Undernews: September 11, 2011

9/11: The assholes on both sides won

Chris Hedges, Truth Dig - I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies¬a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso¬lay scattered amid the wreckage. . .

Reporters in moments of crisis become clinicians. They collect data, facts, descriptions, basic information, and carry out interviews as swiftly as possible. We make these facts fit into familiar narratives. We do not create facts but we manipulate them. We make facts conform to our perceptions of ourselves as Americans and human beings. We work within the confines of national myth. We make journalism and history a refuge from memory. The pretense that mass murder and suicide can be transformed into a tribute to the victory of the human spirit was the lie we all told to the public that day and have been telling ever since. . .

I returned that night to the newsroom hacking from the fumes released by the burning asbestos, jet fuel, lead, mercury, cellulose and construction debris. I sat at my computer, my thin paper mask still hanging from my neck, trying to write and catch my breath. All who had been at the site that day were noticeable in the newsroom because they were struggling for air. Most of us were convulsed by shock and grief.

There would soon, however, be another reaction. Those of us who were close to the epicenters of the 9/11 attacks would primarily grieve and mourn. Those who had some distance would indulge in the growing nationalist cant and calls for blood that would soon triumph over reason and sanity. Nationalism was a disease I knew intimately as a war correspondent. It is anti-thought. It is primarily about self-exaltation. The flip side of nationalism is always racism, the dehumanization of the enemy and all who appear to question the cause. The plague of nationalism began almost immediately. My son, who was 11, asked me what the difference was between cars flying small American flags and cars flying large American flags.

“The people with the really big flags are the really big assholes,” I told him. . .

We could have gone another route. We could have built on the profound sympathy and empathy that swept through the world following the attacks. . It was a moment we squandered. Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We became terrorists too. The sad legacy of 9/11 is that the assholes, on each side, won.

From our overstocked archives: Ann

Sam Smith

When 9/11 happened, one of the first people I thought of was Ann Jones. I was working out in my basement six blocks from the US Capitol, my wife was at her office five blocks from the White House and one of the captured planes was still on its way to Washington.

Ann was thousands of miles away, safely in London, but I still thought of her and asked myself: what would Ann do now?

Ann had been one of two English children who had come to live with our family in Washington during World War II. Ann returned to live with the family for five years after the war. She passed away in London today.

It hadn't been easy for a nine year old Ann to get to Georgetown in July of 1940. She wrote me 60 years later:

I set sail in the Duchess of Atholl in convoy. There was a slight skirmish with a submarine. I remember feeling the ship shudder as depth charges were dropped but we were unscathed and pressed on, though I remember seeing icebergs and wondering.

My mother told me we might well be sunk. If I was dragged underwater, not to struggle. I would come to the surface naturally, then not to strike out to England or America but float on my back, as I had learned at school, until I was picked up.

On August 30, 1940, the Volendam set off with a load of British children for America. It was sunk in the Irish sea. All were saved.

On September 17, the City of Benares sailed with many of the Volendam survivors. It sank in mid-Atlantic and most of the children perished.

No more British children were sent to America after that.

Ann was dry in wit, resolute in determination, stolid and unflappable in crisis. Decades later we were discussing a recently departed relative who had been on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group. What had happened, I asked, to Lucy Norton's ashes? "Well, I suppose they were thrown out with the rubbish." Ann paused and then added, "I think Lucy would rather have liked that."

Ann managed to blend pleasure with realism, treating them not as opponents but as natural colleagues of life, and helped this young boy learn how to face the bad times.

The man she would marry was quite a bit older and had been a new doctor during the London blitz, during which over 20,000 people died in seven months and a million of the city's homes were destroyed or damaged. Each day the doctors were given colored tags to attach to the feet of air raid victims. Each tag represented one bed and each color one hospital in London. When the tags were gone so were the beds.

I told this story in a talk I gave some years ago and added the following, which unconsciously incorporated some of what I had learned from Ann:

To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power are not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise.

But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities. To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list. "You don't have to change the world," the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. "Just keep the world from changing you."

Oddly, those who instinctively understand this best are often those who seem to have the least reason to do so, who somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle around them.

From our overstocked archives: Follow the limousines

Sam Smith - A thought occurred to me as I sat in my car the other day waiting for a presidential cavalcade to make its way noisily down a Washington street: perhaps we should insist on a bit less protection for our leaders based on the theory that if they felt more endangered they would have more sympathy for the rest of us. And their policies might improve.

After all, the justification behind the hyper security is that the lives of presidents and the like are simply too valuable to risk. The logic of this can be easily refuted by simply listening to one of their speeches. Sooner or later even the terrorists would realize that when it comes to George Bushes, we've got a million of them - and give up in frustration.

Before the Bush regime, I caught then Governor Tommy Thompson down on the Mall during the Folk Life Festival. He was surrounded by Wisconsinites, some of them drunk, some of them merely enthusiastic. I think I spotted the governor's security man but I wasn't certain. In any case no one - unlike much of downtown Washington on a typical day - looked afraid of anything.

Thompson had clearly not yet become accustomed to Washington ways where even the mayor of this city gets a security detail worthy of a small dictatorship fearing an imminent coup.

In the end, a lot of what passes for security is just a matter of culture. There are two basic ways of securing oneself against others: (1) not making them mad at you and (2) defending yourself when they are. What is so striking about our leaders is that they spend so little effort on the first option and so much on the second.

The problem with this is that you not only shield yourself from bullets but from the rest of life as well. And it's worth remembering that no one lives in a medieval castle for protection anymore. It turned out that they weren't as safe as the inhabitants thought.

From our overstocked archives: Towards a more perfect union

From an essay that appeared in a Tom Paine magazine ad on the op ed page of the New York Times on September 11, 2003

Sam Smith, 2003 - The wondrous mystery of America is found not in its perfection but in its ability to improve, its perpetual search for a more perfect union. The idea had been fading for some time, not just because we came to think of power as an adequate substitute, but because we came to ignore such mundane matters as teaching children democracy with the same vigor that we teach them how to drive or about the dangers of drugs. And so we tried to recover from 9/11 with a flag and loyalty to a place called America, but without its dream. We used instead military power, anti-democratic security measures, seductive technology, and yet another elephantine bureaucracy -- offering still more temptations for guerillas with simple weapons and no love of life.

The 9/11 attackers, and the tens of millions around the world who share some measure of their anger, have only seen our money and our fist -- not the decency, democracy, and dream that made America strong in the first place. These virtues are still lying in the rubble of the past year. Our job is to recover them, revive them, share them, and become once more a model rather than a target. Only then will we be both safe and free.

9/11 was part of a war that had already begun

From a high instructive timeline leading up to 9/11 by Joyce Battle of the National Security Archives

Around May 1991 -- George H.W. Bush signs a top secret directive authorizing a CIA covert operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein, using any means necessary including lethal force. The agency concludes at the outset that there is no chance of success since it has no reliable assets in Iraq.

Around May 11, 1991 -- The CIA hires the Rendon Group for propaganda operations against Iraq. Rendon assembles anti-government Iraqis under the rubric Iraqi National Congress, and helps install Ahmad Chalabi, recently convicted in Jordan for fraud and embezzlement, as INC chief.11 February 1992 – Defense Department policy under secretary Paul Wolfowitz has his deputy Zalmay Khalilzad secretly draft a paper, “Defense Planning Guidance“, outlining military planning for the next century. It calls for the Pentagon to “establish and protect a new order” to deter any possible rivals from even trying to compete with a hegemonic U.S. and contemplates preemptive use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, “even in conflicts that do not directly engage U.S. interests.” The draft is leaked to the New York Times and causes the Bush administration major embarrassment.

October 1997 -- The International Atomic Energy Agency issues a definitive report declaring Iraq to be free of nuclear weapons; its main author later says it was "highly unlikely" that Iraq could conceal a nuclear weapons program from modern detection systems. [Doc. 1]27 November 12, 1997 – David Wurmser

February 19, 1998 – The Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf publishes an open letter to Clinton, signed by Stephen Solarz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, Richard Armitage, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Bernard Lewis declaring that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and no intention of giving them up and that the U.S. must use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein.31 Spring 1998 -- In a letter to the editor

October 31, 1998 – Under pressure from neoconservatives and Congress, and over 5 the objections of skeptics in his administration, Clinton signs the Iraq Liberation Act, based on elements in the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf’s February 19, 1998 open letter. Among other things it calls for prepositioning equipment for possible use by U.S. ground forces in the region. It establishes regime change as official government policy and provides for assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including the INC, encompassing funding for propaganda activities and for training paramilitary forces, as envisioned by the Chalabi/Downing plan. It does not authorize use of U.S. military force.36

January 30, 2001 – Bush administration principals (agency heads) meet for the first time and discuss the Middle East, including Bush’s intention to disengage from the Israel-Palestine peace process and “How Iraq is destabilizing the region.” Bush directs Rumsfeld and JCS chairman Hugh Shelton to examine military options for Iraq; CIA director George Tenet is directed to improve intelligence on the country. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke are both struck by the emphasis on confronting Iraq, an aim consistent with Rumsfeld’s hiring of Wolfowitz and later Feith, well known for their bellicosity on the issue, for high-level Pentagon positions.44 February 1, 2001 – The NSC

February 1, 2001 – The NSC principals meet to discuss Iraq including its economy, a “Post-Saddam Iraq,” and Defense and CIA plans for “possible regime change, war crimes initiatives, dealing with the Kurds, coalition military posture and redlines.” Rumsfeld cuts 6 Secretary of State Colin Powell off when he tries to discuss a new sanctions strategy. To Paul O’Neill it appears that Iraq is seen as “useful as a demonstration model of America’s new, unilateral resolve” – overthrowing Saddam Hussein would “dissuade” other actors from trying to stand up to U.S. power. Wolfowitz lobbies for arming the Iraqi opposition and for giving it direct U.S. military support.45

February 16, 2001 -- The U.S. and the U.K. bomb anti-aircraft facilities near Baghdad without informing Congress in advance. An observer tells McClatchy that the administration is making “it clear that they are going to do something to get rid of Saddam Hussein”; Bush meanwhile has told speechwriter David Frum that he is determined to oust Saddam from power.48

June 5, 2001 -- During his nomination hearing to be Defense Department policy under secretary, Douglas Feith says that the U.S. “has a strong interest … in facilitating as best we can the liberation of Iraq.” Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA.) says “with no particular strategy for winning and no particular exit strategy, your answer disturbs me greatly,” noting he is speaking as a Vietnam veteran.61 June 22, 2001 -- The deputies meet to

Word

[With the dissolution of the Soviet empire] they were looking for a new explanation in the form of a new common enemy and so they invented one which we're going to hear a great deal about in the future and that is Islamic fundamentalism which they say is the giant wave that is threatening the west- Former Deputy Secretary of State George Ball, 1993, on CSPAN

Why has the media totally censored this issue?

PEW POLL AS REPORTED BYU GLENN GREENWALD

Auto workers about to be screwed again; new workers paid at 1931 level

Jerry White, World Socialist - On September 14 the four-year labor agreements covering 114,000 US auto workers at GM, Ford and Chrysler expire. Although the companies have raked in more than $7 billion in profits this year, they have made it clear that workers¬who have not had a raise since 2003¬will see no improvements in wages or working conditions.

On the contrary, with the full backing of the Obama administration and the United Auto Workers (UAW), the auto executives are pressing ahead with plans to drive out the remaining better-paid workers and create a low-paid, casualized workforce.

If this is to be stopped, workers must find a new road of struggle, independent of the UAW. They must begin with the realization that workers face a political struggle against the Obama administration’s cuts, which are supported by the UAW.

The Obama administration’s 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler was the culmination of a three-decade-long assault on auto workers. With the complicity of the UAW, the White House used the threat of liquidation to slash wages in half for new hires, dump hundreds of thousands of retirees and their families into an underfunded health insurance scheme run by the UAW, and eliminate annual wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments and unemployment protections.

The rollback has been used by corporate America to launch a wage-cutting campaign against every section of the working class. This has fueled an explosion of profits, even as mass unemployment continues and the economy slides into a deeper recession.

Once the highest paid industrial workers in the US, a newly hired UAW worker now earns a “tier two” wage of $14 an hour. This is the equivalent, once inflation and union dues are taken into account, to the 92 cents an hour their counter-parts made in 1931¬four years before the UAW was established. As for “tier one” workers, they have seen their wages’ purchasing power fall to the level of nearly a half-century ago.

Inside the factories workers face 10-12 hour days, speed-up on the assembly line, shorter breaks and vacation time and the constant threat of job loss. Laid-off workers are forced to uproot their families and move hundreds of miles to take work at other plants. The UAW has also given up the right to strike at GM and Chrysler and agreed to binding arbitration, essentially stripping workers of any vote on the final contract.

Note: Your editor is a member of the National Writers Union, a local of the UAW

Study: Shutting down internet makes revolutions more effective

Slashdot - In a widely circulated American Political Science Association conference paper, Yale scholar Navid Hassanpour argues that shutting down the internet made things difficult for sustaining a centralized revolutionary movement in Egypt. But, he adds, the shutdown actually encouraged the development of smaller revolutionary uprisings at local levels where the face-to-face interaction between activists was more intense and the mobilization of inactive lukewarm dissidents was easier. In other words, closing down the internet made the revolution more diffuse and more difficult for the authorities to contain.

Department of good things

An interview with one of America's leading activists, David Swanson

Internet sightings

Obama-appointed Drug Czar blames medicinal marijuana for encouraging kids to smoke pot. Yes people, it must have all started when we watched Grandma do it when she was getting chemotherapy - Fark

Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don't have a clue what it's actually about.

Football season is coming

Fox News explains how to handle the Postal Service fiscal crisis

Obamameter

Overall: 23%
24% in second two years

Things real Christians don't do

Kill 234 people in the name of retribution as Rick Perry has done.

Stupid city councilmember tricks

Dennis Zine of LA City Council has proposed checking IDs, and keeping tabs on the info, for purchases of various art supplies that are considered "graffiti paraphernalia."

Obama’s foreclosure plan far from enough

Iwatchnews - It was almost a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in President Barack Obama’s jobs speech, but for about 20 seconds¬after he urged Congress to pass his $447 billion economic stimulus bill¬he offered a quick sketch of a plan to aid struggling homeowners.

“To help responsible homeowners we are gonna work with federal housing agencies to help more people refinance their mortgages at interest rates that are now near 4 percent,” the president said Thursday evening. “I know you guys must be for this, because that’s a step that can put more than $2,000 a year in a family’s pocket and give a lift to an economy still burdened by the drop in housing prices.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mark Seifert, a Cleveland-based housing activist, told iWatch News after the speech. “This is all he said?”

Consumer advocates and lawyers representing homeowners in foreclosure say it’s difficult to judge the plan without more details, but that reducing interest rates on some mortgages won’t be enough to stem a flood of foreclosures that shows little sign of abating. They say the administration needs to require banks to reduce the debt load for struggling homeowners, especially those who are underwater¬owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Teaching music in the era of rock

Is our view of jobs out of date?

David Rushkoff, CNN - I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks -- or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that's even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriving under this arrangement.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a "job."

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can't capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility -- something we couldn't really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

For the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends.

The President’s job speech: the good, bad and uncertain

Sam Smith: My first reaction to Obama’s job speech was: it’s nice he has finally discovered what the Democratic Party used to stand for. How much the rest of the current party will go along remains to be seen.

But it was definitely a different speech, one of the more remarkable shifts in presidential tone and substance that I’ve ever seen. And he never used the word “infrastructure” once, a word the Progressive Review has been on a lonely campaign to remove from the dictionary.

Now if Obama could only learn to look at his audience instead of his teleprompters.

Beyond the impetus of the unforgiving economic crisis, my hunch the speech reflects in part the replacement of that product of the economically reactionary culture of the University of Chicago, Austan Goolsbee (about whom I warned during the 2008 campaign), with a new chief advisor Al Kreuger, no progressive but certainly a political improvement. Even the Economic Policy institute’s president, Larry Mishel, praised his appointment.

This doesn’t mean Obama's plan is the answer to all our problems by a long shot. Here are some of the good and bad specifics:

- Says the Atlantic Wire: “Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics expects the plan to increase economic growth by 2 percentage points, drop unemployment by 1 percent by next year and add 2 million jobs.”

- Now here’s the bad news. This is what a one percent drop in unemployment (to 8%) would look like. Still a long way to go.

- Worse, reports Atlantic Wire: “On the other side of the argument, Nigel Gault, the chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight, said the Obama package won't be able to beat down unemployment. ‘The kick to growth is going to be pretty small. It will add substantially less than 1% to GDP growth in 2012,’ he tells CNN Money. Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, adds ‘If we’re talking about whether the package is big enough to … start making a dent, it’s probably going to fall short of that goal.’

- We incorrectly said some days ago that the Social Security payroll tax suspension would hurt Social Security. Under the present plan, Social Security is reimbursed out of general revenues for any loss. Whether that is also true under Obama’s proposed extension is not clear yet, but is probably the case.

- Good things although not economic heavies: tax credit for hiring vets, preventing up to 280,000 teacher layoffs, modernizing at least 35,000 public schools, expanding access to high-speed wireless as part of a plan for freeing up the nation’s spectrum, giving states greater flexibility to use unemployment funds including for work sharing plans, a $4,000 tax credit to employers for hiring long-term unemployed workers, prohibiting employers from discriminating against unemployed workers when hiring, Allowing more to refinance their mortgages at today’s near 4 percent interest rates.

- Bad things although details not clear yet: cutting Medicare and Medicaid while calling it reform. Also, notes, Matthew Rothschild at the Progressive, “He failed to propose a federal jobs program. . . He failed to call on the banks to halt foreclosures for a year. . . “Obama also urged Congress to pass free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea, claiming they would help bring jobs here. But NAFTA and other free trade agreements have drained jobs from America and mostly helped U.S. multinationals.”

- There’s also some funny money.As Robert Reich notes: “$450 billion sounds like a lot -- and is more than I expected -- but some of this merely extends current spending (unemployment benefits) and tax cuts (in Social Security taxes. . . The net new boost to the economy is closer to $300 billion. That doesn't approach even half the gap between what the economy is now producing and what it could produce at or near full employment.”

“And much that $300 billion is in the form of temporary tax cuts to individuals and companies. . . Temporary tax cuts haven't proven to be particularly effective in stimulating new spending in times of economic stress. People tend to use them to pay off debts or increase savings. Companies use them to reduce costs, but they won't make additional hires unless they expect additional sales -- which won't occur unless consumers increase their spending. That leaves some $140 billion for infrastructure . . Good and important but still small relative to the overall need.”

- Reich on why cozying up to the GOP doesn’t work: “Why did the president include so many tax cuts, and why didn't he make his proposal sufficiently large to make a real impact on jobs and growth? Because he crafted it in order to appeal to Republicans. To get it enacted, he needs their votes.

"I'm having a dizzying sense of déjà vu. The first $800 billion stimulus (spread over two years) wasn't nearly large enough given the drop in aggregate demand. And half of it was in the form of tax cuts. The reason it wasn't bigger and contained so many tax cuts was to get Republican votes. But its apparent ineffectiveness -- it saved around 3 million jobs, but that didn't save it from appearing to fail -- made it harder for the White House to do anything more to stimulate the economy, and ward off what's likely to be a double dip.

"That's been the heart of Obama's dilemma. Big and bold enough to make a difference, and Republicans are certain to reject it. Small and focused on tax cuts, and maybe Republicans will bite."

- Since he didn't specify his plans,let's hold off on the tax side for now

Pot use up 20% since 2007, one in five your Americans should be in prison according to the disastrously failed war on drugs

Web MD - The use of illicit drugs and the nonmedical use of prescription medications is increasing, and this is largely driven by an increased rate of marijuana use, a survey shows.

The survey on drug use was released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

About 22.6 million Americans aged 12 and older used illicit drugs in 2010. That's nearly 8.9% of the U.S. population.

These rates are similar to those seen in 2009 (8.7%), but higher than in 2008 (8%). In 2010, 17.4 million Americans used marijuana, up from 14.4 million in 2007.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which included about 67,500 people in the U.S. aged 12 and up:

More young adults aged 18 to 25 are using illicit drugs, up from 19.6% in 2008 to 21.5% in 2010. Rates of nonmedical use of prescription drugs, hallucinogens, and inhalants are around the same as in 2009.

The number of current methamphetamine users decreased by roughly half from 2006 to 2010. Cocaine use also declined, from 2.4 million current users in 2006 to 1.5 million in 2010. Fewer 12- to 17-year-olds drank alcohol and used tobacco.

Recovered history: The real Kennedys

Sam Smith

Over the years, I have restrained myself from writing what I really thought about Jackie Kennedy. Now with the release of an interview made shortly after her husband’s death, we know that she considered Martin Luther King “terrible,” so I feel that I can now admit that I thought of her as a pretentious, narcissistic caricature of whom she wanted desperately to be, namely the queen we thankfully never had. When the assassination of her husband brought that dream to the end, she married again, this time for the money.

Writes the NY Daily News, “Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy described King as ;phony’ and ‘tricky’ . . . Kennedy, in one of seven Q&A sessions with former JFK aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., said King had mocked her slain husband's funeral Mass and its celebrant, Cardinal Richard Cushing. ‘He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said he was drunk at it,’ Kennedy recounted. ‘I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, 'That man's terrible.'"

King was far from perfect but there is no choice between Jackie Kennedy and the civil rights leaders. Further, it’s worth remembering that her husband tried to stop the protest that included what would turn out to be one of the greatest speeches in American history, delivered by King.

More revelations on the Kennedys have been reported by Rick Klein of ABC News: “President John F. Kennedy was so ‘worried for the country’ about the prospect that Vice President Lyndon Johnson might succeed him as president that he'd begun having private conversations about who should become the Democratic Party's standard-bearer in 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy recalled in a series of oral-history interviews recorded in early 1964.

“’Bobby told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?’ she said.

“The president gave no serious consideration to dropping Johnson from the ticket in 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy recalled. But he did have some talks about how to avoid having Johnson run for president in 1968, at the end of what would have been Kennedy's second term, she said.”

History would show that while Kennedy’s administration was largely devoid of significant achievement (excepting postponing our Nixon years), LBJ’s was in league with the New Deal as the most positively productive administrations in our history.

One reason this is not generally understood is because with Kennedy we learned to regard the presidency as a form of show business rather than politics. Television had introduced us to the idea that how one looked and talked was more important than what one did. It is a major reason why Rick Perry is leading the GOP pack at the moment.

LBJ, on the other hand, was a classic political scoundrel, unjustifiable in personality, integrity or style, but amazing in getting things done.

This conflict was far too complicated for the new television age of politics, so we just settled in to choosing our future based on style rather than on achievement.

And it was the Kennedys who introduced us to this curse.

Idea mill: Bees provide jobs for ex-convicts

Governing - In May, Chicago's departments of Aviation and Family Support Services partnered with a nonprofit and a skincare manufacturer to open the nation's first apiary (otherwise known as a beehive farm) at an airport, reports the Daily Herald. The farm, located on the east side of O'Hare International Airport, houses 1.5 million bees in 23 hives. It's staffed by "carefully screened" former convicts who want to re-join the workforce but have had trouble doing so. The honey produced will be used to create a variety of personal care products that the Department of Aviation is hoping to sell in airport kiosks soon. The project also helps to replenish the bee population, which has been in decline for a decade and are vital for pollinating one-third of the world's food. In addition, the hives and surrounding grassland keep birds away from the nearby runways, keeping them clear for airplanes.

Great achievements of Rick Perry

From Freak Out Nation:

• Texas Ranks #1 in population living below the poverty line ( 17.2 % ).
• Worst environmental record in the United States
• Ranks #1 in illiteracy
• Ranks # 1 on the poorest gun regulations in the US and highest per capita gun murder rates in the US
• Ranks #1 with the highest real estate taxes per $1,000 value of a home in the United States
• Ranks #1 in the lowest high school graduation rate
• Ranks #1 with the highest interest rates “pay day” companies can charge
• Ranks # 1 in those making below minimum wage
• Ranks 50th ( dead last ) in Teacher Pay
• Ranks # 1 (26.5%) who lack health insurance
• Ranks # 1 (20.3%) of children who lack health insurance
• Ranks # 1 in the highest per capita executions in the world
• Ranks # 50th in $ spent for Medicaid for the poor and children
• Ranks 50th ( dead last ) in $ spent on its citizens
• Ranks # 1 in the # of food insecure children.
• Ranks 49th ( the 2nd lowest ) in Medicaid $ given to nursing homes
• Ranks 2nd highest in teen births
• Ranks #2 with the highest home insurance rates
• Ranks #2 with the highest sales tax
• Ranks 49th in $ funded for the mentally ill
• Ranks #1 with the highest overall pollution rate
• Ranks #1 in adults under correctional control
• Ranks #1 in adults under probation

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