Ross Garnaut describes climate change as a "diabolical policy problem". It is harder, says the author of yesterday's landmark report, than any other important issue that Australia has confronted in living memory. Yet this is, for Australia and the world, the "last chance to get this difficult policy problem right".
Garnaut, one of a handful of Australian economists of true international standing, is no stranger to tough policy problems. He advised the Hawke-Keating governments on the intensely controversial matter of cutting manufacturing tariffs in the 1980s. Tearing Australia away from a century of protectionism was one of the most wrenching changes this country has ever made.
But in the report he delivered yesterday he comes very close to throwing up his hands in despair: "This issue might be too hard for rational policy making. It is too complex. The special interests are too many, powerful and intense."
Had he stopped there, it would have been a very slender volume. Instead, he plunged ahead, sketching the Australian landscape as he expects it by the end of the century if global warming proceeds unchecked - a country with savage coastal storms, with a scorching inland up to 7 degrees hotter, the collapse of the Murray-Darling Basin as a productive area where water flows shrivel by 90 per cent, the death of the Great Barrier Reef and the Kakadu wetlands, with a couple of hundred thousand climate refugees from inundated South Pacific islands clamouring for a home in Australia and New Zealand, an extra 4000 Queenslanders a year dying of heat stress and a further 5.5 million Australians contracting dengue fever annually, the extinction of all rainforest vertebrates and the loss of between 13 per cent and 23 per cent of today's rainfall, and average Australian wages 7.8 per cent lower than they would otherwise be in the absence of global warming.
"Damage - perhaps immense damage - is likely to be a part of the Australian reality," says the Australian National University professor.
For Kevin Rudd, it's a diabolical political problem. First, consider the highly perishable nature of his electoral appeal. Three principal reasons underpinned Rudd's election win last November.
One was the appeal of change - the desire to get rid of the Howard government, the freshness of Rudd. Another was the urge to repeal Howard's Work Choices. Third was Rudd's pledge to act on climate change.
The first two of these are now inoperable. Howard is gone; Rudd cannot campaign on being fresh a second time. And Work Choices is now irrelevant. That leaves climate change. Yet even here the picture has become more complicated.
First, a great global inflation surge is carrying oil and food and commodity prices higher and higher. The price of petrol has risen by almost one-fifth since Rudd first sat behind the prime ministerial desk.
This might help condition people to the idea of the inevitability of higher prices for energy; but not if the alternative government is holding out the idea that it is somehow possible to avoid this fate.
And that is the second big complication for Rudd.
The last time Garnaut was advising a federal Labor government, when Hawke and Keating were dismantling Australia's tariff barriers, they had the great comfort that the Opposition was supporting them.
All through the Hawke-Keating reform program, the Coalition stood behind it. This meant there was no real alternative to the reforms. It was a relatively straightforward matter for the government to withstand the special pleading by various companies and industries. The political system presented a united front.
Before the election, it seemed the task of dealing with climate change would also be a bipartisan affair. Although Howard could not bring himself to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, he was proposing to act to cut Australian carbon emissions. Remember that it was Howard who commissioned the Shergold report on the design on an emissions trading system, the same idea Garnaut is recommending in his report.
But today the picture is different. Brendan Nelson's Coalition is prepared to play populist politics. The Opposition is still playing tricky games on emissions trading.
Although it expresses its support for the scheme, it wants introduction delayed until 2012 and refuses to say whether it supports the inclusion of petrol.
"With petrol now a $1.70 a litre, Australians have already received a significant price signal on petrol. The Coalition is determined to protect Australian motorists from an additional tax on petrol," Nelson said yesterday.
It would be wrong to get too indignant about this - when Howard was trying to enact reforms, such as the tax review that introduced the GST and cut other taxes, Labor opposed him.
But the reality is that Rudd faces having to deal with the hardest policy challenge that the country has faced in living memory, without the benefit of reliable Opposition support. Rudd intends to deal with this by positioning himself as the responsible leader - the Government that is prepared to make the tough decision in the long-run national interest.
But can he lead the public debate and keep public support on his side? Can he stay the course in the face of persistent Opposition goading and opportunism?
The Garnaut report is the first tool in Rudd's political kit for leading the public debate. It is a credible account of the situation, with a sobering explanation of the costs of inaction, and a workable proposal for a solution. Among developed nations, Australia, says Garnaut, is uniquely vulnerable to the damage that climate change will wreak.
While the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, jokes his country might benefit from a general warming of 1 or 2 degrees, Garnaut warns that Australia cannot say this.
The best way to prevent further climate change is to let the market take over through the creation of an emissions trading scheme, Garnaut argues.
Garnaut's vision for the scheme sees it start in 2010 and apply to all areas of the economy - including transport and petrol - but excluding agriculture. Permits would be needed for any business that puts greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The new market would be regulated by the Independent Carbon Bank, a Reserve Bank of Australia style of body.
Garnaut wants all the permits to be auctioned off, with no freebies handed out to companies with high emission records such as those in the coal and aluminium industry.
The money raised from the sale of the permits would be mostly spent on compensating low income households for the rises in petrol and energy costs.
However, some would be set aside for investment in renewable energy and some to compensate companies that do business overseas and would be at a competitive disadvantage because of the higher costs they would have to bear as a result of the scheme.
It would be very handy if the recent surge in petrol prices could do the work of curbing carbon emissions. But Garnaut gave two persuasive reasons why this is not the answer. First, because Australia needs a long-run system for addressing a long-run problem. Petrol prices might fall again in
a year or two, yet what is needed is a "system for all seasons".
Second, in his report he points out that in earlier oil price surges, this has indeed cut petrol use. But it has encouraged a switch to coal instead, and coal puts even more carbon into the atmosphere.
One of the strongest reasons for not acting is that for Australia to cut emissions while other countries do not would be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Australian industry and jobs would suffer, but that activity and those jobs would simply move to another country that was not penalising carbon emitters.
Garnaut calls this the "prisoners' dilemma". This is an old game played by economists and game theorists to show that it can be profitable to betray a friend or ally. Consider. Two people are arrested for committing a crime. They are questioned in separate rooms. Each may give evidence against the other, or say nothing.
If both say nothing, both get a minor reprimand and go free for lack of evidence. But if one rats on the other, he goes free and the other is severely punished. If both give evidence, both are severely punished. Not knowing or trusting what the other may do, the best individual - or local - strategy is to give evidence against your friend. In climate change, this translates into a strategy of allowing other countries to act while you do not.
But the best overall - or global - strategy for the prisoners is for them to each trust the other and for neither to give evidence. This way, both go free.
Garnaut argues that Australia, together with other rich nations, needs to lead. His report estimates that 90 per cent of extra carbon emissions over the rest of the century will come from developing countries. So the premium is to get these countries to bring their emissions under control.
But Garnaut argues that these countries will not act until the rich countries observe the principle enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol - that the developed nations will act first. Until Australia and the other rich nations do something, they are vetoing action by the poor nations.
This international prisoners' dilemma is now compounded by a local prisoners' dilemma - as long as the Opposition declines to lend full support to the Government.
It will take courage and cunning to lead on this, and to succeed. There remain concerns about the timing of the introduction of the scheme and the issue of whether the permits should all be auctioned.
The big power companies have been banging their heads against the doors of Garnaut and the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, pleading to be given free permits.
They argue that they will have to buy so many permits that they will have to pass hefty increases on to consumers.
But their pleas have fallen on deaf ears with Garnaut.
The indications from Wong to date are that she also finds their arguments unconvincing.
Garnaut watched closely what happened in the first phase of the European trading system that handed out free permits with the hope of protecting consumers.
Power companies raised prices and their own profits accordingly.
In the second phase there were no such free rides.
Not all the talk of a changed economy is gloomy.
A CSIRO report last month found that at least 3 million Australian jobs could change beyond recognition because of global warming, but net employment will show healthy growth if the nation adapts smartly.
It has predicted that the hoped-for surge in "green collar" work will result in job growth even in the greenhouse gas-intensive industries of mining, energy, manufacturing and farming, despite the costs to business of introducing an emissions-trading scheme in 18 months.
The report contradicts statements by some industry groups that emissions trading and a shift to renewable energy could wreck some economic sectors.
But Australia has reached a turning point, it warns, and there is no sign yet of the improvement needed in skills and training.
"We are talking about mass change, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution," said Oona Nielsen, executive director of the Dusseldorf Skills Forum, which commissioned the report.
"It's not just a case of some jobs in renewable power; we're going to have to make every single workplace in the country more sustainable."
The report used different models to assess employment growth for two scenarios - one that predicted change under the federal plan to reduce emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, the other looking at a more ambitious scheme to become "carbon neutral" by mid-century. Both showed continued strong growth in jobs.
And Garnaut argues that if emissions trading is crafted in a comprehensive reform package with the tax review now under way, it could end up creating a net economic boost to Australia.
"Because carbon taxes - or emissions permit systems - are relatively efficient ways of raising revenue, you can end up having a major efficiency-boosting reform in a comprehensive package intelligently designed," he says.
News and politics
climate change
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Garnaut Review
Australia
RT On Air
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Climate Change - A diabolical policy problem
This is an edited extract of the draft report by Professor Ross Garnaut to the Australian Government.
The weight of scientific evidence tells us Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change. The risk can be substantially reduced by strong and early action by all major economies. Without that action, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their prosperity and enjoyment of life, and to longstanding patterns in their lives.
There is no doubt about the position of most reputed specialists in climate science, in Australia and abroad.
There are nevertheless large uncertainties in the science. While there is a clear majority view that there are high risks, there is debate and honest recognition of limits to knowledge about the times and ways in which the risk will manifest itself.
There are prominent dissenters on this matter, gathered under the rubric of "sceptic". For the most part "sceptic" is a misnomer for their position, because these dissenters hold strongly to the belief that the mainstream science is wrong.
The dissent took a curious turn in Australia in 2008, with much prominence being given to assertions that a warming trend had ended over the last decade.
Effective international action is necessary if the risks of dangerous climate change are to be held to acceptable levels, but deeply problematic. International co-operation is essential for a solution to a global problem. However, such a solution requires the resolution of a genuine prisoners' dilemma. Each country benefits from a national point of view if it does less of the mitigation itself, and others do more.
If all countries act on this basis, there will be no resolution of the dilemma. We will all judge the outcome to be insufficient and unsatisfactory.
Resolution of the international prisoners' dilemma takes time - possibly more time than we have. The world has squandered the time that it did have in the 1990s to experiment with various approaches to mitigation.
Climate change is a diabolical policy problem. It is harder than any other issue of high importance that has come before our polity in living memory.
Climate change presents a new kind of challenge. It is uncertain in its form and extent, rather than drawn in clear lines. It is insidious rather than directly confrontational. It is long term rather than immediate, in both its impacts and its remedies. Any effective remedies lie beyond any act of national will, requiring international co-operation of unprecedented dimension and complexity.
While an effective response to the challenge would play out over many decades, it must take shape and be put in place in the next few years. Without action, if mainstream science is broadly right, the review's assessment of likely growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in the absence of effective mitigation tells us the risks of dangerous change, already significant, will soon have risen to dangerously high levels.
Observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia and elsewhere suggests that this issue might be too hard for rational policy making. It is too complex. The special interests are too numerous, powerful and intense. The time frames within which effects become evident are too long, and the time frames within which action must be effected too short.
The most inappropriate response would be to delude ourselves, taking small actions that create an appearance of action, but which do not solve the problem.
Such an approach would risk the integrity of our market economy and political processes to no good effect.
We will delude ourselves if we think that scientific uncertainties are cause for delay. Delaying now will eliminate attractive lower-cost options. Delaying now is not postponing a decision. To delay is to deliberately choose to avoid effective steps to reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels.
The work of this review is directed at nurturing the slender chance that Australia and the world will manage to develop a position that strikes a good balance between the costs of dangerous climate change and the costs of mitigation.
Australia has a larger interest in a strong mitigation outcome than other developed countries. Our location makes us already a hot and dry country; small variations in climate are more damaging to us than to other developed countries. The problems of our neighbours would inevitably become our problems. And the structure of our economy suggests that our terms of trade would be damaged more by the effects of climate change than would those of any other developed country.
However, Australia carries some major assets into this challenge. Australians are facing this new kind of challenge in the best of times. Australia is fortunate that humanity is enjoying the harvest of modern economic development in Asia and beyond. More people are emerging from poverty more quickly than ever before.
Australia is enjoying a double harvest. The internationally oriented market reforms from the 1980s were put in place just in time. We are now riding the extension of the beneficent processes of modern economic growth into the heartlands of the populous countries of Asia.
In the early years of our federation Australians took pride in the highest living standards in the world. We turned in on ourselves, and paid the cost.
Then, a quarter of a century ago, we caught that tide which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. On such a full sea we are now afloat.
So we have much to contribute and much to lose as we face the diabolical policy challenge of climate change. Unmitigated climate change could lose this challenge. Or it could be lost by a bungled attempt to mitigate climate change, which would bring back into the centre of our national policy all of the self-interested pressure groups and arbitrary interventions that retarded our progress for so long.
The Asian economic boom is also the source of the sharper immediacy of the climate change problem. The increase in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last two centuries has generated the climate change that we have experienced to date and will experience over the next couple of decades. This is the result of economic activity in the countries that are now rich. The rapid increase in concentrations that are expected over the next several decades is primarily the result of activities in the developing countries that are becoming rich. This rapid increase is what makes action to avert dangerous climate change urgent.
It is neither desirable, nor remotely feasible, to seek to lower the climate change risk by substantially slowing the rise in living standards anywhere, least of all in developing countries.
The solutions to the climate change challenge must be found in removing the links between economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions.
For Australia, the commitment to the mitigation of climate change can be seen as the reinvestment of a part of the immense gains that have come from accelerated Asian economic growth, in contributing to reduction of an adverse side-effect of that growth.
Our trade-exposed, emissions-intensive industries have valid concerns.
Along with some of our farm industries, metals processing would be the most affected, and have the first claims for special measures. Every element of costs matters, and no increase in costs should be imposed on business without good reason. But when assessments of the reasonableness of arrangements for trade-exposed industries are made, we should be mindful of the wider context.
The highest possible obligations under an emissions trading scheme would represent a small fraction of the resource sector's increased revenue from higher export prices in recent years.
Balance, reason and understanding of the premises and logic leading to policy conclusions are the keys to Australia and the world using well its last chance to get this difficult policy problem right.
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
The weight of scientific evidence tells us Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change. The risk can be substantially reduced by strong and early action by all major economies. Without that action, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their prosperity and enjoyment of life, and to longstanding patterns in their lives.
There is no doubt about the position of most reputed specialists in climate science, in Australia and abroad.
There are nevertheless large uncertainties in the science. While there is a clear majority view that there are high risks, there is debate and honest recognition of limits to knowledge about the times and ways in which the risk will manifest itself.
There are prominent dissenters on this matter, gathered under the rubric of "sceptic". For the most part "sceptic" is a misnomer for their position, because these dissenters hold strongly to the belief that the mainstream science is wrong.
The dissent took a curious turn in Australia in 2008, with much prominence being given to assertions that a warming trend had ended over the last decade.
Effective international action is necessary if the risks of dangerous climate change are to be held to acceptable levels, but deeply problematic. International co-operation is essential for a solution to a global problem. However, such a solution requires the resolution of a genuine prisoners' dilemma. Each country benefits from a national point of view if it does less of the mitigation itself, and others do more.
If all countries act on this basis, there will be no resolution of the dilemma. We will all judge the outcome to be insufficient and unsatisfactory.
Resolution of the international prisoners' dilemma takes time - possibly more time than we have. The world has squandered the time that it did have in the 1990s to experiment with various approaches to mitigation.
Climate change is a diabolical policy problem. It is harder than any other issue of high importance that has come before our polity in living memory.
Climate change presents a new kind of challenge. It is uncertain in its form and extent, rather than drawn in clear lines. It is insidious rather than directly confrontational. It is long term rather than immediate, in both its impacts and its remedies. Any effective remedies lie beyond any act of national will, requiring international co-operation of unprecedented dimension and complexity.
While an effective response to the challenge would play out over many decades, it must take shape and be put in place in the next few years. Without action, if mainstream science is broadly right, the review's assessment of likely growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in the absence of effective mitigation tells us the risks of dangerous change, already significant, will soon have risen to dangerously high levels.
Observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia and elsewhere suggests that this issue might be too hard for rational policy making. It is too complex. The special interests are too numerous, powerful and intense. The time frames within which effects become evident are too long, and the time frames within which action must be effected too short.
The most inappropriate response would be to delude ourselves, taking small actions that create an appearance of action, but which do not solve the problem.
Such an approach would risk the integrity of our market economy and political processes to no good effect.
We will delude ourselves if we think that scientific uncertainties are cause for delay. Delaying now will eliminate attractive lower-cost options. Delaying now is not postponing a decision. To delay is to deliberately choose to avoid effective steps to reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels.
The work of this review is directed at nurturing the slender chance that Australia and the world will manage to develop a position that strikes a good balance between the costs of dangerous climate change and the costs of mitigation.
Australia has a larger interest in a strong mitigation outcome than other developed countries. Our location makes us already a hot and dry country; small variations in climate are more damaging to us than to other developed countries. The problems of our neighbours would inevitably become our problems. And the structure of our economy suggests that our terms of trade would be damaged more by the effects of climate change than would those of any other developed country.
However, Australia carries some major assets into this challenge. Australians are facing this new kind of challenge in the best of times. Australia is fortunate that humanity is enjoying the harvest of modern economic development in Asia and beyond. More people are emerging from poverty more quickly than ever before.
Australia is enjoying a double harvest. The internationally oriented market reforms from the 1980s were put in place just in time. We are now riding the extension of the beneficent processes of modern economic growth into the heartlands of the populous countries of Asia.
In the early years of our federation Australians took pride in the highest living standards in the world. We turned in on ourselves, and paid the cost.
Then, a quarter of a century ago, we caught that tide which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. On such a full sea we are now afloat.
So we have much to contribute and much to lose as we face the diabolical policy challenge of climate change. Unmitigated climate change could lose this challenge. Or it could be lost by a bungled attempt to mitigate climate change, which would bring back into the centre of our national policy all of the self-interested pressure groups and arbitrary interventions that retarded our progress for so long.
The Asian economic boom is also the source of the sharper immediacy of the climate change problem. The increase in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the last two centuries has generated the climate change that we have experienced to date and will experience over the next couple of decades. This is the result of economic activity in the countries that are now rich. The rapid increase in concentrations that are expected over the next several decades is primarily the result of activities in the developing countries that are becoming rich. This rapid increase is what makes action to avert dangerous climate change urgent.
It is neither desirable, nor remotely feasible, to seek to lower the climate change risk by substantially slowing the rise in living standards anywhere, least of all in developing countries.
The solutions to the climate change challenge must be found in removing the links between economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions.
For Australia, the commitment to the mitigation of climate change can be seen as the reinvestment of a part of the immense gains that have come from accelerated Asian economic growth, in contributing to reduction of an adverse side-effect of that growth.
Our trade-exposed, emissions-intensive industries have valid concerns.
Along with some of our farm industries, metals processing would be the most affected, and have the first claims for special measures. Every element of costs matters, and no increase in costs should be imposed on business without good reason. But when assessments of the reasonableness of arrangements for trade-exposed industries are made, we should be mindful of the wider context.
The highest possible obligations under an emissions trading scheme would represent a small fraction of the resource sector's increased revenue from higher export prices in recent years.
Balance, reason and understanding of the premises and logic leading to policy conclusions are the keys to Australia and the world using well its last chance to get this difficult policy problem right.
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
Getting the monkey off our backs
Whatever your situation, expect emissions trading to change the world as you know it, writes Ben Cubby.
Australia is about to wean itself off the big smoke. Not the tobacco variety, which does enough harm, but the even riskier addiction to coal-fired power and petrol-driven transport. Like nicotine, fossil fuels have got under our skin and breaking the habit will hurt, at least initially.
Most in the Federal Government, together with scientists and economists designing the nation's response to climate change, believe the pain will be worth it. They believe that running an economy reliant on pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would be our greatest environmental undoing, pushing up temperatures, playing havoc with rainfall patterns, rendering useless great slabs of arable land, and threatening low-lying settlement with rising sea levels.
In his interim report in February, Ross Garnaut attempted to outline the extent of the horror that inaction poses. He nominated the loss of up to 90 per cent of Victorian vertebrate animals' habitat, shrinking of Kakadu wetlands, bleaching of the entire Great Barrier Reef, and dengue fever's spread as far south as Brisbane.
The centrepiece of the treatment plan is an emissions trading scheme, an eye-glazing concept with broad public support even though it will raise prices of electricity and petrol, and those commodities that rely on them. And this against a background of most Australians knowing little or nothing of how such a scheme would work. One poll, by Essential Media Communications, found 93 per cent of Australians acknowledged their ignorance about a scheme they're trusting will save the day.
Put simply, emissions trading is an attempt to control greenhouse gas pollution by making polluters pay. The Federal Government will take over
state and territory schemes with one national approach.
Permits are likely to be auctioned by government, possibly returning to public coffers $20billion over decades.
These permits will allow their buyers
to release a given weight of greenhouse gas - overwhelmingly carbon dioxide - into the atmosphere.
But the system will be underpinned by a Government-imposed cap on greenhouse gas. Emissions now total 580million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The Government wants that cut by 60 per cent of 1990 levels, to about 220million tonnes a year by 2050. No interim targets are set.
An alumina refinery is an appropriate example for how emissions trading might work. It buys large amounts of electricity and pumps its own greenhouse gas into the air. It will have to pay more for its electricity because the supplier will have to buy its own permits, and the refinery will need to buy emission rights for its own pollution.
The refiner would need to bid at the initial Government auction for emission permits. If it needs subsequent top-ups, permits will be available on the open market, at the going price. If it cuts pollution to levels less than permitted, the refiner can sell excess permits to others. But the total number of permits will be calibrated to equal the government-imposed cap on total emissions; hence, permit prices will rise over time as permits become more scarce.
Alternatively, the refiner will be able to earn credit - or offsets - against its pollution by, for instance, planting eucalypt plantations, which absorb carbon.
Although Australia emits just 1 per cent of world emissions, its per capita rate is high by world standards, principally because of heavy reliance on coal-fired electricity to meet a boom in power demand from households and industry.
The arrival of emissions trading in Australia will be a unique moment - the first time market forces have been directly harnessed on a national scale to achieve environmental and social objectives. There is a general consensus among commentators, industry and green groups that emissions trading will lead to mass change, perhaps on the scale of the original industrial revolution.
The effects will flow on from the power plants and oil refineries to touch all areas of society. As the price of coal-fired power goes up, so will household power bills, grocery bills and probably petrol. In yesterday's draft climate change review, Professor Garnaut did not hazard guesses on exactly how much food, fuel and power prices would rise - just that people on lower incomes would need compensation.
The scale of change is contested by experts, though most agree that when the trading scheme is brought in, in about
18 months, there will be an immediate spike in costs to the public, accompanied by special offers from competing power retailers.
As the cost of coal-fired electricity and petrol rise, renewable power will be more affordable. By implication, it is designed to encourage everyone - homes and businesses - to find ways to use less power and save money. Local goods may be cheaper than imports facing high transport and climate-controlled storage.
Emissions trading is being tried overseas, with some teething problems but generally high levels of success. The biggest scheme, involving 25 nations, has been operating in Europe since 2005. It is on track to reduce emissions. Over the next two decades, most nations will become embroiled in some form of trading scheme, economists believe.
Some countries may try to position themselves as "polluter havens" to attract industry, but such plans are unlikely to endure under international pressure. However, some companies have cut long-term deals in which local authorities protect them from the polluter pays principle. In NSW, BlueScope Steel has extracted government protection in the form of a 25-year exemption from carbon taxes.
Across Australia, lively competition between dozens of companies measuring and offsetting carbon emissions is likely to increase dramatically. With the right species in the right environment, half a dozen trees can cancel out a tonne of black coal over their 30-year life-span.
"There are some companies that are well aware of offsets and what they will need to do; others have absolutely no idea," said Peter Bassarova, chief executive of Carbon Conscious, which is planting eucalypts throughout the West Australian wheat belt.
Scientific opinion varies on how deeply the world must cut carbon emissions to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Gloomier predictions are made each week. If global temperatures rise by two degrees, the risk of rapidly increasing climate change and a dangerously transformed planet becomes much more likely.
Economic modelling suggests scenarios can be met without ruining the economy. The alternative - doing little or nothing now - would be a steady rise in prosperity, perhaps to the middle of the century, then sharper, more catastrophic falls later on.
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
Australia is about to wean itself off the big smoke. Not the tobacco variety, which does enough harm, but the even riskier addiction to coal-fired power and petrol-driven transport. Like nicotine, fossil fuels have got under our skin and breaking the habit will hurt, at least initially.
Most in the Federal Government, together with scientists and economists designing the nation's response to climate change, believe the pain will be worth it. They believe that running an economy reliant on pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would be our greatest environmental undoing, pushing up temperatures, playing havoc with rainfall patterns, rendering useless great slabs of arable land, and threatening low-lying settlement with rising sea levels.
In his interim report in February, Ross Garnaut attempted to outline the extent of the horror that inaction poses. He nominated the loss of up to 90 per cent of Victorian vertebrate animals' habitat, shrinking of Kakadu wetlands, bleaching of the entire Great Barrier Reef, and dengue fever's spread as far south as Brisbane.
The centrepiece of the treatment plan is an emissions trading scheme, an eye-glazing concept with broad public support even though it will raise prices of electricity and petrol, and those commodities that rely on them. And this against a background of most Australians knowing little or nothing of how such a scheme would work. One poll, by Essential Media Communications, found 93 per cent of Australians acknowledged their ignorance about a scheme they're trusting will save the day.
Put simply, emissions trading is an attempt to control greenhouse gas pollution by making polluters pay. The Federal Government will take over
state and territory schemes with one national approach.
Permits are likely to be auctioned by government, possibly returning to public coffers $20billion over decades.
These permits will allow their buyers
to release a given weight of greenhouse gas - overwhelmingly carbon dioxide - into the atmosphere.
But the system will be underpinned by a Government-imposed cap on greenhouse gas. Emissions now total 580million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The Government wants that cut by 60 per cent of 1990 levels, to about 220million tonnes a year by 2050. No interim targets are set.
An alumina refinery is an appropriate example for how emissions trading might work. It buys large amounts of electricity and pumps its own greenhouse gas into the air. It will have to pay more for its electricity because the supplier will have to buy its own permits, and the refinery will need to buy emission rights for its own pollution.
The refiner would need to bid at the initial Government auction for emission permits. If it needs subsequent top-ups, permits will be available on the open market, at the going price. If it cuts pollution to levels less than permitted, the refiner can sell excess permits to others. But the total number of permits will be calibrated to equal the government-imposed cap on total emissions; hence, permit prices will rise over time as permits become more scarce.
Alternatively, the refiner will be able to earn credit - or offsets - against its pollution by, for instance, planting eucalypt plantations, which absorb carbon.
Although Australia emits just 1 per cent of world emissions, its per capita rate is high by world standards, principally because of heavy reliance on coal-fired electricity to meet a boom in power demand from households and industry.
The arrival of emissions trading in Australia will be a unique moment - the first time market forces have been directly harnessed on a national scale to achieve environmental and social objectives. There is a general consensus among commentators, industry and green groups that emissions trading will lead to mass change, perhaps on the scale of the original industrial revolution.
The effects will flow on from the power plants and oil refineries to touch all areas of society. As the price of coal-fired power goes up, so will household power bills, grocery bills and probably petrol. In yesterday's draft climate change review, Professor Garnaut did not hazard guesses on exactly how much food, fuel and power prices would rise - just that people on lower incomes would need compensation.
The scale of change is contested by experts, though most agree that when the trading scheme is brought in, in about
18 months, there will be an immediate spike in costs to the public, accompanied by special offers from competing power retailers.
As the cost of coal-fired electricity and petrol rise, renewable power will be more affordable. By implication, it is designed to encourage everyone - homes and businesses - to find ways to use less power and save money. Local goods may be cheaper than imports facing high transport and climate-controlled storage.
Emissions trading is being tried overseas, with some teething problems but generally high levels of success. The biggest scheme, involving 25 nations, has been operating in Europe since 2005. It is on track to reduce emissions. Over the next two decades, most nations will become embroiled in some form of trading scheme, economists believe.
Some countries may try to position themselves as "polluter havens" to attract industry, but such plans are unlikely to endure under international pressure. However, some companies have cut long-term deals in which local authorities protect them from the polluter pays principle. In NSW, BlueScope Steel has extracted government protection in the form of a 25-year exemption from carbon taxes.
Across Australia, lively competition between dozens of companies measuring and offsetting carbon emissions is likely to increase dramatically. With the right species in the right environment, half a dozen trees can cancel out a tonne of black coal over their 30-year life-span.
"There are some companies that are well aware of offsets and what they will need to do; others have absolutely no idea," said Peter Bassarova, chief executive of Carbon Conscious, which is planting eucalypts throughout the West Australian wheat belt.
Scientific opinion varies on how deeply the world must cut carbon emissions to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Gloomier predictions are made each week. If global temperatures rise by two degrees, the risk of rapidly increasing climate change and a dangerously transformed planet becomes much more likely.
Economic modelling suggests scenarios can be met without ruining the economy. The alternative - doing little or nothing now - would be a steady rise in prosperity, perhaps to the middle of the century, then sharper, more catastrophic falls later on.
News and politics
climate change
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Garnaut Review
Australia
Garnaut's innovation plan has Australia paying its share of world R & D
The Garnaut review is proposing a sea change in the scale of government support and, more importantly, rationale towards innovation policy.
The headline proposal is for the Government to allocate more than $3 billion a year for innovation on low-emissions technologies. To get a sense of the scale of that increase, the previous government's Backing Australia's Ability allocated about $1 billion a year to innovation projects.
What is interesting is that Garnaut calls for this magnitude of spending while ruling out "wrong arguments" for greater spending on innovation. These include that need for speed (ruled out because, if the emissions cap is binding, that is what emissions will be; end of story), low permit prices (ruled out because the setting of future targets will mean that prices will rise and innovation is all about the future), and that innovation will soften the blow from the carbon cap (ruled out because this blow is the point of the whole exercise).
So what is the rationale for the desired spending? Put simply, it is exactly the same as why Australia needs to do something about emissions. Like Australia's contribution to reducing greenhouse gases, its contribution to knowledge is a drop in the ocean. Nonetheless, as it is a global public good, Australia should pay its way for membership in the international community.
If, as Garnaut projects, the world fund for research in low-emissions technologies needs to be about $100 billion a year, then, proportionate to its GDP share, Australia's contribution would have to be about 3% of this. Over all research, our share is now less than half that.
What Garnaut is doing is saying emissions caps are only part of our international commitment. We need to commit to spending on the other public good - knowledge - in the same way. And, fortunately, the revenue from emissions permits will more than cover such a commitment. This is a critical change in philosophy on innovation policy. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
Back in 2003, Northwestern University's Scott Stern and I wrote: "Some have claimed that, as a relatively small and geographically remote economy, Australia need not invest in innovation but simply be content to adopt the best of global technology. We disagree. It is Australia's duty as a leading member of the world community to itself become an active contributor to the world's knowledge pool. As a prosperous nation, our payment for innovations developed by companies in other countries should be a reciprocal contribution ourselves. While individual companies invest in innovation to serve the interests of their investors and stakeholders, government investment in the innovation environment can be premised on ensuring Australia's appropriate place in the community of nations."
At last, we have a major government player who agrees.
What of the details? Garnaut wants to ensure the money is spent where it is needed most to fill market gaps. The report is concerned that private companies wanting to invest in research and development will suffer a first-mover disadvantage. While patents cover some of these, if you invest to overcome regulatory barriers, as you open up a market for others, you close it for your own returns. Garnaut wants the money to hit at these issues.
In this regard, Garnaut favours grants whereby the Government matches the contribution of the company to close financing gaps. But this is only part of the innovation story and still gives rise to a problem in allocating the matching grants themselves. To this end, Garnaut wants an organisation to co-ordinate this here and abroad. This is a good idea but matching grants are still a blunt instrument.
What I would like to see are prizes and other demand-pull incentives to ensure research is directed to solving problems facing Australian government and industry in meeting new emissions' challenges.
We have a permit price that will allow unprecedented comparisons between different research proposals. A dedicated organisation can use that and create market-based incentives to drive innovative activity. That way we "don't pay it forward" but "pay it when we get it". This is something private philanthropic organisations have realised. Prizes remove the chance that matching turns into industry assistance; something that I, and you, would think Garnaut would worry about.
Garnaut's proposals adopt something that I made in my submission to the review: to build courses and skills in managing emissions. Emissions trading and its effects are widespread. For businesses to manage them, they will need highly trained employees with skills across science and commerce. To date, there are no bachelors of emissions management in our universities. With the cap on the horizon and four years to train graduates, we need to get started. Garnaut is one of the first to recognise that need.
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
The headline proposal is for the Government to allocate more than $3 billion a year for innovation on low-emissions technologies. To get a sense of the scale of that increase, the previous government's Backing Australia's Ability allocated about $1 billion a year to innovation projects.
What is interesting is that Garnaut calls for this magnitude of spending while ruling out "wrong arguments" for greater spending on innovation. These include that need for speed (ruled out because, if the emissions cap is binding, that is what emissions will be; end of story), low permit prices (ruled out because the setting of future targets will mean that prices will rise and innovation is all about the future), and that innovation will soften the blow from the carbon cap (ruled out because this blow is the point of the whole exercise).
So what is the rationale for the desired spending? Put simply, it is exactly the same as why Australia needs to do something about emissions. Like Australia's contribution to reducing greenhouse gases, its contribution to knowledge is a drop in the ocean. Nonetheless, as it is a global public good, Australia should pay its way for membership in the international community.
If, as Garnaut projects, the world fund for research in low-emissions technologies needs to be about $100 billion a year, then, proportionate to its GDP share, Australia's contribution would have to be about 3% of this. Over all research, our share is now less than half that.
What Garnaut is doing is saying emissions caps are only part of our international commitment. We need to commit to spending on the other public good - knowledge - in the same way. And, fortunately, the revenue from emissions permits will more than cover such a commitment. This is a critical change in philosophy on innovation policy. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
Back in 2003, Northwestern University's Scott Stern and I wrote: "Some have claimed that, as a relatively small and geographically remote economy, Australia need not invest in innovation but simply be content to adopt the best of global technology. We disagree. It is Australia's duty as a leading member of the world community to itself become an active contributor to the world's knowledge pool. As a prosperous nation, our payment for innovations developed by companies in other countries should be a reciprocal contribution ourselves. While individual companies invest in innovation to serve the interests of their investors and stakeholders, government investment in the innovation environment can be premised on ensuring Australia's appropriate place in the community of nations."
At last, we have a major government player who agrees.
What of the details? Garnaut wants to ensure the money is spent where it is needed most to fill market gaps. The report is concerned that private companies wanting to invest in research and development will suffer a first-mover disadvantage. While patents cover some of these, if you invest to overcome regulatory barriers, as you open up a market for others, you close it for your own returns. Garnaut wants the money to hit at these issues.
In this regard, Garnaut favours grants whereby the Government matches the contribution of the company to close financing gaps. But this is only part of the innovation story and still gives rise to a problem in allocating the matching grants themselves. To this end, Garnaut wants an organisation to co-ordinate this here and abroad. This is a good idea but matching grants are still a blunt instrument.
What I would like to see are prizes and other demand-pull incentives to ensure research is directed to solving problems facing Australian government and industry in meeting new emissions' challenges.
We have a permit price that will allow unprecedented comparisons between different research proposals. A dedicated organisation can use that and create market-based incentives to drive innovative activity. That way we "don't pay it forward" but "pay it when we get it". This is something private philanthropic organisations have realised. Prizes remove the chance that matching turns into industry assistance; something that I, and you, would think Garnaut would worry about.
Garnaut's proposals adopt something that I made in my submission to the review: to build courses and skills in managing emissions. Emissions trading and its effects are widespread. For businesses to manage them, they will need highly trained employees with skills across science and commerce. To date, there are no bachelors of emissions management in our universities. With the cap on the horizon and four years to train graduates, we need to get started. Garnaut is one of the first to recognise that need.
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
Friday, 4 July 2008
Garnaut urges emissions trading scheme 'without delay'
The much anticipated draft climate change report from economics professor Ross Garnaut calls for an emissions trading scheme for Australia without delay as the best of the possible options for cutting greenhouse gas output.
He would include petrol but initially exclude agriculture, but above all he stresses the urgency of introducing the scheme if the death of Australian icons like the Barrier Reef is to be averted.
Speaking on the release of his report in Canberra, Professor Garnaut called for a system to cap greenhouse emissions and a permit system for industry.
The delay in including agriculture acknowledges the difficulties in measuring greenhouse emissions in that sector.
The Federal Government is committed to an emissions trading scheme from 2010, but the Opposition is sceptical about the time frame.
Professor Garnaut says the scheme would have a transition period for two years from 2010, but he says there should be no hesitation in starting it.
"Without early and strong action, some time before 2020 we will realise we've indelibly surrendered to forces that have moved beyond our control," he said.
"Delaying now will eliminate attractive lower cost options. Delaying now is not postponing a decision, it's making a decision.
"To delay is deliberately to choose to avoid effective steps to reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels."
The former diplomat, academic and long-time advisor to governments described climate change as a diabolical problem and said the world had already squandered the chance to experiment with different approaches to lessen the impact.
He warns the damage from climate change to Australia may be immense and will be a part of Australia's reality.
The risks, he says are high if nothing is done. Australia's heartland, old rural Australia, could be lost and the Professor says that loss to national identity would be mourned.
The risks include, on median predicted temperature and rainfall changes, a cut to economic growth by 5 per cent, a cut to household consumption by a similar amount and a cut in wages by nearly 8 per cent by the turn of the next century.
Iconic wonders threatened
Professor Garnaut says adapting to climate change will test Australians' values and preferences in profound ways and people will have to think whether they are prepared to pay for the preservation of areas like the Great Barrier Reef.
He has warned that "iconic" natural wonders like the Great Barrier Reef could die out, even if an emissions trading scheme is introduced.
He says the focus must shift to adaption.
"We are forced to decide what consumption of goods and services we would be prepared to forgo, to avoid loss of things that we value," he said.
The report states that even with moderate reductions in emissions, the Great Barrier Reef could still disappear and there would be a 20 per cent decline in agricultural production from the Murray-Darling Basin.
If nothing is done, Professor Garnaut warns that by the end of the century there would be another 4,000 heat-related deaths in Queensland alone, and there would be significant risk to coastal buildings from rising sea levels and storms.
"In the best of circumstances damage from climate change, perhaps immense damage, is likely to be part of the Australian reality of the 21st century and beyond," he said.
The head of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Don Henry, says Professor Garnaut's report is cautious and the Government must adopt his first recommendation to have emissions trading from 2010.
"This is a credible but conservative report. If we really want a good chance of handing on a healthy Great Barrier Reef to our kids and avoiding devastating droughts, we need to go further and we need to go much faster," he said.
International environment
Professor Garnaut recommends that policy in Australia be deeply integrated with international climate change negotiations and that Australia's effort be aimed at keeping the prospects for an international agreement alive.
With that international agreement, the costs of achieving emissions reduction targets would be lower.
He says developed countries should make an unconditional initial commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then aim to have a more ambitious offer involving all emitters.
He believes China should be involved in the effort to cut emissions, saying its participation in a global agreement is essential.
Targets and schemes
The report is a draft one and modelling on specific figures will be done over the next few months.
But the report does say Australia's first commitment on emissions targets in the post 2012 period should be similar to those made by other countries and the Professor thinks the Rudd Government target of a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 may fit this.
Key points of the draft report
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
He would include petrol but initially exclude agriculture, but above all he stresses the urgency of introducing the scheme if the death of Australian icons like the Barrier Reef is to be averted.
Speaking on the release of his report in Canberra, Professor Garnaut called for a system to cap greenhouse emissions and a permit system for industry.
The delay in including agriculture acknowledges the difficulties in measuring greenhouse emissions in that sector.
The Federal Government is committed to an emissions trading scheme from 2010, but the Opposition is sceptical about the time frame.
Professor Garnaut says the scheme would have a transition period for two years from 2010, but he says there should be no hesitation in starting it.
"Without early and strong action, some time before 2020 we will realise we've indelibly surrendered to forces that have moved beyond our control," he said.
"Delaying now will eliminate attractive lower cost options. Delaying now is not postponing a decision, it's making a decision.
"To delay is deliberately to choose to avoid effective steps to reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels."
The former diplomat, academic and long-time advisor to governments described climate change as a diabolical problem and said the world had already squandered the chance to experiment with different approaches to lessen the impact.
He warns the damage from climate change to Australia may be immense and will be a part of Australia's reality.
The risks, he says are high if nothing is done. Australia's heartland, old rural Australia, could be lost and the Professor says that loss to national identity would be mourned.
The risks include, on median predicted temperature and rainfall changes, a cut to economic growth by 5 per cent, a cut to household consumption by a similar amount and a cut in wages by nearly 8 per cent by the turn of the next century.
Iconic wonders threatened
Professor Garnaut says adapting to climate change will test Australians' values and preferences in profound ways and people will have to think whether they are prepared to pay for the preservation of areas like the Great Barrier Reef.
He has warned that "iconic" natural wonders like the Great Barrier Reef could die out, even if an emissions trading scheme is introduced.
He says the focus must shift to adaption.
"We are forced to decide what consumption of goods and services we would be prepared to forgo, to avoid loss of things that we value," he said.
The report states that even with moderate reductions in emissions, the Great Barrier Reef could still disappear and there would be a 20 per cent decline in agricultural production from the Murray-Darling Basin.
If nothing is done, Professor Garnaut warns that by the end of the century there would be another 4,000 heat-related deaths in Queensland alone, and there would be significant risk to coastal buildings from rising sea levels and storms.
"In the best of circumstances damage from climate change, perhaps immense damage, is likely to be part of the Australian reality of the 21st century and beyond," he said.
The head of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Don Henry, says Professor Garnaut's report is cautious and the Government must adopt his first recommendation to have emissions trading from 2010.
"This is a credible but conservative report. If we really want a good chance of handing on a healthy Great Barrier Reef to our kids and avoiding devastating droughts, we need to go further and we need to go much faster," he said.
International environment
Professor Garnaut recommends that policy in Australia be deeply integrated with international climate change negotiations and that Australia's effort be aimed at keeping the prospects for an international agreement alive.
With that international agreement, the costs of achieving emissions reduction targets would be lower.
He says developed countries should make an unconditional initial commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then aim to have a more ambitious offer involving all emitters.
He believes China should be involved in the effort to cut emissions, saying its participation in a global agreement is essential.
Targets and schemes
The report is a draft one and modelling on specific figures will be done over the next few months.
But the report does say Australia's first commitment on emissions targets in the post 2012 period should be similar to those made by other countries and the Professor thinks the Rudd Government target of a 60 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 may fit this.
Key points of the draft report
- Transport should be included in an emissions trading scheme and including as many sectors as possible will help spread the costs across the economy.
- $3 billion per year should be committed to low-emissions technology research and development and a new research council should be set up to coordinate this.
- An emissions trading scheme is the best option to reduce emissions as compared to a tax or hybrid scheme.
- Emissions permits should be sold competitively.
- The emissions trading scheme could have a transitional phase from 2010-2012 - during this time permits could be sold at a "low, fixed" price.
- The Building Australia Fund, announced in the May Federal Budget, should also be used for energy infrastructure.
- Energy Prices will rise under the scheme and will hit low-income households hardest - these households will need to be compensated.
- Half of the funds collected from the sale of permits can be used to compensate households through tax and social security payments.
- Australia should lead the way in making carbon capture storage commercially viable and to help Asia reduce their levels.
- Areas that rely on coal-based power stations will need specific support.
News and politics
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Australia
Australian Government urged to act swiftly on Garnaut report
Environmental and industry groups have urged the Federal Government to act on climate change findings in a draft report presented by Professor Ross Garnaut.
Mr Garnaut called for an emissions trading scheme for Australia without delay as the best of the possible options for cutting greenhouse gas output.
He would include petrol but initially exclude agriculture, but above all he stresses the urgency of introducing the scheme if the death of Australian icons like the Barrier Reef is to be averted.
Speaking on the release of his report in Canberra, Professor Garnaut called for a system to cap greenhouse emissions and a permit system for industry.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the Garnaut report shows Australia must act now on the issue.
She says she will detail the Government's plan on an emissions trading scheme this month.
"What this confirms yet again is that this nation must take action on climate change," she said.
"We have a very strong interest, a national interest in tackling climate change. It confirms the Government's view that is if we take responsible action now the cost will be far less than if we delay."
Bipartisan support needed
Greg Bourne of the WWF says he supports Professor Garnaut's recommendation of a broad-based emissions trading scheme (EST) and has called on the Opposition to support it.
"We need to spread the burden across the economy. Everyone has a little bit of burden and everyone is prepared to pay that," he said.
"The most important thing is the Opposition needs to get behind Garnaut, to back this up. The continued trivialising of these most important of issues is not good leadership for the public of Australia."
But Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson says his party will be guided by its own advice on an emissions trading scheme.
Dr Nelson says the Federal Government would be rushing a carbon trading scheme if it were to begin by 2010.
"Last year in government, the advice that had been given to the previous government was that the earliest you could start to introduce it was 2011 and to get it running by 2012," he said.
"The most important thing for us is that we get this right, we owe it to our children. Importantly we protect jobs and don't send jobs and industries off to other parts of the world."
Tony Maher of the CFMEU has urged the Government to endorse the report.
"Thank God for Garnaut. At last we've got a balanced approach to emissions trading and climate change generally. Professor Garnaut has outlined an approach that gives priority to the low paid and that's the first time we've heard that," he said.
Wilderness Society spokeswoman Virginia Young says Professor Garnaut has highlighted the urgency of the need to act.
"It was also heartening to hear him reassure the community that action now will be less disruptive and more economically feasible than action in two years time or three years time or 10 years time," she said.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh says Professor Garnaut has made some interesting suggestions.
"He proposes an emissions trading scheme where 'permits to pollute' effectively would be bought and sold, and the money arising from it could then be returned by way of compensation and assistance to both householders and industry," she said.
"I'll be very interested to hear what not only industry, but what citizens have to say about it."
Interest group support
Brett Solomon, executive director of activist group Get Up, says it is clear Australia must act now on climate change and agrees petrol should be included in the scheme.
"I think the impact of the ETS on petrol prices will be minimal in comparison to the international oil prices that we have no control over," he said.
"The threat to Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef are real threats to Australian identity, to our environment, to our culture, to our future."
He has urged the Government to adopt the report and implement its findings.
Climate Institute chief executive John Connor says the Government must focus its policy on investment in clean energy rather than consumption and says the report paints a stark picture about the cost of inaction.
However he says the report also provides hope that Australia can move towards having a low carbon economy.
The Climate Institute is looking closely at some of the renewable energy target recommendations but Mr Connor says it broadly supports most recommendations, including the report's approach to encouraging better practice within the trade-exposed emissions intensive industry.
The Queensland Farmers' Federation (QFF) says it welcomes the report's recommendation that agriculture not be included in an emissions trading scheme for the time being.
Professor Garnaut says there should be a delay in including agriculture because it is hard to measure the greenhouse emissions in that sector.
But QFF CEO John Cherry says he is not convinced the agricultural sector should ever be included.
"There are some fundamental problems with applying an ETS to agriculture, we're not sure we can sort the measurement issues out," he said.
"We're not sure that his compensation mechanism sorts out the trade exposure issue and we might end up exporting our agriculture industries to countries that don't have an ETS."
Report criticism
Greens Senator Christine Milne says Professor Garnaut has painted a dire picture if urgent action is not taken, but his recommendations are too soft.
"His slow start is completely unacceptable. If you believe that climate change is as urgent and dire as Professor Garnaut says it is, how could you possibly be suggesting that the first two years of any trading scheme simply be at the Kyoto levels of 108 per cent of 1990 levels? That doesn't match," she said.
ACTU head Sharan Burrow says workers will be hit hard by climate change, and today's report should send a warning to reluctant businesses to get on board.
"We can't afford not to act and we say to those businesses generating hysteria, put your case, evidence-based, absolutely transparent, you'll get support if you need it," she said.
"But there can be no 'get out of jail free' cards, everybody must be in this."
Greenpeace's Steve Shallhorn says Professor Garnaut is right to push for urgent action, but some of his policy advice has missed the mark.
"Unfortunately some of his prescriptions fall a little short," he said.
"He has too much emphasis on the notion of clean coal which will not be ready for at least another two decades and we need to take very strong action on a much quicker time frame than that."
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
Mr Garnaut called for an emissions trading scheme for Australia without delay as the best of the possible options for cutting greenhouse gas output.
He would include petrol but initially exclude agriculture, but above all he stresses the urgency of introducing the scheme if the death of Australian icons like the Barrier Reef is to be averted.
Speaking on the release of his report in Canberra, Professor Garnaut called for a system to cap greenhouse emissions and a permit system for industry.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the Garnaut report shows Australia must act now on the issue.
She says she will detail the Government's plan on an emissions trading scheme this month.
"What this confirms yet again is that this nation must take action on climate change," she said.
"We have a very strong interest, a national interest in tackling climate change. It confirms the Government's view that is if we take responsible action now the cost will be far less than if we delay."
Bipartisan support needed
Greg Bourne of the WWF says he supports Professor Garnaut's recommendation of a broad-based emissions trading scheme (EST) and has called on the Opposition to support it.
"We need to spread the burden across the economy. Everyone has a little bit of burden and everyone is prepared to pay that," he said.
"The most important thing is the Opposition needs to get behind Garnaut, to back this up. The continued trivialising of these most important of issues is not good leadership for the public of Australia."
But Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson says his party will be guided by its own advice on an emissions trading scheme.
Dr Nelson says the Federal Government would be rushing a carbon trading scheme if it were to begin by 2010.
"Last year in government, the advice that had been given to the previous government was that the earliest you could start to introduce it was 2011 and to get it running by 2012," he said.
"The most important thing for us is that we get this right, we owe it to our children. Importantly we protect jobs and don't send jobs and industries off to other parts of the world."
Tony Maher of the CFMEU has urged the Government to endorse the report.
"Thank God for Garnaut. At last we've got a balanced approach to emissions trading and climate change generally. Professor Garnaut has outlined an approach that gives priority to the low paid and that's the first time we've heard that," he said.
Wilderness Society spokeswoman Virginia Young says Professor Garnaut has highlighted the urgency of the need to act.
"It was also heartening to hear him reassure the community that action now will be less disruptive and more economically feasible than action in two years time or three years time or 10 years time," she said.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh says Professor Garnaut has made some interesting suggestions.
"He proposes an emissions trading scheme where 'permits to pollute' effectively would be bought and sold, and the money arising from it could then be returned by way of compensation and assistance to both householders and industry," she said.
"I'll be very interested to hear what not only industry, but what citizens have to say about it."
Interest group support
Brett Solomon, executive director of activist group Get Up, says it is clear Australia must act now on climate change and agrees petrol should be included in the scheme.
"I think the impact of the ETS on petrol prices will be minimal in comparison to the international oil prices that we have no control over," he said.
"The threat to Kakadu and the Great Barrier Reef are real threats to Australian identity, to our environment, to our culture, to our future."
He has urged the Government to adopt the report and implement its findings.
Climate Institute chief executive John Connor says the Government must focus its policy on investment in clean energy rather than consumption and says the report paints a stark picture about the cost of inaction.
However he says the report also provides hope that Australia can move towards having a low carbon economy.
The Climate Institute is looking closely at some of the renewable energy target recommendations but Mr Connor says it broadly supports most recommendations, including the report's approach to encouraging better practice within the trade-exposed emissions intensive industry.
The Queensland Farmers' Federation (QFF) says it welcomes the report's recommendation that agriculture not be included in an emissions trading scheme for the time being.
Professor Garnaut says there should be a delay in including agriculture because it is hard to measure the greenhouse emissions in that sector.
But QFF CEO John Cherry says he is not convinced the agricultural sector should ever be included.
"There are some fundamental problems with applying an ETS to agriculture, we're not sure we can sort the measurement issues out," he said.
"We're not sure that his compensation mechanism sorts out the trade exposure issue and we might end up exporting our agriculture industries to countries that don't have an ETS."
Report criticism
Greens Senator Christine Milne says Professor Garnaut has painted a dire picture if urgent action is not taken, but his recommendations are too soft.
"His slow start is completely unacceptable. If you believe that climate change is as urgent and dire as Professor Garnaut says it is, how could you possibly be suggesting that the first two years of any trading scheme simply be at the Kyoto levels of 108 per cent of 1990 levels? That doesn't match," she said.
ACTU head Sharan Burrow says workers will be hit hard by climate change, and today's report should send a warning to reluctant businesses to get on board.
"We can't afford not to act and we say to those businesses generating hysteria, put your case, evidence-based, absolutely transparent, you'll get support if you need it," she said.
"But there can be no 'get out of jail free' cards, everybody must be in this."
Greenpeace's Steve Shallhorn says Professor Garnaut is right to push for urgent action, but some of his policy advice has missed the mark.
"Unfortunately some of his prescriptions fall a little short," he said.
"He has too much emphasis on the notion of clean coal which will not be ready for at least another two decades and we need to take very strong action on a much quicker time frame than that."
News and politics
climate change
emissions trading
Garnaut Review
Australia
GM Foods: The U.S. Fights Mandatory Labeling in An Untested Human Experiment
The U.S. and several other nations recently attended a Codex meeting in Calgary, Canada to discuss food labeling. The Codex Alimentarius Commission implements the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Program, the purpose of which is to protect the health of consumers and to ensure fair practices in the food trade. The Codex Alimentarius (Latin, meaning Food Law or Code) is a collection of internationally adopted food standards presented in a uniform manner. One of the principle reasons for this forum was to discuss the necessity, or lack of necessity as the U.S. sees it, to set up mandatory labeling of GM (genetically modified) and GE (genetically engineered) foods for consumers. South Africa (SA) and many African countries are strong dissenting voices of the U.S. policy that all GM/GE foods are considered equal to non-GM/GE foods and are in fact deemed safe under a 1992 George H. W. Bush Executive Order.
Under this official policy, all GM/GE foods are not required to undergo any kind of safety testing before entering the market. Below you will find the exact policy of the FDA concerning GM food:
"FDA relies primarily on two sections of the Act to ensure the safety of foods and food ingredients. Generally, whole foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and grains, are not subject to premarket approval. The primary legal tool that FDA has successfully used to ensure the safety of foods is the adulteration provisions of section 402(a)(1). The Act places a legal duty on developers to ensure that the foods they present to consumers are safe and comply with all legal requirements. FDA has authority to remove a food from the market if it poses a risk to public health. Foods derived from new plant varieties developed through genetic engineering will be regulated under this authority as well" [1].
Hence, nearly every modified food in the U.S. is completely untested for safety. This is very noteworthy for two reasons: (a) the U.S. leads the world in GM/GE foods (with up to 80% of its prepared and prepackaged foods being modified); and (b) every other nation besides the U.S. tests all GM/GE food before they are put into the food chain. Several African nations have dubbed GM/GE foods as "lethal" and believes the U.S. is fulfilling a population reduction strategy in Africa.
During the CODEX meeting, SA, who has been demanding that Codex provide them with distinct and mandatory GM/GE labels, presented a 10-page document expressing this view. In this document the following critical points were made:
1. Unmet Religious and Ethical Concerns of Christians and Jews
a. Corruption of Divine Protection
South Africa pointed out that in nearly every country there are various religious groups with differing beliefs when it comes to ingesting certain foods. South Africa stated that these "religious and ethical concerns must be noted and respected through global mandatory labeling of foods derived from genetic engineering and biotechnology must take into account ethical and religious concerns" [2] (CCFL, 2008, p. 1). For example, kosher Jews and Halal Muslims would wish to know whether the corn they were eating had been modified with a gene from pigs. Similarly, vegetarians would certainly wish to avoid vegetables which contained animal genes inserted into them and have an ethical right to know if this was the case.
B. Moral and Ethical Protection
SA contends that Codex and the WTO (World Trade Organization) assure protection of the moral, ethical and religious rights of Christian and Jewish believers. Therefore, mandatory labeling is essential to ensure these rights are preserved. If, for example, a Christian believed that God created the heaven and earth as well as all living creatures (including food), then a serious ethical concern would arise if he or she wanted to avoid such modified foods but had no realistic way to do so.
2. Unintended Consumer Health Effects
a. Psychological and Emotional Health
SA rightfully argued that the introduction of GM/GE foods violate the principles and mandates of Codex which are in place to protect the health of the consumer. In Norway, a report on GM/GE foods stated that, "some customers may experience strong ethical, religious, emotional or other objections for purchasing certain foods. These perceived risks may influence their health. These aspects of health should also be considered when the needs for new standards are discussed"[2]. Hence, the labeling of GM/GE foods should be mandatory under such an assumption.
B. Unknown Effects of Consumption of GM/GE Biotech Foods
Due to the lack of testing on GM/GE foods, safety is a significant concern for many individuals. These individuals may wish to avoid such food out of legitimate concern for their well-being. Antibiotic-resistant super diseases may be created if the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM foods would transfer into the consumer. Furthermore, some concerning results have been evinced from animals consuming GM/GE foods. GM DNA has been found in every organ (including fetuses) of animals eating these types of food. Additionally, numerous studies have shown many deleterious short and long-term effects from the consumption of GM/GE foods. For example, spermicide-containing corn, which was developed with funds from the USDA, and results in complete sterility in males has been rampant in the food chain for some time. Without proper labeling of these types of foods, there is no way to protect the fertility of males. Several other recent studies are detailed below:
* In 2005 and 2006, researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that female rats who were fed glyphosate-tolerant GM soya produced an excessive number of stunted pups with over 50% of them dying within three weeks. The other half were all sterile. This experiment was repeated several times with the same result [3].
* Between 2005 and 2006 in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradech in India, thousands of sheep died while grazing on residues from Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a type of bacteria which is toxic to some types of insects) cotton crops [4].
* In 2003, villagers in the Philippines' south suffered mysterious illnesses when a Monsanto Bt maize hybrid came into flower. At least five have died and many villagers tested positive for antibodies to the Bt protein while others still remain chronically ill [5].
* Between 2001 and 2002, 12 cows died in Hesse, Germany after consuming Syngenta GM maize (Bt176), while many others had to be slaughtered due to mysterious illnesses [6].
* From 2002 to 2005, researchers from four Italian universities published articles indicating that GM soya adversely affected pancreatic, hepatic (liver) and testicular cells in young mice [5].
* In 2005, Australian researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Canberra reported that a harmless protein in beans (alpha-amylase inhibitor-1) caused inflammation in the lungs of mice and elicited increased dietary sensitivities to other proteins when transferred to peas [7].
* In 1998, researchers reported damage to every organ system of young rats who were fed GM potatoes containing snowdrop lectin [8]. In the same year, researchers in Egypt found analogous effects on the guts of mice fed Bt potato [9].
* In 2002, Aventis, later named Cropscience, submitted research to regulators in the U.K. reporting that chicken fed glufosinate-tolerant GM maize Chardon LL were twice as likely to die prematurely than chickens in the control group [10].
C. Nutrient Non-Equivalence
SA contend that plants genetically modified may not be nutritionally equivalent, bio-available and can possibly possess toxic anti-nutrients [11]. There is no nutritional information for such foods, which raises the possibility that the modified nutrient could be toxic. Different and modified forms of nutrients may be present, which may make these foods unsafe. South Africa concluded that the risks from GM/GE food fall outside the realm of non-modified food and therefore, require strict labels.
D. Post Market Surveillance Impossible Without Labeling
Safety concerns are never over once food reaches consumers. For example, The National Institutes of Science in the U.S. reported in June of 2004 that workers processing GM celery contracted severe rashes, especially when exposed to direct sunlight. Labeling would allow handlers and consumers to become cognizant of potential risks involved with eating and processing such types of foods. Based on the principles of Codex, SA stated that it would be inconsistent and dangerous to adopt anything other than mandatory labeling of GM/GE foods. Furthermore, the absence of adequate labeling of GM/GE foods essentially equates to human experimentation without informed consent. According to Nuremberg Code,
"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved... All inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment" [12]. According to SA, mandatory labeling will allow implied informed consent, which will allow consumers to opt in and out of the experiment if they choose to do so.
After SA had submitted their highly researched rationale behind the mandatory labeling of GM/GE foods, the U.S. and its allies (e.g., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia) jumped all over them and stated that extensive research clearly supports that GM/GE foods are safe, therefore, no labeling is necessary. This is obviously not the case (as presented by SA) and delineates the inter-meshed interests and historical marriage between U.S. and large food corporations (i.e., Monsanto, who produces up to 90% of GM/GE seeds and foods). Following the overwhelming condemnation of SA's paper from the U.S. and the extra procedural requirements the U.S. pushed for because of these comments, the SA government had it subsequently withdrawn.
As a result of this development and the constant battles with the corporations of the U.S. and their biased agendas, SA called another meeting and declared they would circumvent Codex and create their own labeling system with or without their agreement. Countries like Swaziland, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, Cameroon, Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa and several other African countries with Japan, EU, Switzerland, Norway and many other countries stated their commitments to the mandatory labeling.
The meeting concluded with an agreement to eliminate all previous labeling documents and keep the door open for the future possibility of international labeling of GM/GE foods at a later date, which was strongly opposed by the U.S.
References:
1. Nutrition, U. S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. FDA's Policy for Foods Developed by Biotechnology. 2008 [cited May 27, 2008]; Available from: (http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/biopolcy.html) .
2. CCFL 2008. Comments from South Africa Agenda Item 5. [cited May 27, 2008]; Available from: ((http://www.prweb.com/prfiles/2008/05/01...) .
3. Ho, M.W., GM soya fed rats: stunted, dead or sterile. Science in Society, 33: (in press).
4. Ho, M.W., Mass deaths in sheep grazing on Bt cotton. Science in Society, 2006. 30: p. 12-13.
5. Ho, M.W., GM ban long overdue. Dozens ill & five deaths in the Philippines. Science in Society, 2006 29: p. 26-27.
6. Ho, M.W. and S. Burcher, Cows ate GM maize and died. Science in Society, 2004. 21: p. 4-6.
7. Ho, M.W., Transgenic peas that made mice ill. Science in Society, 2006. 29: p. 28-29.
8. Pusztai, A., S. Bardocz, and S.W.B. Ewen, Genetically modified foods: Potential human health effects, in Scottish Agricultural College, J.P.F. D'Mello, Editor. 2003, CAB International: Edinburgh.
9. Fares, N.H. and A.K. El-Sayed, Fine structural changes in the ileum of mice fed on dendotoxin-treated potatoes and transgenic potatoes. Natural Toxins, 1998. 6: p. 219-233.
10. Novotny, E., Avoid GM food, for good reasons. Science in Society, 2004. 21: p. 9-11.
11. Allinorm 08/31/34. Report of the Seventh Session of the Codex Ad Hoc Intergovernmental Task Force on Foods Derived from Biotechnology, Appendix III,. 24-28 September 2007: Chiba, Japan.
12. Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, in Vol. 2. 1949, U. S. Government Printing Office: Washington, D.C. p. 181-182.
News and politics
Mandatory Labeling
GM Foods
Under this official policy, all GM/GE foods are not required to undergo any kind of safety testing before entering the market. Below you will find the exact policy of the FDA concerning GM food:
"FDA relies primarily on two sections of the Act to ensure the safety of foods and food ingredients. Generally, whole foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and grains, are not subject to premarket approval. The primary legal tool that FDA has successfully used to ensure the safety of foods is the adulteration provisions of section 402(a)(1). The Act places a legal duty on developers to ensure that the foods they present to consumers are safe and comply with all legal requirements. FDA has authority to remove a food from the market if it poses a risk to public health. Foods derived from new plant varieties developed through genetic engineering will be regulated under this authority as well" [1].
Hence, nearly every modified food in the U.S. is completely untested for safety. This is very noteworthy for two reasons: (a) the U.S. leads the world in GM/GE foods (with up to 80% of its prepared and prepackaged foods being modified); and (b) every other nation besides the U.S. tests all GM/GE food before they are put into the food chain. Several African nations have dubbed GM/GE foods as "lethal" and believes the U.S. is fulfilling a population reduction strategy in Africa.
During the CODEX meeting, SA, who has been demanding that Codex provide them with distinct and mandatory GM/GE labels, presented a 10-page document expressing this view. In this document the following critical points were made:
1. Unmet Religious and Ethical Concerns of Christians and Jews
a. Corruption of Divine Protection
South Africa pointed out that in nearly every country there are various religious groups with differing beliefs when it comes to ingesting certain foods. South Africa stated that these "religious and ethical concerns must be noted and respected through global mandatory labeling of foods derived from genetic engineering and biotechnology must take into account ethical and religious concerns" [2] (CCFL, 2008, p. 1). For example, kosher Jews and Halal Muslims would wish to know whether the corn they were eating had been modified with a gene from pigs. Similarly, vegetarians would certainly wish to avoid vegetables which contained animal genes inserted into them and have an ethical right to know if this was the case.
B. Moral and Ethical Protection
SA contends that Codex and the WTO (World Trade Organization) assure protection of the moral, ethical and religious rights of Christian and Jewish believers. Therefore, mandatory labeling is essential to ensure these rights are preserved. If, for example, a Christian believed that God created the heaven and earth as well as all living creatures (including food), then a serious ethical concern would arise if he or she wanted to avoid such modified foods but had no realistic way to do so.
2. Unintended Consumer Health Effects
a. Psychological and Emotional Health
SA rightfully argued that the introduction of GM/GE foods violate the principles and mandates of Codex which are in place to protect the health of the consumer. In Norway, a report on GM/GE foods stated that, "some customers may experience strong ethical, religious, emotional or other objections for purchasing certain foods. These perceived risks may influence their health. These aspects of health should also be considered when the needs for new standards are discussed"[2]. Hence, the labeling of GM/GE foods should be mandatory under such an assumption.
B. Unknown Effects of Consumption of GM/GE Biotech Foods
Due to the lack of testing on GM/GE foods, safety is a significant concern for many individuals. These individuals may wish to avoid such food out of legitimate concern for their well-being. Antibiotic-resistant super diseases may be created if the antibiotic gene inserted into most GM foods would transfer into the consumer. Furthermore, some concerning results have been evinced from animals consuming GM/GE foods. GM DNA has been found in every organ (including fetuses) of animals eating these types of food. Additionally, numerous studies have shown many deleterious short and long-term effects from the consumption of GM/GE foods. For example, spermicide-containing corn, which was developed with funds from the USDA, and results in complete sterility in males has been rampant in the food chain for some time. Without proper labeling of these types of foods, there is no way to protect the fertility of males. Several other recent studies are detailed below:
* In 2005 and 2006, researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that female rats who were fed glyphosate-tolerant GM soya produced an excessive number of stunted pups with over 50% of them dying within three weeks. The other half were all sterile. This experiment was repeated several times with the same result [3].
* Between 2005 and 2006 in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradech in India, thousands of sheep died while grazing on residues from Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a type of bacteria which is toxic to some types of insects) cotton crops [4].
* In 2003, villagers in the Philippines' south suffered mysterious illnesses when a Monsanto Bt maize hybrid came into flower. At least five have died and many villagers tested positive for antibodies to the Bt protein while others still remain chronically ill [5].
* Between 2001 and 2002, 12 cows died in Hesse, Germany after consuming Syngenta GM maize (Bt176), while many others had to be slaughtered due to mysterious illnesses [6].
* From 2002 to 2005, researchers from four Italian universities published articles indicating that GM soya adversely affected pancreatic, hepatic (liver) and testicular cells in young mice [5].
* In 2005, Australian researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Canberra reported that a harmless protein in beans (alpha-amylase inhibitor-1) caused inflammation in the lungs of mice and elicited increased dietary sensitivities to other proteins when transferred to peas [7].
* In 1998, researchers reported damage to every organ system of young rats who were fed GM potatoes containing snowdrop lectin [8]. In the same year, researchers in Egypt found analogous effects on the guts of mice fed Bt potato [9].
* In 2002, Aventis, later named Cropscience, submitted research to regulators in the U.K. reporting that chicken fed glufosinate-tolerant GM maize Chardon LL were twice as likely to die prematurely than chickens in the control group [10].
C. Nutrient Non-Equivalence
SA contend that plants genetically modified may not be nutritionally equivalent, bio-available and can possibly possess toxic anti-nutrients [11]. There is no nutritional information for such foods, which raises the possibility that the modified nutrient could be toxic. Different and modified forms of nutrients may be present, which may make these foods unsafe. South Africa concluded that the risks from GM/GE food fall outside the realm of non-modified food and therefore, require strict labels.
D. Post Market Surveillance Impossible Without Labeling
Safety concerns are never over once food reaches consumers. For example, The National Institutes of Science in the U.S. reported in June of 2004 that workers processing GM celery contracted severe rashes, especially when exposed to direct sunlight. Labeling would allow handlers and consumers to become cognizant of potential risks involved with eating and processing such types of foods. Based on the principles of Codex, SA stated that it would be inconsistent and dangerous to adopt anything other than mandatory labeling of GM/GE foods. Furthermore, the absence of adequate labeling of GM/GE foods essentially equates to human experimentation without informed consent. According to Nuremberg Code,
"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved... All inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment" [12]. According to SA, mandatory labeling will allow implied informed consent, which will allow consumers to opt in and out of the experiment if they choose to do so.
After SA had submitted their highly researched rationale behind the mandatory labeling of GM/GE foods, the U.S. and its allies (e.g., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia) jumped all over them and stated that extensive research clearly supports that GM/GE foods are safe, therefore, no labeling is necessary. This is obviously not the case (as presented by SA) and delineates the inter-meshed interests and historical marriage between U.S. and large food corporations (i.e., Monsanto, who produces up to 90% of GM/GE seeds and foods). Following the overwhelming condemnation of SA's paper from the U.S. and the extra procedural requirements the U.S. pushed for because of these comments, the SA government had it subsequently withdrawn.
As a result of this development and the constant battles with the corporations of the U.S. and their biased agendas, SA called another meeting and declared they would circumvent Codex and create their own labeling system with or without their agreement. Countries like Swaziland, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, Cameroon, Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa and several other African countries with Japan, EU, Switzerland, Norway and many other countries stated their commitments to the mandatory labeling.
The meeting concluded with an agreement to eliminate all previous labeling documents and keep the door open for the future possibility of international labeling of GM/GE foods at a later date, which was strongly opposed by the U.S.
References:
1. Nutrition, U. S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. FDA's Policy for Foods Developed by Biotechnology. 2008 [cited May 27, 2008]; Available from: (http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/biopolcy.html) .
2. CCFL 2008. Comments from South Africa Agenda Item 5. [cited May 27, 2008]; Available from: ((http://www.prweb.com/prfiles/2008/05/01...) .
3. Ho, M.W., GM soya fed rats: stunted, dead or sterile. Science in Society, 33: (in press).
4. Ho, M.W., Mass deaths in sheep grazing on Bt cotton. Science in Society, 2006. 30: p. 12-13.
5. Ho, M.W., GM ban long overdue. Dozens ill & five deaths in the Philippines. Science in Society, 2006 29: p. 26-27.
6. Ho, M.W. and S. Burcher, Cows ate GM maize and died. Science in Society, 2004. 21: p. 4-6.
7. Ho, M.W., Transgenic peas that made mice ill. Science in Society, 2006. 29: p. 28-29.
8. Pusztai, A., S. Bardocz, and S.W.B. Ewen, Genetically modified foods: Potential human health effects, in Scottish Agricultural College, J.P.F. D'Mello, Editor. 2003, CAB International: Edinburgh.
9. Fares, N.H. and A.K. El-Sayed, Fine structural changes in the ileum of mice fed on dendotoxin-treated potatoes and transgenic potatoes. Natural Toxins, 1998. 6: p. 219-233.
10. Novotny, E., Avoid GM food, for good reasons. Science in Society, 2004. 21: p. 9-11.
11. Allinorm 08/31/34. Report of the Seventh Session of the Codex Ad Hoc Intergovernmental Task Force on Foods Derived from Biotechnology, Appendix III,. 24-28 September 2007: Chiba, Japan.
12. Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, in Vol. 2. 1949, U. S. Government Printing Office: Washington, D.C. p. 181-182.
News and politics
Mandatory Labeling
GM Foods
American Politics: Resolved to Continue Religious Bigotry
The First Amendment assures not only a separation of church and state, but the right of any person to practice any religion - or no religion. Nevertheless, the action of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives make it obvious that a large part of Americans fail to appreciate the structure of what is America.
by Walter Brasch
There should have been absolutely no controversy in a resolution presented in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives this past week.
Speaker Dennis O’Brien, a Republican from Philadelphia, wanted to honor the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which was holding its 60th annual national convention in Harrisburg. These resolutions are routine and almost always noncontroversial. The resolution pointed out that the organization’s purpose was to “increase faith and harmony and introduce various humanitarian, social and religious services.” But that wasn’t what angered Rep. Daryl Metcalf, a five term Republican from north of Pittsburgh. “The Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God,” he declared indignantly, and said he would vote against the resolution.
Now, normally, Rep. Metcalf’s views would be heard—and dismissed as a bigoted attack. But this is Pennsylvania politics. So, Rep. Gordon Denlinger, a Republican from Lancaster, felt he had to talk. “Certainly this nation went through an attack some years ago that is well-burned into the subconscious of our society,” he said, and then emphasized, “What I sense on our floor today is that, for some people, this evokes very strong passion and emotion.” Apparently, Denlinger never considered that all religions, including Christianity, have violent extremists.
Nevertheless, on Denlinger’s suggestion, the full House sent the resolution to committee, where it would ultimately die long after the weekend convention. The nonsense in the House isn’t isolated.
Voluminous lies and exaggerations about Sen. Barack Obama permeate the conservative talk shows, e-mails, and Internet. From bitterness dripping in an equal amount of invective and stupidity, we are told that Obama is a radical Muslim “mole” who is waiting to take over America, that he attended Muslim schools and was indoctrinated in that faith, that he switched to Christianity solely to get elected to office, and that he took his oath of office by placing his hand on a Koran.
Obama’s supporters aren’t much better than the liars from the misnamed “right.” Their vigorous defense of the probable Democratic nominee is that Obama isn’t a Muslim but really a Christian; his staff has even gone to great lengths to distance Obama from any possibility that he could have any connection to Islam. Apparently, being a Christian is more tolerable, certainly more acceptable, than being a Muslim, a Jew, or a believer of any other religion.
Sen. John McCain, the probable Republican nominee for president, agrees. “Since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn’t mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don’t say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just . . . feel that that’s an important part of our qualifications to lead.”
Disagreeing with Sen. McCain and millions of Americans are the Founding Fathers, most of whom were Deists; some were agnostics; a few were Christians or Jews. “[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” according to Article 11 of The Treaty of Tripoli, written near the end of George Washington’s presidency, unanimously approved by the Senate, and signed by John Adams in June 1797. That same treaty also established that the United States “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity [sic], of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
The Treaty itself was an extension of the principles enunciated within the Constitution. Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution is clear that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The First Amendment assures not only a separation of church and state, but the right of any person to practice any religion—or no religion. Thomas Jefferson said that his Bill for Religious Liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination.”
George Washington, the year after his inauguration, wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., to tell them that “happily the government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. . . . Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Explaining what James Madison and the other Founding Fathers intended, Jefferson as president in 1802 wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” The Supreme Court of the United States twice used Jefferson’s argument to rule that the Constitution, although it doesn’t specifically spell it out, does include an “establishment clause” to preserve the separation of church and state.
Abraham Lincoln later quashed all attempts to create a Constitutional amendment that would have established America not only as a Christian nation, but would impose Christianity as the official state religion. Nevertheless, the action of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the blathermouths who populate talk radio and the Internet, and the apologists who whine that Sen. Obama is really a 100 percent genuine practicing Christian, make it obvious that a large part of Americans not only fail to appreciate the structure of what is America, but in their own misguided form of Christianity fail to understood the values of the Jew named Jesus Christ.
News and politics
Christianity
by Walter Brasch
There should have been absolutely no controversy in a resolution presented in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives this past week.
Speaker Dennis O’Brien, a Republican from Philadelphia, wanted to honor the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which was holding its 60th annual national convention in Harrisburg. These resolutions are routine and almost always noncontroversial. The resolution pointed out that the organization’s purpose was to “increase faith and harmony and introduce various humanitarian, social and religious services.” But that wasn’t what angered Rep. Daryl Metcalf, a five term Republican from north of Pittsburgh. “The Muslims do not recognize Jesus Christ as God,” he declared indignantly, and said he would vote against the resolution.
Now, normally, Rep. Metcalf’s views would be heard—and dismissed as a bigoted attack. But this is Pennsylvania politics. So, Rep. Gordon Denlinger, a Republican from Lancaster, felt he had to talk. “Certainly this nation went through an attack some years ago that is well-burned into the subconscious of our society,” he said, and then emphasized, “What I sense on our floor today is that, for some people, this evokes very strong passion and emotion.” Apparently, Denlinger never considered that all religions, including Christianity, have violent extremists.
Nevertheless, on Denlinger’s suggestion, the full House sent the resolution to committee, where it would ultimately die long after the weekend convention. The nonsense in the House isn’t isolated.
Voluminous lies and exaggerations about Sen. Barack Obama permeate the conservative talk shows, e-mails, and Internet. From bitterness dripping in an equal amount of invective and stupidity, we are told that Obama is a radical Muslim “mole” who is waiting to take over America, that he attended Muslim schools and was indoctrinated in that faith, that he switched to Christianity solely to get elected to office, and that he took his oath of office by placing his hand on a Koran.
Obama’s supporters aren’t much better than the liars from the misnamed “right.” Their vigorous defense of the probable Democratic nominee is that Obama isn’t a Muslim but really a Christian; his staff has even gone to great lengths to distance Obama from any possibility that he could have any connection to Islam. Apparently, being a Christian is more tolerable, certainly more acceptable, than being a Muslim, a Jew, or a believer of any other religion.
Sen. John McCain, the probable Republican nominee for president, agrees. “Since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn’t mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don’t say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just . . . feel that that’s an important part of our qualifications to lead.”
Disagreeing with Sen. McCain and millions of Americans are the Founding Fathers, most of whom were Deists; some were agnostics; a few were Christians or Jews. “[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” according to Article 11 of The Treaty of Tripoli, written near the end of George Washington’s presidency, unanimously approved by the Senate, and signed by John Adams in June 1797. That same treaty also established that the United States “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity [sic], of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
The Treaty itself was an extension of the principles enunciated within the Constitution. Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution is clear that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The First Amendment assures not only a separation of church and state, but the right of any person to practice any religion—or no religion. Thomas Jefferson said that his Bill for Religious Liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination.”
George Washington, the year after his inauguration, wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., to tell them that “happily the government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. . . . Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Explaining what James Madison and the other Founding Fathers intended, Jefferson as president in 1802 wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” The Supreme Court of the United States twice used Jefferson’s argument to rule that the Constitution, although it doesn’t specifically spell it out, does include an “establishment clause” to preserve the separation of church and state.
Abraham Lincoln later quashed all attempts to create a Constitutional amendment that would have established America not only as a Christian nation, but would impose Christianity as the official state religion. Nevertheless, the action of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the blathermouths who populate talk radio and the Internet, and the apologists who whine that Sen. Obama is really a 100 percent genuine practicing Christian, make it obvious that a large part of Americans not only fail to appreciate the structure of what is America, but in their own misguided form of Christianity fail to understood the values of the Jew named Jesus Christ.
News and politics
Christianity
Techno-Fascism - Every Move You Make
By CHELLIS GLENDINNING
Surveillance of private calls and emails. Cameras documenting every move. No habeas corpus. Unimpeded entry into personal financial records. Voting machines changing election outcomes with the flick of a switch. Protest defined as terrorism. Many people hope that the loss of civil rights Americans have endured since the onslaughts mounted by Bush Administration II is a political reality that can be reversed through electoral will.
Established mechanisms of political power are, of course, the immediately available means for attempting change. Notions of citizens’ rights, freedom, and democratic participation are compelling paradigms that have consistently stirred the bravery of U.S. citizens – and yet elder political scientist Sheldon Wolin, who taught the philosophy of democracy for five decades, sees the current predicament of corporate-government hegemony as something more endemic.
“Inverted totalitarianism,” as he calls it in his recent Democracy Incorporated, “lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual.” To Wolin, such a form of political power makes the United States “the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.”
Wolin rightfully points out that the origins of U.S. governance were “born with a bias against democracy,” and yet the system has quickly lunged beyond its less-than-democratic agrarian roots to become a mass urban society that, with distinct 1984 flavorings, could be called techno-fascism. The role of technology is the overlooked piece of the puzzle of the contemporary political conundrum.
What are its mechanisms of control?
The use of telecommunications technologies for surveillance is obvious. So are willful alteration of computer data for public reportage, manipulation of television news for opinion-shaping, and use of microwave-emitting weapons for crowd control.
Less obvious are what could be called “inverted mechanization” whereby citizens blindly accept the march of technological development as an expression of a very inexact, some would say erroneous, concept of “progress.” One mechanism propagating such blindness is the U.S. government’s invisible role as regulatory handmaiden to industry, offering little-to-no means for citizen determination of what technologies are disseminated; instead we get whatever GMOs and nuclear plants corporations dish out. A glaring example is the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that, seeking to not repeat the “errors” of the nuclear industry, offers zero public input as to health or environmental impacts of its antennae, towers, and satellites – the result being that the public has not a clue about the very real biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Inverted mechanization is thrust forward as well by unequal access to resources: corporations lavishly crafting public opinion and mounting limitless legal defenses versus citizen groups who may be dying from exposure to a dangerous technology but whose funds trickle in from bake sales. In his Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, political scientist Langdon Winner points out that, to boot, the artifacts themselves have grown to such magnitude and complexity that they define popular conception of necessity. Witness the “need” to get to distant locales in a few hours or enjoy instantaneous communication.
Even less obvious a mechanism of public control is the technological inversion that results from the fact that, as filmmaker Godfrey Reggio puts it, “We don’t use technology, we live it.” Like fish in water we cannot consider modern artifacts as separate from ourselves and so cannot admit that they exist.
Social critic Lewis Mumford was among the first to make sense of the systemic nature of technology. In The Pentagon of Power, he identified the underlying metaphor of mass civilizations as the megamachine. The assembly line -- of factory, home, education, agriculture, medicine, consumerism, entertainment. The machine -- centralizing decision-making and control. The mechanical – fragmenting every act until its relationship to the whole is lost; insisting upon the pre-determined role of each region, each community, each individual.
Mumford deftly peels away false hope from a social reality based on principles of centralization, control, and efficiency. In 1962 he peered into the future and saw the pentagon of power incarnate: “a more voluminous productivity, augmented by almost omniscient computers and a wider range of antibiotics and inoculations, with a greater control over our genetic inheritance, with more complex surgical operations and transplants, with an extension of automation to every form of human activity.”
Inverted totalitarianism is both inverted and totalitarian because of the power of modern mass technological systems to shape and control social realities, just as they shape and control individual understandings of those realities. Its contemporary existence is most definitely the result of the efforts of a group of right-wing fundamentalists who hurled themselves into power through devious means -- but today’s desperate social inequities, dire ecological predicament, and fascist politic are the offspring of long-evolving technological centralization and control as well.
The challenge is to see the whole and all its parts, not just the shiny new device that purports to make one’s individual life easier or sexier -- which in itself is a contributor to the making of political disengagement. The whole is a megamachine, with you and your liquid TV, Blackberry, and Prius a necessary cog.
Forging a survivable world is indeed going to take a change of administration -- for starters. The terrifying reality that is mass technological society suggests more: radical techno-socio-economic re-organization, and to that end spring visions informed by the indigenous worlds we all hail from, the regionalism of Mumford’s day, and today’s bioregionalism. Or visions of the forced localization that Peak Oil, economic collapse, climate change, and ecological devastation propose.
technology
totalitarianism
Surveillance of private calls and emails. Cameras documenting every move. No habeas corpus. Unimpeded entry into personal financial records. Voting machines changing election outcomes with the flick of a switch. Protest defined as terrorism. Many people hope that the loss of civil rights Americans have endured since the onslaughts mounted by Bush Administration II is a political reality that can be reversed through electoral will.
Established mechanisms of political power are, of course, the immediately available means for attempting change. Notions of citizens’ rights, freedom, and democratic participation are compelling paradigms that have consistently stirred the bravery of U.S. citizens – and yet elder political scientist Sheldon Wolin, who taught the philosophy of democracy for five decades, sees the current predicament of corporate-government hegemony as something more endemic.
“Inverted totalitarianism,” as he calls it in his recent Democracy Incorporated, “lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual.” To Wolin, such a form of political power makes the United States “the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.”
Wolin rightfully points out that the origins of U.S. governance were “born with a bias against democracy,” and yet the system has quickly lunged beyond its less-than-democratic agrarian roots to become a mass urban society that, with distinct 1984 flavorings, could be called techno-fascism. The role of technology is the overlooked piece of the puzzle of the contemporary political conundrum.
What are its mechanisms of control?
The use of telecommunications technologies for surveillance is obvious. So are willful alteration of computer data for public reportage, manipulation of television news for opinion-shaping, and use of microwave-emitting weapons for crowd control.
Less obvious are what could be called “inverted mechanization” whereby citizens blindly accept the march of technological development as an expression of a very inexact, some would say erroneous, concept of “progress.” One mechanism propagating such blindness is the U.S. government’s invisible role as regulatory handmaiden to industry, offering little-to-no means for citizen determination of what technologies are disseminated; instead we get whatever GMOs and nuclear plants corporations dish out. A glaring example is the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that, seeking to not repeat the “errors” of the nuclear industry, offers zero public input as to health or environmental impacts of its antennae, towers, and satellites – the result being that the public has not a clue about the very real biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. Inverted mechanization is thrust forward as well by unequal access to resources: corporations lavishly crafting public opinion and mounting limitless legal defenses versus citizen groups who may be dying from exposure to a dangerous technology but whose funds trickle in from bake sales. In his Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, political scientist Langdon Winner points out that, to boot, the artifacts themselves have grown to such magnitude and complexity that they define popular conception of necessity. Witness the “need” to get to distant locales in a few hours or enjoy instantaneous communication.
Even less obvious a mechanism of public control is the technological inversion that results from the fact that, as filmmaker Godfrey Reggio puts it, “We don’t use technology, we live it.” Like fish in water we cannot consider modern artifacts as separate from ourselves and so cannot admit that they exist.
Social critic Lewis Mumford was among the first to make sense of the systemic nature of technology. In The Pentagon of Power, he identified the underlying metaphor of mass civilizations as the megamachine. The assembly line -- of factory, home, education, agriculture, medicine, consumerism, entertainment. The machine -- centralizing decision-making and control. The mechanical – fragmenting every act until its relationship to the whole is lost; insisting upon the pre-determined role of each region, each community, each individual.
Mumford deftly peels away false hope from a social reality based on principles of centralization, control, and efficiency. In 1962 he peered into the future and saw the pentagon of power incarnate: “a more voluminous productivity, augmented by almost omniscient computers and a wider range of antibiotics and inoculations, with a greater control over our genetic inheritance, with more complex surgical operations and transplants, with an extension of automation to every form of human activity.”
Inverted totalitarianism is both inverted and totalitarian because of the power of modern mass technological systems to shape and control social realities, just as they shape and control individual understandings of those realities. Its contemporary existence is most definitely the result of the efforts of a group of right-wing fundamentalists who hurled themselves into power through devious means -- but today’s desperate social inequities, dire ecological predicament, and fascist politic are the offspring of long-evolving technological centralization and control as well.
The challenge is to see the whole and all its parts, not just the shiny new device that purports to make one’s individual life easier or sexier -- which in itself is a contributor to the making of political disengagement. The whole is a megamachine, with you and your liquid TV, Blackberry, and Prius a necessary cog.
Forging a survivable world is indeed going to take a change of administration -- for starters. The terrifying reality that is mass technological society suggests more: radical techno-socio-economic re-organization, and to that end spring visions informed by the indigenous worlds we all hail from, the regionalism of Mumford’s day, and today’s bioregionalism. Or visions of the forced localization that Peak Oil, economic collapse, climate change, and ecological devastation propose.
technology
totalitarianism
Robert McChesney's The Political Economy of Media (Part II) - by Stephen Lendman
McChesney's book is a compilation of his best political economy of media work in the past two decades. It contains 23 separate offerings under three topic headings. In them he covers "enduring issues" and "emerging dilemmas." Part I of this review discussed some of them. More follow below. The entire book is must reading and contains new material never before published.
The Battle for the US Airwaves, 1928 - 1935
McChesney recounts the beginning. It explains much of the current dilemma and necessity to confront it.
The notion that the dominant media system is "natural" and was adopted enthusiastically is pure myth. Opposition to what emerged was considerable. It insisted that network, for-profit, commercial broadcasting was inimical to the public interest, and that there should be a substantial nonprofit sector.
In the mid-1920s, things looked much different than later on. Several hundred nonprofit broadcasters began operating in the decade's early years, mostly affiliated with colleges and universities. Commercial ones, in contrast, weren't even professionals. They were owned and run by newspapers, department stores, power companies and others in the private sector.
NBC was established in 1926, CBS the following year, and neither had an impact until the 1927 Radio Act's passage. Commercial advertising, the pillar of today's system, hardly existed until 1928. It was very controversial and very unpopular throughout the 1920s. Before 1927, it was generally agreed that nonprofit broadcasting should have a significant, even a dominant position, in the US system.
Then came the Radio Act that year. It established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC). It was to make the airwaves orderly, reduce the number of stations, allocate broadcast licenses, and favor those applicants that would best serve the "public interest, convenience or necessity." The FRC was renewed in 1928 and then indefinitely in 1929. It used these years to solidify the emerging industry's dominance and make no effort to change it.
FRC held meetings with commercial broadcasters. Nonprofits and nonbroadcasters were left out, so it's not surprising how things developed. FRC's reallocation plan came out under General Order 40. Of the 90 available, it set aside forty 50,000 watt clear channels for one occupant nationally. The remaining 600 broadcasters got the other 50 to operate simultaneously on at much lower power levels. Those in the same region would share a frequency at different times of day. The squeeze was on, and by autumn 1929, 100 fewer stations were on-air.
Not surprisingly, the networks won big. They got a flying start, and by the early 1930s, controlled 30% of the stations, including all but three of the clear channel ones. In addition, commercial advertising began growing substantially. Equally dramatic was the decline in nonprofit, noncommercial broadcasting. The FRC reduced their hours and power and made it harder for them to generate funds to keep operating. As a result, by 1930, their numbers dropped to less than one-third their 1927 total of around 200. By 1934, nonprofit broadcasting accounted for about 2% of total broadcast time. Business was king. The potential of the medium was beginning to be understood. The FRC was on board to support it, and said it was in "general public service" to do it.
Nonetheless, nonprofit opposition emerged. A National Committee on Education by Radio (NCER) was formed to get Congress to set aside 15% of channels for its use. Other nonprofit broadcasters joined the battle, and so did newspaper owners (at first) and civic groups. The former ended up partnering with for-profit broadcasters, while remaining opposition elements continued the struggle. They were against the status quo and wanted reform. Three themes underlined their position:
-- the airwaves should be a public resource and broadcasting a public utility;
-- most important, an advertising-supported for-profit network would use its programming to defend the status quo and would shut out unpopular or radical ideas; and
-- reformers criticized broadcast advertising and the limitations of for-profit broadcasting; it would work against cultural, educational, and public affairs efforts that are less suited to commercial operations.
Opposition groups proposed a number of plans with three getting the most attention in the early 1930s:
-- setting aside a fixed percentage (15 - 25%) of broadcast channels for exclusive nonprofit use;
-- have Congress authorize an extensive and independent broadcasting study to devise a whole new system; and
-- have the government establish a number of local, regional, and national nonprofit stations; they'd be subsidized by taxes and operated by a congressionally approved citizen board of directors; these stations would supplement, not replace, commercial operations.
None of the proposals were considered. For-profit operators worked against them. The opposition movement was divided in its tactics, and it faced three major barriers - the radio lobby, consisting of NBC, CBS and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). They went all out with a PR blitz to establish the "status quo."
Against this, reformers got little coverage while the press was strongly on board with the broadcasters. So was the legal community. The ABA established a Standing Committee on Communications in the late 1920s and stacked it with commercial broadcasting attorneys, The handwriting was on the wall.
The campaign to restructure commercial broadcasting went through three distinct phases from 1930 to 1935:
-- from 1930 to when Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933; the period was "the high watermark for popular discontent with US broadcasting;" it won over House and Senate support for setting aside nonprofit channels; nothing passed because economy recovery legislation took precedence; more significantly, powerful leaders (like Clarence Dill, chairman of the Senate Commerce Commission) blocked anti-commercial reforms; so did Sam Rayburn in the House;
-- from 1933 until the Communications Act of 1934; it established permanent broadcasting law; reformers hoped Roosevelt would support them; instead he ducked; he was in no mood to confront a "powerful and entrenched communications industry," especially when passing New Deal legislation took precedence; broadcasters seized the moment; they got House and Senate leaders on board; got the Communications Act passed, the FCC established, and pretty much everything they wanted; Roosevelt signed the new law in June 1934; it was called a "New Deal in Radio Law;" indeed so for the broadcasters; and
-- in January 1935, the FCC formerly reported to Congress that there was no need to alter the status quo; nonprofits lost out, and for the rest of the 1930s "the industry became economically and politically consolidated;" by decade's end, the public no longer had a say over what kind of system was best; as far as government and industry are concerned, they still don't, but surging reform movements blossomed post-2000 to change things; McChesney is one of its leaders; more on that below.
The Commercial Tidal Wave
Corporate giants today are so dominant that they compete less on price and more on what economists call "monopolistic competition." Advertising is key. It needs "advertising-friendly policies and regulations to allow it to flourish," and its the major source of media revenues.
Most notably on television, it's "ubiquitous." Yet the greater number of ads, the more alike they become, less believable, and less people pay attention to them. One solution - run more ads. The airwaves wreak with them, and the "commercial tidal wave" takes many forms. On radio and television, they consume nearly one-third of each hour compared to around half that volume before 1982.
Advertisers have also gotten very creative and more intrusive. A proliferation of TV "infomercials" for one thing, and entertainment programming "product placement" is everywhere. The idea is to seamlessly weave products into story lines so they're hard to ignore. It's not cheap with Coca Cola one of many examples. It paid Time Warner $25 million for the characters of one prime time show to "drink Cokes in each episode." Time Warner also developed "virtual" advertising by getting products placed retroactively in popular shows.
Radio is used as well. Increasingly, broadcasters use airtime to hype products they're paid to advertise. Hollywood is also cashing in. Disney's Miramax Films cut a deal to make Coors the studio's official beer and feature it exclusively in Miramax productions. Then consider James Bond films. They once shunned product placements. No longer in today's "very competitive movie environment." It's now a necessity, and look at the payoff. The 2002 Bond film, Die Another Day, so wreaked with them that Variety called it an "ad-venture," and the Financial Times said James Bond is now "licensed to sell" - with a $120 million payoff for the film studio.
Product placements show up everywhere, and children aren't exempt. Far from it. The animated film, Foodfight, had "thousands of products and character icons from the familiar (items) in a grocery store." Children's books also feature branded items and characters, and millions of them have snack foods as lead characters.
ESPN is cashing in as well with help from digital ad firm Princeton Video Image. It places changing product billboards on walls behind home plate on Major League baseball telecasts. Only viewers see them, not fans at games because they're not there.
Overall, the wall separating ads from editorial is disappearing because of media companies' greed, advertisers' enormous clout, and the concentrated power of eight dominant advertising/PR agencies that control 80% of all spending. They have great leverage - over product placement and program content. They're also clever enough to produce ads that are indistinguishable from entertainment.
Sum it up and here's the problem. Advertising is all-pervasive. We drowning in it and paying the price. It's corrosive to society and intrusive in our lives. It fosters false values, wants and needs. It makes otherwise normal people shop excessively for what they never knew they wanted until Madison Avenue mind manipulators convinced them. Years ago, economist Paul Baran said makes us "want what we don't need (nonessential consumer goods and services) and not....what we do (health care, education, clean air and water, safe food, good government, and so forth)."
Things are so extreme, McChesney puts it this way. We're "rapidly moving to a whole new paradigm for media and commercialism, where traditional borders are disintegrating and conventional standards are being replaced with something significantly different." It marries content with commercialism so pervasively they're indistinguishable, and it shows up everywhere all the time - television, radio, movies, publications, music, popular culture, schools, universities, public vehicles, commercial ones, public broadcasting and radio, art, subways, restrooms, and any and all other ways advertisers can reach people whether or not we approve.
McChesney calls it "the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history." It increasingly targets younger people. Acclimate them early because they become adult customers, and the children's market besides accounts for tens of billions of dollars globally and growing.
Hyper-commercialism is troubling. It's contrary to democratic practices, crowds out other forms of speech, and diverts attention away from more vital concerns. It also produces "profound cynicism and greed (that's) cancerous to public life." It reduces "our most treasured values....to commodities provided by the market." McChesney believes resisting advertising is "essential" because of its corrosive effect on society. Who can disagree.
The Political Economy of International Communications: Foundations for the Emerging Global Debate About Media Ownership and Regulation
Across the world, media and telecommunication systems are a key profit making area in modern capitalist societies. But the idea that it established "naturally" is rubbish. In the US and elsewhere, state policy is crucial to what emerges. It's true going back to 19th century America when the US Postal Service was the nation's earliest "telecommunication infrastructure." Publisher postal subsidies were instituted. They're important to this day, but very much favor media giants.
Government then was and now is an active player. The question is in whose interests and what values are encouraged. Seen this way, powerful special ones have corrupted US communication policy historically. Today, more than ever, and they constitute a "legitimacy crisis for capitalist media in a democratic society."
Earlier in the last century, "professional journalism" became the solution. It was to be nonpartisan, politically neutral and objective instead of representing the views of owners. It would also be produced by professionals trained to be neutral.
The result was tepid journalism reflecting elite opinions unthreatening to entrenched interests. By any standards, it's weak democracy or barely any at all. It then got worse.
Post-WW II, the US dominated nearly all global negotiations, including communication ones. Prior to the 1960s, colonial states had to accept whatever systems were imposed on them. After becoming independent, however, a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) campaign was established. But it went nowhere after the US and UK withdrew from UNESCO.
Globalists had other ideas, and they've blossomed since the 1980s. Neoliberalism and corporate globalization emerged and unleashed national and international policies favoring business. Markets were the solution to everything while unions, regulations, taxes, tariffs, public investment, and so forth were considered restraints of trade.
These ideas exploded in the 1990s - capitalism's golden age and a heyday for communication giants. After the Soviet Union collapsed and China embraced the market, it was open-season for vast business expansion. Globalization became the buzzword, and privatizing everything a universal solution for developing states. As a result, direct foreign investment rose dramatically along with a spectacular increase in international mergers and acquisitions. These amounted to under $100 billion in 1987. By 2000, they grew tenfold to $1.14 trillion. The world was being reconfigured into "a global market for goods and services (and) an international production system, complemented by an increasing global market for firms."
Giant communications companies were at its forefront. Before the 1980s and 1990s, their operations were mainly domestic, and in many countries state ministries controlled telecommunication monopolies. It changed and fast.
Neoliberal orthodoxy took over, WTO rules were established in January 1995, trade barriers came down, communications giants took advantage, and the US government backed their global expansion efforts. Then and now, their goal was a global communications and entertainment oligopoly controlled by a handful of international companies, mainly US-based. One estimate puts the market potential in the trillions of dollars annually.
Two distinct features characterize the vision:
-- dominant companies "moving across the planet at breakneck speed;" the US market is well-developed, so overseas represents the greatest potential and dominant media firms say they're "supranational entities" regardless of where they're home-based; and
-- consolidating into every market segment is the strategy; the guiding logic is also to get big fast or get swallowed up by a larger competitor; in the end, a mere handful of companies will be "end-game winners."
Today, nine giants dominate global media markets, and nearly all rank among the top 200 non-financial firms in the world. Five are US-based, and consider their power. Among them they own:
-- the major US film studies;
-- the US TV networks;
-- 80 - 85% of the global music market;
-- most satellite broadcasting worldwide;
-- all or part of most cable broadcasting systems;
-- a dominant portion of book and commercial magazine publishing;
-- all or part of most commercial US and worldwide cable TV channels; and
-- a big stake in European terrestrial TV; and more plus an endless appetite for the greatest possible scale; the idea is to spread costs across a large base, be able to outbid competitors, and maximize profits at the same time.
Structural changes in world advertising are also strongly linked to global media consolidation. Further, globalization depends on a commercial media system to market their wares worldwide. It, in turn, is partnered with a handful of "super-advertising agencies" dominating a $400 billion global industry and consolidating just as fast as media companies.
About 100 second tier players are also important. Among them - Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Thomson Reuters in the US and others around the world like Mexico's Televisa, Venezuela's Cisneros Group, London-based Pearson plc, and global publisher Reed Elsevier. These companies dominate their own national and regional markets and have extensive ties and joint ventures with the giants. Together, first and second tier operators control much of the world's media - from TV and radio to publishing, films, music, and so forth, and the entire system is still undergoing change because of continued consolidation.
These companies are in it together, but the race will determine who wins, so it's likely to end up with a small handful of very large finalists. As a result, the global media market is more a cartel than a competitive marketplace. The largest firms have similar dominant shareholders. They each own portions of the others. Their directorships interlock. The CEOs all know each other, are on a first name basis, and communicate regularly as they plot the future of their businesses.
First and second tier operators are also connected through their investment bankers - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch among them. Financial houses, of course, are matchmakers and make multi-millions at their trade. For them, the more the better, and they had a heyday in the 1990s with deals worth hundreds of billions.
Media content also comes into play. At times it can be positive where media censorship is common. Overall, however, it subverts local culture when it interferes with profits. The "Hollywood juggernaut" concerns many countries as US film exports expand. Of the top 125 1999 grossing ones, nearly all were US produced, so it shows local audiences like them and more for sure are coming.
Music as well captured overseas markets with US recording artists getting 60% of their sales outside America in 1993, although it fell to 40% in 1998 as local music still has great appeal.
Overall, the combination of global media and neoliberalism is numbing. It reduces everything to entertainment and light fare and results in profound depoliticization. Case in point - 2008 America.
It's also the driver behind communication industry consolidation. It made it vast, quick, and got it accomplished in two phases:
-- from the mid-1980s to 2000 across industry segments; soaring equity valuations fueled it; as currency, it helped in selling debt instruments and getting generous loans; everyone in on the scheme got rich - lawyers, accountants, bankers, and especially CEOs whose compensation soared; and
-- a second phase followed the first; by 2001, the technology bubble burst; equity prices deflated, and a "dog-eat-dog" shakeout began.
Companies were enormously indebted. Consolidation came at a high price. Companies were reeling from debt. Some committed fraud to hide it. Write-offs became unprecedented with AOL Time Warner the most noteworthy example. After its market valuation plunged from $290 billion to $135 billion, the company took a $54 billion "impairment charge for goodwill" so shareholders would get stuck with the cost along with laid-off employees by the many thousands.
Global access to voice telephony was just as dramatic. Wired phone access accelerated, and mobile phone usage expanded from a tiny 1990 base to one billion users by 2002. In addition, as business expanded overseas so did telecommunication providers to service it. The FTC backed it. So did the IMF, World Bank, and new trade rules that smoothed the way to opening markets everywhere. In 1997, the WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunications was established. It harmonized national operating frameworks, bound its 70 signatories to firm commitments, enforced them by a multilateral dispute settlement process, and greased the way for easy market penetration.
From 1984 (before WTO) to 1999, about $244 billion in state-owned systems were privatized - 90 of the 189 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) membership. In addition, by 2000, 25 countries agreed to allow majority foreign-owned carriers use their own controlled networks to provide international voice service.
Between 1990 and 2000, mergers and acquisitions volume skyrocketed - an estimated $1.616 trillion, and cross-border takeovers accounted for a large share of it. Including investments and service revenues, telecommunications expenditures totaled trillions of dollars. Investments were heavily debt-financed. Banks lent an estimated $890 billion. An additional $415 billion came from debt instruments, and $500 billion more from private equity and stock issuance.
At its peak, lucrative markets information-carrying over-capacity was stunning (along with neglect in others) with most of it built from 1996 to 2000 - millions of fiber-optic cable circuitry, underseas cable laid, and huge Internet investments for this burgeoning new technology.
Government partnered in the enterprise. It deferred to business and investor needs while neglecting overall social responsibilities and the nation's basic infrastructure - roads, airports, power plants, bridges, and so forth.
Until the bubble burst, investors were having a party and so were industry players. Rates favored business users. Workers lost collective bargaining rights. Downsizing following, and so did consumer quality of service. They were also victimized by scams and overbilling.
By the second half of 2000, the industry got its comeuppance. It was routed along with the dot-coms in a bloodletting they're still recovering from. Giant firms began reporting huge losses, and most people know the WorldCom story that got its founder and CEO Bernie Ebbers convicted of fraud and conspiracy and given a 25 year prison sentence. Along with Enron, it became the largest ever accounting scandal in US history.
Everything came up roses in the 1990s. The power of global capitalism seemed unstoppable. So even its opponents were resigned and largely quiescent. Ignored was that none of this expansion was natural. It took plenty of government help fueling it. It led to growing monopoly, higher prices, and poorer service so powerful business interests could profit at the public's expense. It's a familiar story going back generations, but the stakes keep getting greater and the harm caused even worse.
Add to it massive fraud, a corrupted business-government alliance, a historic public rip-off, and chalk it up to defrocked market miracles. Those of us committed to democracy have our work cut out for us. And in view of the media's importance, it's crucial to democratize it.
Communication "comprises the indispensable institutional basis for social deliberations - discussion, debate and decision making - beyond elite forums." Solutions aren't simple, and McChesney cites "two overarching principles" central to reform:
-- policy debates on these topics must be public; behind closed doors no longer cuts it; and
-- the public interest must be "reaccredited, strengthened, and enlarged;" to a large degree, it should also be protected from direct state control but not to the point of neglect.
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
At a time of technological wonders, communication breakthroughs, and near limitless online ways to stay informed, our society is largely depoliticized. Political involvement is weak, and it's evident when presidential and off-year elections are held. Routinely, half or less of the electorate turns out, and those most in need show up least often or not at all. It mocks the idea of democracy, but who can blame people when candidates are pre-selected, machines do our voting, candidates who lose are declared winners, and winners don't complain.
What's the cause? More than anything, the dominant media that's "become a significant antidemocratic force...." They're larger and more influential than ever. Combined they're the main information source for most people, and it's in their interest to marginalize the public to shut out any interference with their commercial aims. Profits uber alles are paramount. Concentrated power and hyper-commercialism are dominant, and when combined with the sorry state of today's journalism it's easy to understand the problem. Fixing it will be no easy task.
The "corporate media explosion" corresponded with the "implosion of public life," and McChesney calls it "the rich media/poor democracy paradox." He cites two components:
-- a political crisis; our hyper-commercialized corporate media system bodes ill for our politics and society; a crisis this great is totally off-limits for discussion; how and by whom the media is controlled, and how it's structured and subsidized should be at the heart of discussion; and
-- media ideology; its defense is indefensible - that markets "give the people what they want;" commercialized media are innately democratic; so is nonpartisan, objective professional journalism; new technologies are inherently democratic; and most important, the First Amendment gives media giants and advertisers unfettered free speech rights without public or government interference; this reasoning is no more credible than the discredited American exceptionalism notion, except in its negative sense.
Media concentration was most notable in the 1990s, but it was powerfully that way earlier. A handful of Hollywood studios dominated film production since the 1930s. Until cable and satellite TV, three networks dominated national television. Too few companies publish the popular magazines most people read, and from the 1960s to the 1980s, newspapers "underwent a spectacular consolidation."
Now it's much worse in the wake of the outrageous 1996 Telecommunications (giveaway) Act. Mega-media deals followed, and unless stopped, more are coming. Along with them, journalism keeps getting worse - in commercial and so-called "public" spaces. The reasons again are covered above - hyper-commercialism; PBS and NPR as corrupted as the giants; the endless quest for dominance and profits; professional reliance on "official sources;" labor's decline; the public shut out altogether; a lack of local journalism; and the dismal state of democracy overall.
Given the above, reporters need no direction - serve your owners or find new line of work. And when covering media political allies, it's de rigueur to show favoritism and "swift boat" the opposition. It violates fundamental journalistic canon, but at times of campaign frenzy it shows how pervasive the practice is. And the more concentrated media become, the worse it'll get.
The same holds for what's aired, to what degree, and what isn't. Mass antiwar and global justice protests barely get mentioned. But let celebrities like OJ Simpson or even Bill Clinton run afoul of the law (or be perceived that way) and it's wall-to-wall, round-the-clock headline news for days or longer.
Other major topics are also shut out - wars of aggression, a militarized society, hugely repressive laws, erasing social services, silencing dissent, rigging elections, pervasive corruption, the unprecedented wealth gap, and far too many more to list that all should top media discussions in a democratic society where journalists are supposed to hold the powerful to account. McChesney sums it up saying "In the crescendo of news media praise for the genius of contemporary capitalism, it is almost unthinkable to criticize the economy as deeply flawed." He quotes the Washington Post calling us a "perfect economy." Indeed for the rich and them alone.
Next, he discusses the Internet and calls its "rapid commercialization and expansion....the most striking media and communication development since January 1999." But alone, it's not magic and not a solution to media concentration and dominance. In the digital age, they'll continue to grow, partner and merge until we're left with a handful of mega-global giants with potential veto power over world governments. They pretty much have it now as well as large swaths of the Internet.
Worse still is that governments hand it to them - secretly, behind closed doors with no public involvement or press coverage. It shows since the late 1990s in the "shadowy history of how the Internet went from being a public-sector creation to being the province of Wall Street." Politicians from both parties were bought off to do it. Media influence remains dominant, but a battle royal looms to preserve Net Neutrality, and that topic is discussed below. But if media giants prevail, the Internet will be as commercialized as all other media components with the public left out in the cold.
There are more concerns as well - violating our privacy, pervasive spying, shutting out the poor, debasing democracy even more if the Internet is totally commercialized, charging whatever the market will bear, censoring content, and overall letting a potentially wondrous technology cost more than it benefits.
With this in mind, and the media giants insatiable quest for size and dominance, now's the time to demand the unmentionable - reactivate antitrust laws. Break up the giants along with other industry conglomerates. A century ago, it dismantled the Oil Trust and in the 1980s AT & T. Today, however, the only time trustbusting comes up is when one industry sector challenges another, never when it's in the public interest.
Nonetheless, as media enlarge, its public trust betrayal worsens, and the battle for Net Neutrality looms, anything is possible if a great enough groundswell gets behind it. Frances Fox Piven cites four historical times (in her book Challenging Authority) when people in America achieved the impossible. Conditions produced outrage enough over the status quo to erupt into a "disruptive protest movement." It shook the political establishment and brought about transforming social change - if only for a short time.
Media reform pressures are now building at a crucial moment in our history. McChesney put it this way in his 2007 book, Communication Revolution. We have "an unprecedented (rare window of opportunity in the next decade or two) to create a communication system that will be a powerful impetus (for) a more egalitarian, humane, sustainable, and creative (democratic) society." He calls it a "critical juncture" that won't remain open for long. It's a "historic moment" in a "fight we cannot afford to lose." In the digital age, "the corporate stranglehold over our media is very much in jeopardy.." Citizen actions have successfully challenged them. Important victories have been won on ownership rules, public broadcasting, and exposing fake news.
It now remains to enlarge grassroots efforts, take the fight to the next level, partner with other progressive campaigns, and force politicians to respond or be replaced. Media giants won't lay back and take it. They'll do all they can to quash reform efforts. So far they've had everything their way, and "the smart money says that the big guys (always) win." The "same smart money once said that communism" would last forever and apartheid couldn't end peacefully. It may turn out that the "smart money" isn't so smart. If enough people join the fight for media justice, "anything can happen."
The US Media Reform Movement Going Forward
Here McChesney examines the relationship of the political economy of media to the media reform movement and how the former provides understanding of the media's role in society. It's whether it "encourages or discourages social justice, open governance, and effective participatory democracy." Also vital is how "market structures, policies and subsidies, and organizational structures shape and determine the nature of the media system and media content."
For decades US media scholars have been at odds with their counterparts around the world. They assume a for-profit, advertising-supported corporate media is a given. Major reform against capitalism is unthinkable, "unrealistic, even preposterous" for a media system considered inviolable.
Over time, however, it became apparent that viewing a corporate-run media system as "natural" was erroneous. That's how it was at earlier key moments when the status quo was challenged - the 1900 - 1915 Progressive Era and again in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the last century's second half, media became a non-issue. Policymaking was corrupt and commercial interests increasingly dominant. At the same time (and like today), press coverage was nil. So when television emerged it was "gift-wrapped and hand-delivered to Wall Street and Madison Avenue without a shred of public awareness and participation." FM radio, cable and satellite TV got the same treatment.
Things hit rock bottom after 1980 at a time of Republican ascendence and neoliberal ideology's emergence. It took its toll on political economy of media scholarship. The field began declining and headed for obscurity. At the same time, "something was happening." Vital research was published and distinguished figures like Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Ben Bagdikian produced it. Their earlier media critiques are still cutting-edge and seminal.
They proved the crisis of media, how inhospitable it is to democracy and social justice, and how essential it is to change it. Progressive writers and publications also emerged as well as media reform movements. Groups like Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) were in the vanguard and are now seen as trailblazers for today's burgeoning efforts.
Critics at the time weren't just on the left. By the 1990s, things got so bad even some conservatives became alarmed. Ownership was increasingly concentrated, labor weak, journalistic standards dismal, and hyper-commercialism overpowering. Further, editorial staffs were downsized, bureaus closed, trivia got substituted for substance, and who could know what was coming.
McChesney cites the "tipping point" - early in the new millennium "when the connection was made between the nature of the media system and a variety of policies and subsidies that created it." Global justice protests erupted, media activism grew, and the notion that the US free market media system was preordained began to crumble. Back room deals designed it, and benefits cut both ways for the dealers. Politicians were rewarded for their efforts, and media giants got an open field to get bigger. Public interest was off the table.
The key moment came in 2003, and the issue was over new media ownership rules. At the time, it looked like a slam-dunk for Big Media. George Bush was president, Republicans controlled Congress, and three of the five FCC members were Bush appointees. Media giants smelled victory and went for the kill. In spring 2003, what could stop them.
An aroused public could and did, and it seemed to materialize out of thin air. Within a year, two million or more outraged people swamped the Powell FCC and Congress with protests over the proposed relaxation of ownership rules. McChesney calls it the moment when the "contemporary US media reform movement was born," and ever since mushroomed dramatically as millions in the country are fed up and won't take it any more.
They won victories, and the Media Access Project (MAP) got one of them. In June 2004, it prevailed in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC when the Third Circuit Court threw out FCC's new rules. It ordered the agency to reconsider its ill-advised changes that if enacted would be an early Christmas for the giants. They included:
-- ending the cross-ownership ban that prohibits a company from owning a newspaper and TV or radio station in the same city;
-- eliminating the previous ban on radio/TV cross-ownership and replacing both types with a single set of cross-media limits;
-- a concocted "diversity index" to determine cross-media limits; it was based on assigning weights to the various media to determine if markets retained enough diversity; it would only consider ownership limits if by its formula there wasn't enough; it was pure deception because in major markets like New York the FCC gave equal or greater weighting to a community college radio station than The New York Times and local ABC affiliate;
-- cross-ownership limits only in smaller markets; in ones with eight or more TV stations, proposed changes would have no cross-ownership newspaper, TV and radio station restrictions;
-- a company would be able to own two TV and six radio stations in the same market if at least 20 "independently owned media voices" remained after a merger; if only 10 remained, ownership would be limited to two TV and four radio stations; and
-- redefining National Market Share to mean the total number of households company TV stations reach and raising the allowable ownership ceiling from 35 to 45%; a 39% compromise was reached to accommodate News Corp. and Viacom; they already exceeded the allowable limit, so the deal let them keep their stations.
Down but not out, FCC tried again last year under new chairman Kevin Martin. It proposed similar kinds of loose ownership rules. Unleashed a wave of activist protests in response. Members of Congress from both parties joined in. Martin ignored them, and last December 18 pushed through a 3 to 2 party-line win.
Here's where things now stand beyond the timeline of McChesney's book. On April 24, the Senate Commerce Committee voted unanimously for a "resolution of disapproval" to block the FCC's December 18 decision. To take effect, it must pass the full Senate and did in a historic May 15 vote - by a near-unanimous voice vote showing strong bipartisan support. Republicans and Democrats are united on this issue (so far), especially in an election year when mass constituency opposition is hard to ignore. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration threatened a veto. Hopefully it won't matter because too many in Congress feel otherwise.
The issue is gaining traction in the House as well with two Net Neutrality bills for consideration. On May 6, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 was introduced (HR 5353). It's to "establish broadband policy and direct the (FCC) to conduct proceeding and public broadband summits to assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues relating to broadband internet access services, and for other purposes." It also amends the Communications Act of 1934.
On May 8, the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (HR 5994) was introduced. It requires that ISPs operate and interconnect with other network providers in a nondiscriminatory way. It applies to content, applications and services, and establishes antitrust measures for anticompetitive practices.
It now remains to be seen how House and Senate legislation turns out, what final forms they take, how the White House responds, and whether there's enough support in Congress to override vetoes. Current efforts show promise, and activists hope sentiment is turning their way. In time, we'll know.
Back in December 2002, McChesney co-founded the media reform group Free Press and serves as its president. In 2003, it started off with a few staffers and now has 35 and a membership approaching 400,000 and growing. In five years, Free Press became the largest media reform group in the country, but it's joined by dozens of others. Freepress.net lists 165, and two dozen formed the Media & Democracy Coalition in 2005. In addition, local media reform initiatives are emerging throughout the country with distinguishing characteristics:
-- media concentration is key and efforts to reverse it are crucial; so is the battle to preserve Network Neutrality, expose and end fake news, protect and reinvigorate public and community noncommercial broadcasting, and influence the course of the digital revolution democratically;
-- making media policy a political issue; open it to public debate; make sure people know there's nothing "natural" about the current system, and that they have a right to participate in policy deliberations;
-- media reform groups are linked to independent media creation efforts; they've exploded online; media reform, activism and independent media "rise and fall together;"
-- for decades, the US was a media activism laggard; now it's a leader, but its future remains undetermined; much depends on the success of the political left; so far it's "weak and largely inchoate;" the bottom line is whether people or corporations will control communication, and that leads to the larger question of who should direct society and what kind will emerge; according to McChesney, at some point ahead, we're heading for "a direct confrontation with capital," and the outcome will determine it.
Millions know what's at stake, and what's vital for a free and open society. Today, we're light years from it. That no longer can be tolerated, but it won't happen without systemic media reform. McChesney, Free Press, FAIR, dozens of other media initiatives, and growing numbers around the country, are more engaged than ever for it. McChesney calls it "our moment in the sun, our golden opportunity," and for media reformers, activists, progressives of all stripes, scholars, political economists of media, and all of the above like himself "we must seize it." Indeed we must. There's no turning back now.
News and politics
media
The Battle for the US Airwaves, 1928 - 1935
McChesney recounts the beginning. It explains much of the current dilemma and necessity to confront it.
The notion that the dominant media system is "natural" and was adopted enthusiastically is pure myth. Opposition to what emerged was considerable. It insisted that network, for-profit, commercial broadcasting was inimical to the public interest, and that there should be a substantial nonprofit sector.
In the mid-1920s, things looked much different than later on. Several hundred nonprofit broadcasters began operating in the decade's early years, mostly affiliated with colleges and universities. Commercial ones, in contrast, weren't even professionals. They were owned and run by newspapers, department stores, power companies and others in the private sector.
NBC was established in 1926, CBS the following year, and neither had an impact until the 1927 Radio Act's passage. Commercial advertising, the pillar of today's system, hardly existed until 1928. It was very controversial and very unpopular throughout the 1920s. Before 1927, it was generally agreed that nonprofit broadcasting should have a significant, even a dominant position, in the US system.
Then came the Radio Act that year. It established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC). It was to make the airwaves orderly, reduce the number of stations, allocate broadcast licenses, and favor those applicants that would best serve the "public interest, convenience or necessity." The FRC was renewed in 1928 and then indefinitely in 1929. It used these years to solidify the emerging industry's dominance and make no effort to change it.
FRC held meetings with commercial broadcasters. Nonprofits and nonbroadcasters were left out, so it's not surprising how things developed. FRC's reallocation plan came out under General Order 40. Of the 90 available, it set aside forty 50,000 watt clear channels for one occupant nationally. The remaining 600 broadcasters got the other 50 to operate simultaneously on at much lower power levels. Those in the same region would share a frequency at different times of day. The squeeze was on, and by autumn 1929, 100 fewer stations were on-air.
Not surprisingly, the networks won big. They got a flying start, and by the early 1930s, controlled 30% of the stations, including all but three of the clear channel ones. In addition, commercial advertising began growing substantially. Equally dramatic was the decline in nonprofit, noncommercial broadcasting. The FRC reduced their hours and power and made it harder for them to generate funds to keep operating. As a result, by 1930, their numbers dropped to less than one-third their 1927 total of around 200. By 1934, nonprofit broadcasting accounted for about 2% of total broadcast time. Business was king. The potential of the medium was beginning to be understood. The FRC was on board to support it, and said it was in "general public service" to do it.
Nonetheless, nonprofit opposition emerged. A National Committee on Education by Radio (NCER) was formed to get Congress to set aside 15% of channels for its use. Other nonprofit broadcasters joined the battle, and so did newspaper owners (at first) and civic groups. The former ended up partnering with for-profit broadcasters, while remaining opposition elements continued the struggle. They were against the status quo and wanted reform. Three themes underlined their position:
-- the airwaves should be a public resource and broadcasting a public utility;
-- most important, an advertising-supported for-profit network would use its programming to defend the status quo and would shut out unpopular or radical ideas; and
-- reformers criticized broadcast advertising and the limitations of for-profit broadcasting; it would work against cultural, educational, and public affairs efforts that are less suited to commercial operations.
Opposition groups proposed a number of plans with three getting the most attention in the early 1930s:
-- setting aside a fixed percentage (15 - 25%) of broadcast channels for exclusive nonprofit use;
-- have Congress authorize an extensive and independent broadcasting study to devise a whole new system; and
-- have the government establish a number of local, regional, and national nonprofit stations; they'd be subsidized by taxes and operated by a congressionally approved citizen board of directors; these stations would supplement, not replace, commercial operations.
None of the proposals were considered. For-profit operators worked against them. The opposition movement was divided in its tactics, and it faced three major barriers - the radio lobby, consisting of NBC, CBS and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). They went all out with a PR blitz to establish the "status quo."
Against this, reformers got little coverage while the press was strongly on board with the broadcasters. So was the legal community. The ABA established a Standing Committee on Communications in the late 1920s and stacked it with commercial broadcasting attorneys, The handwriting was on the wall.
The campaign to restructure commercial broadcasting went through three distinct phases from 1930 to 1935:
-- from 1930 to when Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933; the period was "the high watermark for popular discontent with US broadcasting;" it won over House and Senate support for setting aside nonprofit channels; nothing passed because economy recovery legislation took precedence; more significantly, powerful leaders (like Clarence Dill, chairman of the Senate Commerce Commission) blocked anti-commercial reforms; so did Sam Rayburn in the House;
-- from 1933 until the Communications Act of 1934; it established permanent broadcasting law; reformers hoped Roosevelt would support them; instead he ducked; he was in no mood to confront a "powerful and entrenched communications industry," especially when passing New Deal legislation took precedence; broadcasters seized the moment; they got House and Senate leaders on board; got the Communications Act passed, the FCC established, and pretty much everything they wanted; Roosevelt signed the new law in June 1934; it was called a "New Deal in Radio Law;" indeed so for the broadcasters; and
-- in January 1935, the FCC formerly reported to Congress that there was no need to alter the status quo; nonprofits lost out, and for the rest of the 1930s "the industry became economically and politically consolidated;" by decade's end, the public no longer had a say over what kind of system was best; as far as government and industry are concerned, they still don't, but surging reform movements blossomed post-2000 to change things; McChesney is one of its leaders; more on that below.
The Commercial Tidal Wave
Corporate giants today are so dominant that they compete less on price and more on what economists call "monopolistic competition." Advertising is key. It needs "advertising-friendly policies and regulations to allow it to flourish," and its the major source of media revenues.
Most notably on television, it's "ubiquitous." Yet the greater number of ads, the more alike they become, less believable, and less people pay attention to them. One solution - run more ads. The airwaves wreak with them, and the "commercial tidal wave" takes many forms. On radio and television, they consume nearly one-third of each hour compared to around half that volume before 1982.
Advertisers have also gotten very creative and more intrusive. A proliferation of TV "infomercials" for one thing, and entertainment programming "product placement" is everywhere. The idea is to seamlessly weave products into story lines so they're hard to ignore. It's not cheap with Coca Cola one of many examples. It paid Time Warner $25 million for the characters of one prime time show to "drink Cokes in each episode." Time Warner also developed "virtual" advertising by getting products placed retroactively in popular shows.
Radio is used as well. Increasingly, broadcasters use airtime to hype products they're paid to advertise. Hollywood is also cashing in. Disney's Miramax Films cut a deal to make Coors the studio's official beer and feature it exclusively in Miramax productions. Then consider James Bond films. They once shunned product placements. No longer in today's "very competitive movie environment." It's now a necessity, and look at the payoff. The 2002 Bond film, Die Another Day, so wreaked with them that Variety called it an "ad-venture," and the Financial Times said James Bond is now "licensed to sell" - with a $120 million payoff for the film studio.
Product placements show up everywhere, and children aren't exempt. Far from it. The animated film, Foodfight, had "thousands of products and character icons from the familiar (items) in a grocery store." Children's books also feature branded items and characters, and millions of them have snack foods as lead characters.
ESPN is cashing in as well with help from digital ad firm Princeton Video Image. It places changing product billboards on walls behind home plate on Major League baseball telecasts. Only viewers see them, not fans at games because they're not there.
Overall, the wall separating ads from editorial is disappearing because of media companies' greed, advertisers' enormous clout, and the concentrated power of eight dominant advertising/PR agencies that control 80% of all spending. They have great leverage - over product placement and program content. They're also clever enough to produce ads that are indistinguishable from entertainment.
Sum it up and here's the problem. Advertising is all-pervasive. We drowning in it and paying the price. It's corrosive to society and intrusive in our lives. It fosters false values, wants and needs. It makes otherwise normal people shop excessively for what they never knew they wanted until Madison Avenue mind manipulators convinced them. Years ago, economist Paul Baran said makes us "want what we don't need (nonessential consumer goods and services) and not....what we do (health care, education, clean air and water, safe food, good government, and so forth)."
Things are so extreme, McChesney puts it this way. We're "rapidly moving to a whole new paradigm for media and commercialism, where traditional borders are disintegrating and conventional standards are being replaced with something significantly different." It marries content with commercialism so pervasively they're indistinguishable, and it shows up everywhere all the time - television, radio, movies, publications, music, popular culture, schools, universities, public vehicles, commercial ones, public broadcasting and radio, art, subways, restrooms, and any and all other ways advertisers can reach people whether or not we approve.
McChesney calls it "the greatest concerted attempt at psychological manipulation in all of human history." It increasingly targets younger people. Acclimate them early because they become adult customers, and the children's market besides accounts for tens of billions of dollars globally and growing.
Hyper-commercialism is troubling. It's contrary to democratic practices, crowds out other forms of speech, and diverts attention away from more vital concerns. It also produces "profound cynicism and greed (that's) cancerous to public life." It reduces "our most treasured values....to commodities provided by the market." McChesney believes resisting advertising is "essential" because of its corrosive effect on society. Who can disagree.
The Political Economy of International Communications: Foundations for the Emerging Global Debate About Media Ownership and Regulation
Across the world, media and telecommunication systems are a key profit making area in modern capitalist societies. But the idea that it established "naturally" is rubbish. In the US and elsewhere, state policy is crucial to what emerges. It's true going back to 19th century America when the US Postal Service was the nation's earliest "telecommunication infrastructure." Publisher postal subsidies were instituted. They're important to this day, but very much favor media giants.
Government then was and now is an active player. The question is in whose interests and what values are encouraged. Seen this way, powerful special ones have corrupted US communication policy historically. Today, more than ever, and they constitute a "legitimacy crisis for capitalist media in a democratic society."
Earlier in the last century, "professional journalism" became the solution. It was to be nonpartisan, politically neutral and objective instead of representing the views of owners. It would also be produced by professionals trained to be neutral.
The result was tepid journalism reflecting elite opinions unthreatening to entrenched interests. By any standards, it's weak democracy or barely any at all. It then got worse.
Post-WW II, the US dominated nearly all global negotiations, including communication ones. Prior to the 1960s, colonial states had to accept whatever systems were imposed on them. After becoming independent, however, a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) campaign was established. But it went nowhere after the US and UK withdrew from UNESCO.
Globalists had other ideas, and they've blossomed since the 1980s. Neoliberalism and corporate globalization emerged and unleashed national and international policies favoring business. Markets were the solution to everything while unions, regulations, taxes, tariffs, public investment, and so forth were considered restraints of trade.
These ideas exploded in the 1990s - capitalism's golden age and a heyday for communication giants. After the Soviet Union collapsed and China embraced the market, it was open-season for vast business expansion. Globalization became the buzzword, and privatizing everything a universal solution for developing states. As a result, direct foreign investment rose dramatically along with a spectacular increase in international mergers and acquisitions. These amounted to under $100 billion in 1987. By 2000, they grew tenfold to $1.14 trillion. The world was being reconfigured into "a global market for goods and services (and) an international production system, complemented by an increasing global market for firms."
Giant communications companies were at its forefront. Before the 1980s and 1990s, their operations were mainly domestic, and in many countries state ministries controlled telecommunication monopolies. It changed and fast.
Neoliberal orthodoxy took over, WTO rules were established in January 1995, trade barriers came down, communications giants took advantage, and the US government backed their global expansion efforts. Then and now, their goal was a global communications and entertainment oligopoly controlled by a handful of international companies, mainly US-based. One estimate puts the market potential in the trillions of dollars annually.
Two distinct features characterize the vision:
-- dominant companies "moving across the planet at breakneck speed;" the US market is well-developed, so overseas represents the greatest potential and dominant media firms say they're "supranational entities" regardless of where they're home-based; and
-- consolidating into every market segment is the strategy; the guiding logic is also to get big fast or get swallowed up by a larger competitor; in the end, a mere handful of companies will be "end-game winners."
Today, nine giants dominate global media markets, and nearly all rank among the top 200 non-financial firms in the world. Five are US-based, and consider their power. Among them they own:
-- the major US film studies;
-- the US TV networks;
-- 80 - 85% of the global music market;
-- most satellite broadcasting worldwide;
-- all or part of most cable broadcasting systems;
-- a dominant portion of book and commercial magazine publishing;
-- all or part of most commercial US and worldwide cable TV channels; and
-- a big stake in European terrestrial TV; and more plus an endless appetite for the greatest possible scale; the idea is to spread costs across a large base, be able to outbid competitors, and maximize profits at the same time.
Structural changes in world advertising are also strongly linked to global media consolidation. Further, globalization depends on a commercial media system to market their wares worldwide. It, in turn, is partnered with a handful of "super-advertising agencies" dominating a $400 billion global industry and consolidating just as fast as media companies.
About 100 second tier players are also important. Among them - Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Thomson Reuters in the US and others around the world like Mexico's Televisa, Venezuela's Cisneros Group, London-based Pearson plc, and global publisher Reed Elsevier. These companies dominate their own national and regional markets and have extensive ties and joint ventures with the giants. Together, first and second tier operators control much of the world's media - from TV and radio to publishing, films, music, and so forth, and the entire system is still undergoing change because of continued consolidation.
These companies are in it together, but the race will determine who wins, so it's likely to end up with a small handful of very large finalists. As a result, the global media market is more a cartel than a competitive marketplace. The largest firms have similar dominant shareholders. They each own portions of the others. Their directorships interlock. The CEOs all know each other, are on a first name basis, and communicate regularly as they plot the future of their businesses.
First and second tier operators are also connected through their investment bankers - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch among them. Financial houses, of course, are matchmakers and make multi-millions at their trade. For them, the more the better, and they had a heyday in the 1990s with deals worth hundreds of billions.
Media content also comes into play. At times it can be positive where media censorship is common. Overall, however, it subverts local culture when it interferes with profits. The "Hollywood juggernaut" concerns many countries as US film exports expand. Of the top 125 1999 grossing ones, nearly all were US produced, so it shows local audiences like them and more for sure are coming.
Music as well captured overseas markets with US recording artists getting 60% of their sales outside America in 1993, although it fell to 40% in 1998 as local music still has great appeal.
Overall, the combination of global media and neoliberalism is numbing. It reduces everything to entertainment and light fare and results in profound depoliticization. Case in point - 2008 America.
It's also the driver behind communication industry consolidation. It made it vast, quick, and got it accomplished in two phases:
-- from the mid-1980s to 2000 across industry segments; soaring equity valuations fueled it; as currency, it helped in selling debt instruments and getting generous loans; everyone in on the scheme got rich - lawyers, accountants, bankers, and especially CEOs whose compensation soared; and
-- a second phase followed the first; by 2001, the technology bubble burst; equity prices deflated, and a "dog-eat-dog" shakeout began.
Companies were enormously indebted. Consolidation came at a high price. Companies were reeling from debt. Some committed fraud to hide it. Write-offs became unprecedented with AOL Time Warner the most noteworthy example. After its market valuation plunged from $290 billion to $135 billion, the company took a $54 billion "impairment charge for goodwill" so shareholders would get stuck with the cost along with laid-off employees by the many thousands.
Global access to voice telephony was just as dramatic. Wired phone access accelerated, and mobile phone usage expanded from a tiny 1990 base to one billion users by 2002. In addition, as business expanded overseas so did telecommunication providers to service it. The FTC backed it. So did the IMF, World Bank, and new trade rules that smoothed the way to opening markets everywhere. In 1997, the WTO Agreement on Basic Telecommunications was established. It harmonized national operating frameworks, bound its 70 signatories to firm commitments, enforced them by a multilateral dispute settlement process, and greased the way for easy market penetration.
From 1984 (before WTO) to 1999, about $244 billion in state-owned systems were privatized - 90 of the 189 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) membership. In addition, by 2000, 25 countries agreed to allow majority foreign-owned carriers use their own controlled networks to provide international voice service.
Between 1990 and 2000, mergers and acquisitions volume skyrocketed - an estimated $1.616 trillion, and cross-border takeovers accounted for a large share of it. Including investments and service revenues, telecommunications expenditures totaled trillions of dollars. Investments were heavily debt-financed. Banks lent an estimated $890 billion. An additional $415 billion came from debt instruments, and $500 billion more from private equity and stock issuance.
At its peak, lucrative markets information-carrying over-capacity was stunning (along with neglect in others) with most of it built from 1996 to 2000 - millions of fiber-optic cable circuitry, underseas cable laid, and huge Internet investments for this burgeoning new technology.
Government partnered in the enterprise. It deferred to business and investor needs while neglecting overall social responsibilities and the nation's basic infrastructure - roads, airports, power plants, bridges, and so forth.
Until the bubble burst, investors were having a party and so were industry players. Rates favored business users. Workers lost collective bargaining rights. Downsizing following, and so did consumer quality of service. They were also victimized by scams and overbilling.
By the second half of 2000, the industry got its comeuppance. It was routed along with the dot-coms in a bloodletting they're still recovering from. Giant firms began reporting huge losses, and most people know the WorldCom story that got its founder and CEO Bernie Ebbers convicted of fraud and conspiracy and given a 25 year prison sentence. Along with Enron, it became the largest ever accounting scandal in US history.
Everything came up roses in the 1990s. The power of global capitalism seemed unstoppable. So even its opponents were resigned and largely quiescent. Ignored was that none of this expansion was natural. It took plenty of government help fueling it. It led to growing monopoly, higher prices, and poorer service so powerful business interests could profit at the public's expense. It's a familiar story going back generations, but the stakes keep getting greater and the harm caused even worse.
Add to it massive fraud, a corrupted business-government alliance, a historic public rip-off, and chalk it up to defrocked market miracles. Those of us committed to democracy have our work cut out for us. And in view of the media's importance, it's crucial to democratize it.
Communication "comprises the indispensable institutional basis for social deliberations - discussion, debate and decision making - beyond elite forums." Solutions aren't simple, and McChesney cites "two overarching principles" central to reform:
-- policy debates on these topics must be public; behind closed doors no longer cuts it; and
-- the public interest must be "reaccredited, strengthened, and enlarged;" to a large degree, it should also be protected from direct state control but not to the point of neglect.
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
At a time of technological wonders, communication breakthroughs, and near limitless online ways to stay informed, our society is largely depoliticized. Political involvement is weak, and it's evident when presidential and off-year elections are held. Routinely, half or less of the electorate turns out, and those most in need show up least often or not at all. It mocks the idea of democracy, but who can blame people when candidates are pre-selected, machines do our voting, candidates who lose are declared winners, and winners don't complain.
What's the cause? More than anything, the dominant media that's "become a significant antidemocratic force...." They're larger and more influential than ever. Combined they're the main information source for most people, and it's in their interest to marginalize the public to shut out any interference with their commercial aims. Profits uber alles are paramount. Concentrated power and hyper-commercialism are dominant, and when combined with the sorry state of today's journalism it's easy to understand the problem. Fixing it will be no easy task.
The "corporate media explosion" corresponded with the "implosion of public life," and McChesney calls it "the rich media/poor democracy paradox." He cites two components:
-- a political crisis; our hyper-commercialized corporate media system bodes ill for our politics and society; a crisis this great is totally off-limits for discussion; how and by whom the media is controlled, and how it's structured and subsidized should be at the heart of discussion; and
-- media ideology; its defense is indefensible - that markets "give the people what they want;" commercialized media are innately democratic; so is nonpartisan, objective professional journalism; new technologies are inherently democratic; and most important, the First Amendment gives media giants and advertisers unfettered free speech rights without public or government interference; this reasoning is no more credible than the discredited American exceptionalism notion, except in its negative sense.
Media concentration was most notable in the 1990s, but it was powerfully that way earlier. A handful of Hollywood studios dominated film production since the 1930s. Until cable and satellite TV, three networks dominated national television. Too few companies publish the popular magazines most people read, and from the 1960s to the 1980s, newspapers "underwent a spectacular consolidation."
Now it's much worse in the wake of the outrageous 1996 Telecommunications (giveaway) Act. Mega-media deals followed, and unless stopped, more are coming. Along with them, journalism keeps getting worse - in commercial and so-called "public" spaces. The reasons again are covered above - hyper-commercialism; PBS and NPR as corrupted as the giants; the endless quest for dominance and profits; professional reliance on "official sources;" labor's decline; the public shut out altogether; a lack of local journalism; and the dismal state of democracy overall.
Given the above, reporters need no direction - serve your owners or find new line of work. And when covering media political allies, it's de rigueur to show favoritism and "swift boat" the opposition. It violates fundamental journalistic canon, but at times of campaign frenzy it shows how pervasive the practice is. And the more concentrated media become, the worse it'll get.
The same holds for what's aired, to what degree, and what isn't. Mass antiwar and global justice protests barely get mentioned. But let celebrities like OJ Simpson or even Bill Clinton run afoul of the law (or be perceived that way) and it's wall-to-wall, round-the-clock headline news for days or longer.
Other major topics are also shut out - wars of aggression, a militarized society, hugely repressive laws, erasing social services, silencing dissent, rigging elections, pervasive corruption, the unprecedented wealth gap, and far too many more to list that all should top media discussions in a democratic society where journalists are supposed to hold the powerful to account. McChesney sums it up saying "In the crescendo of news media praise for the genius of contemporary capitalism, it is almost unthinkable to criticize the economy as deeply flawed." He quotes the Washington Post calling us a "perfect economy." Indeed for the rich and them alone.
Next, he discusses the Internet and calls its "rapid commercialization and expansion....the most striking media and communication development since January 1999." But alone, it's not magic and not a solution to media concentration and dominance. In the digital age, they'll continue to grow, partner and merge until we're left with a handful of mega-global giants with potential veto power over world governments. They pretty much have it now as well as large swaths of the Internet.
Worse still is that governments hand it to them - secretly, behind closed doors with no public involvement or press coverage. It shows since the late 1990s in the "shadowy history of how the Internet went from being a public-sector creation to being the province of Wall Street." Politicians from both parties were bought off to do it. Media influence remains dominant, but a battle royal looms to preserve Net Neutrality, and that topic is discussed below. But if media giants prevail, the Internet will be as commercialized as all other media components with the public left out in the cold.
There are more concerns as well - violating our privacy, pervasive spying, shutting out the poor, debasing democracy even more if the Internet is totally commercialized, charging whatever the market will bear, censoring content, and overall letting a potentially wondrous technology cost more than it benefits.
With this in mind, and the media giants insatiable quest for size and dominance, now's the time to demand the unmentionable - reactivate antitrust laws. Break up the giants along with other industry conglomerates. A century ago, it dismantled the Oil Trust and in the 1980s AT & T. Today, however, the only time trustbusting comes up is when one industry sector challenges another, never when it's in the public interest.
Nonetheless, as media enlarge, its public trust betrayal worsens, and the battle for Net Neutrality looms, anything is possible if a great enough groundswell gets behind it. Frances Fox Piven cites four historical times (in her book Challenging Authority) when people in America achieved the impossible. Conditions produced outrage enough over the status quo to erupt into a "disruptive protest movement." It shook the political establishment and brought about transforming social change - if only for a short time.
Media reform pressures are now building at a crucial moment in our history. McChesney put it this way in his 2007 book, Communication Revolution. We have "an unprecedented (rare window of opportunity in the next decade or two) to create a communication system that will be a powerful impetus (for) a more egalitarian, humane, sustainable, and creative (democratic) society." He calls it a "critical juncture" that won't remain open for long. It's a "historic moment" in a "fight we cannot afford to lose." In the digital age, "the corporate stranglehold over our media is very much in jeopardy.." Citizen actions have successfully challenged them. Important victories have been won on ownership rules, public broadcasting, and exposing fake news.
It now remains to enlarge grassroots efforts, take the fight to the next level, partner with other progressive campaigns, and force politicians to respond or be replaced. Media giants won't lay back and take it. They'll do all they can to quash reform efforts. So far they've had everything their way, and "the smart money says that the big guys (always) win." The "same smart money once said that communism" would last forever and apartheid couldn't end peacefully. It may turn out that the "smart money" isn't so smart. If enough people join the fight for media justice, "anything can happen."
The US Media Reform Movement Going Forward
Here McChesney examines the relationship of the political economy of media to the media reform movement and how the former provides understanding of the media's role in society. It's whether it "encourages or discourages social justice, open governance, and effective participatory democracy." Also vital is how "market structures, policies and subsidies, and organizational structures shape and determine the nature of the media system and media content."
For decades US media scholars have been at odds with their counterparts around the world. They assume a for-profit, advertising-supported corporate media is a given. Major reform against capitalism is unthinkable, "unrealistic, even preposterous" for a media system considered inviolable.
Over time, however, it became apparent that viewing a corporate-run media system as "natural" was erroneous. That's how it was at earlier key moments when the status quo was challenged - the 1900 - 1915 Progressive Era and again in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the last century's second half, media became a non-issue. Policymaking was corrupt and commercial interests increasingly dominant. At the same time (and like today), press coverage was nil. So when television emerged it was "gift-wrapped and hand-delivered to Wall Street and Madison Avenue without a shred of public awareness and participation." FM radio, cable and satellite TV got the same treatment.
Things hit rock bottom after 1980 at a time of Republican ascendence and neoliberal ideology's emergence. It took its toll on political economy of media scholarship. The field began declining and headed for obscurity. At the same time, "something was happening." Vital research was published and distinguished figures like Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Ben Bagdikian produced it. Their earlier media critiques are still cutting-edge and seminal.
They proved the crisis of media, how inhospitable it is to democracy and social justice, and how essential it is to change it. Progressive writers and publications also emerged as well as media reform movements. Groups like Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) were in the vanguard and are now seen as trailblazers for today's burgeoning efforts.
Critics at the time weren't just on the left. By the 1990s, things got so bad even some conservatives became alarmed. Ownership was increasingly concentrated, labor weak, journalistic standards dismal, and hyper-commercialism overpowering. Further, editorial staffs were downsized, bureaus closed, trivia got substituted for substance, and who could know what was coming.
McChesney cites the "tipping point" - early in the new millennium "when the connection was made between the nature of the media system and a variety of policies and subsidies that created it." Global justice protests erupted, media activism grew, and the notion that the US free market media system was preordained began to crumble. Back room deals designed it, and benefits cut both ways for the dealers. Politicians were rewarded for their efforts, and media giants got an open field to get bigger. Public interest was off the table.
The key moment came in 2003, and the issue was over new media ownership rules. At the time, it looked like a slam-dunk for Big Media. George Bush was president, Republicans controlled Congress, and three of the five FCC members were Bush appointees. Media giants smelled victory and went for the kill. In spring 2003, what could stop them.
An aroused public could and did, and it seemed to materialize out of thin air. Within a year, two million or more outraged people swamped the Powell FCC and Congress with protests over the proposed relaxation of ownership rules. McChesney calls it the moment when the "contemporary US media reform movement was born," and ever since mushroomed dramatically as millions in the country are fed up and won't take it any more.
They won victories, and the Media Access Project (MAP) got one of them. In June 2004, it prevailed in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC when the Third Circuit Court threw out FCC's new rules. It ordered the agency to reconsider its ill-advised changes that if enacted would be an early Christmas for the giants. They included:
-- ending the cross-ownership ban that prohibits a company from owning a newspaper and TV or radio station in the same city;
-- eliminating the previous ban on radio/TV cross-ownership and replacing both types with a single set of cross-media limits;
-- a concocted "diversity index" to determine cross-media limits; it was based on assigning weights to the various media to determine if markets retained enough diversity; it would only consider ownership limits if by its formula there wasn't enough; it was pure deception because in major markets like New York the FCC gave equal or greater weighting to a community college radio station than The New York Times and local ABC affiliate;
-- cross-ownership limits only in smaller markets; in ones with eight or more TV stations, proposed changes would have no cross-ownership newspaper, TV and radio station restrictions;
-- a company would be able to own two TV and six radio stations in the same market if at least 20 "independently owned media voices" remained after a merger; if only 10 remained, ownership would be limited to two TV and four radio stations; and
-- redefining National Market Share to mean the total number of households company TV stations reach and raising the allowable ownership ceiling from 35 to 45%; a 39% compromise was reached to accommodate News Corp. and Viacom; they already exceeded the allowable limit, so the deal let them keep their stations.
Down but not out, FCC tried again last year under new chairman Kevin Martin. It proposed similar kinds of loose ownership rules. Unleashed a wave of activist protests in response. Members of Congress from both parties joined in. Martin ignored them, and last December 18 pushed through a 3 to 2 party-line win.
Here's where things now stand beyond the timeline of McChesney's book. On April 24, the Senate Commerce Committee voted unanimously for a "resolution of disapproval" to block the FCC's December 18 decision. To take effect, it must pass the full Senate and did in a historic May 15 vote - by a near-unanimous voice vote showing strong bipartisan support. Republicans and Democrats are united on this issue (so far), especially in an election year when mass constituency opposition is hard to ignore. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration threatened a veto. Hopefully it won't matter because too many in Congress feel otherwise.
The issue is gaining traction in the House as well with two Net Neutrality bills for consideration. On May 6, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 was introduced (HR 5353). It's to "establish broadband policy and direct the (FCC) to conduct proceeding and public broadband summits to assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues relating to broadband internet access services, and for other purposes." It also amends the Communications Act of 1934.
On May 8, the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (HR 5994) was introduced. It requires that ISPs operate and interconnect with other network providers in a nondiscriminatory way. It applies to content, applications and services, and establishes antitrust measures for anticompetitive practices.
It now remains to be seen how House and Senate legislation turns out, what final forms they take, how the White House responds, and whether there's enough support in Congress to override vetoes. Current efforts show promise, and activists hope sentiment is turning their way. In time, we'll know.
Back in December 2002, McChesney co-founded the media reform group Free Press and serves as its president. In 2003, it started off with a few staffers and now has 35 and a membership approaching 400,000 and growing. In five years, Free Press became the largest media reform group in the country, but it's joined by dozens of others. Freepress.net lists 165, and two dozen formed the Media & Democracy Coalition in 2005. In addition, local media reform initiatives are emerging throughout the country with distinguishing characteristics:
-- media concentration is key and efforts to reverse it are crucial; so is the battle to preserve Network Neutrality, expose and end fake news, protect and reinvigorate public and community noncommercial broadcasting, and influence the course of the digital revolution democratically;
-- making media policy a political issue; open it to public debate; make sure people know there's nothing "natural" about the current system, and that they have a right to participate in policy deliberations;
-- media reform groups are linked to independent media creation efforts; they've exploded online; media reform, activism and independent media "rise and fall together;"
-- for decades, the US was a media activism laggard; now it's a leader, but its future remains undetermined; much depends on the success of the political left; so far it's "weak and largely inchoate;" the bottom line is whether people or corporations will control communication, and that leads to the larger question of who should direct society and what kind will emerge; according to McChesney, at some point ahead, we're heading for "a direct confrontation with capital," and the outcome will determine it.
Millions know what's at stake, and what's vital for a free and open society. Today, we're light years from it. That no longer can be tolerated, but it won't happen without systemic media reform. McChesney, Free Press, FAIR, dozens of other media initiatives, and growing numbers around the country, are more engaged than ever for it. McChesney calls it "our moment in the sun, our golden opportunity," and for media reformers, activists, progressives of all stripes, scholars, political economists of media, and all of the above like himself "we must seize it." Indeed we must. There's no turning back now.
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