December 29, 2008 archive

Obama’s Duty To Prosecute Bush For War Crimes

Obama promised that he would investigate and prosecute Bush team for “genuine crimes”  because no one is above the law, but he would not prosecute “really dumb policies.” Obama plans to have his AG review the available information to determine if investigations are needed.   Well, AG nominee Eric Holder knows that many crimes have been committed:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution…. We owe the American people a reckoning.

Four at Four

  1. The NY Times reports from Central Falls, Rhode Island with a City of immigrants fills jail cells with its own.

    Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

    Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

    After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt – only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

    In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime – people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

    If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

    A Growing Detention Network

    Click the map for larger, interactive map.

Four at Four continues with wind versus coal and the national power grid, dismal economic news, and the silver lining.

A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land

I am in pain.  This diary will not be a reasoned presentation of fact.  I do not want to make a reasoned statement of fact, even if I could, which is doubtful.  

The very title of this diary is not a reasonable statement of fact.  

It is the slogan which has been used for well over a century to justify the “supposedly” reasonable Jewish takeover, invasion, acquisition, domination of Palestine.  Palestine is seen as “…a land without a people…”, an empty space which the Jewish people, the “…people without a land…”, can claim as their own and set up the state of Israel.

The FACT that this mode of thinking continues into the 21st century is a profound tragedy and a frightening indication that the human species might become extinct.  This mode of thinking, of seeing others as less than human, less important, non-existent even, is the basis of war and injustice.  

Einstein refered to this mode of thinking when he said that — with the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s [sic] way of thinking and thus we drift toward unimaginable peril —   to a space where we must ask along with the Palestinian poet:  

          Where shall the birds fly after the last sky?

                                                by Mahmoud Darwish

                                                1941– 2008  

Please fly on beneath the fold…                

On Coalition building between DFH’s and ‘mainstream” farmers.

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Next American Revolution

We do not have a progressive populist movement in this country. We do not have an effective change coalition in this country. And the first implies the second, since successful progressive populism has been a component of all of our effective change coalitions for over a century.

To fend off the possible semantic quibble … yes, by an effective change coalition, I do mean to say change going forward. We have, obviously, had effective reactionary coalitions without a progressive populist component!

In sketching out the potential membership for an effective change coalition, I have previously identified farmers. And so I take special interest when Stranded Wind at the Daily Kos adopts a provocative and potentially quite divisive framing for discussion of organic farming “versus” sustainable production of chemical fertilizer such as ammonia (NH3) derived fertilizers produced with the harvest of sustainable, renewable electric power:

On one side of the field we have the hemp clothes and Birkenstocks set flinging organic tomatoes. The other side has Monsanto’s minions, flinging GMO hand grenades with one hand and trying to lasso producers with the other. The official federal referee of the USDA would like to help but their rules are the province of misguided ideologues and sociopathic transnational corporations.

Stuck in the middle is the puzzled farmer, who just wants a fair price for the work he does and some protection for when things go badly. They’d happily plow the earthly remains of all three of the above groups into the soil if it would increase yields and get unsolicited opinions out of their business.

A reaction, after the fold …

Manufacturing Monday: Week of 12.28.2008

Greetings folks, I hope your holiday season is going well.  In case you were wondering, there was no Manufacturing update last week, family and health related issues.  This week will be kinda short, my apologies, but I wanted to cut some of the gloom and doom for the holiday season.  We got stuff on solar energy, a new grant system for electric car innovation, milestones on wind, and something for the kids!  But as always, we hit our first section…

Oy!

What a world!

How does one even begin to comment?

Not to diminish the achievement of President Elect Barack Obama, it does seem in some ways a dirty joke on African American aspirations that we would finally elect an African American just at THE moment in history when the country is about to tank, and tank hard.  Welcome to the presidency African America.  Here’s the big, reeking pile of dung we’ve turned the country into for you.  Good fuckin’ luck with that!

Shredding whats left of the safety net

I’ve written before about what this current recession is doing to state budgets, the “first responders” in delivering whats left of this country’s safety net. But this morning, I read an essay from a very tired social worker at Whiskey Fire that brought it all down to a very personal level.

Photobucket

I have had a ringside seat to the economic downturn this year. It is not an abstraction to me. The folks at the bottom are always the first to feel the pinch, when it comes. Clients of the agency I work at come through our doors every day requesting assistance with basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and medications. As the year has progressed and New York State has chosen to repeatedly victimize its most vulnerable citizens, it has become more difficult to help people meet these needs. I have visited food banks with empty shelves, been told clients were ineligible for help when I knew they were and had to challenge these decisions. I have sat with clients while their applications for public assistance were reviewed by fraud investigators at social services…

For nearly 30 years we have done our best to dismantle the safety net for the poor and struggling among us. I keep praying that we have reached the end of this folly. At 42, these policies are what I have known my entire work life. I dream about social service programs and rules that would treat people like human beings, rather than as an undesirable applicant to be culled out. I want so badly for us as a nation to stop punishing people for being poor, or elderly or a child of poor people. This holiday season was hellish as I watched scores of our clients navigate the realities of a holiday with nothing but further grinding poverty. Some days I am just weary from the strain of witnessing the suffering that goes on around me. It takes a toll that is more than physical, it eats away at the soul to see people ask for so little and receive far less.

Open Thread

 

LOLThread

funny pictures

Annus Horribilis: Looking Back

to see if I was looking back to see if they were looking back at me.

**

If proof were needed that the US constitution still worked, here it was. If proof were needed that America had expunged its original sin of racial discrimination, here it was. And if proof were needed that Americans were pragmatists, not ideologues, here it was.

By year end, it was possible for the first time to detect – rather than just to hope for – the beginning of the end of the Great Repression. The downward spiral in America’s real estate market and the banking system had finally been halted by radical steps that the administration had initially hesitated to take. At the same time, the far larger economic problems in the rest of the world had given Obama a unique opportunity to reassert American leadership, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.

The “unipolar moment” was over, no question. But power is a relative concept, as the president pointed out in his last press conference of the year: “They warned us that America was doomed to decline. And we certainly all got poorer this year. But they forgot that if everyone else declined even further, then America would still be out in front. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

And, with a wink, President Barack Obama wished the world a happy new year.

**Niall Ferguson is a contributing editor of the FT and the author of “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World” (Penguin)

Docudharma Times Monday December 29

One Bush Accomplishment

Doing Nothing And Liking It




Monday’s Headlines:

Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction

Hundreds of migrants feared drowned in Bay of Bengal

China’s new export: farmers

Protests erupt in the Arab world against airstrikes

For Kurdish Girls, a Painful Ancient Ritual

Belgian King Names Parliament Leader to Form Government

Shoes flung at Bush flying from shelves

Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US

SAfrica ends block on aid to Zimbabwe: official

Israel considers ground attack as it mobilises more troops

Olmert: fighting in Gaza will be ‘long and painful’

Rory McCarthy Jerusalem

The Guardian, Monday 29 December 2008


Israel’s cabinet yesterday approved the call-up of thousands of reservists as the military deployed tanks close to the border with Gaza while pressing on with air strikes, suggesting a major ground invasion was being considered to follow the biggest single day of conflict in Gaza since the 1967 war.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, reportedly told a cabinet meeting the fighting in Gaza would be “long, painful and difficult”. After two days of air raids, more than 290 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 600 injured. Gaza’s hospitals, already short of supplies, had corpses lying on their floors as the morgues filled up.

In an attempt to escape the mayhem, hundreds of Gazans broke through the border fence with Egypt at Rafah, where Palestinian gunmen and Egyptian border guards traded gunfire, killing one Egyptian and one Palestinian.

Study: Murders among black youths on rise

The number killed in gun crimes has jumped 40 percent since 2000

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The number of young black men and teenagers who either killed or were killed in shootings has risen at an alarming rate since 2000, a new study shows.

The study, to be released Monday by criminologists at Northeastern University in Boston, comes as FBI data is showing that murders have leveled off nationwide.

Not so for black teens, the youngest of whom saw dramatic increases in shooting deaths, the Northeastern report concluded.

Last year, for example, 426 black males between the ages of 14 and 17 were killed in gun crimes, the study shows. That marked a 40 percent increase from 2000.

 

USA

Veterans of ’90s Bank Bailout See Opportunity in Current One



By ERIC LIPTON and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: December 28, 2008


WASHINGTON – A tight-knit group of former senior government officials who were central players in the savings and loan bailout of the 1990s are seeking to capitalize on the latest economic meltdown, enjoying a surge in new business in their work now as private lawyers, investors and lobbyists.

With $700 billion in bailout money up for grabs, and billions of dollars worth of bad debt or failed bank assets most likely headed for sale or auction, these former officials are helping their clients get a piece of the bailout money or the chance to buy, at fire-sale prices, some of the bank assets taken over by the federal government.

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

Evaporation

Strange Stigma

Is it so awful to be smart

that I must hide it

so you’ll feel better?

If I mention it

you consider it

a personal attack?

Perish the thought

that anyone feel dumb

compared to me

Who invented these rules?

Someone who isn’t smart

I’ll wager

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–February 6. 2008

Late Night Karaoke

Those 70’s Styles Just Rockin

Barnstorm – Rocky Mountain Way [Midnight Special, 1973]

Load more