2364. The Failed Promise of "Clean Coal"

By Ian Urbina, The New York Times, July 5, 2016

A “first-of-its-kind” technologically speaking and the most expensive coal plant of all time, Mississippi Power’s Kemper Plant has put ratepayers at risk in pursuit of unproven and far-off returns. 

DE KALB, Miss. — The fortress of steel and concrete towering above the pine forest here is a first-of-its-kind power plant that was supposed to prove that “clean coal” was not an oxymoron — that it was possible to produce electricity from coal in a way that emits far less pollution, and to turn a profit while doing so.

The plant was not only a central piece of the Obama administration’s climate plan, it was also supposed to be a model for future power plants to help slow the dangerous effects of global warming. The project was hailed as a way to bring thousands of jobs to Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, and to extend a lifeline to the dying coal industry.

The sense of hope is fading fast, however. The Kemper coal plant is more than two years behind schedule and more than $4 billion over its initial budget, $2.4 billion, and it is still not operational.

The plant and its owner, Southern Company, are the focus of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and ratepayers, alleging fraud, are suing the company. 

Members of Congress have described the project as more boondoggle than boon. The mismanagement is particularly egregious, they say, given the urgent need to rein in the largest source of dangerous emissions around the world: coal plants.

The plant’s backers, including federal energy officials, have defended their work in recent years by saying that delays and cost overruns are inevitable with innovative projects of this scale. In this case, they say, the difficulties stem largely from unforeseen factors — or “unknown unknowns,” as Tom Fanning, the chief executive of Southern Company, has often called them — like bad weather, labor shortages and design uncertainties.

Many problems plaguing the project were broadly known and had been occurring for years. But a review by The New York Times of thousands of pages of public records, previously undisclosed internal documents and emails, and 200 hours of secretly though legally recorded conversations among more than a dozen colleagues at the plant offers a detailed look at what went wrong and why.

Those documents and recordings, provided to The Times by a whistle-blower, an engineer named Brett Wingo, and interviews with more than 30 current or former regulators, contractors, consultants or engineers who worked on the project, show that the plant’s owners drastically understated the project’s cost and timetable, and repeatedly tried to conceal problems as they emerged.

The system of checks and balances that are supposed to keep such projects on track was outweighed by a shared and powerful incentive: The company and regulators were eager to qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies for the plant, which was also aggressively promoted by Haley Barbour, who was Southern’s chief lobbyist before becoming the governor of Mississippi. Once in office, Mr. Barbour signed a law in 2008 that allowed much of the cost of building any new power plants to be passed on to ratepayers before they are built.

Seeing so many of the problems from the inside, at least one employee felt the need to speak up.

“I’ve reached a personal tipping point and feel a duty to act,” Mr. Wingo wrote in a 2014 email, which was among several that he sent to officials of Southern Company and Mississippi Power, the state utility that runs the plant, alleging that the company had broken federal law and engaged in corporate fraud. “Hope is not a strategy,” he added. “This is a high-profile project with many misguided enemies, so why give them free ammo?”

In their recorded conversations with Mr. Wingo, at least six senior engineers from the plant said that they believed that the delays and cost overruns, as well as safety violations and shoddy work, were partly the result of mismanagement or fraud.

“It has nothing to do with the design, it has nothing to do with the technology, it just has to do with poor project management,” Landon Lunsford, an engineer at the plant, said during one recorded call with Mr. Wingo last December, when they discussed an email from Southern’s legal department telling senior employees to retain all emails because of a continuing S.E.C. investigation.

The company will never admit the project-management problems because they will attract more scrutiny from regulators, Mr. Lunsford said. “As long as they can talk away the results as attributable to something else other than just poor performance, the other public service commissions can’t hold them over the fire as much,” he added.

Officials from Southern Company and Mississippi Power, which is a Southern subsidiary, said that they could not comment on Mr. Wingo’s allegations but that all decisions about cost and budget projections were made by consensus. They also said that Mr. Wingo’s accusations had previously been investigated by the company and could not be substantiated. Mr. Wingo was fired in February, a move that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration later ruled illegal.

Ed Holland, the former chief executive of Mississippi Power, added that one of the project’s biggest mistakes was to start construction with little of the plant designed. “We still believe that from our investors’ standpoint, this was a wise investment to prove the technology,” he said in an interview.

In the end, the Kemper project is a story of how a monopoly utility, with political help from the Mississippi governor and from federal energy officials who pressured state regulators in letters to support the project, shifted the burden of one of the most expensive power plants ever built onto the shoulders of unwitting investors and some of the lowest-income ratepayers in the country.

Kemper’s rising price tag and other problems will probably affect the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on new power plants, and also play into broader discussions about the best way to counter climate change. E.P.A. regulations in effect require new coal plants to have carbon capture technology but are being held up in federal court partly by arguments that the technology is not cost-effective.

The importance of this technology grows, as well, after President Obama said last week that the United States would join Canada and Mexico in pledging to reach a shared goal of generating 50 percent of North America’s electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2025, up from 37 percent today, with a power mix that includes wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear energy and coal or gas power paired with carbon capture technology.

“The big question with clean coal has always been whether it’s a moonshot or a money pit,” said Charles Grayson, the director of the Bigger Pie Forum, which advocates fiscal conservatism in Mississippi and has been critical of the Kemper project for years. “The Obama administration and my state made a really bad wager in trying to use Kemper to make the economic argument for this technology.”

Coal represents a conundrum: It is among the dirtiest sources of fuel, producing roughly 45 percent of the emissions that contribute to climate change. And yet the world still relies on it for power, with more than a quarter of the electricity used globally coming from coal plants.

Southern Company proposed a promising idea with the Kemper project. Providing a cleaner way to use coal, which is cheap and abundant in the United States, the plant also offered the means to preserve many coal-mining jobs that are fast disappearing in this part of the country.

Kemper County, with mostly two-lane roads cutting through clay hills and pine forest, has an average per capita income of $14,837 and an unemployment rate roughly double the national average. To the region, the plant offered more than clean power: It promised hope, at least 12,000 jobs and long-term savings. As construction ramped up, the county took in over $8 million annually in extra tax money, which went toward repairing roads, bridges and schools, lowering local property taxes, and clearing debt.

In the summer of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina toppled drilling rigs and uprooted pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, the price of natural gas rose by more than 40 percent. In Mississippi, utility regulators saw the Kemper plant as a way to diversify its energy options in a state that relies on natural gas for nearly 80 percent of its electricity.

The plant, which broke ground in 2010, would run on lignite, a type of coal that is difficult to process but is plentiful in the region. Most of the carbon dioxide produced by the plant would be captured, compressed, sold and piped to oil fields. There, it would be pumped underground in a process known as enhanced oil recovery, to help push up previously unrecoverable oil to levels where it could be reached.

Though carbon capture technology is proven and widely viewed as a potentially important tool to slow global warming, the question has been whether it can be scaled up affordably.

Before becoming governor, Mr. Barbour helped orchestrate the transfer of about $270 million in federal subsidies from a canceled coal plant in Florida to the proposed Mississippi plant. As governor, Mr. Barbour then signed the Baseload Act, which shifted much of the cost and risk of building power plants from investors to consumers, and allowed utilities such as Mississippi Power to charge ratepayers for projects before they were completed.

Carbon capture has been considered a holy grail for decades. For Ronald Reagan, it was a solution to acid rain; for Bill Clinton, an alternative to nuclear power. George W. Bush billed his FutureGen project as the world’s first zero-emissions coal plant but mothballed it when it became too expensive.

As the emphasis on fighting climate change grew, the Obama administration hung many of its hopes on Kemper. Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator, cited federal support for the project as proof that her agency was not anti-coal, despite strict new rules on power-plant emissions. The Energy Department repeatedly wrote state regulators emphasizing the importance of the project.

By 2012, though, “Miss Power,” as locals called the state utility, was facing mounting criticism about the plant. In May of that year, after the utility said that the Kemper project was $366 million over budget, it announced a plan to raise its customers’ rates by 13 percent.

Campaigning for a seat on the Mississippi Public Service Commission, Thomas A. Blanton, an opponent of the project, ran television ads featuring an older woman eating dog food and warning of sacrifices that poorer people sometimes make to afford electricity. In cramped trailers where some of the poorest people in the state live, summer temperatures topped 110 degrees — potentially deadly for older residents who could not pay to keep their air-conditioning running.

“You don’t want to pay to build my home, and I don’t want to pay to build your plant,” John Gooding, a cabinetmaker from Bay St. Louis, who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, said during a public hearing about the rate hikes. “Some people are still living in trailers, and now you want to build a plant you can’t guarantee.”

Other critics piled on. Environmentalists called the plant the “Solyndra of clean coal,” a reference to the heavily subsidized but failed federal solar project. They asked whether the plant’s climate change benefits were overstated because the carbon it would capture from coal was going to be used to pump more oil.

Why was Kemper being cited as a model worthy of replicating, they asked, given that other plants would not share one of Kemper’s main advantages: a plentiful supply of cheap coal nearby.

Alleging that Southern Company and Mississippi Power had overstated the plant’s cost-effectiveness, the Bigger Pie Forum sued to unseal project records. To help make their case that the Kemper plant would be competitive with natural gas, which is coal’s main competitor, utility executives predicted to investors and regulators that the per-unit price for natural gas would be higher than $11 by 2016. But gas remains less than $2 per unit, undermining the business case for the plant.

The project did create jobs, but Mark Klinedinst, a retired economics professor from the University of Southern Mississippi, said that more were lost in the region as businesses laid people off to pay for the higher electrical bills caused by Mississippi Power rate increases from plant construction. The University of Southern Mississippi also raised annual tuition $236 per student, partly to offset its additional $1 million in higher electrical costs, he said.

The Whistle-Blower

Mr. Wingo, 48, had lived paycheck to paycheck for years, working at small, struggling engineering firms. When he was hired in 2007 by a subsidiary of Southern, it was a big step up. He doubled his salary to become a midlevel manager to help oversee scheduling and some design decisions on a project that he believed would make history.

Before long, Southern began flying him around the country to explain the project to others. He received glowing performance reviews and was awarded an annual $2,000 “Southern Excellence” employee award.

By 2012, though, Mr. Wingo had begun his transition to whistle-blower. About two weeks after state regulators renewed the license for the project to continue, Mississippi Power admitted to regulators that it had concealed cost overruns of about $366 million.

In increasingly testy meetings and emails over succeeding months, Mr. Wingo told his supervisors that other scheduling information that Mississippi Power and Southern Company were providing to the public was infeasible and misleading.

Ed Day, Mississippi Power’s chief executive at the time, tried to tighten control over what was shared. “I would like to remind everyone ‘again,’ no numbers, schedules, or information in general should be communicated to external parties until I review it/them first,” Mr. Day wrote in an Aug. 8, 2012, email to senior staff.

Others shared Mr. Wingo’s growing concerns. Tom Theodore, a scheduling consultant who worked on the Kemper project for about eight months in 2012, described the company’s stated schedule as little more than “a pretty picture to show everybody that we’re all doing wonderful as opposed to what reality showed on the ground.”

His predecessors had altered the software so it no longer automatically adjusted the final price and completion date to reflect problems as they emerged, he said.

Greg Zoll, who had been hired by the state to be the project’s independent monitor, also grew skeptical. While engineering expenses and purchases went up, reported construction costs went down and scheduling timelines were shortened.

“These trends are illogical,” he wrote in of one of a series of highly critical reports that he filed with regulators from 2012 to 2014. Documents show that in a rush to qualify for federal subsidies, Mississippi Power started construction with less than 15 percent of the plant designed, Mr. Zoll told regulators.

Mississippi Power rejected Mr. Zoll’s criticism, responding that the delays were caused by glitchy software and shifts in design, and that the company was absorbing most of the additional costs.

But Brandon Presley, now the chairman of the Mississippi Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities, said that the project was troubled from the start and he voted against it. “The train left the station,” he said, when, in a rush to qualify for millions of dollars in federal subsidies, the commission approved the project.

He added that the problem was not the federal subsidies, which are necessary to develop innovative technology, but the failure by all parties to slow down and ask enough questions.

On May 20, 2013, Mr. Day abruptly stepped down as chief executive. His replacement, Ed Holland, told regulators that Mr. Day had directed or allowed employees to withhold from regulators documents about cost overruns. That sparked public outcry because the information was withheld from the commission while it was deciding whether to reapprove the project. “I will see that it never happens again,” said Mr. Holland, according to news articles at the time.

An Internal Battle

In February 2014, an argument erupted at the plant. Engineers told upper-level managers that the company should not promise to regulators and investors that the project would be done before the end of the year, emails and recorded calls show. Weeks later, the company did so anyway.

The next day, the owner of the project’s scheduling firm sent an email saying that he could not in good conscience continue to work on a project that did not “fairly and accurately represent the work that still remains.”

Mr. Wingo wrote in a subsequent email to an official at PricewaterhouseCoopers, an auditing firm that was helping to manage the project, “This has really put the entire project at a crossroads.” The other engineers in his division were in “utter disbelief” that the company had published a false schedule, he added.

On March 10, Mr. Wingo called Mr. Fanning, the chief executive of Southern Company, to ensure the message reached him. “I’m glad you brought this to me,” Mr. Wingo said Mr. Fanning told him. “I plan to get to the bottom of this.”

Instead, Southern Company and Mississippi Power focused in subsequent months at least as much on damage control as they did on rooting out wrongdoing.

In meetings, Mr. Wingo and other engineers said that they were told by plant managers that they needed to present an optimistic timetable for the project or the utility risked “financial Armageddon” of lost tax subsidies, spooked investors, possible bankruptcy, and harsh criticism from the news media, regulators and lawmakers.

After Mr. Wingo provided company officials with a binder of documents corroborating his allegations, he said he was ordered to stop sending emails on the matter because they could become public through litigation.

After he told his manager in an email that most project engineers agreed that the plant could not be completed by 2014, the manager continued telling executives that “to a man” all of the plant’s engineers thought that finishing by 2014 was feasible, Mr. Wingo said, and Mr. Lunsford, the engineer at the plant, reiterated in a recorded call that the manager’s comment was false.

2363. U.S. Oil Reserves Larger Than Those of Saudi Arabia or Russia

By Rob Nikolewski, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2016

The United States has overtaken industry giants Saudi Arabia and Russia in recoverable oil reserves, an international study released Monday says.

The U.S. is sitting on 264 billion barrels, 8 billion barrels more than Russia and 52 billion more than Saudi Arabia, the dominant member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), according to the report by Rystad Energy, a respected oil and gas consulting firm based in Oslo.

Three years ago, the U.S. was behind Russia, Saudi Arabia and Canada in Rystad's estimates of recoverable oil — barrels that are technologically and economically feasible to extract.

"It is an encouraging study," said Saeed Irani, president of Irani Engineering, a Sacramento company that is one of the state's leaders in oil field operations. "It shows that even though our economy is so vast and diverse, oil is still going to play a big part in it.”

The big jump for the U.S. largely stems from technological advancements such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling that squeeze oil and gas from shale formations.

Starting in the mid-2000s, shale from places such as the Bakken formation in North Dakota and the Permian Basin in Texas helped reverse a long-term trend of flattening oil production in the U.S.

Poring over data from more than 60,000 oil fields across the globe, the Rystad Energy study reported overall global reserves of 2.1 trillion barrels. It said more than half the remaining reserves in the U.S. are in unconventional shale oil.

By itself, Texas holds more than 60 billion barrels of shale oil, rivaling all of Mexico.

Oil experts say the figures should be viewed in context of the price at which reserves are worth exploiting.

"It's not like a hard number," said James D. Hamilton, an economics professor at UC San Diego. "It's a function of economics.”

Although oil prices have recovered since hitting a low of $27 a barrel in February, the price for West Texas Intermediate — the benchmark price for domestic crude — fell nearly 5% amid global market jitters Tuesday to $46.60 a barrel.

That's a far cry from the $100-a-barrel mark oil enjoyed in June 2014.

"I don't think much of [the reserves are] going to be produced if the price were to stay below $50," Hamilton said. "But if it goes back to $100, there's quite a bit of oil that can be produced for a number of years from the United States.”

Although California has a reputation as the leader among U.S. states for renewable energy production, it has also long been among the nation's biggest oil producers.

According to the U.S Energy Information Administration, California's crude oil production is the third-largest in the country, trailing only Texas and North Dakota and ahead of Alaska.

But the shale revolution has largely passed California by. Irani cited regulations on hydraulic fracturing that are stricter than in most states and challenges to advanced drilling techniques in the Monterey Shale formation in the Central Valley.

"Even though [the Monterey formation] produces oil, it [also] produces a lot of water," Irani said. "And especially at these prices, nobody is attempting to do anything creative in Monterey now and with the regulations in place it's hard to see that they're going to do anything about it in the near future."

2362. Genetically Engineered Crops: the Grand and Failed Promise

By Jim Goodman, Counterpunch, July 5, 2016

The endless miles of dead brown fields are finally gone. Spring in the Midwest should be announced by endless miles of green, but at best, a haphazard patchwork of winter wheat, rye, hayfields and the occasional bit of pasture are the only green that show up after snow-melt.

Most of the winter grains planted last fall have been sprayed and killed to make way for endless miles of corn and soybeans.

Corn, soy and alfalfa cover the Midwest, a mono-culture of Genetically Engineered crops (GE) that have mostly displaced the small dairy farms and their pastures, the fields of small grain and diverse mixes of clover and grass hay.

We are at least, partially, through the herbicide season. The first wave was last fall’s “burn-down”, the non-selective spray application (most notably Roundup®) that kills everything and gives the fields that lovely dead brown look in the spring.

The spring “pre-emergence” spray (killing weeds before the corn and soy emerge) is over and the third wave of “post-emergence” spraying is in progress and of course the forth and even fifth spray applications can come anytime during the summer to hopefully kill any weeds that escaped the first three attempts.

Then of course, wheat will need the pre-harvest application of, again, Roundup®, to kill any surviving perennials, but mostly to enhance the dry down of the grain. This is done a few days prior to harvest, and while it is quite effective as a desiccant, it also puts a good amount of herbicide directly on grain that will move into our food chain.

So, if nothing else GE crops have clearly changed the appearance of our landscape, the crops farmers grow and the way they manage weeds and pests. But they have changed the economy as well. The small diversified farms, the cheese factories and the small town businesses are mostly gone.

Some would argue, mostly agricultural economists, corporate agribusiness executives and those farmers who decided to get big rather than get out, that modern agriculture is the economic engine that drives rural America.

And it does, but those of us who still farm on a relatively small scale, those who value the environment, who try and keep our rural schools running, our rural roads passable our hospitals open, to us, it appears modern agriculture has mostly driven the money out of rural America.

Industrialized agriculture still needs people to do the work, but that work must be done at very low wages. When the profit is gone, when small farms are gone, when farm inputs are no longer purchased locally, when the tax base erodes,— rural communities die.

The profit seems to have instead, gone into the pockets of seed, chemical and equipment companies, Wall Street banks and through the hands of corporate lobbyists into the hands of elected officials who will, at all costs, support corporate profit and the wishes of agribusiness. Small towns, people and the environment have become secondary to the growth of modern agriculture.

Just as blue collar workers have seen their jobs and financial stability outsourced, so we have seen the wealth of our rural communities, the local farm income that had once been recirculated in our small towns, sent into the profit margins of corporate agribusiness.

So, do I blame this on GE crops? No, not directly, but the system of farming, the large scale mono-culture grain and livestock production for the world market could not exist without them.

Before the introduction of GE soy in 1996 the trend to larger and fewer farms was clearly happening, but the GE “promise” of effective weed control and higher yields certainly hastened that trend. But that “promise” was just that, a promise— one that was false and quickly broken.

The National Academy of Science in a recent report seemed to find no clear evidence supporting the grand promise of GE crops— they worked in some instances, but failed in others. There was some indication of increased yield but weeds were developing herbicide resistance as well– in short hardly a ringing endorsement. And, GE crops actually increased herbicide usage, not a positive change for our health, or the environment.

Despite the high cost and progressive failure of the GE technology, farmers continue (out of desperation to make a profit?) to embrace it and cover the Midwest with GE corn and soy. More grain used to fatten livestock (despite the demand for grass fed dairy and meat) and further the growth of dairy, hog and poultry production into giant Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s).

The integral part GE crops have played in the growth of industrial agriculture, the global food economy, obscene corporate profits and the decline of rural communities will be their real legacy and success,— if you can call it that.

And don’t be surprised, as American consumers increasingly reject GE technology, forcing GE crops on the rest of the world is the plan of corporate agribusiness and our government— That, it seems, is one more aspect of American Exceptionalism.

2361. The Lure of Conspiracy Theories in Iranian Politics

By Rohan Alvanadi and Christine Emery, The Guardian, July 1, 2016

An estiamted five million welcomed arrival of Ayatollah Khomeine from exile, Tehran, February 1, 1979

A tempest in a teapot’ was how Gary Sick described the recent reports by BBC Persian’s Kambiz Fattahi on declassified United States documents on contacts with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution. As the official dealing with Iran in Jimmy Carter’s White House, Sick pointed out that these dealings with Khomeini have been public knowledge for decades and that the BBC’s ‘revelations’ added little to what we already knew. 

Yet, the BBC’s claims have provoked outrage from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, who has called the documents a forgery and a British conspiracy to defame Khomeini’s memory. Conversely, for many Iranians who fled Iran after the fall of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the BBC reports confirmed the Shah’s claims in his memoirs that the Carter administration had abandoned him and paved the way for the victory of the revolution.

Many historians of modern Iran have commented on the ‘paranoid style’ in Iranian politics, a term coined by Richard Hofstadter in an essay on American politics. Iranians are not alone in subscribing to conspiracy theories, but their allure is deeply rooted in Iran’s experience of European exploitation and cold war superpower intervention. 

Britain and the BBC Persian Service have a special place in such thinking, best captured in Iraj Pezeshkzad’s much-loved 1973 satirical novel, My Uncle Napoleon.

So, has the BBC really uncovered new evidence that President Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah and helped usher in the Iranian Revolution? Or is this all just Iranian paranoia, fuelled by the BBC’s desire for a ‘scoop’?

In the first week of January 1979, there was an American plan to establish contact with Khomeini and gain his support for a managed transition to a post-Shah Iran. But the problem for the conspiracy theorists is that President Carter vetoed it.

At the time, the Carter administration was deeply split on what to do about the crisis in Iran, with many senior officials in denial about the Shah’s deteriorating position. The US ambassador, William Sullivan, had accepted the Shah’s demise and was planning a political transition and building bridges to the opposition. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor, had lost faith in the state department’s reporting on Iran and was open to the idea of a military takeover. Cyrus Vance, the secretary of state, was preoccupied by the SALT II and Egypt-Israel peace process, and recoiled at the idea of a coup: he advised that the Shah should either offer sweeping reforms or make way for a government of national unity.

But Sullivan had persuaded Vance to send an emissary to meet Khomeini in Paris. Theodore Eliot, a senior American diplomat who had served in Iran, was selected but at the last moment Brzezinski managed to persuade Carter to veto the meeting for fear that it might weaken the resolve of the fledgling government of Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar.

An incandescent Sullivan sent an excoriating memo to Washington on 10 January, calling this intervention a “gross and perhaps irretrievable mistake”. Vance had to persuade Carter not to fire Sullivan for insubordination.

Carter had not yet given up on the Shah or Bakhtiar. Brzezinski was deeply suspicious of the reporting coming out of the US Embassy in Tehran, believing it overly sympathetic to the Shah’s opposition. The relationship between Brzezinski’s staff in the White House and the state department’s Iran desk had broken down. Sullivan, meanwhile, pursued his contacts with the opposition and kept the full extent of his plans to himself. Few of his colleagues shared Sullivan’s optimism that Khomeini could be persuaded to cooperate with the military. In short, there was no coherent US policy for how to response to the Shah’s imminent departure.

When Carter’s foreign policy advisors gathered on 11 January, the majority accepted that the Shah was probably finished and Khomeini would almost certainly return and dominate the process of establishing an Islamic Republic. The United States would have to do what it could to rebuild its position in Iran.

Carter authorised a meeting between an American diplomat in Paris, Warren Zimmerman, and one of Khomeini’s chief aides, Ibrahim Yazdi. Was this the moment when Carter gave Khomeini the green light? It appears not.

When Zimmerman met Yazdi in Paris, rather than acquiesce to Khomeini’s triumphant return, he tried to persuade Yazdi that Khomeini should delay his departure. The Americans hoped to buy time for Bakhtiar’s government to succeed.

There was an element of blackmail in Zimmerman’s message. The US wanted to give the impression it was trying its best to prevent a military coup and that the ayatollah’s caution was vital. Zimmerman told Yazdi that “the left would be the only force to gain from a religious-military clash”. The records of these meetings suggest Khomeini’s camp feared a military coup and believed that the revolution would not succeed unless the US persuaded the Iranian military to allow him to safely return.

The Carter administration did not encourage the army to seize power and quash the opposition, but this hardly amounts to a conspiracy to topple the Shah and pave the way for Khomeini. The idea of a bloody military takeover was anathema to Carter, who had placed human rights at the centre of his foreign policy.

Moreover, not even the Shah supported a military crackdown, which he feared would lead to the disintegration of the armed forces and the end to any legitimacy for even a constitutional monarchy. Instead, Carter sent a military envoy to Tehran, General Robert Huyser, to encourage the Iranian generals to remain in Iran, keep the military united and support Bakhtiar’s civilian government.

After Khomeini’s return on 1 February and the collapse of Bakhtiar’s government on 11 February, the Americans were out of ideas and unable to understand a revolution led by a 76-year old cleric who wanted to establish an Islamic state. Like much of the secular opposition to the Shah, they did not expect religious seminarians to be able to run a modern country. They assumed that sooner or later more liberal secular elements of the revolutionary movement would come to power and pursue a foreign policy cognisant of Iran’s vulnerability to communist subversion and Soviet invasion.

For a brief moment, American officials were encouraged when the newly appointed prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, voiced alarm at the communist threat and requested secret intelligence briefings from US intelligence officials. These hopes were finally dashed, however, with the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and the resignation of Bazargan’s government.

Many criticisms can be levelled at the United States for the incoherence of its policy during the Iranian Revolution, but the idea insinuated by BBC Persian that there was a coherent US policy of abandoning the Shah and paving the way for Khomeini’s return is not supported by the documentary record. The Carter administration was slow to come to terms with the crisis in Iran, unable to agree on how to respond to it, and desperately hoped that some peaceful outcome that preserved US interests would somehow materialise.

But the United States is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Panic, confusion, infighting, and wishful thinking should not be confused with conspiracy.

Roham Alvandi is associate professor of international history at the London School of Economics and author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Christian Emery is lecturer in international relations at the University of Plymouth and author of US Policy in Iran: The Cold War Dynamics of Engagement and Strategic Alliance, 1978-81 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

2360. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Fourth of July

By Chris Hedges, Information Clearning House, July 4, 2016

Mumia Abu Jamal

FRACKVILLE, Pa.—Tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans, like those in the visiting room of the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, drove often for hours on the Fourth of July weekend to visit relatives or friends who are locked in cages. Millions suffered the painful absence this weekend of a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter or a friend. These people, mostly poor people of color, understand a dark truth about the cruelty and ultimate intentions of the corporate state. They know that “freedom,” “justice” and “liberty,” especially if you are poor, are empty slogans.

“We live in one of the most un-free systems on earth,” said the black revolutionary and author Mumia Abu-Jamal, whom I visited Saturday. “Mass incarceration is a reality endured by millions of people in prison and in the systems of repression that exist outside of prison. 
What does freedom mean to poor people who cannot walk freely down a street? What does freedom mean when they cannot find work? What does freedom mean when there is no justice in the courts? What does freedom mean when black people cannot attend a Bible study in a church without the fear of being murdered? Where is this American freedom they keep telling us about? I don’t see it. Black folks are more in danger, and being killed in even greater numbers, than during the reign of terror that was lynching and Jim Crow.”

Abu-Jamal, who is fighting off hepatitis C that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and the privatized prison medical service refuse to treat, scoffed when I asked him about the differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump is the real face of the ugly American empire,” he said. “Yes, he ain’t pretty. He ain’t black. He ain’t a woman. He has a fake tan and orange hair. His rhetoric is cruder. But his ideas are the same. The two major political parties are the abject servants of Wall Street and American empire über alles. They each support militarism, at home and abroad. They each support the indiscriminant murder of civilians from drones. They each support the worldwide archipelago of secret prisons. They each support mass incarceration of poor people, the suspension of habeas corpus and torture. It is only their talk that is different. What is the difference between being beaten up by a black cop or a white cop? The only solution is to rise up to stop the cops from beatin’ our asses and shootin’ us in the streets, our homes and our cars. I can assure you voting for Hillary Clinton won’t make a damn bit of difference. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, once served as the unofficial armed wing of the Democratic Party. You can’t invest hope in an organization with a history like that.  

“The black political elites, including Barack Obama, are powerless,” he went on. “They are emblems. They are not the voice of black America. They are like a ventriloquist’s dummy. They mouth the same words the white corporate masters mouth. They do not make white America uncomfortable. They do not name unpleasant truths. They never lifted their voices to denounce Bill Clinton’s decision to massively expand our system of mass incarceration. And they do not lift their voices now. They go right along with the repression. And they are well paid for it.”  

Abu-Jamal, a journalist and author of books such as “Live From Death Row” and a former member of the Black Panther Party, is serving a life sentence in the killing of a Philadelphia police officer. Despite flagrant irregularities in his trial and evidence tampering, he was sentenced to death in 1982. His sentence was later commuted to life without parole. He spent 30 years on death row. 

The prison’s visiting room, with a wall lined by vending machines that only the visitors were allowed to use, was crowded with families. Children played in groups or ran across the floor, darting in and out of rows of chairs.

A guard, seated on a raised platform, periodically bellowed through a loudspeaker. He recited every admonishment twice. “Children must be supervised by an adult. Children must be supervised by an adult.”

“… Like every prisoner must be supervised by a prison guard who is a racist and an idiot,” Abu-Jamal muttered when one announcement ended.

Abu-Jamal understands that radical change exacts a high price. It takes years, sometimes decades, to achieve. It requires dedication, self-sacrifice, unwavering belief in a new vision of society, a trenchant understanding of the mechanisms of power, a willingness to suffer persecution, go to jail and even, when the elites truly feel threatened, face the daily possibility of being murdered. No political revolution was ever achieved without these qualities and this acceptance of risks and steadfastness.

“Black people will probably vote for Clinton,” he said with resignation, “but this symbolizes the emptiness of hope. They fear Trump. They should look closely at the pictures from Trump’s third wedding. Hillary Clinton is in the front pew of the church. Hillary, Bill, Trump and Melania are shown embracing at Trump’s estate afterwards during the reception. These people are part of the same elite circle. They represent the same financial interests. They work for the same empire. They have grown rich from the system. The words they shout back and forth during political campaigns are meaningless. Trump or Clinton will deliver the same political result. They will serve, like Obama, corporate and military power. And if they were not willing to serve these centers of power they would not be allowed to run. Their job is to manufacture hope during election campaigns that ultimately end in betrayal. This is why they spend billions on elections. They need to feed the illusion that our voices matter, that we are participants in their closed systems of power.

“The liberals and the Democrats are in many ways more dangerous than the right wing,” he said. “Repression and neoliberalism are more effectively instituted by Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They sound reasonable. But because what they do is hidden it is more insidious and often more deadly.”

“Do not leave your trash in the cup holders. Do not leave your trash in the cup holders,” the loudspeaker blared.

Abu-Jamal looked toward the guards, all of whom were white.

“Bill Clinton developed a rural employment program called prisons,” he said. “Prisons are the economic lifeblood of these poor white communities. The only time these people have any contact with black people is when they put them in cells or escort them in shackles.
 Prisons are the gift William Jefferson Clinton gave to poor, rural whites that keeps on giving.

“The system is broken,” Abu-Jamal said. “It has to be torn up, root and branch. And this has to be done from the bottom up. If we keep electing and re-electing these puppets we will keep getting played. We have to form political parties that reflect our political ideas. We have to stop surrendering to false parties and politicians that do not represent us.” 
He said he places his hopes in groups such as Black Lives Matter that have taken to the streets. He said that if he could he would be in the streets of Philadelphia, where he was raised, during the Democratic convention.

“This is our hour of protest,” he said. “We have to physically resist. We will reclaim our power when we say no, when we refuse to cooperate. We must, in everything we do, defy the architects of imperialism, neoliberalism and mass incarceration. We cannot enable, in any way, this system to perpetuate itself.

“It is time to raise holy hell,” he went on. “We need to demonstrate in the streets. We need to use megaphones. We need to hold teach-ins. We need to sell radical books. We need to make the streets our commons.”

Again the loudspeaker boomed: “Children must put away the toys they took out of the children’s room. Children must put away the toys they took out of the children’s room.”
Prisons, like the rest of the society, have been privatized. Prisoners are billed for an array of services and items that once were the responsibility of the state. Corporations, which make billions off the prison system, run phone services, food services, medical services and commissaries. They have established for-profit prisons and detention centers. Prices for basic services and necessities such as shoes have soared.

“Services that were once the responsibility of the state have been outsourced to corporations, as in the rest of society,” said Abu-Jamal, who works as a trash collector. “We are worth what we are able to pay. If we pay nothing, in their eyes, we are worth nothing.
“When [prisoners] fill out a sick call slip, a request for medical attention, we have to also sign a cash slip,” he said. “The medical visit costs five or 10 dollars. This may not sound like a lot. But a prison job only pays $30 a month. Prices are constantly going up.Wages in prisons have remained the same since the 1980s. Most prisoners can only go to buy items from the commissary after begging their mothers, grandmothers or girlfriends for money.

“In February, Global Tel Link began selling electronic tablets in the prison for $150,” he said. “They charge 25 cents for an email and $1.80 to download a song. And you have to pay them in advance. The state pays Wexford Health Services $298 million a year to run the medical services. The more medical services are cut, the greater the profit. You go to medical and most of the time they tell you to go to the commissary to buy Tylenol or throat lozenges. If you fall in the yard and need a wheelchair they charge you $25. If you can’t sit up they charge you $75 for a motorized cart. They will not treat my hepatitis C, saying it is not advanced enough, but of course it is because the medicine is expensive. It costs between $87,000 and $95,000. A price like this exists solely to enrich pharmaceutical companies. I could get the same drug from India for a few thousand dollars. There is a guy in my block, Joseph Kish Sr., with stage four hepatitis C and cirrhosis. They have denied him treatment because, they said, he will get out soon. There is always a reason not to treat us. Prisons have replaced state psychiatric hospitals. MHM Correctional Services is paid $89 million a year to handle the mentally ill. It does little more than medicate them. And remember most guards, especially with overtime, make more money, about $100,00 a year, than a full professor at a university.

“They are doing to us on the inside what they are doing to us on the outside,” he said. “They are letting poor people die or killing them for profit. Things will get worse and worse until people can’t take it anymore. These corporations won’t stop. No one in the political class will make them stop. It is up to us.” 

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

2359. Climate Change: A Remote Pacific Nation, Threatened by Rising Seas

By Mike Ives, The New York Times, July 2, 2016

Residents of a village in South Tarawa waded through water during high tides that flooded the region, leaving homes isolated until the waters receded. Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times. 

TARAWA, Kiribati — One clear bright day last winter, a tidal surge swept over an ocean embankment here in the remote, low-lying island country of Kiribati, smashing through the doors and windows of Betio Hospital and spewing sand and debris across its maternity ward.

Beero Hosea, 37, a handyman, cut the power and helped carry frightened mothers through the rubble and water to a nearby school.

“If the next one is combined with a storm and stronger winds, that’s the end of us,” he said. “It’s going to cover this whole island.”

For years, scientists have been predicting that much of Kiribati may become uninhabitable within decades because of an onslaught of environmental problems linked to climate change. And for just as long, many here have paid little heed. But while scientists are reluctant to attribute any specific weather or tidal event to rising sea levels, the tidal surge last winter, known as a king tide, was a chilling wake-up call.

“It shocked us,” said Tean Rube, a pastor with the Kiribati Uniting Church. “We realized, O.K., maybe climate change is real.”

Pacific island nations are among the world’s most physically and economically vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events like floods, earthquakes and tropical cyclones, the World Bank said in a 2013 report. While world powers have summit meetings to negotiate treaties on how to reduce and mitigate carbon emissions, residents of tiny Kiribati, a former British colony with 110,000 people, are debating how to respond before it is too late.

Much of Kiribati, a collection of 33 coral atolls and reef islands scattered across a swath of the Pacific Ocean about twice the size of Alaska, lies no higher than six feet above sea level. The latest climate models predict that the world’s oceans could rise five to six feet by 2100. The prospects of rising seas and intensifying storms “threaten the very existence and livelihoods of large segments of the population,” the government told the United Nations in a report last year. Half of the 6,500-person village of Bikenibeu, for instance, could be inundated by 2050 by sea-level rises and storm surges, according to a World Bank study.

The study lays out Kiribati’s future in apocalyptic detail. Causeways would be washed away, crippling the economy; degraded coral reefs, damaged by warming water, would allow stronger waves to slam the coast, increasing erosion, and would disrupt the food supply, which depends heavily on fish supported by the reefs. Higher temperatures and rainfall changes would increase the prevalence of diseases like dengue fever and ciguatera poisoning.

Even before that, scientists and development experts say, rising sea levels are likely to worsen erosion, create groundwater shortages and increase the intrusion of salt water into freshwater supplies.

In response, Kiribati (pronounced KEE-ree-bas in the local language) has essentially been drawing up plans for its demise. The government has promoted “migration with dignity,” urging residents to consider moving abroad with employable skills. It bought nearly 6,000 acres in Fiji, an island nation more than 1,000 miles away, as a potential refuge. Fiji’s higher elevation and more stable shoreline make it less vulnerable.

Anote Tong, a former president who pushed through the Fiji purchase, said it was also intended as a cry for attention from the world. “The issue of climate change is real, serious, and we’d like to do something about it if they’re going to take their time about it,” he said in a recent interview. But packing up an entire country is not easy, and may not be possible. And many Kiribati residents remain skeptical of the need to prepare for an eventuality that may be decades away.

The skeptics include the rural and less educated residents of the outer islands who doubt they could obtain the skills needed to survive overseas, and Christians who put more faith in God’s protection than in climate models. “According to their biblical belief, we’re not going to sink because God is the only person who decides the fate of any country,” said Rikamati Naare, the news editor at Radio Kiribati, the state-run broadcaster.

As President Tong became a climate-change celebrity, invited to speak at conferences around the world, opponents accused him of ignoring problems back home, such as high unemployment and infant mortality. They derided the Fiji purchase, for nearly $7 million, as a boondoggle; dismissed his “migration with dignity” as a contradiction in terms; and called his talk of rising sea levels alarmist and an affront to divine will.

Mr. Tong, having served three terms, was not allowed to run for re-election this year, but in March elections the opposition defeated his party. The new president, Taneti Maamau, said he planned to shift priorities. “Most of our resources are now diverted to climate-change-related development, but in fact there are also bigger issues, like population, the health of the people, the education of the people,” he said during an interview at Parliament, which sits on reclaimed land at the edge of a turquoise lagoon.

“Climate change is a serious issue, but you can’t do very much about it, especially if a big hurricane comes,” he added with a hearty laugh.

The Fiji purchase was not the first effort to address Kiribati’s perilous future. The World Bank-led Kiribati Adaptation Program, begun in 2003, developed water-management plans, built coastal sea walls, planted mangroves and installed rainwater-harvesting systems. The bank says the project, which cost $17.7 million, has conserved fresh water in Tarawa and protected about one mile of Kiribati’s 710 miles of coastline.

But a 2011 government-commissioned report cast doubt on whether the World Bank project helped Kiribati prepare for climate change. And while the mangroves and water management plans have helped, a 2014 study said the first round of sea walls, made of sandbags, had proved counterproductive and caused more erosion.

“Adaptation is just this long, ugly, hard slog,” said the study’s lead author, Simon Donner, a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “The idea that an outside organization can just come in with money, expertise and ideas and implement something easily is naïve. What you need is consistent, long-term funding — the type of stuff that’s hard to pull off with development aid.”

Denis Jean-Jacques Jordy, a senior environmental specialist at the World Bank, acknowledged that “we had some issues” with the first sea walls but said subsequent ones made of rock were better designed.

There is no shortage of ideas to avert Kiribati’s environmental fate. China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea shows the promise of sophisticated island-engineering technology, experts say. Mr. Tong commissioned a study on raising Kiribati’s coastline.

But such measures are financially unrealistic for a resource-poor, aid-dependent country like Kiribati. “It’s not about the place going underwater,” Professor Donner said, noting that some of Kiribati’s islands had actually grown in recent years because of land reclamation or natural coastal dynamics. “It’s about it becoming prohibitively expensive to live in. That’s the real challenge for Kiribati.”

The parallel freshwater crisis is also fixable, at a cost. Clean drinking water is already scarce on several islands, and saltwater from high ocean tides has infiltrated some wells. Many residents of South Tarawa, home to half the country’s people, now get their drinking water exclusively from rainwater tanks. Experts worry that as sea levels rise, Kiribati’s fragile groundwater supply will face even greater risks, while the next drought could quickly exhaust the municipal supply and household rainwater tanks. Kiribati could invest in desalinization equipment or ship in drinking water, but this is a country with only one paved road. “It’s all doable,” said Doug Ramsay, the Pacific Rim manager at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand. “It’s just going to be a very expensive exercise.”

Another novel response gaining attention lately is the idea of applying international refugee law — largely drafted after World War II to protect people fleeing political, religious or racial persecution — to those forced from their homes because of climate change.

In 2012, a migrant worker from Kiribati, Ioane Teitiota, applied for asylum in New Zealand, arguing that he was unable to grow food or find potable water in Kiribati because of saltwater intrusion. His lawyer, Michael Kidd, said the distinction between environmental and political refugees was arbitrary. “You’re either a refugee or you’re not,” he said in an interview.

The courts rejected the argument, and Mr. Teitiota was deported from New Zealand last year. Mr. Kidd said he had appealed to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Still, migration may become increasingly important. Mr. Tong said he hoped to prepare his people to move with job-training programs that would meet standards recognized in Australia and New Zealand. “The science of climate change is not 100 percent precise,” he said in the interview. “But we know without any argument that, in time, our people will have to relocate unless there are very, very significant resources committed to maintain the integrity of the land.”

Coastal threats are increasingly clear to residents of Buariki, an oceanside village of thatched-roof huts and towering coconut palms on the island of North Tarawa. Erosion along the beach has already toppled dozens of coconut trees. The World Bank estimates that 18 to 80 percent of the village, which sits on a peninsula not more than a few hundred feet wide, may be underwater by 2050.

Some villagers said they were resigned to leaving. “Our government already has land in Fiji for the Kiribati people, so if there are more high tides here, they’ll bring people to live there,” said Kourabi Ngauea, 29. “But it depends on the government, and if they can support us.”

Others see no need to leave. “This is where I belong,” Aroita Tokamaen, 76, said as she peeled a coconut on her patio. “I would rather stay.”

The tide that damaged the hospital here last winter was an exceptionally strong king tide, a surge that occurs twice a year when the moon is closest to the Earth. The waves also flooded the thatched-roofed outdoor meeting space of the local branch of the Kiribati Uniting Church. While some people were alarmed, the pastor, Ms. Rube, said she refused to accept the idea that Kiribati could disappear.

“We are Christians,” she said. “So we don’t believe that God could have given us this world and then take it away.”