LIBERTAS - In the Name of Liberty

Supercapitalism - by Robert Reich


REASON: why Liberals will win the war - by Robert Reich


The future of Success - by Robert B. Reich


The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism

By Nancy Scola on October 30, 2007

The hits just keep on coming. Blackwater has been given immunity by the State Department. Whatever has been learned thus far in the inquiry into its violence in Iraq can't be used by the FBI in its investigation.

Keeping in mind that the failings of one private security company are less concerning than the fact that a bastion of U.S. government thought it wise to unleash uncontrollable forces out into the world, this sure smacks of self-protection. Is this the America we want?

Well, the trouble is, we're not getting the information we need to chose a different path. Just 1 percent of Election '08 news stories thus far have focused on candidate records. Just 15 percent concerned public policy. That's troubling in any election. But when the governing style of those in power is to wreak global havoc, it's downright scary.

And so to see today's political landscape clearly, even skilled commentators like the New York Times's Paul Krugman have to dig into their bags of Lord of the Rings world-domination imagery. While progressives have been debating the finer points of trade law, "Sauron was gathering his forces in Mordor." Indeed, some political leaders indeed do have a world view that's perfectly comfortable with Blackwater roaming free in Iraq and being absolved of guilt when 17 Iraqi civilians die.

The question then to put to presidential candidates then is simple: what exactly does America mean to you? If it jibes with your view of her to outsource a war to private interests and then cover-up when those interests commit horrible wrongs, that's all well and good. We just don't want you in the White House. Rest assured though, lucrative consulting and lecture gigs await you.

We desperately need to know how our presidential candidates honestly see this American experiment turning out. Today, getting a straight answer to even that simple question would be a great start.

The Sense of Wonder - by Rachel Carson


The Edge of the Sea - Rachel Carson


The Sea Around Us - by Rachel Carson


Silent Spring - By Rachel Carson


Under the Sea - Wind, By Rachel Carson

If there is a chance for the ignorant to be educated,
If there is a hope for the faithful to learn,
If there is a dream of a better future,
It must begin with us.

We're writing you today to announce exciting new developments at the Center for Constitutional Rights:

a completely redesigned website;
a new case we've filed; and
a new campaign we're launching,
Beyond Guantanamo: Rescue the Constitution.

When you go to our website today, which you can visit at our NEW address www.ccrjustice.org, you'll see information about our new campaign Beyond Guantanamo: Rescue the Constitution. We're calling this campaign Beyond Guantanamo because it's about more than just President Bush or Guantanamo, it's about all the areas where the government is taking the law into its own hands. It's about the systematic dismantling of the Constitution and the erosion of everyone's rights, not just those of the detainees. It is time that we think beyond Guantanamo and this administration's disastrous policies.

Also many of you have probably also heard about the case we filed recently against Blackwater USA for the killings of innocent Iraqi bystanders in September. This lawsuit cannot bring back those killed at Nisoor Square but it can make Blackwater accountable for its actions. Read more about this case on our new website.

In these months leading up to the December 5 Supreme Court arguments that will decide again whether detainees have the right to contest their detention, CCR will be rolling out ads in magazines and on the web as well as launching a speaking tour and a radio tour.

Our new website features an updated and expanded case index; issue area pages; a much-improved search function so that you can more easily access our resources and find exactly what you need; and new features like podcasts with our attorneys on our issues, clients, and cases. Stay tuned in the coming months, we'll be adding more videos and more actions for you to take on the issues you care about.

You can also watch this video featuring Venssa Readgrave reading from a letter she recieved froma former detainee.

Please take some time today to go to our new website, explore all it has to offer, and read about our new campaign Beyond Guantanamo. Most important - please tell five of your friends about CCR's campaign to not only close Guantanamo but rescue our Constitution. We need your help to spread the word to your friends and family that we're starting this important new campaign.

As a people, we need to move beyond the example of torture and dehumanization set by our government. Let's move Beyond Guantanamo and Rescue the Constitution.

Thank you,
Vincent Warren
Executive Director

Speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives April 2007, the head of the Illinois Department of Entomology had this to say:

"It is an unfortunate consequence of benign indifference to the precarious nature of an overwhelming reliance on a single species that few alternative actively managed species are currently available for use. And despite evidence of their efficacy as crop pollinators, wild species are not being exploited to any significant extent. While efforts to monitor honey bees are inadequate, efforts to monitor the status of wild pollinators in North America are essentially non existent…. There is reliable evidence that some North American pollinator species have gone extinct, become locally extirpated, or have declined in number. At least two bumble bee species, one of which is a crop pollinator, could face imminent extinction, and several other pollinators have declined significantly."

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

… Since last November, the US has seen a decline in bee populations so dramatic that it eclipses all previous incidences of mass mortality. Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.

The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called “Bt corn” on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a “toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations.” But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a “significantly stronger decline in the number of bees” occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.

Is it not possible that while there is no lethal effect directly to the new bees, there might be some sublethal effect, such as immune suppression, acting as a slow killer?

Given that nearly every bite of food that we eat has a pollinator, the seriousness of this emerging problem could dwarf all previous food disruptions. - San Francisco Chronicle

Personally, I believe situations like this are an opportune moment for reflection - a time to humbly consider a few realities, and perhaps learn a few lessons. Of significance to me is the fact that scientists haven’t got this figured out as yet. It begs the question - which is easier, when dealing with the infinitely complex interactions of nature: 1) predicting specific consequences to our ‘tinkering’ before they occur, or 2) understanding how something happened after-the-fact? I would have thought the latter was the easiest - you know the old saying, “hindsight is a wonderful thing”. Looking back at the results, following the trail of clues, is a lot less challenging than postulating over what could happen. Or, to put it into a framework that might be better understood - if Sherlock Holmes, expert in crime scene deductions, were to turn his attention to predicting crimes rather than solving them, how would he have fared?

• Lack of diversity: This point, above all others, is a critical cause of natural imbalance. Diversity is stability. Mono-crop farming creates vulnerability. In fact, the dependence of our agricultural systems on just one species of bee for pollination is a perfect example of this vulnerability in action. In complete contrast to the natural order, where diversity is the rule, we plant gigantic fields of just one crop, leaving minimal borders, or ‘bio-corridors’ (woodlands, shrubs, wildflowers, hedges, etc.), for beneficial insects to take up residence, or none at all. Integrated bio-diversity is the future of farming.
  Pesticides & Herbicides: Crops (and even hedges, verges, and woodlands, where they remain), are often sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. These chemicals are the practical extension of an exasperating belief that nature is our enemy. Pouring poison on our food is a very simplistic way of dealing with our problems, and ignores the root causes. New genetically modified crops, designed to be immune to certain pesticides and herbicides, have resulted in the increased usage of these chemicals (scroll down to: “New Problem: Herbicide-Resistant Weeds in Genetically Engineered Crops” on this page). Pesticides, particularly Bayer’s imidacloprid, a nicotine-based product marketed under the names Admire, Provado, Merit, Marathon and Gaucho, have been concretely implicated in the destruction of bee populations before (see also). That other bees and insects are not raiding deserted hives to feed on the honey, as they normally would, lends some credence to the theory of toxic overload.
  
• GM Crops: GM Crops are widespread in the U.S., in particular, as is unintended contamination through horizontal gene transfer. Creating plants with built-in pesticides will kill insects. Bees, by the way, are insects. Additionally, it is known that inserted genes can combine in host DNA molecules to create unexpected proteins - that can be toxic or allergenic. It is impossible to know all the implications of how pollen from such plants will interact with the organisms they are in contact with.
  
• Direct Stress: Transportation, lack of natural food, and natural food diversity, pesticides sprayed directly into hives, antibiotics and GMOs in feed. Bees today are ‘factory farmed’ much in the way hens are. We take too much of their honey, replacing it with sugary water instead, and, like hens, stifle their instinctive habits - like swarming. These things, and other environmental factors, can cause a general weakening of pollinators’ immune systems. The few dead bees that have been located are often found to contain multiple pathogens and diseases - indicative of an AIDS-like syndrome.
  Varroa mites: Although some like to pin the blame on these mites, I’m dubious, and I’m not alone: “Many bee experts assumed varroa mites were a major cause of the severe die-off in the winter of 2005. Yet when researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, traveled to Oakdale, California, where Anderson and a number of his fellow beekeepers spend winter and spring, they could find no correlation between the level of varroa mite infestation and the health of bee colonies. “We couldn’t pin the blame for the die-off on any single cause,” says Jeff Pettis, a research entomologist at the lab.- The Vanishing. However, treatments against mites may be leaving hives open to the onslaught of powerful pathogens, much in the same way the overuse of antibiotics lead to super bugs in our hospitals.
  
• Artificial Insemination: “Rudolf Steiner gave lectures to the workers at the Goetheanum in 1923 in Dornach, Switzerland. Among the workers was a professional beekeeper, Mr Müller, who contributed to these lectures in the form of insights and questions. However, Mr Müller rebelled vehemently and showed no understanding when Steiner explained the intricacies of the queen bee, mentioning that the modern method of breeding queens (using the larvae of worker bees, a practice that had already been in use for about fifteen years) would have long-term detrimental effects, so grave that: “A century later all breeding of bees will cease if only artificially produced bees are used (November 10). . . . It is quite correct that we can’t determine this today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other again in one hundred years, Mr Müller, then we’ll see what kind of opinion you’ll have at that point”. Seventy-five years have passed and the kind of queen breeding Steiner spoke of has not only continued, but has become the standard, and is now supplemented with instrumental insemination.” - Gibson, commenting on Celsias
  
• Weather: The hotter, dryer summers and wetter winters brought about by global warming.
  
• Mechanistic Mindsets: Last, but by no means the least, is the problem of our mechanistic mindset - reducing an infinitely complicated world of interactions to an overly simplistic viewpoint. This is the root cause of several of the issues outlined above. Where, in mathematics (adding numbers or inanimate objects) 1 + 1 = 2, in biology (i.e. the combination of two life forms), 1 + 1 may equal 3, or a billion and three. The term bio-engineering itself is a contradiction in terms - they are entirely juxtaposed. ‘Bio’ equates to ‘life’. ‘Engineering’ refers to design and manufacture, a blueprint of exactness. Biological forms (i.e. life-forms) can never be ‘engineered’ - i.e. predictably controlled or manipulated. Unlike a sheet of metal that can be machined with consistent results, organisms in natural systems are ever changing and adjusting. This makes ‘bio-engineering’, in the best-case scenario, a futile exercise and an enormous misallocation of human and environmental resources, and, in the worse case scenario, an ecological catastrophe with no chance for a product recall.
  
• Navigational Hindrances: There was also a miscontrued study on cellphone radiation and its effects on the bees ability to navigate - which turned out to be an over-zealous knee-jerk reaction by The Independent (see more on this here). Some have also mentioned other navigational hindrances such as UV radiation, shifting magnetic fields and even quantum physics.
  

Researchers are desperately seeking the ’cause’ of colony collapse disorder. The reductionist mindset would be tempted to pull a single root cause out from amongst those above, but, I would propose that the items listed above, in combination, constitute a great load on the camel’s back - with one or two of the above being the final straw that broke it.

The truth on the ground about the U.S. War on Iraq is even more shocking than you can imagine.

This movie will haunt you, but only if you have the courage to face "The Ground Truth".

Without the voice of those who fight these illegal wars how can you learn the true extent of the damage?
Watch this documentary, buy the DVD, then host a screening. Ask everyone you meet, how long will this war last?

Hegel's method in philosophy consists in following out the triadic development (Entwicklung) in each concept and in each thing. Thus, he hopes, philosophy will not contradict experience, but will give to the data of experience the philosophical, that is, the ultimately true, explanation. If, for instance, we wish to know what liberty is, we take that concept where we first find it, in the unrestrained action of the savage, who does not feel the need of repressing any thought, feeling, or tendency to act. Next, we find that the savage has given up this freedom in exchange for its opposite, the restraint, or, as he considers it, the tyranny, of civilization and law. Thirdly, in the citizen under the rule of law, we find the third stage of development, namely liberty in a higher and a fuller sense than that in which the savage possessed it, the liberty to do and to say and to think many things which were beyond the power of the savage. In this triadic process we remark that the second stage is the direct opposite, the annihilation, or at least the sublation, of the first. We remark also that the third stage is the first returned to itself in a higher, truer, richer, and fuller form. The three stages are, therefore, styled:
in itself (An-sich)
out of itself (Anderssein)
in and for itself (An-und-für-sich).
These three stages are found succeeding one another throughout the whole realm of thought and being, from the most abstract logical process up to the most complicated concrete activity of organized mind in the succession of states or the production of systems of philosophy.