By Heather Pilatic

In the last few weeks beekeepers have reported staggering losses in Minnesota, Nebraska and Ohio after their hives foraged on pesticide-treated corn fields. Indiana too, two years ago. What’s going on in the Corn Belt?

No farmer in their right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the upcoming release of a Purdue study confirming corn as a major pesticide exposure route for bees, his face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed and said, “You know, I held out for years on buying them GE seeds, but now I can’t get conventional seeds anymore. They just don’t carry ‘em.”

This leaves us with two questions: 1) What do GE seeds have to do with neonicotinoids and bees? and 2) How can an Iowa corn farmer find himself feeling unable to farm without poisoning pollinators? In other words, where did U.S. corn cultivation go wrong?

The short answer to both questions starts with a slow motion train wreck that began in the mid-1990s: Corn integrated pest management (IPM) fell apart at the seams. Rather, it was intentionally unraveled by Bayer and Monsanto.

Honey bees caught in the cross-fire

Corn is far from the only crop treated by neonicotinoids, but it is the largest use of arable land in North America, and honey bees rely on corn as a major protein source. At least 94 percent of the 92 million acres of corn planted across the U.S. this year will have been treated with either clothianidin or thiamethoxam (another neonicotinoid).

As we head into peak corn planting season throughout the U.S. Midwest, bees will once again “get it from all sides” as they:

• fly through clothianidin-contaminated planter dust;
• gather clothianidin-laced corn pollen, which will then be fed to emerging larva;
• gather water from acutely toxic, pesticide-laced guttation droplets; and/or
• gather pollen and nectar from nearby fields where forage sources such as dandelions have taken up these persistent chemicals from soil that’s been contaminated year on year since clothianidin’s widespread introduction into corn cultivation in 2003.

GE corn & neonicotinoid seed treatments go hand-in-hand

Over the last 15 years, U.S. corn cultivation has gone from a crop requiring little-to-no insecticides and negligible amounts of fungicides, to a crop where the average acre is grown from seeds treated or genetically engineered to express three different insecticides (as well as a fungicide or two) before being sprayed prophylactically with RoundUp (an herbicide) and a new class of fungicides that farmers didn’t know they “needed” before the mid-2000s.
A series of marketing ploys by the pesticide industry undergird this story. It’s about time to start telling it, if for no other reason than to give lie to the oft-repeated notion that there is no alternative to farming corn in a way that poisons pollinators. We were once — not so long ago — on a very different path.

How corn farming went off the rails

In the early 1990s, we were really good at growing corn using bio-intensive integrated pest management (bio-IPM). In practice, that meant crop rotations, supporting natural predators, using biocontrol agents like ladybugs and as a last resort, using chemical controls only after pests had been scouted for and found. During this time of peak bio-IPM adoption, today’s common practice of blanketing corn acreage with “insurance” applications of various pesticides without having established the need to do so would have been unthinkable. It’s expensive to use inputs you don’t need, and was once the mark of bad farming.

Then, in the mid-to-late 1990s, GE corn and neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) seed treatments both entered the market — the two go hand-in-hand, partly by design and partly by accident. Conditions for the marketing of both products were ripe due to a combination of factors:

• regulatory pressures and insect resistance had pushed previous insecticide classes off the market, creating an opening for neonicotinoids to rapidly take over global marketshare;
• patented seeds became legally defensible, and the pesticide industry gobbled up the global seed market; and
• a variant of the corn rootworm outsmarted soy-corn rotations, driving an uptick in insecticide use around 1995-96.

Then, as if on cue, Monsanto introduced three different strains of patented, GE corn between 1997 and 2003 (RoundUp Ready, and two Bt-expressing variants aimed at controlling the European Corn Borer and corn root worm). Clothianidin entered the U.S. market under conditional registration in 2003, and in 2004 corn seed companies began marketing seeds treated with a 5X level of neonicotinoids (1.25 mg/seed vs. .25).

… and in the space of a decade, U.S. corn acreage undergoes a ten-fold increase in average insecticide use. By 2007, the average acre of corn has more than three systemic insecticides — both Bt traits and a neonicotinoid. Compare this to the early 1990s, when only an estimated 30-35 percent of all corn acreage were treated with insecticides at all.

Adding fuel to the fire, in 2008 USDA’s Federal Crop Insurance Board of Directors approved reductions in crop insurance premiums for producers who plant certain Bt corn hybrids. By 2009, 40 percent of corn farmers interviewed said they did not have access to elite (high-yielding) non-Bt corn seed. It is by now common knowledge that conventional corn farmers have a very hard time finding seed that is not genetically engineered and treated with neonicotinoids.

Enter fungicides

In 2007, what’s left of corn IPM was further unraveled with the mass marketing of a new class of fungicides (strobilurins) for use on corn as yield “boosters.” Before this, fungicide use on corn was so uncommon that it didn’t appear in Crop Life’s 2002 National Pesticide Use Database. But in the last five years, the pesticide industry has aggressively and successfully marketed prophylactic applications of fungicides on corn as yield and growth enhancers, and use has grown dramatically as a result. This despite the fact that these fungicides work as marketed less than half the time. According to this meta-analysis of efficacy studies, only “48% of treatments resulted in a yield response greater than the economic break-even value of 6 bu/acre.”

Back to the bees. Neonicotinoids are known to synergize with certain fungicides to increase the toxicity of the former to honey bees up to 1,000-fold, and fungicides may be key culprits in undermining beneficial bee microbiota that do things like make beebread nutritious and support immune response against gut pathogens like Nosema. Fungicide use in corn is likewise destroying beneficial fungi in many cropping systems, and driving the emergence of resistant strains.

As with insecticides and herbicides, so too with fungicide use on corn: Corn farmers are stuck on a pesticide treadmill on high gear, with a pre-emptively pressed turbo charge button (as “insurance”). Among the many casualties are our honey bees who rely on corn’s abundant pollen supply.

Keeping us all tethered to the pesticide treadmill is expected behavior from the likes of Monsanto. But what boggles the mind is that all of this is being aided and abetted by a USDA that ties cheap crop insurance to planting patented Bt corn, and a Congress that refuses to tie subsidized crop insurance in the Farm Bill to common-sense conservation practices like bio-intensive IPM. Try explaining that with a waggle dance.

By Jedediah Biagi

Looking at where we are right now in our country – with our freedom, liberty, and right to local self-governance at threat or already seriously impinged, it’s hard to see all the small things that have brought us here.

One of those small things happened at the last Nevada County Supervisors meeting, exemplifying how our right to self governance can be attacked and stripped by an innocent thing called a nuisance ordinance.

Not respecting the Constitution of the United States, the State of California, and opposition from a landslide super-majority of local citizens, four of the Supervisors voted to pass an ordinance giving a deputy, fire code or building code enforcer the right to enter your property any day of the week, day or night without a warrant (oh, but they ‘promise’ the ordinance won’t be used that way).  If you thought you had private property rights or the right to use your property as you see fit, think again.

If you believe in the right to not self-incriminate, then it should make you upset to be required to get a notarized letter stipulating an arrangement of permission to exercise a California State given right, even if it’s contrary to Federal Law.

Input from the citizens’ focus group was either ignored or ratcheted back as to become unworkable or illegal. Examples being:  decreasing the suggested allowable grow size over 500% to a restrictive average of 150sq ft per parcel or less, well below the state’s legally defined minimal allowances.  When the suggestion of using grow bags was put forward to help restrict size of plants in residential areas the suggested size was 60 – 80 gallons, the county came back with 25 gallons, a size not even available on the market or if it was, not big enough to suit the needs of patients.  Not only that, but using the process of an urgency ordinance took away our constitutional right of the citizenry to petition our grievance through signature gathering.  This end-run around of our inalienable rights in the drafting and then passing of this ordinance cannot be ignored.

If you believe in the second, fourth, fifth, and tenth amendments you should be appalled at this blatant disregard for your rights.

The Federal Government has been conducting raids in neighboring counties against small organic farmers including raw milk co-ops and raw food co-ops, if you were wondering where our sheriff stood on the constitution and the tenth amendment – now you know, all small farmers should be on their toes right now because the sheriff sees no immediate threat from an overreaching federal government.

As we slide down the path of an all controlling Federal Government with things like the Patriot Act, NDAA, or planned FEMA camps, that path is being greased by hundreds of invasive nuisance ordinances like this one that grant far over reaching powers to government agencies beyond the definition of the nuisance.

I am running as a write-in candidate for Nevada County Supervisor District 2 (South County).  I believe in the right to local self governance and creating buffers of protection from outside forces that wish to strip that right. I would like to create a public County Bank, and institute a foreclosure moratorium.  I’ll be hanging out at local restaurants for lunch or dinner in the next couple of weeks, if you want to meet me check out my calendar online or if you have a group of people who would like to meet me, set up an appointment.  My website is www.biagiforsupervisor.com .

If Emgold Mining Co. fails to pay the City of Grass Valley the required deposit of about $440,000 by September of 2012, the City will consider the Idaho-Maryland Mine project application withdrawn.

The deposit is for independent consultants to begin preparation of a revised Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) on the proposed mine and ceramics factory. A total of $3-4 million and about   two years will be needed to finance and execute the DEIR, additional studies, another round of public hearings, and a Final EIR before obtaining a permit.

Emgold may be unable to rise to the occasion. The annual financial report for 2011 shows a loss of $2,338,060, or $0.06 per share, pushing the accumulated deficit to over $50 million. Emgold has no sources of regular revenue and is predictably out of operating capital again. This has been going on for years.

Penny stock junior mining companies such as Emgold are notoriously risky investments in general, but the Idaho-Maryland Mine project is increasingly unlikely to succeed. Working against the efforts to raise funds is the huge added risk of the ceramics factory, which should scare off investors. Fusing tailings into tiles to dispose of mine waste may seem like a good idea, but it has never been done on a commercial scale, and the tile market for this product is not promising. Furthermore, Emgold has no expertise in ceramics and the plan calls for selling 480,000 sq. ft. of tile per day; unbelievable, especially in today’s market. Add to that the obstacles of getting the Grass Valley General Plan modified, annexation approval, significant air pollution in the face of new strict carbon emissions regulations for California, and a variety of local issues such as threats to local wells and property values.

Note that, if a permit is obtained, the costs to de-water the old mine and build the mining and ceramics factory facilities will likely exceed $200 million. This will easily consume all the profits from the “measured gold reserves”.  (As per NI 43-101 report, 212,000 oz.)

To date, in an effort to promote the project, Emgold has made a number of questionable statements:

• The revised project documents, as submitted to the City of Grass Valley, estimate the maximum number of long term jobs at 500, but in public statements Emgold is now claiming 600 jobs. It was 400  last year.
• Promotional pieces about the Idaho-Maryland Mine repeatedly claim the project is in the “advanced stage of permitting”, when in fact they have not even submitted deposits needed to restart the DEIR process.
• A constant claim of “community support” from a 2006 poll fails to mention that the support was conditioned upon addressing all environmental concerns, upon which it fails. Now that the project description has been made public, there is strong opposition to the mine.

In an effort to raise yet more funds, Emgold has now employed Vanguard Shareholder Solutions Inc. to disseminate news and public information to investors, at a cost of $8500/month and stock options.

As the marketing of the Idaho-Maryland Mine project becomes more expert, it becomes even more important to do one’s own research and carefully scrutinize the merits of any investment before committing funds. Buyer beware!

He labels this one, “We Are Star Dust,” which is not a metaphor, or … not just a metaphor. It’s also a plain scientific fact. Boswell is working on both sides of our brains with these science/music videos.

His work reminds us that if anything is sacred, everything is.

See the whole set in this series here: http://sierravoices.com/tag/symphony_of_science/

A Letter of Apology to My Granddaughter

By Chip Ward

[Note: I became politically active and committed on the day 20 years ago when I realized I could stand on the front porch of my house and point to three homes where children were in wheelchairs, to a home where a child had just died of leukemia, to another where a child was born missing a kidney, and yet another where a child suffered from spina bifida.  All my parental alarms went off at once and I asked the obvious question: What’s going on here?  Did I inadvertently move my three children into harm’s way when we settled in this high desert valley in Utah?  A quest to find answers in Utah’s nuclear history and then seek solutions followed.  Politics for me was never motivated by ideology.  It was always about parenting.

Today my three kids are, thankfully, healthy adults.  But now that grandchildren are being added to our family, my blood runs cold whenever I project out 50 years and imagine what their world will be like at middle age -- assuming they get that far and that there is still a recognizable “world” to be part of.  I wrote the following letter to my granddaughter, Madeline, who is almost four years old.  Although she cannot read it today, I hope she will read it in a future that proves so much better than the one that is probable, and so terribly unfair.  I’m sharing this letter with other parents and grandparents in the hope that it may move them to embrace their roles as citizens and commit to the hard work of making the planet viable, the economy equitable, and our culture democratic for the many Madelines to come.]

March 20, 2012

Dear Maddie,

I address this letter to you, but please share it with Jack, Tasiah, and other grandchildren who are yet unborn.  Also, with your children and theirs.  My unconditional love for my children and grandchildren convinces me that, if I could live long enough to embrace my great-grandchildren, I would love them as deeply as I love you.

On behalf of my generation of grandparents to all of you, I want to apologize.

I am sorry we used up all the oil.  It took a million years for those layers of carbon goo to form under the Earth’s crust and we used up most of it in a geological instant.  No doubt there will be some left and perhaps you can get around the fact that what remains is already distant, dirty, and dangerous, but the low-hanging fruit will be long-gone by the time you are my age.  We took it all.

There’s no excuse, really.  We are gas-hogs, plain and simple.  We got hooked on faster-bigger-more and charged right over the carrying capacity of the planet.  Oil made it possible.

Machines are our slaves and coal, oil, and gas are their food.  They helped us grow so much of our own food that we could overpopulate the Earth.  We could ship stuff and travel all over the globe, and still have enough fuel left to drive home alone in trucks in time to watch Monday Night Football.

Rocket fuel, fertilizer, baby bottles, lawn chairs: we made everything and anything out of oil and could never get enough of it.  We could have conserved more for you to use in your lifetime.  Instead, we demonstrated the self-restraint of crack addicts. It’s been great having all that oil to play with and we built our entire world around that.  Living without it will be tough.  Sorry.

I hope we develop clean, renewable energy sources soon, or that you and your generation figure out how to do that quickly.  In the meantime, sorry about the climate.  We just didn’t realize our addiction to carbon would come with monster storms, epic droughts, Biblical floods, wildfire infernos, rising seas, migration, starvation, pestilence, civil war, failed states, police states, and resource wars.

I’m sure Henry Ford didn’t see that coming when he figured out how to mass-produce automobiles and sell them to Everyman.  I know my parents didn’t see the downside of using so much gas and coal.  The all-electric house and a car in the driveway was their American Dream.  For my generation, owning a car became a birthright.  Today, it would be hard for most of us to live without a car.  I have no idea what you’ll do to get around or how you will heat your home.  Oops!

We also pigged out on most of the fertile soil, the forests and their timber, and the oceans that teemed with fish before we scraped the seabed raw, dumped our poisonous wastes in the water, and turned it acid and barren.  Hey, that ocean was an awesome place and it’s too bad you can’t know it like we did.  There were bright coral reefs, vibrant runs of red salmon, ribbons of birds embroidering the shores, graceful shells, the solace and majesty of the wild sea…

…But then I never saw the vast herds of bison that roamed the American heartland, so I know it is hard to miss something you only saw in pictures.  We took lots of photos.

We thought we were pretty smart because we walked a man on the moon.  Our technology is indeed amazing.  I was raised without computers, smart phones, and the World Wide Web, so I appreciate how our engineering prowess has enhanced our lives, but I also know it has a downside.

When I was a kid we worried that the Cold War would go nuclear.  And it wasn’t until a river caught fire near Cleveland that we realized fouling your own nest isn’t so smart after all.  Well, you know about the rest — the coal-fired power plants, acid rain, the hole in the ozone…

There were plenty of signs we took a wrong turn but we kept on going.  Dumb, stubborn, blind: Who knows why we couldn’t stop?  Greed maybe — powerful corporations we couldn’t overcome. It won’t matter much to you who is to blame.  You’ll be too busy coping in the diminished world we bequeath you.

One set of problems we pass on to you is not altogether our fault.  It was handed down to us by our parents’ generation so hammered by cataclysmic world wars and economic hardship that they armed themselves to the teeth and saw enemies everywhere.  Their paranoia was understandable, but they passed their fears on to us and we should have seen through them.  I have lived through four major American wars in my 62 years, and by now defense and homeland security are powerful industries with a stranglehold on Congress and the economy.  We knew that was a lousy deal, but trauma and terror darkened our imaginations and distorted our priorities.  And, like you, we needed jobs.

Sorry we spent your inheritance on all that cheap bling and, especially, all those weapons of mass destruction.  That was crazy and wasteful.   I can’t explain it.  I guess we’ve been confused for a long time now.

Oh, and sorry about the confusion.  We called it advertising and it seemed like it would be easy enough to control.  When I was a kid, commercials merely interrupted entertainment.  Don’t know when the lines all blurred and the buy, buy, buy message became so ubiquitous and all-consuming.  It just got outta hand and we couldn’t stop it, even when we realized we hated it and that it was taking us over.  We turned away from one another, tuned in, and got lost.

I’m betting you can still download this note, copy it, share it, bust it up and remake it, and that you do so while plugged into some sort of electrical device you can’t live without — so maybe you don’t think that an apology for technology is needed and, if that’s the case, an apology is especially relevant.  The tools we gave you are fine, but the apps are mostly bogus.  We made an industry of silly distraction.  When our spirits hungered, we fed them clay that filled but did not nourish them.  If you still don’t know the difference, blame us because we started it.

And sorry about the chemicals.  I mean the ones you were born with in your blood and bones that stay there — even though we don’t know what they’ll do to you).  Who thought that the fire retardant that kept smokers from igniting their pillows and children’s clothes from bursting into flames would end up in umbilical cords and infants?

It just seemed like better living through chemistry at the time.  Same with all the other chemicals you carry.  We learned to accept cancer and I guess you will, too.  I’m sure there will be better treatments for that in your lifetime than we have today.  If you can afford them, that is.  Turning healthcare over to predatory corporations was another bad move.

All in all, our chemical obsession was pretty reckless and we got into that same old pattern: just couldn’t give up all the neat stuff.  Oh, we tried.  We took the lead out of gasoline and banned DDT, but mostly we did too little, too late.  I hope you’ve done better.  Maybe it will help your generation to run out of oil, since so many of the toxic chemicals came from that.  Anyway, we didn’t see it coming and we could have, should have. Our bad.

There are so many other things I wish I could change for you.  We leave behind a noisy world.  Silence is rare today, and unless some future catastrophe has left your numbers greatly diminished, your machines stilled, and your streets ghostly empty, it is likely that the last remnants of tranquility will be gone by the time you are my age.

And how about all those species, the abundant and wondrous creatures that are fading away forever as I write these words?  I never saw a polar bear and I guess you can live without that, too, but when I think of the peep and chirp of frogs at night, the hum of bees busy on a flower bed, the trill of birds at dawn, and so many other splendorous pleasures that you may no longer have, I ache with regret.  We should have done more to keep the planet whole and well, but we couldn’t get clear of the old ways of seeing, the ingrained habits, the way we hobble one another’s choices so that the best intentions never get realized.

Mostly I’m sorry about taking all the good water.  When I was a child I could kneel down and drink from a brook or spring wherever we camped and played.  We could still hike up to glaciers and ski down snow-capped mountains.

Clean, crisp, cold, fresh water is life’s most precious taste.  A life-giving gift, all water is holy.  I repeat: holy.  We treated it, instead, as if it were merely useful.  We wasted and tainted it and, again in a geological moment, sucked up aquifers that had taken 10,000 years to gather below ground.  In my lifetime, glaciers are melting away, wells are running dry, dust storms are blowing, and rivers like the mighty Colorado are running dry before they reach the sea.  I hate to think of what will be left for you.  Sorry.  So very, very sorry.

I’m sure there’s a boatload of other trouble we’re leaving you that I haven’t covered here.  My purpose is not to offer a complete catalog of our follies and atrocities, but to do what we taught your parents to do when they were as little as you are today.

When you make a mistake, we told them, admit it, and then do better.  If you do something wrong, own up and say you are sorry.  After that, you can work on making amends.

I am trying to see a way out of the hardship and turmoil we are making for you.  As I work to stop the madness, I will be mindful of how much harder your struggles will be as you deal with the challenges we leave you to face.

The best I can do to help you through the overheated future we are making is to love you now.  I cannot change the past and my struggle to make a healthier future for you is uncertain, but today I can teach you, encourage you, and help you be as strong and smart and confident as you can be, so that whatever the future holds, whatever crises you face, you are as ready as possible. We will learn to laugh together, too, because love and laughter can pull you through the toughest times.

I know a better world is possible. We create that better world by reaching out to one another, listening, learning, and speaking from our hearts, face to face, neighbor to neighbor, one community after another, openly, inclusively, bravely.  Democracy is not a gift to be practiced only when permitted. We empower ourselves. Our salvation is found in each other, together.

Across America this morning and all around the world, our better angels call to us, imploring us to rise up and be as resilient as our beloved, beautiful children and grandchildren, whose future we make today.   We can do better.  I promise.

Your grandfather,

Chip Ward

Chip Ward, a

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Copyright 2012 Chip Ward

Van Jones reflects on his time in—and out of—the White House.

by Van Jones

This article is adapted from Rebuild the Dream, Van Jones’ new book.

The 2008 campaign was a campfire around which millions gathered. But after the election, it was nobody’s job or role to tend that campfire. The White House was focused on the minutiae of passing legislation, not on the magic of leading a movement. Obama For America did the best that it could, but the mass gatherings, the idealism, the expanded notions of American identity, the growing sense of a new national community, all of that disappeared.

It goes without saying that clear thinking and imaginative problem solving are easier in hindsight, away from the battlefield. I was in the White House for six months of 2009, and I was outside of it afterward. I had some of the above insights at the time, but many did not come to me in the middle of the drama and action. Most are the product of deeper reflection, which I was able to do only from a distance.

Nonetheless, the exercise of trying to sort out what might have been and trying to understand why nobody was able to make those things happen in real time has informed this book and shaped my arguments going forward.

Let me speak personally: looking back, I do not think those of us who believed in the agenda of change had to get beaten as badly as we were, after Obama was sworn in. We did not have to leave millions of once-inspired people feeling lost, deceived, and abandoned. We did not have to let our movement die down to the level that it did.

The simple truth is this: we overestimated our achievement in 2008, and we underestimated our opponents in 2009.

We did not lose because the backlashers got so loud. We lost because the rest of us got so quiet. Too many of us treated Obama’s inauguration as some kind of finish line, when we should have seen it as just the starting line. Too many of us sat down at the very moment when we should have stood up.

Among those who stayed active, too many of us (myself included) were in the suites when we should have been in the streets. Many “repositioned” our grassroots organizations to be “at the table” in order to “work with the administration.” Some of us (like me) took roles in the government. For a while at least, many were so enthralled with the idea of being a part of history that we forgot the courage, sacrifices, and risks that are sometimes required to make history.

That is hard, scary, and thankless work. It requires a willingness to walk with a White House when possible—and to walk boldly ahead of that same White House, when necessary. A few leaders were willing to play that role from the very beginning, but many more were not. Too many activists reverted to acting like either die-hard or disappointed fans of the president, not fighters for the people.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama went too far to the left to accommodate his liberal base. In my view, the liberal base went too far to the center to accommodate Obama. The conventional wisdom says that Obama relied on Congress too much. I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much. Once it became obvious that he was committed to bipartisanship at all costs, even if it meant chasing an opposition party that was moving further to the right every day, progressives needed to reassess our strategies, defend our own interests, and go our own way. It took us way too long to internalize this lesson— and act upon it.

The independent movement for hope and change, which had been growing since 2003, was a goose that was laying golden eggs. But the bird could not be bossed. Caging it killed it. It died around conference tables in Washington, DC, long before the Tea Party got big enough to kick its carcass down the street.

The administration was naïve and hubristic enough to try to absorb and even direct the popular movement that had helped to elect the president. That was part of the problem. But the main problem was that the movement itself was naïve and enamored enough that it wanted to be absorbed and directed. Instead of marching on Washington, many of us longed to get marching orders from Washington. We so much wanted to be a part of something beautiful that we forgot how ugly and difficult political change can be. Somewhere along the line, a bottom-up, largely decentralized phenomenon found itself trying to function as a subcomponent of a national party apparatus. Despite the best intentions of practically everyone involved, the whole process wound up sucking the soul out of the movement.

As a result, when the backlash came, the hope-and-changers had no independent ground on which to stand and fight back. Grassroots activists had little independent ability to challenge the White House when it was wrong and, therefore, a dwindling capacity to defend it when it was right.

The Obama administration had the wrong theory of the movement, and the movement had the wrong theory of the presidency. In America, change comes when we have two kinds of leaders, not just one. We need a president who is willing to be pushed into doing the right thing, and we need independent leaders and movements that are willing to do the pushing. For a few years, Obama’s supporters expected the president to act like a movement leader, rather than a head of state.

The confusion was understandable: As a candidate, Obama performed many of the functions of a movement leader. He gave inspiring speeches, held massive rallies, and stirred our hearts. But when he became president, he could no longer play that role.

The expectation that he would or could arose from a fundamental misreading of U.S. history. After all, as head of state, President Lyndon Johnson did not lead the civil rights movement. That was the job of independent movement leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer. There were moments of conflict and cooperation between Johnson and leaders in the freedom struggle, but the alchemy of political power and people power is what resulted in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As head of state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not lead the labor movement. That was the job of independent union leaders. Again, the alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the New Deal. As head of state, Woodrow Wilson did not lead the fight to enfranchise women. That was the role of independent movement leaders, such as suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in women’s right to vote. As head of state, Abraham Lincoln did not lead the abolitionists. That was the job of independent movement leaders Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the emancipation of enslaved Africans. As head of state, Richard Nixon did not lead the environmental movement. That was the job of various environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club, and other leaders, like those whom writer Rachel Carson inspired. Once again it was the alchemy of political power and people power that resulted in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency

The biggest reason for our frustrations and failures is that we have not yet understood that both of these are necessary—and they are distinct. We already have our head of state who arguably is willing to be pushed. We do not yet have a strong enough independent movement to do the pushing. The bulk of this book makes the case for how and why we should build one.

Interested?

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By Dean Baker

This could well have been the want-ad Esquire used to attract a writer for its story titled, “War Against Youth.” This lengthy piece is the best compendium of warped logic and misplaced facts on this topic since the Peter Peterson financed film, IOUSA.

The whole story is given away in the first paragraph:

“In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.”

That sounds really awful. Thankfully it is not true, as readers could find by looking at the chart that accompanies the article. This is a ratio of wealth not income.

This is a huge difference. Wealth adds up a household’s total assets. This means the value of their home, their 401(k) and other savings, their checking account and car. The calculation the n subtracts liabilities: mortgage debt, car loans, credit card debt, and student loans. This is very different from income, which for most people means their wages and for older people their Social Security.

If the writer, the editor, the fact checker or anyone at Esquire had a clue, they would have caught this mistaken first paragraph and killed the piece. As their chart shows, the median net worth for households over age 65 was $170,494. That merits repeating a couple more times. The median net worth for households over age 65 was $170,494. The median net worth for households over age 65 was $170,494.

Again, net worth refers to total assets minus liabilities. This means that if we add up the home equity of the typical household over age 65, their 401(k) and all other savings, the value of their car and any other possessions they might have, it comes to just over $170,000. This is a bit more than the price of the median home.

In other words, if the typical household over age 65 took all of their wealth, they would have enough money to pay off their mortgage. After that they would be entirely dependent for their living expenses on their Social Security benefit, which averages a bit more than $1,200 a month.

To take another comparison, the lifetime accumulation of wealth of the typical household over age 65 would be approximately equal to what the CEO of Goldman Sachs earns in two days. A top hedge fund manager, who makes $3-4 billion a year, can pocket this much money in ten minutes. Yet, Esquire tells us that it is the high living retirees getting by on their $1,200 a month Social Security checks who are responsible for the questionable future facing the young.

Even this comparison of net worth is misleading. It shows that the net worth of households over age 65 increased from $120,000 in 1983 to $170,000 in 2009. However these numbers do not include pension wealth. A household over age 65 in 1983 was far more likely to be receiving money from a defined benefit pension than a household today. The loss of pension wealth would offset much of this modest gain in wealth over the last quarter century.

Also, using the ratio of the wealth of households over age 65 to the wealth of households under age 35 is just a foolish exercise. Households under age 35 never had much wealth. Their 1983 median wealth of $11,500 was not going to carry them far in life. The fact that it fell to $3,660 is not of great consequence compared to their career opportunities.

This would be like saying that homeless people are in trouble because the median amount amount of money they had in their pockets fell from $1.20 to 60 cents. Just as the main factor that will determine the well-being of homeless people is not the amount of change in their pocket, the main factor that will determine the well-being of the young is not their wealth.

A 25-year-old Harvard MBA with $150,000 in student loan debt will do just fine. The relevant issue for young people is their career prospects. These will not be very good if the 1 percent continue to get most of the gains from economic growth.

But the first paragraph is just the beginning. This piece is a true cornucopia of bad logic and misinformation. It tells readers that:

“The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers’ deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.”

Social Security is projected to first face a shortfall in 2036, according to the Trustees projections (2038 according to the Congressional Budget Office), but it does not “run out in 2036,” even in the absurdly unlikely event that Congress never does anything to address the shortfall. (The share of beneficiaries in the voting population will be about 50 percent larger in 2036 than it is today. Any bets that Congress won’t pay full scheduled benefits?)

There will still be plenty of tax revenue being paid in 2037. This will be sufficient to pay about 80 percent of scheduled benefits. With benefits projected to be close to 40 percent higher (after adjusting for increases in the cost of living) in 2037, the payable benefit in 2037 would still be higher than what the typical retiree gets today.

Perhaps even more importantly, today’s beneficiaries paid for their benefits. The return on their payroll taxes is reasonable (@1-3 percent, after adjusting for inflation), but hardly excessive. This is why it is absurd that Esquire tells us that:

“According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, ‘The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget.’”

Yes, using the Brookings Institution methodology the United States spends about 1000 times as much on billionaires as on children, measured on a per capita basis.

Figure it out yet? Billionaires own government bonds. The government pays them interest on these bonds. A billionaire like investment banker Peter Peterson might well get tens of millions of dollars a year in interest on these bonds. It’s true that Peter Peterson paid for these bonds, but the Brookings Institution and Esquire says this does not matter.

The next golden nugget of ignorance comes in the very next paragraph:

“But the government’s future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth.”

If the measure of splurging is the public debt, then Esquire is on the wrong planet here. The gross debt of the federal government was equal to 64.1 percent of GDP at the end of 1992. It had fallen to 57.3 percent of GDP by the end of 2000. How could they get something so simple so wrong?

Of course the debt is not a measure of intergenerational equity. At some point everyone alive today will be dead. The bonds that they hold will end up in the hands of the next generation. This means that the debt will be paid from some members of younger generations to other members of younger generations. There can be an issue of intra-generational equity, for example if Bill Gates’ children and grandchildren own all the debt, but there is no issue of inter-generational equity here.

What matters for inter-generational equity is the overall state of the economy and the physical and natural infrastructure that we hand down to future generations. By the first measure, we are doing quite well. Productivity is increasing at the rate of close to 2.5 percent annually. This means that after 30 years, the average worker will be producing more than twice as much in an hour of work as they do today. If this gain is relatively evenly shared (i.e. the distribution of income gets no worse), then the typical worker in 2041 will enjoy a standard of living that is close to twice as high as what workers today enjoy.

It’s true that if we ignore global warming then this may not be the case. Similarly, if the U.S. manages to antagonize the rest of the world with its foreign policy, people here may not be able to enjoy the fruits of productivity growth. But this will have nothing to do with the Social Security and Medicare benefits received by baby boomers.

There is way too much other nonsense to address in this post, but one item is too delicious to pass up. There is a box with the heading:

“How to disenfranchise a generation.”

The box then discusses the measures proposed by Republicans in many states to impose more restrictions on voting, most importantly requiring a government issued photo ID card to vote. Incredibly, Esquire tells readers that this rule is aimed at young people, as though they expect these measures to keep the children of Wall Street traders and Fortune 500 CEOs from having a vote.

In fact, these laws are quite obviously targeted at minorities of any age. The Republicans are not trying to keep their kids from voting. There are trying to keep the kids of African Americans and Hispanics from voting, as well as parents and grandparents. Does Esquire really not know this?

This article is a shameful effort to transform the realities of class war, where the wealthy have been rigging the rules to secure themselves most of the gains from economic growth, into a generational issue. The combination of ignorance and dishonesty in this piece is truly extraordinary.

By Paul Buchheit

In March of 1936 U.S. photographer Dorothea Lange, on her way to San Francisco after searching the countryside for Depression-era photos, passed a sign saying “Pea Picker’s Camp” in Nipomo, California. Thinking little of it, she drove on. But a few miles down the road she changed her mind and turned back. Her first encounter in the camp was with a widowed 32-year-old Oklahoma mother of seven who had driven to California looking for work. Now, after a storm had wiped out the crop, and after she had sold the tires from her car to buy food, she sat under a makeshift tent with her children, unprepared for the days ahead of them. She looked a lot older than 32.

Days later a San Francisco News article reported: “Ragged, Hungry, Broke, Harvest Workers Live in Squalor.” Shocked Californians immediately began sending food, and the family of “migrant mother” Florence Thompson found refuge in a government shelter.

Millions of Americans today are like the woman in that 76-year-old black and white photo: desperate and determined but dignified individuals who want a job rather than a handout. But the present keeps fading into the past. The National Poverty Center recently reported that extreme poverty in America has doubled since the 1990s. 1.5 million people live on less than two dollars a day. Many more Americans — up to half the population — are considered “low income” by the Census Bureau.

Just like in the Depression years, people are losing their homes, or they’re losing the wealth that was in their homes. Foreclosures now account for almost a quarter of all residential sales. American families owe $700 billion more than their homes are worth.

Just like in the Depression years, people are without work, or they can’t find decent jobs. Unemployment figures don’t show the millions of underemployed and the millions who have stopped looking for work. Incredibly, wages over the last decade have increased more slowly than during the ten years of the Great Depression.

Other comparisons between then and now are equally striking. Inequality has returned to the modern-day high set in 1928. The middle class is rapidly losing its consuming power. Congress is making the same mistake that led to the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937, focusing on budget-cutting rather than job growth.

Conservatives insist that the poor can’t become dependent on government. That’s fine, if they have job opportunities. Education is said to be the key. But state education cuts for 2012 are $12.7 billion, federal education cuts of 8% are anticipated beginning in 2013, and the total amount of student loans has reached $1 trillion.

The rational solutions include ending the Bush tax cuts, implementing the Buffett Rule, and imposing a small financial transaction tax.

Then wage a war, as we did in the 1940s, but this time against oil, by building wind turbines and solar panels and a smart grid for alternative energy transmission. That would create millions of jobs, and take us far away from a time we’d like to forget.

And it would put America back in the hands of middle-class workers instead of financial executives whose only goal is to get rich. It might even create a new class of folk hero. For a while in the 1930s “Pretty Boy” Floyd was a hero for taking money from the bankers responsible for foreclosures. He’d still be popular if he were around today.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of “American Wars: Illusions and Realities” (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

By Jonathan Thompson

In November, La Plata County Commissioner Kellie Hotter called local land-use planning “a blood sport.” She wasn’t kidding. Since last spring, as this southwestern Colorado county considered a new comprehensive land-use plan, carnage has piled up. By mid-December, casualties included a fired planning commissioner, a resigned county planning director and the plan itself — a 400-page document that took two years, $750,000 and 137 public meetings to produce.

Even planning veterans in the rural West — where it’s not uncommon for mind-numbing meetings to erupt into verbal fisticuffs — were shocked by the bloodshed in La Plata County. But perhaps most surprising was who emerged the untarnished victors: Activists who believe that smart growth, clustered development, smart meters and even bike paths are all part of a nefarious United Nations plot to rob citizens of their liberties.

They may sound like folks on the fringe. But they are increasingly influential — and they’ve sabotaged planning efforts nationwide.

The movement’s ideology isn’t new: resentment of government interference and vigilant defense of private-property rights, especially when environmental initiatives are involved. What is new is the alleged villain: Agenda 21, a two-decades-old U.N. document that encourages sustainable development worldwide. The Agenda is being foisted, opponents claim, on often-unsuspecting local governments by ICLEI, a nonprofit that offers planning tools, greenhouse gas inventory software and technical support to some 550 government members in the U.S.

The result? “Government will control how hot your shower may be, how much air conditioning or heat you may use,” writes Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center, an intellectual parent of the end-Agenda 21, or Agender, movement. “The policy of Agenda 21 comes in many names, such as Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, historic preservation … and comprehensive planning.”

La Plata County might not seem like a yeasty environment for fermenting right-wing movements. It’s voted mostly Democratic in major elections for at least 10 years. The population center is Durango, a college town with a disproportionate number of professional cyclists, lawyers and raft guides, not to mention a fabulous bike path. But remnants of the older West remain, most notably some 3,000 oil and gas wells. A far-right faction also still festers. When Colorado’s GOP was fractured by extremist and moderate infighting in 2006, the struggle was centered here.

Planning has always been contentious, and the county commission expected some controversy when, in 2009, it charged its staff and a team of consultants with developing a community-driven vision for the county’s growth over the next 20 years. The plan would contain no actual regulations, but it would provide a critical road map for rewriting the county’s land-use code.

A diverse, 17-member working group was formed to represent the community, and the public was encouraged to attend meetings. From the beginning, a vocal minority suspicious of government interference was present. At one early meeting, after a consultant spoke about preserving agriculture, possibly through zoning, sheep-rancher J. Paul Brown said: “If you’re looking for a fight, keep that crap up!”  Such sentiments were incorporated into the draft plan.

Last spring, an ambitious vision emerged to rein in sprawl, encourage bicycling and public transportation, protect agriculture and promote sustainability. Respect for private-property rights and conventional energy development were also emphasized, and the draft was sent to the planning commission, an appointed body that in Colorado has the final say on county comprehensive plans. “There wasn’t a word in that plan that wasn’t vetted by the working group,” says Charlie Deans, the lead consultant.

But around the same time, the Agender movement was slithering out of the political primordial soup. Since as early as 2003, a few far-right commentators such as DeWeese had banged the Agenda 21 drum, but few listened. Then, in 2009, DeWeese took his ideas to the Tea Party, and its branches began adopting the Agender platform. “It was a slow acceleration,” says Don Knapp, an ICLEI spokesman who has tracked the movement.

During the 2010 mid-term campaign, Dan Maes, a doomed Republican and Tea Party Colorado gubernatorial candidate, announced that Denver’s bike-sharing program was part of a U.N. plot — probably the first high-profile mention of Agenda 21. In a debate for Colorado House District 59, La Plata County’s J. Paul Brown declared that Obama had a secret army and that the U.N. is “going to control our land and our guns.” Gleeful Democrats assumed the rhetoric would kill Brown’s chances for a seat long held by moderates. They were wrong: Brown won.

Also in 2010, Rosa Koire started the Post-Sustainability Institute, which campaigns against Agenda 21 and “communitarianism.” Despite the fact that she’s a registered Democrat who looks fresh from auditions for a Gloria Steinem bio-pic, Koire, a Bay Area real-estate appraiser, has become a Tea Party YouTube hero and Agender leader. Then, last June, Glenn Beck did a 14-minute anti-Agenda 21 monologue on Fox News.

“It really picked up steam after that,” says Knapp. Last month, Koire and dozens of fellow Agenders packed a planning meeting in Marin County, Calif., shouting anti-planning slogans. Agenders in Benton County, Ore., went after a plan to protect river corridors. One told the Corvallis Gazette-Times: “Riparian, sustainability — it’s the words that give ‘em away. Their goal is to take over the world by taking over the water, the land and the food.” Last fall, Newt Gingrich vowed to cut funding for “any kind of activity for United Nations Agenda 21″ if elected president.  And at least 16 communities have ended their ICLEI membership in protest.

In La Plata County, by late July the anti-planning crowd started referencing Agenda 21 in their public comments. County planner Erick Aune had never even heard of it. So he attended an “evening of Agenda 21 education” hosted by the Four Corners Liberty Restoration group, where the featured speaker masterfully laid out a 200-year conspiracy culminating in the comprehensive plan. By the end of that month, more than 100 people had signed a petition against it, saying it was “based on emotional feel-good ideas that are designed for social engineering and social equity that trample our rights as free people.”

In December, after whittling the plan down to about 40 pages and snuffing out an entire chapter on sustainable development, the La Plata County planning commission unanimously voted to scrap it altogether. Aune resigned a day later.

The reasons the planning commissioners gave were somewhat vague. The plan was too values-based; it didn’t reflect the will of the community. But there’s little doubt that the Agenders influenced the process. “I’m for planning, but I’m not for the ideological, political, social engineering that went into this document,” commissioner Steven Kallaher said in December. Earlier, of community concerns, he said, “Someone who owns hundreds of acres in the county doesn’t want someone living in the city who rides a solar-powered bicycle to tell them what to do.”

“The (Agenders) group was very organized and very focused and very intent on delivering a consistent message,” says Aune. “They wanted (the comprehensive plan) to go away because it represents government and control to them.”

The movement’s meteoric rise is probably due to the fact that it’s just the most recent incarnation of an age-old ideology. “Local debates about property rights have been around for decades,” says Knapp. “What’s new is this idea that it has to do with the United Nations or the imposition of some outside force … that there’s this tyranny at play.

“(It’s) motivated a lot of people to get involved in local politics,” he says. “It’s a really good scare story. It’s big on fear, it’s big on fiction, and it’s short on fact.”

Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News and a 2011-2012 Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Once the black sheep of high finance, government owned banks can reassure depositors about the safety of their savings and can help maintain a focus on productive investment in a world in which effective financial regulation remains more of an aspiration than a reality. Centre for Economic Policy Research, VoxEU.org.

Public sector banking is a concept that is relatively unknown in the United States.  Only one state—North Dakota—owns its own bank.  North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since; but skeptics write this off to coincidence or other factors.  The common perception is that government bureaucrats are bad businessmen.  To determine whether government-owned banks are assets or liabilities, then, we need to look farther afield.

When we remove our myopic U.S. blinders, it turns out that globally, not only are publicly-owned banks quite common but that countries with strong public banking sectors generally have strong, stable economies.  According to an Inter-American Development Bank paper presented in 2005, the percentage of state ownership in the banking industry globally by the mid-nineties was over 40 percent.[i] The BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—contain nearly three billion of the world’s seven billion people, or 40% of the global population.  The BRICs all make heavy use of public sector banks, which compose about 75% of the banks in India, 69% or more in China, 45% in Brazil, and 60% in Russia.

The BRICs have been the main locus of world economic growth in the last decade. China Daily reports, “Between 2000 and 2010, BRIC’s GDP grew by an incredible 92.7 percent, compared to a global GDP growth of just 32 percent, with industrialized economies having a very modest 15.5 percent.”

All the leading banks in the BRIC half of the globe are state-owned.  In fact the largest banks globally are state-owned, including:

• The two largest banks by market capitalization (ICBC and China Construction Bank)
• The largest bank by deposits (Japan Post Bank)
• The largest bank by assets (Royal Bank of Scotland, now nationalized)
• The world’s largest development bank (BNDES in Brazil).

A May 2010 article in The Economist noted that the strong and stable publicly-owned banks of India, China and Brazil helped those countries weather the banking crisis afflicting most of the rest of the world in the last few years.  According to Professor Kurt von Mettenheim of the Sao Paulo Business School of Brazil:

Government banks provided counter cyclical credit and policy options to counter the effects of the recent financial crisis, while realizing competitive advantage over private and foreign banks.  Greater client confidence and official deposits reinforced liability base and lending capacity.  The credit policies of BRIC government banks help explain why these countries experienced shorter and milder economic downturns during 2007-2008.

Surprising Findings

In a 2010 research paper summarized on VoxEU.org, economists Svetlana Andrianova, et al., wrote that the post-2008 nationalization of a number of very large banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, “offers an opportune moment to reduce the political power of bankers and to carry out much needed financial reforms.”  But “there are concerns that governments may be unable to run nationalised banks efficiently.”

Not to worry, say the authors:

Follow-on research we have carried out (Andrianova et al, 2009) . . . shows that government ownership of banks has, if anything, been robustly associated with higher long run growth rates.

Using data from a large number of countries for 1995-2007, we find that, other things equal, countries with high degrees of government ownership of banking have grown faster than countries with little government ownership of banks. We show that this finding is robust to a battery of econometric tests.

Expanding on this theme in their research paper, the authors write:

While many countries in continental Europe, including Germany and France, have had a fair amount of experience with government-owned banks, the UK and the USA have found themselves in unfamiliar territory. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that there is deeply ingrained hostility in these countries towards the notion that governments can run banks effectively. . . . Hostility towards government-owned banks reflects the hypothesis . . . that these banks are established by politicians who use them to shore up their power by instructing them to lend to political supporters and government-owned enterprises. In return, politicians receive votes and other favours. This hypothesis also postulates that politically motivated banks make bad lending decisions, resulting in non-performing loans, financial fragility and slower growth.

But that is not what the data of these researchers showed:

[W]e have found that . . . countries with government-owned banks have, on average, grown faster than countries with no or little government ownership of banks. . . . This is, of course, a surprising result, especially in light of the widespread belief—typically supported by anecdotal evidence—that ‘… bureaucrats are generally bad bankers’ . . . .

What accounts for their surprising findings?  The authors provide a novel explanation:

We suggest that politicians may actually prefer banks not to be in the public sector. . . . Conditions of weak corporate governance in banks provide fertile ground for quick enrichment for both bankers and politicians – at the expense ultimately of the taxpayer. In such circumstances politicians can offer bankers a system of weak regulation in exchange for party political contributions, positions on the boards of banks or lucrative consultancies.  Activities that are more likely to provide both sides with quick returns are the more speculative ones, especially if they are sufficiently opaque as not to be well understood by the shareholders such as complex derivatives trading.

Government owned banks, on the other hand, have less freedom to engage in speculative strategies that result in quick enrichment for bank insiders and politicians. Moreover, politicians tend to be held accountable for wrongdoings or bad management in the public sector but are typically only indirectly blamed, if at all, for the misdemeanours of private banks. It is the shareholders who are expected to prevent these but lack of transparency and weak governance stops them from doing so in practice. On the other hand, when it comes to banks that are in the public sector, democratic accountability of politicians is more likely to discourage them from engaging in speculation. In such banks, top managers are more likely to be compelled to focus on the more mundane job of financing real businesses and economic growth.

The BRICs as a Global Power

Focusing on the financing of real businesses and economic growth seems to be the secret of the BRICs, which are leading the world in economic development today.  But the BRIC phenomenon is more than just a growth trend identified by an economist.  It is now an international organization, an alliance of countries representing the common interests and goals of its members.  The first BRIC meeting, held in 2008, was called a triumph for former Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy of promoting multilateral arrangements that would challenge the United States’ concept of a unipolar world.

The BRIC countries had their first official summit and became a formal organization in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009.  They met in Brazil in 2010 and in China in 2011, and they will meet in India in 2012.  In 2010, at China’s invitation, South Africa joined the group, making it “BRICS” and adding a strategic presence on the African continent.

The BRICS seek more voice in the United Nations, the IMF, and the World Bank.  They are even discussing their own multicultural bank to fund projects within their own nations, in direct competition with the IMF.  They oppose the dollar as global reserve currency.  After the Yekaterinburg summit, theycalled for a new global reserve currency, one that was diversified, stable and predictable; and they have the clout to get it.  According to Liam Halligan, writing in The U.K. Telegraph:

The BRICs account for . . . around three-quarters of total currency reserves. They have few serious fiscal issues and all are net external creditors.

Western financial interests have long fought to maintain the dollar as global reserve currency, but they are losing that battle, despite economic and military coercion.  Russia, China and India are now nuclear powers.  The BRICS will have to be negotiated with, and the first step to forming a working relationship is to understand how their economies work.

Written for the Public Banking in America Conference April 27-28th, Philadelphia.

Ellen Brown