November 17, 2013

Cobb County, GA, has an $86 million school budget deficit, but plenty of $$ for a baseball stadium

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/atlanta-braves-new-stadium-cobb-county


(Mother Jones) Baseball's Atlanta Braves are planning to move to suburban Cobb County, Georgia, leaving behind their within-city-limits home of 17 years. "The issue isn't the Turner Field we play in today, but instead whether or not the venue can remain viable for another 20 to 30 years," the team wrote on a website explaining the move, essentially conceding that the current stadium is fine—but that it might not be in 30 years.

Although the price has not yet been finalized, reports claim the new stadium will cost $672 million, with $300 million coming from Cobb County (motto: "Low on taxes, big on business&quot . This is the same Cobb County that faced an $86.4 million school budget shortfall this year, forcing employees to take furloughs. While local officials are hoping a new stadium will eventually pay for itself in local economic impact, such claims are often exaggerated. And a look at some recent stadium boondoggles should be enough to give any municipality—or taxpayer—pause.

Here's what $300 million in stadium subsidies could mean to folks in Cobb County:

November 17, 2013

Bill Black: Will the Chilean People Save the U.S. by Electing Michelle Bachelet?

The effort by corporate CEOs to dominate the global economy and global government is reaching the end-game stage. Corporate CEOs view government and democracy as their gravest threats and are constantly seeking to discredit and hamstring government and democratic decision-making. CEOs are particularly eager to discredit, destroy, or capture regulation and they have enlisted enormous support in both major U.S. parties and many of the world’s dominant parties for these efforts. President Obama has continued and made worse the effort of President Bush to betray our nation, our democracy, and our people through the secret, draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. In this first column on TPP I explain that while there is no realistic chance of convincing Obama to repudiate the TPP, there is a chance that the people of Chile will save our democracy and our national sovereignty.

Chile’s national election will occur on November 17, 2013 and it is widely expected to return former President Michelle Bachelet to power. In this article I describe the disgraceful position that the U.S. has taken in the TPP negotiations in which it sides with corporate interests rather than the victims of a terrible parasitical infection that is epidemic in much of Latin America and a serious problem in the United States. Chagas is a serious problem in Chile, which is one of the countries negotiating TPP.

The failure of Chile under President Sebastián Piñera’s leadership (and the failure of Peru and Mexico) to stand up to the U.S. and expose and block its effort to block vital treatment for victims of Chagas disease represents a national disgrace by the heads of state of the U.S., Chile, Peru, and Mexico.

Progressives should urge Dr. Bachelet, should she be elected President, to make the full drafts of TPP public immediately. Dr. Bachelet is a pediatrician who doubtless treated victims of Chagas disease. She will understand fully the threat posed by the TPP to public health. I urge her to demand that the draft TPP be scrapped and fundamentally changed to build democracy and national sovereignty and to control the multinational corporations rather than allow them and their plutocrat panels to dominate and denigrate democracy and national sovereignty. ..........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/11/will-chilean-people-save-u-s-electing-michelle-bachelet.html#more-6914

November 17, 2013

Richard Wolff: Global Capitalism: November 2013 Monthly Update

Published on Nov 12, 2013

In addition to our usual shorter updates on major economic events in the news over the last month, major attention will be devoted to the following:
The federal government's austerity policy, compromises with the Republicans over social security, medicare, Obamacare, etc.
The state and local governments' austerity policies (summary of a major new report on state and local cutbacks)
How and why changes in federal, state and local taxes could remove the need for austerity and achieve tax justice.
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics

November 17, 2013

Lou Holtz .......

I watched him give his analysis during the college football postgame show yesterday. .... I don't think I understood more than two words he said.

November 16, 2013

Vandana Shiva On Resisting GMOs: "Saving Seeds Is a Political Act"

from YES! Magazine:


Vandana Shiva On Resisting GMOs: "Saving Seeds Is a Political Act"
Why the fight for biodiversity is about protecting life itself.

by Sarah van Gelder
posted Nov 15, 2013


Trained in physics and philosophy, Vandana Shiva is renowned for her activism against GMOs, globalization, and patents on seeds and traditional foods. She co-founded Navdanya, which promotes seed saving and organic farming and has more than 70,000 farmer-members.

Sarah van Gelder: The seed has been a major part of your work. Could you say a little about what a seed is at its essence?

Vandana Shiva: The seed in its essence is all of the past evolution of the Earth,
the evolution of human history, and the potential for future evolution. The seed is the embodiment of culture because culture shaped the seed with careful selection—women picked the best, diversified. So from one grass you get 200,000 rices.

That is a convergence of human intelligence and nature’s intelligence. It is the ultimate expression of life, and in our language, it means “that from which life arises on its own, forever and ever and ever.”

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

van Gelder: Can you say more about that? What is the relationship of freedom to biodiversity?

Shiva: Life is self-organized. Self-organized systems evolve in diversity. You are not identical to me, because each of us has evolved in freedom. The self-organizing capacity of life is expressed in diversity. Diversity of culture, diversity of humans, diversity of seeds.

Uniformity is constructed from the outside. It is coercive. So a farm of only Roundup Ready soya is actually a battlefield. Chemical warfare is going on—spraying of Roundup to kill everything green, to kill the soil organisms,
to kill the diversity, but also to kill the potential of the crop to manage itself and diseases.

Monocultures can only be held together through external control, and uniformity and external control and concentration go hand in hand. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-to-eat-like-our-lives-depend-on-it/vandana-shiva-freedom-starts-with-a-seed

November 16, 2013

Toronto City Council attempts to make Rob Ford a CSMINO

Crack-smoking Mayor in Name Only




TORONTO (AP) The Toronto City Council moved a step closer to making Rob Ford a mayor in name only following months of publicity surrounding his excessive drinking and drug use, and will look to complete those efforts next week when council resumes.

Ford vowed to take City Council to court after it voted overwhelmingly Friday to strip him of some of his powers over his admitted use of crack cocaine, public drinking and increasingly erratic behavior.

The motion, approved in a 39-3 vote, suspends Ford's authority to appoint and dismiss the deputy mayor and his executive committee. The council, which lacks the authority to force the mayor from office unless he is convicted of a crime and jailed, also voted to give the deputy mayor authority to handle any civic emergency.

The effort will continue Monday when the council moves to strip the mayor of most of his remaining powers, including his office budget. It would also appoint the deputy mayor to lead of his executive committee. That motion has already been signed by 28 of the council's 44 members. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/feedarticle/11069438

November 16, 2013

A ‘Historic Moment’ for Campus Solidarity

from In These Times:


A ‘Historic Moment’ for Campus Solidarity
University of California grad students will join service workers on the picket lines in a rare sympathy strike.

BY Rebecca Burns


In a labor action rarely seen on university campuses, graduate student employees in the University of California system announced on Wednesday that they plan to strike alongside university service workers walking off the job next week due to allegations of illegal retaliation against members of their union. After members of UAW 2865, which represents 16,000 UC graduate teaching and research assistants, voted to authorize a strike last week, the union pledged Wednesday to join the picket lines when service and patient care workers represented by AFSCME 3299 stage a one-day walkout on November 20. Graduate student organizers call the decision to stage a sympathy strike alongside other campus workers a “historic moment” for campus solidarity that comes in the midst of contentious contract negotiations between the university’s largest unions and the UC administration.

“Academic workers standing in solidarity with service workers will send a clear message to UC management that its employees will not tolerate intimidation from bosses or the decline in working conditions,” says Marco Antonio Rosales, a union steward and graduate instructor at UC Davis. The California Nurses Association and UC Santa Cruz’s Skilled Crafts Unit have also announced that their members will strike in sympathy with AFSCME.

Nearly $1 billion in budget cuts over the past five years have had a tumultuous effect on the UC system and have strained relations with students, who have seen steep tuition hikes, and staff, who have endured wage and hiring freezes. Contract talks between the university and AFSCME, which represents 22,000 employees across the UC system, have been deadlocked for more than a year, with the union contending that the university has forced through several rounds of painful pay cuts on top of already-low wages (according to the union, 99 percent of service workers are already eligible for some form of public assistance).

Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who was selected as the new UC president this summer and addressed the Board of Regents for the first time yesterday, has been charged with charting a path out of economic crisis for the university. Unions say they want that to ensure that that path includes fair pay and conditions for campus workers. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15885/uc_grad_student_employees_declare_solidarity_with_service_workers/

November 16, 2013

Picket, Fight, and Win

from Dollars & Sense:


Picket, Fight, and Win
Solidarity networks scale down to defend tenants and workers.

BY SETH GRANDE


Late this past July, a small group of activists from around the United States and Canada converged in Seattle for the first ever International Solidarity Network Conference. After spending the weekend discussing organizing skills and listening to presentations from groups as far away as Hamilton, Ontario, on Sunday afternoon the attendees piled into cars and headed to the Tressa Apartment complex in the north Seattle neighborhood of Shoreline to do what solidarity networks do best: picket, fight, and win.

The apartment complex, owned by the national real estate group FPI Management, had kept hundreds of dollars of a former tenant’s security deposit, despite telling him that only sixty to seventy dollars would be deducted for general cleaning. The tenant and his family had considered taking the company to small claims court, until they heard about the Seattle Solidarity Network, or SeaSol for short. After consulting with SeaSol organizers, the family decided they would rather resolve their grievances through direct action. Together with activists from the network, they spoke with other Tressa residents and hung posters around their neighborhood urging potential tenants not to rent there. Following weeks of community outreach—and shortly after a spirited, attention-grabbing picket, the tenant received a check from FPI Management for the remainder of the security deposit.

The fight with FPI Management is just one example of a new model of worker and tenant organizing that has begun to emerge in recent years in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. Solidarity networks are volunteer mutual support groups that organize around specific cases using collective, direct action tactics. Decisions within the group are made on a directly democratic basis at weekly meetings, with no elected officers. There are no specialized professional organizers, and groups don’t have any regular funding sources outside of small individual donations. “We believe its more advantageous to build power in the long run if we can structure ourselves in a way where we don’t need paid staff, we don’t need lawyers,” Andrew, a SeaSol organizer, told Dollars & Sense. (He asked us to only use his first name.) “All we need is to continue organizing regular people to solve these problems ourselves.”

So far, the strategy seems to be paying off. Since a small group of activists in Seattle started organizing according to the solidarity-network model, in late 2007, SeaSol has taken on over forty different cases, winning the vast majority and getting back thousands of dollars in withheld wages and security deposits for dozens of workers and tenants. Such a high rate of success has inspired other groups, not only here, but also around the world. The Seattle Solidarity Network’s website lists contact information for over forty other solidarity networks, including groups as far away as Glasgow, Scotland, and Brisbane, Australia. “I think a lot of (activists) are frustrated with feeling like we’re losing all the time,” Andrew continues, explaining one appeal of the solidarity-network model and its smaller scale. “I think it’s attractive to people in that they can see that here is something where we can use our skills, our energy, our organizing power to tangibly improve someone’s life in a way that will also hopefully help us build a broader movement.” .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2013/1113grande.html

November 16, 2013

Chris Hedges: We Have to Atone for Turning Our Backs on People of Color

After a talk on the collapse of complex societies, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges answers an audience question: “How should people of color respond to the dying of a civilization that has not been civil to them?”


http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_we_have_to_make_atonement_for_turning_our_backs_on_people_of_c

November 16, 2013

OMG. Sometimes, all you can say is OMG.

This Louisiana Official Hates It When Mexicans Learn


Meet one immigration hardliner who doesn’t want immigrants to speak English.

Lindel Toups, who sits on the Lafourche Parish City Council, wants to route some funding away from a library and into a new jail. Toups played down the importance of libraries in comments to the local press, pointing out that the Spanish-language Biblioteca Hispana section helps Spanish-speakers learn English, which he says is a bad thing.

“They’re teaching Mexicans to speak English,” Toups told the Tri-Parish Times and Business News. “Let that son of a bitch go back to Mexico.”

Toups doesn’t just oppose Mexicans learning. He elaborates:

There’s just so many things they’re doing that I don’t agree with… Them junkies and hippies and food stamps (recipients) and all, they use the library to look at drugs and food stamps (on the Internet). I see them do it.

Library System Director Laura Sanders defended the idea that all people should have access to public institutions like librarys. “We are here to serve all the residents of Lafourche Paris,” Sanders told The Los Angeles Times. "It doesn't matter what ethnicity they are -- we serve them all." ..........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/15/lindel-toups-mexicans_n_4283844.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037&ir=Politics