May 20, 2014

The economic crash brought Vegas to its knees; climate change could do it again

(Grist) Next time you fly into Las Vegas at night, take a close look at the casino-studded carnival in the center of the city. You’ll notice something odd. Amid all the glitter, there are a couple of black spots, like patches of dark matter in a star cluster. These are the dead zones, reminders of the 2007 economic collapse that brought this city to its knees.

The largest one is the Fontainebleau Las Vegas, a gleaming, blue-black skyscraper that stands at the north end of the Strip. The $3 billion project was to be the tallest building between Dallas and L.A., a 68-story, 3,889-room hotel-casino that would out-glitz all the rest. It was two-thirds complete when the economy crashed, and time seemed to grind to a halt.

In 2010, billionaire Carl Icahn bought the bankrupt project at a fire sale for $150 million. Since then, it has become an eyesore and a destination for urban explorers. Icahn has been mum about his plans for the development, but the recent disappearance of the construction crane on its roof gives credence to rumors that he plans to dismantle the structure and sell it for scrap, possibly to the Chinese, who seem to still be building skyscrapers.

What a fucking world we live in.

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

So how does climate change play into all of this? Well, it will make life in Vegas even hotter and drier than it is now, as I’ve written. But the primary impacts will likely be economic. Vegas is, after all, a city that imports almost everything necessary to its existence — not just most of its water, but nearly all of its food, and its primary economic lifeblood: tourists.

What happens when rising oil prices prevent the airlines from offering cheap tickets for weekend revelers, or when the drive from L.A. (a city that is going to have plenty of climate-related problems of its own) becomes so expensive that people find it’s no longer worth the trip? “If the Indian casinos in California really upped their game,” says Brown, the economist, “I could see people saying, ‘Why spend $100 for a tank of gas to go to Vegas when I could go to the (local) casino I see advertised at the Padres game?’” .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/cities/the-economic-crash-brought-vegas-to-its-knees-climate-change-could-do-it-again/

May 20, 2014

The Ivory Tower Built On Slave Labor

from the Working Life blog:


The Ivory Tower Built On Slave Labor
Posted on 19 May 2014


It’s not particularly surprising to learn that the John Sexton-led New York University is building its latest monument of “higher education” on the backs and sweat of abused workers. After all, Sexton and NYU led a vicious anti-union campaign to deny graduate students the right to have a union, and tried to kill the union at the end of a four-year agreement. The higher-ups at NYU are despicable, anti-union thugs–and they are happy to let people be abused half around the world, all for the glory of an academic empire.

Kudos to The New York Times for this expose on labor conditions at an NYU campus being built in Abu Dhabi:

Facing criticism for venturing into a country where dissent is not tolerated and labor can resemble indentured servitude, N.Y.U. in 2009 issued a “statement of labor values” that it said would guarantee fair treatment of workers. But interviews by The New York Times with dozens of workers who built N.Y.U.’s recently completed campus found that conditions on the project were often starkly different from the ideal.Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. Most of the men described having to work 11 or 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, just to earn close to what they had originally been promised, despite a provision in the labor statement that overtime should be voluntary.

The men said they were not allowed to hold onto their passports, in spite of promises to the contrary. And the experiences of the BK Gulf strikers, a half dozen of whom were reached by The Times in their home countries, stand in contrast to the standard that all workers should have the right to redress labor disputes without “harassment, intimidation, or retaliation.”

Some men lived in squalor, 15 men to a room. The university said there should be no more than four.

The entire story details repeated abuse–abuse NYU officials, of course, just would be shocked, shocked, shocked to hear of:

Told of the laborers’ complaints, officials said they could not vouch for the treatment of individual construction workers, since they are not employees of the university but rather of companies that work as contractors or subcontractors for the government agency overseeing the project. Those companies are contractually obligated to follow the statement of labor values.To help monitor the situation, an engineering firm, Mott MacDonald, has been on hand to interview workers and prepare annual reports. The latest, released last month, noted some challenges, including a single contractor who fell behind on one month’s wages, but concluded, “Over all, there is strong evidence confirming the N.Y.U.A.D. project is taking workers’ rights seriously.”

.....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/2014/05/19/the-ivory-tower-built-on-slave-labor/#sthash.jowEw1FV.dpuf

May 20, 2014

Kurt Vonnegut: Ode To America’s Freshwater People

from In These Times:


Ode To America’s Freshwater People
On Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, and other Midwesterners.

BY KURT VONNEGUT

As a young man, Kurt Vonnegut considered becoming a labor organizer, and he admired and honored those who fought for the rights of wage earners everywhere. As a member of Pen International, he fought for the rights of writers around the world. On receiving the Carl Sandburg Award on October 12, 2001, the late Indiana-born author and In These Times senior editor celebrated some self-taught Midwesterners who made waves from sea to shining sea.

We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

I thank you for this honor, although it is a reminder that I am not nearly the passionate and effective artist Carl Sandburg was. And we are surely grateful for his fog which came in on little cat feet. But tonight seems an apt occasion as well for celebrating what he and other American socialists did during the first half of the past century, with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity, and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.

That wage earners, without social position or higher education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workmen. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandburg of Illinois, and Abraham Lincoln, of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois.

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

Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal, and should not starve.

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

Another of our freshwater ancestors was Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana. A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for president of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, “As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.” Some platform. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16698/ode_to_americas_freshwater_people

May 20, 2014

What’s the Point of a Source Protection Law That Wouldn’t Protect Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden?

from truthdig:


What’s the Point of a Source Protection Law That Wouldn’t Protect Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden?

Posted on May 19, 2014
By Carey Shenkman


Laws are bad when they don’t do what they are meant to and even worse when they cause harm instead. The journalist-source protection law being debated by Congress—the Free Flow of Information Act (FFIA or “federal shield law”) fails in both respects. Despite being pushed by media organizations after Associated Press reporters and other journalists were served court orders last summer, it is doubtful that the proposed law will meaningfully protect anyone. Instead, it sets the stage to punish whomever the government decides are “illegitimate” journalists.

Indeed, any outlet committed to giving voice to whistle-blowers—such as The Intercept or WikiLeaks—is not considered a “covered journalist” under the measure. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who drafted the bill, conceded that The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, whose coverage of whistle-blower Snowden’s releases won a Pulitzer for The Guardian, would probably not be covered. The FFIA would fail to protect Snowden, or Manning, who provided evidence of war crimes and military cover-ups to WikiLeaks. Both sparked unprecedented public debates on government accountability and suffered the full wrath of the federal government. In other words, they are precisely the sources we need a shield law to protect.

The FFIA does not include those “whose principal function, as demonstrated by the totality of such person or entity’s work, is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed to such person or entity without authorization.” This is colloquially called the WikiLeaks clause. But The Intercept is also in trouble owing to what its new editor-in-chief, John Cook, described in mid-April as a “commitment to continue the work of reporting on, publishing, and explicating” Snowden’s releases.

Certainly, Snowden came forward with his identity voluntarily and Manning was betrayed by a confidant, but this is no justification for crafting a law to exclude them. There will be more like them. The market for fearless government accountability publishing is small, and these sources are prime targets for subpoenas. Right now the traditional media still strongly support this bill, under the rationale that expecting perfection out of Washington is unrealistic. Schumer argued at a conference in March that the “perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good.” But in this case, the bad is the enemy of the good. Protecting Greenwald, Julian Assange and their sources is not perfection. It is a baseline. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/point_of_source_protection_law_wouldnt_protect_manning_snowden_20140519

May 19, 2014

The Birth of a Eurasian Century: Russia and China Do Pipelineistan

from TomDispatch:


The Birth of a Eurasian Century
Russia and China Do Pipelineistan

By Pepe Escobar


HONG KONG -- A specter is haunting Washington, an unnerving vision of a Sino-Russian alliance wedded to an expansive symbiosis of trade and commerce across much of the Eurasian land mass -- at the expense of the United States.

And no wonder Washington is anxious. That alliance is already a done deal in a variety of ways: through the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa); at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian counterweight to NATO; inside the G20; and via the 120-member-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Trade and commerce are just part of the future bargain. Synergies in the development of new military technologies beckon as well. After Russia’s Star Wars-style, ultra-sophisticated S-500 air defense anti-missile system comes online in 2018, Beijing is sure to want a version of it. Meanwhile, Russia is about to sell dozens of state-of-the-art Sukhoi Su-35 jet fighters to the Chinese as Beijing and Moscow move to seal an aviation-industrial partnership.

This week should provide the first real fireworks in the celebration of a new Eurasian century-in-the-making when Russian President Vladimir Putin drops in on Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. You remember “Pipelineistan,” all those crucial oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing Eurasia that make up the true circulatory system for the life of the region. Now, it looks like the ultimate Pipelineistan deal, worth $1 trillion and 10 years in the making, will be inked as well. In it, the giant, state-controlled Russian energy giant Gazprom will agree to supply the giant state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) with 3.75 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas a day for no less than 30 years, starting in 2018. That’s the equivalent of a quarter of Russia’s massive gas exports to all of Europe. China’s current daily gas demand is around 16 billion cubic feet a day, and imports account for 31.6% of total consumption.

Gazprom may still collect the bulk of its profits from Europe, but Asia could turn out to be its Everest. The company will use this mega-deal to boost investment in Eastern Siberia and the whole region will be reconfigured as a privileged gas hub for Japan and South Korea as well. If you want to know why no key country in Asia has been willing to “isolate” Russia in the midst of the Ukrainian crisis -- and in defiance of the Obama administration -- look no further than Pipelineistan. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175845/

May 19, 2014

In High Finance, Humming a Happy Tune

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


In High Finance, Humming a Happy Tune

The latest annual hedge fund industry pay stats have suits smiling — and ordinary mortals worrying about public education’s future.

By Sam Pizzigati


Pharrell Williams has reason to be happy. The singer and music producer has had the world’s hottest pop single over the past six months. His Happy has been topping the charts everywhere, from the United States to Lebanon and Bulgaria.

If this bouncy ditty keeps selling, Williams might even end up 2014 as happy as Taylor Swift, the most lavishly compensated musical artist in all of 2013. Swift took home $39.7 million for the year.

But Pharrell Williams, if he should hit that lofty mark, probably still wouldn’t be feeling nearly as tickled and giddy as the over 3,000 power suits who were swaying to his Happy last Monday.

Those suits — an assemblage that included most all the major domos of hedge fund America — were attending an annual high-powered investment conference in Manhattan. At the conference close, reports Businessweek, the attendees all rose as Happy’s infectious beat filled Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.

What had the hedgies so happy? The rest of us found out the next day. In 2013, the trade journal Alpha revealed, the hedge fund industry’s top 25 earners collected $21.15 billion, a whopping 50 percent over their total the year before. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/in-high-finance-humming-a-happy-tune/#sthash.VfNAU3TI.dpuf

May 19, 2014

Professor Richard Wolff's Economic Update: Yet More Big Bank Misdeeds (audio link)

Listen: http://rdwolff.com/content/economic-update-yet-more-big-bank-misdeeds


by Richard Wolff.
PUBLISHED ON MAY 18, 2014

Updates on US sanctions against Putin aides, relative decline in US median disposable income, stunning "accounting error" by Bank of America, and clever manipulation of US regulators by 15 biggest US banks. Major discussions of declines in discount stores reflecting absence of mass recovery, successes and growth of worker coops in Spain's deep economic crisis. Response to listener question on reverse mortgages and declining quality of jobs in US.

May 19, 2014

Chris Hedges: They Can’t Outlaw the Revolution

from truthdig:


They Can’t Outlaw the Revolution

Posted on May 18, 2014
By Chris Hedges


RIKERS ISLAND, N.Y.—Cecily McMillan, the Occupy activist who on Monday morning will appear before a criminal court in New York City to be sentenced to up to seven years on a charge of assaulting a police officer, sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers’ necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.

“It’s all out in the open here,” said the 25-year-old student, who was to have graduated May 22 with a master’s degree from The New School of Social Research in New York City. “The cruelty of power can’t hide like it does on the outside. You get America, everything America has become, especially for poor people of color in prison. My lawyers think I will get two years. But two years is nothing compared to what these women, who never went to trial, never had the possibility of a trial with adequate legal representation, face. There are women in my dorm who, because they have such a poor command of English, do not even understand their charges. I spent a lot of time trying to explain the charges to them.”

McMillan says Grantley Bovell, who was in plainclothes and did not identify himself as a police officer, grabbed her from behind during a March 17, 2012, gathering of several hundred Occupy activists in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. In a video of the incident she appears to have instinctively elbowed him in the face, but she says she has no memory of what happened. Video and photographs—mostly not permitted by the trial judge to be shown in the courtroom—buttressed her version of events. There is no dispute that she was severely beaten by police and taken from the park to a hospital where she was handcuffed to a bed. On May 5 she was found guilty after a three-week trial of a felony assault in the second degree. She can receive anything from probation to seven years in prison.

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

McMillan’s case is as much about our right to nonviolent protest as it is about McMillan. It is about our right to carry out such protest without being subjected to police violence intended to crush peaceful and lawful dissent. It is about our right to engage in political organization without our groups being monitored and infiltrated by the security and surveillance state. It is about our right of free speech and free assembly, guaranteed under the Constitution but effectively stripped from us in a series of judicial rulings and through municipal ordinances that make it impossible to protest in many U.S. cities. ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/they_cant_outlaw_the_revolution_20140518#

May 18, 2014

UK Survey Finds High Levels of Depression and Desperation Among the Young

from Naked Capitalism:


UK Survey Finds High Levels of Depression and Desperation Among the Young
Posted on May 16, 2014 by Yves Smith


If you’ve been keeping half an eye on economic news, the UK has of late been looking pretty spiffy relative to its advanced economy peers, with 2014 growth forecast at 3%. Even though unemployment in the UK is at its lowest level in five years, the young and the long-term unemployed haven’t benefitted to the same degree.

One issue that doesn’t get the attention that it merits is the destructive psychological impact of being out of work. Work doesn’t just provide money, as critical as that is. It provides a way of organizing your time, social interaction, and a place in society, even if that place is not really where you’d like to be. Being unanchored is extremely taxing. Recall that the Japanese get people to quit by giving them a desk and nothing to do. The lack of legitimacy, the implicit shaming of being isolated is sufficiently punitive as to induce workers to give up their pay and being able to tell their families they have a job.

The BBC reports on the results of a survey by the Prince’s Trust called the Macquarie Youth Index, which is based on a survey of roughly 2200 16 to 25 year olds. 13% were what the survey called Neet: not in employment, education, or training.

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

The report found 9% of all respondents agreed with the statement: “I have nothing to live for”…

Among those respondents classified as Neet, the percentage of those agreeing with the statement rose to 21%.

The research found that long-term unemployed young people were more than twice as likely as their peers to have been prescribed anti-depressants.

One in three (32%) had contemplated suicide, while one in four (24%) had self-harmed.

The report found 40% of jobless young people had faced symptoms of mental illness, including suicidal thoughts, feelings of self-loathing and panic attacks, as a direct result of unemployment.

Three quarters of long-term unemployed young people (72%) did not have someone to confide in, the study found.

Martina Milburn, chief executive of the Prince’s Trust, said: “Unemployment is proven to cause devastating, long-lasting mental health problems among young people.

........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/uk-survey-finds-high-levels-depression-desperation-among-young.html

May 18, 2014

America dumbs down

from Maclean's:


America dumbs down
The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?

Jonathon Gatehouse
May 15, 2014


South Carolina’s state beverage is milk. Its insect is the praying mantis. There’s a designated dance—the shag—as well a sanctioned tartan, game bird, dog, flower, gem and snack food (boiled peanuts). But what Olivia McConnell noticed was missing from among her home’s 50 official symbols was a fossil. So last year, the eight-year-old science enthusiast wrote to the governor and her representatives to nominate the Columbian mammoth. Teeth from the woolly proboscidean, dug up by slaves on a local plantation in 1725, were among the first remains of an ancient species ever discovered in North America. Forty-three other states had already laid claim to various dinosaurs, trilobites, primitive whales and even petrified wood. It seemed like a no-brainer. “Fossils tell us about our past,” the Grade 2 student wrote.

And, as it turns out, the present, too. The bill that Olivia inspired has become the subject of considerable angst at the legislature in the state capital of Columbia. First, an objecting state senator attached three verses from Genesis to the act, outlining God’s creation of all living creatures. Then, after other lawmakers spiked the amendment as out of order for its introduction of the divinity, he took another crack, specifying that the Columbian mammoth “was created on the sixth day with the other beasts of the field.” That version passed in the senate in early April. But now the bill is back in committee as the lower house squabbles over the new language, and it’s seemingly destined for the same fate as its honouree—extinction.

What has doomed Olivia’s dream is a raging battle in South Carolina over the teaching of evolution in schools. Last week, the state’s education oversight committee approved a new set of science standards that, if adopted, would see students learn both the case for, and against, natural selection.

Charles Darwin’s signature discovery—first published 155 years ago and validated a million different ways since—long ago ceased to be a matter for serious debate in most of the world. But in the United States, reconciling science and religious belief remains oddly difficult. A national poll, conducted in March for the Associated Press, found that 42 per cent of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” confident that all life on Earth is the product of evolution. Similarly, 51 per cent of people expressed skepticism that the universe started with a “big bang” 13.8 billion years ago, and 36 per cent doubted the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.macleans.ca/politics/america-dumbs-down/