big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
There’s something rabid on the right wing. Their snarling is more important than sense.
Reuters
Guantanamo “quite simply a mess”.Most of the prisoners convicted of terrorism crimes in the Guantanamo tribunals are free men while most of the captives cleared for release are still imprisoned.
The only way to live in the world of ordinary human poverty is to live there in a world where your pocket isn’t picked constantly, where you aren’t the victim of endless resource conflicts, where your government doesn’t sell your future out. And the only way to be a nation of reasonably self-sufficient, ordinarily poor people living decently is this – to remember that the reason we use the word “ordinary” here is that there are a lot more of us peasants than there are of the powerful. The truth is that repressive governments, or even well intentioned but stupid and misguided governments are scary – but they never have enough troops, enough power to stand up against the unified dignity of those who are simply ordinary, and simply want enough. But that requires that we trust each other, that we work together, that we create the institutions of ordinary poverty…
Is it the artist who has amassed a small fortune based on “appropriation” yet still sends cease and desist letters to other artists for appropriating his work?
Or is it the largest (and only) US based nationally-oriented news service which fails to recognize “fair use” even when it literally stares them in the face?
Evan Roth created hand painted canvases of Shepard Fairy’s Obama Hope poster, and Mannie Garcia’s Associated Press photograph.
Be a part of social and legal history! Evan’s works are for sale on his website here and here.
For those unfamiliar with the Shepard Fairy / Associated Press intellectual property battle over the Obama Hope poster, here is a good place to start. Techdirt ran a post as well; always good for comments.)
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva spent a day meeting with Chinese leaders in Beijing, during which analysts said he could broach a plan to ditch the US dollar in his nation’s trade with China.
He said, “In just 35 years of diplomatic relations, Brazil and China have more to celebrate than countries that have had relations for more than 100 years. It’s absurd if two important trading nations such as ours continue to carry out our commerce in the currency of a third nation.”
Beijing replies, “Everybody has realised… that the currency and debt crises in many countries and the global economic crisis are linked to the dollar standard.”
Yes. Worry.
Eighty-one percent of the Los Angeles Central Business District is a parking space.
Each surface and building space costs a minimum $50,000.
San Francisco parking coverage rate is 31 percent and New York is 18 percent.
We neglect to manage the impact of parking lots. The urban heat island effect raises costs for all of us. Runoff from impermeable surfaces is destroying our waterways and wildlife.
Landscape architect Veenu Jayaram at Land+Living says there are many things we can do.
Yes. You can write an entire book about fake orange juice in our supermarkets.
Most juice oranges are from Brazil, the world’s top user of pesticides.
Brazil orange trees account for 6.5 percent of all pesticide use, but they account for the largest pesticide use per hectare of any agricultural crop.
Carbofuran and Methidathion and Fenthion and Diazinon and Dimethoate and Imazalil: carcinogens and gender-benders for breakfast?
Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy tells us that while orange juice “has come to symbolize purity in a glass” it may actually be quite processed and doctored up by the time it greets you at your breakfast table.
Want a job? Get a license.
Would it surprise you to know that 29 percent of the U.S. workforce has a job requiring a license, up from 5 percent in the 1950s?
Would it further surprise you to know that the economic consensus is that licensing raises prices, restricts job opportunities from the less privileged, and offers little or no quality improvement in service rendered?
And would it surprise you to know, lastly, that the ivory tower has essentially turned a blind eye to this research?
Find it here, with this abstract:
The ‘shadow banking system’ at the heart of the current credit crisis is, in fact, a real banking system – and is vulnerable to a banking panic. Indeed, the events starting in August 2007 are a banking panic. A banking panic is a systemic event because the banking system cannot honor its obligations and is insolvent. Unlike the historical banking panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the current banking panic is a wholesale panic, not a retail panic. In the earlier episodes, depositors ran to their banks and demanded cash in exchange for their checking accounts. Unable to meet those demands, the banking system became insolvent. The current panic involved financial firms ‘running’ on other financial firms by not renewing sale and repurchase agreements (repo) or increasing the repo margin (‘haircut’), forcing massive deleveraging, and resulting in the banking system being insolvent. The earlier episodes have many features in common with the current crisis, and examination of history can help understand the current situation and guide thoughts about reform of bank regulation. New regulation can facilitate the functioning of the shadow banking system, making it less vulnerable to panic.
Addendum: Arnold Kling summarizes some of the recommendations:
1. Senior tranches of securitizations of approved asset classes should be insured by the government.
2. The government must supervise and examine “banks,” i.e., securitizations, rather than rely on ratings agencies. That is, the choices of asset class, portfolio, and tranching must be overseen be examiners.
3. Entry into securitization should be limited, and any firm that enters is deemed a “bank” and subject to supervision.
As soon as I found the secret, I put in a 1/4 acre.
Robbery factors in our health sector:
The group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is spending more than a million dollars for attack ads this month.
The ads feature the chairman of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, Rick Scott. Who’s he? “He hopes people don’t Google his name.”
Scott’s not a doctor; he just acts like one on TV.
He’s an entrepreneur who took two hospitals in Texas and built them into the largest health care chain in the world, Columbia/HCA. In 1997, he was fired by the board of directors after Columbia/HCA was caught in a scheme that ripped off the Feds and state governments for hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus Medicare and Medicaid payments, the largest such fraud in history. The company had to cough up $1.7 billion dollars to get out of the mess.
Rick Scott got off, you should excuse the expression, scot-free. Better than, in fact. According to published reports, he waltzed away with a $10 million severance deal and $300 million worth of stock. So much for voluntarily lowering overhead.
With medical costs rising six percent per year, that’s who’s offering himself as a spokesman for the health care industry.
Too much is outright wrong:
Bloomberg
Americans paid $6,719 a person for doctors, medicines and hospital visits in 2006, up from $4,570 in 2000 – more than nine times the global average.
With a life expectancy of 78 for a person born in 2007, the U.S. trails at least 27 other countries among 193 in the report.
Boston, MA — A new study from Harvard School of Public Health found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles, the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles, showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA).
Exposure to BPA, used in the manufacture of polycarbonate and other plastics, has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans.
Proper muckraking at Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel discovers the FDA relied on two studies – both paid for by BPA chemical makers – to declare BPA to be safe. At the same time, the FDA improperly discounted dozens of studies that showed the chemical caused harm.
Chemical trade association lobbyists routinely have met with FDA administrators over the past nine years to give their opinion on various independent studies on the effects of BPA.
In fact, the American Chemistry Council wrote entire sections of the ruling for the FDA, showing capture, a pattern of preferential treatment.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. – John Kenneth Galbraith
Economic Populist shares a rant:
Yes, it is possible to destroy a nation in just eight years. Less, actually.
By 2006 the US economy was finally broken beyond all repair and, for the first time since 1913, the Federal Reserved stopped telling the world how much money they were printing. Then Bush and Greenspan proceeded to rip all wealth out of the hands of the middle class through interest rate manipulation and easy schemes of mortgage equity withdrawal, which fueled consumer spending and hid the robbery of our national treasures.
The most depraved economic position the US took, however, was to allow the real estate asset class to collapse in value, dragging down with it all other US asset classes, which decimated pension funds. This, in turn, bankrupted the banks and brokerage houses, who were trading globally and misrepresenting themselves as regulated, when they were not.
…
The reality, however, is that there is nothing that Obama can do to change the trajectory of the nation toward economic collapse — beyond what he is doing.
Most importantly, he is keeping all of us afloat during a time when the nation has staggering obligations, a thin trickle of revenue, and no liquid assets or reserves whatsoever. At the same time, he did not see this economic crisis coming, and thus he made promises to the people which are difficult to achieve, even in the best of times.
| Part I — The People Who Lost their Country Part II — Is the Nation’s Fate Your Destiny? Part III — Putting the Individual Ahead of the Nation |
I will never hide the truth because it is uncomfortable. I will deal with Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government. I will tell the American people what I know and don’t know, and when I release something publicly or keep something secret, I will tell you why.
Two pictures with the exact same face. In one photo you see a girl and the other a boy??
Since the 1960s Russia has been draining the Aral Sea, the fourth largest inland body of water. NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted satellite photos. Montage by EcoGeek.
Dave McCurdy, president and CEO, Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, on reducing carbon emissions and increasing fuel economy.
For seven long years, there has been a debate over whether states or the federal government should regulate autos. President Obama’s announcement ends that old debate by starting a federal rulemaking to set a National Program.
What’s significant about the announcement is it launches a new beginning, an era of cooperation.
The President has succeeded in bringing three regulatory bodies, 15 states, a dozen automakers and many environmental groups to the table. We’re all agreeing to work together on a National Program. [USNewswire]
Donald Rumsfeld refused to deploy troops until almost a week after Katrina.
After the president had returned to the White House, he eventually convened a meeting in the Situation Room to discuss the government’s response.
Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”
Trusting throughout my youth that my society was, well, a society, I saw corruption and crime, but near me was civility and cooperation. Could I have imagined doctors taking 15% of our payroll every month?
Reuters:
Healthcare costs, both payroll deductions and out-of-pocket medical expenses, now eat up 14 percent of the average household income of about $50,000 for these people.Costs grew by an average of $1,162 per family this year from an average of $15,609 last year.
Cost-control measures include efforts to reduce medical procedures.
Yes. Reduce medical procedures. Effort. That’s it.
In the summer, air conditioning and refrigeration account for half the USA’s energy use.
Oh, don’t forget that before it makes a chill, 60-70% of fossil electricity is lost in transportation.
:-0 How many eco-autos can make up for this heavy demand for summer energy?
The rise in obesity since the 1970s – weight gain in the American population – seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. Changes in physical activity plays a minimal role.
Most doctor’s receive little education specifically for pain. Specialists are important and often view pain very differently.
Low-back pain is the fifth most common reason for doctor’s visits and accounts for more than $26 billion in direct health care costs.
The American Pain Society found that evidence for the use of many low back pain interventions was mixed, sparse or not available.
The APS new statement of guidelines:
In otherwords, there’s too few proven fixes, too few experts and none should be solely relied upon.
Journalists at GQ are offering a scoop.
AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly.
But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty.
By Robert Draper
DO see the scans of the documents in GQ’s slideshow.
Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House.
“People devastated by poverty are not deficient, less than or subhuman. They are not broken; however, the system in which they are embroiled very well may be.”
Kay Ann Taylor at Kansas State University:
Far too many schools continue to endorse a curriculum of the absurd that encompasses ‘heroification’ of primarily white males, while the contributions of women and people of color appear in pop-out format in textbooks.
The No Child Left Behind Act also continues to be a problem, except for students who attend private schools, which are exempt from the act.
The No Child Left Behind Act’s scripted curriculum, relentless testing and oppressive mandates create a robotic-like setting for mindless regurgitation of irrelevant and contextually void facts that challenge our most creative, dedicated and culturally responsive teachers and run the remainder out of teaching all together.
But the truth is that we can fix Social Security for literally pennies a day per worker and don’t need to pay attention to hysterical Henny Penny’s.
Social Security is mostly not broken and the part that kinda is (Disability) is fixable. And we have (or will shortly) numbers to prove it.
Economic Populist says:
Bruce Webb is a social security watchdog and is promoting two plans to fix social security for pennies on the dollar.
He deserves a read for social security is continually under attack by privatization parties who want to turn yet another social safety net into some sort of gambling casino.