Growth in the U.S. today is at its slowest point since 1875. That means our economy is growing a slower pace today that it was during the Great Depression.
In August of 2007 the Federal Reserve policy committee revealed that America’s potential for economic growth was slowing down. Factories and workers were less productive than they had been in the past. This recession may accelerate that downturn, and affect living standards for every American citizen for years to come.
Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics believes that our economy will be growing at two-thirds the speed it was a few years ago.
We have seen signs that the collapse of our $14 trillion economy is slowing, but that does not mean we will correct ourselves to our former state. The long-run outlook does not look good for the United States.
Big government rescues on Wall Street and elsewhere, domestic stimulus plans, toxic asset replacement plans, and new government programs to address a wide range of other longstanding problems are causing the United States budget deficit to skyrocket.
More than US$12 trillion has already been committed and/or spent in this crisis, with the current year’s budget deficit projected to reach, or exceed, nearly $2 trillion. The US Treasury is flooding the market with new issuance of debt, while the chances appear increasingly slim that the huge and ballooning deficit will be brought under control anytime soon. With all this spending, we’re guaranteeing that huge and persistent tax increases will be enacted down the line to pay for it all. That will trounce economic growth and is an enormously ugly prospect.
The US dollar will inevitably bear the full and ferocious brunt of the decidedly hyper-inflationary policies of Washington, notwithstanding the Federal Reserve’s empty promises to reverse such policies swiftly to protect the currency when inflation inevitably rears its ugly head again.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,”
Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.
OPS: Personally, I start hallucinating after about 30 hours without sleep
CIA terror suspects ‘kept awake for 11 days’
More than 25 of the CIA’s war-on-terror prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for as long as 11 days at a time during the administration of former president George Bush, according to The Los Angeles Times.
At one stage during the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days, the Times reported, citing memoranda made public by the Justice department last month.
The limit was later reduced to just over a week, the report stated.
Sleep deprivation was one of the most important elements in the CIA’s interrogation programme, seen as more effective than more violent techniques used to help break the will of suspects.
OPS: It’s an old trick. It was used during teh Vietnam protests – probably long before that
G20 police ‘used undercover men to incite crowds’
MP demands inquiry into Met tactics at demo
An MP who was involved in last month’s G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.
Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.
Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.
Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament’s joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.
I grew up with family tales about the unique beauty of Ecuador. My father’s family made their living on tourism in the Andes, the Galapagos, and the Amazon. Sadly, what was to us a mysterious and majestic example of the wonder of creation was merely a dumping ground to Texaco. They chose to discard 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the pristine rainforest, poisoning its people.
Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, not long after I finished college, and in their wake was left the worst oil related disaster on the planet. That damage is still there today. Mere weeks ago I stood in front of a toxic waste pit, decades old and yet only a few feet from the home of a family of campesinos. Told the area was cleaned and safe, they bought the land and built their home there. Families like that one have lost more than Chevron, or anyone else, can ever repay.
I found it impossible to witness such a horrific site in contrast to the beauty of the rainforest and not be changed. As much as the smell turns my stomach so does the knowledge that Texaco admitted to dumping it, yet refuses to accept responsibility.
On May 5, eight health care advocates, including myself and two other physicians, stood up to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the Senate Finance Committee during a “public roundtable discussion” with a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table?
The answer was a loud, “Get more police!” And we were arrested and hauled off to jail.
The fact that a national health insurance program is supported by the majority of the public, doctors and nurses apparently means nothing to Sen. Baucus. The fact that thousands of people in America are dying every year because they can’t get health care means nothing. The fact that over 1 million Americans go into bankruptcy every year due to medical debt – even though most of them had insurance when they got sick – means nothing.
And so, as the May 5 meeting approached, we prepared for another one of the highly scripted, well-protected events that are supposed to make up the “health care debate” using standard tools of advocacy. We organized call-in days and faxes to the members of the committee requesting the presence of one single-payer advocate at the table of 15. Despite thousands of calls and faxes, the only reply – received on the day before the event – was, “Sorry, but no more invitations will be issued.”
We knew that this couldn’t be correct. We had heard Sen. Baucus say on that very same day that “all options were on the table.” And so, the next day, we donned our suits and traveled to Washington. We had many knowledgeable single-payer advocates in our group. And as the meeting started, one of us, Mr. Russell Mokhiber, stood up to say that we were here and we were ready to take a seat. And he was promptly removed from the room.
In that moment, it all became so clear. We could write letters, phone staffers, and fax until the machines fell apart, but we would never get our seat at the table.
WASHINGTON – U.S. President Barack Obama’s failure to lift a federal funding ban on syringe exchange — a policy that allows intravenous drug users to swap used needles for clean ones — is a blow to AIDS-prevention efforts, says a global health group.
Although Obama pledged on the campaign trail to overturn the federal ban on funding for syringe exchange, he refrained from doing so in his proposed 2010 budget. “Providing clean syringes is proven to be one of the most effective public health interventions since the polio vaccine,” said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health Global Access Project (GAP). “It is clear that it works, but yet, we now have to wait for Congress to act to have the freedom to use every possible resource to make it widely available.” (See Health GAP’s full statement below.)
The results of the stress tests on 19 of the biggest US banks have left European banks exposed, as they now look vulnerable to recapitalization needs and to claims that not all checks were made to ensure rules were being followed, analysts said on Friday.
“Compared to the US, the European banking system is rapidly being left behind on the bank recapitalization front,” UBS analysts said in a research note.
“Unlike the US stress test that set out clear objectives, framework, and deadlines, there is no major policy initiative to recapitalize banks in Europe,” they added.
European bank stocks rallied Friday, boosted by relief that no bad surprises arose from the results of the US stress tests, but UBS kept its underweight recommendation, while upgrading their weighting on US banks’ stocks to neutral from underweight.
Bank Practices Inflame Good Customers, Irk Government
The federal government is taking up the fight against credit card companies accused of taking advantage of consumers.
n taking aim at what he called “abuse that goes unpunished,” President Obama has asked Congress to send him a bill by Memorial Day that prevents credit card companies from suddenly raising rates on everyday customers.
“Americans know they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe,” Obama said. “But they also have a right to not get ripped off by sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties and hidden fees.”
Congress is moving swiftly to comply with the president’s request. A credit card holder’s Bill of Rights has already passed the House. The bill would prohibit retroactive rate increases, prevent companies from issuing cards to anyone under 18 and eliminate what’s called “double-cycle billing.”
MINGORA, Pakistan — Thousands of fearful civilians _ many on foot or donkey-pulled carts _ streamed out of a conflict-ridden Pakistani valley Sunday as authorities briefly lifted a curfew. The army said it had killed scores of militants in the latest fighting.
Pakistan has urged residents of the Swat Valley to leave over the past week, while its warplanes have pounded the Taliban-held valley and surrounding areas in a U.S.-backed operation the prime minister has called a “war of the country’s survival.”
President Barack Obama mocked his own administration and gave playful digs at his critics and Republicans at a black-tie dinner Saturday night attended by a mix of politicians, celebrities and journalists.
Part 1:
The Republican Party was a favorite target for Obama, speaking at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney couldn’t make the dinner, Obama joked, because he was writing his memoir, “How to shoot friends and interrogate people.” It was a reference to Cheney’s support of harsh interrogation and his accidental shooting of a hunting companion
The president directly addressed Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who was in the audience.
“Michael for the last time, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a troubled asset, I’m sorry,” said Obama, referring to recent economic steps of the White House and the radio personality’s public criticism of the GOP party leader.
Some Sharks, Barracuda Completely Gone in Caribbean
The big fish that prowl the Caribbean reefs—gaping groupers, sharp-toothed barracuda, and gigantic sharks—are completely gone in some places due to overfishing, a new study says. The problem is worst in the most densely populated Caribbean countries, where fishers have wiped entire reefs clean of large predators.
In such places, smaller predators have begun to fill in niches left by the big hunters—sending coral reefs into a tailspin.
The new research, based on a public database of fish sightings by trained volunteer scuba divers, provides one of the most comprehensive glimpses so far of the decline in large Caribbean predators.
Turley to Obama: ‘Do the right thing,’ prosecute torture
Constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley wants the Obama administration to “do the right thing” by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s torture program.
“I hope, at a minimum, President Obama will end this just endless performance of Hamlet on the Potomac, debating whether a special prosecutor will be appointed, whether these crimes will be investigated, and do the right thing,” he said on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show Thursday night. “Just appoint a special prosecutor and let the chips land where they may.”
Judge Jay Bybee, who co-authored memos that authorized the Bush administration’s torture program, is trying to reach out and lobby members of the Nevada delegation in hopes that he won’t be disbarred from his seat on the bench, Maddow said.
Bybee, who has offices in Las Vegas, is one of several former Bush administration attorneys who are harshly criticized by an internal Justice Department report for their “deeply flawed” and “sloppily reasoned” legal analysis in approving torture.
The memo, which has not yet been released, is rumored to recommend disbarment for Bybee and John Yoo, another Bush administration attorney heavily involved in producing the so-called “torture memos.”
Microsoft Faces European Antitrust Hearing in June
European Union (EU) antitrust regulators have set an early June date for an oral hearing during which Microsoft Corp. can defend its practice of bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows news reports said last week.
Jonathan Todd, spokesman for the EU’s Competition Commission, told several news outlets, including the Reuters and Dow Jones wire services, that the agency had set June 3-5 for Microsoft to respond to charges that it “shields” IE from competition.
Todd did not immediately reply to a request for confirmation. Sources close to Microsoft, however, said that while the company has requested the hearing — a procedural matter that was required when it submitted its written response last week — it has not made a final decision about whether it will actually go through with the conference.
CBS Evening News: Community Supported Agriculture Lets Customers Buy Produce Straight From The Farm
(CBS) Consumers seeking a healthy lifestyle these days are increasingly cutting out the supermarket and going straight to the farmer for fresh fruits and vegetables. CBS News correspondent Kelly Cobiella reports that community-supported agriculture is a growing trend.
On a small farm in Palm Beach County, Fla., it’s harvesting season. They’re picking and packing. Only this bounty isn’t headed for a big warehouse or grocery store.
It’s going from Nancy Roe’s fields straight to Florida kitchens. From field to table. No stops in between.
It’s called community supported agriculture or CSA – part of the “buy local” movement. Customers pay Roe directly, and she sends them a box of fresh produce every week of the growing season.
Hackers broke into US air traffic control computers on several occasions over the past few years and increased reliance on Web applications and commercial software has made networks more vulnerable, according to a government audit.
Among the breaches was an attack on a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer in February 2009 in which hackers gained access to personal information on 48,000 current and former FAA employees, the report said.
In 2006, it said, a viral attack on the Internet spread and forced the FAA to shut down some of its air traffic control (ATC) systems in Alaska.
The audit was conducted by an assistant inspector general in the US Transportation Department and released this week. A copy of the report was obtained by Internet news agency CNET and posted online.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – As US newspapers shrivel up and die, an unlikely figure is emerging as their potential savior: News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch.
The much-villified Australian-born media tycoon is preparing to battle against the practice many hold largely responsible for newspapers’ current plight — the “original sin” of giving away their content for free online.
The 78-year-old Murdoch announced this week that the days of free are over.
He said he planned to begin charging readers of the websites of News Corp. newspapers “within the next 12 months,” testing the scheme “first on some of our stronger ones.
“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content, and it is clear to many newspapers the current model is malfunctioning,” said Murdoch, whose newspaper holdings include The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, The Times of London, the Sun and The Australian, among others.
HBO’s political comedian Bill Maher hosted writer Reza Aslan, author Naomi Klein, animator Seth MacFarlane and journalist Matt Taibbi on his show Friday night.
Here’s the ‘Overtime’ segment, released exclusively on the Internet
Congressman Bob Filner taken into custody for civil disobedience
Seven protesters chanting slogans in Spanish and English were arrested early Friday evening outside the private Fiesta de Reyes restauraunt/shopping complex for demonstrating without a permit, including activist Representative Bob Filner (D-CA).
In recent years, the Plaza del Pasado in San Diego’s historic ‘Old Town’ had been struggling to survive. A new owner, the Chula Vista restauratuer Chuck Ross, renamed and remodeled the Plaza, now known as Fiesta de Reyes. He also instituted a new policy for the restaurants and shops: Ross has said he will run the concession as a ‘non-union shop’. The laying-off of 130 union employees made his point very clear.
Fiesta de Reyes, adjacent to the Old Town San Diego Historical Park, had a grand re-opening ceremony along with a public party yesterday afternoon. After the public celebration, a private event continued within the restaurant/shopping complex. 80 protesters in two circling picket lines marched near the entrance of Fiesta de Reyes without blocking it throughout the afternoon’s event, while a few others marched with placards at the entrance to the Old Town Historical Park. And plans had been made for what the demonstrators called a “civil disobedience literally at the gate of Fiesta de Reyes.” Not until the night’s private celebration began did Filner step forward with six other community leaders.
Greg Gross of the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on the protest:
The Secret Right-Wing Strategy on Health Care—Exposed!
If conservatives make the debate about what is good and bad in the Obama plan – they will win.
Conservative pollster Frank Luntz recently provided right wingers on Capitol Hill a secret 28-page memo entitled The Language of Healthcare 2009—which has leaked! The memo was intended to offer a message framing strategy to defeat President Obama’s plan to provide health care for all. But the document is more useful to progressives than conservatives.
Dr. Frank Luntz is a right-wing spinmeister who won broad influence by acting as pollster for Newt Gingrich, helping to frame the 1994 Republican Contract with America. Over the last dozen years, corporations and conservative ideologues have paid Luntz tens of millions of dollars to craft their messages, and his research has included “hundreds of thousands of telephone interviews, hundreds of dial sessions and focus groups, and literally a million research hours.” In short, he knows what he’s talking about.
Luntz briefed House Republicans about his findings at a closed-door session yesterday (where he was very angry that his memo had been leaked). The memo is based on polling and dial sessions conducted within the last few weeks. If you want all the gory details, you can read the entire memo here. The substance can be grouped into three overall lessons for progressives.
VIDEO: GOP Wastes No Time In Embracing Frank Luntz’s Vapid ‘Patient-Doctor’ Health Care Rhetoric
Will Luntz’s strategy of misdirection derail true health care reform?
Earlier this week, a memo written by right-wing message guru Frank Luntz was leaked instructing the Republican Party on how to frame the health care debate in order to defeat progressive reform. Since his pivotal role in helping craft Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Luntz has had an impressive record of cloaking regressive and conservative policies with carefully poll-tested language. For instance, Luntz is credited with persuading Republicans to use the intentionally misleading term “death tax” to describe the estate tax.
According to CQ, Republicans are enthusiastically embracing Luntz and his health care memo. At a private workshop organized by the House leadership, Luntz was welcomed with applause and cries of “Welcome home!” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) gushed, “We look to him for how do we express the things that we believe in ways that are effective.”
Luntz’s health care memo urges Republicans to denounce progressive reforms as ideas based upon a “committee of Washington bureaucrats.” The memo then calls for Republicans to strongly emphasize the “protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship” because this approach allows Americans to believe that the GOP is doing something to “protect and improve something good“:
Capitalist Pigs: What the Wall Street Meltdown and Swine Flu Have in Common – By David Sirota,
Pigs are supposed to be the smartest domestic animal. But they clearly have trouble when charged with managing capitalism.
Even if you don’t dig on swine, it has become impossible to avoid them. If you’re not pummeled by television reports about Wall Street oinkers, you’re bombarded by talk-radio rants about congressional pork and newspaper dispatches about swine flu.
The bacon-flavored themes probably aren’t purposefully repetitive, but that’s OK because these seemingly unrelated story lines share a common bond: They are each part of what might be called piggish capitalism — an economic theory that mixes subsidization, consolidation and deregulation and that now endangers us all.
Take the pandemic scare: The Associated Press says scientists suspect swine flu began in a Mexican town that “has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm” partially owned by the Smithfield company. That’s the same Smithfield that used three decades of lax anti-trust enforcement and corporate welfare to become one of the few mega-corporations now controlling global agribusiness.
With All Due Respect: Satirizing Presidents from Saturday Night Live to Lil’ Bush
by Jeffrey P. Jones
Embodying his on-screen persona as a conservative talk show host, faux television pundit Stephen Colbert offered a mouth-dropping satirical performance as the featured speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006. As is typical in his television parodies on Comedy Central, Colbert proceeded to lambaste both the press and the president, neither of whom seemed to appreciate the effort. Not to make the same mistake twice, the organizers of the 2007 event took a safer route by hiring the crowd-pleasing presidential impersonator Rich Little for the evening’s entertainment. But in reviving the long-since flagged career of the former late-night talk show staple, the event organizers reminded us of just how far television has come in its caricatures of presidents. For also appearing that same week on Comedy Central was the animated series, Lil’ Bush, a portrayal of George W. Bush as a dim-witted and dangerous fifth-grader running amok in the White House and wreaking havoc across the world with his diabolical pals Lil’ Cheney, Lil’ Condi, and Lil’ Rummy. The airing of these two different sets of caricatures demonstrated that the acceptable norms of television’s treatment of the president have certainly changed.
These God Pundits Can Give You a Splitting Headache
By Matt Taibbi,
God People are constantly fine-tuning their weird arguments to pimp the righteousness of faith.
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.” – Stanley Fish’s Blog, God Talk – - NYTimes.com.
I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair.
This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant runny nose, who seems to have been raised by indulgent aunts who gave him sweets every time he corrected the grammar of other children. The esteemed professor’s new book is called Reason, Faith and Revolution, and it’s sort of an answer to the popular atheist literature of people like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens. If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class.
It’s the norm for U.S. civilian and military leaders to talk about what other countries “must do” — but it’s a radical and dangerous mindset.
A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: “In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition.” And nobody thought it was strange at all.
In fact, it’s the sort of thing you can read just about any time when it comes to American policy in Pakistan or, for that matter, Afghanistan. It’s just the norm on a planet on which it’s assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called “foreign aid,” now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince.
Last week as well, in a prime-time news conference, President Obama said of Pakistan: “We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.”
The house is still burning down, but not quite as fast.
Bob Herbert
It’s a measure of just how terrible the economy has become that a loss of more than a half-million jobs in just one month can be widely seen as a good sign. The house is still burning down, but not quite as fast.
I can understand why people are relieved that we no longer seem to be hurtling toward a depression, but beyond that I see very little to be happy about.
The economy is in shambles. Nearly 540,000 jobs were lost in April, a horrifying number. The unemployment rate rose to 8.9 percent. Even the most optimistic observers expect the job losses to continue, although, hopefully, at a slower pace. The unemployment rate is expected to keep on climbing, like some monster from the movies, toward double digits.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s proposed defense budget includes $130 billion for the nation’s two wars, a figure that may not be enough.
And his Democratic allies in Congress are threatening to set conditions that must be met before that money is handed out.
Obama sent to Congress on Thursday details of his proposed $664 billion Pentagon spending plan for the budget year starting in October. It includes $534 billion for base defense programs and $130 billion for overseas operations, including the wars he’s ramping down in Iraq and ramping up in Afghanistan.
The budget aims to cover what the Defense Department needs “to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead, while at the same time providing a hedge against other risks and contingencies,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a statement released in Washington as he traveled in Afghanistan.
The $130 billion for overseas missions included $65 billion for Afghanistan and $61 billion for Iraq — the first time spending for the seven-year-old Afghan campaign has surpassed the one in Iraq.
“This request is where you’re going to first see the swing of not only dollars or resources but … capability from the Iraqi theater into the Afghanistan theater,” Navy Vice Adm. Steve Stanley, director of force structure for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference.
U.S. threatens to rescind stimulus money over wage cuts
The Obama administration threatens to rescind billions in stimulus money if Gov. Schwarzenegger and lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers.
Reporting from Sacramento — The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.
Schwarzenegger’s office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials.
Poor Little Rich Girl Penny Pritzker Opposes Employee Free Choice
She is joining together with other billionaires to fight bill, which would “make it easier for unions to organize hotels they own.” She has “told the president she is opposed to the measure, known as card check, said a person familiar with the situation.”
Pritzker ran committees that generated a record of more than$745 million for the Obama campaign plus $53 million for the inauguration.
“The president and his supporters don’t agree on every issue, nor does anyone expect them to,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. “But clearly many like Ms. Pritzker, who the president asked to serve on the President’s Economy Recovery Advisory Board, are supportive of his overall economic agenda.”
Fellow billionaire Lester Crowne explains that it is concern for workers rights, rather than rapacious greed, that motivates them:
Voting privately is “an American prerogative and shouldn’t be overturned,” said Crown, 83, whose family holdings include the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa in Ojai, California, and the Little Nell hotel in Aspen, Colorado. “The recommended legislation is absolutely the wrong thing to do.”
Pardon me for a moment here while I compose myself. I always get choked up when rich and important captains of industry take time from their busy schedules to think about the little people.
In Poultney, Vt., a small town near Lake St. Catherine near the Vermont-New York border, “Walter” had been running a small business during the summer for 43 years—until a rectangular piece of plastic helped bring him down.
Walter, as he referred to himself in a letter to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, had been using a credit card from Advanta, a Pennsylvania-based company that specializes in small-business credit cards. The rate had been 7.9 percent for years, he wrote. But last year, for no apparent reason, the rate jumped to 28.8 percent.
“I always paid more than the minimum and always on time,” Walter wrote. “When Avanta was contacted and asked why, I was told it’s a floating interest. I asked to speak to a manager and was advised that’s the way it was and they could do nothing to lower it. I got a line of credit loan from Heritage credit union at 1 percent over prime, paid them off and shut down my business. After 43 years of business, it took usury to shut me down.”
No Generation Gap: Democrats Have Edge in Every Age Group
Democrats lead Republicans among every age group of the American electorate, according to the polling firm Gallup.
A Gallup analysis of its polls between Jan. 2 and May 5 shows younger voters, between the ages of 18 and 29, tend to identify with the Democrats or to be independent. As the age increases, voters gravitate toward one political party or the other.
Also, Republicans show gains among voters approaching middle age in their 30s and 40s, and again as they reach retirement age. Even among those age groups, though, Democrats still hold the advantage.
“At no single age does the percent Republican exceed the percent Democrat,” Gallup says.
The findings were based on interviews with 123,890 adults nationwide this year.
OPS: ….something Thom Hartmann has be talking about for years.
From Five Ways of Looking at Risk.
A Strong Safety Net Encourages Healthy Risk-Taking
The basic underlying principle of the New Deal was that security is not opposed to opportunity but essential to it.
Remember the “ownership society”? Just an election cycle ago, conservatives were urging Americans to give up their antiquated social-insurance programs–Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance–in favor of tax-subsidized individual accounts that would vest responsibility for dealing with economic risk in workers and their families. Thankfully, the most extreme elements of that agenda failed, and the vision behind it (of responsive financial markets capable of managing risk with limited government oversight, and the private sector providing inclusive, progressive protections with minimal public prodding) is now discredited.
Yet while the ownership society was a practical and intellectual failure, it was more of a political success than commentators generally acknowledge. Even before the financial crisis, the broad set of economic protections that arose in the Great Depression and expanded in the decades after–sometimes called the “safety net,” though in truth the net was never understood to be the bare minimum that the term implies–lay in tatters. Over the last generation, our economy and society have dramatically changed, creating new risks and intensifying old ones. But our public-private framework of economic security has decayed, leaving advocates of the existing policies increasingly defending a Potemkin village of hobbled and out-of-date protections.
IF you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq). To prove the point, the partying journalists in the Washington Hilton ballroom could be seen (courtesy of C-Span) fawning over government potentates — in some cases the very “sources” who had fed all those fictional sightings of Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D.
Colbert’s routine did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it “fell flat.” The Times initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.
The bad news about the news business has accelerated ever since. Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Otherpapershave died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it’s bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on “The Future of Journalism.”
President Obama will make his promised speech to the Muslim world from Egypt, a White House official said on Friday.
Obama pledged during the campaign to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital within the first few months of taking office. Picking a site proved challenging for a range of reasons — from diplomacy to security — and the decision took longer than expected, with Obama commissioning options from a research team.
Having settled on Egypt, the White House today announced that he is adding a stop there to his early June overseas trip. That trip will also take him to Normandy, France, for the anniversary of D-Day, and to the Buchenwald concentration camp and Dresden, Germany.
Choosing Egypt will inevitably bring comparisons with a major speech that then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave in Cairo 2005, urging democracy and reform in the Middle East.
In that speech, Rice specifically urged the Egyptian government to “put its faith in its own people,” calling on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to end violent attacks on pro-democracy demonstrators, stop “arbitrary justice” and lift emergency decrees allowing the police to break up gatherings of more than five people. She also made similar demands on Saudi Arabia, another close U.S. ally. However, Rice tempered her comments by saying the United States had “every reason for humility” because of its history of slavery and racism.
Max Baucus, Listen to Ed Schultz and Give Doctor Marcia Angell a Seat at the Table
On May 5th the Senate Finance Committee, headed by Democratic Senator Max Baucus of Montana, had a roundtable discussion on solutions to our current health care crisis. There were 14 seats at the table which included experts representing the “for profit” Health Insurance Industry, the Chamber of Commerce and even a scholar from the Republican think tank the Heritage Foundation. Glaringly absent was any advocate for the single-payer health care system despite recent polling suggesting that 60% of Americans would be in favor of a single-payer system. Keep in mind this is only the discussion and exploratory phase for coming up with workable solutions to our current health care crisis. And yet there was not a single voice out of 14 voices to discuss the potential benefits of a single-payer plan. There was Zero representation for possibly 60% of Americans. It is no wonder many Americans in the past 72 hours are questioning whether Democrat Max Baucus from Montana is truly attempting to promote democratic discussions or only holding pay-for-play discussions with his largest campaign contributors, the health insurance companies and the drug companies.
Pope Benedict XVI has warned against the misuse of religion for political ends, in a speech to Muslim leaders on the second day of his visit to Jordan.
Speaking in the King Hussein Mosque in Amman, he argued that religion was a force for good, but its “manipulation” caused divisions and even violence.
The pontiff is also due to visit Israel and the West Bank on an eight-day tour.
Analysts say he is keen to improve ties with the Islamic world. A speech he made in 2006 offended many Muslims.
Some groups in Jordan had called for him to apologise for the speech, in which he quoted a medieval scholar who criticised the Prophet Muhammad.
The life story and work of Nikola Tesla. He invented AC electricity, Neon Lights, Radio transmission, The Electric motor, Wireless electricity transfer, Remote control, Hydraulics, Lasers, Space weapons, Robotics, and many, many more things.
Some Electromechanical devices and principles developed by Tesla:
* various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (1882)
* induction motor and high frequency alternator
* means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations
* alternating current long-distance electrical transmission system (1888)
* Tesla coil
* bladeless turbine
* bifilar coil
* Telegeodynamics
* systems for wireless communication (prior art for the invention of radio) and radio frequency oscillators
* robotics and the “AND” logic gate
* X-rays Tubes using the bremsstrahlung process
* devices for ionized gases
* devices for high field emission
* devices for charged particle beams
* methods for providing extremely low level of resistance to the passage of electrical current
* voltage multiplication circuitry
* devices for high voltage discharges
* devices for lightning protection
* Magnifying Transmitter
* VTOL aircraft
* Dynamic theory of gravity
* concepts for electric vehicles
________________________________
bull bear market shares tank tanking have been tanked gold silver bonds treasury notes (End of the World is coming December 21, 2021 prophecy. The Maya’s “Long Count” calendar marks the end of every 5126-year era. A previous cycle ended 13,363 years ago–during the age of Leo, at the same time when the Earth was struck by comets and asteroids. The next cycle ends on 2012. Does this mean the world end on 2012? No. It means the calendar ends. Yet, there is also a warning, so let those with eyes, see.) (Planet X Inbound 2012 Mayan Calendar). (alien) (ufo) (solar system) (video biblical prophecy) (Sumerian) (Egyptian) (ancient) (atlantis) (sinking continent) (earth changes) (climate) (sun solar flare) American Militia, American Resistance Movement, American Revolution, Revolution, Revolt, American Militia Movement, A.R.M, Alex Jones, New World Order, Illuminati, NWO, Skull and Bones, Bush, 911 Conspiracy, The Civilians Military, Militia, American Resistance Movement, Revolt, Bilderberg, CFR, Alex Jones, Jordan Maxwell, Loose Change, End Game, Terrorstorm, Patriot Act, HR 1955, 911 was an inside job, truth, iraq war, black water, free masons, Ron Paul, New World Order carbon tax CO2 Global Warming is a fearmongering scam. The sun is getting hotter. Alex Jones is just one source. Police State is just making some X-military clones. MK Ultra mind control. Income. John F. Kennedy or JFK CIA FBI international bankers Rothschild David Rockefeller. Chemtrails chemical trails from jets. Air Force United States Army Navy Marines National Guard. NORAD stood down. Fake war in Iraq and Afghanistan but the human deaths are real. Corporations own a market for every physical item on this Earth. Immortal Technique is trying to push the revolution into the streets. I don’t know if I can agree with that. People go to work all day Jedi Mind Tricks are alright. Vinnie Paz in shit. Paris is OK. Sick Since and Ill Bill all good. 911 or September 11, 2001 was the greatest world scam to take place in a very long time, no matter what your take on the conspiracy theorist or theories America American Turn off the TV and the news. Project Paper Clip Operation Northwoods George W H Bush Bill Skull and Bones Bohemia Grove secrete societies Freemasons mason Masonic Temple Mormon. Government in schools. Mercury Vaccines. Nazi Hitler Every one is in a rush. Drugs marijuana blunt alcohol tobacco National ID Cards in May 2008. Elections are rigged. Real ID Act congress president. Obama and Mccain are clones. Republicans and Democrats are the same. Council on Foreign Relations. Club of Rome. Trilateral Commission. Federal Reserve illusion money dollar fall. Graph and carts. Round Table. Cocaine Mushrooms Crack Heroin Meth. 666 Mark of the Beast Christian Catholic Muslim Jewish Jew inside job protest fight Last Days Jesus Christ God. The second coming. North American Union. South American Union. APEC. European Union. All Seeing Eye. Devil Lucifer. Traffic cams cameras intersection cops The Financial Crisis Explained clowns jesters. CFR is weak. NAU One World corrupt Government Hemp is the Solution
“Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.”
William Shakespeare
Are you a lucky person? Or are you someone to whom catastrophe often happens? According to Professor Richard Wiseman in his book The Luck Factor, you can become luckier through changing your thoughts and behaviour.
Professor Wiseman conducted research with 400 volunteers from a wide range of backgrounds. He explored why some people seemed to lead charmed lives full of lucky breaks, while others experience one disaster after another.
He found that lucky people generate their own good fortune. He used the principles he found as the basis for a Luck School. 80% of those who participated increased their level of luck, happiness and success.
“Being deeply learned and skilled, being well trained and using well spoken words; This is good luck”
Buddha
In my independent survey of lucky people, I have noticed certain characteristics they demonstrate. Here I combine Professor Wisemen’s findings with my own observations:
Cyber espionage and attacks from well-funded nations or terror groups are the biggest threats to the military’s computer networks, a top US officer said.
Air Force General Kevin Chilton, who heads US Strategic Command, said he worries that foes will learn to disable or distort battlefield communications.
Chilton told reporters that even as the Pentagon improves its network defences against hackers, he needs more people, training and resources to hone offensive cyber war capacity.
At the same time, however, he asserted that the US would consider using military force against an enemy who attacks and disrupts the nation’s critical networks.
“Our job would be to present options. I don’t think you take anything off the table when you provide options” to the defence secretary or president, in the wake of an attack, whether the weapon is a missile or a computer program, he said.
Chilton’s comments shed the most light to date on the Pentagon’s ongoing debate over how to beef up its abilities to wage and defend against cyber warfare.
Why entrepreneurs aren’t so optimistic about the economy.
Don’t tell me that the economy is getting better, or has even hit rock bottom. My faith in an imminent recovery deserted me on May 5, when one of our customers, Salyer American Foods, based in Monterey, Calif., suddenly fell into receivership. There had been little to no indication that the company was so close to financial ruin. As it turns out, the company’s lenders say Salyer owes them over $34 million, a debt equal to almost half its sales. A company attorney told local media that tight credit markets and the economic recession had pushed Salyer over the edge. If the receiver doesn’t find some way to revive the company’s fortunes, our bag manufacturing company stands to lose nearly $1.5 million in revenue, about 2 percent of our $60 million in sales.
On the same day my customer fell into receivership, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told a congressional committee that he believed the economy was in the process of bottoming out and “would turn up later this year.” He’s not alone in his optimism. Over the past two weeks or so, it has become a cottage industry among economists and the media to spot the first “green shoots” of a recovery. Certainly shoots there may be. The stock market has rebounded smartly over the past two months, as has consumer confidence. Pending home sales have ticked up, while unemployment claims are easing. And many economists insist a manufacturing revival is in the wings because inventories have fallen so low that restocking must begin soon.
These are hard times for debt collectors. After all, who can pay their bills these days? Not Wall Street, Detroit, millions of homeowners, the rising number of jobless folks – not even several states and cities.
But, wait – here are some lively prospects for debt collectors: the dead. Yes, there’s a boom in dunning the deceased!
We’re not talking about collecting from big time debtors who still owe several hundred thousand dollars on their yacht. No, these are workaday people who died while still owing maybe a couple of hundred bucks on their bank credit card, health insurance, or utility payment. It’s not possible, of course, to squeeze money out of a corpse, so the target becomes the bereaved next of kin. “Hello, I’m very sorry for your loss, but there’s this $211.36 balance on your mother’s Visa, and we wondered who will be covering this?”
The Big “Con”: Taliban About to Defeat Pakistan, Take Control of Nukes, and It’s Another 9/11 – By Michael Collins
(The Intelligence Daily) — A strange feeling of déjà vu arises while listening to the administration sell further U.S. military intervention in Pakistan (our Predator drones are already there).
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen claimed in late March that Pakistan’s intelligence service has “close links with al Qaeda and the Taliban network.” In fact, Mullen warned, the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is “offering logistical support to them (the Taliban).”
In early April, veteran foreign policy icon and special advisor to the president on Afghanistan and South Asia, Richard Holbrook, let us know what this meant. There is a fundamental difference between the Pakistan conflict and the Viet Nam war, he argued. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Holbrook went on to say this:
“And the people who are in this area who we are fighting either pose a direct threat, having committed 9/11, having done Mumbai, having killed (Benazir) Bhutto, and they have publicly said they are going to do more of the same. That is: al Qaeda of course and their allies the Taliban.” Richard Holbrooke, May 5, 2009 (Repeating April 19, 2009 statement)
Texas is charging rape victims who cooperate with the police.
CNN reports that Texas hospitals are charging women who have been raped thousands of dollars for their rape kits that are collected by police as part of their investigations. According to CNN, Texas’s crime victim compensation fund consistently has a surplus and could likely cover these expenses. Watch it:
No. Not really breaking. We knew that CIA was playing around with its obligation to inform the intelligence committees before it starts any big new projects–like opening torture factories around the world.
But that’s the real story of this briefing list–aside from what a bunch right wingers are claiming it says, the actual details of the briefing list notwithstanding. The real story is that the CIA was playing a bunch of games to be able to claim it had informed Congress, even while only informing some of Congress some things.
First, CIA has officially confirmed what I have been saying for weeks. The CIA first briefed Congress on torture on September 4, 2002, 35 days after CIA purportedly began waterboarding and much longer after we know CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah. Moreover, we have on the record statements from Pelosi and Goss (and I’ve had even stronger assurances elsewhere) that CIA did not tell Congress they were already in the business of torture. Their discussions of torture were all prospective, and they may even have stated clearly that they had not used these techniques yet, which (if true) would be a clear and direct lie to Congress.
Second, look at when–according to the CIA’s specific assertions–they first talked about waterboarding to members of Congress:
February 4, 2003: Pat Roberts and a Republican and a Democratic staffer (but not Jello Jay); according to the CIA there was no specific mention of waterboarding in the February 5, 2003 briefing for Porter Goss and Jane Harman
ACCCE’s “72% of opinion leaders” claim is unsupported bunk
The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is running an advertisement at the Washington Post and The Hill websites which makes the following claim: 72% of opinion leaders support coal electricity. The ACCCE touts this claim repeatedly at their various websites, but there is so little information available about the study that produced this claim that it’s literally impossible to verify. However, given the number of inconsistencies in what little information is available, we can make an educated guess as to the accuracy of the 72% claim. If you click on the “America’s Power” advertisement (screen shots shown at right), you’re taken to this page, where the ACCCE claims “it’s easy to see why 72 percent of American opinion leaders support the use of coal.” On this page, however, there are four links on the page that all go to the same press release that describes the ACCCE study that produced this 72% number.
The Election Day press release makes a number of claims about an earlier survey that are inconsistent based exclusively on the information presented in the press release. The claims all rest on the study’s definition, provided at the bottom of the press release, of “opinion leaders,” aka “opinion elites.” They are defined as follows:
Happy Mother’s Day from America’s Health Insurance Plans and Mr. Baucus
by Donna Smith
Wow. America’s Health insurance Plan’s (AHIP) czar — and the woman our Congress and president have anointed as the nation’s architect of health reform — has offered a gift to all of America’s moms and women. The health insurance industry will stop charging you more – they’ll stop discriminating against you – so long as all of you are legally forced to buy their product.
It sounds to me a little like the old saw, “When did you stop beating your wife?” But then when I really thought about it, it made me sicker and sadder and more acutely aware of exactly what this nation’s leaders think of all of the mothers and daughters in the land this Mother’s Day 2009.
Here’s how the New York Times’ Robert Pear wrote it, “Insurance companies offered Tuesday to end the practice of charging higher premiums to women than to men for the same coverage.
Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, made the offer in testifying before the Senate Finance Committee.”
Yes sir and yes maam, Mr. Pear. Karen’s going to stop beating us real soon. I don’t buy that for a moment until they actually go all the way back and acknowledge the fact that the men who impregnated the women charged more for their gender-based ability to be impregnated are made to pay up for all the losses women have suffered at the hands of this unscrupulous industry.
Never mind for one moment that the single payer point of view was systematically shut out of that hearing and nearly all others (as evidenced by the arrests of eight advocates this week at the same hearing – though Mr. Pear chose not to report on those arrests, favoring to lead his piece with an Ignagni tribute).
Taxpayers are demanding that government enforce existing regulations and create more stringent rules to limit the excess and greed in banking, insurance, housing, and on Wall Street. But, in the rush to regulate, we can’t forget to oversee industrial agriculture. It is one of our most polluting and dangerous industries. Like the financial sectors, its practices have not been well regulated for the last thirty years. Let me run down a few of the major problems that have developed because of our poorly regulated U.S. agriculture.
Carbon Foot Print: The U.S. EPA estimated in 2007 that agriculture in the U.S. was responsible for about 18% of our carbon footprint, which is huge because the U.S. is the largest polluter in the world.1 This should include (but doesn’t) the manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers, fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping, electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating, and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other green house gases. Unfortunately, the EPA estimate of 18% still doesn’t include a large portion of the fuel, the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, some of the nitrous oxide, all of the CFCs and bromines, and most of the transport emissions. When they are counted, agriculture’s share of the U.S. carbon footprint will be at least 25 to 30%.
Oftentimes we see all greenhouse gasses as being equivalent to carbon dioxide (CO2). But, methane emissions are 21 times and nitrous oxides 310 times more damaging as greenhouse gasses than CO2. Since agriculture is one of the largest producers of methane and nitrous oxide, the extent of the agricultural impact is staggering. Unless we change our bad habits of food production and long distance delivery, we will not be able to deal with climate change.
Among the giant taboos afflicting Congress these days is the proposal to create a single payer health insurance system (often called full Medicare for everyone).
How can this be? Don’t the elected politicians represent the people? Don’t they always have their finger to the wind?
Well, single payer is only supported by a majority of the American people, physicians and nurses. They like the idea of public funding and private delivery. They like the free choice of doctors and hospitals that many are now denied by the HMOs.
There are also great administrative efficiencies when single player displaces the health insurance industry with its claims-denying, benefit-restricting, bureaucratically-heavy profiteering. According to leading researchers in this area, Dr. David Himmelstein and Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, single payer will save $350 billion annually.
Yet, on Capitol Hill and at the White House there are no meetings, briefings, hearings, and consultations about kinds of health care reforms that reform the basic price inflation, indifference to prevention, and discrimination of health insurers.
There is no place at the table for single payer advocates in the view of the Congressional leaders who set the agenda and muzzle dissenters.
Last month at a breakfast meeting with reporters, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to a question about health care with these revealing and exasperating words: “Over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer.”
Populism is Not a Style, It’s a People’s Rebellion Against Corporate Power
by Jim Hightower
When I lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, I got a call from a friend of mine who worked for the Congressional Research Service–a legislative agency that digs up facts, prepares briefing papers, and otherwise does research on any topic requested by members of Congress.
My friend could barely speak, because he was hooting, howling, and guffawing over a research question he’d just received. It was from the office of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the aloof and patrician Texas Democrat who was known on Capitol Hill primarily as a faithful emissary for Wall Street interests. At the time, Bentsen was contemplating a run for the presidency, and apparently he was searching for a suitable political identity. “What is a populist?” read the research query. “The senator thinks he might be one.”
Uh…no sir, you are not.
Bentsen was closer to being “The Man in the Moon” than he was to being a populist. Yet, he was hardly alone in trying to cloak himself as “The People’s Champion” while remaining faithful to the plutocratic powers. These days, there’s a whole flock of politicos and pundits doing this–from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck.
They are abetted by a media establishment that carelessly (and lazily) misapplies the populist label to anyone who claims to be a maverick and tends to bark a lot. Although the targets they’re usually barking at are poor people, teachers, minorities, unions, liberals, protestors, environmentalists, gays, immigrants, or other demonized groups that generally reside far outside the center of the power structure–the barkers are indiscriminately tagged as populist voices.
First of all, populism is not a style, nor is it a synonym for “popular outrage.” It is a historically grounded political doctrine (and movement) that supports ordinary folks in their ongoing democratic fight against the moneyed elites.
UNITED NATIONS – Environmental groups and indigenous rights activists are calling for the White House and U.S. Congress to ratify an international treaty against the use and production of certain hazardous chemicals.
“Time is running out. The Congress has to take a stand and fight for the lives of the contaminated people and environment of the North,” said Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council.
Carmen and other activists, who are attending international talks on the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in Geneva this week, say they have grave concerns about the impact of toxic chemicals on the health of native communities — especially those living in far northern parts of the globe.
Numerous studies have concluded that exposure to toxic chemicals, such as DDT, endosulfan, and lindane, is afflicting the indigenous populations in the Arctic region with illnesses of various descriptions.
OPS: We heard this crap from Clinton in the 90′s. How is this different? re-train to what? The problem is the OUTSOURCING. The problem is ‘Free’ Trade, the problem is we PAY corporations to move jobs offshore. Re-Train to What? If they can, they will sell us out again by moving any good paying jobs offshore of brining in more H-1B’s to do the jobs.
Obama vows to retrain unemployed
US President Barack Obama Friday announced a new scheme to use unemployment insurance as a springboard to get laid-off workers back to work, by offering expanded access to retraining education.
“Our unemployment insurance system should no longer be a safety net, but a stepping stone to a new future,” Obama said in excerpts of a speech he was due to give later on Friday after the release of monthly jobless figures.
“It should offer folks educational opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have, and give them the measurable and differentiated skills they need to not just get through these hard times, but to get ahead when the economy comes back,” Obama said.
The plan, coordinated with the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, will help unemployed workers get better access to Pell Grant scholarships worth up to 5,350 dollars and attend local community colleges, a US official said.
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) — The National Academy of Sciences said Friday it will review the lab work behind the FBI’s conclusion that Army scientist Bruce Ivins was responsible for the anthrax mailings that killed five people in 2001.
The FBI will pay the Washington-based society nearly $880,000 for the independent, 15-month committee review of the genetic and chemical studies investigators used to link Ivins to the attacks, academy spokeswoman Jennifer Walsh said.
The review, which was requested by the FBI, won’t assess the evidentiary value of the bureau’s detective work or the FBI’s conclusion that Ivins acted alone, the academy said.
Ivins’ lawyer, Paul Kemp, has said the scientist was innocent and would have been cleared if the case had gone to trial. Some of Ivins’ colleagues have expressed doubt about the FBI’s conclusions.
Ivins was a civilian researcher at Fort Detrick in Frederick. He killed himself in July as investigators were preparing to charge him.
The scientific review was first reported in The New York Times.
Judge slams convicted rabbi for putting molested daughter through grueling cross examination
Going to jail: A New York rabbi convicted of molesting his daughter has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Monsey rabbi Israel Weingarten was found guilty in March of abusing his daughter through much of her childhood. The trial was traumatic for his victim, who is now 27.
Weingarten acted as his own attorney and put his daughter through a grueling cross examination.
During the trial, Weingarten’s ex-wife testified against the rabbi and said that on one occasion she found him half-naked in bed with his daughter. On another occasion during the trial, Weingarten brought his own son to tears while cross examining him regarding a suicide letter.
BREAKING: Specter Quietly Changes “Cancer Cure” Fundraising Site After Denying It Was A Scandal
For an entire day in September 2008, the cable news networks reported on “Lipstickgate” — an episode that will forever be a blemish on journalism.
Today, I have to ask: Where’s the media outrage over a true scandal, Arlen Specter’s Cancergate? (Yes, I’m coining that term — to describe Specter tricking the public into donating to a cancer cure website that actually funds his political campaign.)
Also today, I believe I’m first to break some news: Arlen Specter’s campaign has quietly changed his “Specter for the Cure” website after initially denying it was a scandal. And I have the screenshots to prove it.
First, the back story. The hint of scandal was first dropped Sunday, May 3, in a Fort Worth Star Telegram article quoting OpenSecrets.org’s Sheila Krumholz:
As an example of a misleading Web site, she cites www.Specterforthecure.com. It appears to be a fundraising site for a reform movement to help Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., fund programs that will seek cures for major diseases and illnesses.
Actually, it’s a fundraising arm for the re-election of Specter, who last week switched parties from Republican to Democratic.
Unfortunately, “Watchdog” reporter Dave Lieber completely buried the lead in paragraph 23, potentially dooming it to obscurity. Until…the same publication resurrected the item the next day and put it in a headline, “Arlen Specter and his confusing web site.” This story elevates some important details:
Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity, (928) 310-6713Richard Mayol, Grand Canyon Trust, (928) 774-7488
Sandy Bahr, Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, (602) 999-5790
Suit Challenges New Uranium Exploration That Threatens the Grand Canyon
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – May 8 – The Center for Biological Diversity, Grand Canyon Trust, and Sierra Club today amended their lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of the Interior to challenge newly authorized uranium exploration near Grand Canyon National Park. The new uranium projects are located within a 1-million acre area that was required to be immediately withdrawn from new mining claims and exploration by a June 25, 2008 emergency resolution of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources. Today’s amendment challenges new uranium projects authorized by the Bureau of Land Management on April 23 and April 27, 2009. While the Bureau initially denied that new uranium exploration activities had been authorized, it has since acknowledged that exploration on the lands in question could begin whenever the companies wish.
“The Bureau’s new uranium exploration runs afoul of both the law and a congressional resolution protecting Grand Canyon,” said Taylor McKinnon, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is an agency in dire need of leadership from the new administration — the Grand Canyon deserves it.”
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources on June 25, 2008 voted 20-2 in favor of an emergency resolution requiring the secretary of the interior to immediately withdraw 1 million acres of public lands surrounding Grand Canyon from new uranium claims and exploration. New exploration authorized by then-Secretary Kempthorne violated the required withdrawal and prompted conservation groups to file the suit in September 2008. The suit cites violations of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and other laws. Today’s amendment incorporates the Bureau’s new uranium-drilling authorizations based on the same violations.
Emergency withdrawals have been enacted four times prior to this, most recently in 1981 and 1983 by the late Arizona Congressman Mo Udall and the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee to halt public lands mineral- and energy-leasing programs pursued by Interior Secretary James Watt. Congressman Raúl Grijalva also introduced the Grand Canyon Watersheds Protection Act in March of 2008 and again in 2009, legislation that would permanently withdraw from mineral extraction the same 1 million acres encompassed by the Committee resolution.
Witnesses say deaths of 147 people in three villages came after a sustained bombardment by American aircraft. Patrick Cockburn, in Herat, reports
Shouting “Death to America” and “Death to the Government”, thousands of Afghan villagers hurled stones at police yesterday as they vented their fury at American air strikes that local officials claim killed 147 civilians.
The riot started when people from three villages struck by US bombers in the early hours of Tuesday, brought 15 newly-discovered bodies in a truck to the house of the provincial governor. As the crowd pressed forward in Farah, police opened fire, wounding four protesters. Traders in the rest of Farah city, the capital of the province of the same name where the bombing took place, closed their shops, vowing they would not reopen them until there is an investigation.
A local official Abdul Basir Khan said yesterday that he had collected the names of 147 people who had died, making it the worst such incident since the US intervened in Afghanistan started in 2001. A phone call from the governor of Farah province, Rohul Amin, in which he said that 130 people had died, was played over the loudspeaker in the Afghan parliament in Kabul, sparking demands for more control over US operations.
Even if you don’t dig on swine, it has become impossible to avoid them. If you’re not pummeled by television reports about Wall Street oinkers, you’re bombarded by talk-radio rants about congressional pork and newspaper dispatches about swine flu.
These seemingly unrelated story lines share a common bond: They are each part of what might be called piggish capitalism — an economic theory that mixes subsidization, consolidation and deregulation and that now endangers us all.
Take the pandemic scare: The Associated Press says scientists suspect swine flu began in a Mexican town that “has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm” partially owned by the Smithfield company. That’s the same Smithfield that used three decades of lax anti-trust enforcement and corporate welfare to become one of the few mega-corporations now controlling global agribusiness.
Whether or not swine flu is ultimately attributed to this company is less important than the justifiable reason factory farming is a suspect. As Pew Charitable Trusts documented in 2008, researchers have long warned that industrial agriculture means high concentrations of waste, overuse of antibiotics and “continual cycling of viruses and other animal pathogens in large herds” — all factors that increase the possibility of diseases like swine flu.
OPS: Lets pass a law that says all Cop cars must have GPS trackers on them and the signals are publicly accessible. Well…it’s one way to cut down on the number of DUI’s
Court allows police to track vehicles with GPS
A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police were within their constitutional authority when they placed a GPS tracking device on a vehicle belonging to a man accused of stalking.
The decision was rendered following the denial of an appeal by Michael Sveum, who was convicted of aggravated stalking. Sveum petitioned the court to overturn his conviction, but the court ruled that police — who had obtained a warrant to track Sveum’s vehicle — did not in fact need a warrant so long as the device was on the outside of the vehicle.
“The State responds that no Fourth Amendment search or seizure occurs when police attach a GPS device to the outside of a vehicle when it is in a place accessible to the public and then use the device to track the vehicle while it is in public view,” wrote the judges. “We agree with the state.”
Short Sales: Banks Blocking Way Out Of Foreclosure Crisis
Brett Ellis, a real estate agent in Fort Myers, Fla., was thrilled when he got an offer for a property in Bell Tower Park in May 2008.
“It was a gorgeous property on the corner lot,” Ellis told the Huffington Post. The owner, who had lost his job, wanted to sell the apartment for a loss rather than go into foreclosure, a strategy known as a short sale.
The offer was for $350,000, and Ellis, who is a certified distressed property expert trained in executing such sales, knew it was as good an offer as he was going to get in this market. He immediately sent the paperwork into the bank.
He waited for four months. The bank finally told him it wouldn’t take anything less than $400,000 — a price Ellis was sure he could never get. In September, the buyer’s agent called to say, “You know what, we gotta move on, we gotta buy something else.”
KABUL — Video of the aftermath of a disputed incident involving American forces and the Taliban shows bloodied bodies of children laid out with other corpses, confirming international Red Cross findings at the two remote villages in western Afghanistan. The U.S. military does not contest that civilians died but called “extremely over-exaggerated” a report by an Afghan official that as many as 147 were killed.
Afghans blame aerial bombing Monday and Tuesday for the deaths and destruction. President Hamid Karzai said the airstrikes were “not acceptable” and said the government estimated the number of civilian deaths to be 125 to 130, according to an interview with CNN on Friday.
“We cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of Taliban, for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians,” he was quoted as saying.
NEW YORK — Even the homeless can’t escape the high price of a night in New York City.
City officials this month began charging rent to some families staying in homeless shelters.
The policy applies only to shelter residents who have income from jobs.
They could be expected to pay up to half their earnings.
Some shelter residents say the new rule will ruin their chances of saving enough money to get an apartment.
One single mother living in a Manhattan shelter tells The New York Times she got a letter saying she had to give up $336 of the $800 she makes each month as a cashier.
The city says it is only charging people who can afford to pay.
About 2,000 families are expected to be covered by the new rule.
NAIROBI (AFP) – A Kenyan man is seeking damages for anguish sustained during a week-long sex ban called by women’s groups in a bid to force political leaders to put their rivalry aside to work for the common good.
James Kimondo is suing the leaders of G10, a coalition of women’s groups that called for a national boycott to push the men into resolving the east African country’s political woes.
“Since the women called for the sex boycott, my wife has denied me my conjugal rights. This has caused me anxiety and sleepless night,” Kimondo said.
“I have been suffering mental anguish, stress, backaches, lack of concentration,” he told reporters outside the Nairobi High Court, where he lodged his petition for damages.
The group even urged prostitutes to join the strike.
The strike ended on Wednesday with the organisers claiming it had been a success.
(CNN) — Days after national Republicans launched a new campaign to broaden the party’s outreach, former upstart presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says the GOP is at risk of becoming “irrelevant as the Whigs.”
In an interview with the California newspaper The Visalia Times-Delta, Huckabee said the GOP would only further decline in influence should it alienate social conservatives — largely considered the most energetic and loyal faction of the party.
“Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs,” he said in reference to the American political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s.
“They’ll basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to the country. That will be the end of the party,” he said in the interview published Thursday.
Huckabee’s comments come the same day former Vice President Dick Cheney warned his party’s leaders not to moderate their views as they launch an effort to regain control in the nation’s Capitol.
“The idea that we ought to moderate basically means we ought to fundamentally change our philosophy,” Cheney also said. “I for one am not prepared to do that, and I think most of us aren’t,” he told conservative talk-radio host Scott Hennen.
WASHINGTON — Peel it and weep: It’ll cost an extra 2 cents to mail a letter starting Monday.
The price of a first-class stamp will climb to 44 cents, though people who planned ahead and stocked up on Forever stamps will still be paying the lower rate.
It’s the third year in a row that rates have gone up in May under a new system that allows annual increases as long as they don’t exceed the rate of inflation for the year before.
While the increase will bring in added income, the post office continues to struggle financially as more and more lucrative first-class mail is diverted to the Internet, and the recession discourages businesses from sending their usual volume of advertising.
OPS: with all of the other shit the’yre pulling now the least they could do is throw us a bone
Obama Makes Push For Credit Card Legislation (VIDEO)
Obama: Americans Have A Right To “Not Get Ripped Off”
AP: WASHINGTON — Putting himself on the side of fuming consumers, President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to send him legislation by Memorial Day that would put a tighter rein on the credit card industry.
“Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address released Saturday. “But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties and hidden fees that have become all-too common.”
OPS: Thom Hartmann has been talking about this regularly for over a month
On Wall Street: Beware of the sucker’s rally
The Bull Market Express may really be pulling out of the station, but Wall Street’s trains have a nasty tendency to derail just as passengers jostle for seats. Most recently, the S&P 500 soared 24 per cent over seven weeks ending in early January, only to plunge to a new low. It was a fairly typical sucker’s rally and bear markets often need more than one to create sufficient disillusionment for a definitive bottom.
The 2000–2002 bear market had three, with average gains of 21 per cent in the Dow Jones Industrials over 45 days.
The market is a cruel mistress indeed. Compounding the pain of big swoons, it kicks investors when they are down by luring them into sucker’s rallies – typically sharp but fleeting bounces in the middle of a bear market.
The current recovery has propelled the S&P 500 a third above its March low in just 60 days, convincing many sceptics that a new bull market has begun. Noted bear Doug Kass of Seabreeze Partners said the recent nadir may be a “generational low” and strategist Tobias Levkovich of Citigroup claimed many large investors who had feared another bear market rally may soon capitulate, pushing markets higher
Jefferson County bond sales may have violated rules
JPMorgan Chase may be sued by US regulators for violating securities laws and market rules related to the sale of bonds and interest-rate swaps to Jefferson County, Alabama.
The potential Securities and Exchange Commission action is the latest twist in a complex debt financing saga which has already led to charges against Jefferson County officials and which has left the municipality struggling to avoid default on over $3bn of debt, much of it taken on to improve its sewage system.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Banks critical of stress-test sceptics – May-08
Banks turn to markets in effort to plug holes – May-08
In depth: US banks – May-07
JPMorgan said in a regulatory filing, made late on Thursday just as the results of bank stress tests were being released, that it had been told about the SEC action on April 21. It said it “has been engaged in discussions with the SEC staff in an attempt to resolve the matter prior to litigation”. The bank had no further comment on Friday.
Jefferson County is one of the most indebted municipalities in the US due to its expensive overhaul of its sewage system. JPMorgan is one of the lenders which has repeatedly extended the deadline on payments due by Jefferson County on its debt and derivatives.
U.S. Economic Recovery: A Day Late, 7 Million Jobs Short
“…things are worse than at any time since the Great Depression,”
On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department released its employment figures for April, showing unemployment at a 25-year high with the rate climbing to 8.9 percent, but also suggesting that the pace of job loss has slowed and may soon turn around.
A report published by the Economic Policy Institute, however, disputes that assumption, pointing out that the economy needs to create seven million jobs to return to pre-recession employment levels.
“People tend to think that when you come out of a recession you get the labor market you had when you entered it,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute told Bloomberg News. “This time you may get something quite different.”
The study shows that while the unemployment rate may have been higher 15 months into the 1981 recession – 10.1 percent – this recession has seen the unemployment rate increase more rapidly than any previous recession. From December 2007 to March 2009, the unemployment rate rose 3.6 percent. Conversely, through 15 months of recession in 1981, the unemployment rate rose only 3.2 percent.
In that 15 months, the economy has shed a total of 5.1 million jobs. Simply to keep up with population growth, the U.S. economy needs to create roughly 127,000 jobs each month. That means that over the course of the last 15 months, the U.S. economy should have created 1.9 million jobs. Therefore, the U.S. economy is approximately 7 million jobs short of where it should be.
Amidst the contraction of the U.S. auto industry foreign bidders are lining up to pick off parts of Detroit’s Big Three.
As American automakers shed jobs and bleed cash, they have increasingly become objects of foreign appeal. Foreign companies have bought out much of the useful and productive assets, facilities, and real estate in this country already; but up until last year American automakers were still making money for themselves. Now however, that is likely set to change.
Chrysler has announced that it will file for bankruptcy, and if it is ever able to exit that bankruptcy, it would likely come under the majority stewardship of Italian automaker Fiat. This would give Fiat direct access to the world’s largest auto market, while also allowing it to become a player on the global stage.
General Motors, which has received several billion in federal bailouts, is also in a precarious position. The company may be forced to shed several domestic brands and foreign operations if it hopes to stay solvent. Selling off a bad brand like Buick, Pontiac, or Hummer is not actually that bad for GM. It essentially takes a profitless business and makes it someone else’s problem.
OPS: we have been sold out by every Administration and congress for at lease 30 years. Don’t fret – it’s almost over.
China’s Industrial Policy and It’s Impact on the American Economy
Richard McCormack
America’s wealth is no longer in America.
The following article originally appeared on TradeRefrorm.org.
This is an excellent though depressing summary of how we have lost so much of our manufacturing base, the forces are responsible for it, and the U.S. government’s culpability in this process, written by someone who has covered it closely for over a decade. It appeared in Manufacturing & Technology News on April 30, 2009.
In March, Manufacturing & Technology News editor Richard McCormack was asked to testify before the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission on the subject of “China’s Industrial Policy and its Impact on U.S. Companies, Workers and the American Economy.” The USCC was investigating China’s “pillar and strategic industries.” Here is the written testimony he presented to the commission.
Virtually all of the domestic manufacturing and technology executives and workers I cover understand the reason the United States is in its current economic predicament, and why it will take a long time for the country to recover. Few of them were “taken by surprise” by the country’s economic travails. They understand that the United States government has effectively ignored the essential role manufacturing plays in the economy. Its senior leadership has been distracted over the past 20 years and has barely acknowledged that the country is facing an unprecedented competitive challenge posed by dozens of countries, but particularly by China. Until it addresses the underlying cause of the financial sector’s collapse, which is the massive imbalance in trade, the glum economic mood of the country will not change. There are too many millions of Americans who intuitively know — because they shop — that the country no longer produces what it consumes. America’s wealth is no longer in America. The American industrial sector knows very well that until the government puts in place policies that encourage U.S.-based production of a new generation of consumer and industrial products, there can only be an anemic economic recovery.
OPS: Let’s see… the Government conspired with private corporate banks to lie to the American People. Fascism.
Banks successfully lobbied Fed to make ’stress tests’ less stressful.
This week, the government released the results of the stress tests performed on the nation’s 19 largest banks. According to the report, Bank of America’s $34 billion hole was the largest. The Wall Street Journal reports, however, that the Fed Reserve initially estimated Bank of America’s figure at more than $50 billion. Over the last few weeks, a number of banks successfully lobbied the Fed to make the stress tests less stressful:
The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation’s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining.
In addition, according to bank and government officials, the Fed used a different measurement of bank-capital levels than analysts and investors had been expecting, resulting in much smaller capital deficits.
OPS: No shit Sherlock – guess what? That’s not all they have issues with. Wake up and smell the crosses burning
Steele Calls GOP Base Bigoted, Says They ‘Rejected’ Romney Because They Have ‘Issues With Mormonism’
Michael SteeleIn December 2007, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) delivered a speech on religion, in which he addressed how his Mormon “faith would inform his Presidency if he were elected.” Though Romney claimed it was “not a Mormon speech,” it was widely believed to be an effort to dispel “skepticism about his religion” among some conservatives.
Since losing the GOP primary to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Romney has insisted that the Republican Party’s base doesn’t have a problem with Mormonism. “I believe that religion will not be a factor of a significant nature in selecting our nominee, regardless of who might run,” Romney told the Deseret News last month.
But RNC Chairman Michael Steele disagrees. While guest-hosting Bill Bennett’s radio show yesterday, Steele debated a caller who thought Romney could have beat Obama if Democrats and the New York Times hadn’t “co-opted” the GOP primaries.
Steele insisted, however, that Romney couldn’t have won because the GOP based “rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism”:
Climate change displacement has begun – but hardly anyone has noticed
The first evacuation of an entire community due to manmade global warming is happening on the Carteret Islands
Journalists – they’re never around when you want one. Two weeks ago a momentous event occurred: the beginning of the world’s first evacuation of an entire people as a result of manmade global warming. It has been marked so far by one blog post for the Ecologist and an article in the Solomon Times*. Where is everyone?
The Carteret Islands are off the coast of Bougainville, which, in turn, is off the coast of Papua New Guinea. They are small coral atolls on which 2,600 people live. Though not for much longer.
As the Ecologist’s blogger Dan Box witnessed, the first five families have moved to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. There are compounding factors – the removal of mangrove forests and some local volcanic activity – but the main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders’ vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible.
Worship is forced on 99 per cent of children without even asking what they think
Let us now put our hands together and pray. O God, we gather here today to ask you to free our schoolchildren from being forced to go through this charade every day. As you know, O Lord, because You see all, British law requires every schoolchild to participate in “an act of collective worship” every 24 hours. Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray – or pretend to.
If they refuse to bow their heads to You, they are punished. This happened to me, because I protested that there is no evidence whatsoever that You exist, and plenty of proof that shows the texts describing You are filled with falsehoods. When I pointed this out, I was told to stop being “blasphemous” and threatened with detention. “Shut up and pray,” a teacher told me on one occasion. Are you proud, O Lord?
Forcing children to take part in religious worship every day is a law worthy of a theocracy, not a liberal democracy where 70 per cent of adults never attend a religious ceremony. That’s why the Association of Teachers and Lecturers – one of the teachers’ unions – has recently moved to ask the Government to stop forcing its members to take part in this practice.
OPS: Some interesting comments on this one can befound here. Let’s not forget that the Federal Reserve is a PRIVATE FOR PROFIT CORPORATION. He might as well be giving control to ENRON
Huh? The Fed failed in its banking oversight role and cost us $12.8T!
…and now he wants to give them more power?
AP sources: Obama wants Fed to be finance supercop
WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve could become the supercop for “too big to fail” companies capable of causing another financial meltdown under a proposal being seriously considered by the White House.
The Obama administration told industry officials on Friday that it was leaning toward making such a recommendation, according to officials who attended a private one-hour meeting between President Barack Obama‘s economic advisers and representatives from about a dozen banks, hedge funds and other financial groups.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other officials made it clear they were not inclined to divide the job among various regulators as has been suggested by industry and some federal regulators. Geithner told the group that one organization needs to be held responsible for monitoring systemwide risk.
“Committees don’t make decisions,” said Geithner, according to one participant.
Officials from the Treasury Department and National Economic Council, which hosted the meeting, told participants that the Fed was considered the most likely candidate for the job, according to several officials who attended or were briefed on the discussions.
So this is how the auto bailout will work. American taxpayers pump tens of billions into rescuing General Motors from bankruptcy. Then GM pays us back by shipping more jobs overseas–the equivalent of four assembly plants. The federal money will directly subsidize more imports from abroad, enabling GM to double its car production in Mexico, South Korea and China and selling the cars into the US market.
Can someone explain how this is in our national interest? If that is the best deal Obama’s auto czars can come up with, then this angry taxpayer says: laissez-faire–let GM go down. Better to settle for bankruptcy court than provide public financing to further the destruction of US manufacturing.
The Obama administration has stumbled into the middle of the political train wreck known as globalization. The president is an orthodox free trader, notwithstanding his vague promises of reforming trade agreements. But the auto deal is not much of a recovery plan. It begins to look like another sly victory for the old order that has failed. The business plan the federal government is advancing for GM follows the free-trade model created by Robert Rubin and other Clintonistas during the 1990s. Do whatever you can to help US multinationals succeed in the global trading system and assume this represents the national interest– never mind the damaging consequences for US production and value-added jobs. That is how America became a debtor nation with its steadily weakening industrial base and stagnant wages. That condition became the predicate that led to financial crisis.
The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said.
The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The military commissions have allowed the trial of terrorism suspects in a setting that favors the government and protects classified information, but they were sharply criticized during the administration of President George W. Bush. “By any measure, our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” then-candidate Barack Obama said in June 2008.
Right now, the biggest money in the country is arrayed to prevent any sort of public or single-payer health option from even being considered, much less appearing on the slate of choices that will be worked over by the leaders we elect every ballot cycle for final passage into the law that governs every American.
Instead, the biggest money in the country is striving to assure that private gain wins over public good and they’ve poured massive amounts of money into lobbying our leadership.
So, every single day, the lobbyists are telling the people we trust with our vote each cycle, exactly how we should be governed. According to the big money.
Just a couple days ago, one of us wrote about the group of SINGLE PAYER HEROES who, in civil disobedience, dared to call into question the fact that a Democratic-majority was hosting a ’roundtable’ to discuss ‘health care reform’ options without including ONE advocate of single-payer options.
As they were hauled off, the lobbyists laughed when Senator Baucus joked with friends, “we need more police.”
And now, apparently, the big money has bought the services of the big guns message-monger, Dr. Frank Luntz, to scientifically achieve the deception his ilk has grown rich in providing to corporate non-citizens of these United States so as to best achieve private gain’s victory over the public interest.
Eric Cantor’s already new-and-improved National Council for a New America — Now, with the effervescent cleaning action of Sarah Palin! — just can’t catch a break.
It — or I should say they, three middle-aged white guys — launched last Saturday with a “listening tour” more platitudinous than receptive, which nevertheless earned the wrath of their party’s bombastic censor, Rush Limbaugh, who, being a radio talk show host, naturally despises listening. That was major-league strike Number One.
All week, throughout the week, they took their hits in other media as well: where they staged the forum (at a suburban pizzeria), whom they invited or didn’t invite (e.g. Palin), who attended (virtually all Republicans), what was said (see above) — all of it suffered a deafening level of scrupulous ridicule that desperate listening-tourists would much prefer to do without.
But, as the Politico reported Thursday, then came what may yet prove the real coup de grâce: “Social conservatives are blasting the [NCNA] … as a misguided and weak-kneed initiative that is out of touch with the GOP rank and file.”
Tomorrow marks Michael Steele’s 100th day as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). While many members of the GOP were hoping for a dynamic spokesman that could communicate conservative values to the American public, what they ended up getting was a gaffe machine.
Since taking office, Steele has become most known for statements about how the GOP needs to “uptick” its image with “everyone, including one-armed midgets“; how he likes to “wear my hat backwards, you know, because that’s how we roll in the Northeast”; and how he has “slum love” for Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA). ThinkProgress’s Victor Zapanta has put together a video of the highlights. Watch it:
Stress Tested: Has Geithner’s Bank Confidence Game Worked?
From his earliest days as Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner’s biggest challenge has been restoring confidence in America’s fragile banks without taking the politically costly step of asking Congress for more money. To judge by the results of the government-run stress tests released Thursday afternoon, Geithner has somehow pulled it off – at least for now.
Not that three months of supervisory scrutiny of the country’s top 19 banks hasn’t produced some grim news. If the economy dropped to Depression-era levels of unemployment and credit shrinkage, according to the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, those firms could lose nearly $600 billion by the end of 2010, on top of the $350 billion they’ve already lost since mid-2007. Bank of America needs nearly $33.9 billion in new capital, Wells Fargo needs $13.7 billion and Citigroup needs $5.5 billion. Altogether, 10 of the top 19 need $74.6 billion in additional capital. (See who’s who in Obama’s office.)
The Fed’s doing it. The Bank of England says it plans to do it, too. With printing money (or as they say today, “quantitative easing”) back in fashion, TIME reflects on Germany’s efforts in the 1920s — and the crisis that followed.
DOJ Report Reaches “Damning” Conclusions for Bybee and Yoo
An ethics report prepared by H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), reached “damning” conclusions about numerous cases of “misconduct” in the advice attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee provided the Bush administration, according to legal and Congressional sources familiar with the findings and news reports.
The report, which also may be critical of legal opinions authorizing domestic surveillance activities, recommends state bar associations conduct a review of Yoo and Bybee’s legal work to determine whether they should face disciplinary action, including disbarment.
Bybee, now an appeals court judge in San Francisco, signed the so-called August 1, 2002 torture memo and other controversial legal opinions that Yoo helped to draft. Bybee was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and Yoo was a deputy assistant attorney general.
After pouring billions of dollars of federal money into fuel cell car research over decades, the US Department of Energy is cutting back on future spending. In the 2010 budget that the administration is submitting to Congress, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu proposed slashing more than $100 million from the Energy Department’s hydrogen program. That’s a cut of almost 60 percent and one that will almost entirely come from transportation.
Dr. Chu said yesterday that he holds little hope for fuel cell cars in the coming decades. In a press briefing, he said, “We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no.’”
he National Hydrogen Association and the US Fuel Cell Coalition quickly issued a joint statement criticizing the program cuts, but the federal government and the auto industry have already switched direction toward hybrid gas-electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and other battery-powered vehicles. “We think it is too early to be picking winning and losing technologies,” said Patrick Serfass, the National Hydrogen Association’s vice president for technology, in an interview with Edmunds.com.
Dr. Chu pointed to significant stumbling blocks to widespread adoption of hydrogen fuel cell cars, including the lack of a nationwide fueling infrastructure. Plug-in cars—such as plug-in hybrids and pure battery-electric cars—also face significant obstacles in reaching a mass market, including lack of an electric recharging infrastructure and high costs for next-generation lithium ion car batteries. However, the obstacles for introducing those cars— which can be powered via the electric grid—are viewed as solvable, even though it could take five to ten years before plug-in cars reach 1 percent of the new car market.
HOUSTON — Victims of sexual assault are getting bills, rejection letters and pushy calls from bill collectors while a state crime victims’ fund sits full of cash, Local 2 Investigates reported Thursday.
“I’m the victim, and yet here I am. I’m asked to pay this bill and my credit’s going to get hurt,” said a single mom from Houston.She received bills marked, “delinquent,” after she visited a hospital where police told her to have evidence gathered. Officers assured her she would not pay a dime for that rape kit to be handled.”That was unreal,” she said. “I never thought I’d be out anything for what I went through.”She was 44 years old when she was attacked in her own bed. She said she awoke to find a burly 15-year-old friend of her son assaulting her. He was found delinquent, meaning he was convicted, in juvenile court, thanks in part to the evidence gathered with the rape kit.”It is set up legislatively so that the criminal justice system pays for whatever evidence collection occurs,” said Kelly Young, with the Houston Area Women’s Center, a rape crisis facility.Police departments are reimbursed for up to $700 by the Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund, but many departments cover the bills if they exceed that.
In a recent radio address on Radio Chicagoland Senator Richard (Dick) Durbin remarked on power the financial services industry still wields at a time when that industry is theoretically under great scrutiny: “The banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
The banking lobby won a significant victory in Congress on May 1, 2009 when 12 Democrats joined a united Republican Caucus to vote down an amendment to President Obama’s housing bill. At issue was a measure that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.
The House version of the bill, which provides wide housing assistance and consumer protection measures, passed with the amendment, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently said she does not expect the measure to be included in the final bill since the Senate voted it down.
CIA Admits That Info About Torture Briefings For Dems May Not Be Accurate
As I noted below, newly released documents appear to show that according to the CIA, officials briefed Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats back in 2002 about the use of torture techniques on terror suspects.
But a letter that accompanied these documents, written by the head of the CIA, appears to clearly concede that the information in the docs about who was briefed and when may not be accurate or reliable.
Republicans are pointing to the documents — which were produced by the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence, and sent to select members of Congress — to charge that Pelosi and other Dems have been lying about what they knew about waterboarding and when.
But the docs were accompanied by a letter from CIA chief Leon Panetta that appears to suggest the CIA can’t promise that the info is right. The letter was sent along with the documents to GOP Rep Pete Hoekstra, a leading critic of Dems on torture, and Dem Rep Silvestre Reyes, the chairman of the intelligence committee.
I’ve obtained the letter, and a PDF is right here. This is the key part (click to enlarge):
Emphasis mine. “MFR” apparently refers to “memorandum for the record.”
As you can see, this letter says that the info about briefings is taken from notes based on the “best recollections” of those who were there, adding:
In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.
owa Republicans are trying to dismiss claims that the vote count in Tuesday's Iowa Caucus was wrong. An Iowa voter told a local TV station yesterday that he noticed a 20-vote discrepancy in the count - and that Rick Santorum was the real winner of the Caucuses. Republican Party officials, though, are sticking to their first count - showing Mitt Romney as the winner by 8-votes - and there will be no recount.
The Republican Party has launched a war on voters around the nation this year with strict new laws that will disenfranchise over 5 million Americans. They claim these laws are necessary to combat so-called voter fraud. Yet in Iowa - where there are no such laws - and where a very, very close and questionable election was just held - Republicans don't seem to care at all about getting it right.
Clearly - the war on voters isn't about making sure the people's voices are represented accurately - it's about making sure poor people, young people, and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats - can't vote at all.
" We the corporations" On
January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations
are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. __________
MOVE
to AMEND
a project of the CAMPAIGN TO LEGALIZE Democracy
Help end Corporate personhood
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
WATCH IT: Why Are Sex Assault Victims Getting Bills?
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
