The Real GM Story is No Happy Meal

Published on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

The Happy Story of GM Crops

by Jim Goodman

Since the first commercial cultivation of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in 1996, Monsanto and the rest of the big six Biotech seed companies, (Pioneer/DuPont, Syngenta, Dow, BASF and Bayer) have become masters at the art of story telling.

Farmers, always looking for the next big technology fix, loved the stories; the promise of better yields, less chemicals needed for weed control, higher profits and of course, a solution to the elusive goal of feeding the world.

Governments, seeing biotechnology as a huge economic engine, embraced the technology. University research was shifted almost exclusively to biotech crops.

GM was the wave of the future, bankers encouraged planting GM crops to guarantee a "profitable harvest". Crop insurance premiums were lower for farmers planting GM. Everyone bought the story.

In a recent opinion piece in the Wisconsin State Journal former Secretary of Agriculture John Block touted the virtues of GM crops and credited them with producing higher yields, lower pesticide use and solving the ever growing problem of world hunger. Current Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack plugged GM at last weeks USDA Outlook Conference.

Problem is, the promises were just good stories. The believers are missing the truth.

Weeds have become resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide and insects became resistant to the toxins produced by their GM corn.

As GM was planted on more acres, overall pesticide use went up, not down.

A University of Kansas study found that GM crops actually had lower yields than their conventional counterparts.

Even as the problems of GM crops become more apparent, the cost of GM seed continues to rise. Many farmers are backing away from GM, but finding non-GM seed is difficult, considering Monsanto controls roughly 90% of the corn and soy genetics in the U.S.

With corn and soy well under their control, Monsanto now hopes to gain USDA approval for Roundup resistant alfalfa. A perennial crop, alfalfa is the fourth most widely grown crop in the U.S. and again, Monsanto sees profit. The contamination of non-GM and organic alfalfa, the potential for further reduction of bee populations, among other problems, seem of little consequence.

Feeding the world? GM will not do it, even former Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro admitted "The commercial industrial technologies that are used in agriculture today to feed the world... are not inherently sustainable."

Still, Monsanto bills itself as a leader in global sustainability, ignoring the fact that true sustainability cannot be achieved when your only driving goal is the next quarterly profit report.

The world stands a better chance of feeding itself by using and improving upon farming methods that have been relied upon for centuries. In Africa, for example, if indigenous crops, long adapted to their environment, were put forward as the solution to hunger, studies show that the population could have adequate food supplies and at times, cash income from sales of surplus crops.

So, why do so many continue to believe, to have faith in the story, when the evidence is against them?

When GM crops do not yield as promised?

When a USDA report shows that farmers actually loose income by planting GM crops?

When seed costs are unreasonably high as are the fertilizers and chemicals that are absolutely required to grow GM?

When consumers continue to reject GM foods citing concerns of their serious health risks?

When GM will not feed the world?

The GM story as told by the Biotech giants paints the future as a happy and prosperous place; farmers are profitable, everyone is well fed and the environment is protected.

The real GM story is not so happy, it is a story of market control, of environmental degradation, of deceived farmers and consumers.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc WI and an IATP Food and Society Fellow

'Volcker Rule' to prohibit commercial banks from certain risky trading activities Stalls in Senate

Published on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by The Wall Street Journal

'Volcker Rule' Stalls in Senate

by Damian Paletta

Key senators are expected to scrap President Barack Obama's proposal to prohibit commercial banks from certain risky trading activities, people familiar with the matter said, a setback for the administration's bid to limit the size and scope of the largest U.S. banks.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, left, with Mr. Obama last month. (Getty Images)

The proposal, dubbed the "Volcker rule" after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, would have essentially prevented any commercial bank with federally insured deposits from owning a division that makes speculative bets with its own capital.

But after resistance from lawmakers from both parties, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) and other legislators are expected to introduce a plan next week that would give regulators more discretion to limit and potentially ban risky trading at banks, especially if it poses a risk to the broader economy. The measure would stop short of banning such trading outright.

The Senate bill is expected to direct regulators to pay particular attention to "proprietary trading"-whereby a bank trades stocks, bonds or other financial instruments with its own money-which the White House wants to ban at commercial banks. Under the proposal, regulators would examine banks on a case-by-case basis and would be able to direct them to limit or halt certain activities they felt were a systemic risk. Such activities were banned under Depression-era laws requiring the separation of commercial and retail banking activities but those rules were rolled back in the 1990s.

Mr. Volcker, who has advised Mr. Obama on economic policy, has said allowing banks to make bets with capital subsidized by the federal government could pose such a risk. Mr. Volcker didn't return a message seeking comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Dodd said a final decision hasn't been made yet.

The White House introduced the Volcker rule in January as part of its broader proposal to overhaul financial regulations in the wake of the financial crisis, but that package is now being dialed back by lawmakers. As part of that broader plan, the White House wants to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to police mortgages and credit cards.

Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), also a member of the Senate Banking Committee, has opposed the agency, and Mr. Dodd is exploring whether a new consumer division could instead be created within the Treasury Department, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Dodd is negotiating a range of issues with Mr. Corker including how to address troubled financial companies and regulating financial derivatives. Several people close to the negotiations said both lawmakers are optimistic a broader deal could be reached. But Mr. Corker has raised reservations about the proposed "Volcker rule," saying it was introduced to satisfy populist anger against Wall Street and not because the White House thought it was good policy.

The White House proposal came two days after voters in Massachusetts elected Scott Brown to the Senate seat once held by Edward Kennedy.

But few people now expect the concept to be included in the financial-overhaul legislation, in large part because the White House hasn't spelled out to Congress exactly how a ban on proprietary trading would work, said people familiar with the process.

The provision in its original form, if enacted, could force companies such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to shed certain divisions or reorganize their business practices. It has won support from several former Treasury secretaries but triggered a violent reaction on Wall Street, helping send the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a three-day slide after its announcement.

White House and administration officials say they stand by the proposal as originally presented. There's still a chance lawmakers could add amendments later in the process.

"As an administration, we're as committed to the rule as the day the president announced it," White House senior advisor David Axelrod said, echoing a comment from the Treasury Department. "It was presented as a solution to address a problem that the president perceived. There's no diminution of concern about the problem" of proprietary trading by banks.

The modified language senators are considering is similar to a rule in financial-overhaul legislation passed by the House last year. Banks contend the language is unnecessary, in part because regulators already have discretion to stop banks from certain practices.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D., Pa.), a senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview that the new powers needed to be spelled out.

"We want to clearly delineate...this is what you should do,"' he said.

Bob Davis contributed to this article.

© 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

U.S. is Ranked #37 in Health Care in the World

In Case you missed the video: U.S. is Ranked #37 in Health Care in the World By Karen Harper February 24, 2010 "Examiner" -- - Among people living in the 30 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations, Americans rate their personal health around the median for the group despite having one of the highest GDPs per capita. Only 56% of Americans say they have confidence in the U.S. health care system according to a recent Gallup poll. The United States has the highest per-capita total health expenditures of any of the 30 countries yet Americans report only average levels of health. Except for the United States, the more money spent on health care in a nation translates to better health for the respondents. The World Health Organization ranks the United States at 37th in the world. We're number 37

The Real Truth About the Public Option: DNR - DOA

Published on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Do Not Resuscitate the ‘Public Option’

by Andy Coates

Like initiating CPR on a patient who was dead in the field and remained dead on arrival, the effort to resuscitate the “public option” is mistaken and futile.

Once upon a time, proponents of the “public plan option” sought a “Medicare-like” program that might enroll every other person in the nation and thus run private insurers out of business.

“A roadblock to reform” cried the insurance companies. In turn, nothing in the bills passed by the House and the Senate would erect a public insurer that could possibly influence the insurance market.

The House bill included a feeble government plan, to start in 2013, that would enroll perhaps 2 percent of the nation by 2019. The Senate bill simply nixed the idea altogether. Now the President, in his latest proposal, has also abandoned the "public option."

In reality the “public option” was never much more than a K-street phrase, a shadow-puppet, a political posture. All along proponents of adding a new government-sponsored insurer boasted “talking points” but never offered workable health reform.

But the insurance companies oppose the “public option” and that proves its virtue, its supporters exclaim.

Hello? Of course the insurers oppose it.

Why would the insurers want to yield even 2 percent of the market to a public plan (House bill) when they’ve been given the “option” (Senate bill) of keeping 100 percent of the market? Why would the insurance companies not fight for the whole pie when the White House let slip that it saw the “public option” as simply a bargaining chip in private dealmaking?

But there is something else here.

With its reliance on the magic of the marketplace, the “public option” is simply not a proposal for reform. In fact, it has already been tried, and failed: in Maine, a “public option” insurer known as DirigoChoice, was established in 2003. It has failed to enroll but a tiny percent of the uninsured, did nothing to reduce the costs of insurance or health care, nor did it reduced overall health spending, nor did disparities in care improve – and in the last year DirigoChoice has fatally tanked.

In the United States a corporate oligopoly of huge insurers, with near-monopoly control in most locales, dominate the market. A government insurer of any size would simply add yet another bureaucracy to the present byzantine insurance mess.

Does it really make any sense to think that a government plan could give the private insurance companies a run for their money – within the contemporary corporate marketplace – without draconian regulation upon the industry? Even with regulation, as former Cigna executive Wendell Potter explained at the PNHP annual meeting this year, insurance companies simply “flaunt regulations.”

The insurance market cannot be tricked into reforming itself. The health insurance company that wins at the marketplace avoids and jettisons sick and poor patients and enrolls the healthy and the wealthy – and a “public option” will not change this fact. The market that serves the private interests – profiteering at the expense of the sick – would continue to do so.

The proper name for this kind of “market magic” is the race to the bottom. Adding a public plan into the private mix can not and will not change the character of this cruel game.

Any successful “public option” insurance plan would wind up covering the sick and the poor. It would be designed to lose, not win, the market competition. It would not prove affordable or comprehensive. Worst of all, a highly successful “public plan option” could put our nation on a fast-track to permanent two-tiered health services, exacerbating deplorable disparities that plague us.

Regrettably, that the “public option” has been given attention at all is but a measure of how deeply our culture has surrendered to neoliberal ideology, the ideas popularized by Ronald Reagan. It is a lie that the market will always provide, most especially when it comes to health care. So why would some of our friends still seek to revive the false promise of the “public option”?

Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Political Science, identified the psychology at work. In a remarkably prescient essay written in late 2009, she compared health reformers in the United States to victims of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages identify with – and even defend – the hostage-takers.

We ought to reach out with sympathy to our friends who have fallen captive to Ronald Reagan ideology and say: Do not resuscitate the “public option.” It is time to let it go.

All along, adding a feeble public insurance plan to the insurance market has been but a very poor excuse to support “insurance reform” that will criminalize the uninsured, divert billions of tax dollars to subsidize unaffordable private insurance premiums and protect pharmaceutical industry super-profits.

Another world is still possible. It is called Medicare-for-all, expanded and improved.

Andrew D. Coates, MD is a leader of Physicians for a National Health Program and the grassroots coalition Single Payer New York. (An earlier version of this essay appeared at The Progressive Media Project in December.)

Vermont Senate Wants Entergy Nuclear Reactor Shut in 2012

Published on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by Reuters

Vermont Senate Wants Entergy Reactor Shut in 2012

by Scott DiSavino

NEW YORK - The Vermont Senate said on Wednesday it has voted to shut Entergy Corp's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant when its license expires in 2012, after a leak releasing radioactive tritium into the groundwater was discovered last month.

While the Obama administration advocates a nuclear revival to reduce dependency on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions, opponents of Vermont Yankee have used the leak to show Entergy is not operating the reactor safely and that it license should not be renewed.

Entergy applied with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2006 to renew the 40 year operating license for the plant, which began operations in 1972, for an additional 20 years.

"The effort to win a 20-year renewal of Vermont Yankee's operating license is far from over," Entergy said in a statement.

"We remain determined to prove our case to the legislature, state officials and the Vermont public."

If the vote is upheld, it would be the first time in more than 20 years that a state legislature has acted to shut down a reactor.

In 1989, Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California permanently shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant in Herald after a public referendum voted to shut it down due to reliability concerns.

The Vermont Senate vote shows the industry still faces major regulatory hurdles as it tries to swing into construction mode for the first time since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, which threatened the eastern United States with a nuclear meltdown.

Since 2007, the NRC has received applications to build 28 new reactors, which emit no greenhouse gases.

WHAT IS TRITIUM?

Tritium is a mildly radioactive isotope of hydrogen that occurs naturally in very small amounts in groundwater. It is also a byproduct of power production in nuclear plants. But the NRC said the leak reported at Vermont Yankee in January posed no immediate threat to public health and safety.

Entergy said there has been no tritium levels found in drinking water wells or the Connecticut River.

The 620 megawatt Vermont Yankee power plant, located near the Connecticut River in Vernon in Windham County, about 140 miles west-northwest of Boston, can power about 620,000 homes.

"The plant is a vital, safe and reliable source of clean power for Vermont and the rest of New England, and we will continue communicating to the public the substantial economic and environmental benefits of keeping the plant operating beyond 2012," Entergy said.

Tritium contamination, however, is not unique to Vermont Yankee.

Over the past few years, the NRC has investigated tritium releases at several reactors, including Entergy's Indian Point and FitzPatrick in New York and Exelon Corp's Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Braidwood in Illinois.

The 104 nuclear power reactors in the United States provide about 20 percent of the nation's electricity.

(Additional reporting by Chris Baltimore in Houston; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

© 2010 Reuters

Avatar: The Prequel Will 'Earth’s Last Stand' Sweep the 2013 Oscars?

Published on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by TomDispatch.com

Avatar: The Prequel

Will 'Earth’s Last Stand' Sweep the 2013 Oscars?

by Michael T. Klare

The anticipation may be building, but we'll all have to wait for the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7th to find out just how many Oscars the global box-office smash Avatar will receive. That 3-D sci-fi spectacle, directed by James Cameron, has garnered nine nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Director, and it's already overtaken Titanic, another Cameron global blockbuster, as the top money-maker in movie history. But there's an even bigger question absorbing Avatar's millions of fans: What will Cameron, who has already indicated that he's planning to write a novel based on Avatar, do for a screen encore? As it happens, I have a suggestion: skip the sequels on faraway Pandora's sister worlds, and do the prequel.

Admittedly, the movie I have in mind (set in a world that Avatar hints at) would lack the blue-skinned Na'vi people, but it would still feature Jake Scully, this time in his real body, on the most intriguing planet of all: Earth. And given a global audience that can't get enough of Cameron's work, how many wouldn't pay big bucks for a chance to take a Pandora-style, sensory-expanding guided tour of our own planet? It would be part of a harrowing tale of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and perennial conflict in the twilight years of humanity's decline. Think of it as Avatar: Earth's Last Stand.

Cameron offers many indications in Avatar that this is the logical direction for him to take. At a poignant moment before the climactic battle between the Na'vi and the remorseless humans begins, for instance, Scully, the renegade Marine turned native rebel, pleads for help from Eywa, the goddess who rules over Pandora: "See, the world we come from -- there's no green there -- they killed their Mother." At another point, Colonel Quaritch, the homicidal Marine commander played with gusto by Stephen Lang, refers to Scully's previous service with the First Marine Reconnaissance unit on Earth, highlighting his three combat tours in Venezuela. "That was some mean bush," he says. Then, speaking of his own combat record, Quaritch alludes to fierce fighting in Nigeria. For anyone familiar with the present competition for global energy resources, Venezuela and Nigeria stand out as major oil producers with a history of civil strife.

2144 in 3-D

Imagine them, then, on a future, energy-starved planet. In fact, I can easily picture such a future, so let me take one more step and offer myself to Cameron as a technical consultant on his prequel. Admittedly, I wouldn't be the person to write the film's plot or script -- I know my limits -- but when it comes to charting future resource wars, I think I could be useful. Drawing on Cameron's clues in Avatar and my own books, including Resource Wars, Blood and Oil, and Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, let me just sketch out the prequel scenario I envision:

It's the torrid summer of 2144, just a decade before Avatar begins. (That movie takes place in summer 2154, after a flight from Earth that, we're told, involves six continuous years of sleep, which helps us backdate Jake Scully's Venezuelan combat tours.) As it has been for decades, the world is at war, with competing power blocs fighting bitterly over a diminishing pool of vital resources.

Three great power centers dominate the global resource struggle, all located in the northern latitudes where the climate still remains tolerable and the land still receives sufficient rainfall to support agriculture. The first of these, in whose legions both Scully and Quaritch fight, is the North American Federation, founded after the United States, facing desertification in its southern half, invaded and absorbed Canada. The second, Greater China, incorporating northern China, the Korean peninsula, and eastern Siberia (seized from Russia in a series of wars), dominates what's left of Asia; the third, the North European Alliance, encompassing Germany, Russia (west of the Urals), and Scandinavia, relies heavily on Arctic resources. As in the world portrayed by George Orwell in 1984, these powers continually jockey for dominance in shifting alliances, while their armies face one another in the torrid, still relatively resource-rich parts of the planet. In this neo-Orwellian world, warfare and the constant pressure of resource competition are the only constants.

Thanks to global warming, the planet's tropical and subtropical regions, including large parts of Africa, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, as well as Mexico and the American Southwest, have become virtually uninhabitable. Many island nations and coastal areas, including much of Florida, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines, lie under water. Critical raw materials like oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, copper, and cobalt are perennially scarce. Starvation is a constant fear for those not affluent enough to pay for increasingly expensive genetically-modified crops and meat produced on corporate farms with multiple chemical inputs.

Large-scale industrial civilization still persists, but many once-industrialized areas have been abandoned, and what factories and transport systems remain are constantly constrained by limited energy supplies and the lack of steady flows of vital resources. Oil is particularly hard to come by, and so, in all three power blocs, its use is largely restricted to the military, security forces, emergency services, the largest of corporations, and the very rich. (If you want to get a sense of such a world, imagine Mel Gibson's 1979 movie Road Warrior on steroids.) Other sources of energy, including natural gas and uranium, are also in increasingly scant supply. Renewable sources, including wind and solar power, help to make up some, but not enough, of the difference, while a shortage of critical minerals -- copper, cobalt, tin, manganese, titanium -- limits the scale of many industrial undertakings.

For ordinary people -- and only somewhat less so for the elites of the planet's heavily militarized states -- survival is a constant struggle. Outside of the industrialized power centers, life involves a daily search for food, water, and energy of any sort, as well as whatever precious goods (gems, weapons, bits of technology) might be traded to get those basics. For the big corporations and their government sponsors, as they send the Scullys and Quadritches to the distant corners of the planet to enforce their will, the struggle is no less fierce for control of the world's few remaining deposits of oil, natural gas, coal, copper, and uranium.

In 2144, only five areas of the world still possess any significant reserves of oil and natural gas: Russia (and contiguous areas of the former Soviet Union), the Persian Gulf, West Africa (including Nigeria), the Orinoco basin of Venezuela, and the now long ice-free Arctic. Even these areas have been substantially depleted, giving the remaining deposits staggering value to whichever country or company controls them. If these are not quite as valuable as "unobtanium," the rare metal being plundered from Pandora and brought back to Earth, they are close enough to be thought of as "barely-obtanium."

Life (and Death) on a Depleted Planet

For the record, I'm being an optimist here for the sake of Avatar: Earth's Last Stand. Based on my own assessment of planetary energy resources, I doubt that any oil or natural gas worth drilling for will remain in 2144. But for narrative purposes, if such deposits are to be found anywhere almost a century and a half from now, the likely candidates are: the Persian Gulf area because it still possesses the world's largest combined reserves of oil and natural gas, and so probably will be the last to run out; Russia, Africa, and the Orinoco basin because they have to date been spared intensive exploitation by the major Western firms, and so still retain substantial recoverable reserves; and the Arctic, which will only become fully accessible to oil producers when global warming has melted the ice cap.

Given the tripartite global power structure of 2144, Russian oil and gas reserves will have been divided between the North European Alliance, controlling western Siberia and the Caucasus, and Greater China, garrisoning eastern Siberia and Central Asia. The Arctic will be a constant source of conflict among all three blocs, with periodic fighting breaking out concerning overlapping territorial claims in the region. That leaves the Persian Gulf, West Africa, and Venezuela -- the sites of constant warfare between the Na'vi of this planet and the various expeditionary forces sent out by the three big power blocs which, often in temporary alliances of convenience, will also be fighting each other.

Already, we can get a sense of what this might look like. Under its ultra-nationalist president Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has sought to distance itself from its traditional client, the United States, and bolstered its ties with Russia and China. As part of this effort, Venezuela has purchased billions of dollars worth of arms from Russia and forged a strategic energy alliance with China. Claiming evidence of a U.S. plan to invade his country, Chávez has also conducted sizeable self-defense maneuvers and strengthened the military's control over ports and other infrastructure.

Looking into the future, one can imagine a time, some decades distant, when Venezuela is a satellite of Greater China and its deposits of heavy oil -- the largest remaining on the planet -- are reserved for China's exclusive use. Under these circumstances, it is not hard to imagine a move by the North American Federation to oust the prevailing Venezuelan regime by launching an invasion on a remote stretch of coast and striking out for the capital, Caracas. The Venezuelans, backed up by Chinese expeditionary forces, might manage to halt the invasion, but fail to dislodge the North Americans, holed up in harsh patches of the countryside. Brutal fighting might follow -- the "mean bush" mentioned by Quaritch in Avatar. Jake Scully, sent back into this gruesome contest for his third deployment, is gravely wounded and barely survives the trek back to safety.

If Venezuela is still a peaceful land today, Nigeria is already conflict-ridden and certainly destined to be a major battlefield in the unending resource wars of a future planet. Possessing the largest pool of untapped oil and natural gas in Africa, it is already the site of a fierce competitive economic struggle involving the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union, all of which seek to exploit the nation's energy riches. Nigeria's oil and gas reserves were first developed by Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum (now BP) -- a legacy of the country's past as a British colony - but now American, Chinese, and European firms have acquired drilling rights to valuable hydrocarbon deposits. Russia, too, has entered the scene, promising to help build a natural gas pipeline from the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast for eventual shipment to Europe.

Nigeria is also a battlefield today. Disgruntled inhabitants of the Niger Delta area, where most of the country's oil is produced and few benefits are ever seen, have taken up arms in a struggle to receive a bigger share of the nation's oil revenues. Both the United States and China are competing to provide the Nigerian government with military aid to defeat the insurgents, hoping to strengthen their respective positions in the country's oil fields in the process.

Again, it's not much of a stretch to imagine a scenario in which, 134 years from now (or a lot sooner), Nigeria has fallen under the sway of Greater China or the North American Federation and Colonel Quaritch and his cohort are carrying out combat operations in the Delta's jungle regions, a setting not so unlike Pandora's, with obvious Cameron-esque possibilities.

Where else might Scully, Quaritch, and their buddies be sent to fight? As a start, don't assume that the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will simply end or that the United States will ever willingly withdraw its forces from a whole string of bases in the Persian Gulf area. As long as the United States obtains part of its oil from the region -- and the North American Federation might still be fighting to do so in 2144 -- U.S. forces are likely to remain. Given the historic enmities that divide the region and a widespread antipathy to the U.S. presence, don't be surprised if North American Federation forces are still in battle there deep into the twenty-second century.

Finally, the warming Arctic, not currently on the global conflict map, could also experience warfare as it attracts major oil and gas drilling operations. The region also houses some of the world's last remaining indigenous communities that still practice a traditional way of life, and which will undoubtedly face the sort of habitat-destroying invasions pictured in Avatar.

Still, as Cameron imagined, despite constant warfare, the North American Federation (like the other major power centers) will, by 2144, still find itself in desperate need of vital materials, no longer easily available on this planet. Economic conditions, even for privileged elites, will by then be deteriorating rapidly. It is in this context that the giant mining corporations might join in a fabulously expensive bid to use space travel to replenish the planet's resources, voyaging to distant Pandora to extract its precious supply of unobtanium, a miraculous new source of energy.

It's not that hard to imagine just such a future world if we continue on our present course toward ever greater resource consumption, increased carbon emissions, and the militarization of resource dependency. Can you doubt that the movie Cameron and I would make, Avatar: Earth's Last Stand, would be both gripping and spectacular? It would be an amazing, if tension-producing place to visit in 3-D. Here's the only catch: you wouldn't want to live there.

Copyright 2010 Michael T. Klare

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.

The GOP is betting America fails

For OpEdNews: Brent Budowsky - Writer

In the worst riverboat gamble in modern political history, the Republican Party is betting that America fails, a bad bet that hands Democrats the narrative to bring a blue comeback in 2010.

Republicans have so poorly positioned their party that they have a huge political interest in the jobless rate rising and the economy falling. Good news for America becomes bad news for Republicans.

The problem for Republicans, and their great weakness going into the 2010 elections, is that they are so dominated by right-wing factions, and so obsessed with President Barack Obama failing, they are locked into politics that only succeed if America fails.

Modern Republicanism is Reaganism in reverse. Reagan projected optimism. Republicans today project pessimism. Reagan believed in a big-tent GOP. Republicans today view moderation as the enemy. Ronald Reagan would never have allowed his Republican Party to place the big bet on America failing.

I talked on Monday with Lakshman Achuthan, the managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, which has a long history of correctly forecasting major economic turns based on his idea that the great battleship of the American economy moves upward and downward in powerful waves based on turns in the economic cycle.

Achuthan told me "we are now in the strongest economic recovery since the early 1980s that will continue through 2010." He calls this "the Rodney Dangerfield recovery" that he first predicted last spring and now believes is strongly underestimated. Achuthan believes the jobless numbers already peaked last October and will improve further before Election Day. The February jobless numbers will be distorted by the weather, but the March numbers, to be reported in early April, could show a significant jobs surge and begin a period of job growth that continues through Election Day.

The worst nightmare for Republicans is the "morning in America" scenario. They run extreme risks if they continue to obstruct positive change and job creation and are tarred as the "hope America fails" party while jobs are created and growth continues in the months going into Election Day.

President Obama and Democratic leaders should offer true bipartisanship, which means both parties make concessions of value to each other. But while extending the olive branch, Democrats under sustained partisan and personal attacks from a Republican Party in the iron grip of an extreme right wing should wield the whip in response.

Today many Republicans await every jobs number with the fear that a jobs surge that is great for America is bad for them. Democrats should run against the "hope America fails" wing of Republicanism and turn antipathy toward Washington against Republicans.

Democrats should run against the abuse of Senate rules that is a direct attack against majority vote in American elections and a direct attack against changes that Americans voted to enforce. Democrats should run against the hugely unpopular Supreme Court campaign finance decision that large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe would further corrupt the capital.

The winning narrative for Democrats attacks the party that hopes America fails, while they fight for policies to make America succeed by creating more jobs, lowering drug prices, ending insurance price-fixing and premium rip-offs and forcing Republicans to vote for the tough deficit commission they pretended to support and proceeded to oppose.

Brent Budowsky is a regular columnist on thehill.com. He served as Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, responsible for commerce and intelligence matters, including one (more...)