Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

By Askia Muhammad

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - To say that Black farmers are getting the run-around in Washington might be something of an understatement. Since 1997 Black farmers have been protesting racial discrimination in loans and access to other services from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In 1997 Timothy Pigford, a farmer from North Carolina and thousands of other farmers sued USDA claiming they had for years been denied government loans and other assistance that routinely went to Whites. The government settled that lawsuit in 1999 and has paid almost 16,000 claims. But problems persist.

There are at least two groups of unhappy farmers, late filers who were a part of legislation enacted last year, and then there is the “late-late group,” according to an aide to a Congressional Black Caucus member who authored last year’s bill. In addition, there are another 9,000 farmers who also want to be compensated for racist treatment at the hands of federal authorities.

For his part, President Barack Obama is proposing that the government provide $1.25 billion to settle the discrimination claims. The White House said the money would be included in the president’s 2010 budget request unveiled May 7.

Although the budget amount is not yet written in stone, the CBC source said, some estimates of the cost of settling all the justified claims, run from $2.7 billion to as much as $4 billion.

After Black farmers rallied to protest on Capitol Hill in late April, the CBC expressed its own frustration over recent court filings by the Justice Department that could severely limit compensation. The Justice Department suggested the Obama administration may want to cap the total compensation at $100 million—about 2.5 percent of the claims.

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Forget the loss of investigative journalism. The passive American public is the biggest threat to democracy.

By David Sirota

Without a bailout, newspapers will lay off staff, fewer journalists will report important stories, there will be no Fourth Estate check on state and corporate power, and the country will suffer. So goes the pro-democracy case for government and/or altruistic investors to save the newspaper industry with an infusion of cash.

Except, amid the debate about such a bailout, it seems government and investors are already subsidizing the industry with in-kind contributions of damning honesty. These outbursts of candor are so brazen and self-explanatory as to require almost zero reportorial resources for blockbuster scoops.

It started in January, when it seemed America would need enterprising journalists to find out whether President Obama’s Wall Street-connected economic team was focused on helping average Americans, or on protecting the super-wealthy speculator class.

Typically, newspapers have to go all Woodward and Bernstein to answer such questions of influence and loyalties. They have to circumvent diversionary press-secretary spin, dig up documents and ferret out leaks — and all of that takes money they increasingly do not have.

But then Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner came right out and said, “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.” As Bloomberg News correctly noted, the White House was open about its primary “goal of preserving the private banking system.” Motives admitted, objectives acknowledged, no expensive investigative reporting necessary.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Lee Iacocca, the car executive credited with saving Chrysler from bankruptcy in the 1980s, is to lose a big chunk of his pension and a guaranteed life-long company car due to the U.S. automaker’s bankruptcy filing two decades later.

Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli told a U.S. bankruptcy court on Thursday that Iacocca’s pension would be among the obligations Chrysler will no longer have to pay if it gets bankruptcy court approval to sell itself to a “New Chrysler” to be owned by its union, the U.S. and Canadian governments and Fiat SpA (FIA.MI).

Iacocca, the storied former chairman and CEO who revived Chrysler in the 1980s and appeared in car commercials, has participated in a supplemental executive retirement plan that was comprised of non-IRS qualified pension funds and is subject to bankruptcy.

The claim is unsecured, and typically would be paid after secured creditors in a bankruptcy, but even secured creditors are not expected to get full recovery in a Chrysler bankruptcy that will see hundreds of dealerships shuttered and plants closed.

Chrysler has also written to former executives saying that as a result of its April 30 bankruptcy filing it will stop a program that furnished company cars to former executives and directors.

Iacocca, famous for the phrase “If you can find a better car, buy it,” and other senior executives who were part of the program are being asked to return their cars to a Chrysler marshalling center or arrange to pay for them, according to the document.

Chrysler said it regretted the action “in light of the many contributions these individuals have made to Chrysler over the years” and that the “New Chrysler” does not expect to reinstate the car program.

(Additional reporting by Tom Hals and David Bailey, Editing by Ian Geoghegan.)

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A newly released report about marijuana potency undermines previous claims by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) that the drug’s potency has hit record highs.

In May, the media ran wild with stories of highly potent pot sweeping the nation, as the ONDCP announced that their testing showed average marijuana potency had topped 10 percent THC-level for the first time ever. THC is the active ingredient in marijuana.

“According to the latest data on marijuana samples analyzed to date, the average amount of THC in seized samples has reached a new high of 10.1 percent,” reads the announcement by Gil Kerlikowske, the Drug Czar.

But the full report is now available and it shows that the 10-percent bar is only crossed by throwing hash into the equation. Without hash, the average potency was 8.52 percent. The average potency of hash was 20.76 percent.

The Marijuana Policy Project obtained the full report, which is produced by the Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi.

Connoisseurs would enjoy reading the whole thing, which is available here, as it breaks seizures and potency-measurement into “Buds,” “Kilobricks,” “Loose leaf,” “Loose other,” “Thai Sticks” and other categories.

There is also debate over whether there is actually a problem with higher-potency marijuana, with advocates arguing that stronger pot means that users end up smoking less for the same effect, thus sparing their lungs.

If you find anything else noteworthy in the full report, let me know at ryan@huffingtonpost.com.

Read the report here (PDF).

Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

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Pharmaceutical giant Aventis must pay more than 95 million dollars in an out-of-court settlement, after overcharging US and local health agencies for medications destined for indigent patients, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

“We will continue to ensure that programs for the most vulnerable portions of our population do not pay any more for pharmaceutical products than they should under the law,” Tony West, an assistant attorney general at the US Justice Department said in a statement announcing the settlement.

Aventis Pharmaceutical Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sanofi-Aventis, acknowledged that it violated the False Claims Act by misreporting drug prices for patients in the Medicaid Drug Rebate program for poor patients.

Under the program, Aventis was required to report to Medicaid the lowest price that it charged commercial customers, and pay quarterly rebates to the states for their Medicaid patients, based on those reported prices.

But Aventis deliberately misquoted the prices, underpaying rebates to Medicaid and overcharging some public health agencies for the medications.

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David Sirota

I appeared on CNN this weekend to debate right-wing gasbag Chris Plante about the ongoing debate over torture, Gitmo, detainees and President Obama’s effort to curtail the Bush administration’s most egregious legal transgressions. You can watch the debate here – it’s about the most heated television debate I’ve ever taken part in.

As you’ll see, Plante forwards former Vice President Dick Cheney’s most tired, most discredited lies about torture supposedly saving “thousands of lives” – and when confronted with hard reporting exposing Cheney’s dishonesty, Plante pulls the attack the messenger routine, saying you basically can’t believe anything you read in any newspaper.

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By Carl Hiaasen | The Miami Herald

President Obama’s promise to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba has hit a snag because he hasn’t figured out what to do with the 240 detainees.

Some Democratic and Republican senators — and even FBI officials — say it’s risky to bring terror suspects to the United States and lock them up here.

Apparently even the scrawniest Taliban is so cunning and strong that he’ll be able to break out of our toughest maximum-security prisons — prisons that nobody ever escapes from, except in the movies.

The argument that there’s no place secure enough to hold these guys is astounding, considering the number of vicious maniacs and murderous psychos who are currently behind bars in the United States.

No other country incarcerates more people, so we’ve become pretty darn efficient at designing prisons. The feds have a “supermax” facility in Florence, Colo., from which a cockroach couldn’t escape, and there are others.

Even budget-strapped states like Florida know how to ice the bad guys. Here, the most volatile criminals are housed in garden spots such as the Union Correctional or the Florida State Prison in sunny Raiford.

According to the state Department of Corrections, exactly zero prisoners escaped from those facilities – or any other high-security prisons – last year. A few knuckleheads snuck away from work camps and road gangs, but almost all were quickly recaptured.

It’s a safe bet that terror suspects brought to this country wouldn’t be assigned to spear litter in the median of I-95. They would more sensibly be incarcerated 24/7 in the same wing with the lifers – killers, Mafia bosses, street-gang leaders.

(Read the article)

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The credit card reform bill signed into law by the president on Friday won’t just put a stop to several unfair practices of the credit card industry — it also targets misleading advertisements for phony “free” credit reports.

The “free credit report” advertised non-stop on cable television, it bears repeating, isn’t free at all. The law calls for the Federal Trade Commission to issue new rules that will force free credit report advertisers to inform consumers that the only place for a free credit report is AnnualCreditReport.com.

Television and radio ads will also be required to include a pretty deflating statement: “This is not the free credit report provided for by Federal law.”

It’s hard to see how the FreeCreditReport.com’s Renaissance Fair rocker will fit that one into his rhymes about pointy slippers and green wool tights.

Under the Bush administration, the FTC repeatedly fined the folks behind freecreditreport.com for deceptive advertising, since you only get the “free” report after enrolling in a $15-a-month credit monitoring program. But the fines amounted to mere wrist-slaps.

The new rule is good news for consumer advocates.

“For too long, FreeCreditReport.com has taken advantage of a weak consent decree negotiated by the Bush FTC that has let it confuse consumers into buying its over-priced, unneeded subscription credit monitoring product that isn’t free,” wrote U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s Ed Mierzwinski in an email to the Huffington Post. “Consumers have wasted millions buying a service that doesn’t prevent identity theft and doesn’t raise your credit score, sold by one of the companies whose sloppy practices make identity theft easy and keeping your credit score accurate hard.”

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by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

A Blue Cross building in North Carolina. The health insurance company is running inaccurate television ads warning people against the prospect of a public health care option. (Photo: Bill Warren)

The boys running the show at Blue Cross in North Carolina are running scared. They’re worried that President Obama is going to treat them like autoworkers and make them actually compete in the market. The Blue Cross boys think that they belong in the same league as the Wall Street bankers and should just be allowed to collect their multi-million-dollar salaries without being forced to worry about things like competition.

The basic story is that Blue Cross of North Carolina decided to jump the gun on President Obama and Congress and start running television ads telling people how awful a public health care plan would be. According to the ads, people enrolled in the public health care plan wouldn’t have a choice of doctors, would face long waiting periods for appointments and procedures and would not even be able to get a clerk to answer questions on billing.

That sounds pretty awful, but if it were true, you have to wonder why Blue Cross of North Carolina is so worried. After all, President Obama is not proposing that anyone would be forced to join a public plan. He just proposed that people have the option to buy into a public plan. Is Blue Cross of North Carolina really that terrified that it will be unable to compete with a public plan that doesn’t let patients choose their doctor, subjects them to long waits and doesn’t answer questions about billing?

Of course, if the ads being planned by Blue Cross of North Carolina were accurate, then it would not be concerned about a public plan. The reason that Blue Cross of North Carolina is running the ads is that it knows the ads are not true. There is no reason to think that a public plan will offer less choice, require longer waits or provide poorer service than a private plan, like Blue Cross of North Carolina. And there are reasons for believing that a public plan might cost considerably less.

(Read the article)

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By Scott Horton

U.W. Clemon, formerly Alabama’s most senior federal judge, has written a scorching letter to Attorney General Eric Holder itemizing gross misconduct by federal prosecutors involved in the Siegelman case and demanding that the Justice Department open a full investigation into the matter. “The 2004 prosecution of Mr. Siegelman in the Northern District of Alabama was the most unfounded criminal case over which I presided in my entire judicial career,” he writes. “In my judgment, his prosecution was completely without legal merit; and it could not have been accomplished without the approval of the Department of Justice.” Clemon goes on to note that prosecutors engaged in judicial forum shopping, attempted to poison the jury pool, and filed and pressed bogus charges.

Holder has declined to release the full text of the letter, but it was quoted at length in an article by attorney-journalist Andrew Krieg at the Huffington Post. Clemon, who retired from the bench at the beginning of the year in order to return to the practice of law, issued the letter more than a year after handing down a decision in United States v. White, which I discussed in “Corruption in a U.S. Attorney’s Office.” Judge Clemon found “disturbing evidence” suggesting that prosecutors had attempted inappropriately to pressure a witness to give false evidence against Siegelman. Notwithstanding these startling conclusions, documented in a published court opinion, it appears that the Justice Department took no steps to investigate the allegations of serious misconduct.

In recent weeks, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed five of seven counts of the Siegelman conviction in an opinion issued by three Republican judges. The case was referred back to a fourth Republican judge, Mark E. Fuller, for re-sentencing. The ruling prompted further cries for a reexamination of the case, as 75 former attorneys general from 40 states, both Democrats and Republicans, wrote Holder noting gross irregularities in the case and improper conduct by prosecutors who secured the conviction.

In the last week, a number of serious allegations have resurfaced concerning Judge Fuller, who came to preside over the criminal charges against Siegelman following a series of unusual maneuvers by federal prosecutors highlighted in Clemon’s letter to Holder. The Siegelman case came into Fuller’s court just as a series of hard-hitting accusations of judicial misconduct were filed with the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section (“PIN”). PIN, whose leaders are now themselves the targets of a special prosecutor’s investigation, led the prosecution of the Siegelman case. In the last week, Missouri attorney Paul Benton Weeks, whose affidavit making charges against Fuller was first secured and published here, has spoken publicly about the matter for the first time and has provided considerable further detail to his accusations. Weeks stated:

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Bringing Agriculture Back to U.S. Foreign Policy

Catherine Bertini and Dan Glickman

CATHERINE BERTINI was Executive Director of the UN World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. DAN GLICKMAN was U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1995 to 2001. They are Co-Chairs of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Global Agricultural Development Project, from whose final report this essay is drawn. The project’s full report is available online at www.thechicagocouncil.org/globalagdevelopment.

It is not easy for Americans to understand the starvation that afflicts much of the developing world. Families in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia spend up to 80 percent of their incomes on food; for the average U.S. household, that would mean an annual grocery bill of $40,000. Yes, there are hungry Americans in the millions, and the U.S. food-stamp program is operating at record levels. But hunger in the United States does not put tens of thousands of infants into hospitals and require them to be hooked up to feeding tubes. Nor does it lead to stunting, wasting, and debilitating forms of malnutrition, such as kwashiorkor and marasmus.

Yet even if Americans strain to comprehend the depth of hunger that plagues much of Africa and Asia, they do care about it. They know that chronic hunger among Afghans, Congolese, or North Koreans can pose a threat to their national security. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center have consistently revealed that Americans want to make ending hunger and poverty a priority for U.S. foreign policy. A recent survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that the American public feels aid to poor farmers overseas should play a more prominent role than any other form of U.S. development assistance.

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Donna Smith on Bill Moyers Journal

Welcome to the JOURNAL. Health care reform. It’s the talk of the town – if the town is Washington, D.C. But some possible reforms aren’t being talked about at all. Not officially, that is.

The White House and Congress have kept the lid on one of the most controversial but popular options, known as single-payer. It’s a story the mainstream press has largely ignored and that’s why we are covering it in this broadcast.

You don’t expect to see these people demonstrating in our nation’s capitol. You’ll most likely encounter them in the examining room, the operating theater, the clinic or the laboratory.

They’re doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, unaccustomed to making themselves heard in the streets.

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The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) today released its position paper on Genetically Modified foods stating that “GM foods pose a serious health risk” and calling for a moratorium on GM foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes “there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects” and that “GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health.”

The AAEM calls for:

• A moratorium on GM food, implementation of immediate long term safety testing and labeling of GM food.
• Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community and the public to avoid GM foods.
• Physicians to consider the role of GM foods in their patients’ disease processes.
• More independent long term scientific studies to begin gathering data to investigate the role of GM foods on human health.

“Multiple animal studies have shown that GM foods cause damage to various organ systems in the body. With this mounting evidence, it is imperative to have a moratorium on GM foods for the safety of our patients’ and the public’s health,” said Dr. Amy Dean, PR chair and Board Member of AAEM.

“Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions,” said Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, President of AAEM. “The most common foods in North America which are consumed that are GMO are corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil.”

The AAEM’s position paper on Genetically Modified foods can be found at http://www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html .

AAEM is an international association of physicians and other professionals dedicated to addressing the clinical aspects of environmental health. More information is available at www.aaemonline.org .

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You have never before seen — nor will you ever see again — FBI director Robert Mueller so thoroughly humbled in a discussion about drug policy before the United States Congress.

In this instance, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) gets Mueller to admit that marijuana has never killed anybody, then smashes into tiny bits the decades-old “gateway drug” argument with a unique analogy of milk and bourbon.

This video is from CNN, broadcast May 20.

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By Rob Kall

Lately, we’re having more conversations about corporations whose behaviors have been outrageous, shameful, even criminal. These conversations sometimes lead to people saying this or that company is the worst, the most evil, the most murderous, the most corrupt or corrupting, the most destructive, most exploitive.

Some of the companies often listed include AIG, Blackwater, Diebold, Dow, Enron, Exxon, Fox/Newscorp, Haliburton, Monsanto, Walmart, and then there are whole industries– the Military industrial complex, big pharma, big agra, health insurers, porn, anti-net neutrality giants, the RIAA music industry fighting downloading, coal burning energy companies, privacy invading, spying telecoms, auto companies building gas-hog pollution machines, corpstream mainstream media selling corporate and government messages,  chemical or livestock polluters, oil spillers.

The never-ending evil empire by geraintwn

Then there are the enablers– globalism and its manifestations– the World Bank, IMF, WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA and those who endorse and promote them, saying they are the only way. The IMF has been known to demand that third world countries privatize their water supply, for example, and Naomi Klein, in her classic book, Shock Doctrine, has documented how these orgs work with the worst corporations to destroy democracy and destroy economies.

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by Rick Reyes

Editor’s Note from The Nation: The following commentary is based on an interview by Z.P. Heller, editorial director of Brave New Films.

I was on liberty in Australia, dancing at a club I can’t remember sometime around midnight, when it happened. The music shut off and an announcement came on: “America is under attack. Head back to your ships.” This was the worst–the impossible. This was September 11, 2001.

Back at my ship, ambulance sirens blared. Hundreds of Marines stood on deck, anxiously awaiting word. Someone said the Pentagon had been attacked. My platoon sergeant stood up and delivered a fiery speech filled with “No one [expletive] with America!” and “We’re going to kick some ass!” Later that night, the same sergeant turned to me asked me if I was ready.

Without giving it a second thought, I replied, “This is what I joined for.”

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, as I recalled those words testifying before Senator John Kerry and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I sat where a young Kerry was once seated as he awoke the nation to the grim realities of war in Vietnam. I explained to the committee that I always desired to serve my country, ensure basic freedoms and fight for justice and the American way. This had been my dream since childhood, a way to honor my Mexican immigrant parents who worked tirelessly to give my family a better life, a way out of an East Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by gang violence. Yet what I witnessed and experienced during a seven-month deployment in Afghanistan followed by another in Iraq has forever shattered this once noble ambition.

As an infantry rifleman in the Marines Corps, I saw so much of these wars through nightly patrols. We were trained to approach a point of interest on foot, coordinating with translators whose sole vested interest in supplying us intelligence was to earn money and aid. We would gather information that often proved faulty, and question locals to the point we felt comfortable conducting a raid. After receiving an order, we would ransack homes, destroying windows and doors, chairs and tables, families and lives–detaining and arresting anyone who seemed suspicious. The problem, of course, was that it was impossible to distinguish militant Taliban members or Al Qaeda from innocent civilians. Everyone became a suspect.

In one instance, my squad leader gave me orders to pursue possible terrorists leaving the scene in which we had established a perimeter. My four-man fire team and I followed these suspects undetected for about 100 yards along an exposed ravine. When we were four feet from them, I drew my M-16 and pointed it directly at their faces, yelling, “Get down on the ground!” We beat them in search of nonexistent weapons, breaking limbs in the process. Later that day, I learned these men were innocent. Another time, my squad and I detained, beat and nearly killed a man, only to realize he was merely trying to deliver milk to his children. These raids compelled me to tell Congress we have been chasing ghosts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Read the article)

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by Sarah Simpson

It was April 18 — a warm and sunny day, weather completely unlike we had seen for some time.

I must confess, I didn’t have a chance to buy those not-so-fancy farming overalls like I had hoped. But, I did manage to plant my grains — inch by inch, (or thereabouts) crooked row by crooked row.

Red Fife, a hard wheat variety, emmer and hulless oats made up my crop — and by crop I mean whatever I could jam into my 200-square foot plot, which, incidentally, feels a whole lot bigger when you have to pull the weeds out.

The day began with a short session with Metchosin’s Tom Henry, the editor of Small Farm Canada, and Mike Doehnel, a presenter of backyard grains workshops, and a guy well known for producing his own beer from seeds through to suds.

It took a couple hours in total, to get the plot primed and those little seeds into the ground and now what’s left is to wait — and ultimately see if I’ve got any kind of green thumb at all.

And while my grains percolate close to home, I’ve decided to turn my attention to the bigger picture.

It’s been more than 10 years since agribusiness giant Monsanto applied to both the U.S. and Canadian governments for approval to grow commercial yields of their genetically modified (GM) products.

The GM seeds were engineered to resist glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup®.

Monsanto claims that with these seeds a farmer can spray the herbicide over a planted field, kill all the weeds growing there, but not hurt the crop — as long as Monsanto seeds were used.

While it seems like an easy solution to their weed problems, some farmers say all it has done is created havoc throughout the agricultural community, forcing them to buy Monsanto seed every year and use Monsanto herbicides.

(Read the article)

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Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director of the Campaign for America’s Future

A crisis that demands fundamental change. A president with a mandate to drive it. A Congress, controlled by Democrats, ready to act. Now comes the hard part – actually getting something real done.

These are salad days for Democratic lobbyists, because deep pocket interests – health insurance companies, Big Pharma, oil and gas and coal companies, the utilities and, of course, the banks – are buying them up to help harness the gale winds of change. Get ready to be dazzled – the strategies employed will reflect the imagination of Washington’s most clever operators.

For example, the health care lobby has employed one basic theme in trying to stop health care: scare the hell out of Americans by decrying a “government takeover” of health care. But in the age of Obama, they want to be seen as part of the solution, not simply part of the problem.

So last week, the leading health care trade associations – -the lobbies for insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, plus a union – stood with the president to pledge dramatically to “do our part” to reduce the rate of soaring health care costs by 1.5% a year over the next decade, a promise that if fulfilled would save some $2 trillion from the cost of care. Not surprisingly, the president – eager to show that his efforts to give everyone a seat at the table were bearing fruit – was happy to hail that promise.

The lobbies got national coverage that their clients were for reform and would make a real contribution to it. This bolstered their argument that while regulation might be in order, we don’t need a public plan like Medicare to provide a choice for businesses and individuals. Give us time to fulfill our promises (and for this reform moment to pass), they argue. If we fail, then consider a public plan (when the president may be less popular and the Congress more conservative). Word was Senator Grassley, a Republican Senator actually looking for bipartisan accord, thought that the argument made a lot of sense.

Outside the photo op, however, the reality was very different. A new report released today by Health Care for America Now, a leading citizens’ coalition pushing for comprehensive health care reform, put the industry claims in sharp relief.

(Read the article)

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by Tom Schueneman

This advice doesn’t come from me personally, I am only passing it on from a lead official within the German Emissions Trading Authority, the American counterpart of which is still a gleam in the eyes of Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, and supporters of their proposed American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 now slowly taking shape in Congress.

He made clear that his advice comes from experience, expressing the hope that the Americans, who need to get up to speed quickly, could learn from the German’s first stumbles initiating their own cap and trade program, as was Germany’s first-round of emissions trading (Germany’s first round of trading, the “learning by doing phase”, lasted from 2005 to 2007. The second round of trading, the “stabilization and refinement phase” is in place until 2012.)

The advice? Beware the lobbyists and the excessive pressure they exert on the process.

“Early cap and trade [proposals] receive enormous lobby’” Dr. Enno Harders told our international group of journalists and bloggers earlier this month while visiting the offices of the German Trading Authority. Dr. Harders emphasized the need for legislators to exercise leadership and steel themselves with the political will to “resist the excessive lobby pressure that makes initial cap and trade ineffective.”

The concerns expressed by the more experienced Germans follow closely with the concerns of the “Green Big Guns” outlined yesterday in David Levitan’s excellent post.

And it is a well-placed concern. A recent report in the Guardian shows a 50% increase in lobbying efforts from the oil, gas, and coal in the first three months of this year, spending up to $45 million to pressure lawmakers to shut down support for president Obama’s efforts to enact clean energy and climate legislation. “The pressure is enourmous,” says environmental reporter Suzanne Goldenberg, from an advertising barage to money funneled into the coffers of key legislatures, the heat, as it were, is on.

Though Goldenberg reports that supporters of the Waxman-Markey bill are spending more money than ever before to counter this pressure, it is but a “drop in the bucket” in comparison with the resources available to the mamoth fossil energy industry.

The whole world is watching the process unfold and fear that America will fail once again to take a leadership role in building a new, low carbon energy economy.

(Read the article)

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