Undernews For July 12

How Obama could lose in 2012

Sam Smith

Although Obama is currently within about 50 electoral votes of beating most Republican candidates, and even leads his most serious competition – Mitt Romney - by better than two to one, the 2012 race is far from settled.

One problem is that there are signs that the enthusiasm that swept him into office is rapidly fading. This can be seen by comparing his recent poll leads against Romney with his state returns in 2008. Some examples:

Massachusetts down 8
Maine down 9
Michigan down 9
New Hampshire down 10
Pennsylvania down 6
Washington down 6

Far from fatal, but far from encouraging, either.

The problem is not that former supporters will turn against him so much as they will lose interest, stop contributing and fail to show up at the polls.

An underlying difficulty is that Obama has turned out to be a one-con artist. His 2008 campaign was a brilliant illusion that concealed his true political character and paid off well. He has been unable to reproduce this trick even once since he has been in office. His efforts have been boring, annoying, confusing, indecipherable or just plain incompetent. Compared to his indefatigable con man penultimate predecessor Bill Clinton, Obama seems an amateur.

In the best of all political worlds, Obama would be dumped by the Democrats in favor of someone who could get us out of stupid wars, take on Wall Street and provide an economic stimulus driven by something other than endless verbal Viagra dispensed from a White House pulpit.

It won’t happen, of course, and so despite his present lead, Obama could still be headed for big trouble. A few reasons why:

- The thrill is gone. Even the knee jerkers at Move On are infuriated by Obama’s targeting Social Security. Others are just discouraged, disappointed or disengaged. Audacity has turned out to be paucity. And aside from killing Bin Laden, Obama’s administration has been the most boring of modern times. Even Jerry Ford made you smile.

- Against a real candidate – i.e. Mitt Romney – Obama does markedly worse than against the GOP showboaters who are getting all the media coverage. At the present time, Obama only looks strong when pitted against the crazies.

- Obama’s blackness no longer has the effect that it did the first time out. Many blacks feel short-changed, and white liberal post-racial fantasies have been knocked out of the ring. More see Obama as who he is, rather than as a symbol, and that doesn’t score too many points in his favor.

- Liberals like to blame it all on racism. In fact, Obama’s elite Ivy League manner and pro Wall Street politics are much more the culprits.. As far back as the 1980s Jesse Jackson was able to garner lower class white voters by simply addressing their issues and speaking United States. But Americans have a hard time recognizing the role of class in politics and often blame race instead.

- Obama is one of the most boring and pedantic presidents we have had. His occasional basketball tosses and silly little jogs up the steps to the podium can’t hide the vapid quality of what he has to say.

- Obama has a tin ear. He has a hard time responding to things with any emotion. He can’t make anything swing. And thanks to his obsession with teleprompters he rarely even looks his TV audience in the eye.

- In talking to us, he often comes across, at best, as a priggish teacher and, at worse, a scold.

- Like most liberals today, he grossly underestimates the importance of improving people economic lives. By deserting the economic emphasis that underlay the New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society, Obama is donating his own base to the Republicans.

- His handling of the stimulus has been a disaster. There’s a widespread understanding the Wall Street has come out of it all miles ahead of ordinary Americans and Obama just doesn’t even seem to notice it.

- Obama doesn’t know how to handle the opposition. For example, when Romney started hitting him for the high unemployment rate, the White House might have told us how many people have been fired by Romney’s various businesses.

- And, in the end, there will be that unemployment rate. If it doesn’t drop significantly between now and the election, it will be a stunning mark of failure. Back in 2009, even Obama admitted he'd have trouble being reelected if it didn't get better.

Again, this is not about people switching parties, but about them staying home, not helping to get out the vote and not writing checks.

In the last election, Obama won by 7% of the popular vote. That means less than four percent of the electorate has to head for the sidelines to change things dramatically.

Not a prediction. Just something to think about.

Back story: The Ahmed Wali Karzai you won’t hear about

Tom Lasseter, McClatchy, 2009 - The ride to Kandahar airport was tense. The Afghan president's brother had just yelled a litany of obscenities and said he was about to beat me. Ahmed Wali Karzai is feared by many in southern Afghanistan, and being threatened by him, in his home, isn't something to be taken lightly. . .

I was in my third week of tracking down former Afghan officials and asking them about drugs and corruption. Several had mentioned Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother and the head of Kandahar's provincial council. After talking with poppy farmers, a drug dealer and former officials in Kandahar, it was time to see Ahmed Wali Karzai. . .

He began to glare at me and questioned whether I was really a reporter.

"It seems like someone sent you to write these things," he said, scowling.

Karzai glared some more.

"You should leave right now," he said.

I stuck my hand out to shake his; if I learned anything from three years of reporting in Iraq and then trips to Afghanistan during the past couple of years, it's that when things turn bad, you should cling to any remaining shred of hospitality.

Karzai grabbed my hand and used it to give me a bit of a push into the next room. He followed me, and his voice rose until it was a scream of curse words and threats.

I managed to record just one full sentence: "Get the (expletive) out before I kick your (expletive)."... MORE

Anti-War, 2010 - What about when Gareth Porter, who has been doing top-notch reporting on the Afghan War for Inter Press Service, points out McChrystal's striking recent Kandahar flip-flop. Back in March, his team was talking about getting rid of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's half-brother Wali Karzai, Kandahar's major powerbroker, a man reputedly deeply involved in the drug trade, and an asset or former asset of the CIA. ("The only way to clean up Chicago," said McChrystal's intelligence chief General Michael Flynn back then, "is to get rid of Capone.") More recently, however, they have executed a 180-degree turn and decided not only to leave him in place, but to intensify their work with him. "The reaffirmation of ties between the U.S. and [Wali] Karzai," writes Porter, "ensures that the whole military effort in the province is locked into Karzai's political strategy for maintaining his grip on power."

Jeff Stein, Spy Talk, 2009 - Evidently taking a page from the Boston Irish mob - and countless crooks before him - Afghan President Hamid Karzai's younger brother has become a snitch for U.S. intelligence, according to an allegation buried deep in a Washington Post story. If true, the connection with U.S. intelligence would go a long way to explaining why Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful official in Afghanistan's volatile Kandahar Province, remains free despite a widespread consensus that he is one of Afghanistan's major drug kingpins. . Efforts by U.S. and even Afghan counternarcotics officials to persuade President Karzai to remove his brother from Kandahar, a strategic prize for both sides in the war, second only to Kabul -- have failed.

NY Times, 2009 - Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.'s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai's home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America's war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America's increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.'s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

GOP plan contains hidden tax increase on older Americans

UPI - U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday Republican demands for spending cuts would act as a tax increase on senior citizens and middle class. Geithner said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that addressing the budget deficit solely through spending reductions would result in higher out-of-pocket costs for Medicare that would have to be born by fixed-income seniors. "The average cost of Medicare for the average beneficiary when fully phased in would go up by $6,500 a year," Geithner said. "That's like a $6,500 tax increase on elderly Americans."

Witnesses: Bachmann clinic abused gay youth

Minnesota Independent -Two witnesses said over the weekend that a counseling clinic founded by Michele and Marcus Bachmann performs a controversial “ex-gay” therapy. A former client of Bachmann’s clinic told The Nation that he was counseled to become straight when he was in high school. And the group Truth Wins Out sent a staffer undercover and was treated for his homosexuality. Bachmann’s clinic has taken in thousands in state and federal money despite its overt Christian conservative message.

Andrew Ramirez was sent to Bachmann & Associates after he told his parents he was gay. A high school senior at the time, he told The Nation that an employee of Bachmann’s told him that his only choice was to renounce homosexuality.

“He basically said being gay was not an acceptable lifestyle in God’s eyes,” Ramirez recalled in the interview.

Bachmann & Associates also referred Ramirez to a church for “ex-gays” and offered to connect him with an “ex-lesbian” mentor, he said.

That was in 2004 when, as a state senator, Michele Bachmann was ramping up efforts to amend the Minnesota Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. And she made it clear how she felt about the LGBT community.

“This is a very serious matter, because it is our children who are the prize for this community, they are specifically targeting our children,” she told Christian radio station KKMS 980-AM in March of that year. “This is an earthquake issue. This will change our state forever. Because the immediate consequence, if gay marriage goes through, is that K-12 little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal, natural and perhaps they should try it.”

At a November 2004 conference of EdWatch, she said of homosexuality, “It’s part of Satan I think to say that this is ‘gay.’ It’s anything but gay. If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.”

Why one professor won’t let Teach for America recruit students in his classes

Dr. Mark Naison, With a Brooklyn Accent - Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: "Sorry."

Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way.

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for America recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in.

Not one of them was accepted. Enraged, I did a little research and found that TFA had accepted only four of the nearly 100 Fordham students who applied. I become even more enraged when I found out from the New York Times that TFA had accepted 44 out of a hundred applicants from Yale that year. Something was really wrong here if an organization that wanted to serve low income communities rejected every applicant from Fordham who came from those communities and accepted half of the applicants from an Ivy League school where very few of the students, even students of color, come from working class or poor families.

Since that time, the percentage of Fordham students accepted has marginally increased, but the organization has done little to win my confidence that it is seriously committed to recruiting people willing to make a lifetime commitment to teaching and administering schools in high poverty areas.

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make, and encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career. Indeed, the organization does everything in its power to make joining Teach for America seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher paying professions. Three years ago, the TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said "Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School." To me, the message of that flyer was "use teaching in high poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business." It was not only profoundly disrespectful of every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in "resume padding" for ambitious young people.

Jerry Falwell's university receives nearly a half billion in federal aid each year

Alternet - One might think that a private, decidedly conservative, and totally evangelical Christian University, that was founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who was openly critical of government programs, would spurn federal dollars.

This year, the 40th anniversary of Liberty University, Rev. Falwell's dream -- now being looked after by his son Jerry Jr. -- has become a reality thanks in large part to America's taxpayers.

During the last fiscal year alone, Liberty received about $445 million in federal financial aid money, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Over the past few years, Liberty University has raked in so much taxpayer money from the federal government that is now ranked among the top ten universities in the United States receiving federal dollars. It is also Virginia's top recipient of federal money.

News of the World allegedly sought phone records of 9/11 victims

Reuters - Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper reported on Monday that News of the World journalists had offered to pay a New York police officer to retrieve the private phone records of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The police officer, who now works as a private investigator, said at the time that he would turn down the request because of "how bad it would look," the source was quoted as saying.

Word

Men of England wherefore plow

For the lords who lay you low?

Wherefore weave with toil and care

The rich robes your tyrants wear -- Shelley

Pocket paradigms

There is a tendency in the museum world these days, as elsewhere in America, to use design as a substitute for evidence, style as a substitute for reality, empty space as a substitute for substance, and abstract words as a substitute for specific knowledge. Ironically, it all costs a lot of money that could better be spent on creating the sort of alternate realities that actually draws people to such places.- Sam Smith

The 9/11 story no one in power wants to talk about

Although ignored by most media, one of the key questions about 9/11 remains to be answered: did it have to be as bad as it was? This is not a question about politics, foreign affairs, or secret plans: it is about construction and safety. Two groups – the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and 9/11 Parents and Families of Firefighters & WTC Victims – are calling for a new investigation into this aspect of the disaster as well as new building codes. The media, as usual, is indifferent

Progressive Review, 2001- Largely ignored by the ordinary media is a key question about the September 11 disaster: did it have to be that bad? The answers, however, are being sought by firefighters, engineers and architects. A case in point is Jim Malott, a San Francisco architect who has followed the World Trade Center since it first took shape, chronicling its history in words and photos. Mallot was also an officer aboard U.S.S. Enterprise, where he witnessed more than one fiery jet plane crash.

In the November/December 2001 issue of Designer/Builder, Mallot gives a deeply disturbing interview to Kingsley Hammet who writes: "Prior to the advent of the World Trade Center towers, high-rise buildings shared two vital characteristics. They were supported by a grid of steel columns, generally spaced about thirty feet apart, and each interior column was encased in a tough cladding of concrete to create a fireproof skin designed to withstand a four-hour inferno. (The four-hour fire rating is the code rule for the columns and major beams in any large building.) As designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, New York's Twin Towers incorporated neither of these traditional features. And as far as Malott is concerned, it was the failure of their substitutes - not the initial crash, not the exploding jet fuel, and not the subsequent fire alone -that lead to their collapse and the enormous loss of life . . .

"As Malott watched the tragedy unfold, he surmised that the sequence of events went something like this. when the planes slammed into the exterior of the buildings, the fuselages and engines broke through a number of the outside columns while the wings disintegrated as though being forced through a cheese grater. The bodies of the planes crashed across the unobstructed floors, smashed into the central cores of the buildings, and blew the sheetrock off the supporting columns and from around the stairwells, completely destroying the elevator shaft wails. Thus, in the first seconds, the four-hour-rated fireproofing was stripped from the steel core structures and with it went all hope that the buildings could survive a fire. "After an hour of this inferno, the now-naked steel columns of the central core at the impact floors were heated to about 1,600 degrees, which is the point at which steel loses almost all of its structural strength. The relatively skimpy floor system, with hung sheetrock, small-diameter steel bar joists, and the thin layer of concrete, offered little barrier to the raging flames despite having been rated as fire-resistant for four hours. Three floors may have collapsed within the impact area, further tearing fireproofing away from the core columns.

Once the first couple of core columns began to buckle, Malott speculates, they threw all of their load not onto a neighboring ring of strong columns protected with fireproofing (which in this design did not exist), but onto the adjacent columns in the exposed core, which were similarly denuded of fireproofing by the initial impact and also were failing under the intense heat. 'The outside of the building did not fail. It did not get hot enough,' Malott says. 'It was the core that failed.'

"It's time now to go back and rethink the entire concept of the high-rise structural system, Malott says. Buildings such as the World Trade Center towers cannot be built to minimum code specifications And architects must now truly consider the impact of a fully loaded aircraft or other impact/explosion/fire combination striking another tower. Future high-rise buildings must be designed with a redundant system of interior support columns so no failure of any critical part - be it the core, the skin, or the floor -leads to the catastrophic collapse of the entire building . . .

"Ever since the World Trade Center became the global icon of capitalism, most high-rise buildings in America have followed its lead and wrapped their steel columns in some combination of mineral wool and gypsum board rather than concrete, leaving them susceptible to potentially devastating pancake failure not in four hours, for which they are theoretically fire rated, but in less than an hour . . . "It's interesting to note that while the enormous bomb that exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993 killed six people, injured almost 1,000, caused a massive fuel fire, and collapsed two garage floors, it did relatively little structural damage to the tower because the basement columns were encased in concrete . . .

"A building of this scale, in Malott's opinion, should never have been built in this way. The best proof is what happened to the 102-story Empire State Building when rammed by a B-25 in 1945. The plane, loaded with gasoline, hit between the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors. The resultant fire burned for twenty-four hours and gutted five stories of the building. But the accident did not cause any catastrophic collapse of the structure because the tower had been built around a grid of interior columns and everyone had been clad in concrete."

Progressive Review, 2005 – The Review has been a lonely voice pointing to professional evidence from architects, engineers and fire experts that the World Trade Center disaster was far greater than it had to be due to the failure to observe city building codes and to grossly inadequate fireproofing.

To accept this view would, however, would be to recognize that the World Trade Center was built in massive disregard of safety standards and would call into question the behavior of prominent New York City figures including the Rockefeller family. It would become not just an act of terrorism but the biggest building scandal since the Shirtwaist Triangle Fire in the early 20th century.

To put it simply: the evidence - including that buried in the NY Times story of a new study of the collapse - points to an incident that might have killed hundreds - but not thousands - if the buildings had been properly constructed.

We pick up the Times story a full 17 paragraphs in:

The trade center was built by the Port Authority, which is not subject to any building codes. Despite promises by the Port Authority to "meet or exceed" the New York City code, the federal investigation found that the trade center had fewer exit staircases than required and that the Port Authority never tested the fire resistance of the floors. It also found no evidence that a rigorous engineering study supported the authority's repeated public assertion that the towers could stand up to the impact of a fully loaded commercial airliner. .

The three-year, $16 million federal investigation was broken into two primary parts. Using computers to reconstruct the attack, engineers found that when the towers were struck, they redistributed load to surviving columns. Once the fire weakened those remaining, extremely stressed columns, whose fireproofing had been knocked off by the planes, the structures collapsed, the report says.

That research found no flaw in the design of the towers that was a critical factor in the collapse, Dr. Sunder said.

The investigation also raised hard questions about the usefulness of a century-old furnace test that measures the fire resistance of structural components. Last summer, the National Institute of Standards and Technology arranged a furnace test of a 17-foot piece of steel and concrete floor, the standard requirement at the time that the towers were erected. The floor passed the test. However, the tower floors were built not with 17-foot lengths of floor, but with 35- and 60-foot lengths. When a 35-foot length was tested in the furnace, the floor failed the fire-rating requirement.

[Not made clear in the Times story is how critical using more closely spaced uprights encased in concrete or terra cotta blocks, rather than just fireproofing, would have been. In fact, the 1993 bombing of the same building occurred in at its bottom - built according to traditional standards - which is perhaps why the buildings were still around on September 11]

George Washington Blogspot, 2005 - BYU Physics professor Steven Jones has stated that the government agency tasked with examining the collapse of the World Trade Centers did not investigate any anomalies in the collapse of the buildings, failing to even examine any evidence regarding the buildings' impossible near free-fall speeds and symmetrical collapses, apparent demolition squibs, the fact that the buildings turned to dust in mid-air, the presence of molten metal in the basement areas in large pools in all of the buildings, or the unexplained straightening out of the upper 34 floors of the South Tower after they had precipitously leaned over and started toppling like a tree.

I just ran across an article from a respected civil engineering trade journal which backs up Professor Jones' claim that the government did not really examine the conditions immediately prior to collapse or the collapses themselves. Specifically, the article from the journal of the 180-year old UK Institution of Civil Engineers states:

"World Trade Center disaster investigators are refusing to show computer visualizations of the collapse of the Twin Towers despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers."

The article goes on to state "a leading U.S. structural engineer said, 'By comparison [to the modeling of fires] the global structural model is not as sophisticated' . . . The software used has been pushed to new limits, and there have been a lot of simplifications, extrapolations and judgment calls . . . it would be hard to produce a definitive visualization from the analysis so far.'"

In other words, the U.S. structural engineer is saying that even the non-visual computer models which NIST used to examine why the trade centers collapsed are faulty.

Recovered history: Ernest Hemingway

Sam Smith - Ernest Hemingway committed suicide fifty years ago this month. You can read a lot about that and his life in the media, but not so much about one reason he mattered: he knew how to write. As Robert Roper wrote in Obit Magazine. “He has come close to being remembered as much for his death as for his work, a terrible fate for a writer.”

I come from a generation that still remembers Hemingway as a writer. As I once put it, “I devoured Ernest Hemingway because his stories were tough and melancholic and he didn't gush adjectives, metaphors and similes like so many of the writers we were meant to admire. In The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, he said that some things lose their meaning when they get all mouthed up. I appreciated the way he didn't use words as much as the way he did.”

Hemingway put it this way, "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action."

And: “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

And: “Never confuse movement with action."

The Al Qaeda myth: Never has American spent so much and lost so many to defeat so few

The Los Angeles Times reports that “Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is "within reach" of "strategically defeating" Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group's 10 to 20 remaining leaders. Arriving in Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.”

Which sounds like a great achievement until you consider the question the media has steadfastly ignored: how many members of Al Qaeda were there ever? If we’re going to go bankrupt as a country to defeat Al Qaeda it seems like a valid issue.

Fortunately, we found one answer in the Los Angeles Times in 2005:

Terry McDermott, Los Angeles Times, 2005 - ¬Al Qaeda was never the massive, refined army of terror it was portrayed to be. That depiction grew out of a desperate and probably unconscious rationalization. If Al Qaeda was not a sophisticated enemy, how could it ever have succeeded so spectacularly in its assault on the United States? The answer most Americans -- including me -- gave to that question was that it obviously could not have otherwise succeeded. The smoking pile of rubble in Lower Manhattan was all the evidence required -- people tend to create the enemy they want, rather than see the enemy in front of them. . .Al Qaeda was probably never more than a couple of hundred men. . .

Michigan woman faces jail for planting vegetables in front yard

Tree Hugger - Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan -- a mother of 6, law-abiding citizen, and gardener -- is facing 93 days in jail after being charged with a misdemeanor.

Her crime? Planting a vegetable garden in the front yard.

Bass says that she planted the garden after her front yard was torn up for some sewer repairs. Rather than wasting the opportunity to start with a clean slate by planting a lawn, she decided to really put the area to use, and plant a vegetable garden.

Her garden consists of 5 raised beds, where she grows a mix of squashes, corn, tomatoes, flowers, and other veggies. Bass received a warning from the city telling her to remove the vegetable garden, because it doesn't adhere to city ordinances (more on that later.) When she refused, she was ticketed and charged with a misdemeanor. Her trial, before a jury, is set to begin on July 26th. If she is found guilty, she can be sentenced to up to 93 days in jail.

Supposedly, Bass is in noncompliance with a city ordinance that states that only "suitable" plant material is allowed on the lawn area of residences. When local media asked city planner Kevin Rulkowski what that meant, he said suitable means "common:" lawn, nice shrubs, and flowers. However, the city ordinance does not specifically state that those are the only allowed plant materials. . .

America's worst public works project update

Update for cult followers of the Boston Big Dig project:

Boston Globe - Internal e-mails and Transportation Department reports obtained by the Globe show that last winter's light fixture collapse presented a more hazardous situation than Secretary Jeffrey B. Mullan disclosed to the public, and one that could add $200 million to the already-gargantuan price of the Big Dig.

State records also show that his agency's attempt to solve the problem was both more secretive and sluggish than he admitted. Engineers, led by Mullan's close associate Helmut Ernst, didn't even send the fallen fixture to a lab for analysis until March 16, instead leaving the crucial piece of evidence in a South Boston maintenance facility along with mounds of road debris.

Percent of young people with jobs at historic low

National Journal - Two years after the Great Recession officially ended, job prospects for young Americans remain historically grim. More than 17 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds who are looking for work can’t find a job, a rate that is close to a 30-year high. The employment-to-population ratio for that demographic¬the percentage of young people who are working¬has plunged to 45 percent. That’s the lowest level since the Labor Department began tracking the data in 1948. Taken together, the numbers suggest that the U.S. job market is struggling mightily to bring its next generation of workers into the fold.

How bad the economy really is

Just a few of 40 facts about America's crummy economy from the Economic Collapse website

There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million people to the population since then.

The number of Americans that are "not in the labor force" is at an all-time high.

The United States has never had an employment downturn this deep and this prolonged since World War 2 ended.

Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

The number of "low income jobs" in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 30 years and they now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States. According to a report released in February from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries are accounting for 40 percent of the job losses in America but only 14 percent of the job growth. Lower wage industries are accounting for just 23 percent of the job losses but 49 percent of the job growth.

The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

When you adjust wages for inflation, middle class workers in the United States make less money today than they did back in 1971.

According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States were living below the poverty line in 2010.

The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.

In the United States today, the richest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

Obama wants to slash vocational education spending by 20%

Boston Globe - Despite a competitive economy in which success increasingly depends on obtaining a college degree, one in four students in this country does not even finish high school in the usual four years.

Now, federal funding to provide vocational and technical education is at risk. President Obama has instead made it a priority to raise overall academic standards and college graduation rates, and aims to shrink the small amount of federal spending for vocational training in public high schools and community colleges. That aid comes primarily in the form of Perkins grants to states.

The administration has proposed a 20-percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent.

The only real alternative to public schools for career training is profit-making colleges and trade schools, many of which have been criticized for sending students deeply into debt without improving their job prospects. A little more than 1 in 10 students in higher education attend a profit-making institution.

OMB seeking ways to cut red tape for states and localities

Governing - In an effort to help governments reduce their costs, the Office of Management and Budget has told agencies to quickly find ways to make it easier for states and localities to deal with the federal system. The effort puts a special emphasis on eliminating duplicative reporting requirements -- a common complaint among state and local leaders. Being required to submit the same information again and again to secure funding from similar but distinct programs can waste precious personnel and other resources. That can be a huge problem at a time when states and cities are already cutting back…

Climate change update

Dahr Jamail, Aljazeera - The rate of ice loss in two of Greenland's largest glaciers has increased so much in the last 10 years that the amount of melted water would be enough to completely fill Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes in North America.

West Texas is currently undergoing its worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, leaving wheat and cotton crops in the state in an extremely dire situation due to lack of soil moisture, as wildfires continue to burn.

Central China recently experienced its worst drought in more than 50 years. Regional authorities have declared more than 1,300 lakes "dead", meaning they are out of use for both irrigation and drinking water supply.

Floods have struck Eastern and Southern China, killing at least 52 and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands, followed by severe flooding that again hit Eastern China, displacing or otherwise affecting five million people.

Meanwhile in Europe, crops in the northwest are suffering the driest weather in decades….

Professor Cindy Parker co-directs the Programme on Global Environmental Sustainability and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. . .

"Everything that affects our environment affects our health," Parker said, "As fancy as our technology is, we still cannot live without clean water, air, and food, and we rely on our environment for these.". . .

"People think technology is going to save us from climate change, but there is no technology on the horizon that will allow us to adapt ourselves out of this mess," Parker said, "We can physiologically adapt to higher temperatures, but all that adaptation is not going to save us unless we also get the climate stabilized."

"If this continues unabated this planet will not be habitable by the species that are on it, including humans," she concluded, "It will be a very different planet. One that is not very conducive to human life."

The world's population is growing by roughly 80 million people per year, and at the current rates of birth and death, the world's population is on a trajectory to double in 49 years.

William Ryerson is the president of the Population Institute, a non-profit organisation that works to educate policymakers and the public about population, and the need to achieve a world population that is in balance with a healthy global environment and resource base. . .

"We have 225,000 people at the dinner table tonight who weren't there last night, so to maintain our current population we're already over-pumping underground aquifers," [said]Ryerson, "India is over-pumping, and we have over 100 million people in India dependent on over-pumping, so this can't be sustained. “

Unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency recently revealed that greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year to the highest carbon output in history, despite the most serious economic recession in 80 years.

This means that the aim of holding global temperatures to safe levels are now all but out of reach. The goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than two degrees Celsius, which scientists say is the threshold for potentially "dangerous climate change" is now most likely just "a nice Utopia", according to Fatih Birol, a chief economist of the IEA.

"Population is the multiplier of everything else," explained Ryerson, who believes climate change cannot adequately be addressed until the overpopulation problem is solved.

Pocket paradigms

Why is it so hard to deal with multicultural issues while the Arab carry-out across from my office offers a "kosher hoagie?" It is, in part, because most of us are like Bismarck who said when offered German champagne that his patriotism stopped at his stomach. It is also that the ethnic restaurant offers a fair multicultural deal: a good living for one culture in return for good food for the others..- Sam Smith

Michelle Bachmann says she submissively follows orders of her husband

“My husband said ‘Now you need to go and get a post-doctorate degree in tax law.’ Tax law! I hate taxes¬why should I go and do something like that?” she told the audience. “But the Lord says be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.” (In this video, Bachmann also reports that the Lord told her to run for Congress)

Legal question: Can someone who claims they submissively follow the orders of their husband and someone they identify only as "The Lord" serve as president under the Constitution?

Twitter: Let's not get too excited

Mkandlez's Photostream

Obama administration lies about marijuana

MSNBC - The federal government officially declared that marijuana has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous and addictive drug. It will remain in the same class of drugs as heroin.

The Department of Justice declared Friday: "DHHS concluded that marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no accepted medical use in the United States, and lacks an acceptable level of safety for use even under medical supervision."

The decision comes almost a decade after medical marijuana supporters asked the feds to reclassify cannabis. The activists point to research that showed its effectiveness in treating certain diseases, like glaucoma and multiple sclerosis, and the side effects of chemotherapy. The LA Times spoke to advocates who criticized the ruling, but said it came with a silver lining because they could now move the issue to the federal courts.

The instructive roots of our social welfare system

Francois Furstenberg, Muskegon Chronicle - Much like our time, the Gilded Age was an era of economic booms and busts. None was greater than the financial crisis that began in September 1873 with the collapse of Jay Cooke & Co., the nation’s premier investment bank. Like many other firms, Cooke & Co. overextended itself by offering risky loans based on overvalued real estate.

Cooke’s collapse launched the first economic crisis of the Industrial Age. For 65 straight months, the U.S. economy shrank -- the longest such stretch in U.S. history. America’s industrial base ground to a near halt: By 1876, half of the nation’s railroads had declared bankruptcy, almost half of the country’s iron furnaces were shut and coal production collapsed. Until the 1930s, it would be known as the Great Depression.

In the face of economic calamity and skyrocketing unemployment, the government did, well, nothing. No federal unemployment insurance eased families’ suffering and kept a floor on demand. No central bank existed to fight deflation. Large-scale government stimulus was a thing of the distant future.

As demand collapsed, businesses slashed payrolls and reduced wages, and a ruinous period of deflation began. By 1879, wholesale prices had declined 30 percent. The consequences were catastrophic for the nation’s many debtors and set off a vicious economic cycle. When economic growth eventually began, progress was slow, with periodic crises plaguing the economy through the end of the century.

Neither political party offered genuine solutions. As historian Richard Hofstadter put it, political parties during the Gilded Age “divided over spoils, not issues,” and neither Democrats nor Republicans were inclined to challenge their corporate masters.
With neither major party responding to the crisis, new insurgent movements arose: antimonopoly coalitions, reform parties and labor candidates all began to attract support. Writer Henry George, running for mayor of New York, decried the “speculative” gains of financial barons and the monopolists who appropriated “unearned” profits.

The labor struggles of the age were as epic as the fortunes of the tycoons: the Molly Maguires of the Pennsylvania coal fields; the great railroad strike of 1877 that nearly paralyzed the nation; the Haymarket affair of 1886, in which a bomb killed eight people in a Chicago demonstration; the Homestead strike of 1892, probably the most violent labor conflict in American history.

But these were just the most famous episodes of labor unrest: Between 1881 and 1890, there were 9,668 strikes and lockouts, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1886, more than 600,000 workers engaged in 143 strikes and 140 lockouts. State and federal militias were repeatedly called out to quash labor unrest. In the Pittsburgh rail yards in 1877, Pennsylvania militia members fired into the crowds and violence broke loose. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal troops to restore order.

The vast disparities between rich and poor, the spectacular concentration of wealth amassed by the richest Americans in the previous two generations, and the inability of government policies to mitigate the crisis brought the nation to the edge of class warfare and social disintegration.

The specter of a European social order, with societies irredeemably divided between aristocrats and a permanent underclass, seemed to have arrived on U.S. shores. Wealthy Americans began to fear for the stability of the social order.

What force, the wealthy asked in desperation, might mitigate the social chaos and misery, and mute what one public official called “the antagonism between rich and poor”?

Today, new fortunes have been accumulated that rival those of the Gilded Age. Some of that wealth, possessed by people like Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch or Peter G. Peterson, has been used to promote cuts to social spending. Before these opponents and their allies in Congress move forward with the dismantling of the welfare state, however, they might think harder about the reasons such policies were put in place.

The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.

The budgetary baloney over Social Security

Robert Reich, February 2011 - Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. . . .

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

It went from 90 percent to 84 percent because a larger and larger portion of total income has gone to the top. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security’s long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

Republicans so bad, even the Economist has turned against them

Business Insider - The Republicans, the Economist points out, would rather disrupt the US economy and put the country into default than compromise on a long-term deficit and debt reduction plan.

This behavior is an abdication of the Republicans' responsibilities as elected officials. It puts the Republicans' self-interest ahead of the country's.

The Republicans' stance on the debt-ceiling has now gone so far, in fact, that the Republicans appear to be trying to disrupt the economy in order to improve their chances in the next elections, rather than address an economic crisis that threatens to affect millions of Americans.

This is not practical or responsible. It's also not patriotic. It's traitorous.

The Economist, it must be noted, is a pro-private-sector, anti-big-government publication. For more than a century, the paper has extolled the virtues of free enterprise and free-market capitalism and railed against government bureaucracy, fiscal irresponsibility, and stifling regulation. The Economist should be the Republican Party's closest ally when it comes to getting the US back on track. And yet, thanks to the Republicans' extreme stance with respect to tax increases and their recklessness and self-interest with respect to the debt-ceiling, the paper has turned against them.

Michele Bachmann's platform

CARL QUINTANILLA (CNBC): Does it strike you that as the unemployment rate goes up that your chances of winning office also go up?

MICHELE BACHMANN: Well, that could be. Again, I hope so.

Word

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." -- Lewis Carroll

Pocket paradigms

Once we accept the unpleasant persistence of human prejudice, once we give up the notion that it is merely social deviance controllable by sanctions, we drift away from a priggish and puritanical corrective approach towards one that emphasizes techniques of mitigating harm, towards what Andrew Young has called a sense of "no fault justice" and towards emphasizing countervailing human qualities that can serve as antibiotics against hate and fear. We move from being victims to being survivors. We start to deal with some of the real problems of creating a multicultural community; we actually start to envision it, to build it not on false politeness but upon realistic interdependence. Multicultural communities will be constructed not by the hustlers of the diversity trade but by a growing local and personal regard for common sense, fairness and, yes, reasonable self interest. The new multicultural community will work because it is jointly and severally proud of itself.- Sam Smith

Department of Good Stuff

READING

NEW The writings of Jonathan Rowe. A new web site of the writings of jouranlist and thinker Jonathan Rowe who passed recently. Rowe wrote for numerous publications including this one, where his first piece appeared in the early 1970s. More on Rowe

NEW The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch

Guide to jury nullification

A Queer History of the United States

FILMS & TELEVSION

NEW No Contract, No Cookies Documentary on the Stella D'Oro strike

NEW Sons of Perdition. Three young men escape Warren Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints. A remarkable look at some of the reall effects of religious extremism. Not yet on Netflix but you can put it on Save

NEW Freedom Riders

The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman

Hole in the Head: The finally revealed story of harmful scientific studies done on blacks in a town in Indiana. Trailer

SOUNDS

NEW George Kenney interviews Dr. Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a leading neo-Marxist theorist. He see the Greek debt problems as being a prelude to what America undoubtedly will experience somewhere further down the road.

Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute on Libya

The Library of Congress has created a National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. Find out more about the National Jukebox project

Civil rights lawyer Chase Madar talks about the Manning case

"Building a Powerful Left in the United States" -- Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges, David Sirota, Larry Gross and Scott Tucker go looking for America’s missing movement

Bob Edwards Weekend
Electric Politics
Don Imus

VIDEOS

NEW Biker rush hour in Netherlands

If New York City took off to Mars

A piano player like no other

Furthermore. . .

A look at what's happening to American jobs . . . trade by trade

If you want to boycott Murdoch operations you've got your work cut out for you

Fifteen states face temps over 100 degrees

Corporados seizing control of capital's uniquely free taxi industry

Video

The back story

How urban planning killed Washington's Chinatown

U.S. only advanced nation that doesn’t require vacations for workers

ENDS

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