January 12, 2014

NYC: Taxpayers fleeced big-time by pro sports, again.......

A proposed deal to bring a soccer stadium to the Bronx would bail out the bondholders of a set of failed parking garages and delay payments to the New York City until 2056, according to an analysis released by the Independent Budget Office. The controversial garages, which paved over a park, have already cost taxpayers millions.

When the Yankees built their new stadium, the organization insisted on the new garages, which would up the number of parking spaces by some 2,000 spots. Despite widespread warnings that a new Metro-North station would alleviate the need for the garages, the Yankees -- with the support of former Mayor Bloomberg and former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn -- insisted on pressing forward with the project, which received $39 million in direct subsidies and $238 million in tax-exempt bonds. Another $70 million came from the state.

But as Transportation Nation has been reporting, the garages have been a failure. At upwards of $35 per spot, they're more expensive than other parking options in the area. And since the introduction of the new rail station, transit ridership to games has swelled. ..........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.wnyc.org/story/report-soccer-deal-means-yankees-garages-arrears-until-2056/

January 12, 2014

Keiser Report: UK's Economics of Extinction

Published on Jan 7, 2014

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the Ka-Boom! and Ka-bust! the economics of extinction in the UK property market as Thatcher's slow-motion housing timebomb ticks away under the British economy where demand continues to outstrip supply by a factor of two and where one woman being forced out of social housing complains, "I'm sure if they had their way they would kill us. I really believe that."

January 12, 2014

By Pushing the TPP, Obama is Repeating the Mistakes of NAFTA

Published on Jan 6, 2014

David Bacon: Obama's push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership(TPP) demonstrates his 2008 campaign pledge to oppose NAFTA-style free trade agreements was just lip service

See more videos: http://therealnews.com

January 12, 2014

20 Years on, Mexico is NAFTA's Biggest Lie

Published on Jan 2, 2014

Tim Wise: The numbers expose the official distortions around NAFTA's failed promises

January 12, 2014

After 20 Years, NAFTA Leaves Mexico’s Economy in Ruins

from truthdig:


After 20 Years, NAFTA Leaves Mexico’s Economy in Ruins

Posted on Jan 9, 2014
By Sonali Kolhatkar


Twenty years ago, on Jan. 1, 1994, a trade deal championed by Democratic President Bill Clinton went into effect. The North American Free Trade Agreement was meant to integrate the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico by breaking down trade barriers among them, creating jobs and closing the wage gap between the U.S. and Mexico.

What in fact happened under NAFTA was that heavily subsidized U.S. corn flooded the Mexican market, putting millions of farmers out of work. Multinational corporations opened up factories creating low-wage jobs at the expense of organized labor and the environment. This, in turn, drove waves of migration north.

Meanwhile, corporate profits soared, and Mexico boasted the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim. Walmart and Krispy Kreme conquered Mexico, and ordinary Mexicans had access to the same consumer goods as their neighbors to the north. The economies of all three nations, measured only by GDP rather than jobs or wages, were pronounced grand successes, even though the U.S. and Canada disproportionately reaped more financial benefits.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., manufacturing jobs fell dramatically and organized labor lost even more clout. The Great Recession of 2008 worsened the downward trend, especially for Mexicans. Mexico’s economy, tied intimately to the U.S.’ because of NAFTA, suffered more than any other country in Latin America. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/after_20_years_nafta_leaves_mexicos_economy_in_ruins_20140109

January 12, 2014

Chris Hedges: The Last Gasp of American Democracy

from truthdig:


The Last Gasp of American Democracy

Posted on Jan 5, 2014
By Chris Hedges


This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive.

The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.

I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105

January 12, 2014

Water is the Enemy, Gatorade Mobile Game Tells Youth

from Civil Eats:


Water is the Enemy, Gatorade Mobile Game Tells Youth
By Nancy Huehnergarth on January 7, 2014

UPDATE January 11th: IAB Mixx Bronze winner Gatorade (for strategies and objectives in mobile advertising for their Bolt! mobile gaming integration) has completely disappeared from the IAB Award Winners Gallery: http://www.iab.net/mixxawards/gallery2013/strategies-and-objectives/mobile-advertising.html

If you thought Big Soda’s decades-long “War on Water”–part of their strategy to increase sales of soda and other bottled drinks–couldn’t get any worse, you were wrong. The latest assault, courtesy of PepsiCo, is in the form of a mobile game for youth that brands water as the enemy of athletic performance.

According to a case study video posted on the 2013 Interactive Advertising Bureau MIXX Awards Winners Gallery, bronze award-winner Gatorade took action after learning that teen athletes often choose “to drink water during practice because they thought it provided the proper hydration they needed.”

Of course, for all but a minute percentage of youth athletic endeavors (such as a marathon or all day soccer tournament) water is the ideal choice for proper hydration, but that didn’t faze sugary drink brand Gatorade one bit. In an effort to change hearts and minds, as well as further increase parent company PepsiCo’s enormous profits, Gatorade brand managers asked media agency OMD to drive home the following message to youth athletes: Gatorade is superior to water. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2014/01/07/water-is-the-enemy-gatorade-mobile-game-tells-youth/#sthash.17JmjEBk.dpuf

January 12, 2014

The $17 Trillion Delusion: The Absurdity of Cutting Social Security to Reduce the Federal Debt

from Dollars & Sense:


The $17 Trillion Delusion
The Absurdity of Cutting Social Security to Reduce the Federal Debt

BY MARTY WOLFSON | January/February 2014


Shortly after the ceiling on federal debt was raised on October 17, 2013, the conservative Heritage Foundation notified its readers that the outstanding debt of the United States had “rocketed past $17 trillion,” and that “entitlement spending—the key driver of spending and debt—remains unaddressed.” The three assumptions in that statement—that the true measure of our debt is $17 trillion, that the cause of the buildup of debt is entitlement spending, and that therefore the appropriate policy to “address” this problem is to cut Social Security benefits and other “entitlements”—are endorsed by many politicians and policy pundits in Washington. But they’re all wrong as economic analysis and disastrous as policy recommendations.

Seventeen trillion dollars certainly sounds like a big, scary number, especially when national debt clocks tell us that this translates into more than $53,000 for every person in the United States. But we shouldn’t be focusing on that number.

The $17 trillion figure is a measure of “gross debt,” which means that it includes debt owed by the U.S. Treasury to more than 230 other U.S. government agencies and trust funds. On the consolidated financial statements of the federal government, this intragovernmental debt is, in effect, canceled out. Basically, this is money the government owes itself. What is left is termed “debt held by the public.” It is this measure of debt that is relevant to a possible increase in interest rates due to competition for funding between the private and public sectors. It is also the category of government debt used by the Congressional Budget Office and other analysts. (Of course, the full economic significance of any debt measure needs to be considered in context, in relationship to the income available to service the debt.) The total debt held by the public is $12 trillion.

The Social Security Trust Fund owns $2.7 trillion of the $5 trillion of Treasury securities held in intragovernmental accounts. In fact, Social Security is the largest single owner of Treasury securities in the world, surpassing even China’s significant holdings of $1.3 trillion. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2014/0114wolfson.html

January 12, 2014

Looking for Lessons in Iceland's Recovery

from Der Spiegel:

In 2008, Iceland experienced one of the most dramatic crashes any country had ever seen. Since then, its recovery has been just as impressive. Are there lessons to be learned? SPIEGEL went to the island nation to find out.

What should one expect from a country in which the sentence, "What an asshole!" is a compliment? Icelanders say "asshole," or "rassgat," when they tousle a child's hair or greet friends, and they mean it to be friendly.

.....(snip).....

What happened in Iceland from 2008 to 2011 is regarded as one of the worst financial crises in history. It seems likely that never before had a country managed to amass such great sums of money per capita, only to lose it again in a short period of time. But Iceland, with a population of just 320,000, has also staged what appears to be the fastest recovery on record. Since 2011, the gross domestic product has been on the rise once again, most recently at 2 percent. What's more, salaries are rising, the national debt is sinking and the government has paid off part of the billions in loans it received in 2008 from the International Monetary Fund ahead of schedule. It's a sign of confidence.

.....(snip).....

It was German money, Jónsson says, that flowed the most freely following the liberalization of Icelandic banks in the 1990s. Still today, Germany is the country's largest creditor, he says. In 2010, German banks had over €20 billion in open claims in Iceland. "Germany has a weakness for Iceland," says Jónsson, who now works as an economics professor in Reykjavik. "Even Wagner borrowed from our legends for his operas," he says. In 2012, the number of German tourists to Iceland, with 65,000 visitors, was in third place behind the US and Great Britain.

Iceland's rapid return to health hinged on a series of measures that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman later referred to as "doing an Iceland." Krugman, an admirer of Iceland's dramatic comeback, has recommended a similar policy cocktail for other nations in crisis. The rules are as follows: Allow your ailing banks to collapse; devalue your currency if you have one of your own; introduce capital controls; and try to avoid paying back foreign debts. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/financial-recovery-of-iceland-a-case-worth-studying-a-942387.html

January 12, 2014

The events in WV take me back to Chris Hedges' "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" .......

....... and the chapter on West Virginia and what mining hath wrought. It really is a must read if you haven't. ..... An excerpt, via the Daily Beast.


Joe and I are walking along the ridge of Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia with Larry Gibson. Small wooden shacks and campers, including Gibson’s simple wood cabin, dot the line of ridge where he and his extended family have lived for more than 230 years. Coal companies are blasting hundreds of thousands of acres of the Appalachians into mounds of debris and rubble to unearth seams of coal. Gibson has preserved 50 acres from the destruction. His forested ribbon of land is surrounded by a sea of gray rock, pale patches of thin grass, and barren plateaus where mountain peaks and towering pines once stood. Valleys and creeks, including the old swimming hole Gibson used as a boy, are buried under mining waste. The wells, including his own, are dry and the aquifers below the mountain poisoned. The fine grit of coal dust in the air settles on our lips and leaves a metallic taste in our mouths. Gibson’s thin strip of trees and undergrowth is a reminder of what has been destroyed and will never be reclaimed.

......(snip).......

His defiance has come with a cost. Coal companies are the only employers left in southern West Virginia, one of the worst pockets of poverty in the nation, and the desperate scramble for the few remaining jobs has allowed the companies to portray rebels such as Gibson as enemies of not only Big Coal but also the jobs it provides. Gibson’s cabin has been burned down. Two of his dogs have been shot and Dog was hung, although he was saved before he choked to death. Trucks have tried to run him off the road. He has endured drive-by shootings, and a couple of weeks before we visited, his Porta-Johns were overturned. A camper he once lived in was shot up. He lost his water in 2001 when the blasting dropped the water table. He has reinforced his cabin door with six inches of wood to keep it from being kicked in by intruders. The door weighs 500 pounds and has wheels at the base to open and close it. A black bullet-proof vest hangs near the entrance on the wall, although he admits he has never put it on. He keeps stacks of dead birds in his freezer that choked to death on the foul air, hoping that someday someone might investigate why birds in this part of the state routinely fall out of the sky. Roughly 100 bird species have disappeared.

......(snip).......

The spine of the Appalachian Mountains, a range older than the Himalayas, winds its way through Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Isolated, lonely patches of verdant hills and forests now lie in the midst of huge gray plateaus, massive, dark-eyed craters, and sprawling, earthen-banked dams filled with billions of gallons of coal slurry. Gigantic slag heaps, the residue of decades of mining operations, lie idle, periodically catching fire and belching oily plumes of smoke and an acrid stench. The coal companies have turned perhaps half a million acres in West Virginia and another half million in Kentucky, once some of the most beautiful land in the country, along with hundreds of towering peaks, into stunted mounds of rubble. It was impossible to grasp the level of destruction in the war in Bosnia until you got in a helicopter and flew over the landscape, seeing village after village dynamited by advancing Serb forces into rubble. The same scale of destruction, and the same problem in picturing its true extent, holds true for West Virginia and Kentucky.

That destruction, like the pillaging of natural resources in the ancient Mesopotamian, Roman, and Mayan empires, is one of willful if not always conscious self-annihilation. The dependence on coal, which supplies the energy for half of the nation’s electricity, means that its extraction, as supplies diminish, becomes ever more ruthless. The Appalachian region provides most of the country’s coal, its production dwarfed only by that of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.5 We extract 100 tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970. ...................................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/14/chris-hedges-and-joe-sacco-chronicle-mining-catastrophes-in-west-virginia.html