Chickenkeeping in Spartanburg County

12/19 Update: Mr. Angelakis settled with his neighbors out of court: the chickens are going … but maybe he’ll give one to you if you ask?

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Photo from the Herald Journal: "Tony Angelakis tends to the 30 chickens in the backyard of a home in Hillbrook Forest subdivision. The neighbors have filed a lawsuit against him to force him to remove the chickens from this location."

12/18 – Urban farming is on the upswing nationally, and that includes urban chicken farming as Newsweek noted last year:

Over the past few years, urban dwellers driven by the local-food movement, in cities from Seattle to Albuquerque, have flocked to the idea of small-scale backyard chicken farming—mostly for eggs, not meat—as a way of taking part in home-grown agriculture. This past year alone, grass-roots organizations in Missoula, Mont.; South Portland, Maine; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Ft. Collins, Colo., have successfully lobbied to overturn city ordinances outlawing backyard poultry farming, defined in these cities as egg farming, not slaughter. Ann Arbor now allows residents to own up to four chickens (with neighbors’ consent), while the other three cities have six-chicken limits, subject to various spacing and nuisance regulations.

The trend is real. This week, New York City announced it would permit beekeeping for the first time in decades.

So perhaps its not surprising that in a less urban area where lots of people garden, you’ll find people raising chickens.  There is no zoning here in Spartanburg  County.  You can burn your trash, raise goats or do pretty much whatever you want with your own property – at least as far as plants and animals are concerned.   You might think that locals would be a-ok with a little bit of poultry in the suburbs.  You’d be incorrect, according to this article in today’s Herald Journal:

Several residents of Harrell Drive, in the Hillbrook Forest subdivision, have filed a lawsuit alleging William Diangikies and Mary, Matthew and Tony Angelakis are violating neighborhood covenants and restrictions by allowing 30 chickens and a chicken coop to remain in the backyard of 276 Harrell Drive.

Tony Angelakis said no one has lived at the residence on the property since his grandmother died, and he purchased six chickens last year “as a hobby” and so his family could have eggs and meat. He now has 30 chickens and denies allegations that they smell and are a nuisance.

Although the article says otherwise, the City of Spartanburg code does permit agricultural structures for poultry, which condones ownership within city limits.  However, only “goats, chickens, etc.” already in the city and licensed as of January 1, 2009 may remain within the city limits, due to a new Animal Services Ordinance. The ordinance itself isn’t posted online.

Spartanburg County has no restrictions on livestock ownership. The only references in the county ordinances come under flood damage prevention and storm water management: structures used to house livestock and poultry are not exempt from the provisions.

The complaining neighbors may be on firmer ground if the court chooses to regard the chickens as pets. Though the defense will argue for the application of neighborhood covenants.  It would be too bad if Spartanburg County followed the city’s example and outlawed poultry keeping.

Spartanburg was ahead of the curve on urban poultry farming, but has dropped back with the change in the law.   I’m not sure what the city council was thinking, as the exclusionary ordinance was passed without any discussion in the media.  Probably, this is a barely-consciousattempt to conform with outdated notions of modernizing the town and another case of smoothing away the rough edges of a place.

Thirty chickens seems like a bit much, as does slaughtering the chickens on your property.   So what would be wrong with having two or three chickens per family member as laying hens?  Nothing.  But like as not the opportunity to establish some sensible zoning permitting urban poultry fell prey to an controlling need to prettify the town.

Maybe the city council will revisit the issue and reverse the outright prohibition on poultry.  With that in mind, and in the meantime, it would be interesting to know just what the council was thinking when it put the ban in place.

Links:

Code of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, updated March 19, 2009.

Sustainable Urban Poultry Farming. poultryfarming.ncat.org.

Mother Earth News “Poultry” search.

For profit site: http://www.buildingachickencoop.com/

Single Payer Amendment before the Senate at Two Minutes to Midnight

Bernard Sanders (Independent – Vermont) will see his single- payer health plan amendment read before the Senate today. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is going to allow a vote on the amendment as well. Reid loses nothing by doing this. In return for some very late exposure of single-payer, the progressives will vote ‘yes’ on the final bill – a bill lacking a public option, or much that is progressive.

The single- payer health plan amendment is being reported more for the Sen. Tim Coburn’s procedural demand that the entire text of Sanders’ amendment be read into the record. This is expected to take 12 hours and is still ongoing.

Coburn (Republican – Oklahoma) talks as if Sander’s bill and Reid’s bill was the same thing. It’s laughable, as Obama, Reid, Baucus and Pelosi worked strenuously to keep single-payer out of the health care debate. The distinction is academic to most voters. Any intervention of government in health care will play to the Republican’s wall-to-wall anti-communist rhetoric. The failure of the Obama plan to control costs or provide universal coverage will encourage those who would prefer to do nothing over the rising cost of health care and the worsening in quality of life.

In a two-track debate, the Republicans will come out ahead on this one. Including single-payer or national health care advocates in the debate might have brought the Republicans and Right-wing Democrats pro-market (and anti-cost control) assumptions into question. Obama would have to be a very astute politician to manage a play like that. It appears that he is not, unless his constituency is Joe Lieberman and the heath insurance industry.

Digbysblog sums up what’s wrong with this bill from a progressive, free market or socialist perspective (courtesy Glenn Greenwald’s Salon column):

Obama can say that you’re getting a lot, but also saying that it “covers everyone,” as if there’s a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don’t get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn’t make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good — and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.

In the end, Obama seems to have gotten the bill he wanted but lost his base in the process. Or rather, he caused the base to realize that what they saw in him was only a hopeful reflection of themselves.He never was a progressive, he was always a blue dog Democrat with a better story to tell. People voted for FDR, but they got Jimmy Carter.

You can read Sanders’ proposal and even the entire bill here:

- The United States spends $7,129 per person on health care, which is almost double the amount spent by nearly any other industrialized country. Despite this fact, we still do not insure all of our citizens.
- There are currently 46 million Americans without health insurance, 100 million Americans who cannot access dental care, and 60 million Americans who do not have access to primary care.
- The United States ranks among the lowest of developed countries are far as health outcomes, according to both life expectancy and disease metrics.
- One reason we spend our money so ineffectively is that there is tremendous waste in our system. Healthcare providers spend $210 billion on administrative costs, mostly to deal with insurance paperwork, and the ranks of administrative personnel have grown by 25 times the number of physicians in the past 30 years.
- This waste and the high costs of insurance associated with it place a tremendous burden on American employers and makes it difficult for them to compete internationally.

Democrats and Republicans vs Health Care

I’d like to do a longer introduction to this interview with Dr. Andy Coates of the Physicians for a National Heath Program, but I think it speaks for itself. Although its tempting to support the Democratic Party’s health care plan in order to do something about the unavailabillty of basic medical coverage for millions of people (including myself at various times) the plan that is before Congress now is worthless.
The Affordable Healthcare for America Act will not control costs and will leave millions exposed. It may get through Congress, but the resulting failure to meet expectations will only transfer Americans’ resentment for health care failures from HMOs to the government. A future Republican administration will simply repeal it. The Democrats will never attempt even so much as this again. What a waste.

As Dr. Coates writes on his blog, two-thirds of Americans support ‘Medicare for all’. The Democrats might have gone this route, who knows, but they might have connected with the public on this. Obama, Pelosi, Reid and Baucus never so much as breathed a word about single-payer health care for what must seem like obvious reasons of political cowardice and HMO graft.

Read the entire article here: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/coates091209.html

The crux of each bill is compulsory private health insurance. The government will use its power to compel every individual to purchase private health insurance, or enroll in Medicaid. The bills don’t make private health insurance affordable; they propose to subsidize private insurance premiums for those who live on modest means.

For example, the House bill will subsidize the premiums of those whose income is 400 percent of the federal poverty level and below. Taxpayers would pay for this. But it would still mean that people who earn 200 percent to 400 percent of the federal poverty level would have to pay 8 to 12 percent of their income for private insurance premiums, or pay a fine and stay uninsured.

That would be the so-called “choice.” For the uninsured, paying for expensive insurance would amount to an enormous wage cut. And then they’ll get skimpy coverage, with high co-pays, high deductibles and all those other onerous and unworkable measures that come with very expensive private insurance.

One of the justifications that Obama and the Democrats used for these bills is that they will control the cost of health care. Are they telling the truth?

Total health care spending will not be brought under control by either of these bills. It will not bend the cost curve. As health care costs continue to increase dramatically, the crisis of unaffordable health care will continue, for ourselves and our families, with increased out-of-pocket costs, new mandatory premium payments, and ongoing medical bankruptcies will remain acute.

What about the so-called public option? What impact will it have on the health care system?

The proposals for the public option as they stand are meaningless from the point of view of reform, and ridiculous as a way to influence the insurance market. There are so many compromises it might be renamed the incredible shrinking public option. And also, as a TV talking point, it has often eclipsed a focus on what’s really in the bill.

But I think that there’s more fundamental point. The public option was never a proposal for workable reform. It’s actually a neoliberal concept. Marie Gottschalk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an article in the new Socialist Register 2010 entitled “U.S. Health Reform and the Stockholm Syndrome.”

She argues that when it comes to health reform, American reformers are like hostages who identify with, and even defend, their captors. I heard her speak in New York, where she said it seemed that, if a window opened to permit real health reform, many “reformers” wouldn’t even try to climb out.

What do you mean that the public option is in fact a neoliberal proposal?

The public option idea is basically that the insurance market will magically meet our needs, as long as there is consumer choice and fair competition. This is the ideology popularized by Ronald Reagan. If only a government agency could be added alongside these giant, highly profitable insurers with their oligopoly control, then the marketplace would magically reform itself. Does that make any sense?

The insurance market rewards insurers that avoid paying for the care of sick. The public option would have to play by the same rules and compete on the same market. So in the best-case scenario, the public option would tend to enroll the sickest patients and, in turn, would have higher, not lower, expenses. The Congressional Budget Office recently made this very point in a report on the House bill.

Source:

• Selling Out Health Care Reform: Interview with Dr. Andy Coates. By Ashley Smith. Monthly Review Zine. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/coates091209.html

Links:

• Home Care Patients Worry Over Possible Cuts. By Robert Pear. New York Times. December 4, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/health/policy/05home.html?hp

• PRELIMINARY ESTIMATE OF THE EFFECTS ON THE DEFICIT OF H.R. 3962, THE AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR AMERICA ACT, AS INTRODUCED ON OCTOBER 29, 2009 http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc10688/hr3962Rangel.pdf

It wouldn’t hurt to write your Representative, Senator or President to let them know you support single payer, Medicare for All, or however you want to put it. Its a symbolic gesture at this point, but it made me feel better.

If we organize patiently, and create links between people who are hurting from the instability of medical coverage and medical professionals who want to extend coverage to all, then we just may be able to turn around the inevitable campaign to repeal this hack job a few years and get something real. Here’s hoping

South Carolina Working Families Party in context

The New York City politics publication City Hall News has been running a series of articles recently on the Working Families Party.   This week they examined the national organization of the party and looked at the somewhat loosely associated “sister parties” in other states, of which South Carolina is one.

South Carolina has four progressive parties on the ballot, a surprising number for such a conservative state.  These parties are the South Carolina Green Party (of which I serve on the steering committee), the United Citizen’s Party (which has some overlapping membership with the Greens), the Labor Party of South Carolina (founded in 1996 as an independent and classically ‘labour’ party) and the SC Working Families Party (oriented toward the Democratic Party through joint nomination of candidates).

To a certain extent each of these groups occupies the same ideological real estate, but the base is different for each one.  The SC Greens are of course part of the national Green Party.  The United Citizens Party is a civil rights party, originally created to run candidates against Jim Crow Democrats in the late 60’s.

The Labor Party was established to run working class candidates against both Democrats and Republicans.  I attended the Labor Party’s founding convention in Cleveland as a delegate for the union I was working for.  Expectations were high, but the whole project was quickly put to sleep by the national AFL-CIO leadership before a series of union mergers and the death of founder Tony Masaccio let the air out. 

It is only thanks to the work of the Charleston Longshoremen of ILA Local 1422 and their supporters that the 10,000 signatures were collected to secure the ballot line in this state.  The longshoremen have been at the forefront of reforming their national union and are undoubtedly the most important labor local in the state. Their independence and activity would bode well for any political campaign. There are indications that the Labor Party will be running a candidate for the state house this year.

The Labor Party didn’t take off in other states, though the potential was certainly there.  The open membership proved too hard to manage for the unions that were supplying the money and organizers.  The Labor Party banned fusion, and many of the labor leaders had long term relationships with Democratic politicians.  So many of the same unions that had founded the Labor Party (including CWA District 1, my old employer), ACORN and the former organisers of the New Party founded the Working Families Party on an explicity pro-fusion basis.

That was ten years ago.  During the 2009 NYC elections the WFP got a lot of notice because it has apparently succeded in doing what it set out to do: create an efficient political machine that can deliver elections and (maybe) hold some Democrats to its more-progressive platform.  

The New York party has a ready made mass base in the union membership that enthusiastically works for the candidates the party endorses.  It has considerable in-house talent pool of organizers and mailing lists with which to build campaigns.   Finding candidates is no problem as plenty of New York Democratic incumbents are already in agreement with the WFP’s social democratic language.  The WFP endorsement certainly made the difference in some NYC city council primaries and several sitting councilors serve as “Democrat-Working Families”.

These achievements are remarkable for a ‘third’ party but obviously limited.   The WFP campaigns can only be as successful as the Democrats they elect.  So, where the Democratic party is positively pulled toward more pro-union positions, the WFP is tethered to the Democratic Party and its independence is pretty questionable. 

This dependence may not matter very much in NY, but it will matter a great deal in SC, where the Democratic Party is considerably more conservative.  In NY, the WFP has run candidates against a few Democrats, where the Democratic primary winner was judged to be entirely inappropriate, but that’s only a handful of cases.  In SC, the situation would be reversed.  Here the WFP would be hard pressed to fill a van with serving Democrats courting the union vote.  I hope I’m wrong about that, but I’m going to need to see some evidence first.

I’m optimistic that we’re going to see a growth of independent political activism in 2010 and beyond.  The situation being what it is, a lot of it will be right-wing.  So its encouraging to see a movement by a constituency of the Democrats take a move toward political independence in SC.    Let’s hope that there’s such a progressive revival that the SC WFP is not only endorsing SC Greens, United Citizen and Labor parties, but winning some elections as well.

The South Carolina Working Families Party uses the same logo and issue list, as well as material on its website common in many states’ Working Families websites which lays out the logic of fusion voting.

This includes a simple chart explaining that if “Steady Sue” gets 42 percent on Major Party 1’s ballot line, “Fat Cat Bill” gets 48 percent on Major Party 2’s ballot line and Steady Sue gets another 10 percent on the Working Families Party’s line, “Steady Sue wins with 52% and knows where her votes came from.”

The South Carolina WFP was founded by Erin McKee, who now serves as state chair. A former official of the Association of Flight Attendants who is currently with the Office and Professional Employees International Union, McKee said she was inspired to start the Working Families effort in South Carolina after reading an article in The Nation that touted the New York WFP’s success and mentioned that hers was one of only two other states where fusion voting was already legal. A few weeks later, at an AFL-CIO convention at Myrtle Beach, she met Larry Moskowitz.

The two struck up a conversation.

Moskowitz began by briefing McKee on the mechanics of fusion voting and the kinds of people to whom the Working Families effort might appeal. Once the idea gained traction, Moskowitz provided additional help in the crafting of bylaws and rules for the new party.

Several candidates for state legislature and Congress have run on the WFP line, but McKee said bigger plans are being laid.

“We’re trying to figure out who’s running, who we might be able to help that believes in our issues and go from there. We’re trying to form clubs in Charleston and Columbia and Greenville and start getting people motivated, and educating them about the Working Families Party,” McKee said, adding, “we’re going to the unions and educating.”

A notice on the website encourages South Carolina candidates interested in running on the WFP line to contact organizer Joe Berry, reachable via at that same @workingfamiliesparty.org email extension that New York and Connecticut WFP employees use.

Berry did not return a call and email requesting comment, but McKee confirmed that he is the same Joe Berry who spent years on staff at the New York WFP as an organizer before returning to his native South Carolina. Now the only paid employee of the South Carolina WFP, Berry also served as an organizer for the separately incorporated Suffolk County Working Families Party, and was an authorized New York Working Families Organization lobbyist for 2007, 2008 and 2009.

As is the case for the Connecticut WFP, there does not seem to be a visible in-state means of support for Berry’s salary. According to the report filed with the South Carolina State Ethics Commission dated July 10, 2009, the party had a balance of just $200, thanks to a $100 contribution from the Columbia Central Labor Council and IBEW Local 772. The South Carolina WFP also got a $500 donation from the New York State PAC of 1199 SEIU, a key WFP/WFO member union, in October 2006.

Full article: Dovere, Edward-Issac, “All In The Family, Part 5″.  City Hall News. December 3, 2009. http://www.cityhallnews.com/newyork/article-1050-all-in-the-family-part-5.html

Found via Ballot Access News.

Explosive Growth of Unemployment 2007 to 2009

I suppose I keep posting these facts and figures on poverty, unemployment, hunger etc. because I am astounded by  the general inability to do anything about it.  There is some attention focused on poverty now that times are bad, but when times were ostensibly good, they weren’t that great for very many people.  Counties in South Carolina have experienced continuous levels of unemployment as high as the current national average for decades.  Naturally, these places are worse off in the current economy.   You never heard much about Allendale or Union county three years ago from Jim Demint, for example, and you sure don’t hear much about them now.

Incidentally, Detroit is one place they aren’t afraid to discuss the “underemployment rate”, which is approaching 50%.

I found the reference to this ‘progress of unemployment’ graphic via Gawker of all places.

"According to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 31 million people currently unemployed -- that's including those involuntarily working part time and those who want a job, but have given up trying to find one. "

To see this chart as an animated graphic through October 2009, please see here: http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html.

Ms Egwueke’s graphic is apparently based on the official unemployment rate, which as most people know is skewed to emphasize short term shifts in the rate of job losses, not in long term unemployment trends.

As I discussed in a previous post (the most popular on this site by far), the Bureau for Labor Statistics also collects data on persons in long term unemployment or involuntarily working part time.  No unemployment statistic counts persons who have not held a job in a year and are not looking for work.  There were 828,66o such persons in November 2009, according to a BLS database search of seasonally adjusted figures.  These people are simply not in the labor force for a variety of reasons.  According to data from an October 2009 BLS  survey, the most common reason is  a lack of work.

The Department of Labor tracks unemployment through separate survey and analysis of households and businesses.

Current Population Survey: http://www.census.gov/cps/ (the household survey)

The CPS is the primary source of information on the labor force characteristics of the U.S. population. The sample is scientifically selected to represent the civilian noninstitutional population. Respondents are interviewed to obtain information about the employment status of each member of the household 15 years of age and older. However, published data focus on those ages 16 and over. The sample provides estimates for the nation as a whole and serves as part of model-based estimates for individual states and other geographic areas.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Population_Survey

Current Employment Statistics: http://www.bls.gov/ces/

Each month the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program surveys about 150,000 businesses and government agencies, representing approximately 390,000 individual worksites, in order to provide detailed industry data on employment, hours, and earnings of workers on nonfarm payrolls.

The Wikipedia article on unemployment has a very interesting introduction to the problems of calculating unemployment rates, particularly the tendency in U. S. calculations to minimize the rate. This habit produces situations where a 2004 comparitive analysis of the US and France in which the U.S. comes out with an unemployment rate of 4.7% while the French rate is approximately 8% when the available pool of workers in both countries is about 84%.   In other words, it contributes to a possibly erroneous perception that the U.S. outperforms Europe.   Some explanation is in order.

For a discussion on the problems of calculating unemployment please see this comment and conversation with economist Dean Baker here: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=01&year=2007&base_name=wall_street_journal_gets_germa&162#comment-1679545

That said, the official unemployment rate are still pretty startling for South Carolina. Here is a seasonally unadjusted comparison of the official unemployment rate by South Carolina county from February 2007 through October 2009 with changes, all increases. Some as much as 10%.

South Carolina	February			October			32 Month
County	2007			2009			Change
Abbeville County	9.3	%		15.2	%		+	5.90	%
Aiken County	5.9	%		10	%		+	4.1
Allendale County	11.4	%		22.2	%		+	11	%
Anderson County	6.3	%		12.9	%		+	6.6	%
Bamberg County	9.3	%		17.8	%		+	8.5	%
Barnwell County	9.9	%		19.4	%		+	9.5	%
Beaufort County	4.7	%		9	%		+	4.3	%
Berkeley County	5.2	%		10.9	%		+	5.7	%
Calhoun County	6.5	%		13.1	%		+	6.6	%
Charleston County	4.6	%		9.4	%		+	4.8	%
Cherokee County	7.3	%		16.8	%		+	9.5	%
Chester County	11.1	%		21.6	%		+	11	%
Chesterfield County	8.9	%		17.4	%		+	8.5	%
Clarendon County	8.9	%		16.2	%		+	7.3	%
Colleton County	6.1	%		14.3	%		+	8.2	%
Darlington County	7.1	%		13	%		+	5.9	%
Dillon County	9.2	%		17.7	%		+	8.5	%
Dorchester County	4.7	%		10.3	%		+	5.6	%
Edgefield County	6.8	%		11.2	%		+	4.4	%
Fairfield County	8.9	%		12.1	%		+	3.2	%
Florence County	6.8	%		12.1	%		+	5.3	%
Georgetown County	7.3	%		13	%		+	5.7	%
Greenville County	5.1	%		10.6	%		+	5.5	%
Greenwood County	7.6	%		14.2	%		+	6.6	%
Hampton County	7.2	%		16.3	%		+	9.1	%
Horry County	6.1	%		12.2	%		+	6.1	%
Jasper County	5.2	%		11.4	%		+	6.2	%
Kershaw County	5.6	%		10.5	%		+	4.9	%
Lancaster County	9.7	%		19.2	%		+	9.5	%
Laurens County	7.7	%		11.8	%		+	4.1	%
Lee County	9.2	%		15.8	%		+	6.6	%
Lexington County	4.3	%		8.6	%		+	4.3	%
Marion County	12.9	%		20.7	%		+	7.8	%
Marlboro County	13.5	%		21	%		+	7.5	%
McCormick County	11.4	%		16.7	%		+	5.3	%
Newberry County	6.1	%		11.9	%		+	5.8	%
Oconee County	8	%		14.3	%		+	6.3	%
Orangeburg County	8.3	%		17.8	%		+	9.5	%
Pickens County	5.4	%		11	%		+	5.6	%
Richland County	5.5	%		9.8	%		+	4.3	%
Saluda County	6.3	%		9.8	%		+	3.5	%
Spartanburg County	6.2	%		12.5	%		+	6.3	%
Sumter County	7.4	%		13.9	%		+	6.5	%
Union County	10.4	%		20.6	%		+	10	%
Williamsburg County	9.9	%		16	%		+	6.1	%
York County	5.8	%		15.7	%		+	9.9	%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://data.bls.gov/map/servlet/map.servlet.MapToolServlet?state=45&datatype=unemployment&year=2007&period=M02&survey=la&map=county&seasonal=u

We can also see that the counties on the bottom of the pile, with the worst unemployment are pretty much the same, even after the economic downturn:

	S.C. County	February			S.C. County	October
	Worst Unemployment	2007			Worst Unemployment	2009
1	Marlboro County	13.5	%		Allendale County	22.2	%
2	Marion County	12.9	%		Chester County	21.6	%
3	Allendale County	11.4	%		Marlboro County	21	%
4	McCormick County	11.4	%		Marion County	20.7	%
5	Chester County	11.1	%		Union County	20.6	%
6	Union County	10.4	%		Barnwell County	19.4	%
7	Barnwell County	9.9	%		Lancaster County	19.2	%
8	Williamsburg County	9.9	%		Bamberg County	17.8	%
9	Lancaster County	9.7	%		Orangeburg County	17.8	%
10	Abbeville County	9.3	%		Dillon County	17.7	%

However the changes do show that certain parts of the state have been more disrupted than others.  Three of the counties which experienced the greatest percentage increase in the seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate were  York, Cherokee and Lancaster counties, all of which are in the greater Charlotte area.  Might this be some effect of layoffs in the banking industry?

Its worth noting that none of these three made it into the bottom 10 by October 2009.  There are bigger structural problems with unemployment in South Carolina’s counties than can be accounted for in the current recession.

South Carolina Co.	32 Month
	Change
Allendale County	+	11	%
Chester County	+	11	%
Union County	+	10	%
York County	+	9.9	%
Barnwell County	+	9.5	%
Cherokee County	+	9.5	%
Lancaster County	+	9.5	%
Orangeburg County	+	9.5	%
Hampton County	+	9.1	%
Bamberg County	+	8.5	%

I haven’t seen the unemployment figures for November yet, but lots of people are talking about them, including Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer.  Henwood gives the breakdown below, and reminds us that the broadest government calculation of unemployment (including unwilling part-time workers and some long-term unemployed persons) puts the national rate at 17%!:

Aside from the unemployment rate, the stats I’ve been quoting came from the monthly survey of about 300,000 employers. The survey of 60,000 households, done about the same time as the employer survey, showed mixed results. The household survey painted a mixed picture. As I said, the unemployment rate fell 0.2 point, its biggest decline in four years. At 10%, it’s still very high, and it’s quite likely it will rise again in the coming months, but this is one of the better bits of economic news we’ve gotten in a long time. The broadest measure of unemployment, the so-called U-6 rate, which adds to the official measure those who are working part time though they’d prefer full time work and those who’ve given up the job search as hopeless, fell 0.3 point. It’s still an astronomical 17.2% [note: seasonally adjusted numbers], but at least it’s heading in the right direction.

Its probably possible to get the U-6 data by county, but damned if I can find it on the BLS website. You’re welcome to try and find it yourself.  Henwood says the 17% u-6 rate is astronomical and he’s right.  The BLS doesn’t let you graph u-6 info prior to 1994.  From looking at a graph of the seasonally adjusted official rate, its easy to see that the only comparable level of unemployment over the last 39 years was in 1982.

Search of the week: yesterday someone found this site by searching “spd in the nest.”

N+1 : Obama reopens the veins of Latin America

From n+1:

Venas Abiertas

By Nikil Saval

December 2nd, 2009

If anyone was worried that the Obama administration would represent a break with the past, the President’s recent actions in Latin America should assuage any lingering concerns. As Obama was preparing to announce an escalation of American commitments in Afghanistan, he was also preparing, more quietly and furtively, to recognize Sunday’s elections in Honduras, which took place under a military coup government, as well as to expand the US military presence in Colombia to seven military bases, under the pretext of enlarging the limitless “war on drugs.” Latin America has long been the testing ground for US policies that found more forceful expression elsewhere—”empire’s workshop,” Greg Grandin has called it. From the 1901 Platt Amendment, which legitimated US indirect control over Cuba, to the proxy wars in Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the essential character of the US was seen most clearly in the countries just to the south. The events of the last few months reveal no fundamental change.

Read the rest: http://www.nplusonemag.com/venas-abiertas

Dec. 11 Vigils in support of the Copenhagen Summit @ Charlotte and Conway

December 11 is a world-wide day of action in support of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.   Local folks in Charlotte and Conway are getting globally involved by holding actions in support of rolling back climate change.

If you’re in the area, its important to meet up and demonstrate a healthy concern for the current environment and and the world we’ll leave behind.

Charlotte:

Charlotte Vigil in support of the Copenhagen Summit

Friday, December 11th at 6:00 pm

A peaceful family-friendly candlelight vigil in support of climate action by world leaders.
Let’s all get together and show our support, pictures will be taken and sent to the 350.org website for worldwide release.
Afterwards, everybody is welcome to join the Greenpeace lead activists at Fuel Pizza for a meet and greet.

For more information, please email CharlotteGreenpeace@gmail.com

link: http://www.350.org/node/13313

Sponsored by: Greenpeace in Charlotte

Conway:

Conway/Myrtle Beach Vigil in support of the Copenhagen Summit

Friday, December 11th at 6:00 pm

The Grand Strand Sustainability Network and the CCU Sustainability Initiative are organizing a candlelight vigil to be held in Spadoni Park on the CCU campus on Friday, December 11 at 7 pm. We are seeking local environmental leaders who would like to give a brief talk and plan to show a few videos created by 350.org.

links: http://www.meetup.com/GS-SustainabilityNetwork/calendar/12009533/

http://www.350.org/node/13306

Sponsored by: Grand Strand Sustainability Network

Climate researchers are nonplussed over the recent theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  Opinions are mixed [see here and here] as to how to respond to the theft, but the scientific evidence for human alteration of the environment is overwhelming.  The attack on East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit won’t sway general public opinion, or the determination of those meeting in Copenhagen, but will likely provide the climate change denial-industry with an alternate reality touchstone.  As Obama’s birth certificate is/was to the birthers, so shall these academic emails be to the anti-environment crowd.

Stop Cliffside: Protesters Chain Themselves to “Superload” Generator in Greenville

Source: Act For Climate Justice

Several dozen protesters organized by Rising Tide took part in a worldwide day of action against global warming by protesting Duke Power’s new coal-fired 1.5-million pound generator as it passed through Greenville, SC on November 30th.  Four protesters were arrested in an act of civil disobedience after chaining themselves to the stator generator.

According to AP: “The generator and trailer…[travel] at about five miles an hour – is scheduled to resume the drive at 8:00 p.m. Monday. The stator will travel along Highway 25 and portions of Mills Avenue, Marue Drive, Washington Avenue, and White Horse Road.

“Duke Energy’s plan is to travel throughout Monday evening and early Tuesday morning hours to a spot on Highway 25 just short of Highway 124.

“On December 2, the stator will begin moving along Highway 25 towards Highway 11.  Duke Energy expects to reach the Cliffside Steam Station, near Boiling Springs, NC by mid-December.”

Coal has long been regarded as one of the most polluting forms of energy production. A recent report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility reiterated: “[c]oal combustion releases mercury, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and dozens of other substances known to be hazardous to human health.” The report goes on to recommend “that emissions of CO2 be cut as deeply and as swiftly as possible, with the objective of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million…[and secondly] that there be no new construction of coal-fired power plants, so as to avoid increasing health-endangering emissions of CO2 as well as criteria pollutants and hazardous air pollutants. CO2 emissions from coal could increase 60% by 2030 if current plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new and old coal-fired power plants are realized.”

Duke’s new coal plant has been the focus of protests since at least April of this year. Back then, Stop Cliffside organized a rally in front of Duke HQ in Charlotte to protest the announced plans to expand coal usage at the Cliffside facility, which is 50 miles from the city. Charlotte attorney Ken Davies was arrested in for trespassing in another civil disobedience arrest. Charges against Davies were dropped on November 16th.

Also on, November 16, protesters objected to two awards given to Duke CEO Jim Rodgers by the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. Protesters offered their own awards to Rodgers in a mock ceremony.

The South Carolina Green Party is currently fighting the Duke rate hike, which is partly intended to finance the new coal plant expansion. After other parties reach agreement on local issues with Duke Power, the SC Green Party remains the only objector to the rate increase. A hearing was held in Columbia on November 30 before the South Carolina Public Service Commission. An attorney representing the party contested the need for the rate hike. Representatives from Duke not only defended the proposed hike, but reportedly stated they would request another hike in 18 months.

Location of the Duke Cliffside Steam Station. 55 miles from Charlotte, just north of Chesnee, SC. 573 Duke Power Rd, Mooresboro, NC‎ - (828) 657-6314‎.

Links:

Call to action for November 30th protest: http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/2009/11/u-s-concerned-citizens-block-shipment-of-generator-to-cliffside-coal-plant/

Stop Cliffside: http://www.stopcliffside.org

Rising Tide, North America: http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org

Asheville Citizen Times article “Asheville-based protesters lock themselves to generator near Greenville, SC”

WSPA article with video, including interview with protest participants: Protesters Chain Themselves to “Superload”  Generator in Greenville

Search of the week:4 people found this entry yesterday by searching “is big generator going through chesnee“. The answer to that question, if you look at the map and consider that the route is up Hwy 11, is yes.

DN: As UC Berkeley Investigates Police Brutality Against Students Protesting Fee Hikes, a Report From Inside the Takeover of Wheeler Hall

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.democracynow.org/embed_show_v1/300/2009/11/24/segment/2″></script>

Source: LA Times

The University of California, Berkeley is investigating allegations of police brutality against students and workers protesting fee hikes and budget cuts last week. 40 students were arrested Friday night after campus police entered Wheeler Hall, which the students had taken over earlier in the day. The students were part of a statewide movement protesting the UC Board of Regents decision to raise tuition by 32 percent. Independent journalist Brandon Jourdan, who was embedded with the students inside the occupied building on Friday, files a report for Democracy Now!

Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/24/as_uc_berkeley_investigates_police_brutality

Students responded to the hikes by organizing demonstrations around the state, including UCLA and UC Santa Cruz.

U.S. can but won’t ensure housing in foreclosure crisis

As the richest nation on the face of the earth, the United States could do something to help its homeless population.  How can it , when the government will not work to keep solvent families from ruinous foreclosure?

The U.N. has a special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing. Her name is Raquel Rolnik and she has found, based on the guidelines for adequate and appropriate housing laid out in a February 2009 U.N. report, that the U.S. governments’ treatment of the homeless is “shameful”.

She’s undoubtedly correct. Its unsurprising that she was discouraged from completing her report years ago, by Bush Administration opposition. Now that the Obama Administration has removed objections to the report, they may still be surprised to learn that Rolnik is is critical of the Obama’s administration’s handling of the current Mortgage crisis.

No one should be surprised that Obama administration has done so little to protect people from homelessness, given what they’ve done to help people retain their homes via mortgage relief.

As the graphic below shows, the end of the second quarter of 2008 showed a marked increase in foreclosures over the same period in 2007. Thus at the beginning of the housing crisis, we were looking at an alarming increase in vacant homes being dumped onto an already overbuilt market.

America foreclosed and how it got worse: 2008 Homes in foreclosure with sub-prime mortgages, end of second quarter 2008, % increase on previous year.

Source: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/11/12/US_mortgages_260908.pdf

The Bush administration responded in September 2008 with a direct stimulus payment to large banks, intended to shore up their bottom lines and enable them to extend credit to mortgage holders.

At the time, Democrats were critical of the plan as implemented, correctly noting that it did not protect individual homeowners from foreclosure.. Speaking shortly after the election to emboldened Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, outgoing Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson said, “The primary purpose of the bill was to protect our financial system from collapse,” Mr. Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee. “The rescue package was not intended to be an economic stimulus or an economic recovery package.”

Democrats on the committee, were openly hostile. Then (and current) FDIC Chair Sheila Blair, speaking in front of the same committee recommended, according the the NYTimes:

Under her plan, the Treasury would refinance mortgages for people if it is possible to reduce their monthly payments to about 32 percent of their monthly income. To encourage existing mortgage lenders to settle for lower payments, the government would accept responsibility for half of the losses if the homeowner defaults a second time.

And in the same article this plan was endorsed by Nancy Pelosi. 32% of your income is a bit steep, but it is better than foreclosure in most cases. However, no mortgage relief program was included in the January 2009 stimulus package.

It wasn’t until March 2009 that a mortgage relief program was announced, one that fell far short of even Bair’s November 2008 proposal. According to a CBS News report, the plan consisted of “detailed guidelines designed to let the lending industry know how to enroll borrowers in the program” and a website www.FinancialStability.gov. containing “answers to common questions and assessment tools..to help borrowers determine if they are eligible.”

As would subsequently be shown in practice, there were no inducements in the bill for mortgage holders to negotiate with homeowners. What the bill did do, was make it theoretically possible for homeowners to obtain a judicial mortgage adjustment in bankruptcy court.

Borrowers also would have a responsibility to prove that they tried to modify their mortgages with their lenders before seeking help in bankruptcy court.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., one of the centrist negotiators on the bill, said homeowners in fear of losing their homes would have to show that they provided their financial documents to their lenders, “not just a phone call to an answering machine.”

The deal would require judges to consider whether homeowners were offered a “qualified” loan workout – defined as one that would set monthly payments equal to about one-third of a homeowner’s income.

Bankruptcy judges would have to deny a judicial mortgage adjustment in cases where the homeowner is deemed able to afford the loan.

From the point of view of the industry, the legislation actually inhibited judicial mortgage reviews, by requiring the homeowners documentation. The burden of responding to any offer, no matter how unreasonable, or a complete lack of response from the bank lies on the home owner.

Their opposition helped derail the bill last week, even after leading Democrats agreed to restrict it to people who had tried other means of reworking their mortgages and those who couldn’t afford their home loans.

The industry has “been giving it everything they’ve got,” said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., an architect of the legislation. “They still have remarkable influence.”

Eight months later, the initial result of this plan is known and the results aren’t encouraging. According to a November 10 Wall Street Journal report, only about 1 in 5 eligible homeowners have successfully enrolled in the plan. Another way of looking at that is 4 our of 5 people who could pay an adjusted mortgage are receiving no help and stand to loose their homes.

The Wall Street Journal looks at this optimistically – that the program is picking up speed. but if only 4 our of 5 are being helped, then the program is a failure. Any potential help may come too late.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said last week that more than 92,000 of its customers have made at least three trial payments under the program, but just 26% of them had submitted all the required documents for a permanent fix. Many other borrowers are still in the early stages of the program.

…

At Morgan Stanley’s Saxon Mortgage Services, about 26,000 of the 39,000 borrowers in the program have made more than three trial payments. Roughly 500 have received completed modifications.

“It’s hard to get the documents in,” said Saxon Chief Executive Anthony Meola, adding that 82% of borrowers are current on their trial payments. Mortgage servicers collect loan payments and work with troubled borrowers.

…

“It’s a fiasco in the making,” said Alan White, an assistant professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana, citing preliminary information about low numbers of permanent modifications and complaints from attorneys and housing counselors.

“The good news is you’ve gotten all these homeowners in from the cold and on these temporary modifications,” Mr. White said. “The bad news is we are stumbling in getting all these people…all the way” to keeping their homes.

While this plan has helped 20% of those considered eligible so far, ti must arrive too late for the millions that

In bailing out the banks, the Bush and Obama administrations let the banks go on autopilot – which means foreclosures without negotiation. Neither administration placed controls or restrictions on how the banks sorted out the good properties from the toxic assets. This allowed them to proceed pretty much as the market has always worked.: foreclosing looks good on the books.  Writing off any portion of the principle does not.  NPR call-in shows on the housing crisis are overrun with people still working and able to pay something facing foreclosure from a bailed-out bank.

In the last week, the Obama administration announced that they would put rules in place that would enable one-time owners to rent out foreclosed properties. This may encourage banks to become landlords, but won’t help single family home owners in foreclosure. Its doubtful how much this will help in the long term, but it does preserve the free-market credentials of the current administration.

Given that the current administration is no better than the last in protecting homeowners from an uncontrolled wave of foreclosures, it is unsurprising that homelessness and hunger are on the rise. If the U.S. can’t create a social safety net to protect its middle class property owners, it has never considered feeding and housing the homeless.

There are other alternatives, notably those proposed by Bair and Paul Krugman, that while remaining true to market control, still would have protected homeowners first. There are other less-market based solutions, but these can’t be implemented, though they are kinder to the population, because they’ve never been considered.

One alternative would be the so-called Swedish Solution: nationalizing the banks, separating the truly-toxic from the negotiable-to-good assets, the bad assets are concentrated in a “bad bank” which deals with them in turn. The now solvent “good” banks are loosed yet again upon the market. This isn’t even socialism, just social democracy: protecting society at large before protecting assets.

Last year people argued that the Swedish system was many times smaller and less complicated than the U.S. banking system. This is true, but the disruption to families falling behind on their payments would have been less shattering.

One base of reference for how societies with means provide a social safety net in housing might be found in this UN report:
http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid=49a54f4a2

Here is the Guardian article on how foreclosure crisis is pushing millions into homelessness:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/12/un-investigator-us-neglect-homeless

Raquel Rolnik’s blog: [in Portuguese]
http://raquelrolnik.wordpress.com/

Also of interest: a mortgage delinquency map at Huffingtonpost:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/mortgage-deliquencies-see_n_315547.html

Also of interest: the NY Federal Reserves’ map of US credit conditions, searchable by Zip Code: http://data.newyorkfed.org/creditconditions/

Bloomberg article on cost of bank bailout: Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion . By Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry.

MrZine: The Failures of Tarp.

Hunger in South Carolina and the U.S.

On Monday, the US Department of Agriculture released a report Household Food Security in the United States, which uses polite language to describe hunger as an American condition.

According to the report, people experience food insecurity when “food intake … was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food”

Essentially, this means you are going hungry.  More people went hungry in 2008 than ten years before.  This is true nationally.   South Carolinians not only fell below the national average, they also experienced more deterioration in food security than the nation as a whole. Looking at the states on this list, its easy to see the South is overrepresented and maybe easy to understand given its history of income inequality, rural poverty, recent textile-deindustrialization and racial discrimination. In light of that, it’s surprising to see states like Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, Kansas, Arizona and Oklahoma here in the top sixteen.

We’ll have to wait for a breakdown of the hunger data county-by-county to see if the hunger is concentrated in urban or rural areas, or spread more or less evenly around the states.

State.All figures in %	Food insecurity ave 2006-08	Food insecurity ave 2003-05	Food insecurity ave 1996-98	Change 1996-98 to 2006-08	Change 2003-05 to 2006-08
Mississippi	17.4	16.5	14.6	3.2	0.9
Texas	16.3	16	15.2	0.2	0.3
Arkansas	15.9	14.7	13.7	0.8	1.2
Georgia	14.2	12.4	10.9	2	1.8
New Mexico	14.1	16.8	16.5	-0.2	-2.7
Missouri	14	11.7	10.1	2.8	2.3
Oklahoma	14	14.6	13.1	1.7	-0.6
Kansas	13.8	12.3	11.5	0.6	1.5
Maine	13.7	12.3	9.8	2.4	1.4
N Carolina	13.7	13.2	9.8	1.7	0.5
Tennessee	13.5	13	11.8	0.2	0.5
Alabama	13.3	12.3	12.5	2.1	1
Ohio	13.3	12.6	9.7	1.7	0.7
Arizona	13.2	12.2	14.6	0.6	1
S Carolina	13.1	15.5	11	1.7	-2.4

Full downloadable spreadsheet courtesy the UK Guardian.

Local SC media and government figures haven’t noticed the report yet, so far as I can tell. The State ran their wire service article, which made no specific reference to South Carolina. None of the other papers appeared to notice. When and if they do, expect them to emphasis the relative improvement between 2003-2005 and 2006-2008. Establishment South Carolina is well insulated, and so won’t be any more or less concerned than they were one or ten years ago. I would not expect any political discussion in this state on the relative worsening of hunger between 1996 and the present.

Ten years ago, 11% of  South Carolinians occasionally went hungry, according to the report.  Last year, an average of 13.1% of South Carolinians experienced food insecurity – to one degree or another – in the period of 2006 to 2008.  That is actually an improvement over 2003 to 2005, when the average was 15.5%, third worst in the nation.

Going from third worst to sixteenth in hunger just prior to a depression is better than staying at second. But hunger is closely related to poverty and are structural issues that South Carolina’s political establishment habitually ignores. State government could not be less concerned with income disparity, racial inequality and general poverty among the population.

Food insecurity was actually at its highest in 2003-2005, when government and media were completely unconcerned with structural poverty.  The relative drop in food insecurity experienced in 2006-2008 is after all still much higher than the level ten years previously.   In light of the subsequent economic meltdown, hunger must be on the rise again.

Full USDA Report: Household Food Security in the United States, 2008 (66 page PDF file)

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/nov/17/food-insecurity-us-state-data

February 2009 Food Research and Action Center flyer on South Carolina Demographics, Poverty and Food Insecurity.

Protesting and Policing

Demonstrators march during an anti-war rally in London, October 24, 2009. Thousands of people took to London

10/27/09- The media in the UK are reporting police efforts to tag and track political activists as “political extremists.” The police not only use the most aggressive techniques at political gatherings and demonstrations but compile a database of activists to facilitate targeted arrests and intimidation.

We can presume that the police are building the same databases and conducting the same kind of surveillance here. There is much less media coverage of the protests and of their politics. You’ll have to go to Democracy Now for any kind of similar coverage from a U.S. news outfit. The received wisdom of the president, the political class, and the media is that public protests do not make much of a difference, and you’d be better off, as Obama said before the G20, concentrating on local issues.

The president really insults the people who care enough to get out and protest about progressive issues here. Contrast his rejection of progressive and anti-corporate protesters at the G20 with the warm approval given the teabaggers by the GOP leadership. Despite his celebrated background as a community activist, the president is much further from the protesters on the left than the GOP is from rabble rousing anti-taxers, people who want immigrants to die in gutters outside emergency rooms.

So how is it that the politicians allow the police to tag progressive and humane anti-corporate and pro-environment protesters as dangerous extremists, while regressive anti-health care rioters are feted in the media as an aggrieved constituency with legitimate gripes?

Undoubtedly, part of the establishment’s paranoia of the progressive left comes from the fact that the left really does want to eliminate inequalities in health, welfare and condition, changes which would require social transformation. The anti-health care protesters ostensibly only want to preserve the inequalities of the present. The present situation in health care may result in tens of thousands of needless deaths every year and reduced quality of life for millions, but it is not threatening to the current politics. So protesters in favor of the status quo and socio-political inequality are permitted to bring guns to political protests, whereas anti-war protesters in New York were not permitted to mount posters on card-board tubes.

National government departments Homeland Security down to local police divisions like NYPD’s Tactical Assistance Unit, observe and track public protest. The U.S. media is not so keen on oversight of police surveillance, so its hard to know the extent of the activity. However, we can see echoes of the UK officer’s justification for the political surveillance in the FBI raids on G20 protesters in Pittsburgh last month.

In the quote below the picture, the UK police officer says that the police target only a few individuals who may turn to violence “outside the normal democratic process”. Thus, although UK protests increasingly resemble social get-togethers, the attribution of menace to the protesters by the police serves as an excuse to envelope an ever larger number of political and social-activist organizers into a police surveillance scheme. Emily Apple, who appears as “Suspect A” on one of the police spotting cards, writes on what happened when she and others began to track the activities of police surveillance crews (called forward intelligence teams or Fits) at protests:

Fit officers were taking photographs outside meetings, and then greeting me by name in crowds of thousands of people. Before long, they were at every meeting, every demonstration, calling me by name, making derogatory comments, and following me long after a protest had finished.

During 2002, they arrested me four times in three months, raided my house, seized my personal diaries and tried very hard, but unsuccessfully, to have me remanded.

Eleven of the people pictured on this card subsequently contacted the Guardian newspaper. You can read their reactions to being profiled via this page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2009/oct/27/police-spotter-cards-revealed

From the 10/25/09 UK Guardian article “How police rebranded lawful protesters as domestic extremists”:

The term “domestic extremism” is now common currency within the police. It is a phrase which shapes how forces seek to control demonstrations. It has led to the personal details and photographs of a substantial number of protesters being stored on secret police databases around the country. There is no official or legal definition of the term. Instead, the police have made a vague stab at what they think it means. Senior officers describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups “that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process.” They say they are mostly associated with single issues and suggest the majority of protesters are never considered extremists.

Police insist they are just monitoring the minority who could damage property or commit aggravated trespass, causing significant disruption to lawful businesses. Activists respond by claiming this is an excuse that gives police the licence to carry out widespread surveillance of whole organisations that are a legitimate part of the democratic process.

They also warn that the categorisation carries echoes of the cold war, when the security services monitored constitutional campaigns such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Anti-Apartheid Movement because alleged subversives or communists were said to be active within them, although they said the organisations themselves were not subversive.

Spotter cards: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/spotter-cards

BBC: Proposed Carbon Targets Above Historical Safety Levels

A new historical record of carbon dioxide levels suggests current political targets on climate may be “playing with fire”, scientists say.

Researchers used ocean sediments to plot CO2 levels back 20 million years.

Levels similar to those now commonly regarded as adequate to tackle climate change were associated with sea levels 25-40m (80-130 ft) higher than today.

…
What that level is has been the subject of intense debate down the years; but one figure currently receiving a lot of support is 450ppm.

On Tuesday, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its prescription for tackling climate change, which sees concentrations of greenhouse gases peaking at the equivalent of 510ppm of CO2 before stabilising at 450ppm.

The Boxer-Kerry Bill, which has just entered the US Senate, also cites the 450 figure.

“Trouble is, we don’t know where the critical CO2 or temperature threshold is beyond which ice sheet collapse is inevitable,” said Dr Overpeck.

“It could be below 450ppm, but it is more likely higher – not necessarily a lot higher – than 450ppm.

“But what this new work suggests is that… efforts to stabilise at 450ppm should avoid going up above that level prior to stabilisation – that is, some sort of ‘overshoot’ above 450ppm on the way to stabilisation could be playing with fire.”

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299426.stm

Oxfam: Rural Poor In Nepal Face Hunger From Climate Change

Among recent changes in weather patterns in Nepal are an increase in temperature extremes, more intense rainfall and increased unpredictability in weather patterns, including drier winters and delays in the summer monsoons. The melting of the Himalayan glaciers will also be felt well beyond Nepal’s borders. Scientists warn that if the Himalayan glaciers disappear – with some predicting this could happen within 30 years – the impact would be felt by more than one billion people across Asia.

Read the full report here: http://www.oxfam.org.nz/resources/onlinereports/nepal%20climate%20change_full%20report%20final.pdf

Israeli Jew Elected to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council

What does he hope to achieve as a Palestinian Hebrew who is a full member of the Revolutionary Council? His core message, he explains, is "to suggest" to his new colleagues that there is nothing to fear in recognising the notion of a Jewish state. "The correct response is that we will not recognise an Israel defined by political Zionism." And perhaps just as importantly, Davis believes that Fatah can expand its role from representing only Palestinian Arabs to representing all of those who oppose "settler-colonialism". "It cannot win the struggle for equality that it has waged for so long as long as it remains only representative of Palestinians. To win the moral (high ground) it has to project itself as a democratic alternative for all. That is the message I first delivered and that I have persevered with and has led to my election to the Revolutionary Council after 25 years.