Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Monday, 3 June 2013


Daily Headlines

A report from the 2013 public banking conference

The big test, I submit, of whether this president is actually moving away from his prior five years as president of selling out his liberal, working-class and poverty-struck base to stand instead for traditional liberal and progressive ideals will be Social Security.

Last Week in Poverty: Homeowners Take the Foreclosure Fight to the DOJ
Last week at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, 500 activists marched to the Department of Justice to "Bring Justice to Justice" - a three day protest to stand up for people facing home foreclosure.
Lee Fang has become one of the best investigative reporters the progressives have going for them. I discuss his new book, which maps out and details the hundreds of new and old right wing operations, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars-- which are metastasizing within every state in the nation.

In the "trial of the century," now under way in New Orleans is wrestling with whether BP was guilty of "negligence" or "gross negligence" for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. BP faces tens of billions of dollars in potential penalties for their cover-up that concealed the full extent of its crimes from public view. Lying to Congress about that was one of 14 felonies to which BP pleaded guilty last year in a legal settlement with the Justice Department that included a $4.5-billion fine, the largest fine ever levied against a corporation in the US. An anonymous whistleblower has provided critical information.

Israel has derailed the Palestinian train and has the power to maintain the derailment. Israel and Palestine are not two equal parties discussing how to resolve their differences. All of the world leaders to whom John Kerry talked, know this. Kerry knows it. Barack Obama knows it.

The Bradley Manning support at Fort Meade, as the world waits to see the outcome of this US travesty of military and human justice.

We need to tackle the planetary crisis of global warming by creating jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We need to end the scandal of one of four corporations paying nothing in federal taxes while we balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.

Missing context abounded in the recent program "Unfit for Work--the startling rise of disability in America," produced by This American Life and Planet Money, which aired on public radio at the end of March. It left the false impression that freeloaders are gaming Social Security's disability program. The piece did a disservice to an important safety net crucial to the survival of some of the sickest people around.

To turn a blind eye to the natural world, as we have done, translates into psychical ecocide. Perception is degraded. Language truncated. Life becomes dispossessed of purpose and meaning. Apropos, the rise and banal persistence of: The United States of Whatever...[Yet] where there exists the implicate order of the soul there exists the wherewithal to rise up and resist the forces that lay siege to one's innate humanity.

By Rich Herschlag
Guns Don't Kill--Lobbyists Do: Why Sandy Hook Was Not a Wakeup Call
A personalized, unabashed account of just how far we as a nation are from anything approaching sanity on the gun issue.
By Gary Lindorff
I pledge allegiance
New poem by TCBH resident poet

Putzel is an exceptional new movie that delivers a much-needed uplift; a rare example of the nearly lost art of emotionally moving narrative film making. A valuable antidote to these treacherous times.

The empowerment of the Feminine in general is necessary in this age of a patriarchal system gone crazy. In the United States, we are loosing our rights through a budding police state while also loosing our hard fought for benefits for health care, decent wages. The pattern is nothing new for Western Civilization. This article explores this trend for the past several thousand years and argues we need to empower the Feminine.

Increasing CO2 Levels 'Fertilize' Arid Regions : Science : Latinos Post
Do we really understand what's going on? "Systems adjust", is all I can come up with. Here's an interesting observation on the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere that seems kind of obvious if you're familiar with the plant-animal exchange of gases.
Dismantling The Temple - William Greider
The present crisis has not only exposed the Fed's worst failures and structural flaws; it has also introduced citizens to the vast potential of monetary policy to serve the common good. If Ben Bernanke can create trillions of dollars at will and spread them around the financial system, could government do the same thing to finance important public projects the people want and need?
As he prepares for a run at the White House he continues to have the backing of ALEC, the group he belonged to in the 90's.

When Tim Samaras began chasing tornadoes more than two decades ago, he was one of a small, mostly anonymous group of scientists and thrill seekers armed with paper maps, weather radios and a sense of wonder. The risks became apparent on Sunday when relatives confirmed that Mr. Samaras, 55, along with his 24-year-old son, Paul, and his colleague, Carl Young, 45, were killed while chasing the storms that ravaged parts of Oklahoma on Friday.

Haven't all the great and the good been telling us that Social Security and Medicare as we know them are unsustainable, that they must be totally revamped -- and made much less generous? The truth is that the long-term outlook for Social Security and Medicare, while not great, actually isn't all that bad. It's time to stop obsessing about how we'll pay benefits to retirees in 2035 and focus instead on how we're going to provide jobs to unemployed Americans in the here and now.

There are people who live in the real world and are not blind to nuance, people who don't buy what the kook machines have to sell, but also recognize that the establishment media (compromised by, among other things, its financial dependency on the corporate elites) can't be trusted to get to the real bottom of things.

"An unexpected eruption of often-violent civil unrest swept across Turkey over the weekend, the culmination of a simmering clash over social policy between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a broadening coalition of Turks that threatens the political stability of a key U.S. ally."

It was bash-Attorney-General-Eric-Holder day in the Sunday talk shows this week as several Republican lawmakers questioned whether he should remain in his post and warned that he will be facing investigations over statements he gave while under oath. Sen. John McCain went as far as to call on Holder to ask himself whether he should resign. "I think it would be tough for him to answer the question whether he can still effectively serve the president of the United States," McCain said.

The U.S. government wants to lock away Pvt. Bradley Manning for life because he released hundreds of thousands of classified documents that he believes revealed war crimes and other wrongdoing. But overlooked is how much damage over-classification does to the Republic.

By earl ofari hutchinson
The GOP's Hillary Hits Won't Work
The recent Quinnipiac University poll on likely 2016 presidential candidates seemingly had some good news for the GOP and bad news for thousands of Democrats. The poll found that Hillary Clinton's popularity had nose-dived nearly 10 percent in the past few months.


Latest Articles
Poor community in rural Northern Arizona butts head with rich developer over water rights. Who will win?

Have you ever wondered how folks who can't agree on much else can generally agree on a beautiful face? Have you ever wondered how social or religious groups that go out of their way to be different nevertheless display great conformaty within their group? And this business of regression to the mean, does it apply to how we percieve the world?

Redefining Cancer Survivorship
Two women working to support female survivors of cancer. June 2 is National Cancer Survivors Day.
tips, strategies and advice on how to use meetings, hearings and speeches to get your message out

The fossil fuel industry should be turned into an energy industry: we have to take the hundred million dollars a day that Exxon spends on finding new oil, and have them spend it on solar panels instead. Which is why, for now, we have to divest those stocks.

Manning is facing 21 criminal charges that include "aiding the enemy" and could face a life sentence if convicted of the most serious charges. Our reporters and others were denied press credentials, and are now forced to struggle for a spot in the overflow room without knowing the basis for their exclusion. If the court does not increase the size of the media center, we deserve to know why our application was denied.

"Hold Fast" represents a number of firsts in my life. I think it's safe to say that it's my most realistic, most tragic and yet also most deeply joyful book. It's a story of extremes, of dreams, of seems... and of nots and knots! It reminds me all the time of how many people across the U. S. are indeed holding fast to dreams, and of the power of a story to take on a life of its own in the world.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is outwardly going through the motions of supporting peace negotiations but demands preconditions and no cessation of expanding Israeli colonies in Palestine. Netanyahu knows how to play the U.S. government like a harp. He talks about negotiations for peace, but remains intransigent.

Taxes on the rich will remain minimal. Multinationals and other big companies will pay almost no taxes at all. Services for the poor will be cut. But the brunt of the burden will be borne by the middle class indirectly -- value-added and other taxes will raise Israel's already very high cost-of-living even higher.

The Obama administration has repeatedly declared the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government to be a "red line" or "game changer" that would trigger unspecified US intervention. At the same time, Washington and its European NATO allies have turned a blind eye to evidence of chemical weapons use by the Islamist militias.

Almost everything you hear and read in the media about the current IRS "scandal" is based on deliberate falsification of basic facts. Some might call it lying.

The way to get out of our economic funk is to boost wages and hire more workers. Printing money alone doesn't work; just look at CPI. Deflation is NOT a problem when labor gets its fair share of productivity gains. When workers are fairly paid, they have sufficient income to buy the things that industry produces. That prevents prices from falling. That's how you beat deflation when you're in a liquidity trap.

Welcome to Bizarro World, where up is down, Islamist fanatics are fighters for "democracy," and a prominent public figure argues we ought to give arms to people who not only want to kill Americans but have already killed a number of them.

Obama Is "White Power" Tool--of Carpetbaggers, Not of KKK
In a provocative application of history that's a radical shift of perspective from my previous OEN article, which came down pretty hard on political "rednecks," I point out that, like these tragic poor Southern whites after the Civil War, we are all prey to political "carpetbaggers," who exploit the erosion of proper government after a "civil war" to make it the tool of their predatory self-enrichment.

Best News Links from the Web
Matt Taibbi: Why Didn't the SEC Catch Madoff? It Might Have Been Policy Not To
More and more embarrassing stories of keep leaking out of the SEC, which is beginning to look somehow worse than corrupt – it's hard to find the right language exactly, but "aggressively clueless" comes pretty close to summing up the atmosphere that seems to be ruling the country's top financial gendarmes. he most recent contribution to the broadening canvas of dysfunction and incompetence surrounding the SEC is a whistleblower complaint filed by Kathleen Furey, a senior lawyer who worked in the New York Regional Office, the agency outpost with direct jurisdiction over Wall Street. It sometimes feels like we're re-living the same stories over and over again with this agency. The same kinds of blindly political creatures keep getting promoted to the top jobs, while hardworking line investigators who are just trying to do the work keep running into the same kinds of ...
Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture -- a decent, humane and playful culture -- has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces -- forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it.

The most urgent fact she left out of her op-ed, and that has received scant attention in the days since, is absolutely crucial: 70% of the BRCA#1 gene mutation breast cancers result in the most aggressive, least treatable form of breast cancer called the "triple negative," a variation that more resembles ovarian than breast cancer genetically and which does not respond to any of the three main forms of treatment common among other breast cancers. The population next most likely to get triple negative breast cancer, after BRCA carriers, are African-American women.

Whatever triggered the hunger strike at Guantánamo -- the detainees say that the military had begun searching their Korans and instituted a series of harsh new measures, which the military denies -- the underlying issue is that the detainees are in despair of ever getting out. Many of them, including 56 men from Yemen, have been cleared to leave the prison by a committee of top national security officials. But thanks to a combination of Congressional actions taken during the past few years, and the timidity of President Obama, they remain in Guantánamo with no end in sight. The hunger strike has been their way of reminding the world of their continued imprisonment, and it has worked brilliantly. One wonders whether President Obama would have even mentioned Guantánamo in his big national security speech last week if not for the hunger strikers.

A federal judge has ruled that Google must comply with the FBI's warrantless requests for confidential user data, despite the search company's arguments that the secret demands are illegal. CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco rejected Google's request to modify or throw out 19 so-called National Security Letters, a warrantless electronic data-gathering technique used by the FBI that does not need a judge's approval. Her ruling came after a pair of top FBI officials, including an assistant director, submitted classified affidavits.

Editor's note: Residents of Parkmerced, pictured above, is one of the first housing developments to feel the sting of displacement in San Francisco. This award-winning housing complex was not protected by Historical Resources or CEQA, (California's Environmental Quality Act). The last chance to preserve it, is in court... Article starts here: Regional planners want to put 280,000 more people into San Francisco -- and they admit that many current residents will have to leave

It's always useful to know where people are coming from, so we can thank former Florida governor Jeb Bush for making it so easy to understand where he stands on public education. He has nothing but disdain for it. Bush does support "outsourcing" public education to for-profit companies, as is evidenced by his longtime support for charter schools run by for-profit companies as well as private school vouchers paid for with public funds. His annual education summits in Washington are always sponsored by for-profit companies. And he famously said last year that shopping for a school should be like shopping for milk.

Efforts to expand production from the Alberta tar sands suffered a significant setback on Friday when the provincial government of British Columbia rejected a pipeline project because of environmental shortcomings. In a strongly worded statement, the government of the province said it was not satisfied with the pipeline company's oil spill response plans. The rejection of the pipeline -- which was to have given Alberta an outlet to Pacific coast ports and markets in China -- further raises the stakes on another controversial tar sands pipeline, Keystone XL.

The remains of dozens of Palestinians killed by Israelis in fighting during the war of 1948 which led to the creation of the state of Israel have been found in a mass grave in Tel Aviv's Jaffa district. An official at the Muslim cemetery there told AFP news agency that the grisly find occurred on Wednesday when ground subsided as workers carried out renovations, revealing six chambers full of skeletons.

Ecuador's foreign minister will travel to the UK later this month to meet Julian Assange on the eve of the WikiLeaks founder's first anniversary of living in the country's embassy in London. Assange has been inside the embassy since 19 June last year and has been granted political asylum by Ecudador. If he leaves the embassy, he will be arrested and sent to Sweden for questioning over sexual allegations made by two women, which he denies.

Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert has unearthed a new culprit in the Benghazi saga: fellow Republican John McCain. Conservative radio host Frank Gaffney asked Gohmert to comment on McCain's "hobnobbing with jihadists" during his recent trip to Syria. Gohmert brought up a similar trip of McCain's to Libya, where he feels McCain's policy to depose Muammar Gaddafi unleashed the Muslim extremist forces that later attacked the American Consulate in Benghazi.

At the heart of the Obama administration's aggressive stance on leak investigations lies a single, unprecedented case that could test the limit of the government's ability to control information and punish those who disseminate it. When the court martial trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning begins June 3 at Ft. Meade, Md., the 25-year-old will stand alone, accused of aiding the enemy when he provided thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks.

The Kansas Legislature should have convened last January with a clear mission: Find a way to maintain state services despite a gaping budget hole dug by reckless income tax cuts adopted in 2012. But almost five months later, lawmakers still haven't settled on an answer. The results for Kansans? They still don't know what their state sales tax rate will be after July 1. Or whether the rate will be lower on food. They don't know what their income tax rates will be in the future.
Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 19:12