Anahola Biofuel Plan Back Again

SOURCE: Hope Kallai (lokahipath2@live.com)
SUBHEAD: Public meeting regarding the Green Energy Team's proposed bio-mass lease for 2,143 acres of land in Anahola.

By Jobie M. K. Masagatani on 19 June 2013 for the DHHL -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/06/anahola-biomass-plan-back-again.html)


Image above: Interior of Anahola Valley looking north-east. All would be part of 30 year long term biomass lease. From GoogleEarth.

DHHL INFORMATIONAL BULLETIN

Public Information Meeting and Special Commission Meeting Regarding the Green Energy Team's Proposed General Lease for 2,143 acres of land in Anahola.

• Download a  PDF version of this meeting notice letter
  (http://dhhl.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/130619-Anahola-Meetings.pdf)
• Visit the Anahola Renewable Energy Project Beneficiary Consultation page
  (http://dhhl.hawaii.gov/po/beneficiary-consultation/2013-beneficiary-consultations/anahola-renewable-energy-project/)

Aloha Anahola Beneficiaries:

As many of you know, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) has been in negotiations with Green Energy Team LLC (Green Energy) to general lease 2,143 acres of land at Anahola, which includes all lands mauka of Kealia Road. At a special meeting of the Hawaiian Homes Commission (Commission) held last Friday, June 14,2013, Green Energy notified the Commission that they were not able to continue negotiations beyond June 30, 2013. To accommodate Green Energy's deadline, the Commission chose to modify its initial timeline, moving up both the informational meeting and decision-making dates.

As a result, I invite you to attend and participate in two meetings next week:

I. Informational Meeting - Thursday, June 27, 2013
6:30 to 8:00pm
Kapa'a Elementary School
Proposed terms oflease agreement to be presented
Members ofthe Commission will be in attendance

II. Special Meeting of the Hawaiian Homes Commission - Friday, June 28, 2013
10:00am to Noon
Kapa'a Elementary School
Decision-making on Green Energy's General Lease Agreement

To summarize and review this issue, Green Energy wants a 20-year general lease to establish a tree plantation which will supply fuel to Green Energy's biomass-to-energy facility located in Koloa. In return, DHHL will receive monetary and other benefits including improvements to DHHL's Anahola lands. In March of this year, DHHL conducted a beneficiary consultation meeting and two Hawaiian Homes Commission Public Hearings on the proposed project.

Mahalo to all of you who attended the meetings. You gave clear and thoughtful testimonies about your concerns and recommendations. A special meeting of the Commission was planned for April 2013 to approve the lease; however, due to the many comments and concerns raised in your testimonies, the special meeting was postponed. In addition, due to the concerns raised, I committed to conduct an informational meeting for Anahola beneficiaries on the terms of the lease prior to any decision-making by the Commission. I also explained at the March Public Hearings that we are required by law to conduct the decision-making Commission meeting on the island of Kauai.

As a result of your input in March, we were able to propose important changes to the lease terms, and I look forward to the opportunity to present this information to you next week. In order to prepare for the meeting, we encourage you to visit our website (dhhl.hawaii.gov under Beneficiary Consultations) where we will post the most up-to-date information we have. You can access more detailed information, including:

• The Beneficiary Consultation Report which includes a summary of the major concerns raised during the three meetings conducted in March, as well as the meeting handouts, maps, and detailed notes for each meeting.
   
• Staff responses and recommendations for each of the major issues raised in the Consultation Report.
   
• A clrronology of activities that have occurred from February 2013 to June 14, 2013.
   
• Green Energy's website address where you can review Green Energy's detailed responses to the concerns raised in the March meetings.

After you review the information on our website, if you have further questions or if you feel there are major issues that still need to be addressed, in the interest of having a productive informational meeting on June 27, I invite you to submit your additional questions and issues by June 25 to the Planning Office via email: dhhl.planning@hawaii.gov.

Aloha and mahalo,

Jobie M. K. Masagatani, Chairman
Hawaiian Homes Commission
MEDIA CONTACT
Darrell T. Young
Deputy to the Chair
Department of Hawaiian Home Lands
(808) 620-9510
Darrell.T.Young@hawaii.gov

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Hawaiians spurn "Green" Energy 3/11/13

.

California Dam Removal Project

SUBHEAD: Fish, frogs, and people to benefit from biggest dam-removal project in California history in San Clemente.

By Sandra Postal on 21 June 2013 for National Geographic -
(http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/21/fish-frogs-and-people-to-benefit-from-biggest-dam-removal-project-in-california-history/)


Image above: The San Clemente Dam in California, now coming down. Photo via sanclementedamremoval.org.

Today marks a historic event for California rivers: the launch of the biggest dam removal project in state history.

Over the next 28 months, the beautiful Carmel River will be set free to flow more naturally for 70 percent of its length as the 106-foot (32.3 meter) San Clemente Dam is dismantled.

Downstream of the dam, threatened fish and frogs will get a new lease on life as critical habitats open up. And some 1,500 households will enjoy greater safety as the dam’s risk of failure during a major earthquake or flood event disappears.

Built in 1921 to store drinking water for the burgeoning population of Monterey County, the San Clemente Dam is a concrete arch structure located 18.5 miles (29.8 kilometers) upstream from the Pacific Ocean.

While built for a good cause, the dam’s reservoir has lost 95 percent of its original water storage capacity due to the build-up of silt and sediment carried in by the Carmel River. Historically, the river carried that sediment load downstream, keeping its channel functioning well and replenishing coastal beaches. But the dam trapped the sediment in the reservoir, causing it to fill – a common problem with dams worldwide.

The Monterey Peninsula now relies primarily on groundwater for its drinking water supply.

Meanwhile, the dam became a safety hazard as its risk of failure increased. After the state of California’s division on dam safety declared San Clemente “seismically unsafe,” California American Water, the public utility that owns the dam, assessed its options for reducing the dam’s threats. Taking into account cost, environmental benefits and other factors, the idea of tearing the dam down rose to the top of the list.

The project will open up 25 contiguous miles of unimpaired spawning and rearing habitat for a threatened run of steelhead trout. Like salmon, steelhead spend most of their lives in the ocean but move upstream to spawn and grow in coastal rivers and streams. Big dams like San Clemente block their migration and destroy their habitats.

Over the decades, the combination of dams, diversions, and urban development has caused the population of steelhead to plummet. In 1997, federal officials listed the fish as threatened.

For steelhead on the central California coast, “removing this dam is the single best thing you can do for their recovery,” says Samuel P. Schuchat, Executive Officer of the California State Coastal Conservancy.

The dam removal will also restore the natural movement of sediment downstream toward the sea, replenish sand on Carmel Beach, and improve habitat for the California Red-Legged frog, the largest native frog in the western United States and now federally listed as threatened, as well.

The Carmel too will enjoy a revival.

In a gentle ode to the river, John Steinbeck wrote in his classic 1945 work, Cannery Row: “The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have.”

Indeed, over its 36-mile run from the Santa Lucia Mountains to the sea, the Carmel flows through a diverse array of habitats, from mixed evergreen forests and montane chaparral to coastal prairie and sand dunes.

The first stage of the project involves some innovative engineering to re-route the Carmel River into San Clemente Creek so that the sediment behind the dam can be stabilized to remain safely in place. The re-routing will allow the river to resume its more natural, pre-dam flow to the sea.

Once the river is diverted away from the sediment-filled reservoir, dismantling of the dam will begin.

The $83 million project has garnered a wide range of support, including that of the conservation groups American Rivers, the Carmel River Watershed Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy, and Trout Unlimited, as well as the federal Bureau of Reclamation and Fish & Wildlife Service, among others.

California American Water, the dam owner, will pay $49 million of the total cost; the California State Coastal Conservancy and the National Marine Fisheries Service will raise the additional $34 million through public and private sources. The Nature Conservancy is contributing $1 million to the project.

In addition, California American Water is donating 928 acres (375 hectares) of property around the dam to the federal Bureau of Land Management, which in turn is working with the Monterey parks district to develop recreational trails for use by the public.

If all goes according to plan, both the project’s ecological engineering features as well as its public-private partnership may serve as a model for other river restoration efforts across the state and nation.

“This is an opportunity to essentially restore an entire river system from top to bottom,” saysSchuchat of the state coastal conservancy.

“You take the dam out and suddenly you’ve got a natural free-flowing river again – and that’s just really exciting. “
.

One Building - One City

SUBHEAD: Sky City - The world's tallest prefab building is breaking ground in China. Exactly the wrong idea.

By Lloyd Alter on 14 May 2013 for TreeHugger -
(http://www.treehugger.com/modular-design/one-building-one-city-worlds-tallest-prefab-breaking-ground-june.html)

[IB Publisher's note: It's bad enough to think dragging people off the rural countryside to work in industrial cities, but this Sky City colossus is about as unsustainable an idea as we have seen. Just imagine a de-industrialized future. some thirty years hence, when several panels have blown off the building and the elevators are not working. The top 160 stories will be uninhabitable. Could worse planning be conceived?]


Image above: Computer generated Still image rendering from video below. From original article.

Broad Sustainable Construction informs us that a long and arduous approval process has been completed, and that they are starting excavation and construction on Sky CIty in June, 2013.
Why build the world's tallest building in the middle of a field in Changsha, China? Why build it at all? The answer, according to BSC, is that it is the most sustainable way to accommodate a growing population.

This is not a trophy like the Burj Khalifa, a thin high tech spire that isn't even connected to a sewer system. They call it a "pragmatic" building, designed for efficiency, affordability, replicability. They also make a strong case for it being sustainable. BSC writes:

The world population is increasing at 1.8% year by year. In the near future, land, energy, climate may breach the critical point.

The Sky City concept significantly reduces the per capita use of land, and the CO2 emissions generated getting around. They call it "a way of development for higher life quality and lower impact on the environment" They see this as the future of Chinese city building: "Urbanization can not be materialized at the cost of land and environmental pollution."

By going up, hundreds of acres of land are saved from being turned into roads and parking lots. By using elevators instead of cars to get to schools, businesses and recreational facilities, thousands of cars are taken off the roads and thousands of hours of commuting time are saved. It makes sense; vertical distances between people are a whole lot shorter than the horizontal, and elevators are about the most energy efficient moving devices made. A resident of Sky City is using 1/100th the average land per person.

If you would rather walk rather than wait for one of 92 elevators, there is six mile long ramp running from the first to the 170th floor. Beside the ramp are 56 different 30 foot high courtyards used for basketball, tennis, swimming, theatres, and 930,000 square feet of interior vertical organic farms.

They have built a full-scale mockup of the ramp construction.
The numbers continue to stagger. In one building, there will be accommodation for 4450 families in apartments ranging from 645 SF to 5,000 SF, 250 hotel rooms, 100,000 SF of school, hospital and office space, totalling over eleven million square feet. The building footprint is only 10% of the site; the rest is open parkland.

There's more: The building is designed to be earthquake resistant to Magnitude 9, and to a 3 hour fire resistance rating, provided by ceramics installed around the structure. 16,000 part time and 3,000 full time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months. The Broad system is based on prefabricated floor panels that ship with everything need to go 3D packed along with it, so they are not shipping a lot of air. It all just bolts together.


Video above: Promotional film of One Building, One City. From (http://youtu.be/MvX40RHW81w).

BSC claims that by building this way, they eliminate construction waste, lost time managing trades, keep tight cost control and can build at a cost 50% to 60% less than conventional construction.

The design is based on the "bundled tube" structure, first demonstrated in the Sears (now Willis) tower and also used in the Burj Khalifa. BSC notes that "In the past, Super Tall Buildings were form-obsessed, whereas Sky City is a firm pyramidal structure."- they are obsessed with engineering, not style.

In a previous post, commenters suggested that this was too big an engineering challenge, but "Over a hundred tests of physical strength & fire resistance were performed, and wind tunnel tests were conducted by three research institutions.... [The design] completed over 10 sessions of government assembled expert group reviews."

This is going to be a controversial vision of sustainability; Putting 30,000 people in a single building is a hard sell. It is not the bucolic version of green living that most people think of. It certainly is a lot higher than what I have called the Goldilocks Density.
But it is the logical extension of the Edward Glaeser / David Owen thesis that the way to go green is to go up, reducing the amount of land used per person and the distances people travel. Lisa Rochon wrote about the Aqua Tower In Chicago:

[Architect Jeanne Gang] notes that Aqua puts about 750 households on a third of an acre, allowing people to walk from their home to their jobs and to culture and recreation. “The most important thing we can do for the environment is live in compact cities with mass transit,” argues Gang, “that reduce the reliance on the car and other resources.”

This building puts 4,450 households on two acres and it is actually designed with energy conservation in mind. By going huge they are getting tremendous manufacturing efficiencies; by going vertical they get the kind of repetition that makes it affordable. By going half a mile high and 220 stories they are going to get noticed.

It is a vision of sustainability that people in a crowded world are going to have to get used to.


.

Re-election contingent on GMO vote

 SUBHEAD: Pledge your vote to council members who support the Bill. Vote against the others.

By Linda Pascatore on 24 June 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/06/re-election-contingent-on-gmo-vote.html)


Image above: The Kauai County Council in June 2013. L to R - Mel Raposo, JoAnn A. Yukimura, Gary L. Hooser, Jay Furfaro, Ross Kagawa, Nadine K. Nakamura, Tim Bynum. From (http://www.kauai.gov/default.aspx?tabid=88).

When writing testimony to support Gary Hooser's GMO / Pesticide Bill, I decided on a strategy that I would like to share with you. I decided to pledge my future vote to all council members who vote for the Bill, and to deny my future vote to any member who opposes his Bill.

Gary's Bill gives authority to the county to govern the use of pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms. It calls for mandatory disclosure to the public on the use of pesticides and the presence of GMO crops. It also calls for a halt to experimental open field testing of GMOs or pesticides, and a moratorium on expansion of GMO's on the island until further study of environmental impacts and development of a permitting process. The bill gives the county authority to impose penalties for violations.

My letter to the council follows:

To: counciltestimony@kauai.gov

Dear Council Member,

I ask that you support proposed ordinance Bill 2491, Gary Hooser's GMO / Pesticide Regulatory Bill.

This Bill is so needed, and this issue is so important to me, that:

I pledge to vote for and support any council member that votes for this bill, in all future elections.

I pledge to vote against and oppose any council member that votes against this bill, in all future elections.


Needless to say, Gary Hooser now has my lifetime vote for any office he seeks in the future.

I have never made this sort of pledge before, but this issue is just that crucial to me and to Kauai. I live on the west side of Kauai, where Syngenta, Pioneer, DOW Agri-genetics, and Kauai Coffee are all located. These companies are responsible for 99 percent of the restricted pesticides used on Kauai, threatening the health and safety of all Westside residents.

Please protect the people of Kauai, and vote for Bill 2491!


Sincerely Yours,

Linda Pascatore

Email sent to Council Services Staff as testimony:
CouncilTestimony@kauai.gov

For non=testimony email messages to council members:
Jay Furfaro, Council Chair (JFurfaro@kauai.gov)
Nadine K. Nakamura, Council Vice Chair (nnakamura@kauai.gov)
Tim Bynum, Councilmember (tbynum@kauai.gov)
Gary L. Hooser, Councilmember (ghooser@kauai.gov)
Ross Kagawa, Councilmember (rkagawa@kauai.gov)
Mel Rapozo, Councilmember (mfrapozo@kauai.gov)
JoAnn A. Yukimura, Councilmember (jyukimura@kauai.gov)


For non-testimony email messages sent to all Council members:
Councilmembers@kauai.gov

For a PDF of Gary Hooser's proposed bill 2491 click here:

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: My Testimony on GMO Bill 2491 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pass Pesticide Bill - Testify today! 6/23/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser asks for GMO Bill support 6/23/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser's GMO Bill 6/22/13

.

Pass Pesticide Bill -Testify today!

SUBHEAD: Sample written testimony supporting Gary Hooser's GMOO / Pesticide Bill 2491.

By Phoebe Eng on 23 June 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/06/pass-pesticide-bill-testify-today.html)


Image above: Kauai comes out against GMO in Hawaii in Poipu. From (http://www.runningthecountry.com/hawaiians-fight-for-their-land-and-lives-against-biotechnology/#.Uci4Yuuihwn).

Aloha friends,

The Kauai County Council will review Bill 2491 this week, which requires disclosure from the heaviest users of pesticides to report on their pesticide use. It also requires buffer zones and other measures that can protect your children and families from pesticide drift.

If you want this Bill to pass, please send in your testimony as soon as you can today and tomorrow in time for Wednesday's first hearing! The first meeting of the County Council to discuss this bill is Wednesday, June 26. We need a strong west side voice, at least in emails, to show how much we care about the pesticide issue. To pass this bill, the Council needs to know that you want them to help protect your children's health and the future of our island.

Here's suggested wording, below, if you only have a few minutes. Feel free to cut and paste. The blue text can be replaced with your own information and words. If you have more time, you can write your own letter, use your own voice and tell your own story. The Council members want to hear from you! Send your letter to: CouncilTestimony@Kauai.gov

Here's a website that describes the bill, with facts about pesticides and children's health, and information about the County Bill 2491.

www.StopPoisoningParadise.org

Feel free to let me know if and when you send your letter!

Thanks much,

Phoebe

SAMPLE TESTIMONY BELOW

[Your Name]
[Your City]
[Your Zip Code]

Re: Strong SUPPORT for Bill 2491. Please vote YES on this Bill.

Aloha Kaua'i County Council Members Furfaro, Yukimura, Rapozo, Hooser, Bynum, Nakamura and Kagawa:

I strongly support Bill 2491 Relating to Pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms and urge you to vote YES to this legislation.

I am a [describe your job, whether you are a parent, grandparent, etc.] and am very concerned about the large-scale use of restricted use pesticides on Kaua'i. The provisions of Bill 2491 help protect that residents of Kaua'i from the real but hidden impacts of continuous pesticide spraying, including short and longterm health impacts, and degradation to the land and water.

[In 3 sentences or less, tell the Council members why you believe that people have a Right to Know what, when,and where pesticides are sprayed, and/or why there should be buffer zones between schools/homes, and the GMO fields. If you live near a GMO field, witnessed dust storms in the fields, or experience breathing or other health problems, describe them. If your child experiences nosebleeds or other effects after spraying, please describe and let the Council know that you want to know what is being sprayed.]

I urge you to protect our children, communities, and natural resources from the harms of hazardous “restricted use” pesticides by the heaviest users on our island.

[Optional- Feel free to include or delete any part of this section]
In Generations In Jeopardy: How Pesticides are Undermining our Children's Health and Intelligence (2013, Kristen Schafer and Emily Marquez: Pesticide Action Network) reports that:

Neurotoxic pesticides are clearly implicated as contributors to the rising rates of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, widespread declines in IQ and other measures of cognitive function.

Pesticide exposure contributes to a number of increasingly common health outcomes for children, including cancer, birth defects and early puberty. Evidence of links to certain childhood cancers is particularly strong.

Emerging science suggests that pesticides may be important contributors to the current epidemic of childhood asthma, obesity and diabetes.

Extremely low levels of pesticide exposure can cause significant health harms, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood.

Kaua’i people have a right to know:
What pesticides are being used, where and when they are being used and how much is being used;
What impacts on our environment and our health are occurring, or are likely to occur, as a result of pesticides being applied by the large industrial agribusinesses on our island;
The potential impacts of their pesticides drifting into our schoolyards, residences, waters and recreational spaces; and
What GMOs are being grown on our island and where they are being grown.
I support the banning of open air GMO field testing, along with a thorough and independent study of the local impacts of GMO crop production on our island.

And I support our island’s local farmers who practice malama `aina principles and work with respect for the life of our island’s land, its water and the food security of our island’s people.

Please do the same by casting your YES vote to protect the children and families of Kaua'i from health-harming pesticides.

Mahalo nui,
[name]

Email sent to Council Services Staff as testimony:
CouncilTestimony@kauai.gov

For non-testimony email messages to council members:
Jay Furfaro, Council Chair (JFurfaro@kauai.gov)
Nadine K. Nakamura, Council Vice Chair (nnakamura@kauai.gov)
Tim Bynum, Councilmember (tbynum@kauai.gov)
Gary L. Hooser, Councilmember (ghooser@kauai.gov)
Ross Kagawa, Councilmember (rkagawa@kauai.gov)
Mel Rapozo, Councilmember (mfrapozo@kauai.gov)
JoAnn A. Yukimura, Councilmember (jyukimura@kauai.gov)

For non-testimony email messages sent to all Council members:
Councilmembers@kauai.gov

For a PDF of Gary Hooser's proposed bill 2491 click here:

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Re-election Contingent on GMO Vote 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: My testimony on GMO Bill 2491 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser Asks for GMO Support 6/23/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser's GMO Bill 6/22/13

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My testimony on GMO Bill 2491

SUBHEAD: I will not vote in the future for any Kauai Council Member that does not support Bill 2491.

By Juan Wilson on 24 June 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/06/my-testimony-on-gmo-bill-2491.html)


Image above: Trouble in the US Corn Belt. From (http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2010/09/transfer-of-transgenic-crop-toxins-to-aquatic-ecosystems-potentially-widespread-in-the-industrial-corn-belt-of-the-u-s/).

This is my testimony on Gary Hooser's GMO Bill 2491:

Aloha County Council Members;

I believe that Gary Hooser's proposed Bill 2491 for the regulation of GMO agriculture is the most important legislation that has been before the  Kauai County Council in the last decade. And I urge you to support it.

This legislation, taken together,  will impact the secretive and cavalier approach these companies have demonstrated in their operations here. They share the autocratic and economic domination over Hawaii of their forebearers - the plantation owners.

This legislation redefines our understanding of what is good for Kauai. And, if passed, this legislation will lookout for the interests of the aina and health of the people of Kauai by these big chemical corporations operations.

It will send a signal from the people at the fountainhead of this small farm smothering technology.

Why should you pass this legislation?

Here are three reasons.

1) Don't let Kauai be the petri dish for the profiteering of the biggest chemical companies in the world.
Besides the security, climate and water available on Kauai, one vital reason the GMO companies want to conduct open field genetic modification testing here is that if an experiment with genetic mutations, or applied pesticide tests, goes horribly wrong -  the damage will be confined to Kauai. That damage has no known bounds other than the isolation of our island. Thanks so much Syngenta, BASF, Dupont Pioneer, Dow Agrogenetics, Monsanto Dekalb.

2) We need to convert what were sugarcane operations on Kauai into organic, sustainable sources of food for Hawaii.
The GMO companies are chemical companies -  not food companies. Their reason to be in the GMO game is to force farmers to use their seed product exclusively (through patents) and without farmer's ability to resort to their own seeds. These chemical companies want to sell fertilizers; insecticides, herbicides. etc. These are all petroleum based products that are used by big-ag mono-crop operations that are not sustainable, will not feed the world or, for that matter, feed Kauai.

3) The health effects are either unknown or worrisome. Neither is good. We need to abandon "Soylent Yellow".
Current GMO crop procedures are destroying the topsoil of the entire Mississippi watershed "bread basket". The nitrogen runoff is destroying the life in Gulf of Mexico and the region's seafood industry. The GMO corn crops are used to produce high-fructose-corn-syrup (HFCS) that is used to sweeten everything from Coke to hotdogs.That has a major negative impact on the obesity of children and the development of diabetes. This is a pandemic problem for the keiki of Hawaii - particularly the poorest among us.  Virtually all industrial meat products (beef, pork, chicken and even fish) are produced by feeding them GMO corn. Your cats, dogs and children are now grown on GMO corn.

I will not vote in the future for any Kauai Council Member that does not support Bill 2491.

Thank you for supporting Gary Hooser's effort!


Juan Wilson - Architect
Publisher of Island Breath
Hanapepe Valley
Kauai, Hawaii

Email sent to Council Services Staff as testimony:
CouncilTestimony@kauai.gov

For non=testimony email messages to council members:
Jay Furfaro, Council Chair (JFurfaro@kauai.gov)
Nadine K. Nakamura, Council Vice Chair (nnakamura@kauai.gov)
Tim Bynum, Councilmember (tbynum@kauai.gov)
Gary L. Hooser, Councilmember (ghooser@kauai.gov)
Ross Kagawa, Councilmember (rkagawa@kauai.gov)
Mel Rapozo, Councilmember (mfrapozo@kauai.gov)
JoAnn A. Yukimura, Councilmember (jyukimura@kauai.gov)


For non-testimony email messages sent to all Council members:
Councilmembers@kauai.gov

For a PDF of Gary Hooser's proposed bill 2491 click here:
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Re-election contingent on GMO vote 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: My Testimony on GMO Bill 2491 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pass Pesticide Bill - Testify today! 6/23/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser asks for GMO Bill support 6/23/13

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Hoosier asks for GMO Bill support

SOURCE: Brad Parsons (mauibrad@hotmail.com)

SUBHEAD: Submit testimony for Bill 2491 relating to Pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms.

By Gary Hooser on 23 June 2013 in Island Breath-
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/06/hoosier-asks-for-gmo-bill-support.html)


Image above: Scene from Maui rally during May's statewide (and worldwide) demonstrations against GMOs. From (http://mauinow.com/2013/03/23/photos-maui-rally-against-gmo-draws-strong-turnout/).

Letter from Gary Hooser:

Aloha Friends,

I need your help on this one. 

The attached proposed ordinance Bill 2491 Relating to Pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms is self explanatory and The Garden Island article linked below also explains the proposal clearly. 

Our community deserves the right to know what impacts the GMO industry and the related intensive pesticide use is having on our community. The ordinance does not ban GMO's and it does not impact small farmers at all. Bill 2491 is a reasonable attempt at informing and protecting our communities health and natural environment. 

I don't often send out mass emails asking for help but I am today because this is important and to be successful the broader community is going to need to actively engage the issue - at the minimum by sending in supportive testimony. 

Every email and every testimony is very important. 

Please help pass the word to friends and family and ask those that share our values to submit email testimony ASAP prior to the Wednesday June 26 Council meeting.
Attached in case you would like to see the detail, is a copy of the proposed ordinance Bill 2491.

Written testimony supporting Bill 2491 should be sent as soon as possible to counciltestimony@kauai.gov

If anyone would like to become familiar with the basics of the Bill, a copy of The Garden Island newspaper article is here http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/hooser-introduces-gmo-bill/article_b86ae096-da42-11e2-a764-0019bb2963f4.html
Whether testimony is given in person on Wednesday or not, sending in email testimony early is important. 

As you are fully aware, the opposing forces are formidable and though this Bill represents a reasonable approach to the issue, the large agribusiness operations will automatically fight its passage. 

Thank you so, so much for your ongoing help with this. We are going to need to push very hard to make this happen. 

All the best. gh

Gary Hooser
Phone: 808-652-4279

Gary Hooser's Blog http://garyhooser.wordpress.com/

Read "It's Not About Eating The Corn"
My take on GMO labeling and regulation
http://garyhooser.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/its-not-about-eating-the-corn/

For testimony sent to Council:
CouncilTestimony@kauai.gov

For non-testimony email messages to council members:
Jay Furfaro, Council Chair (JFurfaro@kauai.gov)
Nadine K. Nakamura, Council Vice Chair (nnakamura@kauai.gov)
Tim Bynum, Councilmember (tbynum@kauai.gov)
Gary L. Hooser, Councilmember (ghooser@kauai.gov)
Ross Kagawa, Councilmember (rkagawa@kauai.gov)
Mel Rapozo, Councilmember (mfrapozo@kauai.gov)
JoAnn A. Yukimura, Councilmember (jyukimura@kauai.gov)

For non-testimony email messages sent to all Council members:
Councilmembers@kauai.gov

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Re-election Contingent on GMO Vote 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: My testimony on GMO Bill 2491 6/24/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pass Pesticide Bill - Testify today! 6/23/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser's GMO Bill 6/22/13.

Mid Year Digest

SUBHEAD: Young people, harken: prepare for careers in agriculture and activities that support it.

By James Kunstler on 24 June 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/mid-year-digest/)


Image above: Detail of map of the Imperial Federation of the British Empire illustrated by Walter Crane in 1886. From (http://ancientworldmaps.blogspot.com/2011/02/world-map-19th-century.html).

Wondering why the money world got its knickers in a twist last week? The answer is simple: the global economy is breaking apart and its constituent major players are doing face-plants on the downhill slope of a no-longer-cheap-oil way of life.  Let’s look at them case by case.

The USA slogs deeper into paralysis and decay in a collective mental fog of disbelief that its own exceptionalism can’t overcome the laws of thermodynamics. This general malaise precipitates into a range of specific quandaries. The so-called economy depends on financialization, since it is no longer based on manufacturing things of value. 

The financialization depends on housing, that is, a particular kind of housing: suburban sprawl housing (and its commercial accessories, the strip malls, the box stores, the burger shacks, etc.). Gasoline is now too expensive to run the suburban living arrangement. It will remain marginally unaffordable. Even if the price of oil goes down, it will be because citizens of the USA will not have enough money to buy it. Lesson: the suburban project is over, along with the economy it drove in on.

But so is the mega-city project, the giant metroplex of skyscrapers. So, don’t suppose that we can transform the production house-building industry into an apartment-building industry. The end of cheap oil also means we can’t run cities at the 20^th century scale. That includes the scale of the buildings as well as the aggregate scale of the whole urban organism. Nobody gets this. For one thing, there will be far fewer jobs in anything connected to financialization because that “industry” is imploding. 

The recent action around the Federal Reserve illustrates this. When chairman Bernanke’s lips quivered last week, the financial markets had a grand mal seizure. He floated the notion that his organization might “taper” their purchases of US government issued debt and mortgage-backed securities — the latter being mostly bundled debt originated by government-sponsored entities and agencies. That’s the “money” that supports the suburban sprawl industry.

If the Fed were to reduce its purchases of this debt paper, nobody else would buy it. The reason the Fed buys the quantity it does in the first place ($85 billion-a-month) is that nobody else would touch it at the offered zero interest rates. The US Treasury and the mortgage bundlers could only sell the stuff if they paid higher interest rates. 

But the US government would choke to death on higher interest rates because its aggregate debt is so huge and the scheduled interest payments so gigantic that a one percent increase would destroy even the fantasy of economic equilibrium.

Apart from that unhappy equation, entropy never sleeps. Everything in America except the Apple stores and a handful of big banks is falling apart — especially the human habitat and households. Suburbia will only lose value and utility. Big cities will have to get smaller (ouch!). Tar sands, shale oil and shale gas will not ride to the rescue (they cost too much to get out of the ground). 

The entire declension of government from federal to state to local will be too broke to fix the roads and make “transfer payments” to idle, indigent citizens. This populace will lose faith in their institutions… and disorder will eventually resolve in a new and very different disposition of things on-the-ground. If we’re lucky, this will not include cruel despotic leadership and war.

If the “taper” talk is empty rhetoric, and the Fed continues sopping up issued debt, it will eventually destroy the credibility of its issued money. That is just another way of going broke, though it might beat a shorter path to the general loss of legitimacy of governments and other institutions.

Young people, harken: prepare for careers in agriculture and activities that support it. Consider moving to small towns in parts of the country where farming is possible and get ready to rebuild a very different economy.  Also, consider repudiating your college debt en masse, since the fantasy of repayment is but another mental shackle holding you back from your future.

As for the other parts of the global economy, a digest:

Europe doesn’t have enough oil and gas to run itself. Its suppliers (Russia, various Islamic states) are all basically hostile to it. As the late, great Tony Soprano might say, “end of story.” Europe has been playing financial pocket pool with itself for five years with credibility ebbing. Soon Europe will descend into painful economic re-set. Its era as the go-to theme park of advanced civilization is ending. Go there while it’s still possible and take some snapshots of what comfort and artistry used to look like.

China is imploding under the weight of its half-assed crony command economy and banking system. Nice try. Cookie fortune says, “Industrial era entered too late in game.” All else there is desperation: e.g. the idea of moving hundreds of millions of peasants into new cities. As Tony would say, “Fuggeddabowdit.” They’re better off growing bok choy en situ. Anyway, no one should assume that China can remain politically stable. Let’s hope that its economic and political crack-up doesn’t transmute into war.

Russia’s oil production is in permanent decline. It has a lot, but it gets most of its income from selling it to other people. Hence, Vlad Putin’s notion of finding something else to base Russia’s economy on. Like…what? I don’t think they’re going to replace China in making salad shooters.

Farming would be the way to go, and Vlad’s government is hoping that global warming improves Russia’s prospects for doing more of that. In any case, Russia might benefit in the long term by not selling off all of its oil and gas — though Western Europe would surely suffer from that decision. On the plus side, Russia’s government is not crippled by idiot squabbles over abortion, gay marriage, and the Bible in schools.

Japan. Sorry to repeat myself. Going medieval. They have no oil and gas. (Cue Tony Soprano again.) In the event, Japan’s financial hara-kiri will drag down the rest of the world’s banking system — or at least hasten the damage already self-inflicted elsewhere around the globe. I’m also informed that much of the essential computer chip fabrication in the world still happens in Japan, and that will go away, too, as the Japanese engine seizes, smokes, and expels its final belch of CO2.
     
What else is there? 

South America? Think: spreading jungle (or desert, take your pick). 

Canada? There’s an idea. Maybe Labrador becomes the new Hamptons? Second biggest national land mass… 30 million people (2 percent of China’s population). 

Only one drawback: the view to the south.

.

The Lies of Empire

SOURCE: Jonathan Jay (jjkauai@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Don’t believe a word they say – Washington is the sugardaddy of international jihadism.

By Glen Ford on 20 June 2013 for Global Research -
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-lies-of-empire-dont-believe-a-word-they-say-washington-the-godfather-of-international-jihadism/5339820)


Image above: Bush/Obama - Same war policy - different faces. From (http://ahmedtime.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/war-in-afghanistan/).

The U.S. reprises Iraq, inventing a WMD threat from Syria. The FBI concocts home-grown terror through stings, while the NSA claims it has secretly saved many lives. “Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?” And, isn’t the U.S. arming and funding the same jihadists they are supposed to be listening for on our telephones?

The rulers would have you believe that the world is becoming more complex and dangerous all the time, compelling the United States to abandon previous (and largely fictional) norms of domestic and international legality in order to preserve civilization. In truth, what they are desperately seeking to maintain is the global dominance of U.S. and European finance capital and the racist world order from which it sprang.

The contradictions of centuries have ripened, overwhelming the capacity of the “West” to contain the new forces abroad in the world. Therefore, there must be endless, unconstrained war – endless, in the sense that it is a last ditch battle to fend off the end of imperialism, and unconstrained, in that the imperialists recognize no legal or moral boundaries to their use of military force, their only remaining advantage.

To mask these simple truths, the U.S. and its corporate propaganda services invent counter-realities, scenarios of impending doomsdays filled with super-villains and more armies of darkness than J.R.R. Tolkien could ever imagine. Indeed, nothing is left to the imagination, lest the people’s minds wander into the realm of truth or stumble upon a realization of their own self-interest, which is quite different than the destinies of Wall Street or the Project for a New American Century (updated, Obama “humanitarian” version). It is a war of caricatures.

Saddam “must go” – and so he went, along with a million other Iraqis. Gaddafi “must go” – and he soon departed (“We came, we saw, he died,” quipped Hillary), along with tens of thousands of Black Libyans marked for extermination. “Assad must go” – but he hasn’t left yet, requiring the U.S. and its allies to increase the arms flow to jihadist armies whose mottos translate roughly as “the western infidels must also go…next.”

Afghanistan’s Soviet-aligned government was the first on the U.S. “must go” list to be toppled by the jihadist international network created as a joint venture of the Americans, Saudis and Pakistanis, in the early Eighties – a network whose very existence now requires that Constitutional law “must go” in the American homeland.

Naturally, in order to facilitate all these exits of governments of sovereign states, international law, as we have known it “must go.” In its place is substituted the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention or “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a rehash of the “White Man’s Burden” designed to nullify smaller powers’ rights to national sovereignty at the whim of the superpower.

The entire continent of Africa has fallen under the R2P umbrella (without ever having fully emerged from the colonial sphere – but, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?). Somalia achieved a brief period of peace, in 2006, under a broadly based Islamic Courts regime that had defeated an array of warlords backed by the U.S. Washington struck back late that year through its client state, Ethiopia.

The Americans invoked both the Islamist enemy and “Responsibility to Protect” to justify an invasion that plunged Somalia into what UN observers called “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur.” Eventually, the U.S. enlisted the African Union, itself, as the nominal authority in a CIA-led Somalia mission that has militarized the whole Horn of Africa.

U.S. proxies set off inter-communal bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994, a conflagration that served as pretext for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and the loss of six million lives – all under the protection, funding and guidance of a succession of U.S. administrations in mock atonement for the much smaller “genocide” in Rwanda.

President Obama sent Special Forces on permanent duty to the region in search of another caricature, Joseph Kony, whose only central casting defect is his rabid Christianity but whose convenient presence in the bush justifies stationing Green Berets in Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

Muammar Gaddafi’s exorcism in Libya energized jihadists all across the northern tier of Africa, as far as northern Nigeria, giving a green light to a French colonial renaissance and further expansion of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Only five years after its official inception, AFRICOM reigns supreme on the continent, with ties to the militaries of all but two African countries: the nemesis states Eritrea and Zimbabwe. (They “must go,” eventually.)

New age Euro-American law holds sway over Africa in the form of the International Criminal Court. The Court’s dockets are reserved for Africans, whose supposed civilizational deficits monopolize the global judiciary’s resources. This, too, is R2P, in robes.

Back in Syria, the reluctant domino, blood samples taken from alleged victims of chemical weapons are sent to the Americans by jihadists in their employ to prove that Assad really, really, must go. Obama announces that he is going to do what he has actually been doing for a very long time: send weapons to the “rebels.” The Washington Post, forgetting its duty to follow the administration’s scripted timelines, reports that the decision to go public about arms transfers to jihadists was made two weeks before the “proof” arrived.

The lies become jumbled and are quickly superseded by new fictions to justify no-fly, but the targeted caricatures remain front and center, to be hooted and hollered over, once dead. It is only the lies that make these situations seem complex: the lies that cover up multiple U.S. genocides in Africa, to paint a canvas of humanitarian concern, when the simple truth is that the Americans and Europeans have established military dominion over the continent for their own greedy purposes.

The lies that have attempted to camouflage a succession of brazen aggressions against unoffending secular Arab governments in order to remove any obstacles to U.S. domination of North Africa and the Near East. And, the lie that has become central to the U.S. global offensive since 9/11: that the U.S. is engaged in a global war against armed jihadists. In fact, the jihadists are American-contracted foot soldiers in an Arab world in which the U.S. is hated by the people at-large.

Washington was the Godfather of international jihadism, its sugar daddy since at least the early Eighties in Afghanistan – and now, once again quite openly so in Syria as in Libya, at least for the time being.

The simple truth is, the U.S. is at war for continued hegemony over the planet, for the preservation of the imperial system and its finance capitalist rulers. In such a war, everyone, everywhere is a potential enemy, including the home population.

That’s why Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and, now, Edward Snowden are considered so dangerous; because they undermine popular consent for the government’s lies-based policies. The administration has sent its operatives to Capital Hill and all the corporate pseudo-journalistic outlets to explain how its mega-data mining of phones and the Internet has prevented “potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11,” including at least 10 “homeland-based threats,” as mouthed by National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander. The details are, of course, secret.

However, what we do know about U.S. domestic “terror” spying is enough to dismiss the whole premise for the NSA’s vast algorithmic enterprises. The actual “terrorist” threat on U.S. soil is clearly relatively slight. Otherwise, why would the FBI have to manufacture homegrown jihadists by staging elaborate stings of homeless Black men in Miami who couldn’t put together bus fare to Chicago, much less bomb the Sears tower?

Why must they entice and entrap marginal people with no capacity for clandestine warfare, and no previous inclination, into schemes to bomb synagogues and shoot down military aircraft, as in Newburgh, New York? Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?

If the FBI, with NSA assistance, is discovering significant numbers of real terrorists, wouldn’t we be watching a corresponding number of triumphal perp-walks? Of course we would. The only logical conclusion is that terror is a near-negligible domestic threat, wholly unsuited to the NSA’s full-spectrum spying on virtually every American.

So, what are they looking for? Patterns. Patterns of thought and behavior that algorithmically reveal the existence of cohorts of people that might, as a group, or a living network, create problems for the State in the future. People who do not necessarily know each other, but whose patterns of life make them potentially problematic to the rulers, possibly in some future crisis, or some future manufactured crisis. A propensity to dissent, for example.

The size of these suspect cohorts, these pattern-based groups, can be as large or small as the defining criteria inputted by the programmer. So, what kind of Americans would the programmers be interested in?

Ask Edward Snowden. He’s the only one talking.
.

This is an Extraordinary Time

SUBHEAD: We have two economies - the simulacrum one of stocks soaring, and the real one of earnings and hours-worked plummeting.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 22 June 2013 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/this-is-extraordinary-time.html)


Image above: Illustration of for article on Casino Banking in The Freeman. From (http://www.lovingtruthbooks.com/Res.aspx?xr=t&Sku=2859).

It's as if we have two economies - the simulacrum one of stocks soaring and the real one of earnings and hours worked plummeting.

It is difficult to justify the feeling that we are living in an extraordinary moment in time, for the fundamental reason that it's impossible to accurately assess the present in a historical context.

Extraordinary moments are most easily marked by dramatic events such as declarations of war or election results; lacking such a visible demarcation, what sets this month of 2013 apart from any other month since the Lehman Brothers' collapse in 2008?

It seems to me that the ordinariness of June 2013 is masking its true nature as a turning point. Humans soon habituate to whatever conditions they inhabit, and this adaptive trait robs us of the ability to discern just how extraordinary the situation has become.

In my 59-year lifetime, the dramatic, this-is-history-happening moments are obvious: the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, and so on. Other tidal changes developed over a period of months or years: Watergate, which ballooned from a minor break-in to a constitutional crisis, is a good example. So is the financial meltdown of 2008, which actually began back in 2001 when the Federal Reserve chose a policy of super-low interest rates and super-abundant liquidity to lessen the post-dot-com recession.

I have an unavoidable sense that May-June 2013 is the high water mark of the political/financial response to the global financial meltdown of 2008. Nothing systemic has changed in the five years; the status quo financial and political systems have made cosmetic reforms, but the power structures have not changed at all.

The status quo has simply ramped up its traditional policies: since lowering interest rates didn't spark a strong recovery, then lower rates to zero, and so on: more money creation, more credit creation, more bond purchases, more subsidies for housing, more transfers of private debt to the public ledger--more of what has failed spectacularly.

That's what marks June 2013 as extraordinary: the Powers That Be have gone all-in. If their policies fail to ignite a self-sustaining recovery in the real economy, there are no policy options left.

Those who don't follow finance might not have noticed the extraordinary nature of recent financial events: Japan's stock market rose by 75% since December before reversing sharply, the U.S. S&P 500 climbed 24% in 2013, gold crashed by over $200 in a matter of hours, and the Japanese yen has lost a quarter of its value (in U.S. dollars) in a matter of months.

None of this makes sense in terms of the real economy: U.S. corporations didn't suddenly become 25% more profitable; Japan's economy did not expand by 75% in five months, and none of the fundamentals in the value of gold suddenly changed overnight.

These rapid, gargantuan fluctuations are disconnected from the real economy. This in itself is extraordinary. The financial press explains these bubble-like advances and collapses in terms that only make sense to financiers: the yen-dollar pair, the yen carry trade, etc.

That complex, abstract financier policies and trading strategies now dominate stocks, bonds and precious metals is also extraordinary.

I have endeavored to understand the fundamentals behind these wild fluctuations proposed by the media, and have concluded none of it makes any sense in conventional economic terms. To mention just one example: gold has traditionally been viewed as a hedge against inflation. Gold's collapse is being attributed to lower expectations of inflation. OK, so there's no inflation, ergo, the global economy is in slow-growth/no-growth mode, hence no inflation. Then what is powering global stocks higher? We're told "an improving global economy" is the driving force, but the data on this supposed recovery is mixed at best.

Some observers claim gold dropped because the yen dropped and the U.S. dollar strengthened, but a glance at the 10-year chart of gold and the dollar quickly disproves any correlation: gold rose when the dollar dropped and when it rose.

This is another extraordinary thing about the present: none of these moves make any sense. Pundits and analysts are seeking explanations after the fact, postulating correlations as causes with little historical backing. It's as if the financial media is incapable of confessing none of this makes sense, and instead the media piles one complex explanation on top of another to justify what is clearly an extraordinary disconnect between the real economy and asset valuations.

Bottom line: even if the global economy is improving (and there is ample evidence that data is being juiced or manipulated), it isn't improving enough to justify stocks rising by 25% to 75% in a matter of months.

Real estate is also back in bubble territory, in those markets with plentiful capital and limited inventory: we're back to bidding wars and dozens of people competing for the right to buy an ordinary home.

The bond prices of fatally insolvent European governments have fallen, as if these economies have suddenly been restored to health and fast growth by European Central Bank (ECB) intervention. European stock markets are roaring higher as well. Neither makes any sense in terms of traditional risk-pricing, price-earnings ratios and so on.

We are living in an extraordinary global financial experiment, in which financier tricks (zero interest rates and massive injections of credit and liquidity) have been pushed to their red-line limit in the hopes that these extraordinary measures will finally, after five long years, trigger a self-sustaining expansion of the real economy.

Those in charge of the experiment are constantly reassuring us it has already succeeded. I think the data shows the experiment is in the final blow-off stage in which the beaker full of toxic ingredients is bubbling with dangerous vigor.

There is one last extraordinary feature of this time: the data "proving" the experiment is successful is self-referential: drop interest rates to zero and subsidize housing, and voila, you get a surge in building permits. Take one full-time job and turn it into 1.5 part-time jobs, and voila, the unemployment rate declines and the number of jobs increases.

Then take these metrics (higher permits and jobs), weigh them heavily in your measure of leading indicators, and then declare the leading indicators "prove" the recovery is self-sustaining.

All this leads to a question: what would happen to the economy if all the financier tricks were stopped, and the price of risk, credit, assets, etc. were discovered by the marketplace?

It's as if we have two economies: the simulacrum one of stocks rising 75% in a few months, and the real one of household earnings (down) and hours worked (down). Eventually these two economies will have to merge into one. I sense 2013 will be the critical year when the schizophrenia is resolved one way or the other.

---

Financialization, Debtocracy, Diminishing ReturnsSUBHEAD: Every asset (housing, bonds and stocks) that depends on cheap  abundant credit is doomed.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 20 June 2013 for Of Two Minds - 
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/every-asset-that-depends-on-cheap.html)

About a month ago I asked What If Stocks, Bonds and Housing All Go Down Together? (May 24, 2013). Why would such an outrageous thought even occur to me?

Four words: financialization, debtocracy, diminishing returns. The entire global economy, developed and developing nations alike, is now dependent on cheap, abundant credit for everything: for "growth," for asset inflation, and ultimately for central state deficit spending, which props up all the cartels, rentier arrangements, fiefdoms and armies of toadies, lackeys, apparatchiks and embezzlers that suck off the Status Quo.

I have long endeavored to explain the harsh reality of neofeudal, neocolonial financialization: Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012) and the neofeudal debtocracy that depends on low yields (interest rates) to enable enormous deficit spending: Why Krugman and the Keynesians Are Lackeys for the Neofeudal Debtocracy (April 24, 2013).

The wheels fall off the entire financialized debtocracy wagon once yields rise.There's nothing mysterious about this:

1. As interest rates/yields rise, all the existing bonds paying next to nothing plummet in market value

2. As mortgage rates rise, there's nobody left who can afford Housing Bubble 2.0 prices, so home prices fall off a cliff

3. Once you can get 5+% yield on cash again, few people are willing to risk capital in the equities markets in the hopes that they can earn more than 5% yield before the next crash wipes out 40% of their equity

4. As asset classes decline, lenders are wary of loaning money against these assets; if the collateral for the loan (real estate, bonds, stocks, etc.) are in a waterfall decline, no sane lender will risk capital on a bet that the collateral will be sufficient to cover losses should the borrower default.

Let's take a look at four charts about housing and household net worth. For the middle class, the home remains the key asset, so housing and household net worth are correlated.

Since 1970 mortgage rates  rates were pushed to 17+% to snuff inflation in the early 1980s, and they've dropped over the past 30 years to historic lows: the rate for a fixed-rate 30-year conventional mortgage was about 3.5% a few weeks ago. It has now risen above 4%.

In the golden age of growth from 1991 to 2002, mortgages rates bounced between about 7% and 9%. The band from 1970 to 1979 was about 7.5% to 10%.

In other words, in eras of strong growth and low inflation, mortgage rates have been around 7% to 9%. So what happens to the monthly payments when the mortgage rate doubles from 4% to 8%? The monthly payments rise by about 54%. And what happens to the price of houses when rates double? They fall to the point that households borrowing money at 7.5% - 8% can afford to buy a house, i.e. a price much lower than today's Housing Bubble 2.0 prices.

If mortgage debt had expanded at the previous rate, total debt would be closer to $5 trillion instead of $10 trillion.

When debt becomes cheap and abundant: debt rises faster than wages or assets.

But hasn't household wealth increased mightily in the past decades? Here is a chart that plots the relationship of household net worth and total credit owed, i.e. debt:

Household wealth may be rising, but what this chart reveals is debt is rising even faster--that's why the line is declining. Put another way, every dollar of new debt is generating less and less wealth.

You might think that The Federal Reserve's policy of making credit cheap and abundant would goose people to consume and invest more money. Alas, the velocity of money is hitting historic lows: the Fed may be creating credit but people and enterprises aren't putting that money into circulation.

It's called diminishing returns: every dollar of debt creates interest payments, but it's no longer doing households or enterprises any good. The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo: Diminishing Returns (May 1, 2013).

That's why all asset classes that depend on cheap, abundant credit are doomed: once yields/rates rise, the valuations of those assets implode. And once valuations implode, there's not enough collateral left to support the loans used buy all those cheap-credit-inflated assets. So the financial system also implodes.

.

Five Stonking Crashes

SUBHEAD: The realization is seeping through that, there is no such thing as a recovery anywhere in the western world.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 14 June 2013 for the Automatic Earth -
(http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/five-stonking-crashes.html)


Image above: QE and the inflation of the World Bubble. From (http://www.e-gnomi.com/home/archives/15297).

Little by little the realization is seeping through that, provided we can agree a recovery cannot be purchased outright, there is no such thing as a recovery anywhere in the western world. Mind you, I said seeping, and I could even have said trickling; it's a slow process. And that is a direct consequence of various vested interests in producing the illusion of recovery and growth which exist in the realms of politics, finance and media.

A few days ago, in the shadows of its revelations concerning Edward Snowden, The Guardian - in its Sunday sister The Observer - ran another piece that warrants scrutiny. The core line in it is this:

Trying to solve a debt problem with more debt has created a bigger bubble, (and it's hard to see what the central banks can do).

(The core term in it of course is "stonking crashes", I love that.) And then Wednesday Jill Treanor, also for the Guardian, quoted Bank of England director Andy Haldane:

"Let's be clear. We've intentionally blown the biggest government bond bubble in history."

Combine the two, and you get a peek into the reality of what moves our economies these days, and it's not a pretty peek once you think it through. It shows you that all the talk of recovery is just empty air, whether you're in Europe, Japan or the US. That is, again, if we can agree that a recovery cannot be purchased. i.e. that you cannot solve a debt problem with more debt.

As reasonable as this may sound, it's not something everyone will easily agree to; there's a whole camp around Paul Krugman that would disagree. What they don't understand is that no amount of stimulus can lead to a real recovery if the initial debt levels are too high, because you would need to achieve absolutely miraculous growth levels just to avoid being overrun by interest payments. Such growth levels are nowhere in sight. That means that the bottom line of Bernanke's QEs and Draghi's OMT and Japan's Abenomics will prove to be just another transfer of public funds to the private sector disguised as measures to benefit the general public.

It seems obvious enough these days in Japan. The third "arrow" of Abenomics won't arrive until autumn, and already lots of disappointed questions are being asked about the entire program, but Bank of Japan chief Kuroda still came out to say the BoJ won't do anything right now. Sure, the Japanese GDP number looked somewhat alright, but how fleeting is that? Perhaps what we should read into this is that Japan will not act until it's absolutely if not tragically necessary, simply because it's gotten stuck in a no-man's land located between interest rates and bond yields. The Bloomberg headline "Kuroda Stares Down Bond Volatility" speaks volumes in that regard; "Kuroda Stares Into Headlights" would have been a much more appropriate choice.

And maybe this is a good moment to revive the strangely silenced discussion about the importance of central bank independence. Not a soul has talked about it for a long time now, not when it comes to what Abe and Kuroda are concocting.

When Hungary PM Victor Orban last year proposed laws to draw the central bank closer to the government, he was accused of every sin known to mankind, and the EU wanted to take him to court and impose all kinds of sanctions, but now Japan dissolves all barriers between its government, its central bank, and now its largest pension fund, nary a word is heard. And of course Ben Bernanke doesn't have an inch of independence left in him either; he's a tool to transfer taxpayer funds to the private sector, because that's the only source of profit for that sector.

It's becoming increasingly obvious to an increasing number of people both inside the finance community and outside of it that the financial markets we see today exist only by the grace of central banks buying various shades of paper. If these no longer independent but instead highly politicized institutions would start to purchase less bonds or derivatives such as MBS, what is presently advertised as a recovery would disappear in the wink of an eye, and reality would set in once more.

Since neither the central bankers nor the financial community are responsible for paying down the debt these purchases add, and those who will have to pay - the people of the countries involved - have no political ways of halting the practice, the QEs and other stimulus measures may go on for a while. But that won't help the illusionists either, because their purchase schemes come with their own inbuilt demise. And that is what we're starting to see lately.

In the words of the Guardian: 
Cheap credit has inflated the markets, and we could be in for a crash landing:

During the past four centuries, there have been five occasions when major credit bubbles have led to stonking crashes. Tulip mania in 17th-century Holland was the first; the South Sea bubble in the 18th century was the second; the US real estate crash of the 1830s was the third; the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression was the fourth. The sub-prime crisis that began in 2007 was the fifth.

As the world approaches the sixth anniversary of the freezing up of credit markets, a terrible idea has occurred to investors: we might only be part-way through the crisis. This has come as something of a shock. For the best part of the year markets have been pushing asset prices higher in the belief that the worst of the crisis is over. They have given a big round of thanks to Ben Bernanke, Sir Mervyn King et al for keeping monetary policy ultra-loose and avoiding a repeat of the 1930s.

Doubts are now starting to set in, and rightly so. Cheap credit has done wonders for equity and bond markets but precious little to revive real activity. This has been the weakest recovery from a slump in living memory. And financial markets have become dependent on central banks keeping the money taps wide open, even though the evidence is that each additional dose of easing is less effective than the last.

[..] An extremely aggressive and highly dangerous dependency culture has developed and it is not easy to see how central banks get out of the problem that they have created for themselves.

There is clearly a risk that if the Fed, the Bank of England, the ECB and the Bank of Japan started to nudge up interest rates towards pre-crisis levels and gradually reversed QE, over-leveraged households and banks would not be able to cope. Yet, there is also a risk that seeking to solve a debt problem with still more debt is creating the conditions for an even bigger bubble, which could go pop at any time.

Support for this idea is growing. John Kay noted last week that the world was heading for a second crisis because the financial sector was inherently prone to instability. "Prices are driven to silly levels, but everyone makes a load of money in the meantime, and then you get a correction."

[..] Charlene Chu at Fitch has noted that total lending by banks and other financial institutions in China was almost 200% of GDP in 2012, up from 125% four years earlier. Not only is credit twice as big as China's economy, it is growing twice as fast. [..] debt-fuelled growth on this scale can work for a while but eventually proves unsustainable as debts become unpayable.

[..] Europe's banks are pretty much insolvent and kept going only by unlimited liquidity provided by the ECB. What's more, they are far bigger in relation to the size of the eurozone economy (350% of GDP) than are the American big banks (80% of GDP).

[..] ... something very nasty is lurking out there. Investors would do well to take note.

No matter what happens next, the chance that central banks will be able to continue to manipulate down both bond yields and interest rates is getting slimmer by the day. Nonetheless, they'll keep on doubling down on their bets: the more they lose control (or the more it's obvious they never had any), the bigger the losses for the financial community will get, and the more they will clamor for more stimulus.

And though in theory - relatively - low rates and yields could be accomplished as a consequence of economic growth, in this instance that is obviously not the case. Instead, yields and rates rise for the simple reason that investors fear they will rise. And that is a mechanism, especially because it happens in the middle of the biggest stimulus spending in history, that will prove extremely hard to suppress.

Abenomics is already being recognized as desperate, and that can't work in a game based entirely on confidence, or even just the perception of it. And with confidence in Abenomics fading, who will continue to believe in the Fed's QE? They're from the same illusionist handbook. As for the ECB's chapters from that book, the German courts may take care of those even before the markets do.

Bundesbank head Jens Weidmann said in court this week that - in part because of the case in front of the German Constitutional Court - the ECB cannot give an absolute guarantee it will be able to keep purchasing. That may be enough to sink the whole enterprise.

The finance community has increasingly come under the illusion that in reality they are the economy, and drawn a large part of the deluded public with them, but the real economy is still driven not by banks and investors, but by the 70% of GDP that depends on consumers. Whose debt rises with every bond their central bank purchases, whether they're told so or not.

Or the finance community may fool themselves into believing that at least when they are doing - relatively - well, the real economy will also be better off, but that's not true either. The opposite is true: the financial world is doing well at the cost of the consumers responsible for 70% of GDP, since everything finance would be a disaster if not for the stimulus measures paid for by today's consumers and their progeny.

Everybody in finance understands that piling more debt onto a system drowning in debt is at the very least a risky adventure. But they are not the ones bearing that risk, so why should they care? And those who do carry the risk, the population at large, continue to float somewhere between ignorance and gullibility until it's too late.

We can reach the end of this game in one of two ways. First, the people in the streets can call a halt to the illusionary circus that has become our financial system, by refusing to have more of their wealth transferred to the private sector. Since this hasn't happened to date, it's probably more likely it will end the second way: Since stimulus is not just an addiction, but one that requires ever more of the fix provided, and there is no limitless supply of it, interest rates and bond yields, which have been held at historic lows at great cost to society, will rise as the financial community will increasingly demand returns on investments.

You can restructure debt on a voluntary basis; we haven't done that, we've instead chosen to hide it as far and as deep as possible. But it will be restructured - and defaulted on - regardless: higher interest rates and sinking bond prices will inevitably and inexorably start to draw bad debt from its hiding places. Therefore, the tangible desperation of Abenomics simply hastens a process which would have happened anyway.

It's a shame for the people in the street that it must come to this, because the costs for them will be many times higher than if they had made their voices heard earlier. But perhaps, given the entanglement of governments, central banks, the financial community and the media, this was unavoidable.

What's positive for those people is that it means the entire investor model of the economy as we know it is dead (though I don't think many are ready to accept this), once it's obvious it was only held standing up through ever larger injections of taxpayer funds. At least they won't have to worry so much about vultures picking at the carcasses of their lives, even as these lives will in most cases be pretty destitute.

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Hooser's GMO Bill

SUBHEAD: Attention NO-GMO people. This is what you've been waiting for. Be at this Wednesday’s Council Meeting at 9 am.

By Chris D'Angelo on 21 June 2013 for the Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/hooser-introduces-gmo-bill/article_b86ae096-da42-11e2-a764-0019bb2963f4.html)


Image above: Jerry Ornellas of the Kauai Farm Bureau chats with Bernie Nunes, assistant store manager at Sueoka's, while Rod Sueoka and Kauai County Council member Gary Hooser have a conversation while waiting on the rollout of the Kauai Grown program. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: Let's count the votes. Gary Hooser and Tim Bynam YES. What we need is JoAnn Yukimura and Nadine Nakamura's vote. Andmaybe we can even have Mel Reposo looking out for the health of Kauai and its people. While we're at it let's start a Gary for Mayor campaign.]


WHAT:
County Council Meeting
to discuss Hooser GMO Bill

WHERE:
 Historic County Building in Lihue on Rice Street

WHEN:
Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 9:00am

Kauai County Councilman Gary Hooser introduced an ordinance Thursday that would give authority to the county to govern the commercial use of pesticides and genetically modified organisms.

Hooser believes it is an opportunity to set a precedent, and could serve as a model for other communities.

“This ordinance is about impacts on Kauai — Kauai health, Kauai environment,” he said. “It’s not about GMOs and whether they’re good for the world or not.”

The 10-page ordinance, co-sponsored by Councilman Tim Bynum, would require commercial agricultural entities to disclose the use of restricted use pesticides and the presence of genetically modified crops.

“The people of the County of Kauai have the right to know the potential impacts that these substances and the related agricultural practices are likely to have on their human health, and the health of their environment,” states the bill.

It also calls for a 500-foot pesticide-free buffer zone around public areas and bodies of water, a temporary moratorium on the experimental use and commercial production of GMOs until the county has conducted an Environmental Impact Statement on the industry’s health and environmental effects, and prohibits open-air testing of experimental pesticides and GM crops.

Hooser said he put together the ordinance in response to growing community concern with the industry, its practices and the direct and long-term impacts.

“This is all about understanding what’s happening,” Hooser said, “and either putting to rest the fears, if they’re not valid, or putting in place protections if these fears are valid.”

Records obtained by Hooser from the State Department of Agriculture show 22 restricted use pesticides — more than 3.5 tons of them — are used annually on Kauai by five commercial agricultural companies.

Those companies — Syngenta, Pioneer, BASF, Agrigenetics (DOW) and Kauai Coffee Co. — account for 99 percent of the restricted use pesticides used on the island, according to Hooser.

“Nobody says that 22 pesticides, restricted use pesticides, sprayed for 20 years, tons of it year after year, the combination … is safe,” Hooser said. “Nobody is saying that. Nobody has studied it. And that’s what’s happening to our island.”

Scott McFarland, Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation vice president, called the bill a “broad and bold approach to really regulating production of agriculture and food crops on Kauai.”

While it targets the largest corporations, McFarland believes it will impact farmers of all sizes.

“It would be a shame if local farmers could not take advantage of a future innovative tool (pesticide) that could benefit future food production on the island (because of the bill),” he said.

Hooser believes such an ordinance is “reasonable” and “long overdue.”

The Hawaii Revised Statutes Section 46-1.5(13) says that each county “shall have the power to enact ordinances deemed necessary to protect health, life and property,” states the ordinance.

“We have the legal authority to do this,” Hooser said. “We either clearly have it or it’s never been tested. So there’s no law preventing us, and there’s no court cases preventing us from doing this.”

In a release from the Pesticide Action Network, Kauai resident Lorilani Keohokalole-Torio said, “We have a right to know what’s being grown on the island and what harmful chemicals are being used in the process. And when pesticides are sprayed, we need protections in place for children.”

The bill is on the agenda for Wednesday’s county council meeting, beginning at 9 a.m. at the Historic County Building in Lihue.

Mandatory disclosure
If passed, Draft Bill 2491 would make it mandatory for all commercial agricultural entities that purchase or use more than five pounds (or 15 gallons) of RUP annually to disclose the use of all pesticides — restricted use, general use and experimental.

“If you use above the threshold, you have to disclose,” Hooser said. “You have to tell the people in the community in the County of Kauai what you’re using, how much you’re using and where you’re using it at.”

Companies would also be required to post signage in the area a minimum of 72 hours before, during and 72 hours after pesticide application.

Hooser stressed that the ordinance will not apply to common, everyday farmers because, for the most part, they do not use these chemicals.

“In the past three years, only two farmers, other than Kauai Coffee and the seed companies, have purchased restricted use pesticides,” he said. “And they’ve done it in very small amounts.”

In addition, the bill would make it mandatory for all entities that “intentionally and knowingly” grow GMOs to disclose its presence.

“You have to disclose what you’re growing, where you’re growing it and when that genetically modified organism was introduced,” Hooser said.

Annual public reports of both pesticide use and the presence of GM crops would be posted on the county website.

Buffer zones
Hooser said he started out focusing on disclosure, but soon realized it was “not enough.”

The bill would also restrict major agricultural companies — those using large amounts of RUP — from applying any pesticide within 500 feet of a school, hospital, residential area, public roadway, stream, river or shoreline.

Originally, Hooser wanted the buffer zone to be one mile.

“I wanted it to be more,” Hooser said, “but with land in Hawaii, it would just be too hard. … Something is better than nothing, and its unrealistic in my opinion for us to go greater.”

If passed, the buffer zone would go into effect Jan. 1, 2014.
Experimentation
“Then there is a ban on open air testing of experimental pesticides and experimental GMOs,” Hooser said. “Experimental means it’s not approved for release in the environment. It shouldn’t be.”

Hooser said it is important that people understand the bill would not ban GMOs. Rather, it would require commercial agricultural companies to conduct experimental testing within a laboratory, contained greenhouse, fermenter or other contained structure.

Experimental GMOs are those that have not received final approval by federal government for human consumption, release into the environment, or both, according to the bill. Experimental pesticides are those that contain any active ingredient or combination of active ingredients that have not been included in any pesticide previously registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.

During his research, Hooser said he found that Syngenta and Pioneer both have permits for experimental use of pesticides.

“I know for a fact, I have it in writing, that the permits exist,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re doing with it.”

Moratorium on expansion
No new GMOs. No expanded operations.

“Pioneer, Syngenta, Dow, whatever they’re doing right now they can keep doing,” Hooser said. “But they can’t lease new land, buy new land or expand their operations.”

The temporary moratorium would remain in effect until an EIS is completed on the impacts of the industry here.

The EIS would include “testing of soil, dust, water, air and human resident volunteers” for the presence of pesticides or related chemicals in order to further identify any potential health and environmental concerns, as well as to establish a baseline for future testing, according to the bill.

The moratorium would also continue until the county has developed and put into place a permitting process for those intentionally growing GMOs.

“When this ordinance passes, they will have to get a permit,” Hooser said. “And that permit will take into consideration impacts outlined in the EIS.”

The County Department of Public Works would be responsible for implementing the ordinance and permitting process.

McFarland questioned whether Public Works could handle the increased amount of work.

“It does set up a pretty extensive regulatory framework,” he said. “I’m not sure the resources are available.”

Hooser said the bill would not get rid of GMO companies. Rather, it would require them to “live under greater level of regulatory authority.”

Penalties
Any person, firm or corporation that violates the bill’s provisions would be charged with a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and one year in jail for each offense.

In addition, anyone “violating, causing or permitting the violation of any of the provisions in this article, shall be assessed a civil fine of $10,000-$25,000 per day, per violation.”

In the bill, Hooser writes that rapid, long-term and unregulated growth of commercial agricultural entities engaged in the use and development of GMOs on Kauai “has created a unique situation unlike those facing any other county.”

“It’s comprehensive,” Hooser said of the bill. “It boils down to the right to know. The right to know for Kauai.”

Related:
Ea O Ka Aina: Hooser asks for GMO Bill support 6/24/12

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai Coffee & GMOs 5/30/13
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Seed Bullshit 5/22/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Anti GMO march on Kauai 3/9/13
Ea O Ka Aina: GMOsin the Coffee Fields 3/3/13
Ea O Ka Aina: This warning cannot be ignored  10/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Health Study in Rats 9/18/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Hungary denies GMOs & IMF 9/7/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Stop Monsanto poisoning of Hawaii 6/10/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Poland bans Monsanto GMO corn 4/6/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Monsanto suppresses GMO labeling 2/2/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Widespread failure of GMO pesticdes 12/28/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Monsanto GMO BT Corn failing 9/2/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Hungary destroys Monsanto corn 7/23/11
Ea O Ka Aina: 2nd Green Revolution - GMOs 7/13/11
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Contamination 5/23/11
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Alfalfa Contamination Certain 2/16/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Feds Lay Down for GMO's 2/15/11 
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO's sprout in WikiLeaks 12/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Fields Forever  11/9/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Bill Gates and demon corn  10/1/10
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Crop Sabotage on the Rise 8/20/10
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Corn HFCS & Cancer 8/4/10

Ea O Ka Aina: Message from DOW GMO 6/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Corn Virus is still on Kauai 4/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Do GMO crops have higher yields? 2/19/10
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Corn Poison  1/25/10
Ea O Ka Aina: The Big GMO Cover-Up 1/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Consumers reject GMO food 12/28/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Monsanto Lies Again, and Again 10/17/09
Ea O Ka Aina: GMO Taro Ban Wins 9/20/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Health Risks of GMO's 7/26/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Keep GMO regulation options 3/11/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Genetically Modifies Kauai 12/10/08
Island Breath: World According to Monsanto 5/5/08
Island Breath: Monsanto wants it all 4/21/08
Island Breath: Syngenta spraying near school 2/17/08
Island Breath: Spray Ban Bill 2/1/08
Island Breath: Bill to restrict herbicide 1/24/08
Island Breath: Maluia WCMS 7/10/07
Island Breath: Syngenta Poisoning II 2/23/07
Island Breath: Syngenta Poisoning I 1/12/07
Island Breath: Percy Schmeiser's battle with Monsanto 6/23/04
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