Santa Claus is the result of a Coke deal.
No joke. Fat, jolly Santa — the guy with the red suit and cap, the thick black belt and sooty boots, the rosy cheeks, the luminous eyes, the brighter-than-white teeth — is the spawn of an advertising campaign by Coca-Cola back in the 1930s.

Surprised? Don’t be. As far as Coca-Cola is concerned, this is public knowledge. The company is open about its role in popularizing Santa; it has even sponsored gallery exhibitions on “Advertising as Art” that explain how it all happened, one of which was held at the Carrousel du Louvre, in Paris, in 1996. Here’s the story:

Back in the late 19th century, when Coca-Cola was new, the whole purpose of the beverage was medicinal. If you were feeling “low” or if you suffered from headaches, a Coke was the perfect remedy. The featured ingredient — cocaine, or coca-bean extract — guaranteed a renewed agility and acuity. Indeed, many people found out about Coke from their pharmacists; the company paid pharmacists a commission if drugstores allowed them to install a carbonation tap on the premises.

By the 1930s, Coca-Cola needed to re-evaluate its business plan. The more controversial aspects of the beverage had long been dealt with (as early as 1903, coca-bean extract was removed and caffeine took its place), but it was the Depression; beverage sales were slow — especially in the wintry months — and Coca-Cola needed a new hook and line to attract the American market.

So, in 1931, Coca-Cola changed its target audience: from the adult looking for a pharmaceutical pick-me-up to the whole family. Coca-Cola was now a great taste to be enjoyed by everyone! To bring the point home, the company launched an extensive advertising campaign that pioneered the use of well-known artists as ad designers. Coca-Cola blitzed pharmacies and stores with promotional material suitable for the whole family.

The most successful illustrations were by a Swedish artist named Haddon Sundblom, whose work depicted a portly white man in a red suit bringing joy to family and friends with a bottle of Coke. The figure in the illustrations was the first modern Santa.

Naturally Coke can’t take full credit for bringing Santa into the homes and hearts of Americans everywhere; the full history of Santa Claus is much longer than the history of the Coca-Cola company. Various folk traditions incorporate mysterious holiday gift givers: St. Nicholas, loosely based on a fourth-century bishop of Asia Minor; a Scandinavian dwarf or a goat; Kolyada, the white-robed girl of pre-revolutionary Russia who arrived atop a sleigh with accompanying carolers; and the many religious gift bearers associated with the Magi.
In the United States, the Dutch were primarily responsible for spreading the idea of Sante Klaas, whose character was based on one of their revered bishops. Sante Klaas gave form to the current myth of Santa and fleshed out his reputation as a gift giver: eight flying reindeer, living near the North Pole, filling socks with presents, arriving through the chimney.

Two people are usually given credit for creating the American version of Santa: Clement C. Moore and Thomas Nast. In 1823, Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the poem we generally think of as ” ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” His description of Santa is suggestive of a fat man, in the gnomish fashion of the earlier European versions.

The poem reads:

His eyes how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow . . .
He had a broad face, a little round belly
That shook when he laughed, like a bowl of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly elf . . .

Nearly 40 years later, political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a version of St. Nicholas for Harper’s Illustrated Weekly. Nast’s Santa, now a famous image, wears a woolly suit and resembles a stout elf with whiskers and a beard. But still, he doesn’t look quite like Santa. Most of Nast’s illustrations were black and white, but even in his color renditions, Santa prefigures the modern, commercial image only vaguely. Most notably, his trademark bright red color is missing.

As a jolly man in a red suit, Santa Claus is pure Coke. The company found that Haddon Sundblom’s image of Santa Claus — modeled, incidentally, on a retired salesman named Lou Prentice — hit the right buttons in terms of stirring the hearts and quenching the thirsts of consumers everywhere. The company contracted with Sundblom to continue making Coke ads with this model for the next 35 years.

Using Sundblom’s version of Santa, Coca-Cola orchestrated a full frontal attack on the market. Santa-Coke propaganda was everywhere. Magazine advertisements were particularly popular, as were point-of-purchase promotional items. Collectibles, too, were another way that Coca-Cola expanded its presence — a strategy that is standard today for any advertiser, from Camel to Nike.

Coca-Cola also patented a formula for the bright red color used for Coke packaging and for Santa’s suit. Any artist working for Coca-Cola was required to use this color red; every Santa in every Coke ad was the exact same red color as the Coke label. As with its famous bottle, Coke had given birth to a nearly universal American icon.

A marketing campaign, of course, can be too successful for its own good. We no longer associate the Coca-Cola company with Santa, even a Santa dressed in the exact color of a Coke can. In becoming ubiquitous, the two icons have become independent again. Now the link is a matter of advertising history, something to be studied by marketing students and maybe the slew of tourists and French citizens who saw Coke’s exhibit at the Louvre. Occasionally, Coca-Cola revives Sundblom’s Santa in a nostalgic appeal to its loyal consumers, but the story is rarely told.
As Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, concluded:

Prior to the Sundblom illustrations, the Christmas saint had been variously illustrated wearing blue, yellow, green, or red. . . . After the soft-drink ads, Santa would forever more be a huge, fat, relentlessly happy man with broad belt and black hip boots — and he would wear Coca-Cola red. . . . While Coca-Cola has had a subtle, pervasive influence on our culture, it has directly shaped the way we think of Santa.

Despite all the news accounts and punditry since The New York Times published its Dec. 16 bombshell about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying, the media coverage has made virtually no mention of the fact that the Bush administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before the invasion of Iraq.
That spying had nothing to do with protecting the United States from a terrorist attack. The entire purpose of the NSA surveillance was to help the White House gain leverage, by whatever means possible, for a resolution in the U.N. Security Council to green light an invasion. When that surveillance was exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream U.S. media winked at Bush’s illegal use of the NSA for his Iraq invasion agenda.
Back then, after news of the NSA’s targeted spying at the United Nations broke in the British press, major U.S. media outlets gave it only perfunctory coverage – or, in the case of The New York Times, no coverage at all. Now, while the NSA is in the news spotlight with plenty of retrospective facts, the NSA’s spying at the U.N. goes unmentioned: buried in an Orwellian memory hole.

A rare exception was a paragraph in a Dec. 20 piece by Patrick Radden Keefe in the online magazine Slate – which pointedly noted that “the eavesdropping took place in Manhattan and violated the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, all of which the United States has signed.”
But after dodging the story of the NSA’s spying at the U.N. when it mattered most—before the invasion of Iraq—the New York Times and other major news organizations are hardly apt to examine it now. That’s all the more reason for other media outlets to step into the breach.
In early March 2003, journalists at the London-based Observer reported that the NSA was secretly participating in the U.S. government’s high-pressure campaign for the U.N. Security Council to approve a pro-war resolution. A few days after the Observer revealed the text of an NSA memo about U.S. spying on Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. “This leak,” he replied, “is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers.” The key word was “timely.”
Publication of the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg’s heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had been underway for many years. But with an invasion of Iraq still in the future, the leak about NSA spying on U.N. diplomats in New York could erode the Bush administration’s already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council. (Ultimately, no such resolution passed before the invasion.) And media scrutiny in the United States could have shed light on how Washington’s war push was based on subterfuge and manipulation.
“As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq,” the Observer had reported on March 2, 2003, the U.S. government developed an “aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates.” The smoking gun was “a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency—the U.S. body which intercepts communications around the world—and circulated to both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency.” The friendly agency was Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.
The Observer explained: “The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the U.N. headquarters in New York—the so-called ‘Middle Six’ delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the U.S. and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for U.N. inspections, led by France, China and Russia.”

The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, 2003, outlined the wide scope of the surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war resolution through the Security Council—“the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises.”
Noting that the Bush administration “finds itself isolated” in its zeal for war on Iraq, the Times of London called the leak of the memo an “embarrassing disclosure.” And, in early March 2003, the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States.
Several days after the “embarrassing disclosure,” not a word about it had appeared in The New York Times, the USA’s supposed paper of record. “Well, it’s not that we haven’t been interested,” Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale told me on the evening of March 5, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. But “we could get no confirmation or comment” on the memo from U.S. officials. Smale added: “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting.” Whatever the rationale, The New York Times opted not to cover the story at all.
Except for a high-quality Baltimore Sun article that appeared on March 4, the coverage in major U.S. media outlets downplayed the significance of the Observer’s revelations. The Washington Post printed a 514-word article on a back page with the headline “Spying Report No Shock to U.N.” Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that didn’t only depict U.S. surveillance at the United Nations as old hat; the LA Times story also reported “some experts suspected that it [the NSA memo] could be a forgery”—and “several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the memo’s authenticity.”
But within days, any doubt about the NSA memo’s “authenticity” was gone. The British press reported that the U.K. government had arrested an unnamed female employee at a British intelligence agency in connection with the leak. By then, however, the spotty coverage of the top-secret NSA memo in the mainstream U.S. press had disappeared.
As it turned out, the Observer’s expose—headlined “Revealed: U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War” – came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq began.
From the day that the Observer first reported on NSA spying at the United Nations until the moment 51 weeks later when British prosecutors dropped charges against whistleblower Katharine Gun, major U.S. news outlets provided very little coverage of the story. The media avoidance continued well past the day in mid-November 2003 when Gun’s name became public as the British press reported that she had been formally charged with violating the draconian Official Secrets Act.
Facing the possibility of a prison sentence, Katharine Gun said that disclosure of the NSA memo was “necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed.” She said: “I have only ever followed my conscience.”
In contrast to the courage of the lone woman who leaked the NSA memo—and in contrast to the journalistic vigor of the Observer team that exposed it—the most powerful U.S. news outlets gave the revelation the media equivalent of a yawn. Top officials of the Bush administration, no doubt relieved at the lack of U.S. media concern about the NSA’s illicit spying, must have been very encouraged.

settle this man style.

taking odds…

Forty-nine activists who destroyed genetically modified crops have been acquitted of criminal charges in a French court.

The court in the central city of Orleans dismissed the charges of organised vandalism against the 49, who had uprooted GM maize in the region planted by Monsanto, the American biotechnology group, in two incidents, one last year and the other this year.

“The defendants have shown proof that they committed an infraction of voluntary vandalism in a group to respond to a situation of necessity,” the court said.
That situation of necessity “resulted from the unbridled distribution of modified genes that constitutes a clear and present danger for the well-being of others, in the sense that it could be the source of contamination and unwanted pollution”, it said.
The court, however, upheld a civil complaint against the defendants, ordering them to pay $7,000 to Monsanto in damages and interest. Monsanto had been seeking more than $300,000.
Jean-Emile Sanchez, one of the activists, called the verdict “a huge victory for the anti-GM side” and said the judgment would form an important legal precedent.
Alex Perrin, the state prosecutor in the case who had pressed for jail terms for all of the defendants, and Monsanto said that they would appeal against the decision.
The defendants had included two Green Party politicians, one of whom, Yves Contassot, is a deputy mayor of Paris in charge of environmental issues.

New Orleans, LA — Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall!

One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. When he surfaced and showed the evidence to his superior, the on-site Coordinator for FEMA stepped-in and said “You are not here to conduct an investigation as to why this rupture occurred, but only to determine how best to close it.” The FEMA coordinator then threw the evidence back into the water and said “You will tell no one about this.”

At that point, the diver went back down to do more inspection of the levee. On the second dive, he secreted a small chunk of the debris inside his wet suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing.

According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn marks on the cement chunks did, in fact, come from high explosives. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity said “We found traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111 embedded in the debris. This would indicate at least two separate types of explosive devices.”

The levee ruptures in New Orleans did not take place during Hurricane Katrina, but rather a day after the hurricane struck. Several residents of New Orleans and many Emergency Workers reported hearing what sounded like large, muffled explosions from the area of the levee, but those were initially discounted as gas explosions from homes with leaking gas lines.

If these allegations prove true, the ruptured levee which flooded New Orleans was a deliberate act of mass destruction perpetrated by someone with access to military-grade UNDERWATER high explosives.

hmmm….who would benefit from the parishes being “sacrificed”
???

Counterpunch writer Manuel Garcia, Jr opines on this story about how a storm surge could be solely responsible for this levee failure, but is factually incorrect in his analysis.

Yes, a storm surge occurs as a hurricane approaches land, bringing water in from the sea. The water builds up on itself and floods land as the hurricane comes ashore. But only as it comes ashore. Once the rear part of the eye wall comes ashore, the winds blow in the OPPOSITE direction, thus sending water away from the land.

Hurricanes swirl counter-clockwise. The top right side of the hurricane is throwing water inward toward land, the left side of the eye is going in the OPPOSITE direction. So for Mr. Garcia to argue that the storm surge was “delayed” (for the 24 hour difference between landfall and levee failure) is simply impossible.

Mr. Garcia then goes on to state “This pressure would work to both strain the levees — like a membrane being stretched — and to infuse water through pores and cracks in the solid (earthen) material.”

The portion of the levee that failed was not earthen. It was 40′ long steel I-beams, pounded deep into the earth by a pile driver and surrounded at the top by steel reinforced concrete! The portion of levee that failed was steel and concrete, not earth!

I don’t know about any of you, but I’ve never seen steel and concrete stretch “like a membrane.” In fact, the ABC New video , shows the steel and concrete. Concrete is twisted, ripped and shattered. Hardly the effect of water.

for fun Google up some history..the demolition of levees for various reasons has been well documented for a century or more..

but THIS is conspiracy theory..right?

Army Corps of Engineers blow levee to divert floodwaters…1919

first off..
the harrassment of George Clark
forcing ClarkFoam out of business
has little to do with environmental safety
and EVERYTHING to do with the escalating war between BIG and small business
not only in California..where surf culture (mainland) was born..

and has now been killed execution-style
but THROUGHOUT the US..with more and more businesses moving overseas or to Mexico.
here are Clarks words (NOTE: hes facing prison and has to be quite “careful” in his wording)

December 5, 2005

For owning and operating Clark Foam I may be looking at very large fines, civil lawsuits, and even time in prison. I will not be saying more than is in this letter so I hope you read it carefully. I do not want to be answering questions about my decisions for the next few years.

Effective immediately Clark Foam is ceasing production and sales of surfboard blanks.

I would like to give a lot more details but keep in mind that I may have both fines and criminal charges pending at this time or in the future. Therefore I have been advised by my attorney to say as little as possible. I do not want this document to be used as an admission of wrongdoing nor am I going to help the government prosecute me. I do, however, feel I owe everyone some sort of explanation – even if it is incomplete and not a full disclosure of my problems.

The short version of my explanation is that the State of California and especially Orange County where Clark Foam is located have made it very clear they no longer want manufacturers like Clark Foam in their area.

The main concern of the state and county government is a toxic chemical we use called Toluene Di Isocynate commonly called TDI. Some of the other concerns are the use of polyester resin, dust, trash, some of the equipment I built or was built to my specifications, and numerous safety concerns both for employees and the local community.

The way the government goes after places like Clark Foam is by an accumulation of laws, regulations, and subjective decisions they are allowed to use to express their intent. Essentially they remove your security, increase your risk or liability, and increase your costs. This makes the closing of Clark Foam and similar manufacturing an accumulation of issues and not a single issue. They simply grind away until you either quit or they find methods of bringing serious charges or fines that force you to close.

Since the main issue is TDI, I will cover this first. Over the years almost all of the TDI users have left California. The government attack on TDI has been going on for decades and California was not the only State to attack its use. It was a billion pound per year chemical in the United States. In the last few years about one third of the United States TDI production capacity has been closed. I believe one of the reasons was the opening of very modern TDI plants in Asia that cost much less to build and operate. It also appears they have built a better infrastructure for handling the raw materials such as natural gas terminals and refineries.

About 20 years ago OSHA came down on our TDI use very hard and more or less tied one arm behind our back when it came to competing on the international market. We survived this and worked very hard with that agency to meet all of their requirements for using TDI. This is a Federal program and in my judgment OSHA is far better managed than other agencies.

A little over 10 years ago the Orange County Fire Authority changed their inspection methods. California also passed some new laws on TDI use. The Fire Authority also had signed up 23 cities plus the unincorporated areas of the County. They are one of the largest, most powerful Fire Departments in the United States. They set extremely tough standards and have informally asked Clark Foam to move.

In 1999 the Federal Environmental Protection Agency copied parts of the California Law on TDI and implemented a weaker version of the California Law. California then added to the new Federal Law and their version is considerably tougher. The interpretation of this law is quite flexible and the local Fire Authority has taken a very tough line and added extra regulation that could be focused on closing Clark Foam.

Since the Fire Authority first showed an interest in TDI and today I estimate the physical changes they have required for my factory took two people less than a week to build. The cost of paperwork, engineering studies, and time to satisfy their demands for our TDI processing equipment has cost in excess of $500,000.00. This is many times the original cost of the equipment. They are still not satisfied and continue raising new issues or go over old issues that I assumed were closed.

Another tactic used by the Fire Authority is to report us to other government agencies. This is probably a correct action on their part. For the TDI use this has become quite serious.

Based upon a complaint by the Orange County Fire Authority and information that was almost 100% supplied by the Orange County Fire Authority, the very strict Ninth District of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued Clark Foam a 10-page, very serious citation. This has never been resolved. The EPA has hired a private safety engineer to pursue their citation and I believe this process is still taking place. The seriousness of their citation could mean that I could have to go to prison and be fined an astronomical amount of money. (A personal friend just paid a $4,000,000.00 EPA fine and barely got out of going to prison.) It is my understanding that the EPA is very slow, are difficult to deal with, and Federal Judges almost always agree with the EPA. Essentially they refuse to directly communicate with Clark Foam.

I do not know if it was the Fire Authority’s intent but by asking for Federal help they essentially killed any chances of moving to another State.

The Fire Authority has reported our TDI process to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) several times over the years. Each time they supply information and then they openly disagree with the AQMD findings. This tends to stir up the AQMD. The last go-around with the AQMD based on TDI cost quite a bit of money in engineering fees. (The AQMD issued us a permit for our existing equipment but the Fire Authority was not pleased with this action. Therefore, they went to the Health Department.)

The Orange County Health Department operates through the State Department of Toxic Substance Control and the State Environmental Protection Agency. In this case the Fire Authority escorted them to our premises and made their case. This is a series of hazardous waste issues both in definition and methods of disposal. This is very serious stuff and evidently subject to a lot of arbitrary interpretation.

We are emitting TDI fumes into the air.

A large part of the Fire Authority’s focus has been TDI spills. This is very well documented. A few years ago I realized that any spill would create a massive response by the Fire Authority and I doubt they would know how to properly neutralize the spill or know when the spill was no longer emitting toxic fumes. To protect myself I purchased a $50,000,000.00 spill or release insurance policy with a $500,000.00 deductible. This was only necessary due to the current regulatory and legal environment in California. When we have gotten to this point it is a good sign that the game is almost over. (Furthermore, I doubt that $50,000,000.00 would do much more than pay the legal fees. Look up the 6,000-pound spill by General Chemical in Richmond California. The billed attorney’s fees were reported to be in excess of $900,000,000.00.)

We did our last research into new foams in 1993. What we did was, in a large part, illegal even then. Today, almost any attempt at research would be very illegal due to TDI (or any isocyanate) handling. The cost of the required permits would be much higher than the cost of “outsourcing” or doing the work in other countries.

There are two future TDI issues. First there is a good chance that the AQMD or California will require a TDI fume “scrubber” sometime in the future. This would be a roughly 250 horsepower, giant unit costing over a million dollars. Second, there is legislation being proposed in the State government that our TDI supplier has told us would result in them withdrawing 100% from the California market. (This has already happened with TDI storage. One supplier moved out of California in one day and was trucking in from out of State. Now they quit altogether.) If this proposed legislation passes it appears TDI will essentially be banned in California.

The above covers some of the TDI issues. Next I will move to the AQMD.

We have had AQMD permits since the 1970’s. Recently they declared the polyester resin use for the center stringers is really an “adhesive” and fits into different rules. One method of calculation put us into a category of a large refinery and required massive controls, permits, etc. They did some testing that substantiated some of their claims. While it appears they are wrong, they have not responded. We do emit over 4,000 pounds of styrene fumes per year. It appears they will call for a “scrubber” at some time in the future. This will cause a serious problem, as we must keep fume levels within the OSHA limit. (OSHA inspects us for styrene fume levels.) Therefore, we are looking at a massive unit in the million-dollar range.

When reviewing our AQMD compliance with our consultants it appears we are out of compliance in several other areas.

The next issue is ironic. When the Surfrider Foundation was just a Volkswagen Bug and a couple of guys I gave them $10,000.00 being the seed money to get started. Now the Surfrider Foundation is a leading advocate of the storm water runoff legislation. Three agencies inspect us. We have been cited several times. While we are currently in compliance, I do not believe anything but a 100% indoor facility could ever comply with what the law requires. The Surfrider Foundation would have us closed down.

The Fire Authority really ripped into us over 10 years ago. We had to remove our outdoor fire sensors, have a licensed mechanical engineer certify our steel tube racks for strength, put up about 50 signs, build in-rack sprinklers, add a bunch of sprinklers, and do a lot of other stuff. (This was just a few years after they forced us to quit making slab foam.) It appears the forthcoming issues could be aimed at cutting our production capacity. This is nothing new, but simply an ever tightening of the screws. There is also another complete section of our processing equipment they have not addressed. So far they have only played around the edges of these issues. I read the Fire Code and they could shut us down very fast. It is a terrible feeling when one person walks in and says what you are doing is wrong. Now and then it is OK, but when an agency does it over and over you finally get the message.

The above are only some of the government agencies that inspect Clark Foam. It was put well by an expert in these areas when he said: “ignorance of the law is no excuse – but try to find the law”.

Our official safety record as an employer is not very good. We have three ex-employees on full Workman’s Compensation disability – evidently for life. There is another claim being made by the widow of an employee who died from cancer. According to the claim, the chemicals or resins at Clark Foam caused the cancer. A few years ago we had one of those horror stories one hears about lawyers. Almost $400,000.00 in lawyer’s fees and the ex employee suing Clark Foam got $17,000.00. The Judge in the lawsuit advised me “this is just a cost of doing business (in California)”.

We have had no problems with the local city government. The Fire Authority has reported us for violations several times with no consequences. A long-range problem might be a city master plan that wants to eliminate manufacturing at our location and build offices for uses like Lawyers and Doctors. While the local city government has said nothing it appears we are also violating of a number of current buildings, electrical, fire, and land use codes.

There will be questions about the future of the Clark Foam manufacturing facility and equipment. I will answer them below:

Another owner or tenant cannot use the buildings without bringing them up to current code. This is impossible so the buildings will probably be torn down. There is no sense discussing the issue of permits or using the Clark Foam facility further.

In addition, you could build many blank making facilities outside of the United States for just the cost of permits in California.

The equipment and process issue is based on a term frequently called “standards”. This is a difficult legal concept and will be difficult to explain. I will try my best but warn my explanation may not be accurate or correct from the point of view of a lawyer.

Hobie Alter and Dave Sweet independently showed that a polyurethane foam surfboard was possible. Rodger Jennings, Chuck Foss, and Harold Walker pioneered the first successful commercial blank business selling blanks directly to surfboard builders. A lot of other people were involved including myself. All of the resins, supplies, processes, and equipment were very original innovations.

Upon founding Clark Foam I begin using different foam formulations, processing methods, and equipment than the other blank manufacturers. Today my plant is almost all original designs, built in-house by our staff and myself. The small amount of equipment purchased outside of Clark Foam was built to my specifications or modified by me for our unique process. To sum this up no one in the United States or for that matter the rest of the world uses equipment and a process like mine. It is very unique and there was nothing on earth ever built this way before.

This is just an extension of the methods everyone used when the first foam boards were built. I continued merrily along assuming this was the way things worked. No one copied much of my process or equipment and it was very successful. I used no outside engineering firms or other experts for the majority of Clark Foam.

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency used lawyers to prepare their citation. They used the word “standards” a lot. I finally realized with shock that the EPA has determined that my equipment does not meet acceptable or accepted “standards”.

Looking back this has been the same complaint of the Fire Authority and others. They are not as articulate as the EPA lawyers and I did not understand their points. A lot of the $500,000.00 I spent trying to satisfy the Fire Authority was engineering studies to determine if my equipment met “standards”.

The EPA and the Fire Authority have only been interested in a small part of my equipment that handles TDI. Most of the rest of my equipment also does not meet any established “standard”.

Upon pursuing the matter with experts in the law I found that for the majority of my equipment and process I am the “standard”. This means I am legally liable for everything I designed, built, modified, or used in my unique process.

Some years ago I read that the old communist Russian tractors had a negative economic value. They were so poorly built that the raw material used to build them was worth more than the tractor that would rarely work.

I find that due to this “standards” thing my equipment and process has a negative economic value. Why sell something for a dollar when you are risking a lawsuit that could cost you anywhere from the dollar to everything you own? Since I am the “standard” I am liable for everything that was built to my “standard”. Therefore, I am not going to sell any of this equipment or the process. The liability is far too great. Furthermore, most of the equipment can be dangerous if it is not operated properly.

In closing this letter I will make several comments.

First, Clark Foam’s customers have several well-known and well-publicized options for making their surfboards. I will not comment on any of them nor give advice or opinion.

This letter gives a wealth of advice on isocyanate based foam manufacture and some other manufacturing issues particular to Orange County or California. I do not want to clarify any of these issues further than this letter due to both pending and potential civil and criminal liability. In sum, do not bother asking me questions.

When Clark Foam was started it was a far different California. Businesses like Clark Foam were very welcome and considered the leading edge of innovation and technology. Somewhere along the way things have changed.

The State of California and Orange County California are trying very hard to make a clean, safe, and just home for their residents. This is commendable and I totally support their goals. It is my understanding their plan is to remove selective businesses to make way for new, better jobs that will be compatible with the improved environment. They are putting an incredible amount of resources into their effort. This is a tough job and they are doing a good job of meeting their goals.

The only apology I will make to customers and employees is that I should have seen this coming many years sooner and closed years ago in a slower, more predictable manner. I waited far too long, being optimistic rather then realistic. I also failed to do my homework.

What will I be doing in the near future? There is a very good chance that I will spend a lot of time in courtrooms over the next few years and could go to prison. I have a tremendous cleanup expense to exit my business. I have the potential for serious fines. My full time efforts will be to extract myself from the mess that I have created for myself.

In closing I want to thank everyone for their wonderful support over the years. This has been a great ride with great people. I have loved this job and the people I worked with.

Thanks,

Gordon Clark

no surprises

The apology of John Edwards, former Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, for voting for the Iraq war in 2002, has been widely praised. But his apology is based on a lie, one that other Democrats are likely to embrace and one which will serve their ambitions but hide the truth. We should have no illusions about this, for to believe otherwise is to set ourselves up for the continuation of Bush’s war by a Democrat.

Edwards declared in an op-ed column in the Washington Post on November 13, 2005: “The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president—and that I was being given by our intelligence community—wasn’t the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.” Sounds simple enough. “Had I known then what I know now, etc.” Poor John Edwards was deceived. But was he? How was it that 21 other Democratic Senators and 2 Republicans were not deceived and voted against the war?
Part of the answer arrived in another op-ed the Washington Post one week later, November 20, 2005, by another former Senator, Bob Graham, entitled: “What I knew Before the Invasion.” Like Edwards, Graham was a member, in fact the chair, of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the period leading up to the war and on October 11, 2002 when the vote on the war on Iraq was taken. In a nutshell, Graham tells us that everyone on that committee knew that Bush was lying about weapons of mass destruction. Graham begins like a good, loyal Democrat, telling us that his colleagues were deceived, at least “most” of them. But he then tells us that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee knew better. Here are some of Graham’s words:
“At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used Senatorial authority, I directed completion of an NIE.”
“Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein’s capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE”.
“There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein’s will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.”
“Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States’ removing Hussein, by force if necessary.”
(Note: Who do you suppose those “third countries” were that were fanning the flames of war?)
“The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.’ It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as “If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year,” underscored the White House’s claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.”
“From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth—or even had an interest in knowing the truth.”

“On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.”
John Edwards was a member of that Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and he voted for the war. Who were the other Democratic senators? They were Senators Bayh, Edwards, DURBIN, Feinstein, LEVIN, MIKULSKI, Rockefeller and WYDEN as well as Tom Daschle, then majority leader, an ex officio member. I have capitalized those who voted against the war resolution and who should be hailed as senators of integrity. But Bayh, Daschle, Edwards, Feinstein and Rockefeller, all of whom with the exception of Feinstein, have presidential ambitions, voted for the war despite the fact that they had good reason to know the administration Bushies were lying. (And let’s not forget the Republicans on the committee: Dewine, Hatch, Inhoffe, Kyle, Lugar, Roberts, Richard Shelby, Fred Thompson and ex officio, Trent Lott.)
There were 19 members of that committee, all of whom had to know that Bush was lying. Only the four in caps above voted against the war. But if 19, out of what is often called a small and intimate club of 100 Senators, knew that the war was based on a lie, can one believe that the rest did not know? And given the bloodletting that was about to be unleashed, why did none of these 19, including Graham, release the “confidential” NIE report? What sort of men and women are these?
Let us carry this one step further.
There were 23 Senate votes against the war, only 4 of whom were on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. If we add to that 23, the five Democrats (Bayh, Daschle, Edwards, Feinstein and Rockefeller), we have 28. It would have taken only 5 more to sustain a veto against the war. Let’s see who was available among the pro-war votes. There were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Max Cleland (Yes, he voted for the war!), Christopher Dodd, Tom Harkin (Yes, he voted for the war!), Ernst Hollings, Harry Reid (now minority leader) and Charles Schumer. (That’s 8, bringing the total to 36.)
So those Dems cannot say their votes did not matter. They cannot claim we would have gone to war anyway. If they had been willing to filibuster against the war or filibuster to allow the inspectors to complete their work, there would have been no war. These are Dems on whom progressives rely. They betrayed us, and they have blood on their hands since it was in their power to stop the war. But their ambitions came first. (Chuck Hagel who now professes to be anti-war and John McCain who wears his “integrity” on his sleeve would have made two excellent additions among the Republicans.)
Finally it is worth recalling that the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate at the time the war vote was taken on October, 11, 2002. So this is every bit as much a Democratic war as a Republican one.
And that brings us full circle. Why did Graham write his column which, if read carefully, so implicates Edwards and so many others?
Actually Graham set out to do the opposite, to excuse his colleagues. He was trying to explain how he could vote against the war while 99 other Dems voted for it. He was trying to excuse them with his insiders knowledge. As he says in the opening to his op-ed:
“In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. ‘More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,’ he said.”
“The president’s attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace—that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.”
Bush is telling a lie, of course, when he says the Dems had “the same intelligence” as he had. But it contains a kernel of truth, which must be scaring the hell out of the Dems as they feel pressure to abandon the war. (Bush and Cheney finally say something with an element of truth!!!) The kernel is that enough Democrats had enough knowledge to know that we were being lied into war in October, 2002. And except for a courageous 21 Senators, along with 2 Republicans, they went along for the ride – with their careers in mind.

So in attempting to excuse his colleagues, Graham’s op-ed leaves his fellow members of the Select Intelligence Committee hanging out to dry. (It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks. And just perhaps, that very thought occurred to Graham as he penned his piece. ) And he raises suspicions about the rest of the Senate, with the exception of the 23. (And of course how is he to explain the votes of the 23; are they to be labeled traitors to save the reputations of Hillary, Kerry et al? That is a tough sell.)
Where does that leave us? The crisis that is the war in Iraq has become a crisis of Democracy. Right now it is crystal clear that there is no true opposition party, although there are minor elements (very minor ones) among the Left in the Democratic party and the Libertarians in the Republican party. These could constitute a genuine antiwar opposition. Until that happens, the war will go one, the neocons may drive us into further wars and our democracy will be further imperiled.
It is worthwhile looking back at the Senate membership of the 107th Congress and comparing the list to those Senators voting against the war on Iraq…

Pick your own favorite Judas.

life imitates art

no reinforced concrete structure has ever collapsed due to fire…………………..video

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