Among much hoopla Thursday, the Presidential Oil Spill Commission released a letter from lawyer Fred Bartlit, Jr., saying that 3 of 4 tests that Halliburton conducted of the cement designed for BP's Macando well were unstable.  They also published a report of tests performed by Chevron that all nine of their tests using Halliburton ingredients showed it as unstable.  One of Halliburton's tests run prior to the actual cement job showed that formulation to be stable and work.  The letter also stated that the communication about the instability of the slurries between Halliburton and BP was unclear, and that BP may not have even read the report until after the blowout had occurred.

The media and stock market immediately jumped to the conclusion that Halliburton was at fault, and shares of the company dropped about 8% in value when the news hit.  The problem is, though, that this report issued by the commission doesn't matter.  While interesting and demonstrative of the instability of nitrified cements, the main message here is that bad cement does not equal blowout.  Bad cement jobs in the oil and gas industry are common, and there are several ways to remediate those bad jobs after the fact. It's very difficult to determine if a cement job is not effective, even with a bond log, especially in the early hours after a cement job has been pumped.  Bond logs are often inconclusive and the longer cement has to hydrate and gain compressive strength, the higher the likelihood of a better log.  As we all know from the Deepwater Horizon story, there were only about 16 hours from the time the cement job was pumped to the negative test, riser displacement, and the subsequent blowout.

The overriding issues here are casing design and risk management.  Relying solely on the cement job to prevent the well from coming to see them was poor decision making.  I continue to believe that their decision to run only the long string, rather than a liner/tieback combination, as well as the decisions to not wait on more centralizers or to not circulate bottoms up, was BP and Transocean's concern about getting pipe to bottom and getting cement in place, not money.  This well had been scary difficult to drill, losing circulation, then kicking, that they just wanted to get off as quickly as possible.  This rush to get the well finished lead to the disaster.  Add that to displacing the riser with seawater with questionable well integrity was the final straw.  After the blowout, the inhibited alarms and safety shutdowns on the Transocean rig proved deadly.

This disaster was certainly preventable and caused by poor design, poor decision making, and rushing to get the well completed. The tragic consequences should be a lesson to the entire industry, but I'm not holding my breath.

Bob Cavnar's new book, Disaster on the Horizon is now available.

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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Since national energy reform is on the rocks, ethanol subsidies for the Midwest and ballot propositions to roll back progressive energy legislation in California are the most important policy fights to watch right now.

Neither will revolutionize the way Americans get power, and in both cases, moving forward could actually mean moving away from a sensible energy future. In California, voters could turn back progress the state has made towards holding down carbon emissions. And Washington's support for ethanol reveals the static thinking that's smothering our ability to address climate change.

More important than legalizing pot

In 2006, California passed a law that would take effect in 2011 and put an ambitious plan in place to decrease the state's carbon emissions by 2020. Even after the law passed, however, the debate over its merits continued. This being California, that debate made its way onto this November's ballot.

The most commonly floated line of reasoning against the law focuses on negative impacts to job growth: Increasing the price on carbon increases the cost of doing business, limiting economic growth and the resources that businesses have to dedicate to expansion. Proposition 23, a ballot initiative that will come to a vote next Tuesday, would delay the carbon bill's enactment until the state's economy takes a turn for the better.

But Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard knocks down the economic argument against the 2006 law (AB32):

While enacting AB32 could cause job loss in some sectors, most independent experts actually forecast growth in jobs in the renewable energy, transportation, and efficiency sectors. In fact, green jobs are pretty much the only sector growing in the Golden State. The number of green jobs grew 36 percent in California between 1995 and 2008. The rate of growth for regular old jobs was only 13 percent.

Double trouble

Activists have focused on shutting down Prop 23 (check out, via The Washington Independent's Andrew Restuccia, this clever campaign to flip "yes" voters), but as Amy Westervelt points out at Earth Island Journal, that initiative is not the only one that could free companies from their environmental responsibilities.

It turns out another California proposition, Prop 26, could raise the threshold legislators would have to meet in order to make companies pay for their pollution, including from oil spills. As Westervelt writes:

While some companies have steered clear of the Tea Party-backed Prop 23, which seems to be losing popularity every week, California companies interested in slowing down AB32 and maybe ridding themselves of responsibility for pollution altogether have been quietly funneling money to Prop 26.

California has long been a leader on energy issues. If either of these propositions goes the wrong way, it will be yet another troubling sign of the failure of progressive energy policy.

The other ethanol

Although environmentalists have fought hard since 2008 to pass cap-and-trade, the policy was always fundamentally conservative one. The Obama administration has always tried to map out a middle path on energy policy, and so far it has been ineffective. Ethanol is yet another case in point.

As Lynda Waddington reports at the Iowa Independent, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced last week that the administration was moving forward with a program that aids farmers producing crops (in addition to corn) that could be turned into ethanol. Switchgrass, the foundation of Brazil's much-touted ethanol system is one example. Notably, the arguments Vilsack advanced for the program had more to do with the economy than with energy.

Pros and cons

This type of cellulosic ethanol, Brooks Lindsay explains at Change.org, would go mainly towards fueling cars. Lindsay weighs the pros and cons of producing this sort of ethanol in general, and comes down against it. His reasoning: "At best, cellulosic ethanol is just a stop-gap measure while electric cars slowly replace liquid-powered cars....But, a stop-gap fuel does not deserve massive investments and government attention."

Indeed, progressives across the board have long argued that politicians' support for ethanol derives from political calculation, not from practical policy. (Ethanol states are swing states.) Ethanol is energy-intensive to produce, and it has a slew of negative environmental consequences that outweigh the cuts in carbon emissions.

Rethinking the politics

Before they rush to back the Obama administration's policies, however, policymakers should consider this news from Heather Rogers, author of Green Gone Wrong. Rogers reports for The Washington Monthly:

As I discovered on a recent reporting trip through Iowa, many farmers there would welcome a way to break free of the ethanol-industrial complex. The people I met said they'd rather cultivate crops using ecologically sound methods, if they could do so and still earn a decent living. It's not as if midwestern farmers don't know--better than the rest of us--that growing crops for biofuels damages their soil and keeps them at the mercy of predatory multinational corporations.

The article is worth reading in full, but fast-forward to the end to find Rogers' sensible policy proposal. Instead of enlisting farmers in a complicated energy-production procedure that ultimately keeps Americans in their cars, why not aide the work they're already doing to reduce carbon emissions on their farms? After all, farms are responsible for a huge portion of the country's carbon burden -- they just have lobbyists savvy enough to keep their business from being regulated. As Rogers puts it:

Paying farmers to sequester carbon is sound public policy, but it's also, and just as importantly, good politics. By helping to preserve farmers economically while also allowing them to be the stewards of land most want to be, it peels farmers away from the agribusiness coalition that is pushing the Obama administration to bet the country on a failed biofuels energy strategy.

Now there's a bit of thinking that could move energy policy forward.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger

Here's the harsh truth about our immigration system: When 392,000 immigrants are detained per year and 33,000 more are detained everyday with limited staff and minimal federal oversight, institutional misconduct is inevitable.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving record-breaking numbers of immigrants through its ancillary agencies and, in the process, immigrant women are being raped by Border Patrol agents, LGBT detainees are being sexually assaulted at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, and citizens and legal residents are certainly being deported.

How can such things come to pass? Simple: Both overworked and overzealous officials are enforcing overly broad immigration laws. It should be no wonder that people, inevitably, slip through the cracks--whether immigrant, citizen, or soldier.

Immigration judges subverting the law

Misconduct, corruption and a general inability to handle impossibly high caseloads aren't exclusive to DHS and its many agencies. On the contrary, organizational mismanagement plagues every aspect of the immigration process.

As Jacqueline Stevens reports at the Nation, immigration courts are rife with lawlessness and corruption. Charged with adjudicating the hundreds of thousands of immigrants thrown their way by DHS every year, judges are authorizing deportations without even seeing the defendants, issuing rulings at mass hearings (usually with no lawyers present), and abandoning due process for a quicker turn-around.

What's more: the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR)--a separate agency from DHS--is actively shielding this misconduct from the public and trying to avoid federal oversight:

The public's ignorance of the idiocies endemic to the EOIR's business as usual and the calamities these entail is no accident. The agency deliberately withholds basic information from the media and researchers, and its top officials routinely decline requests for interviews [...] Complaints about immigration judges fall under the jurisdiction of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and people may file there directly, but the EOIR instructs immigration court stakeholders to lodge complaints with the EOIR itself. Instead of passing complaints on to the OPR, as the website promises, the EOIR top brass, to protect their cronies and avoid outside scrutiny, sweeps complaints under the rug.

Consequently, American citizens--as well as immigrants who could qualify to remain in the country--are being deported indiscriminately by judges whose decisions are rarely, if ever, questioned.

Immigrant soldiers deported after serving in the U.S. military

Immigrant soldiers serving in the U.S. military are among those routinely cheated by deportation-happy immigration judges.

Julianne Hing reports at Colorlines that 17,000 non-citizens are on active duty in the armed forces, and 4,000 immigrant veterans have already been deported or are facing deportation because of criminal convictions. Hing argues that, while some of those veterans are certainly guilty of violent crimes, many others have committed only minor crimes, like drug possession, and have already served time in jail. Deportation is a secondary, and wholly incommensurate, punishment.

There is certainly a double standard at play here. Veterans, regardless of immigration status, are more likely than the general population to abuse drugs and alcohol and to commit violent crimes. But while non-citizen soldiers are indiscriminately deported for minor offenses, thousands of American military rapists have deftly avoided punishment in the past 15 years.The U.S. government's prejudicial treatment of non-citizen soldiers isn't new (to date, Filipino veterans who fought alongside American soldiers in WWII are still waiting to receive the benefits promised to them), but it remains reprehensible.

The unique plight of immigrant veterans certainly puts into perspective the ongoing push for passage of the DREAM Act--proposed legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for immigrant youth who serve in the military.

New York governor to pardon deportees?

Fortunately, some government officials are working towards a fairer immigration system. Elise Foley at the Washington Independent reports that New York governor David Paterson (D) has created a panel to review thousands of pardon requests from immigrant detainees awaiting deportation:

The idea behind the panel is to allow relief from the "extremely inflexible" federal law for green card holders "who have contributed as New Yorkers and who deserve relief from deportation or indefinite detention," Paterson said when he announced its creation in May. [...] While Paterson's pardon panels would not change the way immigration courts are run, the effort is arguably a push to add a bit of discretion back into the system.

Paterson's laudable commitment to protecting the interests of immigrants, particularly when doing so is far from politically expedient, is proof positive that the rectifying our broken immigration system is entirely within the reach of our politicians. Misconduct and corruption within our immigration agencies are not merely the product of overcrowding and understaffing, but rather persistent inaction on the part of powerful lawmakers and government officials.

As Stevens wryly notes for The Nation: President Barack Obama, whose own citizenship is repeatedly questioned, ought to get on board.

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Last week the State Department and the Pentagon jointly announced the largest arms sale in U.S. history -- dozens of fighter planes and attack helicopters supplemented by transport helicopters, over 16,000 bombs, 10,000-plus laser guided missiles, machine guns, ammunition, night vision devices and other weapons systems too numerous to describe here. The total price tag of over $60 billion is three times as large as the next largest sale in U.S. history, a 1981 offer of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia. The only difference: the earlier deal drew heavy fire from Congress, passing by a margin of 52 to 48. The current deal is likely to sail through without even a hearing, much less any serious effort to block it.

It's not just the Saudi deal. Conventional arms sales in general have received less scrutiny than they did during the arms sales booms of the 1970s through the early 1990s. Congress passed the Arms Export Control Act in the late 1970s in the midst of concerns over U.S. sales to rivals (as with the arming of both sides in the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cypress), to one side or another of a civil war (as in Angola), or to repressive regimes (such as Iran under the Shah). The sheer size of the trade was also a concern, as newly rich members of the OPEC oil cartel went shopping for top-of-the-line weaponry, with the encouragement of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Jimmy Carter's administration almost came to a deal with the Soviet Union to curb sales to regions of conflict, and after the first Gulf War there were talks among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council about limiting arms sales to the Middle East and other regions of concern. The talks collapsed, in part because the U.S. was boosting its sales to the region even as it talked the language of restraint. The size of the trade eventually dropped off, more for economic reasons than due to effective regulatiion, but at least there were serious policy debates about the wisdom of individual sales and the direction of overall arms sales policy.

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If you were a scientist would you really want to get a prize from a dictator? Would you want one of the world's worst human rights abusers to "honor" you with an award, even if it was filtered through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)? UNESCO's decision on Wednesday to indefinitely suspend the Obiang Nguema Mbasogo International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences, established in 2008 with $3 million from the president of Equatorial Guinea, seems to answer the questions above with a "no." The Executive Committee's decision to "indefinitely" postpone the prize until a consensus is reached effectively ensures the tainted accolade will not be awarded. The disgust expressed by organizations and individuals around the world at the idea of legitimizing Obiang's three decades in power has kept it from being awarded thus far, but the UNESCO Executive Committee should go one step further and definitively abolish the prize that is so inimical to the organization's mission.

The president of Equatorial Guinea seemed to think he could buy respectability but is apparently unmoved by the bitter irony of founding a prize intended to fund life sciences research leading to improvement in the quality of human life when he himself has done so little for his own citizens. He seems equally oblivious to the fact that it would be nearly impossible for an Equatorial Guinean to even qualify for the prize, given that there is not a single research center in the entire country. According to the UNDP, Equatorial Guinea spends less on education as a ratio of government spending than any other country in the world. In fact, in the years since Equitorial Guinea's discovery of oil during his rule, net primary education enrollment has plunged from near universal (96.7 percent) enrollment in 1991 to a mere 69.4 percent as of 2007. These statistics are particularly shameful in the country with the highest per capita GDP in Africa.

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Undue corporate influence over U.S. elections has been a serious problem in American politics for decades, but this year's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission made things worse. Worst of all, we may never know the extent of the damage.

Citizens United freed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money backing specific political candidates, and without congressional action, those expenditures can be completely anonymous. Major corporations are already capitalizing on the new legal landscape by the millions, and the public doesn't really know who is buying what influence or why.

That's why The Media Consortium will be carefully watching the effects of this ruling in the run up to this year's midterm elections. Every day through Nov. 4, we'll bring you some of the best independent reporting on the effects of corporate spending in an attempt to measure just how widespread the effect of Citizens United will be on this--and the next--election. Keep your eye on "Campaign Cash" as we follow this issue in the coming weeks. If you want to tweet about it, use the hashtag #campaigncash.

The impact of Citizens United

As Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig explains in an interview with The Nation's Christopher Hayes, the Citizens United v. FEC decision represents one of many ways that corporations buy political favors.

Prior to the ruling, companies couldn't spend money to directly advocate the election of a particular political candidate during election season. They could form Political Action Committees (PACs) to support or attack specific candidates, but those PACs had to be funded by individuals who worked for the company and couldn't be funded from the corporation's treasury directly. The executives of Goldman Sachs, for instance, could band together to form GoldmanPAC and spend their money on whatever candidates they wished--and many corporate employees exercised that right and spent freely on elections through their corporate PACs.

Now corporations can spend as much as they want and actual corporate funds--not just organized individuals--can also be deployed, making massive amounts of corporate cash eligible for political purchasing.

But the scariest part of Citizens United, as Lessig emphasizes, is the money that isn't spent. That is, if a firm makes it known that they are willing spend millions of dollars to fight any politician who opposes them on a particular policy issue, representatives and senators might begin changing their voting behavior in Congress before the company actually has to put up the cash.

And ultimately, Citizens United didn't just legalize unlimited corporate expenses on elections. It also allows those expenses to be anonymous. If companies launder their political cash through a front group, that third-party spender doesn't have to disclose who its donors are.

This isn't your local Chamber of Commerce

As Harry Hanbury details for GRITtv, this laundering scheme is essentially the business model for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-- a lobbying powerhouse in the nation's capital. Don't be fooled by its name--the U.S. Chamber has almost nothing to do with the local small business coalitions who help strengthen local economies.

As Hanbury notes, 40 percent of the U.S. Chamber's 2008 funding came from just 26 corporations. The group represents many of the nation's largest and most irresponsible corporations, from those responsible for the financial meltdown on Wall Street to BP, the company that spilled millions of barrels worth of oil in the Gulf this summer. The Chamber's branding allows them to disguise their political as a coalition of local businesses while it does dirty work for corporate titans.

When BP was publicly promising to do everything in its power to fix the massive oil disaster it created in the Gulf of Mexico, it was also funneling money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And what was the Chamber up to? It was lobbying furiously to protect BP from new rules that would force the company to pay for oil disaster clean-up. The Wall Street banks did the same thing as financial reform legislation moved through Congress, and companies never have to disclose these expenditures to the public.

So it's no surprise that the Chamber responded to Citizens United by immediately announcing a 40 percent boost in its political spending operations. So much corporate money then flowed into the Chamber that the group chose to boost this budget again by 50 percent, allocating $75 million for its 2010 war chest. So far, the Chamber's ads have favored Republican's 93 percent of the time. No entity spends more on politics than the Chamber--not even the political parties themselves.

Corporations top the list of big election spenders

But while the future of corporate spending in campaigns looks bleak after Citizens United, corporations are still barred from contributing directly to political campaigns. A company might take out a television ad attacking Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), but it can't make unlimited contributions directly to Grayson's challenger, Republican Dan Webster.

Nevertheless, corporate employees and company PACs have already been spending lavishly on elections for decades. In a feature for Mother Jones, Dave Gilson compiles the 75 biggest political spenders, both companies and trade groups, from 1989 through 2010, and breaks them down by industry. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are all among the top 20 most extravagant political spenders--but the American Bankers Association, a trade group that all four belong to, is also in the top 10. If you're wondering how Wall Street was able to secure its massive taxpayer bailout in the face of widespread voter outrage, this is your answer.

To soften the Citizens United blow, Congress has been debating the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE) Act, which would require companies to disclose all of their political expenditures as well as requiring front-groups like the Chamber to list the identities and amounts of its donors. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Christopher Van Hollen (D-MD) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), cleared the House this summer but was stymied by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Undoing the damage dealt by Citizens United through something like the DISCLOSE Act will help, but it won't make our democracy totally safe from corporate abuse. As Lessig notes, the day before the decision was handed down, U.S. election financing was already encouraging rampant corruption and in need of serious reform.

Lessig suggests banning political expenditures by corporations altogether, and placing a hard cap on the amount that individuals can contribute. By limiting individual donations to $100, the ability of corporate PACs to funnel cash into the political process would be thwarted.

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Yesterday a federal appeals court granted an injunction sought by our government against the lower court's order abolishing the armed forces' "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The injunction was sought by our Justice Department. Although much will be written about the fact that our president (elected after campaigning with the slogan "Change You Can Believe In"), had the ability to instruct the Justice Department not to challenge the ban and did not, there is an issue at play here which it seems, little has been said about in recent weeks, despite all of the sympathetic press over the issue of teen bullying and gay suicides.

In the face of these suicides, a movement of sorts has begun. In the past two weeks the issue of these suicides has landed front and center in the media, and all over the Internet. We have seen celebrities come out to make statements supporting teens who are struggling with issues of coming out and bullying. We have seen a nationwide campaign arise to provide support as well, as the campaign to wear purple, which spread all over the country via the Internet, has demonstrated. We have seen politicians taking up the cause, most notably, Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns with his heart-wrenching speech made last week before the City Council, which has been viewed now millions of times on the Internet and replayed in numerous television news programs. Despite this groundswell of support from the public in an effort to stop more young people from taking their own lives, what is clearly missing from the dialogue is the ongoing sanctioning by our government of lesser treatment for gay people. Is it any wonder then, that in this so-called enlightened day and age, young people continue to be tormented by their peers because of their sexual orientation?

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Beninoise singer Angelique Kidjo has had a spectacular year. In April she released her newest album, OYO, where she revisited the music that inspired her as a young girl in West Africa and featured collaborations with Roy Hargrove, John Legend, Dianne Reeves, and Bono. In May, she performed for UNICEF in Dublin, her first concert ever in Ireland. In June, she appeared at the Official World Cup Kick-Off Concert in South Africa in front of a cheering, packed stadium and millions more watching on television all over the world. On November 11th, she'll present The Sound of the Drum at Carnegie Hall in New York City, an inspirational tribute to the African roots of music.

Kidjo was dubbed "Africa's premier diva" by Time Magazine and won a Best Contemporary World Music Grammy Award for her 2007 release Djin Djin. She has served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2002 and set up her own foundation, Batonga, to promote secondary school and higher education for girls in Africa. The foundation grants scholarships, works on improving teaching standards, builds schools and provides school supplies, and generally advocates for community awareness of the value of education for girls. In a recent New York Times editorial, Angelique (whose own mother was educated, a rarity) wrote, "My dream is to see every little girl in Benin have the chance I had right after independence: access to a great and sustained education." It's a cause she'll never stop working for. She explained that as an African girl, once you reach puberty, marriage is usually next. "We need highly educated women in Africa, we need women to take the lead in their own lives, we need them to stop being accessories...It's just vital for the future of Africa and the future of the world."

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You might say that since ABC aired its most famous mini-series in 1977, that I have had a serious case of Roots envy. Like Alex Haley, I wanted to be able to find the ancestors on my family tree, deep into the depths of slavery. And to find the lost tribal or ethnic identity of our African ancestors, just as Haley claimed he had, would be more than I could imagine. Well, the Bible says be careful what you wish for. Now, with the digitization of a remarkable variety of public documents through companies such as Ancestry.com, and with affordable DNA tests, all of us can find out an extraordinary amount of information about our ancestors -- both our recent ancestors over the past few hundred years and our more distant ancestors, thousands of years ago.

After producing two PBS series devoted to African American ancestry, African American Lives and African American Lives 2, in which I traced the family trees of nineteen black people, I received a letter from a woman who described herself as eastern European and Jewish, asking me why I didn't trace the ancestry of people with her background? Why, she asked, should black people have all the fun? I had also received many letters from people of West Indian ancestry, asking if the techniques that we used on African Americans would work on their ancestry as well? So, I decided to do a new series, using what I think of as the "Noah's Ark" approach: two Catholics, two Muslims, two Jewish people, two West Indians, two Asian Americans, a Latina and a Native American, etc. And the result was Faces of America, in which we were able to uncover an extraordinary amount of information about the subjects of the film, tracing ancestors back as far as the 5th century A.D. What's more, we were able to draw upon cutting edge genetics to offer certain tests to our guests that did not even exist when I filmed my first African American Lives series just a few years ago. Most gratifying, for me, was being able to have my father's entire genome sequenced, making him the oldest human being ever to have this done.

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Last week saw several reports, including in the Washington Post and the Guardian, claiming renewed or invigorated contacts between the Karzai administration and the Taliban. This has been reported on several occasions throughout the US' nine year involvement in the Afghan war, most recently in 2008 and 2009, and is the necessary first step in ending the conflict and bringing stability not just to Afghanistan, but to the region. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been largely consistent in its dismissal of such efforts over the last two years, keeping constant with the Bush Administration's insistence on a military solution to the conflict. The refusal by the Obama administration to take a more active and leading role in negotiations, by reciting the same mantra as the Bush Administration, of only talking to the Taliban after they have laid down their arms and accepted the Afghan constitution (in essence surrendering)*, continues to obstruct any chances of a successful political resolution to the conflict.

The US with 100,000 troops, plus 50,000 coalition troops and a near equal number of contractors, is obviously the gorilla in the room militarily. However, when you consider the US is spending over $100 billion annually in Afghanistan, a country with a GDP of only $14 billion, the US position must be understood not just for its strength, but for its power brokering and king making abilities due to the sheer and obscene volume of dollars it pumps into Afghanistan. By ignoring this reality, the United States is serving no purpose but to prolong the conflict as it stands on the sidelines with its arms crossed, arguing, as it has for years, that talks are, at best, exaggerated and, at worst, defeatist.

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The 911 of the Middle Class is the consumer credit debacle. It is the gift that keeps on giving. The reality is that the housing crisis is just one piece of this really big, ugly mess. It seems to me that our President MUST call for immediate reform and take action through executive order. Call me politically naïve, but we need action. Unemployment continues to hover close to 10%, and higher in badly hit areas. Interest paid by the banks on savings ranges from less than 1% to maybe 2.5% on a good day. The consumer credit card companies, though regulated now sort of, ran naked through the streets jacking up everyone's interest rates to over 15 to 30%. Yes they have to notify the poor, irresponsible slobs now before they do things, but the banks still get to burn kerosene in the town square with no permits. And we haven't even gotten to the health insurance yahoos that have four more years for their trickery. Oh Nelly, bar the door! It's the Wild West again as the cattle are corralled - only this time it's the American people being herded to ruin by the giddy-up bankers and health insurance companies, not just the mortgage guys.

People are getting sick from worry. Their backs hurt, their necks are out, and they are grinding their pearly whites. Few sleep well at night. Pharmaceutical sales are up. The banks we saved are savaging us. They are bulldozing the Middle Class under mountains of debt. People are losing their homes, divorces are up, businesses are closing, and unemployment is rampant. The consumer credit world and their FICO scores are broken. They are based on a world that no longer exists. In two short years, many consumers have watched their scores collapse under an avalanche of debt. The FICO scores were calibrated for a different time when consumer credit cards were not the only source of money available, mortgages were not under water, and unemployment was not soaring. If we are ever to unwind this situation, these algorithms must be reset. Otherwise the banks will never lend again. The Middle Class needs a do-over, just like the banks got.

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Weekly Audit: Foreclosuregate Hits Home

by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Earlier this month, Bank of America (BOA), the country's largest bank, announced a moratorium on foreclosures in all 50 states.

The bank promised not to sell any foreclosed homes or take any more delinquent borrowers to court until it had reviewed its potentially defective foreclosure process. Other major lenders soon announced that they too were suspending foreclosures in dozens of states. Why are the biggest banks in the country voluntarily calling for a time-out? It's a hint that we're facing a huge problem: The banks aren't sure if they have the legal right to foreclose on millions of homes.

Here's what's new in foreclosuregate since the Audit took up the story last week. The Bank of America announced that it would resume some foreclosures on Oct. 25, having deemed its own methods sound. The stock market begged to differ. BOA's stock fell over 5% on Thursday and other bank stocks also took a beating, as did mortgage bonds. This pattern indicates that investors are very worried about the effect of the foreclosure crisis on the health of the banks.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is calling for a foreclosure moratorium under the new Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), as Ellen Brown reports for Truthout. The FSOC has the power to preemptively break up any large financial institution that threatens U.S. economic security. Grayson wants a moratorium on all mortgages securitized between 2005 and 2008 until the FSOC can determine which foreclosures are valid and which are bogus.

The missing link

So, what kind of "defects" in the foreclosure process are we talking about? Fraud, basically.

Zach Carter of the Campaign for America's Future explains to Chris Hayes of the Nation why Bank of America and other major lenders are in so much trouble: They are just administering loans for other lenders. You make your check out to the Bank of America, but the bank is just babysitting after the loan for the bondholders.

The real creditors are the investors who own bonds made up of pieces of many different mortgages, including yours. The bond gives the bondholder a share of the money that you and other borrowers pay each month. If you don't pay, BOA initiates foreclosure. If you're late, BOA charges you fees.

However, the bank can't just hire a foreclosure company to take your home away on a whim. The bank must first show proof that it is entitled to foreclose because you've defaulted on your mortgage in the form of a mortgage note. If you hold one of those toxic asset mortgages, there's a good chance the bank doesn't have the note.

As Dean Baker explains in Truthout, in many, if not most, cases, "liar loans" (mortgages issued with no proof of income or assets) have become given way to "liar liens" (foreclosures with no proof of default).

According to Carter, all the big banks have been hiring foreclosure mills to rubber-stamp their claims without checking. Unscrupulous foreclosure companies are admitting to "robo-signing," i.e., foreclosing without even checking whether the bank's claims were legit.

Foreclosuregate

According to Andy Kroll of Mother Jones, the Bank of America stands to lose up to $70 billion over what's come to be known as "foreclosuregate." A mortgage starts out with an originator, typically a bank or a mortgage broker. In the heyday of mortgage-backed securities, investment banks were buying up hundreds of thousands of mortgages, making them into mortgage-backed bonds, and selling them to investors.

Unfortunately, if the bank doesn't have the note, who does? The mortgage originator may have gone bankrupt, many were fly-by-night operators that folded when the housing bubble burst. Many mortgages were bought and resold more than once before they found their way into a mortgage-backed bond.

So, the question is whether the bank really owned the mortgages it made into mortgage backed-securities and sold to individuals, pension funds, and other institutions. If not, the banks stand could be on the hook for selling assets they didn't actually own to investors.

Moratorium now

The scandal affects so many mortgages that some lawmakers are calling for a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures until investigators can sort out who owns what once and for all. Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY) told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that Congress needs to stop banks from putting people out on the street until there is some way to differentiate between fraudulent foreclosures and justified ones:

And so, I just think that people who are saying that this is going to hurt--I think that it's going to help, because once people gain confidence in the fact that they're being treated fairly and that there's no discrepancies in the records, then people will feel very comfortable in terms of trying to move forward. But until that happens, you're always going to have these comments about the fact that that was not done right, it was done unfairly. And, of course, I think there's enough here for us to stop and to pause and to say, let's take a look here before we move forward. So a moratorium is definitely in order.

The Obama administration opposes the moratorium on the grounds that it would hurt the housing market and thereby slow the economy. Towns counters that what would really be bad for the economy is letting banks take people's homes away without any semblance of due process. If the government doesn't act to protect the innocent, foreclosuregate could shatter the confidence of potential home buyers. Would you want to invest in a house if you were afraid the bank could just take it away from you?

In AlterNet, Mike Lux argues that fraudulent foreclosures are one more assault on poor and middle class Americans. He argues that the banks are so used to being coddled by Washington that they're counting on legislators to retroactively change the rules to protect them from the consequences of their own devious behavior.

At this point we don't know what percentage of foreclosed-upon homes have simply been stolen by banks to pay bondholders, but we do know the problem is vast and systemic. The Obama administration is content to let the banks seize private property first and ask questions later. We need a moratorium to take stock and restore the rule of law.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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Shame on the bully that made you flinch, or brought fear into your happy heart without a hint of remorse. Shame on the bully that made you feel inadequate and squelched any sense of joy that you could experience. Do you know there are bullies that find a euphoric inebriation from intimidating others, may it be online or in person? These are the pitiful souls that need power and praise in an evil form in order for them to feel whole. What happened in their lives to make them desire and thirst to bring ill will on one that is less fortunate? What kind of gene pool do they derive from to be as menacing and demonic as a witch from Salem? Should they be afforded the luxury of wearing a velvet scarlet letter, like Hester Pryne? Shouldn't there be a surgeon general's warning slapped on their foreheads, to prepare students of this ludicrous form of play? This type of folly takes lives, ruins futures, shatters homes, crushes hearts and can leave scars that are irreparable. In my mind these twisted fools are comprised of the same genetic make-up of Hitler, the Bolsheviks, the Ku-Klux-Klan, the El Rukns and any other group who embraces hatred like a long lost lover. They live and love to hate. The hatred flows through their bloodstream like the many DNA that define them.

I have heard in less than two weeks of a teenager hanging themselves with the provocation of another. Upon hearing this news I instantaneously felt helpless and worried about my own child and remembered as fresh as the morning dew how she had been tormented by classmates relentlessly, solely due to her race. I would've gambled my last dime to protect her from the wrath of her bullies, and many times I worried about her safety or will to continue. The technology has changed like the speed of lightening, the array of gadgetry that lay at our fingers is truly a miracle, but please tread with caution; it is the first weapon of choice for the seasoned bully. There is a term coined "owning" which I had to learn the hard way. To be owned is when someone has cyber stalked you to the point of manipulating you to believe that if you don't obey their requests, they will destroy your hard drive with a virus, i.e. Trojan, and locate your whereabouts and take your life. What kind of human being would swoop into the lives of a happy teen and instill the fear that their home was about to be annihilated if there weren't a hint of cooperation? The teen must understand that emails with a hint of inflammatory jargon could be considered a threat and can be used as substantial evidence to local authorities, especially if IP addresses are traced. Unfortunately these devils are slicker than shea butter, usually quite intelligent and are capable of having numerous IP addresses which are most times untraceable. They simply unplug their wireless box, and get a new one reassigned to them, continue their vigilance and slip into the darkness like a sublime nightmare. Bullies should be referred to something more demeaning, i.e. spineless, Lucifer, sadists, Minotaurs, dragons, and any other term that they embody to the fullest. There is nothing human about these beasts, because every harmful act is carefully contrived.

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On Sunday, Sep. 26, many Christian churches around the world heard the story of the rich man and Lazarus from the gospel of Luke 16:19-31. As I reflected on this story, I was reminded once again of our Christian responsibility to heal the world of all divisions. The rich man in this story is not condemned because he is wealthy, nor is he condemned because of what he did with his wealth. He is condemned because of what he did not do. He is condemned because he did not spend his time, talents and treasures to bridge the gap between Lazarus and himself. The chasm that existed between the rich man and Lazarus is symbolic of the different chasms we have created and maintained in our society.

What are those chasms and who are the Lazaruses? There are several divisions that exist in our society: the rich and the poor, those who dine sumptuously and those who go hungry, gay and straight, whites and people of color, Christians and other religions like Islam. Our Lazaruses are the marginalized or those who are disadvantaged because of the side of the divide where they find themselves. In our society, these are the poor, the hungry, gays, people of color, and Muslims. These are the least of our brothers and sisters that Jesus Christ expects Christians to care for. We cannot ignore them, deride them or pretend that they do not exist. Christians not only have a responsibility to help them, but they must fight to tear down the structures of inequality in our society. Christians cannot sit passively when the rights of Muslims are being violated just because they belong to a different religious tradition. They must act because we all have a common origin. The same God created Muslims and Christians (and people of other faiths). I was not created by a black God or a white God. The God who created gay people is not different from the God who created straight people. The poor are also created by the same God who creates the rich. We all are created by one God. We all share the image and the likeness of one God.

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Is it safe to say that, after Suspiria and The Beyond, we could all use a breather? I, for one, have had my fill of sadistic, stomach-knotting violence for, oh, at least the next couple days. (Nothing puts a damper on one's culinary enthusiasm like watching a dozen eyeballs get popped out like grapes from their peels.) So let's take a little trip back through the gauzy mists of time, to the studio era, when horror was beautiful, mellow, and unlikely to disturb either one's sleep or one's appetite.

I've seen Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, more times than I can count. The same goes for James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), which, in any case, doesn't hold a cobwebbed candelabrum to Mel Brooks's classic Young Frankenstein (1974). But I realized that I had a gap -- a gaping, festering hole, in fact -- in my horror education. I'd never seen The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff and directed by Karl Freund, the cinematographer of Browning's Dracula and a member of the cinematography team responsible for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

I mentioned needing a breather: Now consider the makeup session Karloff called "the most trying ordeal I have ever endured." You've read about how the ancient Egyptians made their mummies; here's how Universal Studios did it. As Gregory William Mank's Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration (2009) relates:

The 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. transformation took place in [Jack P.] Pierce's cosmetology sanctuary, where a photograph of King Seti II served as a model. Pierce pinned back Boris's ears, dampened his face and covered every facial area (including eyelids) with thin cotton strips, covered the cotton with collodion and went to work with spirit gum and an electric drying machine... Boris's only pleasures during the procedure: a cigarette and tea. The makeup application made speech virtually impossible and the star had to pantomime every time he wanted a fresh smoke. Then came beauty clay slicking back the actor's hair... 22 different colors of makeup covering the actors face, hands, and arms, 150 yards of acid-rotted linen (passed through an oven, so it looked decayed), bandages taped in the body joints so that the star could move, and a dusting of Fuller's earth.

Well, here's the big reveal: Karloff appears as a mummy for about five minutes, in the first scene. He doesn't even kill anyone as a mummy. A young archaeologist named Norton (Bramwell Fletcher) reads a forbidden papyrus; the mummy awakens; the mummy takes his papyrus back, and takes off. Norton dissolves into hysterical laughter -- which is impressively painful to listen to -- and we're later told that he "died laughing -- in a straitjacket." That's the last we see of this or any mummy. The next time we encounter Karloff, the resurrected priest Imhotep, he is a "modern" Egyptian named Ardath Bey, who wears a fez and a veritable Lone Ranger mask of kohl.

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This is the latest in our series of community coal ash profiles. This piece was written by Sierra Club Apprentice Lydia Avila.

The community of Joliet, Illinois, identifies as many things - Midwestern, humble, and hard-working. Yet they also identify with something much less positive: being collateral damage. According to Joliet residents, they don't even merit a second thought to Midwest Generation, a coal-fired power plant that has been dumping toxic coal ash near Joliet for over 40 years.

Coal ash is the byproduct of burning coal for electricity, and it's having a major impact on Joliet. Residents say if you were to spend a week in Joliet you would find yourself driving through coal ash fog; a stroll in your yard would cause you to come back covered in "black stuff" and/or yellow particulates; you wouldn't be able to drink or bathe in the water; and your clothes would come out of the washer tinted orange and black from the chemicals in the water. 

If you spent time in Joliet, residents say, you would see this "black stuff" covering your car, yard and house on a daily basis, and you certainly could not fish in any of the lakes, rivers or streams in the area.

But, they added, even worse are the health effects that you and your loved ones would experience: nose bleeds, blisters, skin infections, migraines, coughing, gagging, mercury poisoning, neurological disorders, to name a few. And, these would culminate in the form of asthma, kidney transplants, heart transplants, lymphoma, neurological disorders, seizures, rare forms of leukemia, emergency hysterectomies, and lupus (again, just to name a few).

Tammy Thompson knows the health effects first-hand - calling herself and her family part of that collateral damage. Her six-year-old daughter Faith has suffered the effects of living near a coal plant since she was born. Faith's doctor diagnosed her with Grave's Disease and recommended that she, and all the children in Joliet, be routinely tested for lead and mercury poisoning.

Thompson recalls times when she often had to struggle to gain composure in her car, while her daughter in the backseat would ask, "What's that smell, mommy?" and then complain of headaches. She saw her daughter suffer from blisters and sores every time they bathed her in a storage tub filled with bottled water following recommendations from her doctor, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) and others. Yet, for a long time, their health problems remained a mystery.

Thompson and her neighbors have taken matters into their own hands, filing report after report and making phone call after phone call to local, state and federal agencies. When Thompson discusses the actions taken by the people of Joliet, she underscores the fact that this is a human issue: "I'm not an environmentalist, I'm a mom. I'm not an activist, I'm an American," she said.

Unfortunately, Joliet residents say their concerns have consistently been ignored by every public agency and department that, in theory, is supposed to help them.

The IEPA and local officials play a game of ping pong with their cries for help, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claims not to have jurisdiction over the area. The IEPA likes to claim that these diseases occur naturally, but there is nothing natural about the levels at which they occur in Joliet.

On the rare occasions when the IEPA has returned a few a call, agency officials have tried to justify the horrendous living conditions by saying the jobs at the coal plant and its coal ash disposal site are needed.

Thompson says that supposed "gain" certainly pales in comparison to watching her family and friends suffer the health effects. "'Get use to it and get over it' is what they try to tell us," Thompson said.

Not surprisingly, when the Environmental Integrity Project and Sierra Club's recently released coal ash report, "In Harm's Way," Joliet was listed as one of the most contaminated sites in the country. The town of Joliet has received national attention from such figures as Erin Brockovich and, at the time, Senator Obama.

Thompson and her community continue to ask why they aren't receiving any help. "Why doesn't the EPA prove something is safe? Why must we wait for a body count to show it's not?" asked Thompson.

"It's not an environmental issue; it's an ethical, social and civil rights issue."

Tell EPA we need strong federal safeguards for toxic coal ash.

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by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that it had broken its own record for deportations, affirming the Obama administration's zeal for heavy-handed immigration enforcement. According to the announcement, deportations have increased by 70 percent since the Bush administration, totaling 392,000 in fiscal year 2010.

While the agency hailed this figure as a victory, others are taking a step back to examine the huge political, financial, and human costs associated with this administration's unapologetic and tough approach to immigration.

The human costs

DHS's efforts have resulted in the deportations of 195,772 convicted criminals in 2010 alone--perhaps a cause for celebration, or at least relief, to the scores of Americans who buy into the immigrant-as-criminal narrative. But things are less clear-cut with regard to the remaining 196,228 non-criminal individuals deported this year.

While many of those individuals were undoubtedly swept up during border crossings--spending a relatively short spell in detention before being deported--many others were just as certainly legal residents woefully caught in the "deportation dragnet."

Shahed Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant and legal permanent resident of the U.S., is one such individual. Seth Freed Wessler, writing for ColorLines, brings to light Hossain's tragic--and arguably preventable--story.

The 21-year-old, self-identified Texas was stopped by border guards during a day trip to Mexico because he has brought his Bangladeshi passport instead of his green card. When an officer asked him if he was a citizen, Hossain initially misspoke and said yes, before immediately correcting himself and informing the guard that he was actually a legal resident. Though the officer verified Hossain's status, another officer took over and initiated a chain of events that resulted in Hossain's immediate detention and eventual deportation.

At issue was Hossain's inadvertent--and promptly corrected--claim of citizenship, which has been a federal crime since 1996. Though not meant to target green card holders like Hossain, the broad and indiscriminate application of the law has swept up all manner of non-citizens.

Wessler notes that President Obama's enforcement-focused immigration strategy has only exacerbated a problem decades into the making:

...The Obama administration is predetermining the fate of hundreds of thousands more. In March, a leaked ICE memo confirmed that the agency had set quotas for deportation: 400,000 this year. After the leak, ICE Director John Morton denied that the quotas actually exist. Regardless, the agency is on track to meet its alleged target. [...]

The Obama administration is nonetheless staying the course, refusing to take administrative action to slow deportations or to pick a fight over a broader reform bill.

Hossain's story is not unique, but representative of a growing population of immigrants unexpectedly and unfairly targeted by misguided and overreaching immigration control tactics.

The financial costs

Elise Foley at the Washington Independent summed up the financial costs of rising deportation numbers and found that we spent about $9.2 billion on deportations in fiscal year 2010 alone--at an average cost of $23,480 per deportee. Here's the breakdown, via a Center for American Progress report:

Apprehension: $18,310
Detention: $3,355
Legal processing: $817
Transportation: $1,000

Foley notes that the expense may be justifiable if we're actually deporting criminals whose long-term incarcerations would cost significantly more.

But, as Antonieta Cádiz points out at New America Media, slightly more than half of people deported in 2010 were not criminals--and of those who were broadly classified as "convicted criminals," nearly 50,000 were only convicted of minor offenses like traffic violations. And it's rather difficult to justify spending $23,480 on the deportation of an immigrant guilty of nothing more than a traffic violation.

The political costs

When the Obama administration decided that heavy immigration enforcement should precede comprehensive immigration reform, it didn't expect the decision to alienate Latino voters.

But according to the American Prospect's Adam Serwer, the administration's enforcement push, coupled with a lack of comprehensive reform, has compromised the Latino electorate's projected allegiance to the Democratic party:

Having won the presidency -- and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote -- in part on the promise of immigration reform, Barack Obama has yet to put his feet on the starting blocks. In the meantime, his administration has doubled down on aggressive enforcement policies, ramping up border security and increasing deportations. [...] The Obama administration finds itself trapped. Hoping to create the political conditions for reform, it has amassed a record of strict enforcement, deporting more immigrants in 2009 than at any other time in the nation's history, even as migration decreased. [...]

...But at this point the question isn't whether immigration reform will happen. Rather, the question is, when it does, which party will get the credit and which will take the fall?

Serwer notes that the administration's enforcement-heavy immigration strategy is an attempt to cater to the American public's penchant for increased border security. Immigration enforcement has long proven popular with a large swathe of American voters because it assuages the public's growing (albeit unfounded) fears that immigration fuels crime.

The immigrant-as-criminal narrative has worked its way into the psyches of many Americans, and is no doubt reinforced by the ubiquity of racially-charged terms like "illegals" in mainstream media. Some have speculated that the omnipresence of such language within immigration discourse has a profound impact on public opinion and policy. That possibility even prompted the Applied Research Center, publisher of ColorLines, to launch a campaign to "Drop the I-Word."

To get a better idea of the potential political consequences of the I-word's mainstream ubiquity, we sat down with I-Word Campaign Organizer Mónica Novoa:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwtgcKLjN6Q[/youtube]

With just a few weeks until midterm elections, and the media abuzz with talk of a disillusioned and disaffected Latino voter base, the political implications of increased and indiscriminate enforcement efforts could be profound.

Deporting 392,000 immigrants in one year is monumental, but so are the financial and human costs associated with doggedly driving that figure upwards. And, come November, we may find that the electoral consequences of pushing such an arguably conservative immigration agenda are just as grave.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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The essential job of the National Security Advisor is to act as custodian of the policy process -- to ensure its procedural integrity. Responsible decisions depend on coherent deliberations that are intellectually honest. Honesty in a careful vetting of information, in making explicit premises and assumptions, in laying out all reasonable alternatives along with their benefit/cost/risks. To do this formidable job effectively, the NSA ideally should combine intelligence, knowledgeable understanding of foreign policy issues and also a measure of dispassion. For advancing his own views can jeopardize his main function. The other key is a good working relationship with the president whom he serves. The president must see the need to have a custodian, and then must pick some one he trusts. Otherwise, who holds the post is of secondary importance. The Bush the Elder/Scowcroft relationship stands as one model for an effective partnership.

Perhaps the NSA's most delicate assignment is protecting the president from himself. That means two things. First, to curb impulsive action -- whether it emerges from personality, pet ideas, or a combination. This is of little concern in the Obama White House since Obama has no fixed ideas in the foreign policy realm and, in any case, is an ultra cautious person. Second, there is the obligation to protect the President's thinking from being captured by powerful persons, cliques or dogmas. Obama's instinctive respect for all established forces has made him singularly vulnerable to capture. Indeed, on Afghanistan he fell victim to the Pentagon phalanx of Gates, Petraeus, Mullen and McChrystal who imposed their mindset on him in last year's review. The graphic account offered by Bob Woodward shows that General James Jones lacked the force of personality and/or privileged access to Obama to prevent that from happening -- even if he was so inclined. There is no sign, for example, that he advised Obama to make use of Ambassador (General) Karl Eikenberry's deep seated skepticism about our purposes in Afghanistan by forcing the quartet of military hawks to address his challenge directly. Similarly, Jones has not steered the President off the suicidal diplomatic course of groveling before Bibi Netanyahu in ways that have cut the ground from under the United States' standing in the region. On this matter, the powerful forces are the Israel lobby and its tribunes inside the White House -- Emanuel, Axelrod -- along with Biden and Hillary Clinton.

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Transplant medicine is what some of its strongest proponents, transplant surgeons, call a "victim of its own success." Anyone who is mortally sick with organ failure -- whether the heart, lungs, liver, or kidneys -- will grasp at anything for a second chance at life. The promise held out to those on the official organ waiting list is the "gift" of a "fresh," healthy, undamaged organ. The problem is that as of now, 108,947 Americans are stranded on the UNOS waiting list. The odds of getting a legal, 'clean' organ are slim. In the first half of 2010 there were only 14,141 transplants provided through the gift of living related or deceased donor organs. Something is a bit batty here. The data are skewed by the US system that allows just about anyone -- even those who are so desperately ill the chance of surviving a transplant is almost nil and people over 80 years old -- to be listed on the official organ list. Unlike Central Europe where 'presumed consent' operates ( that is, you are donor unless you say that you are not a donor at brain death) or in the UK where both organs and waiting lists are carefully rationed and rationalized by the National Health Service or in Norway where giving a kidney or one lung or half a liver is considered not too much to ask a loved one to provide, we in the United States have allowed our official waiting list to run riot. The result is that some sick grandparents are now being coaxed to ask their 18 year old grandchildren to fork up a spare kidney so that the Grandma can live to see her great-grandchildren, presumably.

Organ scarcities, real or exaggerated, produce real organ panics, as those who are low-listed for an official UNOS organ try to solve their problem by illegal and sometimes criminal means, including traveling to a country in the third world to buy an organ through transplant brokers, some of whom, in real life, are surgeons. In a few weeks the CEO of South Africa's leading private hospital corporation, Netcare, and five highly skilled university-affiliated Durban transplant surgeons , nephrologists, and transplant coordinators will appear in court facing criminal charges of over 100 counts of fraud, forgery, physical assault with a deadly weapon (the scalpel) and organized crime. The Netcare team fell like a ripe piece of fruit into the hands of international organs brokers who enlisted them in a big money-making scheme that trafficked poor people from rural Romania and Moldova, and slum dwellers from Northeast Brazil to Durban and Johannesburg to provide one of their 'spare' kidneys -- fresh kidneys -- to more than one hundred transplant tourists, most of them from Israel, a few from Europe and one lonely American who signed up to pay between $150,000 and $180,000 for their South African transplant safaris. The surgeons and Net care administrators thought that the 'brokers' and 'intermediaries' would be charged, not themselves. They told South African police investigators that they were duped by international criminals. But Captain Louis Holmberg, head of the Durban criminal crime branch of the South African police force, listened and nodded his head sagely while taking notes, interviewing the brokers, buyers, sellers and other intermediaries in the scheme and confiscating the hospital files from the Net care Transplant clinic in St. Augustine's hospital in Durban. In the end the government charged the doctors and hospital CEOs. Who's the felon? Captain Helberg asked rhetorically at a Berkeley Conference in May organized by Organs Watch. "Who's got the knife?" Both South Africa's Human Tissues Act and the Prevention of Organized Crime Act are involved in the trials scheduled for the beginning of 2011.

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In a somewhat shocking turnaround, Warner Bros. has announced today that they will be releasing the first portion of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 35mm and IMAX 2D only, with no 3D conversion. The studio is claiming that there will not be enough time to properly convert the feature in 3D at a quality level they are comfortable with. That probably translates as 'we've seen the blowback of conversions with Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender, and we don't want to risk our golden goose in such a manner'. The last thing that Warner Bros. wants is a parade of reviews exclaiming 'the movie is good, but the 3D is terrible!'. Those who don't care for 3D, and especially detest 3D conversions are no doubt applauding the decision. For what it's worth, good on Warner for opting for going for quality over commerce.

I don't often share many personal things about myself in sermons, but tonight I am going to. Not so you can get to know me better, but to make a point. All things being equal, I have been very fortunate to live a pretty sheltered, privileged life. As a white, upper middle class, straight, American Jew born in the latter half of the 20th century and now living in the 21st century, I have had it good. I have never faced direct anti-Semitism or had my life threatened in any way. I have never been a slave, like Bill Nathan, the amazing director of the St. Joseph Home for Boys in Haiti told us this week, when he spoke at PJTC, that he was from age 6-8. I have never had any noticeable physical, psychological, emotional disabilities that would draw attention to me as being different, subject to potential ridicule. The worst that I have had, I guess, was when I was only 4'11'' tall through 11th grade, before shooting up 7 inches in one summer. But, I was cute and popular with the girls, so even that wasn't so bad. I was an athlete, did well in school, was student body president in high school and went on to college and a successful career. I don't remember being teased that much as a kid, was bullied once, maybe, in my first week of high school, but nothing major. I didn't stutter, have a birth mark, like my sister's huge red mark on her left cheek, always had friends. I went to Hebrew High school and excelled, summers at Camp Ramah where I was in the "in" crowd, and so, I have never really known what it is like to be subjected to humiliation, taunting, teasing, bullying or alienation. And so, for sure, I have absolutely no idea what it must have been like to be Tyler Clementi, or one of the other four gay young people who took their lives in the last three weeks. These deaths are horrible tragedies, not only for their families, whose pain is unimaginable, but for us as a nation, as we mourn the loss of 5 young people, the oldest 19, the youngest 13, who took their lives, it appears in all five cases, because of either the torment they endured for being gay, or being thought gay by their peers, or in Tyler's case, because of the public humiliation that he felt after his college roommates video taped him and another young man having sex in their dorm room and streamed it live on the internet. Young Seth Walsh, a 13-year old boy in Tahachapi, CA, featured in today's LA Times, was a bright, loving child who knew he was gay, tried to be himself, express himself and was taunted for it. He was teased since the 4th grade because he liked to play with girls, didn't like sports, wasn't aggressive or assertive -- he was called a sissy, that is where it began. Three years later, it ended with him hanging himself in his backyard. The others were Billy Lucas, 15 and Asher Brown, 13. Five young people now gone. The challenge tonight is that this could be many sermons: the issue of homosexuality in our society, the issue of bullying and teasing amongst our kids, the issue of privacy and the Internet, and I am sure a few other things as well. I am going to focus on the first issue, homosexuality and our society, and our own community.

In his groundbreaking book, Wrestling with God and Men, Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the first self-identified gay Orthodox rabbi, writes about a response he got from another Orthodox rabbinic scholar asked to comment on his coming out and continuing to identify as Orthodox. Greenberg had been hiding his true sexuality since the time he was a teen, trying to date women, be a "normal" boy, and actually was almost married to a woman once. Raised in a non-religious home, Greenberg discovered Orthodoxy as a young teen and became more and more religious as he grew up. Greenberg's first step into speaking his truth came in 1992 when he authored a piece that was printed in Tikkun magazine, under a pseudonym, Rabbi Yaakov Levado, meaning "Jacob alone," which he writes is based on the story of the Biblical Jacob and how he remains alone the night before meeting his brother Esau, and famously wrestling with the angel, which most of the commentators understand as a wrestling with himself to identify who he truly is. The outcome of that Biblical story, as we know, is that Jacob becomes Israel; the outcome of Greenberg's piece is that he started to no longer be "levado, alone," but become fully himself. He explains why he couldn't reveal his true identity in the article, saying, "I feared that the cost of honesty and realness would be isolation and marginalization. Coming out would compress my life into a narrow and grossly overdetermined identity. I bristled at the thought of being known widely as 'the gay Orthodox rabbi.'" (Greenberg, p. 10) Yet, the letters he received, from folks around the world, both gay and straight, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, gave him courage and a taste of support and acceptance. But, he also got responses such as this, from an Orthodox colleague, "A gay Orthodox rabbi is an absurdity as inconceivable as an Orthodox rabbi who eats cheeseburgers on Yom Kippur. There is no such thing as a gay Orthodox rabbi."

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Sometimes we reach our desired destination by taking an indirect route. That is the key theme of John Kay's new book Obliquity. And it was on my mind over the last two days at a meeting of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), a consortium of donors promoting greater transparency in international aid funding.

IATI has made much more progress than I imagined possible, and I left the conference encouraged by the possibilities and by the people working on it.

One of the presentations was particularly striking, because it demonstrated John Kay's point. A representative from UNDP showed the system they had designed to track trust fund budget flows. They created the system because UN country offices were complaining that the trust funds they had been allocated were not being disbursed to them in a timely way. As a result, programs were delayed. Under the old system, it was hard to tell if the problem was in the implementation or in budget availability. And if the problem was the budget, was it because the donors had not paid up, or was it because of some delay at headquarters? So they set out to make the flow of funds in the system available in near real-time to relevant UNDP staff.

After they designed this beautiful system, they then realized it would be useful to a larger group of people within the United Nations system. At this point, they started thinking about who should have access and who should not. The answer to this was not obvious, and in any case the complexity of creating and managing an restricted access system was substantial. So the UNDP team asked itself "Is there any reason not to just make it open access? That would sure make our lives easier."

And it turns out there was no good reason not to do this. The result is that anyone in the world - beneficiaries, recipient governments, aid workers, donors, and taxpayers can all see where billions of dollars of UN trust fund money is coming from, and where it is going, what it is for, and when it arrives.

So this was an example of an initiative that created unprecedented transparency at the United Nations. But it didn't start out that way. It started out as an initiative to solve a problem within the agency itself, and because it solves that problem you can be sure it will be properly maintained and sustained. I left the IATI meeting wondering how such an indirect approach can be pursued in other dimensions of the information we need to make transparent.

www.globalgiving.org, Pulling for the Underdog

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On September 15, 2000, a 29-year-old man named Craig Finn from Minneapolis moved to New York City. Finn took a job in an office and after three years was bored of everyday mundane office life; he called a few friends and started a band. That band would get together on Tuesday nights, have a few beers, jam and wanted to become the best bar band in the city. That band would be The Hold Steady. After a few gigs, the band developed a buzz and started touring and releasing records, now a few years later the band is on album number five, Heaven is Whenever, which was released this past Spring. The Hold Steady has gone on from playing small Brooklyn dive bars to Manhattan clubs to various venues around the world to opening to everyone from The Rolling Stones to Dave Mathews Band. Last night their hard work and road dog ethic built to the bands biggest and most prestigious gigs ever - a sold out show at Beacon Theater.

Arriving on stage, the six members walked on to a thunderous applause, Craig Finn would grab the mic and say "Hi! We are The Hold Steady, we are a rock and roll band," within seconds they would bust into "Constructive Summer" a tour de force anthem that had the band shooting out of cannon. From one foot stomping anthem to another, they would go right into "Massive Nights," "Hurricane J," "Sequestered in Memphis," "The Swish" and so on. Everyone in the room would forgo the fact that it was a Thursday and had work the next morning, they wanted to party and The Hold Steady made sure they partied. I have seen this band numerous times before and keep falling more and more in love with them after each gig. They play their hearts out as if each gig is going to be their last. This six piece line-up debuted in the spring after long time keyboardist Franz Nicolay had left the band last fall, I saw the new line-up in April at Bowery Ballroom and felt it was a different Hold Steady experience I was normally accustomed to, in the past it was Finn and Nicolay feeding off each other and jumping around on stage, while Nicolay would back Finn on vocals, that was absent in April. Last night it was back to brass tactics and just as thunderous as when Nicolay was with the band. Guitarist Tab Kubler is one of the most underrated guitarists in the business right now and the most underrated guitarist of a generation, his ability to shred like Slash and get as bluesy as Jeff Beck, Kubler is a sight to be seen and heard. The Beacon maybe a seated venue, but you would not know as everyone was on their feet and singing their hearts out along with Finn, it even got to a point where some fans began crowd surfing, this prestigious venue turned into one of the clubs and dives that made The Hold Steady so popular. After a near two hour set, with a three song encore that included "Hornets, Hornets," "Stuck Between Stations," and the epic show closer "Killer Parties," The Hold Steady retreated to the wings of the stage as heroes and left the crowd begging for more. This band has come along way from the dives of Brooklyn and the Beacon is now just a stepping stone as to where they are going from here.

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This post is the latest in our series of community coal ash profiles. It was written by Sierra Club Apprentice Flavia de la Fuente.

When a company named Making Money, Having Fun LLC (how's that for Orwellian?) applied for a permit for a commercial disposal facility to dump coal ash (along with waste oil and gas water) in eastern Oklahoma, they provided geographical maps and documents indicating that, pursuant to the Corporation Commission rules, there was no town of a population below 20,000 within three miles.

Except that's not true.

The town of Bokoshe (450 people) has been there since the 1800s. You can drive through it, you can stop at the post office, and you can graduate from the high school.

But for Making Money, Having Fun, there is no town and there are no rules. For eight years, they have been dumping waste oil and gas water and driving trucks of toxic coal fly ash (as many as 80 trucks in a single day), the product of a nearby coal-fired power plant run by AES, through the main street in town and dumping it in a pit a mere mile and a half from Bokoshe. Dozens of people in Bokoshe have died of cancer or are battling it right now, and children with asthma wake up in the middle of the night, struggling to breathe, afraid that they're going to die.

Diane Reece, an elementary school teacher in Bokoshe, protested the fly ash pit from the beginning.

"We didn't know anything about fly ash at the time," she said. "When they granted us a meeting downtown, it was a courtesy, because they were going to do it anyways. They haven't honored any of the promises they made, and they said it was harmless. And we believed them."

Tim Tanksley, another local Bokoshe resident, also recalls being told not to worry: "They just told everybody it was dirt, that you could put it on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

Choosing a site near Bokoshe was nothing if not predatory. Reece stated, "In small towns you have people who help each other. It's a beautiful place to live. It's a wonderful thing to live in a community to help each other. And I feel that they have chosen small towns because we are so trusting. We trusted that they wouldn't be dumping anything to harm us."

"They" is a broad term for the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission (lead state agency in charge of oil and gas water that issued the original permit), and the Department of Mines (lead agency in charge of reclamation).

To Reece and other Bokoshe residents, also complicit is Oklahoma's political leadership: the governor who appoints people to these various commissions, the local congressional representative, and the senators from Oklahoma, who in theory are charged with representing the interests of their constituents.

The ODEQ refuses to acknowledge that fugitive coal fly ash is impacting people and property outside the fence line. The Department of Mines refuses to acknowledge that the pit is leaking contaminated wastewater. And Oklahoma's political leadership refuses to acknowledge basic, incontrovertible science.

Tim Tanksley appealed directly to Senator James Inhofe and Representative Dan Boren to help, who in turn replied, "The fly ash is temporarily mounded while it is mixed with water to form slurry. Ultimately, the mine will be transformed into a pasture. Therefore, the fly ash mound is temporary and will disappear once the reclamation is complete."

Meanwhile, Senator Inhofe and Representative Boren are both helping the pit stay open.

According to Harlan Hentges, Oklahoman and attorney for Bokoshe residents, "Senator Inhofe is all over this thing. EPA stopped (the company) from dumping out there. After that happened, the Senator called EPA to find out when they could resume dumping in the pit. Representative Dan Boren did the same thing."

Hentges has learned to follow the money. "Those businesses pay a whole lot of money to do whatever the hell they want to do. They pay people to exploit the power that they have on their behalf. And you come up with all kinds of interesting ways to justify it. It's becoming really, really hard to justify in Bokoshe. What is wrong with this? What is so twisted here? Why is it so bad that we don't think you should dump fly ash into a pit?"

Bokoshe residents are fighting back, and founded B.E. Cause to protect their town, their health, and the future of their children. They've tussled with state agencies, with their elected officials, and even with other people in Bokoshe.

There's a younger generation that is fighting back as well: Diane Reece's class of sixth graders has taken the kind of initiative that reassures us that small towns are still America's moral compass.

Thanks to a federal grant program called "Learn and Serve America" there is structured time set aside for Reece's class (pictured below) to serve their community. Proposals for this year's program included a "Welcome to Bokoshe" sign and a bench downtown for the gossip group (it's a small town, after all).

But then three girls raised their hands and said, "We need to stop the fly ash." Reece asked the class how many people had asthma, and of the 17 students, 9 raised their hands.

Reece recalled, "That was my answer. They started telling me about what it's like to have asthma. I was listening to them tell me how their attacks made them feel like they were going to die."





"We're just getting started," said Reece, "my sixth graders are leading the cause. The other night at our parent-teacher conference, they got 25 signatures in an hours' time. And this type of stuff is important, because out here, not everybody has access to computers and the internet. Tonight at the football game, we're going to pass out flyers about fly ash."

Bokoshe may be a small town, but the residents have big hearts.

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