"Occupy Wall Street" censorship

SUBHEAD: Yahoo has been censoring email messages concerning "Occupy Wall Street" protests.  

By Lee Fang on 20 September 2011 for Think Progress -  
(http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/09/20/323856/yahoo-censoring-occupy-wall-street-protests)

 
Image above: Yahoo screen announces censorship with "Suspicious activity has been detected on your account" when it detects words "Occupy Wall Street". From original article. Click for video.

Thinking about e-mailing your friends and neighbors about the protests against Wall Street happening right now? If you have a Yahoo e-mail account, think again. ThinkProgress has reviewed claims that Yahoo is censoring e-mails relating to the protest and found that after several attempts on multiple accounts, we too were prevented from sending messages about the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations.

Over the weekend, thousands gathered for a “Tahrir Square”-style protest of Wall Street’s domination of American politics. The protesters, organized online and by organizations like Adbusters, have called their effort “Occupy Wall Street” and have set up the website: www.OccupyWallSt.org. However, several YouTube users posted videos of themselves trying to email a message inviting their friends to visit the Occupy Wall St campaign website, only to be blocked repeatedly by Yahoo. View a video of ThinkProgress making the attempt with the same blocked message experienced by others (click full screen for a better view of the text):

ThinkProgress tried other protest websites, like AmericansforProsperity.org and TeaPartyPatriots.org, and both messages were sent smoothly. However, emails relating to the "Occupy Wall Street" protest were blocked with the following message (emphasis added):

Your message was not sent Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent. If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help. We apologize for the inconvenience.

ThinkProgress has sent a request for more information to Yahoo, and will post any reply once we have received it with Yahoo’s explanation for its apparent censorship.

It’s not the first time Yahoo has been accused of political censorship. Yahoo officially partners with the repressive Chinese regime to provide the government with access to emails related to groups viewed as dissidents. An explosive investigation by Der Spiegel found that Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with access to emails from journalists, and the snooping resulted in the same journalists being sent to prison camps.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have continued, but if you own a Yahoo e-mail account, you might not know about it.

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Tahrir Moment on Wall Street  
By Staff on 19 September 2011 for AdBusters - 
  (http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tahrir-moment-wall-street.html)  
Image above: "Occupy Wall Street" protesters in Liberty Square, NYC on Saturday. From original article.
 
On Saturday, September 17th, many of us watched in awe as 5,000 Americans descended on the financial district of Lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk toward the "financial Gomorrah" of the nation. They vowed to "occupy Wall Street" and to "bring justice to the bankers," but the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints. Undeterred, protesters walked laps around the area before holding a people's assembly and setting up a semi-permanent protest encampment in a park on Liberty Street, a stone's throw from Wall Street and a block from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Three hundred spent the night, several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day and as we write this article, the encampment is rolling out sleeping bags once again. When they tweeted to the world that they were hungry, a nearby pizzeria received $2,800 in orders for delivery in a single hour. Emboldened by an outpouring of international solidarity, these American indignados say they'll be there to greet the bankers when the stock market opens on Monday. It looks like, for now, the police don't think they can stop them. ABC News reports that "even though the demonstrators don’t have a permit for the protest, [the New York Police Department says that] they have no plans to remove those protesters who seem determined to stay on the streets." Organizers on the ground say, "We're digging in for a long-term occupation." Now the world is watching and wondering: Could this be the spark of a "Tahrir Moment" in the USA?

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET was inspired by the people's assemblies of Spain and floated as a concept by a double-page poster in the 97th issue of Adbusters magazine, but it was spearheaded, orchestrated and accomplished by independent activists. It all started when Adbusters asked its network of culture jammers to flood into Lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens and peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months. The idea caught on immediately on every social network, and unaffiliated activists seized the meme and built an open-source organizing site. A few days later, a general assembly was held in New York City and 150 people showed up. These activists became the core organizers of the occupation. The mystique of Anonymous pushed the meme into the mainstream media. Their video communique endorsing the action garnered 100,000 views and a warning from the Department of Homeland Security addressed to the nation's bankers. When, in August, the indignados of Spain sent word that they would be holding a solidarity event in Madrid's financial district, activists in Milan, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Israel and beyond vowed to do the same.

There is a shared feeling on the streets around the world that the global economy is a Ponzi scheme run by and for Big Finance. People everywhere are waking up to the realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to $1.3 trillion (50 times more than the sum of all the commercial transactions). Meanwhile, according to a United Nations report, "in the 35 countries for which data exist, nearly 40 per cent of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year."

"CEOs, the biggest corporations and the wealthy are taking too much from our country and I think it's time for us to take back," says one activist who joined the protests last Saturday. Jason Ahmadi, who traveled in from Oakland, California, explained that "a lot of us feel there is a large crisis in our economy and a lot of it is caused by the folks who do business here." Bill Steyerd, a Vietnam veteran from Queens said, "It's a worthy cause because people on Wall Street are blood-sucking warmongers."

There is not just anger. There is also a sense that the standard solutions to the economic crisis proposed by our politicians and mainstream economists – stimulus, cuts, debt, low interest rates, encouraging consumption – are false options that will not work. Deeper changes are needed … like a "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions; reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act in the USA; implementing a ban on high frequency "flash" trading. The "too big to fail" banks must be be broken up, downsized and made to serve the people, the economy and society again. The financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown must be brought to justice and given lengthy prison terms. Then there is the long-term mother of all solutions: a total rethinking of Western consumerism that throws into question how we measure progress.

If the current economic woes in Europe and the US spiral into a prolonged global recession, then people's encampments will become permanent fixtures in financial districts and outside stock markets around the world. Until our demands are met and the global economic regime is fundamentally reformed, our tent cities will keep popping up everywhere.

Bravo to those courageous souls in the encampment on New York's Liberty Street. Every night that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET continues will escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.

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Bioclimatic buildings in the tropics

SUBHEAD: Home built of indigenous materials, without walls, in northern Columbia is a beachside paradise.

 By Paula Alvarado on 20 September 2011 for TreeHugger -  
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/bioclimatic-no-walls-house-in-northern-colombia-is-caribbean-paradise.php)  
Image above: Photo by Sergio Gomez. From original article.
 
World renewed for their work in Medellin, especially with the Orchid House at the Botanical Garden, Colombian firm Plan B Architects is busy and keeps coming up with great projects.

One of their latest is this wall-less house in Rio Cedro, a city located by the Caribbean Sea, 200 miles north from Medellin.






The house (spotted at Inhabitat) was built with certified wood from reforested sources as a way to respect the surrounding native vegetation that has been hit with deforestation due to the expanding livestock industry.

Instead of coming up with a structure that can resist efforts and loads, they came up with one that can be traversed by the environment that surrounds it. As the climate in the area is warm all year long, they decided on an open, permeable design that has passive cooling trough through solar orientation (main facades point to north and south) and crossed ventilation.



For the ceiling, they chose a local construction technique with branches of the Palma Amarga (sabal mauritiiformis) and palmata (Bactris guineensis) stems, as stated in Plataforma Arquitectura.

About 30 centimeters (12 inch) thick, the roof is impermeable to rain and helps control temperature. Concrete was only used to secure the base of the building and accessories like a sofa, stairs and a table on the lower level.



The upper level was designed for day activities and the lower level is thought for more intimate, night activities. All facilities have modular installations that can be arranged to accommodate more or less people.

Undoubtedly this is a paradise beach house in no way thought for practical applications in places less perfect than the Caribbean, but it's always interesting to see projects conceived especially for local conditions and carefully carried away with local materials.

Economic Religious Warfare

SUBHEAD: Taking the risk of plunging countless people into unspoken misery on account of your religion is not recommended. By Illargi on 20 September 2011 for the automatic Earth - (http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/09/september-18-2011-religious-warfare.html) Image above: "The Liberator" by Mark Bryan, 2004, with George Bush removed from steeple by Juan Wilson. From (http://www.artofmarkbryan.com/the_crusaders.html). It probably hasn't escaped you that we are entering the next phase of this fine crisis of ours. Those equally fine leaders we've elected to represent us and protect our interests are now almost literally stumbling from one emergency meeting into the other. It doesn't look like Greece can hang on much longer as an EU and Eurozone member without some sort of miraculous intervention. Well, US Finance Secretary Tim Geithner claims to have the powers of miracle, and he personally brought them to a meeting -an emergency one- in Poland on Friday (where many a European wondered whether he spoke for Washington or for Wall Street, no doubt). Geithner's big plan is for Europe to take its European Financial Stability Fund, which is projected to be €440 billion by the end of this year, though that is by no means certain, and leverage it about ten-fold to some €4.4 trillion. This, as per Geithner, will calm the markets -and presumably restart economic growth, and job creation, and the housing markets-. Geithner's perspective is a purely religious one. He has no proof that his idea would work, there is no science that underlies or reinforces it, just a belief system. Nevertheless, ideas like his are very popular, and I for one wouldn't bet against them being unleashed upon us all. Obviously, the ten-fold leveraged expansion of the EFSF is an act of faith: the faith that creating more debt/credit out of thin air will restore the markets' faith in a sound financial system. Thing is, when you look beyond its immediate impact, the expansion, if it is executed, can only, and of necessity, achieve the opposite of what it's supposed to do. While the markets will be glad to gobble up the cheap funds, they will not have faith in them. They are simply not that stupid. They will know where the money comes from. And there is still a fundamental difference between money made with productive work and money made with mere acts of faith. They're not even the same money, much as they may appear to be. Just as there are relatively few people who understand that deflation, not inflation, is the biggest and most immediate threat to our economies, there are equally few who have fully mentally processed the notion that debt can't be overcome with more debt, except perhaps in particular situations where a broad set of exceptional conditions is met. Engagement in war comes to mind. Or the discovery of a truly unparalleled source of very cheap and productive energy (for practical purposes, I'll leave out the earth being hit by an asteroid). But there is no sign of the latter on the horizon, no matter how much faith one may have that it lies just beyond that horizon. That leaves us with the former. Barring both, there is no way we can borrow our way out of our debts and into prosperity. It seems apparent that we have indeed entered a new phase of the crisis because our "leaders" are losing their sense of control -hence all the emergency meetings-. And they have no idea what will happen from here on in, no more than we do. That scares everyone, but leaders even more so. It's because they are addicted to control; it's also because they feel they have deeper to fall. And when people get scared, they turn to faith. In practical terms, if Greece would default in the nearby future, and chances are fast growing that it will, nobody can predict what goes next. The domino effect in banking and sovereign debt is only predictable in that it will occur, not how or to what extent. And what is presented by Geithner, and the IMF's Christine Lagarde, and the World Bank's Robert Zoellick, and Princeton's Paul Krugman, and all these economists posing as scientists, as some sort of sound policy, is nothing but an act of ultimate faith driven by fear. Fear for their particular positions in their particular world. Which in all likelihood is not yours. They don't know how bad it all will be. They're just afraid it will be very bad for themselves. Their actions are not necessarily driven by reason; they may not even recognize either their faith or their fear. But whatever drives them, they sure as hell and high water don't fit my profile of who I would want to see tackle this crisis, or any other for that matter. Taking the risk of plunging countless people into unspoken misery on account of your religion is not something human history seems to recommend, at least not to me. If the best we’ll be able to say afterward is they at least meant well, we're doing something wrong. Are there no opposing views? There's a few inside these meetings. Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann said:"The EFSF’s sole purpose is the financing of states and that’s in order as long as it’s done via the capital market. If it’s done via the central bank it constitutes monetary state financing," (which is forbidden under European Union rules). And German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble: "We don’t think that real economic and social problems can be solved by means of monetary policy. That has never been the European model and it won’t be." The Dutch and the Finns are also quite outspoken opponents of bottomless European pits. But most of the finance "experts" there are still cut from more or less the same cloth, and in the end adhere to the same faith-based economic models. They may feel fine about letting Greece go under, and Portugal and Ireland, but they will nevertheless pour their voters' money down the nearest drain they can find when it comes to "saving" their own respective banks. Which is of course the exact same thing, even if it feels different to them. We have no democratic means in place anymore to put those folks into power who would truly try and alleviate the plight of the people. Our democracies are based on voting systems, but votes are of necessity bought and sold if and when money is allowed to enter the political system. And the money that has bought the system says that it must fork over the money of the people. Or else. The faith-based fake science named economics is but a tool used on the ignorant in order to justify this. I sincerely hope that what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has labeled "Germany's austerity nihilism" will at least beat some sense into some heads. But I don't have much faith in that. For our children, it would seem to be best if Greece falls tomorrow, and takes down a lot of countries and banks all over the globe with it. It's the only way we might be able to stop ourselves from spending tomorrow's money today. But the flipside of that, too, I'm afraid, is religious warfare. .

Hook, Line, and Stinker

SUBHEAD: A bill dealing with permitted camping at Lydgate Park is mired in non-answers and inaction by all concerned. By Andy Parx on 15 September 2011 for Parx News Daily - (http://parxnewsdaily.blogspot.com/2011/09/hook-line-and-stinker.html) Image above: "No Camping" sign at Lydgate Park from Garden Island News. From (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/article_99411c72-dabb-11e0-9a80-001cc4c002e0.html). During the last month we've used the bill (#2149) to allow camping at Lydgate Park as a kind of case study of the long-practiced and well-honed dance of the headless chickens used by the last three Kaua`i administrations- especially in the Department of Public Works (DPW) and the now spun-off Department of Parks and Recreation (DP&R)- to run out the clock on county council oversight of various and sundry mismanagement schhemes. But the manner in which DP&R Director Lenny Rapozo's final "rope-a-dope" performance yielded a split decision in favor of the bill's passage last Wednesday, gave a whole meaning to "don't ask me- I'm only in charge here." Of course Rapozo's use of "the fog" and the "I not here" method of administrative oversight could not have been accomplished without council allies willing to look the other way at the misrepresentations and outright lies as well as the lack of any semblance of competency of Rapozo and his underlings. After months of non-answers to "the eight questions" that had been repeatedly asked, in writing, of Rapozo, the bill was moved out of committee to the full council where last Wednesday despite the fact that there were amendments pending and it was no where near ready for a vote... something that has inflamed Chair Jay Furfaro's hair on many an occasion in the past. Rapozo appeared after handing in the alleged answers just that morning, claiming he never had the questions, many of which had been sent in writing months ago, until the previous Friday. And, much to Furfaro's chagrin, they hadn’t even been distributed to councilmembers yet. The old bait and switch made an appearance too. Seems the originator of "the fog" himself, perennial county appointee Ian Costa who now serves as Rapozo's deputy, had unexpectedly shown up instead of Rapozo the week before with Rapozo conveniently on the mainland, allowing Rapozo to claim he had no idea what had happened the previous week. As we've previously described, it's a classic move Costa developed during the year-long "Developers Gone Wild," grubbing and grading hearings before the council in the 90's which exposed the early misdeeds of Jimmy Pflueger preceding the deadly Ka Loko Dam break for which Pflueger is scheduled to stand trial for murder later this or next year. The session began with Council Chair Jay Furfaro waving around what a real plan would look like, taken from a Virginia Beach Virginia campground saying "can you kokua me... this is what I'm looking for Lenny." The questions dealt with almost everything imaginable from lack of a sufficient number of toilets to insufficient staffing for maintenance and security and were seemingly at least partially a result of there being no written plan to make sure the professed "work-class facility" would even be run in an organized and coherent manager. But try as he might, Furfaro could not get a commitment from Rapozo to put together such a plan by the time camping was scheduled to begin, 60 days after the passage of the bill. Finally after twenty minutes of trying to get such a commitment from Rapozo, Furfaro demonstrated the council's archetypical part in the avoidance scheme by declaring Rapozo's "no" to be a "yes." Of course the run-around can't properly function without an administration shill. The role was made for Councilmember Tim Bynum whose "don't confuse me with the facts" rhetoric, previously honed on the issue of the bike path, consisted of declaring the questions to have been answered already- whether they were or not- and calling all criticism of the not-ready-for-prime-time "plan" to be too "meticulous." This left an opening for Councilmember Mel Rapozo to perform one of his classic ape-like chest beating routines consisting of lines like "That's our job, to be meticulous... guilty as charged." But perhaps the most Kafkaesque scene in the melodrama played out over the issue of the "fishermen" who have traditionally frequented the area since, well, forever. As championed by Councilperson Kipukai Kuali`i the council went back and forth, working to make sure fishers could go to the campground and essentially camp out while fishing without really being official campers. Of course the task was impossible on its face. How do you allow people to stay overnight in the campground, in their tents, as long as they leave their fishing poles stuck in the sand with the line in the water- as described by Kuali`i, and then distinguish who is actually camping without a permit and who is simply fishing. The council has been asking Lenny Rapozo, and Costa, for the actual metes and bounds of the camping area rather than providing the cruddy little map with dotted lines that had been made part of the bill. Mel Rapozo- an ex-cop- described the absurdity of the prosecution going to court with such a map and how any good attorney could raise enough questions to make it unenforceable. The answer apparently was simply, as stated by many, that the standard was "we know who is camping and who is fishing." Oh great. The island isn't sufficiently wracked with charges of "reverse racism" by the increasing number of uptight, malahini mainlanders who can't distinguish between the word "haole" as used descriptively and the more provocative "stupid f-ing haole." Now we have an area where the line between campers and fishermen is going to be- at least in their eyes- as much a factor of the shade of their skin as anything else. County Attorney Al Castillo didn't really help by hemming and hawing and finally maintaining that it didn't matter what the law said as long as there was "sufficient notice" in the form of signage to tell the users what made a fisherman a fisherman and what made a camper a camper. As if. Finally, the answer was to be as ambiguous as possible and the council inserted language that allows "fishermen" to "fish" any place in the campgrounds where there isn't an actual designated camp site. However all this probably doesn't matter one whit because, it was revealed, the county's park rangers are never there between 10:30 p.m. and 4 a.m. leaving enforcement of the unenforceable provision an academic matter anyway. The bill passed with Kuali`i and Mel Rapozo voting against it and now it's up to the DP&R to promulgate administrative rules- which promise to be as vague as the bill- in the next two months and decide which parts of the campground to "open for camping" with no real idea of what is going to happen, in a classic Kaua`i County "ready, fire, aim" manner. But whatever happens you can bet dollars to donuts that we haven't heard the end of the seven-year saga, especially when the first "you're not fishing, you're camping- I can tell by the color of your skin" ticket is issued. .

The Rainmakers

SUBHEAD: The hopes and wishes of the political right-wing make them hell-bent on keeping this country from entering a plausible future.  

By James Kunstler on 19 September 2011 for Kunstler.com - 
  (http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/09/the-rainmakers.html)

 
Image above: From the 1956 movie 'The Rainmaker". Burt Lancaster as Starbuck, the con artist, convinces some in a small Texas town suffering a drought that he can bring them rain with his contraption. (http://acertaincinema.com/browse/person/burt-lancaster/?p1=1&p2=8&p3=1&p4=1).

 This much can be stated categorically about the USA these days: the more distressed our economy gets, the more delusional thinking you will encounter. People want to assign the cause of their misery to this or that (socialism, abortion, Jews, the New World Order). People want to believe that their world is a safe place with bright prospects (climate change is a myth, we have a hundred years of shale oil). The realm of oil is especially ripe for misunderstanding, since we depend on the stuff so desperately, and the world's geology is complex indeed, and then you have to bring math and money into the picture. But it's another thing when professional propagandists take the stage and attempt to systematically mislead the public.

Such is the case with two ersatz bombshells zinging across the web-waves this past week, fired off by two of the foremost professional liars on the scene. The first comes from the oil industry's leading prostitute, Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), owned by the mammoth HIS consulting company. CERA is the main public relations shop for the oil industry. Its mission is to blow smoke up America's ass in order to keep investment dollars flowing into oil companies because oil companies prefer to use other people's money to perform their risky operations. They make a lot of money themselves, and accumulate it diligently, but they are not so foolish as to squander it on dry holes and adventures in alchemy.

So, last week Daniel Yergin came out with a blast in the Wall Street Journal affecting to debunk peak oil. His own theory is much like Irving Fisher's economic theory set out October 21, 1929 that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Three days later, the markets crashed and the Great Depression commenced. Yergin says we've hit a permanent plateau for oil production. He is pimping for a bonanza in shale oil, tar sands, and other innovative ventures in picking "fruit" that is not hanging so low anymore. He says:

"Meeting future demand will require innovation, investment and the development of more challenging resources. A major reason for continuing growth in petroleum supplies is that oil previously regarded as inaccessible or uneconomical is now part of the mix, such as the "presalt" resources off the coast of Brazil, the vast oil sands of Canada, and the oil locked in shale and other rocks in the U.S."

Spoken like a true PR whore. Translation: give us money. Calling all investors. Give your dollars to the folks working the Bakken play, or Eagle Ford down in Texas. These shale plays represent oil that is trapped in "tight," low-permeability rock that has to undergo fracturing operations ("fracking") before you can drain it out. It costs a lot more to get oil this way than by sticking a pipe in the ground and running a pump-jack to get it out the old-fashioned way. There are more than a few dirty secrets about the shale oil plays, but the biggest one is that you have to throw a huge amount of capital and steel at it to keep it running as an ongoing enterprise, and that money - other people's money - will be in shockingly short supply in the years head.

Those troubled distant rumblings you hear from places like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain - that's the sound of the world's money whooshing into a black hole, which is what happens when debts are not repaid. Something very similar is happening in the USA, where all the unresolved mega-borrowing of the past thirty years is whirling down the drain, never to be seen again, and a craven corporate oligarchy (there, I said it) is working tirelessly to hoard the last remaining vestiges of money before it either deflates across that event horizon, or inflates away to nothing by digital multiplication. In either case the result is the same: you're broke.

Here's the truth about the US shale plays: they will never amount to more than about one million barrels-a-day (m/b/d) in production under any circumstances (the nation uses 19 m/b/d); and even more probably the money will not be there to keep the shale oil coming very many years into the future. You can take that to the bank (if your money has any value when you get there, and if the bank has not cratered).

In our fugue of techno-narcissism, America wants to believe that we can just keep on being what we used to be, pizza, DisneyWorld, WalMart, and all. So, the second big buzz of the week came courtesy of Goldman Sachs, in a sloppy press release saying America would be the world's top oil producer in 2017, at 10.9 m/b/d. The effrontery of these thieving pricks! They apparently pulled the information out of chief Goldman flack Lucas Van Praag's ass. One might infer that Goldman Sachs is campaigning to raise money for the oil industry by suggesting a bonanza is underway. It's a crude ruse. The actual "confidential" report - as opposed to the brief summary in the media - shows that Goldman Sachs arrives at this position by referring to non-oil substances as oil. Neat trick. Be sure to call Goldman Sachs to invest your remaining savings in algae secretions and ethanol.

No doubt, though, that these two PR offensives will accomplish their secondary mission: to gird the hopes and wishes of the political right-wing, who are hell-bent on keeping this country from entering a plausible future. Watch these ideas take flight and wonder that you live in such credulous nation.

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Hawaiian Sovereignty Issues

SUBHEAD: The three articles cited below illustrate real problems facing the future of Hawaiian sovereignty.  

By Juan Wilson on 17 September 2011 for Island Breath - 
  (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/09/hawaiian-sovereignty-issues.html)

 
Image above: A Pan Am 1930's ad with fanciful mythical Waikiki view of Diamond Head to appeal to Americans to fly to an exotic foreign land. There wasn't much left of Hawaii after they arrived. From airline travel poster sale on Ebay.

Yesterday the United Kingdoms Guardian newspaper published three disparate articles about people of very different cultures having difficulty expressing their own cultures and achieving their own sovereignty. In the first case -

Amish Jailed on Principle Since 2008 a conservative wing of the Amish religion has been involved with defying the authority of the "Englishers" to control their lives. They perceive their culture as separate from the United State and its local governing bodies. They run their own schools. Live off the power, water, food grid of the dominant society. They live in a truly cooperative community largely within the constraints of 19th century technology. They have their own style and sense of decorum that they do not want it violated. Now they are beginning to act with civil disobedience to rules that infringe on their culture. In the second case -

Cherokee seek blood quantum The 1866 Cherokee Nation constitution allowed all residents of their territory to become free citizens. That included whites, as well as indigenous Cherokees. The large and well-off Cherokee nation was primarily in the agricultural Southeast. As most Southerners with land, the Cherokee had many African slaves. In 1866 they were allowed to be Cherokee citizens and were called Cherokee Freedmen. Many blacks and Cherokee intermarried in the decades that followed. Now the Cherokees want to eject the Freedmen unless they can prove a blood quantum of native Cherokee. To compound the problem the US Federal Government is stepping in to fight this as a civil rights issue (while hypocritically recognizing other native Americans by their blood heritage). It seems everybody has this one wrong. And lastly -  

Palestinians ignore US on UN statehood The United States has been pretending to be a fair broker between the Palestinian desires for a nation and the ever expanding Israeli foreign occupancy. With the US on the case, things haven't exactly worked out. The Palestinians are fed up with waiting for justice. They want sovereignty now. They intend to take the issue to the United Nations Security Council to get status as a member nation. The US may be forced to veto the vote in the Security Council. Behind the scenes the US is twisting the arms of the temporary UNSC members to vote against the Palestinians so that American hands will be clean. If that happens the Palestinians are ready to go to the UN General Assembly where they can likely get an enhanced Observer Nation status. To me the lessons of these stories for Hawaiians are:

• With clear perspective know your culture well enough to see where it is separate from the dominant occupying authority. If necessary act with civil disobedience to maintain the principles and integrity of your culture.
• Don't reduce your nationhood to ethnicity. Embrace those that wish to share your culture and nation. Don't trust the United States to act in the interest of either even in the best of cases.
• Move on without the United States. Appeal to the world. You don't need the US to achieve freedom and sovereignty. Waiting for America to make an acceptable deal with your enemies is likely never to happen.

Cherokee seek blood quantum

SUBHEAD: The Cherokee ruling excludes blacks from citizenship, but US intervention will only cause more problems.  

By James MacKay on 17 September 2011 for the Guardian -  
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/17/cherokee-nation-black-freedmen)

 
Image above: Cherokee native Eli Grayson emphasizes a point about the Cherokee Freedmen issue during an Aug. 27 meeting in Muskogee. From (http://www.cherokeephoenix.org/Article/Index/5449).
  

The idea that a 21st-century sovereign nation would expel a racial minority that had been part of it for a century and a half seems outrageous. Yet this is precisely what has happened in the last month in the Cherokee nation, the second largest American Indian tribe. The US government's condemnatory response, however, may cause more problems than it solves.

The Cherokee freedmen are the descendants of African American slaves owned by wealthy Cherokee tribal members. When principal chief Stand Watie became the last confederate general to surrender in the American civil war, a treaty emancipated these slaves and gave them equal rights. The Cherokee nation went further than this in 1866, amending their constitution as follows:

"All native-born Cherokees, all Indians and whites legally members of the nation by adoption and all freedmen who have been liberated by voluntary act of their former owners or by law […] shall be taken and deemed to be citizens of the Cherokee nation."

But more than a century later, chiefs Ross Swimmer and Wilma Mankiller created a new requirement that all Cherokee should hold a certificate of degree of Indian blood. This stripped the freedmen of citizenship. It was declared unconstitutional in a 2006 decision by the Cherokee supreme court. Chief Chad Smith, an uncompromising opponent of freedmen citizenship, arranged a referendum which, in 2007, amended the constitution of the Cherokee nation to once again require "Indian blood". Last August, this referendum was upheld by the Cherokee supreme court. Two thousand eight hundred freedmen lost their status as citizens, including their right to food aid and medical services. This occurred against the backdrop of a knife-edge election for principal chief, in which freedmen votes would have the potential to change the result.

Some freedmen activists blame the nation's stance on a combination of factors, including racism and an unwillingness to share federal funding or profits accruing from recognised tribal status. However, there is another set of factors that make this a much more nuanced issue. Larry Echo Hawk, assistant secretary for Indian affairs in the US department of the interior, wrote in a widely circulated letter to the acting principal chief Joe Crittenden:

"The department's position is, and has been, that the 1866 treaty between the US and the Cherokee nation vested Cherokee freedmen with rights of citizenship in the nation, including the right of suffrage."

Echo Hawk's threat is that the US federal government will not recognise the outcome of the upcoming election, potentially leading to another constitutional crisis for the Cherokee nation (the last, in 1997, saw a near-coup followed by armed federal intervention). At the same time, the US department of housing and urban development froze $33m (£20.9m) of funds due to the tribe's refusal to reinstate its African American members.

There is a long history of US government attempts to deny the Cherokee's right to self-determination. The most infamous instance is the 1838 ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears, a forced march that killed a quarter of the tribe and an unknown number of their slaves who marched with them. At the turn of the century, the Cherokee constitution was dissolved. This continued as the federal government chose men to act as "chiefs for a day" in order to sign treaties, but otherwise kept the Cherokee nation dormant, and then dragged them through the 1950s federal "termination" policy. The US government interventions were accompanied by boarding schools that forbade the speaking of the Cherokee language, and are part of much wider efforts to kill off Native American cultures. The fear of acculturation is very real, especially given American conservative attacks that modern-day Indians are somehow inauthentic and hence no longer "deserve" treaty rights. Small wonder, then, that the Cherokee should wish to retain the right to determine the criteria for citizenship in their own nation.

It's nevertheless worth noting that the Cherokee are less purist in their approach to race and citizenship than the many tribes that require one-quarter Indian blood for membership. Their use of "linear descent" means there are citizens whose ancestry is only 1/2048 Cherokee. There are many Cherokee citizens with African or Asian ancestry whose citizenship is not being challenged.
If the constitutional amendment is seen to be overturned due to federal bullying – the freedmen have requested the withdrawal of funds that currently pay for food distribution to more than 35,000 households – the idea of self-determination will have taken a heavy blow. More, the hypocrisy of the federal government continuing to support the racial logic of "blood quantum" in other tribes while condemning it here is not lost on anyone. Surely such an outside action will perpetuate, not heal, racial divides within the nation. Self-determination surely means the right to make bad decisions as well as good.

However, none of this excuses the Cherokee nation for its collective decision to exclude the descendants of slaves. Natural justice demands that the citizenship first granted in the 19th century should be upheld without question. Cherokees should celebrate their sovereignty precisely by acknowledging their debt to those whose forced labour helped build Cherokee independence.
The tragedy of the Cherokee supreme court's decision, as Steve Russell argues in a excoriating editorial, is that it achieves what federal government has always wanted. It makes the Cherokee an ethnic special interest group, no longer deserving of the title of "nation".

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Amish Jailed on Principle 9/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Palestinians ignore US on UN bid 9/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaiian Sovereinty Issues 09/17/11
 .

Palestinians ignore US on UN bid

SUBHEAD: Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, ignores US warnings on UN independent statehood bid.  

By Chris McGreal & Harriet Sherwood for the Guardian -  
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/16/palestinian-leader-ignores-us-statehood)

 
Image above: Palestinian independence march in Jerulslem on 7/15/11. From (http://chroniquespalestine.blogspot.com/2011/07/jerusalem-march-for-palestinian.html).
 

Mahmoud Abbas says he will go ahead with request to UN security council to recognise independence despite US warnings. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he will go ahead with a request to the United Nations security council to recognise what amounts to a unilateral declaration of independence despite warnings from the US that it will raise "dangerous" false hopes and set back real self-determination.

Abbas said in a televised address the Palestinians will seek recognition next week of an independent Palestinian state on the basis of the borders of 4 June 1967 with East Jerusalem as the capital. He noted that the US president, Barack Obama, said a year ago he hoped to see an independent Palestine join the UN at this time.

"Obama himself said he wanted to see a Palestinian state by September," said Abbas. He said he would not bow to foreign pressure and what he called attempts to "buy off" the Palestinians.
"We are going to the security council," he said. "The world is sympathising with the aspirations of the Palestinian people."

Abbas's defiant speech came amid a flurry of diplomatic activity by the US, EU and Tony Blair in Jerusalem and Ramallah aimed at trying to avoid a showdown next week at the UN security council, where the Americans say they will veto a Palestinian request for recognition of statehood.

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, said the Palestinians had "miscalculated" if they believed the move will bring them closer to independence. Rice warned that even if the Palestinians were to win a vote in favour of statehood it will not change the situation on the ground.

"There's no shortcut, there's no magic wand that can be waved in New York and make everything right. In fact, there's a risk in that because if you're an average person in the Palestinian territories and your hopes have been raised that by some action here in New York something will be different, the reality is that nothing is going to change.

"There won't be any more sovereignty, there won't be any more food on the table. And this gap between expectation and reality is in itself quite dangerous," Rice told the BBC.

"The miscalculation here on the part of the Palestinians is that by coming to the United Nations they will be in a better position to negotiate ... As tough as it is today to bring the parties to the table, it will be much much tougher after action here in New York. If the aim is to isolate and confront Israel, which is the effect of this action potentially in New York, then that is not going to encourage Israel to come back to the negotiating table any sooner."

Abbas rejected the assertion that the UN vote will jeopardise talks.

"We will come back to negotiations on other issues. But we need full membership of the UN," he said. "Over the past year we have expressed our readiness to take part in serious negotiations. Israel has wasted time and imposed facts on the ground [by expanding Jewish settlements]."

Israel, he said, had nothing to fear from the move.

"Israel is there, no one can deprive it of its legal status, it is a recognised country." But, he added, Palestinian statehood would mean Israel could no longer claim it was colonising "disputed territory. This is occupied territory."

On Thursday, Rice met Jewish American leaders in New York to assure them the Obama administration will do it all it can to derail the Palestinian move at the UN. But she conceded that Washington was unlikely to be able to prevent the Palestinians from taking a request for recognition of full statehood to the security council, or alternatively turn to the general assembly, which can offer only enhanced observer status.

Washington is instead concentrating on garnering support against the move. It is targeting non-permanent members of the security council, such as Colombia, Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the hope of ensuring they at least abstain if they are not prepared to vote against a Palestinian state, and so lessen the impact of a US veto.

The US is also pressing Britain to back its position. The UK, which has one eye on its standing in the Middle East particularly as it is heavily involved in Libya, says it is undecided and is waiting to see the wording of the Palestinian request.

However, Britain has suggested it is prepared to consider supporting a watered down request in the general assembly where the Palestinians can in any case expected to win with a comfortable margin.
In the Middle East, the Europeans and Tony Blair - envoy of the quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia - were attempting to engineer a compromise to head off the need for a US veto in the security council.

One effort is to divert the whole issue to the general assembly. Another is for Abbas to submit his request for statehood but for it then to be put on hold while peace talks are revived. The request would then be activated if negotiations fail to reach an agreement within a year.

The Palestinians are resistant to the idea in part because they do not believe the Israelis are serious about talks but also because it would not require a freeze on construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank - an issue that has become a major obstacle to fresh negotiations.

There were reports in Israel that the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is prepared to consider an upgrade in the Palestinian status at the UN through a vote in the general assembly so long as it falls short of full membership.

An Israeli official refused to confirm the reports but he did say that intensive efforts were continuing to find a compromise.

"The goal is to avoid a diplomatic train wreck," he said. "There are various ideas on the table to find a formula to allow us back to talks."

According to the Israeli official, there was a "greater understanding on the Palestinian side that the train wreck needs to be avoided". But there was no certainty a deal could be reached.

"The Palestinians climb up a tree, kick the ladder away, and then say help me get down the tree. It's not always possible," he said.

However, there is no public indication the Palestinians are looking for a way to backtrack. Their team continues to insist they will demand full membership of the UN at the security council and will only seek a lesser status at the general assembly following a US veto.

Netanyahu will address the general assembly next Friday hours after Abbas delivers his speech.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Cherekee seek blood quantum 9/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Amish Jailed on Principle 9/17/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaiian Sovereinty Issues 09/17/11

 .

Amish Jailed on Principle

SUBHEAD: Eight men from conservative sect refuse triangles on their horse-drawn buggies – then refuse to pay fine. By Jo Aditunji on 17 September 2011 for the Guardian - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/17/amish-jailed-kentucky-warning-triangle-fine) Image above: Amish buggy with no fluorescent orange triangle on the back. From (http://www.patchwork-europe.com/Who-are-the-Amish).

Eight Amish men have been jailed by a judge in Kentucky for non-payment of fines after refusing to fix reflective orange warning triangles to the back of their horse-drawn buggies.

The unusual suspects, whose mugshots have been published online, were arrested for misdemeanours. A ninth man was arrested but not jailed.

The group hail from the stricter Old Order Swartzentruber sect and objected to the bright triangles on modesty grounds, saying they were barred from wearing or displaying anything bright or colourful.

Members of the sect can affix reflective tape to their vehicles but refuse the orange triangle – a legal requirement on slow-moving vehicles.

After their arrest, the group subsequently refused to pay any fines as that would, in turn, mean recognising the law they refuse to obey.

Judge Deborah Hawkins of Graves County district sentenced eight of the men to between three and 10 days in jail for their refusal to pay up.

Local television station WPSD reported that a "concerned citizen" had paid the fine for the ninth man so that he could be with his sick child.

The case has been running since 2008 and the men have been represented by a civil rights group, but it was reported that their latest appeal was refused in June. William Sharp, their lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, invoked their constitutional right to religious liberty.

"This case is about the right of Kentuckians to freely exercise their religious beliefs and, by necessity, the limits of government's ability to impose a substantial burden on that right."

Because of the belief no bright clothing should be worn, the men were given dark-coloured jumpsuits to wear rather than standard issue orange overalls.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Cherekee seek blood quantum 9/17/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Palestinians ignore US on UN statehood 9/17/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaiian Sovereinty Issues 09/17/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Volcom - A Common Future 9/16/11 .

Volcom - A common future?

SUBHEAD: A mystery shared between a local teen from Hanamaulu and a young Amish buggy driver in the Northeast.

 By Juan Wilson on 16 September 2011 for Island Breath - 
  (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/09/volcom-common-future.html)

 
Image above: My Chevy S-10 pickup sporting mysterious logo. Photo by Juan Wilson.

I recently bought a 1988 S-10 extended cab pickup truck to replace by well-worn 1987 Toyota 4x4 pick-up. The previous owner was a really nice kid, of about 19, who lived down in Hanamaulu. He had cleaned it up and tricked it out. After a new hedders and a paint job he installed a 2000 watt bass speaker and added tinted windows and some decals.

Thankfully the speaker wasn't part of the deal. It took up much of the extended cab. I probably would have lost consciousness had I actually used it while driving. I did get the decals, however. One I had seen on many vehicles on Kauai was without words or fine print. It was shaped like a spearhead with facets. I vaguely thought it had something to do with Hawaiian culture, or surfing, but really had no clue.

Then I saw a photo on Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net/2011/09/15/amish-buggy-decals.html) about Amish buggy decals and was surprised to see my truck decal sported on the "caution" reflector on the back end of a buggy. Whoa!
 

Image above: A Amish buggy with same mysterious logo. From (http://boingboing.net/2011/09/15/amish-buggy-decals.html).

 I came to Kauai from western New York state in an area where there are a lot of Amish farms. It was not unusual there for the local hardware stores to sell buggy hardware and for the county roads to sport caution signs for Amish buggy traffic. The teens among the Amish have a few wild oats to sew before entering their religion and adulthood.

I knew them to sneak calls from public phones in nearby small towns. I had heard there boomboxes coming from parked buggies in the state forest. They would even join in regional music festivals poorly disguised as "Englishers". These were youth capable of "breaking bad", and flaunting authority. And now I was displaying that I shared this attitude with them as well as youth here on an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean. I had to find the source of this iconic symbol.

Well, I could have asked anybody under 40 and they would likely know, but I took my quest to the internet. I googled "diamond shaped logo" for clip-art among images. The reward was "Volcom logo vs Roc Nation logo" (http://mteelove.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/jay-z-being-sued-over-diamond-logo/). Volcom it was.


 
Image above: Volcom (left) sues Roc Nation (right) over logo trademark infringement. From (http://mteelove.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/jay-z-being-sued-over-diamond-logo).

The Volcom is a company that sells surfboarding, skateboarding and snowboarding clothing, through its website. It is apparently trying to be relevant to young adults by appealing to many interests. There site index touts "Shop", Happs", "Team", "Aart", "Girls", "Music", "Events", "Blogs". Under blogs the first item is "Sustainability". And I quote:

"Building a sustainable future, day by day. The New Future looks a lot different than today’s future. It is Cleaner, more Conscious, more Renewable, more Efficient, more Regenerative, more Sustainable and Less Impactful.

We’ll continue to work towards incorporating New Future thinking into all aspects of our business and we ask that you do your part in helping us build a future that we can proudly pass on to all generations to come."

Volcom is trying to involve its fans with the ocean front cleanup efforts of Surfrider Foundation (http://newfuture.volcom.com/featured-surfrider-foundation-emerald-coast-needs-your-support/), but one cannot forget this is a company that is primarily selling fossil fuel based synthetic fabric boardware to kids. I don't know how many of the Amish that like the decal have a clue about that, but I discovered some Amish have gotten a bit rebellious .  

Mark Frauenfelder, a Boing Boing contributor saw the buggy decal story and submitted the photo below of mugshots of some young Amish men arrested for defying authorities by refusing to display the required orange reflective triangular caution sign on the back of their buggies. The moral: Obey, Consume and Prosper!

 
Image above: Troublesome Amish youth defying authorities. From (http://boingboing.net/2011/09/15/mugshots-of-amish-who-wont-put-orange-triangles-on-their-buggies.html).


 .

GMO-HFCS by another name

SUBHEAD: High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has earned a bad reputation. So now the industry wants the name changed to "Corn Sugar".  

[Editor's note: We must be winning. The GMO dominated corn syrup industry is on the defensive. They know that, due to health concerns, consumers are avoiding "high-fructose" labeled foods. As a result some food companies are removing it from their products. The industry answer: Change the name to "corn sugar". ] 


By Tara Parker-Pope on 14 September 2011 for the NYT - 
  (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/a-new-name-for-high-fructose-corn-syrup/)

 
Image above: Ingredients for Coke, and virtually all nationally distributed sodas consist overwhelmingly of HFCS mixed into carbonated water. From (http://blog.thegreenplate.org/2010/09/corn-sugar-leaves-sour-taste/).
 
Would high-fructose corn syrup, by any other name, have sweeter appeal?

The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make the syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient “corn sugar,” arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer confusion about the product.

“Clearly the name is confusing consumers,” said Audrae Erickson, president of the Washington-based group, in an interview. “Research shows that ‘corn sugar’ better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose and the sweetness in this ingredient.”

According to the market research firm NPD Group, about 58 percent of Americans say they are concerned that high-fructose corn syrup poses a health risk.



Some scientists over the years have speculated that high-fructose corn syrup may contribute to obesity by somehow disrupting normal metabolic function, but the research has been inconclusive. As a result, most leading scientists and nutrition experts agree that in terms of health, the effect of high-fructose corn syrup is the same as regular sugar, and that too much of either ingredient is bad for your health.

Marion Nestle, a professor in New York University’s department of nutrition and a longtime food industry critic, says that Americans consume too much of all types of sugar, but that there is no meaningful biochemical difference between table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.
“I’m not eager to help the corn refiners sell more of their stuff,” Dr. Nestle wrote in an e-mail. “But you have to feel sorry for them. High-fructose corn syrup is the new trans fat. Everyone thinks it’s poison, and food companies are getting rid of it as fast as they can.”

Dr. Nestle says she thinks the plural “corn sugars” is a better description of high-fructose corn syrup, which is actually a mixture of glucose and fructose. But she agrees that the corn refiners “have lots of reasons to want the change.”

“Even I have to admit that it’s not an unreasonable one,” Dr. Nestle said.

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the health advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, said he thought the term “high-fructose corn syrup” had misled many into thinking the sweetener was composed mainly of fructose, a simple sugar found in honey and fruit.

“Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are nutritionally the same,’’ said Dr. Jacobson, who has a doctorate in microbiology. “I don’t know if ‘corn sugar’ is the best term, but it’s better than ‘high-fructose corn syrup.’ ”

High-fructose corn syrup, which came into widespread use in the 1970s, isn’t particularly high in fructose, but was so named to distinguish it from ordinary, glucose-containing corn syrup, according to a report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and sucrose (also known as table sugar) contain about the same amount of glucose and fructose. In fact, one commonly used version of the ingredient known as HFCS-42 actually contains less fructose (42 percent) than table sugar, which has 50 percent fructose, according to the report.

“The name is confusing, and consumers don’t understand that it has the same calories as sugar,” said Ms. Erickson, of the Corn Refiners Association. “They also think it’s sweeter tasting. That’s why the alternate name provides clarity for consumers when it comes to the ingredient composition and helps them better understand what’s in their foods.”

Table sugar comes primarily from sugar cane or sugar beets. High-fructose corn syrup is made essentially by soaking corn kernels to extract corn starch, and using enzymes to turn the glucose in the starch into fructose. The ingredient is a favorite of food makers for practical reasons. Compared with sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup doesn’t mask flavors, has a lower freezing point and retains moisture better, which is useful in making foods like chewy granola bars. And because the corn crop in the United States is heavily subsidized, high-fructose corn syrup is also cheap. As a result, it’s now used in so many foods, from crackers to soft drinks, that it has become one of the biggest sources of calories in the American diet.

But the public perception of high-fructose corn syrup as unhealthful has prompted many food companies to stop using it in their products, including Hunt’s Ketchup, Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice and Wheat Thins crackers.

The F.D.A. has six months to respond to the name-change petition. If the agency accepts it, the decision on whether to allow the name “corn sugar” on food labels may take another 12 to 18 months.
Although food label changes aren’t common, the F.D.A. has allowed name changes in the past. The ingredient first called “low erucic acid rapeseed oil” was changed to “canola oil” in the 1980s. More recently, the F.D.A. allowed prunes to be called “dried plums.”

“It’s rare that food ingredient labels are changed, and when they are it’s always been to provide clarity to consumers,” Ms. Erickson said. “This is a classic case for consumers to better understand an ingredient.”

.

American Empire Decline & Fall

SUBHEAD: We've been blindsided by every major trend of the last decade as we go deeper into the darkness. By Mike Davies on 13 September 2011 for Alternet.org - (http://www.alternet.org/world/152389/the_decline_and_fall_of_the_american_empire) Image above: An American Hummer and crew stuck in Southern Afghanistan. From (http://2log.biz/?tag=Obama%27s+Wars).

1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most haunted building in the world. There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Condé Nast publishing has signed the biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where 658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001.

Not to worry: The “Freedom Tower” -- the boosters reassure us -- will be an enduring consolation to the families of 9/11’s martyrs as well as an icon of civic and national renaissance. Not to mention its dramatic resurrection of property values in the neighborhood. (I confess that I find this conflation of real-estate speculation with sublime memorial unnerving: like proposing to build a yacht marina over the sunken Arizona or a Katrina theme park in the Lower Ninth Ward.)

One World Trade Center, in the original design, was also meant to restore vertical architectural supremacy to Manhattan and to be the tallest building in the world. This global phallic rivalry was won instead by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa super-tower, completed last year and twice as high as the Empire State Building.

In a few years Dubai, however, will have to surrender the gold cup to Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family

Financed by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who revels in being known as the “Arabian Warren Buffet,” the planned Kingdom Tower in Jeddah -- the ultimate hyperbole for Saudi despotism -- will pierce the clouds along the Red Sea coastline at an incredible altitude of one full kilometer (3,281 feet).

One World Trade Center, on the other hand, will max out at 1,776 feet above the Hudson. (Conspiracy theorists can obsess over this coincidence: the number of feet higher the Saudi Arabian tower will be than the American one almost exactly equals the number of people who died in the North Tower of the WTC in 2001.)

With little publicity, the initial billion-dollar contract for the Jeddah spire was awarded by Prince Al-Waleed to the Arab world’s mega-builders and skyscraper experts -- the Binladen Group. It may keep their family name alive for centuries to come.

2. Collusion

Ten years ago, lower Manhattan became the Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism. Although conscience recoils against making any moral equation between the assassination of a single Archduke and his wife on June 28, 1914, and the slaughter of almost 3,000 New Yorkers, the analogy otherwise is eerily apt.

In both cases, a small network of peripheral but well-connected conspirators, ennobled in their own eyes by the bitter grievances of their region, attacked a major symbol of the responsible empire. The outrages were deliberately aimed to detonate larger, cataclysmic conflicts, and in this respect, were successful beyond the darkest imagining of the plotters.

However, the magnitudes of the resulting geopolitical explosions were not simple functions of the notoriety of the acts themselves. For example, in Europe between 1890 and 1940, more than two dozen heads of state were assassinated, including the kings of Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, an empress of Austria, three Spanish prime ministers, two presidents of France, and so on. But apart from the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, none of these events instigated a war.

Likewise, a single suicide bomber in a truck killed 241 U.S. Marines and sailors at their barracks at the Beirut Airport in 1983. (Fifty-eight French paratroopers were killed by another suicide bomber the same day.) A Democratic president almost certainly would have been pressured into massive retaliation or full-scale intervention in the Lebanese civil war, but President Reagan -- very shrewdly -- distracted the public with an invasion of tiny Grenada, while quietly withdrawing the rest of his Marines from the Eastern Mediterranean.

If Sarajevo and the World Trade Center, in contrast, unleashed global carnage and chaos, it was because a de facto collusion existed between the attackers and the attacked. I’m not referring to mythical British plots in the Balkans or Mossad agents blowing up the Twin Towers, but simply to well-known facts: by 1912, the Imperial German General Staff had already decided to exploit the first opportunity to make war, and powerful neocons around George W. Bush were lobbying for the overthrow of the regimes in Baghdad and Tehran even before the last hanging chad had been counted in Florida in 2000.

Both the Hohenzollerns and the Texans were in search of a casus belli that would legitimate military intervention and silence domestic opposition.

Prussian militarism, of course, was punctually accommodated by the Black Hand -- a terrorist group sponsored by the Serbian general staff -- that assassinated the Archduke and his wife, while al-Qaeda's horror show in lower Manhattan consecrated the divine right of the White House to torture, secretly imprison, and kill by remote control.

At the time, it seemed almost as if Bush and Cheney had staged a coup d’étatagainst the Constitution. Yet they could cynically but accurately point to a whole catalogue of precedents.

3. “Innocence” and Intervention

To put it bluntly, every single chapter in the history of the extension of U.S. power has opened with the same sentence: “Innocent Americans were treacherously attacked…”

Remember the Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 (274 dead)?

The Lusitania torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915 (1,198 drowned, including 128 Americans)?

Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916 (18 U.S citizens killed)?

Pearl Harbor (2,402 dead)?

Same sneak attack, same righteous national outrage. Same pretext for clandestine agendas.

In addition, historians will also recall the besieged legation in Peking (1899), Emilio Aguinaldo’s alleged perfidy outside Manila (1899), various crimes against American banks and businessmen in Central America and the Caribbean (1900-1930), the Japanese bombing of the USS Panay in 1938, the Chinese army’s crossing of the Yalu River into Korea (1950), the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam (1964), the North Korean capture of the Pueblo(1968), the Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez (1975), the U.S. Embassy hostages in Tehran (1979), the imperiled medical students in Grenada (1983), the harassed American soldiers in Panama (1989), and so on.

This list barely scratches the surface: the synchronization of self-pity and intervention in U.S. history is relentless.

In the name of “innocent Americans,” the United States annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico; colonized the Philippines; punished nationalism in North Africa and China; invaded Mexico (twice); sent a generation to the killing fields of France (and imprisoned dissenters at home); massacred patriots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua; annihilated Japanese cities; bombed Korea and Indochina into rubble; buttressed military dictatorships in Latin America; and became Israel’s partner in the routine murder of Arab civilians.

4. Decline and Fall?

Someday -- perhaps sooner than we think -- a new Edward Gibbon in China or India will surely sit down to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Hopefully it will be but one volume in a larger, more progressive oeuvre -- The Renaissance of Asia perhaps -- and not an obituary for a human future sucked into America’s grasping void.

I think she’ll probably classify self-righteous American “innocence” as one of the most toxic tributaries of national decline, with President Obama as its highest incarnation. Indeed, from the perspective of the future, which will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular opinion and one’s own campaign promises?

Obama, who was elected to bring the troops home, close the gulags, and restore the Bill of Rights, has in fact become the chief curator of the Bush legacy: a born-again convert to special ops, killer drones, immense intelligence budgets, Orwellian surveillance technology, secret jails, and the superhero cult of former general, now CIA Director David Petraeus.

Our “antiwar” president, in fact, may be taking U.S. power deeper into the darkness than any of us dare to imagine. And the more fervently Obama embraces his role as commander in chief of the Delta Force and Navy Seals, the less likely it becomes that future Democrats will dare to reform the Patriot Act or challenge the presidential prerogative to murder and incarcerate America’s enemies in secret.

Enmired in wars with phantoms, Washington has been blindsided by every major trend of the last decade. It completely misread the real yearnings of the Arab street and the significance of mainstream Islamic populism, ignored the emergence of Turkey and Brazil as independent powers, forgot Africa, and lost much of its leverage with Germany as well as with Israel’s increasingly arrogant reactionaries. Most importantly, Washington has failed to develop any coherent policy framework for its relationship with China, its main creditor and most important rival.

From a Chinese standpoint (assumedly the perspective of our future Ms. Gibbon), the United States is showing incipient symptoms of being a failed state. When Xinhua, the semi-official Chinese news agency, scolds the U.S. Congress for being “dangerously irresponsible” in debt negotiations, or when senior Chinese leaders openly worry about the stability of American political and economic institutions, the shoe is truly on the other foot. Especially when standing in the wings, bibles in hand, are the mad spawn of 9/11 -- the Republican presidential candidates.

• Mike Davis is author, most recently, of the kids' adventure, 'Land of the Lost Mammoths' (Perceval Press, 2003) and co-author of 'Under the Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists Never See' (New Press, 2003). He is currently working on a book about the recent political earthquake in California, 'Heavy Metal Freeway' (to be published by Metropolitan Books).

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A&B endangers Wainiha Taro

SUBHEAD: Taro grower claims A&B hydro-power shutdown impacted taro in Wainiha Valley.  

By Vanessa Van Voorhis on 14 September 2011 for the Garden Island - (
http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/article_b3b2a676-deb6-11e0-b0d9-001cc4c002e0.html)

 
Image above: Aerial view of Hinalele Falls in Wainiha Valley on Kauai, Hawaii. From (http://www.hawaiimagazine.com/blogs/hawaii_today/2010/2/23/untouched_Hawaii_natural_wonders_preserved_forever).

A Wainiha Valley taro grower says she was alarmed when her taro patches suddenly and unexpectedly dried out last month.

“It’s been three days now that no water is in the ‘auwai (irrigation ditch), almost no water in the stream here in Wainiha Valley,” Caren Diamond wrote in a July 28 email to the Department of Health seeking information. “I’m just below the hydro power plant. O‘opu impacted, along with the other creatures … Our taro patches are dry and cracking.”

Alexander & Baldwin, owner of Wainiha Hydro Power Plant, shut down the facility to perform annual maintenance for eight days between late July and early August.

A&B spokeswoman Linda Howe said the facility “gets shut down annually for maintenance for at least a week, sometimes longer.”

“This is a very long standing practice, done since around 1920,” she said. “The hydro can also be tripped offline by the utility, which would stop the flow of water as well.”

Taro ‘hasn’t recovered’

“When it first happened, I didn’t call anybody or do anything,” Diamond said last Wednesday. “I thought it would be coming on in a day or two, as it normally did — but then it didn’t. I wondered if something was wrong … There’s one little stream that comes off of the Wainiha and normally it has good flow.”

So she started asking “old-timers” who live in the valley what was happening. “They said (A&B) normally shuts it off for maintenance but not normally for so long … On the third day is when creatures stared dying.”

She began finding dead o‘opu, a native fish, in the stream along with other animals.

Diamond said there are “certainly” some impacts with hydropower, but issues like timing could be mitigated.

“There’s the heat, the dry summer heat, of July and August,” she said. “That was the exact wrong time to take the water out.”

Diamond questioned why such maintenance couldn’t be performed during wetter or cooler months of the year.

“Eight days with no water, my taro patches grew weeds,” said Diamond, an avid gardener and 32-year resident of Ha‘ena and Wainiha. “My taro patches were very beautiful before then. It hasn’t recovered from this. It will take a lot of manpower to get them back to where they were … This has made a whole lot of work for us.”

A&B’s response

The 3.5-megawatt Wainiha Hydro Power Plant on the North Shore was built in 1906 by McBryde Sugar Company, a subsidiary of A&B, to generate electrical power to drive irrigation pumps in Hanapepe. A 33-mile-long transmission line carries the power from the north to the south of the island.

Today, the power is sold to Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative.

According to a 1988 A&B newsletter, the water for the Wainiha plant comes from the Wainiha River and several feeder streams.

Howe said A&B intentionally schedules maintenance and upgrades of the Wainiha hydro during the driest time of the year for two reasons:

“First, out of concern for the safety of the people who do the work, as the entire system is involved — from the diversion dam, forebay, tunnels and ditches, pipelines to the powerhouse itself with its flywheels, turbines, various electrical equipment and tailrace ditch,” she said in an email.

“And secondly, to cause the least disruption in the supply of power to the Kaua‘i community. When rainfall is high, power production is high, thus the loss of clean renewable power to the public would be greater and result in a greater amount of fossil fuel being burned to compensate,” she said. “Thus, there is probably a lesser environmental impact undertaking the maintenance work in the drier times.”

Howe said A&B internal resources claim Diamond does not live along the river or its stream system.

“That property is located alongside our tailrace, which is a manmade ditch that returns water, after it has run through our hydro plant, back to the stream,” she said. “That property does not border the Wainiha Stream. The tailrace is not ‘natural’ and isn’t intended to be a source of water for anyone.”

To Howe’s assertion, Diamond replied: “The only time I ever heard that was from them after I complained.”

Diamond said the irrigation for her taro is natural and part of the traditional ‘auwai system the Hawaiians created centuries ago to specifically feed taro systems.

“The original taro lo‘i are on our property,” she said. “I looked up the Land Commission Award for here and the taro patches are named and numbered. The power plant came after the taro patches.”

Diamond said the water goes from mauka to makai and traverses many people’s taro lo‘i.

DLNR: More info needed

Gary Ueunten, an environmental health specialist for the Clean Water Branch on Kaua‘i, inspected Wainiha on July 29th. He confirmed that “the Wainiha hydroelectric plant was undergoing maintenance and the flow of water through the plant was stopped.”

Ueunten did not provide additional comments or information on his findings. He referred The Garden Island to Robert Chong, a planner for the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Commission on Water Resource Management on O‘ahu.

Chong said in order to speak specifically on the matter, he would need to see the property’s TMK map showing the parcel along with the Land Commission Award — “the actual LCA translated into English.”

Generally speaking, people who live alongside a stream have certain riparian rights, Chong said, certain kuleana or appurtenant water rights under the Great Mahele, Hawaii’s land redistribution act during the 1830s and ’40s. It predates the Water Code, he said, and was grandfathered into it.

“There was a land commission that awarded land to the Native Hawaiians and, with this award, they may have kuleana water rights. For a person to claim they have kuleana water rights today, they need to show that that parcel of land has received that from the land commission.”

With hydro, he said, there’s a man-made diversion, an intake and an outtake. Whether it is located on public or private land is an important consideration.

Chong added that the Water Commission is currently in the process of setting a procedure to determine kuleana or appurtenant water rights on Maui.

In service management areas, people who divert water from ditches would be required to have a permit to use the water, he said. If the diversion is located on private property, typically permission must be obtained from the property owner to use the water in the ditch.

Sustainability

Don Heacock, a Kaua‘i state biologist who has spoken out about environmental impact and sustainability issues related to the Wainiha Hydro Power Plant, said the o‘opu nakea are the most culturally important native fish species. They spawn and migrate down river between August and November, he added.

“What triggers these spawning migrations is flood waters,” Heacock said. “There appears to be spawning that takes place on a small level when it doesn’t flood.”

He speculated that when the Wainiha Hydro Power Plant was built more than 100 years ago, its designers didn’t think about what would happen if the turbines were turned off.

“If we were designing one today, we would design it to bypass the turbine to keep water in the river,” he said. “(Wainiha) could be modified.”

The tailrace of the Wainiha plant — where high-pressure water is released from the turbine and into a ditch system — is a quarter to a third of a mile long, he said.

Heacock said he believes the best way A&B can mitigate the power plant’s impact to the o‘opu nakea and other species is to look for partnerships in habitat enhancement and watershed restoration programs through the state, Fish and Wildlife and EPA.

“We need to find creative ways landowners can make projects more sustainable,” he said.

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