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marmar

marmar's Journal
marmar's Journal
April 16, 2013

Robert Reich: Why This is the Worst Recovery on Record


Why This is the Worst Recovery on Record
Monday, April 15, 2013


The biggest economic debate is between Keynesians (who want more government spending and lower interest rates in order to fuel demand) and supply-side “austerics” (who want lower taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to boost incentives to hire and invest, and who see government deficits crowding out private investment).

But both approaches have problems.

George W. Bush tried supply-side tax cuts but nothing trickled down. Jobs and wages declined. And austerity economics has been a disaster for Europe.

Unfortunately the U.S. is now adopting supply-side austerics by making the Bush tax cuts permanent for 98 percent of taxpayers, hiking Social Security taxes back up, and implementing the sequester. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.org/post/48047982332



April 15, 2013

Michele Bachmann's latest chart-topper


During a Thursday House Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) asked CIA Director John Brennan and others on the committee panel a number of puzzling questions about drone strikes and other security issues.

Bachmann began with a question about the White House's involvement in armed drone strikes in Libya.

"Armed drone strikes in Libya?" Brennan replied. "I'm unknowing of such, and I would defer to the White House to address your question."

Bachmann scrambled to direct more questions at Brennan and the panel, focusing on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya last September. Brennan continued to be dumbfounded. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/15/michele-bachmann-john-brennan_n_3085481.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037



April 15, 2013

Small Farms Fight Back: Food and Community Self-Governance


Small Farms Fight Back: Food and Community Self-Governance

Sunday, 14 April 2013 11:57
By Tory Field and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Report


Heather Retberg stood on the steps of the Blue Hill, Maine town hall surrounded by 200 people. “We are farmers,” she told the crowd, “who are supported by our friends and our neighbors who know us and trust us, and want to ensure that they maintain access to their chosen food supply.”

Blue Hill is one of a handful of small Maine towns that have been taking bold steps to protect their local food system. In 2011, they passed an ordinance exempting their local farmers and food producers from federal and state licensure requirements when these farmers sell directly to customers.

The federal government has stiffened national food-safety regulations in order to address the health risks associated with industrial-scale farming. Recent widespread recalls of contaminated ground turkey, cantaloupe, eggs, and a host of other foods illustrate the serious problems at hand. These outbreaks have been linked to industrial farms with overcrowded animals and unbalanced ecosystems. The significant distance between industrial farms and consumers creates a lack of accountability and difficulty tracing problems when they arise.

Small-scale farming, however, doesn’t spark the same safety risks. Small farmers who sell their food locally will tell you that the nature of their business, based on face-to face relationships with the people who eat their food, creates a built-in safety protection. They don’t need inspectors to make sure they are following good practices. Keeping their neighbors, families, and long-time customers in good health is an even better incentive. Customers are also more able to witness the farming practices firsthand. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/15725-small-farms-fight-back-food-and-community-self-governance



April 15, 2013

Not the Picture Picasso Would Have Painted


from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


Not the Picture Picasso Would Have Painted
April 14, 2013

A colossal gift from a fabulously rich patron of the arts has the museum world buzzing. But hold the hosannahs. The rich aren’t saving us.

By Sam Pizzigati


Thomas Campbell didn’t have a good week last week. He had a great week.

Campbell directs the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Last week he announced “something museum directors only dream about”: the donation to the Met of a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture worth over $1 billion.

Pablo Picasso paintingThe donor: cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder. His gift: 33 pieces by Pablo Picasso and dozens of other landmark works from Picasso’s fellow artists, activists all in the “cubist” movement that ushered in the modern era of abstract art.

Forbes estimates Lauder’s overall net worth at well north of $8 billion. Chunks of this fortune have been going to the art world for some time now. In 2008 alone, Lauder gave $131 million to the Whitney Museum. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/not-the-picture-picasso-would-have-painted/



April 15, 2013

Chris Hedges: Sweatshops on Wheels


from truthdig:


Sweatshops on Wheels

Posted on Apr 15, 2013
By Chris Hedges


WASHINGTON, D.C.—The deterioration of the nation’s public transportation, like the deterioration of health care, education, social services, public utilities, bridges and roads, is part of the relentless seizing and harvesting of public resources and programs by corporations. These corporations are steadily stripping the American infrastructure. Public-sector unions are being broken. Wages and benefits are being slashed. Workers are forced to put in longer hours in unsafe workplaces, often jeopardizing public safety. The communities that need public services most are losing them, and where public service is continued it is reduced or substandard and costlier. Only the security and surveillance network and the military are permitted to function with efficiency in their role as the guardians of corporate power. We now resemble the developing world: We have small pockets of obscene wealth, ailing infrastructure and public service, huge swaths of grinding poverty, and militarized police and internal security.

The assault on public transportation, which has devastating consequences for the poor who cannot get to work or the doctor’s office without it, is not new. General Motors, Standard Oil, Firestone Tire and Rubber, B.F. Phillips Petroleum and Mack Manufacturing set up companies in the 1930s—first United Cities Motor Transit and later National City Lines—in order to rip up city trolley tracks and replace them with bus and car routes. These corporations, joined by companies such as Greyhound, pushed through the national highway grid. City bus companies, as riders turned to cars, began to go bankrupt. The federal government in 1964 approved the Urban Mass Transit Act, which provided capital and operating funds for mass transit to keep it on life support. The corporations, meanwhile, pushed through huge urban renewal plans, all funded by the taxpayer, which focused exclusively on highways, tunnels and bridges and further sidelined public transportation. Jane Jacobs, who wrote the 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” presciently understood and fought these corporate forces, led in New York City by Robert Moses, who forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of residents and demolished neighborhoods to cater to the demands of the car and fossil fuel industries. Robert A. Caro in his biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” exposed this relentless process in depressing detail.

This process of destroying our public transportation system is largely complete. Our bus and rail system, compared to Europe’s or Japan’s, is a joke. But an even more insidious process has begun. Multinational corporations, many of them foreign, are slowly consolidating transportation systems into a few private hands. Of the top three multinationals that control transport in the U.S. only one, MV Transportation, is based here. FirstGroup, a multibillion-dollar corporation headquartered in the United Kingdom and a product of Margaret Thatcher’s privatization of British mass transit, now owns First Student, which operates 54,000 school buses in 38 states and nine Canadian provinces and has 6 million student riders. FirstGroup also has a controlling stake in Greyhound. Veolia Transportation, a subsidiary of Transdev, a conglomerate headquartered in France, has 150 contracts to run mass transit systems in the United States. It was Veolia, after Hurricane Katrina, that took over the New Orleans bus system. And Veolia did what it has done elsewhere. It stripped bus workers of their pensions. New York’s Nassau County bus service, once part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), was turned over to Veolia after the French corporation hired former three-term Sen. Al D’Amato of New York as its lobbyist. Veolia—which when it takes over a U.S. property, as in New Orleans or Nassau County, refuses to give workers a defined-benefit plan—is partly owned by a pension fund that covers one-third of French citizens. U.S. workers are losing their benefit plans to a company created to provide benefit plans for the French. Veolia is currently lobbying Rhode Island and Atlanta to privatize their bus services.

“Our money is meaningless in politics,” Larry Hanley, the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), lamented when we met in his office here in Washington. “It is still sought after, but it really has no weight in determining anything.” .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sweatshops_on_wheels_20130415/



April 14, 2013

NYT: When Shareholder Democracy Is Sham Democracy


When Shareholder Democracy Is Sham Democracy

By JAMES B. STEWART
Published: April 12, 2013


Two weeks ago, I argued that it was hard to imagine a more compelling case for ousting directors than the one posed by Hewlett-Packard.

It turns out there are many stronger cases — 41.

That’s the number of publicly traded companies where directors actually lost their elections last year, meaning that more than 50 percent of the shareholders withheld their votes of approval. Yet despite these resounding votes of no confidence, they remained in their posts.

At least at H.P., all the directors got a majority of the votes cast, and even then, two resigned and a third gave up his post as chairman. But at Cablevision Systems, the New York cable and media company controlled by the Dolan family, three directors lost shareholder elections twice in the last three years — in 2010 and 2012 — and received only tepid support in 2011. Nonetheless, the three remain on the board. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/business/sham-shareholder-democracy.html?hp&_r=0




April 14, 2013

Charlotte: Streetcar Plan Slows





NC: City's Streetcar Plan Slows

Steve Harrison
Source: The Charlotte Observer
Created: April 11, 2013


After more than a year of being deadlocked over a capital budget, the Charlotte City Council cleared the way Wednesday for a roughly $820 million capital plan that, for now, doesn't include a streetcar extension.

Under the plan tentatively approved, the city's property tax rate would increase in July. But voters wouldn't be asked to approve bonds for projects such as roads, sidewalks, police stations and affordable housing until November 2014.

There are still several budget meetings ahead, and it's possible council members could change their minds. But Wednesday's meeting suggested that the city is close to endorsing much of the Capital Improvement Program first endorsed by former City Manager Curt Walton in March 2012.

City Manager Ron Carlee said he needed more time to study the merits of a 2.5-mile streetcar extension, which has been the main reason for the impasse. And Mayor Anthony Foxx — the streetcar's biggest champion — said he wouldn't let the streetcar stand in the way of other improvements. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/10918833/nc-citys-streetcar-plan-slows



April 14, 2013

Diamondbacks owner forces Dodgers fans to change clothes or move seats


Diamondbacks owner forces Dodgers fans to change clothes or move seats
By Mark Townsend | Big League Stew – 18 hours ago


Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick forced fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers to change clothes or find a different seating location when the teams met in their series opener on Friday night, according to Deadspin's Timothy Burke.

The fans, who were seated in Chase Field's expensive batters box suite — price ranges from $3,250 to $3,500 — right behind home plate, could be seen decked out in Dodgers blue when the game began.


[font size="1"]Before. (MLB.TV)[/font]

However, as the inning went along, ushers were seen bringing Diamondbacks gear to the suite, which the fans willingly changed into in order to keep their seats. It's also said Kendrick, who must be a "Seinfeld" fan (remember the episode where Elaine refused to remove her Baltimore Orioles cap at Yankees Stadium) arrived on the scene sometime during the inning and could be seen (and heard) having an animated discussion with the fans.


[font size="1"]After. (MLB.TV)[/font]

As a result of the incident, Deadspin reached out to the Diamondbacks to clarify what exactly happened and why. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/diamondbacks-owner-forces-dodgers-fans-change-clothes-move-201010214--mlb.html#more-74437



April 14, 2013

So true......





April 14, 2013

Kitchen Sink Socialism


Kitchen Sink Socialism

Saturday, 13 April 2013 09:49
By Andrew Fogle, Jacobin Magazine | Op-Ed


We don’t need gay marriage to "ruin" one man, one woman, one mortgage relationships; austerity is doing just fine.


A curious thing happened in the Beltway last week: for the 48 hours surrounding two landmark gay marriage Supreme Court oral arguments, the millennial political class’ collective Facebook feed blushed bright red. Obama-handshake profile pictures gave way to a sharp crimson square designed by the Human Rights Campaign’s marketing department.

Between torrents of memes and legal commentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s skim milk analogy, Samuel Alito’s rusting Burkeanism, and Elena Kagan’s “batting average,” another item, a report about adults turning to cooperative households to save money, passed without remark in liberal circles.

Two million Americans over the age of 30 now live with a housemate or roommate, and shared households make up 18 percent of U.S. households – a 17 percent increase since 2007.

One group of women sold their homes and bought a house together in Mount Lebanon, Pa., after they all got divorced.

“It made amazing economic sense,” said one of the women, Jean McQuillin. McQuillin, Louise Machinist and Karen Bush call their home a “cooperative household.” Each woman has her own bedroom and bathroom, and they share the common areas of the house, chores and expenses.


The suspicion of a generation of queer leftists is at last confirmed: the lifestyle upending Western Civilization’s social cornerstone looks less like committed gay and lesbian families and more like the Golden Girls.

Tellingly, the piece went viral on the Drudge Report. Just one reason to think that petit bourgeois paranoiacs have better eyes for social decline than the average Tumblring anthropology major. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15713-kitchen-sink-socialism



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