August 23, 2012

NOW Toronto: Wanted: a Quebec spring for T.O.

from NOW Toronto:


Wanted: a Quebec spring for T.O.
With campuses reopening, student leaders hope to rouse debt-ridden Ontario students to some collective indignation

By Halla Imam



[font size="1"]The Quebec strike was successful because of the democratic structure of student unions.
Photo By Ethan Eisenberg[/font]


Another academic year, another crop of students facing another round of bank loans.

With Ontario university students owing an average $26,000 upon graduation ($13,000 for those attending colleges), the big question is whether last spring’s student strike in Quebec will have any spillover effect on campus politics this fall.

While strikers in Montreal took to the streets again this week, last month as part of their Solidarity Tour they visited Toronto campuses to give tactics tutorials. At Ryerson’s Student Centre, local activists eager for action here, given that tuition in Ontario is the highest in the land, wore their red squares and took in the advice.

The message was essentially twofold: the strike didn’t come out of thin air, but was the result of two years of organizing; and Quebec’s form of student government – designed around departments, across schools, and based on mass meetings – was key to the action’s vast participation. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=188297

August 23, 2012

Chicago: 26 bus routes face cuts, changes under CTA 'crowding reduction' plan

Chicago Tribune
August 23, 2012


The CTA on Wednesday released the full roster of bus-route cancellations and changes that transit officials said are painful but necessary to reduce crowding on buses on the busiest routes.

The hit list totaled 26 routes, more than double the 12 low-ridership routes that officials said a day earlier would be discontinued in four months.

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

Service would be added on 48 bus routes under the plan, while 12 bus routes would be discontinued and nine additional privately contracted CTA routes would also be eliminated if subsidizes were not increased. Changes also are scheduled for five more routes.

In addition, 17 rail trips would be added during weekday peak travel times, mostly on the Red, Blue and Brown lines, which are the CTA's busiest train routes. ............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-cta-riders-react-0823-20120823,0,4281553.story

August 23, 2012

After the Drought: Will Climate Reporting Take Off?

from YES! Magazine:


After the Drought: Will Climate Reporting Take Off?
After the release of a report on links between extreme weather and climate change, Americans may get what polls show 80 percent of us want: more environmental reporting in mainstream news.

by Heidi Bruce
posted Aug 22, 2012


Environmentalists have been dismayed for years to see mainstream media in the United States, especially television news, failing to convey the reality of climate change and the urgency of an official response. But there may have been a breakthrough in broadcast television news halfway through this summer’s record-breaking extreme weather events.

A study by watchdog group Media Matters shows that in 2011, major broadcast networks spent more than twice as much time talking about Donald Trump as they did about climate change. The study states that in 2011, when they did discuss climate change, the major Sunday news shows (ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday) consulted political and media figures—but not scientists. Of those interviewed, 50 percent were political figures—including elected officials, strategists and advisers—and 45 percent were from the media.

This lack of fact-based coverage has not been due to public disinterest. A recent poll by the Opinion Research Corporation reveals that nearly 80 percent of Americans want to see more environmental news in mainstream media. The poll—commissioned by the Project for Improved Environmental Coverage—indicates that, regardless of age, race, income, or region, Americans believe the media should improve coverage of the environment.

The trend of underreporting environmental news—specifically, climate change—looked set to continue over the summer of 2012, even during extreme weather events like the destructive wildfires in Colorado. A possible connection between climate change and wildfires, which affected areas in 14 states, went virtually without mention, according to Media Matters. Their analysis of news coverage from April 1 to June 30, 2012 revealed that only 3 percent of news reports on wildfires in the West mentioned climate change. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/its-your-body/tipping-point-for-climate-news-coverage

August 23, 2012

Amy Goodman: Election 2012: Dreams of a Vote Deferred?

from truthdig:


Election 2012: Dreams of a Vote Deferred?

Posted on Aug 22, 2012
By Amy Goodman


People remember 1929 as the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the global economic disaster which remains the only one in history that dwarfs the one in which we now find ourselves. It was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. was born, who wouldn’t live to see 40 years. And it was the year that Langston Hughes graduated from Lincoln University, outside Philadelphia.

Hughes, the grandson of abolitionists and voting-rights activists, was an African-American writer. His poem “A Dream Deferred” begins:

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?”

Hughes left Lincoln University, one of the 105 historically black colleges and universities in the U.S., and spent the rest of his life campaigning for civil and human rights. He died in 1967, two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/election_2012_dreams_of_a_vote_deferred_20120822/

August 23, 2012

Keiser Report: Suicidal Skullduggery

Published on Aug 22, 2012 by RussiaToday

In this episode, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss further signs of success from the shakedown of Standard Chartered as the City starts firing, while the Street is hiring. Max and Stacy look at some of the help wanted ads and examine the unusually small head of JP Morgan's chief executive.

August 23, 2012

American middle class faces ‘worst decade in modern history,’ report finds

WASHINGTON—The U.S. middle class is facing its “worst decade in modern history,” with its share of the country’s income falling for the first time since World War II, a new report says.

The Pew Research Center study says 85 per cent of middle-class Americans feel it is more difficult now than a decade ago to maintain their standard of living. The report describes them as losing faith in the future.

Their share of the national income has been surpassed by affluent earners as median wages stagnate and wealth concentrates at the top in a relatively weak economy.

Roughly half of all U.S. adults define themselves as “middle class,” with incomes ranging from $39,000 to $118,000 (U.S.) .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1245516--u-s-middle-class-faces-worst-decade-in-modern-history-report

August 23, 2012

More BP follies......

By Robert Channick Tribune staff
5:18 p.m. CDT, August 22, 2012


Contaminated fuel from BP's Whiting, Ind., refinery made its way to some 200 retail outlets in Northwest Indiana, Chicago and the suburbs -- along with 20 stations in the Milwaukee area, the company said Wednesday.

More than 7,000 customer complaints over the bad gas had reached BP as of Wednesday afternoon, a spokesman said.

BP believes it has identified the full distribution of a 50,000-barrel batch of bad gas that has been fouling cars in four states since last week. Station operators have been instructed not to sell the recalled gas, which is being trucked back to Whiting for reprocessing, according to the company.

Roughly 2.1 million gallons of gasoline were recalled by BP's Whiting refinery after hundreds of reports of hard-starting and stalling vehicles from motorists flooded Chicago area repair shops this week. BP issued a statement Tuesday, saying the gasoline was blended at its Whiting storage terminal between Aug. 13 and 17 and contained a "higher than normal level of polymeric residue." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-bp-says-tainted-gas-made-it-to-200-stations-20120822,0,4604197.story

August 23, 2012

Lab technician found drunk, partially nude, with monkeys on the loose

A Georgia Health Sciences University lab tech was jailed this week after he was found intoxicated with his pants down in a campus locker room, a GHSU spokeswoman said Friday. Two lab monkeys were found outside their cages, authorities said.

According to a GHSU Police Bureau incident report, a co-worker discovered Coley Mitchell, 32, partially unclothed in a locker room in the Sanders Research and Education Building about 10:30 p.m. Monday.

Campus police said Mitchell, a Lab Animal Services technician, was intoxicated and seated in a chair with his pants half-down.

The spokeswoman said two monkeys were found outside their cages in the lab but were confined to the room. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/crime-courts/2012-08-17/ghsu-lab-tech-found-drunk-partially-clothed-monkeys-police-say

August 22, 2012

Elephants in the room: Urban poverty, climate change, and other problems we love to ignore

from Grist:



Elephants in the room: Urban poverty, climate change, and other problems we love to ignore
By Greg Hanscom


In the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine, longtime education writer Paul Tough has an insightful treatise on President Obama’s policies regarding poverty – the issue that, more than any other, holds American cities down, and one that we seem incapable of addressing in any rational, lasting way.

Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes, a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, a trailblazing program that offers poor kids a web of services designed to carry them out of the ’hood and into the middle class. On the campaign trail in 2007, Obama promised to pour a few billion dollars a year into creating Children’s Zones in cities across the country. Here he is in a speech at the community center in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.:



The proposal, which Obama later dubbed Promise Neighborhoods, sent waves of excitement through American cities. In 2009, dozens of communities hastily compiled proposals to be one of the first 20 test cases.

At the time, I was writing for a magazine in Baltimore, a city that has suffered the whole stew of urban ills, from soaring dropout rates to drug abuse and crime. When Tough came to town to speak about his book, people packed a local synagogue to see him. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/cities/elephants-in-the-room-urban-poverty-climate-change-and-other-problems-we-love-to-ignore/

August 22, 2012

Why Courts Are Handing Down Crappy Decisions on Voting and Abortion Rights

Why Courts Are Handing Down Crappy Decisions on Voting and Abortion Rights


Voting rights activists thought they had a strong challenge to Pennsylvania's restrictive voter ID law. After all, Republican officials admitted the law was designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters and that actual voter fraud was non-existent. But last Wednesday Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson upheld the law. The 70-page opinion is a detailed and well-reasoned application of the law. And that's the problem.

As we've seen in the context of reproductive rights, the Supreme Court under the helm of Chief Justice John Roberts has made it exceedingly difficult to challenge the constitutionality of laws like the Pennsylvania's voter ID measure before they take effect. This has also emboldened Republican-led state legislatures to pass more restrictiive civil rights measures, like voting and abortion restrictions, with an understanding those laws will pass constitutional scrutiny. The district court decision upholding Arizona's 20-week gestational ban and this state court decision upholding discriminatory voter ID represent just the beginning. The legal landscape has tilted far to the right and is not likely to correct itself anytime soon.

The problem is two-fold. First, under Gonzales v. Carhart courts are to give wide discretion to the findings of fact used to support a particular piece of legislation. Standing alone, that premise is not all that controversial. During the legislative process lawmakers hold committee hearings, interested parties submit testimony and, presumably, the legislation that results is drafted to address a specific policy goal.

But the holding of Gonzales presumes that legislators draft legislation in good faith, and as we've seen time and time again in the states this is not a presumption we can afford to make. Whether its supporting so-called "fetal pain" laws or voter ID, Republicans are not legislating in good faith. They are gaming the process so their findings reflect ideological-driven conclusions supported by ideologically manufactured "facts" (like the ability of a fetus to feel pain at 20 weeks or the existence of voter fraud) to create a record insulated from judicial review. And then they pass the most outrageous legislation they can get away with. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/why-courts-are-handing-down-crappy-decisions-voting-and-abortion-rights