Monday Reads

Posted: April 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Federal Budget, Foreign Affairs, Libya, morning reads, Republican presidential politics, SCOTUS, Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 25 Comments

Good Morning!

Well, today I’m starting with a quote from  Robert Kuttner for The American Prospect about Larry Summers’ appearance at the INET conference.  INET is the acronym for the Institute for New Economic Thinking. It was created with a $100 million grant from George Soros and no, I wasn’t invited and I didn’t attend.  Mark Thoma and Brad De Long did. You can read their blogs if you want other views.

Larry Summers, now back at Harvard, was the after-dinner entertainment, interviewed by the prodigious Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, the world’s most respected financial journalist.

Summers was terrific, acknowledging that the stimulus of February 2009 was too small, that the idea of deflating our way to recovery is insane, that de-regulation had been excessive, and that much of the economics profession missed the developing crisis because its infatuation with self-correcting markets.

If only this man had been Obama’s chief economic adviser!

He’s referring to this:

Also worth mentioning is this op-ed by former Obama economist Christina Romer on why we have abysmal unemployment. If you read and listen to both of them, it’s going to be obvious that Obama must not have listened to either of them.  No wonder they quit so early on.  That leaves Timothy-in-the-well Geithner holding the bag for this miserable recovery, imho.  Evidently, the two of them thought  what most economists were thinking for several years now but it just wasn’t evident from policy.  I guess if I heard this austerity crap was coming down the hopper during this miserable recovery, I’d have bailed before my professional credibility went to the crapper too.  Guess Timothy always has the shadow banking industry to keep him warm.  Meanwhile, Summers continues his apology tour and Romer clarifies the unemployment situation.

Strong evidence suggests that the natural rate of unemployment actually hasn’t risen very much. Instead, the elevated unemployment rate appears to reflect mainly cyclical factors, particularly a lingering shortfall in consumer spending and business investment.

Okay. The important phrase here is “lingering shortfall in consumer spending and business investment”.  That means none of these idiotic tax cuts worked.  It also means the stimulus was woefully small and ill-directed.  It also means that it’s absolutely no time to worry about austerity unless you want yet another recession.  Frankly, I think the Republicans are secretly trying to bring one on and Obama is just not that informed about economics and more concerned about chasing the mythical bi-partisan unicorn to wake the frick up.

Since BB knows that I’m a wannabe astrophysicist (or Egyptologist depending on the day of the week), she sent me another kewl science link about a star torn apart by a blackhole! NEATO!!!

On March 28, 2011, NASA’s Swift satellite caught a flash of high-energy X-rays pouring in from deep space. Swift is designed to do this, and since its launch in 2004 has seen hundreds of such things, usually caused by stars exploding at the ends of their lives.

But this time was hardly “usual”. It didn’t see a star exploding as a supernova, it saw a star literally getting torn apart as it fell too close to a black hole!

The African Union’s been chatting up their “Brother Leader”  Whacko Ghadafo and have announced the possibility of an end to the fighting in Libya. And, raise your hand if you’d like to buy the Crescent City connection because I’m entertaining offers since the Brooklyn bridge sold so well last week.

“We have completed our mission with the brother leader, and the brother leader’s delegation has accepted the road map as presented by us,” Jacob Zuma, the South African president, said.

The AU mission, headed by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the Mauritanian president, arrived in Tripoli on Sunday.

Besides Zuma and Abdel Aziz, the delegation includes Amadou Toumani Toure, Denis Sassou Nguessou and Yoweri Museveni – respectively the presidents of Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

Gaddafi made his first appearance in front of the foreign media in weeks when he joined the AU delegation at his Bab al-Aziziyah compound.

The committee said in a statement that it had decided to go along with a road map adopted in March, which calls for an end to hostilities, “diligent conveying of humanitarian aid” and “dialogue between the Libyan parties”.

Speaking in Tripoli, Ramtane Lamamra, the AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, said the issue of Gaddafi’s departure had come up in the talks but declined to give details.

Why is it I want to sing I wanna zooma zooma zooma zooma zoom every time I read something about South Africa these days?  Well, as long as it’s not one of those horn thingies that ruined the world cup this last time out.

More crap from Crazy Republicans via Think Progress: Cantor Sees Current Medicare and Medicaid Programs As A ‘Safety Net’ For ‘People Who Frankly Don’t Need One’

Today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace questioned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) support for a plan in which Americans “pay more out of pocket.” Defending the proposal, Cantor argued that these programs sometimes provide a “safety net” for “people who frankly don’t need one” and that the shift of the burden from the government to the beneficiary will teach government “to do more with less”:

CANTOR: We are in a situation where we have a safety net in place in this country for people who frankly don’t need one. We have to focus on making sure we have a safety net for those who need it.

WALLACE: The Medicaid people — you’re going to cut that by $750 billion.

CANTOR: The medicaid reductions are off the baseline. so what we’re saying is allow states to have the flexibility to deal with their populations, their indigent populations and the healthcare needs the way they know how to deal with them. Not to impose some mandate from a bureaucrat in washington.

WALLACE: But you are giving them less money to do it.

CANTOR: In terms of the baseline, that is correct…What we’re saying is there is so much imposition of a mandate that doesn’t relate to the actual quality of care. We believe if you put in place the mechanism that allow for personal choice as far as Medicare is concerned, as well as the programs in Medicaid, that we can actually get to a better resolve and do what most Americans are learning how to do, which is to do more with less.

Actually, 99% of Americans are doing less with less.  One percent of Americans are doing more with the corporate and rich people’s welfare that folks like Cantor have handed them on a golden platter for the last ten years.  If you have the stomach for it, the link to the TV interview is over at TP too. Frankly, I’ve been sick enough recently and don’t need to see anything that just makes me sicker.

I don’t know about you, but watching Donald Trump–the man who lost his father’s billions and then ran through government subsidies and finally made some money as a really bad reality TV star–as a potential presidential candidate has been sort’ve a surreal trip. James Polis at Richochet says that Trump is Final Proof that the Political Class Has Failed.  Trump’s potential candidacy is like an extension of his reality show with gobs of opportunism, self-promotion and narcissism. It’s bad hair gone wild.

There are two main theories cooperating to explain the Trump phenomenon:

  1. Donald Trump is today’s best self-promoter and professional opportunist.
  2. The Republican field of presumptive candidates for president is lame.

But neither of these, nor even both together, can adequately explain what’s going on. We can’t even turn for supplemental help to subtheories that emphasize the rise of celebreality culture, the fall of Sarah Palin, or The Continuing Story of Bungling Barry. These variables all appear somewhere in the equation that has produced the Trump phenomenon. But none of them explain it.

Trump is suddenly “winning” as a political figure because the political class has failed. The authority of our political institutions is weak and getting weaker; it’s not that Americans ‘lack trust’ in them, as blue ribbon pundits and sociologists often lament, so much as they lack respect for the people inside them.

My theory is that he’s just a summer replacement, along with Michelle Bachmann, that will set the stage for fall when the blue suited, pompadour-sporting  set take over to bore us to death with talks of tax cuts and subsidies ala President Dementia.  Other Republican Presidential wannabes must be thinking we’ll be tired of self-promoting, idea-less hacks by then and that they’ll look refreshing by comparison in a few months.   Oddly enough, the P woman is keeping a low profile in all of this.  Maybe she’s finally figured out that discretion is the better part of valor for a change or it could be she just has enough money  for an excellent summer vacation and has decided to exercise her options.

Okay, so I’m going to move on to something light (weirdly, spinning light, emanating from the patterned Chinese lantern covering the naked bulb in my dorm room while a John Lennon album plays Power to the People on my old turntable … oops, wrong flashback) from New Scientist. Thought mushrooms were just for old hippies and Native American Shaman?  Think again.  Here’s the headline:  Earliest evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe.

EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties – the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.

The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.

Like the objects depicted in the mural, P. hispanica has a bell-shaped cap topped with a dome, and lacks an annulus – a ring around the stalk. “Its stalks also vary from straight to sinuous, as they do in the mural,” says Akers (Economic Botany, DOI: 10.1007/s12231-011-9152-5).

This isn’t the oldest prehistoric painting thought to depict magic mushrooms, though. An Algerian mural that may show the species Psilocybe mairei is 7000 to 9000 years old.

What a long strange ride it’s been ever since.

More on Obama-style Justice for Guantanamo detainees as the Supremes decline to clarify their rights.

The Obama administration has fought all attempts by lawyers for detainees to have the Supreme Court review those rulings. And while the news was overshadowed by the administration’s concession that alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-defendants will be tried by a military commission rather than federal jury — a separate issue — the court last week turned away three detainee challenges arising from Boumediene.

One group active in representing the detainees, the Center for Constitutional Rights, decried what it called the court’s refusal “to defend its Boumediene decision and other precedents from the open defiance of the D.C. Circuit.”

The government told justices that there is no reason for them to believe anything other than “lower courts have properly performed the task that this court assigned them in Boumediene v. Bush.”

“Open defiance” may go a bit far in describing the D.C. Circuit’s rulings, but there is no doubt that the court’s action in Boumediene — and its inaction since — has left few happy.

While detainee advocates complain about the court’s timidity, D.C. Senior Circuit Judge A. Raymond Randolph has received wide attention for a speech he gave last year in which he compared the justices to characters in “The Great Gatsby,” who have created a mess they expect others to clean up.

You don’t need me to start in on the Supremes this morning since BB did such a great job last night.  Please go read her thread on just exactly how bankrupt our government has become.  Believe me, it’s not an article on the deficit either.

Here’s an important information on the Koch Brothers, grand wizards of the kleptocracy.  Alternet says they’re worse than you thought and they’re the astroturf beneathe the Tea Party’s wings.

Then look at a recent position pushed by Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party-allied astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch (and whose sibling organization, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, he chairs):

Similarly, Americans for Prosperity supports the House continuing resolution that cuts spending by $61 billion. Those cuts would reduce the budget for the CFTC by one-third. Make no mistake: Gutting the CFTC or limiting its authority would be a boon to Wall Street businesses that use complex financial instruments. But while the result is more profits for oil companies, it means everyone else pays more at the pump.

Okay, now have a look at the Kochs’ recent direct contributions to political candidates:

The Kochs donated directly to 62 of the 87 members of the House GOP freshman class…and to 12 of the new members of the U.S. Senate.

Don’t look now. It’s Atlas Shrugged, the Movie.  Bad fiction just refuses to die when it gives erections to obsessive white men. I’m just waiting for next year’s Razzies. It’s the tale of a businessman obsessed. No, not the movie …the making of the movie …

It has taken businessman John Aglialoro nearly 20 years to realize his ambition of making a movie out of “Atlas Shrugged,” the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has sold more than 7 million copies and has as passionate a following among many political conservatives and libertarians as “Twilight” has among teen girls.

But the version of the book coming to theaters Friday is decidedly independent, low-cost and even makeshift. Shot for a modest $10 million by a first-time director with a cast of little-known actors, “Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” the first in an expected trilogy, will play on about 300 screens in 80 markets. It’s being marketed with the help of conservative media and “tea party” organizing groups and put into theaters by a small, Salt Lake City-based booking service.

I think I’ll pass.  I prefer those nice little British films.  I’m anxiously awaiting the redo of Upstairs, Downstairs.  I never could make it through that silly John Galt speech even when I was young and my mind was an open book.  Now, where are those lights on the ceiling when you need them?

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?

Fighting Back … Ballroom Days are Over

Posted: April 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, collective bargaining, Corporate Crime, Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Economic Develpment, Economy, education | Tags: , , , | 31 Comments

May take a week, and it may take longer.
They got the guns, but we got the numbers.
Gonna win yeah, we’re taking over.
Come on!

Yeah!

Your ballroom days are over, baby.
Night is drawing near.
Shadows of the evening
Crawl across the years.

Jim Morrison, from “Five to One”

I’ve spent the last six months watching this country’s policy makers throw all common sense and empirical evidence on the US economy to the wind. My jaw just drops when I consider what the Republicans have proposed under the flag of austerity and how the Democrats entertain them.

BostonBoomer and I spend a lot of time on the phone with each other. We’ve been each other’s support system having much in common as older, divorced women gone back to school and social justice activists feeling exiled in some kind of shared virtual gulag. We remember the protests and actions that we took at a younger age to demonstrate against war and the treatment of minorities and women.  BB was active in antiwar protests.  I was an avid women’s rights activist in the 70s and 80s, having found out that just getting good grades and hard work weren’t going to be enough for me to break into white male dominated bastions.  It’s maddening when you think of all the time you spend on your education and doing the right thing and find out that what really gets you ahead is your ability to fit certain biological characteristics and social status.  All those things I tried to change back then are being undone.  All over the country, privileged, wealthy people and corporations are using political donations and power to seek advantage like never before.  This is not healthy for our country or our future.  We need to end their Ballroom Days.

It’s heartened both of us to see union workers in the US and many citizens in the MENA region stand up to authority and demand their right to participate in policy decisions that impact their lives. All over the world, the immense transfer of wealth and national assets to a small elite–the uberwealthy few representing mostly inheritance dynasties–has occurred with the help of political lap dogs seeking donations and parochial interests.  It seems we may have reached a tipping point.  Some yearning-to-be-free democracy contagion has created a new call for activism to protect the interests of the many against the pillaging of the few.  It’s brought people to the streets all over the world and created scapegoats for rapacious states.  From whistle blowing of war crimes by Bradley Manning to shouting for no more political or economic prisoners in Northern African nations, we see ordinary, educated, middle class people taking to the streets and shouting enough!  We’ve fed the cheats long enough!

It’s about time.

Allison Kilkenny at The Nation has a new article up called “The Resistance Has Begun” that lists recent political demonstrations and unrest.  Her article was inspired by a post by Chris Hedges–This is What Resistance Looks Like–on the increasing number of political protests occurring around the country.   Hedges writes on the importance of the protests.  Are we looking at renewed activism from the people who’ve been hurt by the power class-enabling policies of the last 30 years?

Chris Hedges has this to say.

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance.  This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

I’ve written recently about the Social Contract of 20th century America and how that contract has been broken by politicians seeking to empower the monopolies and oligopolies that fill their political accounts with booty.  Things have gotten so blatantly amoral that the very same folks that destroyed the Gulf ecosystem and took 11 lives and many livelihoods through careless management decisions rewarded themselves with bonuses and ‘best safety’ records with no concept that people might find that appalling. This was a repeat performance of the situation where executives of investment and commercial banks took huge bonuses right on the back of their bad management decisions that brought near US economic collapse and massive bail outs with federal funds. Also, BP is right back applying for drilling rights having really not made things right on either the human or the environment accounts for their last cost-cutting, profit gouging adventure in ignoring safety for the sake of quick profits.

When the social costs of doing business exceed the benefits of doing that business for every one but a few, the society needs to take a hard look at why it tolerates such behavior.  Forcing other people to bear the costs of your business or your consumption is wrong and that’s exactly what most business subsidies and lax regulations do.  When businesses can push their costs off on society or consumers of certain goods can push their costs off on society, that market becomes distorted and dysfunctional.   The market price does not reflect true costs. It will overproduce harmful goods and drain resources that would be better placed elsewhere.  The only way to push these costs back to the producers and consumers of  costly activities and end the dysfunction is through legal prosecution or tough regulation.   The idea that’s been propagated that regulation serves no purpose in a market system is part and parcel of the problem.

Opaque, vague markets do no one any good.  They serve as breeders of Ponzi schemes like that of Bernie Madoff. Markets that don’t force the true cost of doing business back on the producer are no good either.  They take precious scarce resources and allocate them to activities that are not worthwhile because prices and costs are understated.  There are mounds and mounds of microeconomic studies that show how insidious markets can be when they are distorted by things like information asymmetries or supply-enabling protection.  All of these activities set up winners and losers.  In most cases, ordinary people are  the losers.  It takes money and power to access the special treatment offered by politicians and their laws.  You only get those huge passes and benefits if your get to call yourself a corporation in this country.  You can collect a lot of money for being inefficient for some reason.  Businesses in this country are considered to be ‘individuals’ for freedom of speech issues but they go unprosecuted for murder every day.  Just talk to grieving families of those 11 workers who died on the Deep Water Horizon in the name of increased production and lower costs.  Only a sociopath could murder 11 people with safety shortcuts then provide incentives for good safety records to the instigators of the bad decisions.  The only offset that we have to the kind of power and access achieved by lobbyists and corporate interests is civil disobedience and protests.  Protest we must!

Kilkenny’s article lists a number of protests that are brewing around the country.  These include examples in New York State, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other average cities with average US citizens.  Is this a Middle Class Awakening going viral?  Here’s some more from Chris Hedges on how concentration of power and money in monopoly banks has warped our policy agendas and priorities. Our incomes from hard work are being skimmed by paper shuffling fees paid as bonuses to agents with no productive purpose but market distortion.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

There is nothing free market about government-installed and enabled monopolies.  We achieve nothing as a society by buying into the delusion that all government does is destroy the business environment when all evidence points to their enabling of the worst business practices.  There is nothing remotely efficient about markets that can use public resources on the cheap to underprice goods and services, hence making them more marketable than they should be.  There is no efficiency in letting producers of products and services pass the costs of their bad management decisions on to middle class and working people.  You cannot blame government workers for the current economic failings.  You can however, blame Bank of America, Republican Governors who hand out tax cuts indiscriminately, and federal subsidies of inefficient businesses. Huge corporations and rich people gobble up tons of public resources via subsidies, tax breaks, and use of infrastructure.  Many governors have literally given away their states treasury and resources courting businesses that cost them more than they bring to that state in jobs or revenues. The big lie is that corporations are overtaxed and receive no benefits from state, local or federal government.  We can’t afford to enable that big lie. We must protest it.

Ordinary Americans cannot band together to hire lobbyists to help repair our broken Social Contract.  The only thing we have are our feet, our voices, and our votes.  Paul Ryan’s budget Anthem is just the latest in a line of assaults on reason and common sense.  It is the very definition of pennywise and pound foolish and it’s insulting.  It hypes unnecessary tax cuts and increases in pentagon spending while removing funding for public health, public education, and public information programs. It continues the effort to redistribute the incomes and the resources of the country to the very few at the cost of the very many. The only way to stop this is to protest.  Protest frequently.  Protest openly.  Protest now.  Public Policy should not be based on badly written dystopian fiction novels.

It is not illegal immigrants that have broken the American Dream.  It’s not bands of stereotyped Muslim Bedouins hiding out in caves a world apart from Main Street that’s threatening the livelihoods of American workers. It’s not poor Cuba’s last vestiges of Marxism or crazy-like-a-fox Hugo Chavez. It’s time to stop falling for their straw men enemies. What has taken the American Dream away from so many is  the greed and power lust of a few people that have completely usurped the nation’s policy makers.  It’s time to remind them that they may have the guns, but we have the numbers.

Monday Reads

Posted: April 4, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Rights, collective bargaining, Diplomacy Nightmares, Foreign Affairs, Hamas, Labor unions, Libya, MENA, Middle East, morning reads, Reproductive Rights, Syria, worker rights | Tags: , , , | 68 Comments

Good Morning!

This is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.  It happened on April 4, 1968.  Historian Robert Creamer remembers the day and its meaning in a post at HuffPo.  It’s the 43rd anniversary of the activist’s death.  He was in Memphis working for the rights of ordinary workers to organize and better their work terms and conditions.

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to support the strike of the city’s garbage collectors who were demanding the right of collective bargaining.

He was there because the right to sit across a table and negotiate wages and working conditions gave otherwise powerless workers, the right to have a say.

Then — as now — collective bargaining was, as the AFSCME banner said in the Wisconsin Capitol Rotunda, about freedom.

At Duke that spring we — and the non-academic employees of the university — took up the same cause. Collective bargaining was the only thing that could systematically, permanently change the relations of power and overcome years of exploitation.

Even in 1968, their $1.15 per hour was a pathetic salary — $2,392 a year. They were exploited every day. They needed a union.

Now, 43 years later, America is relearning the lessons of April, 1968:

  • How collective bargaining is an integral part of a truly democratic society.
  • How the labor movement is about a lot more than wages and working conditions — that it’s about respect and dignity and hope.
  • And finally, it is learning once again that you can’t have the rain without the thunder and lightning. Freedom is earned through struggle. And if you want to have a great life — a life that gives you a sense of fulfillment and meaning — it’s never too late to decide that you will dedicate yours to the struggle for social and economic justice.

The LA Times reports that over 700 Anti-union pieces of legislation have been introduced across the country as part of the Republican party’s war on working Americans.  Sounds like a conspiracy to me.

More than 700 bills have been introduced in virtually every state. Nearly half of the states are considering legislation to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Unions are girding for a fight.

Now that the governors of Ohio and Wisconsin have signed bills to limit public workers’ collective bargaining rights, their fellow Republicans in other states are expected to gain momentum in their efforts to take on unions.

Palm Beach, Florida judges have evidently had it with the sloppy recordkeeping practices of mortgage holders and servicers.  They’re starting to “routinely”  dismiss foreclosure cases.

Angry and exasperated by faulty foreclosure documents, judges throughout Florida are hitting back by increasingly dismissing cases and boldly accusing lawyers of “fraud upon the court.”

A Palm Beach Post review of cases in state and appellate courts found judges are routinely dismissing cases for questionable paperwork. Although in most cases the bank is allowed to refile the case with the appropriate documents, in a growing number of cases judges are awarding homeowners their homes free and clear after finding fraud upon the court.

Still, critics say judges are not doing enough.

“The judges are the gatekeepers to jurisprudence, to the Florida Constitution, to access to the courts and to due process,” said attorney Chip Parker, a Jacksonville foreclosure defense attorney who was recently investigated by the Florida Bar for his critical comments about so-called “rocket dockets” during an interview with CNN. “It’s discouraging when it appears as if there is an exception being made for foreclosure cases.”

Dictator Bashar al-Assad of Syria is undoubtedly one of the most oppressive leaders in the world. He has been a strong supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah.  AJ has an op-ed that talks about how deluded he’s become these days as his people have finally stood up to say enough!  It’s an interesting piece that talks about how just being against Israel does not translate into a blank check from your people or other leaders in the region.

The eruption of Arab revolutions has been a reaction to decades of repression and the skewed distribution of wealth; two problems that have plagued anti- and pro-Western Arab governments alike.

And Syria is one of the most repressive states in the region; hundreds, if not thousands, of people have disappeared into its infamous prisons. Some reappear after years, some after decades, many never resurface at all.

Syrians have not been the only victims. Other Arabs – Lebanese who were abducted during the decades of Syrian control over its neighbour, Jordanian members of the ruling Baath party who disagreed with its leadership and members of different Palestinian factions – have also been victimised.

Syrian critics of the regime are often arrested and charged – without due process – with serving external – often American and Israeli – agendas to undermine the country’s “steadfastness and confrontational policies”.

But these acts have never been adequately condemned by Arab political parties and civil society, which have supported Syria’s position on Israel while turning a blind eye to its repressive policies.

Thus while Syrian dissidents, including prominent nationalist and leftist intellectuals, are incarcerated in Syrian jails, other Arab activists and intellectuals have flocked to Damascus to praise its role in “defending Arab causes”.

This hypocrisy has reinforced the regime’s belief that it is immune from the criticisms directed at repressive pro-Western governments in the region.

As some one who studies the region–albeit mostly in economic and trade terms–I’ve found that each country has its unique set of problems and circumstances even though many of them seem to have similarities on the surface.  Syria’s been one of the worst of the worst destabilizers in the region. This is one regime that could be replaced by nearly any one and it would be an immediate improvement.

Former President Clinton is on record saying that the US government shouldn’t rule out arming Libyan Rebels.

But Clinton said he wouldn’t completely rule out the idea of supplying arms to Libya’s rebels.

“Let me just say this. I sure wouldn’t shut the door to it. I think … we may need to know a little more,” he said.

Clinton, husband of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stressed that he was speaking without “any official sanction” whatsoever.

“I’m just speaking from myself. But I certainly wouldn’t take that off the table, too,” he said.

For some reason, emissaries from Gadhafi are meeting Greek leaders to find a political solution to their civil war and to the UN resolution.  Maybe Gadhafi is looking for that special retirement place on a Greek Isle.

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s acting foreign minister met with Greece’s prime minister yesterday to seek a political solution to hostilities in the north African country, said Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas.

“It appears that the regime is also seeking a solution,” Droutsas said, referring to Qaddafi’s government, after Abdul Ati al-Obeidi met with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, Droutsas said in a statement.

The talks followed “a series of contacts over recent days” involving Greek and Libyan officials, including the countries’ prime ministers, which led to al-Obeidi’s Athens trip, Droutsas said. Al-Obeidi also planned to visit Malta and Turkey, he said.

“It is necessary for there to be a serious attempt for peace, for stability in the region,” the Greek foreign minister said.

The Daily Mail reports that Moussa Koussa is getting asylum in the UK.  I’d say that’s a pretty interesting development considering his role in the Lockabie bombing.  I suppose there’s worse places to spend your retirement from “notorious henchmen”.

Libya’s feared ‘torturer-in-chief’ has been offered asylum in the UK in return for his help to topple Muammar Gaddafi and his hated regime.

The secret offer to Libya’s former foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, was made while he was still in Tripoli and helped persuade him to seek sanctuary in Britain.

But any promise of special protection for one of Gaddafi’s most notorious henchmen has provoked anger from those who want Koussa, 62, put on trial for his alleged crimes.

MP Ben Wallace, parliamentary aide to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, said: ‘This man should not be granted asylum or any other special treatment; the only proper outcome is to bring him to justice.

‘Britain needs to make up its mind quickly. There will be no shortage of courts that will readily seek his extradition. The last thing the UK wants is for Koussa to languish, at taxpayers’ expense, in legal no-man’s-land.’

MI6 officers first made contact with Koussa, who has been linked with the Lockerbie bombing and the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London, in the first few days after the UN-sanctioned attacks on Gaddafi’s military machine on March 19.

A source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Central to the enticements was the prospect of living in safety in the UK under the protection of the asylum laws. Koussa’s greatest concern was what would happen to him once he left Gaddafi.

I’m going to end with something BB sent me last on what the radical right thinks of women.  You can see this onslaught of anti women laws ooze disrespect and the opinion that women aren’t fully competent adults who are capable of making good, moral decisions without some big daddy republican government telling them what to do.  Disgusting!  They want to turn BP loose on the Gulf of Mexico again, but women can’t even been trusted with their own bodies.

Women sure are impulsive, lying, vulnerable and childlike creatures, aren’t they? That’s the conclusion I’d draw, if my understanding of women were based solely on anti-abortion bills.

These bills are pending and passing at a disturbing pace in multiple states. They don’t just reflect the nation’s chronic and understandable ambivalence about abortion. They also paint a shockingly negative portrait of women.

Here are a few key messages gleaned from the latest bills and anti-abortion advocacy:

* Women are impulsive. Half of states now require women to undergo a waiting period before obtaining an abortion. Usually the waiting period is one day. South Dakota just passed a three-day waiting period, the longest in the nation. The implication is that, without a government-mandated waiting period, women would dash into abortion clinics without first weighing the gravity of their decision.

* Women are prone to lying. Last week, the Indiana House passed a measure that would forbid most abortions after 20 weeks. A version of it is expected to pass into law. Opponents tried to carve out an exception for victims of rape or incest, as well as for women whose lives are threatened by medical complications. However, the bill’s sponsor fended off the amendment by attacking it as a “giant loophole” that women would use to get abortions by pretending they were raped.

* Women need things explained to them. A bill recently passed by the Texas House would require doctors to describe the fetus in some detail to all abortion-seeking patients, including victims of rape and incest. The bill allows women to close their eyes and cover their ears. (It doesn’t specify whether women are permitted to say, “La-la-la, I can’t hear you.”)

Well, that’s about it from me.  I’m just waiting for the severe weather to fire up today and trying to heal.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

New Assaults on Family Planning and Reproductive Rights (updated)

Posted: March 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, black women's reproductive health, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, fetus fetishists, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, Reproductive Rights, right wing hate grouups | Tags: , , , , , | 13 Comments

I’ve been trying to post this most of the day.  It seems WordPress had a dashboard outage. That outage made it impossible for us to get to any thing beyond what was already on the front page.  Earlier this evening, ability to comment completely disappeared.  I’ll try to get this out in short order.  Hopefully, we’ll be back to normal now.

South Dakota continues its assault on women. Fetus fetishists continue to believe that setting up any and all road blocks will discourage women from exercising their right to abortion.  Women in South Dakota must now wait 3 days prior to the procedure. The only thing this really does it make it extremely difficult for women in rural areas to get to clinics.  Some need to travel miles and don’t have resources to pay for places to stay for that number of days.  They also have to leave jobs and families to sit around and wait.

Women who want an abortion in South Dakota will face the longest waiting period in the nation — three days — and have to undergo counseling at pregnancy help centers that discourage abortions under a measure signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Dennis Daugaard.

Within minutes of Daugaard’s announcement that he had signed the measure, abortion rights groups said they plan to file a lawsuit challenging the measure, which one said could create particular hardships for women who live in rural areas hundreds of miles from the state’s only abortion clinic in Sioux Falls.

Daugaard, who gave no interviews after signing the bill, said in a written statement that he had conferred with state attorneys who will defend the law in court and a sponsor who has pledged to raise private money to finance the state’s court fight. Officials have said estimated the cost of defending the law at $1.7 million to $4.5 million.

This is nothing more than harassment. It’s hard to imagine any sane person wanting to live in a state that doesn’t believe you’re capable of making an adult decision without the state lecturing you, creating hurdles for exercising your constitutional rights, and inserting itself into your doctor’s ability to do the job.  This is outrageous.

Meanwhile, religious fanatics in Washington not only want to stop access or slow down access to abortion, they want to defund Title X family planning funds.  These funds have been in place since the Nixon years (1970) and are used to provide access to family plan, basic care, and birth control for poor women, men, and children. These funds allow state programs under Medicaid and private providers to get services to poor people.  The funding has been shown to help women off welfare.  Even some Republican Senators have been appalled by this attempt to force childbearing on any one without the means to fund pregnancy prevention. It also creates a public health issue because of the role these funds play in treating and prevent STDs.

House Republicans have sought to eliminate all federal grants and contracts with Planned Parenthood, some $300 million, because the agency provides abortion services. By law, none of the federal money can be used to pay for abortions, but abortion-rights opponents have argued that any financial support for Planned Parenthood frees up other money that could be used for abortions.

The argument comes as part of an ongoing budget fight: Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have been unable to agree on a budget to fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year; Congress has recently passed two short-term stopgaps to allow more time to reach a long-term deal.

Racist, anti-choice propaganda has outraged many students at Princeton.  The Christian right stops at nothing to further its radical agenda to instill its narrow view on all peoples.

It has become the talk among African American students at the prestigious Princeton Theological Seminary — racially charged fliers and postings. All of it is apparently anti-abortion literature.

Among the fliers was one that displayed a noose and another with the words “in the new klan lynching is for amateurs.”

“I was shocked and appalled that someone would place something like that up at this particular institution,” seminary student Maurice Stinnett told CBS 2’s Derricke Dennis.

“There was a lot of devastation for me, psychological damage, injury, because I saw this as social bullying,” student Shirley Thomas said.

Student leaders at the seminary, which neighbors Princeton University but is not directly affiliated, said the fliers first appeared on campus last November then reappeared in February for Black History Month.

The fliers originate from various sources, pointing out the number of African American deaths by abortion.

Student Katherine Timpte called the fliers “appalling and tragic and upsetting at all levels.”

There is some good news. Religion may become extinct in 9 countries. These 9 go straight to the top of my get me out of this crazy place list.  It really amazes me that some many people in legislative positions have no problem forcing their superstitions on other people.  Interestingly enough, most of the countries come out on nearly all the top lists for highest standard of living and best living conditions.  They also rate well in education, low crime, and health and nutrition. The U.S. continues to score high on the superstition and nasty living standards lists. We certainly under assault by Christian Taliban in this country.  I really wish more moderate Christians would speak out against the actions of these radicals.

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Okay, well, that will give you a few things to chomp on while we catch up with all the stuff that went awry today.

Latest News:

Arizona Passes Anti-Abortion Bill To Send Doctors, Clinicians To Jail For Abortions Based On Race Or Gender

In the race to secure the most destructive state anti-abortion law, Arizona may leap ahead of South Dakota by seeking to tackle a problem that doesn’t exist. In a 41-18 vote last month, the House passed a bill to prohibit abortions sought because of the race or sex of the fetus or the race of the parent. Seeking to prevent “race- or sex-based discrimination against the unborn,” the bill would allow lawsuits and civil fines against “abortion providers who knowingly provide such abortions.”

Misreading Elections

Posted: March 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, collective bargaining, Corporate Crime | Tags: , , , , , | 26 Comments

Politicians these days represent narrow interests and are deliberately misrepresenting recent election results as support for policies not presented to the general electorate during their campaigns. Some of this agenda may have been possibly inkled to their extremists supporters through code words but from the looks of polls, most of it appears to have come as a complete surprise to their electorate.  This is probably because people generally don’t pay attention to primaries and the types of candidates supported by the most vocal and most extreme partisans.

No where is this disconnect more clear than in Wisconsin where poll-after-poll shows buyer’s remorse for their right wing extremist governor, Scott Walker. The latest Rasmussen Poll shows support for Budget Cuts but not state usurpation of collective bargaining rights for state workers.

Most Wisconsin voters oppose efforts to weaken collective bargaining rights for union workers but a plurality are supportive of significant pay cuts for state workers. Governor Scott Walker is struggling in the court of public opinion, but how badly he is struggling depends upon how the issue is presented.  There is also an interesting gap between the views of private and public sector union families.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Wisconsin voters shows that just 39% favor weakening collective bargaining rights and 52% are opposed. At the same time, 44% support a 10% pay cut for all state workers. Thirty-eight percent (38%) are opposed. That’s partly because 27% of Wisconsin voters believe state workers are paid too much and 16% believe they are paid too little. Forty-nine percent (49%) believe the pay of state workers is about right. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Strong support for collective bargaining rights showed up in a WSJ/NBC Poll yesterday where only 33% supported limited collective bargaining rights.  This result supported an early poll done by US Today who found the same 33% level of support. Yet, we continue to see bills advance that would erode these rights.  Ohio state senators barely advanced a bill with drastic limitations.  I’m getting qualified in a few months as a professor in one of the few high demand, high paying areas. That would be finance. I’m one of very few white, American women to do so also.  This implies I have two additional job skills that are very difficult to find these days in people with technical doctorates.  I speak and write in coherent American English.  Many of my peers struggle to do their lectures and research in cogent English.  You can only imagine what this does to students.  I don’t have to imagine.  I hear the complaints all the time.  This is a problem for candidates coming from top tier schools.  Ask me if I’m interested in any place in Wisconsin or Ohio at the moment.  The answer is a big fat no. I’m looking outside Louisiana for similar reasons.  I’m not going to be drastically underpaid in cash without some compensating benefits.  I can’t imagine that similarly qualified folks in engineering, accounting, medical fields, and computer sciences aren’t having the same thoughts. I pity the poor administration that’s going to try to find qualified people in those areas under these circumstances.

Why do politicians find people like me so terrible and unprofessional that they seek to deny us a place in determining our working conditions and remuneration?

Ohio state senators narrowly approved a bill that would prohibit public-employee unions representing 400,000 state and local workers from bargaining over health benefits and pensions, while also eliminating the right to strike. I’ve never particularly felt the need to strike except in the private sector where I basically just have voted with my feet after finding another job.  The private sector is filled with capricious and overtly-political bad managers.  It’s why most corporations can’t compete unless they scramble to find extreme cost cutting measures. They don’t want to be bothered with the higher callings of research and development, customer service, or any other type of innovation that would actually benefit employees and customers.  This now appears to be the model that many of these folks want transferred to the public sector where you still had a chance of being paid and promoted on how well you do your job instead of whose ass you’re willing to frequently kiss. The problem now is that there is so much market in the hands of so few businesses and some jobs are only available through the public sector.  The power to abuse is very much in their favor.  This brings me back to the 2/3rds of the electorate that appreciate checks and balances.  Union power checks the power of huge oligopoly and monopoly employers.

This brings me to a story of excess and the  Northern Mariana Islands and Jack Abramoff.  This also includes notorious B I G  Felon, The Hammer, Republican Tom Delay (H/T to Bostonboomer for reminding me about this.).  It’s a story of sex trade, Republicans, a deregulation haven, and the type of things that Republicans would like to see hoisted on the US and American workers.  I have to admit to having to do some reading up on this since most of the story broke in 2006 and I was busy recovering from a little thing called Katrina at the time.  You may recall we were a ‘petri dish’ of privatization and no bid contracts at the time and still are the guinea pigs of US privatization scams.  What they did to us pales in comparison to the treatment of people in the US Territories of the Marianas Islands.

The Marianas Islands situation serves as a cautionary tale that would be worth remembering today because the same people who took jaunts to this paradise of no regulation and slavery are the same people stripping US citizens of rights our grandparents fought for during the gilded age.  Here’s NPR describing work compounds that delighted and tingled the legs of visiting Republican politicians.  JOHN YDSTIE is the NPR host.  He introduced his guest as “Wendy Doromol was a schoolteacher there in the 1980s and ’90s, but became a human rights activist fighting sweatshops after guest workers on the islands came to her with tales of abuse“.  Now remember, this is the work environment that Republican politicians like Scott Walker and John Kasich admire.

Ms. DOROMOL: The barbed wire around the factories face inward so that the mostly women couldn’t get out. They had quotas that were impossible for these people to reach and if they didn’t reach them, they’d have to stay until they finished the quota and they wouldn’t be paid for that work. They were hot, the barracks were horrible. A lot of the females were told you work during the day in the garment factory and then at night you can go and work in a club and they’d force them into prostitution at night.

YDSTIE: And they also experienced things like coerced abortion?

Ms. DOROMOL: Yes, if some female got pregnant, they either had to go back to China to give birth or have a forced abortion.

YDSTIE: Guest workers were lured to the Marianas by recruiters in countries like China, the Philippines and Bangladesh, who told them they were going to the United States. The recruiters charged workers around $5,000 for the trip. Nashir Jahidi(ph) is one of the workers Wendy Doromol befriended. He came to Saipan, one of the Northern Mariana Islands from Bangladesh by way of the Philippines. He says when he got on the plane, he thought he was going to America.

Mr. NASHIR JAHIDI (Ex-Worker): And not only me, there was some people that recruiter exactly told him that he can be going to Los Angeles by train from Saipan. So when I hear that the plane, you know, the host or somebody’s saying they were about to land in Saipan and I when I looked out the window and I saw it’s like blue water everywhere and small island and I was like, how?

YDSTIE: So you thought that you were going to be going to California or somewhere on the U.S. mainland?

Mr. JAHIDI: Not only me, most of the worker. They were surprised when they see the United States flag and the local island flag and we used the U.S. dollar, we used the U.S. stamp and everything, then people understand that this is only a small island. There is no way that you have the opportunity like what’s in the United States.

YDSTIE: Garment manufacturers were attracted to the Marianas, which had become a U.S. commonwealth in 1976, because clothes made there could be labeled made in the U.S.A. and didn’t face import quotas or duties. But despite flying the U.S. flag, the islands were exempt from many U.S. labor and immigration standards. As the abuses that Wendy Doromol helped uncover came to light, garment manufacturers there were sanctioned by the U.S. Labor Department. Then in the mid-1990s when it looked like Congress might force the Marianas to adopt U.S. Labor and Immigration laws, the island’s government took action. It hired lobbyist Jack Abramoff to protect its special status. Abramoff was paid millions for his work.

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