Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit…

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From JON LOVETT

The Atlantic

This item has been excerpted from the prepared Commencement Address to the graduates of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., on May 18, 2013.

What politics taught me that current graduates need to know…

I recently turned thirty, which I know seems like a generation away to those of you graduating this morning. But it’s more than just the worst. Thirty is a year where you’re left straddling two worlds. One foot stands in the world of the young, among the bright eager minds and supple bodies of students like you. And the other foot stands in the world of the grey and decrepit; the ancient shapes of your professors and parents; their dulling senses; their craggily, wizened faces.

And by the way, congratulations parents! This is your day too.

But what it means is that I am in a position to talk about life after college — as someone who just lived through it. For example, do you remember how your elementary school felt enormous? But then when you returned years later, you were amazed by how small it actually was? In time, your chosen professions will feel exactly the same way. That is not to say that you won’t have almost unlimited opportunities. But it is to say that if you sleep with someone who works in your industry, just be aware that you’re going to bump into that person at meetings and conferences and birthday parties for the rest of your life. I literally had to leave politics.

Yeah, we’re going to talk about it. Your love is a delicate flower.

So, I’m going to skip the platitudes, OK? I want this to be a practical commencement address. And I’m going to do my best to tell the truth — even when it’s uncomfortable to say, even when I probably shouldn’t say it. Because you’re already swimming in half-truths

Widely Visible Symbols Of Human Folly…

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From The Automatic Earth

[...] The issue is nuclear waste and its safe disposal. Germany will have to build a storage facility deep underground that can survive the ravages of wars, revolutions and even another ice age. Indeed, the remains of the nuclear age will have to be kept in a final repository for 1 million years – longer than the human race has existed.

[..] What the representatives of the people would rather not talk about, though, is the decommissioning of Germany’s nuclear power plants. They were once the cathedrals of industrial progress. But now their cooling towers and domes have become widely visible symbols of human folly.

German has a major nuclear waste problem. For almost 50 years, the former Asse II salt mine in the northwestern state of Lower Saxony has been used as an underground repository for nuclear and other harmful waste. Some 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste are in the massive mine complex. To make matters worse, the system of tunnels is in danger of collapsing.

It’s a monumental task that the Germans won’t complete until 2080 “at the earliest,” says nuclear expert Michael Sailer from the Öko-Institut, a non-profit research and consulting association for sustainable technology in Berlin. “After all,these are conservative estimates without any leeway for setbacks.”

But it doesn’t look as if things will go smoothly. On the contrary, the phasing out of nuclear power is accompanied by the agonizing challenge of decommissioning existing reactors: Eight nuclear power plants that were rapidly taken offline at the behest of the German government in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster have to be dismantled concurrently, followed by an additional nine facilities by the end of 2022.

Too Soon To Tell…

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From REBECCA SOLNIT
TomDispatch

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home — and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better — a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either — the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed — like the neoconservatives themselves — that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone

Theocracy Watch: Bangladesh Bloggers Face Constant Death Threats Since Government Labeled Them ‘Atheist’…

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From HuffPost

Even though Rasel Parvez is out of prison, he isn’t out of danger.

“They have pushed my life to a state in which I cannot walk free. I remain in self-confinement day after day, and my social relations are mostly snapped,” said Parvez, 36, in an interview with The Huffington Post.

He is talking about the Bangladeshi government, which arrested him and three other bloggers last month for “derogatory comments about Islam.” Parvez, who is currently out on bail, has been branded with the label “atheist” blogger because he dared to criticize the abuse of religion by politicians.

It took Parvez and Subrata Adhikary Shuvo, 24, another arrested blogger, more than a month to obtain bail. The other two — Mashiur Rahman Biplob, 42, and Asif Mohiuddin, 30 — remain in jail.

But Parvez’s own home in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital city, has become something of a prison, as he fears for his life whenever he steps outside.

After his release from jail, some of his most vociferous critics took to Facebook to offer rewards to anyone who killed Parvez, with one offer as high as $12,871 in U.S. dollars. (Per capita income in Bangladesh in 2010 was $641 a year.)

“Who knows — some of them may be waiting just outside my house,” said Parvez.

His wife, Asma Begum, said she’s at her wit’s end. She does her best to protect Parvez — among other things, preventing him from taking phone calls until she has checked the caller’s identity.

“His insecurity means the entire family is in danger,” Begum said.

“I don’t know if he could go to the office again. I am not sure if it is safe now to shift our home and find a new address.

How did Barack Obama become Monsanto’s man in Washington?

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From JON RAPPOPORT
No More Fake News
Thanks to Ron Epstein

And when are anti-GMO activist groups going to stop saying they’re “shocked and disappointed” by the president?

Shocked and disappointed is polite-speak and politically correct reaction. It’s baloney.

Don’t you get it? Obama has never been on your side. He never deserved your trust.

Disappointment implies he was your buddy and then unaccountably walked away.

The man is a politician. He’s a liar. Different pols have different styles of lying. Some pretend they’re your friend before they screw you over and leave you in the dust.

I’ve previously published Obama’s track record as Monsanto’s number-one political supporter in America.

Meet Monsanto’s prime lobbyist, Barack Obama:

After his victory in the 2008 election, Obama filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA:

At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center.

As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.

As commissioner of the USDA, Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack. Vilsack had set up a national group, the Governors’ Biotechnology Partnership, and had been given a Governor of the Year Award by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto.

It’s time for an apocalyptic journalism…

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From ROBERT JENSEN
AlterNet

“Apocalyptic Journalism” and Why We Need Reporters to Face the Reality of Our Crumbling Society

The best journalists in our tradition have seen themselves as responsible for telling stories about the struggle for social justice…

For those who care about a robust human presence on the planet, the 21st century has been characterized by really bad news that keeps getting really, really worse.

Whatever one’s evaluation of high-energy/high-technology civilization (and I have been among its critics; more on that later), it’s now clear that we are hitting physical limits; we cannot expect to maintain contemporary levels of consumption that draw down the ecological capital of the planet at rates dramatically beyond replacement levels. It unrealistic to imagine that we can go on treating the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.

We have no choice but to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also should recognize the need for a journalism of collapse. Everyone understands that economic changes are forcing a refashioning of the journalism profession. It’s long past time for everyone to pay attention to how multiple, cascading ecological crises should be changing professional journalism’s mission in even more dramatic fashion.

It’s time for an apocalyptic journalism (that takes some explaining; a lot more on that later).

The Basics of Journalism: Ideals and Limitations

With the rapid expansion of journalistic-like material on the Internet, it’s especially crucial to define “real” journalism.

Can We Save the Commons that is the Post Office?

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From Institute for Local Self Reliance

For 225 years the U.S. Post Office has been the most admired and ubiquitous manifestation of government. From 1789 until the 1960s, the Cabinet level agency saw its mission not only to deliver the mail but to aggressively defend the public good. In the late 19^thcentury when oligopolistic mail order delivery companies abused their rural customers the Post Office launched parcel post.  The competition quickly forced private companies to reduce their exorbitant prices and dramatically improve the quality of their service. In the early 20^th century, when bank collapses resulted in depositors losing their life saving the Post Office created postal banks that for half a century provide security and attractive interest rates to millions of small depositors.

In 1970 Congress stripped the post office of its cabinet status and stopped providing public funding.  The new quasi public corporation was urged to adopt a more business like attitude.  Its name, the U.S. Postal Service, reflected a circumscribed mission statement.  No longer was it to be a tool to check the predations of the private sector.  Its sole mission would be to deliver the mail.

The USPS used its new flexibility and ability to borrow to dramatically increase productivity. By the 1990s, despite the elimination of a public subsidy that in 1970 had accounted for 25 percent of its total budget the USPS was generating a consistent profit. But to USPS management the mandate to operate in a more businesslike manner was viewed as a mandate to operate more like a private business, improving its internal balance sheet at the cost of weakening the balance sheet of the communities it served.  Again and again Congress had to step in to prevent USPS management from pursuing actions that would have inflicted harm on the nation:  stopping closing Saturday delivery, closing rural post offices willy-nilly.>

In 2006, in an accounting maneuver

The Militarizing of America…

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From LAURA DAVIS
Story Telling Productions
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No Mo’ PoMo…

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From JAMES KUNSTLER

Whenever the Federal Reserve wants to tweak the dials of the economy — or pretend that it can — it turns first to its sock puppet at The Wall Street Journal, John Hilsenrath, and “leaks” a rumor of policy change (HERE). They like to do this late on Fridays when financial markets are about to close, so that market players will have a whole weekend to ponder the Fed’s actions like medieval viziers reading goat entrails.

Last Friday’s puddle of steaming guts was a supposed preview of the Fed’s “exit strategy” from its reckless policy of “quantitative easing” or “money” creation (or “liquidity,” if you like). In other words, they supposedly intend to stop juicing the financial markets with fake wealth, i.e. capital not accumulated from real productive activity, but just fictively created on computer hard drives. For the past year they have been doing this to the tune of $85 billion a month, “buying” US Treasury bonds and bills and an assortment of miscellaneous securities (mostly trash that can’t be pawned off on anyone else) through their so-called “primary dealer” bank cohorts, the too-big-to-fail usual suspects, who “earn” hefty transaction fees in the process of conveying all these pixels from Point A to Point B. These interventions are called Permanent Open Market Operations, or PoMo.

The theory all along has been that this $85 billion a month would seep down to Main Street to provoke spending (increasing the “velocity of money) and therefore “jump start” the economy. The theory has proven itself to be complete horseshit, of course.

‘A Writer’s Life’: Ray Bradbury on writing and the importance of the subconscious…

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From RAY BRADBURY
Dangerous Minds

‘A writer moves about, observing, seeing as much as he can, trying to guess how man will play the game,’ Ray Bradbury stated in A Writer’s Life, a documentary on his life and work from 1963.

‘Constantly measuring the way life is, against the way he feels it ought to be. He is a magnet passing through a factual world, taking from it what he needs.’

Bradbury was always generous with his advice and encouragement, always willing to explain his method of writing to those who wanted to know. Writing was like a love affair.

“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

Bradbury worked his apprenticeship as a writer in libraries, which he later described as places where:

…anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Hidden Power Grab Stops Communities From Deciding Their Own Futures…

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From DAVID MORRIS
On The Commons

There has been much written about the federalist nature of the American political system. But virtually all of it focuses on the rights of states vs. the federal government. At this historical moment, where the last bastion of true democracy is at the local level, we need to extend the debate to include the rights of communities vs. the states.

In his 1996 State of the Union Address Democratic President Bill Clinton famously declared, “the era of big government is over.” And during his tenure he did everything he could to make that true—deregulating the telecommunications and the financial industries; enacting a free trade agreement severely restricting the authority of the federal government to protect domestic jobs and businesses; and abandoning the 75-year old federal commitment to the poor.

Seventeen years later I fully expect a Republican Governor or two to declare in their state of the state address, “the era of small government is over”. Because again and again, Republican governors and legislatures are preempting and abolishing the authority of communities to protect the health and welfare of their communities.

*Earlier this year Wisconsin passed a law eliminating the authority of cities villages and counties to require public employees to live inside city limits, which also voids any existing requirements.

European Commission to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with government…

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From NATURAL NEWS

A new law proposed by the European Commission would make it illegal to “grow, reproduce or trade” any vegetable seeds that have not been “tested, approved and accepted” by a new EU bureaucracy named the “EU Plant Variety Agency.”

It’s called the Plant Reproductive Material Law, and it attempts to put the government in charge of virtually all plants and seeds. Home gardeners who grow their own plants from non-regulated seeds would be considered criminals under this law.

The draft text of the law, which has already been amended several times due to a huge backlash from gardeners, is viewable here.

“This law will immediately stop the professional development of vegetable varieties for home gardeners, organic growers, and small-scale market farmers,” said Ben Gabel, vegetable breeder and director of The Real Seed Catalogue. “Home gardeners have really different needs – for example they grow by hand, not machine, and can’t or don’t want to use such powerful chemical sprays. There’s no way to register the varieties suitable for home use as they don’t meet the strict criteria of the Plant Variety Agency, which is only concerned about approving the sort of seed used by industrial farmers.”

All governments are, of course, infatuated with the idea of registering everybody and everything. Under Title IV of the proposed EU law:

All Empires Crash Soon After They Reach Their Peak…

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From WASHINGTON’S BLOG

Thomas Jefferson said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”   And because I love my country, I frequently criticize America’s shortcomings in the hopes of making her better.

But the truth is that the United States is not unusual … it is just like all other empires which have hit their peak and then quickly crashed.

We noted in 2008:

Political insider and veteran reporter Kevin Phillips has documented that every major empire over the past several hundred years has undergone a predictable cycle of collapse, usually within 10 to 20 years of its peak power.

The indications are always the same:

- The financialization of the economy, moving from manufacturing to speculation;

- Very high levels of debt;

- Extreme economic inequality;

– And costly military overreaching.

We wrote in 2009:

Cancer Capitalism…

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From THOM HARTMANN

Unregulated capitalism is cancer on our nation. Like tumors, greed has metastasized, strangling once-healthy parts of our economy, and our social safety net. A new piece on Alternet lists several ways this cancer capitalism has taken hold. For starters, the hoarding of wealth by the banksters and the 1% has diverted resources away from nutritional aid programs. Twenty people in our country collected a whopping $73 billion in investment income – all taxed at a lower rate than working Americans. Compare that with the fact that President Obama couldn’t even get $1 billion to improve childhood nutrition in our schools.

And, while cancer capitalism has lead to higher-than-ever corporate profits, it hasn’t translated into good jobs for college grads. Because of rising tuition costs, the average student graduates with $26,000 of student loan debt, and adding to that burden, high-unemployment allows the corporate elite to underpay workers, and hoard a larger share of profits.

In addition, tax-dodging corporations have drained much-needed revenue out of our society like a tumor choking off the blood supply to our economy. According to Alternet, tax exemptions and corporate loopholes drain nearly a trillion dollars from “the body of our society” every year.

And, the worst parasite of all is the unrestrained corporate purchase of our politicians.

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world…

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From CAROLE CADWALLADR
The Observer

Stewart Brand didn’t just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he’s the one who put “personal” and “computer” together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn’t just a member of the world’s first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it. And he wasn’t just another of those 60s acid casualties; he was the definitive 60s acid casualty. Well, not casualty exactly, but he was there taking LSD in the days when it was still legal, with the most famous hipster of them all, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

For nearly five decades, Stewart Brand has been hanging around the cutting edge of whatever is the most cutting thing of the day. Largely because he’s discovered it and become fascinated with it long before anyone else has even noticed it but, in retrospect, it does make him seem like the west coast’s answer to Zelig, the Woody Allen character who just happens to pop up at key moments in history. Because no one pops up like Stewart Brand pops up, right there, just on the cusp of something momentous.

I discover this for myself when I go and hunt down my ancient copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s one of the defining pieces of new journalism

Victory for WikiLeaks…

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From Adbusters

[See today's Chris Hedges interview with Julian Assange here]

Time to send some money to Julian again!

Iceland may just have given WikiLeaks & Julian Assange a much needed and overdue boost.

The supreme court of Iceland passed a ruling on April 24, 2013 ordering Valitor – a.k.a Visa Iceland – to resume processing online donations to WikiLeaks within two weeks. And if they don’t follow through, the judge will hold them to it by charging Valitor a nice daily fine of $6,830 until it complies.

“This is a victory for WikiLeaks and freedom of information,” Reporters Without Borders declared, “The arbitrary blocking of payments put in place by financial service companies was completely illegal and has now been condemned as such by a country’s highest court.” RWB continues:

We hope that this ruling will put a stop to the controversial decisions that Visa has been taking until now in connection with WikiLeaks and that Visa will instruct all of its partners and subcontractors around the world to comply. It would be strange, and unacceptable, if only Valitor were obliged to provide a service to WikiLeaks in Iceland while all the other subcontractors, including those in the rest of Europe and the United States, were not.

Chomsky: USA a Top Terrorist State…

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American academic Noam Chomsky says the United States would be recognized as a leading terrorist state if international law is applied.
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Debtors Prisons Are Cruelly Punishing the Poor Across America…

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From BILL BERKOWITZ
AlterNet

A 19th century tool for instilling fear in the public to pay off debt…

“In the 1990s, Jack [Dawley's] drug and alcohol addictions led to convictions for domestic violence and driving under the influence, resulting in nearly $1,500 in fines and costs in the Norwalk Municipal Court. Jack was also behind on his child support, which led to an out-of-state jail sentence.” After serving three and a half years in Wisconsin, Dawley, now sober for 14 years, is still trying to catch up with the fines he owes, and it has “continue[d] to wreak havoc on his life.”

Tricia Metcalf is a mother with sole custody of two teenagers. In 2006, Metcalf “was convicted of passing multiple bad checks. The fines mounted into the thousands. Unable to pay the total amount owed, Tricia entered into a payment plan of $50 per month.” Although she’s worked temporary jobs, a long-term job has been hard to find. “Whenever Tricia missed a payment, a warrant was issued and she was taken to jail.”

The stories of Jack Dawley and Tricia Metcalf are only two of several compelling accounts in the ACLU’s new report

Dandelion Hunter…

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From JILL RICHARDSON
La VIda Locavore

I was barely a few chapters into Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness when I put it down and looked online for author Rebecca Lerner’s email address so I could write her and say “I think you’re my long lost sister!” This is a girl right after my own heart… although I doubt I would have lasted as long on her initial “eat only foraged foods” challenge.

The book starts as Lerner accepts a challenge to eat only what she could forage for an entire week. In Portland, OR. She lasts longer than most of us would have, barely eating anything while expending a LOT of energy to look for food. By the end, she’s even considering eating slugs. I’m glad for her sake she didn’t eat them.

This adventure propels her into explaining many of the lessons that those of us who get our food at the grocery store (or even farmers’ market) don’t realize about foraging. It’s seasonal, and you need to plan ahead and gather what you can in times of abundance to store it for times of scarcity.

With her newfound knowledge and the help of many friends, she plans ahead, stores up food, and tries again to eat only foraged food for a week. The second time is a success.

…and I’m Becky Lerner

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From BECKY LERNER
First Ways

My name is Becky Lerner and I am one of the best-known urban foragers in North America, as seen in the Los Angeles Times, Oregonian, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Portland Monthly magazine, Utne Reader website, Adbusters online, a wide array of local newspapers, websites, radio, and TV. I am the author of the book Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness, an entertaining and informative nonfiction narrative about my adventures foraging for food, medicine, and survival in Portland, Oregon, published April 2013 by Globe Pequot Press.

Recently, I have spoken about foraging for survival preparedness, herbalism, and sustainability at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Portland Plant Medicine Gathering, ResiliencePDX, Cannon Beach History Center & Museum, and more. I also teach classes on urban plant identification, medicine making, and plant-spirit healing, and I will be joining the guest faculty of the Virtues of Healing Institute of Integrated Studies in 2015.

Additionally, I have an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Rutgers University. As a journalist, I have written for

The Democracy Project…

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World

David Graeber, who was actively involved in the early days of Occupy Wall Street and continues to work to advance its principles, starts his new book The Democracy Project with a fascinating (if long) personal history of how OWS found its legs and what it had to deal with (notably the brutal suppression of November 2011 when the governments of the day decided to shut down the protest through a sustained, globally coordinated and ruthless operation, and the disgraceful behaviour of the media ‘covering’ the movement, and then abruptly not covering it at all).

He sees OWS and its sister movements in Europe and the Mideast as important experiments in rediscovering the potential of a real democracy, and a society which retains real freedoms, even at a cost. To explain both the meaning and value of that, he presents a history of both democracy and anarchism that are starkly different from the histories we are taught in school. Democracy, he explains, was initially a derogatory term used interchangeably with the term “anarchy” by the ruling educated elites in most non-egalitarian, hierarchical, class-defined nations:

Jackson was running as a populist—once again, against the central banking system, which he did temporarily manage to dismantle. As Dupuis-Déri observes, “Jackson and his allies were well aware that their use of democracy was akin to what would today be called political marketing”

In Praise of Idleness…

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From BERTRAND RUSSELL (1932)
zpub

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct

The Pursuit of Emptiness…

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From JOHN PERRY BARLOW
eff.org

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. – Chuang-Tzu (350 B.C.)

Chuang-Tzu had it right. No more need be said. But such is human nature that the more succinctly we state the truth, the better we become at ignoring it. So, despite the completeness of the above homily, I’ll proceed, hoping that my volume may insinuate into your worldview what Chuang-Tzu’s brevity might not.

Here’s what I believe. I believe that extolling the pursuit of happiness was a toxic stupidity entirely unworthy of my greatest American hero, Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it is a poison that sickens our culture more wretchedly every nanosecond. I wish he’d never said it.

It produces a monstrous, insatiable hunger inside our national psyche that encourages us ever more ravenously to devour all the resources of this small planet, crushing liberties, snuffing lives, feeling ourselves ordained by God and Jefferson to do whatever is necessary to make us happy.

And yet the American people are miserable. Or so it would appear.

A bit of anecdotal evidence (of which I could supply a thousand more examples). At the beginning of this year, my lover Lotte and I decided to start counting the number of spontaneous smiles we might observe in the upscale organic supermarket we frequent in San Francisco.

‘Brutal logic’ and climate communications…

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From DAVID ROBERTS
Grist
Thanks to Janie Sheppard

In a couple of posts last week — here and here — I laid out the brutal logic implied by the latest climate science (with credit to scientist Kevin Anderson for stripping away the rosy assumptions hiding in many of today’s common climate scenarios). To sum up: a rise in temperature of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) will be extremely dangerous; a rise of 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) or higher could threaten civilization; the only way to avoid 2 degrees C — or even 4 degrees C — is a massive crash program that will likely involve, for the rich, industrialized countries of the world, peaking emissions in 2015 and declining them 10 percent year-on-year after that. Alarming!

In this post I want to take a step back (sideways?) and have a bit of a meta-discussion about messages of alarm/urgency and where they fit into the climate communications landscape.

Reaction to the posts has been interesting. I’ve gotten a ton of (mostly positive) emails and calls about them, had tons of Twitter and meatspace conversations, but as far as I know, nobody’s written about or reacted to them publicly. And I guess that’s not surprising. This kind of thing tends to end conversation like flatulence at a cocktail party. That’s part of why there’s a whole cottage industry devoted to urging climate hawks not to talk like this. What good can it do? Terrifying people just elicits all sorts of defense mechanisms — denial, disengagement, apathy, system justification, what have you.

Another False Flag is Unfurled…

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From Infowars.com

Note that Syria approved the UN sending a team to investigate the first chemical weapon use outside Aleppo but the US blocked it by insisting that Syria give the UN unlimited access to all of the country to look at all chemical weapons sites.  Knowing the nature of the UN team, Syria could not trust such an investigation and insisted it be restricted to the area claimed by the Rebels as the actual site of the attack. The US then withdrew.

Here we have Secretary Hagel saying on Wednesday in Tel Aviv that there was no evidence of Sarin use and then, when his plane lands in the Arab Emitates reversing himself and claiming  “small scale” use by the Syrian Army. and that he has varying degrees of confidence in the evidence. Someone apparently talked with him from Washington and re-convinced him.  The Obama was at theready for an pronouncement that this could be a “game-changer” .  Here we go – like in ” back to Iraq”. ~James Houle

As NATO terror front collapses in Syria, US attempts to justify intervention by drumming up familiar WMD lies…The last two weeks have seen a series of victories for the Syrian Army across Syria. It appears that 2 full companies of so-called “Free Syrian Army” fighters have been annihilated near Damascus

‘Free Market’ Ayn Rand Ideology Was a Root Cause of the Horrific Explosion in Texas…

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From JIM WHITE
Alternet

The tragedy in Waco is part of a larger story about the deregulation of business in the name of pocketing massive profits.

On Thursday, I wrote about the central role that absolute free market libertarianism, as personified by the fictional John Galt, played in the horrific explosion in West, Texas that took the lives of fourteen people, most of whom were volunteer firefighters fighting a fire at an unregulated fertilizer facility. We have now learned that the facility had a checkered history of ignoring regulations and had 1350 times more ammonium nitrate on hand than the amount that triggers a legal requirement to report the facility to Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the facility’s owner chose to ignore that regulation along with the many other regulations he chose to ignore. Sadly, some press accounts of the owner chose to focus more on his role as a church elder (Update: he was even at Bible study when the fire broke out!) than on how his choice to flout regulations and good sense led directly to this tragedy.

Congressman Finally Takes Action To Remove Needless Requirement Bankrupting The Postal Service…

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From ANNIE-ROSE STRASSER
Think Progress

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has introduced legislation to try to save the US Postal Service from its incipient bankruptcy, and he is asking for the public to help him pass it.

DeFazio’s bill would repeal the needless requirement — one no other business or entity must face — that the Postal Service pre-fund 75 years’ worth of employee health benefits. That requirement has hugely contributed to the USPS defaulting for the first and then second time in its history last year. Analysis from 2012 estimated that the USPS would have a $1.5 billion surplus without the benefit requirement.

But DeFazio recognizes that facts alone will not influence his colleagues to take up and pass the legislation, so he has also turned to the White House’s petition platform, We The People, to petition President Obama to take a stand against the health benefit requirement. He also points out many of the other flaws in how Congress has managed the postal service:

Roundup, An Herbicide, Could Be Linked To Parkinson’s, Cancer And Other Health Issues, Study Shows…

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From Reuters

Heavy use of the world’s most popular herbicide, Roundup, could be linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson’s, infertility and cancers, according to a new study.

The peer-reviewed report, published last week in the scientific journal Entropy, said evidence indicates that residues of “glyphosate,” the chief ingredient in Roundup weed killer, which is sprayed over millions of acres of crops, has been found in food.

Those residues enhance the damaging effects of other food-borne chemical residues and toxins in the environment to disrupt normal body functions and induce disease, according to the report, authored by Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Anthony Samsel, a retired science consultant from Arthur D. Little, Inc. Samsel is a former private environmental government contractor as well as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Obama Is Comfortable with Bush’s Inferno…

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From RALPH NADER

George W. Bush is riding high. A megamillionaire, from the taxpayer-subsidized Texas Rangers company, he makes $150,000 to $200,000 per speech, receives a large presidential pension and support facilities and is about to dedicate the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on April 25.

President Obama will be at the dedication, continuing to legitimize Mr. Bush, as he did from the outset by announcing in 2009 there would be no investigations or prosecutions of the Bush officials for their crimes.

In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Bush continued to say he has no regrets about his Presidency. “I’m comfortable with what I did,” he said, “I’m comfortable with who I am.” He added, “Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn’t necessarily want to have happen.”

The Economic Argument Is Over — Paul Krugman Won…

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From HENRY BLODGET
Business Insider

For the past five years, a fierce war of words and policies has been fought in America and other economically challenged countries around the world.

On one side were economists and politicians who wanted to increase government spending to offset weakness in the private sector. This “stimulus” spending, economists like Paul Krugman argued, would help reduce unemployment and prop up economic growth until the private sector healed itself and began to spend again.

On the other side were economists and politicians who wanted to cut spending to reduce deficits and “restore confidence.” Government stimulus, these folks argued, would only increase debt loads, which were already alarmingly high. If governments did not cut spending, countries would soon cross a deadly debt-to-GDP threshold, after which economic growth would be permanently impaired. The countries would also be beset by hyper-inflation, as bond investors suddenly freaked out and demanded higher interest rates. Once government spending was cut, this theory went, deficits would shrink and “confidence” would return.

Why Bankers Rule the World… It’s the Interest, Stupid!

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From Adbusters

In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money, released in the first week of November last year, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35% to 40% cut of our GDP.

That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of “Wall Street greed” but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.

This hidden tribute to the banks will come as a surprise to most people, who think that if they pay their credit card bills on time and don’t take out loans, they aren’t paying interest. This, says Dr. Kennedy, is not true.

Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. They must pay for labor and materials before they have a product to sell and before the end buyer pays for the product 90 days later. Each supplier in the chain adds interest to its production costs, which are passed on to the ultimate consumer. Dr. Kennedy cites interest charges ranging

As Wal-Mart Swallows China’s Economy, Workers Fight Back…

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From The American Prospect

On any given day, go to the Shenzhen Wal-Mart in the city’s Yuanling neighborhood, and you may find a stocky man in his early fifties in front of its doors, draped in a banner that reads, in Chinese characters, “Support the just demands of workers.”

Ask him why he’s there, and he will tell you that he used to work at the Wal-Mart, that he was unjustly fired for organizing other workers and protesting deteriorating work conditions, and that he’s fighting to get his job back.

“A lot of people said I should just leave. But my skin is really thick, and I didn’t want to leave the company. I still had faith that things could and would change,” Wang said. “I asked myself, how should I protect my rights? How can this unfair situation be made right?” The answer he found, he said, was organizing along with his fellow workers and now, continuing to stage his weekly protests.

While he usually protests alone, Wang Shishu’s is one of a growing number of Wal-Mart workers in China who are fighting for their rights. In the past year alone, distribution-center workers have gone on strike to protest cuts in benefits, several cases of retaliation

Released Tim DeChristopher Finds a Movement Transformed by His Courage…

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From YES Magazine

Tim DeChristopher, who was released from federal custody yesterday, is best known as the man who disrupted an auction of pristine public lands. But there’s more to his story than his role as “Bidder 70.”

Yesterday, after 21 months in federal custody, climate activist Tim DeChristopher approached the pulpit at his church in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a free man. The First Unitarian congregation rose in uproarious applause, tears streaming down more than a few faces.

This Earth Day, we thank Tim DeChristopher for steering our movement toward the path of courage.

“It’s good to be home,” DeChristopher told the crowd.

During his sermon, he said that he had never expected to change the oil and gas industry alone. “But I thought that I could change people like you, and I knew people like you have a lot of power.”

The story of how DeChristopher landed in prison is well known. On December 19, 2008, he walked into an oil and gas auction in Salt Lake City, where the Bureau of Land Management was auctioning off leases

Why We Need to Understand the Apocalyptic Worldview of a Small Group of Radical Muslims…

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From CHIP BERLET
Alternet

If we want to understand the genesis of much Islamic terrorism by a small handful of Muslims, a speculative tour of their apocalyptic worldview may help us design a more effective response.

Walk a mile in the shoes of those who claim to honor God and yet cheer the bombing of the Boston Marathon.

They represent only a tiny fraction of the Muslims on our planet, yet they see themselves as carrying out the will of God. Fanatics such as these can be found in many of the World’s religions. They shoot abortion providers in the United States; blast apart buses in Israel; and murder Muslims and Hindus in India.

These religious fanatics often combine a totalitarian political mindset with a belief in sacred prophecy that they are mandated by God to rule the world, and they must act now against their enemies because time is running out. In fact they believe that we are approaching the end of time itself, the literal end of the world as we know it. This worldview is call apocalypticism. Sketchy details are emerging

CISPA is Bad News…

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Sign Petition at: http://www.cispaisback.org/

Under the guise of cyber-security, CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is a bill that would grant corporations the power to share our emails, Facebook messages, and other sensitive online data with the government – all without a warrant. CISPA would kill online privacy as we know it – nullifying the laws that require big corporations to keep our information private from government agencies like the National Security Agency.

Those corporations wouldn’t have to notify you that they have done this and you wouldn’t be able to take legal action against them if they made a mistake when sharing your information. While strong information security is critical to privacy and civil liberties, CISPA does almost nothing to prevent this. All it does is give the government access to your information.

We beat CISPA last year when hundreds of thousands of Americans signed online petitions to let lawmakers know that our online privacy rights are not negotiable. But this bill is back and politicians who want the government to be able to read your emails and see what you purchase online are hoping you won’t speak out this time. Together we can beat CISPA again!

RIP: Ira Sandperl…

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Obituary

[Ira was a fond part of my history... -DS]

IRA SANDPERL – March 11, 1923 – April 13, 2013

By John Markoff

Ira Sandperl, a pacifist and self-styled Gandhian scholar who mentored folksinger Joan Baez, was a political ally of Rev. Martin Luther King, became the first employee of the renowned Kepler’s Bookstore, and introduced a generation of draft-age men to nonviolence during the Vietnam War, died on April 13 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 90 years old.

An ardent follower of the principles of Mahatma Gandhi from the late 1940s, Mr. Sandperl met Ms. Baez at a Quaker meeting in Palo Alto in 1959 when she was a senior in high school. The two developed a deep bond and shared a number of political causes. In 1965, Mr. Sandperl helped Ms. Baez found The Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Carmel Valley, California and became its first president. The organization had a lasting influence on both the civil rights and antiwar movement into the mid-1970s. For a period, Dr. King would send members of his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to the Institute for training in nonviolent organizing tactics.

Did you know that American law is not based on the Ten Commandments?

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From Freedom From Religion Foundation

Some Christians believe* that American law is based on biblical law. One of their evidences is the claim that Moses and the Ten Commandments are prominently featured at the United States Supreme Court. But . . .

Did you know that there is nothing in the design of the United States Supreme Court building that would indicate that the Congress, architect or designers had any special regard for the Ten Commandments?

Did you know that the main entrance to the United States Supreme Court has no reference to religion or the Ten Commandments?

Bill Hicks & George Carlin: The Big Electron…

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Constructive Paranoia: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer…

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From JARED DIAMOND
NYT

The other morning, I escaped unscathed from a dangerous situation. No, an armed robber didn’t break into my house, nor did I find myself face to face with a mountain lion during my bird walk. What I survived was my daily shower.

You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) Among my wife’s and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall.

“Really!” you may object. “What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?” My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough.

Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475.

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier…

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From ROLF DOBELLI
The Guardian

Out of the ­10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life? News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether…

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce.

Understanding Organizational Stupidity…

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From DMITRY ORLOV
Club Orlov

Is it morning in America again, or is the bubble that is the American economy about to pop (again), this time perhaps tipping it into full-blown collapse in five stages with symphonic accompaniment and fireworks? A country blowing itself up is quite a sight to behold, and it makes us wonder about lots of things. For instance, it makes us wonder whether the people who are doing the blowing up happen to be criminals. (Sure, they may be in a manner of speaking—as a moral judgment passed on the powerful by the powerless—but since none of them are likely to see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom any time soon, the point is moot. Let’s be sure to hunt them down once they try to run and hide, though.) But at a much more basic and fundamental level, a better question to ask is this one:

“Why are we being so fucking stupid?”

What do I mean when I use the term “fucking stupid”? I do not mean it as a term of abuse but as a precise, if unflattering, diagnosis. Here is as good a definition as any, excerpted from American Eulogy by Jim Quinn:

If you had told someone on September 10, 2001 that ten years later America would be running $1.5 trillion annual deficits, fighting two wars of choice in countries that despise our presence, and had not only not addressed the $100 [trillion] of unfunded welfare liabilities but added billions more with Medicare D and Obamacare, they would have thought you were a crazy doomster predicting the end of the world.

Building a Peace Movement That Moves Toward Peace…

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From DAVID SWANSON
New Clear Vision

Why did the peace movement of the middle of the last decade not grow larger?  Why did it shrink away?  Why is it struggling now?

As has been documented, a huge factor in the shrinking away was partisan delusion.  You put a different political party’s name on the wars and they become good wars.

But that also means that what you had was a peace movement that believed in the possibility of good wars.  In fact, much of it believed that Iraq was a bad war and Afghanistan a good war.  Many people even went out of their way to display their “reasonableness” by declaring Afghanistan a good war without actually examining the war on Afghanistan; this was imagined to be a strategic way to prevent or scale back or end the war on Iraq.

Of course, when the bad war ends, and all that’s left is the good war, those who are actually motivated by opposition to war must shift to opposing the former good war as the current bad war.  And why would you listen to anyone who did that?

Many, of course, opposed the war on Afghanistan until the invasion of Iraq, and then switched to talking almost exclusively about Iraq.  Afghanistan was labeled the good war once Iraq had happened, just as World War II was labeled the good war once Vietnam had happened.  Our beliefs regarding contrasts between Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly false.  The invasion of Afghanistan was no more legal or moral or honest or U.N.-authorized than the invasion of Iraq.  The occupation of Afghanistan is no less of a vicious one-sided slaughter of helpless people who wished us no ill than the occupation of Iraq was.

The Struggle to Reclaim Paradise…

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From IMANI ALTEMUS-WILLIAMS
Waging Non-Violence
Thanks to Todd Walton

At 9 am on an overcast morning in paradise, hundreds of protesters gathered in traditional Hawaiian chant and prayer. Upon hearing the sound of the conch shell, known here as Pū, the protesters followed a group of women towards Monsanto’s grounds.

“A’ole GMO,” cried the mothers as they marched alongside Monsanto’s cornfields, located only feet from their homes on Molokai, one of the smallest of Hawaii’s main islands. In a tiny, tropical corner of the Pacific that has warded off tourism and development, Monsanto’s fields are one of only a few corporate entities that separates the bare terrain of the mountains and oceans.

This spirited march was the last of a series of protests on the five Hawaiian islands that Monsanto and other biotech companies have turned into the world’s ground zero for chemical testing and food engineering. Hawaii is currently at the epicenter of the debate over genetically modified organisms, generally shortened to GMOs. Because Hawaii is geographically isolated from the broader public, it is an ideal location for conducting chemical experiments. The island chain’s climate and abundant natural resources have lured five of the world’s largest biotech chemical corporations: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer and BASF.  In the past 20 years, these chemical companies have performed over 5,000 open-field-test experiments of pesticide-resistant crops on an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 acres of Hawaiian land without any disclosure, making the place and its people a guinea pig for biotech engineering.

6 Sneaky Ways the Christian Right Foists Its Biblical Agenda on America…

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From AMANDA MARCOTTE
Alternet

Occasionally, the Religious Right has to come up with secular justifications for its agenda.

Bill O’Reilly recently got into a little hot water with the religious right. The abrasive talk show host dared to suggest on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” that the anti-gay movement would be better off using secular arguments against same-sex marriage than resorting endlessly to biblical ones. “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals,” O’Reilly argued, adding, “And the other side hasn’t been able to do anything but thump the Bible.”

The outcry was swift, and in true Christian right fashion, thoroughly disingenuous, with everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Laura Ingraham trying to cast O’Reilly’s statements as some kind of attack on people’s religious beliefs. Not that they didn’t have cause for hurt feelings. After all, the religious right has already tried the strategy O’Reilly suggested. The lawyer arguing against same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court didn’t reference God or the Bible, but instead came up with a bunch of unconvincing but definitely secular claims. The real reason to be mad at O’Reilly is that he’s condescending, telling the religious right something it already knows, that in order to push its religious views on the public, it needs to dress them up in secular packaging.

Since the beginning, the Christian right has been aware that the First Amendment makes it impossible for them to use “God said so” to justify legislation. They’ve spent decades grafting secular reasons onto what are fundamentally attempts to foist their views on the rest of the country, often going out of their way to conceal the religious origins of their policy ideas. In response

Obama’s Flimflam ‘Chained CPI’ Is Pure Naked Class War…

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From TRUTHDIG
Thanks to Todd Walton

The new cost-of-living index proposed in Obama’s latest budget is really a means to push lower living standards on people who need Social Security, University of Missouri economist Michael Hudson says.

The blandly named “Chained CPI” would require Social Security recipients to select cheaper goods and services, effectively diminishing—if not destroying—their quality of life by creating an official policy justification for the issuance of smaller pension checks.

Hudson explained the switch in detail Thursday on The Real News Network:

It’s not really a cost of living index. It’s a “cost of lower living standards” index. Yves Smith calls it the catfood index.

Here’s what it does: Suppose that you have to switch away from eating steak or eating meat or eating fish to eating canned tuna fish or canned beans. That’s considered a price reduction. If the chained index is done “properly,” anti-labor economists can cut Social Security by 50 percent. Here’s how. If people stop taking cabs and begin to take buses, that’s considered a lower cost of living. Well, what if they buy a bicycle? All Obama has to say is, “Look, folks! If you really want to save money, get a bike.” That’s what Margaret Thatcher said. That was one of her campaign slogans: “Get a bike!” So all of a sudden, the transportation in the cost of living goes down to zero.

People pay between 25 percent and 40 percent of their income on rent. Let them live out on the street. Let them live in a homeless shelter … About 15 percent of their income is spent on medical care. Let them do what George Bush said: Go to the emergency ward. That’s free. So the cost of living goes down!

How America Breeds Mental Illness from Birth Until Death…

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From ALTERNET

The over-diagnosis and over-prescription that dominates the mental health care scene in the US contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than fixing them.

In a recent article on the BBC News website, Professor Peter Kinderman – head of the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool – warns that the forthcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ”will lower many diagnostic thresholds and increase the number of people in the general population seen as having a mental illness”.

According to Kinderman, the manual – scheduled for publication in May 2013 – constitutes a dangerous effort to pathologise emotions and other symptoms of human existence and will exacerbate the rampant over-prescribing of drugs that already occurs “despite significant side-effects and poor evidence of their effectiveness”.

The practice of attributing emotional distress and other phenomena to alleged cerebral/biological abnormalities rather than to social and psychological causes, writes Kinderman, is particularly problematic: “Standard psychiatric diagnoses… do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world” and can counter-productively result in “further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion” for their recipients.

Regarding the impending updates to the psychiatric manual, Kinderman notes that “[t]he new diagnosis of ‘disruptive mood dysregulation disorder’ will turn childhood temper tantrums into symptoms of a mental illness”, while relaxed criteria for “generalised anxiety disorder” will turn “the worries of everyday life into targets for medical treatment”.

The Black List: 12 Food Companies to Boycott…

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From THE ORGANIC PREPPER

A genetically modified rose by any other name may smell sweet, but it could still have frankenthorns that might independently detach themselves and lop off your finger while you’re smelling it.  That’s not unlike a trip to the grocery store these days. There are a lot of ugly surprises in pretty, charmingly-named packages.

It seems like no matter how hard you try to avoid them, GMOs and toxic foods creep into your life.

Take for example, the earthily-packaged “natural” foods that are showcased in your grocery store aisles.  They cost twice as much, have obscure brand names, and tout their health benefits and natural sources.  You can almost smell the freshly tilled soil when you pick up the box.

Unfortunately, this is nothing more than corporate sleight-of-hand.

Many of the products that seem so good are actually just subsidiaries of the companies that were most complicit in blocking GMO labeling, aided and abetted by everyone’s favorite purveyor of death, Monsanto. (Monsanto, incidentally, donated over seven million dollars to the fight against the labeling of GMO-containing products.) Don’t forget that Monsanto is now above the law due to the Monsanto Protection Act, a traitorous rider that Senator Roy Blunt managed to attach to a bill that was subsequently signed into law by President Obama. (you know, that guy in the White House, who made the labeling of GMOs one of his 2007 campaign promises?)

Winner Takes All: The Super-priority Status of Derivatives…

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From ELLEN BROWN
WebOfDebt

Cyprus-style confiscation of depositor funds has been called the “new normal.”  Bail-in policies are appearing in multiple countries directing failing TBTF banks to convert the funds of “unsecured creditors” into capital; and those creditors, it turns out, include ordinary depositors. Even “secured” creditors, including state and local governments, may be at risk.  Derivatives have “super-priority” status in bankruptcy, and Dodd Frank precludes further taxpayer bailouts. In a big derivatives bust, there may be no collateral left for the creditors who are next in line.  

Shock waves went around the world when the IMF, the EU, and the ECB not only approved but mandated the confiscation of depositor funds to “bail in” two bankrupt banks in Cyprus. A “bail in” is a quantum leap beyond a “bail out.” When governments are no longer willing to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that have gambled away their capital, the banks are now being instructed to “recapitalize” themselves by confiscating the funds of their creditors, turning debt into equity, or stock; and the “creditors” include the depositors who put their money in the bank thinking it was a secure place to store their savings.

The Cyprus bail-in was not a one-off emergency measure but was consistent with similar policies already in the works for the US, UK, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, as detailed in my earlier articles here and here.  “Too big to fail” now trumps all.  Rather than banks being put into bankruptcy to salvage the deposits of their customers, the customers will be put into bankruptcy to save the banks.

Why Derivatives Threaten Your Bank Account

Disabled Now Blamed for Social Security’s Woes AND Sluggish Economy…

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From FIREDOGLAKE

The mainstream media continues to blame the disabled. Will this create more public support for austerity?

Recently, Planet Money at NPR, wrote a hit-piece accusing the disabled of fraudulently obtaining benefits through SSI and SSDI. Contagion followed and other pundits compounded the NPR error by repeating the falsehoods. But now we have WSJ ‘piling on’ to blame the disabled for leaving the workforce and creating a sluggish economy. The disabled are the designated ‘bad guys.’

… unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration’s disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.

Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.

There are more people qualifying for disability because there are more people entering into the disability danger zone. This is an effect of a larger generation entering into the age when injuries and illnesses occur.

This weekend, former Social Security Commissioners, moved by conscience to respond, came out with a written statement in opposition to the falsehoods being promoted about both the disabled and about the programs which serve the severely disabled, and which are very, very difficult to qualify for.

Bill Maher on Ayn Rand: ‘It’s all stuff that seems very deep when you’re 19 years old’…

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From ARTURO GARCIA
The Raw Story

Bill Maher delivered a blistering critique of modern libertarianism on Friday’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, slamming adherents for developing a “creepy obsession” with author Ayn Rand.

“It’s all stuff that seems very deep when you’re 19 years old,” he said, before making a quick exemption for one of his guests, young anti-creationism advocate Zack Kopplin. “About how government is a dirty trick played by the weak on the strong, and I can see how, if you’re a privileged college kid, you read that and think, ‘Yeah, that’s right, I don’t need anything. So shut up, Dad, and pay my tuition.’”

Rand’s work has often cited been as an influence on Republican lawmakers like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan went so far as to once say that Rand taught him “what my value systems are.”

“I believe him,” Maher said of Ryan. “Because [Rand's work] has a strange appeal to people who are kind of smart, but not really.”

Years ago, Maher conceded, he supported some libertarian ideals, saying he wanted to keep the government out of his bedroom, his medicine chest, “and especially not in the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed.”

But somewhere along the way, he said, libertarians became devotees of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which he called “a book that’s never been read all the way through by anyone with a girlfriend.”

But even as he said he still supported notions