January 23, 2015

Suburban Chicago: Pace Unveils $2.3B Rapid Transit Network Plan

Jan. 21--A wide-ranging network of suburban bus routes could transform the way people commute and shop, connecting people to job centers in Naperville, Elgin and Elk Grove Village, according to an ambitious $2.3 billion plan shared by Pace on Tuesday.

Express buses with high-tech amenities would take riders from the south suburbs to O'Hare International Airport. Or from McHenry south to Oswego via Randall Road. Or from Evanston to O'Hare along Dempster Street.

And buses would travel on the shoulder of the Jane Addams and Edens expressways, bypassing car traffic.

These bus routes, and dozens of others like them, could provide new public transit options for thousands of riders in scores of communities in the six-county area. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/11810968/pace-unveils-plan-for-ambitious-23b-rapid-transit-network

January 23, 2015

NY: Subway Fare Going Up

NEW YORK (AP) — The cost of traveling in New York City is going up.

Beginning March 22, the cost of a subway ride will increase by 25 cents, to $2.75, under a package of fare increases approved Thursday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The price of a 30-day MetroCard will increase by $4.50, to $116.50.

Fares will also jump on the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad, and tolls will rise on the MTA's bridges and tunnels. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/11812399/subway-fare-going-up

January 23, 2015

Professor Richard Wolff Explains Our Staggering Level of Inequality

The wealthy elite are getting even richer, and a new report says that by 2016, the top one percent will control more than half of the world's wealth. What explains this staggering level of inequality, and is there any way to buck this trend?

January 23, 2015

“Black household wealth has collapsed so completely there is no statistical possibility......

......of ever reaching parity with whites under the existing economic system – period.”


from Black Agenda Report:



State of the Union 2015: Lethal, Predatory, Delusional
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

[font size="4"]“The economy inhabited by the vast majority of Americans grows smaller and more cutthroat, with nearly all the new wealth accruing to the rich.”[/font]

Tuesday night, in his next-to-last State of the Union address, President Obama flashed the suckers a bag of tricks that has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, but will allow his apologists to claim that the genuine, more progressive Obama is revealing himself in his final two years in office. Of course, the final-years Obama could have accomplished his modest 2015 agenda, and much more, back in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats dominated both the House and the Senate and the Republicans were in despair and disarray. Which is precisely why Obama chose, instead, to put his party’s perishable congressional majorities at the service of bankers, Wall Street, private insurers and Big Pharma. Now that Democrats are the endangered species on Capitol Hill, Obama hangs a piñata of subsidized community college education, additional tax deductions for child care, seven days paid sick leave, higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy, and billions in fees on casino bankers.

On closer examination, his grab bag of bills and requests for legislation contains even less than advertized – a vapor-thin rhetorical veneer for a center-right presidency whose real accomplishment has been to re-inflate the Wall Street casino, flush the last vestiges of secure employment out of the economy, and put the imperial war machine back on the offensive. Corporate pundits describe Obama’s antics as an appeal to his party’s “base.” In a world in which words actually mean something, a politician’s base would be composed of the people whose interests he actually serves, rather than those he victimizes. But, such logic does not apply in late capitalist America, where both parties cater to the needs of the moneyed classes; one, shamelessly, without inhibition, the other through deployment of talented liars like Obama.

“The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong,” said Obama, reflecting the corporate consensus that the rich can safely get on with the business of appropriating to themselves the wealth of the world. “Over the past five years, our businesses have created more than 11 million new jobs,” he said, failing to clarify that the vast majority of these jobs are low wage and highly insecure, or that five million workers have dropped out of the job market – half a million in December, alone. The economy inhabited by the vast majority of Americans grows smaller and more cutthroat, with nearly all the new wealth accruing to the rich. Yet, “the shadow of crisis has passed....”

Obama celebrated the “resilience” of the “strong, tight-knit” American family, exemplified by a Minneapolis couple that have both regained employment. “Our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,” said Obama – bad jobs, in a nation of growing inequality. For Blacks, wages relative to whites have regressed to 1980 levels, and Black household wealth has collapsed so completely there is no statistical possibility of ever reaching parity with whites under the existing economic system – period. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14635

January 23, 2015

Professor Richard Wolff's Economic Update: Spinning Out of Control (audio link)

Listen: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28689-economic-update-spinning-out-of-control


This episode provides updates on Obama's State of the Union speech, the European Central Bank pumping up the money supply to stimulate Europe, forgiving Greece's debts and housing extremes in the US. We also respond to questions on global wealth inequality and Switzerland's currency maneuvers. Finally, we interview Dr. Harriet Fraad on the US economy's disastrous impact on children.

January 23, 2015

Supreme Court Upholds Auto Stop With No Traffic Violation

Supreme Court Upholds Auto Stop With No Traffic Violation

Thursday, 22 January 2015 00:00
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout | News Analysis


Ignorance of the law is no excuse - that is, unless you're a police officer. For the first time, in December, the Supreme Court upheld a traffic stop even where there was no traffic violation. The court, in Heien v. North Carolina, continued its steady erosion of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In this case, an officer stopped a car that had only one working brake light, thinking that North Carolina law required two working brake lights. But the officer was mistaken about the law. Only one working brake light is required in North Carolina.

Although the court has upheld searches when an officer has made a mistake about the facts, the court has never before said an officer can stop someone due to a mistaken belief the person is committing a crime.

Sgt. Matt Darisse began following a Ford Escort because he thought the driver looked "very stiff and nervous." When the driver of the Escort applied the brakes, only one brake light came on. Darisse then pulled the car over. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28652-supreme-court-upholds-auto-stop-with-no-traffic-violation

January 23, 2015

Australian Open. (spoiler wee hours Friday morning)

Fed ousted by Seppi. Unreal.

January 22, 2015

How To Sell Off a City: Welcome to Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future

from In These Times:


How To Sell Off a City
Welcome to Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future.

BY RICK PERLSTEIN


In June of 2013, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a new appointment to the city’s seven-member school board to replace billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, who’d decamped to run President Barack Obama’s Department of Commerce. The appointee, Deborah H. Quazzo, is a founder of an investment firm called GSV Advisors, a business whose goal—her cofounder has been paraphrased by Reuters as saying—is to drum up venture capital for “an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards.”

GSV Advisors has a sister firm, GSV Capital, that holds ownership stakes in education technology companies like “Knewton,” which sells software that replaces the functions of flesh-and-blood teachers. Since joining the school board, Quazzo has invested her own money in companies that sell curricular materials to public schools in 11 states on a subscription basis.

In other words, a key decision-maker for Chicago’s public schools makes money when school boards decide to sell off the functions of public schools.

She’s not alone. For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable trend of “privatization”—the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit. Chicago’s privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm’s investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.

.......(snip).......



Chicago Inc.

Privatization plainly made sense to another witness to the Plan for Transformation: Rahm Emanuel, who served as a Chicago Housing Authority vice chairman from 1999 to 2001. After his time as a top aide in the Clinton White House, he made more than $18 million in two-and-a-half years as an investment banker, brought into the business by the man who just became Illinois’ new Republican governor, billionaire venture capitalist Bruce Rauner. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17533/how_to_sell_off_a_city

January 22, 2015

Trading Away Our Environmental Future: The Trans-Pacific Partnership

(Truthout) A day after Obama's State of the Union reaffirmed his support for a trade agreement that opponents call "NAFTA on steroids," those opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) remain equally committed to stop it. January 21 is national call-in day to stop "fast track," the trade authority that hands over Congress' constitutional trade and legislative writing authority to the president. Earlier this month, we listened in on a national call and strategy session with author Naomi Klein, Ilana Solomon, responsible trade director of the Sierra Club, and Alisa Simmons, deputy director of Global Trade Watch, about why they oppose the TPP and the free trade model the United States has promoted for over a quarter century.

Deep in the throes of the financial crisis and record job loss, Canada's largest province, Ontario, passed the Green Energy and Economy Act. It was 2009. Climate experts around the world celebrated it as the best plan North America had to get off fossil fuels. The centerpiece was a local content provision that encouraged green energy producers to sell back to the grid. In the case of solar energy, 40 to 60 percent of all content was required to be made with local components. By 2013, 31,000 jobs had been created. Only one coal plant remained operating.

"That's where the good news ends," explains Klein, whose recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, discusses the plan at length. The European Union and Japan took Ontario to the World Trade Organization for violating its trade obligations. "Sure enough," Klein says, "the government of my province repealed parts of the green energy plan." The message was clear for governments everywhere, she adds. Craft local green policies and you'll be challenged by an unelected trade tribunal.

Klein was part of a recent nationwide call organized by MoveOn and co-partners, Citizens Trade Campaign, the Sierra Club, AFL-CIO and Communications Workers of America, among others, to collectively endorse the "FlushtheTPP" campaign. The TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that the United States and 11 other nations have been negotiating for over five years, appears to be close to a deal, say observers who are relegated to watching from the sidelines. Corporations and trade negotiators are the only ones at the negotiating table. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28634-trading-away-our-environmental-future-the-trans-pacific-partnership

January 22, 2015

Why the CIA Is So Eager to Demolish Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling

Why the CIA Is So Eager to Demolish Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling

Thursday, 22 January 2015 09:06
By Norman Solomon, Expose Facts | News Analysis


Midway through the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, one comment stands out. “A criminal case,” defense attorney Edward MacMahon told the jury at the outset, “is not a place where the CIA goes to get its reputation back.” But that’s where the CIA went with this trial in its first week — sending to the witness stand a procession of officials who attested to the agency’s virtues and fervently decried anyone who might provide a journalist with classified information.

The CIA’s reputation certainly needs a lift. It has rolled downhill at an accelerating pace in the dozen years since telling President George W. Bush what he wanted the nation to hear about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That huge bloody blot on the agency’s record has not healed since then, inflamed by such matters as drone strikes, rendition of prisoners to torture-happy regimes and resolute protection of its own torturers.

CIA sensibilities about absolution and prosecution are reflected in the fact that a former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez Jr., suffered no penalty for destroying numerous videotapes of torture interrogations by the agency — which knew from the start that the torture was illegal.

But in the courtroom, day after day, with patriotic piety, CIA witnesses — most of them screened from public view to keep their identities secret — have testified to their reverence for legality. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28667-why-the-cia-is-so-eager-to-demolish-whistleblower-jeffrey-sterling