Archive for August 2011
Brief break: we’re moving
FYI– won’t be much activity here for the next couple weeks as we move from Hawaii to WA state.
And, before you ask, ‘paradise’ is in the eye of the beholder…….My idea of heaven right now is a fireplace and a good library book. (Boxes of books are heavy!)
Feel free to leave me links to any particularly interesting stuff!
Globalization and Debt: a return to slavery?
Taibbi: “Orwellian” SEC May Have Been Hiding Big Wall Street Crimes
By Sarah Seltzer | AlterNet
By Naomi Klein / The Nation When you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance.
Debt: The First Five Thousand Years
By David Graeber
Anthropologist David Graeber argues that it is only with a general historical understanding of debt and its relationship to violence that we can begin to appreciate our emerging epoch. Here he begins to fill in our historical knowledge gap
By David DeGraw | Amped Status
The Icebergs Cometh: Retaking the USA Titanic Before the 2012 Elections
By Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins 
August 8, 2011
“…[W]e no longer control our own democratic system. Puppet candidates have rigged themselves into office and manipulated our government to hand corporations the keys to the kingdom. We the People are now the rabble outside the gates, reduced to begging the rulers within to please be just a little less ruthless…
“Our elections have been bought or stolen for decades, but the People are only now waking up…But whether elections – or politicians – are literally stolen, or simply bought (including Barack Obama), the outcome is the same.
“The democratic system itself is rigged against us – and this rigging is not just another Progressive issue, like ending the Wars on Terror and Drugs, or securing universal healthcare, or getting the 100,000 toxic chemicals out of our bodies, or preventing Monsanto from taking over our food and seed supply…
“We must first outlaw the use of riggable computerized voting machines and institute a public paper ballot count with appropriate procedure and oversight. We must demand full media access for candidates. And we must threaten a full-blown Egypt-style revolution if Citizen’s United is not immediately overturned.”
“The Icebergs Cometh: Retaking the USA Titanic Before the 2012 Elections,”
– by Victoria Collier and Ronnie Cummins, August 8, 2011
Anarchy and Austerity: Why London Won’t Be the Last City to Burn
The Atlantic Aug 10, 2011
The Great Recession gave birth to a lost generation across the world, where youth unemployment rates stretch into the 20s, 30s and even 40s. Those millions have responded with violence.
………… The theft and violence and street crime and lawlessness in London is shocking. But it’s not unique. Around the world, the burden of unemployment falls hardest on the young, who often respond with violence. The average jobless rate between 18-29 years was nearly 20% last year in OECD countries, the Wall Street Journal has reported. High unemployment was a factor in protests in Spain, uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.
The connection between joblessness and violence comes to life in a timely August research paper Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009, which found “a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability.” Authors Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth examined the relationship between spending cuts and a measure of instability they termed CHAOS — “the sum of demonstrations, riots, strikes, assassinations, and attempted revolutions in a single year in each country.”
Their conclusion: Austerity breeds anarchy. More cuts, more crime. This clickable graph helps to tell the story……
read more here
Everybody Knows
Everybody Knows
By Leonard Cohen
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that youve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows youve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it’s now or never
Everybody knows that it’s me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when youve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe’s still pickin cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what youve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows
Does an Old EPA Fracking Study Provide Proof of Contamination?
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica Aug 5, 2011 Thewashingtoncurrent.com 
This post has been updated with the industry’s response.
For years the drilling industry has steadfastly insisted that there has never been a proven case in which fracking has led to contamination of drinking water.
Now Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization engaged in the debate over the safety of fracking, has unearthed a 24-year-old case study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that unequivocally says such contamination has occurred. The New York Times reported on EWG’s year-long research effort and the EPA’s paper Wednesday.
The 1987 EPA report, which describes a dark, mysterious gel found in a water well in Jackson County, W.Va., states that gels were also used to hydraulically fracture a nearby natural gas well and that “the residual fracturing fluid migrated into (the resident’s) water well.”
The circumstances of this particular well are not unique. There are several other cases across the country where evidence suggests similar contamination has occurred and many more where the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing have contaminated water supplies on the surface. ProPublica has written about many of them in the course of a three-year investigation into the safety of drilling for natural gas.
But the language found in the EPA report made public Wednesday is the strongest articulation yet by federal officials that there is a direct causal connection between man-made fissures thousands of feet underground and contaminants found in well water gone bad. The explanation, presented in the EPA’s own words , stands in stark contrast to recent statements made by EPA officials that they could not document a proven case of contamination and a 2004 EPA report that concluded that fracturing was safe.
“This is our leading regulatory agency coming to the conclusion that hydraulic fracturing can and did contaminate underground sources of drinking water, which contradicts what industry has been saying for years,” said Dusty Horwitt, EWG’s senior counsel and the lead researcher on the report.
A spokesperson for the EPA would not directly address the apparent contradiction but said in an email that the agency is now reviewing the 1987 report and that “the agency has identified several circumstances where contamination of wells is alleged to have occurred and is reviewing those cases in depth.”
The contamination debate has intensified as tens of thousands more wells are being drilled in newly discovered shale gas deposits across the country. The EPA and some scientists have long warned that when rock is hydraulically fractured, there is an increased risk of contaminants traveling through underground cracks until they reach drinking water. Many geologists have countered, however, that migration over thousands of feet is virtually impossible.
Surrendercapitulationsell-outscamstampedemanagedsubmissionWeimarmoment
Welcome to the end of a great democratic experiment.
“Krugman Calls Obama’s ‘Surrender’ a ‘Catastrophe on Multiple Levels’“ — Here’s one way to feel worse about the debt ceiling deal announced by the president Sunday night: Read Paul Krugman’s column. The Nobel Prize-winning economist is about as harsh in his assessment of the deal as can be, saying it “will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.”
Rasmus: The $1 Trillion Debt Deal Today’s Boehner-Reid final agreement effectively drops explicit cuts in Defense, another Republican position all along.
ROBERT BOROSAGE: Capitulation |
President Obama’s surrender
By Andrew Leonard
A bad weekend for the White House: The Tea Party wins, Democrats lose, and the carnage will be even worse next year
Democratic politics in a nutshell
By Glenn Greenwald
Report: Dems don’t worry about angry liberals — they’ll just scare them into submission with pictures of Bachmann
Arthur Silber: The Priorities of the Damned
I’ll use a blunt and, I fervently hope, unsettling comparison. All of these repellent people have decided to rape “ordinary” Americans until they’re dead. They’re only debating who gets to rape them next. And what these human slugs know but will never acknowledge, and what they hope you won’t notice, is that they can’t even get it up anymore.
A Bad Solution to a Manufactured Crisis
It goes to show just how dysfunctional our government has become to ordinary Americans. Despite the fact that millions of us are still out of work because of the greed and excess of the last thirty years and resulting crashed economy, politicians cannot focus on real problems.
Top Economist: Deficit Deal ‘Will Do Great Harm to Our Nation’
Obama & the Fake Debt Ceiling Crisis: This President Is Really Just Smarter Than You Are
But what if President Barack Obama never intended to fight for jobs or justice? What if he believes the nonsense about Wall Street being “job creators” instead of economic vampires? What if Cornel West finally got it right? What if Black Agenda Report has been right all along? What if Barack Obama is a Reagan Democrat in every meaningful way, right down to a fanatical belief in trickle down economics? What if the president counts on corporate media and his army of careerists and sycophants to shut down and cover up cracks in the Obama consensus through which reality might leak? What if Obama is not weak, or timid, or vacillating or waiting for us to “make him do it”? What if what we’ve seen is all there is, all there ever was? The truth is that Barack Obama’s actions are entirely rational, understandable and even predictable if you suppose him to have been a vicious, vacuous and cynical right wing operative from the very beginning.
Why the Debt Ceiling Deal Strengthens the Radical Right and Weakens America
By Robert Reich The deal’s spending cuts increase the odds of a double-dip recession and strengthens the political hand of the radical right.
| RICHARD ESKOW Four Ways the Deal Hurts You |
| “1. You’ll be less likely to find a job if you’re looking. If you’ve got a job, you’re less likely to earn more
money–and more likely to lose it … 2. Your housing value is likely to suffer … 3. Your old age just got scarier … 4. Your tax bill is likely to go way up.” |
Debt Ceiling Bill May Hurt Science
Senator Bernie Sanders interview about the debt debacle:
Over Bernie’s strong opposition, Congress approved and President Obama signed a deficit-reduction deal that slashes programs for working families without asking the wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations to pay a nickel more. “This country needs deficit reduction, but we need to do it in a way that is fair and which will result in economic growth and job creation. This proposal does neither,” the senator said. In a Senate speech and a flurry of television interviews, Bernie called the deal “extremely unfair,” “immoral” and “grotesque.”
Wake-up Call 