Who is this Paul Ryan anyway?

Short answer: a grave danger to us all…

(The Progressive: The Truth about Paul Ryan)

More to come on this suit-trooper fellow soon…

 

 

Who is Fred Upton (R MI-6)? [updated]

[Updated, 3/18/11: Fred Upton also likes his generous donors the Koch Brothers (thanks to Benton Harbor, MI, local social activists at BANCO, for posting the Feb. 2011 article from the LA Times on Upton and the Koch Bros.]

Fred Upton is a millionaire grandson of Whirlpool founder Frederick Upton, a fact that Congressman Upton, of Michigan’s Sixth District, doesn’t mention in his bio on his Congressional website. He is the 26th richest member of the U.S. House of Representatives, up from 29th in 2004 (acc. to OpenSecrets.org). That’s inside the top 6% richest mark. Go Fred, you are winning the rich politicians race!

Fred Upton likes luxury golf courses in his back yard.  He likes to golf with his neighbor, Jeff Fettig, CEO of Whirlpool. Fettig has leveraged Whirlpool money and resources to build a luxury golf course in their backyards, justifying it on the business side because it will “help the company attract and retain talent.” Apparently Whirlpool needs talented golfers on its payroll. (Maybe they’ll help him improve his golf game?)

Another friend in the family that Fred likes to play golf with (now granted, I’m just assuming he likes to play golf with them) is Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, real estate developer, and husband of Fred Upton’s cousin. McClendon is also uber-rich: he was the best compensated CEO of 2008–despite his company losing 60% of its stock value; last year he fell to #3 best compensated, with $114 million (More on Chesapeake in a bit.)

When you like golf, power has its perks. You can get prime lakefront public park land requisitioned to build your exclusive private golf resorts, and get hundreds of millions of tax breaks for its development. Good going, Fred, Jeff, and Aubrey, way to leverage those assets! That is some good teamwork! Still, when Aubrey doesn’t get his way, he likes to sue. (He also likes to insult the state of Michigan. And driving small towns into “state receivership.”)

(Thanks to Eartha Jane Melzer of the Michigan Messenger for her crack reporting.)

Fred Upton is good at leveraging his power for personal gain and to protect his private–and his friend’s private–interests. He’s also good at the politician’s fine art of making it sound like his actions  have other, more noble, public-spirited, or at least ideological motives.

Fred Upton is good friends with his in-law McClendon of Chesapeake Energy. Public financial disclosure statements speak loud and clear as to Fred and Aubrey’s friendly loyalties. In 2008 poor Aubrey had to sell 31 million shares of Chesapeake stock at fire-sale prices to cover loan payments being demanded by banks. Poor Aubrey apparently lost something like $1.5 billion in stock value compared to the price a few months earlier. The company helped make up the loss a bit by giving poor Aubrey a $75 million bonus on Dec. 31 (nice Christmas surprise!). But that huge stock sell-off itself drove the price down a bit more, leaving Chesapeake in a good price position as an investment.

That’s just what Fred Upton did, buying somewhere between $10,000-$50,000 dollars in Chesapeake stock on Dec. 19, 2008. Upton currently has by far the greatest private investment in Chesapeake Energy of all members of Congress. In turn, Chesapeake has contributed to Upton’s campaigns ($9800 in the recent cycle). Obviously there is no implication of impropriety, or God forbid conflict of interest (what a quaint notion) in any of this. This is how things work. Friends helping friends. Honi soit qui mal y pense. They are all honorable men.

And money flows to those in the right positions. Upton’s greatest donor is the energy industry, followed second by the telecoms (source):

As the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, this courting of favor makes sense (and cents). And Fred Upton is now richly rewarding both sectors through his committee powers, taking vigorous action to strip the EPA of regulatory authority over green house gases, and overstepping the FCC’s industry-negotiated rules on Net Neutrality to clear the way for an internet “free and open for business.”

Upton boasts that they have “bipartisan support” for the FCC assault. The letter has a total of 5 signatures. The two Democrats are Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Dan Boren of Oklahoma. The committee is calling the FCC’s rules–predictably, but with no evidence to support the hyperbole– a “government takeover” of the internet, which must remain “open and free.” Not allowing giant telecom companies to charge websites for speed of access by users is exactly the “open and free” internet that Net Neutrality rules are designed to ensure. The same letter can barely conceal its own contradictions, citing a 1999 speech by then FCC Chairman William Kennard who “rebuffed calls to force open access.”

So the internet should be “open and free” by “rebuffing calls to force open access.” Open and free for whom, exactly? The answer is obvious, open for business and free from government intrusion (Pro-Business GOP ideology), not open to everyone and free access regardless of ability to pay (Net Neutrality).

Fred Upton has the same blinkered, one-track mind when it comes to Energy and the EPA. First, he is part of the climate-change deniers club. On this general topic he and his friend and neighbor Aubrey McClendon must have plenty to talk about. McClendon is in the business of denying science of all kinds. It’s a job liability, since he’s in the natural gas extraction business–the fragging or fracking business as it’s come to be called–in fact Chesapeake is a major pioneer in this industry. To get at all that liquid gold underground they’ve had to develop their own unique plan of attack, to get around the consequences for the environmental disasters they are creating and leaving behind–literally pumping back into the ground to “cover it all up.”

McClendon is in the business of simply denying obvious facts. Like pretending that chemicals which in small amounts kill cows dead are nevertheless safe for humans and pose no risk to groundwater. McClendon’s Chesapeake brags on its website that it has won the “21st century land rush.” They’re the main player in the hydraulic fracturing that has been controversial everywhere they have been (see Gasland film). They boast on their website that they have now turned their attention to “the manufacturing-like process of drilling tens of thousands of wells in these areas to develop some of the largest natural gas fields in the world.”

They then move from disturbing euphemism to delusional doublespeak: “Chesapeake believes natural gas can become the primary solution to many of our country’s and our world’s most challenging environmental and energy issues.”

Aubrey McClendon’s millions are based on the self-delusional idea that extracting and burning fossil fuels is the “primary solution” to environmental and energy problems. But the plain and simple truth is that extracting and burning fossil fuels is THE primary environmental and energy problem. Again, denial seems to be an occupational hazard here.

After pumping high-pressure toxic cocktails into the ground to crack the bedrock and get at the gas, the company has now come up with the ingenious–or evil genius–solution of pumping all that waste-water (which they somehow still claim poses no health hazard to anyone or anything) back into the ground. In Arkansas where this has been going on there have dramatic increases in earthquakes–100 earthquakes in seven days!–so much so that the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission asked them to halt the waste-water pumping. They’ve done so and the earthquakes have slowed.

McClendon likes just to deny basic physical facts: “Chesapeake Energy has said it does not believe there is a connection between the injection wells and the area’s seismic activity.”

Based on what? If you pump millions of gallons of water into the ground, do you not expect that it will have impacts of some kind on the ground? Are not earthquakes a perfectly reasonable and predictable sort of geophysical consequence?

And now I’ve finally begun to make sense of another facet of Fred Upton’s recent campaign contributions. I noticed it when I started writing this post, but I couldn’t really make sense of it. The fact is this: Upton has received the most of any Congress member from the Waste Management sector in the recent cycle. In 2010 he received $39,800, double what anybody else received–and double what he received in the previous cycle. Now his good friend and neighbor McClendon finds himself faced with the sticky problems of his lucrative and destructively extractive industry’s wastes. It is clearly part of McClendon’s next move, in his “21st century land race,” either to gut any regulatory arms and laws that might impact his business–like the EPA, which CLEARLY HAS THE AUTHORITY TO REGULATE GROUNDWATER CONTAMINANTS–or to forestall any new measures against him.

Aubrey McClendon needs to keep up the “open” season on easy profits and a “free” pass on pollution, earthquakes, ground subsidence, dead cattle, exploding and fiery home water faucets (again, see Gasland), cancerous towns, and any other obviously scientific corollaries to the entire noxious M.O. of hydraulic fracturing and underground waste-water disposal.

Good thing, then, that poor Aubrey McClendon, with all his problems and occupational hazards, has his good friend in very high places, the honorable Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan’s 6th District. Keep up the good work, Fred! You aren’t doing your nation proud, or keeping the interests of most of your neighbors in mind, but at least you’re being good to your friends and uber-rich golf buddies. And isn’t that what really counts?

 

Dylan’s right

Rattigan, that is: http://tinyurl.com/4lo4o6p

The U.S., it seems, is not going to fall from an external enemy. It will be torn apart, piece by bloody piece, by the wolves within.

 

Rango, an anti-capitalist parable

As I walked out of Rango last night I thought, that movie is based on some old socialist text I read recently. I found it: Edward Bellamy’s “Parable of the Water-tank.”

Absolutely no doubt about it. Rango is a “kid’s” version of Bellamy’s Parable.

I guess in that regard it’s kind of like Orwell’s Animal Farm.

There’s a nice YouTube video illustrating (part of) Bellamy’s Parable.

A good quote from Bellamy:

Then the agitators spake unto the people of the way. And they said:
“Behold, what need have ye at all of these capitalists, that you should yield them profits upon your labor? What great things do they wherefore ye render them this tribute? Lo! it is only because they do order you in bands and lead you out and in and set you tasks, and afterwards give you a little of the water yourselves have brought and not they. Now, behold the way out of this bondage! Do ye for yourselves that which is done by the capitalists – namely, the ordering of your labor and the marshaling of your bands, and the dividing of your tasks. So shall ye have no need at all of the capitalists, and no more yield them any profit, but all the fruit of your labor shall ye share as brethren, everyone having the same; and so shall the tank never overflow until every man is full, and would not wag the tongue for more, and afterwards shall ye with the overflow make pleasant fountains and fishponds to delight yourselves withal, even as did the capitalists: but these shall be for the delight of all.”

 

A Letter to Libyan Rebels

Dear Rebels in Libya,

Many of us–millions of us–here in the United States see and feel your pain. We understand that you are only fighting for freedom and dignity, and we hear your urgent calls for help. We’d like to see your crazy, murderous dictator taken out of power, neutralized somehow. It’s only reasonable that the international community of rich and powerful nations take some kind of action to stem the violence being inflicted by a crazy man whom everybody everywhere openly describes as crazy, delusional, insane, mad. But alas, apparently, politics is complicated. And nothing happens. Your blood continues to flow.

As I said, millions of Americans stand with you and would like our nation to stand with you. But unfortunately for you and us, we are currently undergoing our own conservative oligarchic coup as we speak. The American Republican Party, which is the U.S. political arm of the global transnational oligarchy, has seized power in D.C.–by electoral “mandate,” as they love to trumpet–and are currently pursuing a radical evisceration of our public sector:

1. The EPA unfunded and denuded of regulatory powers. The winners: dirty energy producers, the oil and gas industry, chemical polluters and hazardous industries of every sort. The losers: all Americans, who will suffer increased health hazards like poisoned ground water and worse workplace conditions, the environment, other species, public lands, etc.
2. Defunding our Public Broadcasting, which disposes of such radical threats to democracy as child education programming.
3. Slashing spending on education and and other investments in the young.
4. Shredding the principles of Net Neutrality in favor of big telecom companies who would like to monetize the information superhighway–and thereby ghettoize all non-commercialized internet activities.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. And at the level of the States, the right-wing business revolution is proceeding at a precipitous pace. Several states, 29 of which are now in control of Republicans, have declared fiscal “emergencies” and under this pretext are consolidating their power by all sorts of sleazy and unconstitutional maneuvers. Wisconsin is the tip of the iceberg. In Michigan–which has become in some parts a post-post-industrial apocalypse anyhow–the state now plans to engineer the local political landscape by executive fiat, through “appointed emergency managers” who will have the power–I’m not sure where they derive this power, exactly–to dissolve city governments, terminate collective bargaining agreements, etc. It’s amazing what one can get away with in an “emergency.”

You get the picture. The point and the upshot is that at precisely the moment you all in the Arab world have had enough and are standing up, and even taking up arms against, your oppressors, we here in the United States are complacently accepting the dictatorial regimes of a Wall Street and Big Oil oligarchy. There is very little else that anybody with any sense could conclude.

What seems to have happened is this: The absolute impunity with which the money shell-game swindlers on Wall Street and in investment firms around the world got away with their shock and awe campaigns that brought down the global economy has now emboldened them to press their advantage and consolidate their gains. The rearguard at the SEC and Federal Reserve are fending off any attempts at accountability for, first, the housing-mortgage meltdown and, second, the massive-scale bankruptcy fraud-industry, and they are holding steady. The Obama Administration is completely captured by Wall Street and has owned the bailout despite not authoring it. The U.S. monetary system is absolutely captured by the Too-Big-To-Fail Bank/Investment Firms. At this stage any real accountability might just threaten the very legitimacy of the United States Government.

So unfortunately we are suffering the same evil but opaque forces as you are, as we all together watch the “international community” do nothing to stop the bleeding in Libya. We are forced to the unhappy speculation that perhaps those in power, those who can and do “pull strings,” whose word and will carries weight, in international affairs, are more satisfied with violence and chaos than with democracy and stability in Libya. At least in the short term? Perhaps it serves as a convenient and distracting media cover for right-wing gains in the “world’s only superpower”? Make the world that much safer for untrammeled capitalist extractionism.

But such paranoid speculations aside, one thing is clear. The “international community” is not really interested in flesh and blood Libyans, any more than in flesh and blood Americans. What they covet is your oil. Rapprochement with your crazy, delusional dictator in the last few years has meant for the most part gaining safe and easier access to Libyan oil fields for international producers and for foreign export and consumption.  When the oil fields start to burn, then we can expect people to get serious about going in, intervening, making Libya “safe for democracy.” Just like they are busy dismantling democracy in the U.S. to make it safer for what they call “democracy,” but which really is unfettered kleptocracy by offshore expatriated plutocrats.

I wish we could help you, I really do. But no amount of goodwill from the American street will change the opaque machinations of those in power. And we are suffering from their malevolent schemes as much as you are. Let’s hope, god willing, that somehow they go too far and bring down the house on their own heads….

Your American comrade in spirit–

MWF

 

Citizen Tube

I just submitted my first book to the publisher, a new verse translation of the Latin epic Civil War by Lucan. It took several years and feels very good to be done.

I’ve been watching a real civil war, the revolution that is brewing in Iran, over at Citizen Tube, with videos sent to YouTube from people, some of them wounded by gunfire, on the streets there.

We were watching the Daily Show last night, and Jason Jones in Iran visiting with an Iranian family, who seemed just like us, the kids playing video games, the dad playing a silly electronic keyboard while the family danced and had fun. It made me think that we are all, everywhere, in captivity to evil people (who are in turn enslaved to narrow ideologies that justify repression, hatred, and violence).

 

Ptolemy’s universe moving model

This is awesome! Be sure to zoom in all the way.

 

A Rare Gem

I just found a fascinating website that I had to break my work-crunch blogging moratorium to post here: the Farlang Jewelry Online Rare Book Library. A page from one of their texts popped up as I was searching for “eagle-stones” (aetites) to annonate one of Lucan’s lines, and I was uber-impressed with their library of books on gem lore, from Agricola to Theophrastus. 

I’m still not sure what they are–geodes, I think–since google images so far has turned up nothing; I guess eagles don’t produce(?) or find them anymore…

 

UPDATE:

From Pliny’s descrip, they are actually a kind of friable river stone. But still no pics.

 

“There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”

Here’s a headline that SHOULD be top page news, but won’t be:

1,500 farmers commit suicide in India

also here

 

Oh, Pirates!

It looks like things are turning once again to pirates and piracy. A good time to recall the classic critique of empire: 

 

Augustine, City of God, IV.4 – “Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”

I just found this fascinating early modern text: Vidiciae contra tyrranos. (1579). Also here and here.