Quote of the day: Seeing the future in urban form

From a stunning and very perceptive 1999 report by Robert Fishman for Fannie Mae Housing Facts & Findings on the trends shaping of American cities, past and future.

The number one trend he saw for the first half of the 21st Century is proving right on the money:

The past 30 years have seen increasing concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the income scale, relative stagnation in the middle, and worsening poverty at the bottom. Our respondents expect this trend to continue in the next 50 years, with possible dire consequences for American cities and regions. For growing disparities in income and wealth lead inevitably to an increasingly divided metropolis. If, as our respondents believe, these growing disparities of wealth will become the most important single influence on the American metropolis in the next 50 years, some of the negative consequences are detailed in the rest of the top 10 list: a perpetual “underclass” in central cities and inner-ring suburbs and the deterioration of the “first-ring” post-1945 suburb, as the struggling portions of the middle and working classes find themselves trapped in deteriorating older suburbs. On the wealthier side of the great metropolitan divide, we are likely to see the winners in our “winner-take-all society” isolate themselves in gated communities or other exclusive preserves at the edge of the region.

Other likely trends include a home-building industry increasingly focused on high-end “trophy houses” or “tract mansions;” a similar concentration in retailing on upscale malls; office parks located near the enclaves where the top executives live-locations that often leave the bulk of the employees with long, difficult commutes; and increasing disparities between the quality of the school systems and other services in elite suburbs versus less-favored suburbs and inner cities. We are also likely to see new building focused not just on the outer edge of a region but in certain “quadrants” favored by the affluent: for example, in Washington, DC, the Northwest; in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Southwest; in Atlanta and Chicago, the North. For the affluent who choose to live in gentrified neighborhoods in central cities, the rule of isolation will also obtain, as the wealthy use the techniques of privatization, ranging from private schools to special tax-and-service districts, to insulate themselves from the urban crisis around them.

Video report: The Financialization of Food

From The Real News Network, a Paul Jay interview with Sasha Breger Bush, lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She describes her specialty as “International political economy, development studies, global financial markets, food and farming, and political theory.

A transcript of the discussion is posted here.

Juxtapositionalism: First a fact, then a question

Sometimes two items just seem to go together, especially for a blog that’s devoted some attention to AFRICOM and its links to Pentagon plans to exercise military suzerainty over resources in times to crisis.

First, consider the latest move to bolster AFRICOM, the  command spawned by a general who’s since become a private sector agrofuel and security consultant.

From Eric Schmitt of the New York Times:

The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

>snip<

A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.

Read the rest.

In light of the above, consider this question from Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard, in a blog post headlined “Top ten tough questions for Hillary Clinton”:

U.S. military forces are now organized in various regional combatant commands, each under a designated regional “commander-in-chief” or CINC. These regional CINCs have a vast array of military, intelligence, and other assets at their disposal, and the resources they can bring to bear far exceed those of the State Department. For this reason, foreign governments often pay as much or more attention to the CINCs as they do to the U.S. ambassador, for the simple reason that the CinCs can do more for or against them. Here’s my question: if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to make a mark on U.S. foreign policy, why go to a nice four-year college and then join the Foreign Service? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to West Point, Annapolis, or Colorado Springs and try to become a senior military leader instead?

Keiser Report: Ho, Ho, Freaking Ho!

Max and Stacy bring us a Christmas special, replete with punk poetry, high dudgeon, and existential absurdity. Come for the coat, stay for the laughs:

RT’s program notes:

In this episode, Max Keiser first talks to punk poet John Cooper Clarke about Who Stole Bongo’s Trousers, private equity rock stars, the music business and onesies as the next big thing in fashion. In the second half, Max is joined by Stacy to talk about the ‘poverty barons’ financed by the British taxpayer.

GMO labeling defeated, Berkeley mayor loses two

The huge influx of corporate cash and a deceptive ad blitz convinced California voters to go against their own interests and defeat Proposition 37, which would’ve required the labeling of food derived from genetically modified organisms.

The gutted news media failed to report on the true scale of deception involved in the campaign, and the source of the paychecks for all those “experts” who appeared in the corporate-sponsored ad blitz. The corporateers won, and handily.

Here in Berkeley, neoliberal Mayor Tom Bates, who rolls over the instant he hears a corporateer’s or a real estate developer’s wallet open, win reelection, but two of his pet measures didn’t.

One, Measure S, was designed to “cleanse” the streets of the homeless, the victims of neoliberalism, by barring them from sitting or lying on the city’s sidewalks. Measure S was defeated by a narrow margin, losing by 1,055 of a total of 33,767 votes cast.

The mayor’s second major proposal, Measure T, would have gutted a citizen-crafted plan for the city’s shoreline region, allowing high-rise development in hopes of attracting “synthetic biology” and other corporate startups spawned by would-be billionaire scientists from the university up the hill.

The measure went down to defeat by 123 votes of a total of 31,611 votes cast.

For complete results from local races, see the Alameda County Registrar of Voters web page and click on “open all categories.”

GreeceWatch: Cuts, maneuvers, xenophobes

The cuts package is coming down to the wire, with coalition leaders meeting today to add the finishing touches. One of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ own legislators has been kicked out of the party for threatening a no vote, and the finance minister is using a desperate sales pitch: Pass it or you’ll starve. The last remaining stumbling block, labor rights, appears to have been resolved.

Meanwhile, there are hints from the North that another haircut may be in the works, created through a bit of clever semantic engineering, and even the German finance minister is waffling his way to acceptance of the inevitable.

Another rightist party is joining Golden Dawn in calling for resignations in hopes to triggering a new election, and they asked the leftist Syriza to join them, a move that was quickly rejected. Syriza’s also hitting out at a coalition call to force the sale of homes previously exempted.

An Orthodox cleric who has been calling for tolerance and speaking out against Golden Dawn is drawing death threats, austerity measures are leading to environmental devastation, and a blog posts the europol agenda.

Samaras calls for Tuesday cuts session

Fighting to hold his increasingly shaky coalition together, New Democracy head and Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is meeting Tuesday with his coalition partners in what he hopes will result in a final decision on the Troika-demanded cuts package.

From Andy Dabilis of Greek Reporter:

With his coalition government splintering, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras will meet his coalition partners on Oct. 23 for talks on trying to finalize a $17.45 billion spending cut and tax hike package that has been stalled for months, delaying the release of critical funds from international lenders.

Samaras, the New Democracy Conservative leader, will meet PASOK Socialist Evangelos Venizelos, who is facing defections and a challenge to his new leadership over his support for austerity measures, and Democratic Left head Fotis Kouvelis, who is also facing opposition for his backing of more pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions. All three leaders had vowed ahead of the critical June 17 elections to resist austerity measures but have reneged on their promises.

Samaras said he must get agreement from his partners and the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) that is putting up $325 billion two bailouts.

The package then will go to the Parliament the government controls, although the Prime Minister already has ejected one party member for failing to back him and the other coalition partners are facing growing opposition as well. Nikos Stavrogiannis, was dismissed from the New Democracy parliamentary group after saying he would vote against the measures because they were “unfair, harsh and ineffective.” Stavrogiannis hit back saying he could no longer follow ND’s “Ovidian transformations.”

Read the rest.

But Samaras expels one of his own

The prime minister has expelled one of his own members of parliament after the legislator announced he couldn’t vote for the austerity measures Samaras is so desperate to enact.

Nikos Stavrogiannis, a New Democracy legislator representing Fthiotida, got the boot after raising the threat to cast his vote against measures he deemed “unfair, harsh and ineffective.”

While the expulsion removes him from the ranks of the prime minister’s party, he remains in the legislature as an independent.

From the Economic Times:

“My conscience does not allow me to vote for measures that devastate the weakest members of society,” Stavrogiannis told the Real News newspaper in an interview published on Saturday.

The expulsion of Stavrogiannis, who remains in parliament as an independent, underscores Samaras’s hard line on deputies publicly undermining his pledge to push through the cuts to restore Greece’s credibility among lenders.

“Obviously we do not see eye to eye with Mr Stavrogiannis,” the government’s spokesman, Simos Kedikoglou, told Greek television on Monday, confirming the expulsion.

“The vast majority of us have realised that there is an imperative national duty that we must serve, that we must put the national interest above everything else.”

Read the rest.

Using starvation as a sales pitch

The coalition’s getting desperate to convince wavering lawmakers of the necessity to enact the Troika-demanded cuts.

The latest rhetorical gambit: Pass them or people will starve.

From Keep Talking Greece:

He is getting more and more dramatic every time he speaks in the Greek Parliament. Finance Minister Yiannis Stournaras does not miss a chance to praise the benefits of the upcoming austerity measures package – or tsunami.” The cost for the country would be infinite, if we do not take the tranche of  31.5 billion euro,” he said on Monday adding “that if we do not take the tranche, people will starve…”

Yiannis Stournaras refrained to determine who are exactly the people who will starve…

Thank God, the majority of Samaras’ coalition government MPs will vote in favor of the 13.5 billion euro austerity measures for the shake of the 31.5 billion euro loan tranche to be used to banks recapitalization and payment of outstanding state debts. If the austerity package will give another hard kick to low- and middle incomers, that’s a story belonging to a different book of Greece economic depression history….

Labor issues formed the last stumbling block

And the coalition is about to throw in the towel, though the Troika has made some concessions.

“Restructuring” always means destroying the power of organized labor, and that’s what the coalition has agreed to do.

From Athens News:

The government is nearing agreement with the troika of international lenders on the thorny issue of changes to the labour regime, according to statements made by Labour Minister Yiannis Vroutsis on Sunday afternoon after a meeting of the government’s economic staff with prime minister Antonis Samaras.

Vroutsis appeared optimistic on the final outcome of the deliberations, although he avoided reference to details or to the content of the ministry’s electronic correspondence with the EC-ECB-IMF troika of lenders.

According to labour ministry sources, the Greek side appears to have ‘saved’ the three-year salary maturities until the completion of the mid-term programme. The troika maintains that the three-year maturities were abolished with the signing of the second memorandum, which calls for the replacement of the national collective labour agreement with a minimum salary.

The ministry bases its position on the Cabinet Act of February 22 which provides for a reduction of the minimum wage by 22 percent and by 25 percent for young people under 25 years of age “until completion of the fiscal adjustment programme”.

The same Act also stipulates that salary maturity benefits, and benefits for children, university studies and hazardous work will be maintained after the expiry of the collective labour agreements, while all other benefits will be abolished.

Read the rest.

So collective bargaining has been abolished, and the minimum wage slashed, with the greatest cuts for the nation’s young, half of whom simply can’t find work.

Sleight of hand accounting in the works?

Austerity won’t work if an economy has been utterly destroyed. After all, the purpose is to keep cash flowing for the private sector investors.

And sometimes the devastation already inflicted by previous rounds of “restructuring” is so great that investors have to take some losses — “haircuts” in investorese.

Now it looks like another haircut is in the works, though it’s carefully concealed behind a clever bit of semantic persiflage.

From Capital.gr:

Euro-zone countries are considering a proposal that would see Greece cut its debt by buying back bonds held by private creditors at a discount, says Wall Street Journal.

According to the report, the exercise, one of a number of options being studied, could persuade the International Monetary Fund to sign off on a loan payment desperately needed by the debt-laden country and

Quote of the day: Asking the right question

From SUNY labor economist Lisa Krall, via The Daly News:

Perhaps the real question of progress is not how to forge a new energy frontier, but how to forge a different model of economic organization and purpose, a model that isn’t predicated on never-ending growth and a belief that there are no real biophysical limits.

EuroWatch: Debt, taxes, Spailout, miseries

It’s the D-word that’s much in vogue in Europe these days, with debt on the tongues of all the right eurocrats and banksters. Harnessing the debt monster is the play, rather than the simple and rational expedient of a jubilee. We’ve got pronouncements from the German and Dutch finance ministers, a harsh word from the man who broke the Bank of England, and a call for a financial autocrat.

Meanwhile, the Swiss military is training for a European collapse.

Major tax hikes and other austerian measures are about to inflict more misery on Portugal, prompting the inevitable protests and a regional election loss for the ruling party. The Spailout’s drawing nearer as austerity bites deeper, Spanish banks get another downgrade, the mass exodus continues, the secession struggle is heating up, and the national dropout rate is soaring — wwhile demand for welfare is rising as funding for programs is cut. And the Italians are saying the cost of a Spailout will drive them deeper into recession.

The British health service faces a corporate takeover, the country gets an IMF rebuke and an auditor’s seal of approval. Iirish unemployed face new bureaucratic obstacles, Cypriots vow an austerity fight, French corporateers declare war on the government, and European car sales continue to fall.

The Iron Chancellor’s kinder, gentler approach

Yep, Angela Merkel’s got a soft heart. [Either that or the threat of common currency exports is causing her some discomfort, given the potential impacts on German industry.]

The “new Merkel,” via euronews:

Schäuble again invokes the D-word

German money minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been resolutely flogging the debt issue, declaring that the only solution to the eurocrisis is the relentless sacrifice of lives and livelihoods to the debt beast.

Only through ruthless, remorseless payments to the private investment sector, he says, will ensure the S word, sustainable development, the perpetuation of an economic system in which finance and consumerism are exalted.

From Agence France-Presse:

Slashing government debt is the only way to put Europe back on a path of sustainable economic growth, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Monday.

“If we want to achieve sustainable growth, we have to reduce the sovereign debt in nearly all advanced economies,” Schaeuble said in a speech at the Thai central bank.

“There is no choice (but) to reduce in the medium term the over-indebtedness,” he added.

“The most important thing for growth is confidence — confidence by investors and confidence by consumers… Long term stability is the most efficient precondition for regaining confidence,” Schaeuble said.

Read the rest.

Decades to debt cuts says Dutch central bankster

Here’s another of those “duh” stories.

From Reuters:

It may be decades before debt levels in the euro zone drop below the EU limit of 60 percent of economic output, but states should still aim to beat that target, European Central Bank policymaker Klaas Knot said on Monday.

The currency bloc needed a strong authority to enforce a reduction of debt levels, Knot, who also heads the Dutch central bank, said.

His downbeat assessment of how long it might be before states again met the standards on debt they had to adhere to when they joined the single currency added to a growing debate about whether those at the sharp end of the debt crisis should be allowed to scale back their austerity programmes.

Read the rest.

For the umpteenth time, it’s not debt that’s the problem, it’s a slavish devotion to its service that’s the real killer.

The transformation of citizens from autonomous political actors into passive servants of private finance is lethal, both to the democratic impulse and to the lives of every living thing on earth.

It’s corporate greed that spends billions to manipulate our minds, and not just on election days. It’s no coincidence that the same minds that shaped government propaganda efforts during World War I became pivotal players in advertising [Edward Bernays] and in molding public opinion [Walter Lippmann].

Some Teutonic Soros Tsuris

Yep, the billionaire who broke the Bank of England is coming down hard on Germany’s reluctance to cough up cash and take on it’s new role as “benevolent hegemon.”

Yes, he really said that.

From Capital.gr:

The European Union could be destroyed by the “nightmare” euro crisis, and Germany needs to take the responsibility to save the common currency, billionaire fund manager George Soros said on Monday Soros, who made his mark as an investor on a big bet against the British pound in 1992, said the other alternative is for Germany — the euro zone’s biggest economy — to simply leave the 17-member currency bloc.

The crisis “is pushing the EU into a lasting depression, and it is entirely self-created,” said Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management. “There is a real danger of the euro destroying the European Union,” he said, according to Reuters.

“The way to escape it is for Germany to accept … greater commitment to helping not only its interests but the interests of the debtor countries, and playing the role of the benevolent hegemon.”

Read the rest.

Nowhere, of course, does he suggest a debt jubilee or even a default, general or selective.

No, he wants his own class ensured of future profits.

And Germany’s money minister calls for a financial Führer

Schäuble wants a single official empowered as the Lord High Chancellor of Money, with sweeping powers over the budgets of not-so-sovereign states.

From Capital.gr:

Germany’s finance minister called on Tuesday for the creation of a ‘currency commissioner’ for the euro zone with wide-ranging powers over national budgets as part of an overhaul of the EU treaty to deepen integration and end the bloc’s debt crisis.

Wolfgang Schaeuble also backed reform of the European Parliament to ensure that only lawmakers from countries affected by a particular issue could vote on it, CNBC reported.

He said he had spoken with Chancellor Angela Merkel about the proposals, adding that she was “somewhat more cautious” about them.

Speaking to reporters on his way back from an Asian tour, Schaeuble said the European Union should start to discuss his proposals for treaty change at a summit in Brussels this week.

Read the rest.

Swiss army trains for European collapse

While popular myth paints Switzerland as a pacifist country, it’s anything but.

In fact, until recently Switzerland may have been the most heavily armed nation in Europe, if you counted in the reserves.

The country is also ready for war, with fallout and blast shelters in place ready to house the entire population, though while all roads, bridges, and tunnels leading into the country were mined and fortified until late in the last century, those defenses have been downsized in recent years.

And now, with the continent in chaos, the Swiss military is preparing for the worst.

From Valentina Pop of EUobserver:

The Swiss army is preparing for possible internal civil unrest as well as waves of refugees from euro-countries as the economic crisis drags on.

Switzerland, a non-EU, non-euro country landlocked between eurozone states, last month launched a military exercise to test its preparedness to deal with refugees and civil unrest.

“It’s not excluded that the consequences of the financial crisis in Switzerland can lead to protests and violence,” a spokesperson of the Swiss defence ministry told CNBC on Monday. “The army must be ready when the police in such cases requests for subsidiary help.”

Some 2,000 officers took part in the “Stabilo Due” military exercise in eight towns around the country, based on a risk map detailing the threat of internal unrest between warring factions and the possibility

Merkel campaigns in Stuttgart, jeers erupt

For your Saturday amusement, a 14-minute video of the Iron Chancellor’s speech in Stuttgart for Christian Democratic mayoral candidate Sebastian Turner, currently polling behind Green opponent Fritz Kuhn.

The catcalls that persist throughout ther 14-minute speech came because of Angela Merkel’s backing for an underground rail station that would entail the hugely unpopular demolition of much of the exiting station, built in 1928.

We love this line from a Google translation of an article in the Stuttgart-Zeitung because it reads like, well, haiku:

In the pouring rain, the Chancellor of boos is received.

Jeez, and she thought her reception in Greece was hostile.

The end of an era: Kunsthaus Tacheles evicted

Call it Berlin’s first Occupy movement. Kunsthaus [Art House] Tacheles [Yiddish for straight-talking] was once a Jewish-owned Berlin department store and later a Nazi Party headquarters, was taken over by artists in 1990 after the building was slated for demolition. Kunsthaus Tacheles, became a major tourist draw, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

Here’s a video from vlogger Fliegenpilzhamburg showing the Kunsthaus as visitors found it in March, 2011:

But it all came to end today, as police swooped in to evict the artists, paving the way for developers of a half-billion-dollar apartment complex.

From the BBC:

HSH Nordbank, currently in charge of the Tacheles, requested the clearance as part of plans to sell the centre.

Situated in what used to be East Berlin, when the city was divided by the wall, the building stretches over 1250sq m (13,455sq ft) and houses a theatre, cinema, restaurant, as well as a maze of galleries and workshop areas.

Before police arrived, two black-clad artists played a funeral march but bailiffs were able to clear the building without resistance, the AFP news agency reported.

“This is the theft of a work of art, supported by the police,” Tacheles spokesman Martin Reiter told a small gathering of supporters and journalists outside the building.

Read the rest.

More from Spiegel:

“Berlin has suffered a great loss today,” said one of the artists. She called on Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit and the city’s culture minister, André Schmitz, to resign. “They alone are responsible for this clearance.”

Tacheles is the last remaining part of a department store complex built at the beginning of the 20th century. It was heavily damaged by aerial bombs in World War II and the East Berlin authority had much of it torn down in the 1980s.

After the Berlin Wall fell, artists moved in. Plans to turn it into commercial and residential buildings in the 1990s where shelved for years after the real estate company that bought it ran into financial trouble.

HSH-Nordbank as the main creditor now plans to sell it. The city has said part of the complex will continue to be used for the arts and culture. But the trashy center, a colorful blot on the face of an increasingly commercially oriented and streamlined Berlin, is gone forever.

Read the rest.

Here’s a 44 minute video of today’s events from the KiekeMaFilmBerlin vlog [it’s in German, but the images and the feelings tell the story for those who don’t Sprechen Sie]:

A parallel in Berkeley

Here in Berkeley, the battle over Kunsthaus Tacheles reminds us of the long, sad battle over the Drayage Building, a former warehouse converted into a remarkable assembly of artists in self-built live/work spaces.

Berkeley city officials have been slowly chopping away at the few remaining spaces in the city affordable to artists, and the Drayage Building, located alongside the heavily traveled Santa Fe Railroad tracks, was the last major live/work space available in a town once famously friendly to painters, sculptors, printers, and print-makers.

But a developer’s plans and numerous violations of building codes carried more weight with officialdom than did a thriving artist’s community, and after a lengthy struggle that lasted through most of 2005, the artists finally surrendered in December, leaving the community with one remaining refuge, albeit with living spaces, in the landmark Sawtooth Building.

Chris Hedges on the horrors of rapor capitalism

Former New York Times Mideast bureau chief Chris Hedges, fired for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq, talks with Bill Moyers about the devastating impacts of raptor capitalism, the collapse of news media, and much more.

The program notes:

There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

“These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”

The broadcast includes images from Hedges’ collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.”

A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.

Where we’ll be today: Forum on UC Berkeley lab

The University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is planning a new billion-dollar-plus lab complex for the shoreline of Richmond, just north of Berkeley, where much of the work will focus on what’s blithely called “synthetic biology.”

The site of the complex, the university’s Richmond Field Station and the adjacent Campus Bay property, housed chemical plants that polluted the soil with scores of toxic metals and compounds and has been subject to a complex environmental cleanup.

The university fought the transfer of cleanup oversight from an agency with no toxicologists on its staff to one that does, and it took a long and often bitter fight by worried Richard residents to force the regulatory regime change.

Now site has been named the “preferred alternative” for the lab complex, which will be run by the university under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Energy, which is now headed by the lab’s former director, physicist Steve Chu.

Synthetic biology is being cast as the panacea for a wide range of urgent problems, but it’s a worrisome technology, given that lab-created life forms can’t be confined to the lab, as we’ve seen in the case of the technology’s earlier manifestations, genetically modified organisms, where genes inserted into crop plants have escaped into the environment and given rise to so-called “superweeds” resistant to powerful herbicides.

Our own expertise is in the politics of the toxic waste cleanup at the site, and the university’s history of resistance to citizen and local government efforts to ensure scientific oversight of the massively contaminated site.

Today’s gathering is part of the month-long LaborFest events in the Bay area.

Here’s their program for the event, which begins at 1 p.m. in the Richmond Public Library, 325 Civic Center Plaza:

The Richmond UC Synthetic Biology Laboratory, Labor Safety And The Environment — A Speakout and Discussion

What are the potential dangers of the new proposed lab in Richmond? These will be one of the issues discussed at a meeting on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) & U. C. Berkeley Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI) laboratory being brought to Richmond.

Speakers include:

• Richard Brenneman, Research Journalist
• Dr. Henry Clark, West Bay Toxic Coalition
• Dr. Larry Rose M.D. Retired Ca OSHA Senior Public Health Medical Officer M.P.H. Occupational Environmental Medicine Assistant Professor at UCSF
• Dr. Joany Chou, Injured Workers National Network IWNN and California BioSafety Alliance (for information only)
• Jack Dwayne Thrasher, Ph.D., Toxicologist, immunotoxicologist, fetal toxicologist
• A speaker From California Coalition For Workers Memorial Day

Hosted by California Coalition For Workers Memorial Day; Endorsed by United Public Workers For Action.

Assange, Chomsky, and Ali: On popular risings

Though Julian Assange may be holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, waiting for word on his bid for refuge in that land, he’s still at work, as witnessed by the latest of his interview webcast for RT.

It’s an important discussion about the rise of popular movements, primarily in Latin America and the Middle East, among Assange, MIT prof and provocateur Noam Chomsky, and Tariq Ali.

The Julian Assange Show: Noam Chomsky & Tariq Ali

The program notes:

A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West’s structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That’s the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week’s guests on Julian Assange’s show on RT.

Monsanto loses major Brazil GMO case

And the subject is soybeans, presumably including strains developed by UC Berkeley’s Chris Somerville, who made millions selling genetically modified soy to Monsanto.

Somerville currently serves as head of the campus side of the Energy Biosciences Institute [EBI], funded with $500 million of BP money to develop GMO crops and microbes BP can use to produce transportation fuels.

The Brazilian case centers on one of Monsanto’s most insidious practices: Turning farmers into corporate serfs by banning the the practice at the heart of agriculture since its beginngings — saving seeds to plant next year’s crop — and imposing royalties on farmers whose crops by be contaminated by their own GMOs.

The story from Subodh Varma of the Times of India:

Five million Brazilian farmers have taken on US based biotech company Monsanto through a lawsuit demanding return of about 6.2 billion euros taken as royalties from them. The farmers are claiming that the powerful company has unfairly extracted these royalties from poor farmers because they were using seeds produced from crops grown from Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds, reports Merco Press.

In April this year, a judge in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, ruled in favor of the farmers and ordered Monsanto to return royalties paid since 2004 or a minimum of $2 billion. The ruling said that the business practices of seed multinational Monsanto violate the rules of the Brazilian Cultivars Act (No. 9.456/97).

Monsanto has appealed against the order and a federal court ruling on the case is now expected by 2014.

Read the rest.

A telling quote defines the essence of the farmer lawsuit:

“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production,” Jane Berwanger, lawyer for the farmers told the media agencies.

Here’s a video report from RT

Featuring am interview with Shelly Roche of ByteStyle.TV:

Luisa Massarani, writing for Nature, describes the potential impacts:

Brazil is the second-largest producer of genetically-modified (GM) crops, after the United States. Last year, it farmed 30.3 million hectares of the crops, mostly soya beans, but also corn and cotton. It legalized the growing of GM crops in 2005, after it became clear that about three-quarters of the soya crops produced in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul were already being grown from Roundup Ready seeds that had been smuggled in from Argentina. Because the crop is resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, farmers can spray they fields with the chemical to control weeds without risking damage to their crops.

Since the legalization, Monsanto has charged Brazilian farmers 2% of their sales of Roundup Ready soya beans, which now account for an estimated 85% of the nation’s soya-bean crop. The company also tests Brazilian soya beans that are sold as non-GM — if they turn out to be Roundup Ready, the company charges the farmers responsible for the crops some 3% of their sales.

>snip<

On 12 June, the judges of the Brazilian Supreme Court of Justice ruled against Monsanto, deciding unanimously that the ruling by the Justice Tribune of Rio Grande do Sul, once it is made, should apply nationwide. Monsanto has declined to comment on the case.

Some scientists fear that if the company is forced to repay royalties, it could trigger cuts in funding for biotech research.

Read the rest.

If they prevail in the end, the farmers could have a major impact on Somerville’s BP project, which aims at creating massive industrial-scale plantations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia for proprietary agrofuel crops.

UC Berkeley’s role in the death of ecosystems

If you thought the economic news was grim, consider a newly published study just published in Nature, that most eminent of scientific journals.

Written by a team of 22 internationally respected academics, the study paints a grim picture of a planet in danger of massive biological changes as the direct result of human devastation of the natural environment.

What’s not mentioned is the role Berkeley is playing in creating the very natural holocaust the researchers decry.

From UC Berkeley science Writer Robert Saunders:

A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.

“It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” warns Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature. “The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.”

Here’s Barnosky in a brief clip posted by the university:

A critical tipping point

Note in particular this section of Sander’s report on the article [which we’re unable to access because Nature hides it behind a pay wall and we’re short the $32 dollars it would take to read it]:

The authors note that studies of small-scale ecosystems show that once 50-90 percent of an area has been altered, the entire ecosystem tips irreversibly into a state far different from the original, in terms of the mix of plant and animal species and their interactions. This situation typically is accompanied by species extinctions and a loss of biodiversity.

Currently, to support a population of 7 billion people, about 43 percent of Earth’s land surface has been converted to agricultural or urban use, with roads cutting through much of the remainder. The population is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2045; at that rate, current trends suggest that half Earth’s land surface will be disturbed by 2025. To Barnosky, this is disturbingly close to a global tipping point.

“Can it really happen? Looking into the past tells us unequivocally that, yes, it can really happen. It has happened. The last glacial/interglacial transition 11,700 years ago was an example of that,” he said, noting that animal diversity still has not recovered from extinctions during that time. “I think that if we want to avoid the most unpleasant surprises, we want to stay away from that 50 percent mark.”

Read the rest.

Berkeley’s role in pushing the tipping point

If the planet reaches the tipping point, UC Berkeley may be one of the principal culprits should the university’s massive research efforts on turning plants into fuel ever reach a point of commercial success.

In addition to the $500 million BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute [the EBI, headed by a scientist who made a fortune selling genetically modified plants to Monsanto], the university is also home to the federally funded Joint BioEnergy Institute and has spawned several start-up companies devoted to the same end.

EBI head Chris Somerville insisted repeatedly to fellow faculty members that fuel crops developed by the project would only be farmed on “marginal” U.S. farmlands east of the Mississippi.

The scientist who then headed BP’s secret side of the EBI was more honest, declaring that BP’s interest is global, and focused on farming the “green parts” of the planet, the lands of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Africa is already presently the target of massive land grabs by corporations from Asia and Europe, eager to corner cheap land for fuel crops, and massive dam projects to transform waterways and divert their flows to agrofuel plantations are already in the works — efforts that will radically expand the destruction of existing ecosystems.

And here’s what we wrote for the Berkeley Daily Planet on 28 December 2007:

During meetings with industry and legislative officials in Washington in June, BP officials stressed that their company was a global business with a global reach.

The multinational is keen to develop crops suitable for growth in the tropics of Africa, South America and Asia—what BP chief scientist Steve Koonin called “the green parts” of the globe.

BP’s targets are the tropics of the Third World, not just east of the Mississippi in the U.S., the region emphasized by officials at UC Berkeley and its partners at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

And the first researchers dispatched by the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), as Berkeley’s BP-funded project is formally known, headed to India and Africa in search of potential fuel crops five months before the research agreement was formally signed in November.

Read the rest.

The question of population

One area where we disagree with the studies authors is in placing primary blame on the earth’s growing population.

We would argue instead that population increase is greatest in those countries with the greatest income inequality, and that population growth becomes toxic only when coupled with political systems subservient to economies dominated by debt, corporate interests, and media systems which combine to create a noxious

Quote of the day: Some things never change

We’re currently reading British historian Arthur Marwick’s The Sixties, an account of a seminal decade in Britain, France, Italy, and the U.S., and we discovered an interesting quote about a group that started here in Berkeley with the goal of stopping the massive infill of San Francisco Bay.

While Save The Bay won its battle, what struck us was how little things have changed in one key regard: The domination of the political process by powerful real estate interests just like those that control the Berkeley City Council today through their hefty campaign contributions.

From the Saturday Evening Post, 18 June 1966:

The members of Save The Bay did their homework. They watched for every application to alter the Bay and demanded hearings for every project, then attended the hearings and testified. Both routine and under-the-counter deals began to run into trouble. Public officials dominated by real estate interests began to squirm. One applicant for a multi-million-dollar housing project that would require filling in part of the Bay accused the conservationists of being ‘more interested in bird watchers than poor Negro kids.’ The group investigated: The houses of the new project would not do much for poor Negroes—the price for each house ranged from 20,000 dollars to 60,000 dollars. The developer retired to the dubious argument that the ladies were leading the way to Socialism and Communism.

The class politics of views in Berkeley

If you’re wealthy enough to own a home in the Berkeley Hills, there’s a city law that guarantees your view of the Golden Gate.

But if you can’t afford the dough to buy or rent in the hills, there’s no comparable law guaranteeing your view of either San Francisco Bay or the Berkeley Hills.

The rich, the ones who bankroll city council elections, are guaranteed their view by city statute. The rest of us are simply stuck.

We learned about the hills view protection during our reporting days at the Berkeley Daily Planet when we covered land use issues.

Now Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates is trying to ram through a proposal that will destroy Bay views for the few flatlanders [a Berkeley term] lucky enough to still have views [we lost our Bay view a few years back].

The mayor, who suffers from a severe edifice complex, exacerbated by electile dysfunction caused by the hefty sums of developer cash his election campaigns suck in [his number one cash source in every election we covered].

Bates, who once played a Rose Bowl game for UC Berkeley’s Golden Bears and loves to hobnob with the rich and powerful [many of whom share his passion for architectural erections].

He’s an older fellow, and like so many older fellows in politics, he’s consumed with leaving a legacy — making his mark on the face of the community.

And he’s got all those smart, rich guys whispering sweet somethings in his ear, and then there’s his alma mater, which has its own grandiose ambitions to remake the landscape.

That constellation of interests is now engaged in building a Berkeley West Wall, an impregnable ten-story architectural corporate lab park, housing start-ups created on the work of UC Berkeley’s scientific serial entrepreneurs.

Guys like Jay Keasling, Cal’s celebrity “bioengineer .“ He’s started three companies, including Amyris, which started in Berkeley, then moved to nearby Emeryville when it outgrew its quarters in West Berkeley.

Both UC Berkeley and Bates celebrated in Keasling’s company, which first promised a vastly cheaper antimalarial drug shaped in the guts of genetically engineered bacteria, replacing the natural plant-derived drug and depriving thousands of small farmers of a much-needed cash crop. They engineered the bug to do it, with the help of cash from Bill Gates, then turned production over to Big Pharma’s Sanofi-Aventis.

Oh, and the drug costs just as much as the plant derivative.

Keasling made a fortune when Amyris went public, but few others have done as well. The stock has tanked, from a high of $33.85 to today’s closing at a penny over two bucks. There have been layoffs, too.

Designing for failure

So are those much-vaunted start-ups the key to West Berkeley’s success?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published a study of start-ups, and the news is grim:

The number of jobs created by establishments less than 1 year old has decreased from 4.1 million in 1994, when this series began, to 2.5 million in 2010. This trend combined with that of fewer new establishments overall indicates that the number of new jobs in each new establishment is declining.

And then there’s this from Harvard Business School:

The statistics are disheartening no matter how an entrepreneur defines failure. If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing most or all the money they put into the company, then the failure rate for start-ups is 30 to 40 percent, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who has held top executive positions at some eight technology-based start-ups. If failure refers to failing to see the projected return on investment, then the failure rate is 70 to 80 percent. And if failure is defined as declaring a projection and then falling short of meeting it, then the failure rate is a whopping 90 to 95 percent.

Read the rest.

And here’s the icing on the cake, as reported by CNN a year ago:

When it comes to small business success, California is the not-so-Golden state — at least that’s what a recent report from Dun & Bradstreet suggests.

California’s small business failure rate was 69% higher than the national average, the worst of all the states, the report said.

Read the rest.

But for Mayor Bates and his allies in the real estate and construction trade, those sobering figures apparently mean very little.

They’re quite willing to displace artisans and workers in established small industries to make way for those glamorous sounding high tech jobs.

Besides, those folks don’t give him all that money he needs to run for reelection, and they’re not as, well, accommodating as the folks with the large degrees and ever larger egos.

So what if he has to destroy a community to leave his mark on the city?

Say, maybe he could push for a hotel in the hills, say about halfway down the slope. Great views from the rooms, a unique location?

Nah, the view protection law would bar it, and even if there weren’t any view law, that’s where his donors live.

Another Cal prof weighs in on Occupy the Farm

Occupy the Farm [previously], the ongoing launched-on-Earth-Day Occupation of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract agricultural plot, continues.

While the university had wrongly claimed the action had no support from researchers who worked at the site [Miguel Altieri], the action has also enlisted some other notable faculty support [Claudia Carr, Paul Rabinow, Laura Nader, etc.]

Now consider this excerpt of a statement by Professor Jeffrey M. Romm of Cal’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, who specializes in natural resource and environmental policy. Posted at the Occupy the Farm website:

The current Gill Tract issue replicates the kind of problem that many college researchers have worked successfully to overcome, i.e. structural divides that prevent effective ecosystem management in large part by excluding those with the strongest motives for beneficial action. Faculty and students so involved cannot be expected to turn their backs on the core lessons of their careers. The mutual benefits of overcoming the divide and achieving cooperative relations between campus and community are so demonstrable and compelling that a number of faculty would not maintain their integrity if siding with the party that refuses opportunities for cooperation and adaptability.

The Gill Tract occupation creates a huge opportunity. After fifteen years of stonewall in the midst of sweeping social and ecological changes, the occupation should have come as no surprise to anyone. It does come at a time, though, when the university has become surrounded by community generated agricultural enterprise and has established its own capacity to respond in truly excellent fashion. The occupation has been conducted with utmost respect for the university, the community and the land. Equivalent responses by the university would produce a major step forward for everyone. The meaning and matter of Gill Tract extend throughout the Bay Area, with the potential for much more.

Read the rest.

Romm’s insights are particularly noteworthy in light of his expertise, particularly as described in this excerpt from his web page:

Distribution, Growth, and Resource ‘Sustainability’: Our group studies how the dynamics of social distribution, economic growth, and ecosystems interact and respond to alternative forms of policy and organization. These studies range through farm, village, watershed, county, state, and national to global scales of analysis. The conceptual frameworks are chosen to suit the particular problem of interest, but come primarily from political science, ecology, economics and sociology. Members of the group, although each is focused on one or several of these disciplines, develop a shared capacity in the work of all members. Specific topics have included, for example: the dynamics of irrigation, groundwater and watershed regimes (India, Samoa, Philippines, United States); regional patterns of soil enhancement, conservation and decline (Philippines, Nepal); adoption of agroforestry, social forestry and community forestry at farm, village and regional levels (India, Nepal, Bangladesh, United States); forest and land use dynamics and ecological change (Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, United States); impacts of national and state policies on resource use and environmental possibilities (Vietnam, United States, India).

In short, just the sort of guy about the right use of the last urban farmland acreage left along San Francisco Bay’s urban eastern shore.

Quote of the day: Bill Gates’ philanthrocapitalism

From an excellent Eric Reguly Toronto Globe and Mail column about Bill Gates and his aggressive philanthropic and lobbying push for corporate agriculture based on genetically modified crops and corporate chemicals:

Big Ag, including the Monsantos of the world, would have you believe that GM foods, and all the chemicals and fertilizers that go with them, are the solution to world hunger. It’s an argument that should be challenged far more energetically than it is. Sadly, it looks like Gates, with all his crushing power, wealth and influence, is oiling this propaganda machine.

Read the rest.

It was Gates who first bankrolled the GM labs of UC Berkeley spinoff Amyris, which promised us cost-effective fuels from crops and ended up produced cosmetic chemicals.

Occupy the Farm, nurturing sustainability

UC Berkeley’s claim that Occupy the Tract — the peaceful takeover of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract farmland in Albany — lacked support from Cal researchers took a big hit Saturday when several of them showed up for an occupation open house.

Professor Miguel Altieri spoke at an afternoon session, offering his full support for the movement which includes many of his own students.

Altieri is an agroecologist who devotes his research to finding the most effective ways to grow crops without the use of chemicals, a movement which began in its modern form with research at the site.

We counted five other Cal faculty at the site, including two who spoke briefly during the information session held on a bright, sunny day.

Altieri said UC Berkeley faculty have been heavily involved in past efforts to save the land for sustainable urban agriculture, including the 1997 drive by Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture [BACUA], which was endorsed by 45 agricultural and environmental groups including Food First, Urban Habitat Project, and Earth Island Journal.

BACUA came up with a detailed proposal for the site, which is posted online here. The university rejected it.

“We did everything the university asked us to do in developing a plan to convert the Gill Tract to a center for sustainable agriculture,” said Shyaam M. Shabaka, founder and executive director of EcoVillage Farm in nearby Richmond. “The university reneged without explanation on the day the agreement was to be finalized.”

Albany activist Michael Beer helped organize another proposal with the backing of the Albany school board to transform the tract into Village Creek Farm and Garden, a site as a site for interdisciplinary academic research, a teaching center for young people, and as a working farm to provide organic food for local consumers and restaurants.

The proposal is posted online here as a PDF.

The Gill Tract and the global land struggle

Miguel Altieri

Altieri said Occupy the Farm is part of a larger global struggle for land.

Control of the land is essential both for feeding the world sustainably and for the preservation of identities and culture.

Urban farms are critical to the struggle, he said.

“More than 30 percent of the food in the world is grown in cities,” Altieri said. He cited the case of Cuba, where urban agriculture saved the country from famine after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the supplies of oil and other critical resources.

Now Cuban urban farms produce 15 to 20 kilograms of food per square meter annually, compared to 5 kilograms in the U.S.

Altieri’s ideal would be the transformation of the site into a teaching and outreach center. His own research on the Gill Tract has been halted for the moment since the university shut off water to the site.

A look back at the BACUA plan

Fifteen years after it was proposed, it’s worth looking back at BACUA.

Writing in Earth Island Journal in 1997. Food First Executive Director Peter Rosset described the group’s vision:

BACUA believes that the explosion in urban farming taking place throughout the world is a positive development – people taking control of the resources that they need for their own livelihoods.

In this era of privatizaton, the University’s Agricultural Research Stations are casting about for a new research mission. It is becoming increasingly common throughout the world for public institutions (and universities in particular) to form partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to share resources and promote common survival. Such a partnership at the Gill Tract, would involve university professors, researchers and students with committed NGOs, working together in a new and rapidly expanding field. (Something similar already exists at the UC Santa Cruz Agroecology Program, but this program doesn’t serve an urban region anything like the Bay Area.)

We can imagine a working community farm that would provide good jobs to local youth and quality organic food to local residents. The farm would simultaneously serve as a demonstration training site for young farmers and as a research site for the University. The farm’s greenhouses could support research directed at improving urban farming technologies while the vacant buildings could become offices shared by NGOs (ranging from urban gardening, school, and community groups, to food policy and education organizations and advocacy groups) and by university professors studying the economic, agronomic, nutritional, ecological and sociological aspects of urban agriculture.

If the potential is unlimited, the alternative is appalling. The loss of this precious of urban farmland would forfeit a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create something new, something where the total would clearly be bigger than the sum of the parts.

The creation of a unique working farm/research station would be true to the legacy of the Division of Biological Control, which over the last two decades fought the long good fight against the state’s dominant agribusiness interests and the agrochemical industry.

Read the rest.

And for a history of the Gill Tract from its pre-Columbian days to the present, see this essay by Miguel Altieri.