"I ask any of my colleagues to imagine that happening here in the United States. Rockets and mortars coming from Toronto in Canada, into Buffalo New York. How would we as a country react?"

It is hard to believe that the Democratic Senate majority leader would parrot that ridiculous line.

But it is in all the "information" packages that the lobby is distributing, changed to reflect geography. In California, the question is what the people of Chula Vista, CA would do if they were being shelled from Tijuana, Mexico. In Burlington, Vermont, the missiles come from Montreal, Quebec. The info packets can apply the analogy to any two places located on an international border.

And the average Joe is supposed to ignore the huge difference in the two situations. The United States does not occupy Mexico or Canada, If we did, the missile attacks on Buffalo or Chula Vista or whatever might not be considered bolts out of the blue. Millions of Americans would demand that rather than bombing Ottawa or Mexico City, we consider ending our occupation of Canada/Mexico.

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The lead story in today's Washington Post foretells of the impending disaster should either the Bush or Obama administrations seek access to the second $350 billion tranche of the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) "despite intense opposition in Congress," sources familiar with the discussions said.

House and Senate leaders, senior Bush administration officials, and Obama transition staff regard TARP II funds as essential in combating the worst depredations of the deepening recession. As the Post reports, "without the money, [they know] it would be nearly impossible to offer significant help for homeowners facing foreclosure, stabilize the financial system or jump-start the credit markets so more consumers and companies can get loans."

But without reforms substantially improving funding procedures and transparency, TARP 2.0 may be dead on arrival in Congress.

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I watch in shock, like the rest of the world, at the appalling death and destruction being wrought on Gaza by Israel; and still it does not stop. Meanwhile, we see a seemingly never-ending army of well-prepared Israeli war propagandists, some Israeli government officials, and many other people self-enlisted for the purpose, explaining to the world the justifications for pulverizing the Gaza Strip, with its 1.5 million inhabitants. Curious about how Israel, or any society for that matter, could justify a crime of such magnitude against humanity, I turned to my Jewish Israeli friends today to hear their take on things. One after another, the theme was the same. The vast majority of Jewish Israelis has apparently bought into the state-sponsored line that Israel was under attack and had no other option available to stop Hamas' rockets. More frightening is the revelation that many Israelis--including one person who self-identifies as a former "peace activist"--are speaking of accepting the killing of 100,000 or more Palestinians, if need be.

I have a problem with this logic.

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Here is the scariest statistic from yesterday's unemployment report--24.2 million. That's the number of American who are either unemployed, have stopped even looking or are working part time when they want full time work. The average work week for the fully employed was 33 hours, the lowest level since they started keeping count in 1964.

If I detect a bit of uncertainty in Larry Summer's expression, it's because he's working the high wire without a net. There are no textbooks for this situation. In the late 1920's before the crash, the average American household was not a consumption machine and the U.S. economy was a production and export powerhouse. There were no credit cards or home equity lines of credit. So while stupid tariff bills like Smoot Hawley hurt the global trade system, the recovery was not totally dependent on reviving domestic consumer demand. By contrast the current U.S. economy is totally dependent on the average citizen spending every penny she earns at the mall. But as I pointed out last week, despite the siren song of advertising, the consumer is becoming a saver. That's why the $150 billion in tax rebate checks the Bush administration sent out last summer didn't help a bit.

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Jonathan Chait at TNR online reasonably asks what the hell I mean by "dealing with Hamas":

if Hamas truly is seized by an implacable desire to wipe Israel off the map, then I have trouble seeing what there is to negotiate over. The only thing to do is persuade Hamas to change its goals, or persuade the Palestinians to adopt new leaders. The latter can be done by making territorial concessions in the West Bank and promoting economic development, in order to demonstrate the comparative benefits of non-Hamas government. But the task would also seem to involve some combination of crushing Hamas's power and/or persuading it -- or, more precisely, the Palestinians who follow it -- that Israel cannot be terrorized into making concessions. How a group of Hamas's nature could be drawn in through a purely concilliatory approach escapes me.

To which I have three responses and a preface. The preface is that, although I've never negotiated an agreement with an enemy force, I don't think I have any illusions about how easy it is. I just don't see a decent alternative.

That said, the hoary peacenik cliché remains no less true for being a peacenik cliché: all kinds of agreements have been worked out with states and quasi-states that had sworn undying hatred. Even during the Cold War, the US and USSR negotiated arms control and other treaties. Consider the deals Israel has made with Egypt, Jordan, and the PLO. They've held. They haven't brought the millennium but they've held. Each time, deals were made with other parties whom the US or Israel would have left out of their ideal worlds but realized they didn't have the luxury of building castles in the air.

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I never thought I'd see the day. AIPAC is furious with George Bush for not vetoing Security Council Resolution 1860 which calls for an immediate ceasefire. After almost eight years, the Bush administration has decided not to stand with Israel against an otherwise unanimous resolution.

I hope AIPAC enjoys blasting a President. On January 20, Barack Obama. having won a landslide victory -- including 80% of the Jewish vote -- and enjoying record popularity, will be immune to this sort of salvo, leaving AIPAC on the DL.

The Democratic Congres will back Obama's Middle East policies with nary a peep. (That will change if his popularity drops. But Congressional Dems will never take on a popular Democratic President on a foreign policy issue). Obama is freer than any President in decades to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without lobby interference.

Anyway, read AIPAC's statement. It is a humdinger. And, I hate to say this: thank you President Bush and Secretary Rice. Better late than never.

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One night in the 1960s, drunken teenagers in Palmer, Massachusetts decided to spook kids at a Jewish, Hebrew-speaking summer camp. They hurled bottles and catcalls, terrifying 12-year olds in their beds. Two Israeli camp counselors raced into the woods like raging bulls, intending to give the townies more than an escort to the local cops. They didn't catch them, but they set up martial patrols, scaring the campers as much as the rowdies, who never returned.

I am not telling this story to be comical or exculpatory at a time when the UN and the Red Cross have reinforced Darryl Li's claim, presented here on Jan. 4, that Israel has turned Gaza from a Bantustan into an internment camp and worse. I am telling it to offer a glimpse into a part of the Israeli psyche, a mindset that antedates the rockets of today and of 2006, the suicide bombings of 2002 and even the war around Israel's founding in 1948.

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In contrast to Chris Peot who is paid to promote biosolids and can afford GAP clothes, I live on a retirement income and have no conflict of interest when commenting and researching the use of sewage sludge.

I have a Harvard Ph.D. designed, administered, and taught environmental science courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and chaired the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, before retiring. For the last 12 years I have worked full-time and gratis with top scientists, attorneys, activists, and sludge victims, researching the risks of land application.

Peot's comment contains a number of unsubstantiated statements and a lot of misleading information. Let me just point out a few of them.

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Those of us who oppose Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza, who are revolted by the pictures and reports of the mangled bodies and miseries of Palestinian children, dare not let Hamas off the hook because the residents of Gaza are victims. Don't forget what Hamas professes and what it does. Many things are true about Hamas even if you don't like the people who say them. Keep all this in your mind.

For example, here's a clip of Hamas MP Fathi Hammad on Al-Aqsa TV, Feb. 29, 2008, bragging about Hamas using women and children, among others, as human shields:

[The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahedeen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahedeen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: "We desire death like you desire life."

I checked out the translation with two Arabic speakers, who confirm that it is accurate. Hussein Ibish, Executive Director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership and a Senior Fellow of the American Task Force on Palestine, e-mails me that "such declarations are in keeping with a good deal of the rhetoric of Hamas and some of its supporters."

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A final nod to history, and a look to the future: Let us not forget that the most worshiped and praised of all ancient sewers was Rome's Cloaca Maxima, whose spirit resided within the shrine of the goddess Cloacina, where warriors came to purge themselves after battle and young couples purified themselves before marriage. The lovely Cloacina was an emanation of Venus, and her statue overlooked the imperial city's sewer pipes as they transported 100,000 of ancient excrementum a day. Built in the sixth century B.C. by the two Tarquins, hailed as one of the three marvels of Rome, the Cloaca became one of the ancient city's great tourist traps. Agrippa rode a boat through it. Nero washed his hands in it. "Thus may the greatness of Rome be inferred," declared Cassiodorus. "What other city can compare with her in her heights, when her depths are so incomparable?"

Our back and forth over the last few days has been a refreshing antidote to the general repression of shit-related topics in the mainstream media. Despite our disagreements, at least we have discussed that which must not be discussed. Indeed, if we as a culture and a world do not pay our proper respects to Cloacina, we may find ourselves knee-deep in excrementum. Which spells the end of civilization as we know it faster than any other apocalypse I can think of . . .

Thanks for the opportunity to weigh in on this subject. First off, I have to commend Rose for her keen eye. I do, in fact, buy clothes at The Gap. They have clothes shopping for men figured out - brown pants, black belt, black/white shirt. That's all I really need on 350 days of the year. As a matter of background, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm the Biosolids Manager at the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in Washington, DC. I'm an engineer by training and am a public servant, working for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DCWASA). I'm a left leaning, tree hugging liberal who believes the earth is in peril and that we (the humans) need to make major changes in order to right the ship. I also believe that given the current state of science and understanding of the risks, recycling biosolids to the land is the best solution for our organization. I am in charge of a program that recycles 1200 tons per day of biosolids, and I do not believe that properly stabilized biosolids, land applied within the regulations, will make individuals ill. Is it a perfect solution? No. Can it be improved upon? Yes. My colleagues in this profession work hard every day to examine issues, conduct research, and improve techniques to ensure we are producing a quality product for the end users.

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It is obvious who is losing the Gaza war. But who is winning?

First the losers. Hamas is losing. It made the mistake of believing its own propaganda about Israelis having lost the determination to fight for their state. For some reason, Hamas decided that the veterans of 1948, 1967, and 1973 had produced cowardly, unpatriotic, and inept descendants. Big mistake.

Hamas is the mouse that roared. Despite all the stored up munitions and its supposedly well-trained fighters, it has not dented the IDF. Israel appears to have a free hand to do whatever it wants in Gaza; only world public opinion seems capable of constraining its actions. And possibly the United Nations Security Council which, with George W. Bush refusing to use his veto on Israel's behalf, passed Resolution 1860, calling for an immediate ceasefire.

But the biggest loser of all is not Hamas (I wish it was), but the people of Gaza. The conservative Israeli daily Ma'ariv quotes "Israeli sources" who say that "of the approximately 550 fatalities in the operation," only 200 "are linked to the warfare by affiliation or by the manner in which they were killed." This means, Ma'ariv reports, that "that the harm to Hamas members . . . is apparently much smaller than the number of unarmed people who were killed."

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As a followup to LB's earlier comment, I think that, at least in the developed world, lack of public awareness about wastewater sanitation, rather than repulsion to the topic, is primarily what keeps the subject off the agenda. The generations who eagerly witnessed the installation of indoor plumbing are all but gone. Today, we just flush and it's whisked away, too busy in our daily routines to consider its fate. Many who live near sewage treatment plants aren't even quite sure what goes on behind that fence. These days, beach closings are few, and the old "No Swimming/Polluted Water" signs that I grew up with have almost disappeared. In the U.S., significant Federal and state investments in wastewater conveyance and treatment in the 70s and 80s seeming made sewage a problem of days gone by.

Unfortunately, infrastructure doesn't last forever. Like bridges and the electrical grid, our sewers, pumping stations and wastewater treatment plants need a continual flow of funding to be sustained. Federal money for wastewater-treatment projects dried up almost 20 years ago, dumping the burden on cash-strapped municipalities. Growth in population in many areas is already stressing systems, with some locales halting additional sanitary sewer connections. The propagation of pavement has increased storm runoff into aging collections systems; coupled with increasing rainfall rates, wet-weather overflows are on the rise.

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A Reuters dispatch on p. A12 of the NYT reports that a Pentagon commission headed by former defense secretary James Schlesinger is worried that the U. S. (in the words of the headline) is "Inattentive to Deterring Nuclear War." In what respect? Because the U. S. hasn't conducted nuclear tests since 1992. "Mr. Schlesinger warned of a new wave of nuclear proliferation if nations in Europe and Asia that rely on the American nuclear umbrella were prompted to start their own arms programs because of flagging confidence in the United States."

"Flagging confidence" is code for the theory that the-American-nuclear-weapons-may-be-rusting-so-they-may-not-deter-an-enemy. Such musings suggest the flagrant unreality of Hard-Headed Thinking in these times. In theory, an aggressor, call it A, thinks better of launching a nuclear attack because it fears that the U. S. will retaliate in kind. "Flagging confidence" suggests that A might just launch its attack if it thinks that America's old, untested nuclear weapons might not work.

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Last night the United States at last permitted the Security Council to pass a ceasefire resolution. Apparently Bush and Rice had reached the breaking point, probably after this. which was huge news worldwide.

The Security Council then passed a good resolution which, in a first, the United
States did not veto.

Immediately following the vote, the Palestinian foreign minister expressed some satisfaction but predicted Israel will ignore it. "They won't implement it. They will say it is almost the Shabbat and they can't violate it. Of course, they began the war on the Shabbat but stopping a war is a violation. No, they won't stop."

And now, this "hell, no" from Olmert.

Read this from Gideon Levy, veteran of the IDF, serious Israeli journalist, on the war and morality. From Ha'aretz.

[I'm out of town and beyond blog access until next Thursday. The world will go on without my commentary.]

By Bernard Avishai and Sam Bahour

Israel and Hamas are not equals on the battlefield - not at all, clearly - and when the power to harm or control others is this uneven, it is meaningless to speak about moral symmetry. But as the current onslaught in Gaza unfolds, it is sadly evident that both sides are continuing to respond to real provocations in ways that are not morally right, or even politically smart. 

If Hamas thought that lobbing missiles into Israeli civilian neighborhoods was a decent or proportionate response to the grim realities of the occupation, they were wrong. On the other hand, if Israel thinks it can bludgeon the Palestinians into political surrender, or get Hamas - or the Palestinian community at large, for that matter - to acquiesce to military occupation then it, too, is wrong.

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Bloomberg has a new story out comparing the investment terms achieved by TARP with those achieved by Warren Buffett when he invested $5 billion in Goldman back in September. The results aren't pretty for the U.S. taxpayer: the government received warrants worth $13.8 billion in connection with its 25 largest equity injections; under the terms Buffett got from Goldman, those warrants would be worth $130.8 billion. (The calculations were done using the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, which has its critics, but which I think is still a good way of estimating the relative difference between similar options.) That's on top of the fact that TARP is getting a lower interest rate (5%) on its preferred stock investments than is Buffett (10%), which costs taxpayers $48 billion in aggregate over 5 years, according to Bloomberg. The difference in the value of the warrants themselves is due to two factors: (1) Treasury got warrants for a much smaller percentage of the initial investment amount; and (2) those warrants are at a higher strike price - the average price over the 20 days prior to investment, while Buffett got a discount to market price on the date of investment.

The comparison isn't a new one - we recommended that TARP emulate Buffett back in October - but Bloomberg's analysis has put the performance gap in striking perspective. Simon has a quote in the article, using the word "egregious," but the really harsh words came from Nobel prize-winner economist Joseph Stiglitz, who said, "Paulson said he had to make it attractive to banks, which is code for 'I'm going to give money away,'" and "If Paulson was still an employee of Goldman Sachs and he'd done this deal, he would have been fired."

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What do toilets have to do with healthy food??? EVERYTHING!

Agri-business became huge after it launched the "green revolution". But it was a fantastic misnomer ... it was in reality entirely a chemical revolution that replaced animal manure with chemical fertilizer. So what? What's the big difference? The difference is huge and will impact our health for a long time to come!

Chemical fertilizer only contains the three principal building blocks for organic matter: N,P,K or nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. The animal manure, however, also contains a large number of nutrients needed in smaller quantities to make food plants nutritious and good tasting. By not replacing those micro-nutrients, we gradually and sometimes quickly, impoverish the soils so they only produce bulk of grain, fruits and vegetable that look good, tastes like nothing and almost totally lack nutritional value. The same is sadly true for animals that graze on grass that is chemically fertilized if you wonder why beef also has lost it's taste. Now huge corporations, like Monsanto, have almost made food production and agriculture a completely chemical affair with pesticides, herbicides, genetically changing seeds to make crops able to stand more herbicides, and only chemical fertilizers ... and still very few people put their foot down because media serves those who pay best for getting the misinformation out and those who can buy advertising space.

Something wrong with this picture?

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Jimmy Carter makes a powerful case in the WP that "the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided." Neither Israel nor Hamas comes across blameless, in his account, but in his irritatingly level-headed way (and without the thundering abuse routinely handed out by his detractors) he makes a case that Israel could have done better protecting its south from rockets without going to war than it has done by going to war. His account of back-channel talks with Hamas last year is very spare and compressed, and in some particulars confusing--confusing about who in Hamas said what, and when, and what Israeli officials said. But he does succeed in reminding us that Hamas wanted resumption of full-scale supply delivery into blockaded Gaza and that Israel declined. How wise was that?

Depressingly and predictably, the Post's online reader comments immediately plunged into vicious capital-letter abuse. If Carter is wrong about what Hamas was demanding, I'd like to hear some evidence.

In any event, Matt Yglesias anticipates that the cognoscenti will now full-throatedly declare that "as everyone knows Carter is a raging, Jew-hating, Israel-bashing bigot" and invites us to "note the irony that Carter is the most-loathed of US Presidents among Israel hawks, but the Camp David accords he sponsored have done more to advance Israeli interests than anything any president's done since Harry Truman recognized Israeli independence."

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The stimulus plan will create jobs repairing and upgrading the nation's roads, bridges, ports, levees, water and sewage system, public-transit systems, electricity grid, and schools. And it will kick-start alternative, non-fossil based sources of energy (wind, solar, geothermal, and so on); new health-care information systems; and universal broadband Internet access.

It's a two-fer: lots of new jobs, and investments in the nation's future productivity.

But if there aren't enough skilled professionals to do the jobs involving new technologies, the stimulus will just increase the wages of the professionals who already have the right skills rather than generate many new jobs in these fields. And if construction jobs go mainly to white males who already dominate the construction trades, many people who need jobs the most -- women, minorities, and the poor and long-term unemployed -- will be shut out.

What to do? There's no easy solution to either dilemma. But there's no reason to think about "green jobs" as simply high-tech. Many low-income and low-skilled workers -- women as well as men -- could be put directly to work providing homes and businesses with more efficient and renewable heating, lighting, cooling, and refrigeration systems; installing solar panels and efficient photovoltaic systems; rehabilitating and renovating old properties, and improving recycling systems. "Green Jobs Corps" teams could be trained to evaluate and advise homeowners and businesses on these and other means of conserving energy.

People can be trained relatively quickly for these sorts of jobs, as well as many infrastructure j0bs generated by the stimulus -- installing new pipes for water and sewage systems, repairing and upgrading equipment, basic construction -- but contractors have to be nudged both to provide the training and to do the hiring.

I'd suggest that all contracts entered into with stimulus funds require contractors to provide at least 20 percent of jobs to the long-term unemployed and to people withincomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. And at least 2 percent of project funds should be allocated to such training. In addition, advantage should be taken of buildings trades apprenticeships -- wich must be fully available to women and minorities.

Back in November, when we wrote about gains in progressive power in state legislative chambers around the country over at Progressive States Network, one of the question marks was what would happen in the Texas House.
 Earlier this week, that question was largely resolved when it was announced that rightwing Speaker Tom Craddick no longer had the votes to be reelected. Instead, a majority coalition, including most House Democrats and a growing number of Republicans, decided to support Republican Joe Straus from San Antonio as the new speaker.  

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We are not short of causes for our current economic crisis. The basic machinery of capitalism, including the process of making loans, did not work as it was supposed to. Capital flows around the world proved much more destabilizing than even before (and we've seen some damaging capital flows over the past 200 years.) And there are plenty of distinguished individuals with something to answer for, including anyone who thought they understood risk and how to manage it.

But perhaps the real problem lies even deeper, for example, either with a natural human tendency towards bubbles or with how we think about the world. All of our thinking about the economy - a vast abstract concept - has to be in some form of model, with or without mathematics. And we should listen when a leading expert on a large set of influential models says (1) they are broken, and (2) this helped cause the crisis and - unless fixed - will lead to further instability down the road.

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President-elect Obama apparently believes that the crisis brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble will require defaulting on the national debt. The New York Times reported today that Obama believes that "changes in Social Security and Medicare will be central to efforts to bring federal spending in line."

While Medicare is projected to face shortfalls because of the incredible inefficiency of the U.S. health care system, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security will be fully funded until 2049 from its own stream of tax revenues and the U.S. bonds it holds.

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Sorry to ruffle Caroline's feathers with my reference to Milorganite, which keeps the deer away from my shrubs. Perhaps the deer have been reading her posts. But I am glad we're finally getting into some big numbers, like $200 million. As everyone knows, there's big bucks in human fecal matter. I spent a fair bit of time in Houston with the CEO of Synagro, Robert Boucher, who may qualify for the greatest shit capitalist in America. Too bad Synagro, US specialists in the human residuals market, has run up against the law in Detroit . . .

A letter from Gaza. I removed only personal references.

I'm writing you for the latest update from my small home in Gaza, today we are hosting 6 families from different locations in Gaza; 14 of them are DELETED family, my sister and her family are 6 and tomorrow we will host my mother in law and her 2 daughters in addition to her neighbor; an old man and his wife.

This morning I asked DELETED to call his sister to come to our home but he said they are 8 members and I don't want to make more terrible for you but his mother asked him to bring her, at 11:00 am she came with her 5 daughters, 1 son and her husband; they where hosted by UN school, at 4:00 pm the same UN school targeted by the IAF where at least 30 Palestinian killed. I it's crazy. the two parties are crazy and they forget their humanity.

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There is not only no justification for Israel barring press from Gaza, but even Israel's reasoning is seriously flawed. For, as this Israeli analyst writes in ynet, Israel's popular website, when the floodgates 'of hell' open, the stories won't stop.

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Fred touts the sludge compost, Milorganite as "the best deer repelling fertilizer on the market." I have heard the same statement from Al Rubin, EPA's former sludge czar, who usually does not support his views with any published peer reviewed data. We have found no scientific evidence of this claim. In fact, sludge spread in forests initially attracts deer to nitrogen rich vegetation. Ingesting this vegetation can be risky for ruminants, especially if the sludge contained molybdenum.

Last summer the Milwaukee wastewater treatment plant that makes Milorganite experienced a nasty 200 million dollar surprise. Workers at the plant discovered some smelly, tar-like oily substance in sewage pipes they were cleaning. The substance contained very high levels of of cancer-causing PCBs. The contaminated sludge had already been spread on thirty playgrounds and parks, turning these areas into super fund sites. PCB levels in the spread sludge were so high, that most of the material had to be scraped off the sites and trucked out of state to a specially designated toxic waste landfill. At the tune of $200 million dollars. Not to count the loss in producing and marketing Milorgonite. The incident was not made public until after a month of its discovery. Officials claim that no PCB ended up in Milorgonite. But who knows. One wonders what would have happened if the workers had not reported finding that oily, smelly substance.

Most of the current discussion regarding the Obama Economic Plan focuses on whether the fiscal stimulus should be somewhat larger or smaller ($650-800bn seems the current range) and the composition between spending and tax cuts. President Obama stressed on Tuesday that trillion dollar deficits are here to stay for several years, and it looks like part of the arguing in the Senate will be about whether this is a good idea.

There is at least one key question currently missing from this debate. Is this Plan too much about a fiscal stimulus and too little about the other pieces that would help - and might even be essential - for a sustained recovery? The fiscal stimulus may be roughly the right size (and $100bn more or less is unlikely to make a critical difference), but perhaps we should also be looking for more detail on the following:

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As an expert on the risks associated with the land application of America's sewage sludge, I was impressed with Rose's Biosolids chapter. I wish the chapter had been longer and had emphasized how federal and state regulatory agencies work with those corporations that profit from sludge spreading to deceive legislators, the media, farmers, and the public on the short- and long-term risks of this practice. See www.sludgefacts.org. Since the publication of my 2005 paper disturbing new data about the environmental and health risks of spreading sludge on farmland is reported almost every month. US EPA officials continue to ignore and deride complaints by sludge-exposed rural residents who ask for help. Many of them live in low-income and/or minority neighborhoods that have neither the political or legal clout to restrict land application. EPA ignores or covers up incidents of ground water pollution, soil degradation, cattle deaths and fly infestations, all linked to sludge spreading. Occasionally EPA send someone to a problem area to investigate. But their response is always that all is well, because no rules were broken. Of course. The US rules governing sludge spreading are the most lenient of any industrialized nation, which means that almost any hazardous material can legally be used as a soil amendment.

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Good afternoon. Thanks to Carl and Fred for their posts. I agree with both of you. Fred's right that my intro telescoped human attitudes to their shit (I'll address the issue of why I don't like to say "waste" shortly) into the last two centuries or so. I should have been more specific. The rise of the unmentionability of excrement is, in the general sweep of history, recent. Three hundred years ago, it was still commonplace for the highest noblemen and women in Paris and London to use the corridors of palaces as their toilet, quite openly. On the one hand people had little choice but to be at close quarters with excrement, because it was everywhere, in overflowing cesspools; on the street; in the rivers. That meant that there was much more pragmatism about our bodily functions and products: The Wellcome Institute, a medical library in London, has a lovely engraving of a maidservant being handed a stool sample in a bedpan by a visiting doctor, and asking whether he'd like a fork. Doctors and medical men were much more at ease with examining stools, and also, like Paracelsus, in endeavouring to make use of it in medicine, either by recommending it be ingested or applied to the skin in one form or another. I don't know the medical grounds for that, but I was fascinated to learn that fecal transfusions are now used to treat severe cases of MRSA, a "superbug." A relative's feces can supply healthy bacteria that somehow defeats MRSA when conventional treatment didn't.

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It starts with what we replace plant nutrients with in agriculture! Instead of using chemical fertilizers that only effectively replaces the main building blocks of organic matter -- N,P and K -- human and animal fertilizer replaces the whole spectrum of nutrients including the micro-nutrients that give plants taste, good nutrition and resistance to disease. By doing so we would also cut in half the pollution caused by agricultural run-off and the now flushed out nutrients from sewage systems. It may seem to be an impossible change to make but the first step is simple. We can immediately apply a technology for dealing with toilet waste that catches the whole nutrient base from human excretion, without spreading disease from human pathogens.

By switching over to odor-free, hygienic toilet systems that catches the plant nutrients without mixing them up with technical waste, we would get these nutrients back in a directly usable form. This full spectrum fertilizer strengthens the plants and we will not, as now, need to kill everything that we consider a threat to the crop as they get better at defending themselves. The food we produce will taste better, be more nutritious and attract better prices in the markets. Small natural blemishes is then, not a sign of bad agriculture but a sign that these fruits and veggies are organically produced and will be good for us and the environment.

So amazingly, healthy food starts with how we incorporate our and other animals bodily secretions in the cycle of our food production.

First of all, I'd like to say what an honor it is to be included among this august group. I have worked hard all my life to be considered an expert on human waste, so consider my participation in this TPM Cafe a culmination of sorts . . .

Second of all, loved Rose's intro a lot, but she's downplaying the passions human waste engenders today, and over the whole of human history. Perhaps as we go along we should keep in mind that none other than the great Paracelsus, father of modern pharmacology, kept a store of (what he called) zibethum in the cabinet, from which he hoped to conjure nothing less than the philosopher's stone.

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Like everybody else, I think Jon Stewart is terrific. I also think he is brave. But I did not think he was this brave.

I know there are those who will say "what's brave about it. He's rich and famous. What can Israel's right-wing friends in America do to him?"

Who knows? We'll see. I'm pretty much of a nobody but back when I worked on the Hill, my boss Carl Levin wrote something mildly critical of Israel, and William Safire of the New York Times called me and threatened to destroy me. In pretty much those words. Levin backed me up but that wasn't pleasant (ironically, the mildly critical statement was Levin's idea, not mine).

It's only changed for the worse. So Jon Stewart should expect repercussions, especially because the right knows that if it has lost Jon Stewart, it's losing the kids. But Stewart knows what he is up against. And he doesn't care! Bravo.

That's the question that the Obama team should be asking as they court Republican support for a stimulus package. We would all like to get beyond the partisan rancor of the last 16 years, but there are real issues at stake here. If the effort to court Republicans means switching from spending to tax cuts, which will create fewer jobs per dollar; and from tax cuts for low and middle income families to tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy, which will create even fewer jobs, then President Obama will be paying a big price in jobs lost for those Republican votes.

It is understandable that President Obama would want to reach out to Republicans on the first major initiative of his presidency. But the price of this gesture should not undermine the goal of the policy. We need growth and jobs more than we need 80 votes in the Senate.

The economy is in big trouble. The same is true for economics.

The Economic Crisis

The global financial crisis of fall 2008 was unexpected. A few people had been predicting that serious problems were looming, and even fewer had placed bets accordingly, but even they were astounded by what happened in mid-September.

What did happen? There are many layers to unpeel, but let me begin with the three main events that triggered the severe global phase of the crisis. (See http://BaselineScenario.com for more on what came before, how events unfolded during fall 2008, and where matters now stand).

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Ethan Bronner at the NYT online reports that Israel is shutting foreign correspondents out of Gaza altogether.

Israel claims that its Gaza attacks are precisely targeted. War being war and human beings being human, that's unlikely to the vanishing point, but at least it's an empirical claim that's in principle falsifiable. That's where journalism comes in. The Israeli claim cries for on-the-ground verification--especially on a day when at least 30 Palestinian refugees are dead in or near a UN school where they took refuge, and Israel claims that the attack was justified in that "an initial investigation suggested its forces had responded to mortar fire coming from the school."

So let's see what an independent press says, right? Wrong, according to the Israeli government. Here's Bronner:

Daniel Seaman, director of Israel's Government Press Office, said that "any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that."

Bronner adds:

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control.

But never mind, in the eyes of the Israeli government. "Objectively," foreign reporting from Gaza serves Hamas. This theory has the totalitarian look all too familiar in fascist and Stalinist annals.

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Hello and happy new year. It's now no longer the International Year of Sanitation - or indeed the International Year of the Potato - so I'm pleased that TPM Book Café still sees fit to keep talking, and to examine the unmentionables, as Time magazine headlined a piece about Alexander Kira, author of the wonderful and peerless The Bathroom, back in 1966. That title was partly behind my subtitle (the US one at least; the UK one is "Adventures in the World of Human Waste", which was thought a bit too Boy's Own for Americans, though I think it's truthful), but it wasn't actually accurate, in the sense that after two years of research, I don't think the topic is unmentionable.

I'm not referring to myself, because it has obviously been in my interest to mention it, constantly. But in the sense that even when I wasn't talking to people in the business, the unsung heroes who flush the sewers, install latrines, pick hospital aprons out of wastewater treatment plant grills, I found my conversation partners to be astonishingly willing to talk about it. There was usually a pause, after I'd told them what I was writing about, and then invariably some anecdote or other would come pouring out. Sometimes I was the one to change the subject. The same thing has happened since the book has been published: I expected to get some mockery, and some attention because of the potential gross-out nature of the topic, but there's been none of that. Instead, genuine, respectful curiosity and a real interest.

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Author Rose George is joining us this week at TPMCafe for a book club a bit off the normally beaten Cafe path. We'll be discussing her latest book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters. Her excellent book takes a tour of the world's sewage system while addressing the sometimes uncomfortable-- and often controversial-- subject of the global politics of waste.

We've lined up a slew of experts and journalists to discuss along with Rose. Frederick Kaufman, journalist and author of the in-depth sewage study "Wasteland" (Harper's, Feb. 2008); Caroline Snyder, activist and biosolids specialist with the Sierra Club; Vincent Sapienza, assistant commissioner for wastewater operations at New York City's Department of Environmental Protection; Carl Lindstrom, engineer and designer of greywater and composting toilet systems; and Chris Peot, the Biosolids Division Manager with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.

Rose's first post will be up shortly. As she concludes in the introduction to The Big Necessity,

Once I start noticing, I can't stop. And once I start meeting people who work in this world-- who flush its sewers and build its pitlatrines, who invent and engineer around our essential essence, in silence and disregard-- I don't want to. I'd rather follow Sigmund Freud, who wrote that humanity's "wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit [shit's] existence and dignify it as much as nature will allow." So here goes.

Here goes.

Check this out on Politico.

Just as I thought, the President-Elect was holding back so he could fully address the issue after Jan. 20.

"The loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I'll have plenty to say about the issue."

Obama said he was "not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign" and that "starting at the beginning of our administration, we're going to engage effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East."

Read between the lines. He is going to engage big-time, and not piece meal either. This is good news. (Note, he addresses the the loss of life in Gaza first, before mentioning Israel. That is how it should be considering that 98% of the deaths are Palestinians but, nonetheless, this is not how the issue is usually addressed in Washington, neither by Bush or by the Democratic Congress.

I'm a fan of Andrew Sullivan. I like him because he's brilliant, thoughtful, and because he paved the way for other openly gay men and women to play major roles in media. Without Sullivan, I doubt there would be a Rachel Maddow or even a Suze Orman.

What I have never liked about him was his position on Israel. His first big job was at the New Republic, where he was taken under the wing of Martin Peretz, who is fanatical on the subject of Israel. Sullivan, I think out of a feeling of debt to his mentor, never spoke out on the Palestinians because, I think he believed, it would hurt his old friend.

I never doubted where Sullivan's heart was. It is simply impossible that he'd be a hawk on Israel. That position simply did not fit with the rest of his worldview.

And now Sullivan tells us what he really thinks. And in my opinion, his thinking is brilliant. He examines the "just war" theory and concludes that by no standard is this a just war. It's a brave piece. He will lose friends but, I promise you this, Harvey Milk is looking down, very pleased. Can you imagine how Milk would have responded to this?

Harvey's Judaism

The core problem we face is not access to capital. The Treasury has already flooded Wall Street and the banking system with money, committing nearly $350 billion; the Federal Reserve Board has exchanged Treasury bills for some $2.2 trillion of troubled assets; other agencies, such as the FDIC, have guaranteed trillions more. But there has been no appreciable result. Banks will not lend because they fear borrowers will not repay; businesses will not borrow because they do not have adequate markets for their goods and services; individuals cannot and will not borrow because they do not have enough reliable income to do so.

The core problem lies on the demand side. American consumers, whose purchases represent 70 percent of the economy, do not have the purchasing power to maintain overall demand for American goods and services. Businesses will not invest unless consumers are able to buy. Exports cannot possibly fill the gap. Inadequate demand is forcing the private sector to lay off large numbers of workers, which, in turn, is further reducing the buying power of consumers. In 2008, 1.9 million jobs vanished -- the biggest drop in non-farm payrolls in thirty-four years. We are caught in a vicious cycle.

As the buyer of last resort, the federal government must respond if that cycle is to be reversed. In my judgment, this will require a stimulus of about 6 and a half percent of gross domestic product, or a total of some $900 billion, spread over two years. That’s my estimate for the shortfall in private demand. But the federal government should stand ready to spend larger sums if necessary to get the economy back on track toward full capacity. The danger is not that the government will do too much; the danger is that it will do too little, too late.

Without such action, I estimate that another 3 million jobs will be lost in 2009, unemployment will rise to 10 percent of the workforce by the end of this year, and under-employment – including people working part-time who would rather be working full time, and those too discouraged even to look for work – will reach 15 percent. Without federal action, next year could be even worse.

People often ask where the money for the stimulus will come from. The answer is the same places from which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have financed their far larger attempt to rescue the financial system. The bulk of the money will have to be borrowed from abroad, largely from China and Japan. This is less than ideal, but failure to adequately stimulate the U.S. economy, resulting in years of economic stagnation, would be far worse – both for us and for the rest of the world. Moreover, our current ratio of debt to gross domestic product is still below 50 percent, not substantially higher than that of most other industrialized nations. In 1946, our debt to GDP ratio was over 100 percent. Most of the declines in our debt-GDP ratio over the years have been achieved through higher levels of economic growth rather than through less debt. The sooner we return to growth, the better able we will be to reduce this ratio.

No stimulus can fully succeed if millions of American families continue to lose their homes through foreclosure. Housing markets will continue to decline, people cannot move to take new jobs, and industries such as construction and retail services will continue to shed jobs.

Mortgage mitigation efforts to date have failed largely because investors won’t agree to take their losses on bad investments. In my view, the answer is to enable families to write down their home mortgages in bankruptcy – just the way businesses can do with commercial property and people can do with vacation homes and investment properties. This change in bankruptcy law should be part of the stimulus plan.

Overall, the federal government’s responsibility for restoring aggregate demand is at least as great – arguably, far greater – than its responsibility for rescuing the financial system and helping U.S. automakers restructure. Without adequate demand, credit markets will continue to be frozen and major American industries will languish. Yet there is no ready formula for how the federal government should proceed because we have not been here before.

This largest and most serious economic downturn in more than sixty years will require both a willingness to try new policies and to change course if those policies appear to be ineffective relative to their costs. The danger is not that the federal government will do too much but, rather, that it will do too little.

Whatever is contained in the stimulus plan must also be clear and transparent, so that the public can know and understand what is being tried. Finally, although the ferocity of the downturn necessitates quick action, policy makers and the public will need to be reasonably patient. Even with the best of policies, a substantial and sustainable turnaround cannot be expected any time soon.

You'd need a slightly robotic view of human beings to believe this, but let's say Hamas' acts of terror, from suicide bombing to indiscriminate missile attacks, are the pure expression of a closed circle of jihadists, whose fanatic, intractable views are more or less conveyed by the organization's charter: that the "land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [trust] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day," that Islam must "obliterate Israel," and "all initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

Think of Hamas' message as code--as the Darwinist digerati say, a "meme"--that spreads and replicates itself under given conditions. Suppose that no peace process can survive its triumph, and that not only Israelis, but West Bank leaders and professionals, moderate pro-Western Arab regimes, Americans and Europeans--all advocates of civil society--have an interest in seeing it defeated. How to fight it? Is Israel's attack in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, a kind of awful therapy?

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On day 10 of the Gaza crisis I would like to weigh in with some thoughts on (1) what needs to happen next and what a more rational, more thoughtful pro-Israel position might look like, (2) on this human tragedy that is unfolding and how to create incentives to sustain a future ceasefire (3) on the bigger picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and some of the nonsense propaganda on "what would you expect America to do under these circumstances," (4) how this is an American problem too in an already dangerously destabilized region that so impacts American security and finally (5) how congress needs to give political space to the incoming Obama administration to get to work on a very challenging Middle East, and not to box Obama in.

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By and large, it is a good thing that John Bolton is no longer in government, where he worked overtime to undermine any number of worthwhile agreements, such as the effort to cap and roll back North Korea's nuclear program. But his fall from power has come at a price. He is now the mainstream media's neocon of choice, widely quoted in news articles and placed prominently on op-ed pages as if he were just another pundit, not the co-author of some of the most disastrous policies in our nation's history. The last straw may have come today, when Bolton simultaneously had articles on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times (an impressive "daily double").

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Lots of talk this week about the proposed stimulus. One high priority
ought to be the most vulnerable members of our society. The safety net
created in the 1930s to protect Americans from extreme poverty is in
tatters. Now that we¹re in the worst downturn since the Depression, that
safety net needs mending. This should be a key part of any stimulus plan.

Unemployment insurance, for example, was created in 1935, when most people
who lost jobs had held those full time positions for some years. But most
people who are losing jobs now have not been in them all that long.
Typically, the last ones hired are the first fired. And many job losers
have only worked part time.

Either way, they don¹t qualify for unemployment benefits. In fact, fewer
than 40 percent of people now losing their jobs qualify. So a necessary
step toward mending our safety net is to get unemployment benefits to
everyone who loses a job. And if it's a part-time job, partial benefits.

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"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.
A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them" -- George Orwell

On the chutzpah scale this one is off the charts. John Yoo, the author of the infamous torture memo and John Bolton, chief advocate of nuking Iran, have chosen to give the nation a lecture on the Constitutionthis morning. They are worried President Obama might work with other countries to try to slow global warming, leading to "draconian restrictions on energy use". The thought that James Imhoffe and a small cabal of Senate climate Change deniers couldn't hold this up under the treaty clause has them deeply troubled.

Given that these two mugs were chief enablers of Bush and Cheney's wholesale flouting of the Constitution, they are hardly the appropriate teachers of constitutional law. Yoo will be a case study for the next century in the exploitation of legal loopholes ("it's not torture unless there is organ failure") that always say the end justifies the means. That the New York Times would give them a platform for this without a hint of irony is mind-boggling. They both should be stripped of their license to practice law, let alone teach it.

One of the clichés of Obama's presidential election campaign was that the invasion of Iraq was the wrong war, but that the war in Afghanistan is the right one. After all, Afghanistan served as a haven for terrorists. Indeed, Obama and Biden call for a surge of troops in Afghanistan, as the Taliban is making a comeback. However, the attempt to impose a regime change on Afghanistan is failing and very likely to continue to fail, all the while causing more and more Afghan, American, and other casualties.

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William Kristol's penchant for certainty fails him this morning. Here are a few sentences from his NYT column, helpfully annotated by me:

"Israel could well succeed in Gaza....the Israeli leadership seems aware of the mistakes -- political, strategic and military -- it made in Lebanon. That doesn't mean it won't make them all over again." "So far as one can tell, the Gaza operation seems to have been well-planned and is being methodically executed, in sharp contrast to the Lebanon incursion. Barak has also warned that the operation could be long and difficult, lowering expectations by contrast with the Israeli rhetoric of July 2006."

The expectations are being lowered by Kristol now. The generous view is that he is belatedly mindful of some of his earlier enthusiasms. For example, on the subject of Iraq (h/t: David Corn):

"No one believes the inspections can work" (September 15, 2002).

A war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East" (September 18, 2002).

"We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all" (September 19, 2002).

On the risk of sectarian war after a US invasion of Iraq: "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together" (March 1, 2003).

"Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president" (also March 1, 2003, not one of his better days)

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If you're seeing anything funky with the myTPM software, I'm collecting reports here.

The latest mutterings from Congress, especially the Republican leadership, indicate that they still don't have a clue about the seriousness of the economic downturn we are facing. They are saying that they can't have a stimulus package ready for when President Obama takes office in two weeks, and that a package probably won't be ready until well into February.

This delay is inexcusable. Remember when the Wall Street boys needed their TARP bailout in the fall? President Bush and his crew, together with the Democratic congressional leadership, with a huge chorus of media cheerleaders, all told us that the economy would collapse without immediate action. That is almost true now in the case of stimulus.

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The NY Times has an article about the proposed Ledbetter bill to reverse the decision by the Supreme Court which severely restricted the ability of civil rights plaintiffs to file discrimination lawsuits. Here's a reality that goes against conventional wisdom-- the problem of Congress having to reverse decisions by the Court hostile to civil rights is nothing new. From the article:

In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down a law that barred racial discrimination by hotels, theaters and railroads, saying Congress had exceeded its power. In 1988 and 1991, Congress expanded civil rights protections that had been curtailed by the Supreme Court.

In September, Congress repudiated several Supreme Court decisions that had undercut the Americans With Disabilities Act.

"There's a historic pattern of the court's being hostile to civil rights statutes and Congress stepping in to overturn those narrow court rulings," said Deborah L. Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Longtime State Department Middle East specialist Aaron David Miller on the outlook there, and the test for Obama:

Despite efforts to sound reassuring during the campaign, the new administration will have to be tough, much tougher than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush were, if it's serious about Arab-Israeli peacemaking. The departure point for a viable peace deal--either with Syria or the Palestinians--must not be based purely on what the political traffic in Israel will bear, but on the requirements of all sides....

Israel has every reason to defend itself against Hamas. But does it make sense for America to support its policy of punishing Hamas by making life unbearable for 1.5 million Gazans by denying aid and economic development? The answer is no.

In 25 years of working on this issue for six secretaries of state, I can't recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity--including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions--does to the peacemaking process.

This last paragraph is especially shocking. Not surprising but shocking.

I'm immersed in long-range writing and leave tomorrow for six months in Berlin, but the Gaza war provokes me to share a brilliant essay by Darry Li, a doctoral student in anthropology and Middle East Studies at Harvard and a student at Yale Law School who has worked in Gaza for Human Rights Watch, B'tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

The essay appeared last February in Middle East Report, but it's making the rounds again because its clarity and comprehensiveness outweigh its blind spots. Below I post half of it with my comments, but click the link and read it all.

Li writes that Israel's promises to avoid a "humanitarian crisis" reflect its long descent from treating Gaza as a Bantustan to abandoning yet controlling it as a holding pen. He gets polemical at times, and some of his analysis is wrong. But he's right that Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza in 2005 is, not "a one-time abandonment of control" but "an ongoing process of controlled abandonment, by which Israel is severing the ties forged with Gaza over 40 years... without allowing any viable alternatives to emerge." This strategy seeks "neither justice nor even stability, but rather survival -- as we are reminded by every guarantee that an undefined 'humanitarian crisis' will be avoided."

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