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I consider this a Radical Gumbo, with many varied ingredients making more than the sum of its parts. We are no-holds barred, passionate and not overly PC here. Yes, Liberals can have Fangs. Jump in and be part of the cutting edge!
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Twenty months after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. congress is moving ahead with its financial system reform. In the following weeks, the Senate and House bills will be combined. While many details are still to be ironed out around issues like derivatives and consumer protection, it is clear that the legislation will not break up the massive banks that are blamed with the crisis. President Obama says the legislation will ensure the U.S. taxpayers never again bailout Wall Street, but Public Citizen's David Arkush says that until the banks influence on Capitol Hill is broken up or countered, there is no way to guarantee an end to bailouts.
Real News Network - May 29, 2010 Banks still the powerhouse in DC
David Arkush: Bank lobbyists outnumber reform lobbyists 11 to 1 on derivatives legislation alone
The Gulf of Mexico Foundation's website says it was "founded in 1990 by citizens concerned with the health and productivity of the Gulf of Mexico." Its site shows it has sponsored conservation and educational programs and partnered with the likes of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The site also says the group represents a "wide range of interests," including "agriculture, business, fisheries, industry, tourism, and the environment."
But as it turns out, industry appears to be the most represented of those interests.
At least half of the 19 members of the group's board of directors have direct ties to the offshore drilling industry. One of them is currently an executive at Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Editorial Director Bob Cohn of The Atlantic talks with Stuart Taylor of The National Journal about the appointment of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama.
Stuart, a Supreme Court expert who used to cover the justices for the New York Times and the author of a post at The Atlantic [May 10] analyzing Kagan's views, talked about the nominee's record, why Justice Scalia "seems to have a jolly time with her," and the biggest misconception people have about the Court.
British Petroleum's (BP's) Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling site is near a circulating current in the Gulf of Mexico called the Loop Current.
There are strong indications from scientific observations and tracking of the oil leak (both the surface slick and oil rising from the seabed) from the oil well blowout will enter the Gulf Stream in the next few days via the Loop Current.
How and why this can happen is described in a short video produced by The University of South Florida College of Marine Science Ocean Circulation Group (OCG/CMS/USF) showing the affecting Gulf currents and the trajectory of the oil:
There hasn't been much talk so far about what happens if the oil does get into the Gulf Stream.
Lucy Campbell at the legal news site lawyersandsettlements.com today describes the potential (likely) problem this way:
This animation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was created using actual overflight information and forecast models from the NOAA and Unified Command.
The red dot is the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil well, which exploded on April 20, releasing oil into the Gulf near the Louisiana coast that has yet to be contained. Eleven rig workers are missing and are presumed to have died in the explosion.
The animation begins April 22, the day the first image of the spill via flyover was released.
All Antemedius stories about BP's Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico spill are here.
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for March 2010 was the warmest on record at 13.5°C (56.3°F), which is 0.77°C (1.39°F) above the 20th century average of 12.7°C (54.9°F).
This was also the 34th consecutive March with global land and ocean temperatures above the 20th century average.
The March worldwide land surface temperature was 1.36°C (2.45°F) above the 20th century average of 5.0°C (40.8°F) - the fourth warmest on record.
The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.56°C (1.01°F) above the 20th century average of 15.9°C (60.7°F) and the warmest March on record.
For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 13.0°C (55.3°F) was the fourth warmest January-March period. This value is 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20th century average.
Thomas Ferguson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a Senior Fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught formerly at MIT and the University of Texas, Austin, and is the author or coauthor of several books, including Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political System (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986).
Most of Ferguson's research focuses on how economics and politics affect institutions and vice versa. His articles have appeared in many scholarly journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Economic History. He is a long time Contributing Editor to The Nation and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the Historical Society and the International Journal of Political Economy.
Ferguson and his colleague University Statistician at the University of Massachsuetts Jie Chen have together recently completed a Roosevelt Institute study and voting pattern analysis by Massachusetts towns and co-authored a paper based on that study titled 1, 2, 3 Many Tea Parties?(.pdf) into the causes of the election upset in Massachusetts earlier this year, that in their opinion points to possibly major Democratic upsets in the upcoming fall mid term elections.
The abstract of the Ferguson/Chen paper states that:
Passage of the health care reform bill has convinced some analysts that the Massachusetts Senate election might be a fluke. In fact, polls taken after the legislation passed show Republicans widening their lead in fall congressional races. This paper takes a closer look at the Massachusetts earthquake. It reviews popular interpretations of the election, especially those highlighting the influence of the "Tea Party" movement, and examines the role political money played in the outcome. Its main contribution, though, is an analysis of voting patterns by towns. Using spatial regression techniques, it shows that unemployment and housing price declines contributed to the Republican swing, along with a proportionately heavier drop in voting turnout in poorer towns that usually provide many votes to Democratic candidates. All these factors are likely to remain important in the November congressional elections.
Ferguson here talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network with a summary of his study conclusions and their ramifications for the fall midterm elections:
Real News Network - April 19, 2010 Crisis not 'big government" won Brown Massachusetts Ferguson: Study shows it was jobs and housing crisis that lost Mass. election - bad news for Democrats
So far in the first two segments of this six part interview we've heard Jane D'Arista, author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance: Federal Reserve Monetary Policy: 1915-1935 and research associate with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts at Amherst, talk with Paul Jay about the end of the American consumerism as the driving 'engine' of the global economy, and about the decades long development of the offshoring of labor and the companies that have been doing that attempting to continue profiting by selling their goods back into a US market with steadily declining disposable income, finally arriving at the point where massive government bailouts of the financial sector have been used to keep the illusion of a prosperous economy afloat at the expense of the average person.
In this third segment D'Arista goes further in her conversation with Jay to explain why and how the global economic system depends on the US as importer of last resort but that US workers wages are too low and there is no longer the cheap credit available to keep the system going that has been enabling people to live the 'American Dream' through debt, and why other countries are both unlikely and unwilling to take the place of the US as that importer of last resort that is needed to keep the illusion alive.
Real News Network - April 16, 2010
Can US dollar remain world's currency? Pt.3 Jane D'Arista: System depends on US as importer of last resort but wages too low and credit not there
Michael Specter is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, Denialism, asks why we have increasingly begun to fear scientific advances instead of embracing them.
Specter recently spoke at the TEDGlobal2010 Conference, held over the course of four days in Oxford, England to explore "the shocking undercurrent of good news just below the surface of today's troubling headlines -- new ideas, new science, new technology, new social and political thinking, new art and a new understanding of who we are".
While I don't agree with everything Specter says here and I don't disagree with a lot of it, one of the things that I cannot deny is that I'm not always wrong in my opinions. I doubt that you can either.
Michael Specter's new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, dives into a worrisome strain of modern life -- a vocal anti-science bias that may prevent us from making the right choices for our future. Specter studies how the active movements against vaccines, genetically engineered food, science-based medicine and biotechnological solutions to climate change may actually put the world at risk. (For instance, anti-vaccination activists could soon trigger the US return of polio, not to mention the continuing rise of measles.) More insidiously, the chilling effect caused by the new denialism may prevent useful science from being accomplished.
Specter has been a writer for the New Yorker for more than a decade; before that, he was a science writer and then the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. He writes about science and politics for the New Yorker, with a fascinating sideline in biographical profiles.
"Denialism is a virus and viruses are contagious." -- Michael Specter
Spend sixteen and a half minutes with Michael Specter here, and see if he doesn't challenge some of your ideas that you might be wrong about. Or some you might be right about.
(I think this needs more attention, more eyes.I'm not content to let it drift down the page due to the high traffic day in which it was posted. - promoted by Diane G)
If you count all the people unemployed or under employed in the US today, you have a population of almost thirty million.
A country about the size of Canada.
...
In this episode of FaultLines we explore Washington's failure of imagination in dealing with unemployment, and we visit places where creative experiments in job creation are emerging from the grassroots.
The Obama administration has lowered another legal barrier shielding Americans from extrajudicial punitive action by their own government, in this case authorizing the CIA to kill a US citizen suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda in Yemen and links to two attacks inside the United States last year.
Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico but now living in Yemen, may be the first US citizen targeted for assassination by the CIA under a counter-terror policy established by President George W. Bush and since embraced by President Barack Obama.
Awlaki was previously viewed simply as an Islamic preacher espousing a radical religious viewpoint, but the reassessment of his status began last year when it was disclosed that Army Maj. Nidal Hassan had been communicating with Awlaki via e-mail before the Army psychiatrist allegedly shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in Texas last November.
A month later, on Christmas Day, a young Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jetliner over Detroit, and US intelligence officials revealed that Abdulmutallab had been a student of Awlaki's in Yemen. Though Awlaki denied ordering the attack, word began to spread that the CIA was adding Awlaki to a list of about two dozen people targeted for assassination.
Multiple press reports now indicate that Awlaki has been put on the death list, a move that the Obama administration justifies by claiming to have information that Awlaki has shifted from denouncing the United States to plotting violent acts against Americans.
[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.
The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.
The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.
When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.
In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world.Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.
The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.
After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.
Produced in 1992 for the BBC by Director Alan Frankovich, the three part documentary 'Operation Gladio' reveals 'Gladio' (Italian for Gladius, a type of Roman short sword) is a code name for a clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Italy after World War II, set up ostensibly to conduct anti-communist resistance in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe.
According to a well documented and extensively referenced Wikipedia article "Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organisations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organisations, sometimes called "Super NATO".
This BBC series "is about a far-right secret army, operated by the CIA and MI6 through NATO, which killed hundreds of innocent Europeans and attempted to blame the deaths on Baader Meinhof, Red Brigades and other left wing groups. Known as 'stay-behinds' these armies were given access to military equipment which was supposed to be used for sabotage after a Soviet invasion. Instead it was used in massacres across mainland Europe as part of a CIA Strategy of Tension. Gladio killing sprees in Belgium and Italy were carried out for the purpose of frightening the national political classes into adopting U.S. policies."
Jeffrey Kaye in a Seminal post Sunday March 28, 2010 notes that "When the invasion never occurred, the networks were not dismantled, but took on a different mission: to keep the left from gaining power in any of these states, from Sweden and Belgium to France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere."
Jeff goes on in his post to note that "The sensationalistic charges have fed a number of conspiracy theories, particularly those around the existence of "false flag" government operations. Some have indicated they see the 9/11 attacks in this light, though I can't say I have the kind of evidence to make such an assertion. But one can understand how any individual might come to seriously mistrust the U.S. government after learning of the Gladio history, which is extensive and well-documented."
"Among other canards the Gladio story can put to rest is the silly belief that no large scale conspiracies can exist, at least in a so-called open, democratic society such as ours. And yet, Gladio proves that is not true. In fact, since the revelations of the early 1990s, there has been practically no discussion of this crucial aspect of contemporary history by U.S. historians or policy makers."
ESPRESSO PARTY MISSION STATEMENT: The Espresso Party Movement gives voice to Americans who are fed up to fcuking here with the bullsh*t in government.
We recognize that the federal government is the enemy of the people, not the expression of our collective will, and that we must all participate in the process of tearing the system down and kicking ass in November 2010 in order make room for building something fcuking useful to address the challenges that we face as Americans.
As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and we will mercilessly hunt down and politically destroy those who obstruct them.
I woke up very early this morning, as I usually do, had a cup of coffee and something to eat, read and replied to a few essays and comments here, and then again as I usually do, went back to bed and slept for an hour or so.
It's become a habit for me to do this because I really enjoy the extremely lucid dreams I have while sleeping when I'm already rested and after eating.
The dreams I usually have at that time are so lucid they are literally worlds and realities indistinguishable in quality and "realness" from the world of daily life. I converse with people in them, can bang my knee against a wall, pet the cat, slam my fingers in a desk drawer, listen to music, in short they are experiential worlds as real as any other. As "this" one - the one we each find ourselves in at this moment.
Dreams, in other words, are real. They exist. They are as real as anything else.
In his film Capitalism: A Love Story [set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday], Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States's wealth into the hands of a few.
But in one clip cut from the documentary -- which Moore provided exclusively to RAW STORY -- he interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the "degradation of the planet."
"All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don't have a lot of time left," Hedges said. "So it's not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that's not thwarted soon...then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double."
The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power -- leading to a "plutonomy," a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.
In the interview, Hedges decries America's turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're all doing what we can...
I would hope that somehow the Democrats will learn a lesson from knowing they are going to take a serious beating in November, and do something about it.
They have 8 months to get the progressive and independent votes back.
Plenty of time to create and pass some useful legislation, like a universal single payer HCR bill, and plenty of time to charge, try and begin prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the war criminals.
Why, I bet they could even get away with not prosecuting Obama as an accessory after the fact, as long as they prosecute the others, and defund the wars and start REALLY getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And plenty of time to charge, try and prosecute Paulsen, Geithener, Bernanke, and Lloyd Blankfein, and the upper management of AIG, and break up Goldman Sachs.
If they do these things in the next few months they can win November with landslides, and Obama might even win a second term two years down the road.
Making Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public utilities would be icing on the cake.
Otherwise they are toast. And apparently republicans are worse. Somehow (scratches head in puzzlement).
An experienced economist and a novice economist are walking down the road. They come across some dog sh*t lying on the pavement.
The experienced economist says, "If you eat that dog sh*t, I'll give you $20,000!"
The novice economist runs his optimization program and figures out he's better off eating it, so he does and collects the money.
Continuing along the same road they almost step into another pile of dog sh*t.
The novice economist says, "Now, if you eat this sh*t I'll give you $20,000."
After evaluating the proposal, the experienced economist eats the sh*t and collects the money.
They go on. The novice economist wonders, "Listen, we both have the same amount of money we had before, but we both ate sh*t. I don't see us being better off."
The experienced economist retorts, "Not so! We've created $40,000 of trade!"
The 
The Obama administration has lowered another legal barrier shielding Americans from extrajudicial punitive action by their own government, in this case authorizing the CIA to kill a US citizen suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda in Yemen and links to two attacks inside the United States last year.
I woke up very early this morning, as I usually do, had a cup of coffee and something to eat, read and replied to a few essays and comments here, and then again as I usually do, went back to bed and slept for an hour or so.
experiential worlds as real as any other. As "this" one - the one we each find ourselves in at this moment.
