.

Most aspects of the GO-Zone Act were set to expire at the end of 2010, but late last year the Congress extended many provisions, including the tax-exempt bond program which had failed to dole out its entire lending cap. Nevertheless, after a half-decade of implementation the GO-Zone's record speaks loud and clear. The primary beneficiaries of GO-Zone bonds have been the large oil and chemical companies. Areas that have seen the largest GO-Zone bond investments are uniformly outside of the hardest hit parishes and counties. Any economic stimulus and jobs created therefore have been at a distance from the most crippled areas. A mere ten mega-projects financed with GO-Zone bonds involving expansion of oil refineries, chemical plants, pipelines, and petroleum tanks have consumed more than half of all the program's funds in Louisiana. (In the upcoming May/June issue of Dollars and Sense magazine I will present a more complete picture of the GO-Zone's failure as a disaster reconstruction policy in Louisiana.)

One of the biggest GO-Zone bond recipients in Louisiana will be McCrery's former employer and major campaign donor, Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific. The Atlanta based company is expected to receive $250 million to expand a pulp and paper plant in East Baton Rouge Parish. It's an exemplary disaster tax policy-enabled project; the plant will be built in a Parish that experienced relatively little damage from Katrina; it reinforces and further enriches the heavily polluting industries that already dominate Louisiana's chemical corridor; it will generate huge profits for Koch Industries; and it's all being done in the name of disaster reconstruction.

When McCrery retired from the House in 2008 he wasted no time stepping through the revolving door and into a job with the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel. It was a perfect fit for the ex-Congressman. Started in 2007 Capitol Counsel was described by The Hill's Alexander Bolton as a lobbying firm focused on helping shape tax policy for its clients. According to Bolton:

"Two of the most experienced Democratic tax lobbyists in Washington have joined forces with a team of Democratic fundraisers and operatives to form what likely will emerge as one of Washington’s premier boutique lobbying shops. The firm, Capitol Counsel LLC, will focus almost exclusively on two of the most powerful committees in Congress: the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance panels."

When McCrery joined Capitol Counsel he was leaving the Congress as the highly influential ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee. Reaching back into this Committee, and the Senate's tax policy panel, McCrery has worked to reduce taxes for companies like General Electric [yes the NY Times has an article about this but McCrery wasn't mentioned. He should be. GE is one of his biggest clients. See the document below for an example.], provide tax breaks for oil firms like Bass Enterprises Production, and tax credits for manufacturers like Parsons & Whittemore.

300309282

For example, in 2010 McCrery lobbied his former House colleagues and the Senate for passage of a bill that would have amended the Internal Revenue Code to allow a credit against income tax for corporations using energy derived from biomass to power domestic paper, pulp and paperboard factories. Parsons & Whittemore, McCrery's client, would have profited nicely if the bill had passed, but it did not. Coincidentally, earlier in 2010 McCrery's former employer Georgia Pacific reached an agreement to purchase several Alabama pulp and paper mills from Parsons & Whittemore.

Another example of McCrery's continuing influence over tax policy involves Harrah's Casino. Having been one of his biggest fundraisers while a Congressman, Harrah's is now a client. McCrery spent the Summer of 2010 lobbying on Harrah's behalf to amend portions of the tax code to allow the company to expand into Internet gaming and reduce the company's tax burden. While the GO-Zone specifically barred casinos from utilizing its tax provisions, Harrah's nevertheless opportunized Hurricane Katrina in its own way by successfully pressuring Mississippi politicians to finally allow casinos such as its Grand Casino Biloxi to be built on dry land.

Before McCrery exited the House for his substantially more lucrative lobbying gig the Congress attempted to implement disaster tax policies after several other storms. Most notable was the introduction of the Midwestern Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 by Senator Charles Grassley (with Senator Barack Obama co-sponsoring). This bill would have duplicated the GO-Zone's two key provisions with tax-exempt bond financing and bonus depreciation deductions made available to businesses within the geographic region flooded by the storms of that year.

The bill never became law. The Heartland Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 was passed instead. The "Heartland" bill included many tax benefits for individuals and some for businesses, but these two key disaster tax policies were nixed. Nevertheless, the concept of using tax deductions as the central policy tool to rebuild after disasters remains popular in Congress, due in part to the continuing influence of corporations and large wealth holders through lobby shops like Capitol Counsel.

Ironically a senior lawyer at the elite New Orleans law firm of Adams & Reese who helped write portions of the GO-Zone Act, and whose clients have included big companies that have utilized tax-free GO-Zone bonds, sums up the harmful corporate bias inherent in disaster tax policy:

"the single greatest deficiency in the [GO-Zone] Act is the lack of sufficient assistance for small businesses. Smaller businesses typically do not need bonus depreciation because it is only beneficial if you have or expect substantial federal tax liability.

In other words, bonus depreciation was explicitly designed to help only very large corporations, particularly those like oil and chemical companies —think Exxon or Georgia Pacific— who routinely reinvest in machinery and their physical plants. This lawyer continued:

"Without allowing the GO Zone bonds to be bank qualified, banks cannot generally justify the purchase of tax-exempt bonds for small borrowers."

Bank qualification was only one of the many reasons why tax-exempt GO-Zone bonds went un-utilized by 99% of businesses, mostly medium and small firms, in the disaster stricken region. Again, it was an opportunistic policy that only large corporations and large financial companies could possibly gain from.

Thus more than five years after Katrina the Gulf Opportunity Zone has become a zone of spotty recovery, with some communities still suffering from economic damages that will never be repaired by policies that were never designed to do so, and other areas seeing huge investments by polluting industries, wealth all the while being concentrated in the hands of a few. Ultimately this episode is about much more than one member of Congress, or one set of industries that gamed the tax code after a natural disaster; it's about the ascendancy of an ideology among government leadership, on both side of the aisle. The problem is that those who adhere to disaster tax policy not only believe the best response to calamity is to further enrich and empower the wealthy few: they also lack the ability to imagine that government could respond any differently, that it could directly empower and enrich the people, from the bottom up.

Bad Stars, Big and Small

2011-03-21T03:08:00.000-04:00

An oil spill off the coast of Louisiana (yes another one) seems to have occurred over the weekend. Light patches of "weathered oil" have appeared in the bays around Grande Isle. Reports of a petrochemical sheen upwards of 100 miles long have also been described in the Gulf waters around the "Birdfoot," the Mississippi River's terminus where the mighty river splits into three stems, the Southwest Pass, Pass A Loutre, and South Pass. According to the Times Picayune, the Coast Guard is "investigating that as a separate incident" from the mysterious oily pollution floating around Grande Isle. So we have perhaps two spills of unknown quantities, large enough however to force officials to mobilize miles of booms and other materials in a frantic effort to try to contain the damage?

As of this writing the source(s) of oil are unknown, but some Coast Guard officials have speculated that the sheen offshore may have been caused by flooding and dredging far up the Mississippi River watershed, carrying toxic pollutants mixed with sediment out the river's mouth. It's an interesting theory that stems from a sad fact; the once majestic waterway that some call "America's sewer" is now so horribly fouled as to produce oil spills as though they were seasonal regularities, vomited up with the March equinox in some kind of natural cycle like snow melt. Oil film, heavy metals, plastic particulates, pesticides, nitrates, they all flow down the Mississippi when their moon rises, just like the salmon used to run in now mostly dead streams of other great American rivers.

The source of oil floating around Grande Isle is rumored to have come up from a well that is being plugged. Sound familiar? If you don't read or hear about it in the news, besides here, don't be surprised. After BP's oil-pocalypse anything less than a rig the size of the Empire State Building going up in thousand foot tall flames is probably not going to be green lighted for "all the news that's fit to print." Without a New Jersey-sized oil slick it's unlikely the national media will pay attention. What does this say about us, about the world we've created?

This routinization and normalization of disaster is magnified now with the nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Diani plants, nightmarish events that have overshadowed any disasters of less than earth shattering proportions. These are strange days we live in when nothing less than a truly "bad star" will do: appropriately the word disaster originates from a Greek term literally meaning "bad star," a solar object that has died. Think about it. That's as big an event in the universe as there can really be. A nuclear reactor is about the closest thing humans have been able to create approaching a star on earth. By comparison it would now seem that oil spills which don't gush 80,000 barrels a day for several months are unlit flecks of space dust floating invisible across the void - they might as well not exist.

The latest oil spills in the Gulf are only one example of dozens of real time disasters you probably won't hear about. Somewhere else on earth something enormously risky is finally failing, and hundreds or thousands will die as a result. They may be dying suddenly in flames, under water or mud or rubble, or slowly and excruciatingly from toxins.

Reflecting on this seeming proliferation of bad stars, one veteran journalist who wrote extensively about the Macondo Well blowout of last year remarked a few days ago: "Here’s the simple fact: We are living in an age of disasters [....] We have environmental disasters that can lead to technological disasters (Japan) and technological disasters that can lead to environmental disasters (Deepwater Horizon)."

Indeed we are living in an age of disasters, characterized by sublimely violent and precautionary failures of technoscientific progress. It's hard for me to decide what's worse, the mega-catastrophes that dominate our attention for their sheer earth-shattering effects and global reverberations, like Fukushima, or the little disasters that now pass mostly unheard of, except to those who perish in their oblivion.

La Migra de Obama

2011-01-01T12:29:00.000-05:00


Outside of Las Cruces, NM, an agent interrogates a Vietnamese exchange student about his immigration status. The bus was filled to capacity with about 55 riders. I was only one of about 5 white persons aboard.

I take the bus between Louisiana, New Mexico, and California often.

Since the early days of the G.W. Bush administration Border Patrol agents have been boarding buses and creeping around stations trying to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration actually seems to have stepped up these activities with more aggressive methods.

On a recent trip from Louisiana to California my bus was stopped and searched twice by teams of Border Patrol agents.

After ordering passengers off Border Patrol agents used a canine unit to search the bus. One of the officers demanded I erase these pictures immediately after snapping this one, claiming that it was illegal to document their activities.

The first stop was between Las Cruces and Deming, NM, where the bus was pulled over and all 55 passengers were first interrogated about their citizenship and immigration status aboard the bus, and then ordered off while agents searched our luggage with dogs.

The second stop came in Blythe, CA, where agents detained three young Latinos who boarded the bus in Las Cruces. The three young men had taken seats at the back and were trying to remain inconspicuous, but one of the agents homed in on them using racial profiling tactics. When the three Spanish speakers couldn't provide proof of US citizenship one agent called to the others toward the front of the bus, "we've got three more of them here!" They were taken away in the night, hands binded, placed in the back of a converted cabbed pickup truck to be transported to a holding facility awaiting deportation.

Thanks Google Car

At the first stop in Deming I photographed the Border Patrol team aboard the bus and as they search it without passengers aboard. I was nearly detained for taking the second photograph. One agent yelled at me to "delete that picture," claiming I was endangering him, his family, and that it was illegal to take photos at this particular federal facility. Whether it is, or is not, I believe there's a public service to be performed in posting these. And besides, Google has already made excellent 360 degree photos of the facility along with satellite views of it available on the web.

Questions:

1. Is it constitutional for federal agents to demand proof of our citizenship, immigration status, and identifying documents if we're not crossing a border? Do these activities not constitute an illegal search and seizure?

2. Why has Obama seemingly escalated Border Patrol activities targeting immigrants on domestic public transport like Greyhound, Amtrak, and other carriers?

3. I've noticed that passengers on the Greyhound buses, at least in the Southern and Southwestern US, are 90% people of color, whereas in airports whites constitute a much higher percentage of passengers. If Border Patrol claims to not racially profile in order to police travelers' immigration status, should not Border Patrol also be in airports, boarding airplanes and lurking about terminals?

4. How would you respond to seeing fellow human beings dragged off the bus in the night to be incarcerated in some corporate immigrant prison and finally deported? I ask because I'm seriously at a loss to express my outrage and opposition to this state sponsored xenophobia.

A Redistribution Scheme Posing as Deficit Reduction

2010-11-12T16:53:00.003-05:00

Commission Co-Chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson

The Deficit Commission has proposed a plan to rewrite the social contract, and make the poor and middle class pay

The Deficit Commission may have styled itself from day one as a "bipartisan team" bent on cutting the nation's debt, but upon close inspection some its core proposals seem less about reducing absolute debt, and more about shifting tax burdens to rewrite the social contract. The central feature of the plan —which upon first read appears to be a smorgasbord of spending cuts that would hit every sector of society equally— is redistribution.

By its very definition redistribution never affects all sectors of society equally. Wealth and income are shifted among different classes, races, men and women, and sectors of capital under any redistribution scheme. On balance the Deficit Commission's proposal calls for a restructuring of the US political economy to benefit corporate capital and the wealthy, and to force the poor and middle class to pay for an increasing share of everything.

The options presented with respect to comprehensive tax reform are an excellent case in point. The Deficit Commission presents us with several alternatives, all of which would produce a general state of austerity, but also shift wealth and income in drastic ways. For brevity we'll just look at one of the tax plans.

The "Zero Plan" takes its name from the fact that it would begin with a near total elimination of all tax expenditures. Tax expenditures are deductions that taxpayers (persons and corporations) can make by tallying up special exemptions, credits, and rebates that the Congress uses to promote certain economic and social behaviors like home ownership or industrial investment. In a nutshell the Zero Plan would reduce the tax code to three individual rates and a single corporate rate. Within these four rates the plethora of tax expenditures would be drastically cut back, saving $1.1 trillion according to the commission. The Congress would then use this cash to reduce the deficit and further reduce marginal tax rates across the board. Last but not least, the Commission says that the Congress would "add back in any desired tax expenditures, and pay for them by increasing one or all of the rates from their zero- expenditure low."

From the Deficit Commission's Co-Chairs' Proposal.

The Commission's draft proposal includes a graph —"Who Benefits from Tax Expenditures?"— to illustrate the main beneficiaries of tax expenditures, implying that the plan is fair to the poor and middle class because under the current tax code, with its complex and vast array of itemized deductions, it is the wealthy who disproportionately benefit from expenditures. The bottom half of taxpayers benefit mostly from a handful of major deductions which include refundable credits such at the Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and deductions on mortgage interest. The wealthy and corporations on the other hand, pay professional accountants to rack up numerous and byzantine deductions on their assets.

However if we read closely into the Zero Plan its redistributionary nature becomes apparent. First there's the matter of the "simplification" of marginal tax rates to three personal brackets and one corporate bracket. While this means of cutting taxes relies on eliminating tax expenditures, and therefore will not affect social welfare programs financed through legislation, at the zero baseline level it does eliminate very important tax reductions for the low-income working families. These tax reductions are relied upon for for survival –to provide income to pay rent, tuition, for child care, and groceries— and therefore are fundamentally different from tax expenditures available to the wealthy and corporations. Equally eliminating reductions that allow poor people to pay their rent or purchase food and clothing is not at all equal to the elimination of a deduction that allows a millionaire to pocket tens of thousands of dollars because of their second and third homes. In treating every taxpayer equally, the Co-Chairs' Proposal does disproportional harm to those at the bottom.

While the reduction in marginal tax rates appears to be fair and even across the board, we have to remember that we're cutting rates across a drastically different set of absolute incomes. This means that while millions of taxpayers in the lowest tax bracket would see a seven point drop, the money they keep will only be a tiny fraction of what a taxpayer in the uppermost brackets will save under the plan.

For example, a single person with an income of $34,000 is schedule to pay at a rate of 15% in 2011, totaling about $5,130. Under the Zero Plan their tax bracket would fall to 8%, reducing their tax burden to $2,740. They save about $2,390, and while this is a serious chunk of change, it's also not a serious bit of assistance considering the levels of debt Americans are now dealing with, as well as the rising costs of everything from education to gas.

However if we look at a taxpayer in the upper brackets the saving are immense. An individual with an income of 375,000 is scheduled to be taxed at a rate of 33% in 2011. Under the Zero Plan their burden is reduced by 10 points to 23%. Their savings under the Zero Plan increases by $37,570 —more than the pre-taxed income of the above mentioned hypothetical individual! At the uppermost levels, the realm of millionaires and billionaires, tax rates reach 39%, but under the Zero Plan would all drop to 23%, allowing the nation's wealthiest individuals and families to keep an immense share of wealth that would otherwise fund important federal programs that benefit the majority of Americans.

The impression of equality that the across-the-board cut of tax rates gives under the Deficit Commission's proposal is therefore illusory. Low-income and middle class families will end up saving relatively small amounts of their income that will hardly make a difference in paying for housing, health care, transportation and other major expenses, while at the same time losing key tax credits and deductions they already rely upon. The wealthy, on the other hand, lose the myriad of deductions they already use to save immense amounts of money from the tax man, but they save these funds anyhow with the huge proportional drop in their tax rates relative to the poor and middle class.

The Zero Plan includes three baseline options that do not initially ax the Child Tax Credit, EITC, and Current Mortgage, Health and Retirement Benefits. This is where the Commission's redistributionary measures become a little more subtle, and it takes a little unpacking. Here's how the Zero Plan, even when it keeps these important tax expenditures, harms the poor and middle class by redistributing the tax burden on them.

The first thing to note is how the corporate tax rate drops from 35% to 26%. Then, under each scenario which considers keeping some or all of these important tax reductions for working and middle class families, the corporate rate does not rise if (under scenario B) the Child Tax Credit and EITC are kept, and then only rises one point at a time under the next two scenarios (C and D) including further tax expenditures. Table 1. illustrates this virtual corporate exemption from incremental rate increases. This two point absolute rise contrasts starkly with the 5 to 7 point rises for individual taxpayers, with the middle class taking on the burden of rate increases to pay for retained expenditures.

Table 1. Tax rate increases under the Zero Plan's scenarios, A, B, C, D (data adapted from the Deficit Commission's draft proposal).

Guess Who's Not Coming to Tea?

2010-11-06T14:33:00.001-04:00

The morning after the midterm elections news outlets across the nation ran with headlines like, "Minorities ride GOP wave to groundbreaking wins." According to an Associated Press article, "Latina, African-Americans lead a notable list of Republicans to win last night." In the Atlanta Journal Constitution one columnist declared, "Inspired by Obama, Republicans of color win more seats." An editorial in the New York Daily Post put it to its readers: "guess who's coming to tea," claiming that "the Tea Party-inspired wave that produced historic Republican wins also revealed a substantial diversity in the movement."

However, a closer look at this supposed "diversity in the movement" reveals a less than convincing picture of racial progress within the GOP and its voter base. The high profile of a few Republicans of color instead points to a relatively new and circumscribed phenomenon in white political ideology: white conservative voters in select districts and states are now willing to vote for Republican candidates of color, but only under certain conditions. White conservatives seem willing to elect Republicans of color who embrace a post-racial colorblindness, who promote the Party's far-right cultural and economic values, and still only in races without a centrist white option. Furthermore, in most high profile races the GOP's new candidates or color have only prevailed when running against a woman or another person of color, and again only in races with a majority white electorate.

One of the first things that jumps out about the new supposed "wave" of Republicans of color within the conservative movement is that a simple accounting doesn't add up to proclamations that they've made groundbreaking wins or added anything other than token diversity to the GOP. While there might be a few black faces in high places such as Michael Steel, statistically the Republican Party remains about as white as it has been since the mid-1980s, having gained no meaningful political ground within communities of color. The Republican Party's voting base remains overwhelmingly white, as do its successful candidates for national offices.

This year's elections did result in two black Republican representatives who will take their seats in the 112th Congress, but these two men do not even account for one percent of the GOP's caucus in the House. In contrast there are 42 black Democrats in the House, comprising 21% of the Party's ranks, a level of representation that exceeds the general population in fact. There are of course no black senators.

In this year's primaries thirty-two black Republican candidates ran for nomination, the largest in a single year since Reconstruction, spurring commentaries about the new post-racial era. Commentators claimed, among other things, that even the modern day Republican Party —founded as it was after segregationist Dixiecrats joined the pro-corporate GOP establishment— is embracing blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and homosexuals. The results of Tuesday's elections don't support the claim that the Republican Party's white voter base is openly embracing communities of color or acting in a post-racial way. Only fourteen black Republicans progressed into Tuesday's elections. And after the ballots were counted, a mere two prevailed - Allen West in Florida's 22nd Congressional District, and Tim Scott in the 1st District of South Carolina. The remaining twelve were mostly trounced by their Democratic Party rivals.

Interestingly black Republicans West and Scott prevailed in districts that are overwhelmingly white, making them politicians of color with mostly white constituencies. Such is an anomaly in the Democratic Party where except for the commander in chief, black congresspersons nearly all represent districts in which either blacks or Latinos are the solid majority. It would seem then that black Republicans succeed in their campaigns in direct proportion to the extent that they succeed in representing a mythical post-racial America for white conservative voters who do not feel threatened by a candidate's ethnic or racial identification, candidates who in fact go out of their way to deny the significance of their own race, and deny the salience of racial difference in the American political system.

In The 22nd District of Florida, where West prevailed with 54% of the vote, whites make up 82% of the population. Famous as an epicenter of 2000's disputed presidential election, Florida's 22nd was created in the 1990s census and was, congressionally speaking, Republican property for the fourteen years during which Eugene Clay Shaw, Jr. won multiple re-elections on the strength of white conservative voters who routinely out-mobilized white progressives and the district's small Hispanic and black swing votes. Representative Shaw spent the better part of the 1990s bashing immigrants and welfare recipients, making claims such as, "many aliens immigrate to America with the express intent of accessing welfare as soon as they are eligible." Shaw voted for every conceivable bill that would withdraw support for the nation's poor and scapegoat them for everything from crime to budget deficits.

The racial subtext to Shaw's positions were clear to the elderly white population that made up his conservative base. Allen West represents a return of the district to Shaw's white conservative voters after four years of centrist Democrat, and white male, Ron Klein. Klein's ability to win in the 22nd seemed to hinge on the nationwide repudiation of the Bush administration and Republicans in 2006 which mobilized more of the poor, youth, people of color, and other likely Democrats to the polls, and then again in 2008 when Obama's candidacy aligned with the district's congressional election, again boosting turnout of progressives.

Hailed as a new face of diversity within the Republican Party, black Republican Tim Scott again represents a district that is three quarters white and which has a long history of electing segregationists and racists politicians who in words and deeds have opposed legislation to advance racial justice. South Carolina's 1st Congressional District has been a Republican stronghold since 1981 when Ronald Reagan's election signaled the final consolidation of the Republican shift among white southern conservatives away from the Democratic Party which had become, in their eyes, irredeemably colored.

In 1986 the 1st District's voters elected Arthur Ravenel, Jr., a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who once called the NAACP the "National Association for Retarded People." Even the District's previous Democratic Congressmen, like L. Mendel Rivers who held the post from 1941 to 1970, have been ardent segregationists. To appease his own white voter base Scott supported a compromise to move the Confederate battle flag from statehouse to a monument nearby. His platform is popular among conservative white South Carolinians; he is anti-abortion, supports further militarization of the US-Mexico border, and has called for legislation to enforce English as the official language. On the whole he does not support legislation that in polls has been shown to be popular with the majority of African Americans.

Bergmann and her "colorblind" supporters during the campaign.

Outcomes for the Republican Party's new black "wave" have been poor in congressional districts with black and Latino majorities and a history of supporting the civil rights, labor, women's rights. The race in Tennessee's 9th District, roughly encompassing Memphis, is an excellent example. In a race pitting Charlotte Bergmann, a black woman endorsed by the Tea Party movement, against Democrat Steve Cohen, the district's black majority overwhelmingly voted against Bergmann. Cohen won handily with 75% of the vote. Black voters had no problem seeing beyond race and voting for the candidate who they felt best represented their interests, even though he was a white man.

In a radio interview during the campaign, Cohen described the Tea Party as a bigoted reaction against blacks, gays and lesbians, and surmised that its the rank and file's motivation seemed to be "hostility to anybody who wasn’t just, you know, a clone of George Wallace’s fan club." Bergmann's local Tea Party supporters responded by calling Cohen racist and demanding a retraction of his statement which he refused to do. Tea Party bloggers pointed to Bergmann's race to refute Cohen's observations about the movement's overall tenor and the impacts that Tea Party policies would have on blacks, gays and lesbians, and others he considered key members of his constituency. Sticking to his words, Cohen had no problem garnering votes from a majority of black constituents who would seem to agree that the Tea Party's agenda will result in systematically racist harms to people of color, whether implemented by white or black politicians.

In the few remaining races that featured black Republican contenders they mostly faced black Democratic Party opponents. The Democrats easily won election in districts with non-white majorities, producing some of the largest spreads in the nation. Black Democrats had few problems dispatching their Republican rivals by running on platforms that the vast majority of black and many Latino voters identify with: repealing the Bush administration's tax cuts for the wealthy, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing universal health care coverage, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, raising the minimum wage, increasing unemployment insurance, and just about anything else that runs opposite the Tea Party and Republican Party establishment.

The conditions under which Republicans of color can win office appear to be very circumscribed and particular. In many cases where non-white Republicans have won office, they have done so against opponents who are women. Where Republicans of color have beaten Democrats of color, they tend to do so only in districts or states with large white majorities which are given the choice between a black candidate who represents the mainstream of black political thought, and a right-wing black candidate whose platform more resembles white conservative thought.

Gov. Elect Nikki Haley's triumph over Vincent Sheehan in South Carolina appears to be the exception to this rule. However, in Louisiana where the Republican Party elected its first non-white governor in modern history in 2007, Bobby Jindal prevailed over Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a centrist female Democrat, with 54% of the vote. Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries may indicate a similar tendency among among Democratic Party voters for high office?

Susana Martinez's historic election in New Mexico this year pitted a Latina Republican against Democrat Diane Denish, a white woman who lost by a spread of 10 points. While Martinez has been offered up by some as evidence that the Republican Party is inclusive of Latinos and immigrants, a closer look at Martinez reveals quite the opposite.

New Mexico has elected one of the most anti-immigrant politicians in the nation, largely on a wave of white xenophobia. Gov. elect Martinez has promised that one of her first initiatives will be to ban "illegal immigrants" from obtaining driver's licenses. Further playing to popular myths of immigrants who "leech" the welfare state (and sounding like a clone of Florida's Eugene Clay Shaw, Jr. no less), Martinez has promised she will oppose "providing illegal immigrants with free tuition through taxpayer-funded lottery scholarships."

In her campaign ads and appearances she bragged about carrying her own pistol and portrayed herself as a tough on crime leader, especially against "illegals." As the District Attorney of Dona Ana county, borderline to Mexico, she aligned herself with Albuquerque's conservative white Mayor and City Council to the north. In the last year Albuquerque's officials have implemented Arizona-like procedures within the Sheriff and Police Departments and county jails. In June of 2010 a mini-scandal threatened to break when an e-mail leaked from her office. In the note a staff members of the chief law enforcement officer for Dona Ana County joked about killing muslim and mexican immigrants, but the episode blew over with Martinez claiming to have "reprimanded" the underling.

Weighing the actual numbers of Republicans of color in office, the constituencies they represent, the policy programs they intend to implement, and the circumstance by which they won office, claims of a diversifying GOP are much overblown. Rather than representing a shift of voters within communities of color into he Republican Party, or a GOP policy agenda that includes initiatives which resonate with people of color, the new (and small) cohort of black and Latino Republicans in office is mostly a phenomenon resulting from the specific dynamics of particular races, and the willingness of white conservatives to occasionally break racial ranks and vote for non-whites who will represent their interests.

Tuesday's full elections results for black Republicans:

Allen West, Florida-22 (winner with 54% of vote against Ron Klein, white male, in district that is 82.3% white, 10.7% Hispanic, 3.8% black)

Tim Scott, South Carolina-1 (winner with 65% of vote against Ben Frasier in district 74/21% white black split)

Charlotte Bergmann, Tenn.-9 (loser to Steve Cohen, a white man who wins with 75% of vote in district with 59.7% black majority)

Robert Broadus, Md.-4 (loser to Donna Edwards, black woman who wins with 83.5% of vote in district with 56.8% black majority,)

Stephen Broden, Texas-30 (loser to Eddie Bernice Johnson, black woman who wins with 76% of vote in district with 41.2% Hispanic and 39.1% black majorities)

Michel Faulkner, N.Y.-15 (loser to Charles Rangle, black man, who wins with 80% of vote in district with 47.6% Hispanic and 34.6% black majorities)

Ryan Frazier, Colo.-7 (loser to Ed Perlmutter, white man, who wins with 53% of vote in district with 68.9% white majority)

Isaac Hayes, Ill.-2 (loser to Jesse Jackson, Jr., black man, who wins with 80% of the vote in a district with 62.4% black majority)

Charles Lollar, Md.-5 (loser to Steny Hoyer, white man, who wins with 64% of vote in a district with a 60% white majority, 30% black minority)

Bill Marcy, Miss.-2 (loser to Benny Thompson, black man, who wins with 62% of vote in a district with a 63.5% black majority)

Star Parker, Calif-37 (loser to Laura Richardson, black woman, who wins with 69% of vote in a district with a 43.2% Hispanic and 24.8% black majority)

Bill Randall, N.C.-13 (loser to Brad Miller, white man, who wins 55% of vote in district with a 65% white majority, 27% black minority)

Marvin Scott, Ind.-7 (loser to Andre Carson, black man, who wins with 59% of vote in district with 63% white majority, 29% black minority)

Chuck Smith, Virginia-3 (loser to Bobby Scott, black man, who wins with 70% of vote in a district that is 56.4% black)

Sounding the Alarm

2010-10-13T17:22:00.000-04:00

In the wake of 9-11 local governments nationwide set up alert networks to notify citizens in real time of possible threats to public safety. The system is rather simple. Authorities broadcast short notifications simultaneously and in real time through email and text messages to wireless devices.

New Orleans set up its own citizens alert network after Hurricane Katrina. In a city under assault of hurricanes and toxic oil disasters, federal and local authorities have reasoned the system could save lives and help conserve emergency responder resources.

Living downstream from cancer alley's many toxic and volatile refineries, and in a region that frequently experiences deadly and freakish weather, having such a system in place is wise. New Orleanians might be surprised, however, to learn what the system is actually being used for. On October 13, for example, a NOLAReady alert landed in the inboxes and cellular devices of thousands across Orleans Parish.

Was it life-threatening weather?

A highly disruptive road shutdown?

Evacuation or Shelter in Place information?

A boil water notice?

Did the Shell Oil plant blow up? Had the river crevassed? Did a chemical tanker spill its cargo near the French Market?

The grave threat to public safety on October 13 was none other than two women stealing baby formula. According NOPD Officer Gary Flot's alert message sent far and wide at 2:46 pm;

"Members of The New Orleans Police Department are requesting the public’s assistance in locating and identifying two female suspects wanted in connection with a shoplifting. The offense occurred October 8, 2010, approximately 6:30 P.M., in the Ideal Market in the 200 block of South Broad Street.

According to investigators, the suspects entered the store and concealed 18 cans of Enfamil baby formula under a baby blanket and exited the store. Both suspects entered a dark green Dodge Intrepid and fled south on Palmyra Street then unknown."

This dire warning to the people ends with the assurance that "First District Detective Kris Vilen is actively working the case and following up on leads given by our citizens."

Please forgive me for proposing a different kind of alert for New Orleans. Maybe the NOPD would kindly send it out through NOLAReady? It goes like this:

Warning: The people of New Orleans are suffering after five years of failed and misguided reconstruction policies. The poverty rate remains 1 in 4 for the general population. 35 percent of our children endure poverty. The city lacks affordable housing, and yet the politicians and real estate companies barrel ahead to demolish public housing. A quarter of our homes are vacant, while 1 in 25 of us is homeless. The public hospital remains shuttered. Lower-Mid City is evicted. The city has lost 20% of its pre-Katrina population. Some neighborhoods never came back at all. Half of workers in New Orleans earn less than $35,000 a year, and many earn considerably less, enduring frequent spells of un and underemployment. Government remains corrupt. The cops still brutalize, and now apparently have nothing better to do than chase impoverished mothers who are just trying to feed their kids. Displaced and dispossessed after the flood, now the people of New Orleans struggle through the Great Recession. Interpersonal violence has worsened. Women and children suffer from family and institutional abuse. Young men are killing each other in the streets. Trauma and mental illness have worsened and there are few resources to help one another. The people of New Orleans have caught hell.

I'd be interested in hearing from others what you might write as an alert for the city of New Orleans.

New START: A brief analysis of the treaty ratification process, campaign finance, and lobbying activities

2010-09-24T18:57:00.014-04:00

Summary

For many reasons the New START treaty is proving to be a costly affirmation of nuclear arms as a national priority. The ratification process has empowered pro-nuclear interest groups. Debate during ratification has also cemented assurances to fund the multi-billion dollar missile defense and prompt global strike weapons systems while undermining the possibility of political opposition. Campaign contribution and lobbying disclosure data both help to explain why corporate contractors with stakes in these programs have been ably protected by both Republican and Democratic Senators throughout the ratification debate. Like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was debated in the 1990s, the political process of New START ratification has insulated nuclear weapons spending, as well as large budgets for other weapons systems. On balance New START has already exerted strong anti-disarmament influences on federal decisionmakers, making it an arms affirmation treaty.

Ratification and the Budget

On September 16 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported the New START treaty to the Senate floor by a vote of 14-4. If the Democrats believe they have the Republican votes lined up a full-Senate ratification vote is expected to take place after the upcoming elections, during the lame duck period.

The federal government will not have a budget before the end of the fiscal year (Oct. 1). In place of a detailed budget the Congress is now set to pass a continuing resolution (CR). CRs typically fund government at the previous year's levels until the legislature can draft and approve a comprehensive budget. There is much uncertainty and anxiety about how long departments will operate under these constraints; without a budget planning will be very difficult.

Partly because of pressure to ratify New START, the Obama administration is now poised to make several exceptions within the budget to allow for immediate increased spending, and to facilitate long-term planning in specific areas. One of these exceptions would guarantee a large increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration's budget, by about $624 million over 2010 levels. In all the USA would spend upwards of $7.009 billion on nuclear weapons for 2011. A large portion of the increase is to lock in "modernization" of the US nuclear weapons complex.

Arms Affirmation

New START has already proven to be one of the most costly treaties in recent history. Whether or not the treaty is ratified, negotiation between the White House and Senate Democrats and their Senate Republican colleagues has already produced a multi-billion dollar deal ensuring the military and its contractors receive billions in budget increases for, among other things, a new plutonium bomb pit factory, a growing missile defense program that is already as large as the NNSA nuclear weapons program, and hundreds of millions in funding to convert nuclear-capable missiles into conventional strike weapons. The dynamics of the ratification process, fed by the right and left, has produced this and other contrary outcomes to the supposed intent of the treaty - disarmament. New START, however, should not be seen as a disarmament treaty. Indeed, it would be more accurate to classify New START as an arms affirmation treaty.

The nominal reductions in deployed strategic nuclear weapons the treaty requires of the United States are rather trivial when contextualized alongside the multi-billion dollar nuclear and non-nuclear weapons programs that the treaty text and Senate ratification process have committed the White House and Senate to authorize and fund. Some of New START's key shortcomings include the following; The treaty's "reductions" only address deployed strategic nuclear weapons, not tactical weapons, nor strategic weapons held in reserve. Because of the way nuclear weapons are counted in the treaty, the USA may, if it chooses to, withdraw as little as 162 weapons from its arsenal to reach the 1550 warhead limit. This would amount to a mere 8% reduction, and again the reduction only affects deployed strategic weapons. In fact, if the USA choses to juggle warheads among different platforms under the treaty's accounting rules, US Strategic Command could, in theory, actually upload warheads to the arsenal, keeping more than 1550 at the ready. Table 1. outlines the treaty's so-called disarmament requirements.

Table 1., US nuclear force "reductions" required under New START.
Under the treaty the USA must reduce its total strategic deployed arsenal to 1550 weapons on 700 platforms. The treaty counts each bomber as 1 nuclear weapon, even though bombers are capable of carrying 16-20 nuclear weapons a piece.
Thus if the United States currently has 1,968 strategic weapons deployed on 798 platforms, it need only reduce the platform count 98. It does not need to de-deploy 418 weapons to reach the 1550 limit. Rather, US war planners can, if they choose to do so, upload cruise missiles and bombs onto bombers that are "reduced" from the ICBM and SLBM legs of the triad. Thus, because of the bomber counting rule, the United States instantly has 256 weapons hidden in 60 bombers. More so, it has an upload capacity of 820 spaces for cruise missiles and bombs on these bombers, which in theory would allow it to deploy well over the 1550 limit, so long as it reduces ICMB and SLBM weapons by 162.

Ironically, many "peace and security" foundations and organizations, from the Ploughshares Fund and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, to the American Friends Service Committee and Peace Action West have been lobbying aggressively for New START ratification, further empowering Republican Senators to demand even larger investments in nuclear and non-nuclear weapons programs. The Obama administration has proven more than willing to promise larger funds.

From the very start, New START was negotiated with the understanding that it would not impede modernization of nuclear weapons, nor the nuclear weapons complex, and also that it would not impede ongoing and planned investments in missile defense and prompt global strike (PGS) weapons systems. In Article V the treaty text makes it clear that nuclear modernization is allowed, and also provides an important exemption for the current Ground-based Midcourse missile defense system.

In an attempt to win Republican votes, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. John Kerry allowed the minority party's "Resolution of Advice and Consent," drafted by Sen. Lugar, to replace his own text, and to accompany the treaty to the floor for full Senate ratification. Sen. Lugar's text replaced Sen. Kerry's already strong endorsement of nuclear modernization, missile defense, and PGS with an even bolder endorsement and binding set of assurances. Two additional amendments were made to Lugar's text by Republican Senators Risch and DeMint to assure funding increases for new nuclear weapons capable submarines, missiles and bombers (the strategic "triad"), and a clause expressing that the sense of the Senate is to build not just any missile defense system, but to approach the vision of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative - an impenetrable shield over North America ready to strike down one or thousands of warheads from the sky.

Lugar's approved resolution further insulates nuclear modernization, missile defense, and prompt global strike, not just legally from the treaty's requirements, but politically from any official, agency, or advocacy group that would seek to cut the budgets of any of these programs. In this way the ratification process, characterized by intense pressure from the White House and arms control and "peace" groups, has actually undercut the possibility of opposition to new weapons programs that will consume many billions of dollars, many decades into the future. In testimony and op-ed pieces centrist arms control groups like the Arms Control Association and Council for a Livable World, have actually emphasized that New START imposes no limits on modernization, nor on PGS or missile defense. Liberal "peace" groups have tended to omit any references to modernization or other weapons systems that will be given the green light by the treaty in their communications with constituents and the public.

With respect to nuclear weapons modernization, Lugar's text, now the official Senate text reads;

"(iii) the United States is committed to providing the resources needed to achieve these objectives, at a minimum at the levels set forth in the presidents 10-year plan provided to the Congress pursuant to section 1251 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010,
(B) If appropriations are enacted that fail to meet the resources requirements set forth in the President's 10-year plan, or if at any times more resources are required than estimated in the President's 10-year plan, the President shall submit to Congress, within 60 days of such enactment or the identification of the requirement for such additional resources, as appropriate, a report datelining—
(i) how the President proposed to remedy the resource shortfall;
(ii) if additional resources are required, the proposed level of funding required and an identification of the stockpile work, campaign, facility, site, asset, program, operation, activity, construction, or project for which additional funds are required;"

Modernization of the Stockpile and Complex

Required resources for modernization are immense. The "section 1251 plan," written by the Obama White House outlines a large array of investments in nuclear weapons modernization, including, funding to sustain the large weapons research and design laboratories at Livermore, CA, and Los Alamos, NM; funds to work directly on the nuclear stockpile by "reusing" "refurbishing," and even "replacing" components with newer and more advanced capabilities; and funds to rebuild the complete core of the federal government's industrial nuclear complex where nuclear weapons and materials are fabricated, tested, and assembled. This possibly constitutes the federal government's single largest program-specific capital infrastructure investment.

By NNSA's own definition, a "major construction project" is any capital investment costing more than $20,000,000. The agency currently has 14 such projects underway in the nuclear weapons complex. The largest among these will cost many billions of dollars. For example, the CMRR Nuclear Facility's last official price tag was $3.2 billion, but sources close to the design process report that it is nearing the $6 billion mark.

The Uranium Processing Facility may cost upwards of $5 billion.

The Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility has already cost $255 million.

The High Explosive Pressing Facility is scheduled to cost $134 million.

Seven of NNSA's 14 major construction projects have no total cost estimate. The Agency also plans to begin other major construction projects within the next five to ten years.

Table 3., reproduced from the section 1251 report, shows major planned infrastructure projects within the nuclear weapons complex between 2010 and 2030.

Then there is one project that is omitted from NNSA's own construction accounting budget because its upfront cost are being borne by a private developer and local government in the Kansas City Area. The facility, "KCRIMS," which is estimated to cost half a billion to build, will then be leased back the NNSA for a cost of almost a billion dollars over its operating life-span. KCRIMs will be a large industrial factory where most of the thousands of parts inside every US nuclear weapon model will be manufactured.

The FY2011 nuclear weapons budget is stocked with increased design and fabrication accounts for nuclear weapons. For example, the Obama administration suggests spending $249 million on the W76 "Life Extension Program" (LEP). With 768 W76 warheads in the deployed strategic stockpile, this weapon constitutes the true backbone of US nuclear force.x Its life extension program will cost at least several billion. Other LEPs with similar or even larger cost estimates, like the B-61 gravity bomb, are planned or underway.

Section 6 of the Senate's ratification resolution calls on the executive branch to clarify its plans for the prompt global strike weapons program. PGS is reportedly "embraced by the new administration," whose top advisors see it as a more usable strategic alternative to nuclear weapons. With respect to Missile Defense the treaty resolution reads, "It is the understanding of the United States that [...] the New START Treaty does not impose any limitations on the deployment of missile defenses other than the requirements of paragraph 3, Article V." Paragraph 3, Article V imposes limits on the conversion of ICBMs and SLBMs for use as missile defense interceptors, but the treaty excludes existing Minuteman ICBMs used at Vandenberg and Ft. Greely Air Force Bases for this very purpose. No other ICBM or SLBM is proposed or desired by the Pentagon for such a weapons system. The limitation, therefore, is not one.

Senate Brokerage of Arms Spending

An analysis of campaign funds partly helps to explain why the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been so diligent in crafting the treaty resolution's language, making sure that nuclear weapons modernization, missile defense, and prompt global strike are not limited in any meaningful way, and that planned major investments in these weapons programs will proceed under the most favorable fiscal and political conditions. Democrats and Republicans have agreed upon big investments throughout the ratification debate. The difference is in how much they propose to increase weapons procurement budgets by, with the Democrats offering somewhat less than Republicans.

Democrats and Republicans have been protecting the interests of nuclear weapons, missile defense and PGS contractors who are among their biggest financial supporters and who have the most active professional lobbyist on Capitol Hill. Over the last five years members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have received more than $765,000 in contributions from missile defense, prompt global strike, and nuclear weapons contractors. Democrats led Republicans with approximately $424,000 in contractor cash. Republicans received $341,000 from the same set of contractors.

Table 4., Senate Foreign Relations Committee members and campaign contributions from nuclear weapons, missile defense, and PGS constractors, 2005-2010.
Data compiled from http://www.opensecrets.org.

Figure 1., Largest recipients of nuclear weapons, missile defense, and PGS contractor campaign contributions on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Data compiled from http://www.opensecrets.org

Senators with the most arms contractor cash were Christopher Dodd (D), James Inhofe (R), Jim Webb (D), and Jim DeMint (R). Sen. Dodd's commanding lead is due to a singularly large pattern of contributions from United Technologies, a diversified military contractor headquartered in his state, Connecticut. Without Dodd's $115,250 in United Technologies Corp cash the Democrat's would trail Republicans in total weapons contractor contributions by about $31,000.

Figure 2. Distribution of contributions of NNSA, missile defense and PGS contracting corporations made to SFR Committee members over the past five years.
Data compiled from http://www.opensecrets.org

In raw cash terms the largest contributions by corporations have come from United Technologies, Honeywell International, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, CH2M Hill, General Dynamics and Boeing. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor from the PGS "Conventional Strike Missile," a modified Minuteman III ICBM with a hypersonic "payload delivery vehicle" capable of attacking any point on earth within one hour. Boeing and Northrop Grumman are the prime contractors for the Missile Defense Agency's "Ground-based Midcourse Defense," weapons system. United Technologies, Raytheon, and General Dynamics and Honeywell have numerous contracts and subcontracts supporting these and other missile defense or PGS weapons programs.

Only three Senators on the Committee, all Democrats, have reported no significant contributions from missile defense, PGS, and nuclear weapons contractors: Russell Feingold, Robert Casey, and Edward Kaufman.

A look at lobbying records is also helpful in understanding the dynamics of the New START ratification process and why it is resulting in such a favorable outcome for specific weapons programs and their contractors. Since signing New START on April 8 2010, military contractors with stakes in missile defense have spent approximately $59 million lobbying the Senate. Raytheon alone has spent $22 million since April to employ its own lobbyists as well as firms like the Breaux Lott Leadership Group, Potomac Advocates and DLA Piper, LLP.

In the same period other military contractors have reported similarly large lobbying expenses in filings that mention "missile defense": Lockheed Martin $13 million, Boeing and Northrop Grumman both $9 million, Honeywell $1.6 million, and Orbital Sciences Corporation half a million. Other professional lobbying firms employed by these corporations include Clark & Weinstock, McBee Strategic Consulting, The Foxtail Group, and Carter Consulting.

Table 5., Top 10 missile defense contractors and their lobbyists listing "missile defense" in their Senate disclosure filings between April 8, 2010 and September 22, 2010.

Data compiled from Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, http://soprweb.senate.gov

Registrant Name	Client Name	Amount Expended	Date received
The Breaux Lott Leadership Group	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$70,000	04/20/10
The Breaux Lott Leadership Group	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$70,000	04/20/10
DLA Piper LLP (US)	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$120,000	04/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,550,000	04/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,550,000	04/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,550,000	04/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,920,000	06/03/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,920,000	06/03/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,920,000	06/03/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$2,220,000	07/20/10
The Breaux Lott Leadership Group	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$75,000	07/20/10
DLA Piper LLP (US)	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$110,000	07/20/10
The Breaux Lott Leadership Group	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$75,000	07/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,660,000	07/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,660,000	07/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$1,660,000	07/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$2,220,000	07/20/10
RAYTHEON COMPANY	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$2,220,000	07/20/10
PRASAM	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$10,000	04/19/10
PRASAM	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$10,000	07/14/10
American Defense International, Inc.	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$80,000	04/16/10
American Defense International, Inc.	RAYTHEON COMPANY	$80,000	07/15/10
Total Raytheon		$22,750,000

Principled Strategies, LLC	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$5,000	07/13/10
Clark & Weinstock	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$40,000	04/14/10
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$3,450,000	04/20/10
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$3,450,000	04/20/10
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$3,460,000	06/02/10
LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$3,460,000	06/02/10
Clark & Weinstock	LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION	$40,000	07/08/10
Total Lockheed Martin		$13,905,000


BOEING COMPANY	BOEING COMPANY	$4,060,000	04/20/10
McBee Strategic Consulting, LLC	BOEING COMPANY	$60,000	04/20/10
McBee Strategic Consulting, LLC	BOEING COMPANY	$60,000	04/20/10
BOEING COMPANY	BOEING COMPANY	$4,970,000	07/19/10
McBee Strategic Consulting, LLC	BOEING COMPANY	$90,000	07/20/10
McBee Strategic Consulting, LLC	BOEING COMPANY	$90,000	07/20/10
The Foxtail Group, LLC	The Boeing Co.	$50,000	04/15/10
The Foxtail Group, LLC	The Boeing Co.	$50,000	07/03/10
Total Boeing Company		$9,430,000

CARTER CONSULTING, INC.	NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP	$20,000	07/02/10
NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION	NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION	$4,130,000	04/20/10
NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION	NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION	$4,930,000	07/20/10
Total Northrop Grumman		$9,080,000

HONEYWELL INTERNATIONAL	HONEYWELL INTERNATIONAL	$1,650,000	04/20/10

AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	$215,334	04/09/10
AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	$241,276	06/14/10
AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	$241,275	06/15/10
AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.	$207,928	07/09/10
Total AIAA		$905,813

AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE	AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE	$676,413	07/19/10

Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$80,000	04/20/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$80,000	04/20/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$80,000	04/20/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$60,000	06/14/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$60,000	06/14/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$60,000	06/14/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$30,000	07/19/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$30,000	07/19/10
Orbital Sciences Corporation	Orbital Sciences Corporation	$30,000	07/19/10
Total OSC		$510,000

Van Scoyoc Associates	Moog, Inc.	$30,000	04/20/10
Van Scoyoc Associates	Moog, Inc.	$30,000	04/20/10
Van Scoyoc Associates	Moog, Inc.	$40,000	07/20/10
Van Scoyoc Associates	Moog, Inc.	$40,000	07/20/10
Total Moog, Inc.		$140,000

J Street	J Street	$130,000	07/20/10

New START's Big Winners: US Nuke Complex, Pentagon, and Contractors

2010-09-17T00:43:00.005-04:00

Passage of New START in a 14-4 vote out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is already being hailed by Democrats and arms control NGOs as a substantial victory. A floor vote for ratification is now apparently set to occur after the elections.

While ratification is by no means guaranteed, there are several clear winners already: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet General, Alliant Techsystems, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories, Y-12 nuclear labs, the Pentagon, and Bechtel Corporation.

While much noise has been made about the New START treaty's cut to the nuclear weapons stockpile, the actual required reduction in arms may be as low as 8%, or 162 warheads out of a total of thousands. Furthermore, keep in mind too that this only affects deployed strategic warheads, not "tactical" weapons, and not weapons in the "reserve" stockpile.

So why the big deal? Why are both sides fighting like mad over a treaty that really requires virtually no change to the status quo US-Russia relationship and US nuclear stockpile?

Here's why in a nutshell:

1. The Democrats, led by the Obama administration, want the treaty badly in order to prove that their means of combating proliferation and the rising power of states like Iran is better than the Republican strategy. The difference essentially is that the Democrats propose to give the impression that the USA is cutting its arsenal and seeking "global zero." Of course it's not and the Dems intend to fund the US nuclear complex at large levels. Long-range national security state doctrine calls for keeping nukes far into the future, and modernizing them the whole way along. But the Democratic foreign policy establishment thinks their plan will provide superior power, diplomatic and military, when dealing with nations that pose a threat to US imperial interests. It's a tough balancing act, this anti-nuclear nuclearism! Thankfully the liberal militarists have found willing allies in the foundation community. Funds and NGOs like Ploughshares, American Friends Service Committee, and Peace Action West have lobbied extensively for ratification, proving that a little money goes a long way in politics.

2. The Republican strategy remains what the old gipper gave us - "peace through strength." G. W. Bush pursued it with his aggressive nuclear weapons programs, but the Democrats managed to back him down. Undeterred, many Republicans think the Democrats are wasting the national security state's time and energy and would just rather invest huge sums in weapons and invade and occupy nations as a first and early recourse when problems arise. There remains a great deal of ideological opposition to treaties, especially arms control pacts, whether or not they actually constrain US military might.

3. In addition to this acrimonious debate about imperial strategy, there's bread and butter. While New START doesn't pose any threats to any military funding whatsoever, it does offer a major opportunity to demand huge funding increases for several weapons programs.

A. Chief among these is the nuclear weapons program. New START ratification is being used as the primary forum in which to hash out the budget for nuclear weapons over the next ten years. Thus far supporters of the nuke complex have gotten a pretty good deal; a minimum $10 billion increase over the next ten years to build a new plutonium pit factory, new uranium plant, new weapons components factory, and other major capital projects. Corker and Isakson's votes on September 16 to pass the treaty to the full Senate for a ratification vote may signal that they have received even larger funding commitments for the huge nuclear facilities in their states, or that they will use their vote on the floor to extort better deals between now and then.

B. Then there's "missile defense" and "prompt global strike." Missile defense has its own agency in the Pentagon and budget larger than the NNSA's. Prompt global strike, a new conventional strategic weapons system capable of killing anyone on the planet in under an hour with hypersonic munitions, is a multi-hundred million dollar and growing program. Both are getting very large increases in Obama's FY2011 budget, due in part to Republican demands that neither program be constrained by New START. Of course the treaty does not such thing, but the concern is really a theatrical way of demanding even larger increases for these weapons systems. The Democrats are too happy to oblige. Obama and Biden are champions of prompt global strike.

4. Thus the Senators on both sides of the debate are working for the nuclear weapons complex, Pentagon, and their powerful corporate contractors. The Democrats have already offered up major funding increases, even before Republican opposition. Conservatives have only pulled the issue further to the right, and arms control foundations and NGOs have fed the whole process by making New START out to be vastly more important and meaningful than it objectively is.

Still don't see the bi-partisan consensus to fund the nuclear weapons complex and Pentagon's missile defense and prompt global strike programs and contractors? Here's some campaign finance data for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee members' 2010 election cycle bank accounts. Both Democrats and Republicans are well endowed, demonstrating why the interests of the nuclear weapons complex and other weapons programs are absolutely not threatened by New START.

[The first number ranks the contributing corporation among the Senator's top donors for 2010. Figures from http://www.opensecrets.org. Raytheon, Textron, Lockheed, Boeing, United Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, Carlyle, BAE, EADS all contract with the Missile Defense Agency and related Pentagon program offices. Lockheed serves at the lead contractor for prompt global strike. Bechtel, Honeywell, CH2M Hill, McDermott (through its BWXT subsidiary), URS, Flour, and Lockheed Martin contract with the NNSA to operate the US nuclear weapons complex. AECOM is subcontractor for the US nuclear weapons program.]

Democrats

John Kerry

20 Raytheon Co $15,250

84 Honeywell International $8,500

84 Textron Inc $8,500

Christopher J. Dodd

3 United Technologies $115,250

16 General Dynamics $29,300

Russell D. Feingold

Barbara Boxer

18 CH2M HILL $23,500

84 Lockheed Martin $10,300

89 Honeywell International $10,000

Robert Menendez

21 CH2M Hill $36,075

95 AECOM Technology Corp $17,200

Benjamin L. Cardin

41 Northrop Grumman $15,700

83 Lockheed Martin $11,000

Robert P. Casey Jr

Jim Webb

5 SAIC Inc $20,000

8 Northrop Grumman $18,150

21 US Dept of Defense $10,800

24 McDermott International $10,000

48 Raytheon Co $8,250

Jeanne Shaheen

17 Honeywell International $16,000

Edward E. Kaufman

Kirsten E. Gillibrand

59 BAE Systems $16,300

79 Carlyle Group $12,500

85 Raytheon Co $11,750

Republicans

Richard Lugar

24 Lockheed Martin $10,000

33 Raytheon Co $9,750

36 Bechtel Group $8,850

39 Honeywell International $8,500

Bob Corker

57 Honeywell International $15,000

85 US Government [partly Y-12] $12,650

Johnny Isakson

50 Boeing Co $10,000

50 Lockheed Martin $10,000

James E. Risch

5 URS Corp $12,700

12 Honeywell International $10,000

50 Bechtel Group $7,000

69 Boeing Co $5,000

Jim DeMint

13 URS Corp/Washington $16,499

18 Fluor Corp $14,250

25 Lockheed Martin $12,600

44 Boeing Co $10,201

91 Honeywell International $9,000

John Barrasso

15 Northrop Grumman $13,500

34 Honeywell International $10,000

96 URS Corp $6,000

Roger F. Wicker

14 Northrop Grumman $17,500

21 European Aeronautic Defence & Space $14,500

41 General Dynamics $11,000

47 Raytheon Co $10,000

James M. Inhofe

21 BAE Systems $12,700

27 Lockheed Martin $12,000

29 Boeing Co $11,750

48 Honeywell International $10,000

48 Northrop Grumman $10,000

48 Raytheon Co $10,000

48 United Technologies $10,000

Women of the Spill - And the Oil Men Who Love Them

2010-07-30T21:42:00.007-04:00

"Be The One," a campaign urging citizens to petition the Congress towards passing and funding a comprehensive Gulf Coast restoration plan, has drawn criticism from some who point to the group's corporate oil and gas industry backers.

Brenden DeMelle and Jerry Cope report in the Huffington Post that, "a group of oil companies including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Citgo, Chevron and other polluters are using a front group called 'America's Wetland Foundation' and a Louisiana women's group called Women of the Storm to spread the message that U.S. taxpayers should pay for the damage caused by BP to Gulf Coast wetlands, and that the reckless offshore oil industry should continue drilling for the 'wholesale sustainability' of the region."

"Be The One" draws on celebrity endorsements from Sandra Bullock, Dave Matthews, Lenny Kravitz, Emeril Lagassi, John Goodman, Harry Shearer, Peyton and Eli Manning, Drew Brees and other stars with connections to New Orleans. To her credit Sandra Bullock —who bought a mansion in the city's posh Lower Garden District several years ago— withdrew her endorsement of the campaign after learning about the role of oil and gas companies in funding the America's Wetland Foundation. But the influences of corporate oil and gas goes much deeper into this campaign than just America's Wetland Foundation and its fiscal supporters.

Women of the Storm is the coordinator of "Be The One," and the group's founder Anne Milling has said she sees no problem with the grassroots organization's partnership with America's Wetland Foundation. DeMelle and Cope noted, however, that Anne Milling is married to R. King Milling, chairman of America's Wetland Foundation, making the relationship between her community group and the industry front group more than cozy. They go on to note other partnerships between the two organizations and their overall coordination of a single message: restoring the Gulf and making the region "sustainable" means keeping the oil and gas spigots flowing at full force.

How is it that Women of the Storm came to be such a pro-oil interest group? Truth is Women of the Storm was never a grassroots "women's organization." It began as an elitist post-Katrina lobby that emphasized broad social and economic issues related to reconstruction of the city and region. Women of the Storm was founded by Anne Milling and other mavens of New Orleans' Uptown elite who convened strategy meetings in their St. Charles and Audubon Place mansions to create a kind of women's auxiliary group, one that would keep the Congress's attention on southern Louisiana, and support the corporate and political campaigns run by their husbands to restore the region's dominant extractive and environmentally destructive industries as quickly as possible. From its very beginning Women of the Storm was a pro-oil and gas lobby by virtue of its leadership, determining positions they would or would not take on major legislation. They were also strong supporters of tax credits and the major housing assistance program that cut checks to homeowners, but left renters with nothing. As philanthropists, all of their initiatives aligned with big oil and other dominant economic forces.

Women of the storm organized press conferences, wrote letters, held vigils, and used their direct access to the media and the Louisiana Congressional delegation to lobby Congress for key pieces of post-Katrina legislation that would facilitate the rebuilding of New Orleans and the regional economy - along specific lines, of course. One of these bills resulted in greatly expanded deepwater exploration and drilling, with the promise that billions of federal royalties from well production would be turned back over to Louisiana and other Gulf states by 2017, creating a new revenue stream for the region's legislatures. The funds are supposed to be used for coastal restoration programs, but so far the states have seen piddling amounts. The point of the law for the oil and gas industry, however, was to open up vast new reaches of the Gulf. Women of the Storm chalked it up as a political victory. A couple of their husbands and a few family members chalked the bill up as another profit making opportunity.

Anne's husband R. King Milling isn't just chairman of America's Wetland Foundation. President of the Whitney Bank and its parent company, Whitney Holding Corporation from 1984 to 2007, R. King Milling personifies the elite of New Orleans. His bank, the largest in Louisiana, finances the oil and gas industry and depends upon its growth. Whitney Bank capital is heavily vested in offshore and onshore production, chemical refining, shipping, and other sectors of the economy that have been directly responsible for the destruction of the marshes and swamps that used to provide safety from storms, food, and a home for the millions who live along the Gulf Coast. Whitney Bank has held major investment stakes in oil industry firms like Hornbeck Offshore Services (now Tidewater, Inc.), which operates a 66 acre dock in Port Fourchon, hauling drilling mud, fuel and lube to rigs like the Deepwater Horizon. Upriver assets held by Whitney Bank include chemical refineries like CF Industries, which operates one of the nation's largest petrochemical fertilizer factories in Donaldsonville, LA.

As the oldest bank in New Orleans, Whitney was there during the first days of the oil rush. The bank and its holding company profited smartly from the expansion of oil and gas drilling into the swamps after World War II. Whitney made loans to the multitude of companies cutting canals and dumping spoil banks through the wetlands, building drilling rigs and establishing services. In other words, Whitney Bank quite literally financed the destruction of Louisiana's wetlands, building a fortune for its shareholders and executives along the way.

In 2009 Whitney Bank noted in its annual report that it had:

"approximately $894 million in loans to borrowers in the oil and gas industry, representing approximately 11% of its total loans outstanding as of that date. The majority of the Bank’s customer base in this industry provides transportation and other services and products to support exploration and production activities."

As Whitney Bank's annual report states, "If there is a significant downturn in the oil and gas industry generally, the cash flows of Whitney’s customers’ [sic] in this industry would be adversely impacted. This in turn could impair their ability to service their debt to the Bank with adverse consequences to the Company’s earnings."

By June 2010 the Bank's executives judged that the Deepwater Horizon's short-term impact on their investments in offshore oil would be "minimal." However the situation could rapidly change if the moratorium on deepwater drilling remained in place because 56 percent of the Bank's oil and gas loans were for "exploration & production" and "drilling and pre-drilling," with only 44 percent invested in supply and transport services to currently operating platforms.

"Loans outstanding to the O&G sector totaled $762 million, or approximately 10% of total loans at June 30, 2010. Based on discussions with customers in this industry, and currently available information, management expects minimal near-term impact to their business operations and to the performance of our loans in this portfolio sector. Management’s current assessment could change depending upon the length of the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf and the ultimate impact of this disaster on the cost of drilling operations in the future."

R. King and Anne Milling own 306,321 shares of Whitney Holding Corporation stock (in King's name). In April of 2010, days before the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank into the Gulf, Whitney Holding Corporation shares were valued at $15.29 each. R. King Milling's holdings were worth roughly $4,632,000.iv As of July 21 the Bank's shares had hit a 52 week low, trading at $7.41.

NASDAQ traders had devalued the bank because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and uncertainty about the future of oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Milling's current ownership stake in the company has been devalued by half. On July 14 Whitney Bank posted the largest loss of any corporation in the exchange at the close of trading - an 18 percent drop. [Note in the chart below —Whitney Holding Corp.'s stock performance over the past six months— that the Bank's value began a steady decline exactly on April 23, the day after the Deepwater Horizon sank].

Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart
Click here to download Flash Player now

View the full WTNY chart at Wikinvest

Financial industry analysts have been projecting steep loses for Whitney Bank since the gusher began flowing. Anne and R. King Milling's connection is only one of many in the oil soaked region and its elite, all of whom —as Judge Martin Feldman taught us— seem to have a finger in one oil well or another.

Women of the Storm Executive Committee member Rebecca Currence came to New Orleans in the early 1960s with her newlywed husband Richard. Richard Currence earned a law degree from Tulane and immediately established himself as a rising star in offshore Gulf oil and gas production.vii With stints running operations at Tidewater Marine Services, Gulf Fleet Marine Corporation, and even Zapata Gulf Marine Corporation (famously begun by George H. W. Bush in 1953) Currence spent four decades running offshore drilling companies as far away as Africa and the North Sea.

Currence has owned major stakes in offshore oil and gas companies like Tidewater, Ambar, Inc., Gulfmark Offshore and made an honorary appearance at Tidewater, Inc.'s 2009 annual shareholder's meeting. Along with the Milling's Whitney Bank, Currence owned stock in Hornbeck Offshore Services, Inc. Hornbeck is now owned by Tidewater, having been bought out in the late 1990s, an acquisition that helped catapult the company into the billion dollar club.

Tidewater remarked about the Deepwater Horizon disaster in its 2009 annual report that, "the Recent Rig Catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico Could Have a Significant Impact on Exploration and Production Activities in United States Coastal Waters that Could Adversely Affect the U. S. Operations of the Company." Tidewater concluded that;

"Among the possible future consequences of this event are additional regulatory oversight and control with respect to offshore drilling, a potential ban or restriction on oil and gas exploration in certain offshore areas, particularly deepwater drilling, and an increase in insurance premiums for casualty insurance that may be more difficult to obtain. Any such development could reduce demand for the company’s services in the U.S. GOM. The events in the U.S. GOM may also have ramifications in foreign exploration areas, which could adversely affect our international operations as well, although it is impossible to assess at this time."

Lucky for Tidewater, the Currences, and the Millings, the moratorium on deepwater drilling was lifted. Maybe they'll get real lucky and Congress will pass billions to clean up the Gulf, leaving industry to spend its profits on further exploration and drilling?

Upset with critics who have unmasked big oil's front group America's Wetland Foundation and the dubious message being promoted in their "Be The One" campaign, the Women of the Storm have posted a rebuttal on their web site:

"There’s a saying, often attributed to Mark Twain, that 'a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.' We want you to know the truth at www.restorethegulf.com, in the face of misleading information and poor reporting that’s out there in the blogosphere. The Restore the Gulf campaign was created and funded entirely by Women of the Storm. We received support from many organizations, though it should be noted that the campaign has received no money whatsoever from either America’s Wetland Foundation (AWF) or any oil companies."

So would Women of the Storm have us believe that their money is in no way connected to any "oil companies"?

Countdown to Zero - Highly Anticipated Sequal to "Team America"

2010-07-29T17:16:00.002-04:00

The most highly anticipated sequel of the year is out. Countdown to Zero further develops a storyline and themes around which Southpark creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone used in their 2004 film Team America: World Police.

The developers of Countdown to Zero drew heavily from one scene in Team America, embedded below for your viewing pleasure. Only problem with the sequel is that it appears the producers of Countdown to Zero missed the irony and sardonic humor that Team America's script writers soaked their film in.

The result: a rather Islamophobic and alarmist pseudo-documentary about nuclear weapons and materials.

Countdown to Co-optation

2010-07-21T22:32:00.005-04:00

No medium of propaganda is as powerful and effective as film. Think of the classics, the most notorious efforts to to sway the public with the electrifying and collective passion of cinema: racial apartheid was justified in the US with Birth of a Nation. The Soviets glorified their revolution with the Battleship Potemkin. Then there was Triumph of the Will.

A typical propaganda film tugs at emotions and invokes fears. It invokes dark threats to "the people," and it offers up solutions extolling state and corporate power. Unlike a political documentary it will not criticize the state or corporation. Instead it will celebrate great men as our leaders and saviors. Distinct from a run-of-the-mill political documentary, a propaganda film butchers the complexity and contradictions that permeate politics and real life, presenting things in simplistic moral terms. Functionally, propaganda is mobilized to secure popular support for a primary, often hidden agenda that is not apparent in the film's narrative. Propaganda is a tool used by elites to secure the consent of the masses, and channel their anxieties.

Now hitting theaters is one of the most dangerous propaganda films produced in decades. Countdown to Zero "traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs." A promotional blurb on the film's web site claims that it "makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, an issue more topical than ever with the Obama administration working to revive this goal today."

Before I go any further in explaining Countdown as a propaganda film I should note that note all propaganda need be the product of a secretive and manipulative council of elites behind some curtain. Instead, the many contributors to Countdown and its promotional effort have different motivations and intentions. What makes this film a coherent piece of propaganda is its medium, style, and likely effects on the US political climate.

On its surface Countdown to Zero is about nuclear disarmament, but deeper down the film is making a very specific case that isn't about disarmament at all. Its political function will prove to be quite different. Countdown is joining a suite of political campaigns and other propagandistic efforts, the point of which is to build support for increased US spending on nuclear weapons, as well as a more belligerent foreign policy, based around islamophobic depictions of "terrorists" and "rogue states." Countdown is likely to be used by hawks to drum up support for military action against Iran, North Korea, and other states that would dare to transgress the current near-monopoly that a handful of states have on the bomb.

To understand how this is possible, one has to break through the simplistic and moralizing presentation of issues in the film and its promotional materials, and explore the complex political situation into which it is being launched.

The first and most important thing to understand is that the Obama administration does not have a disarmament agenda. Because the entire moral thrust of the film rest on this notion, it's important to dispel it right off the bat. Obama and his military advisers have made their nuclear ambitions abundantly clear on multiple occasions.

The administration's Nuclear Posture Review in no significant way changed the nuclear force structure or use doctrines. The NPR makes it abundantly clear that US national security is founded on the nuclear "deterrent," and that no one in government will seek to reduce the role of nukes in the foreseeable future.

The recently negotiated New START treaty does not significantly cut the US and Russian arsenals. In fact the treaty language secures an allowance for US "missile defense" programs as well as the "prompt global strike" weapons system while consolidating the US stockpile and reaffirming existing strategic agreements with Russia that are about balance. As noted by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the irony here is that the Senate's possible ratification of New START is premised on the Obama administration's pledge to fund US nuclear weapons programs upwards of $180 billion over the next ten years, something even George W. Bush could not accomplish. The down payment for the next fiscal year includes a $624 million surge in nuke spending, for a total of $7.01 billion. The administration foresees spending more than $1 billion each year to refurbish and upgrade existing warheads and bombs. To support New START requires accepting these huge infrastructural and programmatic investments in nuclear weapons, far into the future.

To put it more simply, the debate in Washington revolves around two camps fighting over how large an increase in nuclear weapons spending there will be. At this point in time all agree on expending billions more. All agree upon building a new plutonium pit factory, a new uranium processing facility, a new components factory, and five other major capital projects in the nuclear weapons complex to extend the US nuclear enterprise half a decade or more into the future. Most agree on procuring a new class of nuclear equipped submarines. Most agree on new ballistic missiles. Everyone seems to be fine with upgrading warheads and bombs.

Some conservatives are uncomfortable with the cosmetic cuts to the stockpile that will be made under the auspices of New START. Senate Republicans have circled their wagons to demand greater funding increases in consideration of ratification, and given all of the agreements they have with the Democrats and the Obama administration over expanding the weapons complex, they are actually correct. In order to carry out this bi-partisan nuclear arms buildup, quite a bit more than a $1 billion per year boost (at its peak) will be needed for the NNSA's budget, especially as inflation eats into the real value of future year budgets.

Determining the future of the US nuclear weapons complex is a tricky balancing act for the foreign policy elite because it is embedded in a larger set of much more important goals. The over-riding goal of foreign policy for the United States, with respect to nuclear weapons, is to maintain control of nuclear weapons and materials. Forget lofty ideas like disarmament. Lofty moral oughts only matter with respect to the realpolitik of geo-strategy (and this is where Countdown comes in, as we shall see).

To elite strategists who will decide at the end of the day, the power of nuclear weapons only matter within, and comprise a small part of a much greater geopolitical game. Henry Kissinger made this very point in 1957 with his first book, the subject being the role of nuclear weapons in US foreign policy. Controlling resources, energy supplies, and access to geo-strategic regions for US corporations and allies is the primary goal of US foreign policy, and this requires a stable imbalance of powers, with the US the weightier.

Nuclear weapons are problematic today because they remain a necessary means of overpowering other nations and intimidating foes, but they have also become a liability as other states threaten to go nuclear in order to restore balance to a unipolar world. American hypocrisy is seen as a major weakness for the maintenance of American power by liberal imperialists like Obama, even if disarmament is an idealistic and counterproductive pipe dream. Conservatives like Senator Jon Kyl would rather just avoid soft power altogether and stick to a hard-nosed defense policy.

This is why US policy with respect to Iran seems so disjointed and paralyzed: Iran's influence and power is growing, it possesses immense energy resources, and straddles a region of geo-strategic importance. For US elites, Iran must be controlled at all cost. A nuclear Iran would make this much, much more difficult. Regime change is the goal, just like in Iraq. Nonproliferation as an end in itself seems to offer the most justifiable reason for using force and "rebuilding" nations (remember that it was the reason given for the 2004 invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq). But with its Bush-era reputation of seeking new nukes, liberals fear that United States can hardly coerce or attack Iran in the name of nonproliferation. As the world's preeminent nuclear power with no interest in disarming it would be bald hypocrisy. But then again the US will not disarm, for this would be anathema to the needs and goals of the foreign policy elite. What to do?

Into this mix arrives Countdown to Zero and similarly crafted propaganda pieces. Countdown's major achievement is repackaging the strategy of anti-nuclear nuclearism into a sexy and thrilling propaganda film full of special effects and heart pulsing music. It will invoke fear of nuclear weapons to justify aggression, war, and the extension of US control over much of the rest of the world.

While the film's title and a lot of the fanfare surrounding it emphasizes the "zero" message of disarmament, Countdown is actually an alarmist portrayal of dark skinned men, muslims, "terrorists" and other racial or ethnic boogeymen who we are told, over the span of 90 minutes, are seeking nuclear weapons to use against the American people. A related theme in the film is the demonization of Iran and North Korea which are portrayed as dangerous rogue states with ties to terrorist organizations, and who must be controlled, against whom military action may be warranted - or else. Or else what?

One of the main "experts" in Countdown to Zero, Joseph Cirincione frames the take home message by invoking a very post-9-11 Bush administration theme:

"That day changed our sense of security and how we view the world. We learned how vulnerable we are to the destructive acts of a determined few. Just think how worse it would have been if the terrorist had nuclear weapons."

Cirincione is not just any expert. He is the doyen of the Democratic Party's NGO apparatus that shapes nuclear weapons policy through foundation funding of grassroots groups and elite policy shops. Cirincione is president of the Ploughshares Fund. In spite of its name, Ploughshares' mission these days actually involves beating ploughs into swords.

Throughout the 1990s, but especially during the George W. Bush years, Ploughshares and circle of foundations called the Peace and Security Funders Group increasingly narrowed the range of acceptable anti-nuclear activism, while simultaneously ghettoizing the field so that the work of various NGOs became less and less applicable to social justice and economic development issues, and increasingly focused on abstract global problems and hypotheticals, such as the existence and possible use of nuclear weapons. In the process discussions of the injustices of the global political economy and how nuclear weapons fit into it were silenced. Anti-nuclear activism became increasingly specialized, boring, and disconnected from issues that affect people's everyday lives. Arms control eclipsed abolition as the rallying cry. Those NGOs that obeyed the consolidation period survived with funding and access to media, so long as they kissed the ring.

Ploughshares was at the center of it all. Today the Fund's priorities are shaped by its board of directors made up of Democratic Party donors, other foundation executives, and liberal academics. The Fund's advisers include men like George Shultz, the former Bechtel president who served as Reagan's Secretary of State, and former Defense Secretaries William Cohen and William Perry. The latter is actually a board member of the for-profit corporations that manage the nation's two nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos and Livermore. You figure it out.

Ploughshares' adviser and propagandist Jeff Skoll is president of Participant Media, one of the production companies behind Countdown to Zero. The film's Co-producer, the World Security Institute (a major recipient of Ploughshares Fund dollars), tapped its Global Zero project membership to narrate the film through dozens of interviews with the likes of elder statesmen, and NGO executives like Cirincione who are very friendly to the Obama administration's nuclear buildup.

Participant Media is a full service propaganda shop for liberal campaigns, producing both documentaries and dramas. In addition to the benchmark documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Participant is responsible for some very excellent and thoughtful films like Syriana, Food, Inc., and The Cove. And this is where complexity comes in. Some of the producers and voices featured in Countdown to Zero have wonderful intentions, and all of them are probably genuinely concerned with, and fear, the possible day that nuclear weapons might be used, whether by a state or by a criminal group. Herein also is the propagandistic danger of Countdown to Zero.

Albert Camus once wrote that "the evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." Backed with a lot of foundation money, the producers of Countdown to Zero have paid organizers across the US to do considerable outreach for the film, whipping up interest on Facebook and other social media and generally co-opting the energies and intentions of many anti-nuclear activists. Countdown premiers July 23 and will be shown in theaters across the US. Many screenings are being organized by activists whose intentions are unimpeachable, if naive.

What audiences are going to learn from Countdown to Zero is that nuclear weapons are a threat today because the bad guys might get a hold of them. They'll learn that al-Qaeda is seeking nuclear weapons, that it is their sworn duty; That highly enriched uranium is easy to smuggle; That "we are on the verge of a nuclear 9-11"; That tens of thousands of pounds of uranium are stored under virtually no security around the globe. In other words they'll learn that dark scary men, muslims, "terrorists" and anarchists are trying to kill them with nuclear weapons, and that nations like Iran and North Korea will gladly assist them. Their feelings of revulsion for nuclear weapons will be stimulated and channeled against these dark enemies of civilization.

What they'll learn about US nuclear weapons and policy, if it is discussed in any real and honest depth at all, is that better control and management is needed, a slightly smaller arsenal is desirable. But mostly they'll learn to just trust our leaders, and that everything will turn out alright so long as the proper authorities are in power. Joseph Cirincione will eagerly explain to audiences that George Shulz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn are hard at work to "secure" our nuclear weapons. It all sounds great, but the "four horsemen," as they have come to be known, are actually among the biggest lobbyist for the surge in nuclear weapons spending and the construction of a new US nuclear weapons complex.

In a promotional video attached to the START ratification effort Cirincione urges viewers to "join this patriotic consensus" toward zero. In a recent op-ed he has urged Senate ratification of New START writing, "The statesmanship demonstrated by the Consensus members today could help break the partisan blockade in the Senate and restore America's leadership on this urgent security challenge." The capital C Consensus he's referring to is a newly formed NGO, created to translate the groundswell of public response they expect from propaganda efforts like Countdown to Zero, into sharp policy programs for government, including aggressive military action against would-be nuclear states, much of it in the name of nonproliferation. The Consensus for American Security is one manifestation of the platform that many foreign policy elites hope will solve the contradiction in current US nuclear policy. The mission statement of the Consensus includes, "strengthening and modernizing America’s nuclear security," because it "is a vital element of protecting the United States and its allies."

Ploughshares put up the money for The Consensus for American Security... an organization dedicated to strengthening and modernizing America's nuclear security. Modernizing is not an arbitrary word. In the current policy debate over the future of the US nuclear weapons complex and stockpile, modernization means a very specific thing. It means approving the Obama administration's program to build a pit factory, uranium processing facility, components plant and other billion dollar capital projects for the weapons complex. It also means modernizing warheads and bombs by rebuilding them and designing new features. And it means acquiring new, very expensive platforms like subs, bombers, and missiles.
Members of the Ploughshares Consensus include a predictable list of centrist retired military brass and statesmen, most of whom occupy revolving door positions on other foundation and NGO boards like Ploughshares, and more than a few of whom have links to the military industrial complex: George Shulz, Samuel Berger, Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, and physicist Sidney Drell, all of them strong supporters of US nuclear weapons programs, and American empire.

The Consensus' second mission appears to involve stoking Islamophobia. A special project of the Consensus, the American Security Project, is a well-funded think tank churning out reports about "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," and "Are We Winning? Measuring Progress in the Struggle Against al Qaeda and Associate Movements." ASP's homepage features a photograph of "terrorists" in black masks hauling an American nuclear warhead (a W-76 or W-88 it appears) on a bamboo rickshaw over a wooden bridge toward a waiting van in some distant jungle.

Countdown to Zero is one component of a larger and coherent foundation campaign to stoke up public fears about nuclear weapons for the purpose of extending a near-monopoly on nuclear weapons, and legitimating a more aggressive foreign policy aimed at regime change in Iran and elsewhere. The consensus behind those who funded and produced the film has little to do with disarmament, and a lot to do with stabilizing the American empire.

Capital Speaks

2010-06-24T17:18:00.003-04:00

How Big Foundations and Wall Street Elites Are Legitimating Their Plans to Balance the Budget

This Saturday tens of thousands of Americans, from all walks of life, men and women of all races, immigrants and citizens, young and old, from all regions of the country, will gather in hundreds of town hall meetings. There they will "weigh in on strategies for a sustainable fiscal future." This series of coordinated gatherings is called America Speaks, and its goals are to "educate the American public about the challenges facing our nation, provide Americans with a neutral space to explore the issues and weigh the trade offs, and deliver to political leaders in Washington a clear message about the shared priorities of a large, demographically representative group of Americans."

At least this is how the foundation funders and political operatives organizing America Speaks describe their well-funded exercise in hegemony. A more honest appraisal it deserves though. Following up a highly exclusive budget summit in Washington D.C. last month that featured the likes of Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, America Speaks is more for those of us who BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg recently identified as the "small people." The town hall meetings being organized by America Speaks are in fact the latest and one of the largest and most sophisticated operations in securing consent to rule that the U.S. elite has ever attempted. Like the D.C. budget summit organized by Peter G. Peterson, the town hall meetings are intended to make an impression on President Obama's official commission which has been tasked with putting all options on the table in order to reduce the federal deficit.

Bankrolled by a strange cast of institutional and individual characters, the guiding force behind America Speaks' town hall meetings on the national budget is Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire founder of the Blackstone Group. In the 1970s Peterson left his post as CEO of Bell and Howell Corporation to begin his forays into public policy through official appointments and foundation initiatives. He served as President Nixon's Secretary of Commerce in 1972, and then naturally was appointed Chairman of Lehmen Brothers. It was at Lehmen where Peterson spent the majority of his business career making fistfuls of cash. In 1985 he set out with other captains of the financial industry to create the Blackstone which became the world's largest private equity firm.

Two years later Gordon Gekko, the fictive embodiment of Peterson's cohort, would tell America;

"The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons, and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market."

On Wall Street Peterson became known for his fiscal conservatism and free market faith which initially translated into strong support for the Republican Party. But Peterson has been more than a partisan. Democrats have also solicited his energies to rationalize cuts in welfare spending alongside federal policies to grease the wheels of wealth accumulation to the benefit of the elite. Throughout his career as a philanthropist Peterson has seemed equally displeased with both Republican and Democratic Party failures to structurally adjust the U.S. economy by balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. His lament is shared by many financial elites.

While one function of the U.S. government (perhaps the main function in recent decades) is to facilitate capitalist accumulation on ever-greater scales, another function, more a necessity growing out of the pain and dislocation that wealth accumulation creates, is to legitimate rule, oftentimes by stabilizing an otherwise brutal socioeconomic structure. This means placating the working poor with minimum wages, food stamps, and public housing, while rewarding the more politically powerful, if complacent, middle class with huge social welfare programs like Social Security or federally backed mortgages. Congress and the White House have essentially lost all sense of balance in this act, due in no small part to the nation's imperial overstretch as well as the power of corporations and the wealthy to insulate their fortunes from the grasp of the tax man.

During George H.W. Bush's term in office Peterson was moved to found the Concord Coalition which sounded alarms over the U.S. deficit, focusing a lot of attention on health care spending, social security, and other entitlements that stood in the way of greater sums of speculative profit and private wealth accumulation. A close observer and panderer to the needs of the financial elite, President Clinton appointed Peterson to the Bi-Partisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform which built support for the "end to welfare as we know it." Clinton and the Republican controlled Congress brought some of the Commission's findings down like a bludgeon on tens of millions of low-income Americans with the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

With Peterson as its prime backer you can see where the America Speaks budget town halls are likely to be steered. Up for discussion: cutting welfare spending, health care, education. Not up for discussion? The backers of America Speaks have so far kept military spending off the table. They've also been conspicuously silent about one of the simplest solutions to the fiscal crisis, taxing corporate wealth and private equity.

Peterson is by no means alone in funding the America Speaks budget town hall meetings. Other powerful financial elites are bankrolling this exercise in legitimation. There's South Carolinian Roger Milliken, heir to an enormous private textile fortune. Milliken's contempt for social welfare programs is well-known, as is his support for ever greater levels of militarism. Milliken helped bankroll the Peace Through Strength PAC, and Freedom's Defense Fund. The former helped Cold War era politicians win elections and funnel the national treasury into pie-in-the-sky weapons systems. The latter has carried on this work while condemning welfare in most forms. According to their web site, Freedom's Defense Fund is "dedicated to the principles of limited government, as the Founders understood them," and works to liberate America from "the shackles of the nanny state."

Other anti-"nanny state" parties behind America Speaks include a cluster of Wyoming-based groups with roots in the oil, gas, and coal industries. This is due no doubt to Alan Simpson's influence. The former Senator from Wyoming is co-chair of President Obama's budget commission. The Wyoming Business Alliance, Casper Area Economic Development Alliance, Casper Community Foundation, Casper Events Center, City of Casper, Casper Rotary Foundation, along with two oil and gas businesses, Goolsby-Finley and Associates, and Gene George and Associates, are providing funding and in-kind support for the budget town halls.

Rounding out America Speaks are a few of the Democratic Party's Daddy Warbucks, including real estate investor Robert Monks, Rockefeller Brothers Fund trustee Richard G. Rockefeller, and hedge fund manager S. Donald Sussman.

What this seemingly bi-partisan caste holds in common is their fear over the U.S. deficit, but also their fear that the budget will be balanced to the detriment of the top 5 percent's ability to further accumulate wealth. And so on Saturday these AstroTurf town hall meetings, occurring in 19 major cities and dozens of other locations, will provide cover for what is otherwise a foregone set of conclusions that include recommendations that the Congress and White House cut and privatize many social programs.

There is an illustrative precedent to this exercise in fiscal hegemony. After Hurricane Katrina the Rockefeller Foundation financed an initiative called the Unified New Orleans Plan, or UNOP. UNOP's supposed function was to create a democratic process for the planning of the disaster-stricken city's future. In practice UNOP was an exercise in legitimating plans already in the works. UNOP town hall meetings, called "charrettes," a buzzword in planning and architecture circles, were filled with middle class white residents of the city. Displaced citizens had no voice, but still the campaign's organizers, ever-sensitive to creating the appearance of sensitivity and democracy, claimed to hold planning sessions in distant cities where black and working class residents were struggling to survive.

UNOP was mostly a failure. Multiple and competing plans were hatched by the Mayor, City Council, and foundations like Rockefeller, and disorganization consumed most everyone. Even so, parts of the foundation funded plan have purportedly been used as a base for the new city master plan (still in the works). Furthermore, the main goal from the start wasn't to actually plan the city's future. It was instead to create the appearance of inclusion and participation, and to give New Orleanians a sense that the future of their city, economy, and public sector was being democratically determined. All the while it was not.

Decisions to demolish tens of thousands of housing units were made behind closed doors, in concert with developers seeking to privatize them. Health care facilities like Charity Hospital were shuttered in the name of building newer and more profitable facilities, and also to create a base for the newest economic development scheme of the city's elite: a biomedical district. Public schools were closed down and replaced with a virtually all charter system. Public transport was drastically scaled back. All of these cuts were made possible by foundations and NGOs which provided a mask of pluralism and inclusion. Resistance to austerity measures was undermined with faux democracy and inclusion.

While "greed is good" may be the most quoted line from Wall Street, it's a different Gekkoism that provides deep insight into the dynamics of capitalism and the strategic thinking of its agents whose base of operations is the world of large foundations. At one point Gekko explains, "it's a zero sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one person to another. Like magic." Transferred. Money is transferred.

In some respects the national budget question is a zero sum game. It's a pie that can split various ways. Military spending is currently the biggest "discretionary" slice. Welfare programs and tax rebates that aid the poorest citizens of the United States —such as TANF or EITC— are but a mere fraction of what is spent every year supplying the Pentagon and waging its wars. Who will win and who will lose if the pie shrinks? As it shrinks, and it has been shrinking, how will it be redistributed? So far it has been redistributed increasingly into the hands of the upper 5 percent of wealth holders. And how will the loss and sacrifice imposed upon the nation's most vulnerable be legitimated and explained? America Speaks is one answer to that question.

In another respect the federal budget isn't a zero sum game. The budget can grow if the vast deposits of wealth held by the top 5 percent are taxed more progressively. But America Speaks is being set up to keep this off the table too.

The Failed Recovery, New Mexico and Beyond

2010-06-16T19:56:00.002-04:00

I recently completed an analysis of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that's posted on the Los Alamos Study Group's web site.

The focus is on New Mexico, but the findings are of national importance. Before we get to the nitty gritty of New Mexico's ARRA spending take a look at the following, drawn from Recovery.org. Of the ten largest ARRA contracts in the U.S., 9 are for cleaning up nuclear weapons waste:

Largest Awards in U.S.

Contracts

Grants

Loans

Contracts

Recipient State Amount Awarded

1. CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY WA $663,047,229

2. SAVANNAH RIVER NUCLEAR SOLUTIONS, LLC SC $534,942,264

3. SAVANNAH RIVER NUCLEAR SOLUTIONS, LLC SC $454,353,256

4. WASHINGTON RIVER PROTECTION SOLUTIONS LLC WA $322,255,000

5. GTP INCORPORATION MD $309,587,600

6. SAVANNAH RIVER NUCLEAR SOLUTIONS, LLC SC $287,060,682

7. CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY WA $228,520,000

8. CH2M WG IDAHO LLC ID $217,875,000

9. CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY WA $202,503,000

10. SAVANNAH RIVER REMEDIATION LLC SC $198,650,436

Grants

Recipient State Amount Awarded

1. PLANNING AND RESEARCH, GOVERNOR'S OFFICE OF CA $4,387,948,882

2. EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA FL $2,208,839,244

3. GOVERNOR, TEXAS OFFICE OF THE TX $2,177,682,329

4. ILLINOIS, STATE OF IL $1,681,130,685

5. NEW YORK, STATE OF NY $1,653,933,720

6. EXECUTIVE OFFICE STATE OF OHIO OH $1,463,709,963

7. STATE OF MICHIGAN, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE MI $1,302,368,992

8. NATIONAL RAILROAD PASSENGER CORPORATION DC $1,293,525,000

9. GEORGIA, STATE OF GA $1,260,799,095

10. EDUCATION, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CA $1,226,944,052

Loans

Recipient State Amount Awarded

1. SOLYNDRA, INC. CA $535,000,000

2. GOVERNMENT OF GUAM- DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATION GU $88,536,000

3. PIKEVILLE MEDICAL CENTER INC. KY $44,602,500

4. DILLON COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION SC $35,820,000

5. JOHNSON, COUNTY OF MO $34,000,000

6. ELKINS, CITY OF WV $28,075,000

7. WASHINGTON COUNTY SERVICE AUTHORITY VA $26,580,000

8. CHATHAM, TOWN OF MA $21,585,540

9. SHELTON, CITY OF WA $20,379,000

10. OZARK MOUNTAIN REGIONAL PUBLIC WATER AUTHORITY OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS AR $19,365,000

Updated 6/16/2010

Recipient	State	Amount Awarded
1. CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY	WA	$663,047,229
2. SAVANNAH RIVER NUCLEAR SOLUTIONS, LLC	SC	$534,942,264
3. SAVANNAH RIVER NUCLEAR SOLUTIONS, LLC	SC	$454,353,256
4. WASHINGTON RIVER PROTECTION SOLUTIONS LLC	WA	$322,255,000
5. GTP INCORPORATION	MD	$309,587,600
6. SAVANNAH RIVER NUCLEAR SOLUTIONS, LLC	SC	$287,060,682
7. CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY	WA	$228,520,000
8. CH2M WG IDAHO LLC	ID	$217,875,000
9. CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY	WA	$202,503,000
10. SAVANNAH RIVER REMEDIATION LLC	SC	$198,650,436

Recipient	State	Amount Awarded
1. PLANNING AND RESEARCH, GOVERNOR'S OFFICE OF	CA	$4,387,948,882
2. EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA	FL	$2,208,839,244
3. GOVERNOR, TEXAS OFFICE OF THE	TX	$2,177,682,329
4. ILLINOIS, STATE OF	IL	$1,681,130,685
5. NEW YORK, STATE OF	NY	$1,653,933,720
6. EXECUTIVE OFFICE STATE OF OHIO	OH	$1,463,709,963
7. STATE OF MICHIGAN, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE	MI	$1,302,368,992
8. NATIONAL RAILROAD PASSENGER CORPORATION	DC	$1,293,525,000
9. GEORGIA, STATE OF	GA	$1,260,799,095
10. EDUCATION, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF	CA	$1,226,944,052

Recipient	State	Amount Awarded
1. SOLYNDRA, INC.	CA	$535,000,000
2. GOVERNMENT OF GUAM- DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATION	GU	$88,536,000
3. PIKEVILLE MEDICAL CENTER INC.	KY	$44,602,500
4. DILLON COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION	SC	$35,820,000
5. JOHNSON, COUNTY OF	MO	$34,000,000
6. ELKINS, CITY OF	WV	$28,075,000
7. WASHINGTON COUNTY SERVICE AUTHORITY	VA	$26,580,000
8. CHATHAM, TOWN OF	MA	$21,585,540
9. SHELTON, CITY OF	WA	$20,379,000
10. OZARK MOUNTAIN REGIONAL PUBLIC WATER AUTHORITY OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS	AR	$19,365,000

Now your first reaction might be to applaud this, but I encourage you to read the full press release and brief I've written which explains why this isn't the best way to spend billions of dollars and stimulate the economy while protecting the poor. And keep in mind, the government might be cleaning up some nuke waste, but its weapons labs and nuclear facilities continue to generate far greater amounts of it.

Okay, back to NM. Among other things I examine the largest contracts and grants made under the ARRA in New Mexico. What did I find?

A full quarter of these have been consumed by nuclear weapons and military contractors so far. Four of the top-ten contract recipients are nuclear weapons laboratory contractors. Thirty-six nuclear and military contractor recipients have consumed more than $504 million of New Mexico's ARRA allocation. Compared to practically every other federal agency, nuclear and military spending of ARRA funds has proven so far to be a poor generator of jobs. There are huge equity issues because this spending does not employ the tens of thousands of New Mexicans who have been harmed the most by the economic downturn.

There's so much more to be said, so please read ahead.

Possible spread of the oil slick from the Macando well

2010-06-03T17:21:00.001-04:00

Deepwater Horizon Could Result in 2nd Largest Oil Spill in History

2010-05-18T12:42:00.006-04:00

Sometime within the next two weeks the free-flowing Deepwater Horizon well could surpass the second largest oil spill in history. Indeed, if we assume the highest independently measured estimates of the leak's flow rate, Deepwater Horizon may have already released 84% of the total petroleum that was dumped into the Gulf of Mexico by the Ixtoc I, a similar rig blow-out that occurred in 1979.

One of the highest estimates to date has been made by Mirko Gamba, a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford. Using a computer imagery analysis tool called Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), Gamba has measured the parameters of the flow at between 30,000 and 95,000 barrels per day (bpd). At 30,000 bpd it would take approximately 117 days for Deepwater Horizon's total oil release to exceed Ixtoc I. As of Thursday, May 20, 31 days have elapsed. At the upper-limit of Gamba's range, Deepwater Horizon will become the second largest oil spill in history on Wednesday, May 26.

Most independent estimates of the Deepwater Horizon's flow rate are five to nineteen times as large as BP's 5000 bpd estimate. Nevertheless, BP has insisted on this figure, which the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has used also.

These measurements are so disproportionate, however, that many scientists have voiced concern about BP's refusal to make more data public, as well as the companies restriction of further attempts to gauge the leak's flow rate.

Attached is a simple chart comparing Deepwater Horizon to Ixtoc I and other similar ocean rig blow-outs.

Given that almost one month has elapsed and the well has not been capped, it is likely the leak will continue to flow at high rates until relief wells are successfully drilled. Relief wells typically take weeks or months to finish depending on the depths and conditions confronted. For Deepwater Horizon this process may take another two-three months. Combined with a flow rate that exceeds 20,000 bpd average over this time frame the leak will easily surpass Ixtoc I.

There is a remote probability that Deepwater Horizon could even surpass the 10+ million barrel spill of the Persian Gulf War, still measured as the largest in world history.

The US-Russia START Treaty - Just What Does "Arms Control" Really Mean?

2010-05-16T00:05:00.003-04:00

There's a funny if intimidating gun-nut bumper sticker you may have seen on the road: "gun control means using both hands." It's clever, invoking gun control to brazenly undermine it.

This last week the United States government, by its actions, formally adopted this bumper sticker as its de-facto nuclear weapons and arms control policy. Actually the U.S. did much worse. Reasonable people can disagree about laws governing the sale and possession of firearms, and at least the libertarian gun lobby is honest about their intentions. They want as few restrictions on small arms as possible and don't have double standards about who can possess what.

With nuclear weapons and the states that possess them it's another story entirely. For the rest of the world they want the sort of "gun control" that Liberals like —firm restrictions and penalties on everything from processing nuclear materials to possession of the bomb— but when it comes to their own militaries they want a more, how shall we put it?, two-handed technique.

The basic position of the Obama administration is that it seeks strict nonproliferation measures to prevent any and all non-nuclear nations from obtaining nuclear arms capabilities. This is not very different from past administrations except that the current White House has proven a little more patient and multi-lateral in confronting potential proliferators. At the same time the administration is making an unprecedented fiscal commitment to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while also keeping the military's "nuclear posture" virtually the same as it has been throughout the Cold War. In spite of its title and much of the press it has gotten, the recently penned New START treaty in no way puts restrictive "controls" on U.S. nuclear armaments. In fact, the Congress is demanding, and the administration is delivering a minimum $80 billion dollar reconstruction funding package for the nuclear weapons complex, and another $100 billion investment package in a new generation of nuclear subs, missiles, and bombers, all just so that the Senate might ratify the treaty.

A START Toward What?

President Obama's newly negotiated arms control agreement with Russia does not actually reduce either state's stockpile of weapons in any significant way. It certainly doesn't involve any disarmament-inspired steps. And yet it is being drummed up in the press as an arms control treaty. How is this? Comments from Ireland and South Africa's delegates to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, currently underway in New York, provide a useful perspective here. According to one report:

"Both the South African and Irish delegations stated that arsenal reductions do not automatically mean a commitment to nuclear disarmament. South Africa’s representative said that reductions could be undertaken for a variety of reasons, such as strategic stability, financial constraints or safety issues. The Irish delegation said that reductions alone do not explain the whole story and that one can only judge a state’s true intentions by surveying the full range of its actions and pronouncements."

So what is the whole story behind New START? What might be the true intentions of the U.S.?

Stabilizing and economizing measures are two of the prime functions of the treaty. On the stability front it serves the aggressively imperial ambitions of the U.S., while addressing the concerns of a fiscally weakened Russia. Russia has had major concerns with U.S. plans to build a "missile defense" system for many years now. Most of the world understands this system to be part of a larger offensive U.S. military stance, not a "defense." START is one attempt to smooth things over on this front, while also formalizing small cuts in nuclear arsenals that both states were likely to make with or without the treaty. "Missile defense" is moving ahead full speed. Defense Secretary Gates has said, “the reductions in this treaty will not affect the strength of our nuclear triad," and furthermore; "nor does this treaty limit plans to protect the United States and our allies by improving and deploying missile defense systems.” The military's head of missile defense, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, said in support of the treaty, “relative to the recently expired START Treaty, the new START Treaty actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program.”

During a briefing on Nuclear Posture Review —the administration's stated nuclear doctrines which were drafted parallel to the New START treaty— General James Cartwright forthrightly admitted that, “There are no constraints in this treaty associated with our missile defenses or our prompt global strike capabilities, read conventional.” Prompt global strike refers to a new class of weapons, ICBMs tipped with conventional, non-nuclear warheads. This system is intended to provide U.S. leadership with the ability to strike any point on the planet within an hour. Like "missile defense" it has elicited a lot of concern from the Russians (to say nothing of other nations for whom it is intended to be used upon). Here again the New START treaty has functioned to negotiate a resolution that will allow the U.S. to develop and deploy this new, highly asymmetrical, strategic weapon under terms that do not miff the Russians too much. In other words, it's not really about nuclear weapons, up or down. It's about finding a way to roll out a new class of extremely destructive and destabilizing conventional weapons.

A related function of the treaty is to provide both states with more fungible accounting rules with respect to nuclear missile warheads and bombs. New START only barely reduces a fraction of the hugely disproportionate nuclear arms of each state. It does this through fuzzy accounting methods, ones that do not address warheads and bombs in storage, or tactical weapons. It amazingly counts nuclear capable bomber jets, each of which can hold many nuclear weapons, as single warheads.

New START expires the SORT Treaty signed under President George W. Bush. One of the SORT treaty's biggest flaws (in the eyes of many nuclear proponents) was that it did not allow for these fuzzy accounting methods. SORT was an impediment to pro-nuclear strategists. As Hans Kristensen puts it, "the United States resisted restrictions on its upload capability, which it achieved by the high limit on delivery platforms. The 'fake' bomber count enables more weapons to be deployed on ballistic missiles and more weapons to be retained at bomber bases than would have been possible under the Moscow Treaty."

Article V of the treaty explicitly allows for the "modernization" of existing designs. This allowance was written into the treaty by negotiators to permit weapons scientists to aggressively re-design existing bombs and warheads, so long as they stay within technical boundaries, but these boundaries are by no means certain. Both U.S. and Russian weaponeers are already hard at work refurbishing and rebuilding weapons, often with improved components. The Americans are miles and miles ahead and possess an arsenal without peer, of course. Thus the treaty also states that "when a Party believes that a new kind of strategic offensive arm is emerging, that Party shall have the right to raise the question of such a strategic offensive arm for consideration in the Bilateral Consultative Commission." None of this is for contingency. "Modernization" of the stockpile already being carried out under what are called "life-extension programs." Big dollar amounts will soon flow into the U.S. nuclear weapons labs to further tinker with weapons designs, START treaty or not. The treaty's possible ratification by the Senate is only expected to boost these funding amounts. It has already emboldened proponents in the weapons labs, Congress, and military who'd like to see the physics packages of warheads and bombs opened up entirely under attempts at component replacement.

Modernization of the nuclear weapons complex is seen as a necessary step in tandem modernization of the weapons themselves. Prior to the New START treaty's handover to the Senate, the Obama administration had already proposed a $5 billion down payment to the National Nuclear Security Administration over the next five years. Much of these funds will subsidize the rapidly growing costs of planning and building a uranium enrichment facility at the Y-12 site in Tennessee, and a plutonium "pit" manufacturing center at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Succeeding Where Bush Failed?

Under the George W. Bush administration there were two names for the NNSA's costly infrastructure aspirations. At first the federal agency called its plan to rebuild the nation's nuclear infrastructure "Complex 2030." Then it was "Complex Transformation." The latter title was adopted and its environmental impact statements are officially guiding construction and operations at the nation's nuclear labs and facilities today. Key components related to the administration's transformation plan were nixed by Congress however, including their centerpiece proposal, the Reliable Replacement Warhead. Now the language is once again shifting from "Complex Transformation" to "Modernization," a term that is being applied to both the complex and the weapons it builds, and far larger sums of money are being offered up than during the Bush era.

Ironically then for a president who has pledged himself to a vision of a nuclear free world, the question is not whether a new weapons complex (the operational life-span of which will be generations into the future) will be built, but how quickly funds will be ponied up for it, and at what levels. The difference between Obama and treaty skeptics like Senator Jon Kyl is on the order of billions of dollars. But it's necessary to keep in mind that the low end commitment, which Obama has already pledged, is still a 13% increase over the FY2010 budget, from $6.4 to 7 billion, with a major ramping up of spending again in 2014, by hundreds of millions, finally culminating at $9 billion by 2018.vi So what we're really talking about is the difference between Obama's major nuclear weapons spending increase, and Senator Kyl's double-major spending increase.

And yet the treaty has been promoted as an "arms control" agreement, and even praised by some observers as consistent with the President's famous April, 2009 Prague speech in which he affirmed a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. If anyone had any doubts about what New START accomplishes with respect to cementing the place of nuclear weapons in this world, the administration's own boosters have made it clear that the treaty is in fact a very pro-nuclear law. Former Defense Secretary William Perry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “the President’s FY11 budget submission proposes substantial increases to the nuclear weapons program for [improvement of the nuclear weapons complex]…. The administration has been consistent in its statements and proposals on this point, all of which support upgrade and improvement of the nuclear weapons complex.”

Accompanying the New START treaty's arrival in the Senate for ratification (which may not even occur this year anyway) is a plan required by the Congress in which the President must outline his administration's commitment "to enhance the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile of the United States, modernize the nuclear weapons complex, and maintain the delivery platforms for nuclear weapons."viii Informally called the "section 1251 report" after the legislative language requiring it, this classified plan states that the U.S. will consolidate its nuclear arsenal around 420 deployed ICBMs, all with a single warhead, and 14 submarines armed with 240 SLBMs spread between them. It's the bombers again that neatly illustrate the nature of the treaty, being more about the "both hands" version of arms control than genuine reductions in the spirit of de-escalation and disarmament. According to a White House fact sheet on the section 1251 report: "The United States currently has 94 deployable nuclear-capable bombers. Under the baseline plan, some will be converted to conventional-only bombers (not accountable under the treaty), and up to 60 nuclear-capable bombers will be retained."

Again, under the treaty these sixty bombers each count as one nuclear weapon, but each can actually be armed with multiple nuclear bombs and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, a protege of Perry and one of the Obama administration's most influential supporters with respect to nuclear policy, has praised the New START treaty, Nuclear Posture Review, and other initiatives by saying:

“One of the things in the nuclear posture review that has gotten zero attention—but deserves some attention—is the common sense notion that deterrence involves more than just nuclear weapons. There are all sorts of ways historically that you can deter an enemy. If you are an Al Qaeda fighter in the hills of Pakistan, you are much more worried about a drone than a nuclear missile.”

On the flip side, if you're George Shultz, you are much more worried about the United State's strained ability to bomb Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Iraqis into submission with "conventional" weapons than you are about maintaining 94 nuclear capable bombers. After all, the cost savings achieved by transferring 34 of these bombers to other missions can and will be passed straight into more urgent military missions. Combined with the fuzzy accounting methods of New START the U.S. doesn't really lose any real capacity in this wing of the nuclear triad. It does so while gaining kudos for supposedly "reducing" its stockpile.

With respect to this administration's arms control agenda, the whole story behind New START and other recent U.S. arms control overtures appears to be one of a foreign policy establishment worried about its military being over-stretched in current wars and occupations, and paranoid about states like Iran and North Korea that might seek a capable deterrent in nuclear weapons. Pursuing economizing measures to better balance its more-than-all-the-world-combined annual military budget, and also attempting to position itself as a good guy when it comes to its own disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the U.S. has an able tool in the New START. It would seem to accomplish all of this at once. Unfortunately it has little to nothing to do with disarmament, and a lot to do with the heightening of U.S. militarism.