Undernews For January 21

Undernews For January 21

Since 1964, the news while there's still time to do something about it

Because of the large number of letters we get, we ask our email readers to post them directly to our site. Just click on the headline and then go to 'Comment' at the bottom of the article.

GE seizes control of Internet & White House in same week

National Journal - President Obama today will name General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the White House announced. . .

Immelt, GE's CEO since September 2001, met with the president earlier this week and attended Wednesday's state dinner with Chinese President Hu Jintao. He will guide the president on a tour of GE headquarters in Schenectady, N.Y., today. Immelt, a Republican, donated to both Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain during the last presidential cycle, but not President Obama, according to Bloomberg.

John Nichols & Robert McChesney, Common Dreams - "When the same company owns the content and the pipes that deliver that content, consumers lose," explained [Senator Al Franken]. That complaint parallels objections raised by Stop Big Media, a coalition of consumer, labor and community groups that objected to the [Comcast/GE/NBC merger] which studies suggest will cost cable viewers as much as $2.4 billion over the coming decade.

But a second objection voiced by Franken, echoing other critics of the merger, is even more unsettling: "Allowing this merger to proceed could lead to subsequent deals, leaving Americans at the mercy of a few powerful media conglomerates.". . .

The details of this plan are daunting: Comcast is poised to control one in five hours of all TV viewing in the United States; to own more than 125 major cable channels, television stations, websites, film studios and related production facilities; and to dominate local media controlling cable and Internet service and TV stations in major cities across the country. Senator Bernie Sanders overstates nothing when he argues that "this new media giant will be the largest cable provider, the largest Internet provider and one of the largest producers of content in the United States. At a time when a small number of giant media corporations already control what the American people see, hear and read, we do not need another media conglomerate with control over the production and distribution of media content. What we need is less concentration of ownership, more diversity, more local ownership-and more viewpoints."

Massico, Firedog Lake, September 2010 - People used to think of GE as an American success story. It was an innovative manufacturer of machines, from small appliances to jet aircraft engines, and medical machinery that was a marvel. In fact, GE’s financing businesses averaged over 37% of total revenues for the period 2006-8, and averaged 46% of total earnings from continuing operations. The Great Crash was a serious problem for GE Capital. Its earnings fell by 80% from 2008 to 2009, and its access to the capital markets in late 2008 was precarious.

It was not eligible for support from the FDIC, which was rushing programs into place to insure continued access for banks to short-and medium-term funding, including the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, set in place in October, 2008. However, according to the Washington Post, GE went to see the FDIC and pleaded for access. The FDIC did not want to guarantee the debt of other companies.

GE owned two small thrift institutions, which were regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision. The OTS, along with whoever else made calls to whoever else, persuaded the FDIC to expand access to the Temporary Loan Guarantee Program to include affiliates of FDIC-insured institutions. This startling decision let GE get an FDIC guarantee of over $100 billion of securities, allowing it to issue those securities at lower interest rates than would otherwise have been available, and saving it billions in interest charges, if, indeed, it could have accessed public markets at all.

The Post reported that GE was not subject to restrictions applicable to other recipients of government bailouts, including restrictions on compensation.

Immelt screwed up a profitable business in a greedy search for money, and then got a government bailout. He was wrong about his own business, just like Larry Summers was at Harvard, and in the financial deregulation movement. That qualifies him for a job in this administration.

Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner - Immelt was at the Export-Import Bank's conference rallying the troops behind Obama's National Export Initiative, aimed at doubling U.S. exports in five years. Immelt praised Germany and Japan's policies of "government and business working as a pack.". . .

The Germans exhibit stronger "public will" and national "vision," Immelt says. "The companies roam as a pack. They stick together. And the government supports the companies to be exporters."

France and Japan are also better at economic team play. And Immelt flashed an envious smile when he said, "China pays all the bills." "What you see in China," Immelt added, "is an incredible unanimity of purpose from top to bottom.". . .

The economics Immelt advocates -- "government and business working as a pack" -- is also known as corporate socialism, or corporatism.

The 1798 healthcare mandate bluff

Sam Smith - Greg Sargent of the Washington Post notes that "Forbes writer Rick Ungar is getting some attention for a piece arguing that history shows that John Adams supported a strong Federal role in health care. Ungar argues that Adams even championed an early measure utilizing the concept behind the individual mandate, which Tea Partyers say is unconstitutional. . . That law authorized the creation of a government operated system of marine hospitals and mandated that laboring merchant marine sailors pay a tax to support it."

Before knee jerk supporters of Obamacare get too excited there are a couple of points worth bearing in mind:

Rick Ungar has created a completely false comparison: "This government provided healthcare service was to be paid for by a mandatory tax on the maritime sailors (a little more than 1% of a sailor’s wages), the same to be withheld from a sailor’s pay and turned over to the government by the ship’s owner. The payment of this tax for health care was not optional. If a sailor wanted to work, he had to pay up."

Later Ungar says, "Clearly, the nation’s founders serving in the 5th Congress, and there were many of them, believed that mandated health insurance coverage was permitted within the limits established by our Constitution. The moral to the story is that the political right-wing has to stop pretending they have the blessings of the Founding Fathers as their excuse to oppose whatever this president has to offer. History makes it abundantly clear that they do not."

Note that the bill of which Ungar writes was a tax to provide government services and not a penalty for not buying something from a private corporation - totally different from the issue with the Obamacare mandate. He has misconflated the two.

Secondly, to quote what John Adams thought in 1798 is a little risky as Wikipedia reminds us:

|||| The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed in 1798 by the Federalists in the 5th United States Congress during an undeclared naval war with France, later known as the Quasi-War. They were signed into law by President John Adams. Proponents claimed the acts were designed to protect the United States from alien citizens of enemy powers and to prevent seditious attacks from weakening the government. The Democratic-Republicans, like later historians, denounced them as being both unconstitutional and designed to stifle criticism of the administration, and as infringing on the right of the states to act in these areas. They became a major political issue in the elections of 1798 and 1800.

Vice President Thomas Jefferson denounced the Sedition Act as invalid and a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which protected the right of free speech. ||||

Ironically, at least one of the unconstitutional acts was passed in the same month as the bill of which Ungar writes.

Lawyer pressing Marines on Manning mistreatment

Washington Post - The lawyer for alleged government secrets leaker Bradley Manning is accusing military authorities of using punitive measures against Manning at the Marine Corps jail in Quantico, Va. Manning, a 23-year-old Army private suspected of passing thousands of classified documents to the online site WikiLeaks, was placed on suicide watch for two days this week - against the recommendation of the jail's forensic psychiatrist, attorney David E. Coombs said.

During this time, Manning was forced to stay in his cell around the clock, stripped to his underwear, the lawyer said. His prescription eyeglasses were taken from him, except for the hour of television he is allowed to watch or when he was reading, Coombs added. The circumstances of Manning's confinement have drawn public attention. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said he submitted to the State Department a formal inquiry about Manning's treatment.

The liberal Web site Firedoglake.com says a petition urging that Manning be treated humanely will be delivered this weekend to Quantico; its site founder says that the petition has drawn more than 30,000 signatures.

Union membership drops again

Union membership by country(before latest results from U.S.)
Nationmaster graph

Sam Smith

Union membership has fallen again - from 12.3% of the American work force in 2009 to 11.9% last year. That's down 612,000 members in 2010. This leaves the United States only the 17th most unionized country in the world.

The long term drop in union membership is due to variety of causes. Among them:

- The strong right wing drift of the U.S. with its anti-worker theology encouraged by a media that thinks it's objective to be anti-union.

- The growing separation between union workers and the lifestyle and culture of an increasingly elitist liberal class that was once strongly pro-union.

- The fact that unions have done so much good that many Americans forget how much their success is due to the union movement. As the bumper stickers put it: "Unions: the folks who brought you the weekend."

- The corporatizing of union leadership - much as has happened with non-profits and foundations - thus culturally isolating leaders from their goals and members.

- The failure to adapt to the times.

There is, however, considerable hope for a union movement if it were to take a number of important steps:

- Make a serious effort to organize non-union workers AARP style, building a proto-union movement when conventional labor organizing is too difficult. Using a combination of social action and social benefits, there would be considerable potential in this approach.

- Emphasize cooperatives, worker ownership, and worker participation at the board level. Labor needs to try out different approaches instead of just attempting to recreate the 1930s all over again.

An example of this was word over a year ago that the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, a multi-billion dollar cooperative based in the Basque region of Spain, had formed an alliance with the United Steelworkers, the largest industrial trade union in the U.S. The two announced that they would develop Mondragon manufacturing cooperatives in the United States and Canada that would "adapt collective bargaining principles."

Another critical point unions should be making:

if you look at the countries with the highest union membership - 57% to 82% in Scananvian countries, for example - you find that only a few - Ireland in particular - that also make the list of countries in deep financial trouble.

While it would be difficult to draw a strict correlation, it is fair to say that nations which respect their workers are least likely to give the sort of freedom to rip everyone off that the American government has given Wall Street. At the very least, strong union membership exists because of values towards which any decent nation should strive.

A progressive approach to lowering the deficit

Pollster Michael Bocian & Andrew Baumann, Politico - Any progressive deficit reduction plan needs to make it easier for the middle class and small businesses to lead an economic recovery, while requiring CEOs and special interests to make contributions commensurate to the gifts they’ve been given by taxpayers. This would include:

• Ending federal oil subsidies: The public rightly sees these handouts as wasteful spending that should be ended. Voters easily rated this proposal as their top choice among 10 options for deficit reduction, in a survey we conducted for Democracy Corps.

• Allowing Medicare to negotiate cheaper drug prices: Kaiser and the Harvard School of Public Health found 71 percent in favor of allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.

• Enacting a Wall Street Deficit Reduction Fee: In 2010, Democrats lost voters who blamed economic problems on Wall Street. This has to change. Democrats should consider a “deficit reduction fee” on excessive Wall Street profits to help repay the taxpayers for their assistance during the financial crisis. Bloomberg recently found a 70 percent majority in favor of a “tax on Wall Street profits.”

• Enacting tax reform to make the system more simple and fair: A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that two-thirds of Americans favor eliminating tax deductions in return for lower rates. Democrats can gain even more support by pushing reform that would lower taxes on the middle class and small businesses, while ending giveaways and loopholes for the wealthy and special interests.

• Cutting unnecessary red tape on small businesses: Increasing economic growth is critical to long-term deficit reduction and voters, with reason, view small businesses as a key to that growth. A recent survey we conducted in one Midwestern swing state found 75 percent in favor of a proposal to cut red tape on small businesses.

Note: A good plan except for the simplified tax. This could easily be used to hike taxes on people without them knowing it.

How the police squelch free speech

ACLU - Since 9/11, law enforcement agencies across America have continued to monitor and harass groups and individuals for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.

If you're a death penalty protestor peacefully calling for an end to capital punishment in Maryland, you were spied upon by the state police.

If you're a Cal State Fresno student interested in veganism, undercover officers from the county sheriff's department monitored a speech you attended .

And if you're an anti-gas-drilling activist in Pennsylvania like Virginia Cody, you might be monitored by the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security.

These kinds of law enforcement behaviors ¬ monitoring, infiltrating and spying ¬ have taken place in at least 33 states plus the District of Columbia in recent years.

One mass bird killing explained

Truth Out - The United States Department of Agriculture took responsibility for hundreds of dead starlings that were found on the ground and frozen in trees in a Yankton, S.D., park on Monday.

The USDA's Wildlife Services Program, which contracts with farmers for bird control, said it used an avicide poison called DRC-1339 to cull a roost of 5,000 birds that were defecating on a farmer's cattle feed across the state line in Nebraska. But officials said the agency had nothing to do with large and dense recent bird kills in Arkansas and Louisiana.

Nevertheless, the USDA's role in the South Dakota bird deaths puts a focus on a little-known government bird-control program that began in the 1960s under the name of Bye Bye Blackbird, which eventually became part of the USDA and was housed in the late '60s at a NASA facility. In 2009, USDA agents euthanized more than 4 million red-winged blackbirds, starlings, cowbirds, and grackles, primarily using pesticides that the government says are not harmful to pets or humans.

From our overstocked archives: two inaugurations

50 years ago . . .

Sam Smith, Multitudes - In January 1961, I made my only foray into the real world of network television. I was hired for Kennedy's inauguration by CBS News as a news editor. Along with fellow WWDC newsman Ed Taishoff, I sat all day capped with a headset in a ballroom of the Hotel Washington , turning phone calls from CBS correspondents into stories then placed on Walter Cronkite's personal news ticker. If there was one thing Ed and I knew, it was how to take news from callers, turn it into copy and get it on the air fast.

But when the calls weren't coming in, I looked around the room and tried to figure out what the scores of CBS minions and executives were doing. As far as I could tell, Ed and I and a few people in front of dials and screens were doing most of the work. Yet we were badly out-numbered and underpaid by men in suits who tore around yelling and looking concerned or angry or wanting to know where something was. It all didn't look like much fun and I think it was when I decided I didn't want to be a network anchorman after all.

Two years ago

Sam Smith, 2009 - On Inauguration eve I returned home after midnight and, two blocks from my Capitol Hill home, noticed four soldiers on patrol in cold weather gear huddled together in the dark drinking coffee. Leaning against one of the men's boots was a large bag labeled Dunkin' Donuts. The men were standing on the corner of 8th & A NE in the same block as my office a long time ago. I recalled the last time I had seen soldiers on that street. It was right after the 1968 riots. The scene was familiar but how its meaning had changed.

The healthcare mess

Sam Smith

The underlying problem with the healthcare bill is that there are few precedents for such a purportedly well intentioned measure that is so incredibly complex in its language (and hence in its true meaning), so uncertain in many of its effects, so contradictory in others, and so remarkably tardy in coming fully into effect.

As things stand, we have years of debate ahead of us before aspects of the measure will even become law and meanwhile both sides can continue to mislead or lie, as one prefers to describe it.

Some of the GOP lies have been well exposed but the liberal myth that there aren't any real problems with this measure continue, often without challenge. Further, the fact that the individual mandate is unconstitutional gets dishonestly dismissed as a wing nut fantasy.

Ask yourself this question: how many measures purportedly reforming some major problem in American life have been immediately challenged in court by 26 states? Reform is supposed to be more cheerful than that.

Further, I was about to quote some figures compiled by Rep. Henry Waxman showing how many people would benefit from the bill in each district. Just what we need, I told myself. And then I began to combine the figures from Maine's two congressional districts and found that Waxman's numbers increased the population of seniors in the state by about a third. Once again numbers were being used as mere adjectives.

Basically our problem is that the law is too hard to understand, too contradictory, too indolent in materializing, and too tempting for both sides to fib about in the meanwhile. Besides it amounts to a contorted way of subsidizing the health insurance industry with significant help from the presently uninsured, many of whom have strong fiscal reasons for being in this state in the first place.

It got so bad last night that I dreamt myself in the hospital for surgery and suddenly Henry Waxman and John Boehner appear on either side of my bed and start a knife fight over proper healthcare policy. I tried to suggest that this helped neither the policy nor my recovery, but they didn't seem to even notice that I was there.

Despite it all, I supported the passage of the bill largely because it aided a significant number of people who otherwise wouldn't have insurance. Further, it offered solid improvements in some areas.

But, while it may have appeased the insurance industry's lobbyists it certainly didn’t appease their business offices which almost immediately began jacking the premiums.

Further, the individual mandate provision, even putting aside its unconstitutionality, will leave untold numbers of citizens with a choice between paying more than they can afford in penalties or much more than they can afford in health insurance premiums.

There is no easy solution apparent. We should, however, call it a healthcare mess and not a policy, and start to reform it all over again.

And not necessarily at the national level. It might be possible, for example, to create a huge health insurance co-op that could service states, businesses and individuals wanting to join, while at the same time undermining the profits of one of America's least needed corporate industries. The co-op is one of the most underused alternatives in our economy.We should also watch closely Vermont's effort to find an alternative.

In any case, it is a mess and you don't repeal a mess; you reform it. And the sooner we start, the better.

Morning Line

When news came that Steve Jobs was leaving Apple, we were reminded of John Kenneth Galbraith's suggestion that one could judge the real importance of CEOs by how badly the stock did after they left. Just for the record, Apple's went down by 2.3% the next day.

Drug sanity working in Portugal

Economist - Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs¬from marijuana to heroin¬but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.

But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized¬indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.

Supreme Court strikes another blow against the Constitution

Wired - The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that U.S. government contractors must undergo the same background checks as federal employees. A lower court had declared the checks an unconstitutional, “broad inquisition” when applied to the contractors.

The challenged background investigations sought information from any source surrounding an employee’s sex life, finances and drug use. The background checks for contractors were required beginning in 2007, and were challenged by nearly three dozen NASA contractors as being too invasive. The contractors neither sought, nor were granted, security clearances for classified information.

Ruling 8-0 with Justice Elena Kagan recused, the court found there was no breach in the contractors’ right to so-called “informational privacy.” The checks were “reasonable, employment-related inquiries that further the government’s interests in managing its internal operations,” the court concluded.

So the court, in overturning the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, agreed with the Obama administration’s contentions that the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory workers’ privacy rights were not breached. The government, the court noted, was not releasing the information to the public.

Word: How Obama screwed America

Tom Eley, World Socialist - From day one, the policy of the Obama administration has been to utilize the economic crisis to effect a vast restructuring of class relations in favor of the financial elite. While ruling out any serious measures to put the unemployed to work, Obama has overseen the funneling of trillions of dollars to the banks, intervened to block legislation limiting bonuses at banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, and given the signal for a campaign of wage cutting across the country by imposing a 50 percent wage reduction on newly hired auto workers as part of the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler.

The administration has refused to provide significant aid to states and localities facing gaping budget deficits as a result of the recession, tacitly supporting cuts in jobs, wages and pensions for teachers and other public employees and crippling cuts in social services.

The Federal Reserve Board has kept interest rates at near-zero and electronically printed hundreds of billions of dollars in order to provide the corporations with virtually free credit and boost corporate profits and the stock market. Since March of 2009, US stock indexes have climbed by nearly 80 percent. Corporate America has amassed a multi-trillion-dollar cash hoard as a result of government subsidies and its own cost-cutting drive, while refusing¬without encountering any opposition from the government¬to use its mountain of cash to hire workers and expand basic production.

The policies of the government have enabled the major banks to tighten their stranglehold over the economy. According to data from the Federal Reserve, just five banks¬Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs¬now control $8.6 trillion in assets, or 13.3 percent of all financial firms’ holdings. The three largest commercial banks by themselves control 33 percent of all US deposits and over half of all home mortgage originations.

In his book Overhaul, Steven Rattner, the Wall Street insider selected by Obama to head his Auto Task Force, bluntly acknowledges the manipulation of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. “More than once, I would think of [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel saying, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste,’ as we used the growing economic catastrophe to achieve changes and sacrifices that would have been impossible in another environment,” he writes.

Meanwhile. . .

An 8th grader explains high frequency stock trading

70% of all trades are done by computers, not humans

Polls

Things the media forgets to tell you

Ron Paul & Ralph Nader agree & disagreee

Real Christian Republicans support single payer

Jesus went throughout Galilee. . .healing every disease and sickness among the people. - Matthew 4:23

Great moments in recycling

A hotel made entirely of rubbish opens in Madrid

Word

Glenn Beck: "Shoot them in the head"

Apparently Wall St doesn't want the competition. . .

Feds stage huge Mafia bust More

Friendly reminder to TV news crews

Remember to take your broadcast mast down driving somewhere

Friendly reminder to Johnson & Johnson

Customers are probably better than MBAs in deciding whether they still need those tampons

Apparently Wall St doesn't want the competition

Feds stage huge Mafia bust More

Friendly reminder to TV news crews

Remember to take your broadcast mast down driving somewhere

Friendly reminder to Johnson & Johnson

Customers are probably better than MBAs in deciding whether they still need those tampons

Great moments in research

Psychological Science - In Study 1, we found that professional baseball players modify their behavior as the season is about to end, seeking to finish with a batting average just above rather than below 300. In Study 2, we found that high school students are more likely to retake the SAT after obtaining a score just below rather than above a round number. In Study 3, we conducted an experiment employing hypothetical scenarios and found that participants reported a greater desire to exert more effort when their performance was just short of rather than just above a round number.

Great moments in evolution

Scientists in New Mexico have successfully bred a bell pepper to a jalapeno to create a new, larger, medium-hot version of the jalapeno. The breeding program was specifically aimed at meeting America's growing demand for ever-more-massive, cheese-stuffed, deep-fried peppers.

Facebook is bad for your health

This year, 480,000 U.S. Facebook users will die, and 1.78 million of them internationally, which works out to about three every minute.

Word

I know exactly how Caesar felt. -- Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele

Some are still staying afloat in hard times

How JP Morgan helped repay its bailout

JPMorgan Chase is admitting it overcharged more than 4,000 active-duty military personnel on their home loans and foreclosed in error on 14 of them.

Furthermore. . .

Indiana governor wants to shorten drug crime sentences

Vermont coming up with own healthcare plan

The politics of the individual mandate

ENDS

© Scoop Media