Month: April 2010

I just watched quite the spectacle on the Senate floor. Senator Claire McCaskill attempted to get unanimous consent to the confirmation of 12-15 nominees to various government agencies who have been subject to secret holds despite receiving no objection from anyone in the committees of jurisdiction. I believe that Sen. Jon Kyl allowed the first name to be confirmed and then objected to all the rest of them. He claimed that he did not personally have a secret hold on any of the nominees and that the leaders were working out (debate) time agreements so he had to object to simply confirming them by unanimous consent. Majority Whip Dick Durbin then stood up and asked McCaskill if it was true that Reid had any objection to confirming her list of nominees. She said it wasn’t and Kyl went on objecting anyway ‘for the same reasons’ he had stated before.

So, what’s a secret hold?

A secret hold is a parliamentary procedure within the Standing Rules of the United States Senate that allows one or more Senators to prevent a motion from reaching a vote on the Senate floor. If the Senator provides notice privately to his or her party leadership of their intent (and the party leadership agrees) then the hold is known as a secret or anonymous hold…

…Sections 2 and 3 of Rule VII (Morning Business) of the Standing Rules of the Senate outline the procedure for bringing motions to the floor of the Senate. Under these rules, “no motion to proceed to the consideration of any bill…shall be entertained…unless by unanimous consent”. In practice, this means that a Senator may privately provide notice to his/her party leadership of intent to object to a motion. At that point, the motion cannot proceed because unanimous consent has not been reached, even though the Senator has not publicly announced his/her intent to object. This allows a Senator to remain anonymous while preventing the motion from going forward.

The original intent of these sections was to protect a Senator’s right to be consulted on legislation that affected the Senator’s state or that he/she had a great interest in. The ability to place a hold would allow that Senator an opportunity to study the legislation and to reflect on what it means before moving forward with further debate and voting.

Holds, like filibusters, can be defeated through cloture; however, the time required to bring around a cloture vote often allows fewer than 40 senators to block unimportant legislation when the majority is not willing to force the vote.

I’m not sure how the ‘secret’ part of it was ever necessary to protect a senator’s right to study legislation. The Congress passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act in 2007 requiring public notification of a hold within six days, but the Senate has simply ignored the law and it refuses all pressure to enforce it.

Here’s the language:

(Sec. 512) Requires the Majority and Minority Leaders of the Senate (or their designees) to recognize a notice of intent of a Senator who is a member of their caucus to object to proceeding to a measure or matter only if the Senator:
(1) submits such notice in writing to the appropriate leader (or designee) following the objection to a unanimous consent to proceeding to, and, or passage of, a measure or matter on their behalf; and
(2) within six session days afterwards submits a similar notice for inclusion in the Congressional Record and in the applicable calendar.
Requires the Secretary of the Senate to establish, for both the Senate Calendar of Business and the Senate Executive Calendar, a separate section entitled “Notice of Intent to Object to Proceeding,” containing the name of each Senator filing the notice, the measure or matter objected to, and the date the objection was filed.
Authorizes a Senator to have such an item removed from a calendar upon submitting to the Congressional Record a statement of non-objection.

As CREW director Melanie Sloan said recently after the Senate Ethics Committee turned down her request that they enforce the law:

If the ethics committee can’t enforce a ban on secret holds enacted by the Senate just a couple of years ago, then the ban was clearly nothing more than a sham from the get go. The Senate tried to pawn off this ban to an American public fed up with congressional inaction and secrecy as real change. Now we learn the truth: the ban – like so much that comes out of senators’ mouths — is meaningless. Was the ban part of “honest leadership” or “open government”? Seems like a tossup.

Sen. McCaskill finished her presentation on the Senate floor by putting everyone on notice that she expects publication of who is putting secret holds on these nominees and why in six days time. And she announced her intention of forcing the issue on more nominees for the rest of the week.

Originally featured in the Montreal Gazette. Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

I grew up in Westmount as an only child with a relatively privileged middle-class life. I attended Selwyn House elementary, and we had season tickets to the Canadiens at the old Forum.

My upbringing seems a long way from the sidewalks of Antanarivo, Kampala, Lusaka, or the cities of any of the dozen or so African countries where I’ve been travelling the last six months.

It’s a little embarrassing, but these are the only images of Africa I had as a child:

When I turned up my nose at broccoli at the dinner table, my mom would guilt me into eating everything on the plate, “because people were starving in Ethiopia.”

While watching The Wonder Years, I saw commercials of B-list celebrities pleading for people to send money to feed emaciated children in Africa.

As I grew older, my view of Africa didn’t really change. It seemed that no good news came out of the continent. Everything I read and saw was about conflict, famine, HIV/AIDS, or disease. And for many of us, that’s all we know about Africa.

I felt, as most people do, powerless about the problems there. Most of us think of Africa as a lost cause.

It wasn’t until my partner, Danielle Nierenberg, received a grant through the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet (www.nourishingtheplanet.com) to travel across the continent visiting innovations that offered sustainable ways of reducing hunger and poverty, that everything I thought I knew about the continent began to change. The grant culminates next year with the release of State of the World 2011, Worldwatch’s flagship publication, which will serve as a road map for the funding and donor community on projects working on the ground. I decided to take a leave of absence from my job to travel with her and learn as much as I could.

We started in Ethiopia in October 2009, and after six months visiting 120 projects, I quickly began to realize how much these individuals and organizations were doing with minimal resources. And that the news media seem to miss the real story: underneath the very real problems they were covering were hundreds of exciting innovations that were protecting the environment and improving people’s lives.

So let me share some examples of “good news” taking place across the continent – people and places that Danielle and I saw firsthand that gave us hope.

In Ethiopia, we met Kes Malede Abreha, a farmer-priest living near Aksum who, as part of a farmers’ group supported by the non-government organization Prolinnova is now a leading agricultural innovator in his neighbourhood.

In Kenya, we visited Kibera – one of the largest slums in sub-Saharan Africa, home to almost a million people. There, travelling with Urban Harvest, we met members of a women’s co-operative who are raising vegetables on “vertical farms” by poking holes in sacks, filling them with soil, and planting seeds.

In Tanzania, we visited the World Vegetable Centre in Arusha, where researchers and farmers are working together to improve diets and livelihoods.

In Uganda, we met with an organization run by two 20-year old volunteers that built school gardens to teach children about nutrition. It’s called Project DISC (part of Slow Food International).

In Rwanda, we met with families outside Kigali benefiting from a donation of small livestock from Heifer International.

In Mozambique, we attended a training session in which farmers were brought in from across the country to share with each other what was working. This will culminate in a free book of best practices, published in multiple indigenous languages.

In Zambia, we visited COMACO, whose sustainable, high-wage, non-profit peanut butter, organic rice, and honey under the label It’s Wild, were selling in major grocery stores across the country.

In Ghana, we met with a women’s co-operative that was processing palm oil.

As our plane landed at Dorval this week, we were filled with optimism and the African continent seemed not so far away, and much less hopeless. What we loved about many of the projects we visited is that they were Africa-led, often by local volunteers, and with very modest resources.

Bernard Pollack is travel blogging from Africa with his partner Danielle Nierenberg. You can follow them online at BorderJumpers (www.borderjumpers.org).

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The International Monetary Fund a/k/a the IMF is not exactly a radical, extremist left wing organization. It is deeply embedded in the current global economic and financial establishment (and responsible in part for the mess we are in now).

Yet even the Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand lovers at the IMF are scared by the financial services monsters they helped enable, those large multinational financial institutions that the twin gospels of “globalization” and “de-regulation” birthed. Even the IMF is now warning that financial reform to eliminate the systemic risk that still exists in our global financial system, and which if not dealt with son may lead to the next financial collapse, one that this time we may not be able to prevent from turning into a global Great Depression:

Time is running out for governments to overhaul regulation of global banks that have become bigger and more powerful since the start of the financial meltdown three years ago, the International Monetary Fund warned today.

In its half-yearly health check on the financial sector, the Washington-based fund said there was an urgent need for international co-operation to tackle the systemic risks posed by banks deemed “too big to fail”.

“The future financial regulatory reform agenda is still a work in progress, but will need to move forward with at least the main ingredients soon”, the IMF said in its Global Financial Stability Review. “The window of opportunity for dealing with too-important-to-fail institutions may be closing and should not be squandered, all the more so because some of these institutions have become bigger and more dominant than before the crisis erupted.

“Policymakers need to give serious thought about what makes these institutions systemically important and how risks to the financial system can be mitigated.”

These aren’t a group of Marxist-Socialist-Fascists making these warnings. This is the premier international organization created after WWII to re-establish the wrecked economies of war torn countries and spread capitalism around the globe. It is also an organization that is less diverse and more mainstream than any other international organization. And by mainstream I mean the IMF has always followed the c=dominant thinking of the leading economists of the day. This is “who they are:

The bulk of IMF analysis has always been
mainstream and centrist, viewed from the perspective of the dominant strain of Anglo-Saxon economics. The leading universities of North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia have been the main training grounds for much of its professional staff. Martha Finnemore, a political scientist who has studied a number of large organizations, has even claimed that the Pentagon displays more intellectual diversity than the IMF. […]

These are the people that Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz once referred to as outdated in their thinking and patronizing in their approach to transformation of the global economy:

The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or out-of-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they’re right. Country teams have been known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of the text for one country’s report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the “search and replace” function on the word processor didn’t work properly, leaving the original country’s name in a few places. Oops.

It’s not fair to say that IMF economists don’t care about the citizens of developing nations. But the older men who staff the fund–and they are overwhelmingly older men–act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden. IMF experts believe they are brighter, more educated, and less politically motivated than the economists in the countries they visit.

So these are not hot headed communists seeking to destroy our freedoms. Far from it. If they had their preference they would all be still be worshiping at the twin altars of Milton Friedman and the “Free Market” to solve all of our current economic problems. Unfortunately for them, even they now realize that government has a role to play in harmonizing and stabilizing the financial markets, and that bigger is not always better in the world of finance, even if that was the ultimate result of the policies they promoted and in which they put their trust and faith.

When even the IMF turns against the Mega Banks and Wall Street Gangsters (Hello there Goldman Sachs!) who are fighting tooth and nail to derail financial reform with their “friends” in both parties (but especially the Republicans led by Mitch McConnell) it behooves us, especially those indoctrinated in the faith that unfettered free markets solve all problems, to take their warnings seriously.

Twenty years ago these were the people who supported the policies of globalization, the free flow of capital around the world and financial de-regulation by governments inn order to allow the financial markets to expand exponentially. These were the people who supported the growth of large, integrated financial institutions that could do everything from selling stocks and bonds, to investment banking, to commercial and residential loans, to providing insurance.

The IMF staff may never come right out and say that they were wrong, but in effect that is what this most recent report urging immediate reform and re-regulation of the multinational megalithic financial institutions represents: an admission that what they thought they knew about macroeconomic was seriously flawed. It’s time that those on the right who still believe reasonable regulation of banks and Wall Street is an infringement on “their freedoms” reach the same conclusion.

Richard Cohen remains one of the most incoherent columnists in America. Even as he tries to reassure his religious brethren that the president has an entirely sensible policy towards Israel, he can’t help but bash Obama for his lack of empathy. If Obama would just follow Anwar Sadat’s example and visit Jerusalem, he would eliminate all Israel’s anxiety about his commitment to their country. That’s baloney.

Cohen follows the practice of trying to sell us a one-sided version of reality.

…the Israeli middle, is scared. It would give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank for peace — only it is skeptical that even those concessions would work. None of this is theoretical. It is about life and death. It is about rockets coming in from Gaza yet again. It is about Hezbollah’s Scud missiles and the reasonable apprehension that Hamas would oust the moderate (and hapless) Palestinian Authority from the West Bank and turn the area into the functional equivalent of Gaza, an Islamic republic whose charter is a stew of crackpot anti-Semitism laced with death threats.

I don’t dismiss those fears. But it is not at all clear to me that Israel’s ‘middle’ is willing to give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Every indicator I can think of points the other way. In fact, I would argue that the Israeli middle’s refusal to stop expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is the root of the problem that the Obama administration faces in trying to reboot a peace process.

But let’s assume that some theoretically plausible future Israeli government could muster the will and popular support to trade away almost all of East Jerusalem and the West Bank for assurances of peace. If they made that deal the political and public relations landscape would shift dramatically. No political deal can make everyone accept the existence of Israel, but a deal that involved the official recognition of Israel by all the Arab nations would cast all future harassment from Palestinian or Lebanese (or Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian) territory in an entirely different light. In fact, you will notice that Israel doesn’t face harassment from Egyptian or Jordanian soil, and that is because Israel has made peace agreements with those two countries.

No one can assure Israel that they will never again have to dodge rocket fire if they just make peace. But we can assure them that continued harassment will be viewed almost universally as illegitimate, and any Israeli responses to continued harassment will not be second-guessed the way they are now.

The paradigm in Israel seems to be that they withdrew from Lebanon and received rocket fire and the withdrew from Gaza and received rocket fire. Therefore, why would a withdrawal from the West Bank be any different? This has a surface plausibility, but the reason they still struggle with resistance is that they still occupy Palestinian territory and are still expanding their permanent settlements on that territory. At least half the world (actually, considerably more than half) thinks some form of Palestinian resistance is legitimate under current circumstances. That would no longer be the case if Israel obtained official recognition from all its neighbors.

It’s not hateful to point these things out to Israel. It’s what a good friend does. Obama is telling Israel what it needs to hear, and there is no lack of empathy in the message.

Sarah Palin thinks of the founding age of the United States as an era of “Christian Roots.” That’s true in a way, but not in the way that Palin means it. In rejecting the principle that God should be separated in any way from the state, she disrespects the unique genius of our country.

First, we have to consider why the majority of Europeans settled here in the 17th and early 18th Centuries.

The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as “inforced uniformity of religion,” meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst.

But these settlers were not so different in outlook from the culture from which they fled. The colonies tended to be outposts of uniformity. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was Congregationalist. Pennsylvania was Quaker. Virginia was Anglican, and so on. You could even look at these early settlements as akin in some ways to what has been attempted in Israel. These people had tried practicing their religion in Europe, but had found it too dangerous. They wanted a place where they could worship without harassment and persecution. In this sense, the early settlers were very much Christian in their outlook.

But two things happened during the 18th-Century that changed things. First, more and more people began coming for cheap land and other non-religious motivations as new land began to open up in the interior of the country. Second, Europe came up with their own solution to the problem of constant sectarian strife. It was called the Enlightenment. I am not going to try to explain the Enlightenment in this piece, but our Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by it and used its principles to meld together the 13 colonies into one religiously tolerant country.

The reason our Constitution says right at the outset of the Bill of Rights that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ is because the colonies had been doing just that. And if the Congress passed a law saying that Congregationalism is the one true religion, then all the states outside of New England would have revolted. To see how true what I’m telling you is, consider the following:

The First Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly forbids the U.S. federal government from enacting any law respecting a religious establishment, and thus forbids either designating an official church for the United States, or interfering with State and local official churches — which were common when the First Amendment was enacted. It did not prevent state governments from establishing official churches. Connecticut continued to do so until it replaced its colonial Charter with the Connecticut Constitution of 1818; Massachusetts retained an establishment of religion in general until 1833. (The Massachusetts system required every man to belong to some church, and pay taxes towards it; while it was formally neutral between denominations, in practice the indifferent would be counted as belonging to the majority denomination, and in some cases religious minorities had trouble being recognized at all.)

And lest you think that we now live a country of perfect religious liberty:

All current U.S. state constitutions include guarantees of religious liberty parallel to the First Amendment, but eight (Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas) also contain clauses that prohibit atheists from holding public office.

Since 1961, the (evil) Supreme Court has held those laws unenforceable. So, even to this day, the Massachusetts Constitution says that an atheist cannot serve in public office. And the only reason that an atheist can serve in the socialist utopia of Massachusetts is because of the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s eventual insistence that it applied to the states as well as to Congress.

But all of this might lead you to think that our Christian Roots are still as strong as the day this country was founded. That is, unless, of course, you consider that the whole originality of the American experiment was the idea that a nation of people could exist without conformity in their religious beliefs. To illustrate my point, I want to use two quotes from the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson:

“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Now you know why the Palinites on the Texas Board of Education have replaced Thomas Jefferson with John Calvin in the approved curriculum.

I believe Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) was the first Christian (non-trinity denying Deist) president of the United States. However, he didn’t join a church until a year after he left office. That’s a lot of our history where our leaders were more inspired by Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, and Hume than they were by the New Testament. Long after we had the Second Great Awakening most of our presidents expressed little to no affinity for the dogmas of any sect of Christianity. As recent an example as President William Howard Taft was a non-believer:

Before becoming president, Taft was offered the presidency of Yale University, at that time affiliated with the Congregationalist Church; Taft turned the post down, saying, “I do not believe in the divinity of Christ.”

Of course, it’s hard to come to grips with this history in our current environment where we have only one avowed atheist in all of Congress. It makes one wonder who really lost the America that once sparkled so brightly as a beacon of freethinking and tolerance.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be an unusual number of natural disasters happening lately? I don’t know. It seems like we’ve had fewer hurricanes and more of everything else.

.
Prepare for the big one, each eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in past 1000 years — 1821, 1612 and ~920 — triggered the vicious Katla.

Study of Katla and Eyjafjallajökull Volcanoes [pdf]

Prediction from history …

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

If you were Charlie Crist, what would you do?

1. As part of his statewide “Jobs for Florida” tour, Kendrick visited 12 cities in just four days. He traveled from South Florida to Tallahassee to Tampa to Indian River County talking to middle class Floridians about his vision for creating jobs across this state and building a strong and sustainable Florida economy. As Kendrick said, “You can bet I will continue to work hard to get the state’s economy working again for Florida families.” Click here to see the stops (http://www.kendrickmeek.com/index.php/pages/tourmap).
2. Even though Kendrick needed 112,476 signatures to get on the ballot for U.S. Senate, he submitted 145,000. That includes petition signatures from counties all across Florida. And, just last week, the Division of Elections verified the ballots and made it official!
3. Kendrick has written op-eds for newspapers all across the state. This includes two in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and one each in the Tampa Tribune, Panama City News Herald, and Florida Today. He also was a guest columnist on FiveThirtyEight.com. Click here to read Kendrick’s editorials (http://www.kendrickmeek.com/index.php/issues/op-eds/).
4. Kendrick is the only major candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida that has not called for the repeal of health care reform that President Obama signed into law. One of his Republican opponents even featured “Repeal Obamacare” on the homepage of his campaign website.
5. Last week, we released a brand new video that highlights Kendrick’s journey for the U.S. Senate. Click here to watch the video (http://www.kendrickmeek.com/page/s/video).

6. The pundits and press alike are saying the same thing – if Kendrick wants to win, he needs money to go up on TV and share his story with Florida. You can help make sure that happens Click here to make a contribution today – even as little as $5 makes a difference (https://donate.kendrickmeek.com/page/contribute/20100416)