Undernews For 25 August 2010

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HOW WE DESTROYED IRAQ
Foreign Policy in Focus - For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.
U.S. DRONES KILL MORE CIVILIANS
Anti War - The Obama Administration’s policy of escalating drone strikes took another hit after the explosion from a drone attack against the house of “suspected militants” in North Waziristan also destroyed a neighboring house full of women and children.

The combined toll from the blast was 20 people killed, with at least four women and three children among the slain. At least 13 other civilians were also reported wounded, including a number of other children.
SUMMER JOBS PLUMMETED OVER PAST DECADE
Firedog Lake - Summer and after-school jobs have been in decline for the past decade, said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. In June 2000, according to Sum’s research, 51 percent of teenagers had jobs. In June 2010, that number fell to 28.6 percent. July’s official unemployment number, which only includes teenagers who are still looking for work, not those who have given up searching, was higher than for any other age group in the country.

Now, adults are accepting low-paying, low-skill jobs once filled by teens. The problem is further exacerbated by a trend toward downsizing, outsourcing and the use of undocumented immigrant labor in jobs once held by teens, Sum said.
ROTTEN EGGS
Robert Reich - One especially rotten egg is Jack DeCoster, whose commercial egg agribusiness, which goes under the homey title “Wright County Egg,” headquartered in Galt, Iowa, sends eggs all over the country under many different brands. Those eggs have now laid low thousands of Americans with salmonella poisoning, and may well infect thousands more.
DeCoster is recalling 380 million eggs sold since mid-May. Another commercial egg company, also headquartered in Iowa, and in which DeCoster is a major investor, is recalling hundreds millions more.

Thirteen years ago when I was Secretary of Labor, DeCoster agreed to pay a $2 million penalty (the most we could throw at him) for some of the most heinous workplace violations I’d seen. His workers had been forced to live in trailers infested with rats and handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands. It was an agricultural sweatshop. Several people in Maine told me the fine wouldn’t stop DeCoster. He’d just consider it a cost of doing business. Evidently they were right. DeCoster’s commercial egg business has a record that would make a repeat offender blush.

Grist - Jack DeCoster is one of the most reviled names in industrial agriculture. I first heard of him back in 2007, when I visited Hardin County, Iowa, for a story on the ravages of industrial hog production. One day, as a group of disgruntled farmers gave me a tour of their CAFO-scarred county, they muttered darkly about DeCoster. They said he had been run out of Maine for the egregious practices of his vast egg factories, and that he had set up shop in Iowa with massive, highly polluting hog factories. He was cited as the owner of several operations as we passed foul-smelling concentrations of hog buildings, sometimes as many as eight plunked down together in a cluster, each containing thousands of hogs and each draining mass quantities of waste into a single fetid "lagoon."

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration last month fined Mr. DeCoster $3.6 million for violations in the workplace and at workers' housing. Federal investigators said they found workers, many of whom are immigrants from Latin America, handling manure and dead chickens with their bare hands, and living amid rats and cockroaches in the company's trailer park.

HISTORIAN FINDS GERMANY'S 19TH CENTURY INDUSTRAL EXPANSION AIDED BY LACK OF COPYRIGHT LAW
Frank Thadeusz, Spiegel, Germany- Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might. . . Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century. German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. "For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain," Höffner states. Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

STUDY: GOOGLE'S BOOK SCANNING DOESN'T HURT PUBLISHERS
Tech Dirt - A new research paper from law professor Hannibal Travis tries to look at the actual economic impact of Google's book scanning on publishers, and finds that the falling sky claims from publishers and critics simply isn't supported by the evidence:

"First, it finds little support for the much-discussed hypothesis of the Association of American Publishers and Google's competitors that the mass digitization of major U.S. libraries will reduce the revenues and profits of the most-affected publishers. In fact, the revenues of the publishers who believe themselves to be most aggrieved by GBS, as measured by their willingness to file suit against Google for copyright infringement, increased at a faster rate after the project began, as compared to before its commencement. Their profits also increased significantly more on average from 2005 to 2008 than from 2001 to 2004. . .

"Second, this arrticle finds some support for the view that mass digitization and expanded access to book previews may increase the revenues and profits of the most-affected publishers. The evidence for this proposition takes the form of large increases in revenues and profits for publishers affected by GBS who did not opt out of Google's publishing partner agreement for broader access to previews of works still in copyright.

"Third, it seems that GBS may simultaneously vindicate the public interest in expanded access to the world's cultural heritage and the pecuniary interests of authors and publishers in recouping the substantial fixed costs of book and periodical production and distribution. Analyzing this virtuous circle can help us begin to theorize the relationship between the Internet industry, the producers of cultural products, and the wider public."
ACLU GETS PRISONERS OUT OF SQUIRREL CAGES IN LOUISIANA
ACLU - Last month, we told you about the "squirrel cages" in Louisiana: 3-by 3-foot metal cages that St. Tammany Parish officials use to detain mentally ill, suicidal prisoners. The ACLU of Louisiana sent a letter to parish Sheriff Jack Strain informing him that locking prisoners in these cages was inhumane and unconstitutional. After some he-said, we-said, today we're happy to report that the St. Tammany Parish sheriff's office has issued a new set of policies for the treatment of suicidal prisoners. Now, instead of locking them in cages, they will be housed in a holding cell monitored by guards. Instead of urinating in milk cartons, which the previous practice allowed, prisoners will have access to bathrooms and potable water. Instead of sleeping on the floor of the cage, mentally ill prisoners will now have beds. And instead of being forced to wear Daisy Duke-style shorts with the words "HOT STUFF" scrawled across the backside, prisoners on suicide watch will be given jumpsuits and clothed as modestly as possible.
RECOVERED HISTORY: 80 YEAR OLD STAUGHTON LYND HAS TWO NEW BOOKS
Center for Labor Renewal - Suddenly Staughton Lynd is all the rage. Again. In the last 18 months, Lynd has published two new books, a third that's a reprint of an earlier work, plus a memoir co-authored with his wife Alice. . . In an epoch of imperial hubris and corporate class warfare on steroids, the release of these books could hardly have come at a better time. Soldier, coal miner, Sixties veteran, recent graduate - there's much to be gained by one and all from a study of Lynd's life and work. In so doing, it's remarkable to discover how frequently he was in the right place at the right time and, more importantly, on the right side.

Forty-six years ago, during the tumultuous summer of 1964, Lynd was invited to coordinate the Freedom Schools established in Mississippi by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. . . That August, Lynd stood with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Party convention. Led by Fannie Lou Hamer, the M.F.D.P. had earned the right to represent their state with their blood and their remarkable courage. . . In early 1965, Lynd spoke at Carnegie Hall in one of the first events organized in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam
HIGH SCHOOL DRAFTS STUDENTS INTO JROTC
Sun News, OH - The entire freshman class at Carvers Bay High School has been automatically enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, a military-sponsored program that trains high school students in military discipline and concepts. Principal Richard Neal, a Navy veteran, said the school's Marine Corps JROTC class is fulfilling the student's physical education requirement and is part of the school's Ninth Grade Academy. But Charles Holloway, the parent of a freshman student at Carvers Bay, said he did not want his son in that program and when he asked that his son be taken out, his son was put in a class by himself.Holloway said he feels his son was being punished for not wanting to take part in that class.

WHAT THE MEDIA DOESN’T TELL YOU ABOUT OBAMA'S SCHOOL 'REFORM'
David Moberg, In These Times

- In the most definitive national study to date, Stanford University researchers reported last year that only 17 percent of charter schools outperformed traditional public schools in math, with 37 percent faring worse than public schools and 46 percent measuring up equally. Chicago's charters (without tenure protection for their mostly nonunion teachers) have performed better in math, but no differently in reading, than public schools. Chicago's public magnet schools--where teachers have tenure and a union, but students compete for admission--scored much higher in both math and reading.

- Duncan's much-touted RTTT encouragement of bonus payments to "good" teachers--to spur both teacher development and higher student test scores--had "no significant impact on student achievement or teacher retention" in Chicago, according to Mathematica Policy Research, a leading firm in assessing performance of social programs. (A study of a New York City merit-pay program also showed little effect on student performance.)

- RTTT priorities also reflect Duncan's Renaissance 2010 plan--close schools, then reopen them as small schools or charters--and his "portfolio strategy," the school plan equivalent of an investment portfolio of private and public educational "assets." But studies by SRI International and the Chicago Consortium on School Research (affiliated with the University of Chicago) concluded that Renaissance 2010 schools only occasionally performed better than demographically similar schools and that the portfolio strategy yielded "no dramatic improvements."

- Both Duncan and the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation encouraged increased reliance on standardized tests to measure student performance, thereby pressuring teachers to teach to the test so they and their students would "pass." But strategies imposed on Chicago schools as a consequence for low scores--often against community and union protest--did not produce higher test scores, let alone better schools. Elementary school scores did rise sharply, but mostly because of a change in the test.

- The number of high school students who failed to meet grade-level performance remained between 69 and 73 percent from 2001 to 2008, the year before Duncan left Chicago for Washington. In 2009, the Commercial Club concluded that despite "moderate" elementary school gains, after all of Duncan's policy changes, the city's high schools remained "abysmal" and students were not prepared for success in college or beyond. . .

Unfortunately, most Republicans and many Democrats, including some progressives, believe that the problems with American schools can be solved with more market-style policies, competition, financial incentives, charter schools, privatization, standardized testing and weakened teachers' unions.

But the theory that supports treating education as a marketplace is flawed, as is the practice. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute and others point out that few professionals in the private sector are paid for performance (except in finance, and that should be a cautionary example). And when faced with performance incentives, people typically end up gaming the system. In a 2003 study, economists Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and Brian Jacob of Harvard found that as high-stakes testing increased, teachers were more likely to cheat, for example, changing student answers, giving students correct answers and teaching from illicitly obtained advance test copies.

The educational systems in the rest of the developed world, which famously outperform U.S. schools, are overwhelmingly public, highly unionized and protected from market-style funding. Even though American suburban schools vary dramatically, many of these schools--with unions and teacher tenure--perform so well that affluent families pick their homes partly on the basis of school quality.

A Chicago Consortium on Schools Research team led by Anthony S. Bryk recently published Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, the result of two decades of study. They found that successful schools had five essential pillars of support: educational leadership, parent-community ties, professional capacity, a student-centered learning climate and instructional guidance. The stronger these pillars, the more the schools thrived and test results improved.
RACE TO THE BOTTOM: UNIVERSITY LABELS ITS STUDENTS WONKS
American University Eagle - After two years of research and discussion of what makes AU unique and reputable among hundreds of colleges and universities, a team of AU faculty, staff and students released a catch phrase today that will now serve as the rebranding statement to describe AU ¬ “American Wonk.”

T-shirts emblazoned with “Welcome Wonk,” “Community Wonk” and “Service Wonk” dotted campus during welcome week, and many more T-shirts proclaiming policy wonks, global wonks, green wonks and fill-in-the-blank wonks were being distributed Monday at Celebrate AU on the quad.

Web page
RACE TO THE BOTTOM: CITY DRIVING OUT ISLAND'S FREE GOLF CART TAXI SERVICE
Portland Press Herald, ME - The Maine Heritage Policy Center is threatening to sue the city of Portland unless it changes the city taxi ordinance that requires a college student who offers free rides on his golf cart on Peaks Island to be licensed and insured. The Portland-based organization claims the ordinance, which was adopted last week by the City Council, violates student Matt Rand's constitutional rights because it is aimed at eliminating the sole competitor for the city-subsidized taxi service on Peaks Island.

For the past two years, Rand has offered island visitors and residents free rides on his golf cart during the summer months. Rand accepts tips as donations, which he said helps pay for books and spending money at college. . . . Peaks Island Transportation System is a nonprofit group that spent $20,000 in city money last year to buy a van. It also must pay about $5,000 a year for insurance. Operators said Rand's venture was taking business away from the island taxi service.
TEENS OBJECT TO PARENTS ON FACEBOOK
LA Times - Nearly a third of Facebook teens are ready to unfriend their parents on the social networking site and are twice as likely to want to avoid Mom as Dad, according to an AOL study. . . Youngsters are blanketing the Web with protests. Scores of complaints about mothers posting annoying messages and embarrassing photos have been posted on Twitter, often crammed between adoring tweets about pop singers Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers. It has even spawned a YouTube video that has had nearly 1.2 million views. The video, "My Mom's on Facebook," bemoans the loss of the "sanctuary in cyberspace" to news feed-stalking mothers. Maybe that's why some teens are getting "Facebook fatigue." Nearly 1 in 5 are losing interest, according to a survey of 600 teens this spring by online gaming site Roiworld. Of those teens, 16% said they're leaving Facebook now that their parents have joined, while 14% said there are just "too many adults and older people."

DENVER PRISON ABUSING WOMEN
ACLU - According to press reports and letters sent to the ACLU by prisoners at Denver Women's Correctional Facility, prisoners now must hold open their labia as correctional officers, sometimes using a flashlight, sometimes positioning their faces only inches away from a prisoner's genitals, conduct an inspection. Reports even indicate that some prisoners have been forced to pull back the skin of their clitorises. These searches occur even when the guards have no particular reason to suspect concealment of contraband ¬ correctional officers search prisoners' body cavities on a frequent basis, after work assignments and visits from friends and family. Guards apparently have threatened prisoners who resist with pepper spray.
GREAT MOMENTS IN RESEARCH
Improbable Research - Tammy Castle of James Madison University and Jenifer Lee of Texas A&M International University analyzed how prostitution is adapting to the Internet: “Ordering sex in cyberspace: a content analysis of escort websites,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 107-121 (2008). They report: “The purpose of this study was to uncover information about the escort agencies and escorts that utilize the internet for advertisement purposes. One of the goals of this research study was to describe the `typical’ escort website from the potential customer perspective and includes information on individual escorts, prices, payment options and reviews.”

A study called Similar Preference for Natural Mineral Water between Female College Students and Rats pulls off a nice bit of interspecies diplomacy. Reading it end to end, you would be hard pressed to say who – the college students or the rats – was most intended to benefit from the research.
BOOKSHELF
Wolf: The Lives of Jack London: "In his 40 years of life, he was a "bastard" child of a slum-dwelling suicidal spiritualist, a child laborer, a pirate, a tramp, a revolutionary Socialist, a racist pining for genocide, a gold-digger, a war correspondent, a millionaire, a suicidal depressive, and for a time the most popular writer in America."

James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption: "As an openly gay, African-American writer living through the battle for civil rights, Baldwin had reason to be afraid ¬ and yet, he wasn't. A television interviewer once asked Baldwin to describe the challenges he faced starting his career as a black, impoverished homosexual to which Baldwin laughed and replied: 'I thought I'd hit the jackpot.'"

Not Written in Stone: Learning and Unlearning
American History Through 200 Years of Textbooks

FILMS
Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans

The Tillman Story: Tillman, as he is being fired on by fellow American soldiers, says "I'm Pat fuckiing Tillman."

Plunder: The Crime of Our Time: The criminal side of the financial crisis

Countdown to Zero. . . .Another review

BALTIMORE TO GET ITS OWN CURRENCY
Afro - Baltimore may soon have its own local currency, or scrip, if Jeff Dicken of the Baltimore Green Currency Association has his way. Next spring Dicken, with partner Michael Tew, is planning to launch the BNote, a form of money that can only be spent locally. The object, Dicken said, is to have the money stay in the local community and help the community grow economically.

“A bunch of us realized that there is a real need for economic options in Baltimore City,” Dicken told the AFRO. “A local currency provides a way for residents to support their own community and their own local merchants. And it makes them think twice about where they spend their money, whether they want to support their neighbors, the local merchants, or whether they want to support national chains that may be taking the money and booking it as profit in Delaware or Texas.”

Kathleen Snyder, president of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, said local currency is another sales tool retailers use to attract people to their stores. “It has a positive effect, particularly in a bad economy, to encourage people to shop locally” she said.

NOLA COPS TOLD TO SHOOT LOOTERS AFTER KATRINA
Pro Publica - In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department. It's not clear how broadly the order was communicated. Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

The accounts of orders to "shoot looters," "take back the city," or "do what you have to do" are fragmentary. It remains unclear who originated them or whether they were heard by any of the officers involved in shooting 11 civilians in the days after Katrina. Thus far, no officers implicated in shootings have used the order as an explanation for their actions. Only one of the people shot by police – Henry Glover – was allegedly stealing goods at the time he was shot.
DETROIT SCHOOLS GIVE HOMEWORK BEFORE VACATION IS OVER
Detroit News - Detroit elementary and middle-school students don't resume classes for two weeks, but they already have homework. Detroit Public Schools announced Monday it will mail 62-page packets of homework this week to 28,650 students in grades three through eight. The packets, which must be finished and turned in the first day of classes, focus on areas in which DPS students have tested poorly.

The booklets will be mailed in a back-to-school packet that contains school assignments, immunization updates and other information. They contain literacy exercises and activities that emphasize subjects some students have had difficulty with on standardized tests such as the Michigan Educational Assessment Program exam.
BANK CREDIT CARD USURY CLIMBS AGAIN
Chicago Breaking Business - Interest rates continue to tumble for the U.S. Treasury, companies and home buyers alike. But for a large portion of 381 million U.S. credit-card accounts, borrowing rates have been moving only one way: up.

In the second quarter, the average interest rate on existing cards reached 14.7 percent, up from 13.1 percent a year earlier, according to research firm Synovate. That was the highest level since 2001. Those figures look especially stark when measuring the gap between the prime rate ¬ the benchmark against which card rates are set ¬ and average credit-card rates. The current difference of 11.45 percentage points is the largest in at least 22 years, Synovate estimates.

Progressive Review - One of the interesting things about usury - a topic neither politicians nor the archaic media wish to discuss - is that the Bible is far more critical of it than it is, say, of gay marriage, abortion or Muslim mosques. A few selections:
If you lend money to any of My people who are poor among you, you shall not be like a moneylender to him; you shall not charge him interest.

If one of your brethren becomes poor, and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no usury or interest from him; but fear your God, that your brother may live with you.

You shall not lend him your money for usury, nor lend him your food at a profit.

I also, with my brethren and my servants, am lending them money and grain. Please, let us stop this usury!

Woe is me, my mother, That you have borne me, A man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent for interest, Nor have men lent to me for interest. Every one of them curses me.

If he has exacted usury Or taken increase -- Shall he then live? He shall not live! If he has done any of these abominations, He shall surely die; His blood shall be upon him.
THE FORGOTTEN DISASTER OF NOLA'S CHILDREN
As you read this post, bear in mind Education Secretary Arne Duncan's sick comment last January: " I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster. It took hurricane Katrina to wake up the community and say we have to do better."

The National Center for Disaster Preparedness - Children are "a bit of canary in a coal mine in that they really represent a failure or a dysfunction of many, many other systems in the community," said [lead study author David] Abramson, who is with Columbia's National Center for Disaster Preparedness. About 500,000 people, including more than 160,000 children, weren't able to return to their homes for at least three months after the storm hit on Aug. 29, 2005.

At least 20,000 of those children still have serious emotional disorders or behavior problems, or don't have a permanent home, the report suggests.

"Five years after Katrina, there are still tens of thousands of children and their families who are still living in limbo with a significant toll on their psychological well-being," said co-author Irwin Redlener, also with the Columbia center.

Over the five years, 38 percent out of 427 children have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression or a behavior disorder since Katrina. That's almost five times more likely than children from similar families evaluated before the hurricane.

The percentage of newly diagnosed children has declined in each round of interviews but the numbers are still almost double the national average, Abramson said.

Almost half of the households either were living in transient housing or had no guarantee that they'd be in their current quarters for more than a year.

In separate research, Osofsky has looked at about 5,000 fourth- through 12th-grade children screened last year in St. Bernard, Plaquemines and Orleans parish schools. Of that group, 31 percent showed some symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress, but only 12 to 15 percent asked for individual or group counseling.
FULL BODY SCANNERS BEING USED ON AMERICAN STREETS
Andy Greenberg, Forbes - As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where back scatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.
A TEA PARTY GUIDE TO BEING SAFE IN WASHINGTON
A Maine Tea Party blog has given its readers hints on how to handle Washington DC during their visit as part of a Glenn Beck demonstration later this month. The recommendations are not totally stereotypical. For example, while blogger Bruce Majors describes Dupont Circle as a "gay area," he also recommends the Middle Eastern food of the nearby Pasha Bistro, backing up our argument that if you want multiculturalism, serve it with some food.

But then things deteriorate in a section labeled "Safety and Mores:"

||| DC's population includes refugees from every country, as the families of embassy staffs of third world countries tend to stay in DC whenever a revolution in their homeland means that anyone in their family would be in danger if they went back. Most taxi drivers and many waiters/waitresses (especially in local coffee shops like the Bread and Chocolate chain) are immigrants, frequently from east Africa or Arab countries. As a rule, African immigrants do not like for you to assume they are African Americans and especially do not like for you to guess they are from a neighboring country (e.g. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia) with whom they may have political or military tensions. It's rare to meet anyone who gets really offended, but you can still be aware of the issue.

Many parts of DC are safe beyond the areas I will list here, but why chance it if you don't know where you are?

If you are on the subway stay on the Red line between Union Station and Shady Grove, Maryland. If you are on the Blue or Orange line do not go past Eastern Market (Capitol Hill) toward the Potomac Avenue stop and beyond; stay in NW DC and points in Virginia. Do not use the Green line or the Yellow line. These rules are even more important at night. There is of course nothing wrong with many other areas; but you don't know where you are, so you should not explore them.

If on foot or in a cab or bus, stay in Bethesda, Arlington (preferably north Arlington), Crystal City, Falls Church, Annandale, or Alexandria, or in DC only in northwest DC west (i.e. larger street numbers) of 14th or 16th streets, or if on Capitol Hill only in SE Capitol Hill (zip 20003) between 1st and 8th Streets, not farther out than 8th (e.g. 9th, 10th etc). (Or stay on the Mall and at the various monuments.) Again there are many other lovely places, from the Catholic University of America to Silver Spring, Maryland. But you don't know where you are so you cannot go, especially at night, unless you take me with you.||||

To those unfamiliar with the capital, what is being described as dangerous are the predominantly black parts of town. Although a little confusing because the names, the subway recommendations are also based on melanin levels (except of course for Ethiopian and Eritrean cab drivers).

The above was sent to us by cartoonist Mike Flugennock who will be grateful if the Tea Party folk don't discover his favorite hangouts.
A RARE MOMENT OF POLITICAL SOUL

David Cobb
Sam Smith

Over a century ago, real populists - not the deluded drones of the Tea Party - showed how politics can really work. And did. We have populists to thank for their major contributions to a lot of things we take for granted: the secret ballot, popular election of US senators, women's suffrage, a graduated income tax, direct primaries and agricultural cooperatives to name a few.

They did it with 10,000 secular missionaries spreading the word around the county, with music and even with ventriloquists. They understood that for politics to work it had to be an interesting and enjoyable part of our lives, not another burden to share.

Which is why when I walked in late to the darkened hall off the main space of the Frontier Cafe in Brunswick, Maine, I thought I was in a time warp, suddenly catapulted back more than a hundred years to a populist rally.

But soon I realized it was just what I had come for: a talk by David Cobb of Move to Amend about the Supreme Court's despicable ruling granting personhood to corporations and what we should do about it.

Cobb hails from a shrimping village in Texas and now lives in California. He was once the Green Party's candidate for president. But he still carries the accent of his youth and speaks in a manner half lawyer, half logician and half (as he himself admits) Elmer Gantry. You end up with a loaf and a half and more.

It was a reminder - both pleasant and sorrowful - of why progressives don't do better these days. They have let the heart and soul go out of politics. While I occasionally wondered if Cobb's approach wasn't a little too hearty for a bunch of laconic Mainers, it lifted my spirits not only for his cause but for all the other matters of virtue currently wallowing in everything from apathy to despair.

It isn't that Cobb is a role model. There's only one of him. But what we need is thousands of something elses, each reintroducing the notion of passion, honest argument and appealing energy in their own way to the causes of our time.

As Duke Ellington put it; it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

Move to Amend

A talk by David Cobb
BPA HARMING LOBSTERS?

Diseased lobster
CHINA CONFRONTS ITS CHOPSTICKS
Tree Hugger - China's Ministry of Commerce has had it with disposable chopsticks. It sent out a warning to chopstick makers in June to warn them that: "Production, circulation and recycling of disposable chopsticks should be more strictly supervised." With about 45 billion disposable chopstick pairs made every year in the country, or about 130 million a day, a lot of wood is being wasted, and that in a country that is trying to increase its forest coverage (from about 8% in 1949 to 12-13% today, compared to 30% for the USA). Greenpeace China has estimated that to keep up with this demand, 100 acres of trees need to be felled every 24 hours. That works out to roughly 16 million to 25 million felled trees a year.
WHY LIBERALS BORE PEOPLE
The libertarian online journal Hit & Run referred to "Center for American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias" and got this email in return from CAP:

"I would like to clarify that Matthew Yglesias is a blogger for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Center for American Progress' 501(c)(4) affiliated organization. While the Center and the Action Fund share a mission, the Center is a research and educational institute, while the Action Fund transforms progressive ideas into policy through rapid response communications, partnership with other organizations, legislative action, and grassroots and political advocacy. We hope you will keep the distinction between these two organizations in mind in the future."

Replied Hit & Run: "Duly noted."
SOMETHING TO SLEEP ON
Gawker - Couples cannot figure out how to sleep together. Teens are too wired to slumber. And celebrities think they're so special they don't even need to sleep. Does this sleep crisis threaten to destroy America? You could say that, yes. . . Details
TEACHING AMERICA TO KILL

JOHN GRAHAM-CUMMING
TEACHING AMERICA NOT TO MAKE THINGS

BUSINESS INSIDER

SALES OF PREVIOUSLY OWNED HOMES DROP 27%
Los Angeles Times - Sales of previously owned homes plunged 27.2% nationally in July -- fallout from the expiration of a popular federal tax credit that had fueled the market for much of the year. The big drop, which was worse than what many analysts had expected, sent stock markets tumbling Tuesday morning as investors feared a double dip in housing.

READER COMMENT CLIPS
PUBLIC EDUCATION: ROTTEN TO THE COMMON CORE

Kevin Carson - My older sister gave me Little Men when I was in fifth grade, and I was utterly engrossed in it for a week. I can still remember bits and pieces of the story that caught my imagination.But I'm not really big on required reading lists. For me, the bare fact that I've been ordered to read a book by an authority figure behind a desk is the kiss of death. I noticed a few years back that Watership Down was advertised at a local bookstore, along with the rest of the school system's "summer reading list." Thank God there was no summer reading list back when I was in high school, and that Watership Down wasn't on it. I first read that book when I was almost forty, and was enthralled by it. If I'd been commanded to read it on my summer vacation, I'd probably hate it to this day. For me, summer vacation was the time I could actually read about things that were important, without being interrupted by authoritarian trivia.

CHINA CONFRONTS ITS CHOPSTICKS

People in China used to bring their own chopsticks into restaurants. This practice fell out of fashion probably because carrying them around all day and cleaning them is not "convenient" and this practice might have become associated with poverty. The chopsticks would have to be carried about in a bag and cleaned religiously. And where do you do that? In the restroom? Should you bring your own dish soap, too? Would hand soap serve as well, assuming the pump works at all?
BREVITAS
Robert Reich, Huffington Post - Democrats should propose eliminating payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of income, and making up the revenue loss by applying payroll taxes to incomes above $250,000. This would give the economy an immediate boost by adding to the paychecks of just about every working American. 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes. And because lower-income people would get most of the benefit, it's likely to be spent.

Alternet - A federal district judge on Monday blocked President Obama’s 2009 executive order that expanded embryonic stem cell research, saying it violated a ban on federal money being used to destroy embryos. The ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at universities across the country, which had viewed the Obama administration’s new policy and the grants provided under it as settled law. Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling’s immediate impact on their work. “I have had to tell everyone in my lab that when they feed their cells tomorrow morning, they better use media that has not been funded by the federal government,” said Dr. George Q. Daley, director of the stem cell transplantation program at Children’s Hospital Boston, referring to food given to cells. “This ruling means an immediate disruption of dozens of labs doing this work since the Obama administration made its order.”

Deeply embedded establishment journalist Walter Pincus has discovered the real cause of our huge deficits: military bands: "Maybe Gates should take a closer look at those military bands during his campaign to trim defense spending." In fact, military bands are a great jobs program for musicians in a society controlled by the likes of the RIAA and are one of the few joyful products to come out of the Pentagon.

Into Mobile - A federal appeals court ruled that the covert recording of a phone conversation using a mobile phone is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitimate purposes. This interesting ruling stems from a dispute over a family inheritance that harkens back to 2008. In this Connecticut case, a woman died without a will; leaving the status of her possessions mired in a battle between her son and her husband. To bolster his case, the son presented an audio conversation to the probate court in 2008 that was recorded a few days before the woman’s death. Unbeknownst to everyone present, the son has used his iPhone and the 99-cent Recorder app to record a conversation among himself, his dying mother, his stepfather, and others regarding the posthumous distribution of her estate.
THE HIDDEN WAR IN YEMEN

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