Observations on current events

Pensions:

While it is certainly wrong for public sector employees to game their State's pension system by deliberately using overtime to skew the last years of their pay, workers who play fair are getting the short end of the stick...

Ellen Dannin: Of Pensions, and Piggybanks: The Challenges of Ensuring a Secure Retirement
"Imagine that every week, decade after decade, you faithfully put aside part of your pay in a special piggy bank to provide for your golden years. But when you are ready to retire, your employer takes all your savings back.
Or imagine that, instead of money, your employer deducts money from your paycheck in exchange for IOUs stamped: 'Money to paid upon retirement.' But when you retire, your employer says no money has been put aside for you.
You did nothing wrong, but you will not have a secure retirement.
This is the plight of many employees today. They agreed to defer part of their income for their retirement, but their employers have not kept their side of the bargain..."


The Fourth Estate:

I'm guessing Ms. Stahl didn't report what she experienced for fear of loosing 'access,' irrespective of the public's right to know. The real question is, who was minding the highest office of state while Reagan was unfit to do so?

Raw Story: CBS almost reported Reagan was mentally unfit in 1986
"Two sons of former President Ronald Reagan have been engaged in a public disagreement over whether their father exhibited early signs of Alzheimer's disease while still in the White House.
Veteran CBS reporter Leslie Stahl, who saw Reagan have mental lapses in 1986, could possibly play a role in settling that feud -- or cause it to become even bigger than it already was.
In his new book, titled 'My Father at 100,' Ron Reagan, who's identified himself as a liberal and an atheist, wrote that in 1984, he began to 'experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true' with regards to his father's mental condition..."

Corporate Fraud:

The Atlantic: E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out of Billions
"Former Bear Stearns mortgage executives who now run mortgage divisions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Ally Financial have been accused of cheating and defrauding investors through the mortgage securities they created and sold while at Bear. According to e-mails and internal audits, JPMorgan had known about this fraud since the spring of 2008, but hid it from the public eye through legal maneuvering. Last week a lawsuit filed in 2008 by mortgage insurer Ambac Assurance Corp against Bear Stearns and JPMorgan was unsealed. The lawsuit's supporting e-mails, going back as far as 2005, highlight Bear traders telling their superiors they were selling investors like Ambac a 'sack of shit,'..."


Economics:

Families paying the price for the sins of the Banksters? This must be the 'New Fairness'...

Robert Winnett: Bank of England chief Mervyn King: standard of living to plunge at fastest rate since 1920s
'Families will see their disposable income eaten up as they 'pay the inevitable price' for the financial crisis, Mervyn King warned.
With wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation, workers’ take- home pay will end the year worth the same as in 2005 — the most prolonged fall in living standards for more than 80 years, he claimed..."


State of the Union:

Democracy Now! - Consumer Advocate Joan Claybrook and Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson Respond to State of the Union
"...ROCKY ANDERSON: He didn’t mention human rights at a time when he has assassination lists for the first time in our nation’s history, that include U.S. citizens. No due process—we don’t just have indefinite detention anymore; we just go out, put their name on a list, and kill them. The invocation of state secrets, it’s absolutely obliterated any notion of checks and balances. Our courts have been removed from that equation, by and large, when it comes to torture, when it comes to warrantless wiretapping by our government. No discussion about that, of course. And we’re seeing, really, an institutionalization by this president of some of the worst abuses and what we, a lot of us, thought were just aberrations during the Bush years...

[responding to Obama's statement on tort reform as it pertains to health care costs]

...JOAN CLAYBROOK: ...First of all, they’re not frivolous lawsuits in the medical malpractice area, because the lawyers who take these cases don’t get paid unless they win. So they’re not going to take frivolous lawsuits. That’s the first thing. Secondly, medical malpractice kills between 40,000 and 100,000 people a year. Five percent of the doctors cause 55 percent of the medical malpractice in this country. The medical system does not discipline themselves. And so, the only way that you can have any kind of redress against repeat offender doctors is to have the opportunity for people to sue and to make sure that these doctors are eventually disciplined..."


Humans vs. Artificial Legal Constructs:

The position of the ACLU in supporting non-humans is inexplicable to me.

Bruce Robinson: The problem with the ACLU
"The American Civil Liberties Union has been a courageous and credible defender of our First Amendment rights for decades and I was proud to be a member. Unfortunately, the ACLU lost me last year, when I realized that it had drifted from its essential work of defending human freedom to undermining it.
In Citizens United v. FEC, the ACLU filed a brief arguing that corporate executives and fronts for wealthy interests should enjoy the power to spend unlimited amounts of money on efforts to elect or defeat candidates for elected office. Of course, a bare majority of our corporate-friendly Supreme Court agreed, resulting in a large influx of cash that may already have altered election results.
Not surprisingly, many ACLU members disagree vehemently with the group`s board of directors and some local chapters are taking opposing stands. Unfortunately, the ACLU`s position on Citizens United was not an anomaly, but consistent with a pattern of accepting 'corporate personhood' -- applying constitutional rights to corporations as legal 'persons.'
Of course, the term 'corporation' never appears in the Constitution, but that has not deterred the ACLU from siding with the Roberts Court or previous courts to create corporate 'rights.' Granting the rights of personhood to corporations, which in reality are legal concentrations of wealth, rigs economic and political competition in favor of wealthy interests..."

Economics:

While this is news from 2008, but how many Americans would readily believe that WalMart deals with unions? When it has to, of course...

The Economist: Membership Required

"Rather than deal with trade unions, Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, has reconfigured its operations around the world, even pulling out of some markets altogether. But, in a reflection of just how different operating conditions are in China, Walmart signed collective-bargaining agreements with workers in two provinces in July. Further agreements covering all 50,000 of its local employees in China are a foregone conclusion.
The financial terms of the contract are of only minor importance. Far more important are the other implications of Walmart’s new ties to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), a monopoly that claims 193m members and is deeply intertwined with China’s government and Communist Party. Like it or not, Walmart now has a business partner, and if it wants to close stores, lay off employees, or change other aspects of its business such as operating hours and work quotas (what employees are expected to accomplish), that partner must be consulted..."



Paul Krugman: The Competition Myth
"Meet the new buzzword, same as the old buzzword. In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness. The President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board has been renamed the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And in his Saturday radio address, the president declared that 'We can out-compete any other nation on Earth.'
But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.
Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?
Still, you might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he’s anti-business. That’s fine, as long as he realizes that the interests of nominally 'American' corporations and the interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.
Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity..."

You Can't Be Serious, Can You?

Pure DoD Propaganda...

American Forces Press Service: King Might Understand Today’s Wars, Pentagon Lawyer Says
"If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?
Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy..."

Dr. King was very, very explicit in his rejection of war ['Beyond Vietnam' 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, NYC] :
"...A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood..."


Was He Asleep During A Discussion of the Establishment Clause In History Class?

The Governor sounds like an inclusive fellow, in his narrow terms, of course...

The Birmingham News: GOP Governor: Christians Are My Brothers And Sisters, Others Not So Much
"...Bentley, who for years has been a deacon at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, gave what sounded like an altar call.
'There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit,' Bentley said. 'But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.'
Bentley added, 'Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother.'
Asked later if he meant to be insulting to people of other faiths, Bentley replied, 'We're not trying to insult anybody,'...'


Economics:

If our tax system doesn't actively discourage this job-killing behavior, we only have the lobbyists to blame...
NY Times: Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China
"Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.
But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China..."


War As A Profit-Center:

Gareth Porter: From Military-Industrial Complex to Permanent War State
"...when the power of the militarist alliance seemed unstoppable in the late 1960s, the public turned decisively against the Vietnam War, and a long period of public pressure to reduce military spending began. As a result, military manpower was reduced to below even the Eisenhower era levels.
For more than a decade the alliance of militarist interests was effectively constrained from advocating a more aggressive military posture.
Even during the Reagan era, after a temporary surge in military spending, popular fear of Soviet Union melted away in response to the rise of Gorbachev, just as the burgeoning federal budget deficit was becoming yet another threat to militarist bloc. As it became clear that the Cold War was drawing to a close, the militarist interests faced the likely loss of much of their power and resources.
But in mid-1990 they got an unexpected break when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. George H. W. Bush - a key figure in the militarist complex as former CIA Director -- seized the opportunity to launch a war that would end the 'Vietnam syndrome'. The Bush administration turned a popular clear-cut military victory in the 1991 Gulf War into a rationale for further use of military force in the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's 1992 military strategy for the next decade said, 'We must be prepared to act decisively in the Middle East/Persian Gulf region as we did in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm if our vital interests are threatened anew.'
The Bush administration pressured the Saudis and other Arab regimes in the Gulf to allow longer-term bases for the U.S. Air Force, and over the next eight years, U.S. planes flew an annual average of 8,000 sorties in the 'no fly zones' the United States had declared over most of Iraq, drawing frequent anti-aircraft fire.
The United States was already in a de facto state of war with Iraq well before George W. Bush's presidency..."


Transportation:

Jason Hiner: Most futuristic product of CES 2011: GM en-v scooter/car
"...GM showed off a little electric vehicle called the 'en-v' that I think of as a mix between a Segway and a Smart Car. This product is being designed for urban areas a decade from now. It can get up to highway speeds while joining up with other vehicles like it to form a train that can make much more efficient use of the roads..."

Language:

On the importance of speaking with conviction, a poem by Taylor Mali.



The Military Industrial Complex:

William Hartung: Big 'Corporate' Brother: Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
"Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you? No? Then you haven't been paying much attention. Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.
True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history...
...In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution..."


Media & War:

Peter Maass: The Toppling - How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war
"...Some have argued that the events at Firdos were staged, to demonstrate that America had triumphed, the war was over, and the Iraqis were happy. After all, the marines had seized the only place in Baghdad where a large number of foreign reporters could be found—at least two hundred were at the Palestine. And U.S. officials were suspiciously quick to appropriate the imagery from Firdos. A few minutes after the toppling, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, 'The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain,'..."


The GOP-Majority House:

Robert Parry: Republicans Aim Info-War at Obama
"Finally, Congress appears ready to hold some high-profile hearings – except they won’t be about the most important scandals of the past decade, like how the United States was misled into the Iraq invasion, how the Afghan War was bungled, how torture became a U.S. practice, or how bank deregulation and Wall Street greed nearly destroyed the economy..."


Education:

Stephanie McCrummen: Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy
"The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.
But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to 'say no to the social engineers!' it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.
And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits - logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation..."


Conflating Politics & Violence?

Columbia Free Times: S.C. Company Sells Engraved “You Lie” Component For AR-15 Rifle
"A South Carolina gun and accessories company is selling semi-automatic rifle components inscribed with 'You lie' – a tribute to the infamous words of 2nd District Republican Congressman Joe Wilson when he shouted at President Barack Obama during a congressional speech about national health care reform in the fall of 2009.
'Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new ‘You Lie’ AR-15 lower receiver,' reads a portion of the company’s website.
The product 'is neither endorsed nor affiliated with Joe Wilson or his campaign,' according to a line of text at the bottom of the page. A picture of Wilson holding a rifle and standing in the company's gun shop appears on the same page..."


Energy:

Andrew Nikiforuk: Pfffft Goes Promise of Pumping C02 Underground
"Farmers say high profile carbon sequestration experiment is a bubbling, dangerous failure..."

War As A Profitable Enterprise:

The materials used here will be more scarce when needed for other, non-military uses. 250k rounds to eliminate each baddie seems not only excessive, but it smells like fraud; crates falling off trucks and cash illegally exchanging hands.
I'd like to see the paperwork that covers the delivery of this ammo, the supply-chain handling of it before it makes it to the units in the field, and finally the field-reports that justify ordering such an amount per gunner.
In an odd twist, it looks like re-reporting of an old story(?).

Belfast Telegraph: US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed
"US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan - an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed - that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel.
US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan - an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed - that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand.
A government report says that US forces are now using 1.8 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition a year. The total has more than doubled in five years, largely as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as changes in military doctrine..."

Economics:

Nathan Diebenow: America has ‘reached the point of no return,’ Reagan budget director warns
"The Obama administration's $78 billion cut to US defense spending is a mere 'pin-prick' to a behemoth military-industrial complex that must drastically shrink for the good of the republic, a former Reagan administration budget director recently told Raw Story.
'It amounts to a failed opportunity to recognize that we are now at a historical inflection point at which the time has arrived for a classic post-war demobilization of the entire military establishment,' David Stockman said in an exclusive interview.
'The Cold War is long over,' he continued. 'The wars of occupation are almost over and were complete failures -- Afghanistan and Iraq. The American empire is done. There are no real seriously armed enemies left in the world that can possibly justify an $800 billion national defense and security establishment, including Homeland Security.'
Short of that, he suggested, the United States has 'reached the point of no return' with its artificial creation of wealth, and will eventually face a sharp economic decline.
Stockman last fall criticized the extension of the Bush tax cuts while the federal government continued to borrow money abroad to pay for its public welfare and warfare programs. His solution to deficit spending -- a huge across-the-board tax increase -- is contrary to the current anti-tax ideology shared among tea party activists as well as fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party..."


The Economics of Empire:

Nick Turse: US Empire of Bases 2.0
"...There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it's 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure..."


War Profiteering:

Chris Hedges: Even Lost Wars Make Corporations Rich
"Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice...
...Either you are against war or you are not. Either you use your bodies to defy the war makers and weapons manufacturers until the wars end or you do not. Either you have the dignity and strength of character to denounce those who ridicule or ignore your core moral beliefs-including Obama-or you do not. Either you stand for something or you do not. And because so many in the anti-war movement proved to be weak and naive in 2004, 2006 and 2008 we will have to start over. This time we must build an anti-war movement that will hold fast. We must defy the entire system. We must acknowledge that it is not our job to help Democrats win elections. The Democratic Party has amply proved, by its failure to stand up for working men and women, its slavishness to Wall Street and its refusal to end these wars, that it cannot be trusted..."


On Torture:

Alexander Cockburn: The American Way of Torture
"...In his first State of the Union address, Obama declared to the joint session of Congress that 'I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture. We can make that commitment here tonight.' Within days of this guarantee, Obama's Justice Department lawyers were telling U.S. judges in explicit terms that the new administration would not be moving on from Bush's policies on the legal status of renditions and of supposed enemy combatants.
The torture system is flourishing, and the boundaries of the American empire marked by overseas torture centers such as Bagram. There are still detainees in Guantanamo -- as of November last year, 174 of them. They are supposedly destined for a Supermax in Illinois.
For the past seven months 23-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, first in an Army prison in Kuwait; now in Quantico, Va., has been held 23 hours out of 24 in solitary confinement in his cell, under constant harassment. He faces months, if not years, of the same. Will he end up like accused Chicagoan Jose Padilla, four years in total isolation and silence before his trial in 2007 (convicted as a terrorist and given 17 years), with his lawyer informed by prison staff that Padilla had become docile and inactive to the point that he resembled 'a piece of furniture,'..."

Lifelong Illegal Detention Without Trial:

A year ago today, Barak Obama set a one-year deadline to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, no such thing has occurred.