AlterNet.org: Activism

Why America & China's Future Plans Are Totally Nuts

James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:32:00 -0700

Big plans for the future for the world's biggest economies will take them both further down the hole.

Societies periodically go insane. Fallacious memes sweep through a frightened and confused populace and bad things happen, bad choices get made. Two bad ideas in particular infect the American thought-o-sphere these days: 1) that non-cheap oil can keep all the rackets of consumerism going; 2) that we can offset all the quandaries of non-cheap oil with accounting fraud and debt creation.

These ideas present themselves in the places of greatest authority and influence. The president says “we have a hundred years of shale gas.” The Wall Street Journal says that an inflating Dow Jones index stands for a growing economy. My recent favorite came out of the increasingly demented New York Times on Saturday: Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy. Quoting an econ professor named Tyler Cowen from George Mason University The Times said:

The recent surge in domestic oil and gas production signals “the start of a new era of cheap energy,” he said, while less expensive online education programs could open the door to millions of people who have been priced out of more traditional academics.

That was a two-fer of stupidities since A) it ought to be self-evident that $90-a-barrel oil is not cheap oil, and B) that because of A, there’s unlikely to be lucrative employment for people who learn double-entry book-keeping on their laptops. In fact, anyone who actually learns math over the Internet must conclude that $90-a-barrel oil will crash all the supposedly normal operations of a consumer society, including the ability of oil-and-gas companies to get the capital investment necessary for further oil production.

None of these accredited morons seems to get the basic equation between available cheap energy — e.g. oil with a high energy-return-on-investment — and capital formation — the accumulation of wealth that can be deployed to produce more wealth-producing activity. That was only possible on the way up Hubbert’s curve. On the way down, alas, the relationship enters a Ponzi unwind of too many claims on excessive promises to pay. The net result is a society with a lower standard of living. Personally, I think it will go way lower, and way sooner than later.

The idea that online education is a sovereign tonic for economic vitality is just another gloss on the inane belief that technology can take the place of energy in the equation above. Tom Friedman, grand poobah, of The New York Times Op-Ed page is the cheerleader-in-chief for that meme, but it is accepted by virtually all authorities in business and politics, and their handmaidens in the academic chairs. As the American economy dissolves in an acid bath of capital scarcity and grievance, these idiots will be waiting for the next iPhone app that can power the electric grid — and thus all the new iPhones streaming out of the Apple factories of China into the hot little hands of nineteen-year-olds in Michigan taking “Macroeconomics” on the Kahn Academy website.

Speaking of China, The New York Times ran another humdinger over the weekend: China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities that illustrates how meshugga that society is. Such are the tragic sorrows of late-blooming techno-industrialism that China is doing exactly the opposite of what the future requires — namely, destroying the basis for small-scale local food production. But, not to put too fine a point on it, China is fucked. They are simply in the hopeless zone of population overshoot and resource scarcity. There was some loose talk in thatTimes story to the effect that China will offset all its problems by colonizing Africa (and, who knows, other lands with other resources), but it will be interesting to see how it goes on the slow boat back to Shanghai with all that bok choy rotting in the hold as it plies east out of Mombasa under an ever-hotter tropical sun.

Chinese leadership apparently thinks this is the way to go. Just as the Princeton-bred American economists think that we can all migrate onto the Web and live a virtual existence on virtual wealth with virtual energy. The manifold disappointments that societies around the world face as they discover the falsity of their own memes is already leading to a lot of dangerous mischief, which is to say armed conflict. There is potential for a lot worse.

The New Generation of American Patriots Are the Whistlebowers Who Came of Age After 9/11

Gary Younge, The Guardian — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:52:00 -0700

The violation of civil liberties in the name of security has compelled many to take enormous risks in the name of patriotism.

When Darrell Anderson, 22, joined the US military he knew there was going to be a war, and he wanted to fight it. "I thought I was going to free Iraqi people," he told me. "I thought I was going to do a good thing."

Until, that is, he realised precisely what he had to do. While on patrol in Baghdad, he thought: "What are we doing here? Are we looking for weapons of mass destruction? No. Are we helping the people? No, they hate us. What are we working towards, apart from just staying alive? If this was my neighbourhood and foreign soldiers were doing this then what would I be doing?" Within a few months, he says, "I was cocking my weapon at innocent civilians without any sympathy or humanity". While home on leave he realised he was not going to be able to lead a normal life if he went back. His mum drove him to Canada, where I met him in 2006 at a picnic for war resisters in Fort Erie.

Anderson's trajectory, from uncritical patriotism to conscious disaffection and finally to conscientious dissent, is a familiar one among a generation of Americans who came of political age after 9/11. Over time, efforts to balance the myth of American freedom on which they were raised, with the reality of American power that they have been called on to monitor or operate, causes a profound dislocation in their world view. Like a meat eater in an abattoir, they are forced to confront the brutality of the world they are implicated in and recoil at their role in it – occasionally in dramatic fashion.

It is from this generation that the most recent prominent whistleblowers have emerged: Edward Snowden, 29, the former National Security Agency contractor, now on the run after passing evidence of mass snooping to the Guardian; Bradley Manning, who at 22 gave classified diplomatic and military information to WikiLeaks and now faces a court martial; the late Aaron Swartz, who by 24 was a veteran hacker when he was arrested for illegally downloading academic articles from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later took his own life; and Jeremy Hammond, 28, who is facing federal criminal charges for allegedly publicising the internal files of a private spying agency.

Just as America's military record abroad, complete with torture and "collateral damage", has helped push a section of disaffected Muslim youth across the globe towards terrorism, so the violation of civil liberties and privatisation of information has driven a number of disillusioned Americans to law-breaking dissent at home.

In a 2008 book, The Way We'll Be, US pollster John Zogby categorised this age cohort as First Globals. Tracking everything from views on gay marriage to propensity to travel, he described young Americans aged 18-29 as "the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history". Unfazed by social diversity at home, they held more open attitudes towards the rest of the world. They were far more likely to travel abroad than others, have friends or family overseas, and to be aware of international politics. "[They] might not be more able than other age cohorts to point to Darfur on a map," argued Zogby, "but they at least know there is a Darfur, and they care what's happening there."

The perpetual war and accompanying "anti-terror" security structure after 9/11 is all this generation has ever known. And it has had a profound impact on shaping their views on US foreign policy.

In 2007, 63% (significantly higher than any other age group) disagreed with the statement "I support my country, right or wrong". In 2004, 86% thought "an imperialist power that acts on its own regardless of what the rest of the world thinks" was improper or somewhat improper, while just 3% thought the opposite. On the latter question, Zogby wrote: "No other group we studied, not Democrats nor self-described progressives, not readers of the New York Times, had a greater spread between the two extremes." It is in this context that the defiance and determination of these young people must be understood.

One could make too much of their age as a unifying factor. Since these leaks demand proficiency with new technology, those involved are bound to be younger. And older people, with families, careers and pensions, are less likely to do things they know will put them in jail or force them to flee. Moreover, for all the similarities between them, there are significant differences. Snowden contributed money to Republican libertarian Ron Paul's campaign; Hammond describes himself as an "anarchist-communist".

Yet, while each acted separately from the other, their unrepentant justifications read as though they were unconsciously working in concert. "I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," wrote Hammond.

"We need to take information," wrote Swartz. "Wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world."

"This is the truth. This is what is happening," said Snowden. "You should decide whether we need to be doing this."

Manning said: "I want people to see the truth, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public."

They seek to liberate not land or people, but information. The state seeks to criminalise them as spies. But it wasn't treachery but patriotism (once blind, now wide-eyed, and arguably always misplaced) that brought most of them to this point. Their aim was neither to enrich themselves nor to aid a foreign power, but to make the power in which they invested much of their identity – America – more transparent, knowledgeable, accountable and honourable.

Anderson, Manning and Snowden, for example, all joined the military-security sector after Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were in the public domain. They knew what could be done in America's name. They just never thought they would be put in a position where they would have to choose between doing it, concealing it or exposing it. Raised in the true American ideal that an individual can make a difference, they spoke up.

Forced to choose between allegiance to the flag and uniform, and loyalty to the ideals the flag is supposed to represent and the uniform is supposed to defend, they chose the latter. Their defiance stems from the fact that, in acting as they have, they don't believe they've let down America. They believe they had to act because America was letting itself down.

If We Can't Stop Corporations from Hiding in Cayman Islands to Avoid Taxes, We All Need to Become Pirates

Paolo Cirio, Creative Time Reports — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:36:00 -0700

We need to supplement public demonstrations with new, creative strategies of subversion.

Artist Paolo Cirio’s introductory video to Loophole4All.com teaches everyday people how to pursue tax loopholes by becoming a pirate and hijacking an offshore company.

With leaders from eight of the world’s wealthiest countries discussing economic policies that will affect citizens worldwide, the G8, always a symbol of undemocratic governance, is particularly contradictory this year. British Prime Minister David Cameron, host of the summit in Northern Ireland, is calling for a crackdown on widespread global tax evasion. But he might as well be called prime minister of major tax havens for his role overseeing London and the Crown Dependencies.

As usual, G8 members will advance measures aimed at maintaining, rather than resolving, these contradictions. Their proposals will not contain any changes that might distress corporate interests.

A mere 100 miles southeast of the summit, Dublin serves as a tax haven and a center of massive tax evasion for many of the wealthiest corporations. American companies like Cisco and Apple set up subsidiaries in Dublin to evade U.S. taxes, since corporate tax rates are roughly three times lower in Ireland than in the United States. Apple’s Irish affiliate actually paid no taxes on $30 billion in profit over the last four years. Corporate CEOs defend such tax evasions by presenting themselves as job creators acting for the benefit of the economy as a whole, but they leave out the data showing the decline of the middle class and consequent increases in poverty and homelessness. Ireland is not such a great place for normal people, with its severe austerity and outrageously high unemployment.

If corporations don’t pay taxes, then it follows that when people buy iPhones, search on Google or order items on Amazon, everyone loses hospitals, schools, road maintenance and eventually pensions. Meanwhile, the lucky employees of untaxed companies get higher wages that directly produce unaffordable living costs for people employed by local and public businesses. Only those who work for the regime of major firms can survive.

People who raise their voices against the injustice of this situation by taking to the streets outside G8 summits have met escalating violence from security forces. In my twenties, I joined several anti-G8 protests across Europe, facing riot police that regularly employed tear gas, water cannons and clubs against peaceful demonstrators. At the Genoa summit in 2001, I dodged the massacre at the Diaz school out of pure luck. I have not always had the same fortune, and violent repression and mass arrests have become ordinary in the decade since.

Although street protests are crucial in manifesting dissent, we need to supplement public demonstrations with new, creative strategies of subversion. For instance, with the project Loophole4All.com, I managed to unsettle corrupt Cayman Islands authorities and international accounting firms by creating a caricature of the Certificate of Incorporation used by shell companies set up in the Caymans. At the same time, I drew attention to thousands of fraudulent companies, engaging the public in an unusual form of civil disobedience that threatens the offshore financial system.

Political innovation should be considered an art form that challenges brutal repression and creates solutions for global governance. I believe that artists can create legislative and financial models for the complex needs of the 21st century, incorporating humor, beauty and interactivity into new forms of social organization. Just as creativity and concrete social goals come together in architecture, contemporary artists should intervene in proposing policies that work for our times, while guiding us in interpreting and unveiling the invisible truths of our world.

The absurdity of the unsolved legality of offshore business helps to expose to everyone the disorder of our times and the need for radical change. The vast exploitation of discrepancies among legal jurisdictions undermines the notions of law and national borders that are central to contemporary civilization. Globalization has outstripped the power of governments, businesses and citizens; each is left powerless against the other.

The leaders at the G8 summit may recommend some weak international regulations. However, they won’t resolve the implicit conflict of global economic competition. Take the cases of Russia and Cyprus, China and Macao, the United States and Delaware or the United Kingdom and its Crown Dependencies. Every economic power has its own offshore center as a structural financial instrument that cannot be dismantled without major consequences. The use of offshore finance is too big to fail. The financial centers of London, New York, Frankfurt and Hong Kong are today’s toxic factories, and they exploit offshore jurisdictions like the Caymans, Jersey, Zurich and Singapore as noxious, yet legal resources.

As the American Senate and the British House of Commons interrogated the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Starbucks and Google about their massive tax evasions, it was evident that these companies would get away with the biggest robberies in recent history with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The public, otherwise powerless, could only laugh at this nonsense.

When impunity and injustice are the new normal, transparency becomes an empty word. Corruption is no secret in Ireland, for example, which never needed to hide the fact that corporations pretend to be based there in order to evade taxes everywhere else.

Embedded in digital technologies, transparency is unavoidable, but it isn’t enough to tackle present and future abuses of power. Leaks of unclassified information are important; however, information doesn’t make any sense by itself. The huge quantity of data published by WikiLeaks and the recent Offshore Leaks can only generate political change if mainstream media filter the leaks sensitively and honestly. (Hence, whistleblower Edward Snowden turned to Glenn Greenwald, because he trusted the journalist, and his outlet The Guardian, to tell the story of the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance.) Real change can only come about when people incisively interpret the political and ethical value of information.

We should all be involved in designing alternative tax structures in a process similar to the participatory budgeting initiatives that have spread from Brazil to Mexico to the United States. For example, people and businesses could be empowered with tools that let them determine which area of society needs their funds. People should be able to enact change in a more participatory and fluid manner, rather than waiting on a slow and corrupt legislative system to deliver tax reforms.

We already have the tools for a direct and open democracy. What we need is a cultural and educational revolution that can bring it into being. Designing new ideas for governance is the real creative challenge of today. Faced with the austerity recommended by politicians and economists, artists can activate the utopian imagination, fostering innovative forms of participation and shared cultural values in social structures.

Paolo Cirio interviews John Christensen, executive director of the Tax Justice Network; William Brittain-Catlin, author of The Dark Side of the Global Economy; and Jack Blum, chair of Tax Justice Network USA; and Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.

Edward Snowden Had a Breaking Point, Where He Decided to Risk It All to Fix This Country -- What's Yours?

Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, AlterNet — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:29:00 -0700

Change starts with action, and each of us has a way to contribute.

When Edward Snowden reached his breaking point, the world saw the truth about the vast extent of spying by the NSA on Americans and people around the world. In an act of conscience, Snowden released secret information, saying “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

Snowden sparked protest, lawsuits, criticism of the administration and US intelligence. His action shows the power that comes when someone inside the system break ranks and tells the truth. Successful movements depend on people breaking ranks: questioning, demurring, disobeying, defecting and withdrawing support. As Ken Butigan writes in Waging Nonviolence, the impact can start a metamorphosis for all of us:

“the individual conscientious objector, the abstainer, and the resister — the one who, as Gandhi said, pits ‘one’s whole soul against the will of a tyrant.’ Not only do the Edward Snowdens of the world help the rest of us see more clearly the realities we are up against — in this case, the institutionalization of unfettered, massive data collection on and profiling of the population — they can shock us into realizing that part of our job description as human beings is our obligation to withdraw our passive or active consent from such policies.”

What is your breaking point? This is the question we must all ask ourselves, especially those who have not yet taken action. As whistleblower Sibel Edmonds wrote this week, the inaction and apathy of people is our greatest enemy: “Apathy is a must ingredient for any police state, authoritarian regime, dictatorship, for abuses of power, for corruption, national atrocities, genocide. . . .”

This week, we read the sad story of Brandon Bryant, the 27 year old who served as a drone operator from 2006 to 2011 at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and Iraq and who helped to kill 1,626 people. He now suffers from PTSD. Bryant told NBC News “I don’t feel like I can really interact with that average, everyday person. I get too frustrated, because A, they don’t realize what’s going on over there. And B, they don’t care.”

Imagine how better off he would be if he had taken action years ago and told the truth about drone killings then. We hope he will continue to speak out about his experience. He will find that many people do care and may inspire other drone killers to stop what they are doing and help spur an end to US militarism.

One or a few people can make a tremendous difference. Sam Smith, the editor of Progressive Review, reminds us of the unpredictable power of action, recalling: “there was the time in early 1960 when four black college students sat down at a white-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in 15 cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to 54 cities in nine states. By April the leaders of these protests had come together, heard a moving sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Four students did something and America changed. Even they, however, couldn’t know what the result would be.”

Just as we are seeing in Turkey, it is often the response to an act of conscience that betrays the regime, shows the regime for what it is, and in a reversal, all of the power of the state boomerangs against itself. Prime Minister Erdogan issued threats followed by extreme police violence, but the result has been more people joining the protests. Yesterday, thousands of lawyers joined the protests and Erdogan issued another threat. And when Erdogan called for parents of children who are protesters to take them home, their mothers formed a human barricade to protect them from the police instead.

Another result has been people joining protests around the world and asking what can I do for Turkey? In the United States, people crowd sourced the funds for a full-page ad in the New York Times. Photo journalist Jenna Pope tells Acronym TV Turkey is part of a global revolution, “Everything is connected,” Pope says, “people all over the world are fighting against these governments who are only interested in making the very rich even richer.”

We are seeing the same type of solidarity with whistle blowers. Up to a thousand people are expected to protest in support of Snowden in Hong Kong this Saturday, showing that he may have been right in picking Hong Kong. Protests in support of Snowden and against the NSA’s Internet spying and collection of phone records are also being held in the United States. Scores of civil liberties groups, Internet companies and others (including Popular Resistance) are demanding an end to NSA spying. Sign up at StopWatchingUs.org to get involved.

The ACLU has filed suit against the program. But we need to rely more on our own actions than the security-state friendly courts to stop this attack on democracy. And, Snowden also exposed, once again, how the New York Times and other corporate media report from the perspective of the security state.

Another high profile whistle blower, Bradley Manning, is also garnering support from many people. His court martial, which Chris Hedges describes as a ‘judicial lynching,’ began with the perfect symbolism: supporters of Manning wearing a shirt that said “Truth” had to hide that dangerous word on the first day of his trial. They were ordered to turn their shirts inside out.

Though the corporate media continues its inadequate reporting, there is lots of citizen’s media writing about the case and you can keep up with details at www.BradleyManning.org. Many of Bradley’s supporters are veterans who explain their support for exposing the war crimes of US Empire.

Veterans are also among those leading the protests against the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Three veterans are on a solidarity hunger strike in support of Guantanamo prisoners being held in indefinite detention without trial. We are impressed with many Americans who put their lives on the line to challenge militarism, especially nuclear weapons, and those are seeing through the sham of ‘humanitarian war’ in which military attacks kill innocent people and destroy countries.

This week, we continue to report on the escalation actions of front-line environmentalists who are challenging the extraction economy. The clarity of thought of those on the front lines, compared to the big environmental groups, was evident recently in Illinois. While some applauded the regulation of hydro-fracking, others who are more clear in their thinking said, we need to ban hydro-fracking because it cannot be done safely.

The solidarity of “Fearless Summer” with its epic protests against radical energy extraction is taking shape and promises to help end the silence on dirty energy. Activists continue to protest at Obama fundraisers. We’ve reported on actions in New York and San Francisco, and now in Los Angeles climate change protesters and immigrants who called for an end to deportation protested Obama.

The reaction of the extraction industry shows their fear of organized militant resistance. TransCanada, the corporation seeking to profit from the tar sands pipeline, is telling the police that protesters should be treated as terrorists. They are calling Nebraska ranchers aggressive and abusive. And, protest also helps people take actions of conscience, a TransCanada whistle blower has come forward to report on the shoddy pipeline practices describing the company as “organized crime” that is “a “culture of noncompliance” and “coercion,” with “deeply entrenched business practices that ignored legally required regulations and codes” and carries “significant public safety risks.”

Another big area of continuing and escalating activism is around labor. The week began with the Walmart shareholders meeting where a Bangladesh activist addressed shareholders about unsafe working conditions and Janet Sparks, a Louisiana worker, pointed out “our CEO Mike Duke made over $20 million last year more than one thousand times the average Walmart associate, with all due respect, I have to say, I don’t think that’s right.” Then she quoted Walmart founder Sam Walton: “Listen to the Associates!” Activists say the campaign is working – building consciousness among workers and consumers; and affecting sales at Walmart which have been stagnant. The number two retailer, Costco is seeing rising sales and rising stock values while paying employees good wages. On the contrary, Walmart workers need government services to get by.

Labor struggles are not only at Walmart. Target contract janitors announced they would be going on strike in Minneapolis. Photographers at the Chicago Sun-Times are picketing the newspaper after it laid them off. Labor leaders are calling for a boycott of Labatt beer as scabs have been working in place of workers on strike since April at the St. John’s brewery. General Motors workers in Colombia have been striking due to unfair working conditions. They literally sewed their mouths closed in hunger strikes and occupied in front of the US embassy as well as bringing their concerns to the Detroit shareholders meeting. More than ever, it is an imperative to rebuild an aggressive labor movement that is independent of the Democrats and stands for working people. In Europe labor unions are rallying on Juneteenth against austerity and for tax justice.

Like many cities, Baltimore has a problem with abandoned homes. In Baltimore, MD there are 40,000 of them. An activist group, Slum Lord Watch, is using an interesting tactic, artwork. They teamed up with an artist, Nether, to beautify the buildings and call out the owners in what they are calling the Wall Hunters: the Slumlord Project. They have 15 murals so far and each includes a QR Code which links people to information about the owner of the vacant building.

Another protest people may want to emulate is the Carnival Against Capitalism. This event began with the WTO protests in 1999, and is being used this year in the run-up to the G8 meeting in London. Activists worked in several sections of the city including taking over an abandoned police station.

More and more people are becoming active. What holds others back? Perhaps their breaking point has not been reached or they do not have the time or resources to understand what is going on. One of our jobs in building a mass movement is to educate people in several areas. We can start by listening and bringing facts to explain their feelings about how bad our situation has become.

Right now an issue that is driving some people is their concern about the security state. Conor Friedersdorf’s article explains that Presidents Bush and Obama have put in place all the infrastructure that a tyrant would need. The author says that his article “is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here.”

It also helps to show people that protest and campaigns of resistance work. There are so many examples throughout history. Harvey Wasserman provides a recent example, showing how the anti-nuclear movement worked to stop nuclear power plants and how the recent closure of San Onofre is part of an ongoing movement in the United States and around the world. And Bill Moyer wrote about the eight stages of a successful social movement.

Finally, we have to show people that we have a strategy that can win. There are now 100 years of history of civil resistance, so we know what is more likely to work and what is less likely. This week we wrote an article laying out this history and describing a strategy to create a mass movement that can succeed, including what groups in the power structure we need to divide and pull to the movement to build our strength and weaken the status quo.

Carl Gibson, founder of US Uncut, recently spoke to Dennis Trainor, Jr. about the uprising in Iceland as a model for a mass movement in the US. Many of the ingredients are in place in the US such as growing wealth inequality and a government corrupted by big finance. Though it seems we are up against a powerful opponent, we have the information and tools we need to create the society in which we want to live.

Sam Smith reminds us that “The key to both a better future and our own continuous faith in one is the constant, conscious exercise of choice even in the face of absurdity, uncertainty and daunting odds.” He tells us that change starts with action, that each of us has a way to contribute, and that when “we will have thrown every inch and ounce of our being into what we are meant to be doing which is to decide what we are meant to be doing. And then to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth doing it.”

This article is produced in partnership with AlterNet and is based on the weekly newsletter of PopularResistance.org. You can sign up to receive the newsletter here.

Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct Its Our Economy and are organizers of thePopularResistance.org.

Unprecedented Coalition Pushes Back on Government’s Domestic Spying

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:57:00 -0700

Nearly 100 groups, tech companies and 110,000 letters in first 48 hours.

The national security establishment’s latest domestic spying scandal has galvanized a lightning-fast response where nearly 100 civil liberties-minded advocacy groups and technology companies are calling on Congress to “halt the surveillence and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and FBI’s data collection programs.”

In just days after the U.K. Guardian and The Washington Post reported the ongoing domestic data dragnet, the StopWatching.Us coalition has emerged and in its first two days has generated more than 110,000 signers for a letter that will be sent to Congress.

“A little earlier this morning (Thursday), we hit 100,000 sign-ups,” said activist Sina Khanifar. “The response testifies to how deeply the public feel about the recent revelations regarding the NSA’s access to our private data.”

Domestic spying is nothing new, but last week Americans awoke to new disclosures by Edward Snowden, a CIA and NSA whistleblower who distributed a top secret court order from a Justice Department tribunal created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that demanded that Verizon turn over so-called meta data of its domestic telephone customers to federal police and spy agencies. That disclosure was by claims that giant Internet companies, such as Google, also were complying with data mining requests under FISA, even though their lawyers said they did so reluctantly.

These eyebrow-raising revelations that every American’s online lives were accessible to federal law enforcement and spy agencies have prompted an uproar across the political spectrum and not just among more traditional privacy and civil liberties groups.

As noted by the AtlanticWire.com, the coalition “comprises perhaps the most diverse collection of groups in the modern history of American politics. Among the groups and businesses that are signatories to it are: 4Chan, Freedomworks, BoingBoing, CREDO Mobile, Greenpeace USA, Mozilla, reddit, Sunlight Foundation, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and California's The Utility Reform Network.”

Tea Party groups and MoveOn.org are also part of the coalition, Khanifar adds, saying that many founding members were attending a Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City last Thursday and Friday when the whistle-blowing stories appeared.

“It’s incredible how broad it’s grown,” he said.

The coalition is using a script written by the recently deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz to deliver e-mails to members of Congress via contact forms on their websites.

“The revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights,” the coalition’s website says. “We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”

“The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other ‘identifying information’ for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime,” their letter to Congress says. “The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.”

This “blanket data collection” is unconstitutional and “strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy,” the letter continues. “This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy.”

The coalition demands that Congress reform the sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that sanction that domestic data mining, and create a special subcommittee to investigate the “extent of this domestic spying” and recommend “legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surviellance.” They also want public officials responsible for the spy programs held accountable.

As AlterNet has reported, many aspects of this still-developing scandal should not surprise Americans. One of those is how government lawyers have found loopholes in federal laws and regulations allowing the unfettered domestic spying to accelerate in recent years. Reining in the ‘anything goes’ culture of the national security state is a tremendous challenge, but this new coalition appears ready for that fight.

Edward Snowden: How the Intelligence Story of the Age Leaked Out

Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:32:00 -0700

A full report on how Snowden came to release the NSA documents, as well as why he chose to speak to the Guardian.

As he pulled a small black suitcase and carried a selection of laptop bags over his shoulders, no one would have paid much attention to Ed Snowden as he arrived at Hong Kong International Airport. But Snowden was not your average tourist or businessman. In all, he was carrying four computers that enabled him to gain access to some of the US government's most highly-classified secrets.

Today, just over three weeks later, he is the world's most famous spy, whistleblower and fugitive, responsible for the biggest intelligence breach in recent US history. News organisations around the globe have described him as "America's Most Wanted". Members of Congress have denounced him as a "defector" whose actions amount to treason and have demanded he be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

His supporters argue that his actions have opened up a much-needed debate on the balance between security and privacy in the modern world.

So is he whistleblower or traitor? That debate is still raging.

Snowden, aged 29, had flown to Hong Kong from Hawaii, where he had been working for the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton at the National Security Agency, the biggest spy surveillance organisation in the world. Since Monday morning, he has gone underground. Hong Kong-based journalists, joined by the international press, have been hunting for him. At the height of the search, reporters recruited Twitter followers to see if they could successfully identify the lighting and other hotel furnishings shown in the video in which he went public. They did: the $330-a-night Mira Hotel, on Nathan Road, the busy main shopping drag in Kowloon district.

Knowing it was only a matter of time before he was found, Snowden checked out at lunchtime on Monday. It is thought he is now in a safe house.

What happens now? The US is on the verge of pressing criminal charges against him and that would lead to extradition proceedings, with a view to bringing him back to the US for trial and eventually jail.

If America is planning to jail for life Bradley Manning, who was behind the 2010 WikiLeaks release of tens of thousands of state department memos, what retribution lies in store for Snowden, who is guilty of leaking on a much bigger scale? The documents Manning released were merely "classified". Snowden's were not only "Top Secret", but circulation was extremely limited.

For an American, the traditional home for the kind of story Snowden was planning to reveal would have been the New York Times. But during extensive interviews last week with a Guardian team, he recalled how dismayed he had been to discover the Times had a great scoop in election year 2004 – that the Bush administration, post 9/11, allowed theNSA to snoop on US citizens without warrants – but had sat on it for a year before publishing.

Snowden said this was a turning point for him, confirming his belief that traditional media outlets could not be trusted. He looked around for alternative journalists, those who were both anti-establishment and at home with blogging and other social media. The member of this generation that he most trusted was the Guardian commentator Glenn Greenwald.

In January, Snowden reached out to a documentary filmmaker and journalist, Laura Poitras, and they began to correspond. In mid-February, he sent an email to Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, suggesting he might want to set up a method for receiving and sending encrypted emails. He even made a YouTube video for Greenwald, to take him step-by-step through the process of encryption. Greenwald did not know the identity of the person offering the leaks and was unsure if they were genuine. He took no action. In March, in New York, he received a call from Poitras, who convinced him that he needed to take this more seriously.

Greenwald and Snowden set up a secure communications system and the first of the documents arrived, dealing with the NSA's secret Prismprogramme, which gathers up information from the world's leading technology companies.

Greenwald flew to New York to talk to Guardian editors on 31 May; the next day, he and Poitras flew to Hong Kong. (I met the two for the first time in the New York office, accompanied them to Hong Kong and joined them in interviewing Snowden over the best part of a week, and writing articles based on the leaked documents and the interviews).

Neither Greenwald nor Poitras even knew what Snowden looked like. "He had some elaborate scheme to meet," Greenwald said. Snowden told him to go to a specific location on the third floor of the hotel and ask loudly for directions to a restaurant. Greenwald assumed Snowden was lurking in the background, listening in.

They went to a room that, Greenwald recalled, contained a large fake alligator. Snowden made himself known. He had told Greenwald that "I would know it was him because he would be carrying a Rubik's Cube".

Both Greenwald and Poitras were shocked the first time they saw the 29-year-old. Greenwald said:

I had expected a 60-year-old grizzled veteran, someone in the higher echelons of the intelligence service. I thought: 'This is going to be a wasted trip.'

After an hour of listening to Snowden, Greenwald changed his mind. "I completely believed him," he said.

The interviews were conducted in Snowden's room, which overlooked Kowloon Park. Snowden and the journalists, complete with camera equipment, crammed into the tiny space. He had been there for two weeks, having meals sent up. He did not have much with him: some clothes, a book, four computers, that Rubik's Cube. He was becoming worried about the costs and especially the chance that his credit cards would be blocked.

Even though he was well-versed in surveillance techniques, he would not have been hard to find – having signed in under his own name, using his own credit cards.

The interviews, combined with the leaked documents, provided the Guardian with four scoops in quick succession, from the court ordershowing that the US government had forced the telecoms giant Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans, to the previously undisclosed programme, Prism.

The Prism story was also published independently by the Washington Post after Poitras, a freelance journalist, had earlier approached the investigative reporter Barton Gellman, who took the story to the paper. Once on the ground working in Hong Kong, Poitras began worked with the Guardian team.

On Sunday, the story shifted from the leaks to the leaker. Snowden had from the start decided against anonymity and Poitras filmed him being interviewed by Greenwald for a video that would announce his outing.

Snowden's decision to go public has mystified many. Why come out? He had, he said, seen at first hand the impact on colleagues of leak inquiries involving anonymous sources and he did not want to put his colleagues through another ordeal.

So what are the options available to him now? In the interviews, he praised Hong Kong as a place with a strong tradition of free speech and a working judicial system, in spite of having been returned to Chinese sovereignty. But these courts, judging by examples of past extradition cases, tend to lean towards being helpful towards the US.

Snowden would likely argue he is not guilty of a crime and claim the charges are politically motivated.

He has been hailed as a hero by some and a criminal by others. He was denigrated in columns in the New York Times and Washington Post. The Post columnist Richard Cohen, though he has never met Snowden, wrote: "He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic." In the New York Times, David Brooks offered up psychological analysis, writing:

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

On Sunday night, Snowden gave the last of what had been almost a week's worth of interviews. It was his final night in that hotel room: the final night before his old life gave way to a new and uncertain one. He sat on his bed, arms folded, television news on without the sound, and spoke about the debate he had started, homing in on a comment Obama had made on Friday, in response to the leaks.

"You can't have 100% security and then also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said. Society had to make choices, he added.

Snowden challenged this, saying the problem was that the Obama administration had denied society the chance to have that discussion. He disputed that there had to be a trade-off between security and privacy, describing the very idea of a trade-off as a fundamental assault on the US constitution.

In what were to be the last words of the interview, he quoted Benjamin Franklin: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

Snowden recited it slowly. For him, it had a special resonance.

He has gone underground for now. But this saga is far from over.

Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as 'Terrorists' (View TransCanada's PowerPoints)

Alyssa Figueroa, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:00:00 -0700

Peaceful environmental protesters framed as criminals? Guess who’s scared of people power…

It’s often difficult to gauge just how much fear activists instill in the powers that be. But on Wednesday, environmental activists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline saw firsthand how much TransCanada, the corporation in charge of the pipeline, is shaking in its boots.

Bold Nebraska, a grassroots landowner advocacy group, obtained TransCanada's presentation slides (below) via a Freedom of Information Act request to the Nebraska State Patrol. These slides revealed that TransCanada provided training to both federal and local police forces on how to crack down on environmental activists, even going so far as to train them to arrest the activists under anti-terrorism statutes.

Lauren Regan, legal coordinator for Tar Sands Blockade and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center said, “This is clear evidence of the collusion between TransCanada and the federal government assisting local police to unlawfully monitor and harass political protestors.”

According to a 350.org press release the slides were presented last month in Nebraska, althought they date back to December, 2012. They specifically call out Occupy Pipe, Occupy Houston, STOP, Rainforest Action Network and Tar Sands Blockade in their presentations, which create an overall narrative that the activists are criminals and terrorists who need to be stopped.

One slide even has photos and descriptions of the “professional organizers” in a “most wanted” fashion:

Scott Parkin, an organizer at Rising Tide North America and campaigner at the Rainforest Action Network, who was listed on this slide, told AlterNet: “It’s pretty appalling. … They want to paint us as terrorists and make people scared of us.”

To the contrary, Parkin said, the activists—some of whom are grandparents— are not a bunch of crooks working underground. They are very upfront about their goals and work withlandowners.

The slides describe the movement as “lead by professionals and organized.” They report that Tar Sands Blockade “appears to be well-funded” by “Large and small donation from individuals.” Under a slide titled, “Protestor Tactics,” TransCanada states the activists “suddenly show up, driving to the entrance of site. Could be five or fifteen or more in several vehicles.”

Under a slide titled “Protestor Motivations,” TransCanada implies that these activists are just protesting because that’s what they do. One bullet point simply quotes an activist saying: “I have been an activist for fifty years. I am seventy,” obviously side-stepping the activist’s true motivations for wanting to stop the Keystone XL pipeline.

Further slides list the activists’ “criminal activity,” to which Tar Sands Blockade responded on their site:

Although TransCanada’s presentation to authorities contains information about property destruction, sabotage, and booby traps, police in Texas and Oklahoma have never alleged, accused, or charged Tar Sands Blockade activists of any such behaviors. Since August 2012, Tar Sands Blockade has carried out dozens of successful nonviolent direct actions to physically halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas and Oklahoma. All of these acts, as well as every pipeline protest in Nebraska, have maintained strict commitments to nonviolence.

Another slide lists all of the laws the activists can supposedly be found violating, and a presentation suggests that the activists are planning “terrorist acts,” and can thus be charged via anti-terrorism statutes:

According to the presentation, there are eight signs of terrorism, including “surveillance,” “suspicious persons” and “terrorism funding.”

Ron Seifert, a spokesperson for Tar Sands Blockade who was pictured in the slideshow said: “Try as TransCanada might to slander Tar Sands Blockade and our growing grassroots movement, we know who the real criminals are. … The real criminals are those profiting from this deadly tar sands pipeline by endangering families living along the route and pumping illegal levels of air toxins into fence-line communities.”

In some ways, TransCanada’s presentations are a testament to the strength and significance of the activists' resistance. It’s evident that the corporate powers are frightened by the power of the people. After all, TransCanada saw these activists and their common, non-violent protest tactics as a threat. For instance, under slides titled “Incident History,” TransCanada lists “protest/demonstrations,” “photography,” “social media organization,” “banners, signs” and other tactics as threatening to their pipeline. And under a slide titled "Potential Security Concerns," TransCanada lists the various activism and media attention surrounding their projects:

“Most of the people I’ve talked to are very much like, ‘Right on!’ ‘This is a badge of honor’ or that sort of thing,” Parkin told AlterNet.

He added that he still feels troubled by the misinformation in TransCanada's presentations:

“I actually find it a little disturbing to know that if I went to Nebraska or around some of these sites or an activist camp or an event or something like that, that law enforcement can just come up and just grab me based on what they’ve seen in these slideshows.”

Fortunately, the grassroots resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline continues to grow. TransCanada is currently digging up defective segments of the new pipeline that failed inspections, and it has been reported that there are at least 40 “anomalies” along the 60-mile stretch of the line in East Texas.

Parkin said that ultimately the presentations reveal their grassroots movement is working.

“I think it shows that it’s really effective, and it’s only getting bigger,” he said.

The following are TransCanada's presentations:

TransCanada Presentation on Security to Local Law Enforcement (Part 1 of 3)

TransCanada Presentation on Security to Local Law Enforcement (Part 2 of 3)

TransCanada Presentation on Security to Local Law Enforcement (Part 3 of 3)

TransCanada Potential Penal Code Charges for Illegal Protest Action Presentation

Nebraska Information Analysis Center meeting on Keystone XL pipeline

TransCanada presentation to FBI on pipeline projects

Crackdown on Turkish Uprising: Police Hammer Youth Revolt as Fight Continues Against Inequality and Repression

Jesse Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:43:00 -0700

Istanbul's revolt enters a new stage as a heavy-handed police force battles youth protesters.

As a sea of riot police backed by water cannon trucks pushed past the barricades, seizing the center of Taksim Square in a barrage of teargas and rubber bullets, the small environmental protests-turned-urban anti-government revolt entered a new stage. In a bid to reclaim the square they occupied for the past week, Turkish youth, woken from their tents to the sound of exploding teargas canisters, erected new barricades, throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails and fireworks in pitched battles with police throughout the day.

By nightfall, thousands of people hearing the 140 character calls on Twitter flocked to the square only to be chased down sidestreets by water cannon trucks dowsing them with pepper spray-laced water in what has become a widening government crackdown. While Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the protesters as radicals in Parliament, police detained dozens of lawyers supporting the movement at the courthouse and stormed the Socialist Democratic Party headquarters, detaining another 70 people.

What started as a sit-in in downtown Istanbul’s Gezi Park to protest the chopping down of trees to build an Ottoman-style shopping mall ballooned into massive youth-driven protests in cities across Turkey following a May 31 violent police eviction of the park. Known for their heavy-handed response to leftists and Kurds and a general intolerance for public protests, the police storming of a tame, mostly middle-class protest in the center of Istanbul set off the country in what has become an increasingly polarizing spiral.

The demonstrations in 78 cities, including the capital Ankara, have been met by a swift and punishing police response. As Erdogan took an increasingly dismissive and then hard line, opposition focused on his government, and the police became to be seen as an arm of his policies.

When labor joined the protests with widespread strikes from two major union federations on June 4 and 5, the actions gained a strong cross-class composition. Spurred on by strict organizing restrictions in Turkey and blunt police suppression to this year’s May Day protests in Taksim Square, union leaders saw a common fight with young people who had been beaten in the streets and an opportunity to air their economic grievances. As the protest coalition grew, the government's rhetoric became increasingly fierce. Erodgan's government lashed out at workers and claimed the protests were being organized by international agitators and leftwing conspirators. National division deepened as a result.

“There is a side in Turkey that people didn’t want to talk about,” says Yusa Yalgintas, a recently graduated 27-year-old artist taking part in last Monday’s university and high school students' march to the square. “But when they attacked us in the park, it couldn’t be ignored anymore." Yalgintas joined the protests after seeing the images of the May 31 crackdown. He sees Erdogan’s repeated dismissals of the protesters and the pitched battles young activists have fought just to keep a presence in the streets as the product of a society that has been going through an increasingly authoritarian turn.

Meanwhile, the economic expansion that primarily benefits the wealthy as the country emerges in the Middle East as a regional empire is a clear example for Yalgintas of a booming society that is only serving the elites. It is something Erdogan made clear last week, when, as protests generated the first real opposition he has had, he left the country on a four-day North Africa state visit.

Inspired by the Arab revolutions and the Occupy Wall Street protests and adopting the tactic of seizing public squares to command the world’s attention, Turkey’s youth have joined an internationally emerging generational politics to contest the direction of their country. For them, with the curtailments on free expression that sees journalists locked up, dissent repressed and a government intent on socially enforcing conservative morals, the symbolism of the mall is an ideal flashpoint for what they are challenging. A wide coalition made of leftists, unions, business people, the LGBT community, Kurds, and even Turkish nationalists came together to set up a festival atmosphere camp with everything from medics' stations and concert stages to free food, art displays and political workshops.

Although Erdogan has now backed down on the construction of the mall, the idea of building a wealthy shopping plaza inside a reconstructed Ottoman Empire army barracks helped encapsulate an image of what Turkey’s youth are responding to.

“The mall, just like much of the development around the Taksim area is intended to serve wealthy tourists from the Gulf,” says Elif Ince, a journalist for the liberal Turkish daily,Radikal. Writing about urban planning and gentrification, she has covered the Gezi Park story since the development plans emerged. “[The government’s] idea is to develop the area for families with a lot of money to spend who want the feel of Europe while still having the [cultural] security of a Muslim country,” she adds.

The youth at the center of the anti-government protests have spent nearly half their lives under Erdogan’s government. While the demonstrations in Taksim Square have created a drastic image contrast between a wealthy European downtown surrounding a budding activist counterculture, Istanbul’s working-class Western neighborhood Gazi has become a force to be reckoned with. A primarily Kurdish and Alawite neighborhood where residents complain of low wages, exploitation and unemployment, Gazi has had constant flareups with the police since the mid 1990s. Away from the glitz of the city’s downtown, it’s filled with towering apartments and lacks street lamps. Now Gazi’s residents have once again taken the opportunity to revolt against a long hated police force locals describe as systemically racist and anti-worker.

Fierce nightly street clashes over the last week have brought thousands of residents of all ages into the streets and the night before police returned to Taksim Square is no different. Tire and garbage fires mark the barricade lines of the street clashes while the high-beam lights from armored police vehicles and water cannon trucks provide the main source of light in the night clashes. As neighborhood youth shoot fireworks and hurl rocks at the cops in a cat-and-mouse game, other residents take to the center of the streets to hold a public assembly.

“I’m here because all the police and government want to do is divide our community,” says Dilan Tiyar, standing on the edge of the popular assembly as several teenagers rush past to the front lines of the clashes. A 21-year-old recent university graduate who grew up in Gazi, she goes to Taksim Square regularly and accuses Erdogan of trying to limit her freedoms and impose the Islamic values espoused by his Justice and Development Party onto society as whole. “Erdogan only governs for people that think like him, not the whole country,” she adds.

Winning three successive elections with increased majority governments, Erdogan has a strong support base, something he has demonstrated in several largely attended rallies of supporters since protests widened. However, the deep splits are solidifying in Turkey and those taking to the streets feel the country they want to see and freedoms they demand are being locked behind police lines and suffocated with tear gas.

How the Transition Movement Is Spreading to Towns Across America

Jessica Stites, In These Times — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:15:00 -0700

Transition's focus on resilient communities finds a middle ground between the 'drop in the bucket' of personal action and the depressing inertia of government.

When I set out to investigate the appeal of Transition, a sustainability movement that has spread to 1,105 towns in 43 countries over the past eight years, I started with what I thought was a basic question: What are “Transition Towns” transitioning to?

“Resilience,” I was told. “What does that mean?” I asked, thinking vaguely of steel. “The ability to absorb shocks to a system!” was the reply. Well, yes, but …? Pressed for details, Nina Winn, who runs a Transition initiative at the Institute of Cultural Affairs in Chicago, said, “I don’t think there’s a conclusion. Like when a person’s trying to self-improve, it’s a constant growth. Our communities would grow to be a lot more intimate. We wouldn’t be hesitant to ask for that cup of sugar or tomato. The streets would be narrower instead of expanding; there would be fresh produce on every corner that was grown just down the street. You would see people on the street because of that—because where there’s food, there’s people.”

Such bucolic but fuzzy visions are typical of Transition, which is more about shifting paradigms than prescribing solutions. With an it’ll-take-shape-as-we-go ethos, most Transition Town websites sport a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. … Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.”

On a basic level, however, the experiment seeks to address what founder Rob Hopkins sees as a source of frustration in the environmental movement: Personal action feels like a drop in the bucket, while governments often move at a glacial pace.

“Until now, there’s been the things you can do at home on your own—changing your lightbulbs and sharing your lofts and things—and then there’s everything else that someone else is meant to do: the sort of mythical ‘they,’” says Hopkins. “Transition is what’s in the middle, what you can do with the people on your street.”

The seed for Transition came in 2004 when Hopkins, a young teacher with a degree in environmental quality and resource management, encountered the concept of peak oil: the theory that easy-to-reach oil will run out at a specific date—some say 2020—precipitating a rapid decline in oil availability followed by the collapse of civilization as we know it. At the time, Hopkins was teaching a permaculture course at the Kinsale College of Further Education, an alternative school on Ireland’s southern coast. Permaculture is another one of these concepts that, as Hopkins notes, is “notoriously difficult to explain in two minutes in the pub,” but it’s most commonly described as an ecological design movement that sees nature in terms of interlocking systems. Alarmed by peak oil, Hopkins assigned his students to apply the principles of permaculture to the problem.

The result was a concrete plan to make Kinsale dramatically less fossil-fuel dependent, with recommendations such as a green buildings officer and a horse-and-cart taxi. The Kinsale Town Council enthusiastically adopted the plan, and the principles underlying it became the precepts of Transition, as outlined in Hopkins’ 2008 Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience and as adopted by Transition Towns worldwide.

But it would be a mistake to think that becoming a Transition Town means setting off on a clear-cut path to energy independence. From permaculture, the movement has inherited a non-linear, bottom-up approach—even the original 12 “steps” outlined in Hopkins’ handbook have been renamed “ingredients.” If the Transition movement has a sine qua non, however, it is the belief that communities must become more resilient in the face of three catastrophic threats: peak oil, global warming and economic instability. Whether the movement means to avert or adapt to future disasters is ambiguous; when I ask, Transition members tend to respond, “Both!” as though I have just recited their favorite koan.

Practically, this means preparing towns to better survive sudden shortfalls of such necessities as food, oil, water or money. These preparations take many forms, some infrastructural—such as solar energy programs and local economic initiatives—others interpersonal, like the “heart and soul” groups that encourage people to help each other in times of need and open their minds to new solutions.

Totnes, England, declared the first official Transition Town in 2006, offers perhaps the most fully realized example. The town, with a population of 7,400, boasts nearly 30 Transition projects and sub-projects. Some are small-scale, like nut-tree planting and a free “bike doctor,” while others are more ambitious, like an incubator for sustainable businesses and a 305-pageEnergy Descent Action Plan to cut the town’s energy usage in half by 2030. The movement is enthusiastically backed by the city mayor and the town councilors, one of whom attests that “the [Energy Descent Action Plan] has filtered into everyone’s plans for everything, so that’s had a major impact.” A much-heralded neighborhood-level project has been Transition Streets, which brought residents together, block by block, to support each other in decreasing their home energy use through improvements like insulation and solar panels. On average, each of the 550 participating households cut its annual carbon use by 1.3 tons and its annual energy bill by £570 (about $883).

Hopkins stresses, however, that the Transition movement is not in the business of stamping out cookie-cutter copies of Totnes. Transition spreads primarily through serendipity. One member likens it to a mycelium network, a fungus with underground roots that can sprout new shoots miles away. In effect, this means that someone—often with a background in sustainability—stumbles across Transition online or in print and decides to start a local chapter.

While guidance is available from umbrella support groups such as Transition U.S. and the U.K.-based Transition Network, the movement is intended to mutate as it grows. “We designed it with a simple set of principles and tools and sort of set it off, and it keeps popping up in the most incredible, surprising places, in the most incredible, surprising ways,” says Hopkins. “When there’s Transition happening in Brazil, it feels like a Brazilian thing, it doesn’t feel like an English imported thing.”

Indeed, the organizers of Brazil’s Transition movement say that two of the three core principles—peak oil and climate change—don’t resonate strongly with the Brazilian public, so Transition trainings focus more on “assuring education and health for all, protecting biodiversity and enhancing autonomy of traditional (indigenous or not) local communities.” In Brasilândia, one of the slums of São Paulo, Transition primarily fosters social enterprise projects; it has given birth to a community bakery and a business turning old advertising banners into bags.

In parts of Europe, Transition has had to respond to the pressing needs of communities decimated by the ongoing Eurozone crisis. When the city of Coin, Spain, went bankrupt and decided to privatize the water, Coin En Transicion gathered 3,000 signatures to convince the city to squash the plan. Now the movement is working with the city government to design a regional water plan grounded in principles of sustainability and resilience.

In Portugal, where unemployment is at 16.9 percent and climbing, the Transition Town of Portalegre has drawn inspiration from ajujeda, an ancient rural practice of trading chores in the fields. This month, Portalegre em Transição will meet to figure out how to translate the principle of ajujeda into a functioning gift economy, allowing those whose skills are not being used (for instance, the unemployed) to share them with those whose needs are not being met.

Across the pond

In making the leap across the Atlantic to the United States, where more than 139 Transition Towns and 200 unofficial “mullers” have sprouted, Transition has also taken its own, distinct path.

Most of the Transition towns in the United States have popped up in places one might expect: relatively moneyed, green, hippie enclaves like Boulder, Colo. (the first official U.S. Transition Town); Sebastopol, Calif.; Northampton, Mass.; and Woodstock, N.Y. None have taken root so far in any conservative strongholds, although there are a number of urban initiatives, in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Cleveland, to name a few.

As in the United Kingdom, members of the U.S. Transition movement tend to split up into working groups around specific projects. A common one is an “emergency preparedness” group, which devises things like phone trees and alternative heating sources for use in the event of disaster. “Yard share” working groups match would-be gardeners to landowners willing to lend a patch of fertile ground. “Heart and soul” or “inner transition” working groups stress psychological and spiritual transformation, drawing on the teachings of thinkers such as Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy. “Reskilling” working groups offer trainings in all manner of practical pre-industrial skills, from cheesemaking to animal husbandry to knot-tying to knitting.

Of course, Transition is not the only sustainability game in town. Wherever it goes, and especially in cities, it enters a terrain thick with environmental non-profits and local government initiatives. More than 1,060 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a pledge to meet the goal of the Kyoto Protocol (the United States was one of only four countries not to join) to reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. Some cities have gone beyond that: Last year, Chicago drafted a sustainability plan for the year 2015 that reads something like Totnes’s Energy Descent Action Plan—a laundry list of goals such as improving citywide energy efficiency by 5 percent and decreasing water use by 2 percent (14 million gallons a day). To get there, the city has launched numerous projects, such as eco-friendly overhauls of city buses, a “rails-to-trails conversion” of a disused train line into a park (modeled on New York City’s High Line), and a Sustainable Backyards Program that urges residents to install compost bins and rainwater collectors.

Given this abundance of initiatives, many Transition movements, especially in cities, take on a networking role to connect existing sustainability projects. Transition Pittsburgh’s mission is to offer “resources—such as educators, movie screenings and licenses, and a library of shared knowledge—to various local initiatives, as well as a city-wide community and some of our own projects.” Chicago’s Transition chapter—called Accelerate 77 after the division of the city into 77 unofficial communities by social scientists at the University of Chicago—set out by creating a dense map of the more than 800 sustainability projects underway in Chicago, which are remarkably evenly spaced throughout the areas of poverty and wealth that stratify the city. It hosted a “Share Fair” in September for the various groups to connect with each other, followed by three neighborhood gatherings on Chicago’s South, West and North Sides to connect with residents.

I asked Ryan Wilson of the nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a sustainability “think-and-do tank” that participated in the Share Fair, whether he thinks Transition has anything to add to Chicago’s wealth of sustainability initiatives. “It was helpful to learn what other projects are out there—maybe more helpful for some of the smaller groups,” he says. “The Transition folks—I like the people. I like their energy.”

This jives with Hopkins’ thinking on Transition, which has progressed from seeing “resilience” as a strictly environmental process to a more social one: “We have all the technologies to [achieve sustainability],” he says, “but we don’t have the social technologies to make it happen.”

The art of hosting

Transition’s freewheeling structure, however, does mean that certain problems—or “challenges”—seem to crop up frequently. As with any volunteer-driven movement, members describe burnout and lack of accountability. After a stage of initial enthusiasm, projects can fall dormant. More successful Transition Towns often have paid staff. After observing that most initiatives “were struggling with an all-volunteer leadership team,” Transition Sarasota founder Don Hall decided to raise the money to pay himself as a full-time organizer, cobbling together his salary from “a mix of event and workshop fees, donations, local business sponsorships and grants.” In many cities, Transition has been adopted by non-profits that provide paid staff, like Chicago’s Institute of Cultural Affairs, a 50-yearold organization dedicated to sustainability and social change, and Jamaica Plain’s Institute for Policy Studies, the Boston branch of aprogressive, multi-issue D.C. think tank.

The Transition movement also grapples with the challenges of non-hierarchical, collective leadership. When I contacted Transition Sebastopol, in California, a longstanding, apparently thriving Transition town with a busy events calendar, I was surprised to learn that all was not well. A dispute in September had put the central Working Group Council on hold, although several working groups—an elders salon, the “heart and soul” group—are chugging along independently. Former working group member Julia Bystrova ascribes the blow-up to a lack of conflict-resolution mechanisms. She hopes that a fresh team will take over and resuscitate the group.

Hopkins is quick to cop to these pitfalls, and Transition is good at tapping into existing knowledge bases to fix problems. Transition U.S. has partnered with an organization called The Art of Hosting to offer facilitation trainings and will begin hosting regional courses on “effective groups” starting in September. Transition U.K. offers Thrive workshops for the same purpose, and ecofeminist and spiritual activist Starhawk gave a workshop in Totnes last month about clear communication and constructive critique in collective decision-making.

Another common concern about Transition, levied from both within and without, is that it is a movement of “white hippies.” While the definition of “hippie” is open to debate, each of the half dozen Transition towns I surveyed in the U.S. indeed lamented a lack of diversity. In addition to being predominantly white, participants in several towns mentioned that their initiative was made up primarily of older women.

While many in the Transition movement said they were working to increase diversity, by far the most impressive effort I encountered is being staged by the Boston branch of IPS’ Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JP NET), which has hired an organizer to help meet this challenge. Carlos Espinoza-Toro, a Peruvian immigrant with a master’s in city planning from MIT, aims to identify spaces where different demographics intersect—farmers’ markets, festivals—as well as to find people like himself who enjoy serving as cross-cultural bridges. But he’s going beyond mixed-race spaces to foster Transition in the heart of Jamaica Plain’s Latino community. A series of IPA-hosted meetings in Spanish (with simultaneous English translation) encourages residents to talk about how they are weathering environmental and economic crises. Espinoza-Toro’s bilingual fliers for the first meeting read:

Us Latinos have adapted to economic crises in our countries and in the US for many years. And we have always prevailed! We are creative, resourceful and entrepreneurial. Currently in the US, MA and JP we are experiencing a crisis that challenges our capacity of adaptation. Work opportunities are scarce, rent keeps going up, it becomes more difficult to afford a healthy diet and take the T, the quality of education in our public schools diminishes. …We invite you to share how you are adapting to this crisis or how you have adapted to previous crises. Tell us your stories of adaptation. We could transform your effort into a neighborhood effort with great impact in JP.

Espinoza-Toro anticipates that the needs of Jamaica Plain’s Latino immigrant community may be very different from the white, middle-class needs that have prompted JP NET’s existing programs, such as garden shares and urban orchards. “Folks in the Latino community may say, ‘Well, we cannot do our own gardening if we are getting evicted from our homes,’ ” he says. JP NET has one program underway to address housing issues, a community land trust called Pueblo, but Espinoza-Toro estimates that it is years from fruition thanks to high property costs in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. He hopes other ideas will emerge from the meetings.

Outside of urban areas, the barriers that limit the reach of Transition can be subtler than ethnicity. In New York state’s Hudson Valley and other agricultural areas around the United States, Transition is one of many sustainability initiatives to run up against a cultural divide between traditional farmers and those who practice newer, more sustainable methods like organic, permacultural and biodynamic farming.

“You have organic farmers who are pretty disdainful and smug, and traditional farmers who are kind of threatened,” says Maria Reidelbach, an artist and member of Transition Marbletown, N.Y., who found herself spanning both sides when she partnered with a 177-year-old local farm to create a mini-golf course featuring entirely edible plants (along with the world’s third-largest garden gnome, “Gnome Chomsky”). “When the traditional farmers adopted machinery and pesticides in the 20th century, the yield increased incredibly, and all of a sudden they were able to feed so many more people with the same amount of land and less help,” says Reidelbach. “To them, that’s great. And then we come along 30 years later and start telling them that they are feeding people poison.”

Reidelbach thinks Transition Marbletown has gone some way toward bridging this divide. The movement, she says, managed to “rope in” the local growers’ association to cosponsor a “Common Ground Celebration” last fall. At a farmers’ market, growers mingled and tasted each other’s crops, and farmers of all stripes were recognized with “Signs of Sustainability Awards.”

“There’s a value to the farmers listening to each other, humanizing each other,” says Reidelbach. “Then they are much less likely to dis each others’ methods, modus operandi and motives. I think everybody’s got to get down off their high horses. That’s one of the things that Transition enables.”

Modest expectations, high spirits

Asked if he eventually envisions Transition scaling up and being adopted by regional or national governments, Hopkins assents cautiously, explaining that the goal would be for government to better enable local projects (for instance, by making laws more friendly to small-scale farming). He also hopes that Transition will hit a tipping point at which new solutions seem possible—where, for instance, local governments don’t feel that the only solution to economic hardship is to try to attract large corporations in a deregulatory race to the bottom.

Espinoza-Toro says that he chooses Transition over other forms of organizing because he is inspired by the movement’s tangibility. “What I find most fruitful and rewarding about my work here is that I’m dealing with folks face-to-face in order to tackle some of these issues,” he says.

Again and again, for Transitioners, it seems to come back to that social aspect. “Between you and me, I don’t know if we’re going to solve the world’s problems,” says Reidelbach. “[But] the underlying ethos is that the process needs to be fun enough to be worth doing anyway. I love that about it. There’s a bit of anarchy, which is wonderful. People who are attracted to it tend to be upbeat, optimistic, joyous people.

“I don’t see anything meaningful happening at the top, with governments and multinational corporations,” Reidelbach continues. “Whether or not we win, Transition is the only group offering a model where I can deal with fossil fuel depletion and climate change myself.”

New Documentary Claims Nuclear Power Can Save the Planet -- Should We Buy in?

Mark Hertsgaard, Terry Tempest Williams, The Nation — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:38:00 -0700

A conversation about a new documentary "Pandora's Promise," its provocative claims—and the facts it leaves out.

Recently, acclaimed writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams alerted The Nation about a new documentary she had just seen that caused her to question her long-held opposition to nuclear power. Pandora’s Promise, which appears in theaters in June and will be broadcast by CNN in the fall, features five “converts” who argue that the dire threat of climate change requires humanity to embrace nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels. Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation’s environment correspondent, who has been covering the nuclear industry since investigating it for his book Nuclear Inc. (Pantheon, 1983), had a different reaction to the film. What follows is a dialogue between Williams and Hertsgaard about the film, the history of the nuclear industry and alternative solutions to the climate crisis.—The Editors

Terry Tempest Williams: “I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead.” So begins the epilogue of my memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, written in 1991. As Utahns, residents of the Atomic West, we are hibakusha, explosion-affected people bound by the wind. Half of my family has died from cancers that I believe were a result of radioactive fallout caused by aboveground nuclear explosions tested in the Nevada desert from 1945 to 1962. In declassified materials from the Atomic Energy Commission, Mormons and Indians living downwind of the blasts were considered “a low-use segment of the population.” In the eyes of our government, my people were expendable. Almost $800 million has been paid in compensation to “down-winders” as an acknowledgment and apology by the government for negligence against its citizens in the testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. My family’s story is just one in an anthology of thousands.

So when I say that Robert Stone’s film Pandora’s Promise challenged my thinking after thirty years of antinuclear activism and repeated arrests at the Nevada Test Site on behalf of “the Clan of One-Breasted Women,” it is not a small statement. This crack in my own thinking is heightened by the fact that I am now watching my extended community of plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings be ravaged by the oil and gas industry, be it fracking or the razing of vulnerable wildlands. And then there is the BP oil spill.

For me, this film’s strength was not that it changed my mind, which it did not, but that it expanded it. I am interested in having an open conversation about nuclear energy. Climate change is real. We know we must wean ourselves off fossil fuels. So what are the alternatives? Are renewable energy sources enough for the energy-poor around the world? My questions are many. Richard Jeffries, the nineteenth-century British naturalist, wrote: “Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible.”

Mark Hertsgaard: Questioning one’s assumptions is a good thing, but I have to point out that this documentary’s pro-nuclear argument is neither as original nor as brave as its protagonists seem to think. Watching Pandora’s Promise reminded me that the first time I heard the phrase “global warming” was thirty years ago… from a nuclear industry executive.

This was in the early 1980s, and the industry was in the doldrums. This executive told me that a number of factors, including something called global warming, would eventually cause citizens and public officials alike to recognize that the world faced a “nuclear imperative,” as he and other executives called it. Sometime around the turn of the century, he confided, global warming would help put nuclear power back on the agenda. This, of course, is the same message the industry has spent untold amounts of money promoting in recent years.

There is no hint in Pandora’s Promise that the film’s director or its protagonists are aware of this history—or, for that matter, that they’re in the pay of the industry. The fact is, however, that they and the film are playing roles in a drama written long ago by the very economic interests that would profit from a nuclear revival.

TTW: I didn’t know that history myself, Mark. But is it fair to say that you and I both agree with Pandora’s Promise that climate change is such an urgent threat that even a technology as problematic as nuclear power should not be automatically excluded from our options? And even if this argument fits a story line envisioned decades ago by the nuclear industry, don’t the voices in this film deserve a hearing?

One of the five converts in the film, Richard Rhodes, is someone for whom I have great respect as a writer. He is a deeply thoughtful man whose book The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a serious historical synthesis of the nuclear age. Among the other converts, I do find the work of Michael Shellenberger suspect on grounds of being intentionally incendiary and provocative. I am also troubled by the assertion in Mark Lynas’s book The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans that we humans are now in control of all things wild and must turn to technology, including genetic engineering, to rescue ourselves. This kind of “pragmatic environmentalism” strikes me as a dangerously arrogant way of seeing our interdependent relationship with the earth.

Even so, I’m interested in the nature of change—how it occurs and why. If I am asking people to change their way of thinking, especially regarding climate change and the adoption of an ethic of place, then it seems only fair to ask that of myself. A reassessment of nuclear energy becomes part of that inquiry.

MH: That’s the conceit of the film, and it’s an angle that has animated more than a few recent media stories about a supposed split in the green movement over whether nuclear power is acceptable as a response to climate change. My own reporting on the movement suggests that nothing so grandiose is under way. A small number of individual environmentalists have advocated nuclear, as have some scientists who rank as climate heroes—notably James Hansen, formerly of NASA, and David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the British government. Other prominent backers include Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen; in fact, Allen is one of the producers of Pandora’s Promise. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of green groups and leaders continue to oppose nuclear power.

The five converts featured in Pandora’s Promise speak for themselves as individuals; they don’t represent large environmental organizations—or small ones, for that matter. Gwyneth Cravens and Richard Rhodes don’t even appear to have track records as activists; Cravens is a fiction writer. Stewart Brand helped found the Whole Earth Catalog, but that was over forty years ago; since then, he’s spent much of his time as a consultant to corporations, including some in the energy sector. Shellenberger is a PR man who, as he says in the film, used to consult for environmental groups but no longer does.

The only bona fide activist is Lynas, who also happens to have written a fine book about climate change, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Some activists are now attacking Lynas as a sellout, especially after his speech in January apologizing for his previous activism against genetically modified crops. But I know and respect Mark and think he is sincere, and in any case I don’t see the value in personalizing such disagreements.

To answer your question, Terry, it is absolutely valid to reconsider nuclear power—and other controversial technologies as well—in light of the fast-accelerating climate crisis. It is also true, as the film emphasizes, that coal is a dirty, deadly technology that needs to be retired as quickly as possible. The mercury and other local air pollutants released by burning coal kill at least 13,000 people every year in the United States alone. And, of course, burning coal is also the largest source globally of the greenhouse gases that are driving our planet toward potentially irreversible warming.

One of my objections to Pandora’s Promise, though, is how the film pretends all of this is news to environmentalists. The truth is that environmentalists hate coal and are fighting it tooth and nail. And quite successfully, I might add: a grassroots campaign led by local environmentalists and coordinated by the Sierra Club has helped end the building of new coal-fired power plants in the United States.

So, yes, I’m all in favor of keeping an open mind. But let’s get the facts straight.

TTW: The fracture line that I do believe is present and widening within the green movement is a philosophical one that cuts to the core of Pandora’s Promise. Given that our species numbers 7 billion and rising, there are those who believe the only practical way we can sustain an energy-rich future is to commit to more development, more technology—nuclear energy included—as we continue on the trajectory of progress to fuel more consumption. The energy-poor deserve what we have in places like the United States and Europe. There is no turning back. We have no historical evidence of stopping the arrow of progress. Developing nations deserve America’s privilege. This is a core belief that saturates the logic of this documentary and its converts.

The other side of the movement is less human-centered: it asks for restraint, seeing ourselves as a species among a cacophony of other species, interdependent and interrelated, where what is called for is not new technology but a new planetary consciousness. This includes the choice to embrace an ethic of conservation that honors biodiversity, wild lands and wild lives. That includes plants and animals—all living species, not just our own. Allow me to quote Robinson Jeffers: “Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty…the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man/ apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.” The question becomes not how can we further promote a lifestyle of living beyond our energy means, but how can we live more lightly on the planet.

In truly understanding what is driving this film, it’s crucial to understand the philosophical underpinnings behind it. But you ask to get the facts right, Mark, and I agree. My primary critique of Pandora’s Promise is its reliance solely on facts that serve the assertions of the five converts. People opposed to nuclear energy are uniformly portrayed as naïve, ill-informed, irrational freaks. Regardless of how you view Dr. Helen Caldicott (she remains a hero of mine for her early alert call), she is hugely maligned in this film, appearing as an antinuclear wingnut shrieking to her Grateful Dead choir. It is a gross oversimplification and displays prejudice. Not one well-spoken opponent of nuclear energy appears on the screen—not one.

And when the film’s converts speak to their preferred facts that there have been no deaths from radioactive fallout since the Fukushima meltdowns in 2011, and that the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 caused only fifty-six deaths, my first complaint is the one lodged within my own cells and the cells of my family members, now buried: it’s too damn early to tell. Cancer from radiation exposure usually takes time to present itself; it is not immediate. My second complaint is that there are plenty of scientific studies—most recently, a report published by the National Cancer Institute in 2012—all refuting the notion that radioactivity is all but harmless, though one wouldn’t know this from watching the film.

MH: You can say that again. Even the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, an organization committed to promoting nuclear power, concluded in a 2005 study that the radioactivity released at Chernobyl would cause 4,000 cancer deaths. A study by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded in 2008 that Chernobyl had caused 6,000 thyroid cancers among children, and “many more” such cancers are projected in the years ahead. But the UNSCEAR study didn’t take into account the long-term impacts of radioactivity, as the European Environment Agency pointed out earlier this year. Applying the standard risk estimates established by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the EEA said that Chernobyl will cause between 17,000 and 68,000 cancer deaths over the fifty years following the 1986 accident, as well as additional cardiovascular and immunological diseases.

Instead of confronting this multidimensional mosaic of scientific findings, Pandora’s Promise portrays all nuclear critics as clones of Helen Caldicott, whom the film shows claiming Chernobyl caused “a million” deaths. Caldicott’s figure is derived from an analysis published in 2007 by former Soviet environmental adviser Alexey Yablokov and two colleagues, which had severe methodological shortcomings. But that doesn’t mean Chernobyl hasn’t killed many thousands of people to date and won’t kill many more in years to come.

TTW: Pandora’s Promise continues to tell us that not only are antinuclear activists confused, but we, the public, have conflated nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and this confusion is responsible for nuclear power’s image problems. As a writer, I understand the power of imagery and how it enters our imagination: we see the mushroom cloud, and we equate its destructive power with the dangers inside a nuclear power plant. But I don’t believe this equation is a myth. The power of plutonium both to create and to destroy is a hard-edged truth. No one knew this better than the scientists themselves, from Einstein to Oppenheimer. So another question arises: Can we separate nuclear power from its military applications? Plutonium can be a force for good and a force for evil, just as humans are.

MH: Once more, this film echoes a lament I heard from corporate executives while writing Nuclear Inc. One exec, complaining about the public’s “irrational” fears, said he’d come up with the perfect antidote: utility companies should paint cooling towers bright colors and add daisies, too. The bosses, being mainly no-nonsense engineers, didn’t see the genius of his plan, he grumbled.

But a paint job isn’t enough to sever the link between the military and civilian applications of nuclear energy. It’s an inalterable physical fact: nuclear fission produces plutonium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons. The weapons risk is especially high in the type of reactor that Pandora’s Promise champions, a breeder reactor. This is because breeders don’t just produce plutonium; they also use it as fuel. A “reprocessing” plant then recycles the burned fuel, producing yet more plutonium that the breeder can burn anew. Advocates therefore praise breeders for providing a virtually inexhaustible source of fuel—enough to power not just the United States but the world for centuries to come, allowing humanity to leave fossil fuels behind. As Brand says about plutonium in the film, eyes twinkling, “That looks very much like a renewable resource.”

The problem, again, is that this same miracle fuel is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. In fact, it was by exploiting the dual nature of nuclear fission that India acquired nuclear weapons in 1974—much as Iran is believed to be trying to do in 2013. Publicly, India’s leaders pledged to use reprocessing only for power production. In reality, they used the first batch of plutonium they reprocessed to fuel what they called a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” This earth-shaking event caused rival Pakistan to beg, borrow and steal until it detonated its own nuclear weapons in 1998. Other nations have followed suit, creating a world where many different hands now hover over many different nuclear triggers.

None of this inconvenient history is mentioned in Pandora’s Promise. Instead, the hot-button words “breeder reactor” are only uttered once, in passing, after which the film refers only to the “integral fast reactor,” though the IFR is in fact a type of breeder reactor. It’s a remarkably one-sided presentation.

TTW: I am a strong advocate for documentary films. I also believe artists have a right to their own creative vision. And I admire Robert Stone’s courage to tell a different story. What becomes problematic is that facts matter when there is so much at stake, from plutonium getting into the hands of terrorists to the issue of nuclear waste and public health, not to mention the astronomical costs of building nuclear power plants. Even so, I remain open to learning about new strategies for nuclear energy; this is the conversation I am seeking.

At my invitation, Robert Stone screened Pandora’s Promise at Dartmouth College this spring. It was a spirited discussion, to say the least. Many in the audience appreciated bringing nuclear energy back into the conversation on climate change and supported nuclear power and the film enthusiastically. There were also antinuclear activists from Vermont who were deeply upset by the film, having fought the Yankee nuclear power plant for years. And there were others, myself included, who didn’t understand the nuances of the integral fast reactors, which the film posits as the solution to climate change. So I now turn to you, my friend, to provide clarity.

MH: You know you’re watching a wonky film when it spends ages extolling the virtues of something called an integral fast reactor, complete with models and graphs. As it happens, the IFR was the Bush/Cheney administration’s favorite reactor design. In Pandora’s Promise, it is Charles Till, who headed an aborted government program to develop the IFR in the 1980s and ’90s, who makes the case.

The film accepts uncritically Till’s claim that the IFR is inherently safe. IFRs are, however, cooled by sodium, which reacts violently upon contact with air or water; nearly all of the world’s sodium-cooled reactors have suffered fires, like the one that closed the Monju nuclear plant in Japan in 1995. (“Monju” is another word absent from this film.) The delicacy of working with sodium has made repairs and maintenance very time-consuming, causing long power outages. In France, whose enthusiastic embrace of all things nuclear Pandora’s Promise urges the United States and the world to emulate, the defunct SuperPhoenix breeder reactor generated less than 7 percent of its electricity capacity during its years of operation. Today, after global expenditures of $100 billion, there is not a single commercially operating breeder reactor on earth—which is but one example of how appallingly expensive nuclear power has turned out to be (more on this shortcoming below).

But the reprocessing plants built to supply plutonium—for all the breeders once envisioned and for nuclear weapons manufacturing—have kept operating. As a result, there are now an estimated 250 tons of plutonium at these plants, enough to make approximately 30,000 nuclear weapons. Is it really wise to go further down this road, even in the name of halting climate change? The government has not thought so. Under Republican and Democratic administrations alike and with bipartisan congressional support, Washington halted the development of breeder rectors in the 1970s and canceled Till’s beloved IFR program in 1994. Yet all the film has to say about proliferation risks is this statement by Rhodes: “There are thirty-seven countries around the world that could produce nuclear weapons, according to the CIA. But none have produced them.” That is not correct, as India’s example, among others, demonstrates. In any case, given how crucial breeders are to this film’s argument that only nuclear energy can prevent climate catastrophe, it is shocking how little it says about the most obvious objection this stance invites: that spreading reprocessing technology around the world would significantly increase the risk of nuclear war. Is the filmmaker trying to dodge this troublesome issue? Or is he simply out of his intellectual depth?

TTW: When Pandora’s Promise was screened at Dartmouth, some of the strongest objections voiced by audience members concerned the film’s dismissal of all noncarbon energy sources except nuclear. Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, took issue with the film’s claim that renewable energy sources are available only intermittently—because the sun doesn’t always shine or the wind always blow—and therefore can’t be relied on. That is not true, especially of geothermal energy, Bradford noted. “Saying that nuclear energy can solve climate change is like saying caviar can solve world hunger,” he said.

Gus Speth, co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, found fault with the film’s assumption that humanity is moving inevitably toward a future that will require producing more energy. “Many of us who have been carefully studying this issue just don’t believe that,” he told Stone, adding that without a more informed discussion of the potential of energy efficiency, Pandora’s Promise loses credibility. Stone’s response was to invoke the inhabitants of developing countries who, he said, “want and deserve” the same material goods as we have in America, and to argue that conservation measures just aren’t enough, nor can renewables carry the energy load.

For me, these questions can be translated to one overall question: What energy sources can we employ that do the least harm to life on earth and at the same time can meet the expanding needs of the human family?

MH: If our options really were as simple as Pandora’s Promise maintains—either go nuclear or incinerate the planet with more coal—it’d be a tough call. But that’s not the case. To make it seem so, the film trashes all nonnuclear alternatives. It is especially dismissive of wind and solar in what I found to be, frankly, an embarrassingly dated critique, though it fits the meta-narrative of Shellenberger’s Breakthrough Institute, some of whose funders helped to finance this film.

Five or six years ago, one could make a plausible argument that solar and wind power were unreliable, unaffordable niche products. But in 2013, when wind power is by far the fastest-growing source of electricity here? (It’s poised to supply 40 percent of the power in Iowa, for example.) And when solar is growing nearly as fast, largely because customers in twenty-two states and the District of Columbia can now get rooftop panels installed free and enjoy guaranteed lower monthly electric bills thereafter?

How about overseas? Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is well on the way to leaving nuclear and fossil fuels behind as it embraces a panoply of noncarbon energy sources. In China, solar-powered water heaters are now standard features on new housing, while solar lamps are spreading much-needed light and prosperity in countless villages in Asia and Africa. How then are solar and wind still “marginal” energy sources, as this documentary asserts?

If nonnuclear sources of renewable energy are really as chimerical as Pandora’s Promise would have us believe, why is the military accelerating its pursuit of them? How did the National Renewable Energy Laboratory come up with its conclusion that the United States could employ them, in conjunction with a smart grid, to reduce its consumption of carbon-based fuels by 80 percent by 2050? Are these establishment institutions and many others like them really less informed and savvy than the five converts featured in this film?

TTW: Michael Totten, whom I regard as one of the world’s leading thinkers about green technologies and ecological sustainability, has set forth these criteria when exploring energy alternatives:

Is it economically affordable, including for the poor?

Is it safe throughout its entire life cycle?

Is it clean throughout its entire lifespan?

Is the risk low and manageable?

Is it resilient and flexible to volatility, surprises, miscalculations and human error?

Is it ecologically sustainable, with no adverse impacts on biodiversity?

Is it environmentally benign in maintaining air, water and soil quality?

If it fails, does it fail gracefully, not catastrophically?

Does it rebound easily and swiftly from failures?

Is it an uninteresting target for malicious disruption, off the radar of terrorists and military planners?

And I think about this: it is possible we haven’t come close to understanding the true nature of forms of energy that have little to do with fossil fuels or the splitting of atoms. We cannot talk about the future without talking about the imagination and what it might bring forth.

MH: Ironically, your point applies particularly well to a source of renewable energy that is generally seen as anything but imaginative: energy efficiency. It takes imagination to envision all the cost-effective ways to improve a given building or business’s energy efficiency, but the payoff is bountiful. As the work of Amory Lovins and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute has demonstrated in great detail, improving energy efficiency is by far the quickest, safest and most lucrative route to reducing consumption of fossil fuels. Indeed, it is the potential of energy efficiency that leads Lovins to argue that going nuclear would actually make global warming worse, not better.

How can that be so, you might ask, given that nuclear produces carbon-free electricity? The answer is rooted not in arguments about nuclear power’s safety or lack thereof, but in its severe economic shortcomings. Nuclear power is fantastically expensive—so expensive that private investors long ago stopped financing large nuclear plants. So for society to allocate scarce capital to nuclear power amounts to pursuing the slowest, costliest route to displacing fossil fuels, while diverting capital from the fastest, cheapest route. Energy efficiency is far more cost-effective at reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions: adding better insulation to buildings and upgrading motors and appliances begins cutting fossil fuel use all but immediately. Data collected by Lovins and his colleagues demonstrate that each dollar invested in improving energy efficiency produces seven times more reduction in greenhouse gas emissions than a dollar invested in nuclear. Seven timesmore. Turning our backs on that option in favor of nuclear therefore makes global warming worse by slowing our response to the real problem.

Nevertheless, energy efficiency is yet another common-sense solution to climate change that this film disparages without bothering to offer evidence. Shellenberger, who “felt angry” after having bought the “seductive” myth of energy efficiency while reading Lovins in college, declares: “People think we’ll reduce our energy consumption [after improving energy efficiency], but in fact we’ll just find more uses for it.” Apparently, that single sentence is meant to settle the matter. Except it doesn’t. Those wacky tree-huggers at McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s foremost management consulting firms, have demonstrated that improved efficiency could cut US energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020, while saving $680 billion and abating 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

Now, it’s not an open-and-shut case for energy efficiency. As the Breakthrough Institute is forever arguing, the “rebound effect”—whereby better efficiency can lead to extra use of the underlying technology, as when a buyer of a more fuel-efficient car then uses it more often—does exist. But it is, as the institute has acknowledged, “relatively small”—something Pandora’s Promise fails to mention. Of course, a documentary film is not a PhD thesis, but this is the posture not of a seeker of truth, but a propagandist who cherry-picks “facts” to fit his agenda.

TTW: For me, Pandora’s Promise is still a compelling film, even if its “facts” are cherry-picked; that cherry-picking is one of the reasons I am glad you and I are having this public conversation: to hold the film accountable. As you can see, there is much about this film that I disagree with. I do not feel antinuclear activists have any kinship whatsoever with climate deniers, as the film repeatedly asserts. I resent this simplistic comparison. My eyes have been opened by death, not fear, and I remain a respecter of science and a seeker of facts.

But, Mark, this film made me think; it created a disturbance in my mind and prompted me to question my most tightly held assumption—that nuclear energy is not a viable solution. I do not take this lightly. The shadow side of nuclear power killed my family. I have been jailed for my convictions, and they contain my own conversion story of how I have tried to transform my anger into sacred rage. But twenty-five years later, as I watch my beloved American West suffer from the ravages of oil and gas extraction—including the perils of fracking and developing tar sands in arid country—I believe something has to shift if we are to remain human beings who care about sustaining life on this planet. We are not just living on a planet in crisis; we as a species are in crisis.

The big question for me is if we will come to our senses soon enough to help. And on that, the odds are uncertain. I remain uncertain about what the right course of action is regarding energy. We have a nuclear power plant proposed on the banks of the Green River in Utah. Am I in favor of it being built? No. But am I in favor of investigating the next generation of smaller nuclear reactors that are more localized and decentralized? Yes, I am. Committing ourselves to thousands of years of nuclear waste still remains the largest and prohibiting factor for me. Can we really trust ourselves as nuclear guardians through the millennia? We have a less than stellar track record.

Humans are now the most influential geomorphic agent on the planet’s surface. We are living in the Anthropocene Epoch. Some see this development as reason for restraint, for taking into consideration the health of diverse ecosystems, human and wild. Others, like the converts in this film, assert the inevitability of human expansion, with technology the only cure for our collective hunger for more and more energy. For my part, I submit that the solutions to climate change are as much about will and evolutionary consciousness as they are about technological choices. It is also about humility. Humans are not “the God species.” We are simply one more breathing, struggling species, one that has been gifted with a large imagination that has a propensity to shape the environment around us. Our task is not to unleash a box of demons upon the world. It is to nurture a space for serious dialogue about our energy choices, while employing our imagination and sustaining what we should love and cherish most: life.

MH: This critique gets at what may be the most basic shortcoming of the film: its blindness to the political-economic context of the nuclear technology it admires so much. Personally, I have no ideological beef with nuclear power. As the father of an 8-year-old daughter who, like billions of other young people around the world, is fated to spend the rest of her life facing higher temperatures than our civilization has ever confronted, I would be grateful if a miracle technology could deliver us from the gathering storm. But history teaches that every technology comes wrapped in a set of social, economic and political constraints. If we ignore those constraints, we will likely be surprised—and not in a good way—by what unfolds. Pandora’s Promise shows no hint of recognizing such nuances. That is hardly a surprise in a documentary backed by a Microsoft billionaire, but it makes the film less a contribution to public dialogue than a self-regarding provocation.

How Google and Silicon Valley Screw Their Non-Elite Workers

Jake Blumgart, AlterNet — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 12:24:00 -0700

Silicon Valley’s biggest firms outsource blue-collar and service jobs to subcontractors, who bid low by scrimping on labor standards.

Silicon Valley sparks the imagination. Its wealth of tech jobs, flashy startups and new media goliaths seems to point toward a better future, beyond post-industrial doldrums and slack labor markets. Work on Google’s idyllic Mountain View campus hardly looks like work at all.

But some Google employees are less equal than others. (Not everyone gets to ride the clown bikes.) Many of Silicon Valley’s blue-collar jobs are outsourced to subcontractors, a practice common with Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and other big tech firms. Usually the lowest bidder gets the contract, and in labor intensive industries such as security, food service, janitorial and landscaping the lower bids tend to come from firms with lower labor standards.

Security Industry Specialists, Inc (SIS) provides hundreds of security contractors to both Google and Apple. (SIS did not respond to interview requests or questions about the exact number of guards the two companies employ.) Tom Seltz, co-president of SIS, claims that the company offers $15 an hour for entry level employees, plus benefits for full-time workers: “We pay 80 percent of the healthcare premium, 100 percent of dental, and these employees have access to a 401k plan in which we match a portion of contributions.”

But according to SIS employees, everyone starts as part-time and must work their way to a full-time position. Part-timers have no health or retirement benefits, no paid sick leave and no vacation. The hours are unpredictable because the company calls them about a day in advance to dispense shifts. Turnover at SIS is high, partly due to draconian disciplinary measures that make it difficult to advance to a full-time position. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is trying to organize the guards, estimates that only 20 percent of SIS’s employees are full-time.

“Supervisors—they didn’t treat us like people,” says Manny Cardenas, the only guard to publicly endorse the unionization drive. “We got fired for small things. Zero tolerance. One guard, he told a janitor what time it was and because he used his cell phone to check the time he was fired.”

Cardenas reports that none of his peers have joined the cause. “My co-workers keep changing [referring to high turnover],” says Cardenas, who spoke at a pro-union rally outside the Google shareholders’ meeting on Thursday, June 6. “And they know that they’ll be fired, if they are getting fired for little things like cell phone to tell the time—they know something might happen.”

What that something is seems pretty clear. Since going public with his support for a union in January, Cardenas has only received one call for a shift. He hasn’t officially been fired by SIS, but the result is pretty much the same. (A charge that SIS illegally interfered in the organization drive by spying on worker meetings “may have merit,” according to William Baudler, regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, who dismissed the complaint “because the conduct at issue here is isolated.”)

The union attempting to organize Silicon Valley’s approximately 3,000 guards is SEIU-USWW (United Service Workers West), which represents the janitorial staff in many of the same buildings. The rally outside the shareholders’ meeting attracted between 40 and 50 people, including two San Jose councilmembers. Community groups addressed Google in an open letter released on the same day: “We urge you to find a more responsible security contractor, a company whose workers can have full-time hours, decent benefits and the fundamental freedom to form a union—without management interference.”

“The leaders in the market are Apple and Google and where they go, the others follow,” says Renee Asher, spokesperson for SEIU. “We want Apple and Google to sit down with us, we want to partner with them, as they have partnered with us in the past about income inequality, the rise of part-time jobs, and the number of good jobs being replaced with bad ones."

So far Google has made no public statement regarding the unionization drive and did not respond to interview requests for this article.

SEIU does have a history of targeting publicity-sensitive tech firms, especially those that put forward a progressive public image (e.g. Google’s “Don’t be evil”). The tactic has a history of success in Silicon Valley, producing victories in the Justice for Janitors campaigns of the 1990s and in subsequent rounds of contract negotiations, most recently in 2008 and 2012, although they usually try to distance themselves from the conflict. This statement from Dave Miller, a spokesman for Allied materials during the 2008 contract negotiations between the janitors and the cleaning companies, is typical: "We don't have a comment on it. Ultimately, it's between (the union) and the employer contractors that work for us.” But often the big tech firms eventually pressure their sub-contractors to reach a settlement. It is unclear if they will intercede on behalf of their security guards or if the union drive will succeed without their involvement.

According to Asher, the unionized janitors aren’t paid substantially more than their security guard counterparts. Indeed, in 2012 one of the points of contention was the janitors’ $28,000-a-year salary after almost 20 years of unionization, according to Dave Jamieson of the Huffington Post. But the bonuses janitors do get are stable, full-time jobs, dependable schedules, pensions, paid sick leave, vacation time and a healthcare plan with no deductible and small co-pays. They are not “at-will” employees—managers can’t fire them for just any reason—and their turnover rates aren’t so high.

Still it seems as though more should be possible, especially against the background of Silicon Valley’s immense wealth and the supposed progressive vision so many of the region’s moguls profess. But as George Packer’s recent New Yorker profile of the region attests, the tech elites seem to believe that they are doing good just by doing business. “I think our selfish interest actually aligns with the broader interest of creating jobs and growing the economy,” Joe Green, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates and associates, told Packer. The article presents Green as unusually politically aware among his peers. He doesn’t elaborate on what kinds of jobs are being created.

“The image is that Silicon Valley’s streets are paved with gold—the quality of life is extraordinarily rich,” says Bob Brownstein, director of policy and research for the labor-backed and San Jose-based Working Partnerships USA. “But the economy here is, at best, an hourglass economy. There are some extremely well-paid jobs at the top, a rapidly shrinking middle-class, and a large number of low-wage, dead-end, no-benefit service jobs. It’s not really an hourglass because the bottom is the part that’s growing fastest.”

A pair of recent reports indicate that Silicon Valley’s economy isn’t that much different from the rest of America's. Working Partnerships USA’s “Life in the Valley, 2012” report shows while corporate profits have rebounded, jobs and wages have not. Between 2000 and 2010 100,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared and real median household income plummeted by 19 percent. While earnings increased per capita, the windfall largely went to a relatively small portion of the population, while the portion of families who were middle-income (those making between $50,000 and $199,999) fell from 62 percent of households to 55 percent.

The 2012 Silicon Valley Index shows many of the same results, although it is published by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a collaborative that includes many of the region’s elites (Google’s Larry Alder sits on the board of directors). “Though the recovery is underway, income growth is mostly limited to high earners, and is not spread across other segments of the population,” reads the report, which also finds a decline in manufacturing jobs and middle-income households.

“There are a lot of other places in the United States that view Silicon Valley as a goal—they want to attract these kind of industries,” Brownstein says. “The important thing for those people to understand is that there are benefits associated with that but it does not solve all problems. It still produces an economy characterized by great and growing inequality and a substantial part of the workforce unable to earn enough to have a decent standard of living. We haven’t seen anything to suggest there is anything in the Silicon Valley model itself that mitigates these problems.”

Watch: 11-Year-Old Tells Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst to Drop Anti-Gay Honoree

Katie McDonough, Salon.com — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:55:00 -0700

StudentsFirst rescinds Tennessee state Rep. John Ragan's “Reformer of the Year” designation after his sponsorship of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

After more than a month of mounting pressure from gay rights and education groups, it was an appeal from an 11-year-old activist that finally got Michelle Rhee’s education nonprofit StudentsFirst to drop Tennessee state Rep. John Ragan and rescind his “Reformer of the Year” designation.

As Salon previously reported, Ragan was the sponsor of Tennessee’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that would have banned teachers from discussing sexuality that is not “related to natural human reproduction” in the classroom and would have forced educators and school therapists to “out” students they suspected of being gay to parents or guardians.

StudentsFirst selected Ragan as its 2012 “Reformer of the Year” despite his notorious legislative track record, and stood by him in the face of criticism from education and gay rights advocates once the honor became public. But the group seems to have changed its position thanks to a petition from 11-year-old activist Marcel Neergaard, who shared his own experience of growing up as a gay kid to show Rhee and StudentsFirst why bills like Ragan’s hurt students like him.

StudentsFirst announced it was rescinding Ragan’s honor, and endorsing anti-bullying legislation on Wednesday:

Marcel Neergaard is not alone. He and his family decided they would home-school this year, afraid of what would happen to the 11-year-old boy if he continued to be bullied at school for being openly gay. He’s a brave boy and is showing tremendous courage by sharing his story.
There are students and families both in his state, Tennessee, and across the country in similar situations, concerned about whether their kids’ schools are safe environments. I have two daughters of my own and worry every day about whether they are learning in a nurturing and secure environment…
Regardless of when Representative Ragan was named a “Reformer of the Year” by our organization, his introduction of ill-conceived and harmful legislation including HB 1332 — which would have cultivated a culture of bullying — does not represent the type of leadership we look for in our legislative champions. We have made that clear to Rep. Ragan and rescinded the recognition.
Simply put, we must hold our “Reformers of the Year” to a higher standard. So let me be very clear — policies that are intended to single out any student based on their sexual orientation and treat them differently are wrong.

“Three days. It didn’t even take a week to change StudentFirst’s mind,” Neergaard told GLAAD. “I’m pretty proud. I want to make sure to thank all the people who signed my petition, because without them, it would not have been possible.”

“I can’t believe the way in which Marcel’s story changed so many minds, beyond just StudentsFirst,” added Marcel’s father, Mike. “We heard from people talking about what it was like to be bullied as an 11-year-old. It was an honor to have Marcel inspire so many people to share their stories.”

We Are All Bradley Manning: New Video Explains Why

April M. Short, AlterNet — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:18:00 -0700

Since it’s the public who benefited from this information, does that make us the enemy? What price will future whistleblowers pay?

Private First Class Bradley Manning is on trial now after releasing information to the public. He has already spent 1,108 days in confinement awaiting trial. The information he shared exposed the unjust detainment of innocent people in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and served as a catalyst for pro-democracy movements in the Arab world. Instead of the cold, clean images of drone planes soaring and American flags waving that mainstream news outlets project, the information Manning helped release displayed the disturbing, human truth about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among other crimes, the whistleblower is accused of “aiding the enemy”—a capital offense and his most serious charge. A conviction on this charge would mean life in prison, and a possible death sentence.

Since it’s the public who benefited from this information, does that make us the enemy? What price will future whistleblowers pay? These are the questions posed on the Manning support network website, I Am Bradley Manning. The site is set up in part to promote a new PSA film created by the eponymous group.

The site’s tagline reads, “I am Bradley Manning because I believe the public deserves the truth and whistleblowers deserve a fair trial.”

The video I Am Bradley Manning features big-names including actors Maggie Gyllenhaal, Russell Brand and Peter Sarsgaard; filmmaker Oliver Stone; musicians Tom Morello and Moby; journalists Chris Hedges, Phil Donahue and Matt Taibbi; and author Alice Walker among others, carrying signs to declare they, too, are Bradley Manning. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg tells the camera, “I was Bradley Manning.” The video’s participants call the “aiding the enemy” charge absurd.

The dialogue opens with the question, “When you join the military are you asked to keep any war crimes you might see secret?”

The video proceeds to pose important points that pertain to Manning’s case, including facts like:

The cables Manning released were not “top secret” documents.
The whole concept of the whistleblower protection laws in place is that you cannot get in trouble for reporting illegal or improper activity.
Manning exposed real war crimes.

The most stark example of war crimes Manning exposed is the video from Iraq titled Collateral Murder. (None of the people associated with the murder of unarmed civilians and journalists, as shown in Collateral Murder, have been arrested or tried for their crimes.  )

Shortly after passing the military information to WikiLeaks, Manning asked former hacker Adrian Lamo this question: “If you saw incredible things, awful things...things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C....what would you do?”

The video echoes this question in a call-to-action statement at its close. Thousands of people in solidarity have posted photos of themselves holding “I am Bradley Manning” signs to iam.bradleymanning.org.

Manning has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and almost 65,000 people have already signed a Roots Action petition asking that he receive the prize.

“I want people to see the truth, because without it you cannot make informed decisions as a public,” Manning says in a chat logs with journalist Adrian Lamo prior to his arrest. He also said he hoped the publication of the diplomatic cables would ignite “worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.”

Now it is for the public to influence the future of one whistleblower, and whistleblowers at large.

Grand Canyon Threatened by Uranium Mining

Sierra Club — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:59:00 -0700

Here's what is at stake and what you can do to protect the Grand Canyon.

Editor's Note: View a slideshow from Post Carbon Institute with photos by Ecoflight to see the threatened land and take action.

The U.S. Forest Service has decided to allow Energy Fuels Resources, Inc. to begin operating a uranium mine near Grand Canyon National Park. The Canyon Mine, located on the Kaibab National Forest six miles south of the park, threatens cultural values, wildlife and endangered species, and increases the risk of soil pollution and pollution and depletion of groundwater feeding springs and wells in and near Grand Canyon.

The mine was originally approved in 1986 and was the subject of protests and lawsuits by the Havasupai tribe and others objecting to potential uranium mining impacts on regional groundwater, springs, creeks, ecosystems and cultural values associated with Red Butte, a Traditional Cultural Property.

Mines that were closed nearly three decades ago continue to pollute streams in the area. The Orphan Mine at the South Rim of Grand Canyon closed in 1969 but still contaminates Horn Creek with radioactive runoff. Recently, the National Park Service began a clean-up effort for that mine that will cost taxpayers millions.

The Canyon Mine falls within the one-million-acre “mineral withdrawal” approved by the Obama administration in January 2012 to protect Grand Canyon’s watershed from new uranium mining impacts. The withdrawal prohibits new mining claims and mine development on old claims lacking “valid existing rights” to mine. In April 2012, the Forest Service determined that there were “valid existing rights” for the Canyon mine, and in June it issued a report trying to explain its decision to allow the mine to open without updating the 27-year-old environmental review. The Havasupai tribe and three conservation groups are challenging this.

Please speak up against the mine and support protectionof Grand Canyon and its watershed.

Click the slideshow below to see what's at stake and take action to protect the Grand Canyon.

Click the thumbnails to see the slideshow and take action (photos by Ecoflight)

Victory for Grassroots Activism and Public Safety: San Onofre Nuclear Plant Closure Announced

Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:20:00 -0700

This victory at San Onofre is a falling domino. Had the public not fought back, those reactors would have been “fixed” at public expense.

From his California beach house at San Clemente, Richard Nixon once watched three reactors rise at nearby San Onofre. As of June 7, 2013, all three are permanently shut.

It’s a monumental victory for grassroots activism and it marks an epic transition in how we get our energy.

In the thick of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, Nixon said there’d be 1000 such reactors in the US by the year 2000. As of today, there are 100. Four have shut here this year. Citizen activism has put the “nuclear renaissance” into full retreat.

Just two of 54 reactors now operate in Japan, where Fukushima has joined Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in permanently scarring us all.

Germany is shutting its entire fleet and switching to renewables. France, once the poster child for the global reactor industry, is following suit. South Korea has just shut three due to fraudulent safety procedures. Massive demonstrations rage against reactors being built in India. Only the Koreans, Chinese and Russians remain at all serious about pushing ahead with this tragic technology.

Cheap gas has undercut the short-term market for expensive electricity generated by obsolete coal and nuke burners. But the vision of Solartopia---a totally green-powered Earth---is now our tangible long-term reality.

With falling prices and soaring efficiency, every moving electron our species consumes will be generated by a solar panel, wind turbine, bio-fueled or geothermal generator, wave machine and their green siblings.

As of early this year, Southern California Edison's path to a re-start at San Onofre seemed as clear as any to be expected by a traditional atomic tyrannosaur.But with help from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Senator-to-be Ed Markey (D-MA), a powerful citizen uprising stopped it dead.

So did the terrifying incompetence and greed that has defined the nuclear industry from the days of Nixon and before.

San Onofre Unit One shut in the 1990s due largely to steam generator problems. In the early 2000s, Units 2 & 3 needed new steam generators of their own. In the usual grasp for more profits, Edison chose untested, unlicensed new designs. But they failed. And the whole world was watching. In the wake of Fukushima, two more leaky tsunami-zone reactors surrounded by earthquake faults were massively unwelcome.

So a well-organized non-violent core of local, state and national activists and organizations rose up to stop the madness.

At Vermont Yankee, Indian Point, Seabrook, Davis-Besse and dozens of other reactors around the US and world, parallel opposition is escalating.

Make no mistake---this double victory at San Onofre is a falling domino. Had the public not fought back, those reactors would have been “fixed” at public expense.

Today, they are dead.

Worldwide, there are some 400 to go. Each of them---including the 100 remaining in the US---could do apocalyptic damage. We still have our work cut out for us.

But a huge double-step has been taken up the road to Solartopia. There will be no Fukushimas at San Onofre. A green-powered Earth is that much closer. And we have yet another proof that citizen action makes all the difference in our world.

So seize the day and celebrate!

AlterNet.org: Activism

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