MP3 File
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
28 August 2010
Movies on the Grass 2010
MP3 File
07 April 2010
Clippings for 8 April 2010
Recommended Audio: 43rd Anniversary of Martin Luther King's 'Beyond Vietnam' Speech
On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War. King's sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon Johnson, who was an ally of King's in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.
Silence Is Betrayal
Stephen Rohde, Los Angeles Daily Journal (via Truthout): "On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered a historic speech at Riverside Church in New York City, which has become known as Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In a powerful and inspiring speech, Dr. King declared that his deep religious faith would no longer allow him to confine himself to the domestic struggle for civil rights."
Amidst National Political Transformation, The UNITED STATES SOCIAL FORUM Brings New Hope for Change
US Social Forum writes: "Thousands will gather in Detroit from June 22-26, 2010, to help transform one of the cities hardest hit by the global economic and environmental crisis. And by doing so, they also hope to strengthen a growing global movement for change. The second United States Social Forum (USSF) will attract organizers, activists, artists and others to build housing and mobile computer labs, create urban gardens, and take actions to generate dramatic change by and for local residents. The USSF will also be a national stage on which Americans and global citizens will strategize to produce sustainable social reforms in education, transportation, employment, immigration and environmental issues."
Greenspan, Summers, and Why the Economy Is So Out of Whack
Robert Reich, RobertReich.org: "I'm in the 'green room' at ABC News, waiting to join a roundtable panel discussion on ABC's weekly Sunday news program, This Week. Alan Greenspan is now being interviewed. He says he bore no responsibility for the housing bubble that catapulted the nation into a financial crisis in 2008 because no one could have known about the bubble when he chaired the Fed in the years before it burst. Larry Summers was interviewed just before Greenspan."
To see other videos in this series, click here.
Who Killed the Miners? Profits over Safety?
Jeff Biggers writes for Common Dreams: "My grandfather, who barely survived an explosion in a coal mine in southern Illinois, taught me this phrase. He also taught me about the 150-year-old battle in the coalfields over reckless production at the cost of responsible safety measures. As our prayers and condolences go out to the many coal mining families in Raleigh County, West Virginia, I think about the needless safety violations and subsequent disasters that have taken place over the past century."
Reaching Zero
Jonathan Schell writes for The Nation: "What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular, has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of something like despair regarding their art. For example, Bernard Brodie, one of the originators of nuclear strategy in the 1940s, was forced near the end of his life to realize that "nuclear strategy itself--the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate--was something of an illusion," according to historian Fred Kaplan. In the introduction to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman airs the suspicion that the phrase "nuclear strategy" may be a "contradiction in terms." Henry Kissinger, a leading figure in nuclear strategizing for a half-century, has expressed a similar feeling of futility. In a remarkable reconsideration, amounting to an oblique recantation of his past thinking, he has written recently in Newsweek..."
McChrystal’s Employment of Military Deception
Jim White writes for Firedoglake: "By now, since the New York Times is grudgingly going along with Jerome Starkey’s blockbuster reporting on US Special Operations Forces murdering pregnant Afghan women and manipulating the evidence in an attempt to hide their crimes, it should be painfully obvious to even the most disinterested observer that US forces, and especially US Special Forces, engaged in deception on this case. What I want to point out in this post is that the deception employed here is not a rare, unexpected development, but is instead a designed feature of how our Joint Special Operations Command forces operate under the command of General Stanley McChrystal. Although McChrystal is no longer head of JSOC after assuming command of all forces in Afghanistan, I consider JSOC still to be under his control since his hand-picked aide, William McRaven, is now in command."
Wikileaks Releases Video Depicting US Forces Killing of Two Reuters Journalists in Iraq
Dan Murphy reports for The Christian Science Monitor: "A video released on the Internet Monday by WikiLeaks, a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from the US and other governments, appears to show the killing of two Iraqi journalists with Reuters and about nine other Iraqis in a Baghdad suburb in 2007 that is sharply at odds of the official US account of the incident."
Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory
David Kushner writes for Mother Jones: "The clock struck 3 a.m. Julian Assange slept soundly inside a guarded private compound in Nairobi, Kenya. Suddenly, six men with guns emerged from the darkness. A day earlier, they had disabled the alarm system on the electric fence and buried weapons by the pool. Catching a guard by surprise, they commanded him to hit the ground. He obliged, momentarily, then jumped up and began shouting. As the rest of the compound's security team rushed outside, the intruders fled into the night." Photo: — WikiLeaks, Wikimedia Commons
How the CIA Avoided Negligent Homicide Charges in the Salt Pit Killing
Emptywheel writes on the Firedoglake blog: "Since the AP story on the Salt Pit death, reporters have focused a lot of attention to a particular footnote in Jay Bybee’s second response to the OPR Report and what it claims about intent (and, to a lesser degree, what it says about Jay Bybee’s fitness to remain on the 9th Circuit). In it, Jay Bybee references a memo CIA’s Counterterrorism Center wrote in response to Gul Rahman’s death at the Salt Pit; the memo argued that the CIA officer in charge should not be prosecuted under the torture statute because he did not have the specific intent to make Rahman suffer severe pain when he doused him with water and left him exposed in freezing temperatures."
Hushed Money: Could Karl Rove's new 527 avoid campaign-finance disclosure requirements?
Richard L. Hasen writes for Slate: "If you thought things have gotten bad with campaign financing since the Supreme Court turned on the corporate money spigot in the Citizens United case, you ain't seen nothing yet. Opponents of reasonable regulation have a new target: trying to keep the flow of campaign money secret. We may soon be going retro, back to the pre-Watergate era of secret campaign cash."
Post-Hutaree: How Glenn Beck and Fox News Spread the Militia Message
Eric Boehlert writes for Media Matters for AMerica: "Reading last week's disturbing news accounts about the Midwestern arrest of nine alleged members of a Christian militia known as the Hutaree, a group whose members were reportedly planning to kill cops in order to spark a wider, armed revolt against the U.S. government, I noticed this nugget[emphasis added]:
Not in Our Town: Communities Use Media to Combat Hate
Roy O'Connor writes for the MediaChannel.org: "Are you tired of the relentlessly battering beat of bad news delivered daily by our media? Did you ever wonder if that same media could be used instead for good? If so, here’s a story that will lift your spirit and might also encourage you to get involved and help make change… because when it comes to combating hate speech and acts of intolerance, it’s bad-news-good-news-time for a change!"
The Market Colonization of Intellectuals
Lewis R. Gordon comments for Truthout: "In many forums over the past decade, public intellectuals seem unable to talk about pressing social issues without performing the equivalent of an academic literature review. Although reasons range from trying to inform their audiences of relevant debates to efforts to demonstrate erudition, that many public intellectuals present their work as the basis for rewards in academe and the entertainment industry suggests influences tantamount to the colonization of intellectuals by the ever-expanding market."
A Society Consumed by Locusts: Youth in the Age of Moral and Political Plagues
Henry A. Giroux comments for Truthout: "As the recent health care debate has made clear, the decades-long conservative campaign against the alleged abuses of 'big government' is far from over. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan insisted that government was the problem not the solution, he unleashed what was to become a neoliberal juggernaut against both the welfare state and the concept of the public good."
The Death of Public Education
Derrick Z. Jackson writes for the Boston Globe: "THE NEWS says we are watching the death of public education before our eyes. Detroit is closing more than 40 schools, Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings. Other cities have been closing schools over the last decade. Boston avoided closings in its most recent budget deliberations, but still must slash custodial staff and postpone building repairs."
"Broadcast Blues" to Screen in Manhattan
Christopher E. Renner writes for the Kansas Free Press: "The Monthly Film Series takes on the issue of media consolidation next Tuesday, 13 April, when it screens Sue Wilson's Broadcast Blues - The Movie the Media Does Not Want You to See beginning at 6:30 pm in the Manhattan Public Library Auditorium. The public is welcomed to attend. Broadcast Blues laments the erosion of the contrasting-views concept in the wake of deregulation following the 1996 Telecommunications Act but also chronicles the consolidation of US media in the hands of five conglomerates over the last three decades."
The Top Ten Works of Journalism for the Decade, 2000 - 2009
The faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, has selected "The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States." We began with a list of eighty nominees. Our purpose was to call attention to and honor work of exceptional importance and quality - journalism that brilliantly met the challenges of this difficult decade.
Ten Things You Can Do to Help Progressive Journalism
ZP Heller writes for The Nation: "What's wrong with this picture? Air America vanishes into the ether, while Glenn Beck indoctrinates 2.7 million daily viewers with his histrionic brand of right-wing lunacy. Independent news agencies must continuously solicit donations from readers to stay afloat, while hate-filled shock jock Rush Limbaugh makes $50 million a year."
Court Decision Endangers FCC's Ability to Protect Net Neutrality and Implement National Broadband Plan
S. Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, made the following statement in response to the DC Circuit's opinion in Comcast v. FCC:
Right-Wing Delusion: Net Neutrality Is Government Plot to Control Internet Content
Media Matters for America writes: "Right-wing media have falsely claimed that the net neutrality principle supported by the Obama administration is an attempt by the government to control Internet content. In fact, net neutrality does not mean government control of content on the Internet; rather, net neutrality ensures equal and open access for consumers and producers of content and applications, and is supported by a wide array of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Christian Coalition of America."
On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War. King's sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon Johnson, who was an ally of King's in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.
Silence Is Betrayal
Stephen Rohde, Los Angeles Daily Journal (via Truthout): "On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered a historic speech at Riverside Church in New York City, which has become known as Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In a powerful and inspiring speech, Dr. King declared that his deep religious faith would no longer allow him to confine himself to the domestic struggle for civil rights."
Amidst National Political Transformation, The UNITED STATES SOCIAL FORUM Brings New Hope for Change
Greenspan, Summers, and Why the Economy Is So Out of Whack
Robert Reich, RobertReich.org: "I'm in the 'green room' at ABC News, waiting to join a roundtable panel discussion on ABC's weekly Sunday news program, This Week. Alan Greenspan is now being interviewed. He says he bore no responsibility for the housing bubble that catapulted the nation into a financial crisis in 2008 because no one could have known about the bubble when he chaired the Fed in the years before it burst. Larry Summers was interviewed just before Greenspan."
Recommended Audio: Graydon Carter and Michael Lewis - The Unabridged Conversation About the Financial Collapse
Recently Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and V.F. contributing editor Michael Lewis sat together onstage in front of an intimate crowd at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and discussed Lewis’s new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, which tackles the question of what caused the U.S. economy to tank. (It was excerpted in the April issue.) Among those who attended the event were writers Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly, and Time Inc.’s John Huey. Now you too can hear the entire conversation between Carter and Lewis—just click here. But be careful visiting that link. You will probably get sucked into Lewis’s hour-long talk, just as the House Republican book group became engrossed in a lecture Lewis gave about the financial collapse. “I was supposed to be there for an hour,” says Lewis in the clip above, referring to his visit with the Hill staffers. “I was there for almost three. And nobody left. And their questions were increasingly: ‘Oh my God, Goldman Sachs did what? A.I.G. did what?’ They didn’t understand it ... The minute they started to understand, they were outraged. And I think the more things are explained, the more outraged people will get.”To see other videos in this series, click here.
Who Killed the Miners? Profits over Safety?
Jeff Biggers writes for Common Dreams: "My grandfather, who barely survived an explosion in a coal mine in southern Illinois, taught me this phrase. He also taught me about the 150-year-old battle in the coalfields over reckless production at the cost of responsible safety measures. As our prayers and condolences go out to the many coal mining families in Raleigh County, West Virginia, I think about the needless safety violations and subsequent disasters that have taken place over the past century."
Reaching Zero
Recommended Audio: America's Nuclear Trajectory
In his article in this week's Nation, "Reaching Zero," Schell argues that the disarmament movement needs a clear strategic architecture if we are to move toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. Listen to Tom Engelhardt and Jonathan Schell discuss American involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan, US nuclear policy from the 1960s to the present and the dilemma of nuclear weaponry in the Obama era.McChrystal’s Employment of Military Deception
Wikileaks Releases Video Depicting US Forces Killing of Two Reuters Journalists in Iraq
Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory
David Kushner writes for Mother Jones: "The clock struck 3 a.m. Julian Assange slept soundly inside a guarded private compound in Nairobi, Kenya. Suddenly, six men with guns emerged from the darkness. A day earlier, they had disabled the alarm system on the electric fence and buried weapons by the pool. Catching a guard by surprise, they commanded him to hit the ground. He obliged, momentarily, then jumped up and began shouting. As the rest of the compound's security team rushed outside, the intruders fled into the night." Photo: — WikiLeaks, Wikimedia Commons
How the CIA Avoided Negligent Homicide Charges in the Salt Pit Killing
Emptywheel writes on the Firedoglake blog: "Since the AP story on the Salt Pit death, reporters have focused a lot of attention to a particular footnote in Jay Bybee’s second response to the OPR Report and what it claims about intent (and, to a lesser degree, what it says about Jay Bybee’s fitness to remain on the 9th Circuit). In it, Jay Bybee references a memo CIA’s Counterterrorism Center wrote in response to Gul Rahman’s death at the Salt Pit; the memo argued that the CIA officer in charge should not be prosecuted under the torture statute because he did not have the specific intent to make Rahman suffer severe pain when he doused him with water and left him exposed in freezing temperatures."
Hushed Money: Could Karl Rove's new 527 avoid campaign-finance disclosure requirements?
Post-Hutaree: How Glenn Beck and Fox News Spread the Militia Message
Eric Boehlert writes for Media Matters for AMerica: "Reading last week's disturbing news accounts about the Midwestern arrest of nine alleged members of a Christian militia known as the Hutaree, a group whose members were reportedly planning to kill cops in order to spark a wider, armed revolt against the U.S. government, I noticed this nugget[emphasis added]:
FBI agents moved quickly against Hutaree because its members were planning an attack sometime in April, prosecutors said."
Not in Our Town: Communities Use Media to Combat Hate
The Market Colonization of Intellectuals
Lewis R. Gordon comments for Truthout: "In many forums over the past decade, public intellectuals seem unable to talk about pressing social issues without performing the equivalent of an academic literature review. Although reasons range from trying to inform their audiences of relevant debates to efforts to demonstrate erudition, that many public intellectuals present their work as the basis for rewards in academe and the entertainment industry suggests influences tantamount to the colonization of intellectuals by the ever-expanding market."
A Society Consumed by Locusts: Youth in the Age of Moral and Political Plagues
The Death of Public Education
Derrick Z. Jackson writes for the Boston Globe: "THE NEWS says we are watching the death of public education before our eyes. Detroit is closing more than 40 schools, Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings. Other cities have been closing schools over the last decade. Boston avoided closings in its most recent budget deliberations, but still must slash custodial staff and postpone building repairs."
"Broadcast Blues" to Screen in Manhattan
Recommended Audio: Media Matters Minute
After being called out by the president by name for the vitriol on talk radio, Limbaugh goes on the defensive. The Top Ten Works of Journalism for the Decade, 2000 - 2009
The faculty of New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, has selected "The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States." We began with a list of eighty nominees. Our purpose was to call attention to and honor work of exceptional importance and quality - journalism that brilliantly met the challenges of this difficult decade.
Ten Things You Can Do to Help Progressive Journalism
Court Decision Endangers FCC's Ability to Protect Net Neutrality and Implement National Broadband Plan
S. Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, made the following statement in response to the DC Circuit's opinion in Comcast v. FCC:
"The decision has forced the FCC into an existential crisis, leaving the agency unable to protect consumers in the broadband marketplace, and unable to implement the National Broadband Plan. As a result of this decision, the FCC has virtually no power to stop Comcast from blocking Web sites. The FCC has virtually no power to make policies to bring broadband to rural America, to promote competition, to protect consumer privacy or truth in billing. This cannot be an acceptable outcome for the American public and requires immediate FCC action to re-establish legal authority."
Right-Wing Delusion: Net Neutrality Is Government Plot to Control Internet Content
03 January 2010
Clippings for 3 January 2010
Learning From the Last Decade as We Move Into the Next One
David Sirota writes for Truthout: "While I'm loathe to write a top-ten list, if only for fear of falling short of Dave Letterman's legendary bit, I'm making an exception in this first week of 2010 - a moment when we get to not only make New Year's resolutions, but resolutions for the new decade. As we make those prospective pledges, let's take a moment to look back at the Top Ten Quotations from the last ten years - the ones telling us some painful truths about our country, society and worldview; the ones that might inform us of what we need to do as we move forward."
Good-bye to 2009, Hello to 2010: Year of the Tiger
Alexander Cockburn writes for Counter Punch: "Once again hands are raised in stupefaction. How could they have missed him – meaning in this case Umar Abdulmutallab the Nigerian bomber on that flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Why, his own father – one of the most powerful bankers in Africa – gave the US embassy in Lagos a warning! He was on the US master computer list of potential terrorists but never made it on to the watch list. The Truthers reject the obvious answers – caution, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing, turf fights – and say it was a plot. Obama joins Bush and Cheney in the big conspiracy. It won’t be long before David Griffin rushes out a book on the affair."
Reducing Your Impact: A Guide to New Year's Resolutions for 2010
Ashwin Seshagiri writes for Planet Green: "When writer Colin Beavan set out to become the No Impact Man, it wasn't because of any near-death experience, New Year's resolution, or other catalyzing moment in his life. He noticed a heat wave ripping through Manhattan in January, and realized something big was going on. He didn't know much about global warming at the time, but he recognized it was one of the most important things happening in our lifetimes, and wanted to do something about it."
The 20 Best Socially Conscious Movies of the Decade
Robert Scheer writes for Truthdig.com: "2009 was a record year at the box office, but there are those who worry that Hollywood has gone into decline over the last decade. Moviegoers are reportedly much more interested in gimmicks than substance, and people supposedly would rather watch talking robots than talking humans, let alone stories about the human condition. But the oughts turned out to be a vibrant decade for politically and culturally enlightened movies, after all. The last 10 years were abundant with films that pushed limits and attacked real issues in real time. The documentary and the foreign film both gained unprecedented mainstream acceptance, the studios experimented with edgier independent movies (though many have now given it up) and even the biggest blockbusters sometimes needled the Establishment.
2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted
Robert Reich writes on Robert Reich's Blog: "The five largest remaining banks are today larger, their executives and traders richer, their strategies of placing large bets with other people's money no less bold than before the meltdown. The possibility of new regulations emanating from Congress has barely inhibited the Street's exuberance. But if Wall Street is back on top, the everyday lives of large numbers of Americans continue to be subject to overwhelming trauma, chaos and disruption."
Mega Giant Corporation Are Very Bad for America
Barry Lynn writes for Alternet.org: " The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, published by Wiley Press. Even with a GPS and a good map, I have a hard time finding Diane Cochrane’s home, which is tucked in the crease of a hill a few miles east of Prescott, Arizona. The one-story green frame building sits at the bottom of a steep driveway that drops from a rocky road that cuts off a maze of streets that, as I drive along in my rented Pontiac, seem more like a mad Motocross track than the arteries of a neighborhood. Yet it is easy to understand why Diane settled here with her husband after they fled the monotony of a Ford assembly line in Ohio. The landscape is a testament to the creativity of both humanity and God. Every one of the hundred or so houses in the community is unique. There are ramblers, chalets, A-frames, ranches, and log cabins. The terrain, meanwhile, seems to change in character almost inch by inch as the roadway drops and twists vertiginously into deep and scrubby ravines, only to crest a moment later to stunning views of a far shimmering horizon."
Judge Dismisses Charges Against Blackwater Guards Involved in Iraq Massacre
Jason Leopold reports for Truthout: "A federal judge in Washington, DC on Thursday dismissed criminal charges against five Blackwater guards involved in the massacre of 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007, an incident that led to a public outcry over the government's increasing reliance on contractors in the battlefield."
Success of Afghanistan Troop Surge Doubted Widely
Sherwood Ross reports for The Public Record: "'There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,' writes Thomas Johnson in a report published Dec. 10 in Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word 'None.' 'The US president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,' Johnson wrote, noting, 'The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing.'"
They Chant of Bitterness and Hell
Patrick Cockburn reports for The Independent (UK):
Hope Fades for End of American Empire under Obama
John Pilger reports for The Daily Censored: "'Information Clearing House' — In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that 'passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past", ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past".' Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that 'extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan' to 'disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.' He called this 'global security' and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: 'We have no interest in occupying your country.'”
The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears
Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon.com: "I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column in yesterday's New York Times that makes several insightful and important points. Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American media. The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe."
Cheney in Winter
Eugene Robinson writes for Truthdig.com: "It’s pathetic to break a New Year’s resolution before we even get to New Year’s Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney’s corrosive and nonsensical outbursts—that I would treat them, more or less, like the pearls of wisdom one hears from homeless people sitting in bus shelters. But he is a former vice president, which gives him a big stage for his histrionic Rottweiler-in-Winter act. It is never a good idea to let widely disseminated lies and distortions go unchallenged. And the shrill screed that Cheney unloosed Wednesday is so full of outright mendacity that, well, my resolution will have to wait.
Homeland Security Marked by Waste, Lack of Oversight
G. W. Schulz reports for the Center for Investigative Reporting: "Soon after hijackers obliterated the World Trade Center towers eight years ago, Marin County received more than $100,000 in surveillance equipment to keep its water treatment system safe from a terrorist attack. But four years after the funds were awarded, state authorities found more than $67,000 worth of the gear still boxed in its original packaging. It had never been used."
Krugman’s Health Care Sell-Out: The Health ‘Reform’ Bill in Congress Is Worse than Nothing
David Lindroff write for The Public Record: "Paul Krugman, one of the few liberal columnists writing for the New York Times, claims that at some point in the hoary past when he 'began writing a lot about health care,' he was in favor of a Canadian-style single-payer health care system. He adds that even today if he thought there was 'any chance of creating Medicare for All any time in the next decade,' he would be 'pushing for single-payer now.' But on Christmas, Krugman threw in the towel, calling on progressives to support the Senate’s version of health care legislation. Suggesting that the so-called Senate Health Reform Bill, if it had been the law back in Dickens’ time in England, would have saved Tiny Tim without any need for the belated charitable intervention of Ebenezer Scrooge, Krugman says progressives should recognize that the Senate bill is the best they can hope for, and that they need to accept that politics is 'the art of the possible.'”
Do Charter Schools Encourage Innovation and Best Practices in TPS?
Danny Weil writes for the Daily Censored: "The neo-liberal argument that charters will oxygenate the practices of traditional public schools (TPS’s) with new and promising educational innovations and practices thereby raising all boats has been more propaganda than fact. The press repeats it, and the people are beguiled. Take the study done by Good and Braden in 2000 which found that public school officials did not believe that charter schools were providing new models and programs for best practices to be highlighted; nor did they see anything being done within the charter schools that they and their schools wished to emulate (Good and Braden 2000). And in Arizona, a state where charter schools have witnessed enormous growth and support, over half the administrators polled said their districts had not been affected by charter schools nor did they believe charter schools would improve education (ibid). As Corwin and Schneider consider, charters are really not doing many things that have not been done some where else at one time or another and frankly, many public school teachers find little in common with experimental charters nor do they have any form of institutional support or mechanisms in place for learning about what they might be doing (Corwin and Schneider 2007)."
Zombie Anti-Choice Bill Shows Up Again
Erin Doughty writes for Forward Kansas: "s we’ve come to expect with the Party of No, forming policy that benefits their constituents, is financially sound, and free of moral judgement is beyond their apparent reasoning level. Enter today’s prime example, Sen. Tim Huelskamp! In the 2009 leg session, Huelskamp introduced an amendment to the budget that would have withheld all federal funds from Planned Parenthood of Kansas + Mid-MO (PPKM). In a time of state budget crisis, its important to remember that these funds do not come from the state’s general fund – they’re federal funds that have no budgetary impact on the state whatsoever. The budget passed with the amendment, which was then line-item’d by Gov. Parkinson."
Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill Controversy Heats Up
Gregory Branch reports for GlobalPost: "To many non-Ugandans, Uganda conjures up two sustaining images; One, a small, beautiful, landlocked east African nation, once called the 'Pearl of Africa' by her British colonizers. The other, a country ruled by African strongman Idi Amin, recently immortalized by the 2006 Oscar-winning performance of Forest Whitaker in, 'The Last King of Scotland.' A new image could be emerging for Uganda, one that would eclipse any other notion and one that Ugandans are hotly debating: one of the few countries in the world to implement the death penalty for gays and lesbians."
The 2010 Forecast: More Delays for Gays
Deb Price comments for Truthout: "Imagine looking up at an airport monitor. Next to the list of flights scheduled for departure is 'delayed,' 'delayed,' 'delayed.' Got the image? Then you have a fairly good feel for how gay Americans ended 2009, a year in which Democrats ran the control towers. Long-promised flights toward equality were, well, you got it, largely delayed."
Top Golbal Media Figures of 2009
Peter Phillips reports for The Daily Censored: "PU L S E has just released their list of the top Global Media Figures of 2009. Include in the list is Nora Barrows-Friedman and Dennis Bernstein from Flashpoints Radio at KPFA in Berkeley. Flashpoints has recently been under threat by management at KPFA loosing over 50% of its funding in the past three years."
Money, Journalism and Democracy
Randy Baker comments for Truthout: "The business model on which most American journalism relies, making a profit by attracting enough readers to sell advertising, is failing. With the closure of several major daily newspapers, such as the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and risks of closure at other major papers, such as the Boston Globe, alarm bells are being sounded. Citing the importance of the press, and particularly newspapers, to democracy, political commentators, concerned citizens, scholars, journalists, newspaper owners and politicians, including, it seems, President Obama, are moving to secure some sort of government assistance for newspapers."
David Sirota writes for Truthout: "While I'm loathe to write a top-ten list, if only for fear of falling short of Dave Letterman's legendary bit, I'm making an exception in this first week of 2010 - a moment when we get to not only make New Year's resolutions, but resolutions for the new decade. As we make those prospective pledges, let's take a moment to look back at the Top Ten Quotations from the last ten years - the ones telling us some painful truths about our country, society and worldview; the ones that might inform us of what we need to do as we move forward."
Good-bye to 2009, Hello to 2010: Year of the Tiger
Alexander Cockburn writes for Counter Punch: "Once again hands are raised in stupefaction. How could they have missed him – meaning in this case Umar Abdulmutallab the Nigerian bomber on that flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Why, his own father – one of the most powerful bankers in Africa – gave the US embassy in Lagos a warning! He was on the US master computer list of potential terrorists but never made it on to the watch list. The Truthers reject the obvious answers – caution, bureaucratic inertia, buck-passing, turf fights – and say it was a plot. Obama joins Bush and Cheney in the big conspiracy. It won’t be long before David Griffin rushes out a book on the affair."
Reducing Your Impact: A Guide to New Year's Resolutions for 2010
Ashwin Seshagiri writes for Planet Green: "When writer Colin Beavan set out to become the No Impact Man, it wasn't because of any near-death experience, New Year's resolution, or other catalyzing moment in his life. He noticed a heat wave ripping through Manhattan in January, and realized something big was going on. He didn't know much about global warming at the time, but he recognized it was one of the most important things happening in our lifetimes, and wanted to do something about it."
The 20 Best Socially Conscious Movies of the Decade
Robert Scheer writes for Truthdig.com: "2009 was a record year at the box office, but there are those who worry that Hollywood has gone into decline over the last decade. Moviegoers are reportedly much more interested in gimmicks than substance, and people supposedly would rather watch talking robots than talking humans, let alone stories about the human condition. But the oughts turned out to be a vibrant decade for politically and culturally enlightened movies, after all. The last 10 years were abundant with films that pushed limits and attacked real issues in real time. The documentary and the foreign film both gained unprecedented mainstream acceptance, the studios experimented with edgier independent movies (though many have now given it up) and even the biggest blockbusters sometimes needled the Establishment.
2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted
Robert Reich writes on Robert Reich's Blog: "The five largest remaining banks are today larger, their executives and traders richer, their strategies of placing large bets with other people's money no less bold than before the meltdown. The possibility of new regulations emanating from Congress has barely inhibited the Street's exuberance. But if Wall Street is back on top, the everyday lives of large numbers of Americans continue to be subject to overwhelming trauma, chaos and disruption."
Mega Giant Corporation Are Very Bad for America
Barry Lynn writes for Alternet.org: " The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, published by Wiley Press. Even with a GPS and a good map, I have a hard time finding Diane Cochrane’s home, which is tucked in the crease of a hill a few miles east of Prescott, Arizona. The one-story green frame building sits at the bottom of a steep driveway that drops from a rocky road that cuts off a maze of streets that, as I drive along in my rented Pontiac, seem more like a mad Motocross track than the arteries of a neighborhood. Yet it is easy to understand why Diane settled here with her husband after they fled the monotony of a Ford assembly line in Ohio. The landscape is a testament to the creativity of both humanity and God. Every one of the hundred or so houses in the community is unique. There are ramblers, chalets, A-frames, ranches, and log cabins. The terrain, meanwhile, seems to change in character almost inch by inch as the roadway drops and twists vertiginously into deep and scrubby ravines, only to crest a moment later to stunning views of a far shimmering horizon."
Judge Dismisses Charges Against Blackwater Guards Involved in Iraq Massacre
Jason Leopold reports for Truthout: "A federal judge in Washington, DC on Thursday dismissed criminal charges against five Blackwater guards involved in the massacre of 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007, an incident that led to a public outcry over the government's increasing reliance on contractors in the battlefield."
Success of Afghanistan Troop Surge Doubted Widely
Sherwood Ross reports for The Public Record: "'There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,' writes Thomas Johnson in a report published Dec. 10 in Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word 'None.' 'The US president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,' Johnson wrote, noting, 'The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing.'"
They Chant of Bitterness and Hell
Patrick Cockburn reports for The Independent (UK):
"We are the AwaleqThis is the tribal chant of the powerful Awaleq tribe of Yemen, in which they bid defiance to the world. Its angry tone conveys the flavour of Yemeni life and it should give pause to those in the US who blithely suggest greater American involvement in Yemen in the wake of the attempt to destroy a US plane by a Nigerian student who says he received training there."
Born of bitterness
We are the sparks of hell
He who defies us will be burned
Hope Fades for End of American Empire under Obama
John Pilger reports for The Daily Censored: "'Information Clearing House' — In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that 'passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past", ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past".' Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that 'extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan' to 'disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.' He called this 'global security' and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: 'We have no interest in occupying your country.'”
The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears
Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon.com: "I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column in yesterday's New York Times that makes several insightful and important points. Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American media. The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe."
Cheney in Winter
Eugene Robinson writes for Truthdig.com: "It’s pathetic to break a New Year’s resolution before we even get to New Year’s Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney’s corrosive and nonsensical outbursts—that I would treat them, more or less, like the pearls of wisdom one hears from homeless people sitting in bus shelters. But he is a former vice president, which gives him a big stage for his histrionic Rottweiler-in-Winter act. It is never a good idea to let widely disseminated lies and distortions go unchallenged. And the shrill screed that Cheney unloosed Wednesday is so full of outright mendacity that, well, my resolution will have to wait.
Homeland Security Marked by Waste, Lack of Oversight
G. W. Schulz reports for the Center for Investigative Reporting: "Soon after hijackers obliterated the World Trade Center towers eight years ago, Marin County received more than $100,000 in surveillance equipment to keep its water treatment system safe from a terrorist attack. But four years after the funds were awarded, state authorities found more than $67,000 worth of the gear still boxed in its original packaging. It had never been used."
Krugman’s Health Care Sell-Out: The Health ‘Reform’ Bill in Congress Is Worse than Nothing
David Lindroff write for The Public Record: "Paul Krugman, one of the few liberal columnists writing for the New York Times, claims that at some point in the hoary past when he 'began writing a lot about health care,' he was in favor of a Canadian-style single-payer health care system. He adds that even today if he thought there was 'any chance of creating Medicare for All any time in the next decade,' he would be 'pushing for single-payer now.' But on Christmas, Krugman threw in the towel, calling on progressives to support the Senate’s version of health care legislation. Suggesting that the so-called Senate Health Reform Bill, if it had been the law back in Dickens’ time in England, would have saved Tiny Tim without any need for the belated charitable intervention of Ebenezer Scrooge, Krugman says progressives should recognize that the Senate bill is the best they can hope for, and that they need to accept that politics is 'the art of the possible.'”
Do Charter Schools Encourage Innovation and Best Practices in TPS?
Danny Weil writes for the Daily Censored: "The neo-liberal argument that charters will oxygenate the practices of traditional public schools (TPS’s) with new and promising educational innovations and practices thereby raising all boats has been more propaganda than fact. The press repeats it, and the people are beguiled. Take the study done by Good and Braden in 2000 which found that public school officials did not believe that charter schools were providing new models and programs for best practices to be highlighted; nor did they see anything being done within the charter schools that they and their schools wished to emulate (Good and Braden 2000). And in Arizona, a state where charter schools have witnessed enormous growth and support, over half the administrators polled said their districts had not been affected by charter schools nor did they believe charter schools would improve education (ibid). As Corwin and Schneider consider, charters are really not doing many things that have not been done some where else at one time or another and frankly, many public school teachers find little in common with experimental charters nor do they have any form of institutional support or mechanisms in place for learning about what they might be doing (Corwin and Schneider 2007)."
Zombie Anti-Choice Bill Shows Up Again
Erin Doughty writes for Forward Kansas: "s we’ve come to expect with the Party of No, forming policy that benefits their constituents, is financially sound, and free of moral judgement is beyond their apparent reasoning level. Enter today’s prime example, Sen. Tim Huelskamp! In the 2009 leg session, Huelskamp introduced an amendment to the budget that would have withheld all federal funds from Planned Parenthood of Kansas + Mid-MO (PPKM). In a time of state budget crisis, its important to remember that these funds do not come from the state’s general fund – they’re federal funds that have no budgetary impact on the state whatsoever. The budget passed with the amendment, which was then line-item’d by Gov. Parkinson."
Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill Controversy Heats Up
Gregory Branch reports for GlobalPost: "To many non-Ugandans, Uganda conjures up two sustaining images; One, a small, beautiful, landlocked east African nation, once called the 'Pearl of Africa' by her British colonizers. The other, a country ruled by African strongman Idi Amin, recently immortalized by the 2006 Oscar-winning performance of Forest Whitaker in, 'The Last King of Scotland.' A new image could be emerging for Uganda, one that would eclipse any other notion and one that Ugandans are hotly debating: one of the few countries in the world to implement the death penalty for gays and lesbians."
The 2010 Forecast: More Delays for Gays
Deb Price comments for Truthout: "Imagine looking up at an airport monitor. Next to the list of flights scheduled for departure is 'delayed,' 'delayed,' 'delayed.' Got the image? Then you have a fairly good feel for how gay Americans ended 2009, a year in which Democrats ran the control towers. Long-promised flights toward equality were, well, you got it, largely delayed."
Top Golbal Media Figures of 2009
Peter Phillips reports for The Daily Censored: "PU L S E has just released their list of the top Global Media Figures of 2009. Include in the list is Nora Barrows-Friedman and Dennis Bernstein from Flashpoints Radio at KPFA in Berkeley. Flashpoints has recently been under threat by management at KPFA loosing over 50% of its funding in the past three years."
Money, Journalism and Democracy
Randy Baker comments for Truthout: "The business model on which most American journalism relies, making a profit by attracting enough readers to sell advertising, is failing. With the closure of several major daily newspapers, such as the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and risks of closure at other major papers, such as the Boston Globe, alarm bells are being sounded. Citing the importance of the press, and particularly newspapers, to democracy, political commentators, concerned citizens, scholars, journalists, newspaper owners and politicians, including, it seems, President Obama, are moving to secure some sort of government assistance for newspapers."
10 December 2009
Clippings for 10 December 2009 - Human Rights Day
Our clippings service will be taking a couple of weeks off as Christopher Renner takes a much need vacation. We will return after the week of December 28th.
Human Rights Day Part 1: Why We Need A Human Rights Movement
Christopher Renner writes for the Kansas Free Press: "On December 10 the world marks the 61st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is commonly referred to as Human Rights Day and this year's theme is: Embrace Diversity: End Discrimination. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillary said:
Human Rights Day Part 2: Moving Beyond 'Civil Rights'
Christopher Renner writes for the Kansas Free Press: "As a nation we have been slow to evolve in our understanding of human rights. When asked, most of us think that civil rights are human rights. They are, but they are only the beginning. Civil rights are basically your right to be created equal to everyone else. Civil rights are incomplete if they are not accompanied by economic, social, political, and cultural rights. Unfortunately early on in the civil rights struggle, here was a big battle in the NAACP over human vs. civil rights. At the heart of this battle were two men: Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP and a lawyer who could pass as white, and W. E. B. DuBois one of the founders of the NAACP. DeBois asked: "Why should we ask for only one of the five rights categories?" Eventually, White won, and force out an ever more radical DeBois from the NAACP which set human rights back 50 years. Equality is precious but is incomplete."
2009: A Year in Human Rights
Andrew Wander writes for Al Jazeera English: "With a new US president, international crises from Gaza to Sri Lanka, and continued political impediments to international justice, 2009 has been a busy year for those working in the field of human rights. On Human Rights Day (December 10), Carroll Bogart, the associate director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), shares her views on some of the key moments of the past year and looks ahead to what 2010 might hold."
Rick Warren Should Denounce Uganda's Anti-Gay Legislation
Kapya Kaoma comments for Global Post: "As the world celebrates Human Rights Day Thursday, Pastor Rick Warren should make his own contribution to human rights by denouncing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Although homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda, the proposed law calls for the death penalty for people convicted of something called 'aggravated homosexuality,' as well as life imprisonment sentences for being gay. If family, friends, teachers or counselors fail to report gay individuals, they too can be imprisoned."
Execissive Secrecy Undermining Obama's Human Rights Achievements
Ken Gude writes for the Center for American Progress: "Today is World Human Rights Day, the annual celebration of the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The visionary leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt was the driving force behind the Declaration and the United States had consistently pressed for the spread of human rights around the world for decades. America’s longstanding authority as a global leader in human rights was one of our greatest national security assets. But the credibility of America’s commitment to human rights has been severely damaged in the wake of the Bush administration’s official policy of torture and abuse of detainees captured in the fight against Al Qaeda."
Worst Companies for Union Organizing Highlighted for International Human Rights Day
International Labour Forum comments: "December 10 - As human rights advocates around the world celebrate International Human Rights Day, the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has released "Working for Scrooge: Worst Companies of 2009 for the Right to Associate" - a list of the four worst multinational corporations for union organizing. Among other rights related to workers, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that "everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests" (Article 23, Section 4). The US-based companies on ILRF's list use intimidation and even violence to violate workers' internationally recognized right to organize."
Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down
David DeGraw writes for Amped Status: "As Obama announced plans for escalating the war effort, it has become clear that the Obama Illusion has taken yet another horrifying turn. Before explaining how the Af-Pak surge is a direct attack on the US public, let’s peer through the illusion and look at the reality of the situation. Now that the much despised George W. Bush is out of the way and a more popular figurehead is doing PR for Dick Cheney’s right-hand military leader Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is leading his second AF-Pak surge now, and with long time Bush family confidant Robert Gates still running the Defense Department, the masters of war have never had it so good."
War and Poverty in Afghanistan
Katrina Vander Heuvel comments for The Nation: "President Obama has made the wrong decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan--at a cost of $1 million per soldier, or $30 billion a year. What we need is not more war but attention to problems like poverty which so often play a role in breeding insecurity and terrorism. In Afghanistan, as we dispatch these first soldiers, it's important that we pay attention to the dire problem of extreme poverty in that tormented country."
'There hasn't been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan'
John Hanrahan writes for Nieman Watch: "The poverty in Afghanistan is almost beyond imagining. Thirty Afghans die from TB every day; life expectancy is 43 years; per capita income is $426; only 13% have access to sanitary drinking water; fewer than one in four are literate; access to electricity is among the lowest in the world. Conditions for women are brutal. If Obama plans to address these issues, he's pretty much keeping it secret, points out world poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs. But without addressing them, can stepped-up American military involvement succeed? Or is it bound to fail?"
Is US Prepared to Care for More Casualties From Troop Buildup?
David Goldstein reports for McClatchy Newspapers: "As the Obama administration ramps up the war in Afghanistan, veterans advocates say the government must develop a better plan to handle the wounded when they come home. Eight years of war have overtaxed the health care systems that treat service members and veterans, several said, and President Barack Obama's decision to deploy 30,000 to 35,000 more troops in Afghanistan will compound the stress."
Dear Barak, Spare Me Your E-mails
Robert Scheer writes for Truthdig.com: "Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths. "
Texas Populist Jim Hightower Makes Progressive 'Hall of Fame,' as Nation Magazine Gathering Grapples with Conflicted Feelings about President Obama
Don Hazen writes for AlterNet: "The annual Nation Institute dinner in New York City on Monday, where the $100,000 Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship was awarded, turned into a revealing Rorschach test of how progressives feel about President Obama nearly a year after the inauguration that made many of them downright giddy. Needless to say, the giddiness has dissipated. Obama's escalation of the war effort in Afghanistan was a prime preoccupation of many of the attendees; a mix of leaders, advocates and wealthy donors who support the great investigative work of the Nation Institute and many other progressive causes."
Liberals Are Usless
Chris Hedges writes for Truthdig.com: "Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision."
Yes, Virginia, It's Bernanke's Fault
Dean Baker writes for the Huffington Post: "As the Senate debates Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's reappointment, it is striking how the media views blaming Bernanke for the Great Recession as being out of bounds. Of course Bernanke bears much of the blame for America's economic collapse. He was either in, or next to, the driver's seat for the last seven years. Bernanke was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board since the summer of 2002. He served a six-month stint as head of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors beginning in the summer of 2005 and then went back to chair the Fed in January of 2006."
Wall Street Snaps Its Fingers
Alexander Cockburn writes for CounterPunch: "For months now, Congress has been stumbling through an exercise billed as “financial regulatory reform,” purportedly dedicated to bringing law enforcement to the Wall Street Casino. One activity notably popular among the gamesters has been the “dark markets” in the $600 trillion derivatives trading markets, not least because trades are executed on a bilateral basis between dealer and customer, with no public price disclosure, at least not until well after the fact. An analogous situation would be for someone buying stock in, for example, the Apple Corporation, to take the price offered by a broker with no opportunity to see what everyone else is paying that day, or that minute.
Thousands of Stimulus Reports Missing, Resulting in Potential Undercount of Jobs Created
Michael Garbel reports for ProPublica: "Eagle Peak Rock and Paving created and saved 32 jobs thanks to an $8 million federal stimulus contract to repair Glacier Point Road in Yosemite National Park. But you won’t find that on Recovery.gov, the government’s Web site for tracking stimulus money. You also won’t find the eight employees hired by Owensboro-Daviess County Regional Airport in Kentucky, or the 46 jobs claimed for some $65 million in grants awarded to the Louisiana Department of Social Services."
The Real Chicago Way: A privatization scheme that's a loser for taxpayers
Thomas Franks writes for the Wall Street Journal: "When the entertainers of the right aren't declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they're pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call "the Chicago way." As imagined by the right, the men in the West Wing are like a demonic cross between the antiwar demonstrators who gathered in Grant Park in 1968 and the Chicago cops who cracked their hippie skulls. Tremble, men of commerce, before this infernal combination. Myths like this are fun to invent. The problem, as ever, is reality."
Gun Activits Take Aim at Obamacare
James Ridgeway reports for Mother Jones: "Right-wingers have long viewed health care reform as a cover for various dastardly liberal plots—from killing off grannies and unborn babies to ushering in a socialist state. Now, pro-gun activists see yet another hidden agenda: Health care legislation, they say, threatens their right to bear arms. The accusation comes from Gun Owners of America, a 300,000 member group that proudly advertises itself with a quotation from Ron Paul: "The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington." The GOA sits well to the right of the National Rifle Association, which it tends to dismiss as a pack of sell-outs. Yet, like the Tea Partiers who draw Republican congressional leaders to their racially tinged protests against "National Socialist Health Care," the GOA could influence the reform debate. GOA has thrown itself wholeheartedly into the battle for the soul of the GOP, pledging to help oust "RINOs" and other insufficiently trigger-happy Republicans in the 2010 primaries—and to go after conservative Democrats, too."
Billionaires Behind the Hate
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, Lee Fang, and Alex Seitz-Wald write the Progress Report for Think Progress: "Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending. The Cato Institute -- founded by Charles -- as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first "tea party" protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations."
ACORN Not Guilty
Peter Dreier writes for Talking Points Memo: "ACORN is getting a bum rap -- in the news media, among politicians, and even by some foundations. That's the conclusion of an independent report released Monday, which acknowledged that ACORN needs to improve its management structure, but that it did not engage in illegal activities when two videographers, one posing as a prostitute, showed up at 10 ACORN offices, tried to entrap low-level staff mem¬bers into providing tax and housing advice for their illegal prostitution ring, and secretly videotaped the encounters."
The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy
Jeff Masters writes for Weather Underground: "In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: 'the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain.' The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: 'Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.' Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the 'Manufactured Doubt' industry."
The Physics of Copenhagen: Why Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of Civilization
Bill McKibben writes for TomDispatch: "Let me be blunt about what amazes me when it comes to global warming. In the U.S., it’s largely an issue for Democrats, “progressives,” liberals, the left, and I simply don’t get that. Never have. If the word “conservative” means anything, the key to it must be that word at its heart, 'conserve'; that is, the keeping or not squandering of what already is, especially what’s most valuable. And for us humans, what’s better than our planet? It’s the only home we’ve got and -- though I was one of those 1950s boys who read H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, as well as plenty of pulp sci-fi, and spent too much time dreaming about other planets and the stars -- probably the only one we’ll ever have. For us, there is nowhere else. Wreck it and you wreck us."
EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Pose Dangers, Plans Regulation
Renee Schoof reports for McClatchy Newspapers: "The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that global warming pollution endangered the health and welfare of Americans and must be reduced, a move that seemed timed to signal that the US is serious about joining an international bid to reduce the risks of damaging climate change."
The True Story About "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming"
Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin comment for Truthout: "Why have hopes faded for a binding agreement at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen that began this week? Why aren't the people of the world demanding that their national leaders act to avert the greatest environmental crisis the world has ever known?"
Climate Change on the Move: Climate Migration Will Affect the World's Security
Michael Werz and Kari Manlove write for The Center for American Progress: "African immigrants are given drinks inside a hospital tent in Los Cristianos on the Canary island of Tenerife, Spain. The Spanish government set up operations in African countries to discourage migration to Spain, which could intensify with climate change's effects."
The Struggle for Public Education
Sanny Weil writes for The Daily Censored: "Recently, Scott Lay, President and Chief Executive Officer Orange Coast College ‘94, a community college in California, spoke with the Academic Senate President Jane Patton about governance in these difficult times to trustees, administrators, faculty, staff and students at Delta College in Stockton. Like many community colleges bereft of monies, they have struggled to slash millions from the budget and align their limited funds to best serve their community. They are one of the hardest hit in the entire country by the financial and real estate crises that has made devastation for the profits of a few while disembowling public education. The entrusted and not to be trusted “legislature” of California have come up with a resolution contained in their Joint Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education that recognizes that the 'recent economic downturn has taken a toll on the state’s fiscal support for public higher education; however, the economy will revive, according to the resolution, and this Master Plan review can set a framework for funding priorities when funds become available to restore and increase the state’s support for its colleges and universities and invest in preparing its future workforce.'"
The Selling of "Precious:" Hollywood's Enduring Myth of the Black Male Sexual Predator
Ishmael Reed writes for CounterPunch: "One can view Sarah Siegel on YouTube discussing her approach to marketing. During her dispassionate recital she says that she sees a 'niche dilemma,' and finds a way to solve that dilemma. Seeing that no one had supplied women with panties that were meant to be visible while wearing low cut jeans, she captured the niche and made a fortune. With five million dollars, she invested in the film Precious, which was adapted from the book Push, written by Ramona Lofton, who goes by the pen name of Sapphire, after the emasculating shrew in “Amos and Andy,” a show created by white vaudevillians Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll."
Transcript available from AlterNet.
Comcast-NBC Deal Finds Donors Converging with Obama's Principles
Kim Hart writes for The Hill: "The proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal will be the first big test of the Obama administration’s stance on the hot-button issue of media consolidation. It could also put the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress at odds with a few of their largest supporters."
Comcast-NBC U Merger Could Hurt Consumers
Josh Silver and Tim Winter comment for the Philadelphia Inquirer: "After months of speculation and rumor, Comcast and NBC Universal have formally announced that they are getting hitched in one of the biggest media mergers in our nation's history. The country's largest cable company and residential broadband provider is poised to take a controlling stake in NBC's broadcast network, dozens of cable channels, 27 local television stations, a movie studio, and a long list of other holdings. If this deal goes through as proposed, Comcast would control huge swaths of the cable, Internet, and content industries. It would be the first of a new generation of media behemoths, with more sure to follow."
Why the Comcast-NBCU Acquisition is Possible: A Glance at Recent History
Kamilla Kovacs reports for Media Access Project: "Many analysts have identified the proposed acquisition between Comcast and NBC Universal (NBCU) as the first example of vertical integration in the communications marketplace of the Digital Age. Few have pointed out, however, that the regulatory framework that allows for such an unprecedented combination of assets is also a 21st century phenomenon. Less than a decade ago, this combination would have been against Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations – indeed, it would have been merely a business executive’s dream. What makes this acquisition attempt possible today is the drastic, systematic deregulation in media policy that has taken place over the last 20 years."
Google, Washington Post and N.Y. Times Create News Tool
Howard Kurtz writes for the Washington Post: "Take the engineering mystique of Google, add the prestige of The Washington Post and New York Times, throw in the spice of secret meetings, and what have you got? A new online tool that, well, isn't exactly going to revolutionize journalism. But those involved in the partnership between the California software giant and two of the nation's top newspapers see it as a first step toward changing the way news is consumed online."
A Municipal Wi-Fi Model that Actually Works
Lynnette Luna reports for Urgent Communications: "While New York City's mobile broadband network garners much attention concerning its ability to serve both public safety and multiple government agencies, Oklahoma City's Wi-Fi mesh network recently passed its third anniversary and is now the world's largest mesh network, handling more than 4 terabytes of data traffic a month and serving up more than 200 applications concurrently for multiple government agencies. Launched in 2006 using Tropos equipment, Oklahoma City's mesh network—which operates in the unlicensed band — now covers 95% of the city's 620 square miles. The vision was to supply public safety with high-speed broadband service but now city departments including transit, public works and IT access the network using a slew of devices ranging from handheld devices, laptops, traffic controllers and video cameras."
Washington to Verizon Wireless: Can You Hear Us Now?
Cecilia Kang reports for the Washington Post: "The Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Verizon Wireless Friday morning asking the company to explain why it has more than doubled its penalties for customers switching carriers. The inquiry follows pressure by lawmakers, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) who introduced a bill Thursday to curb the penalties known as early termination fees (ETFs). Last month, Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest cellphone service provider, increased its ETFs for smart phone customers to $350 from $150. The company said smart phones had become more expensive to subsidize, making it more costly when customers with discounted phones left long-term contracts early. No other wireless companies have introduced higher ETFs."
Human Rights Day Part 1: Why We Need A Human Rights Movement
Christopher Renner writes for the Kansas Free Press: "On December 10 the world marks the 61st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is commonly referred to as Human Rights Day and this year's theme is: Embrace Diversity: End Discrimination. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillary said:
"Discrimination lies at the root of many of the world's most pressing human rights problems. No country is immune from this scourge. Eliminating discrimination is a duty of the highest order."Download and read An End to Discrimination, the official publication for the 2009 Human Rights Day."
Human Rights Day Part 2: Moving Beyond 'Civil Rights'
Christopher Renner writes for the Kansas Free Press: "As a nation we have been slow to evolve in our understanding of human rights. When asked, most of us think that civil rights are human rights. They are, but they are only the beginning. Civil rights are basically your right to be created equal to everyone else. Civil rights are incomplete if they are not accompanied by economic, social, political, and cultural rights. Unfortunately early on in the civil rights struggle, here was a big battle in the NAACP over human vs. civil rights. At the heart of this battle were two men: Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP and a lawyer who could pass as white, and W. E. B. DuBois one of the founders of the NAACP. DeBois asked: "Why should we ask for only one of the five rights categories?" Eventually, White won, and force out an ever more radical DeBois from the NAACP which set human rights back 50 years. Equality is precious but is incomplete."
2009: A Year in Human Rights
Andrew Wander writes for Al Jazeera English: "With a new US president, international crises from Gaza to Sri Lanka, and continued political impediments to international justice, 2009 has been a busy year for those working in the field of human rights. On Human Rights Day (December 10), Carroll Bogart, the associate director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), shares her views on some of the key moments of the past year and looks ahead to what 2010 might hold."
Rick Warren Should Denounce Uganda's Anti-Gay Legislation
Kapya Kaoma comments for Global Post: "As the world celebrates Human Rights Day Thursday, Pastor Rick Warren should make his own contribution to human rights by denouncing Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Although homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda, the proposed law calls for the death penalty for people convicted of something called 'aggravated homosexuality,' as well as life imprisonment sentences for being gay. If family, friends, teachers or counselors fail to report gay individuals, they too can be imprisoned."
Execissive Secrecy Undermining Obama's Human Rights Achievements
Ken Gude writes for the Center for American Progress: "Today is World Human Rights Day, the annual celebration of the adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The visionary leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt was the driving force behind the Declaration and the United States had consistently pressed for the spread of human rights around the world for decades. America’s longstanding authority as a global leader in human rights was one of our greatest national security assets. But the credibility of America’s commitment to human rights has been severely damaged in the wake of the Bush administration’s official policy of torture and abuse of detainees captured in the fight against Al Qaeda."
Worst Companies for Union Organizing Highlighted for International Human Rights Day
International Labour Forum comments: "December 10 - As human rights advocates around the world celebrate International Human Rights Day, the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has released "Working for Scrooge: Worst Companies of 2009 for the Right to Associate" - a list of the four worst multinational corporations for union organizing. Among other rights related to workers, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that "everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests" (Article 23, Section 4). The US-based companies on ILRF's list use intimidation and even violence to violate workers' internationally recognized right to organize."
Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down
David DeGraw writes for Amped Status: "As Obama announced plans for escalating the war effort, it has become clear that the Obama Illusion has taken yet another horrifying turn. Before explaining how the Af-Pak surge is a direct attack on the US public, let’s peer through the illusion and look at the reality of the situation. Now that the much despised George W. Bush is out of the way and a more popular figurehead is doing PR for Dick Cheney’s right-hand military leader Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is leading his second AF-Pak surge now, and with long time Bush family confidant Robert Gates still running the Defense Department, the masters of war have never had it so good."
War and Poverty in Afghanistan
Katrina Vander Heuvel comments for The Nation: "President Obama has made the wrong decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan--at a cost of $1 million per soldier, or $30 billion a year. What we need is not more war but attention to problems like poverty which so often play a role in breeding insecurity and terrorism. In Afghanistan, as we dispatch these first soldiers, it's important that we pay attention to the dire problem of extreme poverty in that tormented country."
'There hasn't been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan'
John Hanrahan writes for Nieman Watch: "The poverty in Afghanistan is almost beyond imagining. Thirty Afghans die from TB every day; life expectancy is 43 years; per capita income is $426; only 13% have access to sanitary drinking water; fewer than one in four are literate; access to electricity is among the lowest in the world. Conditions for women are brutal. If Obama plans to address these issues, he's pretty much keeping it secret, points out world poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs. But without addressing them, can stepped-up American military involvement succeed? Or is it bound to fail?"
Is US Prepared to Care for More Casualties From Troop Buildup?
David Goldstein reports for McClatchy Newspapers: "As the Obama administration ramps up the war in Afghanistan, veterans advocates say the government must develop a better plan to handle the wounded when they come home. Eight years of war have overtaxed the health care systems that treat service members and veterans, several said, and President Barack Obama's decision to deploy 30,000 to 35,000 more troops in Afghanistan will compound the stress."
Dear Barak, Spare Me Your E-mails
Robert Scheer writes for Truthdig.com: "Barack Obama's faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths. "
Texas Populist Jim Hightower Makes Progressive 'Hall of Fame,' as Nation Magazine Gathering Grapples with Conflicted Feelings about President Obama
Don Hazen writes for AlterNet: "The annual Nation Institute dinner in New York City on Monday, where the $100,000 Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship was awarded, turned into a revealing Rorschach test of how progressives feel about President Obama nearly a year after the inauguration that made many of them downright giddy. Needless to say, the giddiness has dissipated. Obama's escalation of the war effort in Afghanistan was a prime preoccupation of many of the attendees; a mix of leaders, advocates and wealthy donors who support the great investigative work of the Nation Institute and many other progressive causes."
Liberals Are Usless
Chris Hedges writes for Truthdig.com: "Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision."
Yes, Virginia, It's Bernanke's Fault
Dean Baker writes for the Huffington Post: "As the Senate debates Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's reappointment, it is striking how the media views blaming Bernanke for the Great Recession as being out of bounds. Of course Bernanke bears much of the blame for America's economic collapse. He was either in, or next to, the driver's seat for the last seven years. Bernanke was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board since the summer of 2002. He served a six-month stint as head of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors beginning in the summer of 2005 and then went back to chair the Fed in January of 2006."
Wall Street Snaps Its Fingers
Alexander Cockburn writes for CounterPunch: "For months now, Congress has been stumbling through an exercise billed as “financial regulatory reform,” purportedly dedicated to bringing law enforcement to the Wall Street Casino. One activity notably popular among the gamesters has been the “dark markets” in the $600 trillion derivatives trading markets, not least because trades are executed on a bilateral basis between dealer and customer, with no public price disclosure, at least not until well after the fact. An analogous situation would be for someone buying stock in, for example, the Apple Corporation, to take the price offered by a broker with no opportunity to see what everyone else is paying that day, or that minute.
Thousands of Stimulus Reports Missing, Resulting in Potential Undercount of Jobs Created
Michael Garbel reports for ProPublica: "Eagle Peak Rock and Paving created and saved 32 jobs thanks to an $8 million federal stimulus contract to repair Glacier Point Road in Yosemite National Park. But you won’t find that on Recovery.gov, the government’s Web site for tracking stimulus money. You also won’t find the eight employees hired by Owensboro-Daviess County Regional Airport in Kentucky, or the 46 jobs claimed for some $65 million in grants awarded to the Louisiana Department of Social Services."
The Real Chicago Way: A privatization scheme that's a loser for taxpayers
Thomas Franks writes for the Wall Street Journal: "When the entertainers of the right aren't declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they're pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call "the Chicago way." As imagined by the right, the men in the West Wing are like a demonic cross between the antiwar demonstrators who gathered in Grant Park in 1968 and the Chicago cops who cracked their hippie skulls. Tremble, men of commerce, before this infernal combination. Myths like this are fun to invent. The problem, as ever, is reality."
Gun Activits Take Aim at Obamacare
James Ridgeway reports for Mother Jones: "Right-wingers have long viewed health care reform as a cover for various dastardly liberal plots—from killing off grannies and unborn babies to ushering in a socialist state. Now, pro-gun activists see yet another hidden agenda: Health care legislation, they say, threatens their right to bear arms. The accusation comes from Gun Owners of America, a 300,000 member group that proudly advertises itself with a quotation from Ron Paul: "The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington." The GOA sits well to the right of the National Rifle Association, which it tends to dismiss as a pack of sell-outs. Yet, like the Tea Partiers who draw Republican congressional leaders to their racially tinged protests against "National Socialist Health Care," the GOA could influence the reform debate. GOA has thrown itself wholeheartedly into the battle for the soul of the GOP, pledging to help oust "RINOs" and other insufficiently trigger-happy Republicans in the 2010 primaries—and to go after conservative Democrats, too."
Billionaires Behind the Hate
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, Lee Fang, and Alex Seitz-Wald write the Progress Report for Think Progress: "Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending. The Cato Institute -- founded by Charles -- as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first "tea party" protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations."
ACORN Not Guilty
Peter Dreier writes for Talking Points Memo: "ACORN is getting a bum rap -- in the news media, among politicians, and even by some foundations. That's the conclusion of an independent report released Monday, which acknowledged that ACORN needs to improve its management structure, but that it did not engage in illegal activities when two videographers, one posing as a prostitute, showed up at 10 ACORN offices, tried to entrap low-level staff mem¬bers into providing tax and housing advice for their illegal prostitution ring, and secretly videotaped the encounters."
The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy
Jeff Masters writes for Weather Underground: "In 1954, the tobacco industry realized it had a serious problem. Thirteen scientific studies had been published over the preceding five years linking smoking to lung cancer. With the public growing increasingly alarmed about the health effects of smoking, the tobacco industry had to move quickly to protect profits and stem the tide of increasingly worrisome scientific news. Big Tobacco turned to one the world's five largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton, to help out. Hill and Knowlton designed a brilliant Public Relations (PR) campaign to convince the public that smoking is not dangerous. They encouraged the tobacco industry to set up their own research organization, the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), which would produce science favorable to the industry, emphasize doubt in all the science linking smoking to lung cancer, and question all independent research unfavorable to the tobacco industry. The CTR did a masterful job at this for decades, significantly delaying and reducing regulation of tobacco products. George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels, who is President Obama's nominee to head the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), wrote a meticulously researched 2008 book called, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. In the book, he wrote: 'the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain.' The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: 'Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.' Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the 'Manufactured Doubt' industry."
The Physics of Copenhagen: Why Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of Civilization
Bill McKibben writes for TomDispatch: "Let me be blunt about what amazes me when it comes to global warming. In the U.S., it’s largely an issue for Democrats, “progressives,” liberals, the left, and I simply don’t get that. Never have. If the word “conservative” means anything, the key to it must be that word at its heart, 'conserve'; that is, the keeping or not squandering of what already is, especially what’s most valuable. And for us humans, what’s better than our planet? It’s the only home we’ve got and -- though I was one of those 1950s boys who read H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, as well as plenty of pulp sci-fi, and spent too much time dreaming about other planets and the stars -- probably the only one we’ll ever have. For us, there is nowhere else. Wreck it and you wreck us."
EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Pose Dangers, Plans Regulation
Renee Schoof reports for McClatchy Newspapers: "The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that global warming pollution endangered the health and welfare of Americans and must be reduced, a move that seemed timed to signal that the US is serious about joining an international bid to reduce the risks of damaging climate change."
The True Story About "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming"
Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin comment for Truthout: "Why have hopes faded for a binding agreement at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen that began this week? Why aren't the people of the world demanding that their national leaders act to avert the greatest environmental crisis the world has ever known?"
Climate Change on the Move: Climate Migration Will Affect the World's Security
Michael Werz and Kari Manlove write for The Center for American Progress: "African immigrants are given drinks inside a hospital tent in Los Cristianos on the Canary island of Tenerife, Spain. The Spanish government set up operations in African countries to discourage migration to Spain, which could intensify with climate change's effects."
The Struggle for Public Education
Sanny Weil writes for The Daily Censored: "Recently, Scott Lay, President and Chief Executive Officer Orange Coast College ‘94, a community college in California, spoke with the Academic Senate President Jane Patton about governance in these difficult times to trustees, administrators, faculty, staff and students at Delta College in Stockton. Like many community colleges bereft of monies, they have struggled to slash millions from the budget and align their limited funds to best serve their community. They are one of the hardest hit in the entire country by the financial and real estate crises that has made devastation for the profits of a few while disembowling public education. The entrusted and not to be trusted “legislature” of California have come up with a resolution contained in their Joint Committee on the Master Plan for Higher Education that recognizes that the 'recent economic downturn has taken a toll on the state’s fiscal support for public higher education; however, the economy will revive, according to the resolution, and this Master Plan review can set a framework for funding priorities when funds become available to restore and increase the state’s support for its colleges and universities and invest in preparing its future workforce.'"
The Selling of "Precious:" Hollywood's Enduring Myth of the Black Male Sexual Predator
Ishmael Reed writes for CounterPunch: "One can view Sarah Siegel on YouTube discussing her approach to marketing. During her dispassionate recital she says that she sees a 'niche dilemma,' and finds a way to solve that dilemma. Seeing that no one had supplied women with panties that were meant to be visible while wearing low cut jeans, she captured the niche and made a fortune. With five million dollars, she invested in the film Precious, which was adapted from the book Push, written by Ramona Lofton, who goes by the pen name of Sapphire, after the emasculating shrew in “Amos and Andy,” a show created by white vaudevillians Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll."
Recommended Audio: Rachel Maddow Demolishes Therapist Who Claims He Can Make Her Straight
Richard Cohen claims his therapy can turn gay people straight -- an absurd theory debunked by all national psychological associations. Transcript available from AlterNet.
Comcast-NBC Deal Finds Donors Converging with Obama's Principles
Kim Hart writes for The Hill: "The proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal will be the first big test of the Obama administration’s stance on the hot-button issue of media consolidation. It could also put the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress at odds with a few of their largest supporters."
Comcast-NBC U Merger Could Hurt Consumers
Josh Silver and Tim Winter comment for the Philadelphia Inquirer: "After months of speculation and rumor, Comcast and NBC Universal have formally announced that they are getting hitched in one of the biggest media mergers in our nation's history. The country's largest cable company and residential broadband provider is poised to take a controlling stake in NBC's broadcast network, dozens of cable channels, 27 local television stations, a movie studio, and a long list of other holdings. If this deal goes through as proposed, Comcast would control huge swaths of the cable, Internet, and content industries. It would be the first of a new generation of media behemoths, with more sure to follow."
Why the Comcast-NBCU Acquisition is Possible: A Glance at Recent History
Kamilla Kovacs reports for Media Access Project: "Many analysts have identified the proposed acquisition between Comcast and NBC Universal (NBCU) as the first example of vertical integration in the communications marketplace of the Digital Age. Few have pointed out, however, that the regulatory framework that allows for such an unprecedented combination of assets is also a 21st century phenomenon. Less than a decade ago, this combination would have been against Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations – indeed, it would have been merely a business executive’s dream. What makes this acquisition attempt possible today is the drastic, systematic deregulation in media policy that has taken place over the last 20 years."
Google, Washington Post and N.Y. Times Create News Tool
Howard Kurtz writes for the Washington Post: "Take the engineering mystique of Google, add the prestige of The Washington Post and New York Times, throw in the spice of secret meetings, and what have you got? A new online tool that, well, isn't exactly going to revolutionize journalism. But those involved in the partnership between the California software giant and two of the nation's top newspapers see it as a first step toward changing the way news is consumed online."
A Municipal Wi-Fi Model that Actually Works
Lynnette Luna reports for Urgent Communications: "While New York City's mobile broadband network garners much attention concerning its ability to serve both public safety and multiple government agencies, Oklahoma City's Wi-Fi mesh network recently passed its third anniversary and is now the world's largest mesh network, handling more than 4 terabytes of data traffic a month and serving up more than 200 applications concurrently for multiple government agencies. Launched in 2006 using Tropos equipment, Oklahoma City's mesh network—which operates in the unlicensed band — now covers 95% of the city's 620 square miles. The vision was to supply public safety with high-speed broadband service but now city departments including transit, public works and IT access the network using a slew of devices ranging from handheld devices, laptops, traffic controllers and video cameras."
Washington to Verizon Wireless: Can You Hear Us Now?
Cecilia Kang reports for the Washington Post: "The Federal Communications Commission sent a letter to Verizon Wireless Friday morning asking the company to explain why it has more than doubled its penalties for customers switching carriers. The inquiry follows pressure by lawmakers, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) who introduced a bill Thursday to curb the penalties known as early termination fees (ETFs). Last month, Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest cellphone service provider, increased its ETFs for smart phone customers to $350 from $150. The company said smart phones had become more expensive to subsidize, making it more costly when customers with discounted phones left long-term contracts early. No other wireless companies have introduced higher ETFs."
20 October 2009
18 Oct. 09 - After the Sunday Morning Talk Shows
On this week's edition of After the Sunday Morning Talk Shows, we open with Robert McChensey, Media Matters, interviewing Michael Moore about his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. Then we hear from Lauran Flanders who interviews Robert Greenwald about his film, Rethink Afghanistan. We close with a GRIT TV panel discussion entitled "Opting Out of Healthcare Reform?" featuring: Paul Waldman from The American Prospect, Adam Thompson from the Progressive States Network, Representative Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus, and Sharon Lerner, contributor to The Nation and author of The War On Moms: Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation. They discuss the many options for the public option, including the new suggestion of an opt-out provision that would let states choose not to take part in a public health care plan.
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