Collapse

Greenpeace warns of the danger faced by two ecosystems:

The Amazon

The "Zero Forest" bill (PL 6424/2005) currently before the Brazilian Congress would substantially weaken Brazil's Forest Code. Currently, privately owned land must maintain at least 80% of the original vegetation. Zero Forest would reduce that to 50%. (You can sign the petition against Zero Forest here.) Business interests are also attempting to remove protections for areas that have more stringent protections, areas like mountaintops and the rivers themselves. And business interests are trying to have the states instead of the federal government regulate deforestation. As the states make their income from taxing these businesses, the states have more of an incentive to be lax with deforestation regulations.

Deforestation would be emphysema to the "World's Lungs," destroying the most biodiverse region on the planet and releasing stored greenhouse gases. Important species, possibly including medicinal plants, have yet to be discovered. And the problem is more than a simple environmental one. Tribes native to the region depend on the forest, and 85% of slaves in Brazil are found in deforested regions of the Amazon.

The Bering Sea

The Bering's pollock fishery is in danger of collapse, losing 50% of its population in just one year. The population drop is so significant that seals and sea lions are washing up on Alaskan shores, dead from starvation. And again, the problems are more than environmental. Destroying the pollock fishery is obviously not in the long-term interest of the fishing industry or the Alaskan coastal towns that depend on it.

But there is no need for a tragedy of the commons scenario. The North Pacific Fisheries Management Council can set fishing limits. (You can write to the Council here.) However, the Council met last week and reduced the 2009 pollock catch limit by only 18.5%; Greenpeace denounced the reduction as a "half-measure," having urged a 55% reduction.

What You Can Do

Besides writing and petitioning through the links provided above, you can donate to Greenpeace here.

Pardon My French

Ah, it's that time of Olympiad. The time when a lame-duck president issues pardons with little political fallout. So who is and who isn't getting a pardon?

Donald Rumsfeld

After a bipartisan Senate report unanimously concluded that Rumsfeld and other Administration officials were directly responsible for abuses committed at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Amnesty International was afraid Bush would grant them a blanket pardon:

After eight years of defiling America's reputation and renouncing our founding principles, the Bush administration wants to jet off into the sunset without answering to the American public...One of our three main objectives during President-elect Obama's 100 days is to ensure an independent commission investigates abuses committed the U.S. government in its "war on terror". Pardoning key officials, or even worse, issuing a blanket pardon, would undermine this critical goal towards restoring our commitment to human rights.

But White House officials have said that such pardons are unnecessary; that would imply that what those officials did was wrong and illegal. You gotta love these guys.

Especially Keith Urbahn, a Rumsfeld spokesman. (Someone still likes Rumsfeld enough to work for him?) Said Urbahn of the Senate report, "It's regrettable that Senator Levin has decided to use the committee's time and taxpayer dollars to make unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation." Yeah, right, it was a political hit job. That's why all twelve of the Republicans on the committee went along with it.

Isaac Robert Toussie

Toussie was a real estate scammer who helped a hundred people illegally qualify for HUD-sponsored mortgages. His father donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee. And on Christmas Eve it was announced that he would be receiving a presidential pardon.

Presidential pardons, once granted, are irrevocable. But Toussie's pardon had not yet been executed. And due to popular opposition, President Bush directed the Pardon Attorney not to execute it.

Whither the Pendulum

I've argued before that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift, that the pendulum is swinging leftward, or whatever historiographical cliché you prefer. But ever since Jon Meachem wrote that the U.S. was inherently a center-right nation, I've been wondering if it were really true.

Don't get me wrong. Liberal/progressive bloggers immediately pushed back against this notion. And the Meachem article is hardly convincing:

The two Arthur Schlesingers, father and son, believed American history was
cyclical, with periods, as they saw it, of liberal action followed by
conservative reaction. There is much to commend this construct, though history
and politics, like so much else in life, do not lend themselves to easy
categorization.

History and politics do not lend themselves to easy categorization, you say? And yet you're perfectly comfortable categorizing the U.S. as just right of center?

Nonetheless, it got me thinking: Is the U.S. really entering a liberal era?

The Basic Argument

Main Idea: Conservatives screwed up: The economy is in shambles due to Republican-led deregulation and we're involved in two wars thanks to gung-ho neoconservatives. The Republican coalition is fracturing, while leftists are adopting a more united front.

The Demographic Argument

Main Idea: The McGovern coalition--students; minorities; and upper-middle-class, college-educated professionals (doctors and lawyers, as opposed to mid-level managers)--failed to elect a Democrat in 1972. But this section of the American populace has grown since '72, and this coalition can now be a winning one. Furthermore, elements of the coalition are now even more likely to vote Democratic due to the decreased salience of issues that favored Republicans, e.g. crime and high taxes.

Pause

Main Idea: But then Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss is re-elected in a runoff in Georgia, and a recent poll shows that "a plurality of voters (49 to 42 percent) are more concerned that the Democratic Congress will be too much of a rubber stamp than they are that Congress will prevent Obama from enacting the changes he thinks are needed." Said poll also concludes that "a large portion of the public is waiting to decide whether Obama is doing a good job." And how likely is it that Obama will save the economy, restore the Big Three to profitability, withdraw from a stable Iraq, secure Afghanistan, end global warming, and so on?

So?

The Schlesinger view is the correct one. Liberals are put in power due to the public's disgust with conservative excesses, liberals go too far, then the public puts conservatives in power, conservatives go too far, etc. Meachem may be right that the U.S. is more conservative than Europe, but it's also more liberal than Saudi Arabia. But who cares? That's not the point we're arguing. 'Liberal' and 'conservative' are relative terms; the context in which they are used is always relevant. And what we're discussing is not how the U.S. of today compares to the Europe of today but how the U.S. of today compares to the U.S. of years past.

The answer to that question is a difficult one. The U.S. could be entering a new liberal era, but I think that depends on the success of Obama's first term. If Obama makes significant headway against today's problems, or if he's able to paint failures as the fault of Republicans, it is probable that 2008 will be remembered as the liberals' 1980. The bottom line is that the (in-)significance of 2008 will probably not be known until at least 2012.