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FOCUS: More Santa Barbara Oil Spills? Or TOTAL Renewables by 2050? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=26125"><span class="small">Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 25 May 2015 12:06 |
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Simpich writes: "Forty years ago, in 1975, the organization Get Oil Out (GOO) convinced 1500 of us to gather in front of the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors. We called for the county to deny the permit for a proposed gas processing facility in Las Flores Canyon."
Sea life has been widely affected, a lobster covered in oil lying on the beach. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
More Santa Barbara Oil Spills? Or TOTAL Renewables by 2050?
By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News
25 May 15
 ctually, it sucks to say we told you so.
Forty years ago, in 1975, the organization Get Oil Out (GOO) convinced 1500 of us to gather in front of the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors. We called for the county to deny the permit for a proposed gas processing facility in Las Flores Canyon.
Click to see full “100% Renewable California” full size graphic from The Solutions Project.
GOO erupted after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, where more than three million gallons oil flooded the beaches and massacred wildlife.
In the next twelve months, Congress passed the National Environmental Protection Act, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and Senator Gaylord Nelson organized the first Earth Day. The environmental movement had come of age, and these moments were cornerstones of that legacy. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of that oil spill on the American consciousness.
Just five years later, Big Oil's argument to the still-enraged citizens was that “no more offshore facilities would be created anywhere near the county. This was an onshore facility.” This way, the oil companies could just deliver the oil to the shore for processing, rather than do the dirty work on an expensive tanker.
We said no more collaboration with Big Oil. It was time to move toward renewables.
We had passion, law, and logic on our side. Everything but enough votes. We lost 3 to 2.
The Las Flores plant was built in 1982, eventually carrying processed crude in a pipeline from the canyon to the Gaviota pump station, and then onward throughout the state from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
That pipeline ruptured last Tuesday, releasing more than 100,000 gallons of oil onto nine miles of the Santa Barbara seacoast.
The beaches have far more “natural seepage” than they did before Big Oil came to town because of the now-pressurized ocean floor. Taking a swim has meant having to install cleaning stations throughout the county. Now, for the second time in less than fifty years, Santa Barbara beaches are a place for death and destruction to what was the healthiest coastal ecosystem in southern California.
A pelican covered in oil flies over the oil slick along the coast of Refugio State Beach. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
The 2015 Santa Barbara spill is a highly visible manifestation of the nation’s continuing dependence on fossil fuels that has to be ended as quickly as possible.
Professor Mark Jacobson at Stanford and the Solutions Project offer a sensible way out. A trip to their website or YouTube reveals 50 plans for the 50 states to transition to renewable energy for all activities by 2050.
Although he has a Ph.D. in atmospheric engineering and a variety of other degrees (including economics) Dr. Jacobson is hardly an obscure academic – if you're nostalgic for David Letterman, you can see his recent interview with Jacobson. His plans are comprehensive, calling for 100% water, wind, and solar (WWS) for all purposes (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry). The plan contemplates all new energy from WWS by 2020, 80=85% of existing energy by 2030, and 100% by 2050.
Jacobson and others have an extremely detailed roadmap for California, estimating that total conversion to WWS will save the astounding amount of $103 billion in reduced health care costs in California in one year.
Jacobson emphasizes how the reduction in air pollution deaths and the reduction in global climate cost benefits will allow these programs to pay for themselves within a few years. As he told Letterman, “It’s not a technological or economic problem, it’s a social and political problem.”
How do we generate the social and political will? There are many ways, but we can’t wait for the next thirty to forty years and expect change to come to us.
One promising route is the “Flood the System” campaign planned for this autumn by Rising Tide North America, leading up to the “Paris 2015” UN climate summit during early December. In Paris, the hope is to get a deal to halt a more than 2-degree centigrade rise in the earth’s climate. Rising Tide believes that a massive direct action campaign will raise the stakes in Paris, while aiming high for more profound social changes in the coming years.
In a dawning era of citizen engagement, Rising Tide’s call to action is a logical path to pursue. The alternative is more Santa Barbara-sized spills, a dystopian climate, and the collapse of the essential engine of hope.
This aerial view shows the extent of the damage. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
100% renewable California, Transition to 100% wind, water, and solar (WWS) for all purposes (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry.)
"Bill Simpich is an Oakland attorney who knows that it doesn't have to be like this. He was part of the legal team chosen by Public Justice as Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2003 for winning a jury verdict of 4.4 million in Judi Bari's lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Whatever Happened to Antitrust? |
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Monday, 25 May 2015 08:27 |
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Reich writes: "Last week's settlement between the Justice Department and five giant banks reveals the appalling weakness of modern antitrust."
Robert Reich (photo: Getty Images)
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
25 May 15
 ast week’s settlement between the Justice Department and five giant banks reveals the appalling weakness of modern antitrust.
The banks had engaged in the biggest
price-fixing conspiracy in modern history. Their self-described “cartel” used an exclusive electronic chat room and coded language to manipulate the $5.3 trillion-a-day currency exchange market. It was a “brazen display of collusion” that went on for years, said Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
But there will be no trial, no
executive will go to jail, the banks can continue to gamble in the same currency markets, and the fines – although large – are a fraction of the banks’ potential gains and will be treated by the banks as costs of doing business.
America used to have antitrust laws that permanently stopped corporations from monopolizing markets, and often broke up the biggest culprits.
No longer. Now, giant corporations are taking over the economy – and they’re busily weakening antitrust enforcement.
The result has been higher prices for the many, and higher profits for the few. It’s a hidden upward redistribution from the majority of Americans to corporate executives and wealthy shareholders.
Wall Street’s five largest banks now account for 44 percent of America’s banking assets – up from about 25 percent before the crash of 2008 and 10 percent in 1990. That means higher fees and interest rates on loans, as well as a greater risk of another “too-big-to-fail” bailout.
But politicians don’t dare bust them up because Wall Street pays part of their campaign expenses.
Similar upward distributions are occurring elsewhere in the economy.
Americans spend far more on
medications per person than do citizens in any other developed country, even
though the typical American takes fewer prescription drugs. A big reason is the power of pharmaceutical companies to keep their patents going way beyond the twenty years they’re supposed to run.
Drug companies pay the makers of
generic drugs to delay cheaper versions. Such “pay-for-delay”
agreements are illegal in other advanced economies, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in America. They cost you and me an estimated $3.5 billion a year.
Or consider health insurance. Decades ago health insurers wangled from Congress an
exemption to the antitrust laws that allowed them to fix prices, allocate
markets, and collude over the terms of coverage, on the assumption they’d be
regulated by state insurance commissioners.
But America’s giant insurers outgrew state regulation. Consolidating into a few large national firms and operating across many different states, they’ve gained considerable economic and political power.
Why does the United States have the
highest broadband prices among advanced nations and the slowest speeds?
Because
more than 80 percent of Americans have no
choice but to rely on their local cable company for high capacity wired data
connections to the Internet – usually
Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or Time-Warner. And these corporations are among the most politically potent in America (although, thankfully, not powerful enough to grease the merger of Comcast with Time-Warner).
Have you wondered why your airline
ticket prices have remained so high even though the cost of jet fuel has
plummeted 40 percent?
Because U.S. airlines have consolidated
into a handful of giant carriers that divide up routes and collude on fares. In
2005 the U.S. had nine major airlines. Now we have just four. And all are politically well-connected.
Why does food cost so much? Because the four largest food companies control 82 percent of beef packing, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing.
Monsanto alone owns the key genetic traits to more than 90 percent of the soybeans planted by
farmers in the United States, and 80 percent of the corn.
Big Agribusiness wants to keep it this way.
Google’s search engine is so
dominant “google” has become a verb. Three years ago the staff of the Federal Trade
Commission recommended suing Google for “conduct [that] has resulted – and will
result – in real harm to consumers and to innovation.”
The commissioners
decided against the lawsuit, perhaps because Google is also the biggest lobbyist
in Washington.
The list goes on, industry after industry, across the economy.
Antitrust has been ambushed by the giant companies it was designed to contain.
Congress has squeezed the budgets of the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the bureau of competition of the Federal Trade Commission. Politically-powerful interests have squelched major investigations and lawsuits. Right-wing judges have stopped or shrunk the few cases that get through.
We’re now in a new gilded age of
wealth and power similar to the first gilded age when the nation’s antitrust
laws were enacted. But unlike then, today’s biggest corporations have enough political clout to neuter antitrust.
Conservatives rhapsodize about the “free market” and condemn government intrusion. Yet the market is rigged. And unless government unrigs it through bold antitrust action to restore competition, the upward distributions hidden inside the “free market” will become even larger.
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Abolish the Death Penalty |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33264"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME</span></a>
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Sunday, 24 May 2015 13:27 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "Traditional reasons to support the death penalty are going the same way as conventional wisdom for denying same-sex marriage and gender equality."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (photo: Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty Images)
Abolish the Death Penalty
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, TIME
24 May 15
We can’t let our passion for revenge override our communities’ best interest
 he death penalty is suddenly trending again. On Wednesday, Nebraska lawmakers voted to repeal the state’s death penalty. Last week, the jury in the Boston Marathon bombing case decided that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be executed. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing the constitutionality of lethal injection in the death-penalty case Glossip v. Gross. Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Justice Department admitted that almost every examiner in the FBI microscopic hair forensic unit overstated matches in favor of the prosecution in 95% of the cases in which they testified over the past 20 years. (This included 32 defendants sentenced to death, 14 of which have been executed or died in prison.) Norman Fletcher, the former chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court who during his tenure upheld numerous death sentences, announced last week that the death penalty is “morally indefensible,” makes no business sense, and is inconsistent and applied unfairly.
Recent polls indicate that the death penalty’s popularity is sinking with Titanic-like inevitability. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that public support for the death penalty is at a near-historic low, with only 56% supporting it. A poll by ABC News and the Washington Post found that 52% of Americans preferred life without parole as the main punishment, and 42% preferred the death penalty, down from 80% in 1994.
Traditional reasons to support the death penalty are going the same way as conventional wisdom for denying same-sex marriage and gender equality. Some will talk about how justice demands the death penalty, and some will say that the only way to enforce the sanctity of human life is by executing those who recklessly and arrogantly take it away. Some will argue that it protects innocent lives, others that it brings closure to victims’ families. Some will offer personal tales of loss. These are all heartfelt points, but ultimately they are simply wrong in terms of doing what is best for society.
The primary purpose of the death penalty is to protect the innocent. Theoretically, if someone deliberately murders someone else, executing that person protects the rest of us by removing him from society, never again to be a threat. But, as always, there’s a big difference between theory and practice. While it’s true that the death penalty may protect us from the few individuals it does execute, it does not come without a significant financial and social price tag that may put us all at an even greater risk.
First, there’s the financial cost. Every society is on a limited budget, and the recent economic recession has forced government on every level to tighten its belts like an 18th century corset. Studies show that the death penalty is more expensive than the alternative, life without parole. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the average cost of a death penalty case is $1.26 million, compared to $740,000 for a life-without-parole case. In addition, keeping a prisoner on death row costs $90,000 more a year than keeping a prisoner in the general prison population. California alone has spent $4 billion on maintaining the death penalty since its reinstatement in 1978.
In the states that have abolished the death penalty in the last decade, politicians from both parties have cited cost as the main reason. This isn’t a matter of morality versus dollars. It’s about the morality of saving the most lives with what we have to spend. Money instead could be going to trauma centers, hospital personnel, police, and firefighters, and education.
Some will ask, “How can you put a price on justice?” and “What if it were your mother or son who’d been murdered?” Fair enough. But given the current cost of the death penalty, my family is much more at risk from not having enough police on the street, firefighters in their stations, and staff in hospitals. The question every concerned taxpayer needs to ask is whether or not we should be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on executing prisoners when life without parole keeps the public just as safe but at a fraction of the cost. The money saved won’t solve all our financial woes, but it will solve some—and could save lives doing so.
Some will argue that this cost dilemma can be resolved by shortening trials and appeals and just getting on with the putting the condemned to death. Unfortunately, in a system that already convicts hundreds of innocent people, removing legal safeguards only ensures more mistakes. Plus, these legal safeguards are guaranteed by the Constitution. We can’t wave the flag and brag about American exceptionalism through individual rights, then turn around and want to strip away those rights in the name of expediency.
The second major problem with the death penalty is that there’s a high probability that we execute innocent people. The traditional test of a person’s philosophy about justice is a simple question: If you had 10 people sentenced to death but you knew one was innocent, would you keep them all in prison for life with the hopes that the innocent person will be discovered and released? Or would you execute all of them with the idea that the occasional innocent person is an acceptable loss for a greater good? If you answer that you’d keep them in prison, you’re against the death penalty.
Recent studies suggest that this theoretical test is more of a reality than most of us realized. A study, “Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants Who Are Sentenced to Death,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that about 1 in every 25 of people sentenced to death are innocent. Since 1973, 143 death row inmates have been exonerated—fewer than half the number who actually may have been innocent, according to this calculation.
The third problem with the death penalty is that the system is biased based on race and economic standing. Minorities have Favorite Son status when it comes to being executed. According to a study by law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, a black defendant is four times more likely to receive a death sentence than a white defendant for a similar crime. Part of the reason for this may be that those most responsible for determining which cases to pursue are white. Nearly 98% of chief district attorneys in counties using the death penalty are white; about 1% are African American. This bias was also apparent in the case of disgraced Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who, along with a group of other officers known as the “midnight crew,” allegedly tortured more than 100 young black men with beatings, suffocation, electrocution, and more in order to extract confessions.
The other key factor is the race of the victim. A black defendant is often more likely to get the death sentence if the victim is white. Between 1976 and 2014, Florida executed 84 people, but none of the condemned were white people who had killed an African American. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, no white person has ever been executed in Florida for killing a black person. In Alabama, only 6% of murders are blacks killing whites, yet 60% of blacks on death row involved a white victim. In Louisiana, if the murder victim is white, the state is 97% more likely to seek the death penalty. Since 1976, 269 African Americans have been executed when the victim was white, while only 20 whites have been executed when the victim was black. This lack of fair application is why some opponents of the death penalty consider it unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
Another unfair application is the lack of adequate representation received by poor defendants. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg addressed this issue: “People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.” Although poor defendants are guaranteed representation, they aren’t guaranteed the best representation. This is evident when we examine the records of some these court-appointed attorneys: Nearly 1 in 4 death row inmates were represented by court-appointed attorneys who were disciplined for professional misconduct during their careers. A report by the Texas Defender Service concluded that death row inmates have a 1 in 3 chance of being executed “without having the case properly investigated by a competent attorney and without having any claims of innocence or unfairness presented or heard.” The attorneys for one-fifth of the death row inmates in Washington state over the last 20 years were disbarred, suspended, or arrested. This list of incompetent representation goes on.
Glenn Ford is an example of all these faults of the death penalty system converging in a perfect storm of injustice. In March of this year, Ford was declared innocent and released after serving 30 years on Louisiana’s death row. Had he been executed at any time during those 30 years, his innocence would never have been revealed. At the time of his arrest for the murder of a white woman, Ford was black, poor, and innocent. His lead attorney was a specialist in law relating to gas and oil exploration and had never tried a case before a jury. The all-white jury who convicted him did so based on eyewitness and expert testimony. Unfortunately, the eyewitness was the girlfriend of another man accused of the crime who later admitted she lied to the court. The three “experts” were later proven to have given evidence that was either inconclusive or just plain wrong. The former prosecutor of the case, A.M. Stroud III, in a letter of apology, said, “This case is another example of the arbitrariness of the death penalty. I now realize, all too painfully, that as a young 33-year-old prosecutor, I was not capable of making a decision that could have led to the killing of another human being.”
Supporters of the death penalty may say it deters other would-be murderers, but 2009 study in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology states that “the consensus among criminologists is that the death penalty does not add any significant deterrent effect above that of long-term imprisonment.” Some argue that it brings closure for families of victims. In some cases it does; in others it doesn’t. That’s why there are various organizations—California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights—made up of family members of murder victims who oppose the death penalty.
Our laws are not based on what will or will not bring closure, but on what is just. Those who claim that the death penalty is necessary to promote the sanctity of life are caught in a spiral of circular logic. Certainly, there’s no proof that the sanctity of life is less in Great Britain, France, Spain, or any of the 140 countries who banned the death penalty.
Some people deserve to die. They commit acts so brutal that they cannot ever be a part of society. But we can’t let our passion for revenge override our communities’ best interest. The death penalty is an elaborate Rube Goldberg device with a thousand moving parts, each one expensive and in serious disrepair, to achieve a dubious end. With something as irrevocable as death, we can’t have one system of justice for the privileged few and another for the rest of the country. That, more than anything, diminishes the sanctity of human life.
Yes, there are many ways the death penalty system might someday be improved so that it will cost less, not risk innocent lives, and be fairly applied to all. Until that day, life without parole will bring us justice and allow us the opportunity to correct our mistakes before it’s too late.
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Sexual Assault Is an Epidemic. Only the Most Committed Apologist Can Deny It. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=30488"><span class="small">Jessica Valenti, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Sunday, 24 May 2015 13:22 |
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Valenti writes: "For as long as college rape has been in the spotlight, there have been detractors insisting that the prevalence and severity of sexual violence on campus isn't really that bad or that the steps taken to stop sexual assault are too extreme. This week, though, a study out of Brown University should have those people eating crow. Should."
Young women deserve better. (photo: Thomas Cristofoletti/Getty Images/Flickr RM)
ALSO SEE: Sexual Violence an 'Epidemic' on US Campuses, Study Confirms
Sexual Assault Is an Epidemic. Only the Most Committed Apologist Can Deny It.
By Jessica Valenti, Guardian UK
24 May 15
Yet another study reports that 1 in 5 women will be assaulted while attending university. But some people don’t want to see the truth
 or as long as college rape has been in the spotlight, there have been detractors insisting that the prevalence and severity of sexual violence on campus isn’t really that bad or that the steps taken to stop sexual assault are too extreme. This week, though, a study out of Brown University should have those people eating crow. Should.
The study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, only counted as rape those sexual assaults that were physically forcible or that happened while the victim was incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol. That means the study didn’t include rape by coercion and threats, nor did it include sexual assault other than nonconsenual vaginal, anal, or oral penetration.
Still, with a narrowed focus, the results reiterated past studies: nearly 1 in 5 college freshman surveyed were the victim of a completed or attempted rape their first year at the unnamed university. The study found that 15% of freshmen women reported in surveys a rape or attempted rape while incapacitated, while 9% reported a “forcible rape” or an attempt. Overall, 18.6% of women – taking into account some overlap – told researchers that they’d either been raped or had experienced an attempted rape by the end of their freshmen years.
Lead author of the study, professor Kate Carey of the Brown University School of Public Health and Brown’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, told CNN that the percentage of women who experienced sexual assault increased to 37% when women starting their sophomore years were asked about their lives starting at the age of 14. “If I have a class of sophomores, this says that one out of every three will have had something like this in her background, and so to some extent, this is a real call to arms.”
It certainly is. This study puts all the spurious denials of the campus rape epidemic to rest: women are raped on college campuses. A lot.
However, the study’s narrow focus on physical force and incapacitation has already created a space for rape denialists to keep on keepin’ on. The inclusion of sexual assaults that didn’t include penetration, physical force or incapacitation in past research studies made them vulnerable to attack by those who insisted that the results didn’t represent incidents of “real” rape, so I understand why Carey might have wanted to exclude non-penetrative sexual assaults or rapes facilitated by threats or coercion.
But by only including certain kinds of sexual assaults, this study may inadvertently discount the veracity and severity of others that students report. Rape is still rape when it is the result of verbal threats, and sexual assaults are still egregious, traumatizing and illegal, even without penetration. While Carey and her colleagues weren’t setting out to redefine rape, you can be sure that, for some less progressive-minded people, that will be the takeaway.
Indeed, already some folks have glommed onto the results about incapacitated rape and speciously claimed that it demonstrates a need for us to discuss the “taboo” of the link between women’s drinking and rape – which is so taboo that it’s written about with alarming regularity. For the record: yes, there is a relationship between drinking and rape. It’s the one in which a rapist uses alcohol as a weapon.
We need more studies like this one about rape, but we need them to go even further. We need studies about all the different ways that people are raped, sexually assaulted, subjected to non-consensual sex acts and sexually coerced. We need studies about rape not just of young people on campus, but off campus as well. And we need studies that – like this one – relay just how urgently we need real solutions.
But no matter how many victims speak out and no matter how many studies underscore the realities of their situations, there will always be people who will continue to believe that rape isn’t that big of a problem, that women regularly lie about rape and that any efforts to reduce the number of people who are sexually assaulted will do more harm to accused rapists than good for victims and potential future victims. There’s not much you can do with people like that, other than make sure not to be in a room alone with them.
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uring my time as an Army infantryman in Iraq, I heard my fellow soldiers express their frustration in many different ways. There are only so many four-letter words to go around, after all, before the mind takes a more creative bent. One expression stands out in my memory: the suggestion that we should “go ‘Nam” on our enemies.
