GE Sees Solar Cheaper Than Fossil Power in Five Years
By Brian Wingfield

Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co. (GE)

“If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said yesterday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Washington office. The 2009 average U.S. retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity ranges from 6.1 cents in Wyoming to 18.1 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.

GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, announced in April that it had boosted the efficiency of thin-film solar panels to a record 12.8 percent. Improving efficiency, or the amount of sunlight converted to electricity, would help reduce the costs without relying on subsidies.

Read more.

Florida Governor Vetoes PBS Funding
By ELIZABETH JENSEN

Just as a deal came together late last week to keep PBS programming on the air in Orlando, Florida’s public broadcasters suffered a financial blow when Gov. Rick Scott vetoed the state’s nearly $4.8 million appropriation for public broadcasting.

That figure had already been reduced by 30 percent from the amount broadcasters received last year. With the cuts, each of 13 public radio stations will lose $87,287 in state funds compared with last year, and each of the 13 public television stations will lose a subsidy of $434,837. Stations receive the same subsidy, regardless of size.

“For me, it is critical; for a small station it might be catastrophic,” said Rick Schneider, president and chief executive of Miami’s WPBT-TV. He said there was “no doubt that people are going to have to look at layoffs” and that he would not be surprised if some stations were shut down. The broadcasters will work to get the funds reinstated, he said.

Read more.

Global warming: Bleaker and bleaker
New figures show we are still hurtling towards dangerous climate change – at a time when policymakers are running out of ideas

Sometimes a quotation really does say it all. As chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol is not given to overstatement – so his comment in our paper today that the latest figures on greenhouse gas emissions are “the worst news” should be taken seriously. It is not just that the statistics showing another record leap in carbon output – 30.6 gigatonnes of CO2 over 2010 – to make the highest annual total in history are grim. They also come at a point when the old centrist certainties about how to tackle climate change are palpably out of date, and yet no new ideas have come along as replacement.

Read more.

Five Eye-Opening Facts About Our Bloated Post-9/11 ‘Defense’ Spending
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 28, 2011, Printed on May 30, 2011

This week, the National Priorities Project (NPP) released a snapshot of U.S. “defense” spending since September 11, 2001. The eye-popping figures lend credence to the theory that al Qaeda’s attacks were a form of economic warfare – that they hoped for a massive overreaction that would entangle us in costly foreign wars that would ultimately drain away our national wealth.

They didn’t bankrupt us the same way the Mujahadeen helped bring down the Soviet Union decades before, because our economy was much stronger. But they did succeed in putting us deep into the red – with an assist, of course, from Bush’s ideologically driven tax cuts for the wealthy.

The topline number is this: we have spent $7.6 trillion on the military and homeland security since 9/11. The Pentagon’s base budget – which doesn’t include the costs of fighting our wars – has increased by 81 percent during that time (43 percent when adjusted for inflation). The costs of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have now reached $1.26 trillion. But that only scratches the surface; it doesn’t include the long-term costs of caring for badly wounded soldiers, for example.

Read more.

Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal?
Post-Legal America and the National Security Complex
By Tom Engelhardt

Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it?

Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court). Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.

My answer is this: they are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don’t begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities. In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic. At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society. (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)

Read more.

In Reversal, Germany to Close Nuclear Plants by 2022
By JUDY DEMPSEY and JACK EWING

BERLIN — The German government agreed on Monday to phase out all nuclear power by 2022, a sharp reversal by Chancellor Angela Merkel aimed at appeasing the country’s intensified antinuclear movement. The announcement came after marathon talks held at the chancellery on a new report by the Ethics Commission for Security Energy that recommended closing all 17 of the country’s nuclear plants.

Mrs. Merkel has been grappling with the sudden deepening of German distrust of nuclear power since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan set off the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. Within days of the disaster, she reversed a pro-nuclear policy adopted just last year and temporarily shut down seven of Germany’s older plants; one had been taken off line earlier.

On Friday, state environment ministers agreed that the seven older plants should remain closed. The energy security commission endorsed that recommendation, and said the others should be phased out gradually.

Read more.

Cancer Now Leading Cause of Death in China

Janet Larsen
Earth Policy Institute
May 25, 2011

Cancer is now the leading cause of death in China.
Chinese Ministry of Health data implicate cancer in
close to a quarter of all deaths countrywide. As is
common with many countries as they industrialize, the
usual plagues of poverty-infectious diseases and high
infant mortality-have given way to diseases more often
associated with affluence, such as heart disease,
stroke, and cancer.

While this might be expected in China’s richer cities,
where bicycles are fast being traded in for cars and
meat consumption is climbing, it also holds true in
rural areas. In fact, reports from the countryside
reveal a dangerous epidemic of “cancer villages” linked
to pollution from some of the very industries propelling
China’s explosive economy. By pursuing economic growth
above all else, China is sacrificing the health of its
people, ultimately risking future prosperity.

Lung cancer is the most common cancer in China. Deaths
from this typically fatal disease have shot up nearly
fivefold since the 1970s. In China’s rapidly growing
cities, like Shanghai and Beijing, where particulates in
the air are often four times higher than in New York
City, nearly 30 percent of cancer deaths are from lung
cancer. (See data.)

Read more.

From Mark Karlin:

Mark,

I think this Times article avoids the point of what the GOP is trying to do with these new laws, which isn’t just “to tighten voting rules” but to disenfranchise everyone who stands against them. The headline should have been: “Republican Legislators Try to Keep Fewer Non-GOP Supporters From Voting,” and Livette Alvarez should have told that story.

As you of all people know, this is no new issue. It was the critical issue in Bush stealing the Florida election due to the caging Greg Palast has detailed over and over again. And the GOP has kept on doing it ever since.

Back when they did real investigative journalism on high-level political corruption, the Times would have run a major exposé–it would have to be a series–on the entire GOP assault on voting rights: not just state legislation, but everything from trying to block the census to the use of computerized machinery run by private companies.

This is just another ho-hum story that doesn’t even start to rise to the importance of the issue at hand.

Mark

Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America

by Joe Burns

First Tuesday Political Series, hosted by Mark Crispin Miller

McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince St. (b/t Lafayette & Mulberry)
NYC
June 7, 2011
7:00 p.m.

Mark Crispin Miller hosts Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America. Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator, labor lawyer, and a former local union president. For the past decade, he has negotiated labor contracts in the airline and health care industries. He has a law degree from the New York University of Law.

Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America

If the American labor movement is to rise again, it will not be as a result of electing different politicians, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt—the kind employed up until the 1960s.

In Reviving the Strike, labor lawyer Joe Burns draws on economics, history and current analysis in arguing that the labor movement must redevelop an effective strike based on the now outlawed traditional labor tactics of stopping production and workplace-based solidarity. The book challenges the prevailing view that tactics such as organizing workers or amending labor law can save trade unionism in this country. Instead, Reviving the Strike offers a fundamentally different solution to the current labor crisis, showing how collective bargaining backed by a strike capable of inflicting economic harm upon an employer is the only way for workers to break free of the repressive system of labor control that has been imposed upon them by corporations and the government for the past seventy-five years.

And they’d have more trouble doing it, if the press had been reporting honestly about the MYTH of “voter fraud.”

MCM

May 28, 2011
Republican Legislators Push to Tighten Voting Rules
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MIAMI — Less than 18 months before the next presidential election, Republican-controlled statehouses around the country are rewriting voting laws to require photo identification at the polls, reduce the number of days of early voting or tighten registration rules.

Republican legislators say the new rules, which have advanced in 13 states in the past two months, offer a practical way to weed out fraudulent votes and preserve the integrity of the ballot box. Democrats say the changes have little to do with fraud prevention and more to do with placing obstacles in the way of possible Democratic voters, including young people and minorities.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed laws last week that would require each voter to show an official, valid photo ID to cast a ballot, joining Kansas and South Carolina.

Read more.