March 30, 2012

Disappearing Toronto: The real danger of undervaluing our historical architecture

from NOWToronto:





Disappearing Toronto
The real danger of undervaluing our historical architecture

By Enzo Di Matteo


Heritage preservation is in trouble in Hogtown.

Developers filling the sky with cranes to erect ever-taller glass condo towers seem to care enough about heritage to go to great expense to save the facades of notable buildings and incorporate others into their designs. It’s at least a nod to the value of our architectural history.

But our entire planning system is more geared to the idea that bigger is better than to preservation. Heritage concerns are typically excluded from the broader planning and development process. At the political level, elected officials are largely unaware of the environmental benefits and economic value of protecting Toronto’s built past.

We have heritage policies, but they’re frequently not enforced. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=185978

March 30, 2012

David Korten: When Bankers Rule the World

from YES! Magazine:



When Bankers Rule the World
How we can call out the myths, restructure the banking system, shut down the con game, and take back America.

by David Korten
posted Mar 29, 2012


The tell-all defection of Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs executive, provided an insider’s view of the moral corruption of the Wall Street banks that control of much of America’s economy and politics. Smith confirms what insightful observers have known for years: the business purpose of Wall Street bankers is to maximize their personal financial take without regard to the consequences for others.

Wall Street’s World of Illusion

Why has the public for so long tolerated Wall Street’s reckless abuses of power and accepted the resulting devastation? The answer lies in a cultural trance induced by deceptive language and misleading indicators backed by flawed economic theory and accounting sleight-of hand. To shatter the trance we need to recognize that the deception that Wall Street promotes through its well-funded PR machine rests on three false premises.



Wall Street aggressively promotes these fallacies as guiding moral principles. Their embrace by Wall Street insiders helps to explain how they are able to reward themselves with obscene bonuses for their successful use of deception, fraud, speculation, and usury to steal wealth they have had no part in creating and yet still believe, as Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously proclaimed, that they are “doing God’s work.” .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/when-bankers-rule-the-world

March 30, 2012

Liberty and Health Care for All

from truthdig:



Liberty and Health Care for All

Posted on Mar 29, 2012
By Bill Boyarsky


In a bare basement law school classroom last week, four students argued the merits and weaknesses of the health care act. It was an exercise no doubt replicated around the country as legal scholars warmed up for the U.S. Supreme Court’s three-day hearing on the law this week—the most searching examination of federal power in decades.

Several miles away at a community health clinic, restaurant workers, gardeners, housekeepers, car washers, nannies, day laborers and others of the low paid who keep Los Angeles running were being given medical care, as were their families. The long-term future of their care awaited the Supreme Court’s decision.

The USC Gould School of Law’s moot court and the Venice Family Clinic offered me enlightening looks at the legal, medical and humanitarian issues involved in this case. The moot court was a useful briefing on what would be discussed by the Supreme Court. The clinic demonstrated the impact of the health care case on the ground.

Barbara Siegel, whom I had met when she was a lawyer representing the poor, had invited me to attend her law school’s moot court on the constitutionality of the law. Three lawyers, including Carlos Moreno, a retired justice of the California Supreme Court, heard the arguments of students representing the federal government and the state of Florida, one of the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberty_and_health_care_for_all_20120329/

March 29, 2012

Naomi Klein, Arun Gupta, William Grieder, Frances Fox Piven, Doug Henwood on the Economic Crisis

March 29, 2012

Four Numbers Add Up to an American Debt Disaster

(Bloomberg) Consider the following numbers: 2.2, 62.8, 454, 5.9. Drawing a blank? Not to worry. They don’t mean much on their own.

Now consider them in context:



For the moment, Nos. 1 and 2 are helping No. 3 and creating a big problem for No. 4. Unless Treasury does something about No. 2, Nos. 1 and 3 will become liabilities while No. 4 has the potential to provoke a crisis.

In plain English, the Treasury’s reliance on short-term financing serves a dual purpose, neither of which is beneficial in the long run. First, it helps conceal the depth of the nation’s structural imbalances: the difference between what it spends and what it collects in taxes. Second, it puts the U.S. in the precarious position of having to roll over 71 percent of its privately held marketable debt in the next five years -- probably at higher interest rates. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-28/four-numbers-add-up-to-an-american-debt-disaster.html

March 29, 2012

Big Food and their political sockpuppets encourage Americans to eat Pink Slime

OMAHA, Neb. — The main producer of "pink slime" and the politicians defending the company will have a hard time persuading consumers and grocery stores to accept the product, even if the processed beef trimmings are as safe as the industry insists.

Three governors and two lieutenant governors plan to tour Beef Products Inc.'s plant in South Sioux City, Neb., Thursday afternoon to show their support for the company and the several thousand jobs it creates in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota and Texas.

Beef Products, the main producer of the cheap lean beef made from fatty bits of meat left over from other cuts, has drawn extra scrutiny because of concerns about the ammonium hydroxide it treats meat with to slightly change the acidity of the beef and kill bacteria. The company suspended operations at plants in Texas, Kansas and Iowa this week, affecting 650 jobs, but it defends its product as safe.

While the official name is lean finely textured beef, critics dub it "pink slime" and say it's an unappetizing example of industrialized food production. That term was coined by a federal microbiologist who was grossed out by it, but the product meets federal food safety standards and has been used for years. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20120329/US.Pink.Slime.Plant.Tour/?cid=hero_media

March 29, 2012

And Jumbo said, "F**k this sh*t"

The forty year old elephant, called Baby escaped from circus workers outside the town's busy shopping centre at around 4.50pm.

Footage of the incident shows the giant animal loose in a car park as handlers from Courtney's Circus try to corner her.

However, the attempts are futile as Baby gives them the slip, breaking through a barrier and galloping away into the town. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/weirdnewsvideo/9172569/Elephant-runs-away-from-circus-in-Ireland.html

March 29, 2012

Cheney resumes normal activities (cartoon)

March 29, 2012

Thomas Frank: How Americans Have Gotten Played -- Over and Over and Over Again

The Baffler / By Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank: How Americans Have Gotten Played -- Over and Over and Over Again
In the 12 hapless years of this millennium, we have looked on as 3 great bubbles have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last.

March 28, 2012 |


The following article is an excerpt of a piece that first appeared in The Baffler.

The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him.

—John Maynard Keynes

In the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last.

First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness.

Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington, particularly the tough-minded men of the media; an enterprise that destroyed the country it aimed to save and that helped to bankrupt our nation as well.

And then, Wall Street blew up the global economy. Empowered by bank deregulation and regulatory capture, Wall Street enlisted those tough-minded men of the media again to sell the world on the idea that financial innovations were making the global economy more stable by the minute. Central banks puffed an asset bubble like the world had never seen before, even if every journalist worth his byline was obliged to deny its existence until it was too late. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/news/154735/thomas_frank%3A_how_americans_have_gotten_played_--_over_and_over_and_over_again/

March 29, 2012

Amy Goodman: Forget Fear of Flying, Fear Airport Screening

from truthdig:



Forget Fear of Flying, Fear Airport Screening

Posted on Mar 28, 2012
By Amy Goodman


There was terror in the skies this week over Texas, caused not by a terrorist but by a pilot—a Flight Standards captain, no less. JetBlue Airways Capt. Clay Osbon, flying Flight 191 from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Vegas, began moving up and down the aisle after the jet was airborne, ranting, according to several passengers, about Iraq, Israel, al-Qaida and bombs, calling on passengers to recite the Lord’s Prayer, saying that they were “all going down.” An off-duty pilot in the cabin went to the cockpit to help the co-pilot with the emergency landing, while passengers and crew subdued Osbon. Osbon, who’d been with JetBlue almost since its founding, was taken to the hospital, suspended with pay, then criminally charged with interfering with a flight crew.

That’s enough to inspire a fear of flying in anyone. But just getting to your airplane these days may present a greater risk to your health than the actual flight.

New airport security screening technology, primarily backscatter X-ray devices, have come under increased scrutiny, as their effectiveness is questioned amid concerns that the radiation exposure may cause cancer. Adding to health concerns are both the graphic nature of the images captured, essentially nude photos of every person passing through the machine, and the aggressive—and for some, humiliating—nature of the alternative to the scans, the “enhanced pat-down” by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins introduced a bill that would require independent laboratory testing of the X-ray backscatter machines, exactly what a group of University of California, San Francisco scientists called on the Obama administration to do in April 2010. Responding to the TSA claim (provided by the manufacturer, Rapiscan) that the radiation dose is less than “the dose one receives from eating one banana,” professor John Sedat and others wrote: “While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high. ... There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations [including pregnant women].” When this risk is multiplied over 700 million annual travelers, Michael Love, Ph.D., the manager of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine X-ray facility, told Discover magazine, “someone is going to get skin cancer.” The European Union has banned the machines. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/forget_fear_of_flying_fear_airport_screening_20120328/?ln