No moralizing, activist message today,  No corporate beating, politician pounding rant.  If your'e lucky you'll soon be with friends and family for a still uncommercialized holiday, Thanksgiving.  While some of you may be working the double overtime shift on newsdesks or running emergency rooms or pumping gas for those of us going to see Grandma, the Native American message below is simply lovely and can work across great diversity: or so I hope as I plan to use it around a Thanksgiving dinner table to include Jews, Christians, atheists, Taoists and assorted undeclaredes.  I hope you enjoy it.  John

 

  (Chief Jake Swamp is a founder of the Tree of Peace Society, an international organization promoting peace and conservation.  Chief Swamp has delivered the Thanksgiving Address throughout the world, as well as at the United Nations.  He was born on the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York, and now lives in Hogansburg, NY.)

 

Hallelujah! 

 

Well I’m no partisan and I run an organization that is crankily independent to its core.  So why am I so happy?  Because civil society was restored last night.  However these last few yet to be decided races turn out, this experiment is over.  Neoconservativism, an experiment in pre-emptive use of military might, of rolling one’s allies as well as opponents combined with the trifecta of lying, cheating and handing environmental protection over to ExxonMobil.

 

Of course even if the Democrats win the Senate as well as the House and the perhaps the White House in 2008, this party can’t deliver the Greenpeace agenda of a green and peaceful world.  But at least we will have politicians, a mixture of good, bad and ugly, Republicans and Democrats, who LISTEN (it's working already, Rumsfeld just resigned) to voters, not just campaign contributors.  Not just right-wing messianics who dreamt of running their own Taliban like state in the name of a harsh and spiteful god.    Good riddance. 

 

With Democratics in the majority we’ll still need bi-partisan efforts in a deeply divided country to stop global warming, protect ancient forests and defend the oceans.  Remember the bulk of the environmental laws still on the books in this country come from the Nixon era.  With this in mind, Greenpeace ran an experiment these past three months to see what would happen if we went into six very different congressional districts across the country and pushed global warming as the threat to be stopped, in a completely non partisan way.  No red, no blue.  Some of our colleagues were a bit shocked but the results were outstanding.  Thousands of people volunteered in the field to make this possible.  We’ll be building up to pushing global warming in 50 districts by 2008. 

 

And on a personal note, seeing Senator George Allen behind in Virginia according to the results so far feels wonderful in this amazing adopted home state of mine.  Wonderful because Allen went from Republican presidential hopeful and shoe-in senate candidate to grand LOSER partly because he had a fine challenger, but also because the real Virginia repudiated the racism he was caught engaging in during the election.     According to a post on Talking Points Memo:

 

The Republicans have backed themselves into a corner in Virginia. If you're going to go to the mat with dirty tricks and voter suppression, your counting on staying under the radar and that once the election is over, folks will move on. If Allen contests the results of the election it changes the election from a single day event into a 3 or 4 week event, plenty of time to chase down those caller id numbers and phone bank contractors. Virginia isn't Ohio. It doesn't have Ken Blackwell to cover up the GOP shenanigans, and the state has already requested the FBI to look into them. The Allen campaign is going to have to make the choice of whether contesting the results is worth the chance of exposing criminal activity. Let's hope they choose to contest. It's our best hope of fully exposing the shenanigans of the GOP to the light of day and getting the mechanisms in place to prevent their use in the next election cycle.

 

It’s a beautiful morning.

 

And here’s an email blast just out from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

 

Both Jon Tester and Jim Webb have won their races in Montana and Virginia but want to make sure that every vote is counted.  We expect to have official results soon but can happily declare today that Democrats have taken the majority in the U.S. Senate.

 Montana Vote Situation: Jon Tester leads Conrad Burns by approximately 1,700 votes (as of 11am EDT) and counting.  In Silver Bow County (Butte), a Democratic stronghold, votes are still being counted but Tester is winning there with 66% of the vote.  We expect to gain the majority of these uncounted votes and to add to Tester’s margin.

 Montana Process: When the counting phase is completed, a canvass will verify the vote tallies.  That process could take as long as 48 hours, and must begin within three days and end within seven.  Unless the canvass shows the margin to be within ¼ of 1%, there is no recount.  As the loser, Burns would have to request the recount.  When the votes are all counted, we expect to be outside that recount margin.

 Virginia Vote Situation: Jim Webb is up by approximately 8,000 votes and once the provisional ballots are counted, we expect Webb’s margin to increase.  (Please note that VA absentees were included in the tallies from last night.)

 Virginia Process: A canvass is underway to verify the results and we expect that process to finish within a day or so.  To be in recount, the margin needs to be less than 1% and Allen (as the loser) would have to request it.  Because of Virginia voting laws, the margin would have to be much tighter than it currently is to see any change in the outcome.  Given the current margins, that is highly, highly unlikely.

 

Here's a fun little search you can do on your computer this Friday afternoon.  Our research team has been dilligently tracking the grants made by ExxonMobil and other corporations for years that go to people who say that global warming is a myth.  We call them tobacco scientists as they are just like the people the tobacco companies paid for years to say that smoking wasn't bad for you.  And now you can get the documents our research team has obtained from the White House through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) showing its links to the oil industry.  We have been making this stuff available to the press for months but now it is all available on the White House web site and just scroll down to CEQ FOIA responses.  Have fun.

 

John 

Like Scott toilet paper.  Why?  You've seen the campaign that Greenpeace and NRDC are running against Kimberly-Clark in an attempt to get them to stop grinding up the ancient Boreal Forest and coastal temperate rainforests in British Columbia, that's why.  Toilet paper is easily made out of 100 percent recycled content without chlorine bleaching.  But the early responses to our pressure have been about denial.  We found a paper industry trade rag that says they just need to do better marketing.  Tissue World Magazine in case you missed it.

More fun is the bumbling from K-C's headquarters as they have been outed for bragging about their environmentally responsible practices, despite the facts.  Don't believe me.  Check it out yourself from this veteran Fortune Magazine reporter.

 John Passacantando

I recently participated in a debate on NPR's Justice Talking. It was held in Chatham, Massachusetts on the controversial issue of wind energy.

Learn more and listen to the debate at http://www.justicetalking.org.

The Senate narrowly missed passing an amendment against burning the flag -- a periodic test to smoke out the craven ones in US politics.  This time it ensnared more Democrats than ever before.

A superstorm drenched much of the East Coast in up to a foot of rain, which caused our Research Director to remark to the Bucks County Courier Times in PA:

“Global warming is like putting the weather system on steroids,” Kert Davies said. “It makes droughts more intense, floods more intense and storms more intense and all of it more frequent.”
 
Which got us a complaint from Major League Baseball, which did not like the negative connotation that Kert gave to steroid use.  They want you to think of home runs when you think of steroids, not foul weather.

And speaking of foul weather, our explorers are about to complete the first ever journey by ski/canoe to the North Pole in the summer.  They are days away, it's a massive meltdown and they have been talking to climate scientists the whole way to help document the meltdown from global warming.  Don't miss the push to the finish: www.projectthinice.org

 And my favorite news of the week, uber investor Warren Buffett whose simple, honest clear-eyed approach to life and success has been built on a lifetime of inconoclastic moves, may have just made his greatest ever.  Instead of building his own foundation, he made plans to leave his fortune to the already towering Gates Foundation.  Imagine going down in history as the world's greatest philanthropist by doing one thing, giving the world's richest man 30 million dollars.  And I'll bet it works.  Happy Fourth of July.

 

 

 

The current Time Magazine cover story on global warming says it all, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”  But if you’ve ever wondered how the United States could have fallen so far behind in addressing this threat, a handful of publications (willing to accept the risk of frivolous lawsuits) are starting to tell the whole sordid tale.  ExxonMobil has spent millions of dollars funding front groups to lie about the truth of global warming.  They’ve confused the public and stalled action and played the Bush Administration like Yo-Yo Ma plays his cello.  Details at:  www.exxonsecrets.org  Seems ExxonMobil doesn’t like to be outed so it funded an effort to get Greenpeace audited.

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has got herself into some deep water after hitting a Capitol Police officer with her cell phone when she was stopped from rushing through Capitol security.  It appears that with a new hairdo and no Congressional pin, the guards didn’t recognize her.  Congressman and Civil Rights Hero John Lewis recommended that she get some non-violence training.  So here is a standing offer from Greenpeace: Congresswoman McKinney, we’ll do the training for you any time you like.  We modeled it after the Civil Rights non-violence training (although we’ve modernized it to include the proper use of a cell phone) and move dozens of people through it every year.

Lastly, what about hope?  Global warming got you down? Think of the bright side, no, not that Castro will be flooded out or that Florida’s butterfly ballot precincts will become coral reefs, but that dealing with global warming gives us a way to create a whole new generation of jobs to produce clean cars and homes, an entire industrial infrastructure not dependent upon our fighting wars in the MidEast.  That stuff’s only good for Haliburton.  Nobody says it as eloquently as Kevin Sweeney, idea man to great politicians and smart companies.

By the way we came through our IRS audit with flying colors - but I’m still grumpy that Exxon could pay someone to get the IRS to do it.