1. From The Guardian comes news of Another record as oil passes $126. OPEC is going to try to increase production… to take advantage of the high prices. “The price of crude was up by around $2 a barrel in trading, reaching a new peak of $126.20, amid concerns about shortages of diesel in the United States, the weakness of the dollar and the possibility of geopolitical tensions in oil producing countries.”

   Of course, Bush has done what he could to increase “geopolitical tensions in oil producing countries”. Jerome a Paris predicts $200 a barrel oil will happen on January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day. A day when “a new president that has not prepared the ground for serious action will be blamed for everything that transpires”.

   Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports Big Oil launches advertising campaign.

   Faced with a national outcry over the high price of gasoline and soaring profits for energy companies, the oil and gas industry is waging an unusually pricey campaign to burnish its image.

   The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main lobby, has embarked on a multiyear, multimedia, multimillion-dollar campaign, which includes advertising in the nation’s largest newspapers, news conferences in many state capitals and trips for bloggers out to drilling platforms at sea.

   The intended audience is elected officials and the public, with an emphasis on the latter. The industry is trying to convince voters — who, in turn, will make the case to their members of Congress — that rising energy prices are not the producers’ fault and that government efforts to punish the industry, especially with higher taxes, would only make pricing problems worse.

   Just what we need is oil-industry astroturfing in blogs.

   The lobby has started courting online journalists as well. In November, the institute said it invited bloggers to Shell’s facilities in New Orleans and then took them to visit the offshore platform Brutus. The same month, the institute also brought bloggers to Chevron’s offices in Houston and its Blind Faith platform under construction in Corpus Christi, Tex. There are more tours in the works.

   Blind Faith: big oil is our friend.

Four at Four continues with 2 corrupt senators, Army “stop loss”, and Pelosi’s war funding bill.

1. Sometimes standing up to bullies works. The Washington Post reports the FBI backs off from secret order for data after lawsuit. First, the good news:

   The FBI has withdrawn a secret administrative order seeking the name, address and online activity of a patron of the Internet Archive after the San Francisco-based digital library filed suit to block the action.

   Yay Internet Archive! Now, the bad news:

   It is one of only three known instances in which the FBI has backed off from such a data demand, known as a “national security letter,” or NSL, which is not subject to judicial approval and whose recipient is barred from disclosing the order’s existence.

   Only 3 times since September 11, 2001? Gah! Part of the problem is the fascists who wrote and voted for the law included a “gag order provision” that prohibit public disclosure. “FBI officials now issue about 50,000 such orders a year.” So the backdown rate is roughly 1 for every 100,000. Here is how it went down:

   The order against the Internet Archive was served Nov. 26, and the nonprofit challenged it based on a provision of the reauthorized USA Patriot Act, which protects libraries from such requests. The privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation represented the archive in the suit, which was joined by the American Civil Liberties Union.

   The archive also alleged that the gag order that accompanied the data demand violated the Constitution.

   As part of their settlement, the FBI agreed to drop the gag order and the archive agreed to withdraw the complaint. The case was unsealed Monday. Yesterday, redacted versions of key documents were filed, allowing the parties to discuss the case.

   The Justice Department knows the gag order violates the Constitution and did not want a Supreme Court decision saying so. The Telcos that are served 50,000 NSLs a year are not refusing this unconstitutional measure. And, according to WaPo, “A bipartisan bill in the House would restore the requirement that NSLs could be used only to collect information that pertains to ‘a foreign or agent of a foreign power’ and would limit the gag order to 30 days, unless a court authorized an extension.” Let’s make Congress do the right thing. Contact your representative and senators.

Four at Four continues with U.S.-Russia tit-for-tat, Crandall Canyon Mine, and flirty flowers.

1. America’s own terrorist is partying in Miami. The Los Angeles Times reports Luis Posada Carriles, a terror suspect abroad, enjoys a ‘coming-out’ in Miami. 500 Cuban Americans honored “Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges and under a deportation order for illegally entering the United States three years ago. Posada, 80, has mostly kept a low profile since his release from a Texas prison a year ago and a federal judge’s dismissal of the only U.S. charges against him — making false statements to immigration officials.”

   Posada is the alleged mastermind of a Cuban airline bombing in 1976 that killed all 73 people on board. Plus he is a suspect in a string of hotel bombings in Havana during the 1990s and according to court documents, claims to have been involved in “some of the most infamous events of 20th century Central American politics.” Posada has also boasted of numerous attempts to kill Castro, including an attempt in 2000 that he was serving time in a Panamanian prison before pardoned in 2004 by Panama’s President Mireya Moscoso as a favor for Bush.

   The Bush administration “has never given Venezuela a formal answer to its 3-year-old request for extradition of Posada, despite a treaty providing for such cooperation that has been in effect since 1922”. “Venezuela’s ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, condemned the celebration of Posada as a mockery of justice and evidence of a Bush administration double standard in fighting terrorism.”

Four at Four continues with stories about wiped emails, war funding, and the duck-billed platypus.

1. The Los Angeles Times reports Chinese firms are bargain hunting in U.S.

   Liu Keli… is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

   Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg — less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn’t have to put up with frequent blackouts.

   About the only major thing that’s more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

   The jobs are low-paying and the state will not get tax revenue – instead that money will stay in China. In just under two decades, the United States has been successfully transformed into a third world nation – unable to respond to natural disasters, collapsing bridges and deteriorating infrastructure, no health insurance, and corrupt elections and public officials. More environmental laws will be rolled back next. It never used to be like this in the U.S.

   For years, investment between the U.S. and China flowed one way, with American firms spending billions in the Asian nation. But the Beijing government’s $5-billion stake in Morgan Stanley and $3-billion investment in the private equity firm Blackstone Group brought China’s overall investments in U.S. firms to $9.8 billion in 2007, up from $36 million the year before, according to Thomson Financial.

   By comparison, U.S. investment in China was $2.6 billion last year, down from $3 billion in 2006, said China’s Ministry of Commerce.

   China out-invested the U.S. last year by $7.2 billion. Or as Mei Xinyu, an economist at China’s Ministry of Commerce, reasoned of the depressed asset prices in a sluggish American economy: “They don’t want to miss this opportunity to bottom-fish in the U.S..” America – land of the bottom feeders.

Four at Four continues below the fold with DoJ v OSC, Guantánamo Briton, and why do they hate us?

1. Over the weekend, The Observer reported Rainforest seeds revive lost paradise. The land around Samboja, Borneo resembled a “moonscape” when Dr. Willie Smits, an Indonesian forestry expert, first visited it six years ago. “The trees had been cut for timber, the land burnt, and in place of what should be some of the richest biodiversity on the planet were thousands of acres of grass.”

   But from this ruined landscape a fresh forest has been grown, teeming with insects, birds and animals, and cooled by the return of moist clouds and rain. It is a feat that has been hailed by scientists and offers hope for disappearing and ruined rainforests around the world. The secret was to use more than 1,300 species of local tree and a fertiliser made with cow urine…

   Smits raised money to buy 5,000 acres and six years ago set about planting seeds collected from more than 1,300 species of tree, more even than would have lived in the original forest. These were planted with a special ‘micro-biological agent’ made from sugar, excrement, food waste and sawdust – and cow urine.

   Planting finishes this year, but already Smits and his team from the Borneo Orang-utan Survival Foundation charity claim the forest is ‘mature’, with trees up to 35 metres high. Cloud cover has increased by 12 per cent, rainfall by a quarter, and temperatures have dropped 3-5C, helping people and wildlife to thrive, says Smits. Nine species of primate have also returned, including the threatened orang-utans. ‘If you walk there now, 116 bird species have found a place to live, there are more than 30 types of mammal, insects are there. The whole system is coming to life. I knew what I was trying to do, but the force of nature has totally surprised me.’

   Some more info is available at BOS’s Create Rainforest website.

Four at Four continues below the fold with stories about air pollution and bees, 66 deaths in U.S. immigration prisons, the U.S. military base in Ecuador, and fat cells.

1. The New York Times reports Congress passes bill to bar bias based on genes. “A bill that would prohibit discrimination by health insurers and employers based on the information that people carry in their genes won final approval in Congress on Thursday by an overwhelming vote.” Bush has suggested he will sign the legislation and if he doesn’t the bill, which “passed the House on Thursday by a 414-to-1 vote, and the Senate by 95-to-0 a week earlier” likely has the votes to override his veto.

   The legislation is a start, but doesn’t prohibit the government from using genetic discrimination. And according to the NY Times story, “as genetic tests provide ever more information at lower costs, the entire notion of insuring against unknown risk that has long defined the industry may be upended.” This may “give ammunition to those who argue for universal health care”.

2. The Washington Post reports White House plans proactive cyber-Security role for spy agencies. “America’s spy agencies for the first time would be tasked with gathering intelligence on threats to the nation’s computer networks under a policy set to be detailed by the White House next week… The [anonymous] official said the president’s new cyber-security directive will share the intelligence gleaned through monitoring threats across the government space with the private sector, which experts say is being hit with the same types of attacks that the federal dot-gov space is battling… Most of the 18 strategic goals laid out in the cyber initiative are currently classified, and few within the government have been fully briefed on the the plan.”

   Alan Paller, director of research at the Bethesda based SANS Institute, which tracks hacking trends, said few federal civilian agencies or private sector companies have the analysts or computer power to spot the most stealthy cyber attacks. Agencies like the NSA, he said, are in a bit of a tight spot in sharing new threat information with allies and the private sector, because spy agencies very often glean intelligence by exploiting the very same security vulnerabilities in hardware and software used by enemies of the United States.

   “This is the oldest conflict in security, because if we give away our best exploits, we lose the ability to use them offensively,” Paller said. “That’s a conflict the guys at NSA deal with every day. When you find good ones, how long do you wait before you tell the vendors and people defending our own networks?”

   On the surface, does this government-private partnership seems similar to the collusion between the telcos and the Bush Administraion?

Four at Four continues below the fold with the expanding ocean’s hypoxic zones, the collapse of the west coast salmon fishery, and fungal doom for Pacific Northwest amphibians.

1. From the International Longshore and Warehouse Union:

   Longshore Workers Stand Down at West Coast Ports

   “Longshore workers are standing-down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.” …

   “Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country,” said McEllrath. “For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops, and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of 3 trillion dollars. It’s time to stand up, and we’re doing our part today.”

   Perhaps the most significant protest against the Iraq occupation ever is receiving scant attention from the corporate media. The Los Angeles Times reports Dockworkers take May Day off, idling all West Coast ports. Notice, how LA Times headline mentions nothing about protesting the war?

   Thousands of dockworkers at all 29 West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, took the day off work today in what their union called a protest of the war in Iraq, effectively shutting down operations at the busy complexes.

   The action came two months before the contract expires between the dockworkers, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents port operators and large shippers, many of them foreign-owned.

   The Associated Press reports Arbitrator orders union to tell West Coast dockworkers they can’t skip work for war protest. The ‘man’ has ordered the workers back to work.

   [Coast Arbitrator John Kagel] ordered the union that represents dockworkers at West Coast ports to tell its members they must report to work on Thursday and not take the day off to protest U.S. military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan…

   Union spokesman Craig Merrilees said the union was complying with the contract, but he declined to specify whether it had taken steps to order members to report to work as the arbitrator ordered.

   “The decision by members to take a day off work on May 1 to protest the war is their right under the U.S. Constitution and it’s about time that citizens stood up to tell the truth about the need to end the war,” he said.

   According to Peter Cole, an associate professor of history at Western Illinois University, who wrote a guest column for the Seattle Post-Intelligence:

   For those unfamiliar, the ILWU is perhaps the most militant and politicized worker organization in the nation. It operates in one of the most important sectors of the world economy — marine transport — and, thus, is in a strategic location to put peace above profits…

   The ILWU is highly democratic. A caucus of more than 100 longshore workers representing every union local establishes policies for the Longshore Division. It was this caucus that voted to declare the May Day strike…

   These days, such examples of worker power are increasingly rare in the U.S. The tragedy is that, historically, labor activism gave us the 40-hour workweek (and the weekend) and helped humanize the exploitative excesses of unregulated capitalism. As income inequality continues to grow in the United States, it is wise to remember how, in the past, strong unions created a larger middle class as well as a more democratic and egalitarian nation.

   The ILWU strike also reminds us that unions still have an important role in public discussions beyond the workplace. As a democratic institution, the ILWU is precisely the sort of “civic society” that the Bush administration has been trying to create in Iraq. On May 1, dockworkers will speak loud and clear — end the endless war in Iraq. Other American workers who want to support our troops by bringing them home can make their voices heard by joining with the brave men and women of the ILWU and taking the day off.

   A big thank you to the 60,000 ILWU members.

Four at Four continues below the fold…

1. Lurita Doan, the horribly incompetent GSA head and certified Bush political hack, has resigned. It only took her a year to do so. The Washington post reports “At the request of the White House, General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan resigned last night as head of the government’s premier contracting agency… Doan’s resignation came almost a year after Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he believed Doan could no longer be effective because of the allegations about her leadership.”

   Doan “violated the Hatch Act in January 2007 by asking political appointees how they could “help our candidates” at an agency briefing conducted by a White House official, according to several of the appointees present for the briefing”. She still needs to be prosecuted for sponsoring illegal political meetings.

   Video from June 2007.

2. The Washington Post reports U.S. Role Deepens in Sadr City. Since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ‘stir the hornet’s nest’ campaign last month in Basra, the U.S. has been drawn deeply into the fighting between rival Shi’ite factions. Yesterday, U.S. troops fight a four-hour battle against Shi’ite militia fighters that killed at least 28 Iraqis dead.

   “Until Maliki’s push into the southern city of Basra, U.S. troops were not intensely engaged in Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood of roughly 3 million people that was among the most treacherous areas for U.S. forces early in the war.” Since Maliki’smove against Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Basra, “more than 500 people have been killed and 2,100 injured in Sadr City“.

   The Iraqis are deliberately escalating the fighting in Iraq to prove the “surge” has not worked, which of course, McCain will explain that this means the “surge” has worked and the Iraqis are just trying to influence the U.S. election. The “surge” cannot possibly fail.

   To prove how right McCain is, al-Sadr “has threatened to call off the eight-month cease-fire, which has been widely credited with lowering the level of violence in Iraq, if the government does not end its offensive against his followers.” And according to a random Mahdi Army member quoted by WaPo, they are “very close to the Zero Hour” meaning time is nearly up.

   McClatchy Newspapers reports Defense War Secretary Robert Gates as saying Lull in Iraq has ended, but withdrawal will go on. He’s sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, but denied it has anything to do with the Bush administration’s plans to attack Iran. The “surge” is working though, because:

   April has been the bloodiest month for Americans in Iraq since September, with 44 troops killed, compared to 39 in March and 29 in February.

   April also was the first month since November that saw U.S. Marines killed in once restive Anbar province. Two Marines were killed in April in Anbar, which had been the deadliest part of Iraq for U.S. troops before a widely heralded tribal rebellion drove Sunni militants from the province.

   Meanwhile, to distract Americans from the obvious success of the “surge”, a trial for Tariq Aziz has begun. BBC News reports, “The trial of Iraq’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz over the deaths of a group of merchants in 1992 has opened in Baghdad,” but “after a brief session the judge adjourned the trial until 20 May”.

Four at Four continues below the fold with stories about the show trials in Guantánamo Bay and the Bush administration’s meddling with science.

1. The New York Times reports Consumer confidence plunges as home prices crash. “Americans’ confidence in the economy continued to plunge this month as their homes lost value at the fastest rate in two decades.”

   The slump in home prices was more severe than the worst point of the recession of the 1990s, the last time values fell so far, so quickly…

   The fall in home prices has also cut into Americans’ home equity and forced many to grapple with mortgages now worth more than the house itself. The problems have contributed to a deepening gloom, which was reinforced on Tuesday by a grim confidence survey released by the Conference Board.

   The private report, which surveys up to 5,000 American households, dropped to its lowest point since March 2003, at the start of the invasion of Iraq. Americans feel worse about the economy’s prospects than any time since the mid-1970s, and many are bracing for job losses.

   The index fell in April to 62.3 from a revised 65.9 in March and 76.4 in February, the Conference Board said.

   George W. Bush is whining that Americans shouldn’t blame him for the dismal economy, rather, according to the Washington Post, Bush blames the Democrats for the sliding economy. “In a news conference at the White House, Bush declined to characterize the economic troubles as a recession, saying he would not get into a debate about ‘words’ and would let economists decide the terminology.” La-la-la… I can’t here you.

   Bush claimed he has “repeatedly submitted proposals to help address these problems. Yet time after time Congress chose to block them.” He is annoyed that Congress is blocking his promise to big oil to throw open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploitation. He also accused Congress of blocking big energy handouts and “provisions needed to increase domestic electricity production by expanding the use of clean, safe nuclear power.” Because what Americans really need is to keep feeding big oil profits to keep the economy humming along.

2. The Bush administration’s destruction of our environment continues unchecked. The Washington Post reports a Federal judge has had to order the Bush administration to classify the polar bear. U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken “ordered the Bush administration to decide by May 15 whether the polar bear deserves protection under the Endangered Species Act. The decision… forces the Interior Department to determine whether climate change is pushing polar bears toward extinction. The agency proposed listing polar bears in December 2006 because warmer temperatures are shrinking the sea ice they depend on for survival, but officials have delayed a final decision on the matter for months” while the Bush administration auctions off oil leases in the polar bears’ habitat.

   In addition, the Los Angeles Times reports Groups sue to get gray wolves back on endangered species list. “A dozen environmental groups sued the federal government Monday in an attempt to reverse a decision to remove gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list. Since the delisting went into effect March 28, at least 35 wolves have been killed in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming… Environmental groups also requested a preliminary injunction to stop wolf kills until the lawsuit was resolved. The suit says federal officials ignored scientists who said a connected population of 2,000 to 5,000 wolves was necessary to ensure long-term genetic viability of the wolf in the northern Rockies.” Some Americans seem obsessed with killing animals for “sport”.

Four at Four continues below the fold with another assertion that the vice president is above the law, finding a long lost relative from 300 years ago, and a giant CO2 sucking sound.

1. The Associated Press reports 2.28 million homes vacant in the United States. “The percentage of vacant homes for sale in the United States set a record high in the first quarter of this year, the government said today. The Census Bureau report shows that shows that 2.9 percent of U.S. homes — excluding rental properties — were vacant and up for sale, compared with 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. It was the highest quarterly number in records going back to 1956. That works out to 2.28 million properties”.

   Reuters adds Homeowner vacancies hit record high. This was “the third quarter in a row in which the vacancy rate increased”. “Analysts attributed the rising vacancy rate to a surge in foreclosures brought on by the subprime mortgage crisis” and “believe home prices will not rebound until 2010.”

   Meanwhile, The New York Times reports the Loan industry is fighting new rules on mortgages. “As the Federal Reserve completes work on rules to root out abuses by lenders, its plan has run into a buzz saw of criticism from bankers, mortgage brokers and other parts of the housing industry. One common industry criticism is that at a time of tight credit, tighter rules could make many mortgages more expensive by creating more paperwork and potentially exposing lenders to more lawsuits.” The NY Times also notes Investments in self-storage stocks are doing well. The industry is being helped by foreclosures and long-term military deployments.

Four at Four continues below the fold with news about Department of Justice’s approval of CIA use of torture, Baghdad’s storm of mortars and sand, and a colossal squid thaw.