Archive for September, 2009
We Can’t Afford to Wait
OPS: the public option is not the answer – HR676″ Medicare For All” is. The Public Option is a Judas Goat
MoveOn.org members and R.E.M. speak out for health care reform. We need a public option now.
Millions of Americans can’t afford to wait for real health care reform. But some in Washington are pushing delays, like the public option “trigger.” To remind them of the urgent need for reform, MoveOn and R.E.M. made a powerful new video.
YouTube – We Can’t Afford to Wait.
People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That
Wendell Berry’s now-famous formulation, “eating is an agricultural act” — is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today.
This article is adapted from Michael Pollan’s introduction to Bringing It to the Table, a collection of Wendell Berry’s writings out this fall from Counterpoint.
A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story bearing the headline Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the paper’s agriculture reporter, said that “after being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have found a receptive ear in the White House.”
Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves — the “food movement,” as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food — local and organic and pastured — are thriving, farmers’ markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture’s census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to “sustainability” and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors. Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there have been more words than deeds — but some of those words are astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a reporter for Time that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil”; he went on to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other, the healthcare crisis.
Wall Street Is Gambling on How Soon Old People Will Die
It sounds too gruesome to be true, but the bankers have already shaken the silver out of everything that had value in America — except for the elderly.
Now we know why America’s oligarchs are fighting to keep the rest of us stuck in the world’s worst health care system: the more we die, the more billions Wall Street will earn. A recent article in The New York Times exposed how Wall Street is licking its lips over a new scheme to make hundreds of billions in profits by creating financial instruments that will profit off of millions of terminally-ill Americans’ agony, desperation, and death. The only thing standing in the way of this massive new Wall Street scheme is the kind of health care reform that might allow Americans to live longer lives. Yep, this is what we spent trillions of dollars bailing out Wall Street for: so that they can kill us for profit.
It sounds like something out of an old sci-fi flick like War of the Worlds, with America’s billionaires as the brutal aliens harvesting our humanoid blood and tissue to fertilize their country club golf courses. Yet it makes logical sense: Wall Street has nowhere else to turn for its fat profits. Our banking class has already destroyed everything else in this country that had any value, from America’s industrial base to the American Dream itself, its housing market–whatever Wall Street could securitize, leverage, flip or restructure, they destroyed for good. There’s nothing left to strip and pawn — except for our lives.
Kucinich Responds To Obama’s Address To Congress
Correspondent Jack Rice speaks with Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) following President Obamas address to Congress.
via YouTube – Kucinich Responds To Obama’s Address To Congress.
Study Reveals How Much Cellphone Radiation You’re Getting
Researchers are divided on whether radiation from cellphones pose health risks or not. Now, one nonprofit 
organization adds some hard data to the argument: the radiation emission profiles of more than 1,200 cell phone models. The data won’t resolve the debate, but does give concrete information to consumers to help them make their buying decisions.
American cellphone radiation standards don’t make enough of an allowance for safety and ignore the impact of electromagnetic radiation on children, says the Environmental Working Group, which analyzed the radiation emissions from 1,268 cellphones. The group also looked at a number of recent research studies and supporting documentation from the handset makers to arrive at its conclusions.
“We think that based on current standards there’s increased risk of developing brain tumors in long term users — people who have used cellphones for more than 10 years — from radiation in cellphones,” says Olga Naidenko, a senior scientist at EWG, who worked on the report for about 10 months
via Study Reveals How Much Cellphone Radiation You’re Getting | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.
How the GOP Pays Off its ‘Base’ of Elites
by Len Hart
GOP tax cuts either bribe or pay off the shrinking class of ruling elites that currently make up just one percent of the US population. This class of ruling oligarchs owes its existence to Ronald Reagan’s infamous tax cut of 1982 which initially benefited the upper quintile. Subsequent tax cuts have enriched this class even as the percentage benefiting has shrunk –from 20 percent to just one percent. Even member of this class should be asking themselves: when do I fall off the ladder? As a result of GOP largesse, this ‘ruling’elite of just one percent owns more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined. Clearly –everyone not a member of this class amounts for very, very little among the leadership of GOP.
The US ‘ruling elite’ have become oligarchs. Bush Jr said: ‘You are either for us or you are agin’ us’. Surely, he had his base in mind. He waged war on their behalf just as Rome waged war to benefit the nobles. If you are not ‘elite’, you are, like most of us, among the the ass-kissin’ paupers. Revolutions have begun upon less cause!
GOP inequities depress the economy. When more and more have less and less to spend, what is an economy to do but shrink? Economists call it ‘contraction’ but by any term, it results in recession/depression.
via The Existentialist Cowboy: How the GOP Pays Off its ‘Base’ of Elites.
America’s Most Toxic Town (VIDEO)
Picher, Oklahoma is so toxic as a result of lead and zinc mining that the government started a buyout program four years ago to get residents to move out. There are still a few holdouts in this ghost town.
WATCH:
via America’s Most Toxic Town (VIDEO).
Another Mysterious Electrocution Death in Iraq
Jeremy Scahill
Adam Vernon Hermanson “was a natural-born leader,” according to his brother, Jesse. In 2002, just before his eighteenth birthday, Adam enlisted in the US military, armed with the required permission from his parents because he was not legally an adult. Adam spent six years in the Air Force. In all, he did three tours in Iraq and one in Uzbekistan. After he was honorably discharged from the military in early 2009 with the rank of staff sergeant, Hermanson took up employment as a private bodyguard in his hometown of Las Vegas, where, according to his family, he protected a wealthy individual. But according to Jesse, Adam was interested in returning to Iraq as a private military contractor. “He had been talking about it a lot; he was interested in Blackwater,” Jesse recalls.
In May, Adam signed a contract that would put him back in the action–as a private contractor for Triple Canopy, the company that the State Department has chosen to take over much of Blackwater’s security work in Iraq. According to his cousin, Paul Moreno, Hermanson was offered about $350 a day for a four-month contract. “It happened real fast,” Jesse remembers. “He didn’t want the family to know and get worried. He actually did it behind the backs of the family–my mom found out a day and a half before he was going. We were trying to change his mind and say it wasn’t worth the money, but he felt that he needed to do it to pay off bills and get a house and be financially secure.” Jesse adds, “He had also tried to get a job in Vegas as a Metro Police officer, and they denied him even with all of his training.” Adam’s mother, Patricia, says, “We know he disliked it. His plan was that after four months he was going to leave Triple Canopy and get a house.”
via Another Mysterious Electrocution Death in Iraq.
The Lessons from History on Health Care Reform
Robert Reich
With Congress returning from recess to consider health care legislation and the President set to deliver a major address on the subject to both houses of Congress tomorrow, a bit of history may be in order. An excellent starting place David Blumenthal’s and James Marone’s “The Heart of Power,” which I reviewed for the New York Times this past weekend. Here are the major points:
Universal health care has bedeviled, eluded or defeated every president for the last 75 years. Franklin Roosevelt left it out of Social Security because he was afraid it would be too complicated and attract fierce resistance. Harry Truman fought like hell for it but ultimately lost. Dwight Eisenhower reshaped the public debate over it. John Kennedy was passionate about it. Lyndon Johnson scored the first and last major victory on the road toward achieving it. Richard Nixon devised the essential elements of all future designs for it. Jimmy Carter tried in vain to re-engineer it. The first George Bush toyed with it. Bill Clinton lost it and then never mentioned it again. George W. expanded it significantly, but only for retirees.
via Robert Reich’s Blog: The Lessons from History on Health Care Reform.
GOP Lawmakers Treat President Obama’s Joint Address To Congress Like A Town Hall Protest
Tonight during his joint address to Congress, President Obama attempted to set the record straight on some of the “key controversies” surrounding the health care debate. While it’s normal for members of the opposition party to occasionally not clap at statements with which they disagree, congressional Republicans went further tonight, being outright rude at times.
At one point, President Obama addressed the myth that his health care proposals would insure undocumented immigrants: “This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”
In response, Republicans not only began booing him, but Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted out, “LIE!” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) shot an angry look in his direction, and Vice President Biden shook his head. The rudeness shocked even veteran political observers such as NBC’s Chuck Todd, who wrote on Twitter, “Wow. What’s next a duel?” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough also wrote, “Whoever shouted out that the president was lying is a dumbass who should show the President respect.” On MSNBC after the speech, Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman said, “The Republicans were mostly stage props in this speech tonight and they behaved like it.”
Blue Cross Blue Shield Execs Profited From Bogus Bonuses
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota used premium payments to fund $15 million in employee bonuses, cover $35,000 for a retirement party and pay for other questionable expenses, according to a state audit released Tuesday.
Insurance Commissioner Adam Hamm said he ordered the company to make changes after insurance examiners found inappropriate or excessive expenses paid with policyholders’ dollars. He said the nearly inch-thick report raised questions about compensation, travel policies, investments and severance packages.
Hamm said the report showed “a lack of judgment” by board members and senior management. It was the first audit of the nonprofit company since 2004.
“I expect and demand that those things won’t happen again,” Hamm said.
via Blue Cross Blue Shield Execs Profited From Bogus Bonuses.
A Letter From Ted Kennedy
The text of the letter from Senator Edward M. Kennedy referenced by President Obama in Wednesday’s address to a Joint Session of Congress. 
May 12, 2009
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me — and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.
On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.
You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.
via A Letter From Ted Kennedy : NPR.
Full text: President Barack Obama’s health care speech
President Barack Obama’s remarks before the joint session of
Congress,as prepared for delivery:
Madame Speaker, Vice President Biden, Members of Congress, and the American people:
When I spoke here last winter, this nation was facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We were losing an average of 700,000 jobs per month. Credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse.
As any American who is still looking for work or a way to pay their bills will tell you, we are by no means out of the woods. A full and vibrant recovery is many months away. And I will not let up until those Americans who seek jobs can find them; until those businesses that seek capital and credit can thrive; until all responsible homeowners can stay in their homes. That is our ultimate goal. But thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January, I can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink.
via Full text: President Barack Obama’s health care speech – Politico Staff – POLITICO.com.
Obama’s Plea: ‘Deliver On Health Care’
President Obama on Wednesday night is expected to forcefully take
on critics of his effort to overhaul health care, and push again for a plan that would create new competition in the insurance marketplace.
“The time for bickering is over,” Obama, is expected to say in a rare address to a joint session of Congress. “The time for games has passed.”
Speech excerpts released by the White House don’t carry the words “public insurance option,” the most controversial piece of overhaul legislation favored by liberal Democrats. But in the past, Obama has suggested that the public option would be one way — though not the only way — to create a more competitive insurance market. And White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the president will address the issue.
“You will hear the president tonight talk about how he thinks the public option is still valuable,” Gibbs told NPR Wednesday morning.
Goodbye To Bipartisanship?
via Obama’s Plea: ‘Deliver On Health Care’ : NPR.
Schumer: Let’s Use Reconciliation Wherever We Can
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), in an interview with The American Prospect, said he’s “always favored using reconciliation for the good parts” of the health care reform bill. 
“We’ve looked at it and you can’t use reconciliation for everything, [but] you can use it for a good number of things,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with using it for the places where you can use it and then trying to get the 60 votes on the places where when you can’t. You’d be surprised — the number of places where you can use it is larger than we first thought.”
He declined to be more specific.
Schumer also said piece-by-piece reconciliation would strengthen the bill.
via Schumer: Let’s Use Reconciliation Wherever We Can | TPMDC.
Palin Adds Voice to Republican Calls for Killing Medicare
Jon Ponder – Pensito Review »
Eschewing Facebook, her usual platform of choice, Sarah Palin blogged an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal yesterday in which she joined other GOP pols and operatives who have recently called for killing Medicare by privatizing it:
Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.
While Republican pols currently serving won’t dare even hint about their support for killing Medicare, those who, like Palin, are out of office, can afford to be honest about their party’s true intentions. As we noted last month, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey — now a GOP lobbyist and one of the prime, behind-the-scenes operatives in the Tea Bagger movement — described Medicare as “tyranny” on “Meet the Press.” (In 1995, Armey also said “Medicare is a program I would have no part of in a free world.”) And on August 19, Tom DeLay, the disgraced former Republican House leader, said on MSNBC’s “Hardball, “I want Medicare to be privatized. It shouldn’t be a government program. It’s the thing that is driving up costs. Not [the need] to have a public option. It’s Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP — the government-run programs — that are running up costs. That’s where the reform ought to be.”
via Pensito Review » Palin Adds Voice to Republican Calls for Killing Medicare.
A skull that rewrites the history of man
It has long been agreed that Africa was the sole cradle of human evolution. Then these bones were found in Georgia…
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
One of the skulls discovered in Georgia, which are believed to date back 1.8 million years
One of the skulls discovered in Georgia, which are believed to date back 1.8 million years
The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man.
The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.
via A skull that rewrites the history of man – Science, News – The Independent.
US job openings fall to lowest level in 9 years
Job openings fell to the lowest level in nine years in July, according to a Labor Department report Wednesday, as businesses remain reluctant to hire despite signs the economy is improving.
The department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, or JOLTS report, found that businesses and government advertised 2.4 million open positions on the last day in July, down from 2.5 million in June. That’s also the fewest openings since the department began compiling the data in December 2000.
Still, jobs are being added in some sectors, as companies seek more health care, technology and child care workers.
via US job openings fall to lowest level in 9 years.
Treasury: Millions more foreclosures coming
msnbc.com
Official says a strong housing market is crucial for the economy
Only 12 percent of U.S. homeowners eligible for loan modifications under the Obama administration’s housing rescue plan have had their mortgages reworked, and millions more foreclosures are coming, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday.
A Treasury report showed 360,165 people had their monthly payments reduced through August, up from 235,247 through July, but a senior Treasury official conceded much more must be done to soften the impact of a severe and prolonged housing crisis.
Treasury has begun releasing monthly reports on the loan modification program, called the Home Affordable Modification Program or HAMP
via Treasury: Millions more foreclosures coming – Real estate- msnbc.com.
How the Federal Reserve Contributes to Crises
by Bill Bergman – Global Research
If your clients had a bad year last year, it might seem easy to conclude that you shouldn’t take it personally, because your clients were far from alone. After all, market prices for individual investments are driven by macro-economic factors as well as factors specific to the investments at hand. And the financial crisis significantly undermined economic and investment confidence in many corners of the markets.
On the other hand, there could be a good reason to take the meltdown personally. Our crisis has had important regulatory underpinnings. Those institutions we’ve created to help “stabilize” banking markets and to “protect investors” may not have done what they advertise heading into the crisis, as well as when dealing with it.
On April 27, we held a conversation with Ed Kane, Martin Mayer, and Walker Todd–three people who have great depth and experience in understanding the plumbing, history, and effects of the regulatory infrastructure of our financial markets. Kane is professor of finance at Boston College, past president of the American Finance Association, and co-founder of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. Martin Mayer is a prolific financial journalist, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, and the author of more than 30 books on financial market issues. Todd worked in the Federal Reserve System as an attorney and economist and is now affiliated with the American Institute for Economic Research. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Bill Bergman: Where does this financial crisis rank historically?
via How the Federal Reserve Contributes to Crises.
“Wall Street’s 9/11″: Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?
by Ellen Brown 
A year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, questions still swirl around its collapse. Lawrence MacDonald, whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense came out in July 2009, maintains that the bank was not in substantially worse shape than other major Wall Street banks. He says Lehman was just “put to sleep. They put the pillow over the face of Lehman Brothers and they put her to sleep.” The question is, why?
The Lehman bankruptcy is widely considered to be the watershed event that changed the rules of the game for those Wall Street banks considered “too big to fail.” The bankruptcy option was ruled out once and for all. The taxpayers would have to keep throwing money at the banks, no matter how corrupt, ill-managed or undeserving. As Dean Baker noted in April 2009:
“Geithner has supposedly ruled out the bankruptcy option because when he, along with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, tried letting Lehman Brothers go under last fall, it didn’t turn out very well. Of course, it is not necessary to go the route of an uncontrolled bankruptcy that Geithner and Co. pursued with Lehman. . . . [But] the Geithner crew insists that there are no alternatives to his plan; we have to just keep giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks . . . , further enriching the bankers who wrecked the economy.”
via “Wall Street’s 9/11″: Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?.
Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains in Last Economic Expansion
— Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007
flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.[1]
During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.
The last economic expansion began in November 2001 and ended in December 2007, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which means the Piketty-Saez data essentially cover that expansion. The last time such a large share of the income gain during an expansion went to the top 1 percent of households — and such a small share went to the bottom 90 percent of households — was in the 1920s (see Figure 1). [2]
Robert Reich Explains The Public Option In 70 Seconds
Tonight, President Barack Obama will address a joint session of Congress and urge lawmakers to pass health care reform. Naturally, it will also be an occasion to address the American people and once again explain the core ingredients of the plan. All eyes will be focused on the extent to which Obama makes or does not make the case for the public option, a matter about which the White House has continually sent mixed signals.
By contrast, former Labor Secretary and Huffington Post contributor Robert Reich has been a clear and outspoken supporter of the public option and, in a video that’s been bouncing around the Internet this week, Reich states the case for the public option in a very clear in succinct fashion. As many have pointed out, it takes Reich only 70 seconds to fully explain what the public option is and does. (He spend the rest of the video explaining the pernicious effects of health care lobbyists and urging the public to act.) It can be done! It will be interesting to see if Obama is capable of a similar explanation. To my mind, Reich sets the standard.
WATCH:
via Robert Reich Explains The Public Option In 70 Seconds.
Amazing New NASA Images From Hubble Telescope (PHOTOS)
Check out these newly released photos from the refurbished Hubble Telescope. They are not to be believed! Be sure to pick your favorite space shot.
From NASA:
“What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!”
via Amazing New NASA Images From Hubble Telescope (PHOTOS).
City council backs Olympics funding pledge
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES ::
In a historic vote that could transform Chicago or saddle future generations with Olympic debt, the City Council on Wednesday authorized Mayor Daley to sign a host city contract that amounts to an unlimited guarantee from Chicago taxpayers.
The 49-0 votes sends a message loud and clear to International Olympic Committee members — one of whom was in the City Council chambers to witness the nearly two-hour debate.
Chicago may have hesitated to sign on the dotted line. But, there’s no hesitation now.
“This is not about Richard M. Daley’s legacy. This is about the city of ChicagoŠ.This is a journey. A journey requires all of us being committed,” Mayor Daley told aldermen minutes before the roll was called.
via City council backs Olympics funding pledge :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: City Hall.
Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession
The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found.
This dominance helps explain how, even after the Fed failed to foresee the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the central bank has largely escaped criticism from academic economists. In the Fed’s thrall, the economists missed it, too.
“The Fed has a lock on the economics world,” says Joshua Rosner, a Wall Street analyst who correctly called the meltdown. “There is no room for other views, which I guess is why economists got it so wrong.”
via Priceless: How The Federal Reserve Bought The Economics Profession.
A New Movement: Health Care as a Civil Right
By Dennis Kucinich
Dear Friends,
There is only one true health care public option: Single payer. It covers everyone, all basic health care needs, with doctor of choice. No more premiums, co-pays or deductibles. All health care assets in America would become not-for-profit. The bill already exists. It is HR 676. Congressman John Conyers and I wrote the bill. Our bill has the support of 85 co-sponsors in the House. And it is backed by a growing national movement of labor, doctors, and nurses. The movement needs you. Please join me for tomorrow’s national conference call at 10:00pm EDT. Please call toll-free 1-800-230-1096.
The hour has arrived to begin anew the Civil Rights Movement, this time for Health Care for All. I am calling upon you to become a force in this movement. Go to Health Care as A Civil Right at Kucinich.us to learn how you can circulate a single-payer petition and organize in your community. Please help fund this effort. Go to Kucinich.us now, contribute.
via OpEdNews – Article: A New Movement: Health Care as a Civil Right.
25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis
Angelo Mozilo – - TIME
The son of a butcher, Mozilo co-founded Countrywide in 1969 and built it into the largest mortgage lender in the U.S. Countrywide wasn’t the first to offer exotic mortgages to borrowers with a questionable ability to repay them. In its all-out embrace of such sales, however, it did legitimize the notion that practically any adult could handle a big fat mortgage. In the wake of the housing bust, which toppled Countrywide and IndyMac Bank (another company Mozilo started), the executive’s lavish pay package was criticized by many, including Congress. Mozilo left Countrywide last summer after its rescue-sale to Bank of America. A few months later, BofA said it would spend up to $8.7 billion to settle predatory lending charges against Countrywide filed by 11 state attorneys general.
Full List
Blameworthy
Poll Results
via Angelo Mozilo – 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis – TIME.
Stock Market Worry: Insiders Are Heavy Sellers
– TIME
Any time corporate executives and directors are heavily selling their company’s stock there’s reason for concern. And lately they’ve been doing just that.
The last time insider selling was as high as it is now was in the period from late 2006 to late 2007. It was right after that insider-selling surge that the stock market began its long painful decline, says Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs, an independent institutional research firm.
Biderman believes that insider trades shoot higher when there’s a disconnect between broad market opinions and what business executives feel in their gut. “When [insiders think] things are going better than most people think, they buy stock,” he says. “When things are going worse than people think, they sell.” (Read “Q&A: Why the Stock Market Looks Bullish for Autumn.”)
via Stock Market Worry: Insiders Are Heavy Sellers – TIME.
Nurses’ Orders: New ‘Super-Union’ Pushes for Healthcare Reform
In These Times 
The progressive talking points for universal healthcare are often framed around the interests of patients. But one sector of the medical workforce is driving a movement at the intersection of organized labor and healthcare policy: nurses.
While lawmakers bicker and the public wades through a muddle of misinformation, the major nurses unions, particularly the California Nurses Association (CNA), are staking out bold positions on reform. Their efforts have culminated in a new union merger that seeks to align progressive nurses with other service workers as well as healthcare consumers.
As a critical link between physicians and patients, nurses occupy a pivot point in the reform debate. Alongside bread-and-butter campaigns on pandemic-flu preparedness and nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, the CNA has taken on universal healthcare as a labor issue, arguing that single-payer would not only serve patients’ best interest, but also make the entire system more economically viable.
via Nurses’ Orders: New ‘Super-Union’ Pushes for Healthcare Reform – Working In These Times.
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education
Is Higher Education in Need of a Moral Bailout?
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education - By HENRY A. GIROUX
As the school year begins, colleges and universities in North America are doing everything possible to attract students, including making themselves over in the image of a high-end mall or a cool brand name. Some institutions are giving students free Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods. Others are building attractive athletic facilities, developing more retail stores on campus, and providing plenty of specialized coffee shops. Some welcome this change as a brilliant market strategy while others believe that any face lift will improve the often stodgy academic image many colleges project.
Even as more and more students are excluded from a decent higher education because of the recession, educators seem less concerned about the plight of poor students than they do about how they can find the right brand to sell themselves to attract new students. But there is more at work here than the development of a new campus aesthetic or a recognition that students are now considered clients who represent an important market niche.
There is also the move on the part of many universities towards embracing market mechanisms as a way of redefining almost every aspect of university life–in spite of the failure and excesses of this system as exemplified in the Bernie Madoff scandal, outrageous executive bonuses, financial corruption, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the corporate greed that caused the current economic recession. Rather than challenge the economic irresponsibility, ecological damage, and human suffering, and culture of cruelty unleashed by free market fundamentalism, higher education appears to be one of its staunchest defenders, uncritically embracing a view of itself based on a market model of the academy.
via Henry A. Giroux: The Corporate Stranglehold on Education.
Unions for Single Payer Health Care
572 union organizations in 49 states have endorsed HR 676
Workers, our families and our unions are waging a difficult struggle to win or to keep good health care coverage.
There is a better way. Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) has introduced HR 676, national single payer legislation.
The single-payer financing in HR 676 saves the money to improve coverage for all of us as we expand care to those who have been left out. The bill restores free choice of physicians to patients.
HR 676 would cover every person in the U. S. for all necessary medical care including prescription drugs and dental.
HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments and saves hundreds of billions by eliminating the private health insurance industry with its high overhead and profits.
Our unions must lead the way!
We must build the movement that wins passage of HR 676 and makes health care a human right.
1,000 unions cannot be ignored!
The All Unions Committee for Single Payer Healthcare — HR 676 has undertaken the task to win the endorsement of 1,000 local unions and other labor bodies for this bold and just legislation.
We’re creating an honor roll of those unions that have endorsed HR 676. We’re asking you to join this struggle. Ask your union to endorse HR 676.
via Unions for Single Payer Health Care |.
National Geographic Does 9/11: Another Icon Debased in Service of the Big Lie
by Jim Hoffman – Opinion
By now it’s quite predictable: every year as the anniversary of the attack approaches, some of the most established mainstream media brands are pressed into service to sell the official story of 9/11.
The 2009 iteration of this spectacle is notable for the contrast between the designated brand and the obligatory message. That brand, best known for its high-brow photojournalistic National Geographic Magazine, has existed since 1889, complete with a non-profit Society dedicated to education in geography, archaeology, history, world cultures, and natural science. One can’t help but wonder how National Geographic’s many benefactors would feel if they understood how the brand was being used to prop up the “War on Terror” with its Popular-Mechanics-style attack piece to be aired on August 31, 2009.
A web feature on the website of the National Geographic Channel provides a preview of the show and a window into the methods and goals of the show’s producers. Those methods are so heavy-handed that the critical reader can’t help but see that those goals are something very different from educating. As an exercise, the reader might want to read the one-page feature first, and then compare notes with my analysis of it below.
Psychopaths in Power: Why Texas is the ‘Gulag State’
by Len Hart,
An innocent man has been executed in the Gulag State of Texas. This man, whose innocence is now proven, is the ultimate price paid for endemic, state-sponsored idiocy and less excusable psychopathy. Educational standards have declined under fascist GOP regimes –prominently Bush Jr and his successor Rick Perry. Incarceration rates have risen and justice is applied inequitably. The death of innocents at the hands of a psychopathic, GOP dominated state is the price we pay for allowing the GOP any influence, any power.
A report published today in the New Yorker finds that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 in Texas for setting a fire that killed his three daughters, was innocent. He is pictured at left with his two-year-old daughter Amber, who died in the fire.
This is incredibly sad news, but it also marks the most conclusive evidence yet that an innocent person has been put to death in the United States. We’ve known for years that the arson science used to convict Willingham was flat-out wrong. Today’s New Yorker report goes further: it dismantles the case that sent Willingham to his death, point-by-point, proving that every shred of evidence used against him was false.
via The Existentialist Cowboy: Psychopaths in Power: Why Texas is the ‘Gulag State’.
A 9/11 Reality Check
By Robert Scheer – Truthdig 
What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?
As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.
via Truthdig – Reports – A 9/11 Reality Check.
The Reality of Economic Recovery
by Jim Hightower on Creators.com
Great news, America! Having just celebrated Labor Day, we can now bask in the revelation that our long economic nightmare is over. Forget recession, much less a depression, our country is poised to spring into a new era of financial prosperity!
We know that this is so because we’re being told so by top economists, Wall Street bankers and others in the know. To put the icing on this happy economic cupcake, President Obama even interrupted his Martha’s Vineyard vacation late last month to announce that he was reappointing Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve banking system.
In our country’s high-flying financial circles, Ben is being hailed as “a monumental figure” for engineering the multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street giants. Those giants are now claiming to be profitable again, and the Dow Jones average has begun to tick upward, so there’s joy in the upper stratosphere of our economy, and those who dwell there have blessed Bernanke’s ordainment as the high priest of America’s monetary policy.
via The Reality of Economic Recovery by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.
Tightening the Corporate Grip: The Stakes at the Supreme Court
by Robert Weissman – | CommonDreams.org
Can things get still worse in Washington?
Yes, they can. And they will, if the Supreme Court decides for corporations and against real human beings and their democracy in a case the Court will be hearing today, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
Until reaching the Supreme Court last year, this case has involved a narrow issue about whether an anti-Hillary Clinton movie made in the heat of the last presidential election is covered by restrictions in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. However, in a highly unusual move announced on the last day of the Supreme Court’s 2008 term, the justices announced they wanted to reconsider two other pivotal decisions that limit the role of corporate money in politics.
The Court ordered a special oral argument on the issue, before the full start of their 2009 term in October.
via Tightening the Corporate Grip: The Stakes at the Supreme Court | CommonDreams.org.
Medicare Part E: Everybody
by Thom Hartmann | CommonDreams.org
The President this morning admitted on national television that he lost control of the message with health care. It’s time to reboot – and use a very, very, very simple message so all Americans can understand it.
Let’s use Medicare, which nearly every American understands. Just create “Medicare Part E” where the “E” represents “everybody.” Just let any citizen in the US buy into Medicare.
It would be so easy. No need to reinvent the wheel with this so-called “public option” that’s a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won’t – just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy the President is so comfortable with.
Just pass a simple bill – it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people – that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.
Thus, Medicare Part E would be revenue neutral!
via Medicare Part E: Everybody | CommonDreams.org.
Supreme Court considers corporate spending on elections
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Supreme Court returns on Wednesday
to consider ending long-standing limits on corporate and union spending in political campaigns — a move critics say could give big money more influence over U.S. elections.
Proponents say the case, which involves a movie critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, represents a basic issue of free speech.
But a decision by the nation’s highest court in the case could reshape the rules on how money can be spent in presidential and congressional elections, which already break new spending records with each political cycle.
via Supreme Court considers corporate spending on elections | Politics | Reuters.
Report: Blackwater guard saw Iraqi killings as 9/11 revenge
By Stephen C. Webster – Raw Story »
Did Blackwater mercenaries murder Iraqis to satiate their thirst for 9/11 revenge?
According to Department of Justice files, at least one did, noted Mother Jones associate editor Daniel Schulman on Tuesday morning.
The revelation was torn from documents relative to the prosecution of Blackwater Worldwide guards involved in a 2007 Baghdad massacre that left 17 dead.
According to the documents Schulman pulled, guards “routinely acted in disregard of the use of force policies,” and one, known as “Raven 23,” allegedly bragged that disregard for Iraqi lives stemmed from a desire for revenge after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
via Raw Story » Report: Blackwater guard saw Iraqi killings as 9/11 revenge.
School refuses Obama speech, but will bus kids to see Bush
A Texas school which refused to air President Barack Obama’s live classroom address is planning to bus students to see the president.
Did school officials reverse course after realizing Obama’s speech wasn’t political, as conservatives had claimed?
Nope. They’re sending fifth graders to see another president: former President George W. Bush, and his wife, Laura. Bush is speaking alongside several Dallas Cowboys players and prominent Texas business leaders.
“District officials said it’s part of a Cowboys Stadium field trip that the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee invited 28 fifth-grade classes to attend several months ago,” a local NBC affiliate wrote Wednesday morning. “The event launches the Super Bowl committee’s largest-ever youth education program. Students must have their parents’ permission to attend, school officials said.”
via The Raw Story » School refuses Obama speech, but will bus kids to see Bush.
US actually increasing personnel in Iraq: More contractors, fewer troops
US forces are not withdrawing from Iraq.
Well, its soldiers are. But not civilian contractors. Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw US troops from the war-torn country, the US is planning to award contracts to protect US installations at a cost to taxpayers that could near $1 billion.
In fact, the Multi-National Force-Iraq just awarded $485 million in contracts just last week, while Congress enjoyed its summer recess. Five firms will handle private security deals to provide security for US bases. It’s a neat rhetorical loophole that will allow US officials to say that the country has withdrawn from Iraq, while its contractors remain.
“Under a similar contract with five security contractors that began in September 2007, the MNF-I spent $253 million through March 2009, with needs growing over that 18-month period,” the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus wrote in Wednesday editions. “That contract, which was to run three years, had a spending limit of $450 million.
via The Raw Story » US actually increasing personnel in Iraq: More contractors, fewer troops.
Hannity: Starting Now, My ‘Job’ Is To ‘Get Rid Of Every Other One’ Of Obama’s Czars
Think Progress » Yesterday, tens of thousands of people gathered in rural West Virginia for the coal-powered “Friends of America Rally.” The point of the event was to rail against the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. Massey CEO Don Blankenship, the driving force behind the rally, said that “America itself” was at stake if the bill wasn’t stopped.
Fox News personality Sean Hannity was one of the rally’s keynote speakers, and he took the opportunity to gloat about Van Jones’ resignation. He vowed to the audience that he would get rid of “every other one” of Obama’s so-called czars:
HANNITY: Do you want another czar?
CROWD: No!
HANNITY: I don’t think so. By the way, we got rid of one, and my job starting tomorrow night is to get rid of every other one. I promise you that!
Watch
via Think Progress » Hannity: Starting Now, My ‘Job’ Is To ‘Get Rid Of Every Other One’ Of Obama’s Czars.
Lieberman: Public option is ‘not attainable’ because ‘the public doesn’t support it.’
Think Progress » Last week, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) told the Connecticut Post that he believed the only “opportunity to achieve significant reform with bipartisan support” was if the public option was “off the table.” “There will be no shot at 60 votes” with a public option, said Lieberman, adding “because I’m not the only one” against it. On MSNBC today, Lieberman claimed that the public option wasn’t “attainable” because “the public doesn’t support it”:
LIEBERMAN: The question is, are people going to continue to fight for elements that are not attainable or are they going to try to find common ground?
MITCHELL: You mean — you mean the public option? You mean the public option is not attainable?
LIEBERMAN: I mean — yes, I mean a government-run health insurance plan. The public doesn’t support it. They know that, ultimately, taxpayers will pay for it. They don’t want us to add to the debt. They feel that the existing system, private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, does pretty well.
Watch it:
GOP Chooses Rep. Boustany, Co-Sponsor Of So-Called ‘Death Panel’ Provision, To Deliver Obama Rebuttal
Think Progress »
Republicans today announced that Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), a cardiothoracic surgeon, will be delivering tomorrow’s response to President Obama’s joint address to Congress on health care. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) sent out a press release heralding Boustany’s experience and lamenting that Democrats have refused to work with him:
Actually, one of Boustany’s most notable proposals has received bipartisan support and was included in health care legislation: a plan to permit Medicare to pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling. Boustany, in fact, was an original co-sponsor of this provision. Republicans were the ones who objected to this bipartisan proposal, saying it would establish “death panels” ready to “pull the plug on grandma.”
Last month, Boustany said the “death panel” scare-mongering had gotten “out of hand”:
Smithsonian exhibit features outdated global cooling myth.
In 2007, Matt Yglesias went to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and found an “outdated panel pushing concern about global cooling based on some highly speculative 1970s-era science”:
He went again to the museum this weekend and noticed that despite the definitive evidence that the earth is warming, the exhibit is still up:
Over two years ago, this display was flagged with a small sign warning that the exhibit in question was being updated to reflect current science. But I went back to the museum yesterday, and it’s still there! A number of other displays in the museum do reflect an accurate understanding of the climate change situation, so it’s not as if the people running the museum don’t know what’s going on. So I don’t understand why they can’t change this.
via Think Progress » Smithsonian exhibit features outdated global cooling myth..
Are financial parasites killing the American economy?
By Richard Clark
According to Michael Hudson, you can think of the financial sector as being wrapped around the real economy, almost like a kind of parasite.
Michael Hudson is a highly-regarded economist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. He is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who also helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund.
What follows here is an edited version of an article at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14922
Hudson has frequently described Wall Street as “parasitic”. For example, in a 2003 interview, Hudson said:
via OpEdNews – Article: Are financial parasites killing the American economy?.
HIRING FREEZE
Craig Harrington – economyincisis.org
A survey by Manpower Inc., provided to CNNMoney.com, reveals that the job climate in the United States may still be getting worse.
Aside from the monthly job losses and weekly additions to federal unemployment benefit rosters, the United States also faces a serious problem for those seeking new employment. Unemployment in this country is worse than simply losing a job, there is also the difficulty in finding a replacement.
Manpower Inc. believes that jobs will recover in growing European and Asian economies before they do here. For an example of how far the American job market has fallen; one year ago the employment index maintained by Manpower stood at plus+9, it now stands at minus-3.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
How the World’s Biggest Corporations, From Starbucks to Wal-Mart to Barnes & Noble, Claim to Be ‘Local’
By Stacy Mitchell, New Rules Project.
Hoping to capitalize on growing public enthusiasm for all things local, some of the world’s biggest corporations are brashly laying claim to the word “local.”
This article has appeared in more than 25 alternative news weeklies, sometimes with additional local reporting. If you’d like to read a version published in your region, go here for a list of links by city.
HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself “the world’s local bank.” Starbucks is un-branding at least three of its Seattle outlets, the first of which just reopened as “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.” Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline, “Local flavor since 1956.” The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to “Shop Local” — at their nearest mall. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say, “Local.”
Hoping to capitalize on growing public enthusiasm for all things local, some of the world’s biggest corporations are brashly laying claim to the word “local.”
10 of the Most Obscenely Stupid Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories and Attacks Against the President
By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet.
Obama’s nefarious plan for the nation’s genitals? His evil designs on your children? Here are the most absurd right-wing assaults on the president — and logic and reason.
Today President Obama gave a speech urging America’s schoolchildren to do their homework and stay in school.
Naturally, conservatives have been extremely alarmed about the address, because obviously the president is looking to create a vast army of adorable little zombies that will help him destroy America faster.
All last week, conservative bloggers and pundits gleefully accused the centrist president of plotting to force radical politics on America’s impressionable youth, after Florida’s Republican chairman Jim Greer said Obama’s address would “indoctrinate” children and spread “socialist ideology.”
When Cocaine and Monsanto’s Pesticide Collide, the War on Drugs Becomes a Genetically-Modified War on Science
When Cocaine and Monsanto’s Pesticide Collide, the War on Drugs Becomes a Genetically-Modified War on Science - By Meg White, BuzzFlash.
Monsanto and the U.S. government are dealing with unanticipated hazards of the pesticide Roundup in the South American drug war.
At the intersection of cocaine and Roundup in rural South America, Monsanto and the U.S. government are struggling to keep up appearances. That’s becoming more and more difficult as the unanticipated hazards of genetic modification become clearer.
Back in April, Argentinean embryologist Andrés Carrasco gave an interview with a Buenos Aires newspaper describing his recent findings suggesting the chemical glyphosate, a chemical herbicide widely used in agriculture as well as in U.S. anti-narcotic efforts, could cause defects in fetuses in much smaller doses than those to which peasants and farmers in his country were already being exposed. Loud calls for a ban on the substance were issued by Argentinean environmental lawyers, and the country’s Ministry of Defense banned the planting of glyphosate-resistant soya crops in its fields.
Then came the backlash. An article in an Argentinean paper recently reported that Carrasco was assaulted in a way he described as “violent” by four men associated with agricultural interests:
Dr Pepper’s Wet Dream: Water, Government Subsidies and Transfer of Wealth in the Middle of the Desert
- By Yasha Levine, AlterNet.
A bottling plant in the middle of the desert? In the warped “pro-business” logic of a sprawling, bankrupt desert city in California, the plan made perfect economic sense.
VICTORVILLE, Calif. — On a sun-baked afternoon in October 2008, a group of soft-drink executives and city officials gathered for a groundbreaking ceremony at an old Air Force base on the outskirts of the city, 100 miles east of Los Angeles.
They were standing on the edge of the Mojave Desert, one of the driest, most inhospitable terrains in America. Yet there they were, posing for photographs, gold-plated shovels in hand, to mark the construction of a massive new bottling plant and distribution hub for the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, a facility that will to suck up hundreds of millions of gallons of water a year from this water-scarce area to supply soft drinks to 20 percent of its domestic market.
A bottling plant in the middle of the desert? It sounds too absurd to be real. But in the warped “pro-growth, pro-business” logic of a city on the frontier of Southern California’s urban sprawl, the plan made perfect economic sense.
Capitalism: A Love Story | Film review
The Guardian 
If Michael Moore’s latest documentary lacks the clean punch of his best-known work, it can only be because the crime scene is so vast, writes Xan Brooks at the Venice film festival
The bankrobbers caught on CCTV at the start of Capitalism: A Love Story are a forlorn and feeble bunch. We see a bedraggled old man in a Hawaiian shirt, and what looks to be a 12-year-old boy wearing a balaclava. For all their flailing efforts, they’ve got nothing on the real crooks: the banking CEOs who recently absconded with $700bn of public money, no strings attached. That’s what’s known as a clean getaway.
Michael Moore‘s latest documentary drew tumultuous applause at the Venice film festival today, suggesting that the veteran tub-thumper has lost none of his power to whip up a response. If the film finally lacks the clean, hard punch provided by the record-breaking Fahrenheit 9/11, that can only be because the crime scene is so vast and the culprits so numerous.
via Capitalism: A Love Story | Film review | Film | The Guardian.
Think Vietnam Vets Were Screwed? Wait Until You See How Many Veterans of Bush’s Wars End up in Jail
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Far too many soldiers end up behind bars while the rest of us are free to ignore the human evidence of what our military ventures really cost.
As all the other justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq have fallen by the wayside, it is ironic that the one that remains is “freedom,” because in the name of someone else’s freedom, we train our own soldiers to behave in ways that may very well cost them their own.
Gordy Lane is a retired Syracuse police detective who served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. As a cop, it was his job to put lawbreakers behind bars, but as a veteran, he understands that when you go to war, “you come back a little different than when you went over there.”
Why the Secret Service and FBI Must Investigate Threats Against Obama and Beef Up Security to Protect Him
Action Editorial: Why the Secret Service and FBI Must Investigate Threats Against Obama and Beef Up Security to Protect Him – By Don Hazen, AlterNet.
With Obama the target of hate speech and over 30 death threats a day, the FBI needs to hear that it can’t let budget shortfalls get in the way of the president’s life.
The right-wing hate speech polluting the debate over health care is generating more and more threats against President Barack Obama, some truly frightening.
Will you join AlterNet and Credo and sign a petition calling for the FBI to do everything necessary to confront threats to Obama and expand and fully fund efforts to protect the president of the United States?
CNN anchor Rick Sanchez reports that when Obama visited Phoenix on Aug. 17, local minister Steven Anderson of the Faithful World Baptist Church, who strongly expresses hatred for Obama in many of his sermons, told his congregation that he wished him dead.
How Dick Cheney’s Radical Acts in the White House Still Threaten Our Democracy
How Dick Cheney’s Radical Acts in the White House Still Threaten Our Democracy
By David Swanson, Seven Stories Press.
In his new book, Daybreak, Swanson warns that Cheney radically transformed the role of the vice president into an unaccountable, dangerous seat of power.
The following is an excerpt from David Swanson’s new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories, 2009), drawn from Chapter 8: “The Cheney Branch” on Dick Cheney’s power grab and radical transformation of the vice presidency during Bush’s presidency.
What was once a position to stand as back-up should the president die or become unable to serve is now, it would seem, a branch of government all of its own. On June 22, 2007, Time magazine ran an article with the headline “The Cheney Branch of Government,” that began thus:
On the same day that the CIA announced it will soon release hundreds of pages of once-classified documents that detail some of the agency’s most closely guarded — and controversial — secrets of old, it was revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney has been resisting even his own Executive Branch’s efforts to find out what kind of secret material his office has been stashing away over the last four years.
The Card Game – Overspending on Debit Cards Is a Boon for Banks
Overspending on Debit Cards Is a Boon for Banks - - NYTimes.com
When Peter Means returned to graduate school after a career as a civil servant, he turned to a debit card to help him spend his money more carefully.
So he was stunned when his bank charged him seven $34 fees to cover seven purchases when there was not enough cash in his account, notifying him only afterward. He paid $4.14 for a coffee at Starbucks — and a $34 fee. He got the $6.50 student discount at the movie theater — but no discount on the $34 fee. He paid $6.76 at Lowe’s for screws — and yet another $34 fee. All told, he owed $238 in extra charges for just a day’s worth of activity.
Mr. Means, who is 59 and lives in Colorado, figured employees at his bank, Wells Fargo, would show some mercy since each purchase was less than $12. In addition, a deposit from a few days earlier would have covered everything had it not taken days to clear. But they would not budge.
via The Card Game – Overspending on Debit Cards Is a Boon for Banks – NYTimes.com.
One dose of swine flu vaccine may be enough
One dose of swine flu vaccine may be enough
Dr. Iain Stephenson of the Leicester Royal Infirmary ran the pilot study on 100 healthy people aged 18 to 50.
The trial of Novartis MF59-adjuvanted cell-based A (H1N1) vaccine found,
“Results showed that the serum antibody responses were highest among subjects who received two doses of vaccine, however a single vaccine dose also induced responses associated with protection against influenza.”
“The findings showed that it is possible to induce protective antibody against A(H1N1) infection within two weeks of administration of a single low-dose adjuvanted vaccine.”
via One dose of swine flu vaccine may be enough.
Why the Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts wildly missed the mark
Why the Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts wildly missed the mark
The voluntary approach to controlling pollution from agriculture has continued to fail and now, a quarter-century and billions of taxpayers’ dollars later, the bay is still on the brink.
The official strategy for dealing with the Chesapeake’s farm pollution problems has been “strikingly implausible” and the main obstacle to clean water in the Chesapeake Bay, according to just-released report, Facing Facts in the Chesapeake Bay, by the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
The solution? A more comprehensive regulatory program that would establish mandatory, enforceable measures for meeting the nutrient, sediment, and toxic chemical reductions needed to remove all bay waters from the Clean Water Act Impaired Waters list, say bay scientists and policy makers quoted in the report.
via Why the Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts wildly missed the mark.
Fines proposed for going without insurance
OPS: This is what being Sold Out looks like.
msnbc.com
‘Gang of Six’ meets to discuss Baucus’ new proposal
WASHINGTON – Americans would be fined up to $3,800 for failing to buy health insurance under a plan that circulated in Congress on Tuesday as divisions among Democrats undercut President Barack Obama’s effort to regain traction on his health care overhaul.
As Obama talked strategy with Democratic leaders at the White House, the one idea that most appeals to his party’s liberal base lost ground in Congress. Prospects for a government-run plan to compete with private insurers sank as a leading moderate Democrat said he could no longer support the idea.
The fast-moving developments put Obama in a box. As a candidate, he opposed fines to force individuals to buy health insurance, and he supported setting up a public insurance plan. On Tuesday, fellow Democrats publicly begged to differ on both ideas.
via Fines proposed for going without insurance – Health care reform- msnbc.com.
Three Words Mr. President: “Medicare for All”
As President Obama prepares to deliver a Wednesday address to Congress that must reframe the debate about healthcare reform, he is getting plenty of advice and counsel with regard to messaging.
Plenty of folks will tell the president that he cannot change course, that he simply needs to offer a better explanation of what’s on offer.
Wrong.
The fact is that the president must change course.
And the wisest counsel on how to do so has come from New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.
via Three Words Mr. President: “Medicare for All”.
9th Circuit Blasts Feds for Post-9/11 Detention of ‘Material Witness’
9th Circuit Blasts Feds for Post-9/11 Detention of ‘Material Witness’
Cheryl Miller – Law.com –
A 9th Circuit panel on Friday denounced the federal government’s post-9/11 practice of detaining innocent Americans under the federal material witness statute as “repugnant” and “a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.”
In allowing Abdullah al-Kidd’s lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft to proceed, the three-judge panel held (.pdf) that the Idaho man’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when he was arrested and imprisoned without charges for two weeks in 2003 and later restricted to Nevada and three other states.
Federal authorities said al-Kidd, an American citizen, had to be detained to provide information germane to the prosecution of fellow University of Idaho student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen on terrorism charges. But al-Kidd was never called to testify at Al-Hussayen’s trial, leading al-Kidd to charge that federal authorities were more interested in investigating him than using him to build their legal case.
via Law.com – 9th Circuit Blasts Feds for Post-9/11 Detention of ‘Material Witness’.
The Snowe Job, and Why a “Trigger” for a Public Option is Nonsense
The Snowe Job, and Why a “Trigger” for a Public Option is Nonsense
Robert Reich
I was just on the phone talking with a reporter for a national media outlet who referred to Senator Olympia Snowe’s idea for a public option “trigger” as the “centrist position.” Whoa. When the mainstream media start naming something as “centrist” the game is almost over because just about everyone with any authority in our nation’s capital wants to be at the “center.”
Let me back up a step. The public insurance option has become a lightening rod for Republicans, hate radio jocks, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and lobbyists for the health-industrial complex who accuse the White House and Democrats of planning a “government takeover” of health care. Anything that has the word “public” in it is always an automatic target for their rants. But most Democrats understand that a public insurance option is essential to control healthcare costs and expand coverage — both because private for-profit insurers now face so little competition in most markets that only the prod of a public option will force them to lower costs and extend coverage, and also because a nationwide public option would have the scale and authority to negotiate lower rates with drug companies and healthcare providers, thereby pushing private insurers to do the same.
via Robert Reich’s Blog: The Snowe Job, and Why a “Trigger” for a Public Option is Nonsense.
Megrahi was framed
Megrahi was framed – John Pilger – New Statesman -
The trial of the “Lockerbie bomber” was worse than a travesty of justice. Evidence that never came to court proves his innocence
The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown’s “repulsion” to Barack Obama’s “outrage”, the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those
who call themselves journalists. “But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?” whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. “What will you say to your constituents, then?”
Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power”. Amen.
The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit”. Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi’s release.
via New Statesman – Megrahi was framed.
10 Questions: How Many Democrats Does It Take to…
10 Questions: How Many Democrats Does It Take to… - David Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening!
Question: How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: In Theory, one. But to hear the Democrats tell it, at least 60, because they claim that even 59 of them aren’t enough to keep 40 Republicans from pushing them off the stepladder (although for the prior eight years, far fewer than 60 Republicans always seemed to be able to manage the job).
Question: How may Democrats does it take to kill a good idea?
Answer: One. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who by herself kept resolutions to initiate impeachment hearings against President Bush and Vice President Cheney “off the table,” and who by herself prevented any hearing in the House on Rep. John Conyers’ excellent bill HR 676 (which would have solved the nation’s health care crisis by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone) from getting a hearing.
Question: How many generals does it take to dig a tunnel?
Answer: Two. One, General Stanley McCrystal, to go to Afghanistan and dig it, and a second, Gen. David Petreaus, to stand up, salute it, promise there will be a light at the other end somewhere, and to tell the President to send more troops to march through it. But it also takes several hundred members of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate to unquestioningly pay for the digging.
via 10 Questions: How Many Democrats Does It Take to… | This Can’t Be Happening!.
Indoctrinate or Inspire? Reagan Told Students to Embrace Guns & Tax Cuts, While GOP Tells Kids They Can’t Think for Themselves
Indoctrinate or Inspire? Reagan Told Students to Embrace Guns & Tax Cuts, While GOP Tells Kids They Can’t Think for Themselves
BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS – by Meg White
President Barack Obama spoke before what I’d posit was one of his toughest audiences in his presidency so far: American high school students. President Obama’s speech Tuesday at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA was met with a screaming, standing ovation and copious handshakes and thank-yous in the rope line on his way out. reagan speaks to schoolchildren in 1988
Listening to the reaction from listeners who called into C-SPAN, not one person had a negative comment about the speech, except to criticize the prejudgment of some conservative parents who threatened to keep their kids home from school so as not to allow their indoctrination by the president’s words.
You can always count on first ladies to stand up for education and children. In an interview on CNN this weekend, former First Lady Laura Bush came to the defense of President Obama’s plan to speak to schoolchildren on this first day back to school for many students across the country.
Union Bill Makes Comeback
Union Bill Makes Comeback – On The Hill:
Call it the bill that just won’t die.
Healthcare reform may be consuming all of the political oxygen in Washington and beyond, but that hasn’t stopped labor unions — or even the White House — from giving up on legislation that would make it easier for unions to organize.
Even as occupied as they are in a full-court press to salvage their healthcare reform plans, President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden took time to tout a separate measure, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
Obama and Biden pitched EFCA, also known as “card check,” in separate Labor Day appearances.
via On The Hill: Union Bill Makes Comeback.
Insist that Democrats Invoke Majority Rule in the Senate
Insist that Democrats Invoke Majority Rule in the Senate – | OurFuture.org
t has come to this: Americans cannot get the health care reform we need without using the “reconciliation” process in the U.S. Senate. We can’t get 60 votes. Senator Kennedy’s seat will remain vacant for 5 months. Senator Byrd remains very ill. A handful of “moderate” Democrats and Republicans stand in the way of achieving cloture. It’s time to craft and pass a bill that requires a majority vote.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle—as moderate a Democrat as any—urges Democrats to invoke majority rule:
[S]hould Republican intransigence continue, Democrats cannot simply stop. They cannot ignore the human suffering as well as their fiscal responsibility to act. They must focus on the budgetary implications of health reform and use the Senate rules of budget reconciliation to allow a health-care bill move with majority support. The choice between complete legislative failure and majority rule should not pose a dilemma for any Democratic senator.
Republicans who cry foul have only themselves to blame. First, they walked away from the table even though they had many opportunities to participate in White House meetings and in House and Senate committees over the past eight months—and eight years. Second, they set an ample number of precedents over the past decade in using their majorities then to pass their agenda using the same reconciliation rules in the Senate.
via Insist that Democrats Invoke Majority Rule in the Senate | OurFuture.org.
College for $99 a Month
College for $99 a Month - by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly
The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.
Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?
via College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly.
Already, 23 Dems have said they will vote ‘no’ on healthcare reform
Already, 23 Dems have said they will vote ‘no’ on healthcare reform- By Mike Soraghan and Michael M. Gleeson
At least 23 House Democrats already have told constituents or hometown media that they oppose the massive healthcare overhaul touted by President Barack Obama.
If Republicans offer the blanket opposition they’ve promised, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can afford to lose only 38 members of her 256-member caucus and still pass the bill.
Most Democrats opposed to healthcare reform argue it costs too much, imposes a new tax and fines businesses that don’t provide insurance to employees. Some fear that the bill would subsidize abortion.
Many other Democratic members, including those berated by protesters at raucous town hall meetings in August, are still undecided.
A lot could change before the vote, expected late this month.
Voting against a president from your own party is starkly different from defying a Speaker or a committee chairman, and Obama is stepping up his involvement, starting with a speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.
The Pelosi camp, for its part, sees no reason to be discouraged.
via Already, 23 Dems have said they will vote ‘no’ on healthcare reform – TheHill.com.
OPS: Note – the reports are the Melissa Bean (D-IL) has stated she will not vote on Healthcare
Spanish judge resumes torture case against six senior Bush lawyers
Spanish judge resumes torture case against six senior Bush lawyers
By Andy Worthington - | AfterDowningStreet.org
The Spanish newspaper Público reported exclusively on Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for implementing torture at Guantánamo.
Back in March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the six prime architects of the Bush administration’s torture policies — former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who played a major role in the preparation of the OLC’s notorious “torture memos”; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy; William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department’s former general counsel; Jay S. Bybee, Yoo’s superior in the OLC, who signed off on the August 2002 “torture memos”; and David Addington, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff.
In April, on the advice of the Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido, who believes that an American tribunal should judge the case (or dismiss it) before a Spanish court even thinks about becoming involved, prosecutors recommended that Judge Garzón should drop his investigation. As CNN reported, Mr. Conde-Pumpido told reporters that Judge Garzón’s plans threatened to turn the court “into a toy in the hands of people who are trying to do a political action.”
via Spanish judge resumes torture case against six senior Bush lawyers | AfterDowningStreet.org.
Some 2,000 students at one university report swine flu symptoms
Some 2,000 students at one university report swine flu symptoms -Raw Story »
Some 2,000 students at Washington State University have reported symptoms of swine flu, university officials said, in one of the largest reported outbreaks of the virus on a US college campus.
Washington state’s Whitman County, where the school is located said that tests at a state laboratory late last week “confirmed that the influenza outbreak at Washington State University (WSU) … is indeed caused by the novel 2009 H1N1 Influenza A.”
The west-coast school last week instituted a blog to help provide information to students about the sudden and dramatic spread of the A(H1N1) virus on campus just days into the new school term.
via Raw Story » Some 2,000 students at one university report swine flu symptoms.
Pa. Man Fires Cannon, Hits Neighbor’s House
Pa. Man Fires Cannon, Hits Neighbor’s House – | NBC Bay Area
My bad, buddy
A Pennsylvania history buff who recreates firearms from old wars accidentally fired a 2-pound cannonball through the wall of his neighbor’s home in Uniontown, Pa.
William Maser, 54, fired a cannonball Wednesday evening outside his home in Georges Township that ricocheted and hit a house 400 yards away. The cannonball, about two inches in diameter, smashed through a window and a wall before landing in a closet. Authorities said nobody was hurt.
State police charged Maser with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct.
No one answered the phone Friday at Maser’s home. He told WPXI-TV that recreating 19th-century cannons is a longtime hobby. He said he is sorry and he will stop shooting them on his property, about 35 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
via Pa. Man Fires Cannon, Hits Neighbor’s House | NBC Bay Area.
Group prays for ‘unpatriotic’ schools ’spitefully’ using children in Obama fracas
Group prays for ‘unpatriotic’ schools ’spitefully’ using children in Obama fracas – Raw Story »
A Houston-area education advocacy group held a prayer vigil Monday for school districts that are “spitefully using” children in political campaigns against President Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren scheduled for Tuesday.
The Honey Brown Hope Foundation, a literacy advocacy group in the Houston area, teamed up with the University of Houston’s NAACP chapter and other organizations to pray over what they see as “contradicting messages about school drop-out.”
Some education groups have stated that the opposition to the president’s speech — which the Obama administration says will be about “the importance of persisting and succeeding in school” — could send the message to schoolkids that it’s okay to drop out of school, or not work hard at academic studies.
via Raw Story » Group prays for ‘unpatriotic’ schools ’spitefully’ using children in Obama fracas.
China to Diversify out of U.S. Dollars
China to Diversify out of U.S. Dollars - Edward Harrison
According to an account published in the Daily Telegraph by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Chinese government is quite anxious about money printing in the United States and the effect this printing could have on China’s dollar denominated reserve assets.
For months now, the Chinese have signalled growing unease with U.S. monetary policy. And now comes the clearest signal yet that they are moving away from the dollar. Cheng Siwei, a former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee, said point blank that the Chinese central bank was actively diversifying new reserve assets away from the U.S. dollar and into currencies like the Yen and the Euro. He also mentioned Gold as an alternative the Chinese are exploring.
The $2 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves the Chinese already have are a sunk cost. Going forward, the Chinese are free to do as they wish with incremental additions to reserves. To the degree that they sell dollars and buy gold, Yen or Euros, there can only be downward pressure on the U.S. dollar.
Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China’s green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed’s recourse to “credit easing”.
“We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again,” he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a policy gathering on Lake Como.
“If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies,” he said.
China’s reserves are more than – $2 trillion, the world’s largest.
via RGE – China to Diversify out of U.S. Dollars.
Top Chinese official signals move away from dollar
Top Chinese official signals move away from dollar - Raw Story »
Update (below): Gold spikes above $1,000 an ounce on fears of sinking US dollar
The Chinese are becoming increasingly wary of the growing supply of U.S. dollars, leading the head of the nation’s green energy initiatives to signal a move away from dollar reserves and toward, gold, euros and yen, according to a published report.
“We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again,” said Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee, according to The Telegraph.
He added: “If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies.”
via Raw Story » Top Chinese official signals move away from dollar.
UN Says New Currency Is Needed to Fix Broken ‘Confidence Game’
UN Says New Currency Is Needed to Fix Broken ‘Confidence Game’
(Bloomberg) – The dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced by establishing a new currency to protect emerging markets from the “confidence game” of financial speculation, the United Nations said.
UN countries should agree on the creation of a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development said today in a report.
China, India, Brazil and Russia this year called for a replacement to the dollar as the main reserve currency after the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market led to the worst global recession since World War II. China, the world’s largest holder of dollar reserves, said a supranational currency such as the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, may add stability.
“There’s a much better chance of achieving a stable pattern of exchange rates in a multilaterally-agreed framework for exchange-rate management,” Heiner Flassbeck, co-author of the report and a UNCTAD director, said in an interview from Geneva. “An initiative equivalent to Bretton Woods or the European Monetary System is needed.”
via UN Says New Currency Is Needed to Fix Broken ‘Confidence Game’ – Bloomberg.com.
United Nations conference calls for new global currency
United Nations conference calls for new global currency - Raw Story »
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in a report published Monday that the U.S. dollar should be replaced as the world’s standard reserve currency, giving rise to a new global currency managed by an as-yet undetermined financial regulatory organization.
Heiner Flassbeck, director of the conference, told Bloomberg News that changes needed in the world’s financial systems rival the scope of the Bretton Woods or European Monetary System agreements.
The Bretton Woods agreement established in 1944 the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, following allied victory in World War II.
“[The] dominance of the dollar as the main means of international payments [has] played an important role in the build-up of the global imbalances in the run-up to the financial crisis,” the report says. “Another disadvantage of the current international reserve system is that it imposes a greater adjustment burden on deficit countries (except if it is a country issuing a reserve currency) than on surplus countries.”
via Raw Story » United Nations conference calls for new global currency.
Healthcare, American style
Healthcare, American style - | Salon News
We spend far more per person than other wealthy nations, but we’re less healthy. What’s wrong with this picture?
Sept. 8, 2009 | President Obama is set to address Congress to try to haul healthcare reform from the thicket it’s caught in. Presumably, he’ll seek to remind elected officials — and more important, perhaps, viewers at home — of just how bad it is out there, and how important it is that reform not be allowed to die yet again.
As a reference guide for those watching the end stages of the president’s toughest fight, Salon has gathered some of the key statistics. Obviously, healthcare, and its associated economic and policy debates, have complexity far beyond what a list of statistics can show. Still, the following data, ranging from insurance coverage to public opinion to legislative politics to health outcomes, paint a fair picture of the state of medicine in America.
via Healthcare, American style | Salon News.
Campaign Finance Case Tests Value of Precedent
A Test Case for Roberts
President Obama’s health-care speech on Wednesday will be only the second most consequential political moment of the week.
Judged by the standard of an event’s potential long-term impact on our public life, the most important will be the argument before the Supreme Court (on the same day, as it happens) about a case that, if decided wrongly, could surrender control of our democracy to corporate interests.
This sounds melodramatic. It’s not. The court is considering eviscerating laws that have been on the books since 1907 and 1947 — in two separate cases — banning direct contributions and spending by corporations in federal election campaigns. Doing so would obliterate precedents that go back two and three decades.
via E.J. Dionne Jr. – Campaign Finance Case Tests Value of Precedent – washingtonpost.com.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan ‘a real problem’: Gates
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan ‘a real problem’: Gates – The Raw Story |
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates
acknowledged in an interview with Al Jazeera that civilian casualties have become “a real problem” for the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.
Gates’ remarks, in an interview to be aired Monday by the Qatar-based Arabic satellite news channel, came amid a raging controversy over an air strike that killed scores of people Friday in northern Afghanistan.
“I think it’s a real problem, and General McChrystal thinks it’s a real problem, too,” Gates said, referring to Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
According to a transcript of the interview posted on Al Jazeera’s website, Gates said the Taliban actively targeted civilians or put them at risk in other ways.
via The Raw Story | Civilian casualties in Afghanistan ‘a real problem’: Gates.
Unemployment Far Exceeding Statistics
Unemployment Far Exceeding Statistics – Craig Harrington – economyincisis.org
All told 353 of 369 surveyed areas in the United States say nonfarm payroll unemployment increased over the past year.
Payroll analysis firm Automatic Data Processing, in concert with CNNMoney.com, released estimates for August 2009 showing that private-sector employers cut 298,000 jobs that month. This is down from an ADP estimated 360,000 in July, but significantly higher than some experts had predicted.
Many look to this as yet another sign that the economic maelstrom is settling, but one cannot stress enough that the trend is not reversing. The economy is no longer shedding jobs at a rate of 600,000 to 700,000 per month, but it is still shedding jobs. Since the recession began in December 2007 over 7.5 million Americans have lost their employment, and more than 6.1 million are currently receiving government benefits as a result. This puts even further strain on the indebted government and embattled economy.
According to a report released September 1, 2009 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment situation in the United States could be far worse than the numbers let on.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Saving Capitalism: Reinventing American Workers
Saving Capitalism: Reinventing American Workers - Dustin Ensinger – economyincisis.org
Economist and former Vice Presidential candidate Pat Choate, writes in Saving Capitalism that three changes are necessary for American workers to adjust to structural economic changes
Over the past few decades, especially since the age of globalization began in the 1970s, American workers have been beset by stagnating wages, job loss, retirement funds disappearing, lack of affordable quality health care and a rapidly changing job market.
Currently, there are roughly 46 million uninsured Americans, older workers have seen their retirement accounts dwindle. From 1977 to 2007 employment of workers 65 and over increased 101 percent and from 2005 to 2008 8.3 million Americans lost their jobs. Many jobs were lost due to the economic downturn, however, millions were lost due to America’s failed trade policies as well.
Economist and former Vice Presidential candidate Pat Choate, in his new book, Saving Capitalism, writes that three things are necessary to allow workers to adjust to these structural economic changes.
First, Choate writes, the U.S. needs to create a “private, portable pension plan tied to workers, not their employers, that will ensure substantial private savings for future retirees.”
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
The Dollar’s Fall from Grace
The Dollar’s Fall from Grace - Craig Harrington – economyincisis.org
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist and professor at Columbia University, believes that the dollar will lose its role as the world’s reserve currency.
Writing for The Washington Post, Stiglitz highlighted that the Obama administration inherited such a horrendous economic situation that the projected $9 trillion deficit-accumulation over the next ten years is almost unavoidable. Stiglitz accepts the fact that it will cost money to return this country to economic prominence, but the United States must begin choosing the right policies and spending programs.
“What really matters is not the size of the deficit but how we’re spending our money. If we expand our debt in order to make high-return, productive investments, the economy can become stronger than if we slash expenditures,” Stiglitz writes.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Tom Coburn Loses ‘Tenther’ Debate With Town Hall Attendee
Video at link
Tom Coburn Loses ‘Tenther’ Debate With Town Hall Attendee – Think Progress »
In a town hall forum conducted late last month in Bentonville, AR, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) admitted that health care rationing occurs in the United States. In a YouTube clip that is being celebrated by conservative bloggers, Coburn engages in a debate with a woman who supports a single-payer system.
Coburn argued that instituting a single-payer system would result in “rationing.” The town hall attendee astutely noted, “I feel like health care is rationed now.” Coburn responded, “Well, not near the extent it is in the countries that have single-payer.” In fact, countries with single-payer systems — like Australia and Canada — enjoy higher life-expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better cost efficiency.
Coburn quickly pivoted to a “tenther” argument, asking the woman: “Where do you find the authority in the U.S. Constitution for the federal government” to run a single-payer health care system? The crowd exploded with applause. Undeterred, the woman town hall participant quickly stumped Coburn:
TOWN HALL PARTICIPANT: Let me ask you a question about the Constitution. I’m not an expert on the Constitution, but we already have Social Security, we already have Medicare –
COBURN: And both of them are bankrupt. So you want to create another bankrupt program?
TOWN HALL PARTICIPANT: You know, we have to take care of people. [Crowd yells "no!"]
Coburn never responded to the woman’s constitutional argument. Watch it:
via Think Progress » Tom Coburn Loses ‘Tenther’ Debate With Town Hall Attendee.
Kingston Claims Health System Worked ‘Very Well’ For Bankrupt Cancer Survivor Without Insurance
Kingston Claims Health System Worked ‘Very Well’ For Bankrupt Cancer Survivor Without Insurance – Think Progress »
At a recent town hall held by Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), an elderly gentleman named Jim Parker stood up and told the congressman that he was recently treated for colon cancer. “I did not have insurance,” he said, because “things didn’t quite work out” after he started his own business. Parker informed Kingston that “a friend of mine was in the same position, and we buried him last January.”
Kingston responded by telling the man that “you did do very well” because he was able to get treated when he arrived at the hospital. Parker responded, “I am functionally bankrupt!” Kingston cut him off and reiterated his point:
But you did get coverage. You didn’t get the insurance, but they won’t turn you down at the door. And we do need to focus on people like you. However, here’s the problem: among other things, in countries that have socialized medicine, you have longer waiting lines, you have bureaucracy…it does lead to rationing.
Watch it:
India in biggest biometric count
India in biggest biometric count – BBC 
A planned Unique Identification (UID) number for Indian citizens will be backed by biometric authentication, the head of the project has told BBC.
Fingerprints and photographs of more than a billion people will be taken when they are registered for the identity number, Nandan Nilekani said.
The biometric evidence will be stored online in what will be the biggest such national database in the world.
The first UID numbers will be issued in about 12-18 months, he said.
Mr Nilekani said that the “technology challenge” in putting together a biometric record of one billion citizens was “immense”.
“Biometrics on this scale has not been carried out before. They will be stored online and help in instant online authentication of the identity of every Indian,” he said.
via BBC NEWS | South Asia | India in biggest biometric count.
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million
A Familiar Pattern
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million
By MARK WEISBROT
The IMF is undergoing an unprecedented expansion of its access to resources, possibly reaching a trillion dollars. This week the European Union committed $175 billion, $67 billion more than even the $108 billion that Washington agreed to fork over after a tense standoff between the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration earlier this summer.
The Fund and its advocates argue that the IMF has changed. The IMF is “back in a new guise,” said the Economist. This time, we are told, it’s really going to act as a multilateral organization that looks out for the countries and people of the world, and not just for Washington, Wall Street, or European banks.
But it’s looking more and more like the same old IMF on steroids. Last week the IMF disbursed $150.1 million to the de facto government of Honduras, and it plans to disburse another $13.8 million on September 9. The de facto government has no legitimacy in the world. It took power on June 28th in a military coup, in which the elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was taken from his home at gunpoint and flown out of the country. The Organization of American States suspended Honduras until democracy is restored, and the United Nations also called for the “immediate and unconditional return” of the elected president.
via Mark Weisbrot: IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million.
Sick and Wrong
Sick and Wrong – : Rolling Stone
How Washington is screwing up health care reform – 
and why it may take a revolt to fix it
MATT TAIBBI
Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
via Sick and Wrong : Rolling Stone.
Mad as Hell Doctor Day 1 Sequim Dr. Hochfeld
We’re not going to fix this by throwing more money at the insurance companies
Mad as Hell Doctor, Dr. Paul Hochfeld, discusses how congress is being manipulated by industry to create policy that serves the interests of corporate America. We are getting policy that is more about profits than public good.
via YouTube – MAHD Day 1 Sequim Dr. Hochfeld.
Who are the wealth creators?
Who are the wealth creators? - | Salon
The right says the answer is rich people, not workers — who are wealth destroyers
Today is Labor Day, when we celebrate the wealth destroyers – at least if the libertarian right is to be believed.
According to many free-market conservatives, economic growth is almost exclusively the result of investment decisions by a small number of rich individuals – the “wealth creators.” The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative “trickle-down” economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.
If you believe this theory, then Labor Day should be a cause for national mourning. We should all pause to mourn the loss of capital that might have gone to a fifth or a sixth mansion or a private jet, but instead was conscripted against its will to pay for a public school or higher wages in a factory.
via Who are the wealth creators? | Salon.
DIVE ARTISTS: Dems ‘lose’ again on health care
OPS: This photo kind of sums up the Democratic Party – doesn’t it?
DIVE ARTISTS – Dems ‘lose’ again on health care 
By Allan Uthman
Man. It’s been years that I’ve forced myself to observe, with muted horror, the degeneration of political discourse in America. Occasionally, I’ve even had the pleasure of taking part in it. But it seems I’m never quite cynical enough to predict the depths we’re willing to plumb as a nation.
I thought I was going to write a piece about how stupid it is that the right argues a public option is unfair because private insurance companies can’t compete against it. I mean, it really is an insane position, that we can’t have a public insurance option because it would provide better service for less money. And it’s equally insane to assert that private insurance companies need to make money more than Americans need access to health care.
But things have spiraled ever downward from there. It’s pointless to even attempt a cogent argument on this subject, when the other side of the debate are running around with their hair on fire, their leaders promoting obvious, absurd lies about “death panels” and… I don’t know, something about Hitler? Shamelessness does have its advantages, apparently. Certainly, no one has to ask Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich if they have any shame, as was asked old Joe McCarthy, because the answer is obviously no. In a saner country, this “death panel” madness would be the end of Palin’s political ambitions forever. But then, a saner country would have tossed her into the ocean a year ago.
via The BEAST: America’s Best Fiend.
Dennis J. Kucinich delivering his Labor Day speech in 2009
U.S. Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich Labor Day Parade speech given in Brookpark after the Cleveland, Ohio Labor Day Parade in 2009.
via YouTube – U.S. Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich delivering his Labor Day speech in 2009.
5 Things You Absolutely Must Know About Homelessness
Seems everywhere we look these days, the topic of homelessness is making a cameo. Newspapers, blogs, the five o’clock news, even the cover of Vogue!
So while we have your ear, world, let us take advantage of this teachable moment to tell you 5 things about homelessness that you absolutely need to know. Consider it a primer in reality, if you will.
Without further ado…
1. Homelessness is not a recession-induced phenomenon.
Remember the 90s, when the economy was booming? Real estate was on the up and up and it seemed everybody was profiting off of something, right? Well, not really.
Homelessness was an issue in the 90s. In fact, homelessness has been a consistent presence in the U.S. since the 1980s. Although people will often cite the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill as the main impetus for the influx of homelessness in the 1980s, in reality, it was actually a combination of things. The 1980s is when the gap between the rich and the not-so-rich began to steadily widen. So while chronically homeless people were more noticeable on our streets thanks to de-institutionalization, income inequality and persistent poverty have been major — and silent — causes of homelessness since the Reagan years.
2. To end homelessness, we need more affordable housing.
Today, there is no county in America where a person earning minimum wage can afford the median cost of housing. This lack of affordable housing stock means people who already have trouble making ends meet must use a larger portion of their income to pay for housing. Until the creation of decent, affordable housing becomes a priority at the federal and community levels, it is likely that more households will be “house poor” and thus vulnerable to falling into homelessness.
3. We need both sandwiches and solutions.
via 5 Things You Absolutely Must Know About Homelessness (End Homelessness – Change.org).
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Republicans Don't Care about Voter Fraud....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.-Thom(Who do you think won? Tell us here.) -
LEGALIZE Democracy
" 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
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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. 
