Instead of a rant today, I just have a few things for people to read and think about. Food for thought.
Why no investigation of Sept. 11th?
I guess it isn't just Arabs and Muslims who are terrorists.
In The Northwest: Ashcroft's power grab brings Joe McCarthy to mind
Wednesday, May 1, 2002
By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
During times when Marxist rulers marked May Day by parading followers and showing state power, the United States countered with an observance called Law Day.
Celebration of our open society this year is, however, muted by Attorney General John Ashcroft's multipronged effort to restrict individual rights and seal off information.
Sixty years after Japanese Americans were marched down Eagledale Dock on Bainbridge Island en route to internment camps, America is again seeing detention without trial and secret deportation proceedings.
So what, you say.
Why should the rest of us worry if people with expired visas get shipped back to Somalia? Or if President Bush shuts down release of presidential records? Or if the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is, for the first time, given the power to classify documents as "secret?"
Why? Because history shows unchecked government power is used to victimize Americans of unquestioned loyalty. One of the Japanese American detainees shipped off as a boy today is U.S. secretary of transportation, a key post in the war on terrorism. Another, a World War II hero, is a senior U.S. senator.
Administrations of both parties lower the curtain of "national security" to conceal excesses and missteps. The head of Richard Nixon's "White House Plumbers," Egil Krogh, today practices law in Seattle and delivers periodic lectures on the abuse of executive power.
Having jailed 1,500 Muslims and Arabs after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Ashcroft Justice Department has launched a drive to deport large numbers of those with questionable immigration status.
In a country built on the Bill of Rights, an unholy trinity of rules has been decreed: "no visitors, no family, no press."
A man in Michigan named Rabih Haddad, who ran a charity alleged to have terrorist links, was detained for overstaying his visa. Barred from his deportation hearing, Detroit media outlets sued to gain access.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds last month ruled such cases are "historically open." She argued that Americans' feelings of security are enhanced by an accountable, responsible government.
"It is important," Edmunds wrote, "for the public -- particularly individuals who feel that they are being targeted by the government as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 -- to know that even during these sensitive times the government is adhering to immigration procedures and respecting individuals' rights.
"Openness is necessary for the public to maintain confidence in the value and soundness of the government's actions, as secrecy only breeds suspicion as to why the government is proceeding against Haddad and aliens like him."
Beyond his detentions, Ashcroft is grabbing powers closer to where we live and work. Examples:
1. States rights are getting usurped. Ashcroft announced the Justice Department would prosecute Oregon doctors who prescribed drugs for patients wishing to end their lives under the state's "death with dignity law." The law was twice approved by Oregon voters.
U.S. District Judge Robert Jones blocked him, finding that the AG had "evidently sought to stifle an ongoing 'earnest and profound debate' in the various states."
2. Power has been centralized. Ashcroft has delivered the Justice Department into the hands of a cadre of top political appointees, repeatedly rejecting advice from local U.S. attorneys and his own professional staff.
"It's hard to get the balanced judgment needed when you sweep the career guys off to one side," noted Seattle lawyer Richard Ford.
With the specter of domestic terrorism and President Bush's sky-high poll numbers, few in Congress have dared criticize Ashcroft's assumption of powers to snoop and detain.
Even polite questions produced an outburst out of Ashcroft that could have come out of Joe McCarthy in witch hunts of the 1950s. "Your tactics only aid terrorists -- for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," he told a hearing.
Ugly stuff. One of the few standing up to it was Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "Who should be watching the watchers?" she asked Ashcroft.
He sneered at her, saying: "You remind me of a spate of cartoons that has appeared in the last week, and it's generally a kid sitting on Santa's knee and Santa saying, 'I know when you've been sleeping, I know when you've been awake, I know when you've been bad or good -- and the kid looks up and says, 'Who are you, John Ashcroft'?"
The AG's handlers thought it hilarious, but Cantwell quietly observed: "I'm not sure everybody in America is laughing at that."
One person not laughing is U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, who ruled yesterday that the Justice Department illegally held a Jordanian college student to get evidence.
"If the government has a probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime, it may arrest that person," Scheindlin wrote. "But since 1789, no Congress has granted the government the authority to imprison an innocent person in order to guarantee that he will testify before a grand jury conducting a criminal investigation."
Ashcroft dismissed Scheindlin's opinion as "an anomaly." He should read it as a message on the rule of law.
P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com
The Ethanol Enigma
David Morris,
AlterNet April 25, 2002
Ethanol is the homegrown, renewable fuel both conservatives and liberals love to hate. They might change their minds if they better understood its remarkable history.
Before the Civil War ethanol, derived from corn or molasses, was one of the nation's best-selling chemicals. It was used primarily as an industrial solvent and illuminant.
To finance the war, President Lincoln imposed a Spirits Tax of $2.08 a gallon. Ethanol had to pay the tax because it is liquor, although at 200 proof it makes for a very potent drink. Other poisonous illuminants, like the newly introduced kerosene, were taxed 10 cents a gallon.
The Spirits Tax wasn't lifted until 1906, after the oil trust was formed and the automobile industry was born. Nevertheless, ethanol made a modest comeback. By the end of World War I ethanol production had returned to pre-Civil War levels.
Then, in 1919 disaster struck again, this time in the form of the 18th Amendment. Prohibition didn't actually prohibit the manufacture of fuel ethanol, but the Treasury Department issued very few production permits for fear that the ethanol would be diverted into the illegal alcohol market. To this day, the ethanol we put in our gas tanks bears a legacy from that era. Just before it leaves the refinery, ethanol must be poisoned to make it undrinkable.
In the early 1920s, ethanol suffered still another setback. Oil and car companies desperately sought an additive that would permit gasoline to burn uniformly in powerful engines. Ethanol was an attractive candidate. But to do its job well it needed 5 to 10 percent of the gas tank.
Oil companies were not about to relinquish that share of the transportation market to farmers, even though American agriculture had just plunged into a severe economic depression that would last two decades. Instead, the companies chose lead.
In 1924, despite the protests of many in the public health community, Ethyl Corporation, a partnership of Standard Oil and General Motors, offered leaded gasoline. By 1940, 70 percent of all gasoline contained lead.
With the end of Prohibition in 1933 ethanol production slowly revived. Then Japan cut off America's supplies of natural rubber. The nation's breweries were drafted into service to manufacture ethanol to make synthetic rubber. By 1944 ethanol production had reached 600 million gallons.
After World War II the market and political constituency for ethanol disappeared. The price of oil plummeted. The Marshall Plan generated an export market for American crops. Once again bioethanol vanished from the market.
Thirty years later twin oil shocks and the realization that leaded gasoline was a public health hazard combined to give ethanol another lease on life. Congress gave ethanol a handsome tax incentive, although not nearly as handsome as the incentives given for the gasification of coal or the production of nuclear power.
The incentive made the price of ethanol competitive with unleaded gasoline but the major oil companies still refused to give up a share of the gas tank.
The ethanol industry reemerged primarily by selling its product through independently owned and cooperatively owned gas stations, almost all of them in the Midwest.
The phase-out of leaded gasoline furnished ethanol another opportunity to become the octane-enhancing additive of choice. Instead, oil companies chose to raise octane ratings by increasing the portion of light aromatics like benzene, toluene and xylene in their gasoline. By 1990 as much as 40 percent of gasoline was composed of these highly toxic chemicals.
When it was discovered that benzene causes cancer, the 1990 Clean Air Act required oil refineries to minimize its use. The same act also required them to add oxygen to gasoline sold in highly polluted areas of the country.
Ethanol, an oxygen-containing octane enhancer, was ready. Instead, the oil companies embraced another 100 percent fossil fuel-derived product: MTBE. In l996, the country began using massive amounts of MTBE. Within months communities discovered MTBE in their ground water. By 2000 14 states, led by California, had passed legislation to phase out MTBE.
With the phaseout of MTBE, the ethanol industry geared up for a major expansion. Much of that expansion has occurred in farmer-owned facilities. In Minnesota, for example, 10 of the 14 biorefineries are farmer-owned.
By the end of this year, nine of the 11 ethanol facilities in Iowa will be farmer-owned. Farmer ownership gives taxpayers the biggest bang for their buck. Ethanol incentives overall increase corn prices about 10 cents a bushel, but when the farmer owns the biorefinery he may receive an additional $1 a bushel.
In 2000, California asked permission to allow oil companies to abandon oxygenates and reformulate gasoline once more, this time to increase the proportion of chemicals called alkylates. Last year President Bush denied its request.
Which brings us to this week's vote in Congress.
Over the past few months a compromise has been fashioned between the oil and ethanol industries. A provision of the energy bill would allow California and other states to rely on 100 percent gasoline. In return the nation as a whole would have to meet a modest renewable fuel standard.
Is it a perfect solution? No. Nothing coming out of Washington ever is. Will it be a boon to midwestern corn farmers? Yes, in the short term. But in the long term ethanol will be made from rice and wheat straw, municipal garbage, grasses and many other raw materials.
We should strive to have a biorefinery in every rural county, not only in Minnesota and Iowa, but in Massachusetts and California and New York. Will a renewable fuel standard benefit Archer Daniels Midland? Yes. But if the nation designs incentives that encourage modestly-sized, farmer-owned facilities, competition will flourish and local economies will prosper.
And after 150 years of struggle, a renewable fuels standard would mark a true coming-of-age of biofuels in America.
David Morris is Vice President of the Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. based Institute for Local Self-Reliance. He has written one book and many reports on ethanol and currently serves on a federal advisory council to the United States Departments of Energy and Agriculture.