July 24, 2013

Mark Kessler, Pennsylvania Police Chief, Says 'F*ck All You Libtards,' Apologizes With Assault Rifle

A police chief in a small town in Pennsylvania is attracting controversy this week after posting a series of YouTube videos attacking people that disagree with his views on gun rights.

Mark Kessler, police chief of Gilberton Burough and a member of the North Schuylkill school board, caught the attention of viewers earlier this month with profanity-laced videos blasting "libtards" and Secretary of State John Kerry for supposedly wanting to take away his guns.

In the video above, which contains NSFW language, Kessler goes on the offensive.

"Fuck all you libtards out there ... yous take it in the ass," he says in the video, posted in mid-July. "I don't give a fuck what you say, so you can all go fuck yourselves. Period." ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/mark-kessler-pennsylvania_n_3643921.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037

July 24, 2013

Connecticut Passes Commons-based Approach to Taxing Urban Land

from OnTheCommons.org:


Connecticut Passes Commons-based Approach to Taxing Urban Land
Turns traditional property taxes upside down by valuing community contributions to land values

By Joshua Vincent


On June 20, 2013, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy signed into law an act permitting – as a pilot program – a tax reform that turns traditional taxation on its head, as it also embraces the idea of the commons as a resource for the community to provide for the everyday public life of urbanized areas. That program is land value taxation (LVT) . Initially, three communities will have the opportunity to apply for permission to use the program, with more to follow if LVT is proved successful.

What is LVT

LVT is an alternative version of the real property tax used by a number of cities, school districts and counties in Pennsylvania, as well as most municipalities and states in Australia and New Zealand. (For more information on this approach to valuing urban land see Land is a Commonwealth.)

Typically, property tax rates (called mills) fall equally upon land values and building values. LVT shifts the bulk of property tax revenue from buildings ( products of private capital and private labor) to the assessed value of land (a public good created by public and community investment).

LVT works to leverage the tax system to work as a tool to help utilize that part of the Commons – schools, public works, parks, police and fire services, etc – that is expensive to build and is often pocketed by private hands in form of speculation and absentee ownership. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/connecticut-passes-commons-based-approach-taxing-urban-land#sthash.lzcx0130.dpuf

July 24, 2013

US Policy Is to Keep the Veil of Secrecy in Place

from truthdig:


US Policy Is to Keep the Veil of Secrecy in Place

Posted on Jul 23, 2013
By William Pfaff


For some 20 years, in another and more youthful phase of my life, I was one of the (apparently) several hundred thousand Americans who possessed a “top secret” security classification.

This was deposited upon me I know not why, as I was a Korean War non-commissioned officer, my sole military qualification that of “small-unit infantry leader,” on my way to the Far East Command. You may imagine how many secrets I knew! Some kind of foul-up further up the line I supposed.

My clearance stayed with me throughout my military service during the Korean War, through an active Army Reserve commitment and through a period of involvement in Cold War political warfare undertakings meant to provide Western intellectual and cultural publications and art to readers inside the Soviet bloc and in the Middle East and Asia. It even lasted through my encounter with a think tank dealing with international relations and strategy, and with why the Vietnam War was a disaster. My top secret clearance went on and on.

It was not a card in my wallet, or a subscription to be renewed, nor did it weigh on my mind. I kept it even after a Soviet KGB man at the U.N. struck up a conversation with me at a party in New York City, and two sober-meined (and obviously well-informed) FBI agents subsequently invited me out for a coffee and asked if I wouldn’t like to pursue the acquaintance on their behalf. I said that if the Russian called me, I would let them know. But I wouldn’t pursue him in order to set him up, which is what they had in mind. They seemed to find this a reasonable moral distinction to draw, thanked me and paid for the coffee. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/us_policy_is_to_keep_the_veil_of_secrecy_in_place_20130723/

July 24, 2013

Richard Wolff: Economic Update: Economics and Religion (audio link)

Listen: http://rdwolff.com/content/economic-update-economics-and-religion


by Richard Wolff.
Published on July 20, 2013

Updates on Fiat labor struggles in Italy, stagnating real wages in US, capitalist corruption (US, China, Russia), "eminent domain" helps homeowners against foreclosure. Interview with Dr. Obery Hendricks, Jr., professor of religion and biblical studies: how the bible contradicts conservatives' interpretations. Responses to listeners on workers coops forming in Italy, how workers coops can manage growth, and US capitalists substituting stock for cash in paying workers.

July 23, 2013

NY Times: MTA Ponders Transit for a New Generation

(NYT) They travel at odd hours. They disdain cars. They are “really adept” with technology.

And they are, according to a presentation by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Monday, the answer to the riddle of how to invest in transportation for the coming decades.

“We call them the millennials,” William Wheeler, the authority’s director of special project development and planning, told the agency’s finance committee. “They are embracing transit. But they have certain demands.”

As part of an overview on transit strategies for the next 20 years, officials at the authority constructed a detailed profile of the millennial — broadly defined as a traveler born after 1980 (though the authority hardly invented the term). The meeting included a fact sheet on the habits and sensibilities of millennials, like a guidebook for visitors to an unfamiliar land. ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/nyregion/mta-ponders-transit-for-a-new-generation.html?_r=1&

July 23, 2013

Study: America Has Hit Peak Pickup Truck Too

(WNYC) Univ. of Michigan researcher Michael Sivak has been producing a steady stream of reports hailing the onset of peak car, the high point of American car ownership. Tuesday he released a few more charts hammering home the point and a study showing even pick up truck popularity is on the decline since a peak around 2006.

Peak car happened somewhere around 2004—maybe as late as 2008 depending on how you measure it.

Either way, the conclusion Sivak suggests is a cultural shift away from car culture. "These reductions likely reflect, in part, noneconomic changes in society that influence the need for vehicles (e.g., increased telecommuting, increased use of public transportation, increased urbanization of the population, and changes in the age composition of drivers)," he writes.

Sivak's paper, "Has Motorization in the U.S. Peaked? Part 2," posted to the Univ. of Michigan website Tuesday shows how the peak car phenomenon applies to light-duty vehicles as well. That classification includes small commercial trucks, vans, SUVs and pickups, exactly the auto segments you might expect to be resistant to cultural shifts against driving. The people who rely on them need vehicles for work or are more likely to live in rural or suburban areas where giving up a car in favor of transit is less feasible. But nonetheless, peak pickup has also come, he argues. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/transportation-nation/2013/jul/23/study-america-has-hit-peak-pickup-truck-too-not-just-peak-car/

July 23, 2013

Death by Corporation, Part II: Companies as Cancer Cells

Death by Corporation, Part II: Companies as Cancer Cells

Tuesday, 23 July 2013 09:40
By Dr Brian Moench, Truthout | Report


The financial industry, chemical industry, drug companies, nuclear industrial complex and dirty energy empire work "like tumor cells for the relentless destruction of the environment that they themselves depend upon for their very lives. And the rest of us stand by and watch it happen."

The Financial Industry

The global financial crisis of 2008, at a cost of more than $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The financial crisis became a human crisis. The World Bank estimated that 53 million people worldwide were thrown into poverty and that between 200,000 and 400,000 babies died annually as a result. Millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa have suffered severe malnutrition and long-term brain damage as fallout from the financial disaster.

Suicide rates rise and fall with the state of the economy. Unemployment and foreclosure are the largest triggers in increased suicide risk. About 35,000 Americans die every year from suicides, up about 28 percent since 1999. Suicide rates in Europe, where the recession has been even more severe, are even higher. Ervin Lupoe from Wilmington, California, shot his five children and wife to death before turning the gun on himself. Lupoe was deep in debt, behind on his mortgage and had been fired from his hospital job. Anxiety, fear, crime, domestic abuse, murder and suicide all increased worldwide because of the financial crisis.

It was an "avoidable" disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a federal inquiry. It was the private market, not government programs, that made, packaged and sold most of these wretched loans without regard to their quality. The packaging, combined with credit default swaps and other esoteric derivatives, spread the contagion throughout the world. That's why what initially seemed to be a large but containable US mortgage problem touched off a worldwide financial crisis. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/17705-death-by-corporation-part-ii-companies-as-cancer-cells

July 23, 2013

Chris Hedges: "America is a Tinderbox"

Published on Jul 19, 2013

On Reality Asserts Itself, Paul Jay asks Chris Hedges if the American Left bears responsibility for the weakness of the mass movement; Hedges says the gravest mistake of the left is not articulating a viable vision of socialism

July 23, 2013

Standing Your Ground (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/standing_my_ground_20130722/

July 23, 2013

The Violence of Organized Forgetting

The Violence of Organized Forgetting

Monday, 22 July 2013 00:00
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

"People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence." - James Baldwin

Learning to Forget

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed. Politicians such as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich along with talking heads such as Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and Anne Coulter are not the problem, they are symptomatic of a much more disturbing assault on critical thought, if not rationale thinking itself. Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.

These anti-public intellectuals are part of a disimagination machine that solidifies the power of the rich and the structures of the military-industrial-surveillance-academic complex by presenting the ideologies, institutions and relations of the powerful as commonsense. For instance, the historical legacies of resistance to racism, militarism, privatization and panoptical surveillance have long been forgotten and made invisible in the current assumption that Americans now live in a democratic, post-racial society. The cheerleaders for neoliberalism work hard to normalize dominant institutions and relations of power through a vocabulary and public pedagogy that create market-driven subjects, modes of consciousness, and ways of understanding the world that promote accommodation, quietism and passivity. Social solidarities are torn apart, furthering the retreat into orbits of the private that undermine those spaces that nurture non-commodified knowledge, values, critical exchange and civic literacy. The pedagogy of authoritarianism is alive and well in the United States, and its repression of public memory takes place not only through the screen culture and institutional apparatuses of conformity, but is also reproduced through a culture of fear and a carceral state that imprisons more people than any other country in the world. What many commentators have missed in the ongoing attack on Edward Snowden is not that he uncovered information that made clear how corrupt and intrusive the American government has become - how willing it is to engage in vast crimes against the American public. His real "crime" is that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower people, to get them to think as critically engaged citizens rather than assume that knowledge and education are merely about the learning of skills - a reductive concept that substitutes training for education and reinforces the flight from reason and the goose-stepping reflexes of an authoritarian mindset.

Since the late1970s, there has been an intensification in the United States, Canada and Europe of neoliberal modes of governance, ideology and policies - a historical period in which the foundations for democratic public spheres have been dismantled. Schools, public radio, the media and other critical cultural apparatuses have been under siege, viewed as dangerous to a market-driven society that considers critical thought, dialogue, and civic engagement a threat to its basic values, ideologies, and structures of power. This was the beginning of an historical era in which the discourse of democracy, public values, and the common good came crashing to the ground. Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished. Large social movements fragmented into isolated pockets of resistance mostly organized around a form of identity politics that largely ignored a much-needed conversation about the attack on the social and the broader issues affecting society such as the growing inequality in wealth, power and income. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17647-the-violence-of-organized-forgetting