October 19, 2015

Novak Djokovic quietly has one of the greatest seasons in tennis history

(CNN) If you're Novak Djokovic you might be hoping that 2015 never ends.

After winning three of this year's grand slams and securing his 57th career singles title in Shanghai on Sunday, Djokovic became the first player in professional tennis to surpass $16 million in prize money in a season, according to the ATP World Tour.

The 28-year-old Serb, who has 10 grand slams under his belt, took just 78 minutes to defeat Jo-Wilfred Tsonga 6-2 6-4 in the Shanghai Masters final.

Rafael Nadal held the previous prize money record in a season -- $14.5m in 2013 -- but playing the most dominant tennis of his career, Djokovic has easily surpassed that figure. ...............(more)

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/19/tennis/novak-djokovic-season-earnings-record/index.html

October 19, 2015

Mississippi judge: "people charged with crimes, they are criminals"

A Mississippi judge displayed a startling lack of concern with constitutional rights during a one-on-one interview.

Circuit Court Judge Marcus D. Gordon agrees that suspects have a right under state law to an attorney as soon as an arrest warrant is issued, but he freely admits that he saves money by waiting to assign public defenders until suspects are formally indicted, reported Al Jazeera.

However, defendants routinely wait in jail for months without speaking to an attorney because Mississippi doesn’t set a time limit for prosecutors to seek an indictment.

Gordon, who is facing an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit for excessive pretrial detention and denial of counsel, told a reporter that he understands the system is flawed, but he said most criminal defendants were “con people” who probably deserved jail time.

“Lady, people charged with crimes, they are criminals, and they say what meets their purpose,” Gordon said. “Now they told you they had requested an attorney. They had not requested an attorney in 98 percent of the cases. You never hear of that, I never hear of that.” .................(more)

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/mississippi-judge-shrugs-off-innocent-until-proven-guilty-people-charged-with-crimes-are-criminals/

October 19, 2015

Pummeled by Lousy Global Demand, Rampant Overcapacity, China Containerized Freight Index Collapse...

Pummeled by Lousy Global Demand and Rampant Overcapacity, China Containerized Freight Index Collapses to Worst Level Ever
by Wolf Richter • October 19, 2015


Growth of exports from China has been dropping relentlessly, for years. Now this “growth” has actually turned negative. In September, exports were down 3.7% from a year earlier, the “inevitable fallout from China’s unsustainable and poorly executed credit splurge,” as Thomson Reuters’ Alpha Now puts it. Most of these exports are manufactured goods that are shipped by container to the rest of the world.

And imports into China – a mix of bulk and containerized freight – have been plunging: down 20.4% in September from a year earlier, after at a 13.8% drop in August.

That kind of decline in shipping volume comes as a nasty surprise for the shipping industry that has been betting on boundless increases, and has been adding capacity in quantum leaps.

Back in early 2011, when Maersk, the world’s largest container carrier, ordered 10 ultra-large container ships capable of carrying 18,000 twenty-foot-equivalent container units (TEU), it expected demand for containers to grow by 5% to 8% every year. Maersk has since been whittling down its forecast to 2% to 4% annually. And as things stand, that may be a stretch. Yet…

“The scramble to order so-called ultra-large container vessels had turned into a stampede,” as 36 ships rated at 18,000 to 20,000 TEU are expected to be delivered in 2015, 12 in 2016, 22 in 2017, and 22 in 2018, the JOC reported. By 2018, nine carriers will operate ships of this size. Overcapacity is expected to hit 10% by 2016, the worst since the Financial Crisis – and maybe worse. ..................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/19/global-demand-rampant-overcapacity-china-containerized-freight-index-ccfi-collapses-worst-level-ever/

October 19, 2015

America’s car obsession will not be diminished by Millennials alone

from the Transport Politic blog:



America’s car obsession will not be diminished by Millennials alone

The plateauing and decline in U.S. vehicle miles traveled per capita that occurred between mid-2005 and mid-2014 was described by some hopeful commentators as a dramatic shift that was indicative of the preferences of a new workforce. Yes, it coincided with the recession and an increase in gas prices, they said, but it was really more about generational change. Whereas in the past Americans dreamed of living in the suburbs and traveling virtually everywhere in their single-occupant automobiles, now Americans, addicted to their smart phones, are looking for walkable, urban living. Evidence suggests that they may have had a point: The age at which people registered for drivers licenses is increasing and certainly neighborhoods in central neighborhoods in city after city have been blossoming of late.

The more recent uptick in per-capita vehicle miles traveled that has occurred since mid-2014, coinciding with a reduction in gas prices, has failed to dim this argument among some. The long-term facts are still there, many urbanists argue; younger people are fine with biking and taking transit. Yes, people might drive more when gas prices decrease, but they’re never going to drive as much as traffic models suggested they would.



Except that’s not enough. The basic facts of life on the ground in America—that our country is an automobile-oriented society—remain the case. Marginal changes in the way a new generation behaves, or even major changes in the way a new generation thinks, cannot overcome the realities of a country where more than three-fourths of jobs are located more than three miles of downtowns and where only one-fourth of homes are in places that their residents refer to as urban.

While slow change may be occurring—the share of Americans driving to work alone declined from 76.98 percent in 2005 to 76.46 percent in 2014—the overwhelming majority of U.S. residents will continue to rely on cars for their everyday needs. Just as importantly, the population is growing so much more quickly than these marginal changes are occurring that the problems related to car dependence are likely to get worse before they improve. Relying on a new generation’s supposed preferences to make a dramatic change in the nation’s overall habits is not only not going to work but it is also naive.

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



Given that this growth is corresponding to increased congestion on transit systems—visible to anyone who uses them—and, perhaps more importantly, that these cities are the center of American media and intellectual culture (the major East Coast regions, plus Chicago and the three biggest West Coast regions), we shouldn’t be surprised that the dominant narrative is one of a move away from cars. .................(more)

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2015/10/19/americas-car-obsession-will-not-be-diminished-by-millennials-alone/

October 19, 2015

GOP -- the party of no escape

(Mother Jones) Has any piece of legislation in American history held on by its fingertips more dramatically than the Affordable Care Act? Let's review the tape.

In 2009, it passed in the Senate by a margin of zero votes. In 2010, thanks to some fancy parliamentary maneuvering, it survived the loss of the Democrats' filibuster-­proof majority after Sen. Ted Kennedy's death. In 2012, it squeaked through a Supreme Court challenge after Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly changed his vote at the last minute. It hung on again later that year when President Barack Obama won reelection. In 2013 came the disastrous rollout of its website, and in 2015, yet another unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge. And along the way it outlasted more than 50 attempts by congressional Republicans to repeal all or part of it.

For six years, Obamacare has been the ultimate Republican punching bag. It helped win the party a landslide victory in the 2010 midterms. Repealing it has consistently been an applause line for conservative politicians. And even now that it's up and running pretty successfully, poll after poll shows at least 40 percent of the public still disapproves of it.

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

Every party faces conflict between its center and its base, but the emergence of the tea party and the Fox News echo chamber has put this dynamic on steroids. Moving even to the moderate right, let alone to the center, is all but impossible for the GOP. Its base demands not just a border fence, but the repeal of the 14th Amendment; not just opposition to gun control, but rejection of universal background checks, which even the National Rifle Association used to support; not just skepticism about climate change, but insistence that global warming is a grand hoax perpetrated by liberals to subvert the free market. This conflict between party and base entered uncharted territory earlier this month when Republicans literally couldn't find a single plausible candidate willing to be Speaker of the House. No one wanted to deal with the bomb-throwing antics of the reactionary wing of their own party. Even candidates who consider themselves tea partiers didn't think they could control a caucus dominated by tea partiers. Among Republicans, becoming Speaker is now considered a career death sentence. ...............(more)

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/no-escape-republicans-obamacare-speaker

October 19, 2015

Snakes on a Bus

Oct. 19 (Philadelphia) --An escaped four-foot snake slithering loose on a SEPTA bus caused a minor panic among passengers Sunday and prompted an emergency evacuation in West Philadelphia, according to transit authority officials.

A SEPTA spokesman said that a rider boarded the Route 52 bus just before 3 p.m. with the animal draped around his neck and hidden under his jacket.

Somewhere along the route the snake escaped and coiled itself in a compartment under a seat.

The driver pulled over near the intersection of 52nd Street and Westminster Avenue to evacuate the bus' passengers. A SEPTA mechanic was later able to retrieve the animal after an hour and return it to its owner by dismantling part of the seat, transit authority spokesman Andrew Busch said.

"There was surely some excitement and some alarm among some folks upon seeing the snake and it getting away from the owner," he said. ...............(more)

http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/12127586/brief-snake-loose-on-septa-bus-causes-evacuation

October 19, 2015

In Praise of Amateur Politics

from Dissent magazine:


In Praise of Amateur Politics
David Marcus ▪ Fall 2015


Left intellectuals often like to lament that there once was socialism in America—that between 1901 and the end of the First World War, a small ingathering of urban reformers, trade unionists, and German immigrants banded together to create an American counterpart to European social democracy. The apex of this movement was 1912. That year, the Socialist Party controlled seventy-nine mayoralties, published a weekly newspaper that had a national readership of over 750,000, and ran a presidential candidate who won nearly a million votes in a contested four-way race. Such was the pride and envy of European socialists that even the ever-dour August Bebel proclaimed that, at this rate, “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist Republic.”

Of course, we all know how the story goes. American Socialists did not usher in a new republic. Many of their ideas—state-centered economic planning, local infrastructure development, suffrage for women—were absorbed into the progressive wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties. But many others—neutrality during the First World War, the nationalization of major American industries, an antagonism toward business unionism—proved so unpopular that they became central reasons for the party’s demise.

The Socialist Party boasted a membership of well over 100,000 in the 1910s. By 1930, it was around 9,000. What once had been a broad-based movement was now a sect. Having expelled its left wing for demanding revolutionary action and its right wing for collaborating with the Democrats, the Socialists became a small cadre of the faithful. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once quipped, “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”

Many on the left still look back to these salad days of American socialism with pride, lamenting that this was the one moment when socialism might have become as American as apple pie. But the failure of third-party socialism was a pivotal moment for the democratic left. Having released its activists and intellectuals from the ambition of seizing state power, the collapse of the Socialist Party was not—as many contemporary leftists insist—the end of socialism in America; it was, in fact, an important beginning. It enabled the left to turn away from professional politics and direct its energies to that realm where the left has always made its gains—that of amateur politics, of everyday citizens organizing and agitating outside the party system.

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

Today, in fact, we are witnessing an exciting uptick in citizen insurgencies, many of which have the potential to become broad-based movements. From graduate student unionism and Title IX activism to Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter, a centripetal force is developing. American citizens are not only directing more and more of their energies to sites of political action outside formal institutions of power; they are also helping to shift public opinion by invoking a set of commonly held American ideals and principles. Equal protection under the law, for instance, is one of the demands at the center of Black Lives Matter, as it was in the fight for marriage equality. Likewise, low-wage and contingent worker campaigns also appeal to the long tradition of labor radicalism by arguing that all workers, no matter their status, deserve the right to earn a fair and decent wage. While a truly intersectional movement may still lie in the future, these campaigns are succeeding, in part, because they have found ways to universalize their demands—to show how they represent an ever-growing and intersecting set of interests. ..............(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/in-praise-amateur-politics

October 19, 2015

Anderson Cooper: Opposing Illegal CIA Wars Is "Unelectable"

(Truthout) A key reason that the US has so many wars is that big US media have a strong pro-war, pro-empire bias. You rarely see big US media badgering a politician for supporting a war that turned out to be a catastrophe. But it's commonplace for big US media to badger politicians for opposing wars, even catastrophic ones.

CNN journalist Anderson Cooper is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

Here's Anderson Cooper, badgering Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate for opposing the CIA's illegal war on Nicaragua in the 1980s:

The question is really about electability here, and that's what I'm trying to get at. You - the - the Republican attack ad against you in a general election - it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you're not a capitalist. Doesn't - doesn't that ad write itself?

Millions of Americans "supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua" in the 1980s. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the US government-installed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, promising to address Nicaragua's extreme poverty and the lack of basic government services like education and health care for the majority of the population. In 1982, Nicaragua was recognized by the World Health Organization as the third world country that had made the most progress in health care.

Under the Reagan administration, the CIA organized a terrorist army (the "Contras&quot to attack the Nicaraguan government. Millions of Americans participated in a solidarity movement to oppose US military intervention in Nicaragua, including public radio host Ira Glass, actors Ed Asner, Mike Farrell and Diane Ladd, civil rights leader Julian Bond and engineer Ben Linder, who was killed in a terrorist attack by the CIA's army. The US-Nicaragua solidarity movement succeeded in passing the Boland Amendment in Congress, cutting off US funding to the CIA's terrorist army, which led the Reagan administration to try to fund the Contras illegally through arms sales to Iran. When these illegal activities were exposed, it became the Iran-Contra scandal.

During this period, Anderson Cooper was working for the CIA. ................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33248-anderson-cooper-opposing-illegal-cia-wars-is-unelectable

October 19, 2015

Chris Hedges: Death by Fracking

from truthdig:


Death by Fracking

Posted on Oct 18, 2015
By Chris Hedges


DENVER—The maniacal drive by the human species to extinguish itself includes a variety of lethal pursuits. One of the most efficient is fracking. One day, courtesy of corporations such as Halliburton, BP and ExxonMobil, a gallon of water will cost more than a gallon of gasoline. Fracking, which involves putting chemicals into potable water and then injecting millions of gallons of the solution into the earth at high pressure to extract oil and gas, has become one of the primary engines, along with the animal agriculture industry, for accelerating global warming and climate change.

The Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers who are profiting from this cycle of destruction will—once clean water is scarce and crop yields decline, once temperatures soar and cities disappear under the sea, once droughts and famines ripple across the globe, once mass migrations begin—surely profit from the next round of destruction. Collective suicide is a good business, at least until it is complete. It is a pity most of us will not be around to see the power elite go down.

I met recently in Denver with three of the country’s leading anti-fracking activists: Gustavo Aguirre Jr. of KEEN (Kern Environmental Enforcement Network) in California; Kandi Mossett with the Indigenous Environmental Network and from the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota, the second-largest oil-producing state because of hydraulic fracturing; and Shane Davis, a longtime campaigner against fracking and the founder of fractivist.org, a data mining organization that exposes what fracking corporations are doing in communities around the country.

The activists are waging a war against a corporate state that is deaf and blind to the rights of its citizens and the imperative to protect the ecosystem. The corporate state, largely to pacify citizens being frog-marched to their own execution, passes environmental laws and regulations that, at best, slow the ongoing environmental destruction. Corporations, which routinely ignore even these tepid restrictions, largely write the laws and legislation designed to regulate their activity. They rewrite them or overturn them as the focus of their exploitation changes. They turn public hearings on local environmental issues into choreographed charades or shut them down if activists succeed in muscling their way into the room to demand a voice. They dominate the national message through a pliable and bankrupt corporate media and slick public relations. Elected officials are little more than corporate employees, dependent on industry money to stay in office and, when they retire from “public service,” salivating for jobs in the industry. Environmental reform has become a joke on the public. And the Big Green environmental groups are complicit because they rely on donors, at times from the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries; they are silent about the reality of corporate power, largely ineffectual, and part of the fiction of the democratic process. ...............(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/death_by_fracking_20151018

October 18, 2015

How Markets Make Fools of Us

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/how_markets_make_fools_of_us_20151017


via truthdig:



In their new book “Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception,” George Akerloff and Robert Shiller merge psychology with economics to give “a broader account of how and why markets produce economic harm,” writes Harvard Law professor and former Obama administration regulator Cass Sunstein in The New York Review of Books.

Dealing in concepts that have seemed clear to many observers for a long time and which are being articulated for current generations in the field of behavioral economics, Sunstein writes that “Akerloff and Shiller believe that once we understand human psychology, we will be a lot less enthusiastic about free markets and a lot more worried about the harmful effects of competition”:

In their view, companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it. Those who fail to exploit people will lose out to those who do. In making that argument, Akerlof and Shiller object that the existing work of behavioral economists and psychologists offers a mere list of human errors, when what is required is a broader account of how and why markets produce systemic harm.

Akerlof and Shiller use the word “phish” to mean a form of angling, by which phishermen (such as banks, drug companies, real estate agents, and cigarette companies) get phools (such as investors, sick people, homeowners, and smokers) to do something that is in the phisherman’s interest, but not in the phools’. There are two kinds of phools: informational and psychological. Informational phools are victimized by factual claims that are intentionally designed to deceive them (“it’s an old house, sure, but it just needs a few easy repairs”). More interesting are psychological phools, led astray either by their emotions (“this investment could make me rich within three months!”) or by cognitive biases (“real estate prices have gone up for the last twenty years, so they’re bound to go up for the next twenty as well”). …

From all of these examples, Akerlof and Shiller offer a general account, which is that phishing occurs because of the “manipulation of focus.” Like magicians and pickpockets, phishermen are able to take advantage of “an errant focus by the phool.” Indeed, the idea that free markets work, and that government is the problem, “is itself a phish for phools,” a kind of story, one that does not capture reality. With respect to Social Security reform, securities regulation, and campaign finance reform, the United States has suffered from false and skewed claims that fail to account for the fact that free markets make people free not only to choose but also “free to phish, and free to be phished. Ignorance of those truths is a recipe for disaster.”

Akerlof and Shiller contend that behavioral economists have failed to explore, or perhaps even to see, the ubiquity of phishing, and the extent to which free markets promote it. Instead of a catalog of human errors and behavioral biases, they seek a more general account, one that gives “a picture to the mental frames that inform people’s decisions.” That picture involves “the stories we are telling ourselves.” Akerlof and Shiller believe that the idea of storytelling is “a new variable” for economics, one that explains why “people make decisions that can be quite far from maximizing their own welfare.” Thus “phishing for phools is not some occasional nuisance. It is all over the place.” Whenever “we have a weakness—if we have a way in which we are phishable—the phishermen will be there in waiting.”

Continue reading here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.