Archive for August, 2010
For-profit colleges can leave you dumb and broke
If you’ve spent any length of time in an urban community in the U.S., I’m sure you’ve seen the ads on public transportation or heard the television commercials from schools where you can train to be a medical assistant or a computer technician. But before you or someone you know signs up for a “promising career” at one of those for-profit colleges, take heed!
For-profit colleges have been around for years. The University of Phoenix, Sanford Brown, DeVry University, and ITT Technical Institute are just a few of the more popular ones. It appears that these schools target minorities, low income individuals and anyone dumb enough to believe their ads. The most memorable are the commercials from ITT Technical Institute: Because you can’t get the jobs of tomorrow until you get the skills today. Start by calling ITT Technical Institute.
But I’m here to tell you these schools are not the answer to a promising career! I think schools like ITT are a money sucking scam! With record unemployment in the U.S. and African Americans making up a large percentage of the unemployed, I fear that more African Americans may be lured into the trap of dishonest for-profit schools only to find themselves with a degree or certificate that they cannot use and loads of debt that they cannot pay.
Full Story: For-profit colleges can leave you dumb and broke | TheLoop21.com.
“Why the Hell Do We Have Forces in Germany?” How Our Vast Empire Saps Our Strength
Our empire does not enhance our power, it squanders it and leaves us bankrupt.
Andrew Bacevich is a professor of international relations and history at Boston University and the author of the new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. You can read a review of this book here. Bacevich talks with FPIF’s Andrew Feldman about current U.S. military policy and the ethics of intervention.
Andrew Feldman: One of the main premises of your new book is that our current military policies are not working for the United States. You don’t really address the question of if it did work for the United States, would it be a kind of policy that we could or should use?
Andrew Bacevich: My previous book, The Limits of Power, argues that there was a time when an expansionist policy served to enhance American power and American prosperity. And so, setting aside moral considerations, during the Mexican war, we took Texas and California. And guess what? It benefited the United States of America tremendously, whether the war was just or not.
Full Story: “Why the Hell Do We Have Forces in Germany?” How Our Vast Empire Saps Our Strength | World | AlterNet.
They’re Baaaack: Return of the Bed Bugs
There’s a plague sweeping across the United States, and this one has nothing to do with sparkly vampires. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just confirmed – bed bugs are back!
Bed bugs are small insects that feed on sleeping animals – namely, us. They are expert hiders and tend to live within eight feet of where people sleep. The intrepid little suckers are making a comeback and it is leading to heightened levels of scratching and anxiety.
The blood-sucking insects were more common in the mid-twentieth century and were mostly eradicated by the end of the century. But experts think world travel and the lack of effective pesticides have led to their resurgence. DDT and its cancer-causing agents were credited with the initial demise of bed bugs. But DDT was banned in 1972, and so the bugs have returned.
Full Story: Eco Solutions for Bed Bugs | EcoSalon: Green Fashion, Culture, News and Lifestyle.
How Conservatives and the GOP Destroyed the “Traditional Family” They Claim to Treasure
Thanks in part to the GOP’s failed policies, America is such a hard place to raise a family that many people are delaying getting married and having kids.
For decades, social conservatives have had a lot to say about the decline of “family values” in the United States, and they have a long list of people they like to blame, including gays and lesbians, Hollywood, the adult entertainment industry, feminists, rappers, the ACLU and abortion providers. As the Christian Right sees it, a major cultural war has been taking place in the U.S. — and the American family is being attacked by everyone from Larry Flynt and Planned Parenthood to 50 Cent and proponents of gay marriage.
Social conservatives are right about one thing: the American family is under attack, but not from cultural liberals. The greatest threat to the American family is economic stress — and the modern-day Republicans and social conservatives who preach family values are the ones who have done the most to imperil the American family. From union-busting and the outsourcing of jobs to developing countries and opposing universal health care, social conservatives have not only endangered the American middle class — they have also made it increasingly hard to raise a “traditional” family.
Economic Hardship Makes People Delay Marriage and Childbearing
Wow — the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives | Economy | AlterNet
What makes glasses so expensive? Oblong plastic lenses? Plastic and metal frames? We’re getting screwed.
Those of us who need prescription eyewear need prescription eyewear. Are you wearing yours to read this? Imagine if you weren’t. Imagine life without your glasses for a year, a week, an hour. Yet many health insurance plans, especially for the unemployed or self-employed, don’t cover them.
Mine doesn’t.
Last year, I went shopping for no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames. Name brands mean nothing to me. Price does. My high astigmatism and need for bifocals disqualify me from those buy-one-get-one-free deals, which almost always involve only single-vision specs.
In store after store, megachains and optical boutiques alike, small oval metal frames fitted with lenses matching my prescription started at $300. One popular shop quoted me $582 for the lenses alone.
Ful
l Story: Wow — the Eyewear Industry Is an Incredible Ripoff, But There Are Alternatives | Economy | AlterNet.
Republican Family Values
The Republicans are always making a big deal about how they are the party of family values, but do they value your family? If not, whose families do they value?
For decades, social conservatives have had a lot to say about the decline of “family values” in the United States, and they have a long list of people they like to blame, including gays and lesbians, Hollywood, the adult entertainment industry, feminists, rappers, the ACLU and abortion providers. As the Christian Right sees it, a major cultural war has been taking place in the U.S. — and the American family is being attacked by everyone from Larry Flynt and Planned Parenthood to 50 Cent and proponents of gay marriage.
Social conservatives are right about one thing: the American family is under attack, but not from cultural liberals. The greatest threat to the American family is economic stress — and the modern-day Republicans and social conservatives who preach family values are the ones who have done the most to imperil the American family. From union-busting and the outsourcing of jobs to developing countries and opposing universal health care, social conservatives have not only endangered the American middle class — they have also made it increasingly hard to raise a “traditional” family.
Full Story: Republican Family Values » Politics Plus.
Taliban Operative: We Are Using Protests Against Park 51 To Get ‘More Recruits, Donations, and Popular Support’
For months, conservatives have led a hateful campaign against the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center that is going to be built two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York City. High-ranking Republicans have spearheaded this campaign, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even going as far as to claim that Park 51 will act as a launching pad for the introduction of “Sharia law” to America.
Now, Newsweek reveals the most concrete evidence yet that this campaign is serving to bolster support for Islamic radicalism abroad. In an interview with the magazine, a Taliban operative going by the name Zabihullah said that, by “preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor.” He goes on to explain that the anti-mosque campaign is providing the Taliban with “with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” Another Taliban official expects that the anti-mosque campaign will provoke a “new wave of terrorist trainees from the West,” similar to suspected Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad. Zabihullah concludes, the “more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get”:
Joe Miller Dodges Questions On Whether Social Security And Medicare Are Constitutional
Yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Alaska GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller suggested that both Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional. When Bob Schieffer wondered whether Miller’s ideas — that Social Security should be privatized and that Medicare should be phased out — were too extreme, Miller shot back, citing the Constitution. “I would suggest to you that if one thinks that the Constitution is extreme then you’d also think the Founders are extreme,” he said.
Today on ABC’s Top Line, host Rick Klein asked Miller to expound. “Do you think those programs are constitutionally authorized?” Miller dodged, first — noting that his parents benefit from Social Security and Medicare — arguing that they should be preserved now, but “transition” to a privatization model in the future. Then, Miller again suggested the programs are not constitutional:
Full Story: Think Progress » Joe Miller Dodges Questions On Whether Social Security And Medicare Are Constitutional.
Judge Smacks Down Cuccinelli’s Global Warming Witchhunt
In what will no doubt be the first of many court decisions blocking Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s frivolous legal theories, a Virginia judge halted Cuccinelli’s witchhunt targeting a respected climate change scientist:
An Albemarle County Circuit Court judge has set aside a subpoena issued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the University of Virginia seeking documents related to the work of climate scientist and former university professor Michael Mann.
Judge Paul M. Peatross Jr. ruled that Cuccinelli can investigate whether fraud has occurred in university grants, as the attorney general had contended, but ruled that Cuccinelli’s subpoena failed to state a “reason to believe” that Mann had committed fraud.
The ruling is a major blow for Cuccinelli, a global warming skeptic who had maintained that he was investigating whether Mann committed fraud in seeking government money for research that showed that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming. Mann, now at Penn State University, worked at U-Va. until 2005.
Full Story: Think Progress » Judge Smacks Down Cuccinelli’s Global Warming Witchhunt.
Obama just doesn’t get it
Unemployment is a catastrophe, the recovery is stalling, but the president says his priority is “debt and deficits”
have underestimated President Obama more than once, starting when he was candidate Obama. At a few points when his campaign seemed shaky — the Jeremiah Wright fiasco, the serial defeats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and more at the end of the primary season; the post-Palin surge after the GOP convention — he turned things around, becoming a tougher candidate better able to reassure voters he understood their anxieties about the country, and that he would fight for their future.
So I hope I’m wrong this time. But even after his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, and what he described to NBC’s Brian Williams Sunday as days of reading, thinking and relaxing, here’s what Obama said were his priorities for doing his “job” for the rest of his term:
“I think the next couple of years, we’ve got to focus on debt and deficits. We’ve got to focus on making sure that we make the recovery stronger. And a lot of that is attracting private investment. Making sure that these companies who are making good profits are actually seeing the opportunities out there in a whole range of new areas and new ventures.”
Full Story: Obama just doesn’t get it – Joan Walsh – Salon.com.
OPS: “..his priority is “debt and deficits”" Just like the Republicans he is.
Reinhart’s Seven More Years of High Unemployment Hit Fed Today
As a seven-year-old in Cuba, Carmen Reinhart memorized the routes of ships carrying silver from Peru and Bolivia to Spain. By 16, she had moved to Miami and got a job at a Sears Holdings Corp. store reviewing credit applications and payment records.
That fascination with history and data has propelled a career at Bear Stearns Cos., the International Monetary Fund and the University of Maryland in College Park. Now Reinhart, 54, is using a paper studying 15 economic crises since World War II to warn Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and fellow policy makers that sluggish growth and high unemployment in the U.S. might persist through 2017 or longer.
“Whether one looks at advanced economies or a whole sample that includes emerging markets, the picture is one of lower growth during the decade that follows the crisis,” she said in an interview from Washington this week. “We are already three years into this post-crisis window. The clock starts ticking in the summer of 2007.”
Full Story: Reinhart’s Seven More Years of High Unemployment Hit Fed Today – Bloomberg.
Rights groups challenge Obama on targeted killings
- Groups seek disclosure of US criteria for targets
- Justice Dept says operations comply with U.S. law (Adds byline, Justice Department comment)
Civil liberties groups sued the Obama administration on Monday over a program they said illegally tries to kill U.S. citizens believed to be militants living abroad, like the anti-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of the Muslim cleric, arguing targeted killings violate the U.S. Constitution and international law. U.S. authorities have tied the cleric to the failed bombing attempt of a U.S. commercial jet on Christmas Day in 2009 and to an Army major who went on a shooting spree that killed 13 people last year at Fort Hood in Texas.
Full Story: Reuters AlertNet – Rights groups challenge Obama on targeted killings.
The right-wing cure for human misery: More pain
Lunatic conservative economics: Obama advisors should be fired for endorsing extended unemployment benefits
An Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal kicks off the week by arguing that the extension of unemployment benefits has raised the unemployment rate almost 3 percentage points higher than it would have been if the government had just said “tough luck” to out-of-work Americans. This, in itself, is not surprising, just standard boilerplate right-wing anti-welfare-state ideology.
But should we take it more seriously because the person making the argument is Harvard economist Robert Barro, long considered on the short list for the Nobel Prize? Barro, according to an admiring profile in Finance & Development, an International Monetary Fund publication, is the author of six of “the 146 most influential articles in economics since 1970.” His work resonates at the core of Chicago school theory, “part of the body of work [in the 1970s] that turned the tide of academic opinion in favor of a more modest role for government.”
He’s a big deal, and you can be sure that his WSJ broadside will be praised and attacked far and wide in the next 24-36 hours. It’s the kind of argument tailor-made for Republican talking points. If only Obama’s economic advisors had told him not to keep extending unemployment benefits, the unemployment rate would be 6.8 percent instead of 9.5 percent! That disparity, as Barro notes, could mean the difference between Democrats’ maintaining, or losing, control of Congress this November.
Full Story: The right-wing cure for human misery: More pain – How the World Works – Salon.com.
The rare earth element big squeeze
China’s dominance of a critical metal processing technology provides an excellent example of free market failure
If a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, then an advocate of government intervention in the economy is nothing more than a free market believer who just realized that China dominates an industry with major implications for national defense and renewable energy technology.
That’s the primary conclusion to be gleaned from a review of three recent studies of Chinese dominance of rare earth element mining and processing, “Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain,” a report published by the Congressional Research Service in July, the Government Accountability Office’s “Rare Earth Materials in the Defense Supply Chain,” published in April, and China’s Rare Earth Elements Industry: What Can the West Learn?” published by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in March.
The last report, written by Cindy Hurst, an analyst for the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office in Fort Leavenworth, KS., is the most interesting and detailed. But all three studies underline the same message. Rare earth elements are critical to advanced military technologies, computer and cellphone hardware, hybrid car batteries and wind turbine magnets. In other words, if you were going to target an industry crucial to dominating key technologies of the 21st century, rare earth element processing would be near the top of the list.
Full Story: The rare earth element big squeeze – How the World Works – Salon.com.
Glenn Beck’s rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected—the Waterworld of white self-pity.
By Christopher Hitchens:
One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority. This awareness already exists in places like New York and Texas and California, and there have even been projections of the time(s) at which it will occur and when different nonwhite populations will collectively outnumber the former white majority. But it also exerts a strong subliminal effect in states like Alaska that have an overwhelming white preponderance.
Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it—or to speak of it very delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled. But nobody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid noticing the symptoms of white unease and the additionally uneasy forms that its expression is beginning to take.
For example, so strong is the moral stature of the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that even the white right prefers to pretend to emulate it. (This smarmy tactic long predates Glenn Beck, by the way: I remember Ralph Reed trying it when he ran the Christian Coalition more than 10 years ago and announced that he wanted to remodel the organization along the lines of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.) Thus, it is really quite rare to hear slurs against President Barack Obama that are based purely on the color of his skin. Even Beck himself has tried to back away from the smears of that kind that he has spread in the past. But it is increasingly common to hear allegations that Obama is either foreign-born or a Muslim. And these insinuations are perfectly emblematic of the two main fears of the old majority: that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.
Why is America suffering so much from a recession that Germany largely bypassed?
As most everyone knows by now, ever more American jobs, recently even white-collar jobs, have been, and are now being, transferred to low-wage workers in other countries. Since 2000, the U.S. has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, with 2.1 million of those jobs being lost in the last two years alone. Since 2001, over 42,400 factories have closed in the U.S., and another 90,000 are considered to be at severe risk of closing. The last time so few people were employed in manufacturing was in 1941, before World War II spending pulled that sector out of its Great Depression slump.
As a result of the loss of all these outsourced jobs, poverty in America is going to keep getting worse if they cannot be brought back, and ever more American children are as a result going to be raised in poverty and violence, with ever more hellish societal and personal consequences. Thankfully, President Obama has come up with a big, bold solution to deal with the problem: He’s going to shut down the federal office that counts how many jobs are being shipped overseas! (Click here for source article)
What permitted and even triggered all this job outsourcing? Something you will never hear about or read about in our oligarchic, corporate-owned mainstream media: It was a simple change in tax law that occurred during Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House — a huge gift to the corporate bigwigs who helped get Reagan elected. As a result of this one new law, the importation of products made in American factories located in low-wage countries was no longer taxed the way it was before Reagan took the White House. As a result, virtually everything we buy these days is made by dirt-cheap workers making a buck or two an hour in some low-wage country.
Full Story: OpEdNews – Article: Why is America suffering so much from a recession that Germany largely bypassed?.
INSIDE JOB Official Trailer
From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (“No End In Sight”), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia. Narrated by Academy Award® winner Matt Damon, INSIDE JOB was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.
Why is America suffering so much from a recession that Germany largely bypassed?
As most everyone knows by now, ever more American jobs, recently even white-collar jobs, have been, and are now being, transferred to low-wage workers in other countries. Since 2000, the U.S. has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, with 2.1 million of those jobs being lost in the last two years alone. Since 2001, over 42,400 factories have closed in the U.S., and another 90,000 are considered to be at severe risk of closing. The last time so few people were employed in manufacturing was in 1941, before World War II spending pulled that sector out of its Great Depression slump.
As a result of the loss of all these outsourced jobs, poverty in America is going to keep getting worse if they cannot be brought back, and ever more American children are as a result going to be raised in poverty and violence, with ever more hellish societal and personal consequences. Thankfully, President Obama has come up with a big, bold solution to deal with the problem: He’s going to shut down the federal office that counts how many jobs are being shipped overseas! (Click here for source article)
What permitted and even triggered all this job outsourcing? Something you will never hear about or read about in our oligarchic, corporate-owned mainstream media: It was a simple change in tax law that occurred during Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House — a huge gift to the corporate bigwigs who helped get Reagan elected. As a result of this one new law, the importation of products made in American factories located in low-wage countries was no longer taxed the way it was before Reagan took the White House. As a result, virtually everything we buy these days is made by dirt-cheap workers making a buck or two an hour in some low-wage country.
Full Story: OpEdNews – Article: Why is America suffering so much from a recession that Germany largely bypassed?.
Houston, We Have A HUGE Problem ! ! !
Compelling Evidence Points To A Different Well Being Capped
What would the world say, if the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that gushed for 87 days, is not the same well location which BP identified to the world as the Gusher Of All Time?
BK Lim is a geohazards specialist who has dissected the entire “Macondo prospect gushing wells scenario” with the penetrating forensic analysis and well-honed investigative techniques. He has broken down so many facets of this apparent deception that one is left with only one conclusion.
When a foreign, multinational corporation perpetrates a deception in the marketplace, it is usually considered business as usual and life goes on without so much as a bleep on the radar screen.
Full Story: Houston, We Have A HUGE Problem ! ! ! (BP America is headquartered in Houston, TX) | Phoenix Rising from the Gulf.
Inequality and the High-End Bush Tax Cuts
As I’ve said before, from the standpoint of economic efficiency there’s a clear-cut case for letting the Bush tax cuts for people over $250,000 expire on schedule in December. Sunsetting the high-income tax cuts makes just as much sense from the standpoint of equity. Recent data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show a stunning shift in income away from the middle class and towards the highest-income people in the country over the last three decades:
* In 1979, the middle fifth of Americans took home 16.5 percent of the nation’s total after-tax income. By 2007, after several decades of stagnant incomes in the middle and surging incomes at the top, the middle fifth’s share had dropped to 14.1 percent. Over the same period, the top 1 percent’s share more than doubled, from 7.5 percent of total after-tax income to 17.1 percent (see graph below). So by 2007, the top 1 percent had a bigger slice of the national income pie than the middle 20 percent.
‘Self-Described Fiscal Conservatives Cannot Be Taken Seriously’
Simon Johnson::
Fiscal Austerity and America’s Future
There are three main views of the financial crisis and the most recent recession. In the first two views, the debate over the fiscal deficit is quite separate from what happened in the crisis. But in the third view, the financial crisis and likelihood of fiscal austerity are closely linked.
The first is that something went wrong with the financial plumbing central to the world’s economy. Failed plumbing is a serious business, of course — great real estate can be ruined by a burst pipe. But it’s a technical issue; nothing deeper is at stake.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation ended up addressing a myriad of technical issues. Clearly, “fix the plumbing” is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s interpretation of what we need to do – he insists that making the system safer just requires “capital, capital, capital.” Note, however, that the leading global experts on capital think that the Treasury’s specific approach is wrong-headed, not making progress and likely to lead us into great danger.
The second view is that the financial system is more deeply broken.
Full Story: Fiscal Austerity and America’s Future – NYTimes.com.
Summer 2010 Hottest On Record, New Data Suggest
New numbers confirm what the sweaty brows of Northeasterners have been saying for months: The summer of 2010 was a record-breaking scorcher.
Preliminary figures provided by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University on Friday show 28 cities from Washington, D.C., to Caribou, Maine, set record highs for average temperature from March through August.
A large swath of the country sweltered in early August, when scorching temperatures and high humidity made it feel like at least 100 degrees in many places and prompted heat advisories for 18 states. While unrelenting heat is the norm in the Deep South, it’s unusual in places like Burlington, Vt., and Portland, Maine, which saw their hottest spring and summer in more than a century.
Full Story: Summer 2010 Hottest On Record, New Data Suggest.
Mesmerizing Time-Lapse Shows Every Asteroid Discovered Since 1980 (VIDEO)
The video below, which uses data from the Asteroid Orbital Elements Database, presents a visual history of the asteroids discovered since 1980.
Two white numbers in the lower left-hand corner of the video indicate the year and the number of asteroids known to scientists at that time. Meanwhile, the animation shows the location of these asteroids within the solar system. (As the years pass, new discoveries are highlighted briefly in white. “Earth Crossers” are shown in red, “Earth Approachers” are in yellow, and other asteroids are shown in green.)
In 1980, according to the video, there were only 8,954 known asteroids. By 1990, that number had grown to over 14,000. The YouTube user that uploaded the video explains the new discoveries that took place throughout the 1990s:
Full Story: Mesmerizing Time-Lapse Shows Every Asteroid Discovered Since 1980 (VIDEO).
How Obama Got Rolled by Wall Street
Why the 44th president is no FDR—and the economy is still in the doldrums.
Barack Obama was “incredulous” at what he was hearing, said one of his top economic advisers. The president had spent his first year in office overseeing the biggest government bailout of the financial industry in American history. Together with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, he had kept Wall Street afloat on a trillion-dollar tide of taxpayer money. But the banks were barely lending, and the economy was still mired in high unemployment. And now, in December 2009, the holiday news had started to filter out of the canyons of lower Manhattan: Wall Street’s year-end bonuses would actually be larger in 2009 than they had been in 2007, the year prior to the catastrophe. “Wait, let me get this straight,” Obama said at a White House meeting that December. “These guys are reserving record bonuses because they’re profitable, and they’re profitable only because we rescued them.” It was as if nothing had changed. Even after a Depression-size crash, the banks were not altering their behavior. The president was being perceived, more and more, as a man on the wrong side of an incendiary issue.
Full Story: How Obama Got Rolled by Wall Street – Newsweek.
Obama Boxed In by Generals on Afghanistan
Ray McGovern: :
Just back from Afghanistan, Marine Commandant, Gen. James Conway held a news conference Tuesday to add his voice to the Pentagon campaign to disparage the July 2011 date President Barack Obama set for U.S. troops to begin leaving Afghanistan.
Conway claimed that intelligence intercepts suggest that this deadline has strengthened the conviction of those resisting the U.S.-led occupation that it is just a matter of time before most foreign forces leave.
Thus, Conway:
“In some ways … it’s probably giving our enemy sustenance. … We think he may be saying to himself … ‘Hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long.’”
Conway, however, was quick to reassure supporters of the war in Afghanistan that Taliban morale is likely to drop when, “come the fall [of 2011] we’re still there hammering them like we have been.”
Full Story: Obama Boxed In by Generals on Afghanistan | CommonDreams.org.
America Facing Depression and Bankruptcy
Long-time economic, political and market analyst Bob Chapman publishes the International Forecaster, offering incisive analysis absent through mainstream sources, especially important now given America’s deepening economic crisis getting harder to conceal as evidence mounts.
His August 25 issue says the following:
“Twenty countries (including America) are headed into bankruptcy and more will follow. That brings up the subject of state debt in the US. America has been in an inflationary depression for 18 months. States have been cutting back for two years,” but still face huge budget gaps required to be closed….2011 will be a terrible year (with) 80% of states expect(ing) deficits of more than $200 billion. 2012 looks even worse.” Most worrisome, “there is no recovery and there never has been….the US economy and financial system is comatose.” The worst is yet to come and will hit hard on arrival.
On August 24, economist David Rosenberg said, “Now (I’ll) tell you why this is a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” what he’s been repeating for months unlike few others, corporate analysts claiming the fall 2007 downturn “ended sometime last year.” Not so, it’s deepened, growing evidence providing more clarity.
Full Story: OpEdNews – Article: America Facing Depression and Bankruptcy.
The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
Frank Rich:
ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.
Vive la révolution!
There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.
Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.
Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party – NYTimes.com.
BP warning clean-up crews that a 200-foot, 2-mile oil slick is about to hit Grand Isle
Journalist Mac McClelland is reporting today that oil clean-up supervisors in the Gulf of Mexico have been informed by British Petroleum (NYSE:BP) that “a 200-foot-by-2-mile swath of oil is going to make landfall on Grand Isle in the next couple of days.”
So much for the dream scenario that all the oil in Gulf of Mexico has somehow disappeared.
Despite announcements by the US administration over the last couple of weeks to the contrary, oil continues to wash up on beaches and large areas of wetland remain contaminated with oil from the disaster that began April 20th when BP’s Deepwater Horizon Oil platform exploded and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
Full Story: BP warning clean-up crews that a 200-foot, 2-mile oil slick is about to hit Grand Isle.
A Republican’s Worst Nightmare: The Poor Vote
Republicans have spent the last 20 months hammering the American poor and unemployed at nearly every turn. From the economic stimulus, to extension of unemployment benefits, Republicans have tried only to stand in the way of offering any help to those who borne the worst of the Great Recession.
They have done so only for the most crass political reasons, hoping to retake control of Congress by energizing the votes of anti-government conservatives, but what if, instead of tea party types, Republicans are met at the ballot box by the very people they’ve been attacking? Yes, what if unemployed and low-income Americans come out in November and turn GOP dreams into nightmares?
Don’t think it can happen? Don’t be so sure.
With the nation suffering its worst period of long-term joblessness (workers unemployed for six months or more) since World War II, and its unemployment rate dangerously close to double digits, there are some 15 million out-of-work Americans out there, and an affiliate of the AFL-CIO labor union is launching a campaign to mobilize unemployed workers across the nation for the November midterm elections.
Full Story: On The Hill: Capitol Idea: A Republican’s Worst Nightmare: The Poor Vote.
Judge Rejects Legal Fees in Ground Zero Settlement
The federal judge overseeing the settlement between ground zero workers and the city over health issues told the plaintiffs’ lawyers on Friday that they should absorb $6.1 million in legal expenses they had intended to pass on to their clients.
The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, disallowed the charges at a hearing after rejecting lawyers’ justifications for the expenses, which involved interest paid on loans that helped finance about $30 million in litigation costs. Those loans had been at interest rates of 14 percent to 18 percent, and would have reduced the workers’ individual settlement amounts by from $78.23 to $2,300, on average.
Paul J. Napoli of Worby Groner Edelman and Napoli Bern Ripka, the law partnership representing the bulk of the more than 10,000 workers, argued that without the borrowed money, “it would not have been possible to litigate this case.” But Judge Hellerstein said that while he did not question the appropriateness or ethics of borrowing the money, he was concerned about the fairness of making the clients pay for it.
“The clients are entitled to the maximum return possible,” he said.
Full Story: Judge Rejects Legal Fees in Ground Zero Settlement – NYTimes.com.
Wall Street’s Connected Lobbyists
Jim Hightower :
Congress finally passed a moderate reform package to tighten regulations on the banksters of Wall Street. Of course, the banksters howled, protesting even the meekest of reforms — but the package is now the law, so that’s that.
Right? Uh … no.
What Congress passed is a 2,300-page compendium of concepts, leaving the real decision-making about the details of financial regulation in the hands of the Federal Reserve, the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and other regulatory agencies.
In other words, the game is still on for Wall Street lobbyists! So they’re presently mounting a furious blitz on the rule-writing regulators, still trying to weaken or even kill many of the reform ideas passed by Congress.
To weasel their way inside, the financial giants have reached into the agencies themselves to hire away nearly 150 regulators, luring them with fat salaries to switch sides and become industry lobbyists.
Full Story: t r u t h o u t | Jim Hightower | Wall Street’s Connected Lobbyists.
National Export Initiative Makes Considerable Advances
President Obama’s National Export Initiative is picking up steam. In support of the president’s Initiative, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced proposed measures on Thursday that will strengthen the enforcement of U.S. trade laws, specifically regarding the importing practices of non-market economies.
President Obama’s National Export Initiative is picking up steam. In support of the president’s Initiative, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced proposed measures on Thursday that will strengthen the enforcement of U.S. trade laws, specifically regarding the importing practices of non-market economies.
The National Export Initiative will focus on three key tasks: improving credit to small and medium-sized businesses who wish to export their goods, enforcing trade laws already on the books, and spearheading an administration-wide trade promotion strategy.
“The Obama administration is committed to aggressively enforcing our trade laws to ensure a level playing field for U.S. companies and their workers – the engines of our economic growth,” Locke said, according to a Commerce Department press release. “Today’s announcement is another demonstration of our continuing efforts to sharpen our trade enforcement tools.”
Full Story: National Export Initiative Makes Considerable Advances | Economy In Crisis.
Opportunity Squandered
Who will bail out the U.S. government when it crashes? No one. The U.S. has emerged from the recent crash with a much larger legacy of debt and a financial system that is less efficient and less competitive and more vulnerable to another crisis
FinReg is a disappointment. Congress and the Administration never waited for the findings and recommendations of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission for a clear review of why the U.S. financial system collapsed. Congressional hearings on the crisis were irresponsibly inadequate. Congress was offered a historic and unique opportunity to change fundamentally the structures, practices and culture of Wall Street. They failed to do so. Their limited objective was to strengthen and restore the financial sector as it existed before, not reform it. They sought – and have achieved – continuity with a discredited past. The measures in FinReg are designed to clean up after bubbles burst, not to head them off before they occur. And the bill for the clean-up will most likely go to the American taxpayer.
FinReg is not designed to prevent the next crisis. Unless the regulators are tough and independent enough to stand up to the pervasive money and clout of the financial community and do what Congress failed to do, Wall Street’s risky business-as-usual ways and uncurbed appetites could ultimately plunge us into yet another crisis. The economy today is far more precarious and prone to catastrophe than it was in 1990. Another devastating crisis would again fall on the backs of taxpayers, investors, workers and consumers – those who bear the ultimate brunt of Wall Street’s recklessness, avarice and crimes. The last crisis was a painful warning.
Full Story: Opportunity Squandered | Economy In Crisis.
Faking It: America’s Standard-of-Living Bubble Burst Looming
Through pretending and borrowing, we have continued to live in a land of make-believe where we can always afford to live a little better, despite any real basis for this assumption.
In America, it seems perception is everything. Amid our economic turmoil, it may seem egregious to say that our standard-of-living has continued to rise, but that is exactly what has been happening. Through pretending and borrowing, we have continued to live in a land of make-believe where we can always afford to live a little better, despite any real basis for this assumption. Due to our reprehensible spending patterns, Americans are encroaching the bursting of the most worrisome bubble of all: the standard-of-living bubble, according to CNNMoney.com.
For the past several years, the average inflation-adjusted total pay of American workers hasn’t been increasing, so there hasn’t been any foundation on which to build our living standard. However, we have continued to save less, borrow more and spend, spend, spend. Credit card debt is growing at exponential rates. With the bursting of the real estate bubble, borrowing from home equity was relinquished and people resorted to borrowing from their credit cards.
Full Story: Faking It: America’s Standard-of-Living Bubble Burst Looming | Economy In Crisis.
China Trying to Acquire Technology Through Trade Policies
Not content to merely be Asia’s economic powerhouse, China is “going abroad” in its economic policy in an effort to acquire vital technologies, which can then be used to further penetrate markets and circumvent trade barriers, according to Peter Navarro, a business professor at the University of California-Irvine.
“China is on a quest to beg, borrow, steal, or, in the case of Anshan, buy into the American market and American technology,” he writes at Bloomberg News.
Anshan is a Chinese state-owned steel company seeking to invest in an American steel mill. Navarro, like 50 lawmakers that have asked the Obama administration to heavily scrutinize the proposed deal, is highly skeptical of China’s motives in this case. In his eyes, China is simply seeking to get a foot in the door, steal America’s technology, use that information to promote “national champions” in the industry, who will then compete against American steelworkers.
Full Story: China Trying to Acquire Technology Through Trade Policies | Economy In Crisis.
VAT and The Great Tax Swap
Pat Choate:
President Obama and his advisers are hinting that they may ask Congress to supplement the existing corporate and personal income taxes with a national Value-Added Tax (VAT) – a tax on consumption. The reaction has been quick, venomous and misleading.
Missing in that criticism is any recognition that VAT-based tax discrimination in the global trading system is a major cause of our large and expanding trade deficits and is costing the United States millions of jobs as U.S.-based corporations shift their production to countries with a VAT.
My proposal herein is simple. Eliminate the existing U.S. personal and corporate income tax system altogether and replace it with a VAT — a great tax swap of historic proportions.
Full Story: Pat Choate: VAT and The Great Tax Swap.
The American Illusion of Wealth
We have become a nation enslaved by consumption, and as a result the wealth our country once held has been transferred to countries like China and Germany. The U.S. economy has become an outsourcer of not only workers and production but of our own investments.
It is stunning that so many people (at all levels) in this country believe that high consumption levels are paramount to a sustainable economy. The problem with this system is that even now when we are in a recession, which was essentially caused by our over-consumption of foreign goods and a lack of domestic investment (ie savings, production, etc.), so many are advocating policies that would only revert the country back to the old system.
Without production and investment an economy will be unable to sustain itself. In the United States, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services. The U.S. spends 22 percent of consumption on real estate (a dead market) and health care (a high-cost market with low direct economic benefit). Approximately Two thirds of federal expenditures (8 percent of GDP) is spent on the defense budget; total government expenditures make up 20 percent of GDP, with state and local governments spending 12 percent. Bringing up the rear at 16 percent of GDP is private savings and investment. Just to get the ball rolling, let’s throw in the U.S. trade deficit, which reached $816 billion in 2008 (it decreased in 2009 because of the global recession) and is on pace to hit similar levels in 2010.
Full Story: The American Illusion of Wealth | Economy In Crisis.
Is Fracking Even Worse Than Drilling?
With cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico barely underway, energy companies are already assuming a crouching stance in anticipation of a no-holds-barred attack by environmentalists on what the industry says is the next major breakthrough in natural resource extraction.
The breakthrough is called fracking – short for hydraulic fracturing – the process of injecting water and chemicals into reservoirs to fracture rock and free up gas and oil.
Critics say fracking can poison water supplies. They also say it uses large amounts of fresh water and generates large amounts of wastewater with limited disposal options. Hydraulic fracturing injects high volumes of water, chemicals and particles underground to create fractures through which gas can flow for collection.
According to the industry, fracturing has been used in roughly 90 percent of wells in operation today and 60 to 80 percent of new wells will require fracturing to remain viable. The industry contends the process is safe.
Full Story: ENERGY: Is Fracking Even Worse Than Drilling?.
Study of coal ash sites finds extensive water contamination
A study released on Thursday finds that 39 sites in 21 states where coal-fired power plants dump their coal ash are contaminating water with toxic metals such as arsenic and other pollutants, and that the problem is more extensive than previously estimated.
The analysis of state pollution data by the Environmental Integrity Project, the Sierra Club and Earthjustice comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to impose federally enforceable regulations for the first time. An alternative option would leave regulation of coal ash disposal up to the states, as it is now.
The EPA will hold the first of seven nationwide hearings about the proposed regulation Monday in Arlington, Va. A public comment period ends Nov. 19.
Full Story: Study of coal ash sites finds extensive water contamination | McClatchy.
Whacking the Middle Class
By DEAN BAKER:
When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules
The middle class is getting whacked by the Great Recession. Fifteen million people are out of work, another 9 million workers can only find part-time jobs, and millions more have given up looking for work altogether. Those lucky enough to be employed are unlikely to see any substantial wage gains for years to come.
Millions of homeowners are facing the loss of their home and more than 10 million are underwater in their mortgage. Most of the huge baby boom cohort is approaching retirement with little other than Social Security to support them, now that the collapse of the housing bubble has destroyed their home equity and much of the rest of their savings.
This pain is infuriating for two reasons. First, this was an entirely preventable disaster. The housing bubble was easy to see. Competent economists had long warned of its dangers.
The second reason why the current situation is infuriating is that we know how to get the economy out of this mess. We just need to boost demand. This can be done either with much more government stimulus, more aggressive monetary policy from the Fed, or pushing the dollar down to boost exports.
Full Story: Dean Baker: Whacking the Middle Class.
Democrats file complaint with IRS, accuse conservative group of tax code violations
The Democratic Party has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service complaining that a conservative foundation spending millions of dollars on ads in election battleground states is violating its status as a tax-exempt organization.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign committee filed the complaint this week, charging that Americans for Prosperity Foundation, founded by billionaire conservative David Koch, is airing ads that violate federal regulations because they “constitute political campaign intervention.”
The foundation began running $4.1 million in ads last week in 13 states. This week it went on the air with a $1.4 million ad campaign that will run in Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania through Sept. 8.
The ads don’t mention candidates or parties, but attack Obama administration policies to rescue the financial sector, the economic stimulus and the new health care law. The criticism echoes themes used by Republican candidates and GOP-leaning groups to attack Democrats.
Full Story: Democrats file complaint with IRS, accuse conservative group of tax code violations – WDAF.
Republicans Very Likely To Overtake House Of Representatives, Analysis Shows
How many House seats will the Republicans gain in 2010? To answer this question, we have run 1,000 simulations of the 2010 House elections. The simulations are based on information from past elections going back to 1946. Our methodology replicates that for our ultimately successful forecast of the 2006 midterm. Two weeks before Election Day in 2006, we posted a prediction that the Democrats would gain 32 seats and recapture the House majority. The Democrats gained 30 seats in 2006. Our current forecast for 2010 shows that the Republicans are likely to regain the House majority.
Our preliminary 2010 forecast will appear (with other forecasts by political scientists) in the October issue of PS: Political Science. By our reckoning, the most likely scenario is a Republican majority in the neighborhood of 229 seats versus 206 for the Democrats for a 50-seat loss for the Democrats. Taking into account the uncertainty in our model, the Republicans have a 79% chance of winning the House.
The model has two steps. Step 1 predicts the midterm vote division from only two variables — the generic poll result and the party of the president. With this estimate of the partisan tide in place, step 2 forecasts the winners of 435 House races using separate statistical models for open seats and races with incumbent candidates. At each step, the forecast takes into account uncertainty about the inputs.
Full Story: Joseph Bafumi: A Forecast of the 2010 House Election Outcome.
BEWARE: Banks Flooding Consumers With ‘Professional Cards’ That Aren’t Covered Under Reform
Amid all the junk mail pouring into your house in recent months, you might have noticed a solicitation or two for a “professional card,” otherwise known as a small-business or corporate credit card.
If so, watch out. While Capital One Financial Corp.’s World MasterCard, Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank CitiBusiness/AAdvantage Mastercard and the others might look like typical plastic, they are anything but.
Professional cards aren’t covered under the Credit Card Accountability and Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, or Card Act for short. Among other things, the law prohibits issuers from controversial billing practices such as hair-trigger interest rate increases, shortened payment cycles and inactivity fees—but it doesn’t apply to professional cards (see table).
Full Story: Beware That New Credit-Card Offer – WSJ.com.
66% of Angle supporters regret her nomination
Obviously, Reid has got some work to do in making the final sale on his own candidacy, but his problems are nothing compared to those of Sharron Angle. Having 2 out of 3 of her own primary supporters regret their decision is simply astonishing, especially given that they nominated her just two months ago. But who knows, maybe all hope isn’t lost for Nevada’s Republicans: perhaps they can still dump Angle and nominate a bunch of chickens instead.
Full Story: Daily Kos: State of the Nation.
Frankenwheat: A New Hope for World Hunger
A team of British scientists has cracked wheat’s genome, promising modified varieties that may one day feed our starved world. [OPS: ...or wipe it out]
There’s a new hope for the 1 billion people who go to sleep hungry every night. On Friday, a team of British scientists announced they had cracked the genome of wheat, the third most-produced cereal in the world after corn and rice, opening the door for the creation of more productive and nutritious varieties.
“The information we have collected will be invaluable in tackling the problem of global food shortage,” University of Liverpool Professor Neil Hall said in a press release.
Five times longer than the human genome, which was fully sequenced 10 years ago, the wheat genome is the latest of the world’s big crops to be cracked. Rice was fully sequenced in 2005, corn in 2009 and soybeans earlier this year.
Full Story: Frankenwheat: A New Hope for World Hunger – Tonic.
‘Sensational’ Discovery: Archeologists Find Gateway to the Viking Empire
For a century, archeologists have been looking for a gate through a wall built by the Vikings in northern Europe. This summer, it was found. Researchers now believe the extensive barrier was built to protect an important trading route.
Their attacks out of nowhere in rapid longboats have led many to call Vikings the inventors of the Blitzkrieg. “Like wild hornets,” reads an ancient description, the Vikings would plunder monasteries and entire cities from Ireland to Spain. The fact that the Vikings, who have since found their place as droll comic book characters, were also avid masons is slightly less well known.
The proof can be seen in northern Germany, not far from the North Sea-Baltic Canal. There, one can marvel at a giant, 30-kilometer (19-mile) wall which runs through the entire state of Schleswig-Holstein. The massive construction, called the Danevirke — “work of the Danes” — is considered the largest earthwork in northern Europe.
Archeologists have now taken a closer look at part of the construction — a three-meter-thick (10 feet) wall from the 8th century near Hedeby (known as Haithabu in German). It is constructed entirely out of stones collected from the surrounding region. Some of them are only as big as a fist, while others weigh as much as 100 kilograms (220 pounds). “The Vikings collected millions of rocks,” says archeologist Astrid Tummuscheit, who works for the state archeology office of Schleswig-Holstein.
Full Story: ‘Sensational’ Discovery: Archeologists Find Gateway to the Viking Empire – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.
Bank of America Must Defend Claims It Concealed Merrill Bonuses
Bank of America Corp. must defend lawsuit claims it concealed bonuses and losses at Merrill Lynch & Co after it agreed to acquire the brokerage firm, a judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan yesterday granted some of Bank of America’s requests to dismiss claims in the consolidated class-action securities-fraud and derivative lawsuits, while denying others.
Bank of America, the largest U.S. bank, acquired Merrill Jan. 1, 2009, in a deal criticized by lawmakers, regulators and investors over its cost and the U.S. bailout that followed. Castel yesterday rejected Bank of America’s argument that one claim in the case should be dismissed because the bank’s proxy materials didn’t misstate or omit Merrill’s intention to award employee bonuses made in December 2008.
Full Story: Bank of America Must Defend Claims It Concealed Merrill Bonuses – BusinessWeek.
Eight lawmakers may soon know if ethics probes will proceed
Eight lawmakers may soon know the results of an ethics investigation into possible links between fundraising and their votes on the Wall Street reform bill.
The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) met Friday to determine whether the investigation unearthed enough evidence to warrant further review by the full ethics committee, two House aides told The Hill.
The board must vote on whether to refer the case to the ethics committee or whether to end it completely. Whatever the decision, the OCE’s final report must be sent to the members who were investigated.
Full Story: Eight lawmakers may soon know if ethics probes will proceed – TheHill.com.
Veterans’ group: CIA blocking lawsuit over experiments on troops
An advocacy group working on behalf of Vietnam veterans has asked a federal judge in California to sanction the CIA, saying the spy agency has been blocking efforts to uncover its role in alleged experiments on US soldiers from the 1950s to 1970s.
The Vietnam Veterans of America filed a lawsuit on behalf of six Vietnam War veterans in January, 2009, claiming that the CIA had used an estimated 7,800 US service members as “guinea pigs” in experiments involving “at least 250, but as many as 400 chemical and biological agents,” according to Courthouse News.
Among the chemicals the lawsuit alleges were used on the soldiers were LSD, sarin and phosgene nerve gases, cyanide, PCP and even THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Full Story: Veterans’ group: CIA blocking lawsuit over experiments on troops | Raw Story.
Ed Show w/ Cenk: GOP Is Party Of Hate
Cenk Uygur (host of The Young Turks) filling in for Ed Schultz on MSNBC explains why the GOP is the ‘party of hate’.
REPORT: Conservative Groups Gearing Up To Spend $400 Million On Midterm Election
In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, corporations and special interest groups now enjoy the ability to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. Now, with less than 10 weeks until November, it’s clear just how far conservative groups are willing to go to try to influence the midterm elections.
According to a new report from ThinkProgress, conservative organizations have committed (or already spent) $400 million to advance their conservative agenda at the ballot box this year. For comparison’s sake, this outside money alone is more than the Democratic campaign committees spent combined when they took back both houses of Congress in the last midterm election. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal notes that special interest groups have already spent three times as much in 2010 than they had in 2006.
Among the outside groups that plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing conservatives are some familiar faces and some new ones as well. While the NRA and the Chamber of Commerce have long supported conservative causes, the former plans to double its spending from $10 million in 2006 to $20 million now and the latter will triple its commitment to $75 million this year. Many new groups are also entering the scene in a big way, including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group with $52 million and Norm Coleman’s American Action Network with $25 million.
Those conservative groups trying to use $400 million in outside spending to tip the midterm election include:
Full Story: Think Progress » REPORT: Conservative Groups Gearing Up To Spend $400 Million On Midterm Election.
Mississippi Middle School Segregates Student Government Officers: Only Whites Can Run For President
With the election of President Barack Obama, the country heralded the coming of an age in which an African-American could overcome significant historical prejudice to ascend to the presidency. But while the country celebrates this collective step forward, a Nettleton, Mississippi public school is taking a clear step back. According to Nettleton Middle School’s rules, children running for certain class officer posts must meet a specific race requirement: to be president, the child must be white.
A school memo, obtained by MixedandHappy and The Smoking Gun, was passed out to every 6th, 7th, and 8th grader to inform them of the breakdown. The upcoming elections are divided between offices delineated for black and white students. Of the 12 offices for which students can compete, “eight are earmarked for white students, while four are termed ‘black seats.” The presidency is reserved for white students across each grade, but a black student is permitted to be the 8th grade vice-president or reporter, the 7th grade treasurer, or the 6th grade reporter. So, along with a “B” average and “a good disciplinary status and moral character,” a child hoping to represent his or her class must be the right race:
Full Story: Think Progress » Mississippi Middle School Segregates Student Government Officers: Only Whites Can Run For President.
Bush’s Aide Says Bush Memoir Will Spark ‘Serious Debate’ About Whether Bush Policies Caused The Financial Crisis
<snip>
Remember, it was the Bush administration that ignored “remarkably prescient warnings” regarding problems in the housing market, while actively pulling strings out of the regulatory framework and appointing regulators fundamentally disinterested in reining in Wall Street. Financial firms thus ran wild, buildings up a huge amount of systemic risk that eventually toppled the system, putting more than 8 million Americans out of work. And as The Wonk Room explains, even before the meltdown, the Bush economy was incredibly weak, across almost every economic indicator.
Will The Libertarian Party Sell Out Its Principles To Win A Senate Seat?
In a stunning upset, Tea Party activist and Sarah Palin-endorsee Joe Miller appears to have upset incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in Tuesday’s Republican primary election. Though there are still around ten thousand absentee ballots yet to be counted, analysts agree it is unlikely Murkowski will be able to close her 1,668 vote deficit.
However, in a move reminiscent of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Gov. Charlie Crist (I-FL), Murkowski now appears to be considering a third-party run on the Libertarian Party ballot in the general election. Indeed, such a move could already be in the works; RedState’s Erick Erickson tweeted last night that “Lisa Murkowski has already gone to the Alaska Libertarian Party promising money in exchange for their spot on the general election ballot.”
Murkowski could only run on the Libertarian line if the current nominee, David Haase, were to step aside. In the meantime, the question remains: Will the Libertarian Party sell out its principles in order to win a seat in the United States Senate?
Full Story: Think Progress » Will The Libertarian Party Sell Out Its Principles To Win A Senate Seat?.
Health Insurers Are Backing Republicans With Campaign Donations By 8:1 Margin
Insurers became the target of the White House’s attacks in the closing days of the health reform debate and so perhaps it’s no surprise that they’re “backing Republicans with campaign donations by an 8-to- 1 margin, favoring the party that’s promised to repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul if it wins back Congress.” Bloomberg’s Drew Armstrong has the scoop:
WellPoint, along with Coventry Health Care Inc. and Humana Inc., gave Republican candidates $315,000 from May through July, according to U.S. Federal Election Commission records. That compares with $41,000 given to Democrats by the three companies as the parties near November elections that will determine who controls the U.S. House and Senate next year.
Full Story: Think Progress » Health Insurers Are Backing Republicans With Campaign Donations By 8:1 Margin.
Five Years Later, Bush Efforts To Block Medicaid Relief Have A Lasting Impact On The Gulf Coast
This week, on the eve of the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a new study was released documenting the shocking psychological toll the storm had on children in the Gulf Coast. Researchers at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health found that more than 37 percent of children displaced by Katrina have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or behavioral and conduct disorders. These children were also five times more likely to experience emotional disturbances than kids not affected by the hurricane. “From the perspective of the Gulf’s most vulnerable children and families, the recovery from Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans has been a dismal failure,” said study researcher Dr. Irwin Redlener. Earlier studies that examined mental illness in adult survivors found very similar results: just under a third of respondents reported mental problems.
One way that many people could have received mental health care following the storm was through Medicaid. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Medicaid is the dominant source of funding for both children and adults with mental illness, comprising more than 50 percent of public mental health spending. However, the Bush administration — even after being roundly pilloried for the initial logistical response to Katrina — neutered emergency Medicaid relief for Gulf Coast residents in the months following the storm.
After Katrina, Senators from both parties wanted to enact a “Disaster Relief Medicaid” program, which would have temporarily extended Medicaid benefits to all low-income residents affected by the storm, even if they were above the minimum income requirements for enrollment. The same type of program was enacted after the September 11 terror attacks, but this time around, it met stiff resistance from the Bush administration.
Full Story: Think Progress » Five Years Later, Bush Efforts To Block Medicaid Relief Have A Lasting Impact On The Gulf Coast.
Corporations scoff at workers’ rights–even the right to come home from work alive
Jim Hightower:
OSHA, the agency scorned by labor haters, has been meek and weak
Their names probably won’t mean mean anything to you, but these people ought to have some modicum of personal recognition: Jason Anderson, Aaron Dale “Bubba” Burkeen, Donald Clark, Stephen Curtis, Gordon Jones, Roy Wyatt Kemp, Karl Kleppinger, Blair Manuel, Dewey Revette, Shane Roshto, and Adam Weise. These are the 11 workers who were killed when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank into the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.
Four months after the disaster, national media outlets continue extensive coverage of BP’s calamitous well–as they should–showing us satellite pictures of the spreading plumes of pollution, footage of dead pelicans, estimates of the ecological horror on the ocean floor, analyses of the frantic efforts to stop the oil, commentaries on the astonishing arrogance of corporate executives, feature stories about the slick’s impact on Gulf tourism, interviews with lawmakers demanding much tougher environmental protections, etc…
But what about those people? Most of the 11 were in their twenties and thirties. They had families and futures. Yet, aside from an occasional off-handed reference to the general body count, their fate had pretty much been dropped from discussion about the cost of our country’s cavalier ethic of “drill, baby, drill.” And what about the 17 other rig workers who were injured in the Deepwater explosion, many of them badly burned and maimed. There’s barely been any media mention of the price they paid for the corporate rush to complete this well, much less any follow-up on their painful and costly ordeal.
Full Story: Hightower Lowdown | Corporations scoff at workers’ rights–even the right to come home from work alive.
What Rotten Eggs Reveal About the State of Our Democracy
Amy Goodman:
The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.
What do a half-billion eggs have to do with democracy? The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs, the largest egg recall in U.S. history, opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.
While scores of brands have been recalled, they all can be traced back to just two egg farms. Our food supply is increasingly in the hands of larger and larger companies, which wield enormous power in our political process. As with the food industry, so, too, is it with oil and with banks: Giant corporations, some with budgets larger than most nations, are controlling our health, our environment, our economy and increasingly, our elections.
Full Story: What Rotten Eggs Reveal About the State of Our Democracy | Food | AlterNet.
Cooler than Thou: Will Hipsters Wreck Christianity?
Brett McCracken’s new book dissects the phenomenon of the hipster church, frets about the fate of Christianity.
It was pouring rain, cold rain, on an early March morning, as I headed to Brooklyn Label, a café near my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was meeting Vito Aiuto, pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, a plant of Redeemer Presbyterian, one of the largest and most influential evangelical churches in New York City.
I arrived drenched and he arrived late, wearing a utility shirt, jeans, and a maroon wool hat he never removed. We sat at the counter, sipping bottomless coffee from oversized mugs, and talked about our neighborhood and how to build community, his experience starting and leading a church, music, education, and his recently adopted son. Aiuto told me that he tries to keep things simple at Resurrection; he lets the congregation decide the church’s programs and activities. He also admitted that ministering in the hipster neighborhood of Williamsburg is both a blessing and a curse, that although Resurrection mainly attracts young and educated artist types, he has an explicit goal of ensuring it is not a “hip” church. There are no gimmicks to draw that crowd in.
Full Story: Cooler than Thou: Will Hipsters Wreck Christianity? | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches.
Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis
Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.
Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:
They created fake demand.
A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.
The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.
Full Story: Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis – ProPublica.
10 Ways Your Taxes Pay For Environmental Devastation
Despite recent green investments, an array of government subsidies pay big dirty industries like oil, coal and factory farms to destroy the environment in every way possible.
Urban sprawl, pollution, over-consumption, deforestation…like it or not, U.S. taxpayers are still paying for all of these things to occur in America and beyond. Despite recent investments in green jobs and technology, an array of government subsidies pay big dirty industries like oil, coal and factory farms to destroy the environment in every way possible while greener, healthier industries like solar power and vegetable farms get a pittance.
10. Highways
When gas prices rose dramatically in 2008, Americans began flocking to mass transit in droves, resulting in declining revenues for the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Naturally, the Bush Administration’s response was to take money from already underfunded mass transit and use it to pay for highways that are already, as Slate put it, “paved with gold”. Billions of dollars are pumped into the highway system every year, which encourages the polluting car culture and leads to further sprawl, while mass transit continues to fall by the wayside.
Full Story: 10 Ways Your Taxes Pay For Environmental Devastation | Environment | AlterNet.
Inside Top Secret America
A major investigation reveals the extent of America’s vast and heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment
In July, the Washington Post published the Top Secret America project — a sweeping portrait of America’s heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment. Lead reporter Dana Priest calls it the “vast and hidden apparatus of the war on terror.”
Priest, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, described the project as the most challenging investigation of her career. She teamed up with national security journalist William Arkin and a team of about 20 Post staffers to create an “alternative geography” of a hidden world that has exploded since the attacks of 9/11. At last count, the official U.S. intelligence budget stood at $75 billion — more than two and a half times what it was on September 10, 2001.
Full Story: Inside Top Secret America | Civil Liberties | AlterNet.
Death of the First Amendment – The Nazification of the United States
Chuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce one of the most important articles of our time, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”
It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.
Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.
Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.
Full Story: Death of the First Amendment – The Nazification of the United States — Signs of the Times News.
WHY AMERICA MUST HAVE AN ANTI-WAR UPRISING
IS THE SILENCE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES?
I am not against war. I am a combat veteran. I sit on my tail, watch TV, go to restaurants and have fond delusional memories about Vietnam. In my bedroom closet, I have a trash bag. It is never opened, it has been there for years. It has, along with other “military mementos,” a small green “government issued” address book. Marines, long ago, scrawled their names in it. Half of them never came back from Vietnam, never had children, grandchildren, got to finish college or even high school. Many, maybe most, had never had sex, owned a car or travelled more than 50 miles from home.
Their lives were stolen, stolen then and we are doing it every day, maybe not the numbers, not on such a grand scale, but the lessons of Vietnam have more than been forgotten. The brightest time in American history, another “greatest generation” may well have been the one that stopped an evil and corrupt war. That generation saw the cost. Only the young, the young and the parents of those the war destroyed knew Vietnam. America simply turned away, a nation of, do we call them, do we call us, cowards? Is there another term?
Of the two to three million that survived, a hundred thousand were seriously physically disabled and a million more suffered lifelong Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Not long after coming home, another 50,000 would die, some of mysterious illnesses, many by suicide. 50,000 or more went to prison, some for a few years, some are still there. One of my closest friends, LCpl. Daniel K. Staggs, winner of the Silver Star, would die in prison. A stabbing.
Full Story: GORDON DUFF: WHY AMERICA MUST HAVE AN ANTI-WAR UPRISING : Veterans Today.
The Two Stories of This Terrible Economy, Yet Obama and the Dems Won’t Tell Theirs
Robert Reich:
The public doesn’t understand specific policies but it does understand stories that link them together. The stories give the policies context and meaning, and thereby show where policymakers are taking a nation (and, by implication, where the opposition would take it).
Republicans lack specific policies but they have a story. Obama and the Democrats have lots of specific policies but don’t have a story. That spells even more trouble for Democrats.
The Commerce Department reported today (Friday) that the economy grew only 1.6 percent in the second quarter, which is a fancy way of saying what everyone on Main Street already knows. The economy has stalled. Unemployment is still in the stratosphere and shows no sign of improving. The housing market is worsening.
Full Story: Robert Reich (The Two Stories of This Terrible Economy, Yet Obama and the Dems Won’t Tell Theirs).
Americans’ Savings: The Last Wealth to Be Redistributed? – UP
If you ask what caused the housing bubble, you’ll get dozens of different answers, mostly relating to the mechanics of the crisis. Conservatives love to spuriously blame Fannie and Freddie. Liberals love to blame Wall Street and predatory lending. But in my opinion, none of these were the cause. The cause was the Republican Party’s only successful policy initiative: No Millionaire Left Behind. When what was deceptively promised to trickle down gushed up, Americans found themselves facing stagnant wages. For the first time since the great depression, wages failed to keep pace with inflation during the Bush Regime, even using the spurious consumer price index, which considers such daily necessities as food and fuel too volatile to be included. Thus, Americans of all classes, except the uber-rich, found themselves struggling to pay their monthly bills. Hoping that things were about to improve, and believing the false common wisdom that real estate would always increase in value, they used the equity in their homes just to make ends meet. Republicans facilitated this trend and used it to further redistribute wealth upward. Sadly, the situation has not changed.
Full Story: Americans’ Savings: The Last Wealth to Be Redistributed? » Politics Plus.
‘I Decline to Accept the End of Man’
Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy
We look back at New Orleans recalling Katrina and more recently the reckless disregard shown the Gulf of Mexico by BP, a ‘person’ by SCOTUS reckoning. BP, of course, proved SCOTUS to be as wrong as they are stupid by going unpunished. That –of course –is the difference. That is why ‘corporations’ are not people and will never be people. People are charged, arrested and tried for crimes. Corporations have been put above the law. To call them ‘people’ is beyond stupid; it is unconscionable.
SCOTUS is oblivious to truth, logic or common sense. Five wing nuts on that court have established a body of odious ‘case law’ that not only makes people of mere legal abstractions, it robs us of what it means to be human. In doing so, SCOTUS has played its utterly dishonorable role in many catastrophes yet to play out. Bertolt Brecht had people like SCOTUS in mind when he wrote: “A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!” Five ideologues on the ‘high court’ are crooks!
It was not so long –again –that yet another Gulf disaster was unfolding amid fears that it would reach biblical proportions. Those fears were justified.
Full Story: The Existentialist Cowboy: ‘I Decline to Accept the End of Man’.
Congress Slow to Act on Food Safety, Despite Outbreaks and Frequent Warnings
Years before last week’s recall of more than half a billion salmonella-contaminated eggs, a government watchdog report said federal oversight of food safety is a “high-risk area,” noting that responsibility for food safety is fragmented among at least 15 agencies [PDF].
That same report, from 2007, noted that expenditures between the two main agencies—the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—showed the FDA holding the short end of the stick.
From the report:
For example, the majority of federal expenditures for food safety inspection were directed toward USDA’s programs for ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products; however, USDA is responsible for regulating only about 20 percent of the food supply. In contrast, FDA, which is responsible for regulating about 80 percent of the food supply, accounted for only about 24 percent of expenditures.
Full Story: On The Hill: Congress Slow to Act on Food Safety, Despite Outbreaks and Frequent Warnings.
Bernanke: Fed ready to print Unlimited Trillions of dollars to “sustain recovery”
The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, signaled once again on Friday that the central bank was prepared to act if the economy continued to weaken, as yet another economic report confirmed that the recovery had slowed to a crawl.
Mr. Bernanke made clear that while the Fed could take various steps, including large purchases of government debt, “central bankers alone cannot solve the world’s economic problems.” Speaking at the Fed’s annual symposium here, he hinted broadly that political leaders had to take steps to tackle the deficit and the trade imbalance.
Hours before Mr. Bernanke spoke, the Commerce Department lowered its estimate of economic growth in the second quarter to an annual rate of 1.6 percent, after originally reporting last month that growth from April through June was 2.4 percent. Economists had been predicting a steeper decline, and stock prices rose after the markets opened.
While Mr. Bernanke announced no new steps that the Fed would take immediately, he said the central bank was determined to prevent the economy from slipping into a cycle of falling wages and prices, a situation he said he did not think was likely. Instead he predicted that growth would continue modestly in the second half of the year and pick up in 2011.
Full Story: Fed Stands Ready to Do More, Bernanke Says – NYTimes.com.
OPS: Intentionally supercharging Hyperinflation. fasten your seat belts
The Republican Vision: Endless, Needless Investigation
The Republicans are not only the party of no, no ideas and no real vision if given power back this fall they will be the party of endless, needless and idiotic investigation just like during the Clinton years. It should come as no surprise. When you have nothing of substance to offer the American people you must keep them transfixed on the shiny object. In the case of the Republicans they are not concerned with the economy, jobs or anything else, just hatred for President Obama.
RDemocrat :: The Republican Vision: Endless, Needless Investigation
So it should come as no surprise for us all to find out that they do not plan on addressing our country’s problems. They plan on wasting at least two years investigating Obama.
The sad part is that they even plan on investigating Obama over things that the Republicans themselves caused with the crashing of our economy and the following Republican Recession of 2008:
No investigation poses a more significant political danger to Obama than a no-holds-barred GOP probe into TARP, the AIG bailout, the Freddie-Fannie sinkhole and the administration’s de facto takeover of GM and Chrysler.
Full Story: Hillbilly Report:: The Republican Vision: Endless, Needless Investigation.
Environmentalists, Others Celebrate Court Ruling Upholding LA Clean Truck Program
An alliance of U.S. truck drivers and environmental, labor, community, faith, civil rights and public health groups cheered the news that a federal judge on Thursday lifted an injunction and upheld the Los Angeles Clean Truck Program in its entirety. The coast-to-coast coalition of more than 125 organizations has advocated for L.A.’s award-winning model, and has led the fight to protect and replicate it nationwide for several years.
Supporters of clean port programs, which are credited with cutting diesel pollution by 70 percent, say congressional action is needed to protect them from future legal challenges. Environmentalists and others would like to expand the L.A. model to clean up other ports around the country.
The Los Angeles Clean Truck Program took 2,000 of the most polluting trucks out of service at the Port of Los Angeles, replacing them with nearly 6,000 new, clean vehicles operating at the port. The Port of Los Angeles is the nation’s busiest.
Full Story: On The Hill: Environmentalists, Others Celebrate Court Ruling Upholding LA Clean Truck Program.
Ten Candidates File Suit as ‘Massive Improprieties, Tampering’ Seen in Shelby County, TN, Election
Election Watchdog: ‘Most brutal voter disenfranchisement, election tampering case we have witnessed yet…like watching a 2 week bank robbery in process’…
While barreling westward across the Great Plains yesterday, I received an urgent text message from Bev Harris of the non-partisan election integrity watchdog organization BlackBoxVoting.org. She and Susan Pynchon, an election integrity advocate from Florida Fair Elections Coalition, had traveled to Shelby County (Memphis), Tennessee, following reports of massive voter disenfranchisement during the state’s August 5th elections.
She and Pynchon have been in the county, on behalf of a number of the candidates affected by the apparent disaster for the last two weeks.
“Wildest election tampering yet in memphis,” Harris’ detailed text message read. “7 out of eight candidates black in black locations with 70 percent dems but white republican sweep.”
Full Story: The BRAD BLOG : Ten Candidates File Suit as ‘Massive Improprieties, Tampering’ Seen in Shelby County, TN, Election.
Pro-Attack On Iran? Anti-Israel!
In his Atlantic piece designed to elicit an Obama endorsement of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Jeff Goldberg undermines his case by realistically predicting what the effects of an attack would be.
He predicts thousands of deaths — not only Iranians but also many Israelis and probably Americans. Oil prices would skyrocket, Jews in the diaspora would come under attack, the United States would be embroiled in the worst Middle East crisis ever, and Israel would become the “leper of nations.”
Pretty horrible.
In January, James Phillips, Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs at the very hawkish and right-wing Heritage Foundation, produced a strong report which, among other things, describes what an Iranian retaliation to an Israeli attack would look like. Here are the “highlights.”
Full Story: Pro-Attack On Iran? Anti-Israel! | Political Correction.
This Is Not a Recovery
Paul Krugman:
What will Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, say in his big speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Will he hint at new steps to boost the economy? Stay tuned.
But we can safely predict what he and other officials will say about where we are right now: that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit more slowly than they would like. Unfortunately, that’s not true: this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.
The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?
The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment.
Full Story: Op-Ed Columnist – This Is Not a Recovery – NYTimes.com.
10 Needed Steps for Obama to Start Dismantling America’s Gigantic, Destructive Military Empire
Chalmers Johnson
The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment will condemn the U.S. to devastating consequences.
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
Full Story: 10 Needed Steps for Obama to Start Dismantling America’s Gigantic, Destructive Military Empire | World | AlterNet.
Gulf Chemist: Mercenaries Hired By BP Are Now Applying Toxic Dispersant – at Night and In an Uncontrolled Manner – Which BP Says It No Longer Uses
Bob Naman is an analytical chemist with almost 30 years in the field, based in Mobile, Alabama. When WKRG News 5 gave Naman samples of water from the Gulf of Mexico, Naman found oil contamination, and one of his samples actually exploded during testing due – he believes – to the presence of methane gas or Corexit, the dispersant that BP has been using in the Gulf:
‘The Party Of No Has A Limited Shelf Life’
‘The Party Of No Has A Limited Shelf Life’
The fervent anti-government populism of the so-called tea party movement way well provide Republicans with short-term gains in the 2010 midterm elections, but it isn’t enough to establish the GOP as a majority party in the long run, according to a left-leaning political analyst.
Ongoing shifts in demographics, such growth in minority voters, young voters, and even white college graduates, all point to trouble ahead for a staunchly right-wing Republican Party, says Ruy Texeira, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, and author of the study, “Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties.”
Texeira is scheduled next week to participate in a panel discussion in Washington on the question, “Can conservatism survive mass immigration?” That event is set for Sept. 1, at 9:30 a.m. at the National Press Club.
Full Story: On The Hill: ‘The Party Of No Has A Limited Shelf Life’.
Pastor’s Plan to Burn Korans Adds to Tensions
If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?
If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?
Mr. Jones, 58, a former hotel manager with a red face and a white handlebar mustache, argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” And in another era, he might have been easily ignored, as he was last year when he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.”
Full Story: Pastor’s Plan to Burn Korans Adds to Tensions – NYTimes.com.
Treasury Makes Shocking Admission: Program for Struggling Homeowners Just a Ploy to Enrich Big Banks
The Treasury Dept.’s mortgage relief program isn’t just failing, it’s actively funneling money from homeowners to bankers, and Treasury likes it that way.
The Treasury Department’s plan to help struggling homeowners has been failing miserably for months. The program is poorly designed, has been poorly implemented and only a tiny percentage of borrowers eligible for help have actually received any meaningful assistance. The initiative lowers monthly payments for borrowers, but fails to reduce their overall debt burden, often increasing that burden, funneling money to banks that borrowers could have saved by simply renting a different home. But according to recent startling admissions from top Treasury officials, the mortgage plan was actually not really about helping borrowers at all. Instead, it was simply one element of a broader effort to pump money into big banks and shield them from losses on bad loans. That’s right: Treasury openly admitted that its only serious program purporting to help ordinary citizens was actually a cynical move to help Wall Street megabanks.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has long made it clear his financial repair plan was based on allowing large banks to “earn” their way back to health. By creating conditions where banks could make easy profits, Getithner and top officials at the Federal Reserve hoped to limit the amount of money taxpayers would have to directly inject into the banks. This was never the best strategy for fixing the financial sector, but it wasn’t outright predation, either. But now the Treasury Department is making explicit that it was—and remains—willing to let those so-called “earnings” come directly at the expense of people hit hardest by the recession: struggling borrowers trying to stay in their homes.
Slow Violence in the Gulf and the BP Coverups
The Gulf Crisis is Not Over
By ANNE McCLINTOCK
Three vanishing acts are being played out in the Gulf: the disappearing of the oil from the ocean surface by Corexit, the disappearing of the story by the media blockade, and the disappearing from view of the shadowy private contractors who are making a mint helping BP and the Coast Guard keep a cover on the clean-up. This triple vanishing trick, collectively choreographed by BP and sundry federal agencies, culminated on August 4th in a report released by NOAA that claimed 75% of the oil spill had been captured, burned, evaporated or broken down. The White House hailed the report as something to celebrate. Energy advisor Carol Browne announced: “the vast majority of the oil is gone.”
A clamor of outrage immediately rose from the Gulf, as residents refused to dance the crisis-is-over, happy-feet dance. Hundreds of locals furiously insisted that they were still seeing masses of oil on ocean, beaches and marshes, and dead fish, dolphins, sharks, birds and other marine life washing ashore. Then on August 18th scientists from the Universities of Georgia and South Florida produced an open challenge to the White House report, asserting that 70% to 79% of the oil in the Gulf still remained in the water. Charles Hopkinson, a professor of marine science at the University of Georgia declared: “The idea that 75% of the oil is gone and of no concern to the environment is just absolutely incorrect.”
Spike Lee, filming in the Gulf, scoffed at what he called the BP/White House “abracabra kawabanga” trick and called on journalists to stay with the story. A few weeks earlier, the triple vanishing act had come together personally for me in a story that Steve, a private contractor, told in the shadows of a southern Louisiana bar. I call the contractor Steve, though that is not his real name. I cannot tell you his real name because he has assured me that he will kill me if I do. I had been in the Gulf for three days with Karin Hayes, a film-maker, documenting the oil-spill when Steve approached us in the bar, urgently wanting to tell us something.
Full Story: Anne McClintock: Slow Violence in the Gulf and the BP Coverups.
Cutbacks force police to curtail calls for some crimes
Budget cuts are forcing police around the country to stop responding to fraud, burglary and theft calls as officers focus limited resources on violent crime.
Cutbacks in such places as Oakland, Tulsa and Norton, Mass. have forced police to tell residents to file their own reports — online or in writing — for break-ins and other lesser crimes.
“If you come home to find your house burglarized and you call, we’re not coming,” said Oakland Police spokeswoman Holly Joshi. The city laid off 80 officers from its force of 687 last month and the department can’t respond to burglary, vandalism, and identity theft. “It’s amazing. It’s a big change for us.”
Full Story: Cutbacks force police to curtail calls for some crimes – USATODAY.com.
How to double your pension payout
Social security, celebrating its 75th anniversary, is a popular scheme – but payments are meagre. Here’s the solution
In the aftermath of the great recession, a debate over the American national pension system, known as social security, is heating up. This debate raises fundamental questions about what kind of society America wishes to be. The debate so far has been between those deficit busters who say social security must be trimmed back to reduce government indebtedness, and others who want to maintain it as is.
But the New America Foundation just released a study (which I authored) that proposes a different approach: doubling the current social security payout, and making it a true national retirement system. Creating a more robust system of “social security plus” would be good not onlyfor America’s retirees, but also for the macro-economy at large.
Here’s the dilemma the US faces. Since the second world war, retirement has been conceived as a “three-legged stool”, with the three legs being social security, pensions and personal savings focused on home ownership. Today, though, most private sector employers have quit providing pensions, and state and local government public pensions are drastically underfunded.
Full Story: How to double your pension payout | Steven Hill | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
Calif OKs rate boost for Blue Cross, Blue Shield
California has approved large rate increases on individual health insurance policies for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
The California Department of Insurance says Blue Shield customers face an average hike of 18.5 percent and Anthem Blue Cross customers face an average 13.4 percent increase.
Anthem Blue Cross, the state’s largest for profit insurer, had previously requested a boost that would have upped rates as much as 39 percent for some customers. But regulators found accounting errors in that filing.
Anthem’s rate hike was repeatedly held up by President Barack Obama as an example of a broken health care system in the run up to the vote on the federal health care reform bill.
Full Story: Calif OKs rate boost for Blue Cross, Blue Shield.
Countdown: David Cay Johnston dismembers McConnell’s Bush Tax Cut argument
Countdown: David Cay Johnston dismembers McConnell’s Bush Tax Cut argument
Ronald Reagan dedicated the Space Shuttle Columbia to the Afgan Fighters
“These gentlemen [Afgan Fighters] are the moral equivalents of America’s Founding Fathers” ~President Ronald Reagan 1985
‘In 1982, Ronald Reagan dedicated the Space Shuttle Columbia to the resistance fighters [Taliban] in Afghanistan.’
Conservative Columnist: Why The Tea Party Is Toxic To The GOP
So the “summer of recovery” swelters on, with Democrats sun-blistered, pestered by bottle flies, sand in their swimsuits, water in their ears. Jobless claims increase, Republicans lead the generic congressional ballot, and George W. Bush is six points more popular than President Obama in “front-line” Democratic districts that are most vulnerable to a Republican takeover. Still, Democrats hug the hope that Obama is really the liberal Ronald Reagan — but without wit, humor, an explainable ideology or an effective economic plan. Other than that, the resemblance is uncanny.
Yet the Republican Party suffers its own difficulty — an untested ideology at the core of its appeal.
In the normal course of events, political movements begin as intellectual arguments, often conducted for years in serious books and journals. To study the Tea Party movement, future scholars will sift through the collected tweets of Sarah Palin. Without a history of clarifying, refining debates, Republicans need to ask three questions of candidates rising on the Tea Party wave:
Full Story: Michael Gerson – Why the Tea Party is toxic for the GOP.
Mark Zandi: Boehner Was Wrong, Stimulus ‘Did Exactly What It Was Intended To’ (VIDEO)
John Boehner’s Plan Would Increase Deficit By Trillions, Think Tank Finds
Joining the backlash against House Majority leader John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) economic speech yesterday, Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, said Boehner was “just wrong” to call the $787 billion stimulus spending “a failure.”
If there was no stimulus at all, Zandi said, unemployment would be at around 11.5% rather than 9.5%.
“I think if we had not had the stimulus, estimates put forward by the Congressional Budget Office are absolutely right: we’d have 2.5-3 million fewer jobs than we’d have today,” he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing this morning.
Full Story: Mark Zandi: Boehner Was Wrong, Stimulus ‘Did Exactly What It Was Intended To’ (VIDEO).
Rick Steiner Got BP Disaster Right From The Beginning, Warns Crisis Is Far From Over
I first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago — about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster — after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped.
What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing — and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.
“Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response,” he told me at the time. “There’s no such thing as an effective response. There’s never been an effective response — ever — where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.
Full Story: Gulf Oil Spill: Rick Steiner Got BP Disaster Right From The Beginning, Warns Crisis Is Far From Over.
Major Garrett Leaving Fox News For National Journal
Fox News’ Chief White House Correspondent is leaving the network — and TV entirely.
Fox News announced Wednesday that Major Garrett, who covers the Obama White House for the network, will “return to his roots in print journalism” effective September 3.
Garrett will join the National Journal as a congressional correspondent, the New York Times reports.
Wendell Goler and Mike Emanuel will share the White House beat.
Full Story: Major Garrett Leaving Fox News For National Journal.
The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.)
It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
Full Story: The Government’s New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS – TIME.
Japan senior lawmaker: Americans are simple-minded
Key figure in Japan ruling party calls Americans ‘somewhat monocellular’
A key figure in Japan’s ruling party dubbed Americans “simple-minded” in a speech to fellow lawmakers Wednesday.
It was not clear what prompted the remarks by Democratic Party heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa at a political seminar, in which he otherwise paid tribute to Americans’ commitment to democracy, saying it was something Japan should learn from.
“I like Americans, but they are somewhat monocellular,” the former Democratic Party leader said. “When I talk with Americans, I often wonder why they are so simple-minded.”
Full Story: Japan senior lawmaker: Americans are simple-minded | Raw Story.
Right-Wing Christian Militia Vows To Protect Florida Church Burning Qurans On September 11 (Updated)
Despite the city’s fire protection ordinances, the poorly-named Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, FL is committed to hosting “International Burn a Quran Day” on September 11. The radical church, which boasts an “Islam Is Of The Devil” message on a sign outside the church and as the title of its pastor’s book, insists “we will still burn Korans” on the church grounds despite being denied a permit. While the church may be fined for openly burning the holy texts, one “armed Christian conservative group” aptly named Right Wing Extreme vowed Sunday to protect the church from any other harassment during the burning:
The Christian conservative organization Right Wing Extreme has offered its support and protection for the International Burn a Quran day.
Right Wing Extreme was founded in April of 2009 after the Department of Homeland Security’s report titled Right Wing Extremism.[...]
Full Story: Think Progress » Right-Wing Christian Militia Vows To Protect Florida Church Burning Qurans On September 11 (Updated).
Four Of Five Health Care Plaintiffs Have Lost Their Republican Primaries
As ThinkProgress previously reported, five GOP officials who joined the completely merit-less lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act ran for governor this year. With Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s defeat at the hands of corrupt former hospital CEO Rick Scott last night, all but one of these five officials have lost their Republican primary:
This March, two attorneys general took the lead in lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the health care overhaul: South Carolina’s Henry McMaster and Florida’s Bill McCollum. Another, Michigan’s Mike Cox, soon signed on.
The lawsuits made them national leaders on the central national issue, and seemed tailor-made for Republican primaries. But all three lost those primaries, as CNN’s Peter Hamby noted of the first two last night.
Full Story: Think Progress » Four Of Five Health Care Plaintiffs Have Lost Their Republican Primaries.
RNC Spokesman: ‘We Embrace Whatever Candidate Needs To Do To Win’
In May, the tea party movement successfully toppled long-time Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment that is “altering the nation’s political landscape.” This tea party tide carried Trey Gowdy to victory over the “reasonable Republican” Rep. Bob Inglis (SC) and now may push tea-party-backed Senate candidate Joe Miller (R-AK) to a win over current Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) in “one of the biggest political upsets of the year.” As President Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson points out today, the Republican party now faces an uphill struggle to rein in the “untested ideology” of these new candidates that is “clearly incompatible with some conservative and Republican beliefs” and may prove “toxic to the GOP.”
But Gerson’s concerns are falling on deaf ears at the Republican National Committee. Today on ABC’s Top Line, RNC spokesman Doug Heye enthusiastically embraced the radical views of GOP candidates like Miller. In opening the discussion between Heye and DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse, Top Line host Jonathan Karl “wanted to see how excited” Heye was about “[his] man” Miller. He aired a previous interview on Top Line in which Miller said unemployment extension benefits are “not constitutionally authorized. I think that’s the first thing that’s got to be looked at so I do not favor their extension.” When Karl asked whether Heye embraces that view, Heye responded “we embrace whatever candidate needs to do to win”:
KARL: Ok, so you have a candidate who thinks that unemployment extension is not constitutionality authorized…uh…First of all, do you embrace that?
Full Story: Think Progress » RNC Spokesman: ‘We Embrace Whatever Candidate Needs To Do To Win’.
Google & Verizon’s Evil Plan Is Really Bad News for Regular Internet Users
If we wake up one day to an Internet that has a carpool lane for the upper class, it’s worth thinking about the alternatives.
The firestorm over tech giant Google and telco titan Verizon’s self-interested proposal to arbitrarily codify a pay-to-play Internet will dominate the news in the coming months, as net neutrality steps onto a mainstream media stage crowded with Muslim mosques and other distracting fodder. But now that other telcos like warrantless wiretapper AT&T have quickly endorsed Googlezon’s proposal, it was left to Jon Stewart on a recent episode of the Daily Show to sum up the mammoth migraine awaiting us all: “We’re fucked.”
My colleague Ryan Singel at Wired had a similar take, calling the one-time staunch net neutrality defender Google a “carrier-humping net neutrality surrender monkey.” Both assessments are dead-on: By giving up its previous commitment to open networks and devices in both the wireline and the wireless space, Google — arguably the most powerful tech company in the world — has simply cashed in its neutrality chips, nearly fully compromised “Don’t Be Evil” corporate philosophy, and screwed us all. The irony is that the Internet we’ve become used to over the last couple decades has made Google and Verizon powerhouses in the first place.
“The Internet and communications industries are in the same category as the energy, transport and finance industries: for they are the lifeblood of commerce and speech in this nation,” said Columbia Law School copyright and communications professor Tim Wu, whose 2003 paper “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination” helped shape the network neutrality issue. “Just consider the power and public role of firms like Verizon or Google (especially if they work together). Sitting atop the web, they can influence what firms succeed or fail — by making sites load faster or slower, or end up on page 10 of search results. It goes further — in subtle ways, the information carriers have the power to influence elections and even censor speech they don’t like.”
Full Story: Google & Verizon’s Evil Plan Is Really Bad News for Regular Internet Users | Media and Culture | AlterNet.
Army Weak: Soldiers Expose Deployment of Unprepared Troops
Army Reserve members facing imminent deployment to Afghanistan are publicly charging that their company is not properly trained or mentally fit for battle. Several members of the Indiana-based 656th Transportation Company, which was due to activate last Sunday, August 22nd, requested a Congressional inquiry into the unit’s lack of readiness. Alejandro Villatoro, a sergeant in the company, is amongst those coming forward.
Sergeant Villatoro says, “The main reason I am doing this is that I want people to know the lack of training and education our soldiers been receiving, and the focus on the mission is just not adequate to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. All I am asking is more time to reevaluate the training and mental health of these soldiers before sending them into war.”
At risk to themselves, these soldiers are going public with firsthand experiences of failures in military training, mental healthcare, and leadership, which many veterans charge are problems endemic to the military. This comes as the Afghanistan War falls under increased scrutiny in the wake of the Wikileaked “War Logs” information.
Full Story: Army Weak: Soldiers Expose Deployment of Unprepared Troops : Veterans Today.
Debunking Boehner’s Five Point Plan
John Boehner took a rare vacation from the tanning beds, the golf course, and the Washington bar scene to give what he called a major economic address. If this is the best the Republicans have to offer we have reason to celebrate.
Rep. John Boehner, the perpetually tanned House Minority leader, unveiled his plan to get the economy going today in a speech [Boner delinked] before the Cleveland City Club. Hold on to your job — if he becomes Speaker, things will get worse.
Understandably, Boehner said not a word about the policies that led to the Great Recession. In fact, he said not a word about the economic collapse. Instead, he argued only that America’s economy was in trouble because business was scared to death. It isn’t the worst recession since the Great Depression, the lack of demand and customers that is plaguing businesses; it is the fear of tax hikes and regulation.
In response, Boehner detailed a five point plan to “break the ongoing economic uncertainty.”
Full Story: Debunking Boehner’s Five Point Plan » Politics Plus.
Tax Jujitsu: Why Democrats Should Propose a “People’s Tax Cut”
Robert Reich:
Republicans are calling the Democrat’s proposal to end the Bush tax cuts on the richest 3 percent a “tax increase,” and demagoging that it will hurt the economy and small business. This is baloney, to put it politely. Let me count the ways:
– Bush’s ten-year tax cut was designed to end this year, so it’s not a tax increase.
– Ending it for the rich simply returns them to the Clinton tax rate, which was hardly confiscatory (reminder: the Clinton years were damn good for business).
– Small businesses would barely be affected. Only 3 percent of small business owners earn over $250,000. And because it’s a “marginal” tax, the Clinton rate would apply only to the portion of their incomes over $250,000.
Full Story: Robert Reich (Tax Jujitsu: Why Democrats Should Propose a “People’s Tax Cut”).
Researcher Arrested After Disclosing Problems With Voting Machines
Video:
A security researcher in India has been arrested after he refused to provide authorities with the name of a person who supplied him with an electronic voting machine that was used to discover vulnerabilities in the system. The researcher had used the machine to demonstrate how someone could hack voting systems to easily subvert an election.
At 5:30 Saturday morning, nearly a dozen police converged on the home of Hari Prasad, managing director of Netindia, to question him about the source of the voting machine he received. After refusing to identify his source, he was reportedly arrested under suspicion of theft and receiving stolen property.
The voting system was allegedly taken from a storage facility at the district election office in Mumbai. It was reported missing on May 12, after Prasad disclosed on a television program in India that he had received a machine from an anonymous source. It’s not clear why it took authorities so long to act on the report, but the arrest comes about a week after two representatives of the India Election Commission got into a heated debate about the country’s machines, during a panel discussion at an electronic voting conference (.mp3) in Washington, D.C.
Full Story: Researcher Arrested in India After Disclosing Problems With Voting Machines | Threat Level | Wired.com.
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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
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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. 
