Economy
Related: About this forumWeekend Economists Review 50 Years Later... February 22-24, 2013
Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, identified the "problem that has no name" - which feminists later labeled "sexism." Three years after its publication - 50 years ago this month - Friedan was instrumental in organizing the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other key groups that helped build the movement for women's equality.
The Feminine Mystique was not only a best-selling book, but also a manifesto for change....
http://truth-out.org/news/item/14514-betty-friedans-the-feminine-mystique-50-years-later
Has it been 50 years already? Not by my clock. But then, I've been living in anticipation of equality for women all my life....
Yes, things have changed, and mostly not for the better. Instead of women getting the "male" jobs, they are fighting to keep those they have as the displaced American male searches frantically for work of any kind.
When The Feminine Mystique was published, men's turnout at the polls exceeded that of women by five percent. Since 1980, women have consistently voted at higher rates than men, according to the Center on American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. The number of women elected to office at every level of government has spiraled. In 1963, there were two women in the US Senate and only 12 women in the House of Representatives. Today, 20 women serve in the Senate and 77 serve in the House. Similar shifts have occurred at the local and state levels. Although a rise in women's turnout has spurred these gains, men are now more willing to vote for women candidates than ever before.
Pardon me if I tell you the glass isn't even half full yet. And it's only half a question of gender roles. The other half is definitely ECONOMICS.
Post what you've got. Join in the discussion. Just be warned, I've had a ROTTEN day....
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Demeter
(85,373 posts)America's federal prison system is broken; facilities are literally bursting at the seams. Overcrowding is endemic; prisoners are often isolated, leading to severe mental health problems that go untreated; staffing is inadequate; taxpayer dollars are flying out the window to maintain facilities, some of which are as structurally unsound as many of the nation's bridges, highways and sewer systems. One of the major reasons for this massive break down is that over the past 30 years, the federal prison population in the United States has increased by 790 percent...."A new report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) attributes this staggering growth ... in part to failed sentencing and correctional policies, including mandatory minimum sentences and the elimination of federal parole," a recent ACLU press release pointed out.
The CRS report, titled "The Federal Prison Population Buildup: Overview, Policy Changes, Issues, and Options," found:
Population has increased by approximately 6,100 inmates each year since 1980. In the 50 years before that, the population increased by 12,000 total.
From 2000 to 2011, appropriations for the Bureau of Prisons increased by more than $2.7 billion...
"Data show that a growing proportion of inmates are being incarcerated for immigration and weapons-related offenses, but the largest portion of newly admitted inmates are being incarcerated for drug offenses."
Since 2000, there has been a huge jump in spending per inmate, going from $19,571 in 2000, to $26,094 in 2011. "During this same period of time," the report notes, "appropriations for the BOP increased from $3.668 billion to $6.381 billion." Overcrowding, especially in high- and medium-security male prisons has become an endemic problem. The report states: "Overall, the federal prison system was 39% over its rated capacity in FY2011, but high- and medium- security male facilities were operating at 51% and 55%, respectively, over rated capacity." Although confirming data isn't totally clear, overcrowding magnifies the potential for inmate misconduct and violence, as well as the potential for staff and officer malfeasance. More inmates require more staff, but over the past ten years, even with the hiring of more staff, "the inmate-to-staff ratio has increased from 4.1 per staff member ... to 4.9 inmates per staff member." In addition, "the inmate to correctional officer ratio increased from 9.8 inmates per correctional officer in FY2000 to 10.2 inmates per correctional officer in FY2011, but this is down from a high of 10.9 inmates per correctional officer in FY2005."
MORE INSANITY AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)WHEN ONE ASKS A QUESTION LIKE THAT, ASIDE FROM THE OBVIOUS ANSWER, THERE ARE THE RAMIFICATIONS.
WHEN MARRIAGES FAIL, THE ENTIRE FAMILY-CLAN-SOCIETY ORGANIZATION FALTERS.
FAMILIES FORM FROM A MARRIAGE: TWO STRANGERS JOINING TO PRODUCE A NEW GENERATION, TO MERGE, OR INCORPORATE, TO BUILD CONNECTIONS. IT IS THIS FIRST STEP THAT IS PROVING TO BE THE WEAKEST LINK.
http://www.alternet.org/marriage-dying?akid=10071.227380._1KLxu&rd=1&src=newsletter796030&t=16&paging=off
Marriage, by the numbers: In 2002, the Bush administration diverted over $100 million dollars from existing welfare programs to create the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a national program to disseminate the importance of matrimony. Displaced funds included $14 million from child welfare, $6.1 million from a child support enforcement program, $9 million worth of support for refugees, and $40 million from a development strategies program focusing on Native Americans. Three years later, the US government sanctioned up to $150 million more per year to support “healthy marriage and responsible programs.” A change of political parties has not tempered the flow: in the last fiscal year, Congress approved $75 million in spending on marriage promotion activities and $75 million for responsible fatherhood initiatives. This, of course, does not include the cost of marriage to individuals themselves (the average American wedding costs over $27,000, according to Reuters). That’s a lot to spend on an institution with a known failure rate of about 50 percent.
Today, Americans are getting married less and less; the numbers of unmarried couples and single parents have risen. And yet, marriage — idealized, perfected marriage, marriage “worth fighting for” — has never had such a strong hold on our political imagination. However much the practice may be waning on the ground, the concept of marriage has found a revived energy in the rhetoric of policy-makers and pundits on both the Right and the Left. Cultural conservatives rally around preserving a nostalgic image of the nuclear family, those good old days when a man could walk through the door to a pot roast and a set of smiling faces. Meanwhile, the most exciting political announcement of the last year for Democrats was President Obama’s concession that gay men and women, too, might one day get married. The more insistently Americans seem to be leaving the institution behind, the stronger its purchase on our language and public policy goals. Why? Two books help illustrate the persistence of these ideals.
In Oklahoma, 32 percent of adults are divorced, 10 points higher than the national average. In 2000, the state has diverted 10 percent of its welfare money (a total of $10 million) to finance a statewide marriage initiative. The program’s listed goals would be to reduce the high number of divorces in Oklahoma by one-third, teach citizens about the benefits of marriage, and encourage cohabiting Oklahoma couples to marry. For Governor Frank Keating, who put the initiative into place, the program’s possibilities didn’t stop there. “The marriage initiative,” he wrote, would, “make our state rich. That simple.” To strengthen marriage, he contended, would be to create a stronger and more stable economic base for the family unit, and by extension, for the state itself.
As the sociologist Melanie Heath shows in her fine-tuned “One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America,” Oklahoma’s program takes several forms. At the core of the program is Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP), a workshop given free of charge over the course of a few weeks to Oklahomans looking to improve their relationships. The audience for these courses is mostly heterosexual, white, and middle class. But the program’s variants proliferate across the state. There’s CPREP, a Christian version; Prison PREP, taught to inmates; Employee Relationship Enhancement (ERE), for Native American reservations; another for high school students; and a special course taught to welfare recipients, compulsory in exchange for aide but not, according to its supporters, “required” (more on that later).
Central to the PREP is the concept of the “marriage cure,” which holds that marriage is the solution to poverty. As Heath explains, the 1990s saw a growth of a “neo-family values” movement that used the language of political science and statistics to push the importance of matrimony as a solution to poverty. Research on the links between matrimony and economics, child welfare, and education began to emerge from secular research branches like the National Marriage Project, housed at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values. Marriage, according to one such report, “is an important social good, associated with an impressively broad array of positive outcomes for children and adults alike.” Never mind that the basic questions of correlation and causation remain totally unquestioned; such research confidently presents marriage as a panacea for all social ills: “Married people” — for whatever reason — “are happier, healthier, and better off financially.”
OF COURSE, THE FACT THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE HAPPIER, HEALTHIER AND FINANCIALLY BETTER OFF ARE BETTER ABLE TO SUSTAIN A MARRIAGE (GIVEN AN ABSENCE OF PSYCHOPATHY IN THE COUPLE) NEVER CROSSES THESE LITTLE MINDS...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Companies have a new solution to rising health-insurance costs: Break up their employees’ marriages.
By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health. See: When your boss doesn’t trust your doctor
While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, last year, 6% of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5% in 2010, as did 4% of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer. These “spousal carve-outs,” or “working spouse provisions,” generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse’s plan.
Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: “That’s the next step,” Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. “We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.
But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner’s employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. “We have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we’re trying to do is level the playing field here,” he says....
YUP. THAT'S NOT WHAT YOU'D CALL PROGRESS, IS IT....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...While couples generally prefer to be on the same health plan, companies often find that spouses are more expensive to insure than their own employees. That’s because, say benefits experts, covered spouses tend to be women, who as a group not only spend more on health care, but also have more free time to go to the doctor if they don’t work. Indeed, JetBlue’s covered spouses cost 50% more than crewmembers themselves, according to the airline’s online Q&A about its health plan, which this year extended wellness incentives to spouses for the first time...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)30 YEARS' WORTH OF SOLIDARITY...WORTH READING...BECAUSE THE M$M WILL NEVER EVER MENTION IT....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In Ontario, 465 union workers used to make locomotive engines. Then Indiana passed ALEC's anti-union legislation, and Caterpillar moved the works to Muncie. And that's bad for everybody...It’s an anniversary London, Ontario, did not celebrate. It’s been a year, and the shock has yet to wear off in the Canadian city just an hour’s drive east of Detroit. All that remains is the hardship of carrying on through mass joblessness, and its hand-in-hand partners, surges in poverty, mental health crises and addiction.
It’s a story many American communities will recognize -- but this one involves an American company wooed with a sweetheart deal by the Canadian government for a factory the Americans likely never intended to keep. What they really wanted, it seems, is to bust the union. The lockout began on New Year’s Day, 2012, when Caterpillar Inc., a U.S. company, left 465 union workers on the pavement. At the Electro-Motive Diesel factory, they made engines and parts for diesel locomotives; Caterpillar subsidiary Progress Rail Services bought up the company in 2010.
The workers had refused the company’s demand of a 50-percent wage cut and slashed pensions and benefits. Then the workers of Canadian Auto Workers Local 27 voted to strike. They were prepared to fight hard bargaining with people power.
But on February 3, the company essentially told them all to go to hell, and permanently closed the plant....
YEAH, THAT REALLY WILL EITHER STRENGTHEN A MARRIAGE, OR KILL IT OUTRIGHT...
...the real incentive was the anti-union law signed by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) less than 36 hours before Caterpillar shut down the Canadian plant....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In 1968, the Phillip Morris Company launched a memorable campaign to sell Virginia Slims, a new brand of cigarettes targeting women, itself a new phenomenon. It had a brand-new slogan: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” The company plastered it on billboards nationwide and put it in TV ads that featured women of the early twentieth century being punished for smoking. In all their advertising, smoking was equated with a set of traits meant to capture the essence of women in a new era of equality -- independence, slimness, glamour, and liberation....As it happened, the only equality this campaign ended up supporting involved lung cancer. Today, women and men die at similar rates from that disease....
These days it may be hard for some to believe, but before the women’s movement burst on the scene in the late 1960s, newspapers published ads for jobs on different pages, segregated by gender. Employers legally paid women less than men for the same work. Some bars refused to serve women and all banks denied married women credit or loans, a practice which didn’t change until 1974. Some states even excluded women from jury duty...Radio producers considered women’s voices too abrasive to be on the air and television executives believed that women didn’t have sufficient credibility to anchor the news. Few women ran big corporations or universities, or worked as firefighters and police officers. None sat on the Supreme Court, installed electrical equipment, climbed telephone poles, or owned construction companies. All hurricanes had female names, due to the widely held view that women brought chaos and destruction to society.
As late as 1970, Dr. Edgar Berman, a consultant to presidents and to Medicare, proclaimed on television that women were too tortured by hormonal disturbances to assume the presidency. Few people ran into women professors, doctors, or lawyers. Everyone addressed a woman as either Miss or Mrs, depending on her marital status, and if a woman needed an abortion, legal nowhere in America, she risked her life searching among quacks in back alleys for a competent and compassionate doctor...The public generally believed that rape victims had probably “asked for it,” most women felt too ashamed to report rape, and no language existed to make sense of what we now call domestic violence, sexual harassment, marital rape, or date rape. One simple phrase seemed to sum up the hidden injuries women suffered in silence: “That’s life.”
On August 27, 1970, in response to such injustice, 50,000 women marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue, announcing the birth of a new movement. They demanded three rights: legal abortion, universal childcare, and equal pay. These were preconditions for women’s equality with men at home and in the workplace. Astonishingly, they didn’t include the ending of violence against women among their demands -- though the experience and fear of male violence was widespread -- because women still suffered these crimes in silence.
Those three demands, and the fourth one that couldn’t yet be articulated, have yet to be met....
PERHAPS I COULD SUMMARIZE THE DEMANDS: CUT THE CRAP!
THERE'S EQUALITY, IF YOU'RE A 1%ER....COMPARED TO YOUR 99% SISTERS.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Amez United Credit Union, Detroit, MI 2/19/13
NCP Community Development Federal Credit Union, Norfolk, VA 2/8/13
New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church Credit Union, Milwaukee, WI 1/7/13
Read more: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-unions/2012-list-of-failed-credit-unions.aspx#ixzz2LgEJh6cB
Follow us: @Bankrate on Twitter | Bankrate on Facebook
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A federal judge said Friday she can't overturn President Barack Obama's decision to revoke a Chinese company's purchase of four wind farm projects in the vicinity of a U.S. naval facility's restricted airspace. However, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the Ralls Corporation has a right to a hearing over whether the White House should be forced to explain its decision.
In his September decision, Obama ordered Ralls Corporation, a company owned by Chinese nationals, to divest its interest in the wind farms it purchased earlier this year in Oregon. The wind farm sites are all in the vicinity of restricted air space near the Naval Weapons Systems Training Facility Boardman. The administration cites unspecified national security risks as the reason for blocking the transaction. Ralls sued. Its CEO, Wu Jialiang, said in Beijing in October that his company would "never do anything that threatens U.S. national security."
Jackson said the federal courts don't have the power to get involved in the president's decision-making on this issue. The law "is not the least bit ambiguous about the role of the courts: 'The actions of the president . . . and the findings of the president . . . shall not be subject to judicial review,'" she said. However, Jackson said the courts can hold hearings on whether the government deprived Ralls of its property without due process of law. Ralls argued that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment entitles it to an opportunity to be heard and to hear the reasons for Obama's decision, she said.
"It is true that the finality provision will bar the court from hearing any attack on the president's findings," Jackson said. "But there is a difference between asking a court to decide whether one was entitled to know what the president's reasons were and asking a court to assess the sufficiency of those reasons."
Jackson said she will hear arguments on that issue later.
THERE ARE TIMES I WONDER IF THEY JUST MAKE THIS SHIT UP AS THEY GO ALONG
Demeter
(85,373 posts)BUT MR. PRESIDENT, YOU SIGNED IT!
http://news.yahoo.com/administration-warns-impact-broad-budget-cut-223232012--politics.html
Widespread flight delays and shuttered airports, off-limit seashores and unprotected parks...The Obama administration is painting a dire portrait of the many ways the public will feel the effects of automatic federal spending cuts due to begin March 1. The grim picture is emerging as the White House and lawmakers count down the days until the government is forced to trim $85 billion in domestic and defense spending with hardly any leeway to save some programs from the budget knife. In detailing the costs of the cuts, President Barack Obama is seeking to raise the public's awareness while also applying pressure on congressional Republicans who oppose his blend of targeted savings and tax increases to tackle federal deficits.
"I've been very clear that these kinds of arbitrary, automatic cuts would have an adverse impact on families, on teachers, on parents who are reliant on Head Start programs, on our military readiness, on mental health services, on medical research," Obama said Friday. "This is not a smart way for us to reduce the deficit."
Just in case those consequences didn't capture the public's attention, the White House also had Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spell out the impact on travelers, a frequent-flier nightmare of 90-minute airport waits, limited flights and closed regional airports. Republican lawmakers dismissed LaHood's warnings as "exaggerations." But LaHood said the cuts would require slicing more than $600 million from the Federal Aviation Administration, resulting in furloughs of one day per pay period for a majority of the agency's 47,000 employees.
"Once airlines see the potential impact of these furloughs, we expect that they will change their schedules and cancel flights," LaHood said.
Moreover, he said, the Transportation Department is looking "to likely close" air traffic control towers at 100 airports that have fewer than 150,000 flight operations per year.
"We're talking about places like Boca Raton, Fla.; Joplin, Mo.; Hilton Head, S.C.; and San Marcos, Texas," he said. All in all, nearly two-thirds of the airports are concentrated in three states — California, Florida and Texas.
...Still, top Republicans on congressional transportation and aviation panels accused the administration of unnecessary alarm.... MORE
***********************************************************
Alice: But I don't want to go among mad people.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you can't help that. Most everyone's mad here.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Ironically, because many "feminist" ideas are now taken for granted, few women today think of themselves as "feminists." According to a 2009 poll conducted by CBS News, only 24 percent of American women identify themselves as feminists. But once the word was defined as someone who believes in social, political and economic equality of the sexes, the figure jumped to 65 percent.
Friedan - who died in 2006 at age 85 - would no doubt be proud of the progressive changes that her book and activism inspired, but she'd be the first to note that full women's equality has still not been achieved. For example, women represent only 3.6 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. Like 50 years ago, women today are more likely than men to be poor. The US is one of the few affluent countries that does not require paid maternity leave or provide universal child care.
The Feminine Mystique began as a simple questionnaire. In 1957 Friedan and two friends prepared a survey of their Smith College classmates prior to their 15th reunion. It included open-ended questions "that we had not asked ourselves out loud before," Friedan recalled. They asked about such topics as decision-making in the family, hours of housework, feelings about being a mother, number of books read in a year, interests outside the home and agreement, or not, with a husband's politics.
Two hundred women responded. Friedan found that the classmates who seemed most happy and fulfilled were those who did not conform to the "role of women" and that those who were most dispirited were traditional housewives. She drew on the survey to write an article for McCall's - "Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?" - but the magazine rejected it. When her agent sent it to another women's magazine, Redbook, a male editor sent it back saying that Friedan "must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this." No magazine would touch it...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and Oliver Stone Will Help
Stone's TV series, "Untold History of the United States," digs deep into American atrocities the mainstream media doesn't spend much time on...
FOR EXAMPLES, SEE LINK!
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)I bought the companion book too, but it's down on the list.
The series came close To Howard Zinn's gold standard for history. One thing I took from the series was, I think democracy in this country was officially killed the night they prevented Henry Wallace's re-appointment as VP (He had overwhelming majority support) and the Conservadems foisted Harry Truman on the nation.
Things haven't been the same since.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)There is plenty of history that I was taught that is not what actually happened.
What is that saying that history is written by the victors. Ha.
I'll need to get the book, and specifically leave it in my will to my children and grandchildren.
Young people nowadays are so clueless.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I'm renovating...hope to finish before it finishes me!
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)When it was over, I canceled it. Still have HBO, with Game of Thrones new season starting soon. In fact, I got the 4 book Thrones set in the mail yesterday.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)... memories flood in - I will try to post some this weekend, more especially because the topic is so near the nerve, still, at 62 ... I just got home, am real tired and still have some work to get through tonight, but thank you thank you.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)as your namesake tells us:
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It's been a rough couple of months for drone advocates. John Brennan's CIA confirmation hearing and the Department of Justice's leaked white paper on the government's "kill list" have finally brought the issue of targeted killing to the forefront of the U.S. foreign policy debate. At the center of that debate is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, both internationally and domestically. Though using UAVs to carry out targeted killing in places like Yemen and Pakistan is still popular, the idea of domestic drones populating U.S. skies doesn't sit nearly as well with a lot of people – as the Seattle police department recently discovered when it had to cancel a planned drone program amid public outcry.
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the primary trade group that advocates for drone manufacturers, is working to counter those negative impressions. Late last year, they launched a website called IncreasingHumanPotential.org, which sounds like an Orwellian cyborg-development project – an impression only strengthened by the creepy Vitruvian Man homage they're using for a logo. The site highlights the positive aspects of drones, such as their ability to survey farmland and gather data in storms that would otherwise be impossible to collect. It's a simple strategy, and one probably best taken with the same skepticism that should accompany a tobacco lobbyist carrying on about how smoking is a great way to meet people. In fact, most resistance to domestic drones is based on the completely rational fear that they will be used as surveillance devices on people's private activities – not on the straw man argument that UAVs are incapable of performing other valuable tasks.
At Least We're Not Measles: Rationalizing Drone Attacks Hits New Low
The drone industry is afraid of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia – where local lawmakers instituted a two-year moratorium on police drone use in criminal investigations or arming drones with so-called less-lethal weapons – spreading to other cities and states. The Virginia General Assembly approved instituting a similar state-wide two-year moratorium, and state legislatures across the country have taken up bills that would require police to obtain a warrant before using UAVs. In an attempt to combat the Virginia bill, Peter Bale, chairman of the board for AUVSI, told the Chamber of Commerce of an eastern Virginia town that unmanned aircraft could bring "2,380 new jobs . . . and $460 million in economic impact" to Virginia, and that the state-level legislation would be "a major stumbling block."
"When people learn how unmanned aircraft can help find missing children, aid firefighters battling wildfires or advance scientific research, they are supportive," Melanie Hinton, a spokesperson for AUVSI says in an email.
As important as cities instituting restrictions is the FAA's perceived reluctance to simply open the door to AUVSI's members and open the sky to their drones. The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 was intended to speed up the process of integrating drones into U.S. airspace by September 2015, but the FAA hasn't granted licenses as quickly as AUVSI's members want – and only recently sought to establish six test sites across the country for drone integration trial runs, after a delay. (AUVSI complaining about the FAA is a bit rich, though, considering drone lobbyists wrote the legislation authorizing domestic drone use.) The annual drone conference last week focused on how the industry could lobby Congress to accelerate the process. With cuts to the defense budget for UAVs expected to continue, the domestic market for drone manufacturers is critical, and it could reach $90 billion over the next decade according to FAA estimates. Getting restrictions in place early is important to limit the potential for spying abuses – to stave off drone normalization before it happens. Even Peter Bale, the AUVSI chairperson, recently acknowledged the ubiquity of surveillance, saying: "You have got cameras on every corner of every street now." We're seeing positive movement to keep domestic drones from further encroaching on our privacy. But with $90 billion up for grabs, expect the drone makeover to continue.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The Obama administration’s drone program may be Washington’s worst-kept secret, but we still don’t know much about how it works.
From Pakistan to Yemen, strikes are widely reported, and the administration frequently acknowledges them, however evasively. But the program itself remains officially classified, along with the rules and procedures that guide it—if they even exist.
Now that Obama has nominated John Brennan, the chief architect of the targeted-killing program, to run the CIA, everyone has decided it’s time again to try to get some answers. Adding to the new urgency is a leaked memo describing (albeit vaguely) the administration’s legal justification for killing American citizens as well as a report of a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia (even if it turned out to be not so secret after all).
CLICK ON LINK FOR a primer on what we know about the drone program—and what we still need to find out...
This undated photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows an unmanned drone used to patrol the U.S.-Canadian border. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection/AP)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)President Obama announced Friday that about 100 U.S. troops have been deployed to the West African country of Niger, where defense officials said they are setting up a drone base to spy on al-Qaeda fighters in the Sahara. It was the latest step by the Pentagon to increase its intelligence-gathering across Africa in response to what officials see as a rising threat from militant groups...In a letter to Congress, Obama said about 40 U.S. service members arrived in Niger on Wednesday, bringing the total number of troops based there to “approximately” 100. He said the troops, which are armed for self-protection, would support a French-led military operation in neighboring Mali, where al-Qaeda fighters and other militants have carved out a refuge in a remote territory the size of Texas.
The base in Niger marks the opening of another far-flung U.S. military front against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, adding to drone combat missions in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The CIA is also conducting drone airstrikes against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan and Yemen. Senior U.S. officials have said for months that they would not put U.S. military “boots on the ground” in Mali, an impoverished nation that has been mired in chaos since March, when a U.S.-trained Malian army captain took power in a coup. But U.S. troops are becoming increasingly involved in the conflict from the skies and the rear echelons, where they are supporting French and African forces seeking to stabilize the region.
Obama did not explicitly reveal the drone base in his letter to Congress, but he said the U.S. troops in Niger would “provide support for intelligence collection” and share the intelligence with French forces in Mali. A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide details about military operations, said that the 40 troops who arrived in Niger on Wednesday were almost all Air Force personnel and that their mission was to support drone flights.The official said drone flights were “imminent” but declined to say whether unarmed, unmanned Predator aircraft had arrived in Niger or how many would be deployed there.
The drones will be based at first in the capital, Niamey. But military officials would like to eventually move them north to the city of Agadez, which is closer to parts of Mali where al-Qaeda cells have taken root....The introduction of Predators to Niger fills a gap in U.S. military capabilities over the Sahara, most of which remains beyond the reach of its drone bases in East Africa and southern Europe. The Pentagon also operates drones from a permanent base in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, and from a civilian airport in Ethiopia.
WELL, THAT'S JUST.....LOVELY
Demeter
(85,373 posts)"The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that refuse military service."
-Albert Einstein
"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
- George McGovern
"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.
But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die
like a dog for no good reason."
- Ernest Hemmingway
amandabeech
(9,893 posts)It just allows the U.S. to go on getting involved all over because fewer young people have to go out there and pound sand or slash their way through jungles.
It's only bloodless for us, well, at least in the beginning.
And to think a Dem is expanding this garbage.
None of McGovern, McCarthy or RFK would have done this stuff.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)sorry to vent my frustrations on you all
...tomorrow will be a better day, because I can't imagine a worse one....
Warpy
(111,230 posts)part of the Civil Rights Act, to which a Southerner added the words "or sex," something he thought would kill that bill stone dead. He was wrong.
It was the best thing a conservative southerner has ever done for half the human race.
Women got their civil rights though the back door, by buy gawd, we got them.
Friedan's book just made us ready to grab them immediately.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Is there any truth to the legend that women’s rights were included in the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an attempt to defeat the bill?
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for an employer:
The Now-Familiar List of Categories
The law prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin. However, the word “sex” was not added to Title VII until Rep. Howard Smith, a Democrat from Virginia, introduced it in a one-word amendment to the bill in the House of Representatives in February 1964.
Was Sex Discrimination Added in Good Faith?
Adding the word “sex” to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act ensured that women would have a remedy to fight employment discrimination just as minorities would be able to fight racial discrimination. But Rep. Howard Smith had previously gone on the record as opposing any federal Civil Rights legislation. Did he actually intend for his amendment to pass and the final bill to succeed? Or was he adding women's rights to the bill so that it would have less chance of success?
Opposition
Why would legislators who were in favor of racial equality suddenly vote against civil rights legislation if it also prohibited discrimination against women? One theory is that many Northern Democrats who supported a Civil Rights Act to combat racism were also allied with labor unions. Some labor unions had opposed including women in employment legislation. Even some women’s groups had opposed including sex discrimination in the legislation. They feared losing labor laws that protected women, including pregnant women and women in poverty. But did Rep. Smith think that his amendment would be defeated, or that his amendment would pass and then the bill would be defeated? If labor union-aligned Democrats wanted to defeat the addition of “sex,” would they rather defeat the amendment than vote against the bill?
Indications of Support
Rep. Howard Smith himself claimed that he genuinely offered the amendment in support of women, not as a joke or an attempt to kill the bill. Rarely does a congressperson act entirely alone. There are multiple parties behind the scenes even when one person introduces a piece of legislation or an amendment. The National Woman’s Party was behind the scenes of the sex discrimination amendment. In fact, the NWP had been lobbying to include sex discrimination in law and policy for years. Also, Rep. Howard Smith had worked with longtime women’s rights activist Alice Paul, who had chaired the NWP. Meanwhile, the struggle for women's rights was not brand new. Support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) had been in the Democratic and Republican Party platforms for years.
Arguments Taken Seriously
Rep. Howard Smith also presented an argument about what would happen in the hypothetical scenario of a white woman and a black woman applying for a job. If the women encountered employer discrimination, would the black woman rely on the Civil Rights Act while the white woman had no recourse? His argument indicates that his support for including sex discrimination in the law was genuine, if for no other reason than to protect white women who would otherwise be left out.
Other Comments on the Record
The issue of sex discrimination in employment was not introduced out of nowhere. Congress had passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. Furthermore, Rep. Howard Smith had previously stated his interest in including sex discrimination in civil rights legislation.
In 1956, the NWP supported including sex discrimination in the purview of the Civil Rights Commission. At that time, Rep. Smith said that if the civil rights legislation he opposed was inevitable, then he “certainly ought to try to do whatever good with it that we can.” (For more information on Smith's comments and involvement, see Jo Freeman’s “How Sex Got Into Title VII.”)
Many Southerners were opposed to legislation that forced integration, partly because they believed the federal government was unconstitutionally interfering with states’ rights. Rep. Smith may have adamantly opposed what he saw as federal interference, but he may have also genuinely wanted to make the best of that “interference” when it did become law.
The “Joke”
Although there were reports of laughter on the floor of the House of Representatives at the time Rep. Smith introduced his amendment, the amusement was most likely due to a letter in support of women’s rights that was read aloud. The letter presented statistics about the imbalance of men and women in the U.S. population and called for the government to attend to the “right” of unmarried women to find a husband... MORE
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/laws/a/sex_and_civil_rights_act.htm
Demeter
(85,373 posts)THERE WERE GIANTS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN THOSE DAYS...LED BY LBJ
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/civil-rights-law-hangs-in-the-balance.php?ref=fpb
On March 15, 1965, a week after Alabama state troopers brutally attacked civil rights protesters in Selma, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a stirring speech to a joint session of Congress introducing a bill to end voter discrimination against blacks...The law that it gave birth to, the Voting Rights Act, now hangs in the balance, with oral arguments next week before the Supreme Court. Five conservative justices are skeptical that a centerpiece of the nearly-half-century-old law is constitutional.
“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” Johnson said that night, nearly half a century ago. “A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept. The time of justice has now come.”
Days later, he submitted legislation to Congress aimed at taking stringent, unprecedented steps to end voter discrimination and disenfranchisement. As Congress took it up, opponents rebelled.
“I said it was worse than the Thaddeus Stevens legislation during Reconstruction, sir, and it is,” said Leander Perez, a pro-segregation Louisianan, at a subsequent Senate hearing. “It is the most nefarious — it is inconceivable that Americans would do that to Americans.”
Despite its intensity, the opposition failed. The Voting Rights Act overwhelmingly passed Congress that summer and was signed into law by Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965. A key part of the law, Section 5, required a slew of state and local governments with a history of voter discrimination to receive preclearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws. Today it is widely credited for helping minority voters participate equally in elections. The law played a key role in ending voter suppression tactics such as literacy tests and poll taxes...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)... regulators are terrified of repeating an Arthur Andersen situation, i.e. punishing a company and seeing massive job losses as a result:
Prosecutors defend their effort, saying it was born from painful experiences over the last decade.
After Arthur Andersen was convicted in 2002, the accounting firm went out of business, taking 28,000 jobs with it. The Supreme Court later overturned the case, prompting the government to alter its approach.
The Arthur Andersen case has become like Wall Street's magic mantra – you hear the name whispered anytime any company gets in trouble. This is a tactic straight out of Blazing Saddles, with banks essentially taking themselves hostage, putting guns to their own heads as they creep sideways out the door: "Back off! Prosecute us and all these jobs will die!" And prosecutors, just like the idiot town leaders of Mel Brooks's Rockridge, are screaming, "They're just crazy enough to do it!"
This isn't brain surgery. You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty.
I get that regulators are worried about job losses. They should be. But the long-term job losses are going to be much greater when investors around the world lose confidence in the U.S. financial system because they recognize that individuals do not face punishment for criminal activity. The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero. Even the worst of the worst – like, say, a certain unindicted co-conspirator in an evolving insider trading case – is only threatened with individual prosecution after years of monstrous and obvious market manipulation, resulting in massive profits that he'll almost certainly get to keep most of, by the way, if previous settlements are any guide.
It continually amazes, the way all of these law-and-order types are so willing to pontificate about the importance of taking individual responsibility for one's actions, until the guy in their crosshairs is someone he/she went to college with, or a former client of his or her law firm. Then, suddenly, their idea of drastic justice becomes maybe yanking the license of a foreign subsidiary. Let's make a new rule: The Department of Justice doesn't get to call itself "tough" until a) it puts someone from one of these companies in jail for at least 24 hours, or b) it extracts fines from either companies or individuals that represent at least slightly more than laughable fractions of their ill-gotten gains. That's setting the bar pretty low, but you have to start somewhere, right?
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/justice-departments-new-get-tough-policy-is-well-not-20130220#ixzz2LieojFtG
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Current law treats student loans as non-dischargeable debt. In other words, no matter how broke a borrower gets, even declaring bankruptcy isn't going to get you out of paying back your student loans.
That's why earlier this month, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) re-introduced H.R. 532. This bill is a counterpart to legislation introduced in the Senate in January that would allow borrowers of private student loans to discharge them in bankruptcy.
"People who seek higher education to better their futures should not be dissuaded from doing so by the threat of financial ruin,” Cohen said in a press release. "Our bill is a modest but important step in achieving that goal."
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates there's about $150 billion in outstanding private student loan debt in addition to the $864 billion in federal loans. Before the 1970s, all student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy along with credit card and auto debt. But a law passed in 1976 changed this regulation for federal loans, placing student debt in a category of items that can't be discharged, including back taxes and child support payments. In 2005, Congress extended this law to private loans... Cohen and Davis' bill marks the fifth attempt in recent years to reform bankruptcy law surrounding private student loans. The same bill introduced this month failed to win passage out of the House Judiciary Committee in the previous congressional session....
I DIDN'T REALIZE THIS DRACONIAN POLICY BEGAN THAT EARLY...BUT I HAD LEFT COLLEGE BY THEN, DEBT-FREE. AFTER ALL, MY TUITION AT A STATE INSTITUTION WAS ONLY $200....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)MOOC (massive open online courses)...Online education might work for remedial algebra or the basics of computer programming, conceded several professors, but when the goal is to teach students to think and write critically about history or literature, the benefits of teaching thousands of students simultaneously via their iPads becomes much hazier. University administrators pushing MOOCs, they argued, are more interested in cutting costs or finding new sources of revenue than in delivering the best education possible. Most students who do register for MOOCs never finish them, they warned, and the available data suggests the kinds of students who need the most educational assistance tend to be the ones who benefit the least from online classes.
Oh yeah, and the whole thing is a right-wing plot to defund public education, screw the humanities, and help corporations profit off of students...The critics of MOOCs make many good points. And yet, from the perspective of someone who has watched closely as Internet-enabled distribution turned the music and publishing industries upside down, a lot of the clamor initially sounded a little like passengers on a sinking ship in the middle of a typhoon complaining about bad weather. Yeah, it sucks, butstorm’s a coming, people; it’s time to start swimming! The spread of quality, low-cost online education is going to shake things up. As one professor said to me via email, “The large lecture at a community college or a satellite state university is about to go the way of the passenger pigeon, and the mass extinction will be just about as fast.”
But what if MOOCs actually turned out to be part of a right-wing plot?
After some reflection, it’s become clear to me that there is a crucial difference in how the Internet’s remaking of higher education is qualitatively different than what we’ve seen with recorded music and newspapers. There’s a political context to the transformation. Higher education is in crisis because costs are rising at the same time that public funding support is falling. That decline in public support is no accident. Conservatives don’t like big government and they don’t like taxes, and increasingly, they don’t even like the entire way that the humanities are taught in the United States. It’s absolutely no accident that in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, three of the most conservative governors in the country are leading the push to incorporate MOOCs in university curricula. And it seems well worth asking whether the apostles of disruption who have been warning academics that everything is about to change have paid enough attention to how the intersection of politics and MOOCs is affecting the speed and intensity of that change. Imagine if Napster had had the backing of the Heritage Foundation and House Republicans? It’s hard enough to survive chaotic disruption when it is a pure consequence of technological change. But when technological change suits the purposes of enemies looking to put a knife in your back, it’s almost impossible.
Call them the three horsemen of the MOOC apocalypse. Florida’s Rick Scott, Texas’ Rick Perry and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker all see themselves as education reformers, and they are all seeking ways to lower the cost of college education while at the same time cutting state funding support. Their holy grail: the so-called 10K degree — a university education completed for just 10 grand...
MOOCs fit nicely into the 10K-or-bust model. The more courses that the University of Texas can offer students at rock-bottom-cost, the less the state, in theory, has to subsidize, a fact that led Perry to applaud the University of Texas’ decision last fall to join edX, the nonprofit MOOC founded by Harvard and M.I.T. In Wisconsin, Walker has proposed a “flexible degree” program that incorporates MOOC-like online educational elements. In Florida, the state university system’s Board of Governors is considering, with Scott’s encouragement, whether to establish an online-only university, allow each existing college to do its own online thing, or put together some kind of collaborative approach.
At the same time, in all three states, the governors have made it painfully clear that they have no intention of increasing funding support for higher education. Quite the opposite! The University of Wisconsin system has been targeted for cuts of over $250 million under Walker. Scott approved a $300 million cut to Florida’s public universities last April. Perry approved massive budget cuts at all levels of public education in Texas in 2011, including a 9 percent across-the-board cut to the University of Texas system.
Budget cuts for higher education are not, of course, limited to states with Republican governors. In California, Gov. Jerry Brown has been quite vocal about his belief that MOOCs will play an important role in supplementing a congenitally underfunded public education system. But in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, the push to cut costs is accompanied by undisguised scorn for the whole enterprise of higher education, insofar as it pertains to anything more than equipping people with marketable skills. That mission of the humanities to help us think more critically, to deepen our knowledge of the world? Forget about it.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/30/texas-florida-and-wisconsin-governors-see-large-overlap-higher-education-platforms
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.
Consider the 45-person law firm of Busch, Slipakoff & Schuh here in Atlanta, a place that has seen tremendous growth in the college-educated population. Like other employers across the country, the firm hires only people with a bachelor’s degree, even for jobs that do not require college-level skills.
This prerequisite applies to everyone, including the receptionist, paralegals, administrative assistants and file clerks. Even the office “runner” — the in-house courier who, for $10 an hour, ferries documents back and forth between the courthouse and the office — went to a four-year school.
“College graduates are just more career-oriented,” said Adam Slipakoff, the firm’s managing partner. “Going to college means they are making a real commitment to their futures. They’re not just looking for a paycheck.”
IS THAT GUY AN ASSHOLE, OR WHAT? THINK HE'S REDACTED THAT YET?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Les Leopold's new book reveals that hedge funds make their super-profits by doing what the rest of us would call cheating...UNLESS WE WERE PART OF THE 1% AND WORKING FOR THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT...
It's a common belief that people are compensated more or less in proportion to the value they produce. Sure, it's an imperfect measure – why should teachers make a fraction of what personal injury lawyers take in? – but if someone's making billions of dollars per year, they must be doing something positive for society. But what do those at the pinnacle of the economic pile – hedge fund managers whose compensation dwarfs that of the best paid corporate CEO – actually do? “A straight answer is hard to come by,” writes Les Leopold in his new book, How to Make a Million Dollars An Hour (Wiley). "Mostly these guys (and yes, they are nearly all guys) keep their efforts hidden from view. Trade secrets and mystical lore shroud their every move. Neither regulators nor the public have any idea how so much money is minted."
"... you know this is America, and we are very accustomed to hearing about the rich and famous. To start the book I thought it would be good to take a look at the 10 richest musicians, athletes, movie stars, CEOs, lawyers, doctors, authors and other celebrities, and then compare them with these hedge fund managers. I couldn't believe what I found. Hedge fund managers make up to 100 times more. For example, while the top movie stars averaged about $21,000 per hour, (which is nothing to sneeze at), the top hedge fund guys averaged a whopping $843,000 per hour. It was a revelation."
MORE AT LINK...DEMYSTIFYING AND UNCOVERING A SCANDAL...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)One can trace the development of today’s right wing Christian think takes to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Religiously conservative people, motivated by their perceived degradation of society, quietly perfected their skills, all the while grooming their own young adherents, played an effective long-game that continues to win (and corrupt) the hearts and minds of a significant segment of our youth. Indeed, there is no better way to affect the future than by propagandizing the young. In this current post election season, the Biblically driven, often racist, members of society are once again regrouping to fight another day.
With the money of wealthy funders like Richard and Betsy DeVos (sister of Blackwater scion Eric Prince and daughter of Elsa and Edgar Prince of the Amway fortune) and the Walton, Koch and Scaife Foundations, simpatico politicians are hard at work bringing Dominionist ideals quietly into the forefront of American education policy. While much of the country argues about budgets, deficits, and guns, a cleverly camouflaged package of School Choice and ”Bible-driven curricula“ make their way up the ladder.
On the surface, School Choice is purportedly about increasing opportunities for inner city and rural youth. The all-important subtext, however, is that School Choice is really about freeing up dollars for Christian-based education. An important arrow that energizes today’s religious quiver is the intentional misuse of language in changing the debate by referring to public schools as “government schools” and public education as a “government school monopoly,” thus instantly and directly speaking to Tea Partiers and Libertarians.
To still relatively scant notice, the call for “School Choice” or Vouchers continues to play out in state capitols across the nation in an effort to increase Biblically based education through a redirection of tax dollars from public to private religious schools. In order to accomplish the end goal of Christianizing all students, stealth remains largely the rule of the day. In 2002, Dick DeVos told The Heritage Foundation,
“We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities. Many of the activities and the political work that needs to go on will go on at the grass roots. It will go on quietly and it will go on in the form that often politics is done - one person at a time, speaking to another person in privacy. And so these issues will not be, maybe, as visible or as noteworthy, but they will set a framework within states for the possibility of action on education reform issues."
YUP, MICHIGAN-FUNDIE DRIVEN...BLAME IT ON GRAND RAPIDS!
...It is critical that Americans recognize not only the intent to privatize our schools but the vast Christian Right agenda behind it. Whether from curricula control and out of order teachers in our public schools, or from the voucherization leading to fundamentalist Christian-based schools, charter schools and Christian homeschooling, a generation of children so educated will graduate from high school ill-equipped to face the realities of a science based world.
***********************************************************
Novelist K.C. Boyd is the author of the viral sensation, Being Christian: A Novel. According to Mikey Weinstein, President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, "Boyd created a story so riveting that not only could I not put it down, but upon finishing it, I found myself, like an addict, craving more.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Who are the absolute worst chief executives of 2012? Sydney Finkelstein thinks he knows. The longtime professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business is the author of 11 books with such titles as Why Smart Executives Fail and Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions, so he knows a thing or two about utter failure. He’s been putting out his list for three years now, and last year it included the chief executives of Netflix (NFLX), Research in Motion (RIM), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Here’s the list (except where noted the companies didn’t respond to a request for comment):
- Brian Dunn, who resigned as chief executive of Best Buy (BBY) in April after allegations surfaced that he had an inappropriate relationship with a much younger subordinate. That’s not why he’s on the list, though. Declining stock price, cratering same-store sales, loss of market share to more nimble competitors, and an addiction to share buybacks that cost the company $6.4 billion with little to show for it—that’s why he’s on the list.
- Aubrey McClendon, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy (CHK) who apparently has trouble keeping his company’s finances and his own apart. According to Reuters, McClendon borrowed as much as $1.1 billion over three years in undisclosed loans against his stake in thousands of company wells and ran a $200 million oil-and-gas hedge fund on the side, an “obvious conflict of interest,” Finkelstein says. Use of the company jet (and company employees) for personal purposes and a corporate sponsorship deal for Oklahoma City Thunder while McClendon was an owner of the basketball team also didn’t help. Jim Gipson, a spokesman for Chesapeake Energy, declined to comment.
- Andrea Jung, who stepped down as chief executive of Avon (AVP) in April but remains as chairman through the end of this year. Jung has been unable to fix the company’s operational problems, failed to groom a successor, and turned down a $10.7 billion offer from the beauty-care company Coty that, in retrospect, it should have leaped at. Since 2004, the company’s market value has fallen under her watch from $21 billion to $6 billion. And the company has had to spend $300 million in legal expenses related to allegations that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars bribery of foreign officials.
- Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga (ZNGA), the mobile gaming company that brought the world Farmville, among other online distractions. Zynga stock is down 75 percent so far this year, and the company is losing top executive talent. Pincus has a fairly illustrious pedigree—he got a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wharton in 1988 and his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1993. But Finkelstein says he’s made some rookie mistakes, including hitching his company’s wagon much too securely to Facebook (FB), which Zynga relies on for a big chunk of revenue. And he hardly expressed confidence in the company’s prospects with his move to unload 16 million shares after the IPO lockup period ended. Joe Libonati, a spokesperson for Zynga, declined to comment.
- Rodrigo Rato, who resigned as chairman of the Spanish lender Bankia (BKIA) in July. Rato is one of Spain’s former finance ministers and a former managing director of the IMF. He’s under investigation for fraud, price-fixing, and embezzlement in connection with Bankia’s spectacular collapse and bailout by the Spanish government. Rato has an MBA from the UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business. In 2011, Bankia announced profit of €309 million; after Rato resigned, it was restated to a €3 billion loss. Carmen de Miguel Hombria, a spokesperson for Bankia, declined to comment.
MORE: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/the-worst-ceos-of-2012#r=most
Demeter
(85,373 posts)NOT EXACTLY NEWS TO FAITHFUL READERS OF SMW AND WEE, BUT A NICE SUMMARY ....
...Business groups and their political allies have been "crying wolf" about the minimum wage ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed it during the Depression to help stimulate the economy. The critics warned that enacting a minimum wage would destroy employees' drive to work hard and would force many firms out of business. The minimum wage law, warned the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) in 1937, "constitutes a step in the direction of communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism." Congressman Edward Cox, a Georgia Democrat, said that the law "will destroy small industry." These ideas, Cox claimed, "are the product of those whose thinking is rooted in an alien philosophy and who are bent upon the destruction of our whole constitutional system and the setting up of a Red Labor communistic despotism upon the ruins of our Christian civilization." Roosevelt and most members of Congress ignored these warnings and adopted the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, establishing the federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour.
Since then, each time Congress has considered raising the minimum wage, business groups and conservatives have repackaged the same arguments. In 1945, NAM claimed that, "The proposed jump from an hourly minimum of 40 to 65 cents at once, and 70 and 75 cents in the following years, is a reckless jolt to the economic system. Living standards, instead of being improved, would fall - probably to record lows." Instead, the next three decades saw the biggest increased in living standards in the nation's history...In 1975, economist Milton Friedman, a conservative guru, said: "The consequences of minimum wage laws have been almost wholly bad, to increase unemployment and to increase poverty. In my opinion there is absolutely no positive objective achieved by minimum wages." While campaigning for president, for example, Ronald Reagan said, "The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression." In 2004, David Brandon, the CEO of Domino's Pizza, declared: "From our perspective, raising the minimum wage is a job killer." Last week, Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, called the minimum wage a "proven job killer" on the newspaper's cable talk show...Following Obama's State of the Union address, business representatives and conservative media pundits echoed the same talking points. Analyzing Obama's speech for Fox News, Nina Easton, an editor for Fortune magazine, repeated the claim that increasing the minimum wage is a "job killer." Michael Saltsman, research director at the business-backed Employment Policies Institute, told Fox Business News that "minimum wage hikes lead to job losses." Bill Herrle, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' Florida affiliate, told Sunshine State News that Obama's plan was a "job killer."
But such dire predictions have never materialized. That's because they're bogus. In fact, raising the minimum wage is good for business and the overall economy. Why? Because when poor workers have more money to spend, they spend it, almost entirely in the local community on basic necessities like housing, food, clothing and transportation. When consumer demand grows, businesses thrive, earn more profits, and create more jobs. Economists call this the "multiplier effect." According to Doug Hall of the Economic Policy Institute, a minimum wage hike to $9 would pump $21 billion into the economy. Moreover, since most minimum wage jobs are in "sticky" (immobile) industries - such as restaurants, hotels, hospitals and nursing homes and retail stores - that can't flee overseas, raising the level doesn't lead to job flight. Not surprisingly, the National Restaurant Association is, along with the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the fiercest opponents of a minimum wage hike.
In recent years, the nation's job growth has been concentrated in low-wage sectors, led by Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, whose pay levels are so low that many employees are eligible for food stamps. So if raising the minimum wage is good for the economy, why are most business lobby groups working so hard to kill the idea?
THAT ANSWER AND MORE AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)/misˈtēk/
Noun
- A fascinating aura of mystery, awe, and power surrounding someone or something.
- An air of secrecy surrounding a particular activity or subject that makes it impressive or baffling to those without specialized knowledge.
Synonyms
mysticism
SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER NAME FOR BULLSHIT...
Friedan found that the classmates who seemed most happy and fulfilled were those who did not conform to the "role of women" and that those who were most dispirited were traditional housewives. She drew on the survey to write an article for McCall's - "Are Women Wasting Their Time in College?" - but the magazine rejected it. When her agent sent it to another women's magazine, Redbook, a male editor sent it back saying that Friedan "must be going off her rocker. Only the most neurotic housewife will identify with this." No magazine would touch it.
Frustrated - but convinced she was on to something important - Friedan expanded the article into a book and worked for five years to complete The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan had struck a nerve and the book quickly became a best-seller. It became a manifesto for a movement - a new wave of women's rights activism that built on the women's suffrage activism of the early 1900s that won the right to vote. Friedan became a spokeswoman for this "second wave" feminism.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)History may not repeat itself, but the parallels between the world economy in the 1930s and the world economy today are becoming hard to ignore. Then, as now, the world was in the grip of a severe economic downturn and painfully high unemployment. Then, as now, governments tried to restore growth and exports by devaluing their currencies and carving out trade blocs, risking a chain reaction around the world. Then, as now, the system was rudderless, unstable, and insecure – which persuaded countries to protect their own national interests, even at the expense of the collective good.
The world has not yet plunged into a full-scale currency war, but the trends are not good. This fact was implicitly acknowledged by G7 finance ministers meeting last Tuesday who went out of their way to renounce “targeting exchange rates,” only to sett off a new and even larger wave of currency volatility. China continues to rebuff pressure to end the fixed and undervalued Yuan, exacerbating global imbalances and fuelling accusations of beggar-thy-neighbour trade strategies. The U.S. continues to drive down the dollar and flood the world with capital through successive rounds of quantitative easing. Brazil, Switzerland, and others continue to intervene aggressively intervene in markets to arrest their currencies from appreciation.
The latest salvo is Japan’s decision in December to pursue a radically expansionary monetary policy, which is both pushing the yen to new lows against all major currencies and dramatically ramping up global currency tensions. Korea is threatening “an active response,” Russia is warning of reciprocal devaluations, Venezuela has just announced a massive devaluation, soon to be followed by Argentina, while the euro zone is again split between France, which is demanding immediate action to weaken a fast-rising euro, and Germany, which is so-far resisting political interference in the European Central Bank. Not without reason, Jens Weidmann, Germany’s Bundesbank president, warned last month that the growing politicization of exchange rate policy was unleashing a global “race to the bottom.”
Recent actions on the trade front, though less volatile, are just as worrying. For the first time in history, the United States and Europe are talking seriously about forming a vast transatlantic free-trade bloc, encompassing half the world’s economic output. This follows the United States’ equally ambitious strategy to link ten or more “like-minded” Pacific Rim economies in a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Both initiatives are clearly aimed as much at restoring the West’s dwindling leverage vis-à-vis China and other recalcitrant emerging giants as at increasing intra-bloc trade. As Joao Vale de Almeida, the EU’s ambassador to Washington, recently put it, “if we get the transatlantic agreement right, we can call the shots around the world.” These trade trends also have historical echoes. The Great Depression entered its most virulent phase not during the financial crisis of 1929, but during the trade crisis that followed, when the U.S.’s infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 set off an escalating global trade war and splintered the world economy into rival regional blocs. World trade collapsed, falling by an astonishing two-thirds between 1929 and 1932...
FACILE REASSURANCES AT LINK...LOOK AT THE AUTHOR'S RESUME, AND YOU'LL KNOW WHY HE THINKS THE WORLD WILL HAVE IT UNDER CONTROL:
John Hancock is senior counsellor at the World Trade Organization. This article is published in partnership with theCanadian International Counciland its international-affairs hub OpenCanada.
IN OTHER WORDS, HUBRIS REIGNS AND THE WORLD ECONOMY IS ON THE PATH TO HELL, ONCE AGAIN
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The biggest U.S. banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are lending the smallest portion of their deposits in five years as cash floods in from savers and a slow economy damps demand from borrowers...The average loan-to-deposit ratio for the top eight commercial banks fell to 84 percent in the fourth quarter from 87 percent a year earlier and 101 percent in 2007, according to data compiled by Credit Suisse Group AG. Lending as a proportion of deposits dropped at five of the banks and was unchanged at two, the data show.
Consumers and companies are reluctant to take on risk until they see more signs that business is improving, even as the Federal Reserve maintains near-record low interest rates designed to fuel growth. Putting more of the unused money to work could boost profit and help turn around the U.S. economy, whose 0.1 percent annualized drop in the fourth quarter was its worst showing since 2009.
...Bankers are also holding back as regulators and investors pressure them to curtail risks that fueled the 2008 global credit crisis. They’re facing a barrage of new federal rules and capital requirements that require them to hold more funds in reserve and evaluate borrowers more stringently, amid concern that loans made at current rates may turn into losers when more normal levels return...
WEEPING AND WILING AT LINK...SUCH CROCODILE TEARS!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Spanish firefighters are refusing orders to participate in evictions because their duty is to “serve the public ” and intervene in “emergencies” and not to be “puppets of the bank or its servants in the government”. Firefighters in Galicia, Catalonia and the Madrid region have rejected any action that “contributes to inequalities and miseries suffered by the working class,” said the CCOO union.
Galician fire crews “have proven to be on the side of social justice” by refusing to participate in the eviction of Aurelia Rey, an 85 year-old woman. Some 200 protesters gathered to prevent the elderly lady’s eviction, which had been triggered because she had fallen behind on rent by one month. The action was organized by Stop Desahucios [Stop Evictions], a group formed to prevent thousands of evictions of those who have fallen behind on rent and mortgages due to austerity amid worsening economic conditions. The group succeeded in blocking police from forcefully throwing Aurelia Ray out of her property.
Last Saturday mass demonstrations against brutal repossession laws took place across Spain. Current policy allows Spanish banks, which have been repeatedly bailed out by Spanish taxpayers and are line for a 100 billion euros EU bailout – that is from citizens across the EU – to repossess a home, while any remaining debt is still owed by the former owners. More than 350,000 Spaniards have received eviction orders since 2008 because they were unable to pay their mortgages as a housing boom fuelled by the banks went bust.
Parliament has agreed to debate a citizens’ motion that would protect indebted homeowners from eviction and has also agreed to suspend foreclosures for two years. However, the government has so far rejected permanent new legislation.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I recently did something insane--I subscribed to the Detroit Free Press.
They insist on sending me paper copies 3 days a week (the sum total of "home delivery"
, which I've decided to turn over unopened to a friend, because I love reading it online...5 minutes or less and I am done except for the Sudoku, which takes a few minutes more. Unfortunately, I cannot work on Sudoku online...the software doesn't permit, nor can I lift articles for posting, but I'm sure I'll figure a way around that, should anything of interest to anyone who doesn't live in the area come up.
I was motivated by the recent articles on Belle Isle, the jewel of the Motor City, and how everyone is scheming to take it away. Fond memories of family outings...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)This will probably change when the Weekend is over....next week promises to be stressful, and it's doubtful that February will simply melt away on schedule....
And yes, Mercury is retrograde for the next 3 weeks...
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Though I have never been to Belle Isle, the park seems similar in concept to NCR. A great place to have family fun, Old River had a huge swimming pool, picnic areas, canoeing, miniature golf, walking paths.
During the 70s, NCR transitioned from mechanical cash registers to electronic ones, and the park began to decline. The pool was the first to close, now totally gone. One of the local park districts has taken it over, trying to breathe some new life in it.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)A petting zoo (gone)
An Aquarium with a genuine electric eel that could light up a neon sign if provoked (closed, just reopened, not sure the eel is still there)
An award-winning Conservatory full of somebody's orchid collection, which blocked all the grottos and fountains that we hid behind as kids (so much broken glass and stuff...the orchids were still there when I last looked, about a decade ago, when I finally got back home)
Carriage rides (don't know, probably gone)
Black squirrels (the Michigan ones are red) (probably still there, hard to get rid of squirrels)
The Yacht Club (you bet your sweet bibby it's still there)
A Great Lakes Museum (
A huge fountain, with a light show in the waters, and frozen into fantastic sculpture for the winter (not sure if they still do that)
A band shell where the symphony would perform under the stars
A lighthouse (I don't remember that, but the site says so)
A carillon (Michigan is big for Carillons, Ann Arbor has three working, two on campus)
A beach with water slide (I think this is new, post 1970, in other words)
The floral clock! how could I have forgotten that!
See the website! http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/RecreationDepartment/BelleIsle.aspx
hamerfan
(1,404 posts)Amazing. But not, really. Just this day & age:
Demeter
(85,373 posts)http://www.alternet.org/hard-times-usa/how-obama-and-valerie-jarrett-helped-launch-their-political-careers-outrageous-urban?akid=10100.227380.HxsweF&rd=1&src=newsletter799132&t=6&paging=off
Developers and investors got rich on a project that destroyed the homes of thousands of Chicago's poorest black residents...
THEY TELL US NOW?
As President Obama's second term begins, and inequality, especially for black Americans, is worse than it was when Obama first took office, it's worth revisiting progressives' and Obama supporters' impression of the president as somebody who might actually care about equality and helping the most unfortunate in society. And a big centerpiece of that impression, which endures despite evidence that he's at best ambivalent, is his early days in Chicago. The narrative that Obama is a salt-of-the-earth community organizer has been spoon-fed to the American populace since Obama first began campaigning. In reality, there's a big piece of the president's past that has gone under-reported that will help us to understand Obama and his closest adviser Valerie Jarrett a bit better: Obama and Jarrett built the nexus of political support that took him to the presidency by participating in one of the most appalling examples of neoliberal-corrupted City Hall-"urban renewal projects" in recent history that enriched developers and investors and destroyed the lives of thousands of Chicago's poorest black residents, in some cases using his community organizer job as camouflage.
We have the opportunity to revisit our impression of Obama thanks to a speech by Robert Fitch, a radical journalist and activist who chronicled the destruction of public housing in his 1996 book, The Assassination of New York, in which he detailed the changing landscape of the city at the hands of bankers and developers. New York's poorest were left to the mercy of the extremely rich, who used their power and money to gentrify, gut and obliterate public housing. Fitch's accounts of the plunder of New York and Obama's efforts in Chicago offer a different narrative than we're often accustomed to hearing -- they weren't the "fault of Republicans," but rather examples of the most frequent attack on democracy and the general welfare: how politicians "of all stripes" served the interests of the richest and most powerful in the society. In the case of NY and Chicago, the powerful took the form of a collection of interests that Fitch called FIRE: finance, insurance and real estate.
During a speech delivered at the Harlem Tenants Associations in November 2008, directly after Obama's presidential win, Fitch explained how the new president and other middle-class blacks, including Valerie Jarrett and Obama's wife Michelle, climbed the power ladder in Chicago at the expense of poor African Americans by aligning themselves with "friendly FIRE":
For almost a hundred years in Chicago blacks have lived on the South Side close to Chicago’s factories and slaughter houses. And Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. The area where they lived was called the Black Belt or Bronzeville—and it’s the largest concentration of African American people in the U.S.—nearly 600,000 people—about twice the size of Harlem.
In the 1950s, big swaths of urban renewal were ripped through the black belt, demolishing private housing on the south east side. The argument then was that the old low rise private housing was old and unsuitable. Black people needed to be housed in new, high-rise public housing which the city built just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. The Administration of the Chicago Housing Authority was widely acclaimed as the most corrupt, racist and incompetent in America. Gradually only the poorest of the poor lived there. And in the 1980s, the argument began to be made that the public housing needed to be demolished and the people moved back into private housing. …
If we examine more carefully the interests that Obama represents; if we look at his core financial supporters; as well as his inmost circle of advisors, we’ll see that they represent the primary activists in the demolition movement and the primary real estate beneficiaries of this transformation of public housing projects into condos and townhouses: the profitable creep of the Central Business District and elite residential neighborhoods southward; and the shifting of the pile of human misery about three miles further into the South Side and the south suburbs.
Obama’s political base comes primarily from Chicago FIRE—the finance, insurance and real estate industry. And the wealthiest families—the Pritzkers, the Crowns and the Levins. But it’s more than just Chicago FIRE. Also within Obama’s inner core of support are allies from the non-profit sector: the liberal foundations, the elite universities, the non-profit community developers and the real estate reverends who produce market rate housing with tax breaks from the city and who have been known to shout from the pulpit“ give us this day our Daley, Richard Daley bread.”
Aggregate them and what emerges is a constellation of interests around Obama that I call “Friendly FIRE.” Fire power disguised by the camouflage of community uplift; augmented by the authority of academia; greased by billions in foundation grants; and wired to conventional FIRE by the terms of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1995. And yet friendly FIRE is just as deadly as the conventional FIRE that comes from bankers and developers that we’re used to ducking from. It’s the whole condominium of interests whose advancement depends on the elimination of poor blacks from the community and their replacement by white people and—at least temporarily—by the black middle-class—who’ve gotten subprime mortgages—in a kind of redlining in reverse.
Evidence of the public-private partnerships’ failures emerged almost immediately.
The public housing included in Senator Obama's transformation plans, such as the 504 apartments in the squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, quickly fell into disrepair. Reports emerged of uninhabitable units with collapsed roofs, fire damage, mice infestations, and sewage backups. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale, a score so bad the buildings were demolished in 2011.
A Boston Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state and federal subsidies -- including several hundred in Obama's former district -- deteriorated so completely they were no longer habitable. Grove Parc, a project that was, along with several other prominent failures, developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters, became a symbol of the broader failures of handing over public subsidies to FIRE cronies, private companies to build and manage affordable housing, an approach lauded by Obama as the best, sometimes only, replacement for public housing...MORE
APPALLING, BUT IT'S THERE IN PRINT
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Dear Leader is a shell, smoke and mirrors. And his wifey too, with her middle-class obsession with fat kids - cutting their portions and calories at school when so many go home to hunger. All the while cutting funds for education and obsessing on testing so there's no money or time or staff for recess, even the first graders are practically chained to their desks all day ...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Manchurian candidate
a candidate running for office who publicly supports one group to win election, but uses his executive or legislative powers to assist an opposing group; it should not be confused with a sleeper agent who has been brainwashed into working for a political party...
ALTERNATE MEANING
Manchurian candidate
One who has been brainwashed into performing actions (such as assassination) upon recieving a special code word or phrase. The candidate acts and behaves normally before recieving the trigger, with no knowledge of what he will do, or what he has done while under the influence of mind control.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)I like to think of myself as "relatively intelligent". I like to think that. But sometimes there happens a situation where I get schooled. Last night was one of those times. I wanted to share this with the board in case there are those who may be thinking the same as I. There might not be, but then again there might be. Anyway....
I was having a conversation with one of my co-workers last night and we were discussing some of the things that are going on right now and the term "manchurian candidate" was mentioned. The guy rolls his eyes and makes mention of the fact that most people throw that term around without ever thinking about what it really means.
That of course caught my attention and I asked him to elaborate on the true meaning. This is what he told me.
He asked me if I had ever watched the movie "Manchurian Candidate" (the original version). I said sure, who hadn't. He asked me if I knew what the movie was about. I said yeah, and thought "why ask a stupid question like that". Then he asked me: "Who was the manchurian candidate"? I said Raymond and asked him where he was going with his questions. He proceeded to ignore that question and continued on.
The next thing he told me was that I had no clue as to what the meaning of the movie was really about. I laughed and told him to "hip me up on the way things really are". Here's how the schooling went down.
1. Who were the communists considered to be?
A: Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, etc.
2. Why did they call it "Manchurian Candidate"?
A: Because it had to do with Manchuria?
3. What is Manchuria?
A: Manchuria, hmmm....not sure (let's look it up)
*A: Manchuria is a historical name given to a vast geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria either falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is divided between China and Russia.
4. At that time the Russians and the Chinese were what?
A: Communists
5. What was the point of the movie?
A: Raymond was a mind-controlled killer
WRONG! The correct answer is Mrs Iselin's rise to power.
He proceeds to explain...
The manchurian candidate was Mrs Iselin. She was Manchuria's candidate for the presidency. Johnny was to be installed in order for Mrs Iselin to see that their (Manchuria's) interests were represented. Raymond was only a tool to ensure Johnny's (who was only a puppet) installation, being controlled by Mrs Iselin. Johnny, being a necessary puppet since women could not be elected. Mrs Iselin was the Manchurian Candidate. You do not have to be "installed" into office in order to control it. Much like ancient times when Kings ruled the countries but they were ruled by the Queens (who ruled the Kings).
Hence you have the following:
Raymond Shaw - Tool
Johnny Iselin - Puppet
Mrs Iselin - Manchurian Candidate
A manchurian candidate is the person in the position of power. Find out who is in control and that is your manchurian candidate.
I was stunned after that conversation. I could not believe that I had not caught the most obvious message. I realize you can watch a movie repeatedly and always come away with something else that you have inadvertently missed. But to have watched that movie so many times and not have caught that was stunningly embarrassing. But now I have a new take on things and that helps me.
Most people will always refer to manchurian candidates as being people who are mind controlled, robotic, expendable individuals carrying out the plans of the elites. How wrong we are, how misled we have been.
My co-worker then asked me if I had seen the newer version and I replied that I had no real desire to see it. He smiled and told me that the only real difference with the two movies were the that the newer one used the "Manchurian Corporation". He went onto say that the newer movie was utilizing the fact that instead of pushing a political attitude they pushed the corporate attitude. Other than that it was basically the same story. But the corporate story line was more in line with what is going on today with corporations being in control.
That changed the whole night for me. But it gave me plenty to think about and actually changed the way I view a lot of things.
Thought this was worth sharing.
http://concen.org/forum/thread-32711.html
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Who else's fingerprints are all over this fiasco of an economy?
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Cheney was the NeoCon, Rubin the NeoLiberal.
The Neocons ran the military arm, the NeoLiberals, the Financial.
But Cheney's plaque-ridden brain and body betrayed his insanity, just as Iraq destroyed his ambitions, and he was isolated near the end. Why they are letting him out of the bag again is disturbing...it may just be that the Keepers are otherwise distracted....or it may be more sinister than that. It may be the heavy hand of the Koch bros. freeing their brother-in-oil for another Iraq...like Iran. Blackwater/Xi/Academie is resurfacing. As are the DeVos pigs.
And now, Rubin's empire is developing fissures....something's gonna blow if the Grand Betrayal doesn't come off. Obamacare may self-destruct before it even gets off the ground (one can hope).
In the inscrutable Chinese fashion, we are cursed to live in interesting times.
Hotler
(11,412 posts)Who's to say thet O hasn't been getting envelopes of cash under the table all these years and how much him and Eric Holder got for not sending the Wall St. crooks to jail. It's hard to trace cash. I'm kind of ashamed I voted for the man.
Hotler
(11,412 posts)in GD just to hear the "Obama can do no wrong crowd" shit bricks and bitch and moan.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I'd go over and rec it up!
Hotler
(11,412 posts)Hotler
(11,412 posts)that urban renewal projects crap reminds me of the HUD scandals in Denver during the 1980"s.
For some good reading on coruption go to this link and have a look. I think you can read most of the book on line. Thge book is "Defrauding America" by Rodney Stich. If you have read it let me know what you thought. Alot of people in power didn't like it and still don't.
http://books.google.com/books?id=WYYbzK8qIMQC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=denver+HUD+scandal&source=bl&ots=wWHuBq388G&sig=cl7uVujEXpb69qsReuSlHjESWyQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w_MoUZ7xIMTwqAHs_oG4Bg&ved=0CFgQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=denver%20HUD%20scandal&f=false
Demeter
(85,373 posts)America, this is your feeble government at its most ineffective and self-destructive.
The sequester’s automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are set to go into effect on Friday, and there is no plan as yet to stop it...The White House favors a balanced plan that would include spending cuts and some tax increases for the wealthy. Republicans reject any solution that includes tax increases. These are two fundamentally different perspectives, only one of which is supported by a majority of Americans. A Pew Research Center/USA Today survey released Thursday found that only 19 percent of Americans believe that the focus of deficit reduction should be only on spending cuts. Seventy-six percent want a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, with more emphasis on the former than the latter.
But the impasse could have dire consequences. A study last year by Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, estimates that the sequester could cost 2.14 million jobs and add 1.5 percentage points to the unemployment rate. Fuller’s analysis was cited in a Congressional Research Service report prepared for members of Congress. What’s more, the sequester would reduce military spending by $42.7 billion; nonmilitary discretionary spending would drop $28.7 billion, in addition to a mandatory $9.9 billion reduction in Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In anticipation of the very real possibility that the sequester could come to pass, some Republicans are leaning on the shoulder of an old friend: denial. This week on CNN, Senator Rand Paul pronounced the $85 billion in mandated cuts a “pittance” and a “yawn” that is “just really nibbling at the edges.” He also called President Obama’s warnings about the sequester’s impact “histrionics,” “ridiculousness” and “emotionalism.” What a perfect segue to Rush Limbaugh, who took to the air this week to denounce predictions about the sequester’s effects as a “manufactured” crisis, saying that “for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.”
Limbaugh continued:
“In truth, we’re gonna spend more this year than we spent last year. We’re just not gonna spend as much as was projected. It’s all baseline budgeting. There is no real cut below a baseline of zero. There just isn’t. Yet here they come, sucking us in, roping us in. Panic here, fear there: Crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control. I’m sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over.”
Those not denying the crisis are hoping to exploit it...GUESS WHO? YOU GOT IT...Karl Rove!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)TODAY'S HUMOR PIECE...
You’ve been having a tough year, Concerned Citizen. You keep waiting for Congress to take up immigration or guns — something you have an opinion about. All you get are arcane budget fights. Unless you live in the Beltway, it’s hard to build a dinner party around sequestration gossip.
But here we are. Sequester, sequester, sequester. Coming March 1. Ask me anything:
Did you know one of the most popular TV shows in Norway was about firewood?
Maybe you should have this discussion with a Norwegian.
According to Sarah Lyall of The Times, the book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning,” was on the Norwegian best-seller list for more than a year. I admit that a Norway dinner party sounds like a really tough lift. And to anticipate your next question, the jury is out on whether the bark should face up or down.
But about the sequester ...
Is this the fiscal cliff where they shut the government down? Because if it isn’t, I want to wait for that one.
This is the cliff before the one where they shut the government down. You really need to keep this stuff on a calendar. If the standoff in Washington continues, at the end of March the government will run out of money, and families will have to cancel their vacations because all the federal parks will be shuttered. The sequester kicks in next week and simply imposes large, irrationally targeted budget cuts. So the parks will probably stay open, but they’ll lay off the grizzly bear containment warden.
You’re making up the grizzly bear part.
There reportedly is a projected cut in bear-incident-reduction at Yosemite. Also, some bad news for protecting the piping plovers in Michigan. And do not count on finding a comfort station on the scenic route from Natchez to Nashville.
There are much more dramatic possibilities if the sequester sticks over the long run; you’re talking $85 billion in cuts over seven months, and about $1.2 trillion over the next decade. But let’s focus on the first wave. They’re across-the-board reductions, with every little agency piece getting a whack. So your opinion about them should depend on whether you think that government generally does useful things with its money.
I certainly don’t want them to hurt the piping plover.
Cute little birds and animals always get sympathy. If the head of the National Institutes of Health was a kitten, scientific research would probably have made the protected-programs list.
Why would they cut scientific research? That’s crazy. The federal budget is almost $4 trillion. Why can’t they just cut out the most useless stuff?
Because this was supposed to be a trigger so dreadful and dire and stupid that Congress would force itself to come up with a reasonable deficit reduction plan to avoid it. Ha. Ha.
So let them change the rules and tell the agencies to just cut the least important programs.
Uselessness is in the eye of the beholder. The Pentagon looks at some of its ships and planes, and sees aging maintenance nightmares we don’t need. However, Congress thinks they might come in handy. Debates over the defense budget can sound a little bit like a clip from “Hoarders.” Don’t touch that cruiser! I might want to fix it up and give it to the grandkids!
Actually, I think this is a bad time to cut anything. The people keeping those boats welded together need jobs, too. We should wait until the economy picks up.
Perfectly rational thought, but remember these sequester cuts are on an automatic trigger. To avert it, you have to come up with an alternative that’s acceptable to the Republicans in the House of Representatives — possibly the only people in the country who would prefer furloughing air traffic controllers to a minimum tax on millionaires.
O.K., what if you just told the agencies to give Congress some plans on making things more efficient?
President Obama has been trying, with no success whatsoever, to just get Congress to promise an up-or-down vote on his plans to eliminate duplication and inefficiency in the Commerce Department. He’s actually made several speeches about it, noting the multitudinous different government entities that currently share responsibility for regulating salmon.
Salmon?
I brought that one up because I know how much you like critters.
I miss the presidential election and making fun of Mitt Romney’s dog.
We’ll get to the 2016 race soon. Just this week I tripped over a news report from South Dakota that began: Senator John Thune, the third-ranking Republican in his chamber, told a group of second graders that he does not plan on running for president.
Meanwhile we’ve only got this stupid cliff. What’s the first bad thing that will happen?
My money’s on the airports. So very, very easy to make life miserable at airports.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Friedan was born Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois in 1921, and was raised in a prosperous family with a nursemaid, cook and butler-chauffeur. Her father, Harry Goldstein, had emigrated from Russia to Peoria in his teens. He began selling buttons from a street-corner stand, which he gradually grew into a successful jewelry store. Her mother Miriam was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. After graduating from Bradley College in Peoria, Bettye's mother starting working as a reporter for the local newspaper. After she married, her husband insisted that she quit working and focus on being a housewife and mother. Miriam hosted bridge luncheons in their spacious home and was active as a volunteer in a variety of community activities, but she always resented having to give up her writing career.
Despite their affluence, the Goldsteins were never fully accepted into Peoria society. A small industrial city in central Illinois, Peoria was conservative, provincial, racially segregated and rife with both subtle and overt forms of anti-Semitism. As part of its resurgence in the Midwest, the Ku Klux Klan was active in Peoria in the 1920s and the sting of racism and anti-Semitism was never far from the surface. Jews were banned from joining the prestigious Peoria Country Club. Bettye's father told her that Peoria's Christian business men and civic leaders refused to talk or socialize with him after business hours, a widespread phenomenon known as the "5 o'clock shadow." Although Bettye had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends growing up, she was turned down for membership in a high school sorority because she was a Jew.
Reflecting on these experiences, Friedan noted, "I hated being different, an outsider." She recalled that her "passion against injustice ... originated from my feelings of the injustice of anti-Semitism."
Bettye's later views about bigotry toward women were shaped at a young age. At dinner, Bettye's father peppered her with questions about current events and literature. But her parents also worried that Bettye's intense interest in reading - her friends called her "Bookworm" - would be a social handicap, making her seem too intellectual and unfeminine. When she came home from the library loaded down with books, her father told her, "Five books at a time are enough. It doesn't look nice for a girl to be so bookish." After reading about Marie Curie, the French researcher who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Bettye considered pursuing a career in science, but a teacher warned her to lower her ambitions and to consider being a lab technician, receptionist or nurse.
In high school, fueled by her brilliance, her ambition, her desire to fit in, as well as her sense of being a misfit, Bettye was both a rebel and a high achiever. She wrote for the school paper, composed poems and founded the literary magazine (which published articles on strikes and labor conflict occurring in the area), won a prize for an essay on the Constitution, recited the Gettysburg Address at a Memorial Day celebration, joined the debating society, acted in school plays, wrote articles about the growing threat of fascism in Europe, and graduated as one of the class valedictorians.
Her academic promise, leadership skills and rebellious spirit blossomed when she arrived at Smith College in 1938, in the midst of the political ferment catalyzed by the Depression and the growing turmoil in Europe. Bettye was one of the few Jewish students at Smith, a college that attracted many upper-class women from socially prominent families. But some Smith professors challenged the students to confront society's injustices, including their own economic and social advantages. Many radical and progressive speakers, including Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, pacifist A.J. Muste, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, upper-class leftist Corliss Lamont (head of Friends of the Soviet Union) and folklorist Alan Lomax visited Smith while Bettye was a student there.
Bettye majored in psychology, and as editor of the Smith College Weekly, she revitalized the paper from a bland publication filled with gossip and social news to a far more political outlet, the Smith College Associate News (SCAN). She embraced radical ideas and the labor movement as an instrument for progressive change. When maids at the college went on strike, Bettye sympathetically covered the struggle in SCAN. Her editorials challenged her privileged classmates to wake up to issues of social justice, workers' rights and fascism. The summer after her junior year, she spent eight weeks at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a radical training center for activists, participating in a writing workshop and taking classes about unions and economics.
In 1942, she went to graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, and dropped the "e" at the end of her first name. She traveled in left-wing circles and joined a Marxist study group. But she later panicked at the implications of getting a PhD, imagining her future as a lonely spinster in academia. She gave up her scholarship.
Fleeing Berkeley, she moved to New York City's Greenwich Village in 1944. Her first job was as a reporter for the Federated Press, an agency that fed news stories to progressive publications and union newspapers. Her stories were popular and showed a talent for humanizing class, race and women's issues. Her next job was with the UE News, the weekly paper of the progressive United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a left-wing union. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, an actor and stage producer. The first of their three children was born the following year...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I think I've left you all with enough to chew over...
why not leave me some stimulating discussion so's I have something to read when I return?
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Hotler
(11,412 posts)
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The Portuguese government on Wednesday said the contraction in economic output this year would be double the government’s initial forecast of one percent of GDP, adding that the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho would seek more time from Brussels to meet its deficit-reduction obligation.
Speaking in parliament, Finance Minister Vítor Gaspar announced a downward revision in the government’s forecast for GDP in the order of one percentage point, explaining that the downturn in the economy at the end of last year would have a negative impact on activity this year. The government’s revised forecast brings it in line with that of the Bank of Portugal, which at the start of this year predicted activity would shrink by 1.9 percent.
Portugal is locked in its deepest recession since the 1970s. GDP shrank 1.8 percent on a quarterly basis in the fourth quarter of 2012 after a contraction of 0.9 percent in the previous three months. The economy has now declined for nine quarters in a row. On a year-on-year basis, the fall in output accelerated to 3.8 percent from 3.5 percent in the third quarter.
For the whole of last year, the contraction in the economy doubled to 3.2 percent from 1.6 percent.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
The conference organized by the Socialist International in Portugal between February 4 and 5 garnered little attention among the world’s media, but one moment went viral on the social networks. Beatriz Talegón, the Spanish-born secretary general of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), lambasted delegates at a luxury hotel in the chic beach resort of Cascais, who included representatives of the ruling French PS and Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE), accusing them of being out of touch with the problems facing young people.
“When people are taking to the streets in Madrid, in Brussels, in Cairo, in Beirut, they’re fighting for what we here, as convinced socialists, defend. [...] Unfortunately, it has not been us socialists taking enthusiastically to the streets and mobilizing,” said the 29-year-old, looking around at her increasingly uncomfortable audience, before continuing: “I am surprised that we claim to lead the revolution from our five-star hotels, traveling in luxury cars. When you political leaders tell people that you understand them, that you support them, that we are socialists, do you really feel their pain inside? Can we really understand them from a five-star hotel?”
Talegón, who is based in Vienna, where IUSY has its headquarters, says her words were not a means to launch her political career, and that she’s not after anybody’s job. But since the speech was posted on YouTube, her cellphone has not stopped ringing and she has received hundreds of congratulatory emails.
Not everyone responded positively, however. In the midst of a protest against evictions for mortgage defaulters last weekend, Talegón and Juan Fernando López, a former Socialist justice minister, were turned upon by a noisy section of the crowd of people on the Madrid march.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Japan will not have to pledge in advance to reduce its massive tariffs on rice or other agricultural products to join free-trade talks with the United States and 10 other nations, potentially smoothing over one major political barrier to Japan’s participation in the negotiations, U.S. and Japanese officials said Friday.
The statement followed a meeting between President Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and in one sense restated the obvious: Tariff levels on agricultural products are part of the negotiations, and no country would be expected to make particular commitments up front.
But the context of the statement, coming after a high-level summit between the two leaders, added weight to the idea that Abe is edging toward a decision to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as part of his larger effort to revive Japan’s stalled economy.
Abe, who just took office last year, faces important parliamentary elections in the summer. Japan’s farmers are a powerful lobby, and rice farmers — protected by an estimated 700 percent tariff on imports — are a particularly potent cultural and political force.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The euro-zone economy faces at least another year of recession and rising unemployment, European officials reported Friday, with some major nations expected to miss their government deficit targets despite painful rounds of cost cutting.
Separately, the region received further bad news when the Moody’s rating agency stripped the United Kingdom of its AAA rating — a step other firms may follow in coming days. That could increase the country’s borrowing costs and make it more difficult to meet its budget goals. Moody’s said in its U.K. assessment it expected that “sluggish growth . . . will extend into the second half of the decade.”
The latest forecast from the European Commission attempted to strike an overall positive tone, noting that the threat of a euro-region breakup seems to have been avoided and that financial markets have stabilized. The region’s overall economy should begin growing again — however slowly — by the end of the year.
But the report’s major findings and its detailed look at individual nations showed the stress still battering the 17-nation currency union, a major economic region that has been a drag on world growth for the past three years.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)That silver is lining the pockets of the 1% ONLY.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)(Reuters) - U.S. companies' capital spending plans are holding up, and mostly exceeding Wall Street forecasts, in the face of policy concerns created by arguments in Washington over the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling and now automatic spending cuts.
Their willingness to spend on new offices, plants and machinery, as well as a pickup in deal making, shows that they are starting to dig into the massive amounts of cash that has been collecting more dust than interest on their balance sheets. That could prove a welcome counterpunch to a softer outlook for spending by consumers and government.
A Thomson Reuters analysis shows that for 2013, more Standard & Poor's 500 firms are forecasting capital expenditures that exceeded analysts' expectations than at any time in the past four years. Recent U.S. government data showed a rise in equipment and software spending in the final quarter of 2012.
If companies ratchet up spending, that could help unleash more hiring and extend the early-year rally in stocks, which tend to rise along with business spending.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)About age 18. It was a revelation in many ways - but for me, among the most astonishing, was reading about "Middle-Class" life. It bore absolutely no relationship to the life I lived in a working class- bordering -on - poor family. I had much the same reaction a few years later reading "Diary of a Mad Housewife" in which the wife spent all her time buying things in one way or another - arranging floor cleanings and catering and and and ... (though, taking place in Manhattan, I guess that would have been upper middle-class?). I was a feminist, I of course fully supported equality for women under the law, equal opportunity, etc., but I mistrusted the notion that getting women into Boardrooms was going to make all the difference.
I have great reverence for Friedan - she was brave, a pioneer. But - because I was young, and in college, I was also reading Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan ... but the thing was, I really LIKED men - and while I could see the gender oppression within the working class in which I grew up, I knew my father was also oppressed, and the men he worked with. I knew I was a "feminist" but I could not relate the men I knew to a purely gender analysis of the world I grew up in.
It was not until much later, when I discovered analysis based on class and race that I began to feel "at home" with what I was reading. However, when - even more years later - I read "The War Against Women," by Marilyn French, my leaning toward a class and race and analysis was deeply shaken.
I am not a profound enough thinker or - much less - scholar to be able to synthesize how gender, race, and class meld into the nearly universal oppression of nearly all humanity. But I feel very certain that without race, gender AND economic equality - and by that I mean equality, not amelioration of poverty but NO ONE eating better, sheltering better, than any other - there is no equality at all.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and by the time I might have, it was outdated for me...but Ms. Magazine, that was an early beacon to sanity. Most of its incarnations were good, but some were gawdawful...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...There was no significant feminist movement at the time, but the Communist Party and the unions in its orbit were among the few organizations concerned about what they called the "woman question." In 1946, they started the Congress of American Women to address issues facing working-class women. As a reporter for UE News, Friedan often wrote about women's issues, including a popular pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers, on corporate discrimination and on the special problems faced by black women workers. In 1952, when she became pregnant with her second son, Friedan left the UE News.
In some respects, Friedan's experience was similar to that of millions of women who had worked during World War II and were then encouraged - by employers, the media, advertising and government propaganda - to return to "hearth and home" as mothers and housewives after men came home. Like many women in postwar America, Friedan volunteered for a variety of community activities, though some of hers were unconventional, like participating in rent strikes. But frustrated by the fact that she was not contributing financially to the family or using her considerable professional talents, Friedan began a freelance writing career, mostly for women's magazines like Cosmopolitan.
When Friedan was asked in 1957 to prepare an alumni questionnaire for her 15th college reunion, she jumped at the opportunity. She felt vaguely guilty as she worked on it, thinking of the academic star she had been and feeling she had not realized her potential.
In 1947, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham published Modern Women: The Lost Sex, which argued that American women were overeducated and that this excess of education caused discontent and prevented females from "adjusting to their role as women." The book triggered considerable controversy in the postwar era. Friedan hoped to use the Smith College alumni questionnaire as a starting point to write a magazine article refuting Modern Women's thesis. Confident that she was on to something important, she persevered despite the rejections from magazine editors, and eventually completed the book that would, to her surprise, make her famous...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)AT $4/GALLON, YOU WERE EXPECTING NEW PEAKS?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-21/u-s-oil-demand-fell-to-18-year-low-for-january-api-says.html
U.S. January oil demand fell to the lowest level for the month in 18 years as a weak economy reduced consumption, the American Petroleum Institute reported.
Total petroleum deliveries, a measure of demand, dropped 1.7 percent from a year earlier to 18 million barrels a day, the industry-funded group said in a monthly report today. Total consumption fell 2 percent in 2012, the API said last month. The U.S. jobless rate increased to 7.9 percent from 7.8 percent in January.
“The January numbers reprise last year’s theme of weak demand,” John Felmy, chief economist at the API, said in the report. “This isn’t surprising given an economy that’s still treading water.”
SHAKES HEAD SADLY
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)- a simple observation that our current Oligarchs seem to have forgotten. The only bright spot is that every gallon of gas not burned, every consumer good not manufactured means that much less carbon released (not enough to matter though, so oh well).
I think our current Overlords are banking on the current wisdom that "people don't revolt when things are bad, they revolt when their expectations are raised and then not met." Since they are in the business of lowering expectations by many orders of magnitude, they feel quite safe. I, however, am not sure that "rule" is universally applicable. The peasants have, on occasion, stormed the castle, the slaves the Master's house. Such revolts may have been crushed, or their perpetrators ran away, or disintegrated from their own internal tyrannies or anarchy - and so can be dismissed as historical anomalies - but then, they didn't have FB and twitter and and and to spread the idea, either. Nor does that "rule" address what happens when people who have known relative safety and prosperity are stripped of it.
"Occupy" was the last hope we've seen - I only hope something rises from its ashes, phoenix like ... and that more of us join in - because unless we can halt this machine peacefully, at some point we'll be seeing the four horsemen ...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Are you ready for a good laugh?
The head of the New York Fed wants Congress to grant the Central Bank extraordinary new powers to deal with future financial system emergencies like the bank run that followed Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008. Here’s the story from the New York Times:
The Fed arrested the 2008 financial crisis by using this authority to create a series of unprecedented programs that offered emergency financing not just to American banks – its traditional flock – but also to foreign banks, and not just to banks but to other kinds of financial companies as well, and indeed to other kinds of companies entirely.” (“Equipping the Fed for a Future Crisis”, New York Times)
It’s true, congress did clip the Fed’s wings after the last great debacle by putting limits on the Fed’s authority to hose down the entire system, regulated or not, with trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts. And congress should be applauded for that action, after all, why should the US government underwrite the high-risk trading activities of financial institutions which operate on mere slivers of capital? That’s crazy! If they go bust, tough luck. Here’s more from the Times:
Uh, huh. Is that hard to grasp? TARP was unpopular. The bailouts were unpopular. People don’t like the idea of handing over free money to crooked bankers every time they get themselves into trouble. The author seems genuinely puzzled by the fact that our democratic system is not supposed to proffer unlimited “power of the purse” to the swinish agents of the robber class at the central bank. The system has gotten so convoluted that journalists cannot even recall earlier times when policy was set by the elected representatives of the people and the banks played a subordinate role. Today, that all sounds like sentimental gibberish about “America’s idyllic past”. Here’s more from the Times:
A more inclusive policy, she continued, “will open the safety net, wide, wide open to all sorts of actors who, smiling sweetly, will rob us blind.” (NYT)
Ms. Petrou is a dreamer. The Fed does what it wants, when it wants”. It answers to no one, which is why their books still remain closed to public inspection despite the myriad legal challenges to pry them open. Sure, the Fed will “rob us blind”; that’s their job, isn’t it? Let me jog your memory a bit: Do you remember the Repo 105 scandal? Think back to April 2010 when the New York Fed (which Dudley now heads) was directly involved in a cover up by the nation’s largest banks that were engaged in shady accounting activities to conceal the amount of debt on their balance sheets. According to the Wall Street Journal:
The “repo 105″ flap was further complicated by suspicions that Lehman was assisted in its effort by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which, at the time, was headed by former Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. Here is a short recap of what transpired between the Geithner’s NY Fed and Lehman according to ex-regulator William Black and former NY governor Eliot Spitzer from an article on Huffington Post:
The Fed’s behavior made it clear that officials didn’t believe they needed to do more with this information. The FRBNY remained willing to lend to an institution with misleading accounting and neither remedied the accounting nor notified other regulators who may have had the opportunity to do so…… We now know from Valukas and from former Treasury Secretary Paulson that the Treasury and the Fed knew that Lehman was massively overstating its on-book asset values.” (Time for the Truth” William Black and Eliot Spitzer, Huffington Post)
Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism summed it up perfectly at the time:
Repeat: “Culpable”, “collusion”, “aiding and abetting Lehman in accounting fraud and Sarbox violations.” And these are the guys who want unlimited power to bailout anyone at anytime regardless of the cost?
Don’t make me laugh!
MORE LAUGHS AT LINK
*************************************************************
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Most left-side commenters paint “Fix the Debt” — the well-funded campaign to scare Americans into believing the debt is not only going to destroy us all, but that massive cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are the only way to “fix” the “problem” — as a billionaire-led, CEO-led operation to kill (or at least seriously maim) the social programs by delivering one blow after another. But Fix the Debt is also a bipartisan operation. This is about bipartisanship — real bipartisanship, bipartisanship in the bad way. In a recent post about how the American people overwhelmingly want to strengthen Social Security (and the rest of the social programs), I made the following point about “centrism“:
The real divide in this country is not Left versus Right — it’s the Rich versus the Rest. It’s the horizontal division between the people taking all the money they can, and those they’re taking it from.
Among the rich, there’s a widely-agreed center position — more for us, less for everyone else on the planet.
As the poll above makes very clear, there’s also a widely-agreed center position among the rest of us — keep your stinking hands off of our last protection against poverty.
Keep that horizontal division in mind as you look at what follows. The left-right divide among the elites, the 1%, is usually represented as Democratic vs. Republican. But that’s only true among the electorate, and then only on some issues. As the following shows very clearly, the leadership of both parties is deeply in bed with the Billionaire push — fronted by Pete Peterson — to kill off the social programs. There’s a true bipartisan consensus among billionaire-backed Democrats and billionaire-backed Republicans — “All your money are belong to us.” Take a look at the great research done on “Fix the Debt” by the true-progressive watchdog group SourceWatch and PRwatch, the good folks who brought you ALECexposed. From their new Fix the Debt portal, we find this about Fix the Debt and its leadership (my emphasis everywhere and some reparagraphing):
Fix the Debt is led by the president of the CRFB, Maya MacGuineas. Erskine Bowles, and Alan Simpson are listed as its “founders.” Michael Bloomberg, Judd Gregg, and Ed Rendell are listed as its “co-chairs.” There is an 11 member steering committee. …
Ed Rendell is a co-chairman of Fix the Debt. In media appearances, he is only introduced as the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania (2003-2011), yet he has extensive corporate and financial ties.
A fine mix of perps. Erskine Bowles is a Clinton man. Bowles and Simpson are Obama men, hand-picked by our president to lead his personal “fix the debt” commission, aka the Catfood Commission. Judd Gregg was the Republican that Obama wanted to install in his first-term cabinet as Secretary of Big Money. (Scorecard note: When you hear Simpson–Bowles, you should see Barack Obama. In my mind, they are his surrogates, his water-carriers, just as he and Bill Clinton are Pete Peterson’s water-carriers.) Finally, Ed Rendell is not a liberal, but he plays one on TV, thanks to the always generous face-time offered him by MSNBC’s supposed liberal program hosts.
We also find these Democrats involved with Fix the Debt (from the same source):
Phil Bredesen
Phil Bredesen is on Fix the Debt’s steering committee. As Democratic governor of Tennessee, he “presided over the largest state cutback of public health programs in the history of our nation,” according to health care advocacy group FamiliesUSA. In 2004, Governor Bredesen did away with Tennessee’s state health care program, TennCare, and reverted to standard Medicaid, eliminating coverage for 430,000 people, and imposted [sic] strict limits on prescription drugs and doctor visits, with no appeals. This resulted in budget surpluses.
Vic Fazio
Vic Fazio is on Fix the Debt’s steering committee. He is a former [Democratic] member of Congress (1979-1999) who works as a corporate lobbyist. He has lobbied for AT&T, Corrections Corporation of America, Archer Daniels Midland, Shell Oil, Blumberg Capital, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, Dow Chemical, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, and Waste Management.
Sam Nunn
Sam Nunn is on Fix the Debt’s steering committee. He was the longtime [Democratic] chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee (1987–1995). He is Co-Chairman and Chief Executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), an organization working to reduce global threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Steven Rattner
Steven Rattner is on Fix the Debt’s steering committee. He is a former investment banker for two decades at Lehman Brothers, Lazard Freres and Morgan Stanley. Rattner was the Treasury Department’s point man on the 2009 bailout of the auto industry by the Obama administration. He is on the board of the New America Foundation, the Pete Peterson-funded parent organization of Fix the Debt and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). Rattner is also chairman of Willett Advisors LLC, the investment arm for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $25 billion in assets.
Rattner’s wife also has strong ties to the leadership of the Democratic Party:
Rattner is married to Maureen White, who served for five years as finance chair for the Democratic National Committee and is now the Senior Advisor on Humanitarian Issues to the Special Representative-Afghanistan and Pakistan for the U.S. Department of State.
Yet more Democrats on the Fix the Debt steering committee:
Alice Rivlin
Alice Rivlin is on Fix the Debt’s steering committee. She is best known for her role as budget director in the Clinton administration (1994-1996). She has deep ties to the finance industry and to budget austerity advocacy groups funded by Pete Peterson. A former vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board (1996-1999) … Rivlin … was also a member of the Simpson-Bowles Commission … where she voted for Simpson and Bowles’ recommended $200 billion annual cuts in discretionary spending, raising of the Social Security retirement age, cutting the federal workforce by ten percent, and reducing federal pensions and student loan subsidies.
Antonio Villaraigosa
Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat who has been Los Angeles’ 41st mayor since July 1, 2005, is on Fix the Debt’s steering committee. He was President of the United States Conference of Mayors in 2011-2012. He has previously been the Democratic leader and Speaker of the California State Assembly and a member of the Los Angeles City Council. He was also Chairman of the 2012 Democratic National Convention in September 2012. In the past, he was a union organizer for the Service Employees International Union and United Teachers Los Angeles, and then President of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Federation of Government Employees.
And that just takes you down through the steering committee. That’s some load of big-time Dems.
One more point needs to be made. Many (or most) of these individuals have big-time conflicts of interest. Again, these are documented by Source Watch. Just one example, there’s this about Ed Rendell’s “extensive corporate and financial ties” mentioned above:
Rendell is a strong proponent of “public private partnerships” (PPPs) in infrastructure, which have been criticized as a dubious form of privatization of public assets. Rendell is also on the advisory board of Verdeva, a firm developing technology to track motorists at the gas pump so they can be taxed for infrastructure revenue, an industry-favored measure for developing the income streams they need to finance infrastructure deals. Hel [sic] has also joined the venture capital firm Element Partners as an operating partner. Element Partners recently invested in oil and gas extraction (fracking) from the Marcellus formation.
Ed Rendell is the servant of Money. He works for Money; he does its bidding; that’s his career path and the source of his personal income stream. Fix the Debt is a perfect way to starve the beast (government) then sell it public-private fixes, like Obama’s health care bill, and Ed Rendell is perfectly placed to both wield the axe (via Fix the Debt) and salve the wound he caused (via his corporate-solutions lobbying). There’s more about the many conflicts of interest in this handy table. Stunning, and a fast read. Do take a look.
... I was not joking, or being excessively snarky, when I wrote that the Democrats are every bit as evil as the Republicans when it comes to economic policy.
■ From the Republicans you get blatant privatization, such as Bush’s 2005 attack on Social Security or Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan.
■ From the Democrats, you get back-door privatization, like Obama’s Health Care act. Ask yourself — why didn’t Obama just offer a bill that expanded Medicare to everyone in the country? Answer: Because he wanted to shovel money into corporate (meaning, billionaire CEO) hands with a “public-private solution” to a public policy problem. This is always the Neoliberal “solution” — starve the government along with the Republicans, then sell public-private “deals” that screw the public while offering pretend or partial solutions.
The difference? Republicans don’t want to offer any solutions to public needs, while Democrats will offer pretend or partial solutions — ‘cuz you know, they’re the party that cares. Yep, that’s branding; that’s their product differentiator. It’s not that all elected Democrats don’t care, it’s just that their leaders don’t, and elected Democrats always play Follow the Neoliberal Leader when it comes time to vote.
Don’t believe me? Think about that crappy filibuster deal, which every Democratic senator voted for. Or watch those 100 Democrats who signed Keith Ellison’s sequester “no cuts” letter when they have to pull their grown-up pants on at Congressional roll-call time.
Notice that I didn’t say “from the Right” and “from the Left” in the above formulation. Democratic Party leaders — who own the total party structure, progressives and all — are not the “left.” They aren’t even Democrats by FDR–Lyndon Johnson standards. Today’s Dem leaders are “neo-Dems,” meaning not-Dems, in the same way that “New Labour” in Britain is not-Labour. They’re just the opposite, in fact; they’re the Right, dressed for bicoastal dinner.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The least controversial lines in President Obama’s State of the Union address should have been his assertions that “deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan” and that “we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.” Common sense, right? Wrong—if you’re getting your economic analysis from the GOP, more than a few Democrats and much of the media. Even Obama, in the same speech, paid homage to the safety-net-shredding strategies of the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission. As Paul Krugman reminds us, “Inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.”
Who does that elevating? Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as figureheads for a fearmongering campaign to convince Americans that the deficits the United States has run throughout its history have suddenly metastasized into “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.” It is the latest incarnation of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.
Peterson has poured an estimated half-billion dollars into schemes so unpopular, so economically unsound and so obviously self-serving that even conservative politicians run from them, as the implosion of the Simpson-Bowles commission illustrates. So Peterson has repurposed his project into what Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) Global Economy Project director Sarah Anderson calls “a Trojan horse” for “filthy rich tax-dodging hypocrites.” With a stable of CEOs, Peterson timed the launch of this new $60 million campaign to exploit the wrangling over the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling and the sequester. Fix the Debt has signed up prominent Democrats and Republicans as spokespeople (many of whom have undisclosed financial ties to firms that lobby on deficit-related issues) and launched “astroturf” campaigns to create the fantasy that young people and seniors are concerned enough about debts and deficits to support Peterson’s austerity agenda.
Quite a few of those CEOs head firms that pay a negative tax rate, like Honeywell, GE, Boeing and Verizon. And as the Public Accountability Initiative notes, many lobby to preserve costly tax breaks for the wealthy (including the “carried interest” tax loophole that made Peterson a rich man) and to prevent a tax on Wall Street speculation. Fix the Debt–tied firms are even pushing for a “territorial tax system” that will increase the debt by $1 trillion over ten years and encourage the offshoring of American jobs. Why would supposed debt slayers favor this boondoggle? Because, IPS calculates, at least sixty-three Fix the Debt firms would divvy up a $134 billion windfall....
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Conspiracies against the public don’t get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change(1). While inflicting untold suffering on the world’s people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.
The two organisations – the Donors’ Trust and the Donors’ Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression that there are many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama’s cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they’re seeking to prevent the US president from trying again(2).
This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations(3), most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations(4). If this funding were not effective, it wouldn’t exist: the ultra-rich didn’t get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those which advance their interests.
A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway)(5). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free market or conservative think tanks. ...MORE AND MORE WITH REFERENCES
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34032.htm
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In a powerful piece, Paul Krugman blasts Alan Simpson as an ignoramus when it comes to federal government budgets. He rightly wonders why anyone takes this nutter seriously:
...I am only disappointed that Krugman did not include Simpson’s Siamese twin, Erskine Bowles. After all, the dumb and dumber National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform created by President Obama was headed by these two (presumably hand-picked by Pete Peterson). Bowles was selected to create the patina of bipartisanship necessary to gut Social Security and Medicare (the real purpose of all the deficit hysteria). It is important for the Democrats to share the blame for this mess. Indeed, since Republicans have always opposed any spending to help ordinary folk, these programs have always relied on the goodwill of Democrats. Unfortunately, the party of FDR has abandoned all principles. They serve only Wall Street, too....Simpson claims that Social Security recipients are little more than new born calves, seeking to suckle the teats (he says tits, apparently confusing his cow with his wife) of our hard working cows down on Wall Street, who’d like to destroy Social Security so they could manage and lose retirement savings in the next big bubble
Now, wait a minute. About three quarters of all Social Security recipients are retirees—those who have worked hard all their lives, contributing to American production. They gave us the living standard we now enjoy. Since 1935, government has held out the promise to all workers: work hard and long and you will enjoy a decent retirement. How can we possibly compare that to suckling the teats (or tits) of 310 million cows? The other quarter of recipients are dependents—widows, children, and people with disabilities. Is the metaphor appropriate?
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—the greatest remaining New Deal and Great Society programs—together comprise our most important safety net. Indeed, Social Security has contributed more than any other government program to poverty reduction, and it is the most important source of income for the majority of American seniors. It is an intergenerational promise, our most important one: if you work hard during your working years, tomorrow’s workers will take care of you in your old age. And if you should become disabled or should die, your co-workers will take care of you or your family. And if you can survive to age 65, you finally get decent health care coverage.
To be sure, such a promise is precisely that—no more, no less. We cannot hold future generations to such a promise. But we can sure as heck protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid today from those who want to dismantle it. The countdown is nearing the fore-ordained conclusion, March 1 when the automatic cuts begin to suck $600 billion out of domestic spending plus another $600 billion out of the military. With luck, the coming cuts to air traffic control and airport security won’t lead to deadly crashes, but they sure will create havoc at the airports. From the point of view of Bowles-Simpson, the more chaos, the better. All the more fuel to the Peterson flaming of Social Security. The buzzards are readying to circle the kill.
Make no mistake. The President as well as both houses of Congress are solidly aligned to gut these programs. That is what the Rube Goldberg machinery is all about. It is time to get out the pitchforks to destroy the doomsday machine Washington is creating for us.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Just in case you haven’t gotten the message already, the White House wants to make sure everyone knows President Obama supports cutting Social Security benefits. They are even bragging about Obama’s desire to cut Social Security benefits on the official White House blog:
If you click on the link it takes you to a PDF of the Obama’s current offer. One of the single biggest items in it is “Spending Savings from Superlative CPI with protections for vulnerable $130.” That is adopting the chained-CPI for for Social Security benefits. It would be a cut to benefits every year that would build cumulatively. The AARP actually has a calculator to show roughly how big a cut it would be for you.
Obama wasn’t forced to reluctantly accept cutting Social Security by Republicans. It is something Obama has always wanted to do and he is actively trying to use it to entice Republicans to support a grand bargain.
The primary thing that has protected your Social Security benefits from being cut under Obama has been House Republicans unwillingness to accept any tax increases.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Published on Saturday, February 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
When You're Cutting Social Security, 'Wealthy' Begins at $25K
by Jim Naureckas
Here's a proposal for Social Security that was on the New York Times' op-ed page Wednesday (2/20/13):
The top third of beneficiaries (by lifetime income) [would] receive no annual cost-of-living adjustment in retirement. The middle third would get half of today’s adjustment, and the bottom third would receive the same annual increase they do now. Such a reform…would reduce Social Security spending by more than a tenth over a decade and fix the program’s long-term financing.
This is part of Paul Ryan adviser Yuval Levin's attempt to find "common ground" on the entitlement issue: "Both sides should agree at least to spend less money on the wealthy." So who are these "wealthy" people who would be getting a benefit cut equal to the rate of inflation every year? According to the SSA, about 34 percent of people over 65 have family incomes of $50,000.
Now, you can argue about what "wealthy" is, but I think you would find pretty widespread agreement on what wealthy isn't: $50,000 a year. If you sent the New York Times an op-ed outlining your plan to balance the budget by raising taxes on "wealthy" people who make 50k a year or more, it would be put in the same pile that gets the submissions about Elvis's UFO diet. But when you're talking about cutting entitlements, if you want to call those people "wealthy," that's perfectly reasonable.
But wait! Those aren't the only people who are getting too much from the government and need to have their benefits cut–the middle third of the elderly are also "wealthy" and need their benefits cut–but by only half the rate of inflation per year. The ones making more than $50,000 must be the super-wealthy, the regular wealthy make…between $25,000 and $50,000, roughly.
Speechless, here.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)women's wages have not yet reached parity with men's, and in addition their careers are often interupted - or at least impacted - by child-bearing and raising, and they are heavily concentrated in the low-paid caring and service sectors, and they typically live longer than men they will, for all those reasons, be significantly impacted by any reduction in SS benefits.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...As Friedan described in The Feminine Mystique, many women were not aware that other women shared similar frustrations. They experienced their unhappiness as a personal problem and blamed themselves for their misery, which Friedan called "the problem that has no name." Earlier books - including Elizabeth Hawes' Why Women Cry (1943), Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (published in English in 1953), Mirra Komarovsky's Women in the Modern World (1953), and Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein's Women's Two Roles (1956) - had diagnosed women's oppression and second-class status, but none of them tapped the vein of dissatisfaction in a way that The Feminine Mystique did. The book touched millions of women, aided by Friedan's accessible writing style and the luck of good timing.
The publisher, W.W. Norton, initially printed only 2,000 copies, but the book's sales exploded. The Feminine Mystique spent six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The first paperback printing sold 1.4 million copies. McCall's and Ladies' Home Journal, magazines with a combined readership of 36 million, published excerpts.
Though the analogy was certainly overwrought, Friedan argued that women were trapped by their domestic lives, that their existence was akin to a "comfortable concentration camp." Women became helpless, almost childlike, with no privacy, cut off from the outside world, doing soul-killing work. Friedan also exposed the myriad ways that advertisers, psychiatrists, educators and newspapers patronized, exploited and manipulated women.
Friedan's agenda for change in The Feminine Mystique was quite modest, especially for someone with her radical background. She wrote about the problem of workplace discrimination, but she barely mentioned the issues of childcare and maternity leave. The book had little to say about the problems confronting poor and working-class women or women of color - issues she had written about for Federated News and the UE News. She mostly encouraged women to get an education and to prepare themselves for a career beyond housework. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that Friedan and others embraced a wider and more progressive agenda: the right to an abortion, protection against sexual violence and domestic abuse, the criminalization of sexual harassment and rape, the demand for childcare centers, equality with men in terms of access to financial credit and other aspects of economic life...
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)"The Feminine Mustache"?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
– Dale Carnegie
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Who should get how much?
Who deserves how much money?
How do we decide?
It is, I believe, nonsense to say that we deserve whatever we happen to earn. The value of our money is not something which is reliant on us as individuals, but is based instead on the productive capacity of our society, something which individuals have almost nothing to do with. Being born in America or Belgium is worth much more than being born in Nigeria or Bangladesh. You didn’t choose your parents, you didn’t choose your upraising, you can’t be said to “deserve” much if anything as a result...People whose parents are poor don’t get into university as much as those whose parents are wealthier, nor do they graduate as often. Being lower on the socio-economic stratum reduces performance independent of ability, as the Spirit Level documents. As the joke about George Bush ran, he was born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple. But the concept applies to so many of us.
Deserve is a very slippery word.
Perhaps we deserve more if we contribute more to society? If this is the case then we can only look at, say, the bankers and brokers of Wall Street, Bay Street and Fleet Street and say “they don’t deserve their money”, because they damaged the world economic system, damage which caused many people to lose their homes, caused food inflation and hunger, and certainly led to many deaths and much suffering which would not have occurred otherwise. Financialization of the economy gave them great rewards at great cost to many of their fellow citizens. And it required trillions of dollars to bail them out, and even after they were bailed out, the damage they did was not undone.
Only by the most debased principles can, say, bankers, be said to deserve their money, the same principle that lead Thucydides to write that the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. The same principles that say anything someone can steal or take, they deserve. Is that justice? Does that create a society we want to live in? As we have, more and more, come to believe that people deserve to keep whatever they make, however they make it (as evinced by the erosion of progressive taxation), has it made our societies better places to live? And, to go back to the initial point about the value of money being social and not individual, does it make sense to say an individual “deserves” their money when most of what their money is worth is created by other people?
As I’ve said before, too many jobs today do harm, do evil, rather than good. The health insurance industry in the US makes its money essentially by denying care. Hydrocarbon companies actively stand in the way of stopping climate change. Many food companies produce food which they know leads to diabetes, obesity and chronic disease. These jobs, these industries, actively decrease the well-being of individuals and of society. They decrease the real value of money, because money which cannot buy well-being is worse than worthless, it is actively harmful....Who does more harm to society, someone on welfare, or a banker who contributed to the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression? Who deserves more? I find it hard to say that the banker deserves more than the person on welfare, for he or she has done vastly more harm. Perhaps the banker works harder, but is working harder to do harm so praiseworthy? Is it worthy of reward? No compassionate society can base distribution of money or goods entirely on contribution to society. If we say that those who don’t contribute deserve nothing, we move quickly into dystopic territory, because someone who receives no goods, dies. If we take the harm principle too seriously, we could easily move into a scenario where we would find the arguments for killing those who do harm overwhelmingly strong. And make no mistake, those in power, private or powerful, can do more harm than almost any garden-variety criminal can. Even a serial killer doesn’t kill as many people as a bad policy can.
Justice recognizes that so much of what we are, so much of what we do, is based on circumstances. Humans are malleable, most people, under the wrong circumstances, will do the wrong thing. Most people, under the right circumstances, will do the right thing, too. That does not mean that we can tolerate too much of the wrong thing, it does not mean we say “oh, they couldn’t help themselves”, it simply means that we put the emphasis on correction, not vengeance; it simply means that we are compassionate, as we would hope others would be compassionate to us...So we give a good living to those who contribute little, we correct those who do harm, if necessary through criminal sanctions, but better by finding work for them where their talents can do good, not harm. We do not allow major industries which do more harm than good. We recognize that people do change, and someone who is not contributing as much as we might want right now may contribute more in the future.
Knowing that most of the value of money is not individual, that even the most rewarded are rewarded because of the society and times he lives in, we put a cap on rewards.
(Note: There is much more to say about economic justice.)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Is America really “the land of the free”? Most people think of money as simply a medium of exchange that makes economic transactions more convenient, but the truth is that it is much more than that. Money is also a form of social control. Just think about it. What did you do this morning? Well, if you are like most Americans, you either got up and went to work (to make money) or to school (to learn the skills that you will need to make money). We spend a great deal of our lives pursuing the almighty dollar, and there are literally millions of laws, rules and regulations about how we earn our money, about how we spend our money and about how much of our money the government gets to take from us. Not that money is a bad thing in itself. Without money, it would be really hard to have a modern society. Unfortunately, our money is based on debt, and debt levels in the United States have exploded to absolutely unprecedented levels in recent years. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and if you are like most Americans, nearly every major purchase that you make in your life is going to involve debt. Do you want to get a college education so that you can get a “good job”? You are told to get a student loan. Do you want a car? You are encouraged to get an auto loan and to stretch out the payments for as long as possible. Do you want a home? You are probably going to end up with a big fat mortgage. And of course I could go on and on and on. The cold, hard truth of the matter is that most Americans are debt slaves. Most of us spend our entire lives trapped in an endless cycle of debt that we never escape until we die, and meanwhile our years of hard labor are greatly enriching those that own our debts.
Have you ever found yourself wondering why you can never seem to get ahead financially no matter how hard you work?
Well, it is probably because you have gotten yourself enslaved to debt.
Just consider the following example about credit card debt from a former Goldman Sachs banker…
In your mind you owe a balance of only $5,000, which is not a huge amount, especially for someone gainfully employed. After all, $5,000 is just a quick Disney trip, or a moderately priced ski-trip, or that week in Hawaii. You think to yourself, “how bad could it be?”
The answer, including the cost of monthly compounding, is $44,235, or about 9 times what it appears to cost you at face value.
But a large percentage of Americans never pay off their credit cards at all. They make small payments each month, but then they just keep on adding to their balances.
In the end, that is financial suicide...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...The Feminine Mystique made Friedan a public figure and a person to be reckoned with. She was flooded with letters from women reporting that the book had opened their eyes about their own lives and had validated their dissatisfaction with the status quo. She was asked to speak at colleges, before women's groups, and elsewhere across the nation.
After the book came out, as Friedan was gaining a platform on TV and radio shows and on the lecture circuit, she described herself as an "educated housewife." As Daniel Horowitz noted in his 1998 biography, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique, Friedan made no reference to her experience in the left-wing movements of the late 1930s through the early 1950s. Indeed, many other women with similar backgrounds (including Congresswoman Bella Abzug) - women who played a key role in building the women's liberation movement and later in creating the new academic field of women's studies - downplayed their past left-wing affiliations. Friedan believed that she and the book would have more credibility if she was seen as someone who shared the frustrations of other middle-class suburban women. Of course in 1963 the hysteria of McCarthyism and the Red Scare were still a lingering force in American politics and culture, and Friedan understood that her past associations with Communist and radical groups could undermine her reputation and destroy her growing influence.
Moreover, Friedan wanted to do more than write about women's roles. She wanted to instigate real change, and that meant renewing her activist credentials. She quickly connected with a small network of liberal, professional women who were involved with the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, which had been created in 1961 by John F. Kennedy at the suggestion of Eleanor Roosevelt. They talked about creating a women's version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in 1966 they formed NOW to lobby and organize for the civil rights of women. Friedan was elected president, a position she held until 1970. She became the first media celebrity of the women's liberation movement and its de facto spokeswoman.
Friedan could be difficult and antagonizing, and she clashed with most radical feminists on the issue of overthrowing male-dominated power structures. Instead she believed in sharing power equally. "Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your men,'" she told Life magazine in 1963. "It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Gotta get some shut-eye before the papers show up.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)How Obama and Valerie Jarrett Helped Launch Their Political Careers in an Outrageous 'Urban Renewal' Scheme
Developers and investors got rich on a project that destroyed the homes of thousands of Chicago's poorest black residents.
January 25, 2013 |
By Allison Kilkenny
Alternet
As President Obama's second term begins, and inequality, especially for black Americans, is worse than it was when Obama first took office, it's worth revisiting progressives' and Obama supporters' impression of the president as somebody who might actually care about equality and helping the most unfortunate in society. And a big centerpiece of that impression, which endures despite evidence that he's at best ambivalent, is his early days in Chicago. The narrative that Obama is a salt-of-the-earth community organizer has been spoon-fed to the American populace since Obama first began campaigning. In reality, there's a big piece of the president's past that has gone under-reported that will help us to understand Obama and his closest adviser Valerie Jarrett a bit better: Obama and Jarrett built the nexus of political support that took him to the presidency by participating in one of the most appalling examples of neoliberal-corrupted City Hall-"urban renewal projects" in recent history that enriched developers and investors and destroyed the lives of thousands of Chicago's poorest black residents, in some cases using his community organizer job as camouflage.
We have the opportunity to revisit our impression of Obama thanks to a speech by Robert Fitch, a radical journalist and activist who chronicled the destruction of public housing in his 1996 book, The Assassination of New York, in which he detailed the changing landscape of the city at the hands of bankers and developers. New York's poorest were left to the mercy of the extremely rich, who used their power and money to gentrify, gut and obliterate public housing. Fitch's accounts of the plunder of New York and Obama's efforts in Chicago offer a different narrative than we're often accustomed to hearing -- they weren't the "fault of Republicans," but rather examples of the most frequent attack on democracy and the general welfare: how politicians "of all stripes" served the interests of the richest and most powerful in the society. In the case of NY and Chicago, the powerful took the form of a collection of interests that Fitch called FIRE: finance, insurance and real estate.
During a speech delivered at the Harlem Tenants Associations in November 2008, directly after Obama's presidential win, Fitch explained how the new president and other middle-class blacks, including Valerie Jarrett and Obama's wife Michelle, climbed the power ladder in Chicago at the expense of poor African Americans by aligning themselves with "friendly FIRE":
...[A]s Obama knows very well, for most of the last two decades in Chicago there’s been in place a very specific economic development plan. The plan was to make the South Side like the North Side. Which is the same kind of project as making the land north of Central Park like the land south of Central Park. The North Side is the area north of the Loop—Chicago’s midtown central business district—where rich white people live; they root for the Cubs. They’re neighborhood is called the Gold Coast.
For almost a hundred years in Chicago blacks have lived on the South Side close to Chicago’s factories and slaughter houses. And Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. The area where they lived was called the Black Belt or Bronzeville—and it’s the largest concentration of African American people in the U.S.—nearly 600,000 people—about twice the size of Harlem.
In the 1950s, big swaths of urban renewal were ripped through the black belt, demolishing private housing on the south east side. The argument then was that the old low rise private housing was old and unsuitable. Black people needed to be housed in new, high-rise public housing which the city built just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. The Administration of the Chicago Housing Authority was widely acclaimed as the most corrupt, racist and incompetent in America. Gradually only the poorest of the poor lived there. And in the 1980s, the argument began to be made that the public housing needed to be demolished and the people moved back into private housing. …
(snip) much more
xchrom
(108,903 posts)One of the biggest legal circuses on Earth — the trial of BP over the extent of its responsibility for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill — is scheduled to open in New Orleans on Monday, featuring 34 leading lawyers in the jam-packed federal court and hundreds of others listening to video feeds in rooms nearby.
There will be 400 minutes of opening arguments from 11 parties, including the Justice Department. The list of exhibits runs nearly a thousand pages, and lawyers have filed 126 depositions and the names of about 80 potential witnesses. The plaintiffs’ team has essentially built an entire new firm, with 300 lawyers, paralegals and support staffers dedicated to the case. BP has a similar battery of attorneys from four of the nation’s most prestigious firms.
Settlement talks were underway over the weekend. The Wall Street Journal reported that federal and state officials were preparing a $16 billion settlement offer to BP, but that figure is far higher than any figure BP has discussed. Without a deal, opening arguments will begin Monday before Judge Carl J. Barbier, himself a former plaintiffs lawyer, who will try the case under maritime law and therefore without a jury.
“The gulf oil spill case, if it does not settle before Monday, will be unlike any other trial brought under the environmental laws,” said David Uhlmann, professor of environmental law at the University of Michigan. “The Justice Department has never tried an environmental case that involved the human tragedy, economic losses and ecological disaster that occurred during the gulf oil spill.”
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I reckon they's responsible, yep!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)The European Commission on Friday estimated Spain’s public deficit swelled to 10.2 percent of GDP if the around 40-billion-euro bailout to recapitalize the country’s banks is included in the calculation. Factoring out the impact of the bailout, it indicated the shortfall in the government’s books would rise in 2014 in the absence of further budget measures.
In its winter forecasts, Brussels painted a dismal picture for Spaniards already suffering the double whammy of recession and austerity, discrediting the government’s estimates for economic growth and unemployment over the course of this year and the next along the way.
Excluding the aid to the banking sector from the deficit last year, the Commission estimated the deficit narrowed to about 7 percent of GDP from 8.9 percent in 2011, implying that the bailout added 3.2 percentage points to the shortfall. In the State of the Nation debate on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy estimated the deficit for last year came in below 7 percent. “Spain already has its head above water,” the Popular Party leader affirmed.
Brussels forecast the deficit would decline further this year to 6.7 percent of GDP, with strong value-added tax receipts in the wake of the hikes introduced at the start of September last year and increased cost controls offsetting the impact of the ongoing recession.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
***SNIP
They are:
Berlusconi wins: Berlusconi is running probably between 3-5 points in the polls. That's a pretty consistent deficit, so he's clearly in 2nd place, but you never know how things could break on election day. We've seen insiders put his odds at winning at maybe just over 10%. If he won, Italy's reform path would be shot, its relationship with its neighbors blown, and markets would tank.
Beppe Grillo really surges: The candidate who is capturing the most attention and enthusiasm is blogger/comedian/populist/anti-banker Beppe Grillo. His new "5-Star" movement is a protest movement that's appealing to the young and angry (thought not just the young and angry... we've also met professionals who like him due to his anti-corruption message). In the last two weeks, he's seemingly gained daily in private polls, and he drew a crowd of 800,000 in Rome. He's probably going to get at least 20% of the vote. But if his momentum continues through the weekend, and he draws more than 25%, then watch out. This will be a huge platform for a real protest candidate.
Monti folds: The unpopular Mario Monti is in the race, but has no chance of winning. However, his support will be needed, most likely, to form a coalition government with Bersani. But if Monti's party fails to get 8% of the vote, then they're ineligible for government, and the coalition is shot. Watch to see if he totally folds.
If any of the above happen, watch out. There will be a feeling of major Italian backsliding.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/election-day-in-italy-3-scenarios-2013-2#ixzz2LpMNlwQt
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Well, it COULD happen. If there's a God, it WOULD happen...and that would certainly affect the election process...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Last year, about $450 million belonging to top executives at billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson’s New York firm took a quick round trip to Bermuda.
In April, the executives sent the money to a reinsurance company that they’d set up on the island 650 miles off the North Carolina coast. By June, the Bermuda company, which has no employees and sells far less reinsurance than the industry norm, had sent all the cash back to New York, to be invested in Paulson & Co. funds.
By recycling the funds through Bermuda-based Pacre Ltd., the Paulson executives are positioned to legally exploit a little-known tax loophole, reduce their personal income taxes and delay paying the bill for years.
“These types of reinsurance companies are permitting U.S. taxpayers to defer -- indefinitely -- U.S. tax,” said David S. Miller, a tax lawyer at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP. For some, he said, it’s “an unjustified benefit.”
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)even though it was about 10F and I was groggy and my route list didn't update properly...
Today I'm off to the Orchid Exhibit at Michigan State U. I will pretend I'm on a tropical isle, sipping a cool drink with lots of pineapple in it, surrounded by exotic beauty.
See you perhaps after dinner?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Two years before NOW's founding, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion and sex. Most members of Congress viewed the law primarily in terms of race and hardly noticed that "sex" was included. For half a century, NOW and other feminist groups have used the law - which established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - to fight for women's equality at work.
Some criticized NOW for being too focused on middle-class white women's concerns. At the same time, Friedan also was concerned that the women's movement would be identified as being dominated by so-called man-hating lesbians, a stereotype that was widespread at the time and that Friedan worried would undermine feminism's credibility. Although she later tempered her views on homosexuality, she never fully embraced gay rights as a key part of the feminist cause.
Friedan also cofounded the National Abortion Rights Action League (originally the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) in 1969. The next year - the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the vote - she helped organize the Women's Strike for Equality. In 1971, a year after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, Friedan joined Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm and others to form the National Women's Political Caucus to encourage more women to participate in politics and run for office.
In 1972, Friedan ran unsuccessfully as a delegate to the Democratic Party convention, but showed up with a large contingent of feminists to support Chisholm's candidacy for President. Twelve years later she did get elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, which picked Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as its vice-presidential nominee.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)I was listening to NPR Fresh Air about Emily Bazelon discussing teen bullying. It just so happens that her grandmother's second cousin was Betty Friedan. The discussion begins appx 37 minutes into the program.
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/19/172027445/todays-bullied-teens-subject-to-sticks-and-stones-online-too