Blue Star (Excerpt)

The following is a glimpse into the book Blue Star.

Copyright: Miriam Delicado 2007

"Most people who have had direct, physical contact will choose not to speak publicly. They have to be concerned about ridicule by the general public."

"The aliens gave me warnings of a possible future in which the planet and/or the human race could face destruction. They asked me to share with you what role they will play if we are threatened as a species or if there is a threat to the Earth itself. It is a peaceful and positive message."

"The Tall Blonds are here to help protect the planet from outside forces that may not be known to us at this time."

"They will not allow it to be completely destroyed by us or any other means."

"They do not claim to be God." (They stress this point to me and I do in the book as well.)

"If we destroy the planet then we ultimately change the very existence of all that is."

"They may make the decision to step in and help the people of this planet if a global event happens that would threaten the ecosystem here on earth." (The Tall Blond Aliens made it clear to me that this is the only way they will make themselves known en mass to the world.)

"Others who have had contact with the Tall Blonds, receive messages that are geared towards preparations in the event of a sudden global change."

"God, asks to be humble, and claiming the power of prophecy as a person is nothing more than vanity. The truth can be seen by anyone who chooses to look. It does not need to be expressed in personal acclaim. Question everything, and everyone—especially those whose vanity can be seen with your eyes as well as your heart."

"they have expressed to me the importance of never following any one person or any one idea as being the only one. That includes me, and my messages. I ask that you question everything I have told you. They ask that you question everything and exclude nothing as being the ultimate truth. It is only through this process you will find truthful answers."

My intention in sharing the above excerpts was to help you understand more of Blue Stars messages. There is a large agenda going on and you as a person searching for information would be wise to educate yourself on all the facts before making any conclusions.

My experiences with the Tall Blond Aliens have been positive. I have not been tortured or threatened to never tell anyone. EDUCATE YOURSELF. What and who should you believe? Yourself! Do not allow yourself to be led without question. This is the cornerstone of the Alien messages. WE, must look after ourselves…they will not be here to "take care of us." WE must learn to look after this earth and ourselves. They are concerned that we are stripping the planet pf precious resources and want the world to wake up and open their eyes.

May God be with us all.



Those of us who claim to have had physical encounters with the Aliens are often being groomed to be ambassadors to pass on their messages to the world.

Although to some of you who may have found your way to this web site it may all seem somewhat unbelievable but I assure you we are rational people from all walks of life.

All any of us ask is for you to stop and listen to our stories. Listen to the most important message you will ever hear. Listen to the warnings and spiritual knowledge that we have been blessed enough to receive as we pass it on to you.

If the people all over the world who claim to have had these experiences are actually crazy then God help us.

If everything we say is the truth and you choose to ignore the messages then God help you.

Now is the time for mankind to unite in the belief and understanding that we are not alone. We are only guests on this great planet Earth. Our world is on the verge of a great change and it is time to prepare.

Biofuels Become Aviation's Big Focus

by Chris Kjelgaard
Aviation.com

As concerns about global warming intensify throughout the world, aviation is receiving a disproportionate level of scrutiny for its contribution to total global production of greenhouse gases.

Even though aviation emits only about one-ninth as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as do motor vehicles, its high-visibility nature as an activity, its rapid growth as an industry and the fact that aviation emits most of its CO2 and particulate emissions in the upper atmosphere has made it a particular target for environmentalists.

Elizabeth Barratt-Brown, a senior attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, told last week's Eco-Aviation Conference in Washington, D.C. that in the United States, unless the industry achieves enormous efficiency increases, "by 2050 aviation emissions are expected to almost equal the amount from automobiles" because of aviation's growth. The event, sponsored by Air Transport World magazine and Leeham Company, was the first aviation environmental forum to be held in the United States.

Luckily for Earth, perhaps, the soaring price of oil has made the search for sustainable, CO2-neutral alternatives an immediate economic imperative as well as an environmentally critical focus for many human commercial activities — with aviation foremost among them. Economic experts are now viewing high oil prices as a long-term fact of life rather than a short-term blip, and say aviation in its present form simply can't live with the possibility of the price of a barrel of oil leveling at $200.

Research into fossil-fuel alternatives is snowballing. Eventually, a clean fuel such as hydrogen may be the answer for aviation — but the technologies that will allow it to be used safely and economically to power large aircraft are generally regarded as being 40 or more years away.

For aviation, it increasingly appears that biofuels — jet fuels made from plants or algae using any one of a variety of processes — represent by far the best medium-to-long-term hope for the economic and environmental survival of the industry. One of the main advantages of biofuels is that the plants used to make the fuels need lots of CO2 to grow, potentially making it possible for the aviation industry to achieve true carbon-neutrality.

"Boeing Commercial Airplanes and its partners are actively accelerating development of second-generation biofuels because they present an economically viable opportunity to sustainably power the world's commercial aircraft fleet," said Boeing in a recent briefing document entitled 'What is the future of jet fuel?'

Aviation's 'proven track record'

Aviation's "proven track record" in reducing its "carbon footprint" on a per-passenger basis already is excellent, with a 70 percent improvement in fuel-efficiency and CO2 emissions per passenger mile in the last 50 years, said Rolls-Royce senior environmental analyst Nuno Taborda.

"Aviation spends relatively more than any other industry on CO2 reduction," he said. Others noted that during the last 30 years, the U.S. automobile industry did not improve the fuel-efficiency and CO2 emissions of its products at all.

But civil aviation is only just starting. "The IATA (International Air Transport Association) goal is for a 25 percent emissions reduction per passenger by 2020," from an average of 4 kilograms of CO2 per 100 passenger kilometers to 3 kilograms, said Billy Glover, Boeing Commercial Airplanes' managing director of environmental strategy. In the U.S., "the Air Transport Association goal is for 30 percent by 2025." These goals do not include any positive effects from using sustainable biofuels which might be available by then, Glover added.

Various partnerships have been established to foster the development of alternative fuels and other ways to improve aviation's environmental efficiency. It is one area on which Airbus and Boeing cooperate willingly. One leading forum is the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI), which includes partners from the aviation industry, fuel suppliers, universities, and various U.S. government agencies.

CAAFI has established a fuel-certification roadmap that envisages achieving certification of jet fuels made entirely from biomass-derived pure hydrogenated oils in 2013. CAAFI also has set several intermediate targets, beginning this year with the planned certification of a fuel made from a 50 percent blend of biomass-derived syngas and conventional jet fuel. (Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen and is created from feedstock by the Fischer-Tropsch process, which was discovered in 1923. Syngas can be processed into jet fuels.)

Finding the right biofuel feedstock

Key to the entire aviation biofuel issue is just what type of biomass is most suitable for fuel production. Several vital issues must be taken into account. First is the density and energy content of the fuel: It must take up a sufficiently small space that it can be carried in an aircraft and, similarly, a given volume of the fuel must produce enough energy so that an aircraft can carry enough in its tanks to complete its flight.

Second is the "carbon lifecycle" of the biofuel: that is, the net amount of CO2 produced during production and burning of the fuel, less the amount the biomass feedstock for the fuel absorbs while growing.

Third is the amount of sulfur and other particulates produced. Fourth is the hugely sensitive political issue of making sure the land and biomass used to make biofuel does not reduce the amount of food available to humanity and the Earth's fauna.

These considerations immediately rule out "first-generation biofuels" such as ethanol produced from corn and soybeans. Not only does ethanol not contain enough energy per unit volume to be suitable as an aviation fuel, but growing enough corn or soybeans to power all the world's airliners would require an area just about the size of the United States, according to Boeing. Nor does ethanol have suitable boiling and freezing points for aviation use.

Second-generation biofuels

Experts believe "second-generation biofuels" derived from the wood and nuts of plants such as Jatropha curcas (Barbados Nut) and babassu, which grow strongly in arid areas unsuitable as arable land and which (in jatropha's case) are poisonous anyway, represent a good interim solution.

These Latin American plants, as well as other flora such as switchgrass and salt-water-tolerant plants known as halocytes (among them marsh grasses found in parts of the Middle East), could be grown for fuel production in non-arable areas suited to their particular growth requirements. Different parts of the world would grow different biofuel-producing plants, depending on their local climatic and soil conditions.

However, there is a problem: Although their oils offer much higher energy content and much better boiling/freezing-temperature characteristics than ethanol, these plants wouldn't yield enough oil per hectare to be able to serve the aviation industry's fuel requirements unless, again, very large areas were given over to their cultivation.

Algae a likely long-term answer

There is broad consensus throughout the industry that, longer-term, algae represent the optimum solution to aviation's fuel needs. A number of basic problems need to be solved, such as ensuring enough light gets to every part of an algae tank to enable all the cells to grow properly; and drying algae cells sufficiently to enable the oil they contain to be extracted and cracked into jet fuel.

But Boeing and Airbus are confident these problems can be solved — and the benefits that algae offers as a "third-generation biofuel" are immense. Algae can produce an oil yield 15 times that of second-generation biofuel plants: The world's entire airliner fleet could be powered from a cultivated area just the size of West Virginia, or Belgium, says Boeing.

Additionally, because algae can be grown in tanks anywhere, biofuel-producing algae farms could be sited next to facilities producing jet fuel from coal or natural gas using the Fischer-Tropsch process. These "coal-to-liquid" or "gas-to-liquid" processes generate large amounts of CO2 from fossil fuels, making them unsuitable as sustainable fuel sources. However, if the CO2 they generate is piped off and used to grow algae in nearby farms, the two forms of fuel production together could create an efficient, carbon-neutral symbiosis for jet fuel production.

Bunge Agrees to Buy Corn Products for $4.2 Billion

by Mark Herlihy and Choy Leng Yeong
Bloomberg
Bunge Ltd., the world's largest oilseed processor, agreed to buy Corn Products International Inc. for $4.2 billion in stock to add corn-based sweeteners as demand increases for soft drinks and processed foods in China and India.

Bunge will pay the equivalent of $56 for each share of Corn Products, White Plains, New York-based Bunge said today in a statement. That's 31 percent more than Westchester, Illinois- based Corn Products' closing price of $42.90 on June 20. Bunge also will assume about $414 million of Corn Products' debt.

Bunge Chief Executive Officer Alberto Weisser, 52, will gain refining operations that sell high-fructose corn syrup and food additives to customers including Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. The addition gives Bunge a portfolio of projects similar to U.S. competitor ADM, which derived 35 percent of its operating profit from corn processing last year.

"Bunge will become a more formidable competitor in global grain processing by broadening the products it sells to customers, strengthening customer relationships, driving down costs by combining logistics and risk management, and extending Bunge's reach into new markets," Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow said today in a note.

Corn Products is the fourth-largest maker of high-fructose corn syrup in the U.S. and will give Bunge new customers in Pakistan, South Korea and Thailand, Moskow said.

Bunge fell $5.87, or 4.8 percent, to $116.30 as of 10:35 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares had risen 4.9 percent this year through June 20. Corn Products rose $9.99, or 23 percent, to $52.89. The stock had risen 17 percent this year through June 20.

Corn Refining

Corn Products, led by CEO Samuel Scott, 64, was established in 1906 through a combination of U.S. corn-refining companies. The company processes corn in South America and has operations in Asia and Africa. In April, the company said first-quarter profit advanced 29 percent to $64.3 million.

Bunge, established in 1818 as an import and export firm in Amsterdam, moved its headquarters to White Plains, New York, in 1999. Its shares traded for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange in 2001. Weisser paid $1.55 billion in 2002 for control of French vegetable-oil maker Cereol SA, and has since added crushing and refining assets.

First-quarter profit surged more than 20-fold to $289 million as record grain prices boosted demand for crop nutrients and distribution services, Bunge said in April.

Corn prices have doubled in the past year because of rising demand to produce ethanol and feed livestock. The World Bank has said 33 countries may face unrest because of surging food costs and deepening poverty.

Bunge said in a separate statement it raised its earnings- per-share forecast for this year to a range of $9.35 to $9.65, from $7.10 to $7.40.

The value of the offer was calculated using the 74.12 million shares of Corn Products outstanding as of April 30, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Credit Suisse is advising Bunge on the deal.

Texas town recovers from its UFO mania

January sightings put witnesses at center of media phenomenon

by Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times

STEPHENVILLE, Texas - Constable Lee Roy Gaitan saw the brilliant red orbs hovering in the sky and hollered for his family to come out.

It's probably an airplane, said his wife, Wendy, who didn't budge from the couch. Only 8-year-old Ryan went to the front yard.

That's a UFO, the boy said.

Gaitan, a stocky, 44-year-old lawman who has spent 16 years patrolling the Texas scrubland, debated whether to tell anybody about it.

"People would say, 'hey, this guy is nuts. He's crazy,' " Gaitan said of his sighting Jan. 8. In the morning, there were no unusual police reports, but the next day, the Stephenville Empire-Tribune came out with a front-page story: "Possible UFO Sighting - Four area residents witness mysterious objects."

Soon, scores more said they had seen the same thing. Stephenville, a ranch town 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, became home to the biggest mass UFO sighting since the 1997 Lights Over Phoenix, in which thousands of people reported seeing a boomerang-shaped object in the sky.

The witnesses

Stephenville is the largest town in Erath County (population 34,000), the heart of Texas dairy country. On a cold January night in nearby Selden, Steve Allen, 50, and a few friends standing around a fire saw a set of brilliant white lights that were quicker and quieter than anything they had ever seen.

The lights stopped near Stephenville, reconfigured to form an arch "shaped like the top of a football," Allen said, and realigned themselves into two vertical lines of randomly flashing lights. Then the object burst into a dirty white flame.

Ten minutes later, the group saw the lights coming from the opposite direction. Trailing them closely, Allen was certain, were two military jets followed by two massive red orbs.

The next morning, Allen contacted Empire-Tribune reporter Angelia Joiner. She knew nothing about UFOs, but Allen sounded like a sensible man.

Allen "seemed very intelligent," said Joiner, a 47-year-old former school teacher who had been a reporter for 18 months. Allen's friends confirmed the account.

Still, it was a strange story, and Joiner's bosses were concerned. Managing editor Sara Vanden Berge said she was so anxious that she cried the next morning when she saw "UFO" in the headline.

Then the television crews started showing up. First came the local reporters, then people from "Good Morning America," NPR and CNN.

"Do you believe alien beings are out there?" CNN's Larry King asked, looking into the camera. "Do you believe they've come to Earth?"

Before long, local people started wearing "Alien Capital of the World" T-shirts.

Gaitan couldn't stop talking about an event he had initially been hesitant to mention. He took media calls came from all over the world, logging more than 100 interviews by mid-February.

Not a weather balloon

A logical explanation for the lights was the military; a portion of Erath County falls under a fly zone used in training exercises. When Joiner checked, however, the 301st Fighter Wing stationed near Forth Worth said no aircraft were near Stephenville on Jan. 8, when the lights were first observed.

Two weeks after the sighting, a break came in the case. Correcting its earlier statement, the Air Force said 10 F-16s were on a training mission over Erath County when the lights were initially spotted.

The town splintered into believers and skeptics.

Joiner doubted the weird pattern of lights reported by Allen and others could be explained by military aircraft. Allen wasn't buying it, either. "Our military wishes it had what we saw," he said.

Gaitan reasoned from the presence of the F-16s that he probably had seen a military experiment the Air Force couldn't fully disclose. "We're in the middle of a war right now," he said.

Gaitan nonetheless found himself repeatedly scanning the sky for another glimpse of the lights. One February morning at dawn, while driving the highway west of Stephenville, Gaitan spotted a mysterious ball of light shining through a field of leafless trees. As winter turned to spring, the inconclusiveness of the cosmic news began to fade into the daily grind of terrestrial events. The town started looking forward to graduation at the high school, and the first award of college scholarships funded by T-shirt sales.

Some were changed

Joiner, frustrated with juggling her duties as education writer, quit the paper and signed on as a special correspondent for the Jerry Pippin radio show, which regularly reports on unexplained phenomena.

Blueprint for nuclear warhead found on smugglers' computers

Ex-weapons inspector fears rogue states bought plan
Encrypted files linked to Pakistan's A Q Khan

Ian Traynor
THE GUARDIAN

Blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear warhead have been found in the computers of the world's most notorious nuclear-smuggling racket, according to a leading US researcher.

The digital designs, found in heavily encrypted computer files in Switzerland, are believed to be in the possession of the US authorities and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, but investigators fear they could have been extensively copied and sold to "rogue" states via the nuclear black market.

David Albright, a physicist, former UN weapons inspector and authority on the nuclear smuggling ring run by the Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, said the "construction plans" included previously undisclosed designs for a compact warhead that could fit on Iran's medium-range ballistic missiles.

"These advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of the most treacherous regimes in the world," wrote Albright.

The Khan network was exposed in 2003, having been found to have supplied clandestine nuclear projects in Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Albright has been investigating the network ever since. The racketeers are known to have provided Libya with an older, cruder, bomb design.

Albright said the network might have supplied Tehran or Pyongyang with the more advanced and much more useful bomb blueprints that have now surfaced. "They both faced struggles in building a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop their ballistic missiles, and these designs were for a warhead that would fit," he stated in a report to be published this week and which was leaked to the Washington Post. "These would have been ideal for two of Khan's other major customers, Iran and North Korea."

The disclosures about the new weapons design arose from a Swiss investigation into engineers awaiting trial for alleged involvement in the Khan network.

The Guardian reported in May that nuclear investigators and experts were alarmed that extremely sensitive information from the Swiss computers - including warhead designs and details on making weapons-grade uranium - were circulating on the nuclear black market.

In recent months the Swiss government has secretly destroyed 30,000 files and documents from the computers of Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer said to be heavily involved with the Khan operations and also alleged to have spied for the CIA. Tinner has been in custody for four years awaiting trial. His brother Marco is also in custody, while his father, Friedrich, whose relationship with Khan goes back almost 30 years, has been arrested and released.

"This was very proliferation-sensitive stuff," said a western diplomat.

The Swiss president, Pascal Couchepin, announcing the destruction of the files last month, said: "There were detailed construction plans for nuclear weapons, for gas ultracentrifuges to enrich weapons-grade uranium as well as for guided missile delivery systems."

Albright found the blueprints included designs for a compact warhead that could fit on Pyongyang's medium-range Nodong rockets as well as on the Iranian Shahab-III missile.

Five years ago a boatload of uranium-enrichment equipment destined for Libya was intercepted by US and British intelligence, and Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Qadafy abandoned his illicit nuclear project. That development led to the exposure of the Khan network: when CIA and MI6 agents examined the Libyan material they found designs, supplied by the Khan network, for an older, larger, and simpler nuclear bomb of Chinese vintage. The designs were put under IAEA seal and taken to the US.

The new designs, running to hundreds of pages, were found in 2006 when the Swiss managed to break the codes on the Tinner computers. Also that year, a German court heard testimony claiming Tinner had told investigators he had nuclear bomb construction plans at his office in eastern Switzerland. The designs were in digital form and believed to have been copied on to the network's computers in Dubai, which served as the hub for the Khan operations.

The testimony surfaced at the trial in Germany of Gotthard Lerch, a German engineer also alleged to have played a central role in the Khan network. The trial was quickly halted because of procedural irregularities, but Lerch was put back on trial last week in Stuttgart and evidence from the Tinner investigation is likely to be used in the case.

The Swiss told the IAEA and the Americans about their find in 2006. Officials from the Vienna agency and Washington supervised the recent destruction of the Swiss files.

But an expert on the nuclear network, Mark Fitzpatrick, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he was certain copies of the blueprint had been made and that no one knew where they were.

According to Albright, the advanced weapons design is similar to a Pakistani bomb design. Khan has been under house arrest in Islamabad since "confessing" in 2004, though there are moves to get him released. The scientist is seen as a national hero in Pakistan.

In his first interview with the western media last month, Khan told the Guardian his confession was not genuine; he specifically mentioned the Swiss case to emphasise how easy it would be for any country to satisfy its nuclear bomb ambitions.

International interrogation of Khan might clarify the provenance and whereabouts of the new bomb blueprint, but the Pakistanis have refused the US and the IAEA investigators access to Khan.

A Major Arms Dealer in Shackles, Delivered to New York

by Alan Feuer
NYT

Manhattan on a Friday afternoon: downtown along the East River, where the sun was flashing brightly and a lazy weekend called. Women strolled through the South Street Seaport in their summer dresses; tourists went on round-the-island helicopter tours. It was close enough to Wall Street to almost feel the brokers getting ready to head off to their houses by the sea.

Then, from a clear blue sky, an ordinary A-Star helicopter touched down at a helipad on Pier 6. Armed federal agents waited for it blandly, dark shades catching the sun. A white-haired man, in shackles, emerged from the cabin and was led across the tarmac to a waiting black Cadillac Escalade. The Escalade turned gently onto South Street, merged with local traffic and disappeared in the direction of the federal jail, half a mile up the street.

The city has its secrets, many of them openly on display, and this was one of them: an international arms dealer arriving in New York, having just been extradited by the government of Spain. His name is Monzer al-Kassar, and he had recently come off a flight from Europe, followed by a 40-minute helicopter jaunt from Westchester County Airport. He looked haggard, and was perhaps wearing the clothes that he had slept in. He did not look pleased.

Before his arrest last June at Madrid Barajas International Airport, Mr. Kassar, 62, was a vastly wealthy weapons dealer, a wanted man for more than 30 years who officials say played roles in the Iran-contra affair, the Achille Lauro hijacking and the insurgency in Iraq.

His arrest in Spain last year (despite the presence of his two bodyguards) was the capstone of an American undercover operation that resulted in his indictment in New York in a plot to ship millions of dollars of weapons on a Greek freighter bound from Romania to members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

No one would have known that a captured suspect, accused of selling arms to terrorists and of helping Saddam Hussein spirit a billion dollars out of Iraq, was landing in a crowd at the Wall Street heliport unless he or she had been alerted in advance. (In fact, the news media were tipped off in advance, and a row of photographers with telephoto lenses lined a railing near the river as French and German tourists asked them who was coming.)

Still, if one knew what to look for, there were signs: the Escalade, a fast boat from the Police Department Harbor Unit bobbing on the water, a few fit men in darkish suits with corkscrewed plastic wires in their ears.

Mr. Kassar had been in custody in Spain since his arrest, when he was lured to Madrid by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration from his seaside villa in Marbella. Prosecutors seeking his extradition filed papers earlier this year, accusing him of agreeing to sell a cargo freighter’s worth of rifles, pistols, grenade launchers and shoulder-fired rockets to the rebels in Colombia who seek to kill American forces there on antidrug missions.

Should it go to trial, the case will most likely be a cinematic thriller with a cast of characters that includes a man named “Samir” who was the D.E.A.’s informant; Luis Felipe Moreno Godoy, Mr. Kassar’s accountant; Tareq Mousa al-Ghazi, another arms dealer who 20 years ago, officials say, helped Mr. Kassar pull off deals in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Yemen; and various of Mr. Kassar’s employees, not the least a Greek shipping captain named Kristos who worked for him for more than 30 years.

All of which came as news to Andrew Moxley, a postal clerk from Texas, who had strolled around the Battery with his family and was looking for a snack. The Moxleys passed the heliport just seconds after the A-Star 350 had departed. They were going to a Broadway show that night, but Mr. Moxley sighed.

“I wished I would have seen it,” he said. “That’s way cooler.”

Professor Designs Plasma-propelled Flying Saucer

Science Daily

Flying saucers may soon be more fact than mere science fiction. University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy has submitted a patent application for a circular, spinning aircraft design reminiscent of the spaceships seen in countless Hollywood films. Roy, however, calls his design a “wingless electromagnetic air vehicle,” or WEAV.

The proposed prototype is small – the aircraft will measure less than six inches across – and will be efficient enough to be powered by on-board batteries.

Roy said the design can be scaled up and theoretically should work in a much larger form. Even in miniature, though, the design has many uses.

The most obvious functions would be surveillance and navigation. The aircraft could be designed to carry a camera and light and be controlled remotely at great distances, he said.

Fittingly, Roy said his flying saucer one day could soar through atmospheres other than Earth’s own. For example, the aircraft would be an ideal vehicle for the exploration of Titan, Saturn’s sixth moon, which has high air density and low gravity, Roy said.

The U.S. Air Force and NASA have expressed interest in the aircraft, and the university is seeking to license the design, he said.

“This is a very novel concept, and if it’s successful, it will be revolutionary,” Roy said.

The vehicle will be powered by a phenomenon called magnetohydrodynamics, or the force created when a current or a magnetic field is passed through a conducting fluid. In the case of Roy’s aircraft, the conducting fluid will be created by electrodes that cover each of the vehicle’s surfaces and ionize the surrounding air into plasma.

The force created by passing an electrical current through this plasma pushes around the surrounding air, and that swirling air creates lift and momentum and provides stability against wind gusts. In order to maximize the area of contact between air and vehicle, Roy’s design is partially hollow and continuously curved, like an electromagnetic flying bundt pan.

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Roy’s use of magnetohydrodynamics is that the vehicle will have no moving parts. The lack of traditional mechanical aircraft parts, such as propellers or jet engines, should provide tremendous reliability, Roy said. Such a design also will allow the WEAV to hover and take off vertically.

Though the design is promising on paper, towering obstacles stand between the blueprint and liftoff.

No plasma-propelled aircraft has successfully taken flight on Earth. Such designs have found some success in space, where gravity and drag are minimal, but a vehicle hoping to fly within Earth’s atmosphere will need at least an order of magnitude more thrust, Roy said.

Also, the power source needs to be extremely lightweight yet still produce enough power to generate the necessary plasma. Not to mention the fact that the very same plasma that will allow the aircraft to fly also will interfere with electromagnetic waves necessary for communication with the vehicle.

But Roy is confident that the unique nature of his design will allow it to clear the technological hurdles and take to the skies, and he’s not deterred by the risk of failure.

“Of course the risk is huge, but so is the payoff,” he said. “If successful, we will have an aircraft, a saucer and a helicopter all in one embodiment.”

The propulsion system for Roy’s saucer sprouts from his extensive U.S. Air Force-funded plasma actuator research, the results of which have appeared in more than 15 scholarly journals.

The production of the aircraft will be a joint project of UF’s mechanical and aerospace engineering department and its electrical and computer engineering department.

Sister hopes for answers from Chile

Man vanished during Pinochet regime; woman asking Schwarzenegger for help

by Matthew Malinowski

Chronicle Foreign Service

Santiago, Chile --

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger meets President Michele Bachelet today in Sacramento, the two leaders are expected to discuss trade and energy issues. But the sister of the lone American citizen still missing from the days of Chile's military dictatorship hopes the California politician will ask her to find out what happened to her brother.

Boris Weisfeiler is among the some 1,100 people who "disappeared" under suspicious circumstance during the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). With the same dogged determination of Ed Horman, the father who sought to find his American journalist son that became the topic of the 1980 movie "Missing," Olga Weisfeiler has single-handedly kept her brother's plight in the media spotlight.

Over the years, she has held news conferences, asked witnesses to come forward and placed newspaper ads with a picture of her brother that read: "Have you seen this man?" She has also met with dozens of officials, including U.S. ambassadors, judges, and then-Defense Minister Bachelet.

These days, she hopes a new short film about her brother's disappearance entitled "The Colony" will spark a renewed effort to find him. Last month, the film was shown at the Santa Cruz Film Festival, and it can be seen at www.stevenjlist.com. The film's director, Steven List, contacted Schwarzenegger's office and he says gubernatorial aides assured him that they "will look into the case."

"An inquiry by Schwarzenegger in such a setting will put pressure on public officials here and in Chile to discover what really happened to my brother and who is responsible for it," said Weisfeiler, 64 who lives in Newton, Mass., and has made seven trips to South America.

Even though Chilean courts have convicted more than 100 people for human rights abuses since democracy was restored in 1990, human rights groups have criticized Chilean and U.S. officials for doing little to find out the whereabouts of Weisfeiler.

"There have been no advances of any kind in this case in the past few years," said Amnesty International Chile Executive Director Sergio Laurenti.

Boris Weisfeiler, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Russia, was a 43-year-old mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University when last seen on Jan. 5, 1985, while camping in scenic southern Chile. At the time, government officials claimed Weisfeiler, a hiking enthusiast, had drowned while crossing the 4-foot-deep Ñuble River where his backpack and personal belongings had been found. Even though his body was never recovered, a Chilean court declared him dead.

But U.S. government documents declassified in 2000 indicate that Weisfeiler, who was Jewish and spoke English with a heavy accent, was detained by the Chilean military, accused of being a spy, and handed over to Colonia Dignidad, or Dignity Colony, a secretive religious compound some 210 miles south of the capital, Santiago. Its founder, Paul Shaefer, had once been a member of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force.

Olga Weisfeiler points out that many declassified U.S. documents have yet to be translated into Spanish. She says the presiding judge in the investigation, Jorge Zepeda, has denied her attorney access to Chilean police documents and has refused help from the FBI, which launched its own investigation in 2006 and has yet to release its conclusions.

In January, however, U.S. Ambassador Paul Simons described the Weisfeiler probe as "a top priority," and an embassy statement in April said U.S. officials "continue to work with Chilean authorities on the 1985 disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler in southern Chile."

Judge Juan Guzman, who is well known for presiding over human rights cases involving Pinochet himself before the general died in 2006, believes U.S. officials are withholding crucial information.

"I know that the U.S. government has the name of the person who was directly involved," he said. "But, they never wanted to reveal this name. Chilean police told me that it existed, but that they were never authorized to see it."

In a recent interview, Zepeda said he couldn't provide more details in an ongoing investigation.

"I cannot divulge details about those proceedings. I am a judge," he said. "My job is not to opine, but to carry out my investigation."

Meanwhile, Weisfeiler and Pennsylvania State University officials have sent letters to Bachelet asking her to use her office to accelerate the investigation. Bachelet said she is prohibited by law from interfering in judicial cases, and that Zepeda is actively investigating the case.

Weisfeiler says her worst fear is that U.S. and Chilean authorities will turn a deaf ear to her pleas.

"I am hoping that he (Schwarzenegger) will bring it up ... because no one is talking right now," she said.

On the Web: "The Colony," a film about the disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, is at www.stevenjlist.com.

In Bay Area: The president of Chile meets with the governor this morning and then visits UC Berkeley. B1

The colony

According to Amnesty International, ex-Nazi Paul Shaefer turned a sprawling 37,000-acre farm of 300 people into a prison for political prisoners. The human rights group estimates that more than 400 opponents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship may have vanished at the farm called Dignity Colony.

Declassified U.S. documents say a Chilean military informant known only as Daniel told U.S. Embassy officials in 1987 that Boris Weisfeiler was still imprisoned there 2 1/2 years after his capture.

For the next 10 years, the documents showed that Daniel met with Chilean and U.S. officials on at least eight occasions. In the final meeting in 1997, the informant told a Chilean senator that Weisfeiler had been executed for being a "Jewish spy."

Amnesty International's Chile Executive Director Sergio Laurenti attributes government inaction on the Weisfeiler case to fear of Schaefer's political connections.

"There is a lack of interest among Chilean authorities in carrying out a thorough investigation," said Laurenti. "Schaefer himself had a ring of protection for years. Schaefer and his associates have economic power both in Germany and in Chile."

Judge Juan Guzman, who headed the Weisfeiler investigation between 2000 and 2003, says Dignity Colony leaders also instilled fear in its members, discouraging them from cooperating with any investigation.

In a recent interview, Judge Juan Zepeda - who now heads the investigation - said that there is no connection between Weisfeiler and the German colony.

Meanwhile, the 87-year-old Schaefer is serving a 20-year-term for sexually abusing underage boys and is awaiting trial on kidnapping and murder charges in a separate case. He has remained tight-lipped about Weisfeiler and has pleaded senility to avoid further charges against him.

Matthew Malinowski

The disappeared

In 1992, a truth commission found the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) responsible for the death or disappearance of 3,197 people. In fact, some scholars have credited Pinochet with introducing the term "disappeared" to the lexicon of modern politics.

Until his death in 2006, Pinochet maintained that he and other members of the military command never issued orders to eliminate political opponents and that any abuses were the work of a few rogue officers.

Boris Weisfeiler, 43, was last seen on Jan. 5, 1985, while hiking in southern Chile.

The university mathematics professor remains the only American still missing from the Pinochet era.

The Death of Robert Kennedy: 40 Years After Assassination, Questions Persist

Were 13 shots fired? Was a security guard involved? Who wore the polka dot dress?

by Michael Taylor
San Francisco Chronicle

The assassination was over in a few seconds. In the photograph of that moment, Bobby Kennedy, his eyes open and glazed, lies on his back on a hotel pantry floor, his head cradled by a busboy dressed starkly in white - a tableau that seems almost angelic were it not so brutal.

Less than 26 hours after being shot early on June 5, 1968, right after winning the California presidential primary, Kennedy was dead. He was 42.

Three major assassinations rocked America in the 1960s. Two of the assassins - Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer of John F. Kennedy, and James Earl Ray, who shot Martin Luther King Jr. - are dead. But Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of killing Robert F. Kennedy 40 years ago this week in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is living out his days in the California state prison at Corcoran. He is 64 and has never fully explained what happened that night other than to say he can't remember it.

Sirhan was a seemingly unremarkable man. He was a Palestinian who was raised in the Middle East until he was 12, when his family settled in Southern California. Before the Kennedy assassination, he held a series of menial jobs and at one point worked at the Santa Anita racetrack and had hoped to be a jockey.

After Los Angeles police found his diary, in which he had written, "RFK must die," investigators concluded that he was angry about Kennedy's support for Israel and somehow had tied the assassination date - he wrote that Kennedy must be killed "before 5 June 68" - to the one-year anniversary of the Six-Day War.

Open and shut

Los Angeles police, who declined Monday to comment on their investigation, deemed the assassination an open-and-shut case - Sirhan did it by himself. Independent investigators who have looked at the case over the years, however, suggest otherwise.

"The interesting thing is how under-examined the Robert Kennedy assassination is, compared to President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.," said David Talbot of San Francisco, author of "Brothers," a book that looks into Robert Kennedy's own investigation into his brother's death and his conviction that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy.

"Bobby remains the unknown territory," Talbot said. "But even if you look at it minimally, there are questions that come to mind."

Among them:

-- Sirhan fired his .22-caliber revolver from a few feet in front of Kennedy, according to police, yet Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi reported that the fatal shot was fired less than one inch from Kennedy's head, behind his right ear. Of the four shots fired at Kennedy, all came from the rear. None of this was raised at Sirhan's trial because his defense was based on the theory that he suffered from "diminished capacity" rather than on any challenge of prosecutors' evidence.

-- Sirhan's revolver held eight rounds; a radio reporter's tape recording of the shooting has sounds of what one audio expert describes as 13 shots. Sirhan never had a chance to reload before bystanders tackled him. Two of the sounds on the tape are what forensic experts call "double shots," which means two shots so close together that they couldn't have come from the same revolver.

-- Several witnesses saw a security guard just behind Kennedy draw his revolver, and one reported seeing him fire it.

-- Over the years, Sirhan has told investigators who interviewed him in prison that he was in a hypnotic trance during the shooting and can't remember it at all. He said he could not remember writing, "RFK must die." He did not respond to an interview request for this story.

Night of celebration

On the night Kennedy was killed, the hotel ballroom was filled with supporters celebrating his victory in the California primary and looking to the Democratic convention in Chicago. The last thing Kennedy said from the ballroom podium, just after midnight, was, "My thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there."

In the pantry, as Kennedy moved through the crowd, he was surrounded by friends, including Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers, labor chairman for Kennedy's campaign.

"All of a sudden, I got hit in the head by a bullet," Schrade said. "I shook violently. I thought I was being electrocuted. When I came to, I was on the floor."

Schrade was one of five people besides Kennedy who were hit by bullets. For the past 33 years, he has been investigating the shooting.

Mystery bullet hole

Unlike the JFK assassination, which created an outdoor crime scene in Dallas sprawling from the grassy knoll to the Texas School Book Depository, the shooting of Robert Kennedy happened in a confined space. Stray bullets ended up buried in walls and the ceiling, where they could be tracked down.

In photos, police investigators can be seen circling what they later said was a bullet hole in a ceiling panel, behind where Sirhan fired. For Sirhan to have shot into that panel, he would have had to "either turn around or the bullet would have to have made a U-turn," said Philip Van Praag, a retired electrical engineer and audio expert who co-authored a book about the case.

Then there was the mystery of the woman in the polka dot dress. According to witness Sandra Serrano, the woman fled from the hotel kitchen with an unidentified man, shouting, "We shot him, we shot him." When a bystander asked who got shot, the woman said, "We shot Kennedy." Other witnesses reported seeing the woman, though it is not clear whether they heard the comment.

In a new film about the assassination, "RFK Must Die," Irish documentary maker Shane O'Sullivan asked Serrano about what happened later. She said Los Angeles police spent hours trying to convince her she was wrong in what she saw, and she finally gave in. Forty years later, however, she told O'Sullivan that her original version was correct.

'I don't remember'

In fact, the iconic polka dot dress is also something fixed in the mind of Sirhan himself.

William Turner, a retired FBI agent who wrote a book about the case, says he interviewed Sirhan in prison in 1975.

"He told me, 'I don't remember anything after the woman in the polka dot dress asked me for coffee, and heavy on the cream and sugar,' " said Turner, who lives in San Rafael. "He said he had amnesia from that time until he was overpowered in the pantry after the shots were fired. He said, 'I must have done it, but I don't remember.' "

Turner thinks Sirhan was "hypno-programmed to shoot" and that he was a real-life Manchurian Candidate - the fictional brainwashed dupe whose controllers want to assassinate a presidential candidate. Turner suspects the same villains as do the JFK conspiracy theorists - "organized crime and, predominantly, people from the CIA."

Van Praag and a fellow investigator, former American Academy of Forensic Scientists president Robert Joling, don't subscribe to any one conspiracy theory, but they are convinced more than one gunman was involved. The two have written a book about the killing, whose title, "An Open and Shut Case," is a dig at the police investigation.

Van Praag, a former senior instructor in commercial audio-video systems for Ampex Corp., analyzed a tape recording of the killing made by a Polish radio reporter. He said he heard 13 shots over five seconds and was able to isolate the sounds well enough to say that two different weapons were firing during those five seconds.

Guard passed polygraph

One of those weapons, according to the documentary, "Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination," which ran on the Discovery Times Channel a year ago, could have been held by Thane Eugene Cesar, the security guard who was near Kennedy.

Dan Moldea, who wrote a book, "The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means and Opportunity," said he thought for years that "Cesar had done it." But in 1987 he persuaded Cesar to undergo a polygraph examination that the former guard "passed with flying colors," Moldea said.

"He's being accused of murder all over the place," Moldea said, adding that he is now Cesar's protector and would be willing to "bring him forward" if authorities ever reopen the case.

In fact, reopening the case is not a far-fetched idea.

Joling says an "independent panel of forensic scientists" should be created to "reinvestigate this matter on all the evidence." The case "should be resolved in a truthful, factual and honest presentation," he said.

"Let the chips fall where they may. That way, at least, the American people will know that somebody without a stake in the outcome made this finding."

Online and on screen Documents and other information about the Robert Kennedy assassination can be found at these Web sites:

www.anopenandshutcase.com

www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Robert_Kennedy_Assassination

www.aarclibrary.org www.robertfkennedylinks.com/assassination.html

www.realhistoryarchives.com/collections/assassinations/rfk.htm

www.aldridgeshs.qld.edu.au/sose/modrespg/mystery/rfk/titlepg.htm

www.paperlessarchives.com/rfk_assassination.html

A new documentary, "RFK Must Die," will be screened at 9:20 tonight at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., San Francisco. Another documentary, "Conspiracy Test: The RFK Assassination," ran on the Discovery Times Channel last year and can be found on YouTube.

How Speculators are Manipulating & Profiting from the Global Food Crisis

by A.K. Gupta
ZMag

Unless you live in a bubble, like George Bush, who expressed total surprise in February when a reporter told him gas was nearing $4 a gallon, you've been socked hard in the pocketbook by rising prices. It's most evident at the supermarket—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of a gallon of milk has jumped 17 percent and a dozen eggs have leaped 40 percent in the last year and a loaf of bread is up nearly 30 percent in the last two years. At the gas pump the national average for regular gasoline notched a record $3.63 a gallon in early May, double from 2005, and it looks set to break the $4 barrier this summer.

As dramatic as the consumer price increases are, the frenzy on commodity exchanges, where traders negotiate "futures" prices (and related financial products known as "options") is even more pronounced. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), in an unprecedented public webcast, held hearings on April 22 examining why agricultural commodity prices are skyrocketing. It noted, "In the last three months, the agricultural staples of wheat, corn, soybeans, rice and oats have hit all-time highs."

Over the last year, wheat prices are up 95 percent, soybeans are up 88 percent, corn is up 66 percent, and Thai B grade rice, the world's trading benchmark, ended 2007 at about $360 a metric ton. It hit $760 at the end of March and continued its dizzying climb to $1,080 less than a month later. On top of that, crude oil futures have more than doubled since January 2007, coming within a hair of $120 a barrel this April.

One striking aspect of the rising commodity prices is that when charted, they look similar to the Internet stock mania a decade ago or the charts of soaring (and plunging) home prices of late. This is no mere coincidence. One of the main factors in accelerating commodity and food costs is financial speculation. The same Wall Street banks and hedge funds that gave us the stock bubble and the housing bubble are reportedly throwing billions of dollars at the commodity markets, betting they can make a fast buck. One analyst interviewed by the Wall Street Journal estimates that "investors have poured roughly $175 billion to $200 billion into commodity-linked index funds since 2001." The Journal explained, "As with energy markets a few years ago, pension funds and hedge funds have flocked to grain investments as the supply of farm acreage and crop output shrinks relative to the growing global population and new demands for crops for biofuels and food. Many such investors make predominantly bullish bets," that is, expecting the price to rise.

The daily fluctuations on commodity exchanges are at times greater than used to occur in an entire year. On February 25 alone, at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, one type of wheat jumped 29 percent. On a single day in March, "the price of cotton jumped 15 percent despite reports showing cotton supplies were at near record highs," according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. During the CFTC hearings, commodity producers laid the blame for soaring prices at the speculators' door. A representative of the National Grain and Feed Association testified, "Sixty percent of the current [wheat] market is owned by an index fund. Clearly that's having an impact on the market," while a cotton producer stated, "The market is broken, it's out of whack."

If there is a main culprit, it is the market. There is a lot of talk about growing consumption and falling supplies for both food and energy, but most of the data contradicts these claims. For example, despite a drought in Australia, ice and snow storms throughout China, and a cold, wet winter in the American breadbasket, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization projects global cereal production for 2007-2008 to increase by 92 million tons to 2.102 billion tons. But almost all this increase is from a record U.S. corn harvest, which is feeding the market for biofuels.

In essence, large speculators ranging from Wall Street banks and hedge funds to oil companies and agribusiness giants are making a killing from trading commodities. Analysts say some players may be manipulating the markets, but this is extremely difficult to prove because regulatory oversight of these markets has been deliberately rolled back. Still, many sectors appear to be engaging in blatant profiteering. This includes speculators, but also extends to food retailers, food producers, and fertilizer manufacturers. One of the ironies of the current situation is that even as the revenue of farmers is increasing furiously, especially in the United States, they are losing out on profits because of the wild gyrations in the commodities markets.

Grain shortages abound because speculators' profits are literally coming at the expense of the world's poor. Food riots have occurred in Egypt, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Ethiopia—countries where many people spend half their income or more on food (compared to less than 10 percent for Americans). The starkest indication of the deprivation is seen in countries like Haiti where, as rice prices have skyrocketed, the poor have been turning to mud cakes made with oil and sugar for sustenance.

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, says, "It's obviously a crime against humanity that this kind of financial speculation is allowed to continue. It's one thing to have speculation on the price of widgets or car parts, but it's another thing to have speculation in the fount of human life.... This should be a wake-up call to help us realize that food isn't a commodity, it's a human right." In a speech on April 2, World Bank President Robert Zoellick noted that food prices "have jumped 80 percent" since 2005, and "33 countries around the world face potential social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices." A few weeks later, the World Food Program called high food prices "a silent tsunami" that has already pushed an estimated 100 million people deeper into poverty and which threatened "to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger."

In the United States, the situation is troubling, if not as dire as the developing world. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates 12.1 percent of Americans, or more than 35 million people, experienced "food insecurity" in 2006. For many, this meant running out of food towards the end of the month, skipping meals, or not eating for a whole day. (Until the Bush administration changed definitions, this used to be known as "hunger.") Reports from media outlets, food banks, and soup kitchens indicate that food insecurity is increasing, caused by the leap in food and energy prices, along with the weakening economy, falling home prices, and fast-rising unemployment. Many low-income Americans, especially retirees on fixed incomes, are being forced to choose between eating, staying warm, or purchasing prescription drugs.

One of the more disturbing signs of economic desperation is that many Americans are selling off their belongings to "meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills," according to the Associated Press. The hard evidence comes from websites like Craigslist where the number of for-sale listings from March 2008 have "more than doubled to almost 15 million from the year-ago period" and are often accompanied by pleas like, "Please buy anything you can to help out."

The Inflation Equation

Understanding the nature and causes of inflation—when prices rise quickly and purchasing power diminishes —is difficult to grasp because there is a gap between people's daily experience and the official story. For years government officials have been declaring soothingly that inflation is "under control." The government reports that consumer inflation has been around 2-3 percent for the last 10 years and has jumped to almost 4 percent in the last 6 months. Some economists, including ones that run the website Shadow Government Statistics, claim the real inflation rate has been above 8 percent for the last decade and is closer to 12 percent at the moment. (They assert one reason the government manipulates the rate of inflation is to reduce cost-of-living adjustments that must be made to Social Security payments.)

Any number of reasons has been put forth for rising commodity and food prices: diminishing inventories of grains, greater consumption of animal products in Asia, a growing global population, global warming, biofuels, natural limits, financial speculation, the falling dollar, escalating crude oil prices, World Bank and IMF policies, hoarding, export restrictions, and more. In one way or another, all of these factor into inflation. But it's not a jumble of reasons; there are a few critical causal chains and feedback loops behind the chaos. In broad terms, the nature of the globalized economy—the role of financial speculation, the dumping of subsidized foodstuffs from Western farmers in poor countries forced to "liberalize" their agricultural sectors, the declining dollar, and the overheated oil market—is why prices are shooting up. What ties all these factors together is politics. It's a political decision to allow rampant speculation in commodities; it's a political decision to decrease regulation of commodities trading; it's a political decision to devalue the dollar by increasing deficits and cutting interest rates; it's a political decision to force poor countries to dismantle supports for their farming sector; it's a political decision to force the poor to buy food in the marketplace, instead of making access to food a basic human right.

The Return of Malthus

Much of the debate boils down to politics versus natural limits. This debate stretches back more than 200 years to Thomas Malthus's 1798 "Essay on the Principle of Population," in which he argued, as John Bellamy Foster put it, "There is a constant pressure of population against food supply which has always applied and will always apply." Without retracing the debate over hundreds of years (Foster's 1998 essay in Monthly Review, "Malthus' Essay on Population at Age 200: A Marxian View," is an excellent introduction), it's critical to note that it's still of great relevance today. Many people who speak of natural limits—such as the "peak oil" or "peak food" crowd—are neo- Malthusians. They often exhibit hostility toward the poor like Malthus, who wrote, "We cannot, in the nature of things, assist the poor, in any way, without enabling them to rear up to manhood a greater number of their children."

Some involved in the debate today, such as Lester Brown and the World Watch Institute, tread close to the Malthusian line in warning of the "population problem" and arguing that it is a major reason why commodity prices are rising. Despite talk of increased food aid—which involves buying more subsidized Western foodstuffs and dumping them in impoverished countries, thereby further undermining their food security by bankrupting small farmers who can't compete against free foods— there is a willingness to let the poor die en masse in adherence to the neoliberal agenda.

There are, of course, limits to everything—food, population, energy. But as Marx argued in the Grundrisse, overpopulation is "a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited by specific conditions of production." It is these limits imposed—such as biofuel production and speculation—that are behind the global food crisis.

On the other side, there is a strategy to blame the developing world for both the food and fuel crisis. China and India, with their booming economies, are held as culprits for the rising demand and thus shrinking supplies of food and energy supplies. India and China's population and caloric intake is increasing, particularly that of meat and dairy products. But this is a decades-long trend. There is no way that steady growth over 20 or 30 years could cause commodity prices to double in a year or 2. For example, from 1990 to 2003, India's caloric intake grew by 155 calories a person, barely 12 calories a year, while China's grew by 231 calories, or 18 calories a year. (During this same period, the intake of the average American increased by 310 calories.) At the same time, despite adverse climatic events such as large crop failures in Australia, the world's cereal output has increased. Part of the problem, notes Raj Patel, is that by one estimate, "740 million tons of grains were fed to animals last year and that would cover the food deficit at the moment 14 times over."

The biofuels industry has been eager to blame China. An April 2008 "study" published by the Biofuels Digest was headlined "China's Meat Consumption Causing Global Grain Shortage." But the study contradicted itself because it found that China's per capita meat consumption increased by less than seven pounds total from 2000 to 2007, a miniscule rise. The same strategy of blaming China and India is being used to hang the energy crisis as well as global warming around their necks. China and India use about 10 million barrels a day of petroleum products. But that's half the U.S. consumption of 20.6 MBD and they have nearly 8 times the population between them.

The "Dot-Corn" Bubble

It is in industrial agriculture where the link between energy and food inflation becomes apparent. The food we eat is literally hydrocarbons like oil. Oil is used for pesticides and herbicides to plant, harvest, and mill grains, to manufacture food products, to transport them and drive them home from the supermarket. Oil is even more central to meat production as the animals are reared on grain-heavy diets. On top of this, fertilizer, the boon of industrial agriculture, is mostly produced from natural gas, which has also been rising in price. With diesel above $4 a gallon already, businesses are passing the costs through the commodity chain to consumers (and truckers). The rise in egg prices has been extreme and therein lies an interesting story. The average egg-laying hen will in a year produce 276 eggs and eat 83 pounds of feed, three-quarters of which is corn.

With the rise in oil prices, there has been a boom in biofuels like corn-based ethanol. Last December, President Bush signed a law mandating the use of at least 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2020. In the summer of 2006, when corn was $2 a bushel and oil $70 a barrel, ethanol producers averaged $1.06 in profits per gallon sold. But then, corn prices doubled to $4 a bushel last year and just breached $6 a bushel this April. Midwestern farmers giddily joke about a "dot-corn" bubble as many of them (and their suppliers) rake in the money, but for everyone else, including ethanol producers, it's been a disaster. Various analyses show that ethanol distilled from corn uses more energy to produce than it provides. It's also a worse greenhouse gas emitter than crude oil and it's driving up feed costs for cattle ranchers, hog farmers, and egg producers, which is a big reason why eggs are much more expensive.

The effects go further still. Corn or corn syrup is used in three-quarters of all processed foods, from bread, chips, and soda to peanut butter, oatmeal, and salad dressing. It's even found in diapers and dry cell batteries, meaning thousands of products are experiencing upward price pressure. Corn is also distorting agricultural production as U.S. farmers have shifted more cropland to corn and have planted less soy and wheat. In 2007, 24 percent of the corn crop, some 3.2 billion bushels, was made into ethanol.

The price of wheat has skyrocketed, boosted by the weak dollar, falling supplies, and speculation. The price of soybean oil is also increasing, partly because of its use for biodiesel. In August 2007, "376.2 million pounds of soybean oil were used for bio-diesel production, accounting for 20.6 percent of the monthly use of U.S. soybean oil," according to the University of Illinois. Having planted so much corn last year, some U.S. farmers are switching to other crops, partly because oil-thirsty corn, even at $6 a bushel, is seeing its margins squeezed by soaring costs for fertilizer and diesel.

The Oil Factor

Rising energy prices are a major factor in the escalating costs of agricultural products. But there is still the issue of why oil prices have almost quintupled since 2002. There are three main explanations: supply and demand, speculation, and the U.S. government's monetary policy. The White House and many pundits point to supply and demand because it's presented as a natural economic law beyond anyone's control. In this view China, India, and the rest of the developing world are the culprits. Yes, China's and India's consumption is rising rapidly, as is that of Middle East countries awash in oil. But from 2002 to 2006, even as oil prices tripled, global oil production kept up with demand by increasing 7.6 million barrels a day to 84.6 MBD. Demand growth has also slowed to a 1.1 million barrel per day annual increase from 2005 to 2008. This is compared to a 3 MBD increase in 2004 alone.

Even more telling, OPEC has announced numerous production cuts over the last year because it wants to keep oil prices high. So if we are supposedly experiencing natural limits to the production of oil, why is production being reduced? OPEC country ministers publicly proclaim they want to keep oil prices high because of falling value of the dollar. The falling dollar is being caused by two main factors: the U.S. trade and the federal budget deficits.

There is also an issue of "excess capacity." The cushion between production and consumption has fallen dramatically in the last six years, which has created supply hiccups and higher prices. The cause is not geological limits, however, but another factor: U.S. foreign policy. The Bush administration has destabilized three major oil producers that have suffered declining production in recent years—Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela.

The commodities building blocks of the modern economy include everything from coal, oil, wood, gold, and copper to cotton, milk, corn, cattle, and sugar. Manufacturers need commodities to produce finished goods while consumers usually encounter commodities at the grocery store. Commodities trading, such as livestock, dates back to ancient times, but the modern "futures" market was established in Chicago in the 1840s. There, at the board of trade, commodities are standardized according to "quantity, quality, delivery month, and terms," while traders negotiate prices and contract amounts. Ideally, this system, through the buying and selling of futures contracts, allows farmers to determine what to plant based on futures prices for corn and wheat while an industrial-scale baker can lock in prices for flour, butter, and sugar months in advance.

After the Internet bubble burst in 2000, the Fed lowered interest rates to historic lows, which increased the amount of money being borrowed and thus the amount of money in circulation. This is known as monetary inflation. What happens is the money supply increases at a faster rate than the production of goods and services. When many more dollars are competing for these goods and services, the result is an inevitable rise in prices. An example of how this works is the link between rising oil prices and the Fed's interest rate cuts. Since the Fed started slashing rates last September, the dollar has plunged against the euro, oil has risen by more than $40 a barrel and gold, at one point, by some $300 an ounce. The Fed is increasing the money supply, which means there are now more dollars in circulation than before against the euro, so the dollar falls in value. As the dollar drops against the euro, oil-producing countries demand more dollars per barrel.

Another inflationary factor is the federal budget deficit, which has doubled under Bush's watch, and the trade deficit. To stabilize the "current account balance," the United States needs an inflow of nearly $1 trillion a year to make up the difference. Dollars flow out because of our overconsumption and excessive government spending, while investments flow in to buy corporate, consumer, and government debt. The torrential outflow of dollars, however, weakens the value of the dollar. The trade deficit is running at about $58 billion a month. More than two-thirds of that goes to pay for the 12.5 million barrels of imported oil we use every day. Rising oil prices have become a vicious feedback loop. As oil prices spiral upwards and dollars flow out, the dollar drops in value, spurring the next round of oil price increases, a greater outflow of dollars, and a further drop in value.

There is one other factor that's rarely talked about, except in the financial press—speculation, which "amplifies" price moves. After the Internet bubble popped, many investment banks and hedge funds began speculating in commodities. Speculators, when they buy a futures contract, create demand. But they are not interested in getting the actual pork bellies or coal. They just want to make a fast buck. When inflation rises significantly, commodities become an attractive investment because they increase in price rapidly. But the speculation completes the feedback loop by making the price rise inevitable and drawing in more speculators.

This is a major factor in the oil markets. In 2004 the New York Times recounted one speculative episode: "When low inventories and news of violent attacks on oil executives and facilities in Saudi Arabia drove oil futures up, speculators piled on, according to market analysts. Their buying forced crude prices up even higher, attracting yet more investors betting on a continued rise, and so on in a classic spiral." Even the head of Exxon, in a March 5 press conference, admitted speculation was a big factor. According to the financial news website Marketwatch, CEO Rex Tillerson called the price increases "pretty crazy" and said, "A weak dollar accounts for about a third of the recent record run in oil prices, another third on geopolitical uncertainty and the rest on market speculation."

The Enron Loophole

What made the oil market speculation possible was legislation passed in the waning days of the Clinton administration. At the behest of energy-trading companies like Enron, a shadow electronic trading system was created that allowed speculators to trade oil futures contracts beyond the regulatory oversight of the Commodities Future Trading Commission. The CFTC is empowered to establish trading limits ‘‘as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent" the "burden" arising from speculation. Because the CFTC can't track much of the oil trading now, it can't stop the speculation. A U.S. Senate subcommittee report from June 2006 squarely blamed speculators for much of the rise in oil prices, estimating more than $60 billion had poured into the markets at that point.

The report noted that even as oil prices were rising, so were oil inventories because suppliers were gambling they could get more money down the road. The same exact thing occurred earlier this year. Crude oil prices zoomed nearly $20 a barrel in January and February. But in eight of nine weeks, U.S. oil inventories increased to multi-year highs. Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program, explains how it works: "You've got hundreds of parties entering into an electronic format to exchange massive volumes of crude oil and gasoline and natural gas and electric power and coal and ethanol and whatever else they want to do. And it's all unregulated." The players, says Slocum, include, "Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and a huge host of hedge funds. Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, UBS—all the big investment banks. The big oil companies that are traders are BP, Shell, and Marathon. Exxon Mobil really is not a big trader."

There are some "legitimate supply-demand issues that are driving prices up," he says. But "supply and demand does not justify the level of prices that we are seeing right now. I think that has to do with the increased level of trading volume, volatility and speculation that is represented by a lot of these new players." Slocum adds that because we "lack any effective transparency...that marketplace has an invitation to engage in anti-competitive behavior—colluding, rigging bets, price fixing."

It's hard to say if agricultural commodities markets are being manipulated, but there appears to be naked profiteering. For one, at the Chicago Board of Trade, there has been a big leap in electronic trading. The volume of wheat and oat contracts in the electronic arena (as opposed to the classic "open pit" where traders physically meet) has increased by more than 130 percent in 2008 so far, while rice contracts have ballooned by 219 percent. Patel says he thinks that "hedge funds and grain-trading divisions of the large agribusinesses are making a ton of cash, like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland."

In 2007 Cargill posted a 36 percent increase in profit over the previous year, ADM 67 percent, and ConAgra 30 percent. In the first quarter of 2008 Cargill announced an 86 percent increase in profit to $1.03 billion, which it attributed in part to the fact that "investment monies have streamed into commodity markets," meaning "prices are setting new highs and markets are extraordinarily volatile."

Another sector profiting handsomely is fertilizer companies. In the last few years, fertilizer prices have risen dramatically. Some, such as urea and diammonium phosphate, have almost doubled or tripled in the last year. In fact, the price charts of some fertilizers closely match crude oil prices. That would make sense, except most fertilizer is manufactured by using natural gas and natural gas prices have been swinging up and down since 2000, not climbing a steep mountainside like oil.

This year, fertilizer companies have been experiencing the "sweet smell of success," as Forbes puts it. On April 4, Mosaic, the world's second-largest fertilizer maker and a Cargill unit, announced a 12-fold increase in profits to $520.8 million. Another manufacturer, Bunge, said its profits increased to $289 million from $14 million a year ago, and a third, Potash, announced its "first-quarter net earnings nearly tripled to $566.0 million." What makes these huge profits so suspicious is if their costs were increasing dramatically, their profits should be pinched. Instead, Forbes noted, there was only a "slight rise in raw material costs."

That's not to say they are manipulating the price increases that take place in the futures markets, but they do seem to be taking full advantage of it. Patel says food retailers are also profiteering. He says "corporations are using food price inflation as an excuse to ratchet up prices.... In fact, in the UK and Spain and South Africa, retailers such as Tesco and Asda [the British division of Wal-Mart] are under criminal investigation for their price-fixing of milk and chicken and bread." A report posted on the website grain.org, "Making a Killing from Hunger," detailed the profit increases among food manufacturers and retailers. Nestlé's worldwide sales grew 7 percent in 2007, Tesco reported a record profit of 12.3 percent last year, Unilever said its profit margins were increasing, and "France's Carrefour and the U.S.'s Wal-Mart, say that foo d sales are the main factor sustaining their profit increases." That's not to say every corporation is raking it in; some food manufacturers, such as Kraft Foods, have announced declining profits due to higher input costs.

The Great Rice Panic

There is no one explanation for why all commodities are rising in price. As the world's workshop, China creates demand-driven inflation for various industrial commodities. It needs mountains of coal, huge swaths of forests, and great veins of copper ore to feed its industry.

In contrast, since the end of 2007, the price of Thai B grade rice doubled to $760 a ton by the end of March and then hit $1,080 weeks later. The reason for the initial rise is attributed to various supply and demand causes—a pest outbreak in Vietnam, low global stocks, the biofuel boom, rising demand from rising affluence. But speculation is driving these huge price leaps here, too. Essentially, all parties involved in the rice trade are engaging in fear-induced speculation. Major rice-exporting countries like India, Thailand, and Vietnam are limiting exports to ensure the domestic market is satisfied, thereby constraining supplies for rice importers. Farmers, including many in Thailand, are reportedly hoarding rice because, as one observer told the Guardian (UK), "Who's going to sell rice at $750 a ton when they think it's going to hit $1,000?" According to anecdotal reports, many consumers in Asia are buying large supplies of rice now because of fears they will pay more down the road.

All this panic and speculation feeds on itself. Absent a global famine, normal demand or supply issues cannot explain why rice prices have tripled in Asia in just a few months.

Another explanation comes by way of the interplay between environment and economics. Australia used to be one of the largest producers and exporters of rice in the world, but 6 years of drought have reduced the crop to virtually nothing, just 2 percent of its former self. In describing the situation, the New York Times notes, while it's difficult to say any short-term weather pattern is caused by global warming, the "severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency."

The rice industry has collapsed because farmers are turning to other commodities. For instance, "Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat." Others are turning to wine grapes, which also use less water and bring pre-tax profits of $2,000 an acre versus $240 an acre for rice. Others are finding it more valuable to sell their water rights or even land to grape growers. One result, then, is because of market-based decisions, wine production is increasing for affluent populations while the poorest rice-dependent populations are left to scramble in the marketplace for food to survive.

Putting the inflation genie back into the bottle is no simple task. One immediate solution is to better regulate commodities markets and tax futures contracts. A similar idea has been proposed on currency speculation, known as the Tobin Tax. A small tax would not hinder the actual buyers and sellers, but it would take a bite out of speculative interest.

For the United States, the answers are much more difficult. The Fed is using inflationary policies to devalue U.S.-denominated debt, which helps the government and corporations, but harms consumers. Cutting the federal deficit is a no-brainer, but unlikely, and involve repealing the tax cuts for the wealthy and ending the Iraq War. The trade deficit must be cut, but even in the best-case scenario, it would take decades to build a new energy infrastructure independent of imported oil.

Some suggest inducing a severe recession, as the Fed did in the early 1980s by jacking interest rates, but the pain would be severe for many Americans. A better solution is a real green energy and infrastructure program combined with single-payer national health care and expanded unemployment and welfare benefits. This could cushion the impact of the recession, while shifting the United States to a healthier economic base. But in this neoliberal world, that's about as likely to happen as George Bush ever admitting he's wrong.And here is the rest of it.

North Meets South: Vermont Secessionists Meet with Racist League of the South

by Heidi Beirich
Southern Poverty Law Center
June 2008

From 1777 until 1791, Vermont was an independent state complete with all the trappings -- a constitution, a flag, even a mint to pump out its own money, the Vermont copper. But in 1791, Vermonters happily joined the new United States. Now, some of the locals want out.

In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a new green flag for Vermont and started selling T-shirts, particularly popular with the state's many tourists, that read, "U.S. OUT OF VT!"

But in recent months and years, SVR's actions have gone from way out to worrying. Starting in 2005, SVR leader Thomas H. Naylor -- along with SVR's very close ally, the Cold Spring, N.Y.-based Middlebury Institute that is headed by longtime leftist Kirkpatrick Sale -- began openly collaborating with a collection of Southern extremists to build a national secession movement.

SVR's disturbing new partner is the white supremacist League of the South. The Alabama-based group is against interracial marriage, believes the old Confederacy never surrendered, and wants to reestablish "the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions" in a newly seceded South. It seeks to accord different classes of people differing legal rights in what sounds very much like a medieval theocracy of lords, serfs and clerics. League intellectuals have defended both slavery (which was "God-ordained") and segregation, a policy described as protecting the genetic "integrity" of both blacks and whites. Right after Hurricane Katrina, league members put up "whites only" housing offers, including one from Alabama offering a trailer to a "white family of three or four," and another from Tennessee offering to temporarily house a "White Christian family."

Many Vermonters have been shocked by this alliance. After all, the Green Mountain State was the first to abolish slavery in 1777, and its men fought fiercely to preserve the union in battles during the Civil War, some of which are proudly commemorated in paintings displayed inside the gold-domed State House. But Naylor isn't worried about his fellow Vermonters' concerns, hotly defending as critical his newfound alliance with members of the radical right.

"For the last 30 years, people have been speculating on the idea of far left meets far right, and I saw the possibility for that not to be fantasy but to be real," Naylor told the Intelligence Report. "The objective is to bring down the Empire." The League of the South, Naylor added, though "not perfect," is "not racist."

Birthing a movement

Talk of secession has been heating up in Vermont since the early 1990s and even before. In 1991, then-Lt. Gov. Howard Dean moderated debates in seven towns that then voted for secession. That same year, University of Vermont professor and current SVR advisor Frank Bryan argued for secession in a series of well-publicized debates with Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley. With the election of George Bush and the onset of the increasingly unpopular Iraq war, secessionist sentiment in traditionally liberal Vermont picked up, with a 2006 University of Vermont poll showing 8% of residents interested in the idea.

It was Naylor who turned that sentiment into a movement, founding SVR after self-publishing The Vermont Manifesto in 2003. Naylor was spurred to create SVR by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which he does not believe were organized by Osama bin Laden, a "fundamentalist living in a remote cave," but rather were the ultimate result of American arrogance. In his manifesto's preface, Naylor writes: "Our nation has truly lost its way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily or environmentally. The Empire has no clothes." A perennial curmudgeon, Naylor regularly berates government officials. He calls Vermont's elected officials "enemies of the state" and has labeled six-term Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, "a world-class prostitute."

To most Vermonters, SVR was originally seen as a far-out outfit that engaged in publicity stunts to push secession. At least in the beginning, its most enthusiastic supporters seemed to be the Glover, Vt.-based Bread and Puppet Theater troupe, a merry band dedicated to "cheap art" whose building hosted SVR's first statewide meeting in October 2003. One SVR attention-grabber was a "memorial service" held on March 4, 2005, commemorating the day in 1791 that Vermont joined the union. The service included everything from a reading from Ecclesiastes to the strains of Chopin's "Funeral March." A funeral procession with a New Orleans-style jazz band carried a flag-draped coffin containing the "deceased First Vermont Republic" to the State House in Montpelier, where it was placed at the feet of Vermont Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen's statue. SVR even achieved a symbolic political success, persuading the legislature to designate Jan. 16 as Vermont Independence Day to commemorate the establishment of the First Vermont Republic in 1777.

Naylor's leftist credentials were enhanced greatly by his close friendship with Kirkpatrick Sale, whose Middlebury Institute he helped found in 2005. Sale, a contributing editor at the left-wing journal The Nation and a chronicler of the militant, 1960s-era Students for a Democratic Society, is best known as the author of The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, a 1991 history that was the first to denounce Columbus for "founding" the New World and ushering in the destruction of its native peoples. Between 1965 and 1968, he was editor of The New York Times Magazine. Thirty years later, in 1995, Sale was named as a "visionary" by the Utne Reader, a liberal journal. Sale also is known for his hatred of technology, once famously smashing a computer to bits on a New York stage.

In 2005, the Vermont secessionist movement also spawned a popular independent newspaper, Vermont Commons, that the SVR describes as a "sister organization." The newspaper promotes nonviolent secession and a "more sustainable Vermont future." Both SVR and Vermont Commons argue that the United States has become an unsustainable "empire" in need of dismantling.

From Mississippi to Montpelier

The image of SVR as a quixotic band of idealistic Vermontophiles fighting for an independent Green Mountain State has taken a public beating since 2006, when Naylor and Sale began openly working with the League of the South and other neo-Confederates. But the fact is that from the beginning, the SVR has been in many ways a Southern import that pushes 19th-century claims about states' rights and a revisionist take on Lincoln and the Civil War.

Naylor, the SVR's 71-year-old founder, is a born-and-bred child of the Deep South. He apparently developed his secessionist ideas under the guidance of former League of the South member and Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston -- a man Naylor told the Intelligence Report is the "philosophical guru of the Second Vermont Republic" and who is also published in Vermont Commons. Livingston -- who told the Report in a 2001 interview that "the North created segregation" and that Southerners fought during the Civil War only "because they were invaded" -- has attended most of SVR's events. Livingston is also featured in the SVR video, "U.S. Empire and Vermont Independence," alongside SVR stalwarts Frank Bryan and Jim Hogue, who is an Ethan Allen reenactor.

Naylor is a native of Jackson, Miss. Some of his father T. H. Naylor Jr.'s correspondence is found in the archives of the infamous Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a secret state spy agency that was formed to battle integration. The elder Naylor was even featured in the notorious film, "Message From Mississippi," which promoted the joys of segregation. Now retired, Naylor taught economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., for 30 years, and has written 30 books, ranging from tomes on computer simulations to political works on Gorbachev. In the early 1990s, he worked as a consultant for companies in the USSR. During that time, he became convinced that the break-up of the Soviet Union was a harbinger of America's future.

Although the younger Naylor told the Intelligence Report that while in college he refused to stand when "Dixie" was played at the University of Mississippi's football games, his ideology is now rife with neo-Confederate ideas. By 1997, Naylor, in his book Downsizing the U.S.A. -- co-authored by William Willimon, the dean of chapel and a professor of Christian ministry at Duke University in North Carolina -- was calling the Civil War the "War Between the States." Parroting the neo-Confederate anti-Lincoln line, Naylor calls Lincoln "arguably the worst" president in American history. "Lincoln invaded the Confederate States without the consent of congress," he wrote in his Manifesto, adding that Lincoln "may have also been the father of American internal imperialism."

And he adopted a revisionist view of the causes of the Civil War that has been roundly rejected by most serious historians. "Most Americans think the Civil War was fought about freeing the slaves, but rather it was fought to preserve the union and build an empire," Naylor told The (U.K) Independent last October.

Naylor also is down on desegregation. In a 2007 essay, "Minority States NOT Minority Rights," Naylor criticizes segregation but also "forced racial integration," complaining that the federal government was in the 1950s and 1960s "ordering me to associate with minorities whether I like it or not." Overall, Naylor can't abide by the idea that since civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, "minority rights always trump states' rights." He asks if integration "disempowered minorities, diluting their influence over their communities and implying that every solution to their problems always lies in the hands of the majority-backed government?"

New Friends

Naylor's reasons for moving to Vermont are explained in Downsizing the U.S.A. He portrays his then-hometown of Richmond, Va., as overcome by crime and angry African Americans, saying it was in a "death spiral." When he moved to Vermont in 1993, Naylor almost immediately started calling for an independent state. He pines for a separate Vermont, perhaps allied with other Atlantic maritime entities, that would resemble Switzerland or Luxembourg -- countries Naylor considers as close to perfect as possible. In Downsizing the U.S.A., Naylor sounds a theme similar to that of many white supremacists, suggesting that some parts of the country could be broken up according to ethnicity. "If Palestine could be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, why can't independent African American, Hispanic, and Native American states be carved out of the United States?"

In Vermont, Naylor grew close to an unlikely secessionist, the renowned diplomat George Kennan, described by Naylor as "the godfather of the movement." In his 1994 autobiography Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan had suggested breaking the U.S. into "a dozen constituent republics" for reasons that don't sound that different than Naylor's. In a letter to Naylor quoted in The American Conservative, Kennan wrote of "unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country" and worried that "the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin-American in nature." Kennan questioned whether American society should be "recklessly trashed" for what he called "a polyglot mix-mash."

Though he has spent his entire life in the New York region and been a regular on the progressive intellectual scene in New York City, Kirkpatrick Sale, too, has sounded very Confederate of late. When addressing the League of the South's convention last fall in Chattanooga, Tenn., Sale came off like a newly minted neo-Confederate. Describing himself as a "Northerner but with the blood of the South running through my veins," Sale told the cheering audience that he was descended from the Sale clan of Virginia and Kentucky and that one of his ancestors, Charles "Chic" Sale, wrote a popular story in Southern vernacular on building outhouses called The Specialist. At the end of the league conference, the audience stood and sang "Dixie" together. In a more recent essay, Sale described his view of what happened when the South seceded the first time: "They were ruthlessly attacked and their society eventually destroyed."

Early last October, Sale's institute co-hosted with the league the Second Annual North American Secession Conference in the same Chattanooga venue. With about 60 attendees, most of the conference's speakers were members of the league or prominent neo-Confederate activists. The event also attracted interest in white supremacist circles outside of the South. For example, publisher Bill Regnery, backer of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, which issues reports on such things as "The State of White America" and "Conservatives and Race," was on hand. For a movement supposedly led out of Vermont and New York, Southerners seem now to be at least co-driving the bus.

Left meets right

Four years earlier, in November 2004, SVR held its first serious conference in Middlebury, Vt., in conjunction with Fourth World, a left-wing British secessionist group supported by Sale. That was the beginning of the close partnership between Sale and Naylor.

Attended by 35 people, the conference produced "The Middlebury Declaration," named for the place where it was signed, the Middlebury Inn. The original signers were Naylor, Sale and Donald Livingston, the former league leader. The declaration asserts that "[t]he American empire, now imposing its military might on 153 countries around the world, is as fragile as empires historically tend to be, and that it might well implode upon itself in the near future." Hence the need for a "new politics" based on separation. Secessionists with League of the South connections were soon involved. Naylor said they approached SVR "as a role model."

Speaking at a Vermont Independence rally that same year was John Remington Graham, an expert on the Francophone independence movement in Quebec, Canada, and an affiliated scholar at the League of the South's Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History. The main outcome of the meeting was a decision to create a think tank to explore secession around the world. That idea came to fruition with the establishment of Sale's Middlebury Institute in 2005 as a sort of secessionist gathering point that posts material on its website about secessionist groups around the world. The institute also holds conferences on secession, two of which have prominently featured league members as well as other neo-Confederates.

In November 2006, SVR and the Middlebury Institute co-hosted the First North American Separatist Convention in the Montpelier State House (which, ironically, is graced by a large statue of Lincoln). The secessionists-only conference brought together several groups, including the Free Hawaii movement and members of the Alaskan Independence Party. But the bulk of the crowd even then was made up of Southern groups including the racist League of the South; Christian Exodus, a theocracy-minded outfit headed by a former league leader from Texas; and the Abbeville Institute, which was established by Donald Livingston in 2003 after he finally left the League of the South due to its "political baggage." Livingston's institute is devoted to the "Southern tradition," including what it describes as the ignored "achievements of white people in the South."

In October 2007, the league, Naylor and Sale met again in Chattanooga for the Second Annual North American Secession conference, an event organized by the Middlebury Institute and this time officially co-hosted by the league. The conference issued the "Chattanooga Declaration" -- a document that pronounced the "old left-right split meaningless and dead" and called for "diversity among human societies." It was while in Chattanooga that Sale spoke so fondly of his Southern roots.

Sale defended the league to reporters, telling The (U.K.) Independent that fall that he wanted to show the "folks up north" that league members are "legitimate colleagues" who have been wrongly declared "racists." (Sale declined to discuss the league, its history or anything else with the Report, saying by E-mail that he did not trust it "for one instant to be fair or truthful.") Sale has hotly contested the SPLC designation of the league as a hate group, telling The Associated Press in 2007 that the league -- whose leader, former university professor Michael Hill, has engaged in such activities as sending out E-mails mocking the names of his African-American students -- "has not done or said anything racist in its 14 years of existence."

Hard to Starboard

Naylor and Sale don't just share secessionist chitchat with their new neo-Confederate friends. Over the last two years, they have both become ensconced in the neo-Confederate movement and collegial with several extremists. For example, Naylor serves as an "associated scholar" at Livingston's Abbeville Institute, whose ranks are filled with current and former league members. Another Abbeville "scholar," Scott Trask, has written for the white supremacist newsletter American Renaissance, which is devoted to proving the intellectual inferiority of minorities and recently claimed that blacks are incapable of creating any civilization.

SVR, the Abbeville Institute and the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History all share as an advisor Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor at Loyola College who has done more than anyone to push the idea that Abraham Lincoln was a paragon of wickedness, a man secretly intent on destroying states' rights and building a massive federal government. "It was not to end slavery that Lincoln initiated an invasion of the South," DiLorenzo writes in his 2002 attack on Lincoln, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. "A war was not necessary to free the slaves, but it was necessary to destroy the most significant check on the powers of the central government: the right of secession."

Appointed to the SVR advisory board in 2005, Marco Bassani, an Italian college professor, is also an associated scholar at the Abbeville Institute. More importantly, he is a member of the xenophobic and anti-immigrant Northern League, whose leader, Umberto Bossi, has described African immigrants as "bingo-bongos" and suggested opening fire on the boats of would-be illegal immigrants to Italy.

Besides speaking at league conferences, Sale's speeches are for sale at Georgia League of the South leader Ray McBerry's Dixie Broadcasting, where Sale is described as a "social liberal who supports the Constitutional concept of the right of secession." The league advertises on its website that it will participate in the Third Annual North American Secessionist Convention, to be put on by Sale's Middlebury Institute next fall.

In the last two years, Sale and Naylor even signed on as guests for the now-defunct Tennessee-based hate radio program "The Political Cesspool," run by white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens board member and David Duke pal James Edwards. Naylor, who has been a guest twice on the program whose guest line-up reads like a Who's Who of the racist radical right, appeared during its celebration of "Confederate History Month" in April 2007.

In the case of Israel, Sale has views that are common to the far left and the far right. In a 2003 article for the left-wing journal Counterpunch called "An End to the Israel Experiment? Unmaking a Grievous Error," Sale asks "[w]hether the 50-year-old experiment known as the state of Israel has proven to be a failure and should be abandoned." He points out that "[t]he [Jewish] diaspora, after all, has existed since 70 A.D., far longer than the state has, and might even be thought of as the natural or historic role of Jewry."

Naylor sees it similarly. "We have a government that is unconditionally allied with the state of Israel, which is an apartheid terrorist state," he told the Report. He complained that the entire congressional delegation of Vermont "supports Israel."

'Hating America'

Some Vermonters continue to stand by Naylor despite concerns. Vermont Commons Editor Rob Williams told the Intelligence Report that although his organization is completely separate from SVR, Naylor is "no racist" and a man whom he considers "a colleague" and whose essays his paper will continue to publish. A member of SVR's speakers bureau, Williams added: "The 'racism' charge, by the way, has become a convenient way for a few outspoken Vermonters who may not agree with our goals to throw stones at us." The real racist, Williams said, is "the United States empire."

But playing footsie with neo-Confederates has cost SVR, as several members have left the group or distanced themselves from it in recent years. Former executive director Jane Dwinel quit the group in 2006, telling the Report later that she had had sharp disagreements with Naylor. John McClaughry, a supporter of decentralization, told the Report that SVR has "shaded over to hating America." According to the Vermont Secession blog, Dan Dewalt, a former SVR advisory member, was dismissed from the group for merely raising irksome questions about Naylor's connection to groups including the league.

Even many of those who remain Naylor's colleagues are worried by SVR's new Southern friends. "You've got to watch whose conference you go to. There's no doubt about it," SVR advisor Frank Bryan told the Report. Added longtime SVR ally Jim Hogue, "If [Naylor] was very flattering toward the League of the South, and they're racist, that was probably a bad idea."

In the face of these criticisms, Naylor remains defiant. "I don't give a shit what you write," he told the Intelligence Report. "If someone tells me that I shouldn't associate with the League of the South, it guarantees that I will associate with the League of the South."

Sale seems to be losing friends, too. Roane Carey, an editor who has worked with Sale at The Nation, told the Intelligence Report: "The Nation has no sympathy for or connection to the League of the South or any group of that ilk. A couple of years ago, we found out that the Vermont secession movement had the astonishingly poor judgment to make an alliance with the [League of the South], whose thinly disguised racism and closed-mindedness we condemn without reservation.

"It's one thing to call for devolution, local self-rule, small-is-beautiful politics -- even, in some circumstances, the idea of secession -- in the cause of ending empire and enhancing democracy, personal liberty, equal rights and environmental sanity," said Carey. "It's quite another to make nice with groups, such as the League of the South, that use the language of secession and regional or local self-rule as a means of promoting Old South revanchism." Carey added that he hopes Sale "comes to his senses."

Despite SVR's best efforts, for now the union appears to be safe -- Vermont secessionists failed to obtain the signatures needed to put independence resolutions on 2008 Town Meeting Day ballots. They will try again in 2009.