Undernews: December 14, 2011

Gingrich wants to execute all those who sold him pot

Firedog Lake - Former New Mexico governor and barely-blipping GOP presidential candidate Gary Johnson resurrected the specter of Newt Gingrich’s doobie-dabbling and pot policy on MSNBC this weekend. Here’s Newt’s most recent position, as of 1996, when as Speaker of House he introduced H.R. 4170 (Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996) to the House of Representatives, which sought to provide a sentence of death for certain importations of significant quantities of controlled substances including marijuana.

Gingrich–who had smoked pot while a grad student in the 1960s, and had advocated medical marijuana in 1982 explained his shift in position in 1995, stating:

See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal and immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.

He again emphasized his firm stance on weed in 1996:

If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs… it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this.

Some scary truths about Obama

Rep. Dennis Cardoza is a Blue Dog Democrat from California who is retiring this year. According to McClatchy Newspapers, last year he voted more conservatively on economic and social policy issues than 40 percent of other House members. But his piece is not about ideology; it's about politics and how poorly Obama plays it.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, The Hill - After observing President Obama for the last three years, it has become obvious to me that the president might prefer to be a university professor rather than do the job he holds today. While he might not realize that he feels this way, the evidence is very clear to those who work with or watch him closely.

Let me be clear I’m not trying to disparage professors. But anyone who wonders why the president is not crushing the weak Republican field only needs to examine how President Obama has behaved more like Professor Obama:

In the president’s first year in office, his administration suffered from what I call “idea disease.” Every week, and sometimes almost every day, the administration rolled out a new program for the country. There was no obvious prioritization and, after the rollout, very little effort to actually pass the latest idea/imperative/plan/edict. Instead, the new programs just kept coming, with the new proposals constantly stepping on the previous day’s message. This rampant “idea disease” squandered the tremendous goodwill generated by the Obama campaign’s message of “hope,” tainting the president’s personal appeal. As Democrats in Congress, we often felt like we were drinking water out of a fire hose, trying to simultaneously deal with past failures of the Bush administration and the avalanche of new initiatives from Obama. This lack of focus also made it easy for congressional Republicans to stall and foil many of President Obama’s best initiatives which they did with relish!

Early in his administration, President/Professor Obama repeatedly referred to “teaching moments.” He would admonish staff, members of Congress and the public, in speeches and in private, about what they could learn from him. Rather than the ideological or corrupt “I’m above the law” attitudes of some past administrations, President Obama projected an arrogant “I’m right, you’re wrong” demeanor that alienated many potential allies. Furthermore, the president concentrated power within the White House, leaving Cabinet members with no other option but to dutifully carry out policies with which they had limited input in crafting and might very well disagree. From my experience, this was especially true in the environmental, resources, housing and employment areas. Not by coincidence, these areas have also been responsible for much of the president’s harshest critiques.

One former administration official told me directly that the people in the White House “never talk to real people.” Another former Obama staffer confided to me that it was clear to him that the president didn’t mind giving speeches (lectures), but really avoided personal contact with members of Congress and folks outside the Beltway. “He doesn’t seem to derive energy from spending time with regular people the way Clinton did. He rallies to give speeches for the big crowds, but avoids individual contact,” the former staffer recalled. This “arms-length” attitude extends to top decision-makers in the president’s administration. A senior housing official recently told me that, despite the fact that he was responsible for crafting policies to stem the foreclosure crisis, he had personally never met with a homeowner who had been foreclosed on.

The president’s disinterest in input from those outside his inner circle is costing him many wasted opportunities. Recently, a senator told me Obama went to his/her state, but issued an invitation for the senator to attend the event only the day before. “I represent a must-win state and lead the president in approval ratings by nearly 20 points. He was totally off-message for what my people wanted to hear. Doesn’t the White House get it? I don’t need him, he needs me!”

Many on the Democratic side wish Hillary Clinton, Gov. Jerry Brown (Calif.), Gov. Martin O’Malley (Md.) or Gov. Andrew Cuomo (N.Y.) were running instead, but the president still has time to learn a thing or two from these skilled politicians. I’ll still take Professor Obama over the “goat rodeo clowns” the Republican field offers, but I fear the overall student body American voters will give him a failing grade next November if he doesn’t improve his performance .

State funding of education goes down as Medicaid costs rise

Rural Blog - An analysis of state spending over recent years shows Medicaid budgets have been increasing steadily while education spending has decreased, reports Michael Cooper of The New York Times. The National Association of State Budget Officers analysis says reasons for these budget shifts come from the "lingering economic downturn" and the overall struggling economy. As more people qualified for the program and medical costs rose, more stimulus money was pumped into it, increasing its overall budget. In 2009, Medicaid accounted for 21.9 percent of all state expenditures; this year, the estimate for state Medicaid expenditures is 23.6 percent.

Cooper reports education spending has decreased from 21.5 percent to 20.1 percent over the same period. In 1987, education got the largest amount of state spending, but in 2003 Medicaid became the largest state expenditure for the first time. The margin between the two used to be small, but for the past three years, Medicaid's lead has steadily increased. The report warned that states are likely to face "austere budgets" in coming years because of an uncertain economy, reduced federal aid, costs of the health-care overhaul and pressure to pay for pensions and health care for retired workers.

The return of debtors' prison

Think Progress - Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It’s a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of debtor’s prisons.

NPR reports that it’s becoming increasingly common for people to serve jail time as a result of their debt. Because of “sloppy, incomplete or even false documentation,” many borrowers facing jail time don’t even know they’re being sued by creditors.

A company will often sell off its debt to a collection agency, generally called a creditor. That creditor files a lawsuit against the debtor requiring a court appearance. A notice to appear in court is supposed to be given to the debtor. If they fail to show up, a warrant is issued for their arrest.

More than a third of all states now allow borrowers who don’t pay their bills to be jailed, even when debtor’s prisons have been explicitly banned by state constitutions. A report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that people were imprisoned even when the cost of doing so exceeded the amount of debt they owed.

Barely half of American adults are married

Washington Post - Just 51 percent of all adults who are 18 and older are married, placing them on the brink of becoming a minority, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census statistics. That represents a steep drop from 57 percent who were married in 2000.

The marriage patterns are a striking departure from the middle of the 20th century, when the percentage of adults who never wed was in the low single digits. In 1960, for example, when most baby boomers were children, 72 percent of all adults were married. The median age for brides was barely 20, and the grooms were just a couple of years older.

“In the 1950s, if you weren’t married, people thought you were mentally ill,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who studies families. “Marriage was mandatory. Now it’s culturally optional.”

Child homelessness up 33% in three years

USA Today - One in 45 children in the USA 1.6 million children were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.

The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing Tuesday. "This is an absurdly high number," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the center. "What we have new in 2010 is the effects of a man-made disaster caused by the economic recession. … We are seeing extreme budget cuts, foreclosures and a lack of affordable housing."

Stemming population growth: the cheap way to limit climage change

Thomas Lovejoy, Guardian, UK -It's unpopular to apply sustainability to the concept of population growth, as the word "population" evokes worries about state control and limits on reproductive freedom. But slower population growth can not only lessen vulnerability to climate change impacts, it also has the potential to significantly reduce future greenhouse gas emissions. Following a slower population growth path could reduce fossil fuel emissions by an extra 1.1 billion tons of carbon per year by 2050.

About half of those reductions would come from fertility decline in the United States and developing countries, and could be achieved simply through meeting existing demand for family planning services. More than 200 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy, but need modern contraception. The emissions reductions that could be expected through meeting these family planning needs would be roughly equivalent to the reductions that would come from ending all tropical deforestation.

Compared with the technological investments needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally, the cost of meeting the current demand for family planning is cheap. Emissions averted through investments in family planning would cost about $4.50 per ton of carbon dioxide, compared with options such as solar power ($30 per ton) or carbon capture and storage from new coal plants ($60 per ton).

Forensic audit finds break-in of central election computer in Pennsylvania

Brad Blog - According to the Initial Report from a landmark independent forensic audit of the Venango County, PA, touch-screen voting system --- the same system used in dozens of counties across the state and country --- someone used a computer that was not a part of county's election network to remotely access the central election tabulator computer, illegally, "on multiple occasions." Despite the disturbing report, we may never get to learn who did it or why, if Venango's County Commissioners, a local judge, and the nation's largest e-voting company have their way. And that's not all we won't get to find out about.

The battle for election integrity continues in Venango, with the County Commissioners teaming up with e-voting vendor Election Systems & Software, Inc. on one side, and the county's renegade interim Republican-majority Board of Elections on the other. The Commissioners and ES&S have been working to spike the independent scientific forensic audit of the county's failed electronic voting machines that was commissioned by the interim Board of Elections. Making matters worse, the Board has now been removed from power by a county judge, a decision they are attempting to appeal as the three-person board and their supporters continue to fight the entrenched establishment for transparency and accountability in the rural Western Pennsylvania county.

Gingrich wants to give millionaires a $600,000 tax cut

Think Progress - The latest 2012 GOP presidential frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, has, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) before him, released a plan to overhaul the U.S. tax code by giving taxpayers the option of paying a single, flat, income tax rate, as opposed to using today’s progressive tax code. In fact, Gingrich goes a bit further than Perry, setting his flat rate at 15 percent, as opposed to Perry’s 20 percent. Gingrich claims that his plan will “allow Americans the freedom to choose to file their taxes on a postcard, saving hundreds of billions in unnecessary costs each year.” However, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the plan will also achieve another of Gingrich’s ends giving millionaires a tax cut of more than $600,000 per year.

Reasons college isn't what it used to be

From End of the American Dream:

#1 After adjusting for inflation, U.S. college students are borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago.

#2 The following comes from a recent CBS News article.... "Average tuition and fees at public colleges rose 8.3 percent this year and, with room and board, now exceed $17,000 a year, according to the College Board."

#3 Average yearly tuition at private universities in the United States is now up to $27,293. That figure has increased by 29% in just the past five years.

#4 In America today, approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loan debt.

#5 In 2010, the average college graduate had accumulated approximately $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day.

#6 According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark in early 2012.

#7 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.

#8 Over the past 25 years, the cost of college tuition has increased at an average rate that is approximately 6% higher than the general rate of inflation.

#9 Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at Harvard was only $600. Today, it is $35,568.

#10 The cost of college textbooks has tripled over the past decade.

#11 One survey found that 23 percent of all college students actually use credit cards to pay for tuition or fees.

#12 According to recent Pew Research Center polling, 75% of all Americans believe that college is too expensive for most Americans to afford.

#13 College has become so expensive that it is causing many college students to do desperate things in order to pay for it. For example, an increasing number of young college women are actively advertising on the Internet for "sugar daddies" who will help them pay their college bills.

#14 The student loan default rate has nearly doubled since 2005.

#15 Approximately 14 percent of all students that graduate with student loan debt end up defaulting within 3 years of making their first student loan payment.

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Wikipedia considers going blank to oppose SOPA

Torrent Freak - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to blank out all pages of the online encyclopedia to oppose the pending SOPA anti-piracy bill in the US. Wales, who has asked the Wikipedia community for input on the idea, fears the bill could seriously hurt the Internet and thinks that blanking out Wikipedia will send a strong message to lawmakers.
Later this week, the Senate’s House Judiciary Committee will vote on the “Stop Online Piracy Act”.

Wales explains that the idea of a ‘self-censorship’ protest is inspired by a campaign the Italian Wikipedia community ran earlier this year.

“A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately,” he writes.

“I may be attending a meeting at the White House on Monday along with executives from many other top Internet firms, and I thought this would be a good time to take a quick reading of the community feeling on this issue.”

By blanking out one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, the Wikipedia founder believes the community can send a strong message to their representatives in Washington. With billions of pageviews a month, a Wikipedia protest will definitely be noticed.

“My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case,” Wales says.

Emendation

Recently we ran a story about John Maher's new book in which we noted:

At one point he asks Jerry Rubin, “How the hell do you smoke all that dope and get anything done?” Rubin replied, “Marijuana is pure poison! I only say that shit about dope because that’s what people expect and want. I’d never use the stuff myself.”

The godfather of the alternative media, Paul Krassner writes us: "I don't know when 'at one point' was, but although Rubin was an opportunist, he did sooner or later become a heavy pot-smoker."

FBI expands definition of terrorist to include someone fighting against invasion of his country by U.S.

Glenn Greenwald, Salon - The FBI announced it has secured an indictment against Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, a 38-year-old citizen of Iraq currently in Canada, from which the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The headline on the FBI’s Press Release tells the basic story: “Alleged Terrorist Indicted in New York for the Murder of Five American Soldiers.” The criminal complaint previously filed under seal provides the details: ‘Isa is charged with “providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy” because he allegedly supported a 2008 attack on a U.S. military base in Mosul that killed 5 American soldiers. In other words, if the U.S. invades and occupies your country, and you respond by fighting back against the invading army the ultimate definition of a “military, not civilian target” then you are a . . . terrorist.

The Durban deal: more delay on facing the ecological crisis

Democracy Now - The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, has ended with an agreement to start negotiations for a new legally binding climate treaty to be decided by 2015 and to come into force by 2020. Negotiators also agreed to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and the initial design of a Green Climate Fund. Many environmental groups say the agreement does not do enough to deal with the climate crisis. "It is really not the important milestone in building a climate regime that many have called it, including the United States and the European Union," says Kate Horner, a policy analyst at Friends of the Earth International. "Instead, what it is is a further milestone in a very long history of the wealthy world backtracking on their existing promises and reneging on existing obligations. The platform will delay action for five to 10 years while a new treaty is being negotiated and ratified. It will lock in the low levels of ambition. And really, I think the most damaging part of it is it’s an attempt to shift the burden of this problem on to developing countries who have contributed less." The outcome of the U.N. climate summit could be especially damaging for Africa. "Africa is off the map. Yet Africa is the [continent] that is going to burn because of the indecision and the weak decisions that have come out of this gathering here in Durban," notes Bobby Peek, director of groundWork, a South African-based environmental justice organization.

Mercencary corporation tries to improve its image, once again

Washington Post - The private security contractor known as Blackwater renamed itself Xe Services nearly three years ago. Now, the firm is rebranding itself again.

On Monday, Xe announced that it was changing its name to Academi, part of a years-long effort by the company to shed a troubled legacy that critics said made the firm a symbol for mercenaries and impunity in Iraq and elsewhere.

In an interview, the company’s president and chief executive, Ted Wright, said the announcement was about more than a simple name change.

“We want to reflect the changes we made in the company,” he said, noting that the firm has new ownership, new leadership and a “refocused strategy on training and security services.”

The company also has unveiled a new Web site and logo. The tag on the Web site reads: “Elite Training. Trusted Protection.”

Xe was acquired by USTC Holdings, an investor consortium, in December 2010, and since then has tried to undergo a corporate makeover. Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL who built the company, no longer has ties to the business. The firm formed a new board of directors to manage the company and picked up big Washington names in the process.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft now serves as ethics adviser, and Jack Quinn, a top lobbyist and former counsel to President Bill Clinton, is an independent director.

How doctors die differently than their patients

Ken Murray, Nexus - Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds¬from 5 percent to 15 percent¬albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen¬that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo. more

Two progressive third party choices in presidential race

Jill Stein for the Greens . . . . More

Rocky Anderson

How to tell a real journalist

Stuff Journalists Like - Think that j-school degree and a desk in a newsroom is all you need to call yourself a journalist? Think again. Journalists are made on deadlines. Here’s my checklist to see if you are truly a journalist.

1. Written a 15-inch story in 30 minutes
2. Corrected a loved one’s grammar in a greeting card
3. Replaced one of the major food groups with coffee
4. Own your own police scanner
5. Eat in your car more often than you do at a table
6. Gotten fired/laid off for no good reason
7. Woke in a cold sweat thinking you forgot to change the date on A1
8. Slept in your car and not because you were too drunk to drive home
9. Found that fine line between harassment and persistence
10. If you needed bail, the first person you would call would be your editor
11. You couldn’t imagine doing anything else
12. MORE

Why people don't trust the Fed

Dean Baker - The Federal Reserve Board is a perverse animal. While ostensibly a public institution, the banking industry has the extraordinary privilege of being able to pick 5 of the 12 members of its most important governing body, the Open Market Committee. The banks also get to have 7 other representatives sit in on the FOMC's secret meetings. Given this structure, it is not surprising that people who do not believe that the banks necessarily place the interest of the general public first are suspicious of the Fed.

Robert Samuelson is nonetheless outraged that anyone could question the neutrality of this institution. He attacks a piece by Bloomberg News that called attention to the Fed's secret lending during the financial crisis as "slander." Samuelson argues that the loans were not secret, the Fed disclosed the amounts being lent under the programs, just not the identities of the borrowers. He argues that it was necessary not to disclose the identity of the borrowers in order not to avoid the risk of creating runs on troubled borrowers.

Samuelson neglected to mention that the Fed refused to release the identities of the institutions receiving the loans available even after the fact. The names of these institutions were only made public as a result of a bill sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson for auditing the Fed. A version of this legislation was eventually included as an amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill. A successful lawsuit by Bloomberg also led to the release of additional data on Fed loans. In other words, the Fed tried very hard to keep the identity of its borrowers secret even long after the release of the identity of borrowers could have had any impact on their financial situation.
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The revolutionary Jesus the right doesn't want to talk about

Gingrich tax plan would slash revenue, add billions to deficit

Big secret money behind online independent presidential plan

NYC's medium income same as Greece, bottom third is below China

Why SOPA is blatantly unconstitutional

The ancestors of the Occupy movement

Perpetual campaigns make candidates hostage to contributors

Tax benefit of commuting being cut by congressional inaction

Meanwhile, furrthermore & on the other hand

Stats

In the mid-’80s, only about 15% of bodies were cremated. The current figure is 41%, and by 2017, it’s expected that cremation will be the choice in more than half of all deaths in the U.S.

Healthcare bill added 2.5 million young adults to coverage

In five days, Bernie Sanders got 140,000 signatures on his petition for a constitutional amendment to void the Citizens United ruling granting corporate personhood

Furthermore. . .

Lawrence Tribe's brief on why SOPA is unconstitutional

An interview with Rocky Anderson

Why public libraries matter

The end of the pickup truck?

Woman faces jail for growing vegetables in her front yard

The ruins of a Disneyland that never was

The ancestors of the Occupy movement

Excellent 60 Minutes show on why Wall Streeters don't get prosecuted

San Francisco first city with $10 minimum wage

The last 50 years of the New Yorker

Sexual lyrics predict songs' popularity

Click for big version.

SIX CHARTS ILLUSTRATING WHY CORRELATION IS NOT NECESSARILY CAUSATION

Paul Krugman - It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege. . .High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

By now, you've probably seen Rick Perry's "Strong" ad, in which he opines, "There's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." Not only are gays in our military, they're also composing music for our campaign ads. As the Harvard Political Review points out, the music that plays in the background of Perry's ad is inspired by or directly taken from Aaron Copland, a gay composer. - Village Voice

Word

One good thing about a Newt Gingrich Presidency, is that the US would finally have a president who both looks and acts like Slobidan Milosevic. - Punk Patriot

I wonder if they make a version of trail mix that's just the M&Ms. - @scottsimpson

"You're in big trouble, Eddie." . . . "Naw, I don't think so. . .,Just one of those days when you feel like a spit-valve on the trombone of life." - Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy

Books

America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz

Polls

52% Say America's Best Days Are In The Past

55% say U.S. should never have beeen involved in Iraq

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