Later On

Julia Whitty reports in Mother Jones:

Read also: The rest of this special report and MoJo‘s complete BP coverage.

WE’RE SWINGING ON ANCHOR this afternoon as powerful bursts of wind blow down through the Makua Valley and out to sea. The gales stop and start every 15 minutes, as abruptly as if a giant on the far side of the Hawaiian island of Oahu were switching a fan on and off. We sail at the gusts’ mercy, listing hard to starboard, then snapping hard against the anchor chain before recoiling to port. The intermittent tempests make our work harder and colder. We shiver during the microbursts, sweat during the interludes, then shiver again from our own sweat.

I’m accompanying marine ecologist Kelly Benoit-Bird of Oregon State University, physical oceanographer Margaret McManus of the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and two research assistants aboard a 32-foot former sportfishing boat named Alyce C. On the tiny aft deck, where a marlin fisher might ordinarily strap into a fighting chair, Benoit-Bird and McManus are launching packages of instruments: echo sounders tuned to five frequencies; cameras; and a host of tools designed to measure temperature, salinity, current velocity, chlorophyll fluorescence, and zooplankton abundance, all feeding into computers lashed into the tiny forward cabin.

Despite the impressive technology crammed aboard the boat, its deployment is pure 19th century. At any given time, two of us man the aft winch, launching the equipment overboard by hand, feeding out dual lines of nylon and coaxial cable, slowly wearing calluses into our gloves as we ease the instruments through the water column at roughly 33 feet per minute. Six feet shy of the bottom, 74 feet down, the rig is hauled back up, collecting data the whole way. The process is repeated around the clock for the next 24 hours, a procedure either monotonous or meditative, depending on your frame of mind. Near the bottom, McManus calls, "Making a mark." She might as well be calling "mark twain."

But whereas old-time riverboat captains sounding with lead-weighted ropes were gleaning information about safe shipping channels and shifting sandbars, we’re sounding for signs of life. To the untrained eye, the incoming echo soundings appear as waves of blue, green, and yellow scrolling horizontally across our computer monitors. To the trained eye, they appear as layers of life flooding in on darkness. Benoit-Bird points toward the screens, each one tuned to read the sonar signature of a different-size life form. "That layer is zooplankton," she says. "And that layer is fish." Suddenly, I can see a crude facsimile of the migrations of the nighttime sea…

Continue reading.

Linda Hooper-Bui writes in The Scientist:

Functioning as an independent researcher in and around the Gulf of Mexico these days is no simple task. I study insect and plant communities in near-shore habitats fringing the Gulf, and my work has gotten measurably harder in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It’s not hazardous conditions associated with oil and dispersants that are hampering our scientific efforts. Rather, it’s the confidentiality agreements that come with signing up to work on large research projects shepherded by government entities and BP and the limited access to coastal areas if you’re not part of those projects that are stifling the public dissemination of data detailing the environmental impact of the catastrophe.

Some Gulf scientists have already been snatched up by corporate consulting companies with offers of $250/hour. Others are badgered for their data by governmental agencies. Some of us desire to conduct our work without lawyers, government officials, or corporate officers peering over our shoulders. In the end, it may be the independent, non-biased researchers who can deliver credible scientific results that perform the crucial function of assessing the damage wrought by this disaster…if we survive professionally.

Thanks to the National Science Foundation (NSF), some of us might. We don’t work for BP or the government’s National Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA)process, which is overseen by state, tribal and federal science agencies and is partially funded by BP. We are independent scientists who want to honestly and independently examine the effects of the oil spill.

The ants, crickets, flies, bees, dragon flies, and spiders I study are important components of the coastal food web. They function as soil aerators, seed dispersers, pollinators, and food sources in complex ecosystems of the Gulf.

Insects were not a primary concern when oil was gushing into the Gulf, but now they may be the best indicator of stressor effects on the coastal northern Gulf of Mexico. Those stressors include oil, dispersants, and cleanup activities. If insect populations survive, then frogs, fish, and birds will survive. If frogs, fish, and birds are there, the fishermen and the birdwatchers will be there. The Gulf’s coastal communities will survive. But if the bugs suffer, so too will the people of the Gulf Coast.

This is why my continued research is important: to give us an idea of just how badly the health of the Gulf Coast ecosystems has been damaged and what, if anything, we can do to stave off a full-blown ecological collapse. But I am having trouble conducting my research without signing confidentiality agreements or agreeing to other conditions that restrict my ability to tell a robust and truthful scientific story.

I want to collect data to answer scientific questions absent a corporate or governmental agenda. I won’t collect data specifically to support the government’s lawsuit against BP nor will I collect data only to be used in BP’s defense. Whereas I think damage assessment is important, it’s my job to be independent — to tell an accurate, unbiased story. But because I choose not to work for BP’s consultants or NRDA, my job is difficult and access to study sites is limited.

In southern Alabama back in late May, my PhD student’s ant samples were taken away by a US Fish and Wildlife officer at a publicly accessible state Wildlife Management Area because our project hadn’t been approved by Incident Command (also called the Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command– which is a joint program of BP and federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, assembled to respond to problems related to the April 20 blowout).

We’ve had similar experiences in south Louisiana, . . .

Continue reading.

For you iPhone fans.

This is sort of neat

Mark Kleiman has long studied drug policy. Here’s his current prescription in a nutshell:

Seven years ago, another blogger asked me for a post-length summary of my practical views about drug policy. What’s scary is how little has changed in the meantime. I’ve reposted that note below verbatim, with a couple of parenthetical updates.

The original note deliberately omitted the question of the hallucinogens and MDMA, which pose a different set of challenges from the drugs that cause most of our actual problems. The issue of religious/spiritual use gets especially tricky. There’s also no discussion of the medical uses of currently banned drugs. That can and should be handled through the FDA approval process; in the case of cannabis, that would require that the federal government stop obstructing medical research

Warning: Believing all of the stuff below will make people on both sides of the drug-war debate look at you funny.

1. Leave heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine illegal for non-medical use.

2. Allow use of cannabis, and growing for personal use or gratis distribution. Forbid commercial activity.

3. Shift drug law enforcement and sentencing to focus on reducing the side-effects of dealing: violence, neighborhood disruption, and the recruitment of juveniles. (Update: The High Point strategy shows how this can work.) Cut back on base sentences for drug-selling. Target a reduction in total drug-related imprisonment from 400,000 to 200,000. (Update: The current number is probably north of 500,000.)

4. Require users of expensive illicit drugs who are also criminally active to abstain from drug use as a condition of bail, probation, parole, or other supervised release. Enforce that requirement with frequent drug tests and predictable, immediate, and mild punishments for each violation. (Update: We now have a decisive proof-of-concept on this, in the form of the HOPE program.)

5. Integrate school-based and mass-media drug prevention efforts into broader efforts aimed at health risk management and self-command. Stop running drug-war propaganda as "drug abuse prevention." (Update: "Resilience" is a theme of the new national drug strategy, and some actual progress is being made.)

6. Tell the National Institute on Drug Abuse that its job is science, not providing support for drug prevention efforts or the latest proposal to stiffen drug sentences on the one hand or the drug treatment lobby on the other.

7. Expand drug treatment by convincing medical providers and their financing machinery that diagnosis of and intervention in substance abuse is an essential part of routine and acute medical care. (Update: The Affordable Care Act and laws requiring parity for drug treatment in health insurance represent movement in this direction; medical education and the actual management of health-care organizations have yet to catch up.)

8. Reduce regulatory burdens on opiate maintenance therapies: methadone, LAAM, and buprenorphine.

9. Continue to raise cigarette taxes. Identify currently addicted smokers and either give them coupons good for exemption from the taxes or just give them lump sums in cash. The point of the policy is to reduce the number of new users to somewhere near zero without impoverishing existing users, not to generate windfalls for the states. Dealing with the resulting smuggling and black-marketing should be considered drug law enforcement.

10. Raise taxes on alcohol from the current average of a dime per drink to something closer to a dollar.

11. Make getting drunk (as opposed to drinking) the object of a big negative-advertising campaign. Goal: make being drunk, or having been drunk, something people—especially young people—try to hide, rather than something they brag about.

12. Abolish the age restriction on alcohol.

Here’s a somewhat longer and more recent statement.

Wade, a regular reader, wrote to point out this recipe by Tiffany Harkleroad, which reminded me of this approach by Trent Hamm. What we need now is dueling loads of laundry, a detergent shoot-out.

I know I was going to use the prototype travel brush today, but I became curious about how the Mühle would work with a shaving cream, so I tried it today with Coates. No problem at all in getting three good passes of lather from the brush—and I assume that as I use and learn it, and it breaks in, I’ll also be getting good lather from soaps.

The Pils with its Swedish Gillette blade did a very nice three-pass shave, and a splash of Geo. F. Trumper West Indian Extract of Limes aftershave was a good finish.

Colorado Senate Primary Could Shape The Face of Senate Rules Reform

Short-term gain, long-term sacrifice (the seemingly suicidal stupidity of the GOP attitude toward immigrants)

Why Ross Douthat got it wrong re: marriage (excellent comment from reader)

The strange affair of Gibbs and his complaints (includes some clips from articles you may want to read entirely)

Steve Benen:

New York imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, best known as the man who hopes to build the Cordoba House in lower Manhattan, has been asked by the State Department to travel to the Middle East to assist with the government’s diplomatic agenda in the region. Specifically, Rauf would talk about the ways in which Muslim Americans enjoy the same rights and respect that other Americans enjoy.

Congressional Republicans seem to be going out of their way to prove a point about undermining these American ideals.

"It is unacceptable that US taxpayers are being forced to fund Feisal Abdul Rauf’s trip to the Middle East," say Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) of Florida and Peter King (R) of New York in a statement issued Tuesday. "This radical is a terrible choice to be one of the faces or our country overseas. The USA should be using public diplomacy programs to combat extremism," they add, "not to endorse it."

"This radical"? Adam Serwer notes the key detail here: the State Department has "a long-term relationship" with Rauf — which included the Bush administration sending him on a similar tour.

Oddly, Republicans didn’t complain when the Bush/Cheney State Department partnered with "this radical" to help with our diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. This isn’t complicated — if Bush considered Feisal Abdul Rauf a valuable American voice and representative, there’s no reason for the GOP to freak out now.

I’m reminded again of Jeffrey Goldberg’s item from last week: "I know Feisal Abdul Rauf; I’ve spoken with him at a public discussion at the 96th street mosque in New York about interfaith cooperation. He represents what Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country."

The sooner Republicans stop looking at a moderate imam, committed to fighting radicalism, as an enemy, the sooner they’ll stop inadvertently helping the goals of terrorists.

It’d be awfully nice if mainstream American imams could go to the Middle East with a positive message about freedom and respect in the U.S., and not have to struggle to make excuses for the right.

Via Sullivan:

Glenn Greenwald asks this question at the end of this column:

And then there is the issue of the restrictions imposed on reporters covering these travesties.  The Miami Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg — probably the single most knowledgeable and relentless journalist covering Guantanamo — was banned in May, along with three Canadian journalists, from attending any further proceedings, a ban that was then reversed as arbitrarily as it was imposed.  Last month, she gave a speech to the National Press Club about how arbitrary and oppressive these restrictions are, and adapted that speech into this superb article published by McClatchy.  Last night, Rachel Maddow discussed those press restrictions with Newsweek‘s Mike Isikoff, who is covering the Khadr trial from Guantanamo; it’s worth watching this 5-minute segment [this link takes you back to the column: I cannot embed the video. But the video is definitely worth watching: very reminiscent of the Soviet trials. The US is quickly moving toward a more and more authoritarian government. – LG].

As I’ve written before about the Khadr case (as well as the very similar case of child soldier Mohamed Jawad), what is most striking to me about this case is this:  how can it possibly be that the U.S. invades a foreign country, and then when people in that country — such as Khadr — fight back against the invading army, by attacking purely military targets via a purely military act (throwing a grenade at a solider, who was part of a unit ironically using an abandoned Soviet runway as its outpost), they become “war criminals,” or even Terrorists, who must be shipped halfway around the world, systematically abused, repeatedly declared to be one of “the worst of the worst,” and then held in a cage for almost a full decade (one third of his life and counting)?  It’s hard to imagine anything which more compellingly underscores the completely elastic and manipulated “meaning” of “Terrorist” than this case:  in essence, the U.S. is free to do whatever it wants, and anyone who fights back, even against our invading armies and soldiers (rather than civilians), is a war criminal and a Terrorist.

* * * * *

Regarding the Obama administration’s efforts to have the scope of National Security Letters expanded to include your email and Internet “transactional” records, Harper‘s Scott Horton examines how abusive a power that is by looking at one case that recently became public (see an excellent Democracy Now interview from this morning with the true hero of that story, Nick Merrill).  Relatedly, I have an essay in Cato Unbound on the ongoing explosion of the unaccountable Surveillance State.  Really, though, it’d be best if you look over there at John Boehner, become sufficiently scared, express gratitude that Obama isn’t Sarah Palin, and then keep your mouth shut about all of these matters and just dutifully get to work to elect Democrats.   That’s what any good citizen would do.

I didn’t even know about this app, but it’s now in version 7.1. I don’t get out much. Take a look, it’s quite cool.

Jennifer Turner at the ACLU:

Yesterday was a stark reminder that instead of closing the book on the Bush-era military commissions, President Obama is adding another sad chapter to that history. Although President Obama promised transparency and sharp limits on the use of tortured and coerced statements against the accused, at Guantánamo today one military judge ordered that a sentence be kept secret from the public and another military judge allowed statements obtained by abuse and coercion of a 15-year-old to be used at trial.

Monday was Day One of the sentencing hearing in the case of Sudanese detainee Ibrahim al-Qosi. Al-Qosi was the first detainee to be convicted under President Obama, in a plea deal entered this June in which he admitted to being an al Qaeda cook and occasional driver. Yesterday saw jury selection of senior military officers, who would deliver a formal sentence in al-Qosi’s case. If the jury delivers a sentence longer than what was agreed to in the plea bargain, it will be moot. Unless the jury delivers a shorter sentence, al-Qosi’s true sentence will be what was hammered out in the plea agreement.

But in an unprecedented move, military judge Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul ordered today that al-Qosi’s true sentence will be kept secret until he’s released. The judge said the government requested that the sentence be kept secret.

A fellow observer of the military commissions here, former Marine judge and law of war expert Gary Solis, here to monitor the commissions for the National Institute for Military Justice, says he has presided over 700 courts-martial and has never heard of a secret sentence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another sign of the decline of the US as it embraces power above all. Ian Millhiser writes at ThinkProgress:

In the first full war crimes tribunal of the Obama administration, a military judge held that a detainee who confessed to killing an American solider after he was threatened with being gang-raped to death if he did not cooperate may nonetheless have that confession used against him at trial:

In May hearings, a man identified as Interrogator 1 said in testimony that he threatened Mr. Khadr with being gang-raped to death if he did not co-operate. That interrogator was later identified as former U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Claus. He has also been convicted of abusing a different detainee and has left the military.

Mr. Khadr’s military-appointed lawyer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Jackson, argued this instance, as well as other alleged instances of torture and coercion, are enough to render any future confessions – even those in so-called “clean” interrogations – inadmissible in court.

“The well was poisoned: The government can’t cleanse the well by saying, ‘Well, someone else came in and was nice to him,’ ” Col. Jackson said.

Not so, the prosecution countered: All the confessions and testimony it plans to bring forward were freely offered by Mr. Khadr to people who treated him well. [...]

Military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish sided with the prosecution

Khadr was only 15 years old at the time of his capture and confession, earning his tribunal a strong condemnation from the United Nations.  In the words of the UN, “Juvenile justice standards are clear. Children should not be tried before military tribunals.”

The military judge’s decision to admit a coerced confession raises even more troubling questions about whether this particular tribunal will reach accurate results.  As the Supreme Court recognized almost 75 years ago, confessions extracted by “brutality and violence” are akin to “deliberate deception” of the court because they reveal little about a suspect’s guilt or innocence and everything about their very human desire to avoid or end torture. This principle obviously applies to Khadr.  A prisoner who is convinced that they will be raped and murdered if they do not confess has nothing to lose — and what remains of their personal dignity to gain — by doing so.

A member of Khadr’s legal team called the judge’s decision a “disgrace,” and that lawyer is right.  Coerced confessions are not simply inhumane — and not simply un-American — they produce wholly unreliable evidence.  Mr. Khadr may actually be guilty, but a confession extracted by a rape threat does nothing to prove this point.

I do see a war crime here, but it was not the detainee who was guilty.

This photo is via Pharyngula:

You can read more about this plant here in Wikipedia.

Some Catholics—Andrew Sullivan, for example—strongly support gay marriage, others are more ambivalent. PZ Myers writes:

Some Catholic site is giving advice on how to field questions from Leftists about homosexuality. After all, those danged lefties keep bringing up issues of equality and civil rights when gay marriage comes up, and it’s awfully hard to talk about restricting gay rights without sounding like a bigot or homophobe, so you’ve got to have a different set of talking points you can switch to whenever talk about equality and fairness and those other non-Catholic doctrines are brought up. So they’ve come up with five different tactics Catholic bigots can use to divert attention from their bigotry. They hope. Mainly, though, it diverts attention to the fact that they use really, really bad arguments. Here are the five, reworded from their misleading rhetoric to a blunter description of what they propose.

1. Obfuscate about rights. Redefine rights any old way you want to, endorse equal rights for everyone, but then claim marriage isn’t a right because there are restrictions (can’t marry your sister, there’s an age of consent, you have to pay a fee to get a marriage license), so it’s OK to add one more restriction. Never mind that by this reasoning the old miscegenation laws are perfectly valid and don’t really deny anyone a right.
2. Point out that heterosexuals have damaged marriage. How this helps the Catholic case against gay marriage is a mystery, but they’re welcome to make the argument — they’re saying that contraception and divorce and artificial fertilization are all also crimes against nature. What a winning strategy!
3. Lie about how awful homosexual parents are. Kids need both a mother and father, because mothers are nurturing and fathers are brave and disciplined. Yes, right, arguing from sexual stereotypes is OK if you’re Catholic, and it also means you get to ignore the fact that a third of all households are headed by single mothers.
4. Slippery slope! Some guy wanted to marry his horse, there are horrible awful polyamorous relationships, and even if you allow gays to marry, they don’t all rush to the altar. This is a pointless argument: it’s basically saying that we should only permit traditional 1 man:1 woman marriages because if we allow other possibilities, not all marriages will be between 1 man:1 woman. We also allow marriage between couples of different races, and a Catholic can even marry a Protestant — this has not led to a massive rush to marriages between a man, an oyster, a pelican, and a watermelon.
5. Lie with statistics. This one is my favorite argument here. Gay marriage will hurt people! Did you know that 31% of lesbian report physical violence with their partner in the last year? (Don’t mention the fact that 39% of women in a heterosexual relationship report domestic violence.) Gay men are more likely to be killed by a partner than a stranger! (Don’t mention that heterosexual women are five times more likely to be killed by their partner than a stranger.)

Oh, and they do cite sources: most of them seem to be something called the Witherspoon Institute, which made a report…funded by the Templeton Foundation. Don’t be surprised. Those rich jerks are pouring money into all kinds of dubious, religiously-motivated projects.

I’m beginning to wonder if Catholicism damages the brain: Ross Douthat also has a column on why gay marriage is wrong. It’s not because gays are bad or unnatural, oh no — we must get away from the ghastly bigoted language and promote bigoted ideals more ambiguously. It’s because relationships between men and women are specialer than those between men and men or women and women: …

Continue reading.

Keith Humphreys writes at The Reality-Based Community:

Although I have made clear my opposition to Proposition 19, I find something admirable about a different ongoing effort to change marijuana law in California. California Senate Bill 1449, introduced by Senator Mark Leno, defines possession of an ounce or less of marijuana as an “infraction” warranting a fine of up to $100 and no jail time. Technically, that’s what the punishment has been for many years, except that marijuana possession is formally defined as a misdemeanor under current law, which brings judges and courtrooms into the picture. The proposed law, which will lead marijuana possession offenses to be handled much like speeding tickets, has already cleared the Senate and is out of committee in the Assembly.

I don’t know if the end law will be a good one because the amendment process is still underway, neither do I think its effect is entirely predictable. Laws changing marijuana penalties have often had unexpected effects, depending on how law enforcement on the street respond (e.g., net widening when police see a penalty as too slight, more selective enforcement if police see a penalty as too tough). But whatever happens de jure and de facto, the process by which this legislation is being developed and deliberated deserves praise for two reasons.

First, going at least as far back as the disastrous property tax revolt initiative (Prop 13), the state legislature has repeatedly kicked political hot potatoes into the initiative process instead of having the courage to govern. This takes critical policy debates out of the deliberative process and into one where bad reasoning, volatile emotions and misunderstanding are the norm. In this case though, our elected leaders in Sacramento are acting like elected leaders and try to legislate, so good on them.

Second, the legislators are being realistic about what is and is not possible within the framework of the federal Controlled Substances Act. By endorsing legalization, Proposition 19 inherently provokes a confrontation with the federal government if it passes, a situation which I think will not end well for California (see Mark Kleiman and Eric Sterling‘s latest posts for other perspectives). What the progress of S.B. 1449 shows is that a state can change marijuana possession penalties without making a federal case out of it, so to speak.

Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post:

As Lindsey Graham and his fellow Republicans explain it, their sudden turn against conferring citizenship on anyone born in the United States was prompted by the mortal threat of "anchor babies" — the children of foreigners who scurry to the States just in time to give birth to U.S. citizens.

The Republican war on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is indeed directed at a mortal threat — but not to the American nation. It is the threat that Latino voting poses to the Republican Party.

By proposing to revoke the citizenship of the estimated 4 million U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants — and, presumably, the children’s children and so on down the line — Republicans are calling for more than the creation of a permanent noncitizen caste. They are endeavoring to solve what is probably their most crippling long-term political dilemma: the racial diversification of the electorate. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are trying to preserve their political prospects as a white folks’ party in an increasingly multicolored land.

Absent a constitutional change — to a lesser degree, even with it — those prospects look mighty bleak. The demographic base of the Republican Party, as Ruy Teixeira demonstrates in a paper released by the Center for American Progress this summer, is shrinking as a share of the nation and the electorate. As the nation grows more racially and religiously diverse, Teixeira shows, its percentage of white Christians will decline to just 35 percent of the population by 2040.

The group that’s growing fastest, of course, is Latinos. "Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today," Teixeira writes, "while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat." Moreover, Latinos increasingly trend Democratic — in a Gallup poll this year, 53 percent self-identified as Democrats; just 21 percent called themselves Republican.

To be sure, the wretched state of the economy could drive some otherwise Democratic-inclined Latino voters to the GOP this November. But Republicans are doing their damnedest to keep this from happening. Their embrace of Arizona’s Suspicious-Looking-Latinos law and their enthusiasm for stripping Latino children of their citizenship will only hasten Latinos’ flight.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

In an activist 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a decades-long ban on the use of corporate money in elections with its ruling in the Citizens United case in January, opening the floodgates to unlimited, anonymous spending on political campaigns by corporations, unions, and advocacy organizations. Reactions were swift, as many voices joined the dissenting justices in expressing concern that the ruling "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation." Lawmakers quickly set to work on a bill, unveiled in April with bipartisan support, designed to mitigate the negative effects of the Supreme Court decision. The legislation — called the DISCLOSE (Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections) Act — seeks to secure transparency in the electoral process through provisions holding corporations to a number of disclosure rules. President Obama called it the "toughest-ever disclosure requirements for election-related spending by big oil corporations, Wall Street and other special interests…trying to buy representation in our government." The Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group, said the bill would "shine a powerful light on…corporate political expenditures." However, corporate lobbyists and many leading Republicans, who cheered the Citizens United decision as a victory for First Amendment rights, called the DISCLOSE Act an attack, as U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue put it, on "constitutionally protected speech." However, as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent, "While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics." Indeed, new polling from MoveOn.org shows that 77 percent of voters in 18 battleground congressional districts and 4 battleground states think that "corporate election spending is an attempt to bribe politicians;" only 19 percent consider it free speech. And 79 percent believe it’s important that a candidate commit to reducing the influence of corporations over elections.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why? Because big businesses now own and run the government, by and large, and they are constantly working to increase their control. Here’s an example by Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

In an explosive first-hand account, ecosystem biologist Linda Hooper-Bui describes how Obama administration and BP lawyers are making independent scientific analysis of the Gulf region an impossibility. Hooper-Bui has found that only scientists who are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process to determine BP’s civil liability get full access to contaminated sites and research data. Pete Tuttle, USFWS environmental contaminant specialist and Department of Interior NRDA coordinator, admitted to The Scientist that “researchers wishing to formally participate in NRDA must sign a contract that includes a confidentiality agreement” that “prevents signees from releasing information from studies and findings until authorized by the Department of Justice at some later and unspecified date.” Hooper-Bui writes:

It’s not hazardous conditions associated with oil and dispersants that are hampering our scientific efforts. Rather, it’s the confidentiality agreements that come with signing up to work on large research projects shepherded by government entities and BP and the limited access to coastal areas if you’re not part of those projects that are stifling the public dissemination of data detailing the environmental impact of the catastrophe.

Hooper-Bui’s depictions of samples confiscated by US Fish and Wildlife officials and expeditions blocked by local law enforcement is consistent with the steady stream of reports about obstruction, censorship, and confusion under BP’s private army of contractors. A full and open scientific assessment of the effects of the BP disaster is crucial for the health of the ecosystem and the residents of this American jewel.